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President Donald Trump and wife Melania Trump ended a busy Inauguration Day with a visit to three balls in Washington. The Liberty Ball and Freedom Ball both took place at the Washington Convention Center. The Trumps took the stage first at the Liberty Ball shortly after 9:30 p. m. ”Well, we did it,” Trump began. ”We began this journey and they said we — we, and me — we didn’t have a chance. But we knew we were going to win.” Trump thanked his supporters, along with his wife Melania and Vice President Mike Pence. ”We want to see great things happen for our country,” Trump said. ”We want to make America great again and we will.” Their first dance was to musicians performing the Frank Sinatra song ”My Way.” The first lady’s dress at the inaugural ball, which often ends up in a museum, was a joint effort of designer Hervé Pierre and Melania Trump. A little over 45 minutes later, according to The New York Times, the Trumps headed over to the Freedom Ball. And their first dance was, once again, ”My Way.” The final stop was the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball at the National Building Museum. Many of the attendees were service members in full uniform. The president, first lady, vice president and second lady each danced with a service member. During the ball, Trump addressed service members in Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan via a live video link. ”You have somebody that’s going to be right alongside you,” Trump said, per DoD News. ”We’re going to do it together. Honestly, not only the support you’ve given me, but the courage you show is incredible, and it’s going to be appreciated. It’s going to be appreciated more than ever before.” The night closed with Trump and Pence cutting a giant red, white and blue cake — with a saber.

When the transition from President Obama to President Trump happened officially at noon ET, a lot changed, including the White House website. Waiting on the new website were six priority areas laid out, including on foreign policy. The entire foreign policy section is literally just 220 words, so it’s hard to draw more than a thumbnail sketch about Trump’s foreign policy. But it gives the first hint of something of a Trump doctrine. Echoing his inaugural address, ”America First” is the organizing theme. To that protectionist point, there’s a whole section on trade. And Trump specifically laid out three points on his approach to the world and his priorities: 1. Defeating ISIS2. ”Rebuild” the military3. ”Embrace diplomacy” . .. ”We are always happy when old enemies become friends. . ..” 1. Defeating ISIS, On defeating ISIS, however, it still remains unclear what Trump will do exactly. ISIS was the top concern for Republican primary voters, and his tough rhetoric helped him in the campaign. He declared he would ”bomb the s*** out of them” but would not lay out a plan. He said he wanted to be ”unpredictable.” He never committed to a ramping up of ground troops. But he mentioned the possibility of as many as 30, 000 troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That’s nowhere close to the number of troops the U. S. had at the height of the Iraq war, but — if Trump followed through — it would represent a significant ramping up of U. S. involvement. Currently, there are only about 600 American military personnel in Syria, about 8, 400 in Afghanistan and almost 6, 000 in Iraq. Russia is also a critical player in Syria. Trump, of course, has said he would be reaching out to Moscow to help fight ISIS and hopes the Russians are helpful. 2. Rebuild the military, Trump has repeatedly harped on this throughout the campaign, but the context here is important. The U. S. spends $596 billion a year on its military. That’s about three times more on its military than all other NATO countries — combined. While spending, adjusted for inflation, has declined some during the Obama administration, the U. S. remains the largest and most capable military in the world. NPR’s Phil Ewing this notion here in April of last year. 3. ”Embrace diplomacy” — ”we are always happy when old enemies become friends” Trump said his foreign policy would be ”based on American interests.” The new president has been very . He has actually been against U. S. trade policies for decades the rhetoric has remained the same since the 1980s. But back then the bogeyman was different — today, he talks of China back then, it was Japan that he said was dumping its cars and VCRs. Trump also noted that he would ”embrace diplomacy,” that the U. S. would ”not go abroad in search of enemies,” but ”that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.” The turn of phrase — ”we are always happy when old enemies become friends” — could be interpreted somewhat provocatively. It could raise eyebrows politically, given Trump’s praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign and his grudging acceptance that Russian meddling was responsible for the hack and leaks of Democratic emails. ”I think it was Russia,” Trump said in his first press conference since being elected before adding later: ”All right, but you know what, it could have been others also.” On ”old friends” becoming ”allies,” ironically, it is precisely America’s closest allies — Japan, South Korea and most of NATO — who are most queasy about Trump’s provocative talk that has questioned the utility of these relationships. NPR International Editor Will Dobson and Middle East Editor Larry Kaplow contributed to this post.

The inauguration of President Donald Trump was a divisive event, as the protests in Northwest D. C. showed. But a few blocks southeast, another battle was unfolding on the inaugural stage. Not between Republican and Democrat, but between a man and his poncho. Light rain began just as Trump started in on his remarks. Fortunately, many in attendance came prepared. Former first lady Michelle Obama and former second lady Jill Biden shared a bubble umbrella. First lady Melania Trump had one, too. Other attendees had translucent ponchos. Former President George W. Bush went that route, but it didn’t work out exactly as planned. As much as he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the poncho to cooperate, and the Twitterverse couldn’t let it go. Bush shouldn’t worry though it’s not the first time a Republican has got himself into some trouble with a poncho. Back in 2012, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney was criticized for making fun of some NASCAR fans for wearing the rain gear, saying: ”I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.” If history is any guide, will the dreaded poncho make another splash on the political stage four years from now? Or will it be bubble gum? (Watch closely behind Melania Trump as another former Texas governor, Rick Perry, struggles to blow a bubble.)

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the you may have missed on this week’s Morning Edition. Inked, Don’t cry for me, Susanna. Cry for the Charger fans and their tattoos. As Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said, the San Diego Chargers announced that they’re moving to Los Angeles for the 2017 season. And unfortunately, their fans are not moving with them, but their fans’ tattoos? Well, that’s a little bit tougher. Tattoo parlors are coming to the aide of the fans though. Think of them as quarterback, coming to to relieve the other two after a catastrophic 3 quarters. The parlors are offering discounts to help people get through this ”painful endeavor” by refashioning the Chargers icons into something else. Turns out team love isn’t forever, only diamonds are. Waddle, waddle, Put one foot in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking out the door. Well, unless you’re this swan. As Morning Edition host David Greene said on Monday one swan decided to ruffle some feathers of those on a commuter train outside of London. For two miles the swan waddled along the tracks with the train slowly crawling behind it. After a much delayed commute, the British news site Metro reported one man got onto the tracks and waved his laptop at the swan who was finally captured. Before you go there, no harm came to the bird. It was released and apparently apologized for its transgressions. Now mosey along. There’s nothing else to read about birds here. No Scrubs, She don’t want no scrub. A scrub is a shark that can’t get no love from her. Honestly, that’s what I believe Leonie said. As Morning Edition host David Greene said on Tuesday, Leonie is a proud zebra shark mom, who gave birth to three baby sharks last year. But unlike the campfire song ”Baby Shark,” these babies did not have a daddy shark. In fact, Leonie didn’t have any contact with a male shark before this set of three was born. So here’s a fun fact: the British magazine New Scientist reports that occasionally some animals that reproduce sexually can also reproduce asexually. Sharks are included on this list. However, this usually happens when a female hasn’t made contact with a male before. That’s not the case with Leonie. She had many little baby sharks with a male partner. He probably tried to holler, again, but his game was kinda weak and Leonie decided she didn’t want any of his time and she went her own way. Paint paw prints Your child couldn’t paint that, but maybe your bear could. This is, assuming of course, if you had a bear. Then maybe your child could sell your bear’s paintings to potential buyers at exhibit openings. And then your bear would hibernate? Yes, you’re with me now. Now as Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said on Wednesday, that is basically how one Finnish painter operates. Juuso — the artist himself — is a brown bear and he has his paintings on display in Helsinki. Eleven original works of art can be seen and some of his prints could be yours. That is if you’re willing to spend some cash as some of his prints have sold for more than $4, 000. Yeah, that’s not chump change. What’s better? Some paintings feature some bits of Juuso’s fur. though it’s cool.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are now working as contractors for the rapidly growing industry, specifically for the largest companies, Uber and Lyft. But a new survey, released this week, finds that Lyft, with its fluorescent pink mustache symbol, is more popular with drivers. More than 75 percent of Lyft drivers said they were satisfied with their experience, while less than half of Uber drivers said the same. Lyft is a significantly smaller company, but its drivers made more money. According to the survey, Uber drivers averaged $15. 68 per hour, while Lyft drivers made an average of $17. 50. Plus, Lyft also prompts passengers to tip. This was one of the findings from a survey of 1, 150 drivers, one of the largest polls of the sort. It was conducted through the blog, podcast and YouTube channel known as The Rideshare Guy, by the founder Harry Campbell with help from researchers at Stanford University. Declining pay, While the companies are enormously popular and often much cheaper than a taxi, Campbell and his team have previously reported that the prices have been declining. Those price drops may be increasing the valuations of the companies, but Campbell says they are taking their toll on drivers who must work longer hours to make a living wage. ”What that means for drivers is that they are driving further for the same income,” Campbell says. ”Ultimately they aren’t making more than they would in a service job at McDonald’s or Burger King.” The drivers are contractors rather than employees of the companies, and their wages are determined by how many rides they do in a day. But the survey also found that the most valuable element, after pay, was the flexibility of hours. ”You can take the day off without asking your boss,” Campbell says. So overall, he says, ”for drivers the situation isn’t terrible, but it isn’t improving.” The survey dovetails with a $ settlement that Uber just reached with federal regulators who charged that the company misled drivers by exaggerating how much they could earn and encouraging them to lease cars through a ’ ’ program that turned out to be not as as advertised. Different demographics The driver survey also found that drivers tend to be a lot older than their passengers. Close to 30 percent are between 51 and 60 years old, and another quarter are older than 61. Campbell says some of this reflects the fact that many retired people drive to supplement their social security or pension. But Campbell believes this might also reflect a darker trend: age discrimination. More than 53 percent of drivers are which is 20 points above the national average. ”You have these older drivers,” Campbell says, ”where it’s a difference between no job and a job. .. This is one of their only options.” On the upside, the survey illustrates how the ride hailing companies — which accept virtually anyone as long as they meet eligibility requirements — are slowly breaking the mold for women. Close to 20 percent of drivers are female, compared to about 1 percent among taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Unfortunately, women still make less than man, by close to $2 an hour. Though Campbell suggests it might be because a lot of female drivers are ”uncomfortable driving Friday and Saturday nights, when demand is highest but there are a lot of intoxicated passengers.” Campbell says ultimately some drivers manage to get the system to work better for them than others. For instance, some drivers might have more cars or lower car payments, which raises their profit margins. But for others, the numbers just don’t add up. According to the survey, about half of all drivers quit after just one year.

It can be difficult to know what to say when a friend is struggling. The conversation is hard to even start. Maya Cohen, a student at Tulane University, says she knows better how to intervene after playing a video game created to help people learn how to recognize signs of psychological distress like depression, anxiety and substance abuse, and get them professional help. Like all incoming students at Tulane, Cohen had to participate in an online conversation simulation game titled ” For College Students.” The purpose is to teach empathetic conversation skills. In the game, you play Jesse, a friend of Travis, a depressed young man who’s been failing his classes. Jesse notices that Travis hasn’t been the same lately, and goes to his apartment to see how he’s doing. Checking in is the kind of supportive effort that friends ideally do for one another, and the game is supposed to encourage more of that. We hear out each other’s burdens. Friends are the first bulwark of support when times are a little rough or when something’s deeply wrong. We might pride ourselves on the advice we give, the shoulders we offer, the general ”being there” for our friends. But our skill at doing that varies, says Glenn Albright, a psychologist at Baruch College at the City University of New York and cofounder of Kognito, the company that developed the game. ”It’s the sad reality that a lot of people don’t know how to help people,” he says. ”How to identify those who are struggling, to approach them, talk to them and give them a level of comfort.” Albright thought that the right conversational training program could help people help those around them. ”You’re talking about 40 percent of college students reporting systems of depression where they say it’s interfering with their functioning,” Albright says. Kognito’s first simulation, released in 2009, focused on conversations. The company has since developed over a dozen simulations. Many focus on peer conversations, like the game that Cohen played others address or family interactions. At the end of the conversation, participants get examples of how to sensitively suggest mental health services. In simulations for medical professionals, that might mean managing care collaboratively with other health professionals. Kognito grounds all of these simulations in psychological counseling methods such as motivational interviewing, which stresses conversation techniques like using questions and listening and reflecting on what someone says during a conversation. ”[This] is really trying to engage the other person in dialogue, understand what’s happening and what’s influencing their behavior,” says Marlyn Allicock, a health behaviorist at the University of Texas in Dallas who is not involved with Kognito. ”Those skills are really grounded in empathy.” In the game that Cohen played, when Jesse relates to the things his friend is saying, Travis responds much more warmly. If Jesse is brusque during the conversation, Travis clams up. ”They’ve done a really nice job modeling a person’s behavior,” Allicock says. The games also shows things that might push people apart, Allicock notes. Giving unwarranted advice, for example, might give the impression that you think you know better than your friend. ”Those are things that push people away,” Allicock says. ”I’m not going to open up to you if you’re saying, ’You’re not doing this right.’ ” Cohen says she didn’t realize any of this until she started playing through the Kognito simulation. ”A speech bubble came up with tips,” she says. One says using ”I” statements is good, but not when a judgment is attached. That reminded Cohen that when a friend of hers would complain about something, Cohen would make a judgment. ”I would approach her and be like, ’I think you’re overreacting,’ ” she says. Cohen, 19, says she kept thinking back to one time last year when she feels she really should have talked to her friend. She got a screenshot of text messages that her friend Angie had sent to her boyfriend. We aren’t using her last name to protect her privacy. The reason will become clear later in this story. ”[Angie] was texting her boyfriend saying, ’I feel none of my friends care about me. Would anybody even notice if I was gone?’ ” Cohen says. She was worried, and wanted to ask Angie about it. ”I just didn’t know how to start that conversation. And once I did I wouldn’t know how to continue it.” Instead, Cohen brought the text to her school counselor, who pulled Angie out of class. ”At the time I was really mad because I was like, so depressed, and now you’re making my life harder,” Angie says now. ”They added this entire like new situation.” Angie, 18, says that at the time she was considering killing herself. The counselor’s intervention got her the help she needed, but the fact that none of her friends tried talking to her first made her upset. Cohen feels like it put a strain on their relationship, even after they made amends. ”We could never go back to how we were before,” Cohen says. After the Kognito training, Cohen says she’d been thinking a lot about how she could have handled the situation better. At the very least, she says, she could have gone to Angie first to check in on her, talk to her and find a way to get her help, but with her consent. ”That would have been more inclusive of Angie,” Cohen says. Angus Chen is a freelance writer based in New York. Find him on Twitter @angrchen.

In its history, Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C. never had a deaf female president — until a year ago. Roberta Cordano is the first deaf woman to lead the school. Gallaudet is a liberal arts university devoted to deaf and students. Classes are taught in American Sign Language, and all students and faculty are required to know how to sign. But president Cordano never attended a deaf school herself. ”I grew up during a period of time when it was believed that American Sign Language was what they called a monkey language,” Cordano says, speaking through an interpreter provided by Gallaudet. While the interpreter translates rapidly, Cordano whispers out faintly in English as she signs. Cordano grew up surrounded by other Deaf people. Her parents and older sister are Deaf and so were many of her childhood neighbors. Her hometown of Delavan, Wisc. is where the Wisconsin School for the Deaf is located. But even though her father was a teacher there, her parents sent her to the local public school. ”They wanted to make sure their children were going to do well,” she says. ”At that time, it wasn’t really understood that American Sign Language was a language in and of its own right.” Going to a hearing elementary, middle and high school made Cordano a pro at reading lips and pronunciation. She never had an interpreter in the classroom. In hindsight, Cordano says school was exhausting. ”I had worked all day long trying to understand people and focus so much on what they were saying and then figuring out what I was trying to be taught.” Cordano says she had to work twice as hard as her peers just to keep up. But she didn’t burn out. When time came to choose a college, Cordano decided to stay in a hearing environment. She went to Beloit College for undergrad and the University of for law school. She broke with family tradition her parents and older sister are alumni of Gallaudet. ”They understood the value of understanding and appreciating the richness of both worlds,” Cordano says. While Cordano enjoyed her college and law school experience, she was often the only deaf person in the room. Her experience is contrastingly different from the lives Gallaudet students lead on campus. ”It’s like another country,” says freshman Ariella Dramin, who also spoke through a Gallaudet interpreter. ”It would be nice if we had our own country, but we don’t.” Dramin is fourth generation deaf. She says being deaf should be seen as a culture, not a disability. It’s a concept, she adds, that many people outside of Gallaudet don’t understand when they meet her. ”I hate when people at a store try to say something to me and I say, ”I can’t hear you,” and they have this pity face,” she says. ”We’re a community, we’re fine. We have a language.” American Sign Language flourishes at Gallaudet. Students chat with their peers in the lunchroom and as they walk through the hallways to class, carrying out their conversations with their hands and facial expressions instead of spoken words. Gallaudet feels like any other college campus, just quieter. While Gallaudet is the only university devoted solely to the deaf and hard of hearing, the Americans With Disabilities act requires all universities to provide interpreting services. But Savannah Hobbs chose Gallaudet because she didn’t want to rely on someone to translate for her. She didn’t enjoy having an interpreter in elementary school. ”The interpreter doesn’t go with me to lunch. I was completely left out of any kind of conversation,” she says. ”Here, not only can I have my own conversation at lunch, but I can just look over to a table and see what other people are talking about because everyone’s using the same language.” There’s a long history of Gallaudet students insisting deaf people are as capable as the hearing. In 1988, Gallaudet students led massive protests calling for the school to appoint its first deaf president. The Deaf President Now protests were successful and the university has maintained a tradition of having a deaf leader ever since. Despite her deaf upbringing, Cordano brings an outsider’s perspective to Gallaudet. Most of her private and professional life has been in hearing environments. Her wife and two children are hearing, and most of the jobs she’s had before coming to Gallaudet — she’s done everything from lead healthcare companies to serve as the assistant attorney general of Minnesota were in a places where she, as a deaf woman, was a minority. ”When I moved to Minnesota, I actually saw the model of bilingual education,” Cordano says, referring to schools where deaf and students receive equal instruction in both English and American Sign Language. Cordano helped start two charter schools following this model. ”I grew to love and respect that model so much because I realized it was an option I was never given.” Cordano never had a deaf school experience of her own where she could sign to her classmates and peers. But she doesn’t feel like she missed out. She considers herself an inherent optimist. ”I think I’ve always navigated two worlds,” Cordano says. ”And I’ve cherished both worlds.”

In the Central Valley, there’s a bumper sticker you see all over the place. It’s shaped like California, and reads ”My job depends on Ag.” In California, that agriculture depends on immigrant labor. Many farmers in the state supported President Donald Trump despite his stance on immigration. So as the new Trump administration takes office, what’s the thinking of those involved in the region’s biggest industry? Just after the workday ends, men in dirty jeans and work boots stream into a small record store in the farming town of Mendota. Racks of CDs and music posters line the walls, but nobody’s browsing. The guys are in line to use the store’s wire transfer service. They’re sending money home to families in Mexico and El Salvador. ”We just came in from the fields — nine hours pruning pistachio trees,” says a man in a sweatshirt. He’ll say only that his name is Pablo because, like all the farm workers I talked to for this story, he’s in the country illegally. I ask him what he thinks of Trump’s tough talk on immigration. Pablo’s answer includes a strong, derogatory word. ”You think a gringo’s gonna be pruning pistachios?” he asks me in Spanish. He says in his 17 years working the California fields, he’s seen only Latinos — mostly immigrants — doing this work. So he’s not buying the idea that he’s taking away a job from a U. S. citizen. I also visit Steve Murray’s farm outside Bakersfield, where a few workers are crouched among rows of strawberries that will sell at farmers markets around the region. As Murray watches them work, he explains why he needs foreign workers. Even though this area has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, Murray says he has a hard time finding people to pick his fruit. He didn’t vote for Trump, and he says his business would suffer if the new administration carries through on plans for mass deportations of immigrants. ”When the economy went south — what was that, in 2007, 2008 and 2009 — and jobs dried up, there were people that returned to Mexico and didn’t come back,” he says. ”It’s hard to imagine that things could get much worse.” An hour north, near Porterville, dairy farmer Tom Barcellos is feeling more optimistic. He tells me he met Trump, and he’s betting the ’s side will win out. ”Of course you heard about him saying ’build a wall,’ ” Barcellos says. ”Well, what he told us is that wall is going to have a door in it, and we’re going to talk to the right people that want to come in and work, and they’re going to have an opportunity to do that.” There’s already an agricultural guest worker program — the visa program. And use has gone up steadily over the past five years, as fewer workers enter the country illegally. But every farmer I talked to complained about it, calling it cumbersome and expensive. Some experts speculate a Trump administration might strip away worker protections and create a program that’s more favorable to employers. Barcellos says Trump assured him that people who have been working in the United States for years will have a chance to get temporary visas, too. But, Barcellos says, ”Citizenship . .. that’s a different animal and let’s not mix up the two.” A path to citizenship doesn’t seem likely under Trump. And not every farm worker I spoke with wants U. S. citizenship. Take Eugenio. I meet him while he’s pruning pistachio trees on Murray’s farm near Bakersfield. Eugenio’s wife and kids are in Mexico. ”So I make a little money, then go back to Oaxaca, where I’m building a house,” he says. Eugenio tells me he’s crossed the border eight times illegally. But he says border security is so tight now he hasn’t been home to Mexico in five years. ”I’m trying to figure out how to come with a work visa,” he says. ”I’d really like that.” Then there are people like Elfego, who’s working on a tree nearby. He doesn’t like the idea of visas. He’s been in the United States 17 years. His family is here. ”What would happen if Trump starts giving visas to people over there?” he asks. Elfego worries legal guest workers from Mexico would replace him. ”What happens with those of us who are here? He’ll deport us because we’re illegal,” he says. Some worry the future under President Trump could bring more immigration raids, less enforcement of farmworker protection laws or the forced use of a government tool for checking employment eligibility. For now, the only thing certain is that the Central Valley’s $35 billion agricultural economy depends on policies that balance the needs of both growers and workers. This story comes to us from NPR member station KQED in California. It first aired as part of The California Report.

At Goats and Soda we’re always watching the developing world. A group of international photographers is doing the same thing — but from a drone’s perspective. We mined the website dronestagram (think Instagram for drone pics) for the most riveting drone photos of the developing world from the past year. Here are a few of the images we came across and the stories behind them. An island home Zorik Olangi grew up on Malaita, which is part of the Solomon Islands in Oceania. He’s now a postgraduate trainee in obstetrics and gynecology in nearby Papua New Guinea but returns home often — along with his drones, which he flies as a hobby to take aerial photos. ”Coming from a rural remote area, I always wondered what my island looks like from the air,” Olangi says. He says the village pictured here, Lilisiana, is known for its expert sea navigators and fishermen — and its shell jewelry. In fact, Olangi tells us, shells from this region were used for thousands of years as currency. The homes pictured, according to Olangi, are built from mangrove trees found in nearby forests and have roofs stitched from palm leaves. He says they could be built so close to the lagoon’s edge because the waves break far from the shore. Over the years, Olangi has seen more homes built out of modern materials and families placing a greater emphasis on education. His big fear for his island is climate change. ”My only worry is that the sea levels are rising and these villagers will surely be affected.” Romanian sheep, seen from the sky Professional photographer and videographer Szabolcs Ignácz captured this shot while on assignment for the World Wildlife Fund in his home country, Romania. He passed this herd of sheep along the road in the village of Marpod, in Romania’s Sibiu County, and launched his drone to take this photo (and some mesmerizing video, which can be seen at his website, DroneMob). Ignácz says Marpod is in the heart of Transylvania, where traditional Saxon houses nestle in the mountains. ”I might compare it to the Shire from Lord of the Rings,” he says. Many of the 800 or so residents are farmers, Ignácz says, noting that some have found success moving into organic farming and tourism. ”Lion’s Rock” towers above a Sri Lankan jungle, Jerome Courtial, a French travel and aerial photographer based in London, traveled to Sri Lanka with the intention of photographing the ancient palace and fortress complex of Sigiriya. Known as ”Lion’s Rock,” the UNESCO World Heritage site towers above the surrounding jungle. To launch his drone from the ideal place, Courtial tells us, he hiked through dense jungle, surrounded by hostile monkeys. Cambodian children couldn’t believe what they saw, This image was captured by Christopher Honglin of Mauritius while on a trip to Cambodia with his girlfriend — and his DJI Phantom 3 drone. When the couple visited Tonlé Sap River region, Honglin says: ”Kids were in awe at the sight of the drone. We wanted to share how their village looked from the top. They couldn’t believe their eyes.” For more drone images from around the globe, visit dronestagram.

With no shortage of material to work with, Saturday Night Live satirized a packed week in American politics, reiterating themes imparted by critics for months. The episode kicked off by lampooning Russia’s role in influencing the U. S. election. Cast member Beck Bennett brought back smug shirtless Vladimir Putin, the star of Saturday’s cold open, to assuage America’s fears about their new president, in a speech carried by RT, the Russian outlet. ”You are worried that your country is in the hands of this unpredictable man. But don’t worry, it’s not,” he smirks. Just look at Russia, suggests SNL’s Putin, whose administration also started out on a road of skepticism. ”Many Russians were skeptical of me at first too, but today, no one seems to hear from any of them,” he says. ”It’s like they’re gone.” The same day millions of American women marched to protest an administration they believe threatens their rights, Bennett’s Putin says that we must simply look to the satisfaction of Russian women to ease our fears. Enter Olya, Kate McKinnon’s subservient Russian character, reading from a scripted statement detailing her contentment under Putin’s leadership. Olya returns, from outside the window behind him, wearing a pink ’pussyhat,’ gesturing ”I’m watching you,” at her leader. SNL made fun of the low attendance of Friday’s inauguration, the central topic of discussion at the White House Briefing Room earlier Saturday evening, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer accused media outlets of downplaying crowd sizes. But what may have genuinely quelled American viewers more were diplomatic words from the week’s host, comedian Aziz Ansari. Ansari’s monologue fell in line with a larger trend among soapbox comedians, who aim to argue a broader social message first — to what’s often their already solid fan base — and to elicit laughter second. As NPR Politics reporter Jessica Taylor notes, ”The most nuanced takes on the election have come from comedians,” like Dave Chappelle’s hosting stint the weekend after the election and now, Aziz Ansari the day after the inauguration. ”We’ve always been divided by some of these big political issues. It’s fine,” the comedian said. ”As long as we treat each other with respect and remember that ultimately, we’re all Americans, we’ll be fine.” Dubbing him the ”Chris Brown of politics,” Ansari said we shouldn’t demonize all of Trump’s supporters. Like the fans of the pop star who beat former girlfriend Rihanna, some supporters rallied behind Trump for his ideology (in Brown’s case, the tunes) not his character. Laying out the day’s events as a reason to stay hopeful, Ansari continued, ”Change doesn’t come from presidents, change comes from large groups of angry people. And if day one [of Trump’s presidency] is any indication, you are part of the largest group of angry people I’ve ever seen,” he cracked. ”Yesterday, Trump was inaugurated — today, an entire gender protested against him.” The next sketch of the night featured Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway (McKinnon, again) in a parody. Dodging questions in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper (Bennett) McKinnon’s Conway pivots instead to perform a musical number about her newfound celebrity in the political world. Next up, the show’s ”Weekend Update” segment took on the week’s leftover news headlines. In exchange for the ”Update” anchor’s usual humorous twist to cap off each news item, Michael Che frequently leaned on a reaction image of Michelle Obama depicted with a glance, adding a curt ”Hmph.” The many faces of the former first lady on Inaguration Day, which suggest she broke her poker face, have been circulating social media. The show closed with a sentimental tribute to the 44th president. Cecily Strong, joined a couple verses later by Sasheer Zamata, sang ”To Sir, With Love,” in front of a backdrop of a photo of Barack Obama. The scene echoed the show’s episode, featuring Kate McKinnon’s solemn double tribute to a freshly defeated Hillary Clinton and the late singer Leonard Cohen. The screen faded to black with the message, ”Thank You President Obama.” Viewers on Twitter lamented the absence of resident Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, who has previously said he’s ”trying to shed the Donald Trump cloak.” Hopefully Baldwin’s will give some solace to the new president, who has criticized SNL as ”Unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.”

A top aide to President Donald Trump says he won’t release his tax returns, insisting that voters aren’t concerned about the issue. ”The White House response is he’s not going to release his tax returns,” said Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, on ABC’s ”This Week.” ”We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care,” Conway added. During another interview on NBC’s ”Meet The Press” Conway also repeatedly clashed with host Chuck Todd over estimates of crowd size at Friday’s inauguration, saying the difference between media and administration officials amounted to ”alternative facts.” ”You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” she said. Conway also pushed back hard against suggestions that Spicer had deliberately misrepresented crowd size, telling Todd, ”. .. if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here.” (Conway’s interview with Todd begins shortly after the 6:53 mark.) Conway’s comments about the President’s tax returns seem to represent a departure from Trump’s earlier statements, which indicated that he would release his returns, if not for the fact that he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. In September, after presidential candidate Mike Pence released his own tax returns, Pence’s spokesman noted, ”These returns are being released with the full support of Mr. Trump who plans to release his tax returns upon completion of a routine audit.” During his Jan. 11th press conference, Trump said, ”I’m not releasing the tax returns because, as you know, they’re under audit.” He added, ”You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, OK? They’re the only ones. ..I won. I mean, I became president. No, I don’t think they care at all. I don’t think they care at all. I think you care.” An ABC Street Journal poll released earlier this month indicated that 74 percent of Americans want Trump to release his tax returns, including 49 percent of his own supporters. In addition, about 217, 000 people had signed an online petition calling for the returns to be released as of Sunday. U. S. presidents are not required to release their tax returns, but they have regularly done so since the 1970s, as a gesture of transparency. Trump’s refusal to do so has been widely criticized by critics who say his many domestic and foreign financial ties need to be scrutinized more carefully. ”The did not release his tax returns. Every other candidate for president has released his tax returns, but he didn’t want to. And he apparently won’t, and we just have no idea where the financing is coming from for all these companies he owns all over the world, all these interests,” said Richard Painter, ethics adviser to former President George W. Bush, during an interview on NPR’s ”Fresh Air” earlier this month. The Conway interview came one day after Trump excoriated the media over reports about how many people showed up to watch his saying journalists are ”among the most dishonest people on earth.” During a visit to the CIA, Trump said as many as 1. 5 million people showed up for the inauguration, and Spicer later added that it was ”the largest to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” But aerial photographs indicate a much smaller crowd, and ridership on the Washington D. C. subway system was down from President Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. While Trump himself had offered an estimate of crowd size, Conway said it wasn’t possible to count the number of people attending, saying, ”I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or another. There’s no way to quantify crowd numbers.” That echoed comments made by Spicer himself, who said the National Park Service no longer gives official estimates of crowd size. However, he then went on to give detailed estimates of the crowd size.

Donald Trump’s first day in office has been marked by much of the same discord that characterized his campaign. In the hours after his inauguration, the newly President began some of the work of governing — even as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in cities across the country, and around the world, to protest Trump’s presidency. Women descend on Washington, Many women brought their families to the main Women’s March in Washington, D. C. which began with a rally with the U. S. Capitol in the background. Heather Ba from Chapel Hill, N. C. said she came with four generations of her family, including her own son. ”We came to show our disapproval of our new president, and I think also to draw attention to women’s issues,” Ba said. She said she believes President Trump to be ”psychologically unwell and not fit to be president,” and said she was considering becoming more involved in local politics during the next few years. Erika Abril came to Washington from Leesburg, VA. with her two teenage daughters. ”I just want them to be part of this — making history,” she said. The family is originally from Ecuador, Abril said, and she’s alarmed by some of Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and minorities. ”It’s just hard to be out of a country that sometimes you don’t like what is happening in there, and then coming here thinking that everything’s gonna be okay, and then not knowing what is going to come,” she said. ”That is the hardest part.” Abril and her daughters held a sign that read, in Spanish, ”Respect my existence or expect my resistance.” Her daughter, Maria Emilia Proano, expressed frustration and disbelief that such a march felt necessary. ”We shouldn’t be doing this, because we should already be equal to men and everything.” Mothers, daughters, and sisters, They were far from the only multigenerational family at the March. Kristina Apgar, 31, came from Brooklyn, New York to march with her mother, Ruth Apgar, and sister, Samantha Apgar, who lives in Connecticut. ”I would be here no matter what by myself, but the fact that my mom and my sister are here and we’re all united fighting for women’s rights and inclusivity for all Americans, it means so much more,” Kristina Apgar said. Ruth Apgar remembers a time when she ”put up with a lot in the workplace,” and she said she doesn’t want her daughters to struggle like she did. ”I’m not going back to the good old days, because quite frankly, they were not good old days for me,” she said. Men, too, While the crowd that filled the streets for multiple blocks was mostly female, there were men among the marchers. Eugene Beckley, a software developer from Ellicott City, MD. said he was thinking of his mother and female cousins when he came to the march. He said he’s worried about the impact of Trump’s administration on women’s rights. ”Feminism in general is only going to grow and be more supported by men supporting it,” Beckley said. Not just women’s issues, While the Women’s March was billed as a display of unity among people concerned about the tone set by the new administration, it hasn’t been without internal conflicts. Women describing themselves as feminists have expressed disappointment about not being allowed to be official partners for the event, whose platform supports abortion rights. And concerns have surfaced about the representation and inclusion of minority women, prompting organizers to stress that the march was also a platform for demonstrators concerned about issues ranging from racial inequality to climate change. Stefani Peart, an student at George Washington University from East Orange, N. J. said she felt the march ultimately succeeded at bringing diverse groups together. ”Being able to stand out here and see people of all races, all ethnicities come together to fight for the same common cause of just women’s rights in general is something that needs to happen more often. ”And the fact that we’re doing it right now just shows how [united] we are as a nation as much as Trump is trying to divide us.” Her classmate, Arion Laws, is also . The Charleston, S. C. native said she came to send Trump and his administration a message. ”They’ve basically insulted every single minority,” she said. Laws said she hoped the large crowds in Washington and across the country would send a message: ”I just want him and his administration to know that no, you can’t silence us, and we won’t be silenced.” Protests beyond the Beltway, In addition to the main event in Washington, D. C. women and their supporters protested across the country and around the world. Marches were held in several major European cities, Mexico, Thailand, and India, among other places. Protestors in the United States who couldn’t make the trip to Washington organized their own hometown events. Thousands turned out in larger cities like Boston and Chicago, while many smaller cities like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, saw substantial turnouts given their size. President Trump starts working Friday, visits the CIA on Saturday, As protestors marched through the streets of Washington, D. C.,Trump made an official visit to CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA. where he praised the CIA, railed against the media, and talked up the size of the crowd at his inauguration: ”a area, all the way up to the Washington Monument, was packed.” That’s despite the fact that aerial photos of Trump’s inauguration showed substantial empty space on the National Mall. In his first hours in office, Trump also took several official actions, including revamping the WhiteHouse. gov website and signing an executive order to ”minimize the economic burden” of the Affordable Care Act. Soon after Trump took office, the Justice Department requested and was granted the delay of two hearings on controversial issues one involved a voter ID law in Texas, and the other was a hearing related to a police reform agreement in Baltimore.

