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After Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state made strong statements about China’s actions in the South China Sea, Chinese officials have responded with muted, measured statements — while media have warned of the potential for conflict and retaliation. Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO nominated to lead the U. S. State Department, had a confirmation hearing Wednesday. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China’s actions in the South China Sea were ”extremely worrisome” and compared them to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Beijing has claimed most of the South China Sea as its territory, a stance rejected by an international tribunal. China has also built artificial islands with military capabilities in the disputed territory. The U. S. has declined to take an official position on the competing claims, but periodically patrols the waters and emphasizes the need for international freedom of movement. Tillerson said the situation was a potential ”threat to the entire global economy.” Asked Wednesday whether he supports a more aggressive U. S. posture in the South China Sea, Tillerson said, ”You’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.” Tillerson also sharply criticized China for failing to dissuade North Korea over its nuclear program. He said the U. S. ”cannot continue to accept empty promises like the ones China has made to pressure North Korea to reform.” ”Such rhetoric from Washington isn’t surprising,” The Associated Press notes. ”Past U. S. administrations have entered office seeking to get tougher on China, and failed.” China’s official response has been to play down the significance of Tillerson’s remarks, the AP reports: ”Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said tensions in [the South China Sea] had lessened and countries from outside the region should support efforts toward stability. ” . S. relations are based on ’ mutual benefit and cooperation,’ Lu said at a daily briefing. ”If you take a look at [Chinese] President Xi Jinping’s call with Donald Trump after he won the election, you can see that the two countries do respect each other, and we agree with him that we should develop our relations based on mutual respect,’ he said.” But opinion pieces in media have been blunt. An in China Daily said Tillerson displayed ”undisguised animosity toward China”: ”Such remarks are not worth taking seriously because they are a of naivety, shortsightedness, prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies. Should he act on them in the real world, it would be disastrous. ”As many have observed, it would set a course for devastating confrontation between China and the US. After all, how can the US deny China access to its own territories without inviting the latter’s legitimate, defensive responses?” A piece in The Global Times, meanwhile, said that ”unless Washington plans to wage a war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the islands will be foolish. . .. Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear power strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories.” The Global Times is ”known for its hawkish and editorials,” CNN notes, ”but analysts say it doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese policy.”

The first of Donald Trump’s nominees headed to Capitol Hill this week to begin their Senate confirmations. And while there were some tense moments and stumbles, overall his Cabinet picks were and most should get quick confirmations as soon as Trump is sworn in next week. But the major theme that emerged in committee hearings was that some of the ’s top advisers revealed some major policy breaks with the future president on issues Trump championed and views he expressed on the campaign trail — from Russian hacking, torture, a Muslim ban and registry, mosque surveillance, NATO, the Iran nuclear deal, even infrastructure, deportations and that border wall. It demonstrates the potential constraints the could run into if he seeks to implement some of the more provocative aspects of what he campaigned on. But it also raises questions of just how much Trump actually meant what he said when he campaigned and about the breadth of discussions he has had with his Cabinet picks on critical policy points. That lack of cohesion could lead to friction in the near future and potential difficulty governing — if the nominees carry their beliefs forward in their roles in the administration. The views, tempered or opposite of Trump’s, could also be a reflection of just how difficult it would be otherwise for a nominee to be confirmed by the U. S. Senate, espousing the kinds of boastful campaign opinions the has expressed. Because there were so many, here’s a quick recap, all in one place, of this past week’s hearings: Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, The Alabama senator had the most exhaustive confirmation hearing of the week, stretching into two days. NPR’s Meg Anderson had a recap: ”Democrats don’t have the votes to stop Sessions’ appointment. Perhaps as a result, they focused primarily on fleshing out what Sessions’ relationship would be with the president as attorney general and reminded him of the importance of an independent Justice Department. Sessions spent a lot of the day reassuring his colleagues that he would follow the law, first and foremost, and expressing his disagreements with some of the ’s more extreme proposals.” Sessions said he opposed bringing back waterboarding as an extreme interrogation technique, and he also said that he opposed other Trump campaign proposals of banning Muslims from coming into the U. S. amid terrorism concerns and also said he opposed any type of registry of Muslims either. ”And I think we should avoid surveillance of religious institutions unless there’s a basis to believe that dangerous or threatening illegal activity could be carried on there,” he added. Sessions’ record on race was a key focus, 30 years after his hopes of a federal judgeship were scuttled by the same committee over allegations he had used racist language as a U. S. Attorney. Sessions denied those allegations, reiterating that, ”I did not harbor the kind of animosities and discrimination ideas I was accused of. I did not.” But that didn’t stop some of Sessions’ colleagues from taking an unprecedented step in testifying against his confirmation. Sen. Cory Booker, . J. the first sitting senator to testify against a fellow senator during a confirmation hearing, said Sessions’ record ”indicates that we cannot count on him to support state and national efforts toward bringing justice to the justice system.” And Rep. John Lewis, . a venerated leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. told the Judiciary Committee that ”Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions’ calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then.” Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, The former Exxon Mobil CEO’s confirmation hearing was the roughest of the week. He faced grilling from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over his close ties with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, along with questions about lobbying and during his four decades with the oil giant. Tillerson faced particularly aggressive questioning from Sen. Marco Rubio, . a former Trump primary opponent. Rubio pushed the chief diplomat on whether he would label Putin as a war criminal, while Tillerson dodged. He also pressed Tillerson on his views on violations in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, and Rubio was flabbergasted when Tillerson said he’d need more information to make such pronouncements despite widely available documentation of atrocities in both countries. Rubio hasn’t said yet whether he will support Tillerson’s nomination, which could be a major complication for his confirmation. Tillerson was also tripped up over his tenure at Exxon Mobil and whether the country had lobbied against Russian sanctions. He initially said he had no knowledge that the company had ever ”directly lobbied,” to which even a supportive Chairman Bob Corker, . interjected that Tillerson had even called him about the sanctions at the time. Tillerson also claimed he didn’t recall whether Exxon Mobil had done business with Iran, Syria and Sudan during his tenure. But Tillerson did express some differences with Trump on key issues. He began by sounding a more hawkish tone toward Russia, and said he believes intelligence reports that the country was involved in cyberattacks designed to influence the U. S. elections. He also said he opposed a potential ban on Muslims coming into the U. S. and any type of Muslim registry, either. Tillerson also said he supported the Partnership trade deal, which Trump has loudly opposed and pledged to abandon. Defense Secretary nominee James Mattis, Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon also struck a very different tone from the on foreign policy, testifying Thursday that Russia was a major threat to the U. S. ”I’m all for engagement,” Mattis said, ”but we also have to recognize reality in terms of what Russia is up to.” And the retired Marine Corps general also reiterated his strong support for NATO, an alliance Trump openly questioned and doubted on the campaign trail. Mattis said he believed Trump was ”open” on the issue and understood his steadfast position. ”My view is that nations with allies thrive, and nations without allies don’t,” Mattis said, calling it ”the most successful military alliance probably in modern world history, maybe ever.” Mattis also expressed acceptance of the Iran nuclear deal and said he believed it was likely workable. Trump has been hotly critical of the deal and has threatened to pull out of it. Senate and House committees, along with the full Senate, also approved a waiver to allow Mattis to serve as defense secretary. He only retired in 2013, while current law requires a wait of seven years to serve in that position. Homeland Security Secretary nominee John Kelly, Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, also broke with Trump on several key points during his Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. On Trump’s seminal campaign promise, to build a wall along the Mexican border, Kelly acknowledged that ”a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job. It has to be a layered defense” of human patrols, drones and other sensors. On the administration’s deportation policies, Kelly also broke with Trump, saying that undocumented children who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would ”probably not be at the top of the list” and that he would ”keep an open mind.” The former head of the U. S. Southern Command also repeatedly stressed working with other Latin American countries to better curtail drug and human trafficking. Kelly also said he opposed reinstating waterboarding and also said he had ”high confidence” in U. S. intelligence findings on Russian attacks on the elections. And Kelly said he opposed any kind of surveillance on mosques or any creation of a Muslim database, testifying that, ”I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to focus on something like religion as the only factor” when looking to prevent terrorism. CIA Director nominee Mike Pompeo, The Kansas GOP congressman Trump has chosen to lead the intelligence department also broke with the opposing waterboarding as a form of torture. In this hearing, in which the power was lost and the camera feed went down (just as they were talking about Russia) Pompeo also said he had confidence in the current U. S. intelligence program and said he agreed with their findings that Russia had tried to meddle in the elections, again putting him at odds with the man he would serve, NBC News reported: ”In his opening remarks, Pompeo took aim at Russia, saying that Moscow has ’reasserted itself aggressively, invading and occupying Ukraine, threatening Europe and doing nothing to aid in the defeat of ISIS.’ ”He later said, ’It’s pretty clear about what took place here about Russia involvement in efforts to hack information and to have an impact on American democracy. ’” Housing and Urban Development Secretary nominee Ben Carson, In the former famed neurosurgeon’s confirmation, it was a question of whether Carson had enough experience dealing with housing issues to lead the agency. He got a warm reception though before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Thursday. He told them that he wanted to oversee HUD because it’s not just ”putting roofs over the heads of poor people, it has the ability to be so much more than that.” Carson said he wants to use his role to to take ”a holistic approach” to help ”develop our fellow human beings.” NPR’s Brian Naylor reports Carson also ”would not say that housing properties owned by Trump won’t benefit from HUD programs” in a tense exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, .: ”Carson responded it would not be his intention ’to do anything to benefit any American,’ quickly adding that anything the department does ’is for all Americans.’ Carson said, ’If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people, and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain, you know, $10 from it, am I going to say ’no’?’ Carson asked. ’Logic and common sense probably would be the best way.’ ”Trump’s family made its fortune in real estate, and it still owns some rental properties in New York. Trump has refused to divest his assets, and Warren, who tangled with Trump during the campaign, charged the is ’hiding his family’s business interests from you, from me, from the rest of America.’ ”In a later exchange, Carson said he would report to lawmakers on any dealings HUD has with properties owned by Trump or his family.” Transportation Secretary nominee Elaine Chao, The AP described Chao’s confirmation hearing as a ”lovefest,” which was a pretty accurate characterization. Yes, the former labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration had already been confirmed before and has a long resume that makes her qualified for the position, but the fact that she’s the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t hurt, either. NPR’s David Schaper reported that Chao talked about the ”bold vision” Trump has to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, but acknowledged that ”the government doesn’t have the resources to do it all.” What’s next? Two planned confirmation hearings for this past week were postponed. Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos will now testify Tuesday amid concerns over an incomplete ethics review and financial disclosures. The Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions said the delay was ”at the request of Senate leadership to accommodate Senate schedule.” Rep. Ryan Zinke, . Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, will also have his confirmation hearing Tuesday. On Wednesday, a key hearing sure to garner lots of attention — Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, will have his confirmation hearing. Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross also saw his confirmation hearing delayed, pushed to Wednesday, also amid a paperwork delay. And on Thursday, Rick Perry testifies to convince senators why he should lead one of the three agencies he said he wanted to eliminate during his 2012 presidential run, the Energy Department.

On Thursday’s Top Chef, the remaining nine chefs were divided into three teams. Each team was responsible for collecting a bunch of ingredients in a sort of scavenger hunt around Charleston, S. C. and then making them into a set of three dishes, one created by each chef. But earlier, chef Jamie Lynch had earned immunity in this big challenge by winning the smaller ”Quickfire” challenge. That meant that he was immune from being sent home if his team blew it on the dishes. The way Top Chef works, the judges choose the worst team overall, and then the worst person from that team is sent home. That meant in this case that it might not be the worst individual dish of all nine, but it’s the weakest dish from the three that had the lowest average quality. But of course, if Jamie’s team were the weakest, it would have to be one of the other two who went home, since he was immune. The obvious problem with this setup was much more starkly presented a couple of seasons back, when there were only six chefs left. Similarly, they were divided into teams of three. And when chef Nick — who had immunity, just like Jamie did Thursday night — made a terrible dish that dragged down his team and made it the weaker of the two, it meant that one of two people on his team who had made good food had to be sent home. What was worse was that the chefs on his team had tried to tell Nick that his ideas for his dish were bad, and he ignored them. And when they turned out to be right, he still stayed, and one of them, a chef named Stephanie who’d been strong all season, still left. When Nick eventually won, it was so profoundly unsatisfying that I wrote these words: ”It stinks. Fully, royally, pungently, and to high heaven.” It has a kind of procedural fairness (after all, everybody knew what the rules were!) but absolutely no sense of fairness. Jamie had a much shakier situation, ethically speaking. He had been assigned the worst ingredients to work with, specifically because he had immunity. It made a certain kind of sense: you can’t be eliminated, so you take the bullet and make something out of chicken breasts and peanut butter. Furthermore, according to the judges, his food was lousy, but so was his teammate Emily’s, meaning for her to go home wouldn’t have stung the way it did when it happened to Stephanie. (A confession: I still miss watching Stephanie. I always thought we’d be pals if we met. She was one of my favorites. I may still be angry about this. Can you tell?) there were three teams and not two, making it less likely that one chef could drag an otherwise strong team all the way to the bottom the way Nick could by simply tipping the balance of badness toward his team away from one other. Are you with me? Still, despite having a much better claim to making use of his immunity and staying, Jamie gave up his immunity voluntarily — and he was sent home. He called it pride I call it that, plus a side of ”knowing how Nick wound up looking.” In a way, it seemed like a bad example of when a person should take this step, because Jamie wouldn’t have been using those lousy ingredients in the first place but for the fact that he was safe. That, again, makes him very different from Nick, who seemed to be simply too arrogant to listen to anyone except himself. Jamie was trying to take one for the team to begin with he wound up taking two. You could even argue his immunity win led directly to his elimination. Still, in effect, his argument was, ”I made bad food. I should get cut.” In reality television as in life, you’re always allowed to do more than what’s required of you. You’re always allowed to adopt a code beyond the one that’s imposed externally, or even the one everyone else has agreed to. In reality television, as in life, you can decide not to use advantages that you have, according to the rules of the game, ”earned.” You can decide how you want to play. You can decide the rules are a floor, not a ceiling. You can even decide you are there to make friends. And in fact, Jamie’s not quite done yet. There’s an sideshow to Top Chef, called Last Chance Kitchen, where eliminated chefs battle each other until only one is left standing, and at some point later in the season, the one who emerges victorious . So you could see Jamie again — that’s how Kristen Kish won, in fact. Kish was the frontrunner through most of season 10 until the ”Restaurant Wars” challenge that happens every season, when she was the leader of the team that failed. And despite having a pretty good argument that she wasn’t to blame for that failure, she took responsibility and was eliminated — but she came back through Last Chance Kitchen and won the whole thing. (The whole thing could have been avoided if Josie had just roasted the bones sooner! Okay, I might still be angry about this as well.) Give your neck tattoos a hug for me, Jamie. As a Stephanie fan, I appreciate you.

This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. The election of Donald Trump has many LGBT people worried that recent civil rights strides will be erased. In Phoenix, three people — two gay men and a young genderqueer woman — meet for the first as part of NPR’s Kitchen Table Conversation series, brought together by their fears for the future. While Donald Trump has called himself a supporter of the LGBT community, many of his Cabinet picks — and his vice president — oppose LGBT rights. Moya — who is 52, gay, Latino and married — thinks Trump’s opinions can turn on a dime. So even though the has said he’s ”fine” with the U. S. Supreme Court legalizing marriage, Moya says he doesn’t believe it. ”I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. That uncertainty has Moya, Brendan Mahoney and Jenni Vega worried. They believe Trump has invigorated people who don’t want to understand them — and might even hate them. Mahoney is a gay white man who’s been out since he was 19, while Vega is a genderqueer Hispanic woman. And their worry isn’t only for themselves, but for other people who are even more vulnerable: trans people, Muslims, those who are in the country illegally. Use the audio link above to hear the full story.

This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. In some ways, Desiree Armas is your typical high school senior. She’s getting ready to take the test for her driver’s license. And she’s applying to colleges. But Armas has a big secret. She rides the bus an hour each way to a magnet school miles away from her family’s apartment. And her friends don’t know that Armas and her parents are living in the country illegally. ”Only my best friend knows. No one else in school, besides my counselors,” Armas says. ”That’s something I don’t tell anyone. Because you never know.” Donald Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. And that’s creating even more uncertainty for thousands of families. Many of those families — including the Armases — will travel to Washington, D. C. this weekend for a rally focusing on the rights of immigrants. Desiree Armas left Peru with her parents when she was 3. Today the family lives in a small, tidy apartment in Elizabeth, N. J. Desiree’s mother, Olga Armas, says the family first arrived in the U. S. in 2002 and stayed to seek a better future for their daughter. ”The beginning was very hard,” Olga Armas says through a translator. ”It was difficult to come. We arrived here with nothing to a lot of uncertainty. No pans or pots or even a spoon.” In Peru, Olga’s husband, Carlos, had a job with an airline. In New Jersey, he gets up at 4 a. m. to load pallets at a paper warehouse. When his parents died, Carlos Armas couldn’t go back for their funerals. ”I withstood that because I wanted my daughters to stay in school,” he says through a translator. ”And my family to stay together here, that they continue to study.” Desiree is a student. So the family was thrilled when President Obama introduced a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, allowing immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as kids to work and attend college. As soon as Desiree was old enough to apply, Olga Armas says, the whole family went to the lawyer’s office together to fill out the paperwork. ”My daughter was so happy, she cried,” says Armas. ”We cried, because my daughter can come out of the dark.” Desiree Armas says getting DACA made a huge difference. Her younger sister Kimberly, who was born in Florida, is a citizen. And Desiree admits, she’s a little jealous. ”I see my sister’s passport. And like, I don’t know, something about it just gets me all like sappy for some reason, that I can’t have one,” she says. ”But when I got my Social Security [card] it felt, like, so official. Like I was way more positive. I was more hopeful.” But Armas’ hopes may have suffered a setback on election night. Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, although he has also said he doesn’t want to break up families. And Trump has committed to rolling back President Obama’s immigration policies, including DACA. ”The truth is, people are in limbo,” says Olga Armas. ”We don’t know what will come [from] Trump’s words. But everybody is talking about it, there is lots of fear.” For Olga Armas, the fear is that what her family has gained could all go away. She’s volunteering with Make the Road New Jersey, an activist group that works for immigrants’ rights. She’s helping to bring protesters to Washington for this weekend’s rally. Without DACA, her daughter could still be accepted to college. But losing her legal status would make it harder for Desiree Armas to find the money for school, or to work at a job or internship once she gets there. She says kids with DACA want the same thing immigrants to this country have always wanted. ”What you have now, your parents had to fight for it,” Armas says. ”And that’s what our parents are doing. That’s what we are doing. Not just me, just so many other students that are — and deserve a chance to show what we got. And if you take that away from us, you will yank the dreams of future doctors and engineers and lawyers.” So Desiree Armas is anxiously watching her mailbox for two reasons. Acceptance letters from the colleges she’s applied to, and news about her future in this country.

Many transgender people in the U. S. are rushing to change their designated gender on government documents before Donald Trump takes office. They worry the next administration may take that ability away. There’s no indication so far that this is a priority for Trump. Mara Keisling with the National Center for Transgender Equality says Trump’s positions on trans issues are not clear. But she’s concerned about people he’s nominated for key positions in his administration. ”Virtually every — if not every — appointment he has announced so far has been an extremely person,” says Keisling. She says trans advocacy groups around the country have been fielding calls from concerned people ever since the election. And they are not alone. ”The calls to our office have increased a lot,” says Benjamin Jerner, managing partner of the Philadelphia law firm Jerner Palmer, which specializes in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal issues. States control many government documents, such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses, Jerner reassures his clients. A new president won’t affect those. Of more concern, he says, are gender designations on federal documents such as passports, immigration papers and Social Security accounts. Jerner says passports are the biggest concern because State Department rules could be changed relatively easily under a new administration. Deciding whether to change gender designations on documents can be an especially tricky question for parents of transgender children. Jerner recently held a legal clinic for such parents in Philadelphia and says 18 families showed up. ”I think that just tells you the level of fear and anxiety that’s out there,” he says. Among those attending were the parents of Dylan, who was born a boy but — with her parents’ encouragement — has long hair, wears pink and lives as a girl. That fits with guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the leading U. S. group of doctors serving children. The general idea is that parents should support their child and not make any big decisions that could limit the child’s options in the future. That’s because some children who appear to be transgender early on are not when they grow up. NPR agreed to use only first names for Dylan and her family. Some groups consider it a form of abuse to allow a child to transition to the opposite gender — even though it’s in line with the AAP. Dylan’s parents — Marla and Jennifer — say other families have had child abuse reports filed against them after they were identified in news stories. Marla says Dylan has identified herself as a girl for as long as she could talk. ”It took us about three years to really sort out with Dylan what that meant,” Marla says. ”We kept telling her, ’Oh, there’s lots of ways to be a boy — you can be a fancy boy, you can be a sparkly boy.’ ” But Marla says Dylan steadfastly insisted she’s a girl. Marla says they plan to administer puberty blockers when Dylan reaches that stage. That will make it easier for Dylan to physically transition to female later if she chooses. Dr. David Levine, a professor of pediatrics at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, says this is a good approach. ”I predict this is going to do great, because the parents are so on board and so supportive of their child,” he says. Levine says he’s not too worried that a Trump administration will make big changes that will affect transgender people. But he also is not opposed to parents who want to change their child’s gender designations now because, technically, that’s something that could be reversed in the future if it became necessary. Dylan’s parents had planned to change her gender on government documents when she got a driver’s license. Because of their concerns over the political climate, they are doing that now instead. So, on a recent evening — just as Dylan and her siblings were finishing up homework — a notary came to their home to witness Marla and Jennifer signing a short stack of papers. Once filed, they will change the gender listed on Dylan’s birth certificate, Social Security account and passport — when she gets one — to female.

A Hungarian camerawoman who was caught on film kicking migrants running from police near the border with Serbia was sentenced to three years of probation. A judge said Petra Laszlo’s behavior ”ran counter to societal norms” and rejected Laszlo’s claim that she acted in . Laszlo was not charged with a racially motivated hate crime instead, she was charged with ”breach of peace.” Her conviction carried a maximum jail sentence, The Independent reports, but Laszlo will not serve time unless she violates the terms of her probation. Laszlo, who did not appear in court in person because she had received death threats, plans to appeal her conviction, The Associated Press reports. The wire service has more: ”The incident occurred near the border town of Roszke on Sept. 8, 2015, where Laszlo had gone to film migrants from the Middle East who were trying to pass through Hungary on their way west. While she was filming, several migrants broke through a police cordon and jostled her as they shot by. ”Laszlo responded by delivering a kick to two people as they fled, including a young girl. Later, she appeared to trip a migrant carrying a child. ” ’It was all over within two seconds,’ Laszlo said. ’Everybody was shouting. It was very frightening.’ ” The court convicted her after a ” examination of Laszlo’s actions,” the AP writes. Laszlo was fired after the video went public. She apologized but also vowed to sue Facebook as well as Abdul Mohsen, the migrant who was carrying his son and fell after Laszlo tried to trip him. NPR’s Lauren Frayer caught up with Mohsen last year in Spain, where he and his son moved after a Spanish man saw the video and offered him a job. ”Abdul Mohsen says he rarely thinks about Petra Laszlo,” Lauren reported. ” ’I don’t know, but I think she just doesn’t like refugees,’ Mohsen says, shrugging. ”He says he feels lucky to have escaped war in his hometown of Deir Syria — now under siege by ISIS militants — and to have found work and asylum in Europe. So many other Syrians have not. . .. ”Mohsen is desperate to reunite with his wife and two other children, a son, 18, and a daughter, 13.”

The Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata has reached a $1 billion settlement with the U. S. Justice Department over a deadly defect in its air bags that led to a massive recall. At least 16 deaths, 11 of them in the U. S. have been linked to the defect. As part of the deal, which still needs to be approved by a judge, Takata agreed to plead guilty to the felony offense of wire fraud. Of the $1 billion total, $25 million will be paid as a fine to the U. S. government and $125 million will be used for restitution to people who are physically injured by the air bags. The remaining money will go to automakers that were defrauded by Takata, to cover the cost of replacing recalled parts. Three executives at the company were also indicted on wire fraud and conspiracy charges, U. S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said at a news conference Friday in Detroit to announce the settlement. The three Japanese executives, Shinichi Tanaka, Hideo Nakajima and Tsuneo Chikaraishi, allegedly concealed deadly defects in the inflator inside the company’s air bags. In emails, they allegedly referred to submitting false reports of test data to automakers that were using their products, even after initial news reports that the inflators were failing and injuring people. The inflator contains ammonium nitrate, which can degrade — either over time or because of temperature fluctuations — putting the metal canister at risk for rupturing and sending shrapnel into the vehicle, McQuade explained. ”Corporations and individuals who cheat will be held accountable,” McQuade said. ”Cheaters will not be allowed to gain an advantage over those who play by the rules.” A total of nearly 70 million Takata air bag inflators have been or will be affected in a massive U. S. recall that began in 2008 and is scheduled to continue through 2018. As NPR’s Sonari Glinton has reported, ”automakers are allowed to sell the vehicles with the inflators under an existing order by NHTSA. But all of the vehicles using the air bags must be recalled by the end of 2018.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has called it ”the largest and most complex auto safety recall in U. S. history.” A congressional report released last summer found that despite the recall, at least four automakers — Fiat Chrysler, Mitsubishi, Toyota and Volkswagen — were still using the type of Takata air bags responsible for the injuries and fatalities. In addition, NHTSA says the following vehicles have inflators at the highest risk of rupturing dangerously: The Department of Transportation has asked drivers to check the website SaferCar. gov to determine whether their vehicles are affected.

Little white chips fly off in every direction with each blow of master ivory carver Li Chunke’s chisel. Gradually, the folds of a robe, tassels and hands of an ancient Chinese woman begin to emerge from a rough piece of ivory in front of him in his Beijing workshop. Li says nothing looks as smooth, nothing can be carved as intricately or expressively as ivory. Wood and jade are too brittle. ”Whether I’m carving animal or human figures, I try to express their feelings,” he says. ”That’s what Chinese consider most important.” He shows me a small piece made by one of his apprentices from a piece of scrap ivory. It shows a high mountain swathed in clouds, beneath which two elderly gentlemen sit under a pine tree playing a game of Go. One of the gentlemen strokes his beard, as if to say, ”Hmm, what’s my next move here?” For years, China’s government has argued that banning ivory would destroy cultural traditions that carvers like Li and his apprentices preserve. But in December, Beijing announced it would phase out its ivory trade by the end of 2017. Environmentalists hailed the move as offering hope for the world’s dwindling number of elephants, as well as a fundamental shift in the way China’s government and people view the use of wildlife products. China is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s biggest ivory markets, if not the biggest, though the total value is hard to gauge. The country’s total consumption, according to one estimate, is about 13. 5 tons annually in recent years, most of it illegal. The existence of a legal ivory market in China has provided cover for black marketeers, who often pass off their wares as legitimately sourced. For the past 53 years, Li has worked at the Beijing Ivory Carving factory. Li says every piece of ivory there is registered by the government, and comes from elephants who died naturally. None, he says, comes from poachers or smugglers, who have supplied a black market and driven elephants toward extinction. ”We ivory carvers hate elephant poachers,” Li says. ”I would never touch a piece of ivory from a poached elephant.” Li says that when he started his job at the factory in 1964, there was no smuggling. Then again, China’s economy had no private sector in those days. Nor was there an Internet, where a lot of ivory is now bought and sold. Li and others saw the Chinese ban coming. President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed in 2015 that both countries would do it. Environmental groups and celebrities have campaigned for years for a ban. ”When the buying stops, the killing can too,” former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming says in an ad for the group WildAid. The group has also enlisted British royal Prince William in its campaign. Steve Blake, WildAid’s acting chief representative in China, says his group does annual surveys in China, asking questions such as whether people know where ivory comes from and whether they would support a government ban on ivory. He says over 95 percent of his Chinese respondents back the ban. Last week, China’s national carrier, Air China, banned the transport of sharks’ fins as cargo. In a swipe at corruption, China had already decided to ban shark fin soup at official banquets in 2012, and Blake says imports and prices have since plummeted drastically. Last September, China also supported an international ban on trade in critically endangered pangolins. And, Blake notes, it is working to stop poaching of the totoaba fish, a food on which the endangered vaquita porpoise feeds in the Gulf of California. ”There have just been a lot of really encouraging signs in the past couple of months of China’s will to change this worrying trend of consuming endangered wildlife,” Blake says. ”And so they should be given a lot of credit.” Details about the ivory ban still need to be ironed out. It’s unclear what the government is going to do with existing ivory stockpiles — buy them or burn them. Meanwhile, the government has promised to find other work for the carvers, restoring ivory to be collected by museums. Carver Li Chunke says he’s not worried about his own survival. ”We’ve been prepared for this for a long time,” he explains. Plus, there’s another source of material he can rely on: ”We also carve mammoth ivory.” That’s right: The tusks of elephants’ woolly ancestors are still legal to buy and sell in China — if you care to go to Siberia and dig them up.

Nuclear power plants are typically hulking structures made using billions of dollars of concrete and steel. But one company thinks that by going smaller, they could actually make nuclear power more affordable. NuScale Power based in Portland, Ore. has submitted a design for what it describes as a ”modular” nuclear power plant. Each module is a nuclear reactor loaded with standard uranium reactor fuel. Modules would be assembled at a facility and then delivered to power utilities and other clients. ”Miniature” in nuclear terms is still pretty big. The modules are small enough to fit on trucks, but they would stand nearly nine stories tall. Moreover, a power plant would probably require several modules hooked together like giant batteries. Of course, they’d need to be operated by professional nuclear engineers. But the design — a radical departure from other nuclear plants — would also have advantages. Each module uses less uranium fuel, making a meltdown far less likely. The fuel would be housed in a special containment vessel that would be submerged in a pool of water, an added safety feature. And rather than using pumps of the sort that failed during the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the reactor would circulate the water using natural convection. The company maintains the design is simpler and safer than existing reactors. NuScale formally completed its design submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday. The application will now undergo a lengthy review by the NRC, which must approve the design before construction can begin. NuScale says its reactor modules will be simpler and more affordable to build than a big plant. Placing several modules in a single location will provide the same power output as a commercial reactor, says Mike McGough, the company’s chief commercial officer. NuScale is already partnering with a consortium of Utah utilities to build a power plant on land in Idaho owned by the U. S. Department of Energy. (The DOE is a partner in the NuScale project.) The company believes that project can be completed for less than $3 billion. By comparison, a new reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee cost around $4. 7 billion and began operation in 2016 after years of delays. McGough says the company envisions the modules also could be used in other ways. For example, he says, they could be installed near wind turbines as backup when the wind isn’t blowing. Or they could be used by the military to power bases that need electricity even if the grid goes down. About a dozen clients in the U. S. and abroad are looking at the technology, he says. But not everyone is convinced smaller is better. Ed Lyman, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the electricity generated by a smaller reactor is more expensive than that generated by a larger one. Companies such as NuScale hope to offset the higher costs by saving on the cost of construction, but Lyman isn’t convinced. He worries savings will come at the cost of safety. He says NuScale wants to do things like reduce the size and strength of the reactor containment building and the number of personnel needed to operate the plant. ”NuScale is proposing major reductions in all of these areas relative to current NRC requirements for large reactors, based on the assertion that the reactor will be safer,” he says. ”We’ve eliminated a number of systems that are not required to protect the core of our plant,” McGough acknowledges. But he says that’s because the small, modular designs are inherently safer than large reactors. He believes the NRC review will clearly show that the modular designs can meet or exceed existing safety standards. The NRC will take its time to make sure the design meets its safety standard. McGough says the review will take over three years. If it wins approval, NuScale hopes to switch on its first plant by 2026.

Vernon Dahmer was a black civil rights leader in the when Mississippians were still required to pay a poll tax in order to register to vote. In January 1966, the successful farmer and businessman publicly offered to pay that tax for black people who couldn’t afford it. That night his house was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan. His wife and three of his children were at home. ”We didn’t think anybody would bother the children, but we were wrong, they intended to get all of us January the 10th, 1966,” Vernon’s widow, Ellie Dahmer, told their daughter Bettie during a recent visit to StoryCorps. ”That night, when I waked up, the house was on fire, and it was so bright and so hot. You was screaming to the top of your voice, ’Lord have mercy. We’re going to get burned up in this house alive.’ I raised the windows up, and then your father was handing you out the window to me.” They escaped to the barn to hide, sitting on bales of hay. ”I had burns over a good portion of my body, and I was screaming and crying because I was in pain,” recalled Bettie, who was 10 at the time. ”Daddy was burned so much worse than I was — when he held up his arm the skin just hung down — but Daddy never did complain, he was just concerned about me. I remember us going to the hospital.” Vernon and Bettie shared a hospital room, with Ellie sitting between the two beds. ”And he yelled my name real loud, and then he was gone,” she said. ”He knew that he might get killed, and he was willing to take the risk, but it was not worth it to me. I miss him so much.” Bettie, who is now 61, looks at the situation differently. ”Daddy wasn’t a man that wore a suit, he wore overalls. In Daddy’s world everybody had a job to do,” she said. ”Black people couldn’t vote, so I do understand why he did what he did. It meant a lot to him.” And that commitment he had to the cause is reflected on his resting place. ”Some of the last words he said was, ’If you don’t vote, you don’t count.’ That’s on his tombstone,” Ellie said. ”We made a tremendous sacrifice Bettie. I try to go on and live my life without thinking about it, but it’s a night I can never forget. It’s been over 50 years, and seems like it were yesterday.” Ellie Dahmer would go on to serve as an election commissioner in Hattiesburg, Miss. and the governor of Mississippi declared Jan. 10, 2016, ”Vernon Dahmer Day,” to honor the civil rights leader. Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud and Liyna Anwar. StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps. org.

The Syrian government says Israel has attacked a military airport west of Damascus, and warns of ”repercussions” without promising any specific retaliation. The Syrian state news agency SANA reports that rockets fired by the Israeli air force caused a fire at the airport just after midnight local time on Friday morning. The report did not identify if there were any casualties. Syria also accuses Israel of attacking the same airport with missiles on Dec. 7, also causing a fire to break out, with no casualties. Syria accused Israel of supporting ”terrorist organizations” through the strike. Israel has not responded to the claims. Over the last few years, Israel has repeatedly been charged with bombing military facilities in Syria, including sites that reportedly contained and missiles.. It’s ”standard Israeli practice to not comment when such attacks happen,” NPR’s Emily Harris noted after one such reported strike in 2013. The strikes were reportedly prompted by concerns that heavy weapons are being transferred from Syria to Hezbollah — the militant Islamist group on Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah, a Shiite group, has supported President Bashar in Syria’s complex, civil war. The Associated Press has more on the reported attack: ”Residents of Damascus reported hearing several explosions that shook the city. The Mezzeh airport compound, located on the southwestern edge of the capital, had been used to launch attacks on areas near Damascus and has come previously under rebel fire. . .. ”Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently reiterated his government’s position to not get involved in the Syrian war.”

For the first time in Japanese history three women of different political persuasions are in positions that could be stepping stones to the prime minister’s office. It’s especially notable in Japan, where women’s labor force participation remains among the lowest among developed nations, and gender roles are . ”Women have not really been coached or mentored or encouraged to take on leadership roles,” Kyoto University diplomacy professor Nancy Snow explains. ”Also, women aren’t allowed [culturally] to often show ambition, to sort of telegraph that.” Lack of childcare options in Japan — and the cultural pressure for women to take on household duties — means it’s the moms here who drop out of work. In official registries, married women to this day are listed, along with children, as part of a man’s household. If they’re single, part of their parents’ household. ”I think it really goes back to the social hierarchy, the way that [Japan has] been for decades,” Snow says. Women make up 43 percent of the labor force in Japan — with more than half of them in jobs. That’s far below the 57 percent of working women in the U. S. Their roles in leadership are scant. But in the political realm, signs point to change. Tokyo is now led by its female governor — Yuriko Koike. Japan’s new defense minister, Tomomi Inada, is only the second woman to ever hold the role. And the opposition Democratic Party in Tokyo is for the first time led by a woman. She’s a former journalist named Renho Murata. ” years ago when I was a newscaster,” Renho tells NPR, ”I interviewed an important member of the ruling party. He said to me, frankly, that he doesn’t think wives should even speak about politics.” More than two decades have passed since that conversation, but today women still represent fewer than 15 percent of all seats in Japan’s parliament, lower than the U. S. where women make up 20 percent of Congress. Renho says she’s hoping to use her position to help get more women elected. ”We don’t have enough women to raise their hands,” she says. When asked what led her to raise her hand, she said she wanted to make change. ”It all began for me when I was raising two children. In a society that complains about not having enough children, the government wasn’t offering any support. That made me want to become a politician,” Renho says. She made it and was a longtime member of parliament before her party elected her its leader last summer. But cultural biases persist. Renho’s bra size was listed on her Wikipedia page. Mayor Koike was criticized during her race for wearing too much makeup. And efforts to increase participation of women in higher levels of power have fallen short. The government conceded last year that it wouldn’t reach its goal of getting women in 30 percent of management roles by 2020. Women are so outnumbered in business that the fact they’re working at all is a story. It’s dismaying, says Nancy Snow. ”I look forward in this century, and it may take awhile, for it to be just the case that a woman is in power in government here or in industry and she just happens to be a woman,” Snow says. For now the few women in power are proving to be rather fearless. In a notable exchange with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month, Renho stood up against casino legislation that was rushed through Japan’s parliament. Facing the prime minister on the floor, Renho said, ”You appear to lie as easily as you breathe.” Abe seemed to chuckle, but didn’t respond. Mari Yamamoto and Jake Adelstein contributed to this story.

If you are interested in food stories accompanied by overhead videos showcasing recipes involving just three ingredients, you would be better off reading something else. This is because when preparing dishes to accompany the new Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which premieres Jan. 13, the more complex the recipe, the more you’ll identify with the many trials and tribulations of the orphaned Baudelaire children as they try to unravel the mysteries surrounding them. Food is often a supporting character throughout the 13 books written by Lemony Snicket, the nom de plume — a fancy word that means ”pen name” — of Daniel Handler, starting with the bland boiled chicken, boiled potatoes and blanched string beans the children are fed at the home of Mr. Poe after the tragic demise of their parents in the first book, The Bad Beginning. No one really wants to eat boiled chicken, but luckily there are many other culinary inspirations to be found sprinkled across the series, including pesto lo mein, chocolate pudding and salmon puffs. Pasta puttanesca is perhaps the most dish among Lemony Snicket fans — inspiring my own daughter when she was 8 years old to join me in the kitchen to discover capers and Kalamata olives this time around, she’ll be making the dish with friends while the show at college. It’s the dish that Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire choose to make for the evil Count Olaf when he demands that they provide dinner for his theatrical troupe, allowing the children a cozy afternoon of cooking together before Olaf complains that they should’ve made roast beef. When cooking instructor Lynley Jones’ son began reading the series, she discovered an unexpected springboard, leading her to create ”A Series of Unfortunate Cooking Lessons” for children that she taught in 2015 in Montclair, N. J. ”I noticed that a lot of the stories he would share with me included some interesting food,” says Jones. ”In some books, the food was a part of the narrative, like when the Baudelaires make pasta puttanesca in some cases, the food in the book is horrible, and adds to the Baudelaires’ misery.” The chilled cucumber soup found in the third book in the series, The Wide Window, exemplifies a truly bad meal, served by the children’s Aunt Josephine, who makes only cold food because she’s afraid of turning on the stove. As Snicket writes, ”On a cold day, in a drafty room, chilled cucumber soup is about as welcome as a swarm of wasps at a bat mitzvah.” Jones’ goal with her version of the cooking lesson, which was geared toward kids, was to show how not to make bad cucumber soup, no matter what time of year, calling her version ”Not Aunt Josephine’s Chilled Cucumber Soup.” ”I always want kids in my classes to learn to appreciate the difference between badly prepared food and bad food,” she says. ”The chilled cucumber soup in the book was horrible because it was badly made, not because chilled cucumber soup is inherently horrible.” Because the first season of A Series Of Unfortunate Events on Netflix encompasses books one through four, you could choose to focus on food that’s featured only in those books. But there are many dishes that you may want to throw in to foreshadow what’s ahead in Season 2 — a favorite literary device of Lemony Snicket that’s well worth emulating. If you’re planning on hosting an ”ASOUE” watch party, channel your inner steampunk for appropriately clothing and decor, being sure to sprinkle the dining table with teething rings, ribbons for tying up your hair and magnifying glasses. And, as for food, the inspirations are multitudinous — which, as you know, is a very long word that means ”endless.” Here are some recipes to provide you with sustenance for the adventures ahead: Pasta Puttanesca In The Bad Beginning, the Baudelaire children roast garlic, wash and chop anchovies, and pit olives to make a tangy, salty puttanesca sauce. Because they are fascinated by the many shapes of pasta that they find at the grocery store, you may want to cook up a variety of different pastas to create visual interest. Jones’ recipe is based on the one in the book if you can’t abide anchovies, try substituting chopped dried seaweed to impart a slightly fishy flavor. Coconut Cream Cake, Things seem to be looking up in the second installment, The Reptile Room, when the children land on the doorstep of the utterly charming Uncle Monty, a herpetologist who welcomes them with a freshly baked coconut cake. Of course, this creamy bliss doesn’t last long, but the memory of the cake lingers. This coconut cake recipe from Ina Garten, host of the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa, does the trick here, but I like to use a pillowy Italian meringue frosting instead of the cream cheese frosting to lighten up a dreary world — just add a tablespoon of lemon juice to the sugar syrup while cooking. Chilled Cucumber Soup, Poor Aunt Josephine. She’s so afraid of, well, everything, that she never seems to enjoy anything and is forever mourning her dear departed husband, Ike, in book three, The Wide Window. Sadly, Josephine’s cucumber soup is both watery and tasteless, which only adds insult to injury. Even in the depths of winter, a chilled cucumber soup can remind us of summer warmth, like this recipe from chef Andrew Zimmern of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods — even though cucumbers are fairly tame. Aqueous Martini, Skipping ahead to book six, The Ersatz Elevator, the children are sent to live with the Esmé Squalor and her downtrodden husband, Jerome. Always concerned, as so many fashionistas are, with what’s in and what’s out, Esmé favors the Aqueous Martini — water served in a fancy glass and garnished with an olive — until Parsley Soda becomes all the rage. Your guests may appreciate the former more than the latter. Enchiladas with Red Tomato Sauce, Now deemed criminals and on the run, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny land in The Vile Village, also the name of book seven, where they dodge a murder of crows and try to escape in a mobile home operated by the kindly handyman Hector — who also introduces them to his homemade enchiladas. I’ve turned to Mexican chef Pati Jinich, of the PBS series Pati’s Mexican Table, for authentic inspiration here, with an enchilada recipe that has just enough bite to even please the toothy infant Sunny. I would tell you to enjoy this delicious repast while Count Olaf wreaks havoc on the charming Baudelaire children — but what would be the point? Prepare to be miserable, no matter how tasty the food.