The streets of Washington looked vastly different the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration than they did the . Instead of the largely white crowds that lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, people of all colors, classes and ages filled the streets for what’s being called the most diverse march for women’s rights ever. The Women’s March On Washington drew tens of thousands to the nation’s capital to press for protection of women’s rights, including reproductive health care, LGBT issues and equal pay. ”Sister marches” held concurrently in every state across the nation, (and in several cities abroad) added to the numbers and the diversity. But all that diversity came with a cost: racial tension — not just around the march itself, but around the feminist movement, who leads it and why. Some bemoaned the discord as a distraction from the march, saying on this occasion, ”we should all be women first.” Grace Hong is not surprised. A professor of Asian American and Gender Studies at UCLA, Hong says for decades, white women didn’t have to consider any interests beyond their own because ”historically, the category ’woman’ has, implicitly, meant white women.” The call to put womanhood above all else, Hong says, is based on the idea that ”critique and dissent undermine a unity that’s based on the lowest common denominator: Find the one thing everyone has in common.” The fact that the feminist movement was so white for so long, says Ashley Farmer, is the reason so many women of color steered clear of it. Farmer is a historian at Boston University, and concentrates on women’s history. She says women of color noticed when their interests and needs didn’t get a full hearing. ”When we actually get down to representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas,” Farmer says, ”it tends to be that white or women’s priorities get put above the rest.” It was that way in the 1850s, when some feminists split over whether to champion abolition or women’s rights. (That’s when Sojourner Truth gave her famous ”Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at a women’s rights conference in Ohio.) It was that way in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when ”Sisterhood is Powerful” became a rallying cry — but with very few exceptions (Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Eleanor Holmes Norton) brown and black sisters were very much on the sidelines. It’s why some women, like writers Alice Walker and bell hooks, chose to refer to themselves as ”womanist,” not feminist. They refused to divorce their race from their gender. (They were intersectional before intersectionality as a term came into existence, created by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.) Today, ”womanist” also resonates with a younger generation of feminists, not all of them black. Dolores Arredondo, a marketing executive with Wells Fargo, in Los Angeles, has been calling herself a womanist for years, in direct response to what she saw as white feminists’ exclusion. ”I just remember this history of the feminist movement,” Arredondo shrugs. ”I can see the history, and none of them looked like me.” Arredondo attended the Los Angeles march with her daughter Sophie. Brenda says she’s not hung up on labels. The director of the California regional office for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group, says she’ll answer to most anything — feminist, womanist, whatever — but she has another term she prefers: chingona. ”It means badass!” she says, gleefully. ”A chingona is someone who is not afraid to stand up for what they believe in, somebody that’s happy to shake things up when needed.” Chingonas, she says, get things done. And they come in all races and genders. The Women’s March on Washington started out pretty white, but quickly added young women of color in positions of leadership. They’re three of the four main organizers, and a lot of attention has been paid to how diverse this march has been in contrast to earlier ones. But even as the march’s diversity was being celebrated, it was also causing tension. When ShiShi Rose, a young black Brooklyn blogger, wrote an Instagram post advising white women allies that ”now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less.” She suggested they become more conversant in culture beyond the mainstream standard. Some white women were so offended that they cancelled plans to attend the march. Margo Jefferson doesn’t have much patience with that. A Pulitzer cultural critic for The New York Times for years, (and part of the Artist Table of creatives and celebrities who participated in the New York sister march) Jefferson remembers being one the few early black feminists who called themselves that. (”Of course I was lonely back then,” she admits. ”It was harder for black women to make a feminist movement in the 1970s. ”) Jefferson advises white women who were offended by Rose’s post to ”Sit back. You’re associated with a history that has to do with being bossy and and bigoted in some ways. I can see how that would rattle, and even anger you,” she says gently. ”But I do not consider it reason enough to cancel an attendance at a march like this. Get over it.” Julie Wittes Schlack is a Boston writer and corporate executive who was neither rattled nor offended by criticism from women of color. If the movement is going to progress to the next level, Schlack believes, white feminists like her are going to have to deal with some hard truths. They are right to be proud of their contributions to women’s progress in this country, she says, but more needs to be done. ”The benefits of our work so far around things like reproductive rights aren’t conferred equally across all women,” Schlack points out. ”And that’s what I think younger feminists, feminists of color, particularly, are trying to wake us up to.” The issues are broader, messier, more intersectional: race, gender, class, nationality, immigration status, everything is connected. The Schlack refers to won’t just benefit women of color, points out Boston University’s Ashley Farmer: ”When you make something that accounts for the most oppressed, everybody’s life tends to get better.” But that process may have bumps from time to time. UCLA’s Grace Hong believes the discord around today’s marches may, in the end, be good for feminism: ”Maybe the point is to not all agree,” she says. ”Maybe the point is to do these kinds of things so that you can have the tough conversations.” And maybe, she says, these marches are the next step toward having those tough, but necessary, talks.

Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday before a crowd speckled with red, many of them wearing the campaign’s famous ”Make America Great Again” hats. Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington in downtown D. C. drew a crowd with vastly different political beliefs, but there was one similarity, as the sea of people was peppered with pink, ”pussyhats.” The (mostly) homemade hats were a sly reference to lewd comments Trump made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before the election. And they also echoed some of the traits that experts said made the Trump hat so effective for the winning candidate. Marchers on Saturday said they liked the hat because it unified them around one general message. ”I think this woman who put this together is frickin’ brilliant and a genius because it’s such a political, simple statement: a pink hat, and all you have is the pussycat ears,” said Mellicent Dyane, 50, a casting director from New York City, wearing a neon pink hat as she watched the rally. ”It speaks volumes.” In that sense, the pussyhat has some of the same traits that made the ”Make America Great Again” hat work: it sends a very particular political message, one that is simultaneously unifying and antagonistic. The Trump ”Make America Great Again” implies that somehow, someone (perhaps the political establishment, especially from the party in power for the last eight years) allowed America to no longer be great, and that the wearers are banding together to get that greatness back. Despite not bearing a slogan, the ”pussyhats” have their own clear target of criticism, explains one expert. ”It doesn’t have the words on the hat like the ’Make America Great Hat’ does, but the name of the hat evokes memories of this [Access Hollywood] tape that has a message that the people who made this want to convey,” said Todd Davies, associate director of Stanford’s Symbolic Systems program. But the hats were intended also to be unifying for women (and the men who came to support the march). Following an election where Donald Trump effectively used masculinity as a campaign strategy, the pussyhats are unabashedly feminine, in that they are pink and homemade (not to mention that they reference a derogatory term for the female anatomy). That’s by design: the ”Pussyhat Project” website explains that ”knitting and crochet are traditionally women’s crafts,” adding, ”[knitting] circles are powerful gatherings of women.” The similarities don’t end there. Both hats represent a kind of backlash: one by a group of people who believed they were ignored political outsiders, and the other by people who recently suffered a stinging election defeat. In addition, simplicity is arguably a central goal of both hats, albeit to different ends. The Trump hat’s plain red background with white Times New Roman lettering ”represented [an] everyman sensibility,” as FastCo Design’s Dianna Budds explained this year. Likewise, most pussyhat patterns are simple — one article promised viewers they could learn how to sew a hat ”in the time it actually takes to ironically watch The Bachelor” — allowing some crafters to crank out and distribute many. While the red caps and pink knit hats invite comparison, they aren’t perfect analogues of each other the homemade pussyhats, in shades ranging from fuchsia to powder pink to mauve (and a few that weren’t pink at all) — were naturally not as uniform as the Trump hats. Again, the Pussyhat Project characterizes that as a feature rather than a bug, allowing people to be unique and diverse in their designs. (Likewise, the homemade hats helped people connect with one another — marchers on Saturday reported getting hats from their grandmothers, wives, state legislators, and even strangers on the street.) Importantly, though, the pussyhat has a long way to go to reach the power that the Trump hat has. Extolling the red trucker hat as the ”symbol of the year 2016,” Davies wrote about what made it stick. ”Lots of things can be symbols,” he said. ”but relatively few things actually are. Being a symbol is an acquired status that gets established through use.” The pussyhats could simply become a memento for marchers, as opposed to something they continually wear. After all, Trump rallies gave supporters regular reasons to get together and don their hats, eventually making the caps familiar to many Americans. The pink hats very easily might never reach that point. At least for now, the pussyhats and trucker hats fulfill the basic role of identifying tribes. Saturday afternoon, families ate in restaurants alongside marchers. Without even talking, they knew exactly which team they were on.

Updated at 9:00 a. m. ET The Trump Administration spent its first full day in office taking shots at the media and arguing about crowd sizes at Friday’s inauguration. Press secretary Sean Spicer delivered a fiery broadside against the Fourth Estate from the White House Briefing Room Saturday evening, claiming that reporters had engaged in ”deliberately false reporting” in the past 24 hours since President Trump took the oath of office. And, after berating the press, he walked away without taking any questions. ”Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” Spicer claimed. He blamed new floor coverings on mall areas that ”had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” And Spicer claimed that fences and magnetometers going further back than ever prevented ”hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in years past.” However, CNN reporter Ashley Killough tweeted out a photo showing that floor coverings had in fact been used at Obama’s second inauguration. Spicer correctly said that the National Park Service does not do crowd estimates any longer, so that there was no official estimate to rely on, and NPR has made no official estimation of crowd size because official figures aren’t available. But then Spicer went on to make his own estimate on the crowd size and incorrectly claimed that the number of people who used the Washington D. C. Metro on Friday had outpaced the number of people who used the service during President Obama’s second inaugural. In 2009, 317, 000 people had, in fact, used the Metro by 11 a. m. according to WMATA, as Spicer cited. But the White House press secretary then claimed that 420, 000 people had used the Metro on Friday by 11 a. m. only 193, 000 people had ridden Metro. For the whole day on Friday, 570, 000 people used the system, but in 2013 there were 782, 000 riders and 1. 1 million riders in 2009 — both much larger than Trump’s inauguration. ”This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said in another unverifiable claim. Spicer’s own math was that there were 250, 000 people in the immediate area of the inaugural dais at the Capitol, and another 220, 000 from 4th Street to the media tents. Spicer then claimed there were another 250, 000 people from the media tents to the Washington Monument. ”All of this space was full when the president took the oath of office,” Spicer said, claiming the entire area from the Capitol to the Washington Monument was full. However, aerial photographs show that claim is false. The area just in front of the Washington Monument was sparsely populated and far from full, as confirmed by photographs and from NPR’s reporters on the ground. Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the television audience was larger than the second inauguration of Barack Obama in 2013. Ratings from Nielsen showed an audience of 30. 6 million on Friday. Their ratings from 2013 back up Trump’s assertion, with an audience of 20. 5 million. Past inaugurations measured by Nielsen that exceeded the audience for Trump’s inauguration include Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, Jimmy Carter in 1977 and Richard Nixon in 1973 — the only president to have a larger audience for his second inauguration than his first since these ratings have been compiled. The dispute over crowd size came Saturday as thousands and thousands of women and men gathered in D. C. and in major cities around the country and the world to participate in the Women’s March on Washington to protest Trump’s agenda on women’s rights and his past statements degrading women. Trump himself had made similar claims disputing crowd estimates earlier on Saturday when he traveled to the CIA to address intelligence officers. The president said he believed there was anywhere between 1 million and 1. 5 million people on the National Mall as he delivered his inaugural address, and he also falsely claimed it stopped raining and the sun came out just as he started speaking when, in fact, the rain continued and the day remained overcast and cloudy. Spicer lectured reporters for not focusing more on Trump’s CIA speech, telling them ”that’s what you folks should be writing and covering instead of sowing division about tweets and false narratives.” Spicer also complained about a report from pool reporter Zeke Miller of Time Magazine on Friday that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office. Miller later admitted he had made a mistake, apologized and reported that it had ”been obscured” by a Secret Service agent and a door.” President Trump himself also attacked Miller over that mistake in his speech at the CIA. Spicer claimed that report was ”irresponsible” and ”reckless,” but in fact the press secretary had tweeted Friday night that he accepted Miller’s apology. Spicer ended with an unprecedented warning that they would hold the press accountable and go around them when necessary. ”The American people deserve better, and as long as he serves as the messenger for this incredible movement,” Spicer said of the president, ”he will take his message directly to the American people, where his focus will always be.”

Republicans plan to turn control of Medicaid over to the states as part of their replacement for the Affordable Care Act, according to an adviser to President Donald Trump. Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, told NBC News’s Sunday Today with Willie Geist, that the health care law that will replace Obamacare will turn Medicaid — a joint health insurance program for the poor — into a block grant program. The change would mean the federal government would give money to the states to implement Medicaid as they see fit. ”Those who are closest to the people in need will be administering it,” Conway said in the interview, which was recorded the Thursday and Sunday. ”You really cut out the fraud, waste and abuse, and you get the help directly to them.” Medicaid is now funded by the federal government and states together and it has an funding stream, meaning it pays for all health costs to which its beneficiaries are entitled under the law. Conservatives who are concerned about the impact the growth in health care spending will have on the federal and state budgets have advocated block grants as a way to cut the Medicaid costs. But many health policy analysts say that block grants could lead to reductions in care. ”A Medicaid block grant program would institute deep cuts to federal funding . .. and threaten benefits for tens of millions of families,” said Edwin Park, vice president for Health Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in a report on the group’s website. Block grants can take several forms. Under one scenario, the federal government would offer a fixed sum of money to each state, which would grow with inflation. Since the rate of overall inflation is typically lower than inflation in the health care sector that leads to an erosion of spending over time. And such a fixed block grant means less money is available when the economy is suffering and more people qualify for Medicaid benefits. Another scenario offers states an allowance for each beneficiary. Under such a plan, spending would increase in bad economic times to cover the additional people who need care. However, overall benefits could still fall over time, depending on how the program accounts for rising health care costs. Conway didn’t give details about how a block grant program would be structured. Medicaid grew under former President Barack Obama, who gave states the option of expanding eligibility for the program to millions of people who live above the poverty line. states and the District of Columbia have expanded their programs. Republicans who are advocating repeal of the Affordable Care Act haven’t said whether they will force those states to roll back their Medicaid programs. Conway also reiterated Trump’s promise that ”everybody” will have insurance coverage under his Obamacare alternative. ”President Trump has said that people will not go without coverage. And he means that,” she said. ”That is certainly part of the official plans that are being worked on.” However, she said that health care for all didn’t mean the president advocates universal coverage or a health plan. ”What he means is that no one will go without coverage,” Conway said. ”There will be ways for people to access affordable, quality health insurance if they’d like to get it.” Conway said voters can also expect an Obamacare replacement to include wider use of health savings accounts, which allow people to save money to help pay for their medical costs. Critics say such accounts don’t help people who struggle to pay health insurance premiums because many don’t have extra money to put aside. Also, they often pay little or no income tax, so such an account doesn’t give them a boost. Health savings accounts, depending on how they’re structured, can help wealthy people however. That’s because they allow people with high incomes and who pay a high rate of high tax to shelter more of their money from federal taxes.

This post has been updated to include more information about the evaluation work done by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. It seems like a . Before you spend big bucks on a massive effort to improve life for the world’s poorest — say, distributing millions of free bed nets against malarial mosquitoes, or offering thousands of women microloans as small as $200 to start small businesses — you should run a smaller scale test to make sure the idea actually works. After all, just because a project sounds good in theory doesn’t mean it’s going to pan out in practice. For instance, what if giving out the bed nets for free makes people less likely to value them? Maybe you should charge a fee on the theory that while less people would get the nets, those who do will be the ones who see a need for them and will therefore take the trouble to actually use them. And what if some totally different method wouldn’t achieve better results for less money? For instance, maybe the key to lifting women’s incomes isn’t helping them start a small business but helping them land a salaried job? Yet for decades, questions like this have been left unanswered. Instead health and development aid for the world’s poorest has largely been designed based on what seems reasonable, rather than what can be proved with hard evidence. Since the early 2000s, however, a growing movement of social science researchers have been pushing to do ”impact evaluations” of their programs. That’s a phrase used in the world of aid that means checking whether your program is achieving its ultimate objective — say raising incomes or reducing disease. In particular, these scientists have been arguing for the use of what they call the of proof: the ”randomized controlled trial.” In an RCT you randomly divide the people you’re studying into at least two groups. One gets the intervention you want to test. The second, an otherwise identical ”control group” of subjects, doesn’t get the intervention. Then you compare the results for each group to see what difference, if any, the intervention made. Over the last decade there’s been an explosion in the number of RCTs being done to measure health and efforts, and they’ve helped settle some major debates about what works and what doesn’t. (As it turns out, offering bed nets for free as opposed to at a price, appears to be extremely effective. On the other hand, while microloans may have all sorts of uses, the evidence suggests that lifting people’s incomes over the long term is not one of them.) Despite these successes, the researchers who advocate this approach — they’re sometimes called ”randomistas” — also worry that RCT’s are still not being deployed frequently enough, and that even when they are done, policy makers often fail to apply the lessons. This sense of mixed progress was evident at a recent conference organized by the Washington, D. C. tank Center for Global Development, where some of the most prominent randomistas gathered to take stock. Just ten years ago one of the most active centers of RCT work was running about 70 impact evaluations worldwide. Today the number it’s completed or currently has underway tops 800. That’s according to Abhijit Banarjee a professor of economics at MIT who helped found the center — the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or a network of affiliated researchers at nearly 50 universities who set up RCTs in the fields of global health and poverty that was started in 2003. And when you include the work of groups beyond the number of impact evaluations of global health and poverty programs that are completed and published each year has risen steadily in the last decade from about 50 per year to 500 per year, said Emmanuel Jimenez. He’s director of the International Impact Evaluation Initiative, or 3ie, an NGO that maintains a searchable database of findings in addition to providing $83 million to fund studies since 2008. Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director of credits the rise of RCT’s not just to funding organizations like 3ie but other research nonprofits that conduct them. Today, she said, major players ranging from the World Bank and USAID — the main U. S. government agency responsible for development programs — all have departments that use impact evaluations in one way or another. ”What encourages me is that we’ve built a whole kind of ecosystem of groups who are trying to move this forward,” said Glennerster. But like other randomistas, she also worried that that the number of RCTs is still paltry compared to the number of development programs that governments, international organizations and NGOs are carrying out. Even at the World Bank and USAID, only a small portion of projects are subject to impact evaluations, agreed Amanda Glassman, chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Every year, her group does an exhaustive review to identify health programs that made a big impact. Of about 250 that they looked through this past year, ”only 50 used rigorous methods to establish the attributable impact. And none of the very largest programs in global health had done any impact evaluation” of the type she argues are needed — including two major international nonprofit organizations: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis as well as GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. This doesn’t mean the health products that these health programs use — medicines or vaccines, for instance — haven’t been proven effective through, say, medical trials or studies of what happens to the incidence of disease when you vaccinate a certain population, explained Glassman. Officials at GAVI note that the organization also tracks the increase in vaccination rates and decline of diseases in areas where it works, using a number of official data sources. Measuring impact ”is a major part of how the organization operates,” says Hope Johnson, director of Monitoring and Evaluation for GAVI. Glassman says that’s not enough when ”the challenge isn’t just the biological effect of a pill or vaccine but how to get those pills or vaccines to those who need them.” One question, for instance: Is it more effective to do an intensive campaign in which health workers armed with vaccines fan out across a community than to provide routine vaccinations at health clinics. Then there’s the question of how much attention are paying to the results of the RCTs that are being done. Banarjee noted that RCTs have at least already ”fundamentally changed our understanding” of some key issues in aid — the limits of microloans as a tool for ending poverty, the advisability of offering not just bed nets but all sorts of other preventive health products like de worming pills and chlorine treatments for water for free or heavily subsidized prices. But in many cases, the information generated by RCTs isn’t used to improve aid. Jimenez, of 3ie, described an internal review done by the World Bank — where he used to work — which found that only about half of impact evaluations done on Bank projects were even cited in the final reports on those projects. So why do some RCT’s make an impact while others vanish without a trace? One important lesson: collaboration with local governments is critical. Researchers need to work more directly with the who implement aid programs, said Jimenez. Several speakers at the conference described successful experiences doing this: A team from has worked with Indonesia’s government to test and then roll out measures to curb corruption in a rice distribution program that serves 66 million people. And researchers from the institute RTI have been helping the government of Kenya design new teaching techniques to improve reading and math skills in elementary schools. To make these partnerships with policymakers work said Jimenez, researchers might sometimes need to put their personal career interests on the . For instance, researchers often prefer not to publicize their results until they’re ready for publication in a prominent journal. But that can take months. Instead said Jimenez, researchers need to be ”getting results out when the need it.” ’s Banarjee said that figuring out how to collaborate with governments is such a priority that recently launched a whole branch dedicated to doing just that — it’s called the Government Partnerships Initiative. Otherwise, he said, ”a lot of good ideas don’t get implemented. And I think that’s really a tragedy.”

Many in the science community have expressed concern about the lack of science literacy demonstrated by the new Trump administration. A look at the administration’s statements and actions related to five key issues that are informed by science — anthropogenic climate change, vaccines, evolution taught in public schools, environmental science and protection of public lands, and human rights — bolsters that concern. As the new administration takes office, here’s a look at statements made and actions taken by the Trump team — and a check against the science. Climate Change, In Nov. 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that climate change was a creation of the Chinese. More recently, in a May 26, 2016, speech in North Dakota, he vowed to dismantle the international Paris Accord. Trump’s pick to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has said there is a viable ”debate” about science and has encouraged ”dissent” about it, leading The New York Times to call him a denialist. During his confirmation hearings Wednesday, however, Pruitt acknowledged there is ”some” role of human activity in climate change. Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson said he doesn’t see climate change as an imminent national security threat. Here, provided by NASA, is a compendium of statements from science associations showing the consensus that trends from the last 100 years are . How is ”a consensus” defined? percent of scientists agree on this fact. Vaccines, Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a vaccine skeptic that is, he takes seriously the possibility that routine vaccinations for childhood diseases might cause autism. Kennedy met with Trump last week, afterward noting that the meeting had come at Trump’s request, and said that he would lead a vaccine safety panel. Since then, the Trump team has clarified that the forming of this panel is a possibility and not a certainty. By contrast, here is an absolute certainty: Any link between vaccines and autism is false, as the CDC unequivocally states. As noted by NPR’s Domenico Montenaro: ”. ..the fact that Kennedy — who has lent his name and prominence to a controversial cause of whether vaccines, specifically the preservative called thimerosal, cause autism, for which there is no evidence within the scientific community — is part of [this] conversation, once again, reflects Trump embracing the fringe when it comes to the science of autism and vaccinations.” On Wednesday, an editorial in Nature underscored just how very solid the science is against any link between vaccines and autism: ”There is already ample evidence that vaccines do not elevate the risk of autism. A 2015 study of more than 95, 000 children found no association between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and an increased risk of autism — even among children with a family history of the disorder.” Evolution Taught In Public Schools, Unlike anthropogenic climate change, the teaching of evolution in public schools was not mentioned (as far as I can determine) during the campaign or its aftermath. Back in 2009, however, Pence told TV interviewer Chris Matthews: ”Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the Earth, the seas and all that’s in them.” What matters, however, is not Pence’s personal belief but whether he (and Trump) would vigorously defend the teaching of evolution in science classes — without the ”equal time” teaching of creationism, which is not science. Pence did address this question, in the same interview with Matthews: ”I think, in our schools, we should teach all of the facts about all of these controversial areas and let our students, let our children and our children’s children decide based upon the facts and the science.” There is no controversy about evolution, though. There is no doubt that, like all other life on Earth, we humans have evolved and continue to evolve. And as I have argued here before, we fail our children unless we teach them precisely that. The National Center for Science Education is, as its website proclaims, ”the only national organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools”. (The NCSE also promotes science, as 13. 7’s Tania Lombrozo has noted.) The NCSE website includes page after page of fabulous resources giving the facts of evolution. The Smithsonian’s Human Origins program offers equally excellent information about the timeline and details of human evolution. Environmental Science And Protection Of Public Lands, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Interior is Ryan Zinke, who declared during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday that climate change is not ”a hoax.” He also said that he is against selling of public lands to the states, which would increase the risk of development on those lands. On both counts, this is somewhat encouraging news for environmental science. Zinke’s remark that humans ”influence” climate change does, though, seriously underestimate the scientific conclusions that I have noted above about anthropogenic climate change. And crucially, as The New York Times reported: ”Mr. Zinke also emphasized his support for drilling, mining and logging on federal lands, activities strongly opposed by many environmental groups.” Environmental science specifies threats to the environment from oil and gas drilling, including disruption of wildlife migration routes oil spills that hurt animals’ health and pollution that negatively affects ecosystems’ health as well as scenic views and night skies. When these activities, not to mention mining and logging, occur on public lands — on range lands, in or near national forests and near national parks — the costs to animals, plants and the land itself have the the great potential to be severe. From a scientific perspective, then, Zinke’s record is mixed at best. Human Rights, Trump has mocked disabled people, denigrated the character of people from Mexico and, according to the global organization Human Rights Watch that just last Friday cited Trump as a threat to human rights, ran a campaign ”fomenting hatred and intolerance.” Trump’s policy proposals, the new Human Rights Watch report said, ”would harm millions of people, including plans to engage in massive deportations of immigrants, to curtail women’s rights and media freedoms, and to use torture.” My field of anthropology, which embraces science, can help here. Anthropology tells us that our species, Homo sapiens, is only 200, 000 years old that we evolved physically and cognitively in Africa and that, wherever we may live in the world, human populations are equal in our ability to learn and in our essential humanity. Of course, anthropology is also about taking the time to live among, closely observe and, most importantly, listen to people in other cultures, other neighborhoods, other streets within a neighborhood, even other rooms within an apartment complex. The idea is to learn. When we reject xenophobia and cultural stereotypes in favor of open looking, listening and dialogue, we come to recognize the varied ways we may express our common humanity. We humans are not to behave in any certain fixed way, even within a population an anthropological perspective tells us that the circumstances that surround us greatly influence our behavior. To a great degree, in terms of our compassion or our cruelty to others, we choose who we become. Tania Lombrozo, writing here at 13. 7, noted that now is the time to expand our circle of moral concern to include people of all backgrounds — a conclusion that fits beautifully with an anthropological outlook. And I have added animals to that moral circle. The onset of the Trump administration can and should be considered a time of opportunity: Here is the moment for us to collectively increase not only our compassion, but also our science literacy, and that of our children. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

It’s not fair to compare the 2004 film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to the new Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events. But let’s do it anyway. Both film and TV show adapt the first three volumes in the wildly popular and manically melancholy series of books for children written by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) though the Netflix series covers the fourth book as well. Both are six ways to Sunday, with muted brown and somber gray soundstages standing in for expressionistically bleak landscapes and baroquely decrepit mansions. Both feature beloved actors in roles (Film: Billy Connolly! Luis Guzman! Catherine O’Hara! TV: Patrick Warburton! Aasif Mandvi! Catherine O’Hara!) and both attempt to achieve the singular tone of the books. It’s the specificity of this tone that made the books such a success. As Handler himself has noted, it owes a great deal to Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey. There is a deliberate, achingly Anglophilic quality to the prose dreadful events are related in a manner engineered to keep us at an emotional distance. Characters and story beats are at, readers are admonished to skip pages ahead, and constantly given schoolmarmy vocabulary lessons. As a result, the mood of the books is waspish, even arch, but never grotesque. ”Whimsically dark” is a narrow sliver of narrative real estate to build a story on, yet it’s there that ASoUE lives. It’s the Netflix series that comes closest to achieving that tone, for two reasons. One, it foregrounds Lemony Snicket. Jude Law played him in the movie, but chiefly in . The Netflix series turns him into a kind of omnipresent, lachrymose host played with deadpan, solemnity by Patrick Warburton. In the series, Snicket is constantly stepping into the shot to impart some new nugget of depressing information, or express concern at something that has just happened, will soon happen, or is happening. He’s like Rod Serling at the beginning of The Twilight Zone, if an episode ever featured Neil Patrick Harris in drag. Snicket’s physical presence turns out to be important. In the movie, Law’s did much of the same work, or tried to, but having Snicket literally step into the proceedings to warn us about what we’re about to see next feels exactly like those moments in the books when Snicket’s narrator would admonish us for reading him. But the big reason it all works? Neil Patrick Harris’ evil Count Olaf. Look, it will likely not surprise you to learn that the acting choices Harris makes as the villain of the piece are generally smaller than those made by Jim Carrey in the film. The film was big, and Carrey made it bigger, and it’s hard to fault him for it. As written, the character of Count Olaf is an after all he’s operatically evil. And when called to do so, Harris can twirl with the best of them: He can lean into Olaf’s dastardliness with a fervor that chews its way through the scenery, and the props, and much of the craft services table to boot. Mostly though, Harris’ Olaf vibrates at a lower frequency. When he’s not being performatively nasty, he seems merely . .. annoyed. Tetchy. Distracted. Impatient. Vexed at the world for not appreciating him. It’s smaller, and feels truer, than anything Carrey managed to find in the character. It’s also variation on Harris’ Dr. Horrible — a guy who can turn it on when he needs to, but whose malice seems like an act. Maybe that’s why his vaunting lust for the Beaudelaire fortune doesn’t seem so much as . .. something to do. Should we get another season of the series that takes us further into the books, those smaller, humanizing aspects Harris is injecting into this cartoonish villain will pay off in ways I probably shouldn’t spoil. But I keep thinking of a scene in one of the later episodes of the TV series, in which Olaf is asked why he does the things he does, why he torments the three Beaudelaire orphans so much. ”Because it’s fun,” he says. I buy that NPH sure looks like he’s having a blast.

Since it opened 50 years ago, the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic has been a refuge — for everyone from flower children to famous rock stars to Vietnam War veterans returning home addicted to heroin. Strolling through the clinic halls in San Francisco, Dr. David Smith, the medical organization’s founder, points to a large collage that decorates a wall of an exam room affectionately referred to as the Psychedelic Wall of Fame. The 1967 relic shows a kaleidoscope of images of Jefferson Airplane and other legendary counterculture bands floating in a dreamscape of creatures, nude goddesses, peace symbols and large loopy letters. ”That was made by a woman who had just taken LSD,” Smith says. ”She stayed here for a very long time and put all that up. It lasted as long as her LSD trip.” He continues on to what was once called the ”bad trip” room, where clinic staff would talk clients down during acid trips gone awry. Fundamentally, Smith and others say, the organization has remained true to its roots in counterculture, still offering free care in a deliberately nonjudgmental atmosphere. But it is also drastically different: It is now the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics — plural — and part of a conglomerate with the decidedly name of HealthRIGHT360. All told, HealthRIGHT 360 serves approximately 40, 000 patients each year via a wide range of programs, including reentry services to ease the transition of formerly incarcerated adults and teens into life outside jail, residential and outpatient drug treatment, mental health care and medical and dental care. In 2014, it purchased a building at 1563 Mission Street in San Francisco as additional space, to offer all of these services under one roof. The organization also serves patients in neighboring San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. It’s been a long journey from Smith’s early days running a standalone clinic. When his clinic first opened, it operated 24 hours a day with an army of volunteer physicians from the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University. The one paid staffer was a nurse. The first year’s budget was her salary: $25, 000. The clinic had what Smith describes as a ”guerilla pharmacy.” Pharmaceutical representatives, he says, would load up their trunks with medication samples and drop them off at the clinic, where a team of UCSF volunteer pharmacists bottled up the medication and shelved it. ”Our first exam table was my kitchen table,” he recalls. Decisions were made by consensus. Even the janitor weighed in, Smith says. Back then, iconic music promoter Bill Graham organized benefit rock concerts — featuring performances by George Harrison and Janis Joplin — to help keep the clinic afloat financially. Smith remembers when Joplin overdosed on heroin, and the clinic rushed over an ”overdose team” armed with naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opiates. ”We zipped out there,” he says, ”and reversed her overdose.” Smith says he saw many Vietnam veterans returning from the war in the early 1970s who were addicted to heroin. They felt ostracized, he says, by what was then called the Veterans Administration, and headed to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and its clinic, which by then offered comprehensive medical care and a drug detox program. The influx of veterans led to federal grants to Smith’s clinic from the Special Action Office on Drug Abuse Prevention. ”That began the government funding era in the 1970s and ensured our survival,” Smith says. In the 1980s, a young woman named Vitka Eisen came to the Haight Ashbury clinic struggling with heroin addiction, and learned firsthand the value of the personal attention the clinic offered. ”I went there for detox at least nine times,” she says. ”I never felt shamed or judged. They always acted like they were glad to see me.” Her trust in the staff, she says, led her to kick her heroin habit and return to school. She eventually earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University. Today Eisen is CEO of HealthRIGHT360. By 2011, like many nonprofits, the organization Smith helped start in the 1960s was deeply in debt. So it merged with Walden House, a respected San addiction and mental health treatment program, which wanted to offer comprehensive medical care to its patients. The merged nonprofit adopted the name HealthRIGHT360. By joining forces, Eisen says, Walden House and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics were able to weather the extraordinary financial expense of shifting their organizations to electronic health records, a requirement of the Affordable Care Act. With the network in place, she says, it’s been easier to train and add new providers as HealthRight360 has expanded. The merger also allowed the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to erase its debt in a year. Between 2011 and last July — when the organization merged with Prototypes, a Southern California women’s drug treatment center — HealthRIGHT360 acquired five other community clinics in Northern California and now offers treatment at 40 sites up and down the state. Ben Avey, assistant director of external affairs at the California Primary Care Association, says such mergers aren’t new, but they have accelerated under the Affordable Care Act. At the individual clinics that comprise health systems like HealthRIGHT360, ”they speak your language, know your culture, understand the situation you’re coming from,” Avey adds. As CEO, Eisen led the consolidation that streamlined HealthRIGHT 360. ”We have one board, one human resources department, one finance department, one payroll department and one executive,” she says. The annual revenue is $110 million. the city, county, state and federal governments all reimburse HealthRIGHT 360 for providing patient services, as do commercial health insurers. But ties to the early days remain. The early treatment of concertgoers evolved into San Rock Medicine, which is now part of HealthRight360. Staff members set up medical clinics at rock concerts, circuses and fairs in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, providing medical treatment that garners $1, 038, 000 annually from the venues. The nonjudgmental attitude of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics’ staff toward patients also continues to this day, according to David Smith, (no relation to the clinic founder) who has been coming to the clinic since the 1980s and says he’s always felt welcomed and accepted. This was true, Smith says, even when he was homeless in the early 2000s. ”It didn’t matter if I was dirty,” he says. ”I didn’t have to feel like I couldn’t come in here because I wasn’t in the proper state of cleanliness — which was, unfortunately, the case for quite a bit of time.” Kaiser Health News, is an editorially independent part of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. Laurie Udesky is an freelance journalist based in San Francisco. On Twitter: @laurieudesky.

To revisit the box office numbers for 1988 is to remember when movies that made a lot of money looked entirely different than they do now. Rain Man grossed more money domestically than anything else that year. It was followed in the top 10 by Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming To America, Big, Twins, Crocodile Dundee II, Die Hard, The Naked Gun, Cocktail, and Beetlejuice. Only one sequel in the bunch. That’s two adult dramas (if you count Cocktail, which . .. maybe?) seven comedies, and Die Hard. In 2016? Rogue One, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life Of Pets, The Jungle Book, Deadpool, Zootopia, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Sing. Five action franchise entries and five kids’ movies, and that’s it. It was back in that more environment that the 15th biggest movie of the year was Beaches, starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as best friends who meet as girls under the Atlantic City boardwalk and remain friends right up until — spoiler alert — one of them dies. (If you think about it, that’s how any friendship ends if it lasts long enough. Again, spoiler alert.) Beaches is often remembered as the epitome of the weepie, the hankie movie, the sniffler, whatever you want to call it. In fact, it’s more interesting than that and contains more angular and painful moments than that, but what people remember is the crying and dying. It makes sense, in a way, that Lifetime would remake it almost 30 (gulp) years later with Idina Menzel and Nia Long as CC and Hillary. They’re both solid actresses who have been wonderful in lots of roles over the years, and the film is directed by Allison Anders, who’s directed a lot of TV but also the films Gas Food Lodging and Grace Of My Heart, both of which are strong stories about interesting women. But unfortunately, the remake, which airs on Saturday night, winds up representing the flatter, film people remember, rather than the film that really was. One of the problems is just timing: the Lifetime film has 90 minutes to do the work of a theatrical film that ran two hours and three minutes. Entire plot elements are dropped, and the opening sequence in which the girls become friends is much shorter, making it much harder to believe that they formed a bond that carried them through years of all the way to adulthood. And while it’s hard to be critical of child performers, there’s nothing in that opening sequence anywhere near as arresting as it was when the young Mayim Bialik, doing the seemingly impossible by plausibly being a young version of Bette Midler, sang ”Glory of Love” with a feather boa. Here, young CC is simply an ’ young busker who doesn’t have a permit, rather than a precocious, kid in feathers who’s first seen puffing on a cigarette. From the very beginning, she doesn’t have the original CC’s huge personality, and Hillary’s instant fascination with her makes much less sense. More generally, the biggest problem is that the two women are too similar in this version. In the original, Hershey is so chilly and patrician and Midler is so Bette Midler that the contrast is obvious and stark. But Menzel and Long are playing very similar women here — they’re both smart, direct, conventionally beautiful, elegant adults. There’s none of the sense Hershey so convincingly conveyed that Hillary is often embarrassed, particularly in the presence of the man who becomes her husband, by CC’s joyful vulgarity. And similarly, Menzel has none of Midler’s visible insecurity about how she’s viewed by a friend who’s become a proudly droll sophisticate. The fights in the original Beaches are scary and ugly they’re raw and hurtful, and you understand how they could lead to long estrangements. Here, the stakes just never feel quite high enough. This version seems to build their conflict around professional success, which is less compelling than in the original, where their conflict was largely about cultural positioning — about who was classy and who was not, and why. Without that conflict, all you have is a couple of pretty ordinary fights between women who seem at all times naturally to each other. And unfortunately, the lack of nuance in the portrayals of young CC and Hillary in the prologue carries through to the role of Hillary’s daughter (Sanai Victoria) who is written without the resistance to CC that you get from Grace Johnston in the 1988 film, so that she’s nothing but cute and perfect and sweet all the time. In the original version, CC’s unlikely relationship with Hillary basically echoes in her relationship with Hillary’s daughter — Midler’s CC doesn’t seem, and doesn’t feel, like a natural mother. But Menzel’s CC seems almost as much of a natural as Long’s Hillary is. To answer one obvious question: Yes, Menzel sings ”Wind Beneath My Wings.” She also sings ”Glory Of Love.” But the quirkier musical numbers from the original, including not just Midler’s odd ”Oh Industry” but the wonderful bauble ”I’ve Still Got My Health,” her very sad rendition of ”I Think It’s Going To Rain Today,” and the memorable ”Otto Titsling,” find no substitutes. So while you get Idina Menzel singing The Pretenders’ ”I’ll Stand By You,” her musical theater talents are set aside in a way Midler’s were not. The point isn’t that a remake has to walk in the footsteps of the original — in fact, it can’t and shouldn’t. But when you remove the parts of a film that make it interesting, you have to put in other elements to make the new one interesting in a different way. You have to put something back for everything that you remove. One lesson here is that memorable ”weepies,” like memorable anythings, are harder than they look. Over time, things flatten in our cultural memory, until attempts to recreate them based on what endured in that memory are likely to fall short for reasons that feel nebulous. Saturday night’s new Beaches, unfortunately, doesn’t amount to much. But go back to the original — it’s more interesting than you remember.

President Trump is now filing the documents needed to remove his name as top executive at his companies, finally making good on a promise to leave management by Inauguration Day. He may be a couple of days late, but public documents show Trump is making changes at the helm of his businesses. For example, a filing from Florida’s Department of State, entered Monday, shows son Eric Trump as president of Trump International Hotels Management LLC. In March 2016, Donald J. Trump had been registered as president of the company. That sort of management shift was confirmed in numerous documents that began appearing online throughout Monday afternoon. The filings don’t show a change in ownership, just a replacement of Donald Trump as the top executive. The Trump Organization may have gotten a nudge from a weekend report by ProPublica, an independent nonprofit news service. It had contacted officials in Florida, Delaware and New York and found no indication that Trump had begun transferring management to his sons. White House spokesman Sean Spicer was questioned Monday about whether Trump would release documents verifying the president had resigned from his businesses. Spicer said Trump has ”resigned from the company as he said he would before he took office,” adding ”he’s taken extraordinary steps to ensure that that’s happened.” It’s believed Trump has more than 500 business entities, so them all could take some time. He did manage to sever ties with his businesses in the United Kingdom in time for his inauguration Friday. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s newest ventures — the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C. — had a rough first couple of months. The luxury hotel just blocks from the White House may have been sold out for inauguration festivities last week, but it lost more than $1. 1 million in its first two months of operation. The hotel lost $334, 000 in September and $825, 000 in October. The Trump Organization had estimated a $84, 000 loss in September and $481, 000 profit in October. Those figures come from the federal General Services Administration, which owns the historic building that houses the hotel. GSA information was obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Reps. Elijah Cummings, Gerald Connolly, Peter DeFazio and Andre Carson asked the GSA for any correspondence it has had with the Trump Organization. They want to see how the federal agency is addressing an ”apparent breach” of the hotel’s lease agreement. When the Democrats got the GSA information, they released it to the public on Monday. The lease explicitly says ”no elected official of the government of the United States” may hold that lease. The letter said the documents did not give any reason why the hotel’s income levels for its first two months were so far below the company’s own projections, although September was a soft launch for the hotel. There were no figures from November, when Trump won the presidential election, until now. One of the concerns ethics analysts have is that the hotel could create a conflict between Trump’s business and his presidency. For example, foreign governments, lobbyists and special interest groups may stay at the hotel, just blocks from the White House, as a way of currying favor with the president. Trump’s lawyers say he will hand over any of the hotel’s profits to the U. S. Treasury Department. NPR intern Lucia Maffei contributed to this report.

Updated at 12 p. m. ET, A team of ethics experts and legal scholars filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday morning that says President Trump’s overseas businesses violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars presidents from taking money from foreign governments. The group says it is asking the court ”to stop Trump from violating the Constitution by illegally receiving payments from foreign governments” with ties to Trump interests. The lawsuit states that: ”These violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens. As the Framers were aware, private financial interests can subtly sway even the most virtuous leaders, and entanglements between American officials and foreign powers could pose a creeping, insidious threat to the Republic.” The lawsuit cites numerous examples of how Trump stands to make money by doing business with companies and other entities linked to foreign government. For example, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which is owned by the Chinese government, is a tenant at Trump Tower in New York, and its lease is due to expire during Trump’s term, the suit says. This could mean that the Chinese government will be in negotiations with the Trump Organization to renew the lease. Another tenant is the Abu Dhabi Tourism Culture Authority, which is owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, the lawsuit notes. The suit also says that Trump collects royalties from his TV show The Apprentice and its various spinoffs, many of which air on broadcast networks owned or controlled by foreign governments. It also cites numerous examples of Trump properties in Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Scotland that require various government permits and exemptions. ”When Trump the president sits down to negotiate trade deals with these countries, the American people will have no way of knowing whether he will also be thinking about the profits of Trump the businessman,” according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is part of the suit. CREW says in the suit that it has been harmed by Trump’s conflicts of interest because as a watchdog, it has been forced to put more time and resources into opposing and publicizing them. The legal scholars and former White House ethics officials filing the lawsuit include Richard Painter, ethics adviser to President George W. Bush Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine and Supreme Court litigator Deepak Gupta. Former Obama administration ethics adviser Norman Eisen told Morning Edition recently that Trump’s business ties violate the Emoluments Clause in numerous ways: ”We need travel no further than a few blocks from the White House, the Trump Hotel. There’s been controversy now about whether or not they’re pressuring governments to leave other hotels in Washington and come to their hotel. ”Whether those allegations are proven or not, there can be no question that the Trump Hotel in D. C. is aggressively seeking business from foreign governments. Once Mr. Trump takes the oath of office, that will be a violation of the Constitution.” It remains to be seen how the lawsuit will be received, because the courts have never ruled on how the Emoluments Clause relates to the president. Trump’s lawyers have already indicated they will oppose the suit. As The New York Times noted: ”The president’s lawyers have argued that the constitutional provision does not apply to payments, such as a standard hotel room bill, and is intended only to prevent federal officials from accepting a special consideration or gift from a foreign power.” ”No one would have thought when the Constitution was written that paying your hotel bill was an emolument,” Trump lawyer Sheri Dillon told a news conference earlier this month. ”This is purely harassment for political gain, and, frankly, I find it very, very sad,” Trump’s son Eric told the Times.

Updated at 5:15 p. m. ET. President Trump acted on Monday to keep a signature campaign promise: withdraw the U. S. from the Partnership. Trump’s action is mostly symbolic. As he signed the memorandum in the Oval Office, Trump said, ”We’ve been talking about this for a long time,” adding it’s ”a great thing for the American worker.” Trump also signed two other presidential memorandums (a pool report, and the original version of this story, referred to these actions as ”executive orders”). One imposes a hiring freeze on federal workers, except for military positions and in the case of national security. The other action reinstates the Mexico City policy, a rule that began in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president. As NPR has reported, the policy ”blocked federal funding for international family planning charities unless they agreed not to ’promote’ abortion by, among other actions, providing patients with information about the procedure or referrals to providers who perform it.” The TPP, as it’s known, is a trade agreement with 12 Pacific Rim nations. It was never ratified by the U. S. because of congressional opposition but was strongly backed by the Obama administration. It would create a free trade area stretching from Japan to Chile, and it was seen as an effort to create a counterweight to China, which is not a party to the agreement. During the campaign, Trump called the TPP ”a horrible deal” and a ”potential disaster” that would hurt U. S. workers and companies. His action on TPP is Trump’s first effort to address the concerns over trade that helped propel him to the Oval Office, and there are many more expected. He is expected to begin talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In a meeting with business leaders Monday morning, Trump said, ”We want to make our products here.” He also vowed to retaliate against businesses that close U. S. factories in favor of foreign plants. ”If you go to another country,” Trump said, ”we are going to be imposing a very major border tax.” Trump said that right now, ”we don’t have free trade because we’re the only one that makes it easy to come into the country.”

For President Trump, the easy part is over. During the 2016 campaign, Trump slammed the U. S. national security and foreign policy establishment as run by people who were ”so dumb,” ”predictable” and played for ”a bunch of suckers.” Now he owns it. Trump’s inauguration makes him responsible for responding to hot spots and crises around the world — challenges that scale from the risk of an individual terrorist attacking inside the U. S. to the danger of a nuclear standoff with Russia. The new president is still assembling the team that will help him. Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last Thursday the new administration has asked more than 50 senior deputy and assistant leaders to stay in place through the transition, including Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work Brett McGurk, the top U. S. envoy for the fight against ISIS, and Nick Rasmussen, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. As the Trump team continues to take shape, here are seven tough international challenges it will face. 1. North Korea, The Defense Department won’t confirm press reports that North Korea could soon a ballistic missile that might be capable of hitting the U. S. with a nuclear warhead. But Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said the military would be ”ready” no matter what. He urged Pyongyang not to misread the change of authority in the U. S. as an opening to make what he called a ”provocative act.” ”We’ll continue to be prepared as we go through this transition,” Cook said. North Korea has demonstrated that it can detonate nuclear weapons and that it can fire ballistic missiles. It’s now trying to build a weapon small enough to fit on a missile effective enough to hit the U. S. or on one of its existing rockets that could target South Korea or Japan. The U. S. has treaty alliances with both nations, and they host some 80, 000 U. S. troops. Although the North has attempted and failed launches in the past, national security watchers in Washington warn that the unsuccessful tests are ultimately productive because they help Pyongyang learn. As NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported, intelligence officers in Washington warn the North Korea nuclear missile threat is the one that doesn’t get enough attention. 2. China, Trump’s dealings with China might be the most consequential bilateral relationship of his presidency, given the size of the economic, diplomatic and military intricacies. They’re off to a rocky start. Beijing was angry about Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan — which was seen as a challenge to the ”One China” policy. Then there was the seizure of a U. S. underwater drone from an oceanographic survey ship that helps the U. S. Navy search for foreign submarines. China returned the ”glider” after Washington demanded it back, but it was another reminder by Beijing that it considers the East and South China Seas its own, even though the U. S. and the other countries in the neighborhood say they are international waters with competing claims. China has been building up reefs and creating artificial islands in the area to bolster its claims of ownership. Washington says none of that construction changes the laws that keep the waterways open. But tension seems likely to remain a recurring theme. 3. Afghanistan, Trump and his new aides have barely spoken about their plans for America’s war, which has now gone on for more than 15 years. Barack Obama hoped he could end his presidency with only a small detachment of U. S. troops there, but gains by the insurgent Taliban forced him to freeze the planned drawdown and hand Trump a deployment of more than 8, 500 troops. New combat units are gearing up to deploy to Afghanistan this year to fight insurgents for ground the U. S. has already gained and lost, especially in the south. The dilemma is that Afghanistan’s government probably can’t survive without American financial and military support. Trump suggested in an interview last summer that the security situation might mean he had no choice but to continue with the American deployments to Afghanistan. ”I think you have to stay and do the best you can,” he told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. ”Not that it’s ever going to be great, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.” 4. Iraq, The Pentagon says Iraq’s army — with significant American support — is making progress in its fight against the Islamic State. The terrorist group is at risk of losing its northern stronghold in Mosul, the last city that is even partly under its control. But even if the heavy fighting ends in Iraq, there will be political challenges for the U. S. the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government based in Irbil. Who will be in charge? Who will provide security? What role will neighboring Turkey and Iran play in Iraq? Can Iraq’s mostly Shiite government provide credible governance to the Sunni areas? If Iraq reverts to the sectarian divisions so prevalent before the rise of ISIS, that could undermine any battlefield victory over the extremist group. 5. Syria, The buildup of forces has begun for an assault on the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa, in northern Syria. With no support from the host government and no major nearby bases from which to support the combatants, the effort depends on small groups of American special operators training and arming thousands of local Kurdish and Arab fighters. The Pentagon under Obama said it was confident it could make the effort work, but Trump and his choice for defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, may seize the opportunity to step things up. Mattis recently said he wanted to ”energize” the war. Mattis did not give specifics, but the U. S. could, for example, give American warplanes greater latitude in attacking ISIS — although that could also bring greater risks of civilian casualties. Or the new administration could deploy more U. S. forces beyond the current 600 or so special operators now in Syria. The potential upside is that more American power could deal a decisive blow to ISIS. The potential downsides are the risks to American forces and local populations, and the ultimate question about what comes next — whether the U. S. would wind up trying to extricate itself from another Middle Eastern war. 6. Libya, Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U. S. has deplored ”ungoverned spaces” around the world. Yet the U. S. helped create another one in Libya, which has been lawless since 2011, when the U. S. and European military operations helped rebels oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Libya has become a refuge for Islamic State fighters, and American troops have responded with airstrikes and other operations. The latest took place Jan. 18, when Air Force Spirit bombers killed an estimated 80 ISIS fighters in desert camps outside the coastal city of Sirte. The U. S. is supporting one of the groups that hope to form a new government in Libya, but under Obama it did not make a major effort. Trump’s team must decide how much energy it wants to expend on trying to establish order in Libya. 7. Eastern Europe, The nations of Eastern Europe are nervous. Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2014, and others, including Poland and the Baltic States, worry they could be next in the crosshairs. Trump says he wants a better relationship with Russia and that if, based on public comments, Russian President Vladimir Putin likes him, that’s a plus. What Eastern European nations fear is they’ll be the ones paying the price for any rapprochement. Obama committed to new demonstrations of military support for the Eastern European members of NATO, including regular rotations of troops for training exercises. Trump must decide whether to keep that up. And he is facing renewed pressure from the NATO allies and some advocates inside the U. S. to go even further and commit to full, permanent military bases. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, an Arizona Republican, asked Mattis at his confirmation hearing about whether he would support a ”permanent military presence in the Baltics.” Mattis said he would. Squaring that outlook with Trump, along with Mattis’ vocal support for NATO, will be one of the biggest stories of the first months of the new administration. Trump himself is sanguine about the world scene he will encounter, as he told The New York Post this week. ”I don’t think we’re going to be tested,” he said. ”I’m not a game player. They understand me.”

President Trump began his first full workweek in the White House by hosting a breakfast ”listening session” with business executives. In his opening remarks, Trump largely stuck to traditional Republican themes of lower taxes and reduced regulation. But he also reiterated his threat to impose a border tax on companies that move jobs overseas — a plan with little support from the president’s fellow Republicans in Congress. Trump said he hopes to hold similar meetings with business leaders on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly. ”We’ll get to know each other very well,” he told executives, including CEOs from Ford, U. S. Steel, Dow Chemical and Under Armour. The president renewed his campaign promise to reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 or 20 percent. He suggested that for many businesses, a reduction in government regulation would be even more valuable. ”The problem with the regulation that we have right now is that you can’t do anything,” Trump said. ”It’s out of control. It’s gotten out of control.” The incoming administration has already ordered a freeze on new government regulations. Eventually, Trump said he’d like to eliminate about of the existing rules. He argued that it’s possible to do that while still safeguarding workers and the environment. ”I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment,” Trump said. ”But some of that stuff makes it impossible to get anything built.” Trump sees both tax cuts and regulatory relief as ways to make doing business in the United States more attractive. ”What we want to do is bring manufacturing back to our country,” he said. ”It’s what the people wanted. It’s one of the reasons I’m sitting here instead of somebody else sitting here.” The United States has about 5 million fewer manufacturing jobs today than it did in 2000. The decline of factory jobs contributed to Trump’s victory in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Economists say most of the jobs losses result from automation, which allows American factories to churn out more products with fewer workers. But Trump tends to highlight factory work that’s relocated to countries such as China. He once again promised to punish American executives who shift jobs overseas. ”A company that wants to fire all of its people in the United Sates and build some factory someplace else, and then thinks that that product is just going to flow across the border into the United States, that’s not going to happen,” Trump said. ”They’re going to have a tax to pay, a border tax.” ”Some people would say that’s not free trade,” he added. ”But we don’t have free trade now,” pointing to barriers that other countries often erect to block U. S. imports. Congressional Republicans have been cool to Trump’s call for a border tax, which would complicate international supply chains and raise prices for U. S. consumers. But Trump told American business leaders there’s a simple alternative. ”All you have to do is stay,” he said. ”Don’t leave. Don’t fire your people in the United States.”

A doctor handed Melissa Morris her first opioid prescription when she was 20 years old. She’d had a cesarean section to deliver her daughter and was sent home with Percocet to relieve pain. On an empty stomach, she took one pill and lay down on her bed. ”I remember thinking to myself, ’Oh, my God. Is this legal? How can this feel so good?’ ” Morris recalls. Soon, she started taking the pills recreationally. She shopped around for doctors who would write new prescriptions, frequenting urgent care clinics where doctors didn’t ask a lot of questions and were loose with their prescription pad. Morris’s path started with Percocet and Vicodin, commonly prescribed pain medications for acute injuries and illnesses. When those drugs no longer got her high, she switched to Oxycontin pills. Then she started injecting Oxycontin. After that, she got her hands on Fentanyl patches, a highly addictive and potent opioid. She’d chew on them instead of applying them to skin as the package directed. When doctors got wise to Morris’ shopping tactics, her supplies of the pills diminished, and she turned to heroin, instead. She started stealing to fund her addiction. Morris then got into the drug trade herself, dealing methamphetamine and other illicit substances, to raise money to buy more heroin. ”You can buy a gram of heroin for 50 bucks,” she says. It’s relatively cheap. ”That’s why so many people here have turned to heroin.” Morris lives in Sterling, Colo. a city of 14, 000 that’s a drive northeast of Denver. The biggest employer is a state prison. Since 2002, the death rate from opioid overdoses in Logan County, which includes Sterling, has nearly doubled, according to data analyzed by the Colorado Health Institute. Morris says she has known at least 10 people in her community who have overdosed on a mix of drugs in the last few years. Sterling is far from unique. Rural areas and small cities across the country have seen an influx not only in the prevalence of prescription opioids, but in illicit ones like heroin. According to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioids were involved in more than 33, 000 deaths in 2015 — four times as many deaths as in 2000. A recent University of Michigan study found the rates of babies born with symptoms of withdrawal from opioids rising much faster in rural areas than urban ones. Like Morris, many new heroin users find themselves using the drug after getting addicted to prescription drugs first. The CDC reports three out of four new heroin users report abusing prescription opioids prior to trying heroin. In the U. S. deaths more than tripled between 2010 and 2015, with 12, 989 heroin deaths in 2015. As the drug use reaches into more communities across the country, researchers are scrambling to both diagnose what causes some people and some regions to be more susceptible to opioid abuse, and to devise solutions. Dr. Jack Westfall, a family physician and researcher at the University of Colorado and with the High Plains Research Network, works with a network of rural clinics and hospitals in the state. He says many doctors on the Plains are feeling frantic. ”We don’t know what to do with this wave of people who are using opioids,” he says. ”They’re in the clinic, they’re in the ER, they’re in the hospital. They’re in the morgue, because they overdosed.” For more than a decade, opioids have been a key part of a rural doctor’s pain management for patients, Westfall says. Treatment options are often fewer in a rural area alternatives like physical therapy may not be available or convenient, so drugs are a prime option. Some researchers think larger economic, environmental and social factors leave rural Americans at particular risk, says University of California, Davis, epidemiologist Magdalena Cerdá. After the 2008 recession, rural areas consistently lagged behind urban areas in the recovery, losing jobs and population. ”You have a situation where people might be particularly vulnerable to perhaps using prescription opioids to a lot of symptoms of distress related to sources of chronic stress — chronic economic stress,” Cerdá says. Plus, the specific types of jobs more prevalent in rural areas — like manufacturing, farming and mining — tend to have higher injury rates. That can lead to more pain, and possibly, to more painkillers. In some ways, the social structures of rural regions contribute to the spread of illicit drugs, says Kirk Dombrowski, a sociologist at the University of . ”One of the things that is counterintuitive to most of what we think of as [being part of life in] a small town is that rural people have much larger social networks than urban people,” Dombrowski says. In some cases, his research suggests, rural residents know and interact with roughly double the number of people an average urban resident does — giving rural people more opportunities to know where to access drugs. ”So some of those social factors of being in a small town can definitely contribute,” he says. ”It’s not a fundamentally rural problem,” says, Tom Vilsack, Barack Obama’s secretary for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, who led the Obama administration’s interagency push to curb opioid abuse. ”But it’s a unique problem in rural America because of the lack of treatment capacity and facilities.” That lack of treatment is definitely a problem in Sterling, where patients often have to drive a long way to get care. Melissa Morris relies on Suboxone, a prescription combination of buprenorphine and naloxone that’s used to help wean people off heroin or other opioids. Morris says she doesn’t get high when taking it, but does avoid the vomiting, diarrhea and sweating that comes with opioid withdrawal. She puts it under her tongue to let it dissolve and take effect. Morris, who has been off heroin since 2012, makes a drive to a clinic to pick up her supply of Suboxone. It’s in short supply in many rural communities, in part because few rural doctors have gone through the required training to prescribe it. There’s there’s a waiting list to get an appointment with the only doctor in Sterling who is certified to prescribe the drug, Morris says. Other areas of Colorado’s eastern Plains have no doctors at all who are legally able to dispense Suboxone. A new effort from University of Colorado researchers could help there, with plans to train 40 primary care doctors, their clinical care teams, and nurses in Colorado’s Plains and southern San Luis Valley. Morris acknowledges that close social ties in her town may have contributed to the spread of opioids there opioid users, she says, tend to ”stick up for each other.” Those bonds can spread drug use quickly, but they also cut other ways, she says. Just recently she recruited two friends to the clinic she goes to weekly for treatment. ”I used to sell them pill and heroin,” says Morris, who is now helping these friends get clean. ”And so I do have hope. I’ve seen those success stories.” This story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a collaborative public media project reporting on important stories in rural America.

Ajit Pai, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, will be the country’s new chief telecommunications regulator. He’s a proponent of limited government and a approach to regulations. Pai’s promotion within the FCC under the administration was long rumored and confirmed on Monday by his office. In a statement, Pai said he looked forward ”to working with the new Administration, my colleagues at the Commission, members of Congress, and the American public to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans.” On Twitter, Pai also added: ”There is so much we can do together to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans and to promote innovation and investment. From broadband to broadcast, I believe in a version of Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural: we are all Republicans, we are all Democrats.” Pai is a longtime Washington lawyer who has worked in the Senate, at the Justice Department and the FCC and had a stint at Verizon before becoming an FCC commissioner in 2012. As a regulator, he voted reliably against many policy proposals by former Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler, including the contentious and move to establish net neutrality rules. Under Wheeler, the FCC moved to impose the and rules on Internet service providers in a way that put them under the regulatory regime. (The agency’s Democratic majority later moved to leverage new oversight powers to set the first privacy restrictions for the ISPs, which Pai opposed.) Though the net neutrality rules — after years in limbo — have now been affirmed in court, Pai and his fellow Republican FCC commissioner Mike O’Rielly have indicated plans to revisit those Internet regulations as well as other FCC rules. ”In the months to come, we also need to remove outdated and unnecessary regulations,” Pai said in a speech in December. ”The regulatory underbrush at the FCC is thick. We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” The FCC is an independent commission whose majority usually flips in party affiliation depending on the party of the president, who nominates the members. With a Republican majority under Pai — who has often made the case for solutions — the FCC is expected to chart a deregulatory and fiscally conservative approach. As The New York Times points out, Pai’s view of competition in telecommunications drastically differs from that of his predecessor: ”Mr. Pai has said web firms such as Google and Facebook are competitors to wireless, cable and broadcast companies in voice calls, messaging and streaming video. The F. C. C. under Mr. Wheeler, Mr. Pai said, strapped too many rules on internet service providers without providing real evidence that consumers were harmed without regulations.” As commissioner, Pai put personal focus on several telecom issues, including a push to connect more rural communities to Internet and a quest to help struggling AM radio stations. His FCC speeches were also known for clever pop culture references. In statements, industry groups praised Pai for his integrity and leadership. Consumer advocacy groups decried him as reactionary and . ”While he doesn’t always agree with our industry on every issue, he is both thoughtful and willing to listen,” the Internet Association chief, Michael Beckerman, said.

On Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. Between the inauguration Friday and the Women’s March on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people came to the nation’s capital to bear witness, protest and show support. Ten NPR video journalists spent two days around Washington, D. C. documenting the events. Here’s what they saw.

Multiple destructive storm systems damaged property and killed at least 19 people over the weekend, and continued to batter much of the U. S. with rain, snow and wind today. All 19 reported deaths were in the South, where apparent tornadoes ripped through towns over the weekend, damaging and destroying buildings in multiple states. ”Trailers are just flat, just laid on top of people,” Debbie Van Brackel, a volunteer EMT in Adel, Ga. told the Atlanta on Sunday. ”You need a bulldozer to pull it off. Trailers are upside down.” The newspaper reported that 15 people died in the southern part of the state, including seven people in a mobile home community in Adel and four people in the town of Albany, Ga. Patrick Marsh of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. told The Associated Press that 39 possible tornadoes were reported in the Southeast over the weekend. Of those, most were reported in Georgia. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia both declared states of emergency for portions of their states where the destruction was most profound. Mississippi Emergency Management Agency officials confirmed that an EF3 tornado struck three counties in the state, killing four people and injuring more than 50 in Forrest County, according to The newspaper in Jackson. All four fatalities were in the town of Hattiesburg, the paper reported. In Palm Beach County, Fla. where the Sun Sentinel reported the National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning overnight, the school district’s Twitter account announced that one of the county’s high schools would be closed Monday due to ”apparent tornado damage.” The NWS warned of winds as strong as 55 miles per hour on Monday morning. Also over the weekend, a separate rainstorm soaked Los Angeles and surrounding communities in Southern California. On Monday morning, a National Weather Service flash flood watch was still in effect for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. ”Coastal areas of Los Angeles County were among the hardest hit, with Long Beach Airport setting a new rainfall record, 3. 87 inches,” the Los Angeles Times reported. ”The intense rain was too much for local roads. Sunday afternoon, both the 110 Freeway in Carson and the 710 Freeway in Long Beach were shutdown due to extreme flooding that left cars stranded like islands in a lake.” ”Today was very intense,” National Weather Service meteorologist Brett Albright told the Times on Sunday. ”It’s not a normal event.” The rain eroded hillsides, some them already weakened by wildfires, causing multiple mudslides. The Times noted that multiple cities had issued evacuation orders for neighborhoods near recent burns, including in Duarte, Santa Clarita and parts of hilly Santa Barbara County north of Los Angeles. A hill that broke away in Sierra County, Calif. buried most of a road, according to Caltrans, the state’s transportation agency. In Topanga Canyon north of Los Angeles, falling debris closed the road through the canyon on Sunday. At higher elevations, the precipitation fell as snow, closing Interstate 80 completely for a period overnight. And in the Northeast and another storm was dumping rain and snow and battering coastal cities with wind on Monday. In New York City, ”A warning is in effect until Tuesday, and with up to four inches of rain possible over the next couple of days, a flood watch and coastal flood advisory will take effect this afternoon,” The New York Times reported Monday. The National Weather Service warned of gusts up to 45 miles per hour for parts of Maryland, including Baltimore, and snow in the western part of the state all week. A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of central New York state and Pennsylvania until midday Tuesday, and the National Weather Service warned roads would be ”very dangerous,” asking residents in the affected areas to travel only in emergencies. Around State College, Pa. the NWS predicted between 6 and 10 inches of snow.

If you book a tour of Holland, the guide may take you to Volendam. It’s a picturesque village north of Amsterdam, with cobblestone streets, tulips and a little old lady selling the local delicacy, smoked eels, from a kiosk at the end of the pier. Volendam is a small but prosperous place, with waterfront homes and sailboats tied up at the docks. There’s almost full employment, and very few immigrants. About a dozen people NPR stopped on the street all used the same words to describe their town: . Traditional. A good place to raise kids. It’s also a stronghold of the Netherlands’ Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders. He’s famous for rhetoric. He promises to pull the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most prosperous countries, out of the European Union, if he’s elected this March. And he’s leading in the polls. ”It’s the same as [Donald] Trump. We never expected him to be U. S. president. But a little bit of revolution also here in the Netherlands is not wrong,” says Theo Stirk, who owns a factory in Volendam. When you hear about populist movements, the stereotype might be America’s Rust Belt, where Trump carried the vote, or old mill towns in the north of England — many of which voted for Brexit, the British departure from the EU. But some of the same political ideas are gathering support in Volendam. It’s a bit of a contradiction for the Dutch, who’ve long defined themselves as open to the world — as history’s naval explorers and international bankers. The Netherlands welcomed and took in Jews more than 500 years ago, after the Spanish Inquisition. The world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, used to be a Dutch colony. But many Wilders supporters in Volendam say globalization has gone too far. ”The Netherlands’ economy is founded on different people [since] the Middle Ages,” says Stirk, the fish factory owner. ”But if you allow them to come into your country, you must ask them to fit in our society and do the same things we are doing.” Stirk says he thinks religious Muslims don’t fit in and pose a threat to liberal values that have become synonymous with Holland: equality, gay rights, legalized drugs. On the sidelines of a youth soccer game at the Volendam field, coach Wem Krockman says he supports banning immigration because the Netherlands, with 17 million people, is already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. ”You see all the fugitives coming by boats to Italy, to Turkey? They are looking for jobs, they are looking for houses,” Krockman says. ”There’s only one man in Holland who says, ’Take care, in 10 years, we’ll have a problem.’ We think he’s right.” That one man, he says, is Wilders. In his political speeches, the leader invokes nostalgia for places like Volendam — for the traditional Holland many tourists come to see. But those traditions are fading. And it turns out the old Dutch identity the likes to play up is pretty hard to define. Standing not far from Krockman is one of the soccer dads from the visiting team, Bulent Ozturk, who happens to be from an immigrant family. The Netherlands, Ozturk says, may be famous for tulips, clocks, wooden clogs and windmills, but its culture is similar to those of nearby European countries, like Germany or Denmark. In those countries, just like in little Volendam, there’s an increasingly vocal nostalgia for a white, Christian past that doesn’t include people like Ozturk. The leader Wilders is riding that sentiment, and is forecast to win the most votes in the Netherlands’ election this March.

Even though studies show kids whose fathers take an active part in their lives are less disruptive and better adjusted socially, most programs that aim to up parenting skills are geared towards mothers. And a lot of dads aren’t eager to sign up for parenting classes. So researchers at New York University created a parenting class for dads that wasn’t called a parenting class. Instead, it was pitched as academic readiness training for preschoolers. But the fathers, who were mostly residents of New York City, did improve their parenting skills. And their children’s behavior language acquisition got a boost, too, the study finds. ”When someone tells you they’re in a parenting course, the first thing that comes to your mind is, ’Well, what’s wrong with their parenting?’ ” says Anil Chacko, an associate professor of counseling psychology at New York University and lead author on the study. ”It assumes there is some deficit present.” This study, published last week in the Journal of Clinical Child Adolescent Psychology, recruited 126 fathers from three Head Start centers. (Head Start centers provide programs that look to increase school readiness in young children from families.) From there, fathers were either asked to participate in eight weekly sessions lasting 90 minutes each, or put on a waitlist as a control. The program, Fathers Supporting Success in Preschoolers: A Community Parent Education Program, was deliberately framed as an program for children and not as a parenting class. And because men are generally more reluctant to talk about their problems to others — from their physical health problems to their parenting insecurities — a program that took the focus from their potential deficits as parents to improving their kids’ academic potential was probably much more appealing, Chacko says. That could account for the whopping 79 percent attendance rate for the sessions, a number Chacko says is high for parenting programs for dads. In each session, fathers in groups of around 10 watched short videos of other fathers reading books with children, but with obvious, exaggerated errors. A father might count the wrong number of cows on a page, and ignore when the child counts the cows correctly. Then, the dads discussed how those mistakes could affect children. After the eight weeks of sessions, in which dads also read books together with their children both in Head Start and at home, both father and child benefited. Based on researchers’ observations and parent questionnaires, dads’ parenting skills — like establishing routines, rewarding good behavior and ignoring behavior — improved by at least 30% compared to the dads on the class waitlist. Children’s overall behavior improved, too. And standardized tests showed a 30% increase in the children’s language development and school readiness. ”I’m very glad to see research on fathering and the engagement in men of child care and child development,” says Michael Addis, a professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts who was not involved with the work. ”It is understudied historically as a culture we have associated parenting with femininity.” He adds that this can make it difficult for men to present themselves as involved fathers, and is often why men get left out of parenting studies. While the findings are positive in the context of shared book reading, Chacko says his team also encouraged fathers to analyze other situations in daily life the same way. They are hoping that this could further improve kids’ social, emotional, and behavioral development. The researchers also note that while the methods in parenting programs typically don’t vary too widely, the way they’re presented to the community is crucial. While this presentation was successful in a particular slice of New York City’s population, it may not have reached families in other cultures or socioeconomic backgrounds. ”The challenge is not the science. We have a good sense of what the key parenting skills and behaviors are,” Chacko says. ”The real challenge is engaging parents — and it’s a huge challenge.”

Six million years ago, giant otters weighing more than 100 pounds lived among birds and water lilies in the wooded wetlands of China’s Yunnan province. That’s according to new research from a team of scientists who discovered a cranium of the species in an open lignite mine in 2010. They recently published their findings in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. The researchers concluded that this prehistoric creature is ”two to three times larger than any modern otter species,” Denise Su, the head of paleobotany and paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, tells The . The fossilized cranium was nearly complete, but flattened to about an inch and a half thick. ”The bones are pretty fragile, so we couldn’t really reconstruct it physically,” Su said. ”So what we did is we took CT scans of the cranium, and then we digitally reconstructed it.” The cranium was particularly interesting because it revealed that the animal’s teeth had ”some badger features,” Su explains. The species name Siamogale melilutra, is a nod to that — in Latin, meles means badger and lutra means otter. And the completeness of the cranium provided the researchers with important information about how otters evolved, Su said. It shed light on a dental mystery in particular. The giant otters possessed large bunodont, or teeth. Scientists have wondered whether different species of otters inherited these teeth from a common ancestor, or evolved them separately because they were eating similar things — a process known as convergent evolution. But by comparing this specimen to modern and other fossil otters, Su says they found ”these bunodont teeth actually arose at least four different times within the greater otter lineage.” That finding suggests they emerged because of convergent evolution, rather than inheritance from a common ancestor. The scientists initially found other bones from the species in 2009, including an upper arm bone. Su remembers looking at that bone and thinking, ”This looks like an otter but it’s huge. . .. Is this really an otter?” There are big questions about why the animal was so large and how it moved on land and in water. ”A lot of times in modern carnivores, the large size is partly due to subduing prey, so their prey is bigger and the carnivores also get bigger,” Su explains. But the scientists think that this animal likely ate small creatures such as mollusks — so, ”why the big size?”

Updated at 3 p. m. ET on Jan. 27, There has been a lot of arguing about the size of crowds in the past few days. Estimates for President Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March a day later vary widely. And for crowd scientists, that’s pretty normal. ”I think this is expected,” says Mubarak Shah, director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida. Shah says he encountered something similar during mass protests in Barcelona, Spain a couple of years ago. ”The government was claiming smaller number than the opposition was claiming,” he says. Counting quarrels have popped up during previous events in the U. S. as well. During the Million Man March in 1995, the National Park Service estimated the crowd to be far smaller than the organizers claimed. The controversy led Congress to bar the Park Service from doing head counts on the National Mall. The reason that disagreements frequently arise is that there’s no foolproof way to get an accurate head count of a large crowd. Decades ago, crowd estimates were done by people who simply looked at photographs of an event. They would count the number of people in one small area of a photo, then extrapolate that number to estimate the entire field of view. This method was inaccurate, though, in part because some areas might have lots people packed together, while others would have just a few people with large spaces between them. Computers have improved counting somewhat. They don’t suffer fatigue the way humans do, and a computer doesn’t have any political bias, Shah says. But even computers have limits, says Dinesh Manocha of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They have no problem sorting a few people who aren’t packed together. But when you have big crowds, like those seen across the country in the past few days, it gets tricky. ”When it’s more than 100, 000, we just can’t estimate right. We don’t have an answer today,” he says. It often comes down to image resolution. Manocha says even professional cameras only capture about 40 million pixels. So if there are one million people, each person will appear as a smudge. A company called Digital Design Imaging Service, is actually trying to make an estimate of attendance at the Womens’ March. They used cameras attached to a tethered balloon to take photos of the marchers. Even with his surveillance system, Curt Westergard, the company’s president, says he doesn’t expect to get a precise figure. Clouds meant the company couldn’t supplement their own photos with satellite images. And the number of people changed constantly throughout the day. ”Our main goal really on this just to ascertain a rough order of magnitude,” he says. ”So if somebody says a million vs. 100, 000 we can easily prove one or the other.” On Friday, Westergard said his company estimated some 440, 000 people were on the National Mall and surrounding streets for the Women’s March. The firm will also share its raw data so that others can try to make their own estimates. ”We can and do make all of our data transparent. We put it online,” he says. ”If you don’t like what we said, count it yourself, and here’s the data.”

LeRoy Rodgers spends plenty of time in the Florida Everglades — mainly in airboats. He works for the South Florida Water Management District. On a recent day, he eases his boat alongside a tree island. He doesn’t like some of the changes he’s seen, so he pulls a pair of clippers from a bag and hops over the side. Rodgers will need the clippers to cut a path through the Old World climbing fern that has almost swallowed the island. ”A deer trying to make your way through this,” he says. ”You can see how difficult it would be.” The fluorescent green fern is everywhere. It cascades from trees, its vines weaving a thick mat near the ground obstructing every step. Florida has long battled invasive species: Burmese pythons, feisty lizards from Argentina, Cuban tree frogs. Now another pest is tormenting the state: the Old World climbing fern. The tenacious fern is toppling trees as it swamps the state. It also threatens to derail a national wildlife refuge. Rodgers says the tree islands dotting the sawgrass prairie here in the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge are where birds and other wildlife forage and nest. He takes the fern in his hand. ”That’s where the spores are produced. . .. You see they’re everywhere,” he says. ”So there are spores by the billions all around us right now, and that’s the other part that makes this plant so invasive.” The Old World climbing fern first appeared in Florida as an ornamental plant and is native to Africa, Asia and Australia. With no natural predators here it grew unchecked. The fern stands to take down more than tree islands. Its grip on Loxahatchee has prompted the state to threaten to terminate its lease authorizing the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the land. That’s strenuously opposed by environmental groups in a region where a environmental restoration is underway, the nation’s largest ever. ”I think it is the worst invasive species that Florida has faced in a very long time,” says Cheryl Millett of the Nature Conservancy. Millett considers herself on the front line of the fern’s march north. She is part of a team of government agencies and private landowners monitoring its spread in central Florida. She steps among the pine trees of an conservation area in a residential neighborhood near Orlando. The fern flows from trees like a waterfall. Crews control the fern by spraying it with herbicide and hacking at it with machetes, leaving the vines overhead to die. It’s exhausting work. Back in Loxahatchee, the South Florida Water Management District’s Rodgers says biologists are trying other ways to corral the fern — including experimenting with a moth and mite found where the fern originates and that feed only on the plant. A longer version of this story is available at WMFE.