When President Obama gave his goodbye speech this week, one of ’s most politically active stars was watching. Killer Mike is a rapper who actively campaigned for Bernie Sanders. So when he and fellow rapper joined Morning Edition to talk about their new album from their group Run the Jewels, we had to get their take on the president’s farewell. Killer Mike says he did like when President Obama urged Americans to get more involved. ”When he started talking about activism, lacing up your boots, hitting the streets, I was actually live tweeting during it,” Killer Mike says. ”It sounds like someone has been listening to the OG: the old guy Bernie.” Clearly, neither artist is a Trump supporter. But they also say they aren’t dreading the transition. ”I don’t have a sense of dread, to be honest,” Killer Mike explains. ”And older black people I talk to don’t have sense of dread, who’ve lived under Nixon and who’ve lived under duplicitous presidents and governors before. So, no: What I have is a sense of what’s next. And what can we do to take care of ourselves.” At this point, who happens to be white, chimes in. ”I think that it’s a mistake to let our history off the hook so much so to say the Trump is introducing the idea of dread into American culture,” he says. Social commentary is a big part of Run the Jewels, which takes its inspiration from rap acts the two men grew up hearing in the 1980s and ’90s, a time when the war on drugs and crack cocaine were ravaging American cities. Killer Mike had had a seat from his neighborhood in Atlanta. ”I saw the world change. I saw it go upside down, and the irony of it is the only people who were telling the truth about what was happening at that time was rappers,” he says. Today, they hope to carry the mantle. 2016 provided a lot of material — not least the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by several shooting deaths of by police. notes that racial tension set the tone for a song called ”Thieves! (Screamed The Ghost).” ”We unfolded a narrative in this one that we knew was important to get right,” he says. ”We wanted to make it an anatomy of a riot.” ”I think there is a pound of flesh owed in terms of this country making sure all of its citizens enjoy the constitutional rights that are promised,” Killer Mike adds. ”And because we don’t, we keep resetting to the same place of anger and fear and angst and explosions of that. The dead don’t rest. The soul’s gonna speak, based on the fact that this country is still not offering full justice.”

Philosophy isn’t natural science, that much is certain. But its relation to the sciences has been fraught — at least since science broke off from philosophy and became its own family of disciplines back in the 17th century. The very features of natural science that are markers of its success — specialization, experiment, mathematical tools, progress — are absent, or take a very different form, in philosophy. My own view is that philosophical problems are not empirical or scientific ones, but that they live cheek by jowl with them. Philosophy and empirical science are in constant dialog and a laboratory is as good a place as a seminar room to engage philosophy. Peter whose new book is my topic today, is not the first philosopher to go even farther afield than the laboratory in pursuit of nature’s secrets. Daniel Dennett, to name one of ’s avowed heroes, went to Kenya to study the vervet monkey in its natural habitat. Still, I think it’s worth pausing and taking delight in the stunning image of a philosopher descending the ocean blue in his quest to find other minds and to understand how they work! Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness is not travelogue or tale of adventure in the great outdoors. It is a work of philosophy. There is no story, but there is an argument: Animal life is . Many hundreds of million years ago, ”cells that were once organisms in their own right began to work as parts of larger units.” But this required coordination. The means of exchange or mutual influence that had once enabled distinct unicellular individuals to communicate, or at least interact, were now deployed within the boundaries of the more complex beast. ”Sensing and signaling between organisms gave rise to sensing and signaling within them,” as the book notes. This, in turn, over evolutionary time, becomes the basis of the nervous system and, eventually, intelligence — and even consciousness itself. has a lot to say about the evolutionary history of animals and even about how, from humble beginnings, we get human beings, along one lineage, and the octopus, along another. But I wish he had said something more about the mystery — for that’s what it is, at the heart of his story — of understanding how a clump of individuals gets put together in such a way as to become not just a collection of coordinated individuals but a genuinely new unity. Animal unity is something special. And, if he is right, it may be the key to understanding why there are nervous systems and, so, why there are animals like the octopus and like us. Later on in the book, remarks that trees and other plants seem to exhibit a kind of unity different from, and intermediate between, that of mere collections and that which is displayed by animals. The tree is an agglomeration, in the sense that if you cut a part away and plant it, you get a new tree. An animal, in contrast, is some kind of an essential unity. The language of Other Minds is calm, spare and exact. It serves as a useful primer on more than one topic — the history of animals, the cognitive powers of cephalopods, the theory of consciousness, the environmental dangers posed by overfishing and the degradation of the waters. It gives us a remarkable description of the octopus settlement or compound — community? — that he and his colleagues studied closely over a long period in waters off Australia. He speculates that some piece of human detritus, something metal, fell to the sea floor and it provided an artificial shelter or den for an octopus the shell remains of scallops cast aside by the octopus then provided a ground better suited for octopus dens than the sandy bottom of the sea floor. This attracted other octopus, he continues, who, in turn, in the normal course of events, laid down more shell flooring — thus further enhancing the habitat and drawing more animals to the spot. wonders whether Octopolis, as they dubbed the small piece of ocean ground, doesn’t give a glimpse of a possible octopus future in which otherwise fairly solitary creatures develop something like real social groups. Octopus sociality is made out to be something of a puzzle in this book. Like cuttle fish, the octopus are capable of fabulous and changes of skin color. How they do this is a mystery. Not because the mechanisms of pigment change are poorly understood, but because these animals are (widely believed) to be color blind. Of what use to a potential mate is a display of color? Actually, the puzzle is deeper even than this. The octopus also changes its color to camouflage itself. But how can it adjust its own color to the surrounding scene if it can’t perceive the colors of things around it? has an ingenious and plausible answer to this question. But surely the most surprising, indeed, the truly shocking fact about the octopus that comes up in these pages is that most species of octopus only live 2 to 4 years. frames this as a problem for evolution. Why would evolution go to the expense of giving animals such magnificent smarts? The octopus, as explains, is a curious, clever and inventive creature it has good eyesight (aside from the color vision) and is capable, in captivity, of recognizing and keeping track of individual people. Moreover, the octopus, and to some degree also the cuttlefish, are the only examples of big brains in the whole universe of invertebrate species. What’s the point, if the animals have such a short lifespan? Drawing on evolutionary ideas, offers a brilliant answer. I won’t give the details here, but the basic idea is pretty straight forward. Animals who live to an old age are less likely to carry mutations of the sort that are likely to kill them when they are young. Indeed, animals who suffer mutations whose harmful effects strike early on are unlikely to have offspring or are unlikely to have as many children as animals who live longer. It follows that there will be a tendency for whatever destructive effects of mutations there may be to manifest themselves, over evolutionary time, later and later in life. Of course, just how long a species will tend to live will reflect environmental conditions as well. Vulnerability to predators, for example, will cull parents who wait too long to have kids. Lifespan is thus likely to be tuned evolutionarily by this kind of environmental risk factor. Back to the octopus. explains: ”They have ended up with their unusual combination: a very large nervous system and a very short life. They have the large nervous system because of what those unbounded bodies make possible and the need to hunt while being hunted their lives are short because their vulnerability tunes their lifespan. The initially paradoxical combination makes sense.” This is an ingenious and plausible account both of why animals don’t live forever, even though their cells are continuously made anew, and also of why, in particular, the octopus has such a short life span. But it is not quite the answer I was looking for. Or, rather, it is the right answer to the wrong question. What makes the fact that octopus die so young so very shocking is not the evolutionary puzzle of it, I think, but rather the fact that there is something in itself and incomprehensible about the very idea that so much intelligence and understanding could be achieved in such a short life. For us, it seems, thought, understanding, wits, are tied up with experience and, so, with time. Octopus nous is freakish, like something out of science fiction. Which ties up with another theme of Other Minds. remarks at the outset that contact with an octopus is the closest most of us will ever come to an intelligent alien. For the most part, reading this book, I had the feeling that this was not so. It isn’t that the octopus isn’t different from us. Long gangly arms, eight of them a boneless body that shifts shape and changes color. All this is strange. And there is no disputing the evolutionary facts. You have to go back 600 million years to meet the bilateral, worm who is the common ancestor of both humans and cephalopods. This is a being whose cleverness took shape as a result of a very different history than that of ourselves. And yet, the octopus doesn’t come across as all that exotic or even all that wild. And this shouldn’t be that surprising when you stop to think that intelligence, wit, rationality, these are, as Dennett has stressed, interpretive notions. To see someone or something as intelligent is to view it as conforming to a certain way of acting. Rational beings are the ones that do what they should in light of what they need given what they know. The octopus, however playful or curious, is a smarty pants and for that reason doesn’t seem that remote at all. Until we come up against the startling fact of the brevity of octopus life, that is. It is here that I had the vivid sense that in encountering the octopus we are brought into contact not merely with an intelligent alien, but a truly alien intelligence. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

Updated at 8 p. m. ET, Donald Trump lashed out at civil rights hero John Lewis on Twitter Saturday morning, a day after the Georgia Democratic congressman said in an interview he didn’t view the as ”legitimate” amid questions of Russia’s interference in the U. S. elections. While Trump has a tendency to take to social media to push back against any slight against him, such a rebuke of Lewis and the criticism of his district was jarring on the holiday weekend celebrating the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders and a top lieutenant of King’s, helping organize the March on Washington in 1963 and marching with King across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. in 1965, where his skull was fractured. Lewis said during an NBC interview on Friday that he didn’t view Trump as a ”legitimate president” after reports that Russia had worked to influence the election in Trump’s favor and to discredit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Trump has largely dismissed those reports and questioned the validity of U. S. intelligence findings, frequently praising Russia and its president Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign and the election. Lewis also said he wouldn’t be attending Trump’s inauguration on Friday, making it the first he’s missed since he was elected to Congress in 1986. ”You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right,” Lewis told Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd. (Editor’s note on Jan. 17: Lewis’ communications director, Brenda Jones, has since corrected the record, noting that the congressman chose not to attend President George W. Bush’s first inauguration. That ”was also a form of dissent,” she told CBS News.) Lewis used Trump’s attack as part of a fundraising plea from the Democratic National Committee and his own congressional campaign later on Saturday, writing in an email that, ”I’ve been beaten bloody, fighting for what’s right for America. I’ve marched at Selma with Dr. King. Sometimes that’s what it takes to move our country in the right direction. We refuse to stop now. We’re not done fighting for progress. We’re ready for the next four years.” Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent critic of Trump during the campaign, defended Lewis on Twitter. On Friday, he’d tweeted a message to Lewis asking him to reconsider attending the inauguration. Trump also claimed that Lewis’s district was ”in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).” As the Atlanta Journal Constitution notes, the district is about 58 percent black, 33 percent white and has a growing Hispanic population. It includes the Atlanta International Airport, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the headquarters of Coca Cola and Delta Air Lines. It also includes several top colleges such as the historically black Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, along with Emory University and Georgia Tech. And while the district does have an 8. 2 percent unemployment rate, higher than the national average of just below 5 percent, more than 40 percent in the district have a bachelor’s degree or higher, higher than the national average. Even amid criticism, Trump doubled down on his remarks about Lewis later Saturday evening: Michigan Rep. Justin Amash had a curt response to that later tweet from Trump:

Just one day after Jennifer Holliday told the media she planned to sing at a welcome concert for Donald Trump, the Tony singer says she has reconsidered. Holliday will not be performing at the event. She announced the turnabout in a letter provided to The Wrap. She wrote, in part: ”Regretfully, I did not take into consideration that my performing for the concert would actually instead be taken as a political act against my own personal beliefs and be mistaken for support of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. ”In light of the information pointed out to me via the Daily Beast article on yesterday, my only choice must now be to stand with the LGBT Community and to state unequivocally that I WILL NOT PERFORM FOR THE WELCOME CONCERT OR FOR ANY OF THE INAUGURATION FESTIVITIES!” Holliday, a Broadway actress best known for her turn in Dreamgirls, in the early 1980s has sung for U. S. presidents on both sides of the aisle — including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both presidents Bush. She says it was this role as a ” songbird” that ultimately persuaded her to accept an invitation to sing at a Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. ”I’m singing on the mall for the people. I don’t have a dog in this fight — I’m just a singer, and it’s a welcome concert for the people on the mall,” she told The New York Times on Friday, adding that she had voted for Hillary Clinton in the election. But ”if someone wants me to sing a national anthem or something,” Holliday told the Times, ”we think about America, and we go.” The announcement Friday drew a swift backlash on social media that astonished Holliday. ”I’m not singing for Donald Trump I’m singing to welcome the people of America,” she told Billboard, in an interview Friday defending the decision. ”He cannot be the only face that’s gonna represent us. And just to have all white people up there singing is not going to be a fair representation either. So you’re just saying don’t go? Really? I’m just very disheartened by it that it would be so much hate.” In her letter, which was addressed to ”MY BELOVED LGBT COMMUNITY,” Holliday says that calculus changed for her after reading a Daily Beast article that called attention to her lofty status as an icon in the LGBT community. The decision to perform in support of the incoming Trump administration represented ”an act that seems to defy everything her most passionate supporters stand for, and even issues she herself has supported throughout her career,” the Daily Beast argued. So, Holliday says, she reexamined her choice. And Saturday, she made that change of heart official. In her letter, she apologized for what she called a ”lapse of judgement,” and ”for being uneducated on the issues that affect every American at this crucial time in history and for causing such dismay and heartbreak to my fans.”

For the past 17 years, Sam Barsky has knit sweaters that depict places he’s seen around the world, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Stonehenge, Jerusalem’s Western Wall — even a field of electrical pylons. But what’s made Barsky an internet phenomenon, with well over a million hits on various websites, are photos of the knitter himself posing in front of a scene, wearing his matching sweater. With more than 100 handmade sweaters under his belt, the says the only limitation he has is the ’ time it takes to make one. ”This is what I enjoy doing, I like creating. I like replicating what I see in life, and what I anticipate seeing.” And that’s just where he finds his artistic inspiration. ”Pretty much any kind of iconic landmark or natural scene — anything, possibly — it could be in my dreams,” Barsky says. As for the electrical pylon sweater, ”I see them all the time, in all my routine travels around the local area,” he says. ”They’re everywhere, so pretty much anything that crosses my eyes is a potential sweater and the pylons are no exception.” For his next project, he’s setting his sights on a Groundhog Day sweater — featuring a groundhog on it, of course. Another ambitious knitting feat of his? Faces — he’s working on a Martin Luther King sweater, just in time for the civil rights leader’s birthday. Now that his art’s virality has garnered him new fame, Barsky says, ”I’m flooded with requests — so many I can’t even see all of them.” But he’s not quite up to fulfilling those requests, sticking to his own artistic direction that got him the attention in the first place. ”I’ve thought about it before, but I’ve realized early on, a long time ago, that it’s not practical for me to be a human sweater mill.”

Small classes. High standards. More money. These popular remedies for school ills aren’t as effective as they’re sometimes thought to be. That’s the somewhat controversial conclusion of education researcher John Hattie. Over his career, Hattie has scrutinized more than 1, 000 ”” looking at all types of interventions to improve learning. The studies he’s examined cover a combined 250 million students around the world. Out of that, he’s identified five common ideas in education policy that he says should be looked at with a critical eye. NPR Ed spoke with Hattie, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, about each of these five ideas following the publication of his 2015 paper ”What Doesn’t Work In Education: The Politics of Distraction.” 1. Achievement standards. ”It seems very sensible. You set up minimum standards you want students to reach. You judge schools by how many reach them,” Hattie says. ”But it has a very nasty effect. All those schools who take kids in difficult circumstances are seen as failures, while those who take privileged students and do nothing are seen as successful.” By the same token, it seems to make sense to set achievement standards by grade level, but the further along students get in school, Hattie points out, the more of them are performing either behind or ahead of the schedule that’s been set. The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts. 2. Achievement tests. schools, and countries, don’t necessarily give more standardized tests than low performers. They often give fewer. The alternative: testing that emphasizes giving teachers immediate, actionable feedback to improve teaching. 3. School choice. Many education reformers tout school choice as a tool for parent empowerment and school improvement through competitive pressure. But Hattie says his research shows that once the economic background of students is accounted for, private schools offer no significant advantages over public schools, on average. The same goes for charter schools. But there is one kind of choice that Hattie does believe makes a difference: teacher choice. Being able to select the best teacher for your child, Hattie suggests, could be truly empowering for parents — albeit a challenging strategy for a school to adopt. 4. Small class size. In the U. S. groups such as Class Size Matters are dedicated to the proposition that fewer students per teacher is a recipe for success. This, Hattie argues, would come as a surprise to Japan and Korea, which have two of the education systems in the world — and average class sizes of 33. Hattie says reducing class size can have a positive impact. But that small class size needs to be paired with training and support for teachers to collaborate more closely with students, offer more personalized feedback and measure student improvement on a more granular level. 5. More money. Korea and Finland far outscore the U. S. on the international PISA exam, which tests learning in math, science and reading. And those two countries spend $60, 000 and $75, 000 respectively per student, for schooling from first grade through high school graduation. That compares with $105, 000 spent per student for the same block of time in the U. S. Hattie believes $40, 000 per student for these years of education is necessary for reasonable school performance. But above that, he sees almost no relationship between money spent and results earned. In his book Visible Learning Into Action, Hattie looks at the flip side — the ideas that do work in schools around the world. Boiled down, he says, the most effective ideas are those that empower teachers to collaborate closely with students and support them in continuously improving. A version of this story was published on NPR Ed in August 2015.

Shelly Fields is a white woman living in Richton Park, a racially diverse Chicago suburb. She says she’s raised her four daughters, who are biracial, to see people of all races as equal, just as her parents raised her. Fields doesn’t think that racism will ever disappear completely, but she’s hopeful that it lessens with each passing generation. ”The more biracial children there are, the more equality we see,” Fields said. ”The more people of color we see in positions of power — it will help to change the way people see race.” Her oldest daughter, Summer, is a graduate of the University of Chicago. When she was in high school, Summer probably would have agreed that race relations were looking up. The ’90s and early 2000s were ”a fantasy time” in Richton Park, Summer said. ”Being firmly in the middle of the Obama era — it [was] a moment of progress. It was validating.” Now, as the Obama era ends, she is of the mind that racism isn’t going anywhere. ”Racism always evolves, and will find a way,” Summer said. The question that Shelly and Summer are tackling has been posed in many forms for many generations. Will racism just die off with old bigots? Does the fate of race relations lie with the children? That idea has been milling about the public psyche for generations. It lives in that famous (if ) line: ”I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr. said it eloquently in his ”I Have a Dream” speech, but we’ve heard that sentiment through the ages, from Thomas Jefferson to Oprah Winfrey. The belief that our children’s generation will be less racist gets repeated by teachers, parents, politicians and activists. And understandably so. Much of American culture is predicated on the idea that we can create a better future for our progeny, instilling in them values that we as a nation have often failed to uphold. In our small, very unscientific survey last month, Code Switch heard that conviction. We also heard just the opposite. We wanted to know if beliefs about the future of racism were held consistently in families from generation to generation. Here’s what we asked in our December callout: Will racism fade away when old bigots die? Of the 120 or so people who responded, more than said they did not think the next generation would usher out racism. And nearly the same number thought their answer would differ from their parents or grandparents. (There’s reason to think, given some more scientific national research, that there’s not really much difference between generations when it comes to racial beliefs.) But let’s get back to the Fields family. Summer Fields responded to our survey. She had no qualms saying that racism would be with us for the long run. She didn’t know exactly what her mom would say, but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be that. Here’s what Shelly said: ”The further we get away from the idea that one skin color or race is better than the other, the better. Past generations had these ideas, and they were spread to the next generation and the next.” Shelly learned about race from her parents. When she was growing up, she said, they taught her never to judge other people based on skin color. That didn’t stop them from being cautious when she began dating outside her race and eventually decided to start a family with a black man. ”Once [my mother] found out I was pregnant, when it hit close to home, it was a different story,” Shelly said. ”She was afraid . .. She said, ’You’re gonna have a baby with dark skin and kinky hair.’ ”’She was afraid because she didn’t know [what to expect]. And I really didn’t know either.” But Shelly said that once her daughters were born, her parents were able to see firsthand that there was nothing to worry about. (She lives right behind her parents, and they’ve been heavily involved in each other’s lives.) She said that her neighborhood has always been racially mixed, and that her family has never really experienced racism there. That, she said, helped her parents move past some of their fears and double down on their belief that people of all races should be treated equally. ”They taught that to my daughters,” Shelly said. ”They and I showed my daughters, and I’m hoping that they’ll show their daughters and sons.” Summer isn’t quite as hopeful. As a high schooler, being surrounded by a mix of black, white, and multiracial classmates, it was possible for her to believe in a more uplifting future. After arriving at the University of Chicago, where less than five percent of the student body was black, her perspective changed. She started learning about things like race theory in her classes. The overwhelmingly white environment also affected how she thought of herself her identity suddenly felt more political. She found herself engaging and disagreeing more with her mom’s ideas about race. They’ve argued over things like trigger warnings and safe spaces (her mom says that’s not how the real world works) and about how to . Summer thought of herself as biracial until she went to college. When she started referring to herself as a black woman, that became another point of contention. ”My mom doesn’t understand,” she said. ”She feels like that’s an affront to her.” While Shelly knows racism won’t disappear (”We still have families that teach the same things they were taught about judging people based on race,” she said,) she holds onto some optimism. Summer’s prognosis is a little bleaker. ”Our country’s whole identity is founded on the pillaging and murder of Native people and chattel slavery,” she said. It would help to acknowledge that, she said. She’s just not sure democracy could handle it. ”For us to call that out and admit it would be the first step,” Summer said. ”But it would destroy the whole project.” That generational dissonance seemed to be a common thread among the people we surveyed. We heard from a South Asian college student in Florida who said that because her parents chose to come to the United States, they’re more invested in the notion that America is a land of opportunity for all people. So they don’t get why so many people of color in this country fear police or don’t work their way out of poverty. ”My mom isn’t racist . .. but she doesn’t understand institutional racism,” she said. ”I have an understanding of [American] history that my parents don’t.” We also heard from a white elementary school teacher in New Jersey who’s hopeful because his white students idolize musicians and athletes of color. But he said his parents think the culture gaps between races are too large to ever overcome. At one point, he spoke to them about moving from his largely white neighborhood into one that was racially mixed. He thought he’d be comfortable there. Their response? ”No, you wouldn’t.” Much of the available public polling data suggests that millennials like the schoolteacher are not as different from Generation Xers or Baby Boomers as they might think. Kathleen Weldon, communications director at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, said millennials tend to say they are more optimistic about race relations than their parents, and more broadly accepting of things like interracial friendships and marriage. But when questioned about specific policy issues tied to race, she said, millennials sound a lot like their elders. They don’t ”have different views on the [George] Zimmerman case, aren’t more aware of the disproportionate effect of HIV on the black community, are not more likely to think government should play a major role in the social and economic position of blacks, and are no more [or less] likely to think the [Voting Rights Act] is still necessary,” Weldon said. ”In other words, when it comes to perceptions and policy around race in the U. S. young Americans don’t look much different from older ones.” Jocelyn Wilks and her father, Elijah, expected their views to diverge significantly when it came to race and racism. But though they come from different generations, were born in different parts of the country, and even have different ideas of what they’ll call racism, their outlook is pretty similar. As a black man born in Mississippi in the early 1960s, Elijah lived with racism. He was in fourth grade when his school integrated. When he was in high school, there was a black homecoming court and a white homecoming court, a black ”Mr. and Miss High School” and a white ”Mr. and Miss High School.” Those experiences inform his thinking about race. His daughter, he said, formed her opinions another way. ”I’ve never taught [Jocelyn] about racism,” Elijah said. ”I never had those conversations with her. I let her grow up and develop her own opinion of things. That was never taught in the home when I was growing up and I didn’t teach her that way.” Another difference between father and daughter, he said, is geographic. He was raised in Mississippi Jocelyn was born and raised in San Antonio. ”Where I grew up, you were either black or white,” Elijah said. ”In San Antonio, it’s predominantly Hispanic, and whites and blacks are minorities . .. It makes a huge difference.” Jocelyn is a accounting student who lives just north of San Antonio. Her experience teaching helped convince her that racism was going nowhere fast. During that time, Jocelyn heard a lot of nonsense from her students, like one boy who, after losing a basketball game, said his opponent’s ”genes were made to jump.” Jocelyn knew the children were getting those ideas from somewhere. ”When you’re 9 or 10 you can’t call bullshit on your parents,” she said. ”You take those racist statements as facts. . .. ”Kids pick up things that you don’t teach them. So if Mom treats a person of color poorly, the kid sees that and picks it up, because that’s their model.” Jocelyn said she and her dad have different ideas of what’s worth labeling racism. Born in a harsher time, his threshold, she said, is higher. ”It won’t be the small slights that people in my generation find to be racist,” she said. ”He thinks things are getting better, and they are better from when he was growing up. But it’s not the better that we’re looking for. He wouldn’t look at gentrification or housing segregation and say, ’They’re doing that on purpose, this is racist.’ It would be a church shooting, and he’d [say] ’That’s a hate crime.’ ”Dad says, ’It’s not fair that these people are getting killed and no one’s going to jail for it.’ And I say, ’It’s not fair, if your name is Shaniqua, that you have to work 15 times harder to get a job than anybody else. ’” But when they come back to that question that has been passed down through the generations — Will racism fade away when old bigots die? — Elijah and Jocelyn sound almost identical. Father: ”As new generations come into existence, it will be lesser and lesser, but I don’t know if it will ever end.” Daughter: ”As long as there’s racism in this generation, there’s going to be racism in the next generation. It might dwindle, but it won’t disappear.”

As their first major act of the new Congress, Republicans rushed approval of a budget resolution this week that sets up a framework for repealing Obamacare, but what exactly to replace it with is still a puzzle Republicans are piecing together. And it could take a while. ”We’re not holding hard deadlines, only because we want to get it right,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, . told reporters this week. The budget resolution does include a Jan. 27 deadline for committees to report back with repeal legislation, but lawmakers have made abundantly clear they’re going to blow past that date. Ryan says Republicans will use their annual GOP retreat for a ”full, exhausting” conversation on how exactly to repeal and replace the law. The approach is at odds with the increasing urgency of the rhetoric on the state of the Affordable Care Act. ”We are on a rescue mission to prevent Obamacare from making things even worse,” Ryan pledged. What do we know? Congressional leaders and Donald Trump have pledged that repeal legislation and the GOP alternative to replace will occur at roughly the same time. Trump this week pledged it will happen ”essentially simultaneously.” The incoming president said they will not offer a plan until his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price, . is confirmed. Republicans expect a significant amount of the repeal effort to come through executive action by HHS since much of the implementation of Obamacare was done through the same agency. In Congress, lawmakers say they want to use piecemeal legislation to address specific issues. There is stiff political resistance among Republicans to voting on one, sweeping legislative package. The Affordable Care Act was 2, 700 pages, and Republicans these days are generally distrustful of behemoth bills. They are too hard to explain to the public their constituents hate them and it’s too easy to tuck in provisions they might regret voting for down the road. Republicans have promised to keep intact some of the more popular provisions of the law. They say people with conditions will still have access to health insurance, and that parents can keep their adult children on their health plans until age 26. House Republicans offered a broad outline for reform in 2016 that provides the foundation for what they will try and do this year. That plan repeals the individual mandate, which is a pillar of Obamacare. Instead, it would create new tax credits to incentivize individuals to buy insurance, but it wouldn’t penalize them if they don’t. Ryan discussed this at a CNN town hall on Thursday. ”We want to instead have tax credits, so that everybody can . .. take their tax credit and go buy a health care plan of their choosing,” he said. ”And that’s the other thing — we don’t want to make people buy something that they don’t want to buy. We don’t want to force them to buy all these different benefits.” There is also loose consensus in the House and Senate to remove mandates on essential health benefits that insurance plans must cover and let states decide minimum coverage. Republicans also plan to use the repeal legislation to cut off funds for Planned Parenthood, which received federal funds through Medicaid reimbursements for services. Planned Parenthood is a political target for Republicans, who oppose the health care provider, because they provide abortion services. Instead, Republicans want to redirect those federal funds to health clinics that do not offer abortion services. What Don’t We know? A lot. Broadly, there is a philosophical debate here about whether the federal government has an obligation to insure all Americans, or whether Americans should decide whether or not to have insurance. Republicans have pledged that no one who has insurance through the ACA will lose it, but without a mandate the number of insured Americans could drop. The other major challenge facing Republicans is cost. The party, at its core, is resistant to expanding federal entitlements and spending, but they have pledged to create better health care coverage options at lower costs. Those two promises are hard to reconcile, particularly for a legislative product that will have to be assessed by the Congressional Budget Office for its impact on the federal budget. Lawmakers say the most ambitious timetable to see a legislative product take shape is late February, although others caution that this debate could consume most of 2017. For all the Republicans’ ambitions on health care, there are still certain legislative realities they have to face. The most significant is in the Senate, where replacement legislation will likely need to pass a hurdle, and that means bringing some combination of Democrats on board. That’s why GOP senators are taking a more measured approach. For instance, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman, Lamar Alexander, . a key negotiator, has already taken Medicare off the table as part of any health care negotiations, because it would repel any Democrat from engaging in talks. What are the political calculations? Democrats advanced Obamacare after winning an election that delivered control of Congress and the White House. In hindsight, many top Democrats have reflected that the party tackled health care when the country was really aching for economic relief. ”Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs not for changes in their healthcare,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, . Y. reflected in 2014. Arguably, Republicans could be making the same mistake. The party is fresh off an election victory that delivered unified GOP control for the first time in a decade. But their dire warnings about Obamacare don’t always line up with the public’s view of the law. A recent poll showed 38% of Americans support strengthening or expanding Obamacare 31% want it repealed and replaced 14% want it repealed and not replaced 6% want it left as is. Democrats think Republicans have their hand. ”When you put pen to paper, all hell is going to break lose on your side,” Rep. Peter Welch, . said during floor debate this week on the budget resolution, ”because you have to move beyond the rhetoric to figuring out how you’re going to pay to keep our kids on our health care plan, figuring out how to have to pay if we’re going to let folks with conditions have health care. Those (problems) don’t solve themselves, and you don’t have a plan.” But doing nothing is also not an option, particularly for lawmakers in states where premiums are rising and insurer options are now down to a single provider. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky argued that Democrats face their own political risks by defending the current system. ”I would caution our Democratic friends to become the spokesmen for the status quo,” he said. ”It associates them with the fact that, after Obamacare, there’s still 25 million Americans who are uninsured, are going up, deductibles are going up and premiums are going up. I would also remind them that (Obamacare) is the reason we had a great year in 2010, 2014 and again in 2016.”

President Obama and Vice Mike Pence were both on Capitol Hill Wednesday, making competing cases for and against Obama’s signature health care law. Republicans have promised to make repeal of the Affordable Care Act their first order of business, once they control both Congress and the White House. Obama is urging his fellow Democrats to do what they can to preserve the law. If that fails, Democrats plan to hold Republicans accountable for any disruption the repeal may trigger. Both sides are trying to position themselves as the protectors of Americans’ health care, while branding the other party as a dangerous threat. As usual, the truth may be somewhere in between. Here we take a closer look at some of the claims being floated by both parties: Trump got the ball rolling with a tweet, cautioning that ”Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases. .... .” Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Trump. ”This law has failed,” Ryan told reporters. ”We know that things are only getting worse under Obamacare. This is about people paying higher premiums every year and feeling powerless to stop it. It’s about families paying deductibles that are so high it doesn’t even feel like you have health insurance in the first place. And in so many parts of the country, as you’ve always heard, even if you want to look for better coverage, you’re stuck with one option. One choice is not a choice. It is a monopoly. The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare.” CLAIM: Obamacare suffers from ”massive premium increases” FACT CHECK: True in some cases, but it’s also relative. Obamacare is also actually cheaper on average than the typical plan. Many people shopping for health insurance on the exchanges set up by Obamacare have seen premium increases this year. The average cost of a benchmark plan rose 25 percent nationwide, but there was considerable variation from state to state. Premiums in Arizona jumped an average of 116 percent, while premiums in Indiana and Massachusetts actually went down. Most people buying insurance on the exchanges receive a government subsidy, which helps defray the cost. A study by the Urban Institute last year found that even without the subsidy, insurance policies sold on the exchanges cost about 10 percent less than the typical plan. Exchange policies might seem more expensive, because part of the cost of workplace plans is typically paid by employers, and thus largely invisible to the employee. CLAIM: ”You’re stuck with one option” under Obamacare, FACT CHECK: Not true for the majority, but it has increasingly become the case. Obamacare insurance exchanges have grown less competitive, as some insurance companies have lost money and left the market. One in five customers on the exchanges had just one insurance company to choose from this year (up from 2 percent in 2016). Nearly 6 in 10 customers have a choice of three or more companies. The lack of competition, which can lead to higher prices, tends to be worse in rural areas and the South. Insurance companies have struggled, in part, because fewer young, healthy people have signed up for coverage than forecast. Backers of the Affordable Care Act say that could be remedied with more generous subsidies to encourage or bigger penalties for those who fail to enroll. Obama also renewed the idea of a public insurance option to supplement private offerings. CLAIM: ”The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare” FACT CHECK: Prices were going up at faster rates before Obamacare. Most Americans under age 65 still get health insurance through an employer, although the percentage has been slowly dropping. The cost of coverage has gone up since passage of the ACA. But the annual price hikes were considerably larger in the decade before the law was passed. Some of the savings from slower premium growth have been offset by higher deductibles. While Republicans highlight the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats warn that repeal would be much worse. ”Instead of working to further ensure affordable care for all Americans, [Republicans] seek to rip health care away from millions of Americans, creating chaos in our entire economy,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. He and his fellow Democrats offered a mocking slogan for the GOP: ”Make America Sick Again.” Schumer also suggested that repealing Obamacare would hurt rural hospitals, ”right in their heartlands. The minute they enact this repeal, [hospitals] are going to suffer dramatically,” he said. CLAIM: ACA repeal would ”rip health care away from millions” FACT CHECK: True, if Republicans don’t protect them or replace ACA with something that provides coverage. The Affordable Care Act has expanded health care coverage to some 20 million Americans through a combination of subsidized individual policies, expanded Medicaid, and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans. The uninsured rate has fallen to an low of around 10 percent. Coverage would be higher still if 19 states had not refused to expand Medicaid. If the Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act, many of those newly insured Americans would be at risk of losing coverage. In addition, millions more who buy individual insurance policies off the exchanges could be at risk, if that market is disrupted. The Urban Institute estimates as many as 30 million people in all could lose their health care coverage, doubling the uninsured rate. Republicans have promised an orderly transition as they work toward a replacement for Obamacare, and it’s possible the effective date for any repeal could be delayed for a number of years. Insurance companies, however, may be reluctant to participate once it’s clear Obamacare’s individual market is being phased out. CLAIM: Rural hospitals are going to suffer, FACT CHECK: True, if repealed outright, but it’s also because of the way the ACA was structured in the first place. The concern for hospitals reflects a when the ACA was passed seven years ago. The government scaled back what it pays hospitals for treating Medicare patients and the indigent, with the expectation that would be offset by payments from millions of newly insured. Hospitals worry that if repeal of the law cuts insurance coverage, but doesn’t restore other payments, they could be left with a mountain of unpaid bills. The American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals urged Congress and the incoming Trump administration to either protect insurance coverage or replace the hospital payments.

So now we know: This is how it’s going to be after Inauguration Day, too. When coverage falls afoul of Donald Trump, the will feed the media itself into the news grinder. As Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon, the new administration is going on permanent offense Trump will invert the usual equation to subject individual journalists and their employers to scrutiny and slashing attacks of the kind usually reserved for public officials. Trump started Wednesday’s cyclone of a press conference with a warning sheathed in seeming compliments: Thanks for the restraint in holding off on all those salacious and unproven allegations about my personal behavior, and the claims of collusion between my associates and the Russians! And don’t tick me off if you want any more of these press conferences. It had, after all, been a since Trump last held one — a hiatus which he ascribed to his displeasure with reporting about him. Standing at a lectern in the atrium of the Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, Trump went on to denounce CNN (”Your organization is terrible. . .. You are fake news! ”) for editorial decisions made by BuzzFeed (which he called ”a failing pile of garbage”). CNN had reported that senior U. S. intelligence officials took the allegations seriously enough to brief President Obama and the — a story that sparked a firestorm but proved uncontroversial among most journalists to publish. It was unquestionably newsworthy. BuzzFeed, by contrast, had sparked industrywide debate in deciding to post the full file of unsubstantiated claim — compiled, apparently, by a former British intelligence officer working on behalf of Trump’s political foes in both parties. The site’s rationale was that posting allowed readers to make up their own minds, even as reporters raced to determine which allegations, if any, held up to scrutiny. Trump shouted down CNN’s Jim Acosta as the reporter repeatedly sought to ask Trump a question in response to his pointed critique. Afterward Sean Spicer, Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, strode briskly up to Acosta and admonished him. Spicer later told me Acosta had been ”disgraceful, rude and inappropriate” in pressing Trump. Spicer also said that he had told Acosta ”if he did it again, I’d have him thrown out.” Trump’s rhetorical jujitsu and verbal attacks at times overshadowed the meat of the stories that drew his ire, including his camp’s alleged ties to the Russians and his business entanglements. Some of Trump’s aides ginned up some hollow stagecraft for the event: Trump stood near a table loaded with unmarked manila folders filled with sheets of paper as his lawyer explained why he would give control of his companies to his sons rather than sell his enterprises. Reporters never saw what the folders contained or learned what information they purportedly held. Even so, the question of conflicts of interest surfaced unexpectedly in the Trump Tower atrium, effectively a mall. ”The blue curtain behind Trump didn’t quite obscure the booth where Ivanka Trump sells her fine jewelry,” the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi noted minutes after the event wrapped up. ”You could see the mannequins where they normally have these diamond necklaces that Ivanka Trump is selling in Trump Tower. ”Even in their staging, they couldn’t quite get rid of the idea that Ivanka and all of the children — and Donald Trump — will have a massive conflict of interest,” Nuzzi said afterward. On Thursday morning, Trump picked up on Twitter where he left off: ”CNN is in a total meltdown with their FAKE NEWS because their ratings are tanking since election and their credibility will soon be gone!” Actually, CNN’s ratings are flying high right now — thanks in no small part to the controversy and conflict engendered by the in the past year. And as for fake news, Trump himself has been a leading purveyor of false claims, from hoaxes over Obama’s birth to unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. Some press critics have publicly wrestled with the need for new strategies and rules on how to cover this administration. I don’t think Trump’s arrival requires new strategies, but perhaps new tactics. Yes, reporters might benefit from standing by one another more, as some commentators have advised. They could reiterate questions posed by competitors who are frozen out, or, in the case of Acosta, who never did get to ask the question he sought, yielding time back to him. At minimum they could call out Trump and his aides on the practice — as Jake Tapper, then with ABC News, publicly did in sticking up for Fox News reporters and Washington bureau chiefs did in private exchanges with Obama aides. The media could benefit from adhering to first principles that probably should have been observed more attentively all along: Access matters less than reporting away from the camera. And the press must recognize it can’t rely on other institutions to raise the right questions. (One congressional committee chairman, instead of serving as a check on the suggested he would investigate a federal ethics official who said Trump’s moves to manage possible business conflicts were insufficient.) Away from the event, reporters joked nervously about what retribution their news organizations might experience in the future. The Trump campaign created blacklists of reporters and news organizations barred from interviews. (BuzzFeed figured prominently.) And yet Trump wants the media’s attention and craves its respect. Trump’s favorite media outlets depend on the vagaries of his mood. Among them one will likely find Breitbart News, the conservative site which heavily favored Trump during the GOP primaries. The site’s former chairman, Steve Bannon, will be a top White House adviser to Trump. And Trump called on a Breitbart reporter during the news conference. Other likely Trump favorites include the New York Post (to which he has given myriad scraps about his personal life over the years) Fox News (which has named Trump fan Tucker Carlson to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly) the National Enquirer (its parent company is run by a close Trump friend who authorized a $150, 000 payment to a former Playboy model to quash the story of an affair, according to the Wall Street Journal) the New York Observer (owned by his Jared Kushner until this month) perhaps even RT, the Russian propagandist network which had a correspondent cheerfully bellowing its initials a few feet from me on Wednesday in hopes of being called on. As it happens, Trump did not call on him. Yet Trump wants the established media’s attention and craves its respect. He gives interviews to The New York Times, even when rejecting the premises of their questions. And he monitors cable coverage more than any TV news agent. On Fox News Thursday evening, former New York City mayor, Fox News commentator and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani hailed a new media age ushered in by Trump: ”It is refreshing and it is very good for our democracy that we have a president that is trying to get us back to a free press.” Free to do what, one wonders.