Early in the morning of March 24, 2016, a Palestinian shoemaker named Imad Abu Shamsiyeh was having coffee with his wife, Fayzia, at their home in the West Bank city of Hebron. They heard shots being fired outside. Instead of seeking cover, they grabbed Abi Shamsiyeh’s video camera and ran to the roof of their house. He immediately started filming, zooming on the street below. ”I saw someone lying on the ground,” Abu Shamsiyeh says. ”I wasn’t sure if he was Israeli or Palestinian. Blood was gushing from him.” The man was Abed Fatah a Palestinian who had been shot and badly wounded after he stabbed an Israeli soldier. Sharif lay nearly motionless. Then a soldier shot him in the head from close range. Abu Shamsiyeh sent his video to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, which verified and published the video on its website. ”One of the aspects of the video that is quite shocking is seeing how apathetic the other soldiers are, like nothing has happened,” says B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz. ”Like a very casual thing to take place, shooting a Palestinian who is laying on the floor motionless in the head.” The video went viral. It was shown during the trial of Sgt. Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier who shot Sharif. A military court convicted Azaria of manslaughter earlier this month. The court will hear arguments on sentencing Tuesday. The case deeply divided Israelis. Polls show most want Azaria pardoned. Abu Shamsiyeh, a father of seven, says he’s been filming violence in Hebron for five years, spurred by what’s happened to his own family. ”My daughter was injured by settlers, my two sons and wife were attacked and put in jail, I was attacked and put in jail,” he says. ”We’ve been the target of a lot of violence by the sheer fact that we live here.” They live practically adjacent to an enclave of Jewish settlers near the center of Hebron, a sprawling city of more than 200, 000, the largest in the West Bank. The proximity breeds conflict between the two sides, but Abu Shamsiyeh tells young Palestinians that cameras are much more powerful weapons than stones, knives or fists. ”We want to change that in our children,” he says. ”We tell them, use your camera to show what’s happening here. Do not use violence.” Abu Shamsiyeh uses a video camera donated by American activists and volunteers with a Palestinian group called Human Rights Defenders. He used to volunteer with B’Tselem, which he admires for archiving the work of volunteer videographers like himself. At a recent training session at his home, Abu Shamsiyeh shows two young girls how to film a steady video using their phones. Nida Abu Haikal, an in a glittery red sweater, lives near a military checkpoint. She says she had a revelation after she got into a fight with a settler boy a couple of years older than her. ”[He] said bad words to me,” she says. ”I got mad and hit him. But what did that do? Nothing. He actually hit me back and pulled my hair. I should have just taken a picture.” But the videography now works both ways. Just down the street, Israeli settler Tzipi Schlissel is also taking video. She’s zooming in on a Palestinian man arguing with an Israel soldier who’s asking for his ID. ”This Arab man getting close to the soldiers, it could be some provocation,” she says. The Palestinians ”come and try to yell at the soldiers and doing some provocation, so I’m prepared. Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s really things that are not good.” Schlissel’s father, a prominent rabbi, was stabbed to death in 1998 by a Palestinian. ”I see what they’re doing, taking pictures and videos of us, taking things out of connections,” or context, she says. Schlissel posts her own videos on YouTube. She says she wants more settlers here to document violence, especially after Abu Shamsiyeh’s video of the soldier got so much attention. ”I can’t do it all the time and I can’t be everyplace always, but I think this is part of the war now,” she says. Abu Shamsiyeh says he’s received death threats because of his video but will keep on filming. In the coming weeks, he’s also training students at four schools in the Hebron area to use cameras to document conflict.

It is a very attractive truffle. It’s made of the usual ingredients — cocoa butter, sugar, chocolate — with a addition. Thirty grams of dried tomatoes from Nigeria. And it was served at the World Economic Forum last week in Davos, Switzerland, with a very specific goal in mind: ”to raise awareness on food waste and hunger,” as stated in a press release. That’s a big job for a bonbon — and it’s the reason for the tomatoes. According to U. N. sources, up to 75 percent of the 1. 5 million tons of tomatoes harvested in Nigeria each year are ”lost.” That can mean a number of things, from rotting in the field to falling off the truck on the way to market. The Roca brothers, three Spanish chefs who are U. N. goodwill ambassadors, created the chocolate. ”We are exploring food preservation techniques, such as the dried tomatoes used in this chocolate that can reduce food waste and create new market opportunities for young farmers,” explains Joan Roca, one of the brothers. ”Preserving tomatoes is our first goal.” They named the candy ”Bombon Kaduna.” Bombon is the Spanish spelling of bonbon. Kaduna is a big region in Nigeria. We interviewed some experts on food and hunger to get their thoughts on the candy campaign. ”It strikes me as a kind of silly representation of concern about global hunger,” says Christopher Barrett, a professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and author of a paper titled ”Food loss and waste in Africa.” We got a similar reaction from Mark Bittman, the cookbook author who is now a lecturer at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, specializing in health policy and food issues: ”I mean, come on!” Bittman finds no fault with the recipe. Using food that might otherwise be wasted is a good thing, he agrees. And tomatoes can be sweet and chewy, so why not add them to a truffle? But, he says, ”This is not a recipe that is going to have any impact on world hunger and on poor and starving people. What they need is money to buy food.” The U. N. defends its candy: ”There is nothing trivial” about finding new ways to use local ingredients and, in the process, cutting down on food waste, a spokesman said. But does reclaiming ”lost” food really help feed hungry people? ”As stated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” the U. N. spokesman told Goats and Soda, ”up to of all food in the world is spoiled or squandered. This is unacceptable at a time where almost a billion people suffer from hunger.” Barrett isn’t sure statistics about food loss can ever be 100 percent accurate because food is lost or wasted in so many ways that are hard to track. If a bag of tomatoes falls off a truck, who notices? And sometimes food loss is unavoidable, he points out — say, if the product becomes unsafe to consume. He also does not think reclaiming lost food is a top priority in the war against hunger. ”We couldn’t find a single study demonstrating that dollars spent on food waste reduction after harvest are dollars well spent,” says Barrett. Why not spend the money on other goals that will help farmers and hungry people, he suggests: say, breeding into rice or paving a road so farmers can more easily get their food to market. But despite these concerns, maybe the chocolate fulfilled its mission. Its aim was to get people talking about hunger — and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this blog post.

For a man with a mural of an oil refinery in his office, deciding to sue the oil and gas industry wasn’t an easy choice. But it was a necessary one for Guy McInnis, the president of Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish, just south of New Orleans. On a recent day, McInnis stands overlooking Lake Borgne. Now an open lake, the area was once prime wetlands and marshlands that protected St. Bernard from storm surge. It took a big hit during Hurricane Katrina. Oil companies would dig through the marshy area to get to their shallow water wells. ”They would dig a ditch to get their boat to the oil well, and that ditch was not replaced or filled in at the end of the time that they used that oil well,” McInnis says. These small channels created mazes through the marshes that eventually eroded into open water. New projections say Louisiana is losing land much faster than officials thought. Each mile of land that washes into the Gulf of Mexico costs the state industry, infrastructure and populations are all disrupted. Now, it has a plan to fight coastal land loss, but needs an estimated $90 billion to do it. An oil and gas state, Louisiana has long relied on money from offshore sales to fund part of its budget. But the $90 billion price tag will require support from Congress. That’s why the state’s new Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, is urging officials like McInnis to sue oil and gas companies for that damage. ”Before we can ever have any hope of asking taxpayers around the country to come to Louisiana and help us restore our coast, we have to be able to show them that we did everything that we could, reasonably, that is within our power,” Edwards says. ”And certainly, you can’t do that if you don’t hold those people accountable who damaged the coast to begin with.” Edwards has said all the coastal parishes should file suits, or he’ll do it for them. But the governor’s controversial idea is facing roadblocks. Some parishes are resistant to suing the companies, which include powerhouses like ExxonMobil and Shell. On top of this, the state attorney general is attempting to stop the process. Gifford Briggs, the acting president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, an industry lobbying group, says he doesn’t think the lawsuits are necessary. ”We believe these lawsuits are driving investment out of Louisiana into other states and other communities [and] that it’s harmful to Louisiana,” he says. Briggs says the state should do its job by enforcing its own permit requirements, rather than turning to the courts. It’s bad for business, he says. Gov. Edwards’ top lawyer, Matthew Block, disagrees. ”This is not about demonizing the oil and gas industry,” he says. Although oil and gas is the most important industry in the state, ”that does not mean that we cannot hold the oil and gas industry responsible for destruction of the coast,” Block says. By some estimates, oil companies cause 60 percent of Louisiana’s land loss. If one or more of the suits succeeds, the industry could owe billions of dollars. Rob Verchick, an environmental law professor at Loyola University, says these suits could set an example. Many other states face problems like land loss and erosion. ”And they are struggling right now to address these issues,” he says. ”And so these lawsuits are going to occur whether our lawsuits in Louisiana go forward or not.”

people have been arrested across Europe for allegedly trafficking stolen art and archaeological relics, according to Spanish police who led the investigation. Interpol and the U. N.’s culture agency, UNESCO, helped in the investigation, as did the European policing agency Europol and the World Customs Organization, according to a statement by UNESCO. The statement noted the arrests took place back in November, but were not made public until late last week. Neither Spanish authorities nor the international bodies involved in the investigation said why they had not previously disclosed the arrests. Lauren Frayer reported for NPR from Madrid: ”Spanish police say the suspects are members of criminal gang that trafficked stolen art and archaeological relics. They have been under investigation for months, by law enforcement from 18 countries, led by Spain and Cyprus. ”Altogether, police say they have recovered about 3, 500 pieces of stolen art — including Byzantine relics and an Ottoman tombstone in Greece. Among those found in Spain were 19 artifacts stolen from an archaeology museum three years ago. Police have not issued a complete inventory, but said most of the artifacts were taken from countries at war.” UNESCO said authorities in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Herzegovina, Cyprus, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and the U. K. all participated in the investigation. The operation was known as ”Pandora.” Spanish authorities recovered some of the coins pictured above by tracing online sales, but ”would not confirm where the arrests were made,” The New York Times reported. ”In the southern Spanish city of Murcia, the police recovered about 500 archaeological pieces, including 19 stolen from the city’s archaeological museum in 2014,” the Times wrote. UNESCO said 92 new investigations had also been opened, following searches conducted as part of the Pandora operation.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. I have always loved Westerns. When I was a kid, I’d watch them with my dad. Saturday afternoons on the couch in the living room. In the weird formlessness of Sunday nights. He had a kind of magic, my dad. This ability to squirm around in the upper reaches of the cable channels and, like he had some kind of personal deal with the gods of static and strangeness, pull down all kinds of oddities. I watched Jeremiah Johnson with him a dozen times, and A Man Called Horse. I saw Duck, You Sucker! when I was too young to understand anything more than the motorcycles and the dynamite and The Missouri Breaks when I was too young to understand anything at all. I still consider The Outlaw Josey Wales one of the most perfect American stories ever told. But it isn’t my favorite. No, my favorite Western of all time? The grand horse opera that eclipses them all? That would be Red Dead Redemption. No, really. I’m at least 95 percent serious here, and I will fight you. Among all video games, it remains (at six years old now, with a sequel in the works) one of the most physically gorgeous and emotionally layered. Look, if we take as fact that Westerns are the American literary counterpoint to the and circular repetition of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey in European high fantasy — that, like jazz or cubism, the Western exists to turn classical form inside out in an attempt at telling a truer story by beginning with the hero, broken by his labors, and attempting (almost always) to get a fresh throw of fate’s dice — then Red Dead is a bonafide masterpiece. As John Marston — tragic hero, farmer’s son, a thief and murderer trying to buy forgiveness by thieving and murdering now for different masters — I have ridden with Mexican revolutionaries and been betrayed by my best friends. I have watched the buzzards circle over men dead by my hand and the sun rise over distant mountains, played poker with an ace always tucked in my boot, and crouched behind a Gatling gun, sighting through the smoke. Red Dead Redemption is my favorite Western because it is all Westerns — because there is no trope, no archetype, no theme or motif that it doesn’t lift, polish and spin into its huge tale of love, violence, revenge and salvation. It begins (in an opening chapter called, aptly, ”Exodus In America”) with a train ride. With the embodiment of Western modernity carrying the scarred and sullen gunslinger into an onrushing future he is unprepared to face. Marston is being escorted against his will by government agents to the frontier town of Armadillo where his task — the sole driving force of a plot — is laid out. As a young man, Marston ran with a gang of outlaws. Bad men who did bad things. He escaped, married, had a son. But now, if he ever wants to see his family again, he must hunt down and kill or capture his former friends at the behest of the government. Which he attempts, straight off. He finds one of them and offers him the chance to surrender. At which point Marston is killed. Or nearly killed, anyway. Shot in the belly and left to die, he is rescued (by a packing rancher’s daughter) and set on his path with a pure and righteous fury. No child set to gain knowledge, slay monsters and bring home boons, Marston is a monster himself, now seeking an honest vengeance against other monsters. The game milks this simple plot architecture across hours and days and months. But rather than appearing thin, Red Dead uses every opportunity to deepen the connections between characters thrown together by circumstance and to gild its skeletal frame with what eventually becomes a remarkable tale of freedom versus servitude and the senselessness of violence used to solve violence begetting only more violence. And it does it all with dialogue — or most of it, anyway. What the game can’t accomplish with beautiful, mournful music cues and gunslinging, it does with a series (dozens, hundreds) of conversations on horseback or front porches, brilliantly written, blazing with style and instantly recognizable voices. The acting is stellar, but Red Dead lives and dies by its words — by the lilt of the drunken Irish and the gruff, bloody philosophy of the grizzled old sheriff. Even knowing how it ends (as Marston does, right from the story’s first moments) Red Dead, like all great Westerns, has a velocity of narrative that is, ultimately, undeniable. There is badness in the world, and it must be met with badness. There is innocence, and it must be defended fiercely. There is a world out there that is moving on — spawning revolution upon revolution, a glorious modernity that will outpace us all — and it must be met . In talking of his son, Marston says it himself, speaking his wish for a future beyond the pixels of his narrative universe: ”He ain’t gonna to be no frontier gunslinger, killing and running in no gang though. That way’s over. Railroads and government and motor cars and everything gone and done away with all of that.” And of course, by the end of his story, it has gone and done away with John Marston, too. Jason Sheehan is an a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

Every day, Border Grill restaurant at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas uses a case of tomatillos and at least a case of cilantro. The tomatillos go into dishes like the pozole verde, a spicy stew with chicken and hominy. The cilantro goes into the green rice, the guacamole, the Yucatan pork roasted in banana leaves and just about everything else. ”The Mexican kitchen is very produce heavy,” says Border Grill Mary Sue Milliken. A lot of the ingredients that she and partner Susan Feniger use most frequently also suffer the greatest in transit. Radishes, jicama, that delicate cilantro, they all die so fast, Milliken says. Nearly every last piece of produce in the kitchen and on the plate at Border Grill’s two Las Vegas locations comes from somewhere else. Most of it is trucked in from California — farm to table, with some freeway in between. But as winter takes hold across the country, a new farm is working to change that. Come spring, Milliken and other chefs like her will be able to source fresh fruits and vegetables harvested blocks from the Las Vegas Strip. Last July, Urban Seed broke ground on its first farm, an assemblage of greenhouses located on a small plot of land smack in the center of Las Vegas. Eventually the space will hold six greenhouses that will produce 25 different crops, from bell peppers to beets to alpine strawberries. If an agriculture company launching in the desert sounds counterintuitive, that’s entirely the point. ”The whole world thinks Vegas can’t grow food,” says Rachel Wenman, vice president of Urban Seed. ”We really feel that if you can grow food in Las Vegas, then you can grow food anywhere.” Urban Seed will be the largest local farm in terms of yield, but isn’t the first company to attempt farming in the desert. An Australian farm made headlines last fall for growing produce using greenhouses and seawater desalinated onsite. The Sahara Forest Project has constructed greenhouses in Qatar and is working on a new farm in Jordan. In Las Vegas, the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension has a outdoor research orchard, and Las Vegas Herbs grows hydroponic microgreens in a greenhouse. Urban Seed, however, is taking a different approach. The company’s strategy for growing in Las Vegas, where summer temperatures regularly top 110 degrees and annual rainfall amounts to just over four inches, is based around a proprietary aeroponic system focused on producing large amounts of food using limited space and resources. The growing system layers plants vertically, but unlike the vertical indoor farms catching on in other cities, its Las Vegas location will be single story and will rely on the area’s plentiful sunlight — not artificial LED lights. To develop Urban Seed’s technology, a team of growers and engineers spent years in research and development, testing various indoor farming methods like aquaponics and hydroponics. Eventually they arrived at their current model, where plants are stacked inside of and grown aeroponically, with roots suspended in the air and water and nutrients delivered via fog. Each varietal gets its own custom nutrient mix, a smoothie to mimic optimal growing conditions. ”They get the exact environment, the exact nutrients that they need,” says Wenman. Each is also a closed loop that recaptures and recycles excess moisture. While a conventionally grown head of lettuce uses about 13 gallons of water to reach maturity, in an Urban Seed greenhouse, lettuce will grow on just 22 ounces, based on testing of the technology at facilities in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Arizona. Stacking the plants also maximizes growing space. In a area, Wenman projects that Urban Seed will be able to grow more than 500 heads of lettuce in 30 days, compared with roughly 50 lettuce heads that might grow during that time on a traditional outdoor farm. That number might sound hyperbolic, but it’s actually pretty conservative when you compare it to estimates for vertical indoor farms currently getting lots of buzz. In Newark, for example, AeroFarms claims yields that are 130 times those of field farms. ”In the same amount of space indoors, you can raise 10 to 100 times what you can do outdoors,” says Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and author of The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. Although Urban Seed’s founders call their model a vertical farm, Despommier — who literally wrote the book on the subject — doesn’t think the term applies because its buildings in Las Vegas are single story. The key benefit to growing indoors is the controlled environment: no variance in weather, water, temperature or humidity, no pesky insects, no pests raiding the field for free snacks. When that indoor farm is placed in an urban center, there’s also no shipping, cutting down on the carbon footprint and allowing food to be harvested at peak ripeness, when it tastes the best and packs the most nutritious punch. With about 42 million annual visitors and a local population of around 2 million, as a test market, Las Vegas is ripe for new sources of produce. ”The longer the produce has to sit in the field and then in the warehouse and then [go through] three or four middlemen and then, finally, getting into the hands of chefs, the more flavor that is lost along the way,” says Border Grill’s Milliken, who is part of Urban Seed’s culinary advisory board. When the company begins harvesting in spring or early summer, its first customers will be chefs who’ll turn the morning’s harvest into the evening’s menu. ”Just by virtue of the proximity and the freshness it should be better than everything I’m buying, says Milliken. ”Having that proximity gives us an opportunity for the flavor to be enhanced so much.”

The American Library Association announced its annual children’s book awards Monday. While the Caldecott and Newbery medals are the best known of these honors, this year, one of the awards might attract the most attention. That’s because the Coretta Scott King Award for best author went to Rep. John Lewis and his collaborator Andrew Aydin for March: Book Three, the third installment in the civil rights leader’s graphic memoir. Lewis’ book also won three other awards from the library association — the first time an author has won that many awards in a single year. In November, March won a National Book Award. But more recently, it was in the news after Lewis questioned the legitimacy of President Trump’s election. Trump later tweeted that Lewis is ”all talk — no action.” That provoked a passionate defense of the congressman from Georgia who has worked his entire life for civil rights — and helped push his book to the top of Amazon’s list. A Coretta Scott King Award is also given to the best illustrator, and this year’s went to Javaka Steptoe for Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Basquiat. Steptoe also won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book. His book tells the story of Basquiat who began his career as a graffiti artist, rose to prominence in the 1980s and died at the age of 27 from a drug overdose. The Newbery Medal for outstanding contribution to children’s literature went to Kelly Barnhill for The Girl Who Drank the Moon, a fantasy novel for middle school readers. A review in The New York Times compared it to such classics as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Books that win the Newbery and the Caldecott sometimes do go on to become children’s classics. Past winners of the Newbery include A Wrinkle in Time and Bridge to Terabithia. Caldecott winners include Make Way for Ducklings, Where the Wild Things Are and The Polar Express.

BADBADNOTGOOD made a name for itself by reworking songs from the likes of Nas and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, eventually catching the attention of Odd Future leader Tyler, the Creator. The masses took notice in 2015 when the group produced an entire LP for Ghostface Killah, Sour Soul. BADBADNOTGOOD has been called a ensemble, but its foundation is clearly jazz, which provides a gateway to countless genres. On IV, the group allows that gateway to widen, adding soul and funk to the repertoire. Still only in their 20s, the band’s members never seemed intimidated by the intimate nature of the Tiny Desk if anything, it accentuated their enthusiasm. This was their zone. They played three selections from IV — including ”Cashmere,” which only slightly veered from the studio version, and ”In Your Eyes,” which features Charlotte Day Wilson’s vocals. The tight arrangement allowed Wilson to hover gently above the instrumentation, showing off the band’s most promising work to date. It was a pleasure to have BADBADNOTGOOD at the desk for IV — and exciting to imagine what’s in store for V, VI and beyond. IV is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) ”And That, Too.” ”In Your Eyes” (Feat. Charlotte Day Wilson) ”Cashmere” Alexander Sowinski (drums) Chester Hansen (bass) Leland Whitty (sax, flute, guitar) James Hill (piano) Charlotte Day Wilson (vocals). Producers: Bobby Carter, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Colin Marshall, Kara Frame Production Assistant: Jenny Gathright Photo: Claire . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.

As congressional Republicans begin work on repealing the Affordable Care Act, many of the nation’s governors want to make sure that their state budgets don’t take a hit during the dismantling process. They’re most concerned about Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor that’s run jointly by the states and federal government. As a result of a Supreme Court decision, states were allowed to decide whether they would expand Medicaid under the ACA 14 million people have gained health insurance coverage through Medicaid since eligibility for the program was expanded. While 19 states declined the expansion, primarily because of the opposition of Republican governors and lawmakers, 11 Republican governors did choose to expand the program. Now they’re lobbying to keep their citizens covered and billions of dollars of federal Medicaid money flowing. Among them is Ohio Gov. John Kasich who, along with several other Republican governors, met with GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee last week for a discussion about the health care law. Kasich has been anything but quiet on the subject. In a letter to congressional leaders, Kasich recommended that Medicaid expansion not be repealed, while indicating he’s open to some changes, such as in income eligibility. Kasich urged Congress in an on Time. com to pass an Obamacare replacement at the same time as a repeal. ”For the millions of Americans who have gained health coverage since 2010, it’s safe to assume that their idea of fixing Obamacare does not involve ripping away their own health care coverage without a responsible alternative in place,” wrote Kasich. ”If I had to pay for my medical costs, I wouldn’t be taking no medicine” Evelyn Johnson is among those who would be affected were the ACA repeal to also roll back the Medicaid. She sat in the back of the cafeteria at a social services center in Cleveland last week as a pair of health care navigators made calls to help people sign up for Medicaid. ”So far I’ve got a pair of glasses. They’re going to do my teeth,” she said of the benefits she has received since getting health insurance. Johnson, who lives with a friend, does not have children and works as a baby sitter, would not have been eligible for insurance before the Medicaid expansion, when it was limited largely to children, parents and people with disabilities. Now, anyone whose income is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line, about $16, 000 a year for a single person, is eligible. Without insurance, Johnson said she would not be able to afford the prescription drugs she needs. ”If I had to pay for my medical costs, I wouldn’t be taking no medicine,” she said. ”There’s no way. I take too many pills.” About 700, 000 Ohioans have signed up for expanded Medicaid since January 2014. Since the Affordable Care Act came into effect, Ohio’s uninsured rate has fallen to 6. 5 percent from 15 percent in 2012. Unpopular position with Republicans Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid was unpopular with Republicans. He fought his own party and sidestepped the state Legislature to get the expansion done. At an event with business leaders this month, Kasich argued that it has been a good deal for the state. ”If they don’t get coverage, they end up in the emergency room, they end up sicker, more expensive. I mean, we pay one way or the other,” Kasich said. ”And so this has been a good thing for Ohio.” Also defending their decisions to expand Medicaid are such Republican governors as Rick Snyder of Michigan, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Gary Herbert of Utah. ”So if all of a sudden, that goes away, what do we tell these 700, 000 people? We’re closed? Can’t do that,” Kasich said at the business event. Medicaid covers about 1 in 4 people in Ohio. If the expansion is rolled back, it will mean fewer payments to doctors and hospitals. ”You pull on one thread, you topple the whole tower,” said John Corlett, who ran the Medicaid program in Ohio under the previous Democratic governor. ”There’s nothing to say that the program can’t be improved, that it can’t be made better,” said Corlett, who now runs a think tank in Cleveland called the Center for Community Solutions. ”But just to say we’re going to get rid of all of it, and then we’ll figure out how to make it better, I think would be really disruptive. It’d be disruptive to healthcare providers, to patients, to insurance companies.” Changes coming? Even if the Medicaid expansion remains, the new Trump administration may make major changes to it in the future. Last year, Ohio asked the federal government to require beneficiaries to pay into health savings accounts, a request the federal government denied. ”I think that with the constellation in Washington the way that it is, that there’s going to be an awful lot of opportunities,” said Greg Lawson, a senior policy analyst with the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Ohio that opposed expansion. Lawson would like to see limits on federal spending per state, and he hopes Ohio will be able to add a work requirement for some beneficiaries. ”I don’t think you’re going to see the light switch probably just get turned, and one day it’s all going to just disappear,” he said. ”I think what you’re more likely to see is major structural changes to the program that over time that will have budgetary impacts.” But it’s not clear yet what shape those changes will take or whether the governor who expanded Medicaid here will support them.

When Ali Andrew Li was born on Jan. 7, he was gently placed on his mother’s chest, where doctors cleaned and examined him and covered him with a warm blanket. ”I just loved it,” his mother, Salma Shabaik, a family physician who lives in Los Angeles, says. ”It was really nice to have the baby right there beneath my eyes where I could feel him, touch him, kiss him.” That was different than the birth of her son Elias two years ago he was whisked away to a bassinet to be examined. And unlike Elias, who cried a lot after delivery, Shabaik says Ali stopped crying ”within seconds” after being placed on her chest. Kangaroo mother care has been widely used worldwide to care for premature babies, and it’s gaining popularity in caring for healthy full term babies like Ali as well. It is as it sounds: Like a kangaroo’s pouch, mothers hold their naked newborns on their bare chest for the first few hours of life. At Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center where Ali was born, the technique is routinely practiced for healthy mothers and newborns. The baby gets to know their mother immediately, says Dr. Larry Gray, behavioral and developmental pediatrician at Comer Children’s Hospital, University of Chicago Medicine. ”The baby gets landed in a trusting environment,” he says, reassuring them that life outside the womb can also be ”soft, comfortable and warm.” The benefits are many, according to Dr. Lydia Lee, an at UCLA. Not only is the baby happier, she says, but his or her vitals are more stable. Body temperature, heart and breathing rate normalize more quickly. The close contact also allows the baby to be exposed to the same bacteria as the mother, which can protect against allergies and infection in the future. Infants who receive kangaroo care breast feed more easily, Lee says, and their mothers tend to breast feed for longer periods of time, which is ”all good.” Babies also seem to suffer less pain. Almost 20 years ago, Gray studied how babies respond to a heel prick to draw blood, a procedure that screens newborns for genetic disorders. He found that when healthy newborns had kangaroo care, there was less facial grimacing and crying suggesting pain, compared to babies who had been swaddled and had the procedure in their bassinets, ”sort of alone.” One of the first places to show how this technique can help preemies was Colombia in the 1990s. There, hospitals with no access to incubators and other equipment often sent home preemies with no expectation that they would live. But doctors were surprised to see that babies whose mothers carried them close, skin to skin, not only survived but thrived. This was a ”serendipitous magical finding,” says Gray, suggesting that contact acted something like a ”natural incubator.” Gray also points to the work of Myron Hofer, a psychiatrist with Columbia University Medical Center who studies attachment between mother and infants. Hofer coined the term ”hidden regulators” that pass between mother and baby. It’s not just that mother and baby are together, Gray says, but also that the mother is in some way ”programming the baby, the breathing, temperature and heart rate.” That ”magic” can also happen between baby and father, too, says Gray, if there’s contact. And if mothers or babies are very sick and have to be isolated, Gray suggests mothers take any opportunity to hold their infant skin to skin. Even a little bit of kangaroo contact, he says, can be beneficial.

The main players in Syria’s civil war are meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, Monday for talks that were arranged by Russia. The discussion seeks to bolster a agreement that hasn’t ended violence in Syria, but officials say they don’t expect a breakthrough. U. N. envoy Staffan de Mistura is playing a role at the talks, which will run through Tuesday. As the meetings got underway Monday, Russia’s Tass news agency reports that Russia, Iran and Turkey plan to sign an agreement to ”create a trilateral mechanism” that will enforce the that was reached at the end of December. From Beirut, NPR’s Alice Fordham reports: ”The talks are the latest of many in Syria’s nearly civil war, but they’re unusual in that they do not have significant presence from the United States or the United Nations. Regional powers Russia and Turkey, with backing from Iran, arranged the discussions. The talks are meant to build on a recent although representatives of the government stress they don’t have high expectations for a breakthrough.” The American ambassador to Kazakhstan is at the talks at Russia’s invitation, the AP reports. The news agency adds, ”For the first time in internationally sponsored talks, Syrian armed groups — not political — are leading the opposition. Thirteen rebel factions, including from the Free Syrian Army, sent delegates.” As the talks in Astana begin, the U. N. is launching a conference in Helsinki aimed at supporting Syrian refugees and delivering humanitarian aid to some 13. 5 million people in Syria. From Moscow, NPR’s Lucian Kim reports that the Kremlin has sought to depict the talks as complementing the U. N.’s attempts to end a crisis that it says has affected more than 22 million people. ”Russia says the main goal of the talks in Kazakhstan is to firm up a that went into effect at the end of December,” Lucian says. According to Tass, Russia and its partners in the Syrian talks say they’ll also support the upcoming U. N. talks between the two sides of the conflict those sessions are scheduled to be held in Geneva on Feb. 8.

On his first day on the job, President Trump made some changes to the Oval Office he installed gold drapes and moved some statues. First Families have some leeway to make changes to the White House, and that includes changes to its art collection. It can take many hands — or eyes — for one work of art to make it into the White House. Take, for example, the large painting the Obamas hung in what’s called the Treaty Room. ”It’s an unbelievably energetic, beautiful sort of thing, in which a black horse whose body is only somewhat defined is seen running across a kind of crimson field,” says curator Mark Rosenthal. Titled Butterfly, the painting is one of a series of horse paintings by American painter Susan Rothenberg. Rosenthal had admired it since the and when he became a curator at the National Gallery of Art 20 years later, he remembered the painting and set out to acquire it. But for that, he needed money. So he convinced Texas donors Nancy and Perry Bass to purchase it for the museum. ”I had met them once or twice — barely knew them,” Rosenthal says. But what he did know was that they were ”revered conservationists.” Rosenthal thought the picture of the horse might speak to them. It did, and the painting entered the National Gallery’s collection. So how did the painting end up in the private quarters of the White House nearly 15 years later? The National Gallery’s current staff preferred not to be interviewed. But Rosenthal says, typically, the new first family sends someone there, and to other museums, to pick out art for their private living quarters. ”It might be a friend, it might be a decorator . .. but it was someone designated by the president and first lady to come to the National Gallery of Art and choose work . .. ” Rosenthal explains. ”It’s very much [like] a kid in a candy store.” When it comes to the public spaces in the White House, the rules are different. In the early 1960s, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy helped bring some order to the process of how art should enter the White House and be paid for. For decades, it was pretty haphazard, says art historian William Kloss. ”In the 19th century in particular, one of the ways Congress had to express their unhappiness with a particular administration incoming was to give them little or no funding for new furniture or new rugs or anything that was needed,” Kloss explains. ”So on more than one occasion, they held a big sale on the White House lawn so they could raise funds for new furnishings.” Today, those funds come from The White House Historical Association, a that raises money from private donations and the sale of merchandise such as books and Christmas ornaments. Former White House curator Betty Monkman started out at the White House in 1967, a few years after President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order establishing the curator position. She says the goal is to collect work by and about Americans, and there were gaps in the collection. ”We only had copies of a lot of 19th century paintings,” Monkman says. She was always on the lookout at auctions for rare life portraits of people like John and Abigail Adams. (”Which we still have not acquired because there are so few of them out there,” she says.) As curator, she was also looking for paintings that represented the nation’s different regions. A New Mexico gap, for example, was filled in during the Clinton administration with a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. First ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama also modernized the collection. Obama acquired a vibrant abstract work by the late Alma Thomas, the first woman in the permanent collection. Bush acquired a painting by artist Jacob Lawrence for the White House Green Room. In 2008, Bush told that the White House should showcase American traditions, but also stay relevant. ”The White House goes on, and history continues to be made here,” she says. ”I also want the White House to reflect more modern presidents and more modern times.” It’s too soon to say what impact Donald and Melania Trump will have on the White House art collection. But former curator Mark Rosenthal says these decisions are worth watching. ”What a person or family chooses to live with is incredibly telling about their openness to visual experiences,” he says. ”One ought to be expanding one’s horizons all the time.” The White House is actually an accredited museum, with a curatorial staff and a committee dedicated to its preservation. So if the Trumps do decide to add to its collection, they’ll have plenty of help.

Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. At his best, Ty Segall is a master songwriter trapped in the body of a punk — although the limitations of his rock actually keep him grounded and focused rather than restricted. The California bandleader’s prolific output over the past decade has grown increasingly ambitious in its own humble and way at the same time, he refuses to set aside the gnarled riffs, spilled booze and busted knuckles of his most blistering work. That hasn’t changed on his latest album (his second, after one in 2008, to bear the name Ty Segall). What’s different is an even more ardent attempt at confining chaos and squeezing catchy, catastrophically massive pop gems out of it. ”Break A Guitar” busts the album wide open right at the outset, as it harnesses a thunderous stomp that barely conceals huge hooks and Segall’s supple, melodies. ”Take my guitar I’ll be at the bar,” he sings at the end, adding a twist to an otherwise swaggering demonstration of rock ’n’ roll overconfidence. The distortion grows even more corrosive in ”The Only One,” whose dueling guitar leads (between Segall and his longtime second guitarist Emmett Kelly) erupt gloriously into a fugue of frenzied abandon. ”Thank You Mr. K” ups the ante even further, succumbing to a attack that chugs along at the breakneck speed of a bad, bleak trip. But Ty Segall does more than throttle and thrash. ”Talkin’,” a pointed parable about is wrapped in softly strummed acoustic guitars. ”Orange Color Queen” picks up on the same vibe, but with a more reflective bent like a daydream on a rowboat in the middle of a river, the song meanders through a vivid landscape of heartache while Segall does his best impression of a warbling angel. Mikal Cronin, the group’s bassist (and an excellent bandleader in his own right) joins Segall on vocals in ”Take Care (To Comb Your Hair),” another acoustic song whose plaintive, plucky tendencies shift deliriously from folky tenderness to needling, riffage by song’s end. The album’s most ambitious moments, though, appear in ”Warm Hands (Freedom Returned).” At minutes, it’s a break from Segall’s standard hand grenades heroically, it doesn’t waste a second in its pursuit of synthesis, starting out as a ball of snarling menace before dissolving into a wonderfully sparse, spacious jam. ”Papers” may not be as ambitious, lengthwise, but it stretches Segall’s canvas in a different way. Keyboardist Ben Boye’s piano is given a more prominent spot in the complex arrangement, and the entire song reflects a sense of sophistication, complete with cryptic lyrics and elusive melancholia. Segall’s role models are still as plain as day — Marc Bolan, Ray Davies and Syd Barrett chief among them — but on Ty Segall, he’s taken yet another strong step toward turning retroactive garage rock into high art.

Samsung announced the results of a investigation into why its Galaxy Note 7 phones spontaneously caught fire last summer, pinning the blame on faulty batteries. The bungled launch led to a recall of 2. 5 million devices and losses totaling more than $2 billion. The root cause, according to an internal investigation conducted with the help of outside experts, was battery short circuits. Both companies that supplied batteries for the Galaxy Note 7 had separate issues leading to the fires, Samsung says, in part due to the rush to replace the originally exploding phones with new ones. The company did not name its battery suppliers. ”The comprehensive responsibility lies with us. We did not thoroughly vet the parts that were assembled for us,” said DJ Koh, the head of Samsung’s sprawling mobile unit. In a packed press conference at its offices in southern Seoul Monday, the world’s biggest smartphone maker again apologized to customers around the world for the bungling of its product release. Phones were initially recalled and replaced, but the replacement devices also began to catch fire. Presentations at the announcement by outside investigators backed up Samsung’s findings, which indicate batteries from supplier A were shorting because of a design flaw or in some cases a lack of insulation tape. And batteries from supplier B — which were issued in the replacement phones following the initial recall — were catching fire because of a separate manufacturing defect. ”We wanted to proceed quickly to change the batteries swiftly, out of concern for the consumers,” Koh said, explaining why the company rushed to replace the faulty phones. ”We are very sorry to the consumers for not having vetted the B batteries thoroughly. At the time the B batteries didn’t exhibit the problems that A batteries did, but in retrospect the B batteries had a different issue.” U. S. safety authorities are conducting their own investigation into this matter. Customers and investors will be closely watching how the company adjusts to prevent another fiasco of this size. Samsung announced a new ” ” product safety protocol that it says will ensure quality of its products going forward. It is set to release the Galaxy S8 device, the closest competitor to the Apple iPhone, in the coming months. The Note line may be forever discontinued. Meanwhile, tomorrow the South Korean giant will announce its earnings, which is expected to be the company’s best performance in three years, despite the loss on the Note 7 devices. The uptick is thanks to robust sales of chips and screens, analysts say. Haeryun Kang contributed to this post.

The Los singer known as MILCK knew she wanted to do something memorable for the Women’s March in Washington, D. C on Saturday. So she contacted a small group of other singers from across the country to coordinate a flash mob performance of MILCK’s song ”Quiet,” an emotional rallying cry for and unity. The group of women rehearsed together via Skype and rendezvoused in D. C. where they performed a cappella versions of ”Quiet” several times during the march. Israeli director Alma Har’el captured part of one of the performances and posted it to her Twitter account and Facebook page, where it’s accrued more than 8 million views. The performance is unadorned and profoundly moving, capturing at least part of the mood that settled on the march, with a balance of defiance and love. MILCK says she wrote the song as a way of exorcising her own history of physical and sexual abuse. ”With this song, I feel like I’m finally allowing my truest inner self to be expressed,” she said in a prepared statement announcing the song, which was officially released days before the weekend marches. ”In this time of fear, propaganda and discrimination, it is critical for our individual and collective voices to be heard. With this song, I’m saying I am NOT the woman who is going to stay quiet where there are figures who promote oppression. I want to encourage others to give a voice to whatever they may have silenced, political or personal.” Here’s the official studio version of ”Quiet.”

The Trump administration is pushing forward with plans for two major oil pipelines in the U. S. projects that sparked nationwide demonstrations and legal fights under President Barack Obama. President Trump signed documents inviting the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline to resubmit a proposal for the project, which the Obama administration rejected in 2015, and instructing the Army to expedite the review and approval process for the section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that hasn’t been built. ”We’re going to renegotiate some of the terms, and if they’d like, we’ll see if they can get the pipeline built,” Trump said of the Keystone XL pipeline. ”This not a done deal,” Bill McKibben of the group 350. org, which has lobbied against pipelines for years, said in a statement. He called the pipelines ”unwise and immoral” because they contribute to climate change. Trump also signed a document requesting a federal plan to incentivize the use of U. S. pipes for pipeline projects. The lobbying group representing the petroleum industry issued a statement in favor of the policy reversal. A spokesperson for the TransCanada company, which proposed the Keystone XL project, said the company was preparing to resubmit a proposal. Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the nearly completed Dakota Access Pipeline, did not immediately comment. Both the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline provoked protests from a diverse group of citizens concerned about the climate impacts and potential environmental contamination from the projects, as well as the safety of their routes across large swaths of the country and the mechanisms by which the federal government approved those routes. McKibben promised to fight the president’s move, saying, ”The last time around, TransCanada was so confident they literally mowed the strip where they planned to build the pipeline, before people power stopped them. People will mobilize again.” A portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline is under review by the Army Corps of Engineers, which announced last week that it was gathering information for an environmental assessment of a crossing under the Missouri River in North Dakota — an area that the nearby Standing Rock Sioux tribe says is sacred land. Demonstrators, sometimes numbering in the thousands, set up several camps on occupied land near the proposed crossing site beginning last summer, in support of the Standing Rock Sioux. The tribe filed a lawsuit against the federal government to block the pipeline, which was retracted earlier this month. The protests diminished after the Army Corps blocked the final permit in December and announced it would reassess the pipeline route, taking into account concerns about the risk of water contamination and allegations that the tribe was not adequately consulted about a route that violated sacred land. On Tuesday, the tribe released a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, promising to take legal action against the federal government. ”Trump’s decision to give the for the Dakota Access Pipeline is a slap in the face to Native Americans and a blatant disregard for the rights to their land,” it stated. The tribe also addressed the president’s stated plan to streamline what he called the ”incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process” for environmental reviews of pipeline and manufacturing projects. ”The Trump administration should allow careful environmental impact analysis to be completed with full and meaningful participation of affected tribes,” the Standing Rock Sioux wrote in its statement. Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota released a statement praising the president’s actions, calling the pipelines ”crucial energy infrastructure projects” and saying they would create jobs. Amy Sisk of Prairie Public Radio was at the site on Tuesday and reports that demonstrators remain camped on the North Dakota prairie near the site where the Dakota Access Pipeline’s slated to cross under the Missouri River. ”They’re living in winterized tents, tepees and wooden structures, many keeping warm by fireplaces installed inside their makeshift homes,” she tells us. ”Demonstrations have slowed this winter in the wake of the December announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers would launch a new environmental review of the pipeline. Word that Trump has begun the process of expediting this review and advancing the project spread quickly through camp Tuesday. For many, this did not come as a surprise. ”Protesters vow to continue their stand against the pipeline. But the camp’s future is in limbo, amid flooding concerns after a heavy winter snowfall. And the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has asked protesters to leave. Some I talked to are moving to higher ground so as to avoid the floodplain, yet continue the fight as the Trump administration weighs in.”

President Trump on Tuesday gave the for construction of two controversial oil pipelines, the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access. As he signed the paperwork in an Oval Office photo op, Trump said his administration is ”going to renegotiate some of the terms” of the Keystone project, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of western Canada and connect to an existing pipeline to the Gulf Coast. The pipelines had been stopped during the Obama administration. The State Department rejected a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and President Obama ordered work halted on the Dakota pipeline after Native American groups and other activists protested its route near culturally sensitive sites in North Dakota. Trump said the Keystone XL pipeline will mean ”a lot of jobs, 28, 000 construction jobs, great construction jobs.” In a statement, TransCanada, the pipeline’s owner, said it ”appreciate( s) the President of the United States inviting us to for KXL. We are currently preparing the application and intend to do so.” Trump also signed a decree that the pipelines will be built with American steel, ”like we used to in the old days,” and two others: one that he said will streamline ”the incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process and reducing regulatory burdens for domestic manufacturing,” and another he says will expedite environmental reviews and approvals ”for infrastructure projects.” ”We can’t be in an environmental process for 15 years if a bridge is going to be falling down or if a highway is crumbling,” Trump said. The president’s actions quickly reignited the debate over the pipelines supporters say the pipelines will lead to lower energy costs and create jobs, while environmentalists argue they will lead to the release of more carbon into the atmosphere. The reaction from lawmakers was swift. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Trump’s actions to advance the pipelines will ”put the profits of the fossil fuel industry ahead of the future of our planet.” But North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said Trump’s actions ”are a needed step” toward the goal of an North American energy strategy. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which protested the Dakota Access pipeline, said it will take legal action to fight Trump’s decision, saying the pipeline ”risks contaminating tribal and American water supplies while disregarding treaty rights.” In remarks to automakers on Tuesday morning, Trump proclaimed himself an environmentalist, but added, ”It’s out of control, and we’re going to make a very short process, and we’re going to either give you your permits or we’re not going to give you your permits, but you’re going to know very quickly.”

Hundreds of people around the country are still suffering from complications linked to injections of tainted medicine produced at a Massachusetts pharmacy in 2012. A nationwide outbreak of fungal infections was tied to the shipment of nearly 18, 000 contaminated vials of methylprednisolone, a steroid, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Barry Cadden, an owner of the pharmacy, is now on trial in U. S. District Court in Boston. He faces federal charges that include racketeering and murder. He pleaded not guilty. The trial, which began Jan. 9, is expected to last two or three months. Federal prosecutors say the steroids were mixed in unsanitary conditions with expired ingredients. Bruce Singal, Cadden’s attorney, declined to comment. In court, he has said that Cadden oversaw the company’s operations, but didn’t work in the facility’s ”clean rooms” or mix the drugs that harmed people. ”He is not a murderer and he is not responsible for their deaths,” Singal said, according to the Associated Press. The outbreak of fungal infections tied to injections with contaminated medicines killed at least 64 people and sickened about 700 more. A report about the public health investigation and response published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, said the outlook for ”patients remains uncertain. Although many case patients have completed antifungal therapy and their conditions are currently stable or improved, relapses of infection are possible.” Many people who got sick after the injections are still waiting for compensation checks from a legal settlement with the compounding pharmacy. Several people who became sick after injections talked about their lives since then. None has testified in the case but some have plans to attend the trial. Here are excerpts from conversations with them. Bill Thomas, 62, of Lowell, Mich. The last injection — the steroid injection that I got in my spine — was for pain in my legs, pain and numbness, due to spinal cord injuries. During the course of the next few days, I felt like I was coming down with the flu . .. I had trouble remembering things. I came down with an incredible headache that didn’t go away. I had terrible neck pain, and my eyes were very sensitive to light. I’ve gone from being a person who walked two or three miles a few times a day. . .. I used to go out a lot in wilderness areas and did backpacking. And now I only leave the house a couple times a week. I’m always tired and always in pain, I can’t think. I get confused easily. . .. I can’t read like I used to. Justice needs to be done here. Tremendous harm was done to a great many people, and that should not be forgotten. Angela Farthing, 46, of Maryland, I had fungal meningitis and was admitted to the hospital. When I was released, I ended up having a stroke and developed a brain aneurysm. I was readmitted, and I was there for almost another two months. . .. I got very sick. I was vomiting all the time, had horrible headaches every day. I lost a good 30 pounds I went down to 100 pounds. . .. I missed about a year of work. And it was discovered later that I’d developed an abscess in my spinal cord. I had to have that surgically removed. But they could not get all of the abscess out, because they said if they would have sliced any deeper, they could have paralyzed me or I could have lost bowel or bladder function. [My husband] really suffered quite a bit when I was diagnosed. He had to take care of me, he had to bathe me, he had to change me, he had to do my IV. . .. He had to take over cleaning the house and cooking and taking care of our dogs. . .. He was a recovering alcoholic, and unfortunately, he stopped going to AA meetings and he succumbed to his addiction. Kathy Pugh, daughter and caregiver for her mother, Evelyn March, 85, of Pinckney, Mich. [My mother had] an abscess in her back on her spine at the site of the injection of the tainted medicine. Now she’s not doing well at all. It’s pretty much pain. She went from being a very vital woman with just sporadic problems with her back, to where she’s bedridden in a hospital bed on oxygen, looking up at the ceiling. That’s her life — occasionally trying to watch TV, but she finds it hard to concentrate for a very long length of time. That’s one of the side effects of the antifungal medication, which it was ’take or die.’ ” Evelyn March, My life’s compared to what it was. I don’t understand why things can be allowed to happen like that. Getting old is bad enough, but then to put something else on to it. . .. I hope [Barry Cadden] gets his butt burned. I mean he, he, . .. well, I’d better shut up, because I’d probably say more than I should say.

It might have been the first place they looked. When federal authorities raided an apartment in Westborough, Mass. earlier this month, they found money hidden under the mattress — approximately $20 million. Photos show a box spring stuffed with bricks of cash that were seized during a Homeland Security investigation linked to a pyramid scheme involving a company called TelexFree. Agents found the money after they arrested a Brazilian national named Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha, who was charged with one count of conspiring to commit money laundering. The admitted to federal agents that he was in the U. S. to facilitate a money transfer to a founder of the company, court documents state. TelexFree, which sold phone service, ”was really a massive pyramid scheme,” according to court documents. ”It make little or no money from selling VOIP, but took in millions of dollars from people signing up to receive financial bonuses from advertising and recruiting.” Federal authorities executed search warrants against the company in 2014 — and court records state that ”about 965, 225 people lost money when TelexFree collapsed, their losses totaling about $1, 755, 927, 755.” One of the founders fled to Brazil another pleaded guilty and admitted the company was a pyramid scheme. In the aftermath of the Massachusetts company’s collapse, TelexFree executives in Brazil allegedly plotted to retrieve money left behind. Rocha is said to be one of those people, sent from Brazil. He traveled to the U. S. in January and June 2016, but money were cancelled both times, according to court records. On New Year’s Eve, Rocha arrived in New York, allegedly for another attempt. He was arrested in Massachusetts on Jan. 4 after he met a ”cooperating witness at a restaurant in Hudson, Mass. and allegedly gave him $2. 2 million in a suitcase,” according to the Department of Justice. Later that day, agents found the cash in an apartment Rocha had visited. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. On Monday, a federal magistrate judge said he posed a flight risk and ordered him detained pending trial. ”There is no incentive for him to remain in the United States, and every incentive for him to flee given the strength of the case against him,” she wrote.

On a frigid winter night, a man wearing two coats shuffles into a brightly lit brick restaurant in downtown Madrid. Staff greet him warmly he’s been here many times. The maître d’ stamps his ID card, and the hungry man selects a table with a red tablecloth, under a big brass chandelier. The man, Luis Gallardo, is homeless — and so are all the diners, every night, at the city’s Robin Hood restaurant. Its mission is to charge the rich and feed the poor. Paying customers at breakfast and lunch foot the bill for the restaurant to serve dinner to homeless people, free of charge. It’s become Spain’s most lunch reservation. The restaurant has poached staff from luxury hotels. Celebrity chefs are lining up to cook once a week. For paying clients, the lunch is fully booked through the end of March. The restaurant opened in early December, and is run by an Catholic priest, Ángel García Rodriguez, whom everyone knows simply as ”Padre Ángel.” ”I want them to eat with the same dignity as any other customer,” Father Ángel says. ”And the same quality, with glasses made of crystal, not plastic, and in an atmosphere of friendship and conversation.” Outside, there’s a sign listing the house rules: Patrons are allowed to sing as they please, as long as it doesn’t disturb other customers. They can use the free wifi and borrow a cell phone if they need to make a call. They’re free to bring their own food and order only drinks, if they prefer. Or they can take over the kitchen for a birthday party or other special celebration. As founder of Messengers of Peace, a local charity, Padre Ángel has also converted an abandoned church nearby into a sort of community center. It’s the only church in Madrid that’s open 24 hours a day — with free coffee, television and places for patrons to sleep. He or a colleague celebrates Mass there daily. On the night NPR visited, the Robin Hood waiters served mushroom consommé, followed by roast turkey and potatoes. For dessert, there’s a choice of vanilla pudding or yogurt. Gallardo, the man in two coats, says the meal reminds him of Christmases past, before the accounting firm he ran went bankrupt and he had to lay off 60 employees. He shows NPR some photos on his cell phone of a dining table holding a huge spread of sweets and a bottle of French wine. He says the photos were taken two years ago at his home, which he has since had to sell to pay debts. ”We were just like any other family,” says Gallardo, 48, shaking his head. His wife has now left him. He lives on the street now, sleeping in ATM machine alcoves. As for his future, he says: ”My future is now. I can’t even talk about tomorrow. I’d like to know, but I don’t what it holds.” Spain’s economy may be out of recession, but its effects are lingering. Unemployment still hovers near 20 percent. The Robin Hood Restaurant feeds more than 100 needy people each night, in two shifts. Back in the kitchen, the restaurant’s dishwasher has just broken down. A volunteer plunges her hands into the sink and starts washing plates by hand. ”Some of our diners are very educated, and some are a bit ashamed to be here,” says Nieve Cuenca, a retiree who comes to help out in the kitchen once a week. ”I love this work. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, in soapy water.

Like any college student, Vanessa Ramirez never expected chemotherapy would be part of her busy school schedule. ”I don’t have any history of cancer in my family, so it wasn’t something I was on the lookout for,” Ramirez says, sitting outside the library of her alma mater, Arizona State University, in Tempe. Ramirez was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was 23. Now, more than a decade later, she’s healthy and so are her children. ”But there are also emergencies that happen,” Ramirez says, explaining the priority she places on health insurance. ”I have two young kids who are running around. They are rambunctious. I have a daughter that loves to climb trees.” After dealing with her own serious illness at such a young age, Ramirez doesn’t take health care for granted. And the Affordable Care Act made her feel secure that she and her kids would be covered. She bought insurance through HealthCare. gov, even with her condition, and her children got covered, too. ”I want them to be able to have health insurance and doctors to monitor them, in case something unfortunate comes up,” Ramirez says. Ramirez has coverage via the exchange, and her kids are covered through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is for working families who don’t quite qualify for Medicaid. Arizona’s version is called KidsCare. State lawmakers froze KidsCare enrollment back in 2010 Arizona was the only state without an active program. But last year Obamacare helped revive the program by covering the entire cost in Arizona and a handful of other states, at least through 2017. ”A lot of people don’t realize that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act could wipe out KidsCare, that we just got back,” says Dana Wolfe Naimark with advocacy group Children’s Action Alliance. In the months since Gov. Doug Ducey and the legislature reopened KidsCare last year, enrollment has already surpassed 13, 000. But now Naimark worries about the fallout if the ACA is repealed. ”It would be up to the state legislature whether they could invest state dollars to keep it going, or whether the coverage would go away,” Naimark says. In recent years, Arizona has had one of the highest rates of uninsured children in the country. But Obamacare has begun to change that, bringing coverage to thousands of kids. Arizona was also one of the states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA — but only after fierce infighting among Republicans in the Arizona legislature about growing federal influence. Conservative critics of KidsCare also retained some control over the budget of the program when they reinstated it state law will halt or shut down Medicaid expansion and KidsCare anytime federal funding dips too low. ”Whenever you take a look at some of these Washington approaches, you really do lard up these insurance policies with a lot of benefits that individuals and families really would not go out and buy on their own,” says Naomi Lopez Bauman director of health care policy for the conservative Goldwater Institute. Her organization sued to stop the state’s Medicaid expansion. One of the proposals favored by Republican leadership is giving states a fixed amount of money, called a block grant, and letting them have more say in who and what they cover, in terms of health care. Bauman says the state, if given enough flexibility, could save money with such a system. The question, she says, would be, ”How do you make it easier and better for individuals and families to get the coverage and care that best meet their own needs and preferences?” But other conservatives say changing how these programs are funded could backfire. Heather Carter, a Republican state representative who lives in north Phoenix, voted for Medicaid expansion and for restarting KidsCare. ”What I hope does not happen is that decisions are made nationally that actually penalize us for being efficient and effective, long before the Affordable Care Act was in place,” Carter says. Arizona already has one of the Medicaid programs in the country, she says. And Medicaid officials in Arizona caution that block grants could actually shortchange the state, because it has a fast growing population and a large share of people living on incomes that are around the poverty line. Less federal funding would likely force lawmakers to cut back services. ”We will have to make very difficult decisions in Arizona on who will — and who will not — receive coverage,” Carter says. If states lose the extra federal funding they received to expand Medicad and KidsCare, it would cost Arizona hundreds of millions of dollars to keep everyone on Medicaid covered to the same degree they are now. And even Democrats who support broad health coverage — including Senate Minority Leader Katie Hobbs — concede that’s not realistic. ”I don’t see anyone in the state coming forward and saying, ’Oh, we’ll cover this,’ ” Hobbs says. ”Because we don’t have the money to do it.” Arizona has more children enrolled in the federal marketplace than almost any other state. If you add in Medicaid and KidsCare, roughly 130, 000 kids or more could be at risk of losing their health care coverage if Congress doesn’t come up with a replacement that is similar in scope. This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with KJZZ and Kaiser Health News.

At the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Clinic in Scarbro, W. Va. oxygen tubes dangle from the noses of three miners slowly pedaling on stationary bikes. All of these men have black lung — a disease caused by breathing in coal dust. Over time, the dust coats the lungs and causes them to harden. Hard lungs don’t easily expand and contract, and that makes it difficult to breathe. ”You try to get air in them, and they don’t want to cooperate with you as they did before,” says retired miner James Bounds, speaking with great effort. Not every coal miner gets black lung, just as some smokers don’t get cancer. But for those who do, Bounds says, the disease is devastating. ”There’s no cure at all,” he says. ”It keeps getting harder and harder until one day, I guess, you take your last breath and they won’t expand for you no more.” Bounds is one of about 38, 000 miners or eligible survivors — usually a spouse — currently receiving black lung benefits. The benefits are compensation for the physical damage Bounds sustained while doing his job. It took him 4 years to get approved, despite the fact that his lungs are so bad he has to stop moving to talk. But now the qualification process is supposed to move faster. The Affordable Care Act includes special provisions that make the process of getting black lung benefits easier for coal miners. If the ACA is repealed, gaining these benefits could become much more difficult, effectively harming a group of people that President Trump has promised to protect. Debbie Wills coordinates the black lung program for Valley Health primary care system. She says that prior to the ACA, it was almost impossible to qualify for the compensation benefits. Coal companies pay the benefits, and also pay into a federal trust fund that pays when coal companies can’t. Wills says the process of getting benefits was arduous for miners. ”Coal company lawyers would doctor shop around the country and find two, three, four, five, seven doctors to say, ’Yes this miner is disabled, but it’s not because of black lung,’” she says. The Affordable Care Act includes something called the Byrd Amendments. One shifts the burden of proof — instead of miners having to prove that mining caused their black lung, the coal companies have to prove that mining didn’t. ”You still have to prove the 100 percent disability, which is hard,” says Wills. ”But if you can prove that, and if you’ve worked 15 or more years or longer in the mines, then you’re entitled to a presumption that your disease arose from your coal mine employment.” Another part provides lifetime benefits to certain dependents who survive the death of a miner, if the miner had been receiving the benefits before death. If the ACA is repealed without a replacement, cases that were approved after the ACA went into effect could be reopened, leaving the miner or survivor vulnerable to losing the benefits. And, the burden of proof may shift again, making it difficult for applicants to qualify. Earlier this month, both the House and the Senate introduced resolutions to preserve the Byrd Amendments from a broader ACA repeal. Rep. Evan Jenkins . Va. an ACA opponent, introduced the measure in the House. ”I am a firm believer that Obamacare is already in a death spiral and desperately needs to be fixed,” Jenkins says. ”While we are going to work to improve our health care system, I feel strongly about my resolution to make sure that the presumption relating to black lung is contained in whatever is the end product of this work this year.” This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Kaiser Health News.

Over the years, music fans have slowly filled in details about a mostly anonymous collective of Detroit studio musicians known as The Funk Brothers, who were the backing band for many of Motown’s hit songs. Less documented is what these musicians did when they were not in the studio. Recently, the archive label Resonance found a tape of Funk Brothers guitarist Dennis Coffey playing live with a trio at a Detroit nightclub in 1968. They’ve now released the recordings as Hot Coffey in the D: Burnin’ at Morey Baker’s Showplace Lounge, an album that offers one answer to the question, ”How did Motown happen?” Detroit in the 1960s was alive with music. When the musicians of Motown finished recording for the day, they could often be found performing in local nightspots. Label founder Berry Gordy has said that the city’s musically diverse club scene was essential to the label’s success: Musicians like Coffey used these recurring gigs to develop not just skills, but also a sensibility. If there is a ”Detroit sound,” it has to do with the way the rhythm players interact: They lay back, follow each other’s moves and even seem to breathe together. This approach didn’t originate in the Motown studio. It developed over countless nights, in small venues the one where Hot Coffey was recorded. These live tracks are some distance from the Motown . Still, you can hear the shared DNA: As Coffey and his trio dig in and work the groove, they bring the energy that was expected in the Motown studio to an ordinary night in a club.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, . tried to test whether President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget believed in facts or ”alternative facts” during a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. With the incoming Trump administration repeating falsehoods about the size of crowds at the president’s inauguration, Merkley asked Rep. Mick Mulvaney, . C. to look at two photos — taken at roughly the same time during former President Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and Trump’s just last week — to gauge which, in fact, was bigger. ”I’m not really sure how this ties to OMB,” Mulvaney said, somewhat puzzled. But he did concede that ”from that picture, it does appear that the crowd on the side [for Obama’s first inauguration] is bigger than the crowd on the side.” Merkley assured Mulvaney there was a reason behind his riddle — he wanted to know if, as OMB director, the South Carolina Republican would be truthful in his budget presentations and recommendations to the president. ”The reason I’m raising this is because budgets often contain buried deceptions. . .. This is an example of where the president’s team, on something very simple and straightforward, wants to embrace a fantasy rather than a reality,” Merkley said. ”Are you comfortable as you proceed as a key budget adviser presenting falsehoods as simply an ’alternative fact’?” the Oregon senator continued, referring to Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s assertion on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that White House press secretary Sean Spicer was simply giving ”alternative facts” to rebut evidence of smaller crowd sizes for Trump’s inauguration. What Spicer presented were assertions riddled with inaccuracies. Mulvaney, still sounding somewhat perplexed over the unusual line of questioning, assured Merkley that he was ”deadly serious about giving you hard numbers I intend to follow through on that” if confirmed as OMB director.

Updated 10:57 a. m. Updated 9:53 a. m. Updated 9:25 a. m. When the nominees for the 2017 Academy Awards were announced this morning, La La Land racked up 14 nods, tying records held by Titanic and All About Eve. Martin Scorsese’s Silence received only a single nomination for cinematography, while the small but critically praised film Hell or High Water performed above expectations, with nominations for best picture, best supporting actor (Jeff Bridges) and original screenplay. Call it Oscars Slightly Less White: Unlike last year, when no people of color managed to secure acting or directing nominations, the Academy nominated Denzel Washington for lead actor in Fences, Mahershala Ali and Dev Patel for supporting actor in Moonlight and Lion, respectively, Loving’s Ruth Negga in the lead actress category, and Viola Davis (Fences) Naomie Harris (Moonlight) and Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) were nominated for best supporting actress. Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins was also nominated for best director. ABC will telecast the 89th Annual Oscar Awards ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 26. BEST PICTURE, First Impressions: If you loved La La Land and were worried that the buzz around it was peaking too early for it to make a strong showing at the Oscars, the raft of nominations it received this morning will either allay your fears, or cement them. One the one hand, it shows, yet again, how much Hollywood loves movies about movies — on the other, we’ve now got 33 whole days for the film’s detractors to feed the palpable, and growing, backlash. Otherwise, no particular surprises here. Except: Notable Snubs?: The poor showing of Martin Scorsese’s Silence isn’t a surprise, if you’ve been following Oscar prognosticators, but it’s striking. ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE, First Impressions: If there’s a surprise here, it’s Mortensen, if only because Captain Fantastic came and went so quickly. This is likely shaping up into a battle between Affleck and Washington. Notable Snubs?: Joel Edgerton’s performance in Loving was powerful but inwardly directed, and there may be room for only one performance (Affleck) on this list. ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE, First Impressions: Florence Foster Jenkins is a chewy role, and Streep attacks it with Streepish verve, while Portman’s performance as Jackie O. risks something by running right up to the edge of satire before retreating to find something smaller, and real. Negga ensures that audiences register the love between Richard and Mildred Loving in a nuanced, grounded way that never feels cloying, and Stone makes the most of some lovely moments in La La Land. But in Elle — a challenging, uncompromising film — Isabell Huppert is icy and ferocious, and she earns our sympathy while remaining unlikable. That is, as they say in acting conservatories, a neat trick. Notable Snubs?: Just about everyone expected to see Amy Adams in here for her quiet but hugely emotional performance in Arrival. And personally, I’d have loved to see Annette Bening in here, because she does so much in 20th Century Women that’s small and quiet, unshowy and true. ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE, First Impressions: Hedges is a slight surprise here, but you can’t say he didn’t earn his place. Ali is heavily favorited. Notable Snubs?: Many expected Hugh Grant to earn a nod for Florence Foster Jenkins. ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE, First Impressions: Williams made the very, very most of her relatively brief screentime, as did Harris, Kidman and Spencer. But screentime doesn’t matter to Oscar voters (ask Judi Dench) emotional weight does. And by that metric, there’s no contest — this is Davis’s to lose. ANIMATED FEATURE FILM, First Impressions: Kubo has a great story, The Red Turtle is achingly beautiful, Zootopia is wildly popular (which doesn’t hurt) and delivers a message (ditto) Moana is the juggernaut that is Moana, and My Life as a Zucchini . ... I haven’t seen My Life as a Zucchini. Notable Snubs?: Many expressed surprise this morning that Finding Dory failed to make a showing here, which makes it the second Pixar film in a row (after 2015’s The Good Dinosaur) to fail to earn a nomination. CINEMATOGRAPHY, First Impressions: Silence’s only Oscar nomination this year. COSTUME DESIGN, DIRECTING, First Impressions: Jenkins is only the fourth director to be nominated for an Oscar in the history of the ceremony. Notable Snubs?: Directors of four of the nine films nominated for best picture — Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures and Lion — didn’t make the cut, here. Neither, as noted, did Scorsese. DOCUMENTARY (FEATURE) First Impression: Depending on whom you talk to, the O. J. doc is either heavily favorited or — because most people saw it on T. V. not in a movie theater — a longshot. That may depress its votes, allowing the widely praised I Am Not Your Negro to take home the Oscar. DOCUMENTARY (SHORT SUBJECT) FILM EDITING, FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, First Impressions: A Man Called Ove is a while The Salesman is . .. not particularly interested in pleasing crowds. This will be interesting to watch. MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING, First Impressions: The West Coast just woke up to a world in which the phrase ”the Suicide Squad” is a thing people can say, with their mouths. MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE) First Impressions: Probably La La Land’s to lose, particularly if the voters don’t go for it in the major categories. MUSIC (ORIGINAL SONG) First Impressions: Two songs from the same movie hasn’t happened in a while, so they might split the vote. But the real story here is that Miranda, of ”How Far I’ll Go,” is one O short of an EGOT. Voters might want to be a part of that milestone. PRODUCTION DESIGN, First Impressions: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! makes its only appearance in the 2017 nominations. SHORT FILM (ANIMATED) SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION) SOUND EDITING, SOUND MIXING, VISUAL EFFECTS, WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY) First Impressions: The screenplay categories offer a chance for both Moonlight and La La Land to get a victory on Oscar night, in case one or the other runs the table — but don’t count out the goodwill that’s still gathering behind Hidden Figures. WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY) First Impressions: I love that The Lobster got a nod — but then, the screenplay categories are historically where films too weird for the Academy get recognized. 20th Century Women isn’t weird, exactly, but it’s pleasantly shaggy and unconventional in structure. That said, if La La Land takes this award, you’re probably looking at a sweep.

”I never thought I can make a film for Oscar!” says Khaleed Khateeb. Khateeb is a volunteer for the Syria Civil Defense forces, rescuing those caught in the crossfire of the civil war. He began filming scenes of the rescue missions and posting them on YouTube. When filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel decided to make a documentary about the group, he got in touch with Khateeb, gave him training and better camera equipment and told him to keep on filming. Today, it was announced that the Netflix film, which features Khateeb’s footage, has been nominated for an Oscar in the short documentary category. ”I feel we let all the people around the world . .. know what is going on in Syria,” he told us after hearing of the nomination. We spoke to Khateeb last September about his work on the film and we interviewed von Einsiedel as well. That story is below.

With so much focus in the early days of the Trump administration centered on GOP plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget that Republicans are planning another ambitious goal this year — overhauling the entire federal tax code. ”Very few predicted President Trump’s election with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate would move us to closer to tax reform than at any point in the last 30 years,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, said Tuesday in a speech previewing the House GOP’s strategy at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. The last major overhaul of the tax code was in 1986, under President Reagan and a split control of Congress. Brady chairs one of the more powerful committees in the House, with vast jurisdiction over the tax code, trade bills and health care. His panel is also working on legislation to repeal certain aspects of Obamacare, and it will play a key role in whatever the replacement plan ultimately looks like. But Republicans are arguably more prepared for a potential tax overhaul, which they have been formulating for years. Former Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, . authored an overhaul in 2014, but it was lobbied into defeat and never received a vote in Congress. Brady sees lawmakers ”moving forward aggressively” to enact tax reform in 2017. ”Tax reform is truly one of those opportunities. We are committed to seizing it in a very bold way,” he said. The broad outlines of the plan include dramatically lowering corporate and business tax rates to the lowest in history. It would also allow businesses to write off the full cost of new capital investments, meaning returns on purchases related to new software, equipment, technology and the like. Republicans also want to end what they call the ”Made in America” tax on U. S. exports, also known as the border adjustment tax. President Trump has criticized this GOP proposal as ”too complicated.” The controversial proposal seeks to boost U. S. manufacturers by taxing imports but exempting exports from taxation. ”It will be a for our businesses and our economy as a whole,” Brady said. He voiced frustration often aired by lawmakers that border adjustment taxes mean, for instance, that it is cheaper for companies to buy Chinese steel than American steel or to buy foreign oil over American oil. House Republicans also want to lower tax brackets for individuals and families, and Brady reiterated a GOP pledge to create a tax system where most people can file a single page of paperwork the size ”of a postcard.” Brady also called for a ”bust up” of the Internal Revenue Service, and to redesign the agency into three service units designed to provide customer service for individual, family and business tax questions. The House GOP plan, of course, faces several roadblocks. The most significant is the U. S. Senate, where top Senate Republicans are moving more cautiously and have indicated they would like Democratic for a legislative overhaul of this magnitude. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, is expected to offer his vision of tax reform in a similar address next week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also indicated he prefers any tax overhaul to be revenue neutral, meaning new tax laws would shift the tax burden but would not change the amount of money coming in to the federal government. The House GOP’s plan, as outlined, would add to the deficit in that it would very likely result in less revenue coming in, but Republicans believe their tax overhaul would generate significant economic growth to make up the difference. But deficit hawks were also given a fresh cautionary warning from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office Tuesday. Its latest budget outlook forecasts deficits will continue to grow over the next decade, adding an additional $10 trillion to the public debt if no changes are made. Maya MacGuineas, head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, which advocates for centrist budget reforms to balance the budget, said in a statement that the current trajectory is ”an unsustainable path” and requires policymaking in Washington. ”Policymakers should not go into debt denial with hopes that unrealistic growth and rosy projections will save the day,” she said.

The Women’s March, which drew millions of demonstrators to city streets on every continent (including Antarctica) this past Saturday, was historic for its numbers and deeply striking in its planetary solidarity. The various marches were a flare for a new movement, galvanized by a shift to the right in national and international politics. The video for ”Work,” a song released by Toronto singer Charlotte Day Wilson late last summer on her CDW EP, is a minimalist piece that alludes, silently and elegantly, to the nascent movement quickly calcifying around it. Its simple premise, ”people commuting to work as a moving portrait” as director Fantavious Fritz puts it, amounts to a soundless scream washed — outside of Wilson’s striking red — in earthen hues tuned lovingly to Wilson’s wide, bright, humid voice. (Joining BADBADNOTGOOD for a song during the band’s recent Tiny Desk concert, her innate talent, laid bare and uncorrected, is made plain.) It’s worth examining how interpretations of the song were likely far different around its release than at the present moment. For example, the line, ”I won’t let go till I’ve got what’s mine” shifts and glides, in retrospect, to accommodate and address this new, maybe darker, reality. It likely won’t be the last time. ”I really wanted to use shooting the video as an opportunity to organize an afternoon of camaraderie with an amazing group of women, genderqueer and trans folks from my community in Toronto,” Wilson, who identifies as queer, writes. ”People got to know each other, make new friends and bask in the powerful energy that occupied an otherwise ordinary, mundane space.” It’s simply, beautifully, the latest example.