Once again, NPR finds itself in the uncomfortable position of reporting on unverified information, just as it did last year when WikiLeaks dumped troves of what it said were hacked emails taken from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and from top officials of the Democratic National Committee. In this case, the unsubstantiated information is contained in a dossier about Donald Trump, compiled last year at the behest of Trump foes — first Republicans, and then the Democrats. The dossier has been circulating in official Washington circles and among the press corps for some time. CNN reported on its existence earlier this week, with BuzzFeed quickly posting it in full after. Other news organizations followed with their own reports that left out the specifics being alleged. NPR is among those that have not detailed the contents of the document. As Phil Ewing wrote for npr. org, ”it remains unverified, but it describes a concerted effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to cultivate a relationship with Trump and his camp. The document, which describes information provided by Russian government and other sources, details behavior by Trump that could leave him open to blackmail, as well as alleged secret meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials called to discuss the campaign against Clinton and potential new business relationships.” Other and online characterizations have been similar, but even that broad description has provoked polarized listener reaction. My office and NPR have heard from those who think NPR is biased against Trump by reporting on even the existence of the dossier and the basic outlines of the information. Listener Scot Lee of Laporte, Colo. was particularly succinct: ”I am most disappointed that NPR leadership allowed the organization to fall into the trap of reporting unsubstantiated information.” Bruce Heida from Frederick, Md. raised the very good question of why NPR, in one report, ”failed to include the information that the memo was generated by operatives wishing to destroy Trump’s candidacy.” In the opposite camp are those who think NPR is treating the too delicately by tiptoeing around the unverified information in the report, unlike when it reported much more extensively on the WikiLeaks material. Listener Michelle Wilson of Wyoming, Mich. wrote to my office, concerned about what she felt was a noting that the WikiLeaks information, which was ”stolen and never authenticated,” was covered in detail, and yet NPR is not reporting specifics in the Trump dossier ”because NPR has not independently confirmed the allegations.” She continued: ”What conclusion should I draw from the difference in coverage? The options seem to be: 1. NPR learned something from the way it handled the WikiLeaks docs and is now trying to do better. 2. Mary Louise Kelly her editor is more careful than [the NPR reporters covering WikiLeaks]. 3. NPR simply has a double standard in covering anything Clinton related versus Trump related. 4. NPR, like many other individuals and entities, fears crossing Trump by reporting unflattering information. Please educate me on the reasons for the difference.” I asked NPR’s standards editor, Mark Memmott, for his thoughts. Not surprisingly — since these are thorny issues — his response was similar to that when I asked him about the WikiLeaks reporting last fall. The word he used to describe both situations was ”awkward.” As he told me, the current story is still in its ”very early stages” and the audience is still getting familiar with it, so ”taking care to remind them about the questions regarding the authenticity of the information is important. That doesn’t mean we can dispense with such reminders as stories go on and on and the news becomes familiar. There were times in the WikiLeaks coverage where we probably should have remembered to include that information.” (NPR did indeed eventually stop including disclaimers on the WikiLeaks material and it should not have done that so quickly.) But, addressing the concerns of Wilson and others, Memmott rightly made a distinction between the two leaks. He said, ”The authenticity of the WikiLeaks wasn’t being disputed.” (As NPR reported at the time, ”The Clinton campaign has not confirmed that the hacked emails are real and NPR has not been able to confirm their authenticity, but the campaign has linked the hack to Russia and says Moscow is interfering with the election to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy.” Later, government officials implicitly confirmed that the material was real when they asserted the Russian government’s role in stealing it.) Memmott continued: ”Yes, the absence of an objection isn’t proof on its own of authenticity. But it is an important sign. Meanwhile, the content of the latest information is of a different nature than what was in the WikiLeaks. You’ve seen words such as ’scurrilous’ and ’compromising.’ Before a credible news outlet goes into detail about such allegations, it had better be confident in the information.” He continued, ”There’s no question, however, that there is news to report about the latest information. Intelligence officials felt its existence was important enough to tell the president and about it. The and his aides reacted very strongly to the posting of the information. As I say, it’s awkward.” My take: NPR’s reporting in this case has been careful so far. When a Cabinet nominee is being asked about a document in a public hearing the president and have both been presented with it and the ’s communications team makes a statement about it at a press conference, NPR needs to report on it, even while dancing around the details. The fact that Trump opponents compiled the dossier should be noted repeatedly, however. Yes, radio time limitations will mean that’s not always possible, but it’s not a detail that should be left by the wayside or always assumed. As for a : I thought NPR the WikiLeaks material, as the story took on a life of its own. So far, NPR has handled this latest disclosure cautiously — and appropriately.

Donald Trump’s election early Wednesday as president — utterly unprecedented, utterly unexpected — caught the media . The distance between the nation’s political press corps and its people has never seemed so stark. The pundits swung and missed. The polls failed. The predictive surveys of polls, the Upshots and FiveThirtyEights, et al. with their percentage certainties, jerked violently in the precise opposite direction of their predictions as election night progressed. And now journalists are confronted by the prospect of a president who avidly campaigned against them and has promised retribution at a time when many of the nation’s most important news organizations can least afford it. Let’s catalog just a few of the questions facing the nation’s news organizations: How will the media cover Trump? The nation’s journalists like to think of themselves as people who hold the powerful accountable, who are skeptical rather than cynical, constructive rather than carping, institutionally adversarial but not personally opposed. I don’t think that’s how the public thinks about the media. Not at all. The media have come off as petty, grasping and out of touch, all part of the great establishment party from which many Trump voters felt excluded. What’s even more problematic for the media is that Tuesday’s vote involves a repudiation of the idea that the nation’s top leader should care about the facts. On the trail, and throughout his public statements, Trump contradicted the record, the facts, and even himself without the blowback one would expect for a more experienced politician. Indeed, Trump has proved impervious to shame when presented with convincing evidence he is wrong. There’s no reason to believe he’ll care now. The press will have to consider how it can hold accountable someone who rarely if ever is willing to accept fault. During the general election season this fall, CNN’s captions were often written to be puckish correctives of Candidate Trump’s frequent false claims. Will it continue to do so for President Trump? For many news organizations, journalism is commerce as well as public service. TV networks pushed for more primary debates because they could make money off those evenings. CNN made great riches by airing Trump at great unedited length on the campaign trail during the primaries: It booked an extra $100 million above what it would expect for an election year, attributed to the obsessive focus on Trump. CNN chief Jeff Zucker even boasted that the network’s ad inventory for election night was sold out in record time. Along the way, CNN, Fox News, NBC and other outlets yielded to all kinds of demands by Trump. As one example, Trump’s on doing interviews by phone ensured he could control the tempo of the exchanges. As a man who prizes negotiation, Trump knew such demands would cement his status. The transition and the start to the Trump presidency should be great for ratings in the same way the invasion of Iraq was: A strong contingent of the country will cheer it on. Another segment will look on with grave misgivings. And the stakes are enormous. Yet that’s just ratings and clicks. If Trump holds to campaign form — which is not certain, but there’s no reason to expect otherwise — news organizations will have to choose whether to lurch from outrage to outrage rather than identifying what’s actually occurring in the new Trump administration. Will news organizations acquiesce to a new day without acknowledging the distinctive and dislocating nature of the Trump administration? Will they take an adversarial but conventional approach to covering his White House? Or will they take on an almost oppositional stance? I don’t know — and I don’t think they do, either. How will Trump address the media? For the moment, put aside questions of partisan bias (not that Trump intends to). Think instead about the degree to which Trump rejects key values fundamental to journalism, undergirding a deeply held worldview. Trump barely gives lip service to transparency. It’s hard to foresee what kind of information the White House — or various federal agencies and departments — will give out under his watch. As a candidate Trump showed indifference or hostility to many civil liberties, which incorporate the freedom of speech, expression and assembly embedded in the media’s sense of self. Reporters were herded and penned up at Trump rallies, singled out for abuse, and blacklisted for critical stories, even as their editors negotiated for concessions that seem meager in retrospect. Trump has called for loosening libel laws to make it easier to beat news organizations in court. His Silicon Valley supporter Peter Thiel underwrote cases against Gawker that helped shut down the site and force the sale of its parent company. Rolling Stone and its parent company, Wenner Media, just lost a libel case in a federal court in Virginia. Even though most cases involve state courts, and are therefore somewhat insulated from federal law, a president’s advocacy can shape laws in state legislatures across the country. Trump has also personally threatened to punish the owners of news organizations whose reports have proved embarrassing or critical. Trump threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting on his taxes. Trump said he would sue NBC for the release of the Access Hollywood tape from 2005 in which he bragged of assaulting women by grabbing their genitals and getting away with it because he is famous. (Trump later denied he had ever done so.) In May, Trump suggested to Fox News he might go after Amazon for unpaid taxes or on antitrust grounds because its founder and CEO, Jeffrey Bezos, personally owns The Washington Post. ”Every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions,” Trump told one of the most sympathetic figures in media toward him, Fox News host Sean Hannity. ”This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos. . .. Amazon is getting away with murder, taxwise. He’s using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.” (I should disclose here that my wife works at Audible, a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon.) In addition, Trump came out against the proposed ATT takeover of Time Warner (parent company of CNN). He also said as president he would have federal antitrust lawyers reconsider their 2011 approval of Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal as part of an assault on media concentration. Such a position is defensible but appears aimed at those owners of media outlets that he sees as providing hostile coverage. Trump has made no such remarks about the Murdochs’ twin media empires at News Corp. and 21st Century Fox, for example. None of this may come to pass. Trump notoriously hates losing. He made his name in the pages of the tabloid press and as the subject of gauzy interviews on entertainment TV shows. He loves being allowed to weigh in on serious matters in interviews with television news anchors. As the winner of the biggest prize of all he may invite the press in to chronicle his triumph. If he does, it is because the siren call of the klieg lights has won out over his anger. But it is hard for the media to rely on his insincerity for salvation. And now, a glance backward to help inform how to proceed. How did the media get this so wrong? The media became a player — an antagonist — on the trail, thanks to Trump and, he would say, thanks to the media’s coverage too. That may well have affected what people were saying to pollsters. Many states performed outside the margin of error of the projections. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight was off. The New York Times’ Upshot was badly mistaken too. People relied on misinformation spread instantly on social media as well as the shoutfests and jabberjaw punditry on cable news. And this occurred at the same time that unrelenting financial strains have hollowed out newsrooms across the country. Executives at News Corp. the New York Times Co. Gannett and tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) have all reported deep declines in advertising revenues. Over time, reporters have only become more concentrated in Washington, D. C. and New York, as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote Wednesday. The conservative columnist John Podhoretz, also the editor of Commentary magazine, mused on Twitter Wednesday that he might have to think about shutting down his social media account. ”[T]he Twitter echo chamber created a din for many of us that made it impossible to hear what was happening,” Podhoretz wrote. It’s ”perhaps unhealthy for chattering classes (me included) to live partly within this cocktail party that reinforces things that maybe shouldn’t be reinforced and rewards facile conventional thinking rather than depth,” Podhoretz continued. ”Twitter is a bubble, or is a world of cliques.” Cenk Uygur, the leftist host of the Young Turks and a supporter of Bernie Sanders, predicted in July that Trump would beat Clinton based on a populist appeal tapping into voter anger against the establishment. He looks pretty good in retrospect. But he has for years been considered outside the acceptable norm of media voices. As the conservative political columnist Salena Zito wrote of Trump in September, ”the press takes him literally, but not seriously his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” She has been writing for months about the depths of Trump’s support. One such column in August was titled: ”Stumped by Trump’s success? Take a drive outside US cities.” This can be a period of great reconsideration by the press of how it operates, even as the stories arise all around us. News organizations can yield to mass distraction, and coverage can bounce giddily once again from one outrage and astonishing turn of events to another. It is a time for humility and taking stock. It is a time for listening to voters who unexpectedly turned to Trump and those who envision a very different form of America. It’s one of NPR’s strengths that it can draw on reporters from hundreds of member stations in states both red and blue. Our reporters consistently capture voters in their own voices. News organizations often struggle to do that. In the days and months ahead, I’d like to see less predictive punditry and much more reporting. God knows, the press has much to be humble about. I’d like to see much more careful coverage of Trump’s actual policies and the rules, regulations and laws that emerge. Now is the time to capture not just what Trump has to say, but what people are doing in his name. years ago, as a rookie reporter in North Carolina, I witnessed an impromptu debate that broke out between two Duke University trustees about the point and power of journalism. An law dean named Wilhelmina praised Gene Patterson, a legendary Southern editor, for his leadership at The Atlanta Constitution, which chronicled the battle for civil rights despite opposition from segregationists. said her family knew that the paper would not ignore the fate of Georgia’s black residents in the 1960s. Patterson, who died in 2013, replied that the newspaper had indeed reported despite pressure to look away — but there were limits to the paper’s influence. Despite the paper’s intense scrutiny of Lester Maddox, the combative segregationist was elected Georgia’s governor in 1966. The paper also covered his occasionally surprising policies. As The New York Times later noted, Maddox ”surprised many by hiring and promoting blacks in state government and by initiating an early release program for the state prison system.” So too does the press have to document developments as they unfold in the Trump presidency. His administration will require an unusually robust, muscular form of accountability reporting — tethered to fact and fairness, independent of political pressure.

Charts can seem dull. But not to data scientist Tariq Khokhar at the World Bank. When he looked through a year’s worth of charts, graphs, maps and more, he was excited by the numbers. For example, although the world’s population has increased by 2 billion people since 1990, there are 1. 1 billion fewer people living in extreme poverty, under $1. 90 a day (highlighted in blue in the chart below). ”I’m amazed at the progress,” Khokhar says. In December, he worked with his colleagues to identify what he calls the 12 most ”popular and interesting” World Bank charts of 2016, which he highlighted in a blog post on the Bank’s website. The graphs, which range from how many people live without toilets to where the world’s youngest people live, reveal a few intriguing challenges our planet will face in the next few decades. Here’s a sampling of the charts that caught his eye. In the majority of countries, smoking rates have gone down in the past 15 years. But for 20 mostly and countries, they’ve gone up. According to the World Health Organization, tobacco smoking kills around 6 million people a year — and nearly 80 percent of the world’s 1 billion smokers come from the developing world. Not only is it a health issue, it’s an economic one. illness or death deprives families of income — imagine if the breadwinner of a family gets sick and can’t work — and raises the cost of health care. In 2000, just 4 percent of the 5 billion people living in and countries had access to a mobile phone. In 2015, that number skyrocketed to 94 percent of the 6 billion people in that population — making it easier to find someone who might lend you their mobile phone than finding clean water or electricity. While a 2016 study from the World Bank says that mobile phones have boosted growth and expanded opportunities for some in the developing world (through apps that provide health care information or make mobile payments) not everyone benefits. Only about a third of the people who have access to a mobile phone have access to the Internet, which is necessary to use many of these mobile innovations. Spain, South Africa and Greece have some of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. In the pool of who want to work and are available to work, or are actively seeking employment, more than half are unemployed. ”This is both a challenge now and in the future,” says Khokhar. A billion more young people will enter the job market in the next decade — and only 2 in 5 of them are expected to find jobs, he says.

I don’t want to oversell this new version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I don’t know how not to. Everything that the movie version got wrong, this TV adaptation gets right. And not just right, but brilliantly. The difference is as stark, and as significant, as the difference between the movie and TV versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — where the writer of that story, Joss Whedon, took the reins and made a television version much truer to his original vision. Daniel Handler, who wrote the original series of Lemony Snicket books, has done the same thing here. And he’s enlisted, as his key two collaborators: Barry Sonnenfeld, of Pushing Daisies and The Addams Family fame, as the director of many of the episodes, and an executive producer. And as another producer, and the show’s central star, Neil Patrick Harris. This new Netflix version, which is written by Handler, is inspiringly faithful to the original books, with two episodes devoted to each of the first handful of stories. The look, which comes from Sonnenfeld, is fright mode — occasionally bright colors against oppressively grey backgrounds, aptly reflecting the mood of the stories. And these are sad, sad stories indeed. The narrative begins with three children being told their parents have died in a fire that burned down the family home — and goes downhill from there. These stories are cracklingly intelligent, and delightfully droll, and occasionally, surprisingly, funny. They’re also so dark, they come with a warning attached — not just at the start, but throughout. In the books, these warnings are delivered by the alleged author, Lemony Snicket. He delivers the same deadpan warnings in the TV version, too — but for TV, Lemony Snicket appears throughout as a pessimistic, narrator, sort of a cross between Rod Serling and Eeyore. And he’s played by Patrick Warburton, whose delivery is as and as inexplicably charming, as his disclaimers. Though Lemony urges viewers not to watch A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m begging you to tune in. I haven’t had this much fun watching TV in quite a while. The three kids playing the unfortunate Baudelaire children, the story’s central heroes, are exceptional. Malina Weissman is Violet, the young teenage inventor. Louis Hynes is Klaus, the bookworm and Presley Smith is Sunny, the expressive baby with very sharp teeth. Their chief nemesis is Count Olaf, an actor and schemer played by Harris, who adopts several guises and plots in hopes of stealing the family fortune the children will eventually inherit. Different stories and episodes are filled with delightful supporting players and performances. Alfre Woodard, as an easily frightened woman, has her most playful role in decades. Catherine O’Hara, Aasif Mandvi, Joan Cusack and others pop in and out, all having heaps of fun playing outrageous characters. No one has more fun, though, or is more outrageous, than Harris. He was a wonderfully camp, cartoonish villain back when he played the titular bad guy in Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Blog — but that was only a for his evil ways in Unfortunate Events, in which he threatens the children who have been newly placed in his care. I don’t know how old children should be to watch this series — that’s a call, parents should make for themselves. But no one is too old. The tone of this show is utterly charming, and it never falters. It looks great, sounds great, takes twists and turns and preserves all the quirky things that made the original book series such a treat. Even the long discourses on proper grammar, and the deeply buried clues and puns, are here. Harris even sings the show’s theme song, which changes each week to reflect the updated action but always ends by encouraging viewers to look away. Don’t you dare. Or you’ll be missing one of the best new TV shows in a long time.

Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer ”radical empathy” and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety. Today the hosts are presented with a question that requires thinking about honesty, trust and judgment in relationships. A woman writes that the man she’s seeing recently confessed to having cheated in past relationships. She’s concerned — not that he’ll cheat again, but that he hasn’t expressed much regret for doing it in the past. Is she being too judgmental? Dear Sugars, I recently met a great guy I’ll call ”Richard” on a dating app, and we’ve been seeing each other pretty regularly for about a month. Recently, he shared with me that he would like our relationship to become exclusive and for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend. I’ve been single for about four years (I’m 30) and I would very much like to be in a committed relationship. I told him that I wanted the same thing, but that I’m still in the process of getting to know and understand him and I needed more time. Since then, we’ve shared details about our past relationships with each other. He revealed to me that he cheated on every girlfriend he ever had when he was in college and in law school. He says he has not acted this way for about seven years, and he has since had other girlfriends to whom he was faithful. When he told me this, I tried to remain open and . I asked him how he was able to rationalize this behavior to himself, and he said, ”To be honest, I just turned that part of my brain off.” He emphasized that he was much younger then and he was ”sowing his wild oats,” and that he wouldn’t cheat on me now because that simply isn’t what he wants. He wants someone to spend time with and be in a committed relationship with. He is a very type and doesn’t mince words, so I take him at his word that he doesn’t have any plans to resume his cheating ways. However, there are a couple things that concern me about this. One is that he didn’t express much regret or . It seemed as though he was saying his bad behavior suited his desires back then, but they don’t now, so he has cut them out. But what I want is a man who has values and principles that guide him through life — not someone who picks and chooses when doing the right thing suits him. The second thing is that some of his friends continue to cheat on their girlfriends or spouses. While he acknowledges that their behavior is scummy, it’s odd to me that he can be friends with people like that. I know this might sound super but I can honestly say that the people I surround myself with are good people who do not cheat on their significant others. Am I judging him too harshly for cheating all those years back? Should I be giving him credit for being forthcoming about it? Or is it obvious that he doesn’t have a strong moral compass? I so would like for this relationship to work, but I’m not willing to commit to someone I don’t deem trustworthy. Sugars, what should I do? Signed, Too Judgy, Or Not Judgy Enough? Steve Almond: TJONJE, it sounds like what’s unsettling you is that this guy doesn’t have an adequate capacity to and tell you, ”Not only did I do these things, but I know they’re wrong because they were hurtful to the people I was with.” Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio:RSSiTunesStitcher, You believe his declaration, but there’s something untrustworthy about how he’s saying it. It’s like when you say to somebody, ”I’m sorry that upset you,” as opposed to, ”I’m sorry I said something that was clearly hurtful to you.” It feels like he disassociates a little bit. I think you need to have a talk about this before it goes any further and say, ”I know we talked about this and I know you think the issue’s over, but it’s not for me.” Cheryl Strayed: I think you’re being too judgy, TJONJE. I don’t mean to say that you don’t have some valid concerns. It seems to me that the most important concern is Richard’s sense of regret. I would want to know if he has really thought about the consequences of his actions. But I think that’s implicit in the fact that he told you about these things, and that he spent the past seven years not cheating on girlfriends. You ask if he’s trustworthy, but maybe you should ask: What does trustworthy mean to you? Does it mean never having made a mistake? Or does it mean telling you the truth about his life? If it’s the latter, you’ve got that. This man has admitted his past mistakes, even though he knows you feel judgmental about them. Would you rather that he doesn’t tell you those things? I’m not saying it’s OK to deceive and lie and cheat. But I am saying that a lot of people make mistakes within this realm of life, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re immoral. The guy I would be much more afraid of is the guy you met on the dating app at the age of 30 who claims to have an absolutely pure background. Lower those judgments. Open your mind and heart. Have some real discussions, and make yourself vulnerable. You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more from people doubting their relationships. Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail. com and it may be answered on a future episode. You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app.

Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, did speak to Russian ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak by telephone on Dec. 29, the same day the Obama administration announced measures retaliating against Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential campaign, two Trump transition officials confirm to NPR. This is different timing than the Trump transition had announced to reporters Friday morning. Transition spokesman and incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said then that Kislyak texted Flynn on Dec. 28, asking to talk. Spicer also said the text messages showed they wished each other Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and added they spoke by phone later that day, the 28, meaning they couldn’t have discussed the retaliation measures or Russia’s response. But now, the transition officials, including Spicer, confirm to NPR that was not correct. The phone conversation, initiated by the Russian ambassador, actually didn’t happen until the next day, Dec. 29, the same day as the retaliatory efforts were announced. David Ignatius at the Washington Post broke the story Thursday that Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador Dec. 29, although the transition said it actually happened the day before. AP published a report Friday night that supported Ignatius’ version. Spicer told NPR in a phone call late Friday night that he had misread the timing of Flynn’s texts Friday morning and that accounts for the discrepancy. Spicer said the call took place ”around the same time” as when the retaliation measures were announced, which was some time around 2 p. m. ET. But, he insisted that the details of the phone conversation did not change from what he said Friday morning and called it ”doubtful” that Flynn and the ambassador discussed the U. S.’s retaliatory measures or Russia’s potential response, because Flynn told Spicer they did not. The first hint that sanctions against Russia were coming was when President Obama said in an interview with NPR on Dec. 15, ”We need to take action. And we will.” The Washington Post then reported on Dec. 27 that action was imminent. By late afternoon the following day, multiple news sources were quoting government officials as saying the announcement would come on the Dec. 29. So Kislyak likely knew an announcement was coming when he asked to talk to Flynn. Another transition official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, said the ambassador invited the Trump administration to participate in a conference in Kazakhstan on the conflict in Syria set for after the inauguration in late January. Were that to happen it could mark a concrete diplomatic shift in the relationship between Russia and the U. S. The Obama administration has opposed Russia’s aid to the Assad regime, essentially putting the U. S. and Russia on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war — even as they have attempted to coordinate on parts of it. Contact between an incoming administration and foreign ambassadors isn’t out of the ordinary. But the timing raises questions, especially in light of Putin’s decision not to respond to the U. S. retaliatory moves. No one can conduct foreign policy, except for the current U. S. government. If someone did, they would be in violation of the Logan Act, which states, in part: ”Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” Others, including Reuters and Ignatius are reporting or have reported that there were multiple phone calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador the day the sanctions were announced. NPR has not confirmed those contacts. The news comes hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee reversed course and said it would, in fact, investigate Russian interference in the election, including ”any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns.”

The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say they intend to investigate the allegations of Russian meddling in the U. S. elections. In a joint statement, Sen. Richard Burr, . C. chairman of the committee and Sen. Mark Warner, . the said ”we believe that it is critical to have a full understanding of the scope of Russian intelligence activities impacting the United States.” The announcement comes after Donald Trump acknowledged that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic Party in the period leading up to his election. But Trump continues to deny that the hacking helped his election campaign. The senators promised a bipartisan inquiry into events that led to the Intelligence Community assessment released on Jan. 6. They said their inquiry will include, but is not limited to: ”A review of the intelligence that informed the Intelligence Community Assessment ”Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, ”Counterintelligence concerns related to Russia and the 2016 U. S. election, including any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, ”Russian cyber activity and other ”active measures” directed against the U. S. both as it regards the 2016 election and more broadly.” The lawmakers said they’ll hold hearings on Russian intelligence activity, but also warned that much of their business will be conducted ”behind closed doors because we take seriously our obligation to protect sources and methods.” The committee will produce classified and unclassified reports on its findings. ”The Committee will follow the intelligence wherever it leads. We will conduct this inquiry expeditiously, and we will get it right. When possible, the Committee will hold open hearings to help inform the public about the issues,” they said. In separate comments, Burr said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence already has held 10 hearings on Russia’s activity around the world. Warner invoked a more ominous tone, saying, ”This issue impacts the foundations of our democratic system, it’s that important. . .. If it turns out that SSCI cannot properly conduct this investigation, I will support legislation to empower whoever can do it right.”

Just months after a launch pad explosion thwarted its last attempt, SpaceX has successfully launched an unmanned rocket into orbit. The launch, which unfolded Saturday at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, marked a crucial — and expensive — test for the private space company in the aftermath of its recent, very visible misfire. Shortly after the launch, the rocket detached its first stage, which subsequently landed safely on a platform in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX the entire process along the way. You can watch it here or play the video embedded at the top of this post. The Falcon 9 rocket is bearing 10 commercial satellites for Iridium Communications, which currently operates a network of dozens of mobile communications satellites in orbit. SpaceX is under contract with Iridium to launch at least 70 satellites into orbit in a series of seven launches for the company — beginning with Saturday’s batch. The new satellites will replace the current network, in ”what will be one of the largest ’tech upgrades’ in history,” according to a press release from SpaceX. Still, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the launch, after an explosion left a wreckage of last September’s test in Cape Canaveral, Fla. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said at the time that the blast came while workers were still loading propellant into the rocket, though no one was physically harmed in the accident. In addition to destroying the rocket itself — a Falcon 9, like the rocket being launched Saturday — last year’s blast also obliterated a $200 million communications satellite. The Israeli satellite ”had been leased by Facebook as part of a project to bring internet to parts of Africa,” NPR’s Rae Ellen Bichell reports for our Newscast unit. A investigation by SpaceX dug into what went wrong — ”the toughest puzzle to solve that we’ve ever had to solve,” Musk said. That probe wrapped up earlier this month, concluding the accident ”was triggered by the failure of a helium tank, one of three used to pressurize the second stage liquid oxygen tank,” according to CBS News. The Federal Aviation Administration then signed off on that investigation, approving the new licence for Saturday’s launch. Prior to last year’s accident, SpaceX had managed a string of successes, including landing a Falcon 9 on a floating barge.

This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. Pennsylvania surprised a lot of people in November when voters abandoned a long history of electing Democrats for president and chose Republican Donald Trump. Jamie Ruppert, a mother in Luzerne County, is among those who switched parties and voted for Trump. It’s an exciting time in Ruppert’s life: She has two toddlers and a baby due this summer. Her husband recently started a promising new job in the fossil fuel business — one that pays well enough that she can stay home with the kids. Ruppert and husband Jesse bought a modest house a bit over a year ago. It sits on two acres in a rural neighborhood outside Pa. Life is pretty good still Ruppert thinks the country needs a change. ”I was always raised in a Democratic house,” says Ruppert, ”both of my parents voted Democrat for a long time. I voted Democrat for both elections for Obama.” But when Ruppert looks around her community, she sees a lot of problems. And she thinks Trump and his policies can help fix them. The coal industry is a good example. On the campaign trail Trump promised to put coal miners back to work. It’s not just the coal industry that has declined in northeastern Pennsylvania: There used to be garment factories, too. They relocated in search of cheaper, labor in the South. For workers in Luzerne County today, options are limited. A lot of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton heard the slogan ”Make America Great Again” and recalled the country’s history of racism, gender inequality and opposition to LGBT rights. But many in Luzerne County, including Jamie Ruppert, heard that slogan and imagined the return of jobs that pay enough to support a family. Still, Ruppert worries about that different view of Trump’s message she doesn’t want to be seen as a racist or a homophobe. ”I’ve always been for gay rights and always will be,” says Ruppert. She doesn’t support everything Trump said during the campaign but feels like he was being more authentic than Clinton. ”Tax cuts and helping the ’failing’ middle class is what got me behind him,” says Ruppert. Asked how her life would be different if Trump succeeds, Ruppert holds up a plastic container for toys. On the bottom it says ”made in U. S. A.” She says it would mean that her neighbors make more of the products she uses. Use the audio link above to hear the full story.

Every child wants to grow up to be independent — to leave their parents’ home, find work, build a life of their own. But that seemingly simple step into adulthood can be a monumental challenge for children with developmental disabilities like autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, or any of a range of other such disabilities that affect about one in six American children, according to the U. S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of them remain dependent on their parents and families for support well into adulthood, or they end up living in a home under the care of professional caregivers. Only a fraction of adults with developmental disabilities end up finding steady employment. But some people are finding work and a path to by working in the food industry. Parts of this industry are particularly to many people with developmental disabilities, like Victoria Reedy of Schenectady, N. Y. Reedy is 23 years old and lives with her parents and two sisters. When I met her in her parents’ home, she was dressed casually in a sweatshirt and wore sparkly nail polish. She’s of average height now — about five feet five inches — but growing up, she says, she was a very small child. ”I was 6 years old, and the same size as my little sister who’s four years younger than me,” says Vicky. She has a condition called panhypopituitarism, which is a problem in her pituitary gland that causes it to not produce enough hormones, including growth hormone. Vicky’s condition affected the development of her brain as well. She struggled with a range of learning problems while growing up, and school felt extremely hard. ”I struggled at just about everything but art,” she says. ”I had a really hard time reading, [a] hard time writing, and learning things in general.” Her speech was affected, too. And she shied away from social interactions. As she grew up, she depended on her parents and a close friend for everything outside her home, from getting around to handling money. But today, Vicky is a very different person. She’s more confident and independent. She even takes the bus everywhere, all by herself. ”I take the bus just about everywhere I have to go, unless I’m traveling with Mom or Dad or any of my friends,” she says. That’s because a year and a half ago, Vicky got a job at a bakery in downtown Schenectady. Puzzles Bakery Cafe in downtown Schenectady is bright and spacious. The winter sun filters through the glass door and windows and fills the front of the café. On the day I visit, it’s packed with customers sitting down for lunch at the small white tables lined on either side. Vicky is a senior café attendant here. She stands behind the counter, matching orders coming out of the kitchen, making sure the right order goes to the right tables. Vicky also handles customers herself sometimes. She trains interns, organizes food and clean tables when necessary. Some of her favorite tasks, though, involve working behind the scenes, in the kitchen. She loves doing dishes, slicing meat and cheese on an electric food slicer. It’s mechanical, somewhat repetitive work that takes time, but Vicky says she finds it satisfying. In the time that she has worked here, Vicky has even made new friends among her colleagues. Her colleagues say she has grown tremendously at the job. She’s now one of the few employees who have a key to the store, so she can open and close the café when necessary. Sara Mae Pratt, 26, is Vicky’s boss and the owner of the cafe. She says she’s very proud of Vicky. ”She’s come such a long way.” As have many of her other employees, who have some sort of a developmental disability. Pratt opened Puzzles Bakery Cafe in April 2015 with the goal to employ people with special needs, who otherwise struggle to find jobs. ”There [are] not a lot of opportunities, certainly not in the way of employment,” Pratt says. Once they graduate from the school system, they often ”kind of fall off a cliff,” she says. And statistics back up her point. According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of people with disabilities who are employed is about of the percentage of people without any disability. And some 50 percent of people who are employed struggle to complete their tasks due to their disabilities, according to the BLS. Many face compensation gaps and discrimination at their workplace, according to the Arc of the U. S. A, an advocacy group for the developmentally disabled. The BLS also finds that those who are unemployed report many obstacles to finding employment, including the absence of sufficient and appropriate training. Pratt knew a lot of this from her personal experience. Her sister, Emily, has autism. As her sister approached adulthood, she says, she and her parents worried what her sister would do once she graduated high school and no longer had any support from the state education system. ”I certainly struggled with what my sister will be doing for the rest of her life. She has a very long life ahead of her.” Her sister is too disabled to work — she recently moved out of their parents’ home and into a group home, where she could have help. But Pratt wanted to help those who could work, to find a sense of and purpose in their lives. Before deciding to open a café, she did a lot of research and found that working with food is a particularly good fit for many people with developmental disabilities. For one, ”food is very forgiving,” she says. ”If you mess up, [it’s] not a big deal. You can throw it away, try it again.” And it’s no surprise that Vicky enjoys simple, repetitive tasks like doing dishes and slicing and arranging food, she says. ”It can be quite therapeutic to kind of do the same thing day in and day out, and it’s something many people with developmental disabilities can actually excel at.” There is another factor about this work that helps people like Vicky overcome their struggles with social interactions. ”They actually get to take part in the creation of this food and bring it to the customer and see that smile on their face,” says Pratt. ”They’re seeing this day in and day out. That’s the really wonderful thing about food, it really connects people.” Similar bakeries and restaurants exist elsewhere in the country. Some, like Jack’s Bar Grill in Arvada, Colo. employ people with special needs. Others, like Sunflower Bakery in Gaithersburg, Maryland, also train and then place such individuals at other businesses in the food service industry. Today, more than 50 percent of Pratt’s employees have a developmental disability, she says. That includes Madaline Hannon, who has autism. She has limited vocabulary and according to her parents, she has always been painfully shy. Now, though, Hannon works four days a week at Puzzles. She only works three hours a day and spends a lot of it serving customers, mostly during the lunch rush. Dressed in a loose jeans and a baseball hat, Maddy stands behind the counter, keeping an eye on every plate of food that comes out of the kitchen through a little window on the wall behind the café’s counter. She matches the food on the plate with the orders flashing on a little screen above the window, then she calls out the order loudly to find the right customer. ”Order for Mary Ann!” she says, holding a plate with a sandwich in her hands. When the customer raises her hand, Maddy walks over the plate of food to her, then wishes her a good day. She rarely makes eye contact, but she interacts with every customer as she serves them their plate of food. And she tells me she enjoys the work. She’s been working here for about a year and a half, and she says she now has big dreams for her future. ”I wanna work at Disney World, in a bakery,” she says. ”They have more gourmet stuff.” Maddy still lives with her parents and unlike Vicky, she still depends on them to bring her to work and take her home at the end of her shift. So, I ask her if she’d be willing to leave her parents’ home and move out of Schenectady to pursue her dream. ”Definitely, yes,” she says with a smile. Her mother, Kathleen Hannon says, this job has transformed her daughter. ”[The] Maddy that walked in here the first day probably didn’t say hello to people who’d come in,” she says. ”Today, she’s out there. I know she will talk to the customers. And we’ve seen a big difference at home. She’s happy!” The job has given Maddy a sense of belonging, she says. ”It’s her job. It’s her friends. It’s her responsibilities. And that’s important. We all want that. We all want to fit in. We all want to belong. We all want friends. And I think that’s helped a lot.” She says her daughter recognizes that she’ll always need extra support, but the job has made her realize how much she can do on her own. ”She’s wandering further and further away from us,” says Kathy Hannon. ”She’s looking for more independence.”

At noon on Inauguration Day, precisely the moment Donald Trump is scheduled to be sworn as president, there will be another changing of the guard in Washington. The D. C. National Guard announced Friday that its commanding general, Army Maj. Gen. Errol R. Schwartz, will be stepping down as of 12 p. m. on Jan. 20. As commanding general of the D. C. National Guard, Schwartz serves at the pleasure of the president — the only National Guard leader in the country to be appointed by the White House. As with other appointees, like members of the Cabinet, it is at the discretion of the incoming administration whether to keep Schwartz in command once Trump takes office. Still, the abrupt change in command is unusual for the D. C. National Guard, particularly on a day when the force — along with 5, 000 additional service members from around the country — will be working to maintain the security of the incoming president and those who have come to see him sworn in. ”My troops will be on the street,” Schwartz told The Washington Post, telling the paper that his removal was ordered by the Pentagon but that he doesn’t know who made the call. ”I’ll see them off but I won’t be able to welcome them back to the armory.” What’s more, it has been common for new administrations to hold on to the commanders appointed by the previous president. Schwartz himself was picked for his command by President George W. Bush in the summer of 2008 President Obama kept him on for the entirety of his two terms. Bush, in turn, kept Maj. Gen. Warren L. Freeman, a Clinton appointee, for his first two years in office. And President Clinton left Russell C. Davis — who had been appointed by President George H. W. Bush — in command of the force for nearly all of his first term. But it’s not the first time an appointee who served during Obama’s administration has been told to hit the road on Inauguration Day. Last month, the ’s transition staff issued a mandate to all politically appointed U. S. ambassadors to leave their posts on that date, with no exceptions. As former diplomat Ronald Neumann told NPR’s Michele Kelemen, that move was also unusual — though by no means against the rules of the transition. ”Some administrations have left people a little longer if they didn’t have a successor right away or the kids were in school or something, for family and human reasons,” Neumann said, ”but there’s no requirement that they do so.” When Schwartz steps down on Inauguration Day, he will be replaced in the interim by Brig. Gen. William J. Walker, the commander of the D. C. Army National Guard’s land component.

Editor’s Note: The photos in this story may be distressing to some viewers. More than one year later, the photo that woke up the world to the Syrian refugee crisis remains indelible: Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a sandy beach in Turkey. The Syrian boy’s lifeless body had washed ashore after the rubber boat carrying him and his family — to what they had hoped would be new lives in Greece — capsized. Now the image has become the focus of a study examining how a single photo of a single individual could stir the emotions and arouse public concern more powerfully than statistical reports of body counts, which at that point — five years into Syria’s civil war — had reached the hundreds of thousands. Until the photo appeared in September 2015, people did not seem focused on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. But Aylan’s photo mobilized empathy and concern, soon bringing in record donations to charitable organizations around the world to aid the victims. As the study shows, however, such immediate outpourings can be . The number of average daily amount of donations to the Swedish Red Cross campaign for Syrian refugees, for instance, was 55 times greater in the week after the photo (around $214, 300) than the week before ($3, 850). By the second week, the donation totals had already begun to decline, but still topped $45, 400. After six weeks, the amount had leveled further, down to around $6, 500 — less than in the previous weeks but nonetheless higher than the original figure. Still more promising, there was a increase of the number of monthly donors signing up for repeated contributions, growing from 106 in August 2015 to 1, 061 in September 2015, with only . 02 percent of them opting out of the commitment by January 2016. From this, the study concluded, iconic photos may lead to some sustained commitment even beyond the immediate surge of donations. To learn more about how the photo powered our emotions, we spoke to the report’s lead researcher, Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit organization that studies human judgment, and risk perception. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. How did you measure the emotional impact of this photo? We looked at the number of Google searches for ”Syria” and ”refugees” and ”Aylan.” Before, there was very little interest in the Syrian refugee crisis. Afterward and for approximately the next month, the searches [for each of these terms] spiked. We also looked at donations to the Swedish Red Cross, which set up a fund specifically to aid the Syrian refugees. Not only did the photo wake people up to make an emotional connection to the situation in Syria. But where people had an avenue for action, like donating, they did. Why did this photo in particular carry such an impact? What is the psychology behind that? It is an open question why this photo among so many stands out. In my opinion, there are a number of things going on. One is that the child is very young, nicely dressed and looks like he could have been one of our own kids. Another is the situation: He is coming with his family seeking a new life, and they were so close yet not quite making it. That adds to the special story. Another element is that we don’t quite see his face, you see the side of his face, so you can project onto him the face of someone you know. You cannot distance yourself as easily. In your paper you mention other emblematic photos, like that of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a Napalm attack. Is it easier to have empathy for one person who is suffering than to feel compassion for large numbers of people who are suffering? It’s not that people are not compassionate. But that compassion has to be aroused, and the data shows that the photograph helped do that. In addition to the cognitive impact that [a humanitarian crisis] is happening, you have to [evoke] emotion and feeling. Emotion is a critical factor in helping us understand an event, and it is a motivator that impels action as opposed to just abstract thoughts. Writers know this [when they] impress upon us the importance of a larger issue by telling the story through the eyes of one individual. In other words, you can identify with an individual but not so easily with an abstract statistic? We call Aylan an ”identified individual victim.” It is similar to the way The Diary of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel’s Night also helped galvanize attention to the Holocaust. Aylan’s photo provided a window of opportunity for individuals to give and to feel [empathy] for the situation, and that is good.