At first glance, the snapshots featured on yolocaust. de look like any other ordinary selfies. People are smiling, dancing, juggling or striking a yoga pose. But if you move the mouse over an image, the background switches to stills showing scenes of Nazi concentration camps. Suddenly, the pictures become profoundly disturbing. People are pictured dancing on corpses or juggling in mass graves. The photo montage series is Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira’s response to visitors snapping what he sees as frivolous selfies at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Germany’s national Holocaust memorial site. His project has sparked a debate over where to draw the line in an age in which most experiences are filtered through the lens of a smartphone and shared online. The name of his website — ”Yolocaust” — is yet another provocation, with its reference to the acronym ”you only live once.” Shapira, 28, was born in Israel and emigrated to Germany at 14. His maternal grandfather narrowly escaped the gas chambers when Polish Christians hid him from the Nazis. His paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was one of 11 Israeli athletes murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Shapira takes umbrage at what he sees as the mindless behavior of posting selfies at a site marking the extermination of 6 million Jews. His aim, he tells NPR, is not to shame people or join the rampant backlash culture that dominates social media — but to ”make people stop and think about where they are in the moment” and what it means to visit a memorial. Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, an unrelenting grid of 2, 711 concrete slabs located near the Brandenburg Gate, is ”a place for reflection,” Shapira says, ”not just another backdrop for goofy selfies.” Shapira had been thinking about the Yolocaust project for about a year before he launched it last week — the day after Bjoern Hoecke, a member of the populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD party, called the memorial a ”monument of shame” and called on Germans to stop atoning for the Nazi past. Hoecke’s remarks sparked widespread outrage in a country where facing up to Nazi crimes is ingrained in the culture and education system. Even Frauke Petry, the AfD’s leader, has distanced herself from Hoecke, describing him as a ”burden for the party.” But she did not overtly criticize his remarks, and on Monday, the AfD leadership decided against throwing Hoecke out. Hoecke’s rhetoric is widely considered an election campaign tactic, part of an AfD strategy of ”targeted provocations.” Although the AfD is not represented in Germany’s federal parliament, this could change when voters go to the polls in September. Shapira says his website is not a direct response to Hoecke’s outburst but is propelled by his own concern about the political shift to the right in Europe and the U. S. In this vein, Shapira’s uncomfortably tweaked selfies recall the photo montages of Berlin artist John Heartfield, who, wanted by the SS, fled Germany in 1933. Heartfield’s political art appeared on the covers of publications in Germany, ridiculing Hitler and condemning the horrors of the Third Reich. Like Heartfield’s jarring montages, Shapira’s images are intended to shock, to agitate and challenge behavior — in this case, unthinking selfie habits. They’ve certainly received attention. Shapira’s website immediately went viral, receiving more than 1. 2 million hits within its first 24 hours. Shapira says he has received thank you emails from Jews around the world who lost family members in the Holocaust, as well as emails from history teachers and Holocaust researchers planning to use the website in their lessons and lectures. The German tabloid BZ Berlin called the idea ”as simple as it is ingenious,” but praise has not been universal. Some newspapers, like the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, questioned the acceptability of using images of the dead in such a fashion. The British weekly New Statesman voiced similar concerns — but about the not victims of the Holocaust. Calling the project ”worryingly sensationalist if not censorious,” it asked whether publicly shaming visitors to the memorial — which is what many see Shapira as doing, regardless of his insistence otherwise — ”risked shutting people out.” The memorial’s architect, Peter Eisenman, told Der Spiegel when it opened in 2005 that he didn’t expect visitors to be overly reverent. ”People are going to picnic” at the monument, he told the magazine. This week, in reaction to Shapira’s website, Eisenman seemed unperturbed by selfies taken at the site. He told the BBC: ”People have been jumping around on these pillars forever. I think it’s fine.” While Berlin’s Holocaust memorial lists behavior it deems inappropriate for visitors — including jumping off the concrete slabs — some have questioned the ethics of Shapira’s own online conduct, since the selfies he has altered on his site have been plucked from people’s public social media profile pictures without permission. Those who find their photos on his site can request to have the images taken down. As of Tuesday, most people had done so, and Shapira says he has complied with the requests. ”Almost everybody apologized,” he says. Shapira hopes the remaining selfie owners get in touch. He expects the site to be empty in a couple of days. That, he says, will be its ”ultimate success.”

Saying she doesn’t want other kids to suffer the way she did, supermodel Hanne Gaby Odiele has announced that she was born intersex — and she wants to ”break the stigma” that can lead to intersex children having surgery to align them with the male or female gender. ”I’m excited to let the world know I’m intersex,” Odiele says, in a sequence of videos produced with the advocacy group interACT. In them, she tells intersex children to ”embrace your uniqueness.” She also urges parents and doctors to allow intersex children to determine their own identities. ”People want to put us in a box — male or female — but in reality sex is on a spectrum,” she says. ”Intersex is just proof of that.” Odiele was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome — a condition in which a person is born with both X and Y chromosomes, but the person’s body does not respond to male hormones, according to a description by the National Institutes of Health. ”Like most intersex kids, I’ve been subjected to irreversible, unconsented, unnecessary surgeries,” Odiele says. ”These surgeries have caused way more harm than good.” Discussing her surgeries in an interview with USA Today, Odiele says she underwent a procedure when she was 10 to remove undescended testes and then had vaginal reconstructive surgery eight years later. According to the NIH, undescended testes ”have a small chance of becoming cancerous later in life if they are not surgically removed.” In her message about AIS, Odiele says such surgeries shouldn’t be carried out at an early age. Odiele, 29, has been among the world’s elite models for the past 10 years, appearing on the cover of Vogue and walking in fashion shows for Marc Jacobs, Chanel and Prada, among others. Along the way, she has also won fans for her enigmatic style that draws on street fashion. Last summer, the Belgian model married her longtime boyfriend, John Swiatek. ”Intersex people should be able to make their own choices about their bodies,” Odiele says in one interACT video. ”I’m speaking out because it’s time this mistreatment comes to an end. It caused me way too much pain.” Saying that being intersex is roughly ”as common as being born with red hair,” the supermodel discussed being intersex in an Instagram video, leading many viewers to praise her for her bravery. Some of them had never heard of Odiele, or of being intersex. But one comment came from another person who was born with AIS. Here’s what that person had to say: ”I have AIS and I’ve hidden it from most of my family and all my friends — from the outside I look like any normal girl but feel ashamed of this secret because of society — I’ve learnt to love me and my body, but I can’t control what others think so I hide it from the world. .. I admire you so much for this, you are amazing xxxx.” In another video, Odiele addresses the parents of intersex kids: ”Just love your child. There’s no rush. Take your time, get informed. Get connected with other parents that’ve been in your shoes. Don’t make any drastic decisions. Let your own child decide for what it wants to do or be.” In that video, Odiele also speaks to intersex children, telling them, ”You can be whoever you want, whatever you want. Just be you.” As for how common it is for babies to be born intersex, estimates generally range from 1 in every 1, 500 to 1 in every 2, 000. As the American Psychological Association notes, intersex children are sometimes misdiagnosed — ”and government agencies do not collect statistics about intersex individuals.” In a recent publication about intersex children, the group also acknowledged that there’s a wide range of opinions on performing surgery to alter children’s genitals to make them less ambiguous. The APA adds, ”At this time, there is very little research evidence to guide such decisions.”

This week, Donald Trump told members of Congress that he would have won the popular vote, were it not for 3 to 5 million votes cast against him by ”illegals.” And when asked about it at the Tuesday press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer affirmed that ”the president does believe that.” But there is no evidence. No, you’re not having deja vu. Yes, he has made this claim before. Yes, many outlets (NPR included) it. And other Republicans have not come to Trump’s aid in defending his claims. ”I’ve seen no evidence to that effect. I’ve made that very, very clear,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters, according to The Hill. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday offered a sharper rebuke, saying that he wants Trump to either say that the election was fair, or provide evidence that it was not. ”I am begging the president, share with us the information you have about this or please stop saying it,” he said, adding: ”As a matter of fact, I’d like you to do more than stop saying it I’d like you to come forward and say, ’Having looked at it, I am confident the election was fair and accurate, and people who voted voted legally.’ . .. If he doesn’t do that, this is going to undermine his ability to govern this country.” In the era of persistent misinformation and conspiracy theories — some of them repeated by the president himself — repeating the ( ) facts is important. So here’s a our fact check again, starting with some bold typeface: The Trump team has yet to provide evidence of widespread voter fraud. Back in November, Donald Trump tweeted something similar to what he told lawmakers this week, saying (without providing evidence) that he ”won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He later also alleged, once again without evidence, that there was ”serious voter fraud” in three states. Those are some heavy accusations. When asked for evidence shortly thereafter, Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser for Trump’s campaign, did provide two sources. However, those proved to have some major problems. One, an analysis of survey data published on the Washington Post’s blog, Monkey Cage, estimated that ”6. 4 percent of voted in 2008 and 2. 2 percent of voted in 2010.” However, that study drew heavy criticism from other scholars, who both saw weaknesses in the authors’ methods and the survey they used. In addition, one of the authors of that heavily criticized study himself later rejected attempts to use that study to prove fraud. ”On the right there has been a tendency to misread our results as proof of massive voter fraud, which we don’t think they are,” wrote Old Dominion University political science professor Jesse Richman in a blog post. In another post, he further pointed out that even if one did extrapolate from his study, it does not imply that illegal votes would have affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, because it simply was not a close election. Though Trump won the electoral vote, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Miller also cited a 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts report on the state of states’ voting systems. And that report did reveal some troubling statistics. For example, it found that 2. 8 million people are registered to vote in more than one state and that 24 million registration records ”are estimated to be inaccurate or no longer valid.” That means voting systems could definitely be modernized in some ways. However, that is not at all evidence of fraudulent voting, as the study’s main author pointed out on Twitter (highlighted by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker): And importantly, while voting systems could be (and have been) improved more, there are rules in place that keep people from being quickly purged from registration lists — simply moving from one state to another or dying won’t instantaneously remove a person from the list. ”So what has happened is that this notion that voter registration lists can possibly be 100 percent accurate at any point in time is a complete fiction,” Lorraine Minnite, author of The Myth of Voter Fraud, told NPR in November. ”It’s not allowed under federal law to be that way.” This is not to say that voter fraud doesn’t happen it does. However, it is not widespread. Bigger problems to come? Trump’s willingness to make (and repeat) untrue claims, demonstrated in just the first few days as president, have provided a taste of the challenges the media could face in holding the administration accountable in the coming years. As I wrote in September, repeated false claims create a difficult situation for journalists. On the one hand, we could continue to write refutations every time one of these inaccuracies is repeated — but that means repeating an untrue claim. On the other hand, we could refuse to repeat the claim — but that means allowing one of the most powerful voices in the nation to make the claim repeatedly unchecked. Aside from the remarks, press secretary Spicer gave other false statements about the inauguration over the weekend. Photos of the National Mall from 2009 and 2017 clearly show Obama’s first inauguration with far more attendees. To explain the lower attendance at the Trump inauguration, Spicer made untrue claims about Mall ground coverings and inauguration security, offering explanations for that attendance to anyone who wants them. He also later said he was referring to audience overall, including online streaming of the event. And for anyone who is firmly dug into their positions, those positions can be remarkably immovable. Beliefs, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote in a 2016 paper, ”seem to be closely linked to people’s worldviews and may be accordingly difficult to dislodge without threatening their identity or sense of self.”

President Trump’s inner circle got one more member — CIA Director Mike Pompeo. The Senate confirmed the former Kansas congressman’s nomination to the post Monday night. It came after Trump went to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Saturday to laud the spy agency and blast Democrats for delaying a vote on Pompeo’s nomination. (That was the same event where the president said he was at ”war” with the media and falsely claimed to have 1 million to 1. 5 million people in attendance for his inauguration.) Technically, CIA director is not part of the president’s Cabinet, but it is a important position. Currently, just two of Trump’s Cabinet nominees have been confirmed — his Defense and Homeland Security secretaries. His Cabinet moved a few more steps closer to being rounded out Tuesday when four nominees got approval votes from Senate committees: Ben Carson to head Housing and Urban Development, Elaine Chao for Transportation, Wilbur Ross for Commerce and Nikki Haley for U. N. ambassador, who went on to be confirmed by the full Senate. Two key nominees, which faced questions from Democrats over personal finances, testified Tuesday: Rep. Tom Price, . for Health and Human Services secretary before the Senate Finance Committee and Rep. Mick Mulvaney, . C. to be the president’s budget director before the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Despite the lack of confirmations at this point — and despite some controversies — all of Trump’s nominees are expected to sail through with little difficulty. That’s thanks to a rules change implemented, ironically, by Democrats when they were in the majority. In 2013, Democrats were frustrated by Republican obstruction of federal court appointees. So Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada eliminated a rule requiring 60 votes to move a nominee to a vote by the full Senate. (The move does not apply to Supreme Court nominees or legislation.) There are a handful of these Trump nominees one could point to who might not have been able to gain enough Democratic votes to be in Trump’s Cabinet if the threshold were still in place. Think: Betsy DeVos, who showed little depth on education policy, for Education State nominee Rex Tillerson because of his oil company background Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions, due to questions about his views on race and his commitment to voting rights Labor nominee Andy Puzder because of his chains’ employee policies Steve Mnuchin, now in line to be Treasury secretary, for profiting off the foreclosure crisis and possibly others, whom Democrats might have voted down, might have been pulled or possibly never brought forward. The process can be confusing, so here’s a quick primer on the steps it takes to become a member of the president’s Cabinet, followed by where each nominee is in the process: 1. Nominated by 2. Senate hearings before relevant Senate committee, 3. Voted out of committee — if a majority of the committee votes for the nominee, it goes to the Senate floor for a vote by the full body. (A caveat here: the Senate majority leader can bring a nominee to the floor for a full Senate vote even if they do NOT get the approval of the relevant committee. It’s rare, but it’s happened in the past.) 4. Confirmed by full Senate in floor vote, For more on each nominee, check out NPR’s list of Who’s In The Trump Administration. Note: Director of National Intelligence and CIA director are technically not considered according to the Presidential Transition Guide put out by the Center for Presidential Transition, but because they are important posts, they are also listed below for where they are in the process. Confirmed, Voted out of committee, Senate hearings complete, Nominated

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer in 2013, is coming back to life — on television. A new series, from Sony Pictures Television, recounts how Chavez rose from obscurity to carry out a socialist revolution in his homeland. But even before hitting the airwaves, the series, called El Comandante, has sparked controversy — because it shows how Chavez set the stage for Venezuela’s current crisis. Colombian actor Andres Parra plays Chavez, the firebrand leftist who ruled Venezuela for 14 years. To prepare for the role, he listened to 400 hours of Chavez’s speeches and worked with a voice coach. His bulky frame, wig and prosthetic chin make him a dead ringer for the Venezuelan strongman, right down to his mimicking of Chavez’s insults of former President George W. Bush as a ”donkey” and ”the devil.” In an earlier Colombian TV series, Parra played drug lord Pablo Escobar. But he finds Chavez even more fascinating. While the Venezuelan leader was dying of cancer, ”He made this speech,” Parra says. ”It was [a] nine hours, 46 minutes speech. Without pee or drinking or anything. It was a way, like, to show people, ’I’m here. I came back. And I’m strong.’ ” In El Comandante, Parra first depicts a young, idealistic Chavez escaping poverty by joining the army and being elected president with the backing of Venezuela’s poor. Eventually, Chavez morphs into a authoritarian. The series suggests his rule laid the groundwork for the food shortages, hyperinflation and political polarization plaguing Venezuela today. Looking back on the Chavez years has proved highly emotional for Henry Rivero, the series director, who grew up in Venezuela. ”It’s been very hard for me,” he says. ”I cried a lot, most of the time. Because, you know, you understand how tough [was] the situation we went through all those years.” The 60 episodes of the series — which premieres in Latin America this month and on Telemundo in the U. S. in the spring — are being filmed in Colombia due to the hardships of working in neighboring Venezuela. What’s more, that country’s socialist government has branded the project a hatchet job. ”They are going to emphasize the bad and make the world think that Hugo Chavez was a barbarian,” lawmaker Diosdado Cabello said in a recent speech. Meanwhile, Venezuelans who despise Chavez have also come down hard on the actors. ”They say I should be ashamed of myself for acting in this series,” says Vicente Peña, a Venezuelan who plays a military attache in El Comandante. But for Parra, playing Chavez is the role of a lifetime. ”It shows you so much things about the human tragedy,” he says. ”Of how we change. You see ambition but at the same time you see compassion. He has everything. For an actor, that’s delicious.”

Father John Misty is back with another opus. Like his previous two solo albums, Pure Comedy is epically orchestrated and vast in its scope, with observations on fame, social media, technology and the overall state of humanity. In announcing the new album, Father John Misty shared a video for the title track, a lengthy dissection of what he calls ”the comedy of man.” While the video includes images of politicians and scenes from the past presidential election, Father John Misty says ”Pure Comedy” is about so much more. ”There’s nothing political about ’Pure Comedy,’ ” he tells NPR Music in an email. ”Unless that’s what the viewer wants, even with all the gratuitous footage of political figures. The video is only ’about Trump’ in that the video is about human beings.” ”Pure Comedy” also appears to take on everything from big pharma, global warming and natural disasters to religion, gluttony and human folly in general. Pure Comedy is due out April 7 on Sub Pop Records.

You’ve probably heard of antibiotic resistance — germs that can resist the drugs designed to wipe them out. Now there’s a new kind of resistance to worry about — fungal infections that are resistant to treatment. The fungal infection in question is Candida auris, which can cause infections in the mouth, genitals, ears, wounds or, worst of all, the bloodstream. While other species of Candida can lead to the same kinds of infections, Candida auris is getting worldwide attention because, according to a study in the February 2017 journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, some cases have proved to be resistant to all three classes of drugs available to treat fungal infections. The first reported case was in Japan in 2009 but it has now been found on five continents. Fungi like yeast and mold develop resistance to the antifungal medications used to treat them in the same way bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics: Drugs kill most germs, but some resistant germs are left to grow and multiply. Misuse of antibiotics and antifungal drugs promotes the spread of these resistant germs. The problem with antibiotic resistance is and widespread. But resistance to all available antifungal drugs ”is something we haven’t seen previously,” says Dr. Cornelius J. Clancy, chief of infectious diseases at the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. All species of Candida can trigger a potentially infection, says Dr. Riina researcher at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, England, and an author of the study. The danger occurs when the fungal infection enters the bloodstream, leading to sepsis — the body’s overwhelming response to an infection, which can slow blood flow, damage organs and sometimes cause death. It appears that C. auris puts people at greater risk of sepsis than other species of Candida, says Richardson. The microscopic spores produced by fungi are present in the air and soil, so most infections begin on the skin or in the lungs. They’re largely harmless, but they can be dangerous for people with weakened immune systems, like cancer or AIDS patients. The infection can spread in health care settings if beds and medical equipment have been contaminated, though it rarely spreads directly from patient to patient. No one knows whether C. auris has spread by traveling with patients or on object surfaces, on planes, for example — or developed simultaneously in various parts of the world. Because microbes can react to changes in the environment, says Richardson, it’s possible that other species of the Candida bug, stressed perhaps by exposure to radiation or antibiotics or disinfectants, changed their form and became C. auris. ”It appears they might have emerged independently in different places,” says Clancy, author of an editorial, ”Emergence of Candida auris: an International Call to Arms,” in the Jan. 15 journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. So far, there have been relatively few cases of C. auris around the world, 24 of them reported in the States. Richardson said the death rate after infection approaches 60 to 70 percent, though the patients also had other serious medical problems, like cancer, so may have died of their underlying disease. Some of the patients were treated successfully with antifungal medications. But a study of 54 samples of C. auris from patients found that 50 of the samples, in lab tests, did not respond to fluconazole, an oral medication that is the treatment for other species of Candida and the most commonly used antifungal drug. Overall, 22 of the samples were resistant to both fluconazole and a second line of defense, injection of a drug called amphotericin B. And two of the samples were resistant to all three available classes of antifungal medications, including echinocandins, the newest class of drugs administered by IV. The new bug has other traits that make it hard to stop. Most bugs dry up and die without moisture, so they’ll die if a hospital room is cleaned and left empty for a day or two. C. auris can survive a day or more of dryness ”and when it wakes up with moisture, it’s still normal,” Richardson says. And traditional cleanup strategies like wiping surfaces with conventional disinfectants failed to clear hospital rooms and equipment of the fungal infection. In the United Kingdom, one disinfectant, a form of bleach, was found to work. ”You have to wash and scrub, and not just put alcohol gel on equipment,” Richardson says. The CDC urges hospitals to contact state public health authorities if they suspect cases of C. auris and to initiate infection control techniques such as patient isolation. That’s possible in developed nations, but most poor countries lack the DNA sequencing equipment to even diagnose C. auris, says Clancy. This new species of fungal infection has the potential to become a serious public health challenge — a threat similar to that of antibiotic resistance. ”There’s no reason for panic,” Richardson says — but there is reason to give full respect to this potential threat.

Rarely has a U. S. president been so willing to use his platform as both bullhorn and cudgel to exert public pressure on individual companies. But one of the hallmarks of President Trump’s approach to economic policy since his election has been his willingness to publicly endorse — and shame — companies in order to advance his message. The new president’s frequent use of social media has created an entirely new kind of channel, one that companies are trying to exploit, in particular by touting their hiring announcements. Last week, Trump publicly thanked Walmart for its ”big jobs push” after the retailer last week released details of a hiring and capital spending plan that it had originally announced in October before the election. Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son parlayed his Dec. 6 meeting with the elect into several supportive tweets from Trump. Ford, General Motors, Hyundai Motors and its affiliate Kia, have all made investment announcements referencing Trump’s tax or economic policies. ”They’re using Trump as a marketing channel,” says Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He says it’s a new paradigm, both for the president and for major company brands. ”Companies didn’t used to feel like they could curry favor with a president through making some moves like this, but today’s day and age it seems like a possibility so companies are exploring it,” Berger says. Trump’s prime focus has been the auto industry, where he has named individual companies and brands as possible targets for higher tariffs on cars made in Mexico. On Monday, during his first meeting with business leaders, Trump called out Ford CEO Mark Fields and the company’s decision to scrap plans for a $1. 6 billion in Mexico in favor of expanding in Michigan. ”Mark was so nice with the plant, I wanted to sit next to him,” Trump told the business executives. Trump criticized Ford’s rival, General Motors, earlier in the month because it manufactures some Chevy Cruzes for U. S. sale in Mexico. But then last week, GM said it would invest an additional $1 billion in the U. S. and Trump thanked the company in a tweet. GM spokesman Patrick Morrissey acknowledges that with U. S. job creation in the spotlight, ”this was good timing for us to share what we are doing.” It is not yet clear how Trump’s Twitter account might shape decision making for companies going forward. Many of the investment plans Trump has tweeted were planned — or even originally announced — well before the election. Take, for example, Fiat Chrysler’s announcement to increase its U. S. investment by $1 billion — which garnered a ”thank you” tweet from Trump this month. CEO Sergio Marchionne told reporters that investment decision was made more than a year ago, and that the attaboy from Trump wasn’t anticipated. ”None of us have had a tweeting president before,” Marchionne said at a Dec. 9 press conference. ”It’s a new way of communication, and I think we’re going to have to learn how to respond.” In most cases, companies are capitalizing on investment and hiring decisions that were set in motion well before Trump’s election. Berger, the Wharton marketing professor, says it’s not clear that companies will change investment decisions based on favorable tweets. ”Whether we’ll see companies actually changing their behavior, you know, actually doing different things or moving jobs in one way or another because of him, that’s a little bit more costly, and I think we will see some of that, but not as much as firms taking advantage of old news and recycling it,” Berger says. But the new president’s approval ratings are already low, so could companies see a backlash for trying to curry favor? It’s certainly possible, Berger says, but if Trump is endorsing the companies, and not the other way around, there’s less chance it could backfire.

After a presidential campaign that divided the country on immigration, some of the most fervent advocates say their views and agenda have now moved into the mainstream under President Donald Trump. His appointments, including top White House advisers and his nominee for attorney general, are powerful allies who support suspending the U. S. refugee resettlement program — the largest in the world — or an outright ban on accepting refugees from ” ” countries. From now on, ”I think you are going to see a very different attitude to the whole program and the whole problem,” says Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy and a leading advocate. In Barack Obama’s Washington, Gaffney — described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ”one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes, gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within” — was considered on the fringe of the refugee debate. But no longer. ”I would put the work we do up against anybody who is in the mainstream,” Gaffney says. He bristles about charges that he is Islamophobic, saying, ”The Southern Poverty Law Center is being used to suppress people who are telling the truth.” A book rack outside Gaffney’s office displays more than a dozen of his center’s publications and pamphlets, with titles like Shariah, the Threat to America and Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America, claiming to document Muslim colonization of America. See No Shariah argues that the Muslim Brotherhood has gained undue influence over American policy makers, including the White House, FBI and Justice Department. These publications supply the talking points for a national and campaign. ’Do The Right Thing’ One battleground is in Rutland, Vt. where some 25 Syrian refugee families are on track to resettle this year. The first two Syrian families arrived earlier this month. The controversy surrounding their resettlement has attracted widespread domestic coverage and reporters from Denmark and Canada. Rutland became a microcosm of the national debate after Mayor Christopher Louras, the grandson of Greek immigrants to Rutland, announced in April that his town would become a host community for refugees. The mayor says he saw an opportunity to ”do the right thing” and rebuild the community, which he describes as ”96 percent white and very much trending older.” The town of nearly 16, 000 has lost residents since 2000, and seems unable to attract new jobs or young people. An opioid crisis has crippled some neighborhoods. Louras says Syrian refugees would be a boost for the aging town, just as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe boosted Rutland’s fortunes a century ago. But there is opposition, and not just locally. ”The people heard about it and they came to stir the pot. It was nasty and we are sorry it got so ugly,” says Lavinia Limon, who heads the U. S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants, one of nine private agencies contracted by the State Department to resettle refugees. ”This is a definitely a national campaign,” she says, referring to the wave of activists who came to Rutland. ”Smaller towns seem to be their target.” Rutland has also attracted the attention of the influential conservative website Refugee Resettlement Watch. The site claims 6 million readers and its editor, a Maryland woman named Ann Corcoran, says resettlement of refugees is a form of ”infiltration” and is ”seeding” the country for the promotion of Islamic law, or sharia. Several state legislatures are considering bills to ban sharia. The whole issue is ”spurious,” Limon emphasizes, because elected lawmakers, not refugees, write the laws. ’Rutland First’ A month after Rutland’s mayor announced the town would welcome Syrian refugees, the ”Rutland First” group appeared on Facebook. The group’s aims were contained in a bold, manifesto: ”Rutland before Refugees.” Timothy Cook, a Rutland physician and one of the group’s founders, contests the mayor’s view that Syrian refugees can remedy the town’s economic woes. ”It seems a little delusional,” he says as he stands in front of his medical office on a cold and foggy January night and points out businesses long closed along Rte. 7, a major thoroughfare in town. In May, soon after the mayor’s announcement, Cook invited James Simpson, a national and activist, to speak at the local library. Simpson, a former analyst for the White House Office of Management and Budget, spoke to a full house at the library in an event livestreamed by Rutland’s public access channel. His book, Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America, charges that the ”progressive left and Muslim extremists” aim to undermine and ultimately abolish the U. S. Constitution through Muslim resettlement and immigration. He calls the vetting of refugees and immigrants by U. S. security agencies a ”sham.” ”I am not Islamophobic,” Simpson insists. ”I am concerned about national security and the costs of the [refugee] program. I’m concerned about the secrecy and the unilateral way it’s imposed on communities.” Louras — who says there was nothing secret or imposed about Rutland’s application to host refugees — says the conversation in Rutland changed after Simpson’s visit. The language got rougher, more xenophobic. ”It certainly provided some false narratives and alternative facts that some people here locally glommed onto to justify their own positions.” But he also says the debate in Rutland was ”reflective of the national mood and the national level of discourse that Donald J. [Trump] was peddling.” ’Rutland Welcomes’ The roughness, for now, has somewhat abated. When refugees arrive in Rutland, they are likely to note signs around town featuring a white heart pierced by a thin black arrow. It is the symbol for ”Rutland Welcomes,” a group with hundreds of volunteers who have pledged to help in any way they can and organized as soon as the mayor announced that refugees would arrive. Since the State Department approved the arrivals in September, volunteer committees have filled warehouses with donated household goods, clothing and kitchen supplies. They organized school registrations for the children and lined up translators for the adults. Recently, they set up Arabic classes taught once a week by linguists from nearby Middlebury College. ”I see no reason to believe that they won’t be successful, ”says Louras. ”They want to integrate into the workforce and that’s the story of our community. That’s what the southern and eastern Europeans did 100 years ago. ” Tim Cook, the local physician, sees these newcomers and thinks about Rutland’s past. His family arrived here more than 200 years ago. He acknowledges immigrants shaped Rutland for good. But this time, he believes it’s different. ”We have a community that is steeped in culture,” he says. ”The idea of having a bizarre chess game where you are just going to drop people here, I have a problem with that.” For now, though, Cook accepts that Syrian refugees will become part of the community. ”I will do everything I can to help them succeed,” he tells me a week after the first families arrived. ”I’ll offer medical care. I will do whatever I can do.” He knows his position will surprise those who’ve followed his vocal opposition, but says those who are surprised should note New England culture. ”That,” he says, ”is what Vermonters do.” But he’s still hoping the new president will abolish the refugee program before more Syrians arrive.

After her tweet about President Trump’s youngest son sparked anger and resulted in her suspension, Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich has apologized. Rich says she regrets the tweet that she now calls ”inexcusable.” Rich, who’s one of around 30 writers listed in Saturday Night Live’s credits, issued her apology Monday about the tweet that was evidently meant to be humorous but was widely criticized for attacking a . A person familiar with the situation tells NPR that the suspension was levied shortly after Rich’s tweet during Friday’s presidential inauguration, and that the suspension is indefinite. Rich deleted the tweet a few hours after it was published. ”I sincerely apologize for the insensitive tweet,” Rich wrote Monday. ”I deeply regret my actions offensive words. It was inexcusable I’m so sorry.” The tweet prompted an online campaign calling for Rich to be fired. On Monday, media news site Deadline was the first to report that Rich had been suspended from her job writing for the ”Weekend Update” news segment on Saturday Night Live, the NBC show that’s often traded barbs with President Trump. By trying to make a joke about Trump’s son, Rich broke a longstanding convention that places the children of politicians — and especially those of presidents — to ridicule or attacks. In the era of social media, that convention has been tested more frequently in recent years. In 2014, Republican congressional staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigned after she posted comments on Facebook that sharply criticized Malia and Sasha Obama for their appearance as their father conferred the traditional presidential pardon upon a turkey at Thanksgiving. After Trump took the oath of office on Friday, those who came to Barron Trump’s defense over the weekend included Chelsea Clinton, who wrote, ”Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does — to be a kid.”

I would argue that the most successful novel of the First World War is not A Farewell to Arms, or even All Quiet on the Western Front, but rather one that’s rarely classified so: The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Like several other British veterans of the trenches — CS Lewis and David Lindsay come to mind — Tolkien chose to explore the inhuman horrors of the Great War through the allegory of mythology. In fiction, poetry, or memoir, he never explicitly addressed his time on the Somme. And neither does a new novel by his grandson, no matter the ”inspired by the experiences” copy on the dust jacket. Simon Tolkien dedicates No Man’s Land to his grandfather, inviting the question: Is this the book that J. R. R. was unable to write? In style, theme, and tone, the answer is no. But who can blame Simon for not even trying to put words in the mouth of his legendary relative? Our protagonist is Adam Raine, no for J. R. R. except in the most basic ways. Raine grows up on the streets of London, moves to coal country in northern England, and then is taken in by the landed lord of the manor. His story is one of serial strife — the picket lines, union strikes, mining accidents, grinding want, and Downton Abbey politics of early 20th century Britain — even before he enters the war. ”Luck ain’t a word we knows the meanin’ of,” says a working class friend. This is not a war book, then, but rather David Copperfield Goes to War. Only in its central third does this novel of manners and civil discord do an about face and march directly to the front lines in France. The shift is sudden, as if the book, like British society, didn’t believe the war would really come until it did. Simon Tolkien is at his best capturing the jingoism of England, the smothering sense of duty and obligation heaped on young men, the peer pressure and public calls of cowardice, old women in the streets lecturing boys to get to the front. It is a sentiment completely foreign to contemporary American culture — now, we deem not enlisting the smart choice, like Donald Trump (as he declared in an election debate) is smart not to pay his taxes. But Raine and every one of his friends eventually sign up, if only because ”anythin’s better than that bloody mine,” as one says. Raine’s victimhood shifts, from class and poverty to idiot generals and the guns trapped in the system, one tragedy after another befalls him. Raine finds the Great War by turns grisly and romantic. The soldiers on duty vomit in their gas masks because the flies, ”clustered so thickly on the rotting flesh that they looked like black fur, were so drunk from feasting that they crawled rather than flew away, leaving their white maggot progeny behind.” And yet, at the same time, he sees his fellow soldiers ”go over the top again and again, inspiring their men with a nonchalant bravery that left him with admiration.” There is truth in this duality, no matter how it feels today, knowing how two world wars will turn out. In the book’s last third, coincidence and cliché play an unfortunately large role. But such quibbles miss the point. This is a an opera, a costume drama to binge watch. Simon Tolkien knows how to keep a story moving, and he does it well. Brian Castner’s newest project is The Road Ahead,”a anthology of short stories featuring veteran writers.

As the Beijing Kunlun Red Stars hit the ice to face off against a team from Moscow, tension is high. A win tonight is crucial to make it to the playoffs in the Kontinental Hockey League, or KHL, Russia’s top professional hockey league, second only to the U. S. National Hockey League in talent. But hardly anyone in the Beijing arena understands the stakes. In fact, there’s hardly anyone here a vast majority of the seats are empty. Zhang Cuihua, a old granny, takes up three seats with bags of knitting supplies. Someone gave her free tickets, and she figured a hockey game was a good excuse as any to knit a sweater. ”I tried to get my son’s family to come with me, but they weren’t interested. I haven’t seen a hockey game in 20 years — I forget the rules. I can’t figure it out. One team is Russian, but who’s the other team?” she asks me. That’s your Beijing team, I tell her. She looks up from her knitting and squints through oversized spectacles. ”Oh. But they’re all foreigners! China’s no good at hockey,” she concludes, returning to her knitting. After China won its bid to host the 2022 Olympics, President Xi Jinping vowed to get 300 million of his people ”on the ice,” an initiative to encourage winter sports. Energy tycoons in China and Russia quickly made a deal to create Beijing’s first professional hockey club, and Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for the signing ceremony with Xi last June. Kunlun Red Star was born — the first Chinese club to join Russia’s premier KHL league. China’s team has 18 players from Russia, Finland, Canada and the United States. There are a few Chinese nationals, but none of them can compete at this level and they rarely see ice time. Team CEO Emma Liao says sponsors, many with close connections to China’s government, have already covered the $30 million cost needed to run the Red Stars. Now comes the hard part: educating the public about the team — and about hockey, for that matter. ”Nobody really knows what is hockey,” Liao says with a sigh. ”So our job is to educate the audience [about] what is hockey, why it’s so attractive and why they should come to watch the hockey game.” Few people have done this more than Mark Simon, a Canadian hockey coach who’s worked for years to raise awareness about the sport in China and now volunteers as an assistant for the Red Stars. On this particular day, he’s juggling an order for new jerseys with a hospital visit to the team’s goalie, who’s out with an injury. Simon says he wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard about the team. ”Great idea — KHL. China, Russia, you know, the Communist brothers and all the stuff. I mean, I get it,” he says. ”But I still thought, you know, it’s early. To expect that you’re going to fill an rink is insane.” Simon says the Red Stars have already broken a KHL record for lowest attendance at a single game — 550 people. The sparse crowds can make for an awkward experience, when the team’s cheerleading squad’s cheers are swallowed by the void of a arena. Or when the announcer — who Simon complains doesn’t know a thing about hockey — begins an exuberant cheer for the Red Stars two seconds after the opposing team scores. A group of spectators from Finland is amused, and a little confused. They say the game would be better if they were drunk. But tight security rules prohibit alcohol inside the arena. They’re the only audience members I meet who’ve actually bought tickets. Peter Solonen, one of the Finns, says he’s never seen a hockey game with such good talent attract so few fans. ”They’ve still got something to learn,” he says with a laugh. ”You don’t see hockey anywhere else but inside the stadium. Nowhere else. That is weird.” It may be weird, but for Red Stars player Zach Yuen, it’s a dream come true. He was the first defenseman drafted by the NHL, and he’s chosen to come here now, to play in his homeland. ”When I was growing up, I never had a role model,” says Yuen. ”It would’ve been cool to have a role model to look up to. Just to know that it’s possible. Because the entry to hockey is tough for sure, culturally. In China, there are kids that watch our games and hopefully, I can live up to that and be a role model for them.” Kids like Yuan Zhongfan, who’s practicing with his team in Shanghai, could use a role model. The loves hockey, but he’s not sure how supportive his parents will be when he gets older. ”My mom wanted me to learn swimming, but I wasn’t tall enough. There was a hockey rink nearby, so we picked that,” he says. Yuan says his dream is to play for the Chicago Blackhawks. I ask him what his parents think about this. ”They don’t think it’s possible,” he says, ”because no Chinese player has made it to the NHL.” Yuan’s parents have never heard of Zach Yuen, and they don’t know much about the Red Stars — who, as it happens, lost their big game and have likely lost their chance to make it to the playoffs. But China’s government is dreaming big about hockey. And no matter how obscure the sport is today, if he works hard, this from Shanghai may someday get a shot at his dream, too.