By now, you’ve probably seen the photo of Aylan Kurdi, the refugee from Syria who died with his brother and mother after their small rubber boat capsized on its way to Greece. You might remember his Velcro shoes. His red shirt. His lifeless body lying face down in the sand. The image has opened a debate about the ethics of publishing photos of children suffering and dying. But regardless of one’s position, the photo is now part of a tradition — another iconic image of a child that has shaped our understanding of global events and that is likely to live on in our minds for years to come. ”When we see pictures of a dead or dying child, I don’t care who you are, where you are, you’re moved,” says Maggie Steber, a documentary photographer and longtime contributor to National Geographic who served on this year’s Pulitzer Prize selection jury. Steber cites photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of a Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc — often called ”Napalm Girl” — as one of the most influential images in history. In the photo, Phuc is running naked down the street after being burned by an explosion. She later recalled removing her clothes and yelling ”too hot, too hot,” as she ran along the road, her back so badly scorched that she spent more than a year in a hospital and required more than a dozen surgeries. ”For people to see that photo and to realize that that was really going on, and having television bring the war into people’s living rooms, that was powerful,” Steber says. She believes that’s partly what caused Lyndon Johnson to bring the Vietnam War to an end. In 2000, former Washington Post photographer Carol Guzy spent time at a refugee camp in Albania during the Kosovo crisis and took a photo that won the Pulitzer Prize — one of four in her career. It depicts a young boy being passed through a barbed wire fence at the border. ”It’s actually a joyful photo,” Guzy says. ”Families that had escaped ethnic cleansing did not know if their loved ones had survived or not [they] were lined up along that fence.” When one family saw relatives on the other side of the barbed wire, they celebrated and handed their young children back and forth while waiting to be reunited. Guzy says images of children are particularly moving. ”It’s something about being completely at the mercy of events happening around you, and being unable to protect yourself — children especially — that reaches the heart and soul of people,” she says. This year, New York Times photographer Daniel Berahulak won the Pulitzer for his image of James Dorbor, a boy suspected of having Ebola, being rushed into a treatment center in Monrovia, Liberia. The men are wearing protective plastic suits and ”are carrying this tiny boy like he was a rag doll,” Steber says. Seeing how they hold him far away, ”without passion, without connection, was ” she says. Even after a long career as a photographer, Guzy says she is still deeply moved by tragic images — including that of Syrian Aylan Kurdi. ”You would think you’d form some kind of immunity after working for three decades and seeing the worst of humanity,” she says. ”But in my case, I’ve actually become even more sensitive.” When she saw the image of him lying on the beach, ”I was breathless,” she says.

With little power left in Washington, Democrats set out on Sunday to make a big statement against GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act with rallies in dozens of cities. It’s also a step for the party toward regaining its footing after grassroots efforts in 2016 failed to keep the White House in Democrats’ hands. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and whose populist candidacy in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was boosted by a strong online following and donations, headlined the day. He was recently named to a leadership post among Senate Democrats as chairman of outreach. Sanders used his vast email list from the campaign to help organize support for Sunday’s rallies in support of Obamacare, which stretched from an event led by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco to one featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Boston. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley even led a at the Utah State Capitol. Warren told an energized crowd outside Faneuil Hall in Boston, ”We knew these fights were coming, and now the first one is here.” In San Francisco, Pelosi insisted, ”We’re not going back.” Sanders and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer went to Warren, Mich. and although Schumer will soon be the most powerful Democrat in Washington, it was Sanders who was the star. Signs like, ”Don’t blame me I voted for Bernie” dotted the crowd, and Schumer had to pause his speech for a chorus of ”Bernie, Bernie” cheers when Sanders walked on stage in the middle of the New York senator’s remarks. It’s no accident that Sanders and Schumer chose to hold their event in Warren. Surrounding Macomb County tells the story of Democrats’ 2016 woes. It went narrowly for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but last year Donald Trump carried Macomb County by more than 10 points over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump’s raw vote total in the largely white, county about 48, 000 votes was more than four times his margin of victory in the Democratic state. Both Sanders and Schumer believe Democrats can recapture working class voters, and holding a rally in Macomb County to defend a healthcare program is one way to show voters who supported Trump that the Democratic Party is attentive to their concerns. Sanders told NPR last week that he could have gone to a lot of places: ”But Michigan is a great state. It’s a state where I did well in the Democratic primary. And is a state where Trump won.” He beat Clinton in the state’s 2016 primary. At Sunday’s rally, Schumer challenged Trump to keep a campaign promise not to cut entitlement programs as he fired up the crowd in support of the ACA. ”We’re gonna win this fight together — the American people and the Democrats in the Congress,” Schumer said. In reality, Republicans have enough votes to dismantle large parts of the Affordable Care Act, particularly elements that help fund the law, through a process that allows the Senate to pass budget measures with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on most legislation. The GOP has 52 seats in the Senate. Democrats can play a bigger role in an attempt to repeal and replace the law which would require 60 votes. That’s a dynamic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow admitted when she spoke at the rally. ”They’ve got the U. S. House, they’ve got the U. S. Senate, they’re going to have the presidency. If they want to rip health care apart, rip Medicare and Medicaid apart, they can do that,” Stabenow said. Republicans point to big increases in health care premiums since the law was enacted, and the fact that many insurers are pulling out of healthcare exchanges created as part of the Affordable Care Act in some states. House Speaker Paul Ryan has also spoken in objection to the mandates on individuals and employers, as well as the taxes enacted to enforce and pay for the law, as evidence of ”bad policy that does not accomplish what it was designed to do.” Republican leaders, including Ryan and Trump, say they will not repeal Obamacare without a replacement at hand. So far, there is no clear plan from Republicans for how to replace the law, but Ryan insists that will be hashed out at the end of January when congressional Republicans hold a retreat in Philadelphia. Stabenow pointed to the face that Democrats’ best hope is to generate enough public support for Obamacare — or enough public concern about fully repealing it — for Republican lawmakers to see a repeal as politically dangerous. While Democrats point to the good the law has done, it’s clear they have struggled on the messaging front. A poll released by NPR and Ipsos last week showed that less than half of Americans — including just 54% of Democrats — knew that the law reduced the number of people without health insurance. But, while they would rather control the agenda, Democrats are beginning to discover something Republicans have known for the entirety of the Obama administration: It’s often easier to generate public support around a simplified voice of opposition, than it is to find the votes to create and pass a complicated piece of legislation.

This week, the House and Senate took the first substantial step toward repealing Obamacare. Today, Democrats are holding rallies across the country, in an attempt to get some public momentum behind their longshot goal of blocking that effort. Congressional Democrats are organizing what they call a ”Day of Action,” with events scheduled from California to Illinois to Maine. And in a demonstration of just how much clout the candidate in last year’s Democratic presidential primary now has within the party that he’s still not a member of, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will host the most rally of the day, in Warren, MI. Sanders played a major role in organizing the Obamacare rallies, sending out information about the events to the massive email list he gathered over the course of the 2016 campaign. ”The goal is to rally the American people against a disastrous Republican proposal,” Sanders told NPR. He’s hoping the rallies are the first step toward an ” ” communication strategy that could help Democrats cut into Donald Trump’s powerful ability to set the daily political agenda. Since Congress came back earlier this month, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders have been pushing back against Republican proposals by doing what they normally do: holding big press conferences, doing TV interviews, and making the most of their time on the Senate floor. Earlier this week, Senate Democrats talked late into the night about all the good they say Obamacare has done. And when the Senate voted to take the first step toward an Obamacare repeal early Thursday morning, many Democrats broke Senate rules by trying to explain their ”no” votes as they cast them. This is the typical minority party playbook. But it’s much harder to break through all the noise in an era where Trump can basically reprogram cable news with a single tweet. Schumer is trying to get Senate Democrats more engaged on social media. But no one else in Washington has been able to dominate it like Trump. This clearly frustrates Sanders. He wants Democrats to reimagine how they get their message out, beyond floor speeches and press conferences. ”How do you mobilize millions of people,” he asked, ”and get them to understand that the Republicans are doing exactly the opposite of what the American people want?” That’s what this Michigan event and all of today’s other rallies are all about. Sanders tapped the massive email list he put together during his primary campaign, blasting out messages about the Michigan rally, and similar events across the country. He and Schumer will be trying to make their case in a state where Democrats typically did well with voters — but faltered badly in 2016. ”There are many parts of the country that I could have gone to,” Sanders said. ”But Michigan is a great state. It’s a state where I did well in the Democratic primary. And is a state where Trump won.” Democrats are now out of power at pretty much every level of government. Party leaders are trying to figure out their strategy. But so are grassroots activists. One place many liberals are turning — an online guide called Indivisible. It’s basically a manual — written by former Democratic Congressional staffers — that lays out ways that Democrats could use Tea Party tactics to fight Trump. Ezra Levin, who helped write the document, said the Tea Party did one thing very effectively. ”If they were in Texas, they didn’t call members of Congress in California,” Levin said. ”They knew that they were constituents of people who had a voice in Washington. And they focused on their two Senators, and their representative.” That’s what this guide recommends to Democrats trying to figure out how to organize. It offers practical tips like, how to effectively call a lawmakers’ office, or how to best pressure a representative during a town hall. The guide’s been read nearly 4 million times. Levin said he wants readers to understand that it’s really easy for people to become politically active. ”This means getting a handful of your friends together, or joining an existing group. And just getting out there on a regular basis, at district offices or at member events. Or just making calls,” he said. That kind of grassroots spirit is what lifted Sanders’ surprising presidential campaign. It also got President Obama all the way to the White House. But when Obama tried to use his campaign apparatus and email lists to mobilize supporters in legislative fights, he had a mixed record. Now Sanders is trying to do the same thing. Today’s rallies will be the first test of how much momentum he still has.

If repealing the Affordable Care Act is the Republican Congress’ job one, defunding Planned Parenthood is a close second. In fact, the two priorities might be paired. House Speaker Paul Ryan, . told reporters Jan. 5 that efforts to defund the organization ”would be in our reconciliation bill,” referring to a measure Congress has put on a fast track in order to repeal major pieces of the health law. But just as Republicans are discovering that undoing the health law could be complicated, so too is separating the controversial reproductive health care provider from its federal funding. Efforts to hastily jettison Planned Parenthood from federal ledgers could actually jeopardize GOP efforts to repeal the health law. One problem is that Planned Parenthood gets its funding from several different government sources. According to the group’s most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood affiliates got $553. 7 million from federal, state, and local governments, accounting for almost half of its total funding. According to the organization, about 75 percent of that government support comes from the Medicaid program to pay for direct medical services provided to patients, including contraception, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment. The remaining quarter comes from other sources, primarily the Title X federal family planning program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that the group gets approximately $390 million annually from Medicaid and $60 million from Title X. None of the funds from either program may be used for abortion, under longstanding federal prohibitions. Only half of the Planned Parenthood affiliates even offer abortion services, the group says. But it is still the largest single provider of the procedure in the nation, and that has made it a target for lawmakers since the 1980s. In recent years, one of the most ardent foes of the organization has been Vice Mike Pence. When he was a member of the House of Representatives, he led unsuccessful efforts to defund the program. As governor of Indiana, he was able to accomplish some of his goals. He also vowed to stop federal spending for Planned Parenthood during the campaign last fall. Yet federal lawmakers have been stymied in these efforts. One big reason is that taking away Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding would require a change in the federal law that guarantees most Medicaid patients with a choice to use any qualified provider. The Department of Health and Human Services has repeatedly warned states that have tried to evict Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs that they cannot legally do that because such a move would violate that law. And federal courts have consistently blocked states that have tried to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding. Changing that section of Medicaid law likely would require 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster by Democrats. Republicans currently have 52 votes. However, the budget reconciliation bill that is expected to be used to repeal portions of the health law operates under special rules. It cannot be filibustered and needs only 51 votes to pass. That presents two problems for Republicans. According to a 2015 Congressional Budget Office analysis, permanently changing the Medicaid law to make Planned Parenthood ineligible would cost more, not less — approximately $130 million over 10 years. That is because, said the Congressional Budget Office, taking away contraceptive access for some women would result in more pregnancies, and ”additional births that would result from enacting such a bill would add to federal spending for Medicaid.” That is not just theoretical. In 2013, Texas kicked Planned Parenthood out of its family planning program and gave up its federal funding. The result was fewer women using birth control and more babies being born, according to an analysis published last March in The New England Journal of Medicine. The second problem is political. While the House under GOP control has been strongly in favor of cutting off Planned Parenthood’s access to federal funds, there are a handful of Republican senators who oppose the idea. And a handful — three, to be exact — is all it would take to threaten passage of the health law repeal effort. ”Obviously I’m not happy that the speaker has decided to include the defunding of Planned Parenthood — an extremely controversial issue — in the (budget reconciliation) package,” Sen. Susan Collins, told reporters earlier this month. A spokeswoman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, said ”she is concerned about defunding Planned Parenthood, as she is a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and has opposed broadly defunding the organization.” Collins and Murkowski fought against the inclusion of a defunding of the organization in a 2015 health law repeal bill that President Obama vetoed last January. Although neither senator has said she would vote against the upcoming budget bill if it includes the Planned Parenthood defunding, they join a growing list of Senate Republicans who in recent days have questioned the idea of repealing major portions of the health law before devising its replacement. Meanwhile, eliminating Planned Parenthood’s access to funding under Title X also would likely be addressed in an appropriations spending bill. The current spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services (and most of the rest of the government) expires April 28. But rather than simply making Planned Parenthood ineligible, Republicans in the House have proposed doing away with funding for the entire Title X federal family planning program. Instead, they would send the money to the nation’s network of community health centers. Last September, the campaign released a letter to leaders vowing to defund Planned Parenthood ”as long as they continue to perform abortions, and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women.” At a CNN town hall Thursday night, Ryan expanded on that. ”We don’t want to effectively commit taxpayer money to an organization providing abortions. But we want to make sure that people get their coverage. That’s why there’s no conflict by making sure these dollars go to federal community health centers.” But that might not work either. ”For health centers, which currently serve about 25 million total patients, to have to absorb an additional 2 million people is totally impossible,” says Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy and law professor at George Washington University who looked at the issue in 2015. In some areas of the country, Planned Parenthood and community health centers may not overlap. Planned Parenthood says that in a fifth of the counties it serves, it is the only provider for women. Asking community health centers to move into new areas, says Rosenbaum, ”displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how long it takes a new provider to move into a potentially new community.” Despite the difficulties, the shifts in political control this year leaves Planned Parenthood concerned about its future. While the organization has weathered funding threats before, ”it is very true when you have people like Mike Pence and Paul Ryan who have been laser focused for years [on ending funding] that they will make it a very high priority,” says Mary Alice Carter, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for communications. She says the organization is counting on the 2. 5 million patients it serves every year to make sure their elected officials know they oppose the defunding effort. Whether that will be enough remains unclear. Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Just days from the end of her tenure, Loretta Lynch took the stage Sunday at a historic Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala. to deliver her final planned speech as U. S. attorney general. ”We can’t take progress for granted,” Lynch told the congregation. ”We have to work. There’s no doubt that we still have a way to go — a long way to go.” In her speech, delivered on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, Lynch focused on her auspicious setting, Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Last week, President Obama designated the church part of a new national monument commemorating the civil rights movement. It was at the church in 1963 that a Ku Klux Klan bombing left four black girls dead and 22 other people injured. ”It reminds us, as few places can, that freedom is not free,” Lynch said. ”And the price of freedom is constant vigilance.” She said she has seen the concerns that the progress made by King and others during the civil rights movement will be undone, ”that with the turn of the electoral wheel, we will be seen as children of a lesser god.” But she countered those concerns with a call to hope, saying she has seen the hard work of her colleagues, of police officers reaching out to community members, of activists raising their voices. ”We are Americans, and we have always pushed forward,” Lynch said, repeating a call to work that became something of a mantra: ”Every generation has to work.” The speech comes on the heels of a Justice Department report on the Chicago Police Department, which concluded the department ”engages in a pattern or practice of the use of excessive force.” That report included ”numerous incidents” of shooting at fleeing suspects and observed ”routinely abusive behavior” toward minority communities in the city. In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin before her speech Sunday, Lynch called the Chicago report ”emblematic of where our practice is: We try and look at the whole problem. ”We’ve got to look at the causes within the police departments,” she continued. ”We talk to community members who came in and told us their stories stories of pain, stories of loss — but also stories of police officers with whom they connected.” Asked about her regrets as she prepares to leave office, Lynch said again she regrets her unscheduled meeting last year with former President Bill Clinton, a conversation that raised questions about whether she could remain impartial during Hillary Clinton’s email investigation. She later said she would accept the FBI’s findings in the probe. But the Justice Department is ”more than the work of more than one group of people and the work of more than one administration,” she told Michel. ”The work that we do spans time, it spans generations and we build on it.” She added: ”We have to admit that change is hard and policing is changing a lot in this country. That being said, I still believe that the work that we have done has been positive.”

People planning to watch — or protest — Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities this week should prepare to maneuver through lots of security, including thousands of law enforcement personnel, National Guard troops, fences, magnetometers and trucks. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson outlined the massive security preparations during a briefing at the Multi Agency Communications Center at a secret location in Virginia. From that room, dozens of representatives from an alphabet soup of different agencies will gather to monitor events starting Thursday, with a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, through Saturday’s prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. But the main focus will be Friday’s swearing in of the 45th president and the inaugural parade from the Capitol to the White House. Johnson says officials expect 700, 000 to 900, 000 spectators to attend the Inauguration Day ceremonies. He said 99 groups are expected to rally in favor of or against the new president. Johnson said officials ”know of no specific credible threat directed toward the inauguration,” but they’re taking no chances. Johnson said the ”global terrorist environment is very different” this year than it was during President Obama’s inaugurations in 2009 and 2013. He said law enforcement has to be concerned with homegrown violent extremism, acts of lone wolves and people who have . ”We’ve got to be vigilant, we’ve got to plan, we’ve got to prepare,” Johnson said. After terrorists drove trucks into crowds in Nice and Berlin last year, officials are protecting against a similar action in Washington. ”Hard perimeter areas,” where nongovernment vehicles will not be permitted, will be fortified by dump trucks, heavy trucks loaded with cement and with buses, Johnson said. ”That is a precaution that we are doubling down on in particular this inauguration.” There are also concerns about possible airborne threats. Noting the airspace above Washington is already to drone flights (as well as most other air traffic) Johnson said unauthorized flights are ”something we have planned for, and there is technology to deal with it.” He would not say what that technology entails. Johnson said some 28, 000 officials will be dedicated to security for the inauguration, including Department of Homeland Security personnel from the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, as well as police from various departments in Washington, D. C. and from out of town, and some 7, 800 National Guard troops. Gates to the Inauguration Ceremony will open at 6 a. m. Friday. There will be sites for demonstrations along the parade route and on the National Mall. More information about the inauguration schedule can be found here.

There’s a popular saying in Spanish — O todos en la cama, o todos en el suelo. It conveys a selfless commitment to equal treatment, and translates roughly like this: Either we all get the bed, or we all get the floor. Among many immigrants in the U. S. there’s been a feeling that when it comes to the spoils of U. S. immigration policy, the government has given Cubans the bed all to themselves, while it has relegated others — Mexicans, Haitians, Central Americans — to the floor. This is because of the policy, which since 1995 has granted Cubans who touch American soil a privilege not afforded other immigrants who come without a visa: the right to stay and get on a fast track to citizenship. This special treatment ended this week when, in the final days of his administration, President Obama announced an abrupt end to the policy, a capstone to his effort to relations with Cuba. Effective immediately, Cubans arriving on U. S. soil without a visa will be treated just like any other immigrant. They will be turned away. This does not mean Cubans will stop coming. ”What it means,” said Florida International University political scientist Eduardo Gamarra, ”is that for the first time, we’re going to have undocumented Cubans. And how the Cuban community responds to that is going to be very interesting.” For decades, Cubans have occupied a rarefied station, particularly among the Latino population of the United States. Because those arriving in the U. S. after Fidel Castro’s ascension in 1959 were seen as fleeing political persecution, the U. S. generally allowed them to stay. In 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans to get green cards after being in the U. S. for two years, later reduced to a single year. Though the Cuban government opposed these policies, they were the status quo until 1994, when the U. S. agreed to amend the rules. allowed only those Cubans who made it to U. S. soil to stay. Those caught at sea were to be turned away. The stated hope was that the threat of getting repelled would discourage Cubans from risking their lives on rickety boats. But they kept coming, and once here, a green card was pretty much ensured. Leaving their country has always carried risk for Cubans, as it has for other immigrants. But unlike for their counterparts, the specter of illegality and all its repercussions (see: the 2016 presidential election) has not applied to Cubans. They have never really had to worry, for example, about deportation once they’ve made it to the U. S. This privilege has affected in fundamental ways the identity that have forged both in terms of their place in American society and in relation to other Latino groups. ”Cubans have never been, and have never seen themselves, as ’illegals,’ or even, particularly, as a minority group,” said Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at FIU who is . ”They have never seen themselves as anything other than added value to this country. It’s part of the Cuban exceptionalism narrative that is just as strong as the American exceptionalism narrative.” The dynamics here are complex. That stems in part from the fact that most of the Cubans who fled Castro’s regime soon after the 1959 revolution were political exiles, not economic migrants. They were of the largely white middle class whose property and businesses Castro seized and nationalized. Beginning in the ’60s, these exiles used their entrepreneurial drive to turn Miami into a vibrant frontier city. Over the decades, this set Cubans apart from many other Latinos in the U. S. who aside from tending to be economic migrants also lacked the legal status that would have allowed them to achieve their full potential. Even as the makeup of the Cuban influx began to change in the ’80s and ’90s — with more Cubans coming for economic reasons — allowed them a unique confidence in their place in the United States. ”That’s always been a schism impeding solidarity between Cubans and other Latino groups,” Grenier said. Though it has rarely led to tension, it has been more evident at times, as it was last year when large groups of Haitians and seeking asylum found themselves stuck at the U. S. border while long lines of Cubans got through. ”The policy has clearly contributed to that,” Grenier said. The fact that unlike other Latinos, have traditionally been a reliable conservative voting block has also contributed to this schism. And even as the political center has shifted to the left in recent years, Grenier said, there is a distance when it comes to issues like immigration between the young Cubans marching for immigrant rights and the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Colombians with whom they’re linking arms. ”It’s a feeling of solidarity with other Latinos and their plight,” Grenier said. ”You see young Cubans fighting for the other guy.” Grenier said he expects the end of to gradually change notions of identity as newer migrants become subject to the construct of ”illegality” that drives so much of the policy and rhetoric around immigration in the United States. While before, young Cubans were fighting for the other guy, ”now you’re going to be fighting for yourself,” Grenier said. ”You’re going to have a horse in the race.” Gamarra said Cubans in the U. S. are going to find their community stratifying in ways familiar to other Latino groups. ”You’re going to have privileged and nonprivileged Cubans,” he said. ”You’re going to find the phenomenon of people trying to demonstrate that they were here before yesterday. You’re going to find mad rushes to find ways to become documented.” At the same time, Gamarra says the end of will not necessarily usher in a level playing field. Obama kept in place a policy that grants roughly 20, 000 visas to Cubans annually, a relatively large number for an island of 11 million people. Nonetheless, Gamarra said the policy’s end may strengthen solidarity between Cubans and other Latinos, ”because we aren’t all going to be on the bed together,” he said. ”We’re all going to be on the floor.”

This time last year, Stephanie Johnson was miserable. She was in her third year teaching special education at a junior high school in Lindon, Utah, about 40 minutes south of Salt Lake City. On the outside it looked like she was doing great. Her classes ran smoothly, students loved her, parents loved her, but like many special education teachers, inside she felt as though she was drowning. She said she thought about leaving all the time: ”I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just so much work. I just feel like I cannot do it.” It’s a very different Johnson I find this year at her new school, the Renaissance Academy, a charter school in the nearby city of Lehi. On a Friday afternoon, her classroom, which she shares with one other special education teacher, is empty of kids. Monday through Thursday, these two teachers instruct all of the school’s special education students. On Fridays, though, they have the classroom to themselves, meaning they’ll actually have the time to do the thing so many special education teachers find so difficult — the record keeping. ”There’s still a lot of work to do and I love that we have Fridays to get that done.” In fact, Johnson says she loves a lot about her new job. And there’s one person behind the scenes making that possible. In a cramped office down the hall, four filing cabinets loom over Kim Beck, the school’s special education director. Inside the cabinets, Beck keeps tons of paperwork on all special education students, required by law, showing they are receiving the help they need. ”I try to take most of that paperwork load off of the teachers, so it allows them to teach during the day,” Beck says. And she does much more. She tests students to see if they need special education services, or if they’re ready to move on. It’s also her job to schedule meetings with parents. ”I don’t think the paperwork in and of itself is too cumbersome,” Beck says. ”Where it becomes cumbersome is the teacher that’s teaching all day is now having to do that paperwork.” She says this division of labor might not work everywhere. ”You have to find a special ed person who likes paperwork and those are few are far between,” she says, adding, ”I do love paperwork.” This approach, dividing and conquering, wasn’t a directive from any school administrator. The teachers just made it happen, and it’s unique. Laurie VanderPloeg, of the Council for Exceptional Children, says she is not aware of this happening anywhere else in the country. What she is aware of is this — special education teachers are spending the majority of their prep time on paperwork, ”in lieu of assessing and designing and delivering that specially designed instruction that they need to be providing to the students with disabilities.” From VanderPloeg’s perspective, that is taking a toll on student results. Johnson says the students benefit from the division of responsibilities — and so does she. She admits that she still stays late and comes in early, but the difference is that she gets to focus on teaching her students. She says a friend approached her at a party recently, commenting, ”Stephanie, have you been losing weight? You look so good. I don’t know, you just look so good.” Johnson replied, ”Oh, that’s my new job. That’s what you’re seeing on my face. It’s my new job.”

Iraqi forces are nearing what is expected to be the toughest part of the fight for the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. As troops push toward the river dividing the city, they face new tactics from Islamic State fighters adapting to an urban environment and the limitations of U. S. air and artillery support. The more densely populated west side of the historic city, with its twisting streets and covered market, is still in ISIS hands. But Iraqi troops this week for the first time reached the east bank of the Tigris River that splits the city. ”We know ISIS very well by now and we knew it would take a long time,” Iraqi Gen. told NPR in a recent interview near the front line. Saadi commands 12 battalions of forces. He won’t say exactly how many troops are under his orders, but several thousand of his fighters have led Iraq’s battle against ISIS for the last two years, pushing them back on several fronts, from areas north of Baghdad to Tikrit to Fallujah and now in Mosul. The last time I saw Gen. Saadi was in Fallujah, as Iraqi forces took back that city in western Iraq last summer. He says ISIS is putting up a tougher fight in Mosul. The extremist group has held the Iraqi city since it overpowered the Iraqi army and police in June 2014 and declared it the capital of their Islamic state, or caliphate. ”Their fighters in Mosul are tougher than they were in Fallujah,” says Saadi, over tea in an abandoned house in a village near the front line. ”In Fallujah, there were just fighters and a few car bombs. Here until now, they have detonated more than 250 car bombs just against my men.” As the fight has moved into more heavily populated neighborhoods and out of the open spaces of the countryside, he and U. S. commanders say ISIS is increasingly using drones. ”They are using them for many purposes,” says Saadi. ”One of the purposes is to track me.” He says the small drones bought on the market are used to help ISIS snipers and suicide bombers in targeting. ISIS has begun attaching explosives to larger drones. Mosul was a commercial center, filled with factories and workshops. ISIS has taken machine tool shops and converted them to manufacturing mortars. It has built car bomb factories across the city and has welded steel plates onto vehicles to turn them into more lethal bombs. Saadi shows us one of the locally made mortars. It’s almost indistinguishable from Iraqi army mortars apart from the black and white ISIS logo painted on it. The Iraqi forces, trained by the U. S. are considered by the U. S. military to be the most professional in the Iraqi forces. Iraqi troops are backed directly by U. S. air support. The Iraqi army and federal police are supported by Iraqi air strikes. But as the fight moves further into the city, air strikes and artillery have limited use. ”Hospitals, mosques, schools, churches — those are all the places the US is not supposed to hit and all the places that ISIS is hiding in,” says Saadi. Although Iraq and international organizations have prepared camps for a flood of displaced Iraqis, relatively few have been able to leave. More than 700, 000 civilians are still living in west Mosul. In last year’s battle for Fallujah, military leaders believe ISIS fighters escaped with thousands of civilians, all of them fleeing when the Iraqi army opened up a corridor. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have surrounded the city and the battle plan has allowed no escape for anyone. Civilians now running out of food and water will be able to leave only as their neighborhoods are liberated. ”The civilians are a problem,” says Saadi. ”Their position near the front line makes us a little worried. It means we go slowly.” Near the airport in the Kurdish capital Erbil, the deputy commander of U. S. forces in Iraq tries to explain the complexity of the fight for Mosul. ”Picture any large metropolitan city on the U. S. East Coast — dense, older cities with smaller streets. And then picture having to eradicate all crime and any enemy force in there,” says Brig. Gen. Scott Efflandt. ”It requires street by street, house by house, room by room operation,” he said. ”There’s no quick way to do it. You have to walk, you have to climb stairs, you have to open doors and then repeat the process again and again and again and then when you’re doing that you have to leave someone behind to guard the area you just went through. ” That’s without U. S. troops on the frontlines. After the U. S. and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003, American forces spent eight years in Iraq. Mosul is the biggest urban battle involving the U. S. in years. However, unlike previous battles, most of the 5, 000 U. S. troops in Iraq aren’t anywhere near the line of fire. ”When we think of what we do in Iraq, it’s very difficult for people to understand we are not side by side with an Iraqi soldier shooting a rifle. It’s not what we are doing here,” says Col. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division — a force whose soldiers actually walked the streets of Mosul early in the war. Sylvia commands about 2, 500 troops advising and assisting the Iraqi military, mostly at tactical operations centers. At Camp Swift, the small U. S. base outpost near Makhmour in northern Iraq where Col. Sylvia is based, a steel door connects the base to the Ninevah Operations Command. Iraqi generals sit next to U. S. officers looking at surveillance feeds from coalition aircraft . ”Mosul is an area twice the size and twice the area of Washington, D. C.,” says Sylvia. ”It would be tough for anyone to execute. When you put it in perspective it’s impressive what they’ve been able to achieve so far.”

Iraqi forces have made a crucial step in the bloody quest to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, according to a spokesman for the country’s military. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool announced that the city’s university has been fully retaken from ISIS militants. Special forces, known in Iraq as the Service, or CTS, raised the Iraqi flag above the campus Friday, the Associated Press reports — but the troops were still days away from claiming complete control. ”Iraqi forces entered the university grounds Friday and managed to secure more than half of the campus the next day amid stiff resistance from IS militants, who mainly deployed sniper and mortar fire to slow down the advancing troops,” the wire service adds Sunday. Iraqi military launched its campaign to retake the northern city — the last major Iraqi city still in ISIS hands — last October. The former Iraqi commercial center is the place ISIS leader Abu Bakr first declared the caliphate, or Islamic state, shortly after the group captured it in June 2014. And it has been one of the central pillars of the militant group’s diminishing territorial claims. Earlier this month, Iraqi troops reached the Tigris River, which bisects the city, retaking much of Mosul’s eastern half. Yet, as Jane Arraf reports for NPR, the toughest fight is likely still to come. ISIS still holds the west side of the city, where more than 700, 000 civilians are believed to remain. Brig. Gen. Scott Efflandt, the deputy commander of U. S. forces in Iraq, tells Jane that part of the complexity of the fight ahead lies in the urban combat required: ”Picture any large metropolitan city on the U. S. East Coast — dense, older cities with smaller streets. And then picture having to eradicate all crime and any enemy force in there. ”It requires street by street, house by house, room by room operation. There’s no quick way to do it. You have to walk, you have to climb stairs, you have to open doors and then repeat the process again and again and again and then when you’re doing that you have to leave someone behind to guard the area you just went through. ” And they will continue to do so without the presence of American troops on the front lines. For now, CTS spokesman Sabah tells Reuters the special forces are combing the university’s campus Sunday for remaining militants. ”The university is completely liberated and forces are sweeping the complex for any hiding militants,” Numan said. ”Most buildings are so we’re being cautious.”

After its nearly century and a half run, Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus plans to shut down ”The Greatest Show On Earth.” The historic American spectacle will deliver its final show in May, says Kenneth Feld, the chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, the producer of Ringling. Feld announced the news on the company website Saturday night, citing declining ticket sales — which dipped even lower as the company retired its touring elephants. ”This, coupled with high operating costs, made the circus an unsustainable business for the company,” Feld says. Ringling has been phasing out elephants as a result of shifting public tastes and criticism from animal rights groups over the of the animals. The company held its last show featuring elephants in May, before completely retiring the animals to its conservation center in Polk City, Fla. established by Feld Entertainment in 1995. Elephants had been a circus mainstay almost as long as the circus itself has been a staple of American entertainment, since Phineas Taylor Barnum introduced Jumbo, an Asian elephant in 1882. But before the traveling exhibition evolved into a regular destination for wholesome family fun, Barnum ”made a traveling spectacle of animals and human oddities popular, while the five Ringling brothers performed juggling acts and skits from their home base in Wisconsin,” reports the AP. ”Eventually, they merged and the modern circus was born. The sprawling troupes traveled around America by train, wowing audiences with the sheer scale of entertainment and exotic animals.” The Feld family bought Ringling in 1967 and employs about 500 people for both touring shows ”Circus Extreme” and ”Out of This World.” Those employees were told about the closure after shows in Orlando and Miami, on Saturday night. ”The Felds say their existing animals — lions, tigers, camels, donkeys, alpacas, kangaroos and llamas — will go to suitable homes,” adds the AP. ”Juliette Feld says the company will continue operating the Center for Elephant Conservation.” In addition to the circus, Feld Entertainment also runs a number of traveling shows, from Monster Jam and Supercross to Marvel Universe Live and Disney on Ice. Each year, Feld Entertainment’s live shows draw some 30 million attendees. Before it draws the curtain, the two touring circuses will perform a total of 30 shows over the next four months, in major cities including Atlanta, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and Brooklyn.

Celebrities, politicians and activists, ranging from Bernie Sanders to Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are asking President Obama to grant clemency to a man who was part of a militant group that fought for Puerto Rican independence. Oscar López Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981, convicted for ”seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the the government of the United States, in relation to his membership in the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or FALN. Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN claimed responsibility for more than 70 bombings in New York, Chicago and Washington, D. C. The bombings caused millions in property damage, dozens of injuries and five deaths. López Rivera’s supporters say he is a political prisoner serving an unjust sentence. His opponents say he is an unrepentant terrorist. Born in Puerto Rico, López Rivera moved to Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood as a teenager. He fought in Vietnam, where he earned the Bronze Star, but became disillusioned by the war and what he saw as U. S. imperialism. After the war, López Rivera worked as a community organizer in Chicago. He also became involved in activism around the cause of Puerto Rican independence. The more he researched Puerto Rican history, the more he became convinced that Puerto Rico was a colony of the United States. ”There were resolutions of the United Nations pointing out very, very clearly that colonialism was a crime against humanity and that colonized people have the right to and to independence and to achieve it by any means necessary — including the use of force,” López Rivera said in an October telephone interview from the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. At some point in the 1970s, López Rivera became a member of the clandestine FALN. The group set off bombs at government and corporate buildings, and left communiques in phone booths calling for a ”free and socialist Puerto Rico.” The majority of the bombs damaged property without causing injuries or deaths, but not all of them. The FALN’s most deadly attack was in January 1975 — the bombing of a crowded restaurant in New York’s financial district called Fraunces Tavern. The bomb killed four and injured 60, leaving law enforcement scrambling to find the perpetrators. ”It was truly the first truly clandestine terror organization that we confronted and we had no clue as to how to approach this,” said Rick Hahn, a former FBI agent assigned to the FALN case. ”They were very sophisticated and we didn’t realize it, and I think that was part of the problem we had in identifying FALN members — false hair items, reversible clothing . .. professional kits, that sort of thing.” In 1976, the FBI found an apartment linked to López Rivera containing dynamite and FALN written materials. López Rivera went into hiding, and wasn’t apprehended until five years later. By then, police had also arrested 11 other members of the group. López Rivera was tried under what was then a rarely used statute, ”seditious conspiracy,” which means ”to oppose and attempt to overthrow by force the power of the United States government,” among other crimes. He was sentenced to 55 years, and later given an additional 15 after being convicted for a conspiracy to escape. ”They were sentenced not because of what they did but because of who they were politically,” said Jan Susler, López Rivera’s lawyer. ”Seditious conspiracy is really a thought crime. It’s agreeing to be part of challenging the United States government. And in this case it was agreeing to be part of the FALN.” In 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of most of the imprisoned FALN members — 16 in all. López Rivera was offered a deal, but he refused it because, he says, not all of his were included. Now, supporters like Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois are hoping Obama will use his pardon powers to let López Rivera go. ”I have never been an advocate of violence in order to meet your goals, but I also am a person who believes in justice and in fairness. He wasn’t indicted for murder, ” Gutierrez says. ”I can only deal in the realm of what a person was indicted for and convicted and, based on that, he should be able to come home.” His supporters often compare him to Nelson Mandela, who was also involved in an armed political movement and served a lengthy prison term. But not everyone agrees. ”I would love to ask people who support his release and say, If not a terrorist, what has Oscar López done to help the Puerto Rican people?” said Joe Connor, who was 9 years old when his father — a banker at J. P. Morgan — was killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing. ”I’m hearing he’s a freedom fighter, he’s done all these things, he’s not violent. But what did he do, if not be a terrorist? There’s no answer to it because he was a terrorist.” Connor says López Rivera does not deserve clemency because he hasn’t expressed remorse for his actions or the deaths caused by the FALN. The Fraunces Tavern bombing case has never been solved. López Rivera has denied involvement in its execution or planning. A petition to release López Rivera has over 100, 000 signatures, but organizers say they’ve gotten no indications from President Obama. In the official response to the petition, the White House said it ”does not comment on individual pardon applications.” López Rivera had said he will no longer condone violence in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. But he says if he walks out of prison one day, he’ll walk out with his head high. ”I had made a decision . .. dealing with finding meaning and purposing life, and not living a life just to exist, you know. And the struggle for me is where I found meaning in life, and I knew that that would keep me strong, and it has,” he said. If Obama leaves him in prison, López Rivera is projected for release in 2023 — when he’ll be 80 years old. This story was produced by NPR’s Latino USA, who will be releasing an audio documentary about Oscar López Rivera later this month.

As seaweed continues to gain popularity for its nutritional benefits and culinary versatility, more people are skipping the dried stuff in the grocery store and going straight to the source: the ocean itself. At low tide on West Coast beaches, foragers hop between rocks looking for bladderwrack, sea lettuce and Irish moss to take home with them. Sea vegetable foraging has become so common, in fact, that you can take a class to learn what to harvest and what to avoid. ”Seaweed foraging is more popular than it used to be,” says Heidi Herrmann, owner of Strong Arm Farm in Healdsburg, Calif. ”With the rise of those little flavored snack packs of seaweed that kids eat in their lunches, seaweed is now a normal household word.” Herrmann commercially forages seaweed to sell to restaurants in places like Napa and San Francisco. She also leads seaweed foraging classes several times a year. The only equipment her students need is a pair of scissors and a bag to carry the seaweed. It’s one of many foraging classes offered along the West Coast. They can cost anywhere between $ $445, and can last for several hours or several days. Some include cooking lessons. Others teach how to harvest seaweed from a kayak. With or without a class, seaweed may be the safest food to forage. Unlike mushroom foraging, where many species can kill you, there are no deadly seaweeds. This has led to the idea that it’s safe to ”eat the beach,” which is not exactly true. Some seaweed should be avoided. For example, consuming a lot of acid kelp (Desmarestia ligulata) can cause intestinal distress. As with all foraging, research is key. ”Those general rules that say, ’All of this is edible’ or ’All of that is edible’ [are] a lazy person’s way of not having to know anything,” says John Kallas, a researcher and educator for Wild Food Adventures in Oregon. ”You don’t just blindly go out and gather stuff. Knowledge is what keeps you safe.” Still, as Kallas is quick to point out, the beach is full of edible seaweed. Many West Coast varieties are similar to Asian seaweeds. This includes versions of nori, which the Japanese use in sushi kombu, the base for the broth dashi and wakame, commonly used in seaweed salad. There are also varieties, like sea lettuce, a delicate green seaweed also used in salads. Then there’s bladderwrack, which looks like flattened deer antlers and can season meat or thicken sauces. Another example is dulse, which looks like red film tape and is commonly dried and flaked into dishes for seasoning. Even something as unappetizing as feather boa kelp can have surprising culinary applications. This aptly named kelp — it looks like something you’d wear to a costume party — has a leathery strap and small blades that give it a corrugated, leafy appearance. Not only are the leaflets edible, so are the hollow oval bladders that keep the plant afloat. ”The bladders are a great substitute for olives,” says Kallas. ”But when you bite them, they pop.” Seaweed is high in protein, and contains Vitamin B12, iodine and fatty acids. It can be a natural source of MSG, which helps provide a savory umami flavor in dishes. As such, seaweed can flavor soups, thicken sauces, be baked into bread or cakes, or dried and eaten like potato chips. Dennis Judson, who leads seafood foraging classes for Adventure Sports Unlimited, recommends making pickles out of seaweed, particularly bullwhip kelp, which is a long tube with a ball at the end that looks like a whip. ”I cut it into strips, like little donuts,” says Judson. ”Then I put it in jars and pickle it. Then I put the pickles in Bloody Marys. They’re delicious.” Seaweeds are algae, not plants. They’re divided into three types: red, green and brown. (Kelp is a type of seaweed.) Like plants, seaweed uses photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy. While they can be harvested all year, they’re usually at the height of growth in spring and summer. They often grow rapidly, as much as two feet a day. Because of this, most seaweed can withstand ethical foraging. The important thing is to only take the blades and leave the — essentially, the roots of the seaweed — intact so it can keep producing. It’s also important to check regulations before foraging, which can vary drastically based on location. Washington state requires a permit to forage, while Oregon restricts seaweed foraging to a season. California, on the other hand, allows personal seaweed foraging all year long, restricting it to 10 pounds per person a day. Both the California and Washington state departments of fish wildlife report increased interest in seaweed foraging from the public. But while harvesting seaweed may seem new, it’s an ancient activity, stretching back thousands of years. For Herrmann, seaweed foraging is more than just gathering food. It’s about feeling connected to the past, and to nature. ”When you’re at the shore, you see all these colors and textures and creatures, so many questions come to mind,” she says. ”And it’s timeless in the sense that you’re collecting food in a way that has been done for so many years before you, in so many cultures and climates. So it feels like being in a long continuum, and the practices of gathering food in general.” Joy Lanzendorfer is a writer based in Petaluma, Calif. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and others. She’s on Twitter @JoyLanzendorfer.

In 2009, the heavy metal band Disturbed received a Grammy nomination for its song ”Inside The Fire,” a emotional track delivered with aggressive guitar riffs and raspy singing. Recently, the band received another Grammy nomination, but this time it was for a song with a very different sound: an acoustic cover of Simon Garfunkel’s ”The Sound of Silence.” Lead singer David Draiman says the band’s drummer, Mike Wengren, had the idea: ”It had been something that his family had played in the background when it was time to do the chores at home,” Draiman says. Once they’d settled on the song, the group’s guitar player, Dan Donegan, urged his bandmates to depart from their signature sound in favor of something gentler. Melodic singing wasn’t out of the question for Draiman: When he was young, he trained to be a cantor, the singer who leads a Jewish congregation in prayer. ”I hadn’t attempted to go to that spot of my vocal ability for many years,” he says. ”Listening to the way my vocals sounded in that beautiful bed of music — and not having heard my voice in that way for so long — it was really just very, very overwhelming.” Disturbed’s latest album, Immortalized, is out now. Hear more from Draiman at the audio link.

When Kennedy Odede was a kid, he lived on the streets of a slum in Kenya. He’d grown up in tough circumstances. His stepfather was violent. There wasn’t enough food to go around. He wasn’t sent to school. A friend convinced him he’d do better out on his own. He’d have his freedom, he’d be able to find his own food. So when he was around 10, Kennedy left home. His new world was a world of violence. He was caught up in gang fights. He remembers being stabbed in the arm: ”I still have the scar,” he says. Then one day, when he was 12 or so, he met Martin Luther King Jr. — on the pages of a book that an older friend at a community center gave him. ”I was looking for hope in my life,” says Kennedy, who’s now in his early 30s. ”When I read the story of Dr. King, it was a powerful story. Dr. King gave me a reason to believe you can change your own life and change your own community. His idea is that you don’t have to wait. Anyone’s path can change. For me that was really powerful.” On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we talked to Kennedy Odede from Kenya, where he started a nonprofit called Shining Hope for Communities. It runs a free primary school for girls and helps youth find jobs. (And in case you’re wondering, his name is an homage to John F. Kennedy: Odede was born a breach baby but survived, which his parents took as a sign he’d be a leader, ”so I had to get a leadership name,” he says.) The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What struck you about Dr. King’s life? The world was full of hatred at that time in America. But he didn’t allow darkness to conquer his life. He looked for light, he looked for hope. I admire people who, because of circumstances, could turn out to be negative and yet turned out for peace, to fight for justice. Violence was part of your life on the streets. When I read about nonviolence, the lesson for me is that violence cannot solve problems, you know what I mean? Nonviolence is a powerful weapon. I was used to having to fight back, but when you’re nonviolent, it gives you peace of mind. I work in the slums now with young people. I go to tough neighborhoods and tell them my story and Dr. King’s story. What’s their reaction to the idea of nonviolence? People say nonviolence is a sign of weakness. What do you tell them? In my community there used to be a lot of men beating their wives. I tell people, they are the weakest men. I tell them, if you are strong, you don’t have to shoot. The weak people are violent. Peace is the most powerful tool to conquer your enemies. It confuses them. They are trying to make you be violent, and if you don’t react with violence, you’ve already won because you didn’t do what they want you to do. So what should you do if someone attacks you on the street to rob you? Ask the person, what do you want, do you want my phone? I believe you have to defend yourself, make sure nobody hits you, but I don’t think you can attack somebody because they snatch something from you. I see my friends who are killed when someone tries to snatch something and they fight back. Does Dr. King’s story have meaning to the youth of Kenya today? People say, ”Dr. King is old school, from the 1960s, we don’t need him now, we have to move on.” I think we need him more than ever. There’s a lot of violence in the world, and for me, violence doesn’t just mean you assault the other person’s body, it’s also what comes out of your mouth. Words that bring hatred — for me that’s violence. Dr. King didn’t divide. He wanted to listen. It’s a time to listen more and speak less. Do you have a favorite Dr. King quote? ”Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve . ... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

The last person to leave footprints on the moon has died. NASA reported that Gene Cernan died Monday at the age of 82, surrounded by his family. Gene Cernan flew in space three times, including twice to the moon. Cernan was big, brash and gregarious. And if he hadn’t been lucky, he could have missed his chance to walk on the moon. Cernan challenged himself his whole life. When he entered the military, he chose to be a naval aviator. Landing on an aircraft carrier is perhaps the hardest thing to do in aviation. Cernan did it because it wasn’t easy. He said he was constantly pushing himself to do better and be better. ”My dad always used to say, ’Just go out and do your best. You’re not going to be better than everyone at everything.’ And he was right,” Cernan said, ”I wasn’t. But he was also right one other time when he said, ’Someday you’re going to surprise yourself. Just do your best and someday you’re going to surprise yourself.’ ” Cernan’s final trip in space was also the final time NASA sent people to the moon, the Apollo 17 mission, which took off on Dec. 7, 1972. Four days later, Cernan landed the lunar module on the moon with astronaut Harrison ”Jack” Schmitt. Cernan couldn’t hide his enthusiasm as he exited the spacecraft, saying, ”We’d like to dedicate the first steps of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible. Oh my golly! Unbelievable!” Decades later, Cernan reflected on that moment in a 2015 NPR interview, no less thrilled to be the last, rather than the first, to go there. ”The first steps had been made by others long before I got there. But those were my first steps.” Cernan is one of only three people to travel to the moon twice (Jim Lovell and John Young were the others). Before Apollo 17, he flew on Apollo 10, which was the mission just before the first lunar landing. On Gemini 9 in 1966, he conducted the second American spacewalk (which almost ended in disaster). Cernan had trouble controlling his body in the weightlessness of space. He became exhausted. His visor fogged up and he barely had the strength to get back into the capsule and close the hatch. ”Fate played another trick because I might not have come home from that flight. We didn’t know much about what we’re doing [yet].” Dreaming big and working hard were two things Cernan always did. He grew up in Chicago. Neither of his parents went to college, but he earned several degrees in engineering. Despite Cernan’s technical background, his time on the moon and in space forever altered his life. Cernan said he gained a new perspective, because ”when you leave the Earth, it’s not only technologically different — it’s philosophically different and it’s spiritually different.” Many astronauts had difficulty describing what it was actually like to be in space — not in the technical sense, but in finding the words to share that remarkable experience. He chronicled some of them in his 2016 documentary, Last Man on the Moon. ”Many of the astronauts didn’t really know how to describe that because that’s not what they were going there for,” said Francis French of the San Diego Air and Space Museum, who has written many books on the space program. ”Gene Cernan in the decades after his mission really reflected on that and he [very well described] what that’s like.” There’s something else about Cernan: He had the opportunity to land on the moon during an earlier mission, Apollo 16, as the pilot. But he turned it down, because he wanted to be commander, in charge of the mission. ”I sort of felt like I’d been an underdog most of my life,” he recalled. ”[Achieving the command of Apollo 17] I proved to myself that I was good enough. That I could get the job done. That was a big point in my life.” Cernan spent his life trying to inspire young people. He once said, ”Dream the impossible — and go out and make it happen. I walked on the moon. What can’t you do?”

years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the country either remain segregated or have . Journalist Nikole tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal. ”There’s never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources,” says. ”They often don’t have the same level of instruction. They often don’t have strong principals. They often don’t have the same technology.” Still, when it was time for ’ daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine. For sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. ”It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it’s also upheld by individual choices,” she says. ”As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children . .. we’re not going to see a change.” adds that her daughter is thriving at school. ”I know she’s learning a lot,” she says. ”I think it is making her a good citizen. . .. It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her.” On why she chose to send her young daughter to the public school in her neighborhood, One of the things I’ve done in my work is kind of show the hypocrisy of progressive people who say they believe in inequality, but when it comes to their individual choices about where they’re going to live and where they’re going to send their children, they make very different decisions, and I just didn’t want to do that. So for me it was a matter of needing to live my values, and not being someone who contributed to the inequality that I write about. On the importance of having students from different races and income levels in the public schools, The original mission of public schools . .. is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education. And no, my daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40, 000 a year in tuition, but that’s kind of the whole point of public schools. And I say this — and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you’re maybe not as good of a parent — I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids. I just don’t. I think that we can’t say ”This school is not good enough for my child” and then sustain that system. I think that that’s just morally wrong. If it’s not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools? On the history of school desegregation since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education Brown v. Board happens, and the way that we’re taught it or the myth about it is immediately our nation repented and went into an integrated future together. That’s not what happened. There was massive resistance, and we don’t see real desegregation occurring in this country until 1964, and really most rapidly from 1968 on. . .. Then you see pretty rapid desegregation particularly in the South, but then that changes, and in 1988 we start to go backwards. So we reach kind of the peak of schools integrating, of black students attending majority white schools at the highest rates that they ever have in the country, and then we start to see school districts which means black students are starting to go to schools that are more and more segregated. And school districts that had had a degree of integration are losing that integration. . .. On American resistance to desegregating schools and housing, When I started what I kind of call the segregation beat about five years ago . .. I think we had stopped talking about this as a problem. If you look at No Child Left Behind, which comes out of the Bush administration, that was all about giving up on integration in schools and just saying, ”We’re going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability.” So no one was discussing integration anymore. I think it’s because . .. we never really wanted this. . .. It’s always had to be forced, and as soon as . .. our elected officials and our courts lost the will to force it, most white Americans were just fine with that. . .. One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating this segregation and inequality, and we’re willing to put almost no effort in fixing it, and that’s the problem.

Archaeologists have unearthed a unique pendant buried on the site of a Nazi extermination camp. They say that they know of only one other that is similar, which belonged to Anne Frank. Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial announced the find on Sunday, saying that they have ascertained the charm may have belonged to a girl named Karoline Cohn. ”Aside from similarities between the pendants, both Anne Frank and Karoline Cohn were born in Frankfurt, suggesting a possible familial connection between Frank and Cohn,” Yad Vashem said. ”Researchers are currently trying to locate relatives of the two families to further explore this avenue.” The charm bears Hebrew writing that says ”Mazel Tov” (Congratulations) the date 3. 7. 1929 (Cohn’s birth date) and the word Frankfurt. The reverse side has the Hebrew letter Hey, which is sometimes used to represent God, and three stars of David. The only difference between the two charms is the date of birth — separated by just three weeks, according to archaeologists. ”Based on searches that we carried out, the only name that fit in terms of her birth date was a Jewish girl by the name of Karoline Cohn, whose birth date is indeed July 3rd, 1929,” said Yad Vashem’s Joel Zissenwein in a video released by the memorial. ”And she was indeed on a transport that we recorded that departed from Frankfurt am Main to Minsk Ghetto.” Researchers found the pendant in Sobibor, a death camp in Poland where more than 250, 000 Jews were killed, according to The Associated Press. It was found in the area ”where victims undressed and their heads shaved before being sent into the gas chambers,” Yad Vashem said. Researchers think it slipped through floorboards in this area, remaining buried until archaeologists found it a few months ago. The Sobibor camp was razed to the ground by Nazis in an attempt to conceal their crimes. But recent excavations have uncovered the foundations of gas chambers and items belonging to the camp’s many victims. Frank died in 1945 at the concentration camp in Germany. ”This pendant demonstrates once again the importance of archaeological research of former Nazi death camp sites,” said Israel Antiquities archaeologist Yoram Haimi. The researchers have also uncovered other personal items, such as a women’s watch and a star of David necklace. Haimi added: ”The items found here, bottles or dentures — all these things, even the most shocking among them — tell us the story of what happened here in the camp.”

European leaders are expressing alarm after U. S. Donald Trump said the EU is ”basically a vehicle for Germany” and reiterated his view that NATO is ”obsolete.” Speaking about the EU, Trump said ”people want their own identity,” and therefore ”I believe others will leave.” He has previously applauded the U. K.’s decision last year to depart from the bloc and repeated that sentiment, saying that ”I think Brexit is going to end up being a great thing.” Trump made the comments in an interview published Sunday with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild newspaper. ”I’ve spoken today not only with EU foreign ministers but NATO foreign ministers as well and can report that the signals are that there’s been no easing of tensions,” German Foreign Minister Steinmeier told reporters, according to Reuters. Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said reality was ”perhaps more difficult than what is going on on Twitter,” according to The Associate Press, in an apparent reference to the ’s penchant for posting on social media. Trump’s opinions on NATO appear counter to those of his pick for Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James Mattis. Mattis stated during his confirmation hearing last week that NATO ”is the most important alliance there is,” NPR’s Tom Bowman reported. Trump also repeated his earlier criticism that many NATO members ”aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying.” NPR’s Frank Frank Langfitt explains that ”Trump’s criticism that other NATO allies don’t pay their fair share is nothing new and he has a point.” Here’s more from Frank: ”NATO has set a goal that nations should spend the equivalent of 2 percent of their GDP on defense, but most don’t. However, the idea that the U. S. — the dominant military force in NATO — might not defend an ally frightened many in Brussels and beyond.” When asked directly about whether the U. S. will guarantee European security in the future, Trump simply replied, ”I feel very strongly toward Europe — very strongly toward Europe, yes.” Trump also stated that he was eager to make a trade deal with the U. K. saying his administration would ”work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly.” U. K. Foreign Minister Boris Johnson appeared to be the only EU leader who responded positively to Trump’s interview, according to The Washington Post. ”It’s very good news that the United States of America wants to do a good deal with us and wants to do it very fast, and it’s great to hear that from Donald Trump,” Johnson told reporters, the Post reported.

Ernest Peterson has spent his entire adult life in Washington, D. C. — almost all of it in Shaw, a neighborhood of colorful row houses and side streets about 2 miles from the White House. In Shaw, Peterson bought his first house and started a business. And, for 20 years, on the Saturday before Labor Day, he organized a community picnic at the elementary school near his house. Over the years, friends and neighbors moved away or got locked up. He lost touch with many of them. But despite living in Shaw for nearly 40 years, Peterson is increasingly starting to feel like an outsider in his neighborhood. ”I go outside, and these people who been here for 15 minutes look at me like, ’Why you here?’ That’s that sense of privilege they bring wherever they go,” he said in his front yard on a sunny Saturday in November. ”I been here since ’78. They been here six months or a year, and they question my purpose for being here.” In a city facing some of the most intense pressure on housing in the country, the feeling is not uncommon for many of Washington’s longtime residents. Even neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of poverty and crime — places once thought immune to the influx of newcomers — are being eyed by developers. At Brookland Manor, a housing development in Northeast Washington home to about 1, 200 mostly residents, the landlord has stepped up evictions of poor tenants, according to reporting by The Washington Post, as the owners prepare to redevelop the property, often filing lawsuits for late rent payments totaling less than $100. (Update on Feb. 1: A representative from the development company told the Post they have always sued over unpaid rent and lease violations.) In neighborhoods south of the Anacostia River, so far largely left out of the district’s housing boom, activists are fighting to preserve housing as developers anticipate a growing appetite for units. But for Shaw, a neighborhood where newcomers began arriving more than a decade ago, gentrification is not a new reality. Now, several years into a period of dizzying demographic and physical change, longtime residents say they are still trying to negotiate a place for themselves in a neighborhood they’ve long called home. Home on P Street, In some ways, Peterson’s stretch of P Street looks a lot like it did when he came to Shaw in the 1970s after moving from North Carolina to attend law school at Howard University. The same two historic churches hug corners at either end of the street. The elementary school is a charter now, but the facade has remained mostly unchanged. Carlos Pyatt grew up across the street from where Peterson lives. Pyatt hadn’t been back to this block since he moved away in the early ’80s. When Pyatt looks back at his childhood on P Street, he remembers riding skateboards and bicycles, playing touch football and tag. The woman who still lives next door to Pyatt’s old house, now in her remembers a less rosy picture — a period after the neighborhood’s heyday as a center for culture and commerce, when Shaw was still reeling from the effects of the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and, later, the rise of crack cocaine. ”I left before the epidemic hit,” Pyatt said, surveying his old house for the first time in three decades. ”I had no idea that was going on. To me, it feels the same, but the people who haven’t left, they’ve seen it.” Pyatt’s old neighbor bought her house for $42, 000 in 1981. In 2017, the property’s tax assessment was more than $888, 000. The city’s assessment of her home jumped nearly $150, 000 in the past year. Developers call her up constantly asking if she wants to sell. Even with all that equity, it can be hard to keep up with the property taxes on a fixed income, which makes the option to sell tempting. Many have taken the offers. Alex Padro, who represents Shaw on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, cites this trend as proof that longtime residents benefit from the community’s growth. ”They decided to take advantage of the wealth creation opportunity and sold their family homes and moved to the suburbs,” he said. ”Grandpa and Grandma were no longer having to climb up several flights of stairs and they have a college fund for the grandkids.” While exploding home prices can generate windfalls for longtime owners who decide to sell, the upward direction of the housing market has also generated concerns about the availability of affordable housing in neighborhoods like Shaw. Even if longtime homeowners or renters aren’t displaced, the trend certainly constricts who is able to move in. Despite initiatives to preserve housing for and residents, census data from the neighborhood point to a period of major demographic change. In 1980, Shaw was 78 percent black. In 2010, the black population in the neighborhood had dropped to 44 percent. And that’s not just because more white people moved in, increasing the overall total population and driving down the neighborhood’s black majority. The actual number of black residents, not just their percentage of the population, has been consistently dropping over the past two decades as well. Home sales also illustrate what’s happening. In 1995, the median home price in Shaw was $147, 000. Today it’s $781, 000. In 1979, the average family income was $50, 089 when adjusted for inflation. Between 2010 and 2014 it was $145, 096. Curtis Smith, administrator at the historic Third Street Baptist Church down the street, said very few of his congregants still live in the neighborhood. Most commute in from the suburbs or elsewhere in the District. ”In the old days, maybe 80 percent could walk to the church,” he said. ”Now just turn that around.” Shifts like this one have meant that institutions such as churches preserve some of the few remaining ties drawing former residents back to the community. Smith hopes his church can serve as a centerpiece of the community, not just as a relic of the past. ”We’re trying to portray that we’re not the black church on the corner, but we’re the community church,” he said. Though every now and then someone who is not a longtime congregant will stop in for the free community movie nights or public forums on topics like neighborhood policing, it’s not often. Smith said that’s something churches throughout Shaw are grappling with — how to play a role in a community that looks less and less like their membership. A few blocks away, the owner of Hollywood Styles Barbershop is thinking through a similar set of questions. For decades, the shop has occupied this small brick storefront just off Seventh Street, a stretch of Shaw that typifies much of the change here. Convenience stores and Ethiopian takeout joints housed in storefronts carry on next door to upscale coffee shops, bakeries and bars. Shop owner DeLonta Dickerson said barbershops are some of the few remaining businesses from the old Shaw. Like churches, barbershops can remain a link to the neighborhood long after people move away. The chrome and vinyl chairs lined up on each side of the small space have seated generations of the same families. Dickerson started coming here as a kid and took over the business in 2009 when the shop’s longtime owner died. Over the years, Dickerson has seen new condos rise on every corner and a subway station crop up across the street. He leases his storefront, and while he figures the owner could sell out to a developer one day, he doesn’t think about it much: ”I’m not sure if I’d go for another space, or if it’s something that I’d just want to leave behind.” Who benefits? For those longtime residents who remember Shaw as a neighborhood pockmarked with empty lots and plagued by crime, rather than the hub of commercial and cultural activity experienced by the generation before them, at least some of the improved resources and services such as lighting, a new library and a renovated recreation center are welcome changes. Dominic Moulden, who has been organizing residents in Shaw for 30 years and represents the tenants rights organization OneDC, said that doesn’t mean everyone benefits from the new amenities. ”If you can’t spend $100 to eat, $5 or $7 for coffee, you can’t buy anything in your own neighborhood,” he said. Peterson puts it this way: Poor in Shaw had been asking for improved services for years, and it’s only now that white people with money and influence have moved in that they’re getting them. Resources are available now not because of who lives in Shaw, said Padro, but because the city’s tax base improved significantly over the past decade. As more people move into the city, its coffers are in a better position to fund new amenities and services. While the tax base may be in a different position than it was just a decade ago, Moulden said the city is still failing to meet the most basic needs of some residents, particularly when it comes to housing. A 2015 analysis of census data by the D. C. Fiscal Policy Institute found that the number of apartments with rents less than $800 per month — a number that represents 40 percent of monthly income for a family of four living at the poverty line — decreased by 42 percent between 2002 and 2013. That’s a decline of more than 24, 000 units. Padro says public strategy sessions, extensive committee work and community surveys have all been employed to bring everybody into the fold when big decisions are made. Virginia Lee, who is in her late 60s and has lived in Shaw for 17 years, says she still feels longtime residents have lost some political clout, especially when it comes to leverage at ANC meetings. She says became less visible at meetings and she began to feel that her input wouldn’t be taken seriously. ”It’s a sense that I have as a black woman, that my voice has low impact,” Lee said. Building relationships, One week before Thanksgiving, dozens of kids lined up in front of a stretch of long folding tables as volunteers heaped their paper plates with green beans, turkey and mashed potatoes. Three of the round banquet tables are crowded with older residents. Harold Valentine is one of them. He moved to Washington in 1981 from Boston, where he struggled to kick a drinking problem. He hasn’t had a drink since he moved to D. C. Valentine said this kind of event wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago — at least not here at Kennedy. And the senior citizens? They would never have crossed the street at night to come to Kennedy. Valentine said this is a prime example of both the kind of positive change he has seen spring up in Shaw — and of the distance still left to go. Seated inside a quiet preschool classroom just off the recreation center’s front lobby, Valentine cites the programs that now occur here day and night, his pride for the former gang leader he mentored at Kennedy and who now serves as a member of the recreation center’s board — all proof, he says, that positive changes really are happening in Shaw. Valentine also wants the recreation center to be a gathering place for the whole community, though he realizes that dream is not entirely the reality yet. He’s not exactly sure how to get there, but said his idea for where to start is rooted in an old saying a pastor once told him. ”I wouldn’t go across the street for another program, but I’d go around the world for a relationship,” he said. That’s precisely what Valentine thinks Shaw needs. He’s optimistic about the progress, and says he is not trying to argue that improving life here won’t also require tangibles such as regulations, programs and money. What he is saying is that there has to be something more. For as much good as Valentine sees happening in his neighborhood, he recognizes there are real lapses when it comes to how people from different backgrounds interact with each other. The neighborhood’s changing demographics have created a space where identities such as race, age and class are constantly brushing up against each other. It’s a tension Shaw is still dealing with years after ”gentrification” began. ”Until I sit down and talk to you, we’re not going to get anywhere,” he said. ”I can say good morning to you, but unless I sit down and say, ’Where are you from?’ until I let you into my comfort zone and you’re not afraid of what happened once upon a time here in Shaw, there’s not going to be that cultural assimilation.” Derek Hyra, an associate professor at American University who has studied gentrification in Shaw, sees building bridges as at least partly a question of policy. Hyra suggests refining the Community Development Block Grant — federal funding allocated to cities each year for community development work, which fund projects such as affordable housing but can also go toward improvements like sidewalks or parking. He’d like to see some of that money support community gardens, arts programs or festivals — or whatever mutual interest the community identifies. Peterson wonders if, in the long run, that will really matter. Even if longtime residents are able to stay in their homes, he wonders what the community will look like once his generation begins to die out. ”I see very few people who look like me that will be here in the next five or 10 years,” he said. ”You can’t stop progress” Peterson wrestles with the nuance of the shifts he has seen in Shaw. That’s because he came here 40 years ago for many of the same reasons that people move in today. ”You can’t stop progress,” he said. ”I understand because we left, a lot of us black folks, in [the] ’30s, ’40s, and ’50, we left small towns to come to urban centers seeking employment. Same thing is happening now. There’s nothing in these small towns for these kids anymore.” That doesn’t mean he grants newcomers a free pass. Those conflicting feelings and experiences have left many lifers trying to reconcile the optimism they have for their neighborhood’s future with the pain inflicted by cultural or political alienation. For those whom the displacement hasn’t been physical, there is still a sense they have been somehow removed or pushed aside amid the tide of newcomers, or that there isn’t the sense of community there once was. ”You sometimes get the effect that nothing existed here before they came,” said Lee. ”All the goodness that has come with the gentrification and certainly the refurbishing and preserving of buildings . .. all that has come has been material in nature and very little has been done to preserve the human aspect of a city that’s being transformed. We have our gathering spots they have their gathering spots. The fact that we use the same sidewalks and streets has very little to do with ongoing communication.” When Valentine talks about the future he envisions in Shaw, he repeatedly uses words like integration and reconciliation — the act of making different beliefs compatible. He sees the process as both grand — such as his idea for a ”reconciliation square” designed to unite neighboring churches — and rooted in the like the relationships he builds with people at the recreation center. That’s where Lee thinks it will start. ”Every day when I go out my door, I go out and figure just speaking to people who pass by is a way of inserting some humanity in the process,” she said. The type of grand ”reconciliation” Valentine talks about may not be possible. But many longtime residents of Shaw say they are confident any progress — in the integration of public spaces, in preserving cultural institutions, in crafting policies that preserve affordable housing and prevent displacement — will also require something that has often proved elusive here: a little bit of empathy.

When Donald Trump won the presidential election, he made a pledge to every citizen: that he would be president for all Americans. In the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, we’re going to hear about some of the communities that make up this nation, from the people who know them best, in our series Finding America. The No. 48 bus runs through the Central District of Seattle. It’s a historically black community that Carla Saulter and Gabriel Teodros know well. It’s also a neighborhood that is gentrifying as Seattle has boomed in the past decade. During a ride on the 48, the two bus companions discussed the changes they’ve been seeing in their city. Saulter says riding the bus allows her to see how different parts of the city have changed physically and demographically. ”The thing about the 48 is that it goes through so many different communities,” Saulter says. ”Of course, over time, the riders of the bus [have] changed, and that’s one of the ways you can really see, just viscerally feel, the changes in the community, is that who’s riding the bus is so different now than it was even 10 years ago.” Use the audio link above to hear the full story.

Bobby Rush is one of the last living blues legends of his generation. He toured the South and the chitlin’ circuit in the ’50s and was often forced to perform music behind a curtain for white audiences. Shortly before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rush heard through fellow Chicago bluesman J. B. Lenoir about a Baptist minister and activist who offered hope: Martin Luther King Jr. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, Rush shares his memories about the early days of the civil rights movement, the harrowing racism he endured and the powerful message Dr. King delivered when they met in person. Listen and download the audio above.

Americans across the U. S. are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. ’s legacy with a day of service. We reflect on his life and message by revisiting his celebrated I Have a Dream speech in its entirety.

Noor Salman, the wife of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, has been arrested on federal charges. Salman is charged with ”Aiding and Abetting by providing material support to a terrorist and Obstruction of Justice,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina said in a statement. On June 12, 2016, 49 people died when Mateen opened fire at Pulse in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U. S. history. He was killed in a firefight with police. Salman is due to make her initial court appearance at 9:30 a. m. Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. according to a tweet from the U. S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Florida. ”This is an example of the fact that investigations do continue long after they’re publicly discussed,” U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said during an interview with MSNBC. ”It was always our goal, and we said from the beginning, we were going to look at every aspect of this case, every aspect of this shooter’s life, to determine not just why did he take these actions, but who else knew about them, was anyone else involved, is there any other accountability that needs to be had here in this case.” Mateen and Salman married in 2011 in Contra Costa County, Calif. as The has reported. She moved to the San Francisco area after her husband’s death, according to The Associated Press. ”I was unaware of everything,” Salman told The New York Times in a November interview. ”I don’t condone what he has done. I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.” In a statement to NPR, Salman’s attorney Linda Moreno reiterated that her client was not aware of Mateen’s plans: ”Noor Salman had no foreknowledge nor could she predict what Omar Mateen intended to do that tragic night. Noor has told her story of abuse at his hands. We believe it is misguided and wrong to prosecute her and that it dishonors the memories of the victims to punish an innocent person.” As NPR’s Dina has reported, Salman has cooperated with authorities but there are inconsistencies in her story: ”For example, she said she didn’t know that the attack was coming, but she also told authorities that she tried to talk him out of the attack. She was with him when he bought ammunition last week. She actually joined him at the Pulse nightclub before the attack, although it’s possible she didn’t know that he was there to case the place. So a grand jury is looking at all of this. It’s not clear if they’ll bring charges, but they’re certainly considering that.”

It was the first day of school for Dan Lear’s three kids. In a scramble to get his boys to class on time, the Seattle lawyer wound up parking in a space he probably should have avoided. ”There was a fire hydrant, but the curb wasn’t painted and the fire hydrant was painted a kind of a funny color. And so I thought, and maybe it was wishful thinking, but I thought I would be OK to park there,” he says. Sure enough, Lear returned to a ticket. ”I was bummed! I mean, obviously no one’s really happy when they get a ticket but I went home, I put it on my fridge and I let it sit there cause I just didn’t want to deal with it,” he says. So he found something that would — DoNotPay, a free online ”robot lawyer.” It has helped drivers in London and New York City appeal parking tickets. It had just expanded into Seattle, and Lear decided to give it a go. He logged in and the DoNotPay bot asked Lear a series of questions — like where the ticket was issued and a description of what happened. Within minutes, he had a letter to send to the city. The verdict? ”Ultimately, yeah, they let me off,” Lear says. The idea behind DoNotPay belongs to Joshua Browder, a student at Stanford University who’s originally from London. He wants to expand the service into San Francisco, so he spends time doing field research, combing the streets, peeking at parking tickets and studying signs. He looks for confusing signage, like one he noticed on a recent visit near the city’s Mission District. ”There are two signs,” he says after his field trip. ”The first one says 7 to 9 a. m. and 4 to 6 p. m. you can’t park. And that one is fine and clearly marked. But then there’s a sign below it that says no parking up to 6 a. m. but there’s no start time. . .. It’s covered up, and it looks like it’s been covered up by the local authorities.” Browder’s bot has, so far, helped drivers overturn more than 200, 000 parking tickets in London, New York and Seattle. This month it will enter several more cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles, the capital of cars and traffic. In Los Angeles, about 40 percent of challenged citations are dismissed. DoNotPay’s success rate is 60 percent, according to Browder. It’s easy to see why drivers would flock to this service. But how do city officials feel? ”Currently, we have four field investigators to do the investigations for signs and curbs in the city of Los Angeles,” says Wayne Garcia, parking operations chief for the city of Los Angeles. He says he’s anxious to see what will soon come through the mail, given how even a modest uptick in appeals could overload resources. But he admits there could be an upside. ”Our staff spend a great deal of time reviewing letters from motorists in trying to decipher what they’re actually contesting,” Garcia says. And that’s because most people just don’t write like lawyers. ”If this process will help the motorists really focus in on why they’re contesting their parking citation, it would also help our staff in reviewing the contested parking citation,” he says. Browder says he wants to ”level the playing field so anyone can have the same legal access under the law.” He also wants this kind of legal help to go beyond parking tickets. And in some cities he’s already done that — with disputes and unexplained banking charges. Right now, he’s working on the bot’s ability to help refugees apply for asylum. ”If one day someone can have the same standard of legal representation as the richest in society then I think that’s a really good aim,” he says. And Browder says it’s all part of an even larger ambition to, one day, make justice free.

Donald Trump said he’s finishing a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act with a proposal that would provide ”insurance for everybody,” according to a report by The Washington Post. He did not get into any specific details about his healthcare plan during a telephone interview with the newspaper. But he did say it would be ”much less expensive” and would involve ”much lower deductibles.” Trump added that he does not plan to cut benefits for Medicare and that he does not want a health care system. His plan will be revealed, Trump suggested, after the U. S. Senate confirms his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia. The Senate Finance Committee has not announced the timing of Price’s confirmation hearing yet. Still, Trump said he expects Republicans in Congress to replace Obamacare quickly with his plan and is ready to put pressure on lawmakers, telling the Post: ”I think we will get approval. I won’t tell you how, but we will get approval. You see what’s happened in the House in recent weeks,” Trump said, referencing his tweet during a House Republican move to gut their independent ethics office, which along with widespread constituent outrage was cited by some members as a reason the gambit failed. Trump’s comments come as Republicans continue their debate over how exactly to repeal and replace Obamacare, while Democrats have been holding rallies around the country in support of the existing health care law. Last week, GOP lawmakers approved a budget resolution that sets up a framework for repealing the Affordable Care Act. But House Speaker Paul Ryan, . has said that lawmakers are not ”holding hard deadlines” for replacing the federal health policy.

Prosecutors in South Korea have requested an arrest warrant for the de facto head of the nation’s biggest conglomerate, Samsung, on charges of bribery and embezzlement in connection with a swirling scandal that led to the president’s impeachment. Investigators say Jay Y. Lee, the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics and the scion of the one of the largest companies in the world, helped improperly direct company money to the confidant of President Park in order to curry favor with the government. That confidant is now at the center of a criminal investigation and ongoing political scandal, and the president is awaiting a trial by a constitutional court on whether a resounding impeachment vote in parliament will result in her official removal. Prosecutors allege that Lee directed funds to Park’s friend, Choi and in return won support from the administration for a controversial merger between two company affiliates. On Thursday, Lee appeared at the prosecutor’s office for questioning which lasted until Friday morning. Before the interrogation began, he said to a throng of cameras, ”I am deeply sorry, and I apologize to the Korean people for failing to put our best face forward due to this incident.” In a statement, however, the company denied the accusations: ”It is hard to understand the special prosecutors’ decision. Samsung has never given support or wanted reward in turn. In particular, Samsung cannot accept the special prosecutors’ claims that there was an illegal solicitation regarding the merger or the management succession. We believe the court will make a good judgment.” Already, lawmakers who supported the ouster of the president have spoken out in support of the charges. The culture of conglomerates, or chaebol, having outsized influence in politics and society has been one of the grievances of protesters who have been demonstrating against the president for months. ”This is a decision that values law and principle,” the Democratic Party of Korea’s spokesman Gi said. ”Arresting Lee will save Samsung and the national economy. This is the beginning of a real and extensive chaebol reform. It’s a great opportunity to break apart the ugly relationship between politics and business.” Haeryun Kang contributed to this post.

A group of scientists is gathering this week in the U. K. to discuss a slab of ice that’s cracking in Antarctica. The crack could soon split off a frozen chunk the size of Delaware. One glacier scientist, Heidi Sevestre, spent six weeks last year living on that giant slab of ice off the Antarctic Peninsula. ”It’s like being on a different planet,” says Sevestre, a glaciologist with the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She and her colleagues would get really excited whenever they saw a bird pass overhead because it was the only other sign of life around. ”Everything is gigantic, everything is white,” she says. And everything seemed so frozen and still. But it wasn’t. ”When you’re camping on the ice shelf, you have no idea that you’re on something that is floating and moving,” she says. The ice shelf is in constant motion: rising with the tides, splitting off icebergs at its edges, and growing again as inland glaciers feed it. The ice shelf Sevestre was studying is called Larsen C, and it now has a massive crack running through it. ”The big rift is slicing the ice shelf from top to bottom,” Sevestre says. It’s now a third of a mile deep, and as wide across as 25 highway lanes. But this is not just another sad climate change story. It’s more complicated. ”A lot of things are going on deep inside the ice,” says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U. K. He’s also leading a project to track changes in the ice shelf. Luckman says climate change is certainly influencing this region. Larsen C used to have two neighbors to the north, Larsen A and Larsen B. As the air and water warmed, those ice shelves started melting and then splintered into shards in 1995 and 2002. But the crack in Larsen C seems to have happened on its own, for different reasons. ”This is probably not directly attributable to any warming in the region, although of course the warming won’t have helped,” says Luckman. ”It’s probably just simply a natural event that’s just been waiting around to happen.” Larsen C has a bunch of cracks. All ice shelves do. This particular crack has been around since at least the 1960s. The unusual part is that in 2014, this crack — and only this crack — started growing in spurts. Why? ”Well, that is a little bit of a mystery and that’s why it drew itself to our attention,” says Luckman. It left other cracks in the dust about 50 miles ago. Now, scientists are crunching satellite and radar data to figure out how. ”And that knowledge will be useful in helping us to understand other ice shelves and how they might respond to rifts coming into them,” says Luckman. One puzzling aspect is how it managed to plow through areas of softer ice, called suture zones, that bind the ice from neighboring glaciers into one giant sheet. ”There’s something different about that ice that slows it down or causes it to hang up for some period of time,” says Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University. But, starting in 2014, that soft ice did very little to slow down this rift. ”We need to get to the bottom of understanding what changed that allowed this rift to progress as it has, and will other rifts follow suit,” says McGrath, who spent four field seasons camped out on the Larsen C ice shelf. (At one point, bad storms kept him inside his tent for more than a week. ”Yeah, you’re peeing in a bottle,” he says. ”There were moments during those seven days that I questioned whether I should have studied tropical reef ecology. ”) Scientists are split on how important this crack is for the stability of the whole ice shelf. ”Just because this iceberg calves off, the ice shelf isn’t just going to collapse and disappear overnight,” says McGrath. Some say if this giant section breaks off, it won’t make a difference. Others think it could eventually cause the whole shelf to fall apart. ”I am cautiously worried,” says Ala Khazendar, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ”Ice shelves are very important. They are the gates of Antarctica in a way, and the gatekeepers of Antarctica.” The ice shelves are already floating, so if they fall apart it does not immediately affect sea levels. It’s what they hold back — water from all the inland glaciers — that could be problematic. Khazendar says there are two possible scenarios. One, the iceberg will break off, he says, ”and nothing spectacular will happen for many, many years.” The glaciers will bulk it up with ice until it’s back to its former look. Or, two, this iceberg is just the first of many irreversible losses for Larsen C, which, in combination with enough warm summers, will be weakened and shatter like the previous Larsens. ”We shall see if that big calving leads to a collapse of the ice shelf. At the moment, this is still a big question mark,” says Heidi Sevestre. According to pessimistic estimates, if the ice shelf completely disintegrated and if all the water packed in those glaciers made their way to the sea, it could significantly raise global sea levels. ”It is quite a large impact, indeed,” says Sevestre. The ice shelf experts gathered in the U. K. this week aren’t sure whether this more serious chain reaction will happen, but they are confident, at least, that the chunk will come off. The crack only has about 10 miles left to go.