The Dow Jones industrial average cruised past another milestone Wednesday — the 20, 000 level, further evidence of the long bull market that has lifted share prices since the depths of the financial crisis. The index closed at a record 20, 068. Since the November elections, the Dow and the broader SP 500 are up 9. 5 percent and 7. 4 percent, respectively. The stock market rally has been remarkably durable so far, withstanding the banking crisis in Europe, the Brexit vote, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, periods of disappointing growth in the U. S. and the polarizing U. S. presidential election. Crossing the 20, 000 threshold isn’t significant in itself. It’s simply a number. But it’s a round one with all those juicy zeroes. So let’s take a moment to examine why stocks have done so well in recent years, why the Dow is an imperfect proxy for the market and why the bull market hasn’t changed the economic fortunes of most Americans. The crisis, the Fed and the corporate moneymaking machine, Over the long term — meaning decades or even a century — stocks are by far the financial asset. Adjusted for inflation, stocks have returned an average of 7 percent a year. That’s better than bonds and far preferable to stashing money in a savings account or under a mattress. But in 2009, the depths of the financial crisis, the stock market was a terrifying spectacle, a place where money went up in flames. After topping 10, 000 for the first time in in 1999, the Dow plunged to 6, 547 on March 9, 2009. Fear permeated markets everywhere. It seemed plausible that the banking system might never recover, putting financial capitalism at mortal risk. Almost no one wanted to be in the market. But by then, the seeds of recovery had already been planted. The TARP rescue, whatever its faults, stabilized the banking system. And the Federal Reserve had put in place an extraordinary policy — keeping interest rates near zero — that ultimately made stocks extremely attractive. The basic idea behind the Fed policy was simple. If the interest rate you get on safe assets such as bonds is essentially zero — who wants that? — investors will eventually put their money back into real estate and stocks. And that’s exactly what has happened. The great stock market rally roughly coincides with the Fed’s policy, which has been in place since 2008. At the same time, corporate profits have come storming back since the financial crisis, and company earnings are closely correlated to stock market performance. So if you want to understand Dow 20, 000 — the Fed and corporate balance sheets are the best place to start. Why the Dow? The Dow isn’t the entire stock market. Not even close. It’s a weighted average of just 30 major stocks, including Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Apple and . Financial professionals pay closer attention to broader indexes such as the SP 500 or the Russell 2, 000. But for much of the media and in everyday conversation, the Dow is often the default, the old standby, cited by force of habit. It’s even used as shorthand for how the market is doing. That’s a mistake. Because it only represents the fortunes of 30 big companies, the Dow doesn’t tell an investor anything about the world of startups or the midsize firms that employ so many Americans. The Dow doesn’t include Facebook, Amazon or Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The stock market isn’t the economy, The stock market has recovered a lot better from the financial crisis than the overall economy. Economic growth has been sluggish since the Great Recession, averaging only about 2 percent. Wages have been stagnant. But the stock market has yielded handsome returns, benefiting institutional investors and households with the means to invest in stocks. All this has contributed to the growing disparities between affluent Americans and everyone else. For those who have maxed out contributions to 401( k)s or socked away money in a brokerage account, the stock market has been a godsend. But only 52 percent of Americans have money in the stock market, matching the lowest rate in 19 years, according to a Gallup Poll from April. In 2007, according to that same poll, 65 percent reported investing in the market. Based on those Gallup numbers, many Americans lost faith in the market at exactly the wrong time — just as it was staging a powerful comeback. Another discouraging side note: The stock market rally could be sweetening the retirement portfolios of ordinary Americans. But those portfolios tend to be skimpy, meaning ordinary investors don’t get much bang from their stock market bucks. In 2015, the median balance in retirement accounts was just $26, 405, according to Vanguard, one of the largest managers of retirement plans. What about that crazy election? The stock market was jittery in the days immediately before the election. And according to research by two prominent economists, the market dipped when Donald Trump’s election prospects improved in betting markets. They even predicted that the SP 500 would be 12 percent lower with a Trump victory than a Clinton win. And for a few hours after Trump clinched the presidency, stock market futures plunged, falling by as much as 5 percent. But prices quickly recovered, and the market has enjoyed an unanticipated Trump rally that began Nov. 9, the day after his victory. It’s impossible to pinpoint a single reason for the bounce. Some analysts point to Trump’s promises to spend big on infrastructure and cut taxes, moves that could juice the economy. How long will it last? Trick question. Only fools say they can predict where the stock market is going. What is known is that a single event can trigger a stock market — like a military confrontation, a bank failure or a big jump in oil prices. But this market rally has withstood many unsettling events. So who knows?

Politics may be at play in the appearance of a draft presidential order that could revive the CIA’s ”black site” prisons, one former CIA director says. The appearance of the document, first reported by the New York Times, drew an immediate outcry from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, as well as CIA veterans. The draft order calls for a review of the interrogation practices permitted under current U. S. law and whether the CIA should reopen its network of overseas prisons. But former CIA Director Michael Hayden says he thinks it is more about sending a message than laying serious plans. ”My instinct is this is a way of reflecting the tough language from the campaign, not a commitment to change anything,” Hayden told NPR. ”I cannot imagine a CIA director saying, ’It’s going to be OK to open a future black site.’ I mean, we’re not doing this again.” President Donald Trump endorsed outlawed interrogation methods during the presidential campaign, telling a crowd in South Carolina: ”Torture works, OK, folks? Believe me. It works, OK? And waterboarding is your minor form, but we should go much stronger than waterboarding.” Trump repeated his support for waterboarding in an interview with ABC News scheduled to air on Wednesday evening, according to previews released by the network. But he also told anchor David Muir that he would defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo about whether to use it. Lawmakers who oversaw the CIA’s previous interrogation and detention programs were quick to criticize the proposals. ”The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. ”But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who oversaw the production of a classified report on CIA detention and interrogation programs during her tenure as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also offered a scathing response. ”Reconstituting this appalling program would compromise our values, our morals and our standing as a world leader — this cannot happen,” she wrote. ”I encourage President Trump to not sign the damaging and dangerous executive order that has been circulating. Read the [Senate] report, declassify it and let the American people see for themselves how the program failed to work — I believe they will never want to go there again.” Rebuilding the CIA’s network of secret prisons would very likely meet resistance from the agency itself, where many officers feel they were hung out to dry after being asked to take on the job of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. At Pompeo’s Jan. 12 confirmation hearing, senators grilled him, demanding to know whether the CIA was definitively out of the torture business. ”If you were ordered by the president to restart the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside of the Army Field Manual, would you comply?” asked Feinstein. ”Absolutely not,” Pompeo replied. ”Moreover, I can’t imagine that I would be asked that by the or .” But in written answers to questions by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pompeo steered a somewhat different course. Pressed — again by Feinstein — on whether he would commit to refraining from any steps that would bring back waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques, Pompeo wrote: ”I will consult with experts at the Agency and at other organizations in the U. S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country or whether any rewrite of the Army Field Manual is needed.” In other words, Pompeo says he will confer with the CIA officers who now report to him on whether the current interrogation rules work. And if not, he’s open to changing them. That review could get underway if Trump signs the draft order revealed on Wednesday. The president argues that U. S. national security officials have their hands tied. On his visit to CIA headquarters on Jan. 21, he told the assembled intelligence officers and analysts that ”we’re going to do great things. . .. We have not used the real abilities that we have. We’ve been restrained.” Supporters say the time is right for the U. S. to take another look at the restrictions Congress imposed during the tenure of President Barack Obama, which limit soldiers, intelligence officers and other interrogators to the techniques spelled out in the Army Field Manual. ”I support very much the idea that we’re going to review — and that’s what the executive order does,” said Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican in the House and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Her father was a key member of President George W. Bush’s administration when it ordered the use of torture after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. Terrorism suspects were jailed in secret in foreign countries — including Afghanistan, Thailand and Lithuania — and chained, beaten and subjected to other such treatments as interrogators demanded information. ”I do support enhanced interrogation,” Liz Cheney told reporters in Philadelphia. ”I think that it’s something that clearly has helped us in the past to prevent attacks and save lives and so I was glad to see President Trump take that step.” People still caught up today in the aftermath of the decisions, however, called that a bad idea. James Connell, an attorney for alleged Sept. 11 plotter Ammar said at the Guantanamo Bay detention center on Wednesday that one reason the trials there are taking so long is the complications caused by the use of brutal interrogations. Defendants like Baluchi argue the government cannot use evidence it extracted from them by torture, but U. S. national security officials say such men are too dangerous to let go. So they have languished in limbo in Guantanamo for years. ”What this case has demonstrated, if it’s demonstrated anything, is that torture makes criminal cases virtually impossible to prosecute,” Connell said. ”In fact, it’s fair to say that torture and due process are mutually exclusive.” NPR Correspondents Susan Davis and David Welna contributed to this report.

Updated at 5:50 p. m. ET, President Trump has signed two executive orders related to immigration and border security, moving ahead with his plans to build a wall along the U. S. border with Mexico and to deport people who are in the country illegally. Trump signed the orders at the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday, shortly after the agency’s new leader, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, was sworn in. ”Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said in an address at the Homeland Security Department. The move comes less than one week before Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is slated to visit Trump in Washington on Jan. 31. Trump emphasized that the actions were in partnership with Mexico. ”The secretary of homeland security, working with myself and my staff, will begin immediate construction of a border wall,” Trump said. News that the border wall plan is moving forward was criticized by Amnesty International USA, whose executive director, Margaret Huang, said, ”This wall would say that those from outside the United States, especially from Latin America, are to be feared and shunned — and that is just wrong.” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that the U. S. will be ”reimbursed at a later date” by Mexico for the costs of building the wall — an idea that Peña Nieto flatly rejected earlier this month. The cost of building such a wall has been estimated at at least $12 billion and perhaps $15 billion for a barrier. Roughly a third of the U. S. border is currently blocked by a fence, as NPR’s John Burnett has reported: ”According to an estimate by the Government Accountability Office, the border fence cost the government $3 million to $4 million a mile to build. Estimates for additional fencing — in harsher terrain — could surpass $10 million a mile.” The border wall is included in an executive order titled Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements. It calls on Kelly to ”identify and, to the extent permitted by law, allocate all sources of Federal funds for the planning, designing, and constructing of a physical wall along the southern border.” The directive calls for hiring more Border Patrol agents and prioritizing the prosecution of criminal offenses related to the Southern border. It also expands detention capacity — a move that could increase the use of private prisons. The Justice Department had already beefed up border prosecutions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The new action suggests law enforcement will be more empowered to prosecute for minor offenses and remove those in the country illegally. A second executive order, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, directs the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. In that action, Trump is also restoring the Secure Communities Program — which had ceased to operate in 2014 after being used by both the Bush and Obama administrations to force state and local governments to share fingerprints and other data to help federal officials identify unauthorized immigrants. Several states and cities sought to opt out of that system, which was also criticized for sometimes resulting in cases of mistaken detention of U. S. citizens. One critic of Trump’s executive orders, Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said there are better ways to keep the country safe than to crack down on sanctuary cities. ”Pressuring local law enforcement to take on immigration responsibilities undercuts the very oath they take to ’serve and protect’ the entirety of their community. Smart law enforcement is built on intelligence gathering and trust, which are dramatically undermined once the cop on the corner is asking victims of crime about their immigration status,” he said. Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors immigration limits, said in an email that the administration’s battle with sanctuary cities is just beginning. ”Who will blink first — cities or the federal government? Cutting off their money is step one. LA and New York will not change their policies. This will play out for years,” he said. Wednesday’s executive order also seeks to force other nations to take back criminals in the U. S. illegally by using leverage such as withholding U. S. visas. And it will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to more aggressively arrest, detain and remove people from the U. S. It also calls for the hiring of 10, 000 additional immigration officers. The order also will create an ”Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens,” aimed to support these victims and their families. The order does not detail exactly how these victims will be supported but states that the office will ”provide quarterly reports studying the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens present in the United States.” The actions come one day after the president tweeted about new immigration policies, saying Tuesday night, ”Among many other things, we will build the wall.” Construction of a border wall was a keystone of Trump’s presidential campaign. Questions still surround the details of the plan for a wall — chief among them, how the undertaking would be paid for. A law already exists that experts say gives Trump the authority to start building the wall. It is the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It was bipartisan and overwhelmingly supported during the Bush administration. The 2006 law envisions both physical barriers and features, like sensors and cameras. It also mentions a fence — but that fence was never built, and the legislation didn’t include money to pay for one. Ten years later, the process could begin in earnest.

From the start of his campaign, after he descended the golden escalator to give his announcement speech, Donald Trump promised to build a wall along the U. S.’ Southern border. Now, Trump is taking the first steps toward keeping that promise, with an executive action that calls for building that wall. In line with his campaign theme of tightening laws on immigration, that action will call for other measures, such as hiring more Border Patrol agents and expanding detention space. Here’s a quick primer on Trump’s wall — how long it would have to be, how much it will cost and what Americans think about it. The situation right now, Trump is no stranger to and he has voiced different opinions on how he wants the border barrier to look. When CBS’s Lesley Stahl asked him if he would ”accept a fence,” he answered, ”For certain areas I would, but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate.” Then at his Jan. 11 press conference, he took a harder line: ”On the fence, it’s not a fence it’s the wall,” he told reporters. ”You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall.” Remember, for the record, he said — ”For certain areas I would.” Should he decide to accept some fencing, he has existing fencing to add onto: As of late 2015, there were 652. 7 miles of border fence along the roughly border. Along with that head start on the barrier, he also appears to have a head start on the legislative side. When Republican Rep. Luke Messer recently claimed that the fence is authorized, and that it only needs to be funded, PolitiFact ruled it ”True.” A November 2016 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service bolsters that finding: ”DHS’s current policy not to deploy a substantial amount of additional fencing, beyond what is expressly required by law, appears primarily premised on policy considerations and funding constraints, rather than significant legal impediments,” writes the author (whose name was redacted from the report). Still, there are other logistical hurdles. For example, there’s the pesky issue of private land ownership. When the U. S. government was building the fence from 2008 to 2010, the Border Patrol ”had to enter into negotiations or begin condemnation proceedings with landowners,” as NPR’s John Burnett reported in . And even then, years after the construction, some lawsuits were still ongoing. Another potential legal barrier exists in a treaty, as the AP reported on Wednesday: ”The Trump administration also must adhere to a border treaty with Mexico that limits where and how structures can be built along the border. The 1970 treaty requires that structures cannot disrupt the flow of the rivers, which define the U. S. border along Texas and 24 miles in Arizona, according to The International Boundary and Water Commission, a joint U. S. agency that administers the treaty.” The cost: high. An actual wall could cost $15 billion to $40 billion, A member of President Trump’s own party criticized the cost of a wall on Wednesday. Texas Republican Rep. William Hurd, who represents a district featuring a lengthy border with Mexico, said in a statement, ”The facts have not changed. Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.” Here are some basic facts on cost: Trump will need to find funding, and he very well may need a lot of it. While Trump at one point estimated the cost of his wall (or combination) to be $8 billion — which he later revised to $10 billion to $12 billion — it could easily be much higher. Were he to, in fact, try a wall, the cost could be much higher. One estimate from MIT found that a wall would cost anywhere between $27 billion and $40 billion. Another estimate from research and investment firm Bernstein put it at $15 billion to $25 billion. Of course, a fence could be far cheaper than a wall. The nearly 653 miles of wall built thus far cost around $2. 3 billion, the DHS said in 2015 congressional testimony. That comes out to around $3. 5 million per mile. Multiply that out across 1, 300 more miles, and it comes to around $4. 6 billion. But there’s a big caveat here: That could easily be a very conservative estimate. Estimating how much a border fence costs isn’t simply a matter of miles times dollars, because some miles of border fence cost far more than others. A 2009 analysis from the Government Accountability Office found that as of late 2008, pedestrian fencing had cost the government an average $3. 9 million per mile — but that costs ranged from $400, 000 to $15. 1 million per mile. Likewise, vehicle fencing averaged $1 million per mile but ranged from $200, 000 to $1. 8 million per mile. And costs vary depending on who’s doing the estimation. One 2009 analysis from the Department of Homeland Security estimated that as of late 2008, it would cost $6. 5 million per mile for pedestrian fencing — that is, fencing primarily meant to block people attempting to cross the border on foot. Vehicle fencing came out to $1. 7 million per mile. Prices can vary for a number of reasons for example, the fence is far taller in some places than others, and different materials are used in different spots. Geography also plays a part in determining cost. Along some stretches of the border, like rough mountain ranges, costs could exceed $10 million per mile, as Burnett has reported. The cost also depends upon who is doing the building. Commercial builders are more expensive than if the U. S. depends upon the military to build the fence. And then other costs could easily arise — for example, the cost of legal proceedings from all those dealings with landowners mentioned above. Cost considerations are less of a worry if Mexico will pay for the wall, as Trump has claimed it would. But he is unlikely to be able to make that happen without a massive fight, as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto seemed to indicate earlier this month. ”It is evident that we have differences with the new United States government on some issues, such as a wall that Mexico absolutely will not pay for,” Peña Nieto said, as quoted by the Guardian. ”At no time will we accept anything that goes against our dignity as a country and our dignity as Mexicans.” Most Americans are opposed to the wall, Many Trump supporters were fervent supporters of a border wall (as evidenced by the loud chants of ”Build the wall” at his campaign events). However, polls suggest that Americans as a whole aren’t thrilled about a border wall. A recent ABC News poll found that only 37 percent of Americans are in favor of building it. It’s not that Americans aren’t concerned about immigration, of course 72 percent of Americans want to ”deport undocumented criminals,” according to the ABC News poll. Likewise, a Pew Research Center poll from late November and early December found that large majorities of Americans support a variety of immigration policies: 77 percent said it’s ”somewhat” or ”very important” to have stricter enforcement of visa overstays, and 73 percent said the same of preventing unqualified immigrants from receiving government benefits, for example. Meanwhile, only 39 percent said the same of building a border wall. Indeed, majorities supported other policies that run counter to the Trump immigration agenda, including allowing people who entered the country as children to stay, as well as supporting a path to legal status.

Mary Tyler Moore played the girl who could turn the world on with her smile. The actress is beloved for two TV roles: the single young professional Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and before that, the earnest homemaker Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Moore died Wednesday at the age of 80, her longtime representative told NPR. ”Today, beloved icon, Mary Tyler Moore, passed away at the age of 80 in the company of friends and her loving husband of over 33 years, Dr. S. Robert Levine,” Mara Buxbaum said in an email. ”A groundbreaking actress, producer, and passionate advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Mary will be remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her smile.” In 1995, 25 years after The Mary Tyler Moore Show first aired, the actress clearly recalled shooting the scenes for its memorable opening credits. ”It was freezing cold,” she told WHYY’s Fresh Air. ”It was in Minneapolis in January, I think. We didn’t know what we were doing — we were just there to grab a lot of footage that shows a young woman’s exuberance [over] being in a new city.” The final opening credits showed Moore’s character tossing her hat in the air. With it, she’s tossing out all the baggage of her last life and starting over in the newsroom of Minneapolis’ . Moore plays Richards as young, polite and very determined. In the first episode, when crotchety news director Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, asks Richards about her age and relationship status during a job interview, she challenges his line of questioning. ”You’ve been asking a lot of very personal questions that don’t have a thing to do with my qualifications for this job,” she says. ”It was the most powerful moment in theater I’ve had, because she played it so beautifully,” Asner told NPR in 2001. ”The audience was going ’ ’ at that moment.” By the time Moore appeared in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she was already an experienced comedic actor and producer. Her production company MTM Enterprises (formed with her second husband, Grant Tinker) was also responsible for the sitcoms Rhoda, The Bob Newhart Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. Moore had learned her craft while playing homemaker Laura Petrie for five seasons on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Her chemistry with her husband, played by Dick Van Dyke, was so electric that CBS insisted her character had to be a single woman on her later show — the network didn’t want viewers to think they had divorced. Van Dyke cheerfully admitted this to NPR in 2011: ”Around the second season, we would try to rehearse and begin to giggle for no reason. And a psychiatrist said, ’You have a crush on each other.’ And I realized that’s true! And I think it showed on the screen. I think that’s why people thought we were really married because we had a wonderful connection.” Laura Petrie also wasn’t the typical 1960s housewife people were used to seeing on TV. ”Laura actually had opinions of her own,” Moore said. ”And while she was asserting herself, she also didn’t make Dick Van Dyke look like a dummy. I mean, society’s expectations at that point still said, ’Hey, wait a minute, lady, you only go so far here.’ But I think we broke new ground.” The character also wore capri pants in a time when skirts and heels were the height of TV fashion. Moore proved she could wear what she wanted and also sometimes take the comic lead to Van Dyke’s straight man. She said she had always been a fan of the comedian Nanette Fabray, and she channeled Fabray to conjure up those trademark comic tears. ”There was definitely a cracking in the voice and an inability to maintain a tone and a certain amount of verbal yodeling that took place,” Moore said. In her real life, the actress was not the single, Mary Richards that America embraced. The real Mary was married by the time she was 18. She was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. but she grew up in Los Angeles with a mother who battled alcoholism, a problem that later afflicted Moore and both her siblings. ”I probably never was really drunk,” Moore recalled. ”And I certainly never drank during the daytime, but I wasted a lot of my time and I forgot a lot because I didn’t remember much of what happened the night before.” Moore channeled some of that unhappiness for her role as a grieving mother in 1980’s Ordinary People, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination. To this day, however, it’s her comedy that endures. In downtown Minneapolis, there’s a statue of her as Mary Richards twirling her cap — a moment of hope and promise, frozen in time.

An article in an online publication accusing Facebook of suppressing the Women’s March in its trending topics caused a little tempest on social media over the weekend. Facebook says it did not intentionally block any story and is revealing a new way its algorithm will now operate. Paul Bradley Carr, writing for online outlet Pando, on Saturday posted what he said were screen shots of his Facebook pages at the height of the worldwide marches, which brought more than a million people into the streets around the globe to protest the agenda of the Trump administration. Despite images and stories from the marches filling many people’s personal Facebook feeds and the day’s media coverage, Carr’s screenshots showed no signs of the march in Trending Topics — a feature supposed to reflect popular discussed topics. And Carr says he discovered he was not the only one who didn’t see the Women’s March reflected on Trending Topics, accusing Facebook of trying to cozy up to the Trump administration. A very unscientific poll by this reporter found that among people in my Facebook and Twitter network most did see the Women’s March or something related trending on their page. However, a few did not. According to Facebook, the Trending Topics — seen to the right of the main news feed on desktop and in search on mobile — are ”based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.” (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams.) Facebook representatives told NPR that the reason why some people did not see the march as trending had to do with the algorithm behind the feature. Although it took into account major news events and what’s popular on the site, it also accounted for the preferences of each person. It’s possible that Carr’s algorithmic profile indicated he wouldn’t be interested in the Women’s March. In addition, some people may have seen trending topics they didn’t realize were about the Women’s March. For example, Ashley Judd and Madonna were trending — both women gave speeches at the main march in Washington, D. C. And, Facebook says, none of this will happen in the future. As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms. Personal preferences are now out of the equation. ”Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone’s interests,” Facebook says in a press release. ”Everyone in the same region will see the same topics.” For now, a region is considered a country, so everyone in the U. S. should see the same topics. The latest algorithm changes are part of Facebook’s ongoing effort to curtail the spread of fake news. Some fabricated stories show up in Trending Topics, despite often originating on sites with no history of visitors and getting no coverage from legitimate news media. It’s a lucrative business, explored by NPR in November, when we tracked down one notorious creator. The new algorithm would make hoax articles less likely to trend because it will look at ”the number of publishers that are posting articles on Facebook about the same topic,” accounting for coverage by multiple news outlets, Facebook says. According to Facebook the new algorithms will also make it easier for those who did not realize that the trends for ”Ashley Judd” or ”Madonna” were related to the marches to understand the context around those posts. Trending topics will now feature a headline below each topic name. The company says the changes are not a response to complaints about trending during the Women’s March. Facebook says they have been in the works because its users — like Carr — actually expect and want to see trending topics related to the most events. Of course, algorithms are programs. While Facebook may hope that its new approach will appease critics such as Carr, the proof will be what happens in the real world of people’s Facebook pages. ”I do give them credit for acknowledging, at least, users’ concerns over this,” says Carr, who called Facebook’s change ”a positive step.” But, he added, ”we’ll see how it works in practice.”

Bangladesh. Myanmar. Benin. Somalia. Haiti. Ireland. South Sudan. Iraq. One by one, 59 immigrants from 29 countries rise before a federal judge in a Kansas City, Mo. courtroom and proudly state their country of origin. Some have brought their young children, who watch from the audience. All look eager and intent. This is a big moment: They are about to become U. S. citizens. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are expected to be naturalized as U. S. citizens in ceremonies around the country, much like this one. Judge Arthur Federman looks out at the rows of faces and smiles. ”It’s rare that we have an occasion in the courthouse where everyone leaves happy,” he tells them. ”Hopefully, this will be one of those days.” Erkin Rahimov, 54, and his wife, Limara, 42, are sitting in the front row, along with Erkin’s daughter from his first marriage, Sabikha. Erkin and Limara immigrated to the U. S. from Uzbekistan Sabikha came from Ukraine, where she was raised by her mother. All three will become citizens today. The evening before the ceremony, the Rahimovs invite us to join them for dinner at their home, a spare, tidy duplex in Kansas City, Mo. Limara has prepared a feast: the flavors of Uzbekistan, transported to the Midwest. There’s rice pilaf studded with beef: ”The Uzbek national dish!” Limara explains. Also on the table: a tangy beet salad, pickled cabbage, eggplant and homemade bread. Limara pours green tea from a beautiful Uzbek teapot and enameled deep blue and gold. ”We don’t have guests often,” their son Murad says, ”but when we do, we give it our all.” And the Rahimovs have much to celebrate. In 2009, after many years of trying, Erkin and Limara won the green card lottery to immigrate to the U. S. So, in March 2010, they left behind their life in Uzbekistan, a harsh authoritarian state. They landed in Kansas City with their two sons — Rasool and Murad — and not much else. ”I remember when we came to Kansas City with two small kids and three suitcases. It was challenging,” Erkin recalls. ”The first days we were sleeping on the carpet. We just put sheets on it.” For pillows, they used their clothes. Then, he says, ”slowly, slowly we started to work and buy some stuff.” Now, after seven years in the U. S. the Rahimovs own their home. They recently bought property outside the city where they plan to go on weekends and grow fruits and vegetables. They just leased a new car, a Hyundai Elantra. Erkin is a civil engineer. He works for a Canadian company that makes harvesting equipment, traveling throughout Missouri and Arkansas to train dealers and mechanics. Limara taught math and physics in Uzbekistan. Now she works with children at an program, and she is studying for a degree in computer science. Their sons are thriving. Rasool, now 7, is a Pokémon fiend and has test scores above grade level. Murad, who spoke no English when he arrived in the U. S. is an honors student on an accelerated track through high school. He loves astronomy his dream is to work for NASA. ”It’s amazing that my parents managed to get me and my little brother here for us to have a really bright future ahead of us,” he says. ”I’m really proud of my parents!” When Erkin and Limara become U. S. citizens, their children, Rasool and Murad, will automatically become citizens, too. The Rahimovs say they’ve always felt welcome in this country. By way of example, Erkin tells this story: One day, soon after the family arrived in Kansas City, Murad missed the bus to elementary school and came home crying. The school principal, hearing about the mishap, came by in his own car to pick Murad up and ferry him to school so he wouldn’t miss a day. ”It was amazing,” Murad says. ”He’s just a really good person.” Even though the Rahimovs came to the U. S. as legal permanent residents with green cards, the step of becoming citizens carries real meaning for them. They’ll be able to vote, and, as Limara puts it, ”take part in the fate of the country.” Looking forward to the ceremony, Limara says, happily, ”We will be, I think, real Americans, right? We will be part of the United States.” Asked what America symbolizes to him, Erkin replies instantly: ”Freedom. Freedom! Even my name means freedom.” He explains that erkin, in Uzbek, is translated as independent or free. Erkin and Limara Rahimov share a family history etched with sadness. They each have parents who were Crimean Tatars. They were among the Tatars who were forcibly deported from Crimea in 1944 in a mass expulsion, on orders of Josef Stalin. The Rahimovs know well that freedom is something to be cherished. On the morning of the naturalization ceremony, the Rahimovs arrive at the courthouse. Erkin is wearing a somber suit and tie Limara, an elegant black wool dress. Sabikha has flown in from New Jersey late the night before to join them in becoming citizens. She is a financial analyst with an M. B. A. and recently took a job with a company in New Jersey. ”Almost to the finish line, right?” Sabikha says as they approach downtown. ”Well,” she adds, laughing, ”maybe just new beginning actually!” Inside courtroom 8C at the Charles Evans Whittaker U. S. Courthouse, the 59 wait expectantly. They’ve already been through months of preparation: They’ve been fingerprinted, had background checks, been interviewed and have taken an English and civics test. Now the final step of the process has come. They raise their right hands and in unison, recite the oath of allegiance, pledging to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States. A chorus of global accents fills the room. ”Congratulations!” says Federman. With that oath complete, they are officially U. S. citizens. For Federman, conducting these ceremonies has special resonance. As he tells the immigrants, he is himself the child of naturalized citizens. His parents survived the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps and went on to forge a new life together in America. ”We need to recognize that we are a nation of immigrants,” Federman tells the courtroom. ”And in the same way I told you my family story, I hope that you will tell your story to us and to our children, so that we can all appreciate the great diversity that makes up our country.” As Erkin Rahimov listens to the judge’s words, he gently dabs away tears that roll down his cheeks. ”Thank you very much for being my fellow citizens,” Federman concludes, ”and for pledging today as you did to uphold our Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees to each of us.” Soon after, the Rahimovs leave the courthouse, their eyes sparkling. They’ve already registered to vote and are holding copies of the Constitution and small American flags. ”I’m so excited!” Sabikha says, gleefully. ”I want to make this country better. It gave so much to me. I want to give back.”

Opponents who spent months resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline were disheartened by President Trump’s decision Tuesday to ”expedite” construction of the controversial project. Dave Archambault, the chairman of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, called the move ”reckless and politically motivated.” Jamil Dakwar of the American Civil Liberties Union said it was ”a slap in the face to Native Americans.” Earthjustice, the law firm that represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, described it as ”legally questionable at best” and vowed to take the Trump administration to court. But as much as Trump’s move has been criticized, opponents of the pipeline say it wasn’t a surprise. ”It’s disappointing, but it’s not unexpected,” said Ruth Hopkins, a reporter at Indian Country Today who was born on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and has been part of the resistance for months. ”This is not the just because he signed those orders. . .. Our hearts have been in this continuously, and we’ve just been waiting to see what would develop, and trying to prepare ourselves the best we can.” Trump signed an executive memorandum that supersedes the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision in December to halt construction. He also signed a memorandum inviting the company TransCanada to resubmit an application for building the Keystone XL — a proposed pipeline that Barack Obama vetoed in 2015. Environmental activists and thousands of protesters, including Native Americans from more than 100 tribes, have resisted both pipelines. They have argued that the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project cutting through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois, would jeopardize the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the millions of people who get their drinking water from the Missouri River. They also say that pipeline construction would damage sacred sites, violating tribal treaty rights. Energy Transfer Partners, the construction company responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline, has contended all along that the pipeline is safe and passes through no land owned by the Standing Rock Sioux. On Sunday, the company shared an article on its website headlined ”Even the Standing Rock tribe is sick of the Dakota pipeline protesters,” which predicted that DAPL would ”finally have an ally in Washington and we can get back to business.” A White House press release on Tuesday said that Trump’s executive orders were in line with his campaign promise to ”reduce the burden of regulations and expedite high priority energy and infrastructure projects that will create jobs and increase national security.” The statement said that construction and operation of Keystone XL would create tens of thousands of American jobs, and that the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and other pipelines is ”critical to a strong economy, energy independence, and national security.” For months, environmentalists, activists and tribes from across the country have been opposing construction of DAPL through lawsuits, demonstrations and civil disobedience. But while protesters considered the Army Corps of Engineers’ actions last month a victory, celebrations came with an asterisk. The people engaged in the fight against the pipeline knew that whatever reprieve they were getting was likely to be temporary. When construction was halted, Hopkins tweeted, ”Those at camp are being encouraged to stick around because it’s expected that Dakota Access will drill anyway, without permit.” There are still ways for people to fight the pipeline, Hopkins said Tuesday. People can call their senators and members of Congress to express their opposition, she said. They can take their money out of the banks that have financed DAPL. They can spread awareness in their communities and on social media. And, she said, there are still people living in weatherized tents at the Sacred Stone Camp in North Dakota, where snow and ice cover the land. Allison Renville is one of those people. A member of the Lakota Nation, she’s a media consultant and activist who has spent a lot of time at the camp over the past year. Renville agrees that divestment and community engagement are going to be key to preventing DAPL construction from going forward. ”Not only do I have faith in God, but I have faith in my people,” she said. ”On the ground, we’ve had 10, 000 people come in and learn to be organizers, [and by] . .. taking courses in nonviolent direct action and learning to set up a camp, utilizing tools, they’ll be able to get anything accomplished.” Following the massive women’s marches held around the country over the weekend, some activists remain optimistic that political mobilization will be a safeguard against any actions the president might take. ”Coming off of the weekend where so many gathered to send the message . .. that President Trump and all that he stands for cannot be normalized, I think that resonates in the air for many people,” Nellis said. A Navajo woman, she is the director of the Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Program for the Sierra Club. She said Trump’s actions affected her personally, and that his presidency is a threat to the rights of Native people across the country. Trump, she said, will ”run into confrontation every step of the way.” ”And people are feeling stronger to fight back against bad decisions like this,” said. ”There’s a strength and there’s a solidarity that’s brewing that will rise up and put President Trump on notice: That we deserve better, we demand more, and we’ll do everything we can to get it.”

Like millions of Americans, I watched the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, as he tried to convince reporters and viewers last weekend that President Trump’s inauguration was the most watched ever — ”both in person and around the globe, period!” Spicer made his case even though photos of the National Mall show that attendance was much smaller than at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, which — incidentally — I covered. The next day, on NBC’s Meet the Press, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway tried to persuade host Chuck Todd that Spicer was using ”alternative facts.” When Todd pressed Conway on Spicer’s falsehoods, she responded: ”Chuck, if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think we’re going to have to rethink our relationship.” To most viewers, that sounded like a threat. To me, all this sounded like standard operating procedure in authoritarian China, where I’d spent a decade as a reporter. The White House seemed to be using the same tactics the Chinese government routinely uses against the foreign press corps: Make false claims to support an alternative narrative. When challenged, threaten reporters — and then try to delegitimize them. Like the new White House, the Chinese government has tried over the years to convince citizens not to believe their own eyes. For instance, when smog enveloped Chinese cities, the government would insist it was really just fog. This tactic grew increasingly absurd as air reached staggeringly toxic levels and people faced scenes that no propaganda campaign could overcome. The Chinese government is much more candid about its air pollution crisis these days, but still tries to manage reality and mislead citizens. Earlier this month, the government ordered provincial officials to halt smog warnings and then censored news of the order when it leaked. The continued mendacity only angers Chinese people and makes them more cynical. Some people have turned to demonstrations, with government responses varying from tolerance to crackdowns. People put surgical masks on sculptures in December to protest smog in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The government countered by deploying riot police. When under fire, another favored tactic of the Chinese government is to misdirect and then try to discredit the press corps. Conway took a similar approach last weekend. Faced with repeated questions on Sunday about Spicer’s false statements, she went on the offensive, criticizing a Time correspondent who had mistakenly reported that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. Conway’s criticism was legitimate. The reporter, Zeke Miller, explained that the bust had been obscured from his view and corrected his report. He publicly apologized. But Conway wouldn’t let it go and insisted the mistake reflected a deeper journalistic bias against Trump. ”Why was it said in the first place?” she asked. ”Because everyone is so presumptively negative.” Since Saturday’s debacle, Spicer has tried to improve his relationship with reporters, but continues to complain that the press is unfair. On Tuesday, he repeated that President Trump maintains he would have won the popular vote had not 3 million to 5 million ”illegals” voted. There is, once again, no evidence that happened. Even as the president keeps making false claims that many fellow Republicans reject, he continues to attack the integrity of the reporters who challenge him. In a speech last weekend at the CIA, he called members of the news media ”among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” This reminds me of the way the Chinese government has spent years impugning the honesty of the international media and suggesting it is part of a broad Western conspiracy to keep China down. Last year, Wang Qiu, a member of China’s legislature and head of broadcaster China National Radio, claimed that 60 percent of Western media reports smeared China. In 2013, Li Congjun, the president of the New China News Service, urged the country to fight against plotting by foreign reporters. ”Some hostile Western forces and media do not want to see a prospering socialist China,” Li wrote in the Communist People’s Daily. This relentless assault on the image of foreign reporters has been very effective. In 2012, I interviewed a man named Zhang about a bridge collapse, which everyone in town attributed to government corruption. Zhang’s mother insisted on attending the interview and repeatedly told him not to speak with me because she thought my sole motive was to malign China and the Communist Party. ”An opportunist like you is what they need,” she told her son. I responded to all of this the way I’d recommend journalists covering President Trump do: Get out of the office as much as possible, report and spend a lot of time listening to ordinary people about their concerns. To help overcome distrust, I even created a free taxi cab service in Shanghai so I could randomly meet Chinese and interact with them outside the framework of a traditional interview. Reporters in China are accustomed to threats from the government. So when Conway told Chuck Todd, ”We’re going to have to rethink our relationship,” that felt familiar to those who’ve been warned by Chinese authorities to be more ”objective” or risk not having their visas renewed. Since 2012, China has expelled two foreign reporters, but long waits for visa renewals have improved. Pressuring journalists is common in other authoritarian states in Asia, too. Nguyen Phuong Linh, who spent five years as a reporter for the Financial Times and Reuters in Hanoi, said Vietnamese authorities phoned her frequently about stories they didn’t like. ”Every time I quoted someone who said something against the official statement, they said, ’No, your fact is not fact,” says Nguyen, who now lives in Singapore, where she’s a political risk analyst. Government officials also pressured her. They’d say, ”’I think we have to reconsider our relationship,’” Nguyen recalls, ”exactly like Kellyanne Conway just said.” Nguyen, who grew up in Haiphong, in northern Vietnam, always thought the United States was a ”dream journalism environment” for someone like her who’d grown up under a repressive government. But when she watched Meet the Press on Sunday, she was shocked. ”I was telling myself: ’Jesus, this is America! It’s not Vietnam. ’” Frank Langfitt is NPR’s London correspondent. He served as NPR’s Shanghai correspondent from 2011 to 2016 and as the Baltimore Sun’s Beijing bureau chief from 1997 to 2002.