Since he began running for president, Donald Trump has been talking about a smaller federal role in education. The confirmation hearings begin Tuesday for the person he has nominated to carry out his vision, Betsy DeVos. In her home state of Michigan, DeVos has been a powerful advocate of school choice and a larger private role in education. If confirmed, she’ll take over a huge federal bureaucracy of some 4, 400 employees and a $68 billion budget. To get an idea of what’s ahead, I reached out to a former Republican education secretary, Margaret Spellings. She ran the Education Department under George W. Bush, from 2005 to 2009, and was a leader in the implementation of his signature education achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act. Today, she is the president of the University of North Carolina system, with 17 campuses and more than 220, 000 students. She says she has not advised the incoming Trump administration on any official level, but she has met Betsy DeVos. She also recently penned a joint letter with other former Education secretaries William Bennet and Rod Paige endorsing DeVos. Here’s an edited version of our conversation. How do you balance the federal, state and local roles in improving public education? This is something we’ve debated for a long time. It changes. We’ve seen the pendulum swing from a more muscular federal role like we had during No Child Left Behind in the Bush era, to times when the primacy was in the states, which is the case now [with the Every Student Succeeds Act]. We’re now in a phase where states can be incubators of innovation. But what specifically should the federal government do to make sure minorities and kids with learning disabilities receive the best education possible? Isn’t equity the central issue here? We do not have equity without accountability and transparency. The reason we’ve moved the needle for poor and minority students is because we’ve cared enough to find out how they’re doing and made them a priority. When we walk back — and this is going to happen [under ESSA] — at the state level, now that we have this crazy quilt of accountability systems with a lot of fine print, we know who gets masked in the data. That’s what I’m going to be paying attention to. The federal role in education is, and has always been, a civil rights focus. Did the U. S. Education Department, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, go too far in dictating or imposing education policies that weakened local control of schools? When we spend a lot of federal money, we ought to expect something for our money. But federal dollars on average make up no more than a small percentage of local school budgets. Right, but it’s billions of dollars. So we should know how well we are meeting the objectives of Title I [the government’s main aid program in education] helping poor and minority students meet their full potential. In my book, accountability and transparency and measurement come into play. But we should take a lighter hand [in terms of solutions] and those [solutions] ought to be reserved for states. And frankly, in NCLB’s case, the federal intervention was oversold. There was a ton of local control in funding and policymaking. But you would agree that the federal government’s relationship with states was strained and adversarial? Well, one of the things I’m proud of with NCLB was that it was a public policy debate that involved compromise. The construct for NCLB was that we care about poor students. That we invest resources through a muscular federal role. Among the ideas in Donald Trump’s education agenda are school choice, ending the Common Core and shrinking or eliminating the Department of Education. Are those the right things to focus on right off the bat? The Department of Education should not be abolished. I do take the view that we need a department of education focused on our neediest students. On Common Core standards, local control tells us that when states embrace standards, [federal officials] are not in a position to stop them. That ship has sailed. I can’t imagine that the administration would insist that states must abandon Common Core. On choice, it’s tricky to drive a policy agenda on something like choice when [the federal government represents] only 8 to 9 percent of school funding. How do you compel state and local taxpayers to spend their dollars on choice? That’ll be interesting to see. Having people vote with their feet makes a lot of sense, if we have the right kind of transparency, information and accountability. What do you think about Trump’s proposal to ” ” $20 billion in federal funds to create a voucher program? I think they’ll try to create a pot of money that mayors or governors would contribute to to create [vouchers]. That’s a possibility. Another possibility is funds to support vouchers and school choice programs. Do you have any concerns about a possible drop in federal funding for early childhood education? States that have seen good results have invested heavily in early childhood education. So if we’re about results, that will continue. If I were to make a wager, I wouldn’t bet on a lot of changes for early childhood education programs like Head Start, but predicting Washington behavior is not prudent. The nation’s two big teachers unions have vowed to oppose Trump’s education agenda. How can Trump and his nominee, Betsy DeVos, avoid a big fight with unions? We do need to make a distinction between national teachers unions and teachers and what their concerns and issues are. Mrs. DeVos wants to hear from teachers. She knows what she doesn’t know, and I think she understands she needs to have good relationships to be a successful and productive secretary of education. I think her approach is going to be around the empowerment of individuals to vote with their feet to make meaningful choices. Most of our students are educated in traditional public schools, so [choice] is part of the solution but not a silver bullet. What about higher education — what are you concerns there? Where I would expect the Trump administration to focus is on workforce training, community colleges and people who need credentials more than BA degrees.

President Trump and his team are filling approximately 4, 000 jobs in the federal government that are held by political appointees. Below is an index of the people appointed to Cabinet positions, key White House staff roles and lead positions at other prominent government agencies. Those requiring confirmation go through the following steps to officially get the job: nomination, Senate hearing, committee approval and, finally, a full Senate vote. (This chart was last updated on April 24, 2017.)

The final few days before Donald Trump takes the oath of office will be filled with a flurry of congressional activity, as the Senate holds confirmation hearings for eight more of his Cabinet nominees. Most are expected to be fairly routine, but a few could be affairs, including hearings for Education Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to confirm several new Cabinet members shortly after Trump is sworn in as president at noon on Friday. ”I’m hopeful that we’ll get up to six or seven, particularly national security team, in place on day one,” McConnell told reporters last week after meeting with the at Trump Tower in New York. Last week’s hearings included several national security picks, including Defense James Mattis, who sailed through his hearing and received a congressional waiver required due to his recent military service Secretary of Rex Tillerson, who faced very tough questions — particularly from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio Attorney Jeff Sessions, who had to defend his record on race against opposition from most Democrats and civil rights groups Mike Pompeo for CIA director and John Kelly, who was nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security. This week’s hearings are for more positions that oversee domestic policy, and discussions are likely to focus on issues like climate change and the role of public education. Here’s a rundown of what’s coming up: Betsy DeVos will have her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) committee at 5 p. m. It was postponed from last week amid concerns of incomplete financial disclosures and ethics review. The HELP committee, however, said the delay was ”at the request of Senate leadership to accommodate Senate schedule.” On Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that DeVos had left a $150, 000 political donation off of her disclosure forms. DeVos, a billionaire GOP donor who once chaired the Michigan Republican Party, is a vocal supporter of school choice and vouchers, but doesn’t have much experience in public education. She has gotten the support of many Republicans, including some who were very critical of Trump during the campaign, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush. Earlier on Tuesday, at 10 a. m. Interior Ryan Zinke will have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Montana Republican congressman was just sworn in to his second term and was a somewhat surprising choice for Trump, especially since he was considered to be a top GOP recruit to challenge Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester for reelection in 2018. He’s a former Navy SEAL commander who served in Iraq and was awarded two Bronze Stars. Zinke is a vocal defender of public access to federal lands, and even resigned his position as a delegate to the Republican National Committee after the party platform included support for transferring federal public lands to the states. However, environmentalists have been critical of his nomination he’s a supporter of coal, oil and gas exploration, and has backed building the Keystone XL pipeline. The middle of the week features four simultaneous confirmation hearings, all beginning at 10 a. m. The hearing for U. N. Ambassador nominee Nikki Haley before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will round out the testimonies of major members of Trump’s foreign policy team. The South Carolina governor was no fan of Trump during the primary, even directly criticizing him during her State of the Union response last year. That alone made her a surprise choice for the position, in addition to the fact that she has little foreign policy experience, so expect Democrats to grill her on international issues. She’s the daughter of Indian immigrants and was the first woman and the first minority to lead the Palmetto State. Georgia Rep. Tom Price will also testify before the HELP Committee on his nomination to be the Health and Human Services secretary, a position that’s sure to get more scrutiny as Republicans have begun pushing to repeal and replace Obamacare. Price is an orthopedic surgeon, who has been a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act and proposed his own alternative. Even though he has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the New York Times reported that his nomination has, nonetheless, left many of the country’s medical professionals divided. NPR’s Scott Horsley reported that Price is under plenty of scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest as he seeks to overhaul the country’s healthcare system, but has recently taken steps to inoculate himself from many of his financial interests. The confirmation for Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is sure to attract plenty of attention as he testifies before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He’s been a leading critic of the very agency he’s seeking to lead. Pruitt has been a leading opponent of President Obama’s environmental and climate regulations, according to NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce: His official biography calls him ”a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” He has repeatedly challenged the agency’s rules in court, and he has even sued the EPA for an allegedly cozy ”sue and settle” relationship with environmentalists. One profile noted that Pruitt would sue the federal government ”every chance he can get.” Pruitt is also a climate change skeptic, writing in National Review last year that: ”Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.” Commerce Wilbur Ross will also have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which was also postponed from last week due to ethics paperwork delays. He’s a billionaire investor and turnaround specialist. And like Trump, Ross has been a vocal opponent of free trade and supports renegotiating current trade deals. Treasury Steven Mnuchin will testify before the Senate Finance Committee at 10 a. m. on Thursday. The wealthy hedge fund manager and former Goldman Sachs executive was Trump’s chief fundraiser during the campaign. Mnuchin will face plenty of questions about his own financial interests and how he would plan to mitigate conflicts of interest if confirmed he’s promised to divest from as many as 43 companies and funds if confirmed, as well as step down from several corporate boards. However, the New York Times reported he won’t step down as an unpaid adviser for ”Steven T. Mnuchin Inc. ,” which manages his own investments. NPR’s John Ydstie also reports that Mnuchin’s time as chairman and CEO of the California bank IndyMac, which has ”been called a foreclosure machine,” is also sure to be a major focus of the hearings. Here’s what Ydstie reported in November: Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac on the condition that the FDIC agree to pay future losses above a certain threshold. They renamed the bank OneWest Bank and, after running it for six years, they sold it last year for a profit, estimated at close to $1. 5 billion. OneWest foreclosed on more than 36, 000 homeowners under Mnuchin’s tenure. Rick Perry will testify before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at 10 a. m. as well on his nomination to be Secretary of Energy. The former Texas governor also briefly ran for president before withdrawing early on in the 2016 campaign he, too, was initially critical of Trump before endorsing him last May. The Austin reports that Perry has cut ties with several oil and gas companies ahead of his hearing.

The U. S. has released 10 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the Arab nation of Oman, reducing the detainee population to 45 in the waning days of the Obama administration. The freed prisoners were not identified by name or nationality, though the Oman News Agency, citing the country’s Foreign Ministry, reported that the 10 had arrived in the country on Monday for ”temporary residence.” Prior to Monday’s announcement, Oman had taken in 20 Guantanamo detainees over the past two years, and all of them were from Oman’s neighbor, Yemen. At its peak, Guantanamo had close to 700 prisoners. When President Obama entered office in January 2009, he immediately pledged to close the prison in Cuba, which was down to 242 detainees at the time. Many have been released to their home countries or to other nations over the past eight years. However, most of those still in Guantanamo are considered by U. S. authorities to be too dangerous to be released, and Congress has barred them from being brought to the United States. Donald Trump recently called on the Obama administration to stop releasing Guantanamo prisoners. On Jan 3, Trump tweeted: ”There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.” The Obama administration promptly rejected Trump’s call. Trump said during the presidential campaign he would like to see additional terror suspects sent to the prison. ”We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up,” Trump said last February.

When Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings’ names — even the dog’s name. ”Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha,” she says. A lot of people mix up children’s names or friends’ names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla. and she wanted to find out why it happens. So she, and her colleagues, Cassidy Fox, Christin Ogle, and senior researcher David Rubin, did a survey of 1, 700 men and women of different ages, and she found that naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone sometimes mixes up the names of family and friends. Their findings were published in the journal Memory Cognition. ”It’s a normal cognitive glitch,” Deffler says. It’s not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how the brain categorizes names. It’s like having special folders for family names and friends names stored in the brain. When people used the wrong name, overwhelmingly the name that was used was in the same category, Deffler says. It was in the same folder. And there was one group who was especially prone to the naming . ”Moms, especially moms,” Deffler says. ”Any mom I talked to says, ’You know, I’ve definitely done this. ’” It works something like this: Say you’ve got an armful of groceries and you need some quick help from one of your kids. Your brain tries to rapidly retrieve the name from the family folder, but it may end up retrieving a related name instead, says Neil Mulligan, a cognitive scientist at UNC Chapel Hill. ”As you are preparing to produce the utterance, you’re activating not just their name, but competing names,” he says. You flick through the names of all your other children, stored in the family folder, and sometimes these competing names win. Like in the classic scene from the TV show, Friends. When Ross says his wedding vows, he is asked to repeat his fiancée’s name, Emily. He says his former girlfriend’s name Rachel instead. Now Ross probably had both Rachel’s and Emily’s names in his mental folder of loved ones and a mental ensued. And it’s not just human loved ones that are filed together. ”Whatever dog we had at the time would be included in the string along with my sister Rebecca and my brother Jesse,” Deffler says. So your family dog typically gets filed with other family members. This of course sparks the question — what about your family cat? ”You are much more likely to be called the dog’s name than you are to be called the cat’s name.” Deffler says. This implies that psychologically, we categorize the dog’s name along with our family member’s names, according to Mulligan. ”And we don’t do that with cats’ names, apparently, or hamsters’ names or other animal names,” Mulligan says. Maybe that’s why we call the dog man’s best friend.

Over the past eight years, Michelle Obama — a former attorney with degrees from Princeton and Harvard universities — has dealt with a lot of cheap (and often mean) shots lobbed in her direction. But while she has her detractors, this first black first lady is widely admired — and not just for her famously defined arms (they even have their own Tumblr). So it’s not surprising that, in these last days of disco for the Obama administration, a few fans of the first lady would share their love for her in the book, The Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own, a collection of essays edited by author Veronica Chambers. These writers aren’t academically dissecting Obama in her role as first lady. No, these are FANS, so much so that some don’t need to call her by her last name. It’s just Michelle. Among them is a Top Chef, a jazzy jazz musician, and an original member of the Hamilton cast. Many of the essayists felt a connection, an intimacy with the first lady that Obama helped foster not just by being one of the people, but by reminding black Americans, as Chambers writes, that ”blackness is not burdensome, and we . .. have joy as a birthright.” In the book’s preface, film director Ava DuVernay declares, outright, that Michelle Obama’s mere presence in the White House was like taking a broom and sweeping out the dirt of past administrations. In one visit, Michelle supplanted the cartoons of Monica, Katrina and their representative presidencies, ripe with mishandled trust and low morals. In that one photo op, Michelle infused the image of the first lady with pride, panache and polish. Many of us saw a woman to be admired. A woman to be trusted. Scratch that. Many of us saw a Black woman to be admired. A Black woman to be trusted. There it is. Indeed. For many black women, writer Benilde Little sums up that feeling of pride meshed with admiration when she explains why she burst into tears upon seeing a inauguration photo of the first lady in The New York Times: ”I’m just so happy,” Little writes. ”She’s just like me.” Little describes how Obama’s working league background helped provide a more fully fleshed out portrayal of black women, something beyond the ”perfect pitch, high bourg or stone ghettoians.” While the first lady isn’t a product of the Jack and Jill set, we know her origin isn’t one of black pathology, either. Nope, her story is the norm for many black Americans: two parents who pushed and encouraged her to aim high and do well, which she did. Then she got married and had some kids. Feminist Brittney Cooper put it real plainly in her essay: As Michelle could correct stereotypes of black women as neglectful parents and welfare queens. She is, as blogger Damon Young writes in his essay, ”a regular black chick.” (He means that in a good way, trust me). While black Americans collectively saw her and saw our sisters and cousins and aunts and moms, we (black men) saw her and saw our classmates and our neighbors our coworkers and our colleagues. We saw the woman we wanted to approach, to court, to date, to commit to, to marry, and to start a family and grow old with, even if we didn’t actually realize we wanted to do any of those things before we saw her. In fact, Michelle’s and sista girl realness comes up a lot, as writer after writer describes how she made the White House — and her husband — seem more relatable. Not all of the essays are perfect, but I don’t think readers will come away from this collection disappointed. They are reflections on a woman who feels like a good girlfriend to a large portion of the American public, though they only know her from afar. And the wistfulness in them brings to mind an oldie but goodie from Boyz II Men:

As President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice has grappled with with multiple crises — wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of the Islamic State, and cyber attacks blamed on China and Russia. Rice, who served as Obama’s United Nations ambassador during his first term, says there have been many successes over the past eight years. But she says her biggest disappointment has been the failure of the international community to stop Syria’s brutal civil war. ”I think all of us have profound regrets about Syria, because of the extraordinary human toll of the conflict, and the fact that the war has had consequences for Syria’s neighbors that are quite profound,” she said. As she prepares to leave office, Rice spoke with NPR Morning Edition host Rachel Martin in the West Wing of the White House. Obama articulated this red line that Syrian President Bashar Assad could not cross, and then he used chemical weapons and the U. S. did not respond. We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the Security Council. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile. But the fundamental problem of Syria persists, and that is that there’s an enormous human suffering. The conflict still rages and the United States, the international community, the U. N. Russia everybody else has not managed to find a negotiated solution. The Obama administration recently imposed sanctions against Russia for the cyber attack on our election. But the administration knew about the hack long before Nov 8. Why the delay? I think this is sort of a misunderstanding. We did what was the most important thing to do — back in October, on Oct. 7th, which was to inform the American people that indeed from the judgment of our intelligence community and 17 intelligence agencies, that the Russian government at the highest levels was involved in cyber activity designed to influence the outcome of our election. So we wanted to the maximum extent possible inform the American people, but not to rush to react until the election had ended and we had plenty of time as we knew we would, depending on what evolved between Oct. 7th and the election itself, to calibrate what we thought was the appropriate response. I want to ask you about your successor, retired Gen. Michael Flynn. I’m not going to get into commenting on the views or the comments of my successor. My responsibility is to execute the most responsible, comprehensive, effective transition that we possibly can. That is the direction that President Obama has given and that’s what we’re doing. We’ve met for hours to try to share with our successors what we know about the challenges and the opportunities they’ve faced. We have prepared hundreds of briefing papers for General Flynn and his incoming team. Those conversations have been candid and constructive. I am not going to characterize what the next administration might do. I will ensure that we continue, up until noon on the 20th of January, to do all we possibly can, which is our sacred duty to the American people, to enable them to pick up the reins and to the greatest extent possible be ready to defend and secure this country on day one. Have you had conversations with Flynn about climate change? We’ve touched a bit on that but not in great depth. I think the incoming administration has said a number of different things on this topic. And I think we need to see where they land. It is manifestly in the interests of the United States to deal with the very real threat that climate change poses. And that’s why President Obama has worked so hard to reduce our own admissions and to lead internationally in forging the Paris climate agreement. And there are more steps that can be taken. We need to do that for our own interests, and I hope very much that as the incoming administration reviews both the domestic and international steps we’ve taken, that they’ll realize as well that it’s in our interest to continue with the Paris agreement and to deal with climate change as the real threat it actually is.

More than a hundred female federal inmates, sentenced to prison, have instead been held for years in two windowless rooms in a detention center in Brooklyn. Conditions for the women have been found to violate international standards for the treatment of prisoners. The problem in Brooklyn actually started in Connecticut, in what was the only federal prison for women in the Northeast. But the prison population across the country increased nearly over the last 40 years, and men’s prisons were overflowing. In December 2012, the Bureau of Prisons decided to move the women out of the Danbury prison and move men in. The women were sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a jail in Brooklyn, until a new prison could be built on the site. The move was supposed to last 18 months. But nearly three years later, many are still stuck at MDC. ”We felt like we were animals that was taken to a pound and then that was it, they just closed the door and left us,” says Ramona Brant, 53. Brant was granted clemency by President Obama in February. Before that, she spent the first 19 years of a life sentence at Danbury for a nonviolent drug charge. She says it was OK — there were activities, jobs, access to the outdoors — until March 2014, when she and the others were moved to the jail. ”Little by little they started filling it up and before we knew it, it was 120 women in this one room, and it was unbearable,” she says. A report released by the National Association of Women Judges finds conditions for the women at MDC violate both the American Bar Association’s standards and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners. The judges said the women had no access to the outdoors and inmates complained of being unable to get appropriate medical care, especially gynecological care. At least one inmate was visibly pregnant. The warden told the judges the Bureau of Prisons couldn’t find doctors willing to work there. David Patton, executive director of the Federal Defenders of New York, the public defenders’ service for people who can’t afford a private attorney, says his organization has had issues with the facility for years. ”There have been maggots in the food, mattresses, dryers that vent into the sleeping area, a lack of fresh air and recreation,” Patton says. Unlike Danbury, which is a prison, MDC is a detention center, just meant to hold people while they await trial. ”Jails, like the MDCs, tend not to have the programming, the level of medical and mental health treatment and a whole range of other services that you find in a prison,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. He points out federal courts have ruled that prisoners have the right to outdoor exercise. ”The Supreme Court has made quite clear that prison conditions that might be tolerable for a few weeks or even a couple of months can ripen into unconstitutionality if they go on for a sufficiently long amount of time,” Fathi says. Sister Megan Rice, 86, spent 13 months at MDC during her sentence for vandalizing a nuclear facility in Tennessee. She says without appropriate support, the women are denied any real shot at rehabilitation. ”They’re meant to be given opportunities to grow, to leave the prison as a more healed person,” she says. Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Justice Department, which oversees it, would talk on record about the conditions or the delay in returning the women to Connecticut. Meanwhile, the new Danbury facility is finally ready. The bureau says they began transferring inmates back last month.

In one of his last moves in office, President Obama has commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army private who leaked a massive trove of military secrets to WikiLeaks. The former intelligence analyst’s prison sentence has been shortened to expire on May 17, 2017, according to a statement from the White House. This commutation was issued along with 208 others, including one for Oscar who was part of a militant group that fought for Puerto Rican independence. Obama also pardoned 64 individuals, including retired Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to federal authorities. Manning, a transgender woman formerly known as Bradley, had requested clemency from Obama and said her life was at risk in an prison, as we reported. She has admitted to ”releasing more than 700, 000 documents, including battlefield reports and U. S. embassy cables.” Her lawyers at the ACLU expressed relief after the decision, saying that Manning has already served more time behind bars than any other whistleblower in U. S. history, and under difficult conditions. ”Since she was first taken into custody, Chelsea has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement — including for attempting suicide — and has been denied access to medically necessary health care,” said lawyer Chase Strangio in a statement. ”This move could quite literally save Chelsea’s life, and we are all better off knowing that Chelsea Manning will walk out of prison a free woman, dedicated to making the world a better place and fighting for justice for so many.” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Margaret Huang, argued in a statement that the move was long overdue: ”Chelsea Manning exposed serious abuses, and as a result her own human rights have been violated by the U. S. government for years. . .. President Obama was right to commute her sentence, but it is long overdue. It is unconscionable that she languished in prison for years while those allegedly implicated by the information she revealed still haven’t been brought to justice.” House Speaker Paul Ryan released a statement protesting the commutation: ”This is just outrageous. Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. President Obama now leaves in place a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes.” Sen. John McCain called the commutation a ”grave mistake” that may ”encourage further acts of espionage and undermine military discipline.” He added: ”Thousands of Americans have given their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq upholding their oaths and defending this nation. Chelsea Manning broke her oath and made it more likely that others would join the ranks of her fallen comrades. Her prison sentence may end in a few months’ time, but her dishonor will last forever.” It’s worth noting one name that did not appear on the list today: Edward Snowden. As NPR’s Carrie Johnson has reported, the NSA leaker, who is living in Russia, has also mounted ”a bid for clemency.” Cartwright ”had been charged with falsely telling FBI investigators that he did not provide classified information for a book written by New York Times reporter David Sanger,” The has reported.

The education philosophy of Betsy DeVos boils down to one word: choice. The billionaire has used her money to support the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. For more than three hours on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Education Department handled tough questions on school choice, charters and the future of the nation’s schools from the Senate committee that handles education. In her opening remarks, DeVos made clear she doesn’t think traditional public schools are a good fit for every child. ”Parents no longer believe that a model of learning meets the needs of every child,” she said. ”And they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, or any other combination.” The problem, say DeVos’ critics, is her faith in the free market, and that she thinks parents should be able to use dollars to pay for alternatives outside the system. That led to this exchange with Sen. Patty Murray, .: Murray: ”Can you commit to us tonight that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?” DeVos: ”Senator, thanks for that question. I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk about how we address the needs of all parents and all students. And we acknowledge today that not all schools are working for the students that are assigned to them. And I’m hopeful that we can work together to find common ground and ways that we can solve those issues and empower parents to make choices on behalf of their children that are right for them.” Murray: ”I take that as not being willing to commit to not privatizing public schools or cutting money from education.” DeVos: ”I guess I wouldn’t characterize it in that way.” Murray: ”Well,” she said, laughing, ”okay.” Congress passed a big, bipartisan education law just a year ago — and, as the committee’s Republican chairman, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, pointed out during the hearing, vouchers didn’t make the cut. So he asked DeVos if, as secretary, she would try to push them onto states anyway. Her answer: ”No. I would hope I could convince you all of the merit of that in maybe some future legislation, but certainly not any kind of mandate from within the department.” Alexander is a strong supporter of DeVos, and began the hearing by saying he believes she is ”on our childrens’ side.” Also on DeVos’ side: former senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who introduced her and swung back at teachers unions and others who oppose her, in part, because the billionaire has never taught in, managed or attended a public school. In Lieberman’s words, it’s a positive that she’s not part of the ”education establishment.” ”Honestly, I believe that today that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job,” he said. The committee’s Democrats were frustrated not just with some of DeVos’ answers, but also with Chairman Alexander — first because he chose to hold the hearing before the Office of Government Ethics could finish its review of her financial holdings, looking for conflicts of interest, and second because Alexander held senators to a strict, time limit, prompting one of his colleagues to lament what he called ”a rush job.”

There hasn’t been a more controversial pick for secretary of education, arguably, in recent memory than Donald Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos. The Senate confirmation hearings for the billionaire Republican fundraiser and activist from Michigan start today. DeVos is a champion of vouchers and expanding charter schools in a broader push for greater school choice — closely aligned with the views of the . Her hearing was pushed back nearly a week because of Democrats’ concerns over her ”extensive financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest,” as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington put it. She’s the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor Pensions Committee, which will conduct the hearing. Here are five areas of questioning that are likely to come up: 1. Money, DeVos and her family have given more than a million dollars to sitting Republican senators, according to Federal Election Commission reports, as well as some $10 million more to superPACs and party committees. That has prompted numerous groups, including End Citizens United, to call for some senators to recuse themselves on a DeVos confirmation vote. Given that DeVos once said she expects a return on investment for contributions, expect Democrats to challenge her on how the DeVos family has used its billions to support ballot measures, organizations, causes and politicians in Michigan, as well as some of the elected officials who’ll be sitting in front of her. 2. ESSA Expect tough questions on Trump’s call for redirecting some $20 billion in federal aid to school choice. Trump has yet to put any meat on the bones of that idea. DeVos will certainly be asked whether that idea might mean redirecting money from federal Title I programs for the poor and disadvantaged. Or whether the new administration will seek to reopen the Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed with rare bipartisan support in 2015. Supporters, however, say DeVos has the leadership and vision to radically shake up the federal education bureaucracy, foster change and further return power to the states. ”Betsy has worked for years to improve educational opportunities for all children,” is how Lamar Alexander, . put it. He’s the former education secretary who chairs the committee. ”As secretary, she will be able to implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind just as Congress wrote it, reversing the trend to a national school board and restoring to states, governors, school boards, teachers, and parents greater responsibility for improving education in their local communities.” 3. School choice, Even some proponents of expanding choice options are voicing fears that DeVos favors an unbridled approach to choice, with too little oversight and accountability. Michigan has one of the charter programs in the country and critics point to Detroit’s troubles as one outcome of that. The state also has a high proportion of charter schools run by organizations. That’s thanks, in part, to the advocacy and funding by DeVos, her family and the organizations they’ve supported. Sen. Murray put it this way in a release, after meeting with DeVos earlier this month: ”I continue to have serious concerns about her long record of working to privatize and defund public education, expand private school vouchers, and block accountability for charter schools, including charter schools.” GOP senators on the committee, meanwhile, seem thrilled that a strong advocate of greater school choice is before them. ”Looking forward to working with her,” Kentucky’s Rand Paul tweeted after DeVos was nominated. 4. Vouchers, Choice critics also worry that DeVos will push the federal government toward vouchers for private schools, a policy opponents say has amounted to a triumph ”of ideology over evidence.” ”If confirmed, would you use your position as Secretary of Education to promote the expansion of private school voucher programs in public education?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asked in a letter listing more than 40 issues and questions she plans to bring up. Conservatives, meanwhile, are elated that they have a nominee who they believe will stand up to teachers unions they see as major impediments to choice and change. 5. Higher ed, Where does DeVos stand on key higher ed issues of access, debt, affordability and accountability that got lots of attention during the presidential race? ”There’s not much to draw on there,” says Lauren Asher, president of The Institute for College Access Success. During the campaign, Trump did tell supporters at a rally, ”If the federal government is going to subsidize student loans, it has a right to expect that colleges work hard to control costs and invest their resources in their students. If colleges refuse to take this responsibility seriously, they will be held accountable.” Asher hopes nominee DeVos voices support for continued tough oversight of colleges, something the Obama administration prioritized. ”Making sure that students including veterans and service members should be protected from waste, fraud and abuse plays directly into college affordability,” Asher says. As the Century Foundation recently pointed out, Republicans have a long track record of standing up for the interests of students and taxpayers when it comes to higher education. DeVos is likely to get questions on one of the only higher ed proposals the Trump campaign outlined during the race: an repayment plan for federal student loans that caps a borrower’s payment at no more than 12. 5 percent of his or her monthly income. Remaining debt after 15 years of payments would be forgiven under Trump’s plan. Sen. Alexander says that in higher ed, too, he’s hoping DeVos will reduce bureaucracy and help ”clear out the jungle of red tape that makes more difficult for students to obtain financial aid.”

Donald Trump loves superlatives: words like ”biggest,” ”best” and ”greatest” pepper many of his statements, whether at a microphone or on Twitter. But a recent poll lends him another, less attractive superlative: the lowest favorability rating of any incoming president in at least 40 years. That’s what a new ABC Post poll shows, with only 40 percent of Americans currently viewing Trump favorably and 54 percent unfavorably. That’s the lowest favorability for any incoming president since at least Jimmy Carter in 1977 in that poll. (Carter’s data are the earliest the poll presented.) The performer on this measure was George W. Bush in 2001, and his favorability rating was 16 points higher than Trump’s currently is. A new poll bolsters this finding, showing Trump with 44 percent favorability (along with 53 percent unfavorability). (A Pew poll from last month had him at an even lower 37 percent.) Americans have a similarly dismal view of his transition — in both polls, only 40 percent of Americans said they approve of how Trump is handling his transition. According to the Post data, that is likewise far lower than for other recent presidents. George H. W. Bush, Clinton and Obama all had transition approvals of 80 percent or higher. Even the relatively unpopular George W. Bush received 72 percent approval of his transition, according to the Post data. (The CNN poll likewise found that only 40 percent of Americans approve of how the is handling the transition.) Trump himself, of course, isn’t pleased with the latest numbers and used his favorite social media platform to voice his disapproval on Tuesday morning: Ironically, that kind of complaining about poll numbers may be helping to drive those poll numbers lower. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain raised this as a possibility on Tuesday. ”I think you can assume that it is because he seems to want to engage with every windmill that he can find, rather than focus on a large aspect of assuming the most important position on earth,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. ”And, obviously, apparently, according to the polls, many Americans are not happy with that approach, when he has not even assumed the presidency.” The tweeting itself hasn’t endeared Trump to many Americans. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that almost of American voters believed that ”Trump should close his personal Twitter account.” Even Republicans were about evenly split, with 49 percent saying he should close the @realDonaldTrump account, compared with 45 percent who disagreed. Even this relatively low favorability, though, is an improvement over Trump’s midcampaign lows. As of April 2016, Trump’s favorability was only at about 28 percent, according to averages from RealClearPolitics. That average also trended upward after Election Day, when it was 37. 5 percent, though it has leveled off since settling at just above 42 as of Tuesday. And Trump still won. What’s more, however ugly Trump’s numbers may be, he may take some small comfort that when he takes office, his administration won’t be the most unpopular institution in Washington — Congress’ approval rating is currently at 14 percent. And that Congress, controlled by Republicans, gives him wide latitude in starting out on policy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the Obama administration is attempting to ”undermine the legitimacy” of Donald Trump. U. S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government, at the direction of Putin, hacked several U. S. targets as part of an ”influence campaign” to shape the outcome of the election. More recently, an unverified document reportedly assembled by a former intelligence operative accused Trump of colluding with Russia, and the Kremlin of holding blackmail material as leverage over Trump. Both Trump and Russia have rejected the allegations. At a news conference with the president of Moldova on Tuesday, Putin was asked about the unverified dossier. He denounced it in ”colorful language,” as NPR’s Lucian Kim reports from Moscow. Putin ridiculed one of the more lurid accusations in the dossier in particular, and said the document illustrates how far Western political elites have fallen, Lucian reports. But he also rejected the broader accusations of Russian involvement. ”What we see is the continuing sharp domestic political struggle although the presidential elections are over and they ended with a convincing victory of Mr. Trump,” Putin said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. He said the allegations of Russian interference cause ”enormous” harm to U. S. interests and are meant to ”bind the by hand and foot” to prevent him from carrying out his campaign pledges. ”Look, how can anything be done to improve the . S. relations if such [a] hoax as the interference of some hackers in the election campaign emerges?” Putin asked, according to TASS. Intelligence officials in the U. S. say they stand ”resolutely” behind their conclusion of hacking operations directed by senior officials in Russia, but much of the evidence they drew on for conclusion remains classified. Trump has openly challenged the intelligence community’s consensus on this issue, but last week said for the first time he ”thinks” Russia was responsible for the election hacks.

Before Luke Whitbeck began taking a $ drug, the ’s health was inexplicably failing. A pale boy with enormous eyes, Luke frequently ran high fevers, tired easily and was skinny all over, except his belly stuck out like a bowling ball. ”What does your medicine do for you?” Luke’s mother, Meg, asked after his weekly drug treatment recently. ”Be so strong!” Luke said, wrapping his chubby fist around an afternoon cheese stick. Luke now spends days playing with his big brother, thanks to what he calls his ”superhero” medicine, a drug called Cerezyme, which has saved his life. For the Whitbecks, finding a way to pay for the drug has been a struggle. Their family business and its insurer cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, spreading the cost across the people it insures. Cerezyme is an orphan drug, which means it was created to treat a rare disease, one that affects fewer than 200, 000 people in the U. S. The orphan drug program overseen by the Food and Drug Administration is loaded with government incentives and has helped hundreds of thousands of patients like Luke feel better or even stay alive. But the program has opened the door to almost unlimited price tags and created incentives for drugmakers to cash in, and to cash in repeatedly, a Kaiser Health News investigation shows. The explosion has burdened insurers as well as government programs like Medicare and Medicaid with drugs that cost up to $840, 000 a year that they have almost no choice but to pay for. The Orphan Drug Act has clearly spurred the creation of drugs. And more are needed: The National Institutes of Health estimates that million Americans, or about 1 in 10, suffer from a rare disease. All told, there are about 7, 000 of them. But the costs are adding up quickly. Annual sales from orphans are expected to grow 12 percent a year through 2020 — a pace that makers could ”only dream about,” market watcher EvaluatePharma said in its most recent orphan drug report. In 2014, the average annual price tag for orphan drugs was $111, 820 versus $23, 331 for mainstream drugs. What’s more, the number of orphan drugs is growing, and their total portion of prescription drug spending is growing, according to EvaluatePharma. Orphan drug sales worldwide are expected to account for just over 20 percent of all drug sales, excluding generics, by 2020. Europe and Japan have strong orphan drug programs as well. At Aetna, orphans are now the part of the giant insurer’s spending on drugs and are driving up insurance premiums, said Dr. Ed Pezalla, Aetna’s former national medical director for pharmacy policy and strategy. For many drugmakers, orphan drugs look so profitable that they’re drawing attention from mass market drugs. ”Companies [are going] after the rare diseases . .. and a larger set of patients with other diseases [are] left behind,” said Alan Carr, a research analyst for Needham Co. High prices are a reflection of the high cost of developing new drugs, said Anne Pritchett, vice president for policy and research at the industry lobbying firm Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. ”You may have a company that focuses on a rare disease area for 20, 30, years and never turns a profit [but] they keep at it,” Pritchett said. Others dispute that calculation. In a December report to Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services said orphan drugs cost about $1 billion to develop compared with $2. 6 billion for mass market drugs. The creators of the orphan drug program say the price spiral — and loopholes in the approval process — have undermined the spirit of a law. ”What was intended for a good purpose can be used for a purpose that’s harmful to patients who can’t afford drugs,” said former U. S. Rep. Henry Waxman, . a primary sponsor of the 1983 Orphan Drug Act. ”And it makes the whole cost of all of these pharmaceuticals much more expensive for everybody.” ”That’s not normal” One winter day in early 2016, Meg Whitbeck stood in her Connecticut home holding a baby onesie. Meg’s days were filled with Luke spiking high fevers, rushing to the doctor’s office and watching her toddler struggle to keep food down. Just before slipping the onesie over Luke’s head, she paused. It was a onesie Luke was 18 months old. ”That’s not normal. Babies fly through clothes the first year and a half of life,” Whitbeck said. As Meg lifted another onesie from Luke’s dresser, she took a deep breath as she realized: It was full of and clothes. Within weeks, Luke would be lying in a hospital bed at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, N. Y. If handed a toy, he would hold it, but he lacked enough energy to play. Luke was diagnosed with Gaucher disease — a genetic condition that affects only about 6, 000 people in the U. S. Luke’s body lacked the glucocerebrosidase enzyme, and every cell in his tiny frame was becoming compromised. Luke’s liver and spleen were swollen, and without treatment his bones would eventually become fragile. Brain damage could follow. Some babies die before the age of 2, if they aren’t treated. Patients can live decades with enzyme replacement therapy. Dr. David Kronn, who heads the medical genetics unit at Maria Fareri, said Luke’s condition was ”quite severe” and he needed help fast. Luke immediately began treatment, but the family said it spent months uncertain whether its health insurer, Oxford Health Plans, which is owned by UnitedHealthcare, would cover the drug. The drug is made by Sanofi Genzyme and costs $6, 356. 69 for each treatment, the Whitbecks’ paperwork shows. ”At the time, there was a lot going on physically with Luke,” Meg Whitbeck recalled. In the first two months after his diagnosis, the family would receive bills and ”we were just putting it all in a pile.” In late April, the Whitbecks received a letter from the insurer asking for additional medical information to process the payments for Luke’s medicine. It was the first time, Meg said, that she became scared about how the drug would be paid for. She recalled wondering: ”How can something that’s going to keep my baby alive not be covered by insurance?” UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman Tracey Lempner said her company covered Cerezyme and the dosage suggested by the doctor from the beginning. Last May, the Whitbecks received a confirmation letter that UnitedHealthcare would cover the drug. Even then, though, the Whitbecks said they were required to get the coverage reauthorized at random intervals, ranging from three weeks to 10 weeks. And in late October, fear struck the family when a letter arrived saying Luke’s medicine was reauthorized for just one week. In an emailed statement, UnitedHealthcare said it granted a request in early November from Luke’s doctor to approve payment for a full year. The insurer declined multiple requests for interviews with executives. But Lempner stated in an email that ”specialty medications like these are among the greatest drivers of pharmacy benefit costs for all employers, individuals, insurers and the government.” At the request of Kaiser Health News, Express Scripts, which manages pharmacy benefits, analyzed the orphan drugs on its approved list, or formulary. Four orphans cost more than $70, 000 for a supply, or $840, 000 annually. An additional 29 orphan drugs cost at least $28, 000 for a supply, or more than $336, 000 a year. At those prices, the revenue for a an maker can build up quickly: A $50, 000 orphan taken by 50, 000 patients could reach $2. 5 billion in annual sales a $300, 000 orphan for just 5, 000 people could hit $1. 5 billion a year. Just after Christmas, Biogen Inc. announced it would market Spinraza, its newly approved treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, for up to $750, 000 in the first year and $375, 000 in later years. Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges wrote in a note that the price could be ”the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of the US market’s tolerance for rare disease pricing.” Executives at Express Scripts, the pharmacy that supplies Luke’s medicine, said orphan drugs like Cerezyme often have very few competing drugs that could help them drive down the cost. ”We have very little negotiating power because the pharmaceutical company can set the price and we have to be a price acceptor,” said Dr. Steve Miller, chief medical officer for Express Scripts. In the past year, the Whitbecks said, they have paid more than $17, 000 out of pocket for Luke’s medical care. Most of the cost falls on Oxford, the insurer that covers the 25 employees and their families where Drew works. The small company, owned by Meg’s side of the family, said medical coverage for its employees amounts to about $338, 000 a year, and employees don’t pay monthly premiums. The ultimate cost to the Whitbecks is unclear, but they fear the drug treatments, plus related care, could reach into hundreds of thousands per year if the reauthorizations ever stop. Meg has gone back to work part time as a dietitian, and the Whitbecks launched a fundraising effort called ”The Warrior Campaign” on social media, which shows they have raised nearly $12, 000 thus far. They also applied for $15, 000 in aid from Sanofi Genzyme’s patient assistance program. So far, the company has paid for a month of Cerezyme and provided guidance from a case manager, the family said. While she appreciates the support, Meg Whitbeck is daunted by the uncertainty of what the family has to come up with. ”We’re not going to not treat Luke, but we’re also never going to be able to pay these bills,” she said. ”It was almost laughable.” Much of the drug’s early development cost was paid for by the National Institutes of Health, according to a 1992 report from the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The report notes that Genzyme spent about $29. 4 million on RD for the early version of the drug, Ceredase. The company quickly recovered those costs. Ceredase launched with a nearly $300, 000 price tag in 1991 as one of the most expensive drugs in the world. Cerezyme, a genetically engineered successor, came to market in 1994. French pharmaceutical giant acquired Genzyme for $20. 1 billion in 2011. Sanofi Genzyme declined multiple requests for interviews. In an email, company spokeswoman Lisa Clemence said the company has raised the price of Cerezyme slightly since it launched and that relative to inflation, it is 33 percent less expensive today than 22 years ago. Asked how drug prices are set, Clemence emailed that it is ”determined by the clinical value they provide to patients and the rarity of the disease they treat.” Cerezyme is still the drugmaker’s medicine, with nearly $800 million in 2015 annual sales, according to the French company’s annual financial filing. Despite competition, prices to treat Gaucher disease have not come down indeed, the newest drugs on the market are priced at about $300, 000 as well. Drew Whitbeck joked that, in the end, it all feels like Monopoly money to him. Meg would like the company to justify Cerezyme’s price. ”I totally get from a scientific point of view, what it takes to create, manufacture and deliver these medications,” she said. ”But why can’t they make it a little less expensive? What’s holding them back?” specialty drugs, which include orphans, have seen ”incredible price increases the past few years, across the board,” said Craig Burns, vice president for research at America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents health insurers. AHIP, in a study led by Burns, found that the prices of 45 orphan drugs increased 30 percent, on average, from 2012 through 2014. Former U. S. Rep. James Greenwood, now president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group, said insurers are overstating the impact. ”The insurance industry likes to tell us that the reason our premiums [and] our copays and coinsurance are going up and our deductibles are going up” is high prices for orphans or other drugs, Greenwood said. ”It just isn’t the case.” The bulk of health care spending, Greenwood said, is for hospitals, doctors and nursing homes. Prescription drugs get attention, he said, because ”we are an easier target.” Insurers, including UnitedHealthcare, try to mitigate the costs of orphans and other drugs by requiring patients to pay a larger share, setting quantity limits and asking patients to try other less expensive drugs first, a process known as step therapy. Some believe that amounts to rationing. ”Nobody wants to talk about rationing, but there is already some of that anyway because of [the] levels of insurance that we have,” said Milne, director of research at Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, ”What would God really think about this?” In the early 1980s, Abbey Meyers was known on Capitol Hill as the housewife from Connecticut — an angry mother who wouldn’t put up with pharmaceutical companies ignoring her son’s illness, Tourette syndrome. A drugmaker had stopped producing medicine for the disorder, saying there weren’t enough patients to justify the cost. Meyers mobilized advocates, lawmakers and even TV actor Jack Klugman from the popular Quincy M. E. show to persuade Congress to pass the Orphan Drug Act. Under the law, companies with orphan drugs win some of the richest financial incentives in the regulatory world: a 50 percent tax credit on research and development in the U. S. fee waivers, and access to federal grants. In a 2009 webinar, an FDA official referred to the incentive package as ”our ’basket of goodies.’ ” Most important, once an orphan gains FDA approval, the agency guarantees it will not approve another version to treat that specific disease for seven years, even if the brand name company’s patent has run out. Now, three decades since the program started, Meyers is worried that corporate greed is ruining her legacy. ”They will set a price of $300, 000 a year for their drug for a fatal disease. And they’ll go to church every Sunday, and they will pray, and they’ll ask for God’s grace, you know?” Meyers said during an interview at her Connecticut home. ”I’m wondering, what does God really think about this?” Epilogue Just before Christmas, the Whitbecks coped with another health scare. There was a blockage in Luke’s chest port, an implanted catheter through which Cerezyme is delivered into his body each week. He needed surgery to fix it. He came down with pneumonia afterward but has recovered. ”I hope in 2017 there are no hospital admissions,” Meg Whitbeck said. Then she paused and recalled that the family hadn’t yet seen all the bills from the port surgery. The family’s savings disappeared in 2016. And the Whitbecks are still trying to figure out if they have to pay an outstanding $6, 000 bill for Cerezyme that appeared on the latest pharmacy statement. ”We’re not scared,” Whitbeck said, but ”when you’re a parent of a child with a chronic illness, you’re always walking on a tightrope. . .. Every day we have to give [Luke] the and make sure everything is good. If it’s a good day, everything is like a normal family.” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent newsroom that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. KHN’s John Hillkirk, Heidi de Marco, Francis Ying, Lydia Zuraw, Emily Kopp, Elizabeth Lucas, Diane Webber and Marilyn Thompson contributed to this report. NPR’s Scott Hensley, Joe Neel and Meredith Rizzo also contributed.

More than 30 years ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed a landmark health bill aimed at motivating pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs for people whose rare diseases had been ignored. By the drugmakers’ calculations, the markets for such diseases weren’t big enough to bother with. But lucrative financial incentives created by the Orphan Drug Act signed into law by President Reagan in 1983 succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. More than 200 companies have brought almost 450 orphan drugs to market since the law took effect. Yet a Kaiser Health News investigation shows that the system intended to help desperate patients is being manipulated by drugmakers to maximize profits and to protect niche markets for medicines already being taken by millions. The companies aren’t breaking the law but they are using the Orphan Drug Act to their advantage in ways that its architects say they didn’t foresee or intend. Today, many orphan medicines, originally developed to treat diseases affecting fewer than 200, 000 people, come with astronomical price tags. And many drugs that now have orphan status aren’t entirely new. More than 70 were drugs first approved by the Food and Drug Administration for mass market use. These medicines, some with familiar brand names, were later approved as orphans. In each case, their manufacturers received millions of dollars in government incentives plus seven years of exclusive rights to treat that rare disease, or a monopoly. Drugmakers of popular mass market drugs later sought and received orphan status for the cholesterol blockbuster Crestor, Abilify for psychiatric conditions, cancer drug Herceptin, and rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, the medicine in the world. More than 80 other orphans won FDA approval for more than one rare disease, and in some cases, multiple rare diseases. For each additional approval, the drugmaker qualified for a fresh batch of incentives. Botox, stocked in most dermatologists’ offices, started out as a drug to treat painful muscle spasms of the eye and now has three orphan drug approvals. It’s also approved as a mass market drug to treat a variety of ailments, including chronic migraines and wrinkles. Altogether, KHN’s investigation found that about a third of orphan approvals by the FDA since the program began have been either for repurposed mass market drugs or drugs that received multiple orphan approvals. ”What we are seeing is a system that was created with good intent being hijacked,” said Bernard Munos, a former corporate strategy adviser at drug giant Eli Lilly and Co. who reviewed the KHN analysis of several FDA drug databases. It’s ”quite remarkable that it has gone on for so long.” And the proportion of new drugs approved as orphans has ballooned. In 2015, 21 orphan drugs were approved, accounting for 47 percent of all new medicines, up from just 29 percent in 2010 in 2016, nine more orphans won approval, 40 percent of the total. (You can search a database of orphan drugs with a tool at the end of this story.) When a drugmaker wins approval of a medicine for an orphan disease, the company gets seven years of exclusive rights to the marketplace, which means the FDA won’t approve another version to treat that rare disease for seven years, even if the brand name company’s patent has run out. The exclusivity is compensation for developing a drug designed for a small number of patients whose total sales weren’t expected to be that profitable. But the exclusivity is a potent pricing tool. Drugmakers can charge whatever they want by shielding their medicine from competition. The market exclusivity granted by the Orphan Drug Act can be a vital part of the protective shield that companies create. What’s more, manufacturers can return to the FDA with the same drug again and again, each time testing the drug against a new rare disease. Critics have assailed drugmakers in the past for gaming the orphan drug approval process. But the extent to which companies have been winning approval for drugs that aren’t what advocates call ”true orphans” hadn’t been documented until the Kaiser Health News investigation. Munos said he was ”shocked” by the sheer number of mass market drugs being repurposed as well as those approved multiple times. Even agency officials said they weren’t aware of the scope of the issue. After reviewing KHN’s findings for two weeks, Dr. Gayatri Rao, director of the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development, said she ”appreciated the work” and expressed interest in studying how often drug companies are ”repurposing” a drug for a new rare disease, or taking ”multiple bites of the apple.” ”We are going to look into this,” she said, adding that she could consider a regulatory change. Rao pointed out that the ”repurposing” of drugs does have scientific and patient benefits. For example, cancer drugs approved for one type of malignancy can be tested and approved for others. Gleevec, a drug that revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia, now has nine orphan approvals. But in a 2015 commentary published in the American Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Martin Makary at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine focused on cancer drugs including Gleevec, arguing that the drug was never meant to serve an orphan population. Instead, Makary and his team wrote, drugmakers purposely identify small patient populations to gain additional approvals — a process he described as ”salami slicing.” ”By salami slicing the disease into subgroups, it allows them to get the orphan drug approval with all the government benefits and even some of the subsidies,” Makary said. The prices of such medications often rise because they have seven years without competition for a new set of patients, Makary added. The FDA has taken a different view of repurposing. ”We always talked about how we permit the second bite of the apple, third bite of the apple, as one small way to incentivize repurposing,” Rao said, noting that industry and patient groups have been pressing the FDA for even stronger incentives. ”Now, all of sudden, it seems like, wow, this practice may be driving up prices.” Novartis, which owns Gleevec, said in an email statement that the company is advancing research and following the science to ”bring the right treatments to the right patients based on unmet need, not the size of the patient population.” Two KHN reporters spent six months analyzing data and talking to lawmakers, patients, advocates, doctors and companies to understand how the FDA’s orphan drug program has evolved amid a national uproar over soaring drug prices. Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to bring down prescription drug prices, and on Wednesday during a press conference he said the drug industry is ”getting away with murder.” The investigation examined how drugmakers use the law to their advantage — often with the guidance of former FDA officials — and have made the development of medicines that were once thought to be business backwaters into one of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest sectors. Orphan drugs now account for seven of the 10 drugs of any kind, ranked by annual sales, according to EvaluatePharma. ”Orphans are wicked hot,” said Dr. Tim Coté, a former FDA official who now runs a consulting firm that advises drugmakers on orphan drugs. No one disputes that orphan drugs have helped or saved hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from debilitating or even fatal rare diseases. And drug industry officials say companies should be rewarded, not punished, for making those treatments possible and for pursuing new drugs that aren’t always an economic success. Research and development is ”long, costly, risky,” said Anne Pritchett, vice president, policy and research at industry lobbying group PhRMA. ”When you look at cystic fibrosis, it was 25 years to the development of an effective therapy . .. I think we would be concerned about anything that would undermine the current [orphan drug] incentives.” Former U. S. Rep. Henry Waxman, . a champion of the 1983 Orphan Drug Act, takes a different view. ”The Orphan Drug Act has been a great success because many people with diseases that affect very few people now have drugs available to them,” Waxman said. ”But it’s been in some ways turned on its head when it becomes the basis of manipulating the system for the drug company to make much more money than they would in an open, competitive market.” Booming business On a late summer day, Tim Coté sits in a corner office of his Sandy Spring, Md. consulting firm, Coté Orphan. He leans into his computer microphone to dispense insider knowledge about the orphan drug approval process on a webcast hosted by FDAnews, a trade news organization. Listeners have paid about $300 a head, but Coté said he wasn’t paid for doing it. The FDA is more flexible in evaluating drugs for rare diseases, he said, explaining that ”about half of them get through with just one pivotal clinical trial. Not so for common diseases.” The FDA, citing a report from the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said about of orphan drugs were approved with one adequate and trial with supportive evidence. It typically requires two or three such trials to approve a mass market drug. Coté also told the webinar audience that clinical trials for orphan drugs are usually smaller and the approval is a ”different scientific and regulatory experience.” Coté knows his stuff. He was Rao’s immediate predecessor as chief of the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development. It’s not unusual for government officials to leave the FDA and other regulatory agencies and obtain jobs as consultants or industry executives. Coté’s website, headlined ”The Inside Track,” notes that he oversaw applications that led to the approval of at least 150 orphan drugs when he was at the FDA and that his firm is now the largest submitter of orphan drug applications. ”We write the entire application,” the website for Coté’s company notes, adding that his staff of 25 includes regulatory scientists with deep knowledge and experience in FDA’s ”unwritten rules” regarding orphan drugs. Many of Coté’s more than 300 clients are small biotech companies — begun by researchers or even passionate parents who found investment backing. Parents Ilan and Annie Ganot, for example, started Solid Biosciences to find treatments and potentially a cure for their son with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Coté will guide them through the regulatory process since most don’t have the expertise. He can offer his expertise and develop an application that makes it easier for the FDA to designate and approve the drug. ”When you make the FDA smile, the value of your asset goes up. And that’s how the game is played,” he said in an interview, adding quickly, ”It’s really not a game because people’s lives are what is in balance.” Coté and other officials play a vital role in helping drugmakers choose rare disease targets and get through the FDA approval process. A small cottage industry has grown around the Orphan Drug Act. Dr. Marlene Haffner, who preceded Coté in FDA’s orphan office, started her own consulting firm, too, to advise small and large companies on orphan drug applications. A third company is Camargo Pharmaceutical Services, led by industry veterans and former FDA officials, which advises companies focused on repurposing drugs for orphan approval. The firm tries ”to be in front of the FDA a lot — three to four times a month,” said Jennifer King, Camargo’s director of marketing. Fees for consulting on orphan drugs industrywide range from $5, 000 to $100, 000, depending upon the services provided, Coté said. Getting through the orphan approval process involves a series of steps. First, drugs must be designated by the FDA as potential candidates for approval. A company has to demonstrate that its drug is a promising treatment for a disease that affects fewer than 200, 000 patients. If the FDA agrees and makes the formal designation, financial incentives kick in, including a 50 percent tax break on research and development and access to federal grants. When drugs get orphan designation, companies often reap other financial rewards. Shares in publicly traded companies often rise on the news — sometimes soaring as high as 30 percent. That happens, in part, because orphans have a track record of being approved at much higher rates than drugs for common diseases. The 50 percent RD tax credit pays off, too. In 2012, one of the biggest orphan drug companies, BioMarin, received $32. 6 million from a combination of federal and state of California tax credits. BioMarin Spokeswoman Debra Charlesworth confirmed that the orphan credit made up the ”vast majority” of that deferred tax benefit. She also noted that credit ”has successfully fueled an industry that didn’t previously exist” and led to more rare disease research. orphan drug tax credits cost the federal government $1. 76 billion in fiscal 2016 — roughly what President Obama asked Congress to spend to fight the Zika virus before a $1. 1 billion expenditure was approved. And, because so many orphan drugs are under development, the U. S. could grant nearly $50 billion in tax credits from 2016 to 2025, estimates the Treasury Department. There’s a lot of creativity behind figuring out how to make a drug an orphan. In Coté’s webinar and in multiple interviews, he described many ways companies can win orphan status. They can test their drugs on children with adult diseases, such as schizophrenia, or find drugs for ailments like malaria that are uncommon in America. ”African sleeping sickness, horrible problem in Africa but not here, not in the U. S.,” Coté told his webinar audience. ”So a drug development effort that was aimed toward some of these tropical diseases can actually get all the benefits of the Orphan Drug Act.” Another popular strategy is to create drugs that represent incremental steps forward. About 30 percent of Coté’s clients are companies looking to improve upon some other orphan drug ”which just made billions and billions,” he said in an interview. Repurposing an already approved drug is another strategy his firm promotes. In a video posted on his website in July, Coté explained the advantages for companies that can move directly into a clinical trial without much preparatory work because the drug’s safety has already been demonstrated. ”All you gotta do is establish that the product can work in this new orphan indication,” he said, adding tips on how to do it and still make money. ”That is not a true orphan drug” Turning mass market drugs into orphans has been a familiar path for some of the most popular drugs ever discovered. AbbVie’s Humira is the drug in the world, and most of its sales are in the U. S. where revenue reached $7. 6 billion through the third quarter of 2016 and $11. 8 billion worldwide, according to the company’s latest financial report. Humira was approved by the FDA in late 2002 to treat millions of people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Three years later, AbbVie asked the FDA to designate it as an orphan to treat juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which, they told the FDA, affects between 30, 000 and 50, 000 Americans. That pediatric use was approved in 2008, and Humira subsequently was approved for four more rare diseases, including Crohn’s and uveitis, an inflammatory disease affecting the eyes. The ophthalmologic approval would extend the market exclusivity for Humira for that disease until 2023. When asked why AbbVie sought multiple orphan designations and approvals for Humira, the company declined to comment. Peter Saltonstall, executive director of the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said that Humira is ”not a true orphan drug.” But, he said, the company has ”the ability to go out and get orphan designation. That’s the way the law reads right now . .. they can do whatever they want to do.” It is difficult to say exactly how or if orphan exclusivity affects the price of Humira, which is a complex biologic drug and also has been protected by numerous patents. The drug has long been AbbVie’s top seller, accounting for 63 percent of its revenues, according to its most recent financial filing. EvaluatePharma notes in its recent report that Humira, as well as a handful of other top drugs, receive less than 25 percent of their sales from orphan uses. Still, if Humira’s orphan uses accounted for just 10 percent of annual sales, the revenue would surpass $1 billion. By stacking up a series of orphan disease approvals, one exclusivity period leads into another, maximizing the length of a company’s monopoly. Pharmaceuticals, for example, had some form of orphan exclusivity for Carnitor, a metabolic disorder drug, for more than 20 years. It received a second orphan approval four months before its first one was set to expire. And it won its third orphan approval, for an IV formulation of the drug, just one day before its second exclusivity period was set to expire in December of 1999. ”The sequence and timing of regulatory filings for Carnitor reflect the time required to conduct large controlled clinical trials, as well as evolving medical strategies and regulatory pathways pursued by different sponsors over many years,” said GianFranco Fornasini, senior vice president of scientific affairs at . The FDA’s Rao said each new exclusivity period is disease specific and once any period runs out, generics can come in. Gleevec, for example, won FDA approval to treat several kinds of rare cancer. All but one of its orphan exclusivity periods had expired by 2015, allowing two generics to enter the marketplace. But Gleevec still has exclusivity until 2020 to treat newly diagnosed Philadelphia acute lymphoblastic leukemia in patients who are also on chemotherapy. It’s also true, Rao explained, that some of the drugs that go through the orphan process may not specifically treat a rare disease. For example, a very toxic cancer drug might may not work well in earlier stages because its risks outweigh the benefits. But the company may propose that it will help a smaller group of cancer patients and win orphan approval just for that group. Former FDA orphan drug director Haffner said her FDA office worked on rules defining how companies could legitimately pursue approval for a small group of patients with a specific unmet medical need. ”People have played games with the Orphan Drug Act since it was passed,” said Haffner, who first took a job at drugmaker Amgen after leaving the FDA and then became an independent consultant. ”It’s the American way, I don’t mean that in a nasty way. But we take advantage of what’s in front of us.” In 2013, the FDA clarified the Orphan Drug Act’s regulations and said it wanted to avoid the possibility that some companies could ”potentially ’game’ approvals by seeking successive narrow approvals of a drug.” In reality, Rao said, the regulations did not really change ”much of what our practice was.” The agency wanted to address what Rao said were ”common misconceptions” and frequently asked questions, so officials changed wording in the regulations to better define exactly what could be considered an orphan drug. Breaking down larger, broader diseases into smaller groups is still allowed under certain conditions and companies can still win multiple orphan approvals for a single drug — even if the total population served rises above the 200, 000 mark. Amgen Inc. ’s Repatha won marketing approval and exclusive rights in 2015 for the orphan disease homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, which affects a population of about 300 people in the U. S. On the very same day, the drug was approved as a mass market drug to treat up to 11 million people with uncontrolled levels of LDL cholesterol, said Amgen spokeswoman Kristen Davis. Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, who ran a broader market trial on Repatha, said, ”It’s certainly not considered by any of us to be an orphan drug.” Safeguarding the prize, Considering the long history of what’s happened, Tim Coté acknowledges that there are ”some loopholes” in the Orphan Drug Act. Perhaps 3 percent or less of approved orphans were not in the ”spirit” of the law, he said. But Coté, rare disease advocates, patients and people in the drug industry expressed fear that changing the Orphan Drug Act or questioning its success would hurt the development of drugs for rare patients. Former U. S. Rep. Jim Greenwood, now president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry trade group, said that concerns about high prices for orphan drugs aren’t justified. The incentives, he said, should not be altered because rare diseases are ”tragically killing and brutalizing mostly children.” Greenwood seemed unaware that dozens of orphan approvals stemmed from the repurposing of mass market drugs, like Humira or Enbrel, another drug developed first for rheumatoid arthritis. Still, he said, ”I would argue that the risk of losing incentives in the system far outweighs the benefit of trying to save a few pennies on the health care dollar.” It’s a sentiment that Coté and other advocates share. While talking about the $311, 000 annual for cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco, Coté said any parent whose child has the disease would be a big fan of the drug. ”The price point is justified because actually it has a dramatic effect on the children. Dead children . .. people are willing to pay a lot to prevent that,” Coté said. ”And that’s a real good thing that we have this drug. OK?” The first drug to specifically target the underlying biochemical defect of cystic fibrosis, Kalydeco is approved to treat a subset of patients who have specific mutations in their genes. Development of the drug was financed by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which sold its rights to sales royalties from Kalydeco and other cystic fibrosis drugs for $3. 3 billion in 2014. Others, including Henry Waxman, are far more critical and have tried to do something about it over the years. Waxman proposed multiple bills to rein in corporate profits by amending the orphan drug law that he sponsored, but none succeeded. The FDA has also tried, but failed, to keep corporations in check. In 2012, drugmaker Depomed Inc. filed suit against the FDA for refusing to give its drug Gralise seven years of market exclusivity as a treatment for pain related to shingles. Rao said the agency wanted to see proof that Gralise, a pill, was clinically superior to other drugs, noting there ”were a bunch of other generics on the market” with different formulations and dosing requirements. Gralise’s active ingredient, gabapentin, is the same one as in Pfizer’s mass market blockbuster Neurontin, which is also approved for treatment of shingles pain. The FDA approved Gralise but denied seven years of exclusivity. In response, the drugmaker sued the agency and won its case, arguing that according to the law they didn’t have to prove their drug was clinically superior to gain the monopoly. Today, the drug is one of Depomed’s top products with sales of $81 million in 2015. And, in a recent proxy statement, Depomed listed ”protecting Gralise exclusivity” as a corporate objective under the category of ”enhance and protect future cash flow.” Its orphan exclusivity ends in 2018. Depomed spokesman Christopher Keenan said Gralise wanted patent exclusivity to block competition. But, Keenan said, ”had the patent effort failed on all fronts the Orphan Drug Designation would have been very important.” After reviewing KHN’s analysis, Rao said she wants to better understand why drugmakers are applying for multiple approvals and has asked for a review of all orphan designations granted in 2010 and 2015. She said the agency lacks the resources to run an analysis of the entire orphan drug database. ”Our goal is to try to get it right,” she said. ”There are over 7, 000 rare diseases, likely more, the vast majority of which have nothing. . .. I want to ensure that we continue to keep our eye on that prize.” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent newsroom that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. KHN’s John Hillkirk, Heidi de Marco, Francis Ying, Lydia Zuraw, Emily Kopp, Elizabeth Lucas, Diane Webber and Marilyn Thompson contributed to this report. NPR’s Scott Hensley, Joe Neel and Meredith Rizzo also contributed.

The number of people 60 and older with student loan debt has quadrupled in the past decade, and older Americans now represent the segment of the U. S. student loan market, according to a new report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As of 2015, more than 2. 8 million Americans over 60 had outstanding student loan debt — up from some 700, 000 in 2005. The vast majority are loans taken out by parents or grandparents to finance education opportunities for young people, with 73 percent of borrowers over 60 reporting that their student loan debt is owed ”for a child’s grandchild’s education.” Many private student loans require students to apply jointly with a or the report notes, and more than half of are over 55. The average amount owed has also increased dramatically. In 2005, the average amount owed by borrowers 60 and older was about $12, 000. In 2015, it was more than $23, 000. The increase in both the frequency and the magnitude of student loan debt has led to financial problems for some older borrowers. The CFPB report found multiple indications that people over 60 were struggling to repay student loan debt as they moved into retirement, including: Social Security is the only source of income for nearly of people 65 and older. ”This means that benefit offsets may impose serious financial hardship for many of the affected older borrowers,” the report states. The conclusion by the CFPB is that older Americans are frequently in a poor position to handle paying back student loans on behalf of their children and grandchildren. ”Unlike their younger counterparts, who generally are expected to experience income growth over their lives, older consumers typically experience a decrease in income as they age,” the report concludes. For federal student loan programs, the CFPB recommends an ”overhaul” to help older Americans take advantage of repayment plans. The report’s authors give the following example: ”Consider the case of a retiree whose income is limited to only her $1, 165 monthly Social Security check, which is the median Social Security benefit for an older consumer that depends on Social Security for all of her income. If this retiree has defaulted on a federal student loan, the government can deduct or ’offset’ $60 from her monthly Social Security benefit, reducing her annual income to $13, 240. ”However, by rehabilitating or consolidating her defaulted student loans, this same borrower would no longer be subject to the Social Security offset and would also become eligible for an repayment plan. Given her low income, the [ repayment] payment formula would set her monthly payment amount to $0.” For private loans, the CFPB suggests lenders provide more and better information to students, parents and grandparents. ”Prospective cosigners would benefit from lenders and school financial aid officials providing counseling effective information and communication regarding the liability that a undertakes,” it says, but does not suggest federal regulation to mandate such practices.

For several years, Oxfam International has released an annual report on global wealth inequity. The numbers were startling: In the 2016 report, Oxfam said the world’s richest 62 people owned as much wealth as the poorest 3. 6 billion. The numbers were also wrong, Oxfam announced Monday. Better data show that last year’s report should have said that just nine billionaires possessed as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet in 2016. And this year, Oxfam says, you only need eight megarich men to balance the scales with the accumulated wealth of 3. 6 billion people. The charitable organization’s executive director describes the disparity as ”obscene.” ”Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty,” Winnie Byanyima said in a statement. ”It is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.” Oxfam’s statistics, released shortly before the World Economic Forum began in Davos, Switzerland, are based on two sources: the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, which looks at wealth distribution within countries, and Forbes’ annual list of billionaires, which evaluates the assets of wealthy individuals. The most recent Credit Suisse Databook used ”new and better data,” especially on the distribution of wealth in India and China, to conclude that the world’s poorest people possessed even less money than previously calculated. That meant a sudden shift in Oxfam’s numbers, too. The poorer half of the world consists of 3. 6 billion people with $409 billion, the group says. All the billionaires on the Forbes 2016 list — 1, 810 people — possess as much wealth as a full 70 percent of the rest of the world, Oxfam concludes. Oxfam notes there are two common questions about its methodology. The first is whether the debt from wealthy people, like U. S. citizens with large amounts of student loans, drags down the global wealth totals. Oxfam argues that the number of indebted people is ”insignificant” on a global scale, and that the vast majority of people living in debt are actually poor, not just seemingly poor. The second is whether exchange rates distort the numbers, which are all converted into U. S. dollars for comparison’s sake. Oxfam says exchange rates have fluctuated over the years, while the disparity shown by Credit Suisse has been ”persistent.” ”By any measure, we are living in the age of the ” the organization writes.

”People keep asking me, how close are we to going off the cliff,” says Dr. James Johnson, professor of infectious diseases medicine at the University of Minnesota. The cliffside free fall he is talking about is the day that bacteria will be able to outfox the world’s entire arsenal of antibiotics. Common infections would then become untreatable. Here’s Johnson’s answer: ”Come on people. We’re off the cliff. It’s already happening. People are dying. It’s right here, right now. Sure, it’s going to get worse. But we’re already there.” His declaration came in response to a report of a woman in Nevada who died of an incurable infection, resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the U. S. to treat infection. Her death was reported in the Jan. 13 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That kind of bacterium is known as a ”superbug,” which belongs to a family of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. In cases like the Nevada woman, who was infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae, the term ”nightmare superbug” has been coined because this particular specimen was even resistant to antibiotics developed as a last resort against bacterial infection. People in the U. S. have died from superbug infections before. The CDC estimates that 23, 000 die every year from infections. A British report, The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, estimates that globally, 700, 000 people die each year from infections that are . In many of those cases, the infection’s resistance was discovered too late, perhaps before a effective drug was finally initiated. In poor countries, those newer, more expensive antibiotics often are not available. The Nevada case is different in that resistance was discovered early in treatment, but even the drugs seen as the last line of defense didn’t work. ”This one is the poster child because of resistance across the board,” Johnson says. The woman described in the report was in her 70s and treated in a hospital in Reno. About two years ago, on an extended visit to India, she broke a thighbone, according to the report. She had several hospitalizations in India because of infections, says Dr. Lei Chen, of the Washoe County Health District in Reno and an author of the MMWR report. When the patient was admitted to the Reno hospital, health workers discovered that the bacteria specimen tested was resistant to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems — enterobacteria. ”Before, we could go to carbapenems, and they could reliably squash the bugs,” says Johnson. ”This case broke down even our last great gun.” The woman’s most recent hospitalization for infection in India had been in June 2016. She was admitted to a hospital in Reno in August, and state health department officials were notified that she had CRE. ”Lab results showed she was resistant to all 14 drugs we tested,” says Chen. Further tests at the CDC lab showed resistance to 26 antibiotics. She died in September of multiple organ failure and sepsis. ”This was my first time to see such a resistant pattern,” says Chen. CRE infections are rare in the U. S. The CDC does not require that hospitals report CRE cases but estimates that some 175 cases have been reported in the states as of January 2017. ”The majority of [CRE] cases still respond to one or two classes of antibiotics,” says Chen. CRE infections are more common in India and Southeast Asia. The reasons aren’t clear, but all infections spread more easily in parts of the world with inadequate sanitary facilities. Then, as people cross borders and board airplanes, the bacteria spread in the same way that brought CRE to Reno. That’s why Dr. Randall Todd, director of epidemiology and public health preparedness at the Washoe County Health District, says all hospitals should double down on preventive efforts, including a travel history. ”It’s important that health care providers and hospitals keep in mind that our world is ever shrinking,” he says. ”When someone comes in, it’s important to know where in the world they’ve been.” Then, if CRE or other resistant infections are diagnosed, the hospital can set up appropriate precautions, like isolating the patient, and immediately start lab tests to try to find an effective antibiotic. But in this case, there was no effective antibiotic. ”And we’re going to see more of these, from a drip, drip, drip of cases to a steady drizzle to a rainstorm,” predicts Johnson. ”It’s scary, but it’s good to get scared if that motivates action.” The action needed is to use antibiotics wisely, in people and in animals, so strains of bacteria don’t get a chance to develop resistance, says Johnson. And to continue research into development of new antibiotics. ”We do have some new drugs coming along, so there’s hope,” he says. But as new antibiotics become available, ”we have to use them selectively, not .”

Most Broadway musicals that close after 16 performances barely prompt memories, let alone documentaries. But in 1981, the Stephen Furth opus, Merrily We Roll Along, rolled along so bizarrely, it became the stuff of Broadway legend, worthy of a 2017 . Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a theatrically captivating documentary in which a director looks sideways at a musical that goes backwards. In the opening moments of the film, director Lonny Price is rummaging around in a cardboard box filled with film from an special about Merrily. The special never aired — it was scrapped when the show closed so quickly — and he’s startled to find footage of his younger self. Barely out of his teens, Price was cast as one of the show’s leads, along with a couple of dozen other . Now as a film director, he’s looking back at his own professional acting debut. Once he cues up the filmed interview, the kid staring back at him from the screen is a innocent, thrilled to be cast in the first project director Hal Prince and Sondheim tackled after their Broadway triumph with Sweeney Todd. ”I walk around smiling all day,” he says. ”This show, if I never do anything again in the rest of my life, I will have had this moment. If I get hit by a truck the night after the opening, I don’t think I’ll care.” He was perfect casting for the exuberant youngster he was playing. You can hear it in his voice on the cast album, as he sings: ”It’s our time, coming through, me and you man, me and you.” This song, though, isn’t how the show starts it’s how it ends. Merrily We Roll Along is about college pals whose friendship sours over time, but as Price explains in voiceover, it’s told in a way that sweetens over time: ”The big conceit of the show is that it goes backwards,” he says. ”These unhappy characters start in their 40s, and in each following scene, it’s a few years earlier they’re a few years younger, a few years less bitter, less jaded, until finally at the end of the show they’re . .. optimistic and full of dreams, with no idea of what’s to come.” You could say that about the show’s creators, too. Prince and Sondheim were pretty young back then, and a string of Broadway hits — Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd — had not prepared them for what was about to happen with Merrily. Oh, it started out like a song — nothing but excitement in rehearsals, these gods of Broadway working with kids who idolized them. One youngster, Jason Alexander, remembers what it was like the first time there was an audience out front: ”I don’t think anything will ever top being behind the curtain just before the overture started at the first preview,” he recalls. (And that’s saying something — this is the guy who later played George on Seinfeld, after all.) But halfway through the first act, it all started coming apart. This going backwards thing, and kids playing adults . .. the audience didn’t get it. One cast member remembers whole rows getting up and leaving. Another remembers singing to the backs of people walking out, which she terms ”not a subtle cue” that the show had problems. This first part of Best Worst Thing will be absolute catnip for Sondheim fans — the ecstasy and the agony, as it were. And then, in the documentary’s second half, director Price does something unexpected. You think he’ll chronicle what happened to the show — which is basically that after it flopped, the creators figured out how to fix it so that it gets produced all the time now. Instead, he does what Merrily does: He concentrates on what everything from disappointment to wild success did to the people involved. Their trajectories are riveting, because Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened has all this footage of them when they were starting out — including that interview with the young Lonny Price, that the Lonny Price was watching at the beginning of the film. He plays it again towards the end, and this time, you watch him watching. Couldn’t feel more different.

When Morning Edition host David Greene spoke to DJ Khaled recently, there was simply too much good stuff to fit all of it on the radio. Fortunately, the show passed along to us an extended version of the interview, which opens with David explaining why this was the second time they set up an interview with the musician, producer and social media . You should listen to the whole thing for yourself, because none of this sounds as intriguing in print as it does when DJ Khaled says it, but here are a few of the things you’ll hear. 1. When David clarifies that the ”keys” he talks about are not literal keys, but keys to success and greatness, Khaled says, ”Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with having some nice keys that will inspire you on a chain, because I have one . .. it’s to remind me that the keys are so important.” 2. ”If you text me, I’m gonna hit you back with a key. With some type of key.” David asks what he would get back if he texted, ”Hey, what’s up? How’s New York.” Khaled: ”It’s a cold world. Bundle up.” And then he would add a key emoji, because of course he would. 3. If you follow DJ Khaled, you know that he frequently tells you that ”they” don’t want you to do whatever it is he’s telling you that you should do. Who, David asks, are they? ”They are the people that don’t believe in us, that want us to lose . .. that want us broke, that want us finished . .. they are the people that we need to stay away from. I remember, I had somebody actually come up to me and say, ’Khaled, you will be nothing, you know? Stop what you’re doing, you know? You’re just a DJ, you’re going to be local forever. You’re not going to be able to succeed.” 4. Hearing Khaled refer at one point to ”cloth talk,” David Greene of NPR’s Morning Edition asks what cloth talk is. ”Cloth talk is what we’re having right now. We’re having like serious talk.” David Greene: ”You and I are having cloth talk.” Khaled: ”Yeah, we’re having cloth talk, and it’s like having real talk, but authentic. You know? This is it.” 5. A lot of folks are familiar with DJ Khaled’s Snapchatted Jet Ski ”incident,” when he got lost in the dark during a trip to visit Rick Ross. (Take all that in for a moment.) But what you may not know — and what you did not hear on Morning Edition — is the way Khaled connects getting lost on a Jet Ski with having been at a very difficult moment in his life when he wasn’t sure he should have a baby. (Yes, really.) He also explains being pulled over by the Coast Guard — not for the first time. 6. Would you expect that Ed Sheeran helped DJ Khaled develop his Snapchat persona? Well, it’s true. Would you expect that Khaled first came to understand the power of his social media presence at an actual Apple store? He says this is also true. All this, plus a couple of that you’ll have to listen carefully to even catch, in this Small Batch edition of Pop Culture Happy Hour.

Britain’s prime minister said Tuesday that the United Kingdom will walk away from the European Union’s single market and unified court system, making a sharp break with its largest trading partner. In a speech delivered about six months after voters passed a referendum requiring Britain to leave the EU, Prime Minister Theresa May laid out a plan for what that split would look like, emphasizing limits on migration into the country. ”We will ensure we can control immigration to Britain from Europe,” May said, continuing: ”In the last decade or so, we have seen record levels of net migration in Britain, and that sheer volume has put pressure on public services, like schools, stretched our infrastructure, especially housing, and put a downward pressure on wages for working class people. As home secretary for six years, I know that you cannot control immigration overall when there is free movement to Britain from Europe.” The speech signaled that ”controlling borders and limiting immigration are more important that the benefits of free trade with the EU,” NPR’s Frank Langfitt reported from London. ”That will play well with the 52 percent of voters who backed Brexit last June,” he continued. ”But economists say, in the long run, it will make the U. K. poorer.” Tim Farron, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, told The Guardian that May’s plan would do ”massive damage” to the economy, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told the newspaper that ”[May] makes all these optimistic statements, but every economic indicator in Britain is going in the wrong direction.” In arguing for a clean break from the EU, May said that ”no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain” in the complex negotiations necessary to untangle decades of integration with Europe. She explained that her plan was not based on ”partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union or anything that leaves us . We do not seek to adopt a model already enjoyed by other countries. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave. ”No, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union,” she said. ”And my job is to get the right deal for Britain as we do.” Exactly what that deal could look like is still unclear. ”I do want us to have a customs agreement with the EU” that would govern trade with the European bloc, May said, but she added that when it comes to the details of such an agreement, ”I hold no preconceived position. I have an open mind on how we do it. It is not the means that matter, but the ends.” As The has reported, the first step toward leaving the EU is for the U. K. to formally notify the European Union of its decision to exit, by invoking a provision known as Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and instigating negotiation on the details of the exit that could last up to two years. May previously said she plans to begin the process by March. But before any plan moves forward, the U. K.’s Parliament must approve it, as we have reported, along with the other 27 EU member nations and the EU Parliament. ”Unless May does a complete from here, any hope of full single market access for Britain is more or less out of the question,” Kallum Pickering, senior Britain economist at Berenberg Bank in London, told The New York Times.

The abortion rate in the United States fell to its lowest level since the historic Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion nationwide, a new report finds. The report by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports legalized abortion, puts the rate at 14. 6 abortions per 1, 000 women of childbearing age (ages ) in 2014. That’s the lowest recorded rate since the Roe decision in 1973. The abortion rate has been declining for decades — down from a peak of 29. 3 in 1980 and 1981. The report also finds that in 2013, the total number of abortions nationwide fell below 1 million for the first time since the . In 2014 — the most recent year with data available — the number fell a bit more, to 926, 200. The overall number had peaked at more than 1. 6 million abortions in 1990, according to Guttmacher. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the longstanding controversy around abortion policy, the meaning of the report is somewhat in dispute. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said efforts to help women get better access to contraception are paying off. She points in particular to recent improvements in the rate of unintended pregnancies, and a historically low teen pregnancy rate. ”It shows that we’re finally doing a better job of helping women get access to birth control that’s affordable and that’s ” Richards said. As Donald Trump prepares to take office, Richards is gearing up for a fight over federal funding for women’s health services provided by Planned Parenthood. Republican leaders in Congress have vowed to work with Trump to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which requires contraceptive coverage for many women. ”We shouldn’t go backwards on access to birth control,” Richards said. Some groups, meanwhile, argue the Guttmacher report shows new state restrictions on abortion are working. Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, said she has her doubts about the Guttmacher report — since the data come from surveys of abortion providers — but accepts the overall conclusion. She emphasized the impact of new regulations on clinics and laws requiring women seeking abortions to get an ultrasound, which she said are having a ”real, measurable impact on abortion.” ”These have been and we see the abortion rate dropping in response,” Hamrick said. Hamrick said she believes abortion numbers are also falling in part because public sentiment is turning against abortion — although surveys by the Pew Research Center show opinions on abortion have been largely stable over the past two decades. The Gallup polling firm has found Americans largely divided on abortion in recent decades, with a majority labeling themselves ” ” in a 2015 survey. The Guttmacher report says abortion restrictions do appear to be a factor in the declining numbers in some states. But principal research scientist Rachel Jones, lead author of the report, said that’s not the whole story. She noted that abortion declined in almost every state, and ”having fewer clinics didn’t always translate into having fewer abortions.” A more important driver of the declining abortion rate, Jones said, appears to be improved access to contraception, particularly birth control options like IUDs. She noted that women in the United States have been using the highly effective devices in growing numbers for more than a decade, and said the declining birthrate suggests more women are preventing unwanted pregnancies. ”Abortion is going down, and births aren’t going up,” Jones said. Chuck Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, called the drop in the abortion rate ”good news,” regardless of one’s political point of view. He said there are likely a number of factors behind the decline. ”By and large, this is encouraging for a country that obviously remains deeply divided and discomfited about the benefits of abortion to the public,” Donovan said. But when it comes to abortion, common ground is hard to find. The Guttmacher Institute’s Jones said the data may signal that some women who want abortions can’t get access. ”If there are women in these highly restrictive states who want abortions but can’t get them because there aren’t any clinics that they can get to, and that’s why abortion’s going down, that’s not a good thing,” Jones said. ”But we think the story that’s going on in a lot of situations, in a lot of states, is that fewer women are having unintended pregnancies and in turn fewer abortions, and that is actually a good story.”

A Nigerian military strike on a camp for internally displaced persons in northeast Nigeria has killed dozens of people, according to Doctors Without Borders. Teams from the organization, also known as Médecins sans frontières, said in a statement that they’ve counted 52 dead and 120 wounded as a result of the strike on the camp in Rann. They’re treating the injured and preparing to evacuate patients from the camp. The bombing was accidental and happened during an air force mission targeting Boko Haram insurgents in restive Borno State, according to tweets from Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. ”This attack on vulnerable people who have already fled from extreme violence is shocking and unacceptable,” Dr. Cabrol, MSF director of operations, said in a statement. ”The safety of civilians must be respected. We are urgently calling on all parties to ensure the facilitation of medical evacuations by air or road for survivors who are in need of emergency care.” Photos from the camp released by MSF show rows of newly dug graves and injured civilians waiting for treatment. Other civilians survey the damage and look through ruins. The organization adds that its teams are ”in shock following the event.” The Nigerian air force has been intensively targeting the extremist organization in the northern area of the country. As NPR’s Ofeibea has reported, up to 2. 5 million people have been displaced from the fighting. ”This is the first time during Nigeria’s campaign against Boko Haram that the military has acknowledged a large number of civilians killed in a mistaken bombardment,” according to The Washington Post. ”It remains unclear how the military could have mistaken a camp with 25, 000 displaced people for a terrorist enclave.” Buhari pledged the federal government’s support ”in dealing with the situation and attending the victims.”

In an article last month on state goals for 2017, China’s Xinhua news agency reported, ”China has lifted 700 million people out of poverty through more than 30 years of reform and ” while aiming to ”lift” 10 million more in the coming year. For some, the verb choice conjures an image of the giant hands of a powerful and magnanimous government carefully extracting villagers from their rundown homes and then delicately depositing them inside new urban apartments with modern amenities. Others, though, don’t give the expression much thought. The term has been used by China’s media for more than a decade, long enough for Western media like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters (among others) to parrot it with regularity whenever China’s poverty alleviation goals reach a new high. But who’s really doing the lifting? Is it China’s government through policies that have created jobs, alleviated poverty in the countryside and provided social welfare to hundreds of millions? Or, as has been pointed out by skeptics, did Chinese people lift themselves out of poverty once Mao and his horrific political campaigns expired, allowing China’s leaders to replace terror and madness with rational economic policies that ensured people’s hard work is rewarded with capital? The question has inspired many a debate about the role of government policy versus the will of the individual in China, but whoever deserves credit (experts would argue both) credit is certainly due. What China — its government and its people — have achieved is unprecedented in human history: Around 700 million Chinese have worked their way above the poverty line since 1980, accounting for of global poverty reduction during that period. (According to the World Bank more than 500 million Chinese lifted themselves out of poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6. 5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on less than $1. 90 a day). I’ve refrained from using the term ”lifted out of poverty” in the previous sentence, and what’s curious is that China’s state media does the same when reporting this news in Chinese to its own people. While China’s largest news organizations routinely boast about China lifting its people out of poverty in their editions, these same news organizations avoid the term in their native language. The Chinese name of the government’s campaign is ”fupin kaifa” (扶贫开发) literally translated ”assist the poor and develop,” and reports about poverty alleviation in the media are peppered with terms like ”tuopin” (脱贫) ”shake off poverty,” ”jianpin” (减贫) ”reduce poverty,” ”xiaochu pinkun” (消除贫困) ”eliminate impoverishment” and ”zhaiqu pinkunmao” (摘去贫困帽) ”taking off the poverty hat.” ”Lifting” people out of poverty is nowhere to be seen. The term seems reserved exclusively for state media’s English language publications aimed at foreign readers. Why? One likely answer is a government bent on cleaning up its human rights record to the developed countries of the West. Each year, China’s State Council releases a white paper on the country’s human rights progress, and poverty alleviation is usually in the report. An editorial in the People’s Daily earlier this year complained that ”certain countries” don’t consider China’s poverty alleviation to be an achievement in human rights, writing that human rights have ”various manifestations due to different circumstances in different countries. In China, poverty alleviation, health care and social security are proof of the country’s progress in human rights.” It’s a point that’s hard to argue with, whoever is responsible for the heavy lifting.

In a major speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Chinese President Xi Jinping positioned himself as a defender of globalization and free trade. It was the first time a Chinese head of state has appeared at the annual meeting of political and financial powerhouses, and the speech was one that would have been ”unthinkable” from former Chinese leaders, The Guardian reports. U. S. Donald Trump, days away from his inauguration, was not in attendance at Davos, and Xi never uttered his name. But many of the Chinese president’s statements were clearly responding to rhetoric from Trump and his supporters, who have sharply rejected globalization and many existing trade deals. ”No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” Xi said at Davos, according to a Reuters translation. He compared protectionism to ”locking oneself in a dark room,” keeping out ”light and air” as well as any potential dangers. Xi said there’s ”no point” in blaming economic globalization for the world’s problems, many of which have nothing to do with global trade, The Telegraph reports. And even though some problems are linked to globalization, that’s ”no justification to write it off altogether,” the Chinese president said. He called for countries to maintain their commitments under the Paris climate accord Trump, during his campaign, promised that the U. S. would drop out of the pact. Overall, the speech ”underscored Beijing’s desire to play a greater global role as the United States turns inward,” Reuters writes. Other observers drew the same conclusion. Ambrose of the Telegraph said Xi was ”throwing down the gauntlet” as Trump’s inauguration approaches. One expert told The Washington Post this could be seen as a turning point where China moved toward filling a ”global leadership role” that the U. S. has played for a century and now might be abandoning. While the speech was by the crowd at Davos, according to The Guardian, there’s also a healthy dose of skepticism about China’s actual commitment to global free trade — let alone concerns over human rights or censorship. In The Wall Street Journal, before Xi’s speech, Andrew Browne anticipated that Xi would present himself as ”globalization’s great defender.” But he wrote that Xi’s vision of globalization is different than the cosmopolitan vision of many Davos attendees. Xi values national, identity over multiculturalism, and ”insists on absolute state sovereignty,” Browne writes. Browne argues that Xi’s plan to invest in global trade infrastructure is intended not ”so much to collapse national boundaries as to pull neighboring countries into China’s geopolitical orbit.” In Fortune, Scott Cendrowski described Xi as idealizing ”a troubled China,” noting that while he presented China as being open for global trade, businesses that work in China express concerns over ”unfair regulations, unclear laws and Chinese protectionism.”

In a presidential campaign marked by harsh rhetoric, Donald Trump directed some of his strongest words toward China. He called the Chinese government a currency manipulator, threatened to impose tariffs on goods imported from one of America’s leading trade partners and repeatedly vowed to get tough on China. Now, as Trump is sounding the same notes. He caused a veritable earthquake in U. S. relations just by taking a call from Taiwan’s President Tsai . This challenged the bedrock of U. S. relations, the ”One China” policy, under which the U. S. officially recognizes only the government in Beijing, though it also conducts business with Taipei. And at his confirmation hearing last week, Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, unleashed another salvo. Though it was just one line in a hearing, he suggested a Trump administration would be willing to wage a showdown over China’s recent island building in the South China Sea. ”We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island building stops,” Tillerson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ”And second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.” Since 2013, China has built seven islands in the South China Sea. An international tribunal last year rejected China’s claims to those artificial islands — and its claims to much of the South China Sea. In the meantime, China has also militarized the islands by building airstrips and installing guns on them. Since Trump is not yet in office, and Tillerson hasn’t yet been confirmed, it remains unclear whether Tillerson’s statement was a genuine policy position or just rhetoric as Trump and his team prepare to assume power. A number of Asia analysts believe Tillerson likely misspoke or overstated the positions a Trump administration will take. ”What I think he meant was that we will not let the Chinese use these new airbases on these reclaimed islands to establish dominance” in the South China Sea, says Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Green, a former National Security Council senior director for Asia, says the Trump administration could increase the U. S. Navy’s presence in the South China Sea and the frequency of patrols — strategies the Obama administration pursued, but only to a limited degree. ”My guess is that [Tillerson] was referring to options such as that — but not stating that the U. S. would blockade or interdict Chinese ships approaching those islands,” says Green. Green says the lack of clarity may be due to the lack of seasoned policy makers in the Trump transition team and the limited input from the State Department. ”I think the process has been less conducive to a careful and thorough consideration of exact wording than in the past,” he says. The Chinese media was less charitable in its assessment. The China Daily called Tillerson’s remarks ”a of naivety, shortsightedness, prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies.” So was David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. ”This is insane and totally unenforceable, not to mention very probably not logistically feasible, and highly provocative and ” he says of Tillerson’s comments. Taken at face value, the remarks call for a Cuban Missile blockade that would prevent the Chinese from accessing the islands they claim in the South China Sea. Doing that would be no easy task for the U. S. Navy. China’s Navy has been rapidly modernizing in recent years and while it is ”not going to be able to defeat the U. S. necessarily, they will certainly be able to punish U. S. forces in the region in a way they couldn’t before,” says Avery Goldstein, director of Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. The danger is that a small incident in the South China Sea could quickly escalate into a major conflict. There is another way to look at Trump’s approach so far. Almost every recent U. S. president has said on the campaign trail that he would take a tougher stance with China. That list includes Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. ”This approach is not unprecedented,” says CSIS’s Green. ”Typically, what happens in every case is that within a few months or a year or two, the policy calibrates and they go back to the norm.” Goldstein, of the University of Pennsylvania, says Trump might be using tactics he learned in the business world, where you often stake out your toughest positions in the beginning. ”Perhaps this is just an attempt to gain bargaining leverage so that at some point, you make a deal that is better than the one you would’ve gotten if you’d been flexible at the beginning,” he says. It might work. Or backfire. China has come a long way in recent years and is increasingly assertive in the international arena. President Xi Jinping is no one’s idea of a pushover. ”The devil,” says Goldstein, ”is in the details. All we have so far are comments and tweets. Until they take office and formulate and implement policy, we can’t be sure.” Nishant Dahiya is NPR’s Asia editor.

The first time I tasted chamoy was in the Mexican border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. At a street cart vendor, chamoy apples sat alongside elotes and tamales. The tart Granny Smith was rolled in a thick paste that was sweet, salty, spicy and sour all at once. As I took the first bite, I thought: ”There is no way this is gonna work.” But it did, and after that, the mere thought of chamoy made me salivate like a Pavlovian dog. I had to learn more about it. In Mexico, chamoy comes in many forms. Originally, it was a salted dried fruit (saladito) traditionally made from prunus mume, more commonly known as an ume plum (even though it’s technically a small, sour apricot). But other fruits like sour green mangoes or tamarind pods are common. Chamoy also comes as a sauce and seasoning powder, both spiked with Mexican chiles, as well as a golosina, or Mexican candy. It can be sprinkled on fruits and vegetables or drizzled on chips (especially tostilocos, tortilla chips topped with a variety of condiments). It can come as a paleta (Mexican popsicle) or raspado (shaved ice). But this Mexican snack actually started off as a Chinese one, and took hundreds of years to work its way into popular Mexican culture. Rachel Laudan, the first food historian to track chamoy’s journey, explains that it is ”a Mexican rendering of see mui,” a salty, dried apricot common in China, as well as the inspiration for Japanese umeboshi, a pickled, salted apricot. Laudan isn’t sure when see mui came to Mexico, but says that Asians have been migrating to the country since the 1560s in Spanish ships that traded Chinese silk and spices for silver. Laudan only figured out chamoy’s Chinese heritage because she had lived in Hawaii, where she encountered crack seed, which is essentially chamoy’s sister. Crack seed is a salted, preserved apricot that is cracked so the exposed seed will impart flavor. She learned that the Cantonese name for crack seed is see mui, and it came to Hawaii with Chinese plantation workers in the 19th century. See mui is pronounced ”see moy,” which sounds like ”chamoy.” Mexico reinvented chamoy as a sauce and candy with chiles, while Hawaii launched entire stores dedicated to crack seed made from different types of fruit. ”I moved to Mexico in the ” Laudan says, ”and all of my Mexican friends agree that chamoy . .. really wasn’t around [nationally] until 1990.” It spread in large part thanks to the major Mexican confectionery company Dulces Miguelito, which began chamoy in the 1970s. ”It’s a very important flavor for Mexicans, especially if you grew up in Mexico,” chef Gabriela Camara says. She owns Cala and Tacos Cala in San Francisco, as well as several Mexico City restaurants. Camara grew up in both Mexico City and Tepoztlan, Morelos. She remembers eating Miguelitos chamoy on top of Cazares, spicy corn chips. Dominica Salomon, chef and owner of Cosecha in Oakland, Calif. agrees that ”It’s typical of the Mexican palate — they want all of the different taste buds going off at the same time. And chamoy ties all of that in.” Salomon grew up in Los Angeles, and her first taste of chamoy was saladitos. ”From as far back as I can remember, I always had a saladito in my mouth,” she shares. ”You’d have to keep it in your mouth a long time until it softened up so you could eat the dried fruit off of the seed.” But not all chefs like chamoy, especially because much of it is heavily processed. Silvana Salcido Esparza, owner of the Bario Cafe in Phoenix, has strong feelings against it. ”Ha, chamoy. I love to hate it,” she says. ”Sabritas [chips] is king in Mexico, and together with chamoy is making Mexico the most diabetic country in the world. And it’s nothing that can’t be produced naturally.” She teaches children to make chamoy from plum or apricot marmalade, ground chile de arbol, lime juice and sea salt. Norma Listman, a private chef and writer currently living in San Francisco, Nayarit, Mexico, agrees. She grew up eating chamoy candy and sauce on fruit, but as an adult feels it is ”processed . .. so I wanted to make my own.” Using tips from working in a Japanese restaurant that makes its own umeboshi, she blends underripe ume plum with hibiscus flowers, dried chiles, lime juice, vinegar, honey, salt, water and rose water. It’s fitting that she uses an Asian pickle recipe as the base for her chamoy. It’s part of the reason she moved near the Bahía de Banderas, Mexico, a base for international trade. ”It’s full of Asian ingredients,” she says. ”I wanted to come here to study the huge Asian influence of the area.” Since that first chamoy apple, my interest has grown into a obsession. I carry a bottle of chamoy sauce in my purse, make Silvana Salcido Esparza’s dip for mandarins and mangoes, and rim tamarind margaritas in Miguelitos chamoy powder. I’ve even found a Japanese farmer that grows ume, so come spring, I will be making my own homemade version. That apple was the first step down the rabbit hole of chamoy, and I’m not looking back. Leena is a San food and culture writer. Her work can be found here.

Several times a month, you can find a doctor in the aisles of Ralph’s market in Huntington Beach, Calif. wearing a white coat and helping people learn about food. On one recent day, this doctor was Daniel Nadeau, wandering the cereal aisle with Allison Scott, giving her some ideas on how to feed kids who studiously avoid anything that tastes healthy. ”Have you thought about trying smoothies in the morning?” he asks her. ”The frozen blueberries and raspberries are a little cheaper, and berries are really good for the brain.” Scott is delighted to get food advice from a physician who is program director of the nearby Mary and Dick Allen Diabetes Center, part of the St. Joseph Hoag Health alliance. The center’s ”Shop with Your Doc” program sends doctors to the grocery store to meet with any patients who sign up for the service, plus any other shoppers who happen by with questions. Nadeau notices the boxes in Scott’s shopping cart and suggests she switch to whole grain pasta and real cheese. ”So I’d have to make it?” she asks, her enthusiasm waning at the thought of how long that might take, just to have her kids reject it. ”I’m not sure they’d eat it. They just won’t eat it.” Nadeau says sugar and processed foods are big contributors to the rising diabetes rates among children. ”In America, over 50 percent of our food is processed food,” Nadeau tells her. ”And only 5 percent of our food is food. I think we should try to reverse that.” Scott agrees to try more smoothies for the kids and to make real macaroni and cheese. Rack up one point for the doctor, zero for diabetes. A small revolution brewing, Nadeau is part of a small revolution brewing across California. The movement has been around for decades, but it’s making inroads as physicians and medical institutions make food a formal part of treatment, rather than relying solely on medications. By prescribing nutritional changes or launching programs such as ”Shop with Your Doc,” they’re trying to prevent, limit or even reverse disease by changing what patients eat. ”There’s no question people can take things a long way toward reversing diabetes, reversing hypertension, even preventing cancer by food choices,” Nadeau says. In the big picture, says Dr. Richard Afable, CEO and president of St. Joseph Hoag Health, medical institutions across the state are starting to make a philosophical switch to becoming a health organization, not just a health care organization. That sentiment echoes the tenets of the Therapeutic Food Pantry program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which completed its pilot phase and is about to expand on an ongoing basis to five clinic sites throughout the city. The program will offer patients several bags of food prescribed for their condition, along with intensive training in how to cook it. ”We really want to link food and medicine, and not just give away food,” says Dr. Rita Nguyen, the hospital’s medical director of Healthy Food Initiatives. ”We want people to understand what they’re eating, how to prepare it, the role food plays in their lives.” In Southern California, Loma Linda University School of Medicine is offering specialized training for its resident physicians in Lifestyle Medicine — that’s a formal subspecialty in using food to treat disease. Research on the power of food to treat or reverse disease is beginning to accumulate, but that doesn’t mean diet alone is always the solution, or that every illness can benefit substantially from dietary changes. Nonetheless, physicians say they look at the cumulative data and a clear picture emerges: that the salt, sugar, fat and processed foods in the American diet contribute to the nation’s high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. According to the World Health Organization, 80 percent of deaths from heart disease and stroke are caused by high blood pressure, tobacco use, elevated cholesterol and low consumption of fruits and vegetables. ”It’s a different paradigm of how to treat disease,” says Dr. Brenda Rea, who helps run the family and preventive medicine residency program at Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Choosing which foods to prescribe, The lifestyle medicine subspecialty is designed to train doctors in how to prevent and treat disease, in part, by changing patients’ nutritional habits. The medical center and school at Loma Linda also has a food pantry and kitchen for patients. Many people don’t know how to cook, Rea says they only know how to heat things up. That means depending on packaged food with high salt and sugar content. So teaching people about which foods are nutritious and how to prepare them, she says, can actually transform a patient’s life. And beyond that, it might transform the health and lives of that patient’s family. ”What people eat can be medicine or poison,” Rea says. ”As a physician, nutrition is one of the most powerful things you can change to reverse the effects of chronic disease.” Studies have explored evidence that dietary changes can slow inflammation, for example, or make the body inhospitable to cancer cells. In general, many lifestyle medicine physicians recommend a diet — particularly for people with diabetes or other inflammatory conditions. ”As what happened with tobacco, this will require a cultural shift, but that can happen,” says Nguyen. ”In the same way physicians used to smoke, and then stopped smoking and were able to talk to patients about it, I think physicians can have a bigger voice in it.” This story originally appeared on the website of member station KQED in California.

There’s the heroic, medical care that saves us from crises. And then there’s the incremental medical attention that doctors provide for weeks, months, years, even decades in the attempt to heal complex conditions. As a surgeon, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande practices the heroic type of medicine. In his new article, ”Tell Me Where It Hurts,” Gawande examines the quieter side of health care. Chronic diseases including heart disease, cancer, Type 2 diabetes and arthritis have become the leading causes of death and disability in the U. S. Gawande argues that it’s time for the health care system to discover the heroism of ”the incremental.” Gawande discusses his article with NPR’s Robert Siegel, touching on the status of incremental medicine and what a shift in healthcare might mean for primary care in upcoming years. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Interview Highlights, On a case that shows the importance of incremental medicine, ”I start out the story with a man who has the worst chronic migraine headaches imaginable. He has suffered for decades with headaches on almost a daily basis: More days of the month with a terrible headache than not, to the point of throwing up. It’s hard to keep your job, hard to make things work. He’d seen all kinds of doctors who offered all kind of fixes, and nothing ever worked. But then he found a physician who saw him regularly over three years. Dr. Elizabeth Loder, whose career has been built on paying enormous attention to ’Let’s try a little something now, see what happens, tweak it again, tweak it again.’ The problem in our existing health care system is that it’s not made to put great value in opportunities that take time to pay off. What [the migraine patient] would have received in an emergency room would be a shot of morphine, a CT scan. ..and be sent on his way. Cured for an hour or two only to have it come back again later. But after three years [of working with Dr. Loder,] at the age of 62, his headaches were cured. And that’s the opportunity we’re missing.” On who decided emergency care should be most valuable, ”We all decided it. If you go back to the 1940s or 1950s, medicine was really only able to rescue. It was an amazing thing that we could bring on antibiotics like penicillin to cure bacterial diseases, or do operations to take care of problems like heart conditions. Primary care physicians couldn’t do much. We didn’t know high blood pressure was one of the biggest problems we have, much less how to address it. Fast forward to where we are now. Only half of people [with high blood pressure] have their blood pressure controlled and are receiving adequate treatment for it. And what it takes to control blood pressure is incremental investment. And we don’t make it. We wait for the heart attack or kidney failure caused by the high blood pressure. It’s too little too late, and at great expense. We raid our commitment to maintenance and prevention to put money into that expensive back end rescue. And that’s what has to shift.” On what a rollback of Obamacare might mean for primary care, ”Obamacare put incentives in [health care] that strengthen and give resources to primary care clinicians to have more team oriented care, and even for people to reach outside the clinic and serve you virtually. Some areas of the country are already doing the majority of their visits by virtual means. [Clinicians] are in touch with you in many different ways. But that’s what we miss, that’s what’s at stake if we repeal legislation without replacement that keeps this kind of direction moving.”

Kenya is gearing up for what will no doubt be a contentious presidential election this August. That means the major political parties and coalitions have begun their schemes. The ruling Jubilee Party had fireworks and confetti, and the newly minted opposition coalition, the National Super Alliance or NASA, decided to send supporters knocking on doors in search of millions of new voters. Mishi Mboko, an opposition member of Parliament in the NASA coalition, has a less conventional idea to encourage new voters: Women in areas where the opposition holds sway should refuse to have sex with their spouses unless they register to vote. ”Sex [is] a powerful weapon to make reluctant men rush to register as voters,” the Standard newspaper reports Mboko said. ”Women, this is the strategy you should adopt,” the paper quotes her as saying. ”It is the best. Deny them sex until they show you their voter’s card.” (Her own husband has already registered, Mboko told the paper). Now, the tactic is not new. Back in 2009, women’s rights groups in Kenya called for a weeklong sex strike to try to get Mwai Kibaki and Minister Raila Odinga to make peace and save a fragile coalition government. In Liberia, women went on a sex strike in the early 2000s as the country’s civil war came to an end. One of them was 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. Since then, the idea of using a sex strike for political leverage has been tried by women in Colombia in 2006, 2011 and 2013 and in the Philippines in 2011. That same year, a senator in Belgium called a sex strike to force a deadlocked parliament into forming a government. So, does it work? In her 2011 memoir, Gbowee wrote that the Liberian sex strike ”had little or no practical effect.” But it certainly garnered the peace movement media attention and is still, she wrote, the thing everyone asks her about. It’s hard to say what effect the other sex strikes may have had, but the violence in Colombia receded, a government formed months later in Belgium and Kenya’s coalition survived. As for Kenya’s opposition voter registration drive, more publicity doesn’t sound .

In the early morning hours of Nov. 10, not long after Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, Phillip Atiba Goff, the head of the Center for Policing Equity in New York, fired off an email meant to encourage his colleagues, who worried that their work was about to be sidelined. They had spent several years working with police departments, examining the use of force by officers and the role race plays in such cases. Their research had gained fresh attention and urgency as issues of race and policing moved to the forefront of the national conversation. And as people took to the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed following encounters with the police, the Obama White House met with organizers from the nascent Movement for Black Lives and convened a national task force on policing. Then Trump, who had run on a ”law and order” platform that was far less sympathetic to calls for police reform than it was to the police themselves, won the election. So Goff told his colleagues that their research into police use of force — an area around which there remains a frustrating lack of comprehensive data — was likely to matter even more. Policing, he told them, was likely to be the mechanism by which the country dealt with some of its most intractable political problems, like immigration and urban violence and, potentially, the targeted monitoring of certain communities. If newly emboldened law enforcement agencies were going to be involved in more aspects of American life, Goff said, many people — activists, researchers, policymakers, communities — were going to need as much information as they could get about what they were doing and how. ”I told them that our work was going to be more important than ever,” Goff told me in a phone conversation last month. The national debates over race and policing were rancorous and polarized under the Obama administration, which often strained mightily to validate the concerns of both police and the communities they policed. But in the wake of scathing federal investigations of major police departments, the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama to attorney general, and recent survey data showing stark racial and partisan divides on issues of policing — even among officers themselves — it seems that those debates are about to become even uglier. The civil rights division of the Obama Justice Department has opened 25 ”pattern and practice” investigations into local law enforcement agencies since 2009 that it said had a stated focus on ”systemic police misconduct rather than isolated instances of wrongdoing.” Some of those investigations ended in federal lawsuits meant to push those police agencies toward reform. (Under Obama, 11 law enforcement agencies entered into consent decrees, compared to just three under President Bush.) But during the confirmation hearing for Sessions, the Alabama senator questioned whether police departments were being treated fairly by the Obama administration’s Justice Department. ”These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that,” Sessions said last week. His intimation that incidents of police misconduct are driven by the behavior of a few bad apples lines up with the responses to a new survey of police officers released last week by the Pew Research Center. The overwhelming majority of the officers who responded to the national survey said that their jobs had become more difficult following several incidents of police violence against black people. But Pew found some telling racial splits among the respondents: White officers, for example, were much more likely than their black colleagues to see the death of black people at the hands of police as ”isolated incidents rather than signs of a broader problem.” Most white respondents were skeptical of the motives of the protesters, with only about a third saying they felt protesters were demonstrating in order to hold officers accountable. White officers were much, much more likely to say that the country had made the changes necessary to bring about equal rights for black people: 92 percent of white officers felt this way only 29 percent of black cops said the same. But the timing of Sessions’ comments was remarkable, coming the same week that saw Baltimore enter into a consent decree with the DOJ after a federal investigation found that officers had regularly roughed up citizens of the predominantly black city when it wasn’t ignoring their calls for help. That same week, the federal government rushed to release a report highly critical of the police department in Chicago, contending that officers there regularly violated the rights of citizens — shooting at the backs of fleeing suspects, using tasers against people who posed no threat, and regularly using force against children. (Our colleague, Camila Domonoske, highlighted some of the most chilling findings from the report here.) And as unsettling as those details were, they weren’t terribly different from the findings about police departments in cities like Albuquerque, N. M, Newark and Ferguson, Mo. all of which also entered into consent decrees with the federal government. We’ve yet to see whether those federal interventions into local policing will improve the relationships between the police and the policed. As the Washington Post found, consent decrees tend to yield mixed results because cities are so different — and it’s still not clear what will happen to the open investigations and consent decrees under the Trump administration. But one effect of these findings has been to corroborate the experiences of the residents in those cities — particularly those in communities of color — who have complained about the ways the police in their neighborhoods have long operated. If the pendulum of federal action is indeed swinging back to days, the next Ferguson or Baltimore or Chicago will play out against an even more fractious backdrop in which there is effectively no official acknowledgment that there was a problem to begin with. By itself, removing that official vindication changes — maybe even jeopardizes — the prospects for police reform in the near term. ”Without the moral weight of the White House . .. behind reform, there is [markedly] less external incentive to change,” Goff told me on Sunday. ”There will still be some momentum. But not the urgency that allowed people to leave the streets and come to the negotiating table.”

A popular Pakistani musician and actor, Atif Aslam, is being hailed worldwide after he stopped a live performance on Saturday night to rescue a female fan who was allegedly being sexually harassed by a group of men at the concert. Videos of the incident shot by concertgoers are circulating online. Aslam stops his musicians and in a mix of Urdu and English, begins berating the alleged harassers, who seem to be right in front of the stage. ”Wait a second,” the singer says angrily. ”Have you ever seen a girl? Your mother or sister could be here, too, huh?” He then instructs security to pull the young woman up onto the stage with him, saying: ”I’m going to rescue her.” Many fans are heard cheering the singer’s actions, chanting: ”Atif! Atif! Atif!” Aslam goes on to address the attackers directly again, saying: ”Act like a human being.” The show, in which Aslam was with Sufi singing legend Abida Parveen, took place at the Institute of Business Administration, a highly ranked university in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. The show was organized by MUNIK, the school’s Model United Nations. Aslam is a household name in Pakistan and is throughout the South Asian subcontinent. His video for the wildly popular Coke Studios Pakistan series, a tribute to the Sufi singers The Sabri Brothers, has been viewed on YouTube more than 56 million times. He made his acting debut in the 2011 film Bol — whose plot involves a family with a transgender daughter and which broke records in Pakistan. Yesterday, the newspaper The Daily Pakistan reported in the aftermath of Saturday’s show that ”dozens of girls were molested and sexually harassed at the venue,” and citing an anonymous tipster, charged that students at the university who helped organize the show sold thousands of fake tickets to the performance, leading to chaos and lack of security. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn posted a number of social media accounts of what happened. One female concertgoer named Mahnoor Alamgir wrote on Facebook: ”Not a single girl escaped harassment unless she was with a male friend or husband. ..I’m utterly disgusted right now.” Another woman in the audience named Yusra Habib wrote on Facebook: ”You know something is terribly problematic when a singer has to stop in between his performance, spot harassment from within a massive crowd and ask his team to ’rescue the girl.’ You know its [sic] even more uncomfortable when three more girls have to be lifted on stage and taken away safely. It only goes on to prove that no matter how our awaam [people] gets over this and so called misogyny at public events, it is what we as a crowd need the most.” In many of the South Asian news accounts of this incident, the harassment and molestation of women is referred to by a common regional euphemism: ” .”

Last week, physicists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology reported they’d cooled an object to a million times colder than room temperature. It was a record for the science of . In this field, researchers inch ever closer to — but never reach — the state of absolute zero temperature. It’s a science that has some very cool (pun very much intended) applications including gravity wave detectors for ”hearing” distant black hole mergers. But moving beyond these applications, why is so hard to begin with? Why can’t we just get to absolute zero degrees and be done with it? The answer to this question drops us straight into one of the quantum universe’s most startling features: The world never rests. To see what this means, let’s remind ourselves about the meaning of ”temperature.” Without getting too technical (we should really be talking about entropy here) temperature for physicists is a measure of random motion. Imagine the gas molecules in the air around you are little cue balls of matter. The higher the air temperature, the faster those little orbs of matter will be ricocheting around the room, bouncing off the walls and each other. So cooling the air means finding some means to slow the molecules down. From this perspective, there there’s no conceptual reason why you shouldn’t be able bring them entirely to a halt. Do that, and the air would have a temperature of ”absolute zero” degrees (as measured in units called Kelvins. In Fahrenheit, this would be . 67 degrees). But, it turns out, nature doesn’t work that way. The universe doesn’t ”do” zero temperatures because it doesn’t do zero motion. Thinking about matter and motion in the way we described above is what we physicists call ”a classical picture.” In classical physics, matter is made of tiny particles of ”stuff” and motion is just the change in the particles position with time. It all makes intuitive sense based on our experience of the world at the scale of baseballs and boulders. But a hundred years or so ago, physicists began probing the world on the scale of atoms. What they found was the classical, intuitive picture didn’t work well for explaining their experiments. In response, they developed a new kind of physics. In an astonishing burst of creativity, they kept key principles from the classical world — like the conservation of energy — but added new rules. One of these was the Uncertainty Principle, which essentially told us that reality is fuzzy at its root level. To be exact, certain pairs of properties — like motion and position — can never be known exactly. The Uncertainty Principle isn’t saying there’s something wrong with our instruments. Instead, it tells us there’s something wrong with our classical intuitions. In particular, when it comes to motion, it tells us it’s impossible to know the position and the motion of a particle exactly. The more you lock in the position of a particle, the wider the range of velocities the particle can have. So what does this have to do with temperature? Absolute zero should mean bringing particles to a halt. But that would imply you knew exactly where they were. You had them perfectly ”localized.” If that’s the case, then the Uncertainty Principle demands there must be some uncertainty in their motion. They can’t be perfectly known to be perfectly at rest. The deeper meaning of this this quantum logic is that the universe can never be at rest. There is a ”floor” to how much things can be slowed down (or cooled). It’s impossible to go below that floor (though scientists do get ever more clever in skirting its edges). The implications of this can get pretty strange. Imagine we put a particle, like an electron, in a box. Now we ask: What’s the lowest energy state of the electron + box system? In classical physics, it would just be the electron sitting there unmoving — i. e. zero motion, hence zero energy. But quantum physics won’t allow such a thing as zero energy (because of the Uncertainty Principle). Instead, the system has ”ground state” energy with the electron bouncing back and forth between the box walls. That’s as low as you can go. The electron can’t be stopped. Take this idea further, and you get to the delicious idea of vacuum energy. There the Uncertainty Principle demands that there can be no pure and perfect vacuum with a state of zero energy. Thus, in quantum physics, the vacuum is not empty but is a seething froth of ”virtual particles” that are never manifested and yet have a verifiable effect on the particles we do see. No vacuum. No zero energy. No zero temperature. No common sense expectation about the world’s behavior. The discovery that the quantum world was the foundation for our classical experience was a triumph of science. It was a validation of science’s ability to take us beyond our limited senses and limited concepts. There is no way to ”picture” this quantum world with our classical imaginations. Instead, what we found was a new frontier. At its root, quantum physics showed us that this world we inhabit is dynamic to its very core: buzzing, roaring, shuddering and trembling like an infinite Jackson Pollack painting. It is not just richer than we imagined, but stranger and more wonderful than we can imagine. That view, hidden in the impossibility of absolute zero temperature, is a gift that science has given us all. Now what are we to make of it? Adam Frank is a of the 13. 7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a ”evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

The long arm of the pharmaceutical industry continues to pervade practically every area of medicine, reaching those who write guidelines that shape doctors’ practices, patient advocacy organizations, letter writers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even oncologists on Twitter, according to a series of papers on money and influence published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine. The findings of the papers provide further evidence showing how conflicts of interest help shape health care, a subject ProPublica has explored through its Dollars for Docs series since 2010. (Check whether your physician receives money from drug or device companies through ProPublica’s search tool.) ”The very way we all think about disease — and the best ways to research, define, prevent, and treat it — is being subtly distorted because so many of the ostensibly independent players, including patient advocacy groups, are largely singing tunes acceptable to companies seeking to maximize markets for drugs and devices,” researchers Ray Moynihan and Lisa Bero wrote in an accompanying commentary. The papers published in the journal cover a variety of issues. 1) More than of patient advocacy organizations that responded to a survey indicated that they had received industry funding in their last fiscal year. For most, the money represented a small share of their budget. But 12 percent said they received more than half of their money from industry. Most organizations reported having a conflict of interest policy, but a much smaller percent said that their groups had policies for public disclosure of those relationships. Fewer than 8 percent of respondents said their group ”perceived pressure to conform its positions to the interests of corporate donors or partners” and nearly 14 percent said their group had declined a contribution because of concerns about conflicts of interest. ”Although the amounts and proportions of financial support from industry are modest, the pervasive nature of industry support suggests the need for robust public debate about how to ensure that [these groups] serve the interests of their constituencies,” the authors affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic and other academic medical centers wrote. It called for greater transparency of funding sources by the groups. 2) Organizations that received funding from opioid manufacturers were less supportive of guidelines proposed by the CDC to limit prescribing of the drugs for chronic pain. More than 150 organizations formally submitted comments after the proposed guidelines were released in February 2016, and 80 percent of them were supportive, though some had recommendations for changes. Among the 45 groups that received money from opioid makers, though, the level of support was only 62 percent. And none of those groups disclosed their funding sources in their comments. (The CDC did not ask or require them to do so.) ”More people are dying than ever before from these products, and it’s important to know how the market is shaped by the spending of drug companies,” G. Caleb Alexander, of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview. 3) Two committees that developed guidelines for the management of high cholesterol and hepatitis C did not fully comply with standards set by the Institute of Medicine in 2011 to limit the number of panelists. The Institute of Medicine required that fewer than half of guideline writers have commercial ties and that all chairs and have no conflicts. But in both cases, at least one chairperson received money from industry and, in the case of the hepatitis C guidelines, a substantial majority of panelists also received money. Moreover, the authors noted, when separate committees with no commercial conflicts developed guidelines for cholesterol and hepatitis C, the recommendations were more conservative and called for less expensive treatments. 4) Nearly 80 percent of U. S. who use Twitter have financial conflicts of interest. The authors said their results raise questions about how conflicts should be disclosed and managed on social media. It recommended that, at minimum, physicians active on Twitter should disclose their industry funding in their biographies. A preliminary analysis of tweets by these doctors, not yet published, has shown that ”a sizeable percentage are tweeting about drugs that they have specific ties to,” oncologist Vinay Prasad, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health Science University, said in an interview. ”Not a single one has disclosed so far, but we’ll find out.” A pharmaceutical industry trade group, in a statement, defended the relationships between companies and other organizations. ”Industry engages with stakeholders across the health care system to hear their perspectives and priorities,” said the statement by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. ”We work with many organizations with which we have disagreements on public policy issues, including on prescription medicine costs, but believe engagement and dialogue are critical. ”While we cannot speak for particular organizations, we have heard from many patients who are concerned about the growing cost burden when trying to access needed health care services and treatments,” PhRMA said. In addition, there is broad recognition by the patient community of the significant unmet medical need that exists for many fighting devastating and debilitating diseases.” Moynihan and Bero, the authors of the JAMA Internal Medicine commentary, wrote that their primary concern is that patient groups actually speak for patients. Recently, when Mylan came under widespread criticism for the price of its EpiPen, patient groups were largely silent. ”To ensure a healthier patient voice in medical research, education, policy and practice, sponsored groups that want to be seen as independent and credible need to decrease their industry sponsorship and ultimately disentangle, gaining in authority what they lose in resources,” they wrote. Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter at ProPublica, an independent nonprofit newsroom based in New York.

The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been suspended after nearly three years of fruitless work. The airplane vanished from radar on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Since then, nothing has been seen of the plane except for pieces of debris that floated far from the original focus. International search crews have examined more than 45, 000 square miles of the Indian Ocean, where experts initially concluded the plane was most likely to be located, to no avail. The search was suspended Tuesday, NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports. ”The transportation ministers of Malaysia, China and Australia issued a joint statement, saying that despite their best efforts, the search had come up empty,” Anthony says. ”They added that their decision to suspend the search was not made lightly, or without sadness.” The search had been ”painstaking,” The Associated Press reports, with large ships dragging small vessels equipped with sonar through the ocean just above the seabed, and unmanned submarines examining any areas of interest detected by sonar. But more recent analysis suggested that the plane might never have been in the search area at all. A report suggested it may have been located slightly north — in a section of ocean that hasn’t been searched yet. But the governments organizing and funding the search decided that information wasn’t specific enough to justify expanding the search zone, NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel reports. ”It’s hard for victims’ families to accept that the authorities will not enlarge the search to the north, and that their loved ones may never be found,” Anthony says. Voice370, which represents the family members of the flight’s passengers and crew, issued a statement saying the group was ”dismayed” by the decision. ”Commercial planes cannot just be allowed to disappear without a trace,” the group said. ”Stopping at this stage is nothing short of irresponsible.” The search has been suspended unless ”new evidence emerges” that points to the plane’s precise location — something beyond the capabilities of current technology, the AP writes. In December, when the report suggesting the plane was farther north was first released, Geoff Brumfiel described what we know about the plane’s fate: ”Fragmentary evidence from military radars and ”pings” from the plane’s own satellite communications system suggested that the Boeing 777 executed a series of turns that eventually led it to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Authorities believe it crashed somewhere along a long arc of ocean, after exhausting its fuel supplies. ”In July 2015, a fragment of the plane washed up on the shores of La Réunion, a small island off the African coast. Since that time, more than 20 other pieces of debris have been recovered along beaches in places like Madagascar, Mauritius, Tanzania and South Africa. It has never been clear why the plane crashed in the first place. ”If the plane is never found, the reasons for its disappearance and crash will probably never be known,” the AP writes, ”though Malaysia has said the plane’s erratic movements after takeoff were consistent with deliberate actions.”

In a career that spans more than 20 years, Spoon has perfected a kind of ruthlessly airtight efficiency: Every few years, the Austin band returns with a new batch of perfectly compact songs. As consistent as it is beloved, Spoon never fails to hit its mark — delivered forcefully, and with hooks for days. On March 17, Spoon returns with its ninth album, Hot Thoughts — and if the title track is any indication, that impeccably chosen palette’s got a few new colors. Thanks in part, no doubt, to Dave Fridmann joining the band as a ”Hot Thoughts” has a rangy, swirly sparkle to it, portending an album that spreads out for a bit of a journey. 1. Hot Thoughts, 2. WhisperI’lllistentohearit, 3. Do I Have To Talk You Into It, 4. First Caress, 5. Pink Up, 6. Can I Sit Next To You, 7. I Ain’t The One, 8. Tear It Down, 9. Shotgun, 10. Us, Spoon’s Hot Thoughts comes out March 17 via Matador.