There’s an active debate inside newsrooms, and particularly within the NPR newsroom, about how to characterize the statements of President Trump when they are at odds with evidence to the contrary. That debate began during the presidential election campaign. For example, in 2015, candidate Trump claimed that when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, ”I watched in Jersey City, N. J. where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” The claim was never substantiated and NPR said so. But we didn’t call him a liar. In September 2016, Trump got into a tiff with an pastor, the Rev. Faith Green Timmons of Bethel United Methodist Church in Flint, Mich. Timmons had criticized Trump for failing to keep his remarks to her congregation, as promised, nonpartisan. Trump later had his own version of that event. Our reporter Scott Detrow was there. He reported what he saw and heard, and that didn’t back up Trump’s account. Back then some listeners asked why NPR didn’t just report that Trump was a liar. This week that same question is being posed to NPR. This time, NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported on Trump’s visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va. the day after his inauguration. Despite his tweets comparing the intelligence services to those of Nazi Germany, Trump told his audience he is with them ”a thousand percent.” He also said that the media were to blame for making up the feud between him and the intelligence services. Kelly said, ”It’s provably not true. In that same speech out of the CIA this weekend, Trump also falsely inflated the size of the crowd at his inauguration.” Now many listeners want to know why Kelly didn’t just call the president a liar. On Morning Edition, Kelly explains why. She says she went to the Oxford English Dictionary seeking the definition of ”lie.” ”A false statement made with intent to deceive,” Kelly says. ”Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn’t, with facts.” NPR’s senior vice president for news, Michael Oreskes, says NPR has decided not to use the word ”lie” and that Kelly got it right by avoiding that word. ”Our job as journalists is to report, to find facts, and establish their authenticity and share them with everybody,” says Oreskes. ”It’s really important that people understand that these aren’t our opinions. . .. These are things we’ve established through our journalism, through our reporting . .. and I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ’lie,’ you push people away from you.” Oreskes acknowledges that other news organizations have made a different decision, most notably The New York Times, where he worked for more than two decades. The Times uses the word ”lie” in this headline about Trump’s repeated claim that millions of votes cast by immigrants who are in this country illegally prevented him from winning the popular vote. As the Times and NPR have reported, there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud.

There have been no executive orders yet to undo President Barack Obama’s signature climate plan, but many officials and environmental groups consider it as good as dead. The Clean Power Plan is on hold while a legal battle plays out, and even if an appeals court upholds it — a decision could come any day — the Trump administration is likely to appeal to the Supreme Court. The state of New York decided to forge ahead anyway. Like a number of other mostly liberal states, it is continuing with efforts to drive down the carbon emissions that drive climate change. In the upstate village of Canton, dairy farmer Rick Moore shows off the solar thermal array tucked next to his slouching red barn. It’s a cloudy, slushy day, but ”you still get rays that still help heat it up,” Moore says. The system warms the water that runs through the solar tubes. Moore then uses the water to spray down his milking equipment. He says it will save him $1, 000 a year, and help reduce the carbon emissions he says are changing the climate here. ”We had winters when I first started, that you had three feet of snow and cold for two weeks at a time,” he says. ”You’re not seeing that nowadays.” New York state paid for nearly the entire system. It sees Moore as a tiny piece of a puzzle that adds up to getting half of the state’s power from renewables by 2030, even without a federal mandate. The Clean Power Plan would have required energy plants to cut their carbon emissions, leaving it up to each state to figure out how to reach a specific reduction target. The plan was supposed to be the main way the U. S. carried out its commitment under the historic Paris climate deal. But after it was announced in 2015, about two dozen mostly conservative states sued the Obama administration to block it. Still, New York has not only stuck with its own plan to reduce carbon pollution, it’s now doubling down on its goal. ”We are not going to stop until we reach 100 percent renewable because that’s what a sustainable New York is really all about,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said earlier this month. New York is pouring billions into everything from solar to smart power grids, electric car charging stations to huge offshore wind farms. In fact, Cuomo just announced the nation’s largest offshore wind project. The state already gets almost 25 percent of its power from renewables, mostly from hydropower dams. Critics say the next 25 percent is the big lift. Cheap natural gas has driven down power prices. So much, says Gavin Donohue of the Independent Power Producers of New York, that existing renewables, like wind, hydro and biomass, need more state help to stay in business. ”What’s guiding all of our policy development here in New York is not cost, not efficiencies, not reliability, but what gets us to some magical CO2 number to show that we’re a national leader,” he says. Another complication could be Cuomo’s recent announcement to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, near New York City. But the state says it plans to replace that with another kind of power, including more wind farms. It also plans to add transmission lines to carry hydropower from Quebec. North Dakota looks to clean up coal, North Dakota led the legal challenge against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and many there were happy to see it put on hold. The state gets of its electricity from thousands of tons of lignite coal, among the most polluting sources of energy. For that reason, the climate plan would have required bigger emissions cuts than almost any other state, some 45 percent. ”North Dakota had to be of that way by 2022,” says Randy Christmann with the North Dakota Public Service Commission. ”That’s only a few years away and there’s no way we were getting there.” The state would likely have had to add hundreds of wind turbines and shut down coal mines and plants. Jason Bohrer, with North Dakota’s lignite coal trade group, says it’s great the Clean Power Plan is likely gone with the new administration. But ”Donald Trump is not the for the coal industry,” he says. ”This doesn’t fix everything. It just gives us the opportunity to provide solutions.” Bohrer says public demand and market forces are fueling a boom in cleaner energy. Cheap wind power has grown into North Dakota’s electricity source. So even though the pressure’s off to curb emissions, the state is looking to clean up coal as a way to save jobs. The state and the coal industry have sunk millions into developing a coal plant that reuses the carbon dioxide it creates. The aim is zero emissions. If it works, Dave Glatt with the state health department thinks this could bring the state close to that ambitious 45 percent reduction target. ”We may not hit it necessarily on the exact timelines that the Clean Power Plan was looking at,” he says. ”But I do think that that’s something we should look at. Can we achieve that or even go beyond that?” This year, North Dakota will craft its own energy plan, hoping coal and renewables can . Paris Climate deal not enough, It’s not clear if market forces can get the U. S. all the way to its goals under the Paris climate deal. They may take a long time to play out, and climate scientists say a shift to clean energy needs to happen urgently. Still, few energy experts can imagine building another U. S. coal plant. Operators must plan decades into the future, they say, and even if the Trump administration won’t tackle carbon emissions, a future president likely will. Obama’s Clean Power Plan was also an easy lift for some, and many states are already close to meeting their goals. But globally, the Paris climate deal is not nearly enough. The U. S. — like other countries — would have to do much more to keep carbon emissions below the point where scientists say they will have disastrous consequences. So far, there’s nothing to suggest the Trump administration plans to make that extra push. David Sommerstein is a reporter for North Country Public Radio. Amy Sisk reports for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America’s energy issues.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is vowing to lead the nation on climate change, as the Trump administration pulls back. But the Trump administration could get in California’s way. In his annual State of the State speech, California Gov. Jerry Brown had one key message about climate change: perseverance. ”We cannot fall back and give in to the climate deniers,” Brown said. ”The science is clear. The danger is real.” And just as President Trump took the oath of office on Friday, California acted, releasing its latest plan for tackling climate change. This includes renewable energy and putting millions of electric cars on the road. It’s a challenge Brown first made in December, when climate scientists from around the world met up in San Francisco. The mood at the conference had been dismal. Scientists were worried about losing federal funding for research and even the NASA satellites that collect basic climate data. Brown declared that should Trump turn off the satellites, California would launch its own. And that wasn’t the only warning Brown had for the Trump administration. Brown has spearheaded his own international climate agreement with more than 160 cities and states. California, he said, is the 6th largest economy in the world. ”We got the scientists,” he said. ”We got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight. We’re ready to defend.” And playing defense may well be in California’s future. The state has rules limiting carbon pollution from cars, but it can’t have those rules without permission from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. That came up at the nomination hearing last week for Scott Pruitt, who could run the EPA. California Sen. Kamala Harris asked Pruitt if he could uphold the state’s special permission — its waiver — for tougher car rules. ”Senator as you know, administrators in the past have not granted the waiver and in fact have granted the waiver,” Pruitt said. ”That’s a review process . ..” He said he would not know his intention without going through the process. This is not a new fight for California. In 2007, the Bush administration denied the state’s request to have tougher pollution rules for cars, saying it would create a patchwork of regulations. California took the federal government to court, but before the case was decided, Obama was elected. California got its waiver. Michael Wara, a professor at Stanford Law School, said this isn’t just about California. ”The first legal disputes are going to be about cars,” he said. ”And I’d be surprised actually if we didn’t see those disputes.” Thirteen other states have adopted the same clean car standards. But the bigger question, Wara said, is a political one. ”How a Pruitt EPA responds to some of these issues with California is really going to test Scott Pruitt’s and the administration’s commitment to conservative values,” he said. Pruitt sued the EPA as the attorney general of Oklahoma. He argued his state had the right to set its own environmental rules. ”So that logic would seem to imply that California should have the right to set its own agenda,” Wara said. ”But we’ll see how that trades off against the desire to roll back regulations related to greenhouse gases.” This is something California will be watching closely, with lawyers at the ready.

If you want to move into 2017’s second month with some fun, Chicago Nnamdi Ogbonnaya offers a good place to start. ”dOn’t turn me Off,” the latest single from his upcoming record DROOL, drips with positivity. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to gather all your best friends and take on the world, and it might just be the soundtrack to your 2017 breakout moment. Ogbonnaya’s aesthetic is quirky and eclectic. A wobbly, sound winds through the track, lending the production extraterrestrial vibes. But an irresistible groove, combined with Mal Devisa’s singular voice on the hook, brings the listener down to earth and injects the song with its central testimony: Confidence is key. ”I’m ready to glow . .. I’m ready to grow,” Mal Devisa sings. Throughout the song, Ogbonnaya doubles up his voice in octaves it’s as if he’s giving each verse its own cheering squad. This choice feels fitting, given what he tells NPR about the track: ”The song is about surrounding yourself with positive people and becoming confident in yourself,” he says. JD AKA ThrashKitten rounds out Ogbonnaya’s team — he joins the track for a verse that overflows with in lines like ”Even unplugged, I still got the power.” The song is about having fun and feeling yourself — but it also delivers a warning about the importance of art and the artist’s indomitability: ”Bringing the Holy of Holies down to the darkest That’s just the job of an artist,” Ogbonnaya sings. ”Don’t even get me started.” DROOL comes out March 3 via and Sooper.

The U. S. men’s national soccer team is back in action with a game against Serbia on Sunday. It’s a friendly, meaning it’s not part of any official competition. But it will provide a first look at the team under its new head coach or, more precisely, its new old head coach. Bruce Arena coached the team from 1998 to 2006. He has won more games with the U. S. men’s national team than any other coach, and is the only person to lead the U. S. at two World Cups, including a quarterfinals appearance in 2002. His long and successful career includes multiple NCAA championships at the University of Virginia and several titles in Major League Soccer, the U. S. men’s professional league. Now he’s back, on a rescue mission of sorts. Last November, the U. S. lost its first two matches in the final round of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. After the defeats, head coach Jurgen Klinsmann was fired. Arena was hired with a specific mandate: get the team to Russia for next year’s tournament. Failure to do so would mean a big step backwards for a men’s team that’s played in every World Cup since 1990. Coalescing at January Camp, The first step was bringing together 32 players for what’s known as January camp in Carson, Calif. All the players were from the MLS. Top U. S. players playing overseas weren’t able to attend because their seasons are underway. The second week of camp opened on one of those southern California days in January that laughs at the calendar. The sky was blue and cloudless. The morning temperature crept toward 70 degrees. And on a lush, green soccer field at Carson’s StubHub Center, the U. S. national team scrimmage was all chatter and speed and energy. After the two qualifying losses in November — to Mexico and a embarrassment to Costa Rica — the Americans dropped to the bottom of the region’s hexagonal. That’s the World Cup qualifying group. The U. S. men’s team is not among the world’s best. Still, the results were dispiriting: The team didn’t play like a team. Two months later, on that beautiful winter day in Carson, the ailing patient looked better. ”I wouldn’t say it’s that bad,” Arena said. ”You know, we’re not in triage right now. We’re in, maybe, primary care. Obviously it’s not an easy situation being down at the bottom in the hex right now, but our aim is to make up for lost ground — real quick.” A new set of priorities, The next qualifying matches, against Honduras and Panama, are two months away. Until then, Arena has a couple of priorities. ”We want to get our defending right,” Arena said. The team’s defense looked weak against Mexico and Costa Rica, so he’s putting some emphasis on that during the camp. Building a team probably is Arena’s main priority. This has been one of his strengths during a long coaching career. ”Bruce has an aura,” U. S. veteran midfielder Michael Bradley said. ”When he walks into a team, he has a way about him and a way of working that I think engages everybody and motivates every guy to play for him and to really go after things.” Midfielder Graham Zusi talked about Arena’s ability to communicate with his players. ”Every day he lets us know what the mission is for training,” Zusi said. ”Every now and then we’ll have a quick meeting after lunch, as well, just to kind of recap.” Asked whether those communication skills were missing with Arena’s predecessor, Klinsmann, Zusi laughed. ”I thought we weren’t talking comparisons here,” he said. Tapping domestic vs. international players, In fact, players were advised before camp opened not to publicly compare Arena to Klinsmann. But comparisons were inevitable. Klinsmann’s firing in November followed several years of criticism: about his game tactics, about his preference for choosing national team players with international experience over players with experience in MLS. It’s understandable — Klinsmann played and coached in his native Germany and he experienced what any soccer fan knows: the best of the sport is overseas. Arena coached MLS teams for a number of years, most recently the L. A. Galaxy from 2008 to 2016. He’s been more open to having MLS players on the national team. In fact he brought to camp some MLS players who were overlooked by Klinsmann. According to a U. S. team official, Klinsmann also liked to make players uncomfortable. When they competed for roster spots, he didn’t want them feeling like anything was guaranteed. Arena, on the other hand, talks about relating to his players — although he’s hardly an ” ” kind of coach. At practice, he lets players know in no uncertain terms when things aren’t working. ”Too sloppy there guys,” he yelled during one drill. ”Keep the ball on the ground!” And while the practice was high speed, physical and keenly competitive, there was a lighter feel as well. A U. S. soccer official watching from the sidelines noted the players ”didn’t look nervous.” As they scrimmaged, Arena yelled ”if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. But make an aggressive mistake.” Destination: Russia, 2018, In 2002, Bruce Arena led the U. S. men to the World Cup quarterfinals. It was the team’s second best finish in history — and the its best finish since the very first World Cup in 1930. Now, 15 years later, his initial goal, at least, is much more prosaic: just to make it to the tournament next year. There are eight matches left in the final round of qualifying. Though it’s not time to panic yet, there is an urgency to the upcoming qualifiers. The games against Honduras on March 24 and Panama four days later aren’t . But Arena says the U. S. needs to at least get four points. That means a win, which is worth three points, and a draw, worth one point. Any more losses, and it might just be time to panic.

Widespread fears about the future — including concerns about politics, the economy, the environment and nuclear war — have led some people to prepare for ways to defend themselves. The ”survivalists” include some Silicon Valley executives, who worry about the tech future they have helped to create. Journalist Evan Osnos, who recently wrote about doomsday prep for the super rich for The New Yorker, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that tech survivalists are stockpiling weapons and food, and, in some cases, preparing luxury underground bunkers. ”They feel a sense of fragility in our politics,” Osnos says. ”Our politics have become disorderly . .. and [the tech survivalists] look at it and think, ’Well, we’re not entirely sure that our institutions are as sound as we’ve always assumed they are.’ ” While researching his article, Osnos spent the night in the Survival Condo Project, a luxury underground apartment complex north of Wichita, Kan. The complex is designed to be with hydroponic vegetables, its own fish farm and renewable energy sources. ”[The project] was developed by somebody named Larry Hall . .. and what he realized was that there was a certain kind of buyer out there . .. who would be willing to spend, in this case, about $3 million for an apartment underground, or $1. 5 million for half an apartment,” Osnos says. ”Larry Hall has sold every unit in it except one for himself.” On the kinds of scenarios the survivalists are worried about, Some of the things that they talk about are the kind of stuff of ordinary disaster movies, but there is some real element to it. The idea that there could be a pandemic, if the Ebola virus, for instance, had affected a much larger part of the population, or an earthquake on the San Andreas in San Francisco, that’s not a completely unreasonable fear. Or the possibility of some sort of civil unrest. They take what they’ve seen in some American cities and extrapolate onto a larger scale and they said, ”Well, what would happen?” . .. And then there’s another piece of it, which is specific to technology, and that is a fairly prevalent fear in this community, which is that the growth and the development of artificial intelligence, which has become such a big subject of discussion, the idea that you will soon have a car that has no driver, that this kind fundamental change in the American labor force will continue to produce tensions particularly between people who are losing their jobs and people who are responsible for the technology that is bringing about that change. . .. Max Levchin who was a of PayPal, is the CEO of Affirm, a lending startup, who is opposed actually to this trend of survivalist thinking but is surrounded by it. He said what people worry about is, to use Max’s word, ”the pitchforks,” and by that he means the idea that the sort of tension that we saw with the Occupy movement a few years ago would take on a wider, more virulent form. On the fragility of our digital systems, including GPS, If you’re somebody who works in technology then you got into that business in part because you tend to think about how systems fit together. As one CEO of a technology company put it to me, ”The truth is, is that our lives today are dependent on systems that are integrated, interdependent in ways that they simply weren’t even 20 or 30 years ago.” To give you an example, he said, ”The food that’s on the shelves in our grocery stories depends on a supply chain that depends on GPS and GPS, the Global Positioning System, depends to some degree on the Internet, and the Internet depends to some degree on another system known as DNS, and each one of those is vulnerable in its own way. ”... He’s a highly rational person. . .. He said, ”Look, I’m not rushing out and declaring that the end of the world is near, but what I am saying is that it is,” in his view, ”logically rational to talk about the fragility of these digital and electrical systems, which are really second nature and largely unexamined as we go about our daily lives.” On how the survivalists come from both sides of the political spectrum, One of the surprises to me was that this was not something that was occupying one political wing or another, it seems to actually draw from both sides. Traditionally most survivalists would describe themselves as libertarians somewhere out typically on the conservative end of the spectrum — they put a high premium on on distance from government. But there is a new element here, which is partly reflected in the success and the candidacy of Donald Trump, and that’s the idea that . .. in the case of Donald Trump, somebody who defies all of the conventional expectations and descriptions of politics, the sorts of experience required, the kind of standard to which he would be held for accuracy in what he says — all of the things that we used to assume would be absolutely fundamental about politics, those no longer obtain at the moment. On the election and the ”creeping disrespect” for American institutions, Antonio García Martínez, who worked at Facebook, later was an adviser to Twitter, in the midst of the presidential campaign when it was getting really toxic between supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, he decided to buy five acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and he brought in generators and solar panels and as he put it, ”thousands of rounds of ammunition,” because as he says, ”When a society loses its founding myth, the thing that holds it together, well then it can descend into chaos.” . .. What he was referring to was something you hear across these conversations and that’s the idea that we are ultimately held together by a kind of commitment to the United States as a functioning entity. It’s a sort of consensus, a belief that our politics are possible, that it’s worth participating, that our institutions are sound, that the president, for instance, will abide by the Constitution, that the courts will have the say over the things which the constitution allows them to govern, so what they feel, the survivalists in Silicon Valley and in finance circles in New York who are expressing this view, is that they are worried that there’s been this creeping disrespect for fairly basic institutions in American life, the things that people used to believe were sources of authority.

President Trump has said he won’t do any new foreign deals while in the White House, but that won’t stop new Trump hotels from springing up across the United States. Bloomberg News reports that Trump Hotels CEO, Eric Danziger, has revealed the company is planning a major expansion of its luxury properties, as well as some of its new Scion hotels. Danziger, speaking after a panel discussion Tuesday at the America Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles, said Trump Hotels will be looking to triple its luxury properties in this country. ”There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U. S. and we’re in five,” Danziger is quoted as saying. ”I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger told the panel that cities up for consideration include Dallas, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco. He said only the luxury Trump hotels will be in the major metropolitan areas, while the Scion properties will be in secondary and tertiary cities. The first of the hotels is due to open later this year. ”Both brands and any others we create will have a domestic emphasis for the next four or eight years,” Danziger told the audience. A spokesperson for Trump Hotels, who did not want to be identified, would not say how long these expansion plans have been in place, but added that business opportunities look positive. ”We see significant growth opportunity in the United States for both our hotel brands, ” the spokesperson said. On Jan. 11, Trump announced that while he would maintain ownership of his business empire, he’d address ethical concerns by turning over operations to his two adult sons. That plan fails to end concerns that Trump could profit from his presidency, according to law professor Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis. Even when his sons manage the operations, the wealth stays in the Trump family, she notes. ”This demonstrates how inadequate and frankly laughable Trump’s plan for conflicts of interest is so far,” she said. ”Trump plans to exploit the power and prestige of the presidency for his own financial benefit,” she added. And Trump critics can point to another example of how the presidency is enriching the Trump Organization: Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla. this month doubled the cost of membership. Bernd Lembcke, ’s managing director, told the New York Times, there’s been ”a sudden surge in requests” for membership applications. The initiation fee to join the club, which was $100, 000, is now $200, 000. Lembcke, who could not be reached for comment, told the Times that the fee had been $200, 000 before 2010, when it was cut in half in response to the recession. In separate news, Politico reported Wednesday that an electrical contractor — AES Electrical, based in Laurel, Md. — has filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Washington hotel for $2 million. The contractor says Trump has not paid bills for ”nonstop” work done to open the luxury hotel inside the federal Old Post Office Building last year. The suit, filed in D. C. Superior Court, says the company was told to rush work on electrical and fire alarm systems ahead of a visit by Trump in September.

”I understand things visually, by finding them in paint. I don’t know if my dyslexia causes me to be this way, but I have a feeling it does.” — Rachel Deane, painter. We know lots of facts about dyslexia: It’s the most common reading disorder. It changes the way millions of people read and process information. But we know much less about how it feels to people who have it. How it shapes your your confidence and how people see and react to you. And so I reached out to some really creative people — artists who have dyslexia — to talk about this. One of the most fascinating things I heard is that dyslexia plays a big role in their creative process. Some said their struggle with written words informs their art, and that the struggle to express ideas they can’t in writing makes their art unique. I asked six of these artists to show me through their work what dyslexia is like. Here’s what they came up with. Gudrun Hasle, fine artist, Copenhagen, Denmark, School was a daily nightmare. Teachers thought I was lazy rather than dyslexic, and at that time if you were dyslexic you were considered plain stupid. I was given books for when I was . Finally, I sort of just gave up on the whole thing and began to injure myself by cutting into my skin. I never graduated school, which is very unusual in Denmark. I use my dyslexia in everything I do. It’s my technique. It began as an accident. When I started to attend the Art Academy in Denmark, I painted a painting and added some texts. I had no time to correct the spelling, so the next day all the other students and professors were trying to read their way through my uncorrected text, and suddenly they were dyslexic. They were having a hard time reading my words. I thought to myself, hmm, this is a very interesting and effective tool. I turned the whole thing around. But it was a giant leap for me to make this change. Since then, I never correct anything. And sometimes the wording is correct — by accident. Website Instagram, Ash Casper, designer and illustrator, New York, My struggle with dyslexia doesn’t define me, and I have never felt defined by it. It was just something that I dealt with and overcame to get where I am today. Art was the answer for me. Many people deal with dyslexia on a daily basis, but they don’t let it define them. Dyslexia isn’t some disability that makes you a struggling student for the rest of your life, it is simply a hurdle that some people must jump in order to succeed. Website Instagram, Rachel Deane, painter, Providence, R. I. I think that my relationship to my dyslexia manifests itself indirectly in my work. My paintings represent the way I see and process the world, the way I learn information. I learn visually and through narratives rather than by memorization or other standard education practices. I saw a large retrospective exhibition of (the artist Pierre) Bonnard at the Musée d’Orsay a couple of years ago and was blown away by his use of color and texture. I could not walk away from the exhibition without purchasing the large, heavy catalog. My Bonnard book protects me visually and emotionally. I think this example shows the way I think, the way I process. I understand things visually, by finding them in paint. I don’t know if my dyslexia causes me to be this way, but I have a feeling it does. Website Instagram, Nick Fagan, fine artist, Columbus, Ohio, COME COME represents an attempt to find the area where communication breaks down into something more abstract. For me, language has always been somewhat of a struggle. The inability and difficulty to express myself through writing has been a particular struggle. In my work, I try to see these flaws as a new way of showing language by breaking it down into the physical lines to demonstrate how words are actually made. I collapse letters and words together and break them apart into a new way of expression. Website Instagram, Leslie Chavez, photographer, Austin, Texas, This piece represents my emotions toward my dyslexia. Every day I am stressed, dispirited and fed up because I never feel satisfied with my work — whether it’s academic, my campus jobs or an artistic project. In the back of my mind, I have a voice telling me, ”You’re not enough, you can’t fit in with the others.” That’s when those emotions rise up and overwhelm me. I work twice as hard as other students to understand what they were able to pick up quickly. Thankfully, my professors are flexible with my learning disability, but once I’m done with school, I won’t have that help. I have to blend in with everyone else and pretend my learning disability won’t affect my job. Those feelings will always be there with me, by my side. Website Instagram, Mel Jarvis, illustrator, Detroit, This little piggy didn’t need to read the book to know how to outwit the Big Bad Wolf! I wish people didn’t think dyslexia was only about mixing up letters. There are other frustrating effects, like memorizing verbal tasks, difficulty learning though written text, even the emotional frustration that comes with the whole package (just to name a few). I feel dyslexic creatives aren’t much different than other creative people, but all dyslexic people are very creative. Website Instagram,

On Tuesday night, President Trump threatened to intervene in Chicago’s law enforcement, citing the number of shootings and murders there in 2016 and 2017. It wasn’t clear what type of intervention the president was referring to in a tweet he sent out Tuesday evening saying he ”will send in the Feds!” if Chicago ”doesn’t fix the horrible ’carnage’ going on.” As in many major American cities, the federal government is already deeply involved in Chicago’s approach to fighting violent crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has, among other units, a homicide squad, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives investigates ”violent offenders, career criminals, gun traffickers and gangs” in the city. The Department of Justice announced earlier this month that it had found a pattern of abuse within the Chicago Police Department, and is working with the city government to reach an agreement in which the federal department will oversee the city’s police. Speaking on WTTW, Chicago’s local PBS station, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Tuesday that ”there’s a lot the federal government can do” to combat violent crime in the city. He cited the need for federal gun control legislation and asked for federal funding for additional police officers. Emanuel also said the federal government should be ”investing in neighborhoods that are by poverty” and become ”a breeding ground for violence” by putting federal funds toward and summer jobs programs. Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also issued a statement, saying, ”The Chicago Police Department is more than willing to work with the federal government to build on our partnerships with D. O. J. F. B. I. D. E. A. and A. T. F. and boost federal prosecution rates for gun crimes in Chicago.” This is the second time this month the president has tweeted about violent crime in Chicago, and the White House’s website, updated by the new administration, specifically mentions the issue. In each reference, the president and his administration have included specific numbers to illustrate Chicago’s problem with violent crime. On Tuesday, the president quoted numbers originally reported Monday by The Chicago Tribune. ”As of early Monday, at least 228 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 5. 5 percent increase from the 216 shot in the same period time last year. There have been at least 42 homicides, up 23. 5 percent from the 34 homicides from the same period in 2016,” the newspaper reported. The newspaper tracks homicides in the city, and noted that its numbers were higher than those reported by the Chicago Police Department because they include ”shootings on area expressways, shootings, homicides in which a person was killed in or pending death investigations.” But while Chicago led the nation in the absolute number of murders last year, the raw number tells only part of the story. Chicago’s per capita murder rate, which is better at capturing human risk because it takes into account the total population, is well below that of other cities, including St. Louis and Baltimore, a review of the FBI’s most recent crime data reveals. ”Chicago’s homicide rate is not among the nation’s highest — but the number of deaths last year, 762, was the worst the city had seen in years and far exceeded those of New York and Los Angeles,” reported NPR’s Cheryl Corley. Although the FBI’s data is the most comprehensive national source of information, the Pew Research Center has noted: ”Fair warning: The FBI stats are compiled from reports by local police agencies that serve populations of at least 100, 000, and for various reasons — including the fact that not all agencies reported data every year — can be difficult to compare meaningfully across cities or time periods.” Member station WBEZ in Chicago has been revisiting families affected by homicides in 1998, the last time the city had more than 700 murders. See more of their work here.

It’s a shocking statistic that caught the world’s attention last week: Just eight men own the same wealth as 3. 6 billion people living in poverty — that’s half the population of the planet. It comes from a new report by Oxfam, using 2016 data from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook and the Forbes billionaires list. While the stat dramatically shows the ”sheer magnitude of the gaps between the rich and poor,” says economist Francisco Ferreira of the World Bank, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t, for example, ”tell us whether inequality has changed over time,” he says. Or ”include other dimensions of ” like health or education, says Diana Alarcon, chief of the development and policy unit of the U. N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. There are other ways to examine global inequality, they say. Here are three sets of data from Ferreira and Alarcon that put Oxfam’s figure into context. Income inequality has declined over the past 25 years Oxfam’s stat shows what people own, not what they earn, says Ferreira. If you look at the income levels around the world, you’ll find that inequality in global incomes has steadily declined over the past 25 years. To measure income inequality in a population, the World Bank uses something called the ”Gini index” (named after Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who developed the formula). A Gini score of zero in a country or region means that everyone has the same income — for example, workers in a utopian commune. A score of 100 means all the income in let’s say, a kingdom, is earned by a single person, like the king. The Gini index for most countries hovers around 30 to 50. The most unequal countries in term of income distribution, according to the Bank, have Ginis above 60. (Note: In the chart, the figures are expressed in decimals). The Bank’s global Gini index reveals a downward trend when it comes to income inequality. In 1988, the Gini index worldwide was 70. In 2013, that number was 62. 5. Researchers credit the overall decline to a few things. Globalization has helped create new jobs and boost income for people in many parts of the world. Government investments in basic services like health care, education and pensions, as in the case of Brazil, have improved people’s chances of success in life. And progressive tax programs on corporations and the wealthy have narrowed the gap between the rich and poor in countries like Chile and Mexico. Still, economists aren’t totally optimistic. ”It’s clear that the levels of inequality are deeply disturbing,” says Ferreira. ”But recent progress shows that it’s possible for countries to reduce inequality if they choose to.” Asia has benefited the most While globalization and other factors have helped reduce income inequality over the past couple of decades, it’s only ”created a lot of wealth and richness and income” in a few parts of the world — namely, Asia, says Alarcon. Rapid economic growth in China and India have helped boost incomes in the region. According to a 2015 report on inequality by UNDESA, a person living in Asia could only expect to earn 14 percent of the average citizen’s income in a developed country. In 2014, that number nearly doubled to 25 percent (although that’s still just a quarter of the average income in a developed country). If you remove Asia from the equation, you’ll see a very different story in the rest of the developing world. You’ll find that ”for the average Joe, they haven’t seen much improvement to their standard of living,” says Alarcon. Wealth alone doesn’t determine quality of life How much a person earns or owns is not the only indicator of says Alarcon. You also have to look at access to education, proper housing, health care and decent jobs. ”In those dimensions of development, progress has been made,” she says. ”Although large inequalities remain.” For example, more children around the world are in school than a generation ago. According to the U. N.’s Report on the World Social Situation 2016, the ratio of children enrolled in primary school was 93 percent in 2015, up from 84 percent in 1999. Advances in health care have helped increase chances for child survival and improved life expectancy around the world. Between 1990 and 2015, the yearly number of deaths in children under five declined from 12. 7 million to 6 million. And people are living longer. In 1990, the average life expectancy was 65 years. In 2015, it bumped up to 70. Money may not be the only thing that matters, but it sure helps. ”If wealth and income distribution improved, achievement on quality of life would improve faster for a larger group of people,” says Alarcon.

Geneviève Castrée died in July. She made deeply searching music as Ô Paon and Woelv, and illustrated comic books with the same emotional intensity. She was also the wife of Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and the mother of their child. A Crow Looked At Me, written and recorded last fall, is an response to Elverum’s past year, and today brings its first song, ”Real Death.” Since July, I’ve kept coming back to a longer essay I’ve been writing about Castrée, Elverum and death, and now there’s a blunt piece to add — one I thought would come and wasn’t sure how to handle. I’m still writing that essay, but for now, here’s a note from Phil Elverum himself about A Crow Looked At Me: Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) In May 2015, they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. ”What matters now?” we thought. Then on July 9, 2016, she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea left over from a more time before I was a a caregiver, a a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known. DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why. A Crow Looked At Me comes out March 24 on P. W. Elverum Sun.

On Wednesday morning, activists from Greenpeace unfurled a massive yellow and orange banner with the word ”Resist” on a tall crane behind the White House. ”We climbed up the crane this morning, and occupied it and locked and chained ourselves in,” the environmental group’s board chairman Karen Topakian, 62, told The . We reached her as she was chained and locked high up on the construction crane with six other activists. ”I have a long, long history of fear of heights,” she said. ”As much as I have a fear of heights, I decided that I would do this because the risks are so great and so tremendous at this point with this administration.” Topakian, who lives in San Francisco, said the environmental group’s protest aimed to send a message against Trump’s plans and actions that he has already carried out. His positions on climate change, immigration and religious minorities motivated this protest, she said, among many other issues. She is lesbian and said she was also concerned about LGBT rights under the Trump administration. Images of the Greenpeace protest were widely shared on social media. Topakian and the other activists had been up on the crane for at least nine hours, about three blocks from the White House. A group of police were waiting below, she said, and the activists had agreed to ”come down ourselves.” The D. C. Metropolitan Police department said they blocked several streets this morning because of the incident. ”While we respect everyone’s right to protest, today’s actions are extremely dangerous and unlawful,” it said in a statement. A carpenter at the site, John Evans, said that the activists ”must have arrived before workers showed up at 5 a. m,” according to The Associated Press. Evans told the wire service that the activists suspended high above appeared experienced: ”Look how organized they are. They have the same equipment that I use every day . ..They’re professionals. Amateurs couldn’t stay up there that long.”

Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who want to publish or present their scientific findings likely will need to have their work reviewed on a ”case by case basis” before it can be disseminated, according to a spokesman for the agency’s transition team. In an interview Tuesday evening with NPR, Doug Ericksen, the head of communications for the Trump administration’s EPA transition team, said that during the transition period, he expects scientists will undergo an unspecified internal vetting process before sharing their work outside the agency. ”We’ll take a look at what’s happening so that the voice coming from the EPA is one that’s going to reflect the new administration,” Ericksen told NPR. Ericksen did not say whether such a review process would become a permanent feature of Trump’s EPA. ”We’re on Day 2 here. . .. You’ve got to give us a few days to get our feet underneath us.” Any review would directly contradict the agency’s current scientific integrity policy, which was published in 2012. It prohibits ”all EPA employees, including scientists, managers and other Agency leadership from suppressing, altering, or otherwise impeding the timely release of scientific findings or conclusions.” It also would likely have a chilling effect on the agency’s ability to conduct research on the environmental issues it is charged with regulating. Ericksen’s comments come just days after Trump’s team ordered agencies to limit their external communications to the public. Employees at the EPA, the Department of Agriculture and the Interior Department, among others, have been instructed not to post on social media accounts. At the EPA, the staff was told not to speak to the news media. Ericksen said it’s not abnormal for administrations to limit outward communication during their transition while they work toward getting different branches on point. Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is still awaiting confirmation. It’s also not abnormal for administrations to restrict access to government scientists. In 2013, a statement by the Society of Environmental Journalists called the EPA under Obama ”one of the most closed, opaque agencies to the press.” ”It’s certainly the case that every administration tries to control information, but I think that what we’re seeing here is much more sweeping than has ever been done before,” said Andrew Light, the distinguished senior fellow in the Global Climate Program at the nonpartisan World Resources Institute. ”And in particular, it’s noteworthy that it seems to be aimed at a cluster of agencies that primarily work on the environment and climate change.” While previous administrations have restricted government scientists’ communications to the public, controlling their scientific conclusions is far more rare. Perhaps the most notable case came in 2003, when the administration of President George W. Bush tried to alter the climate change section of a major EPA report on the environment. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which tracks such issues, changes included the deletion of a 1, 000 year temperature record and insertion of a study funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Many federal agencies employ scientists to help conduct research. Those findings are crucial in ensuring that regulations and government policy are based on the best information available. Data collected by federal scientists is also used by state and local governments as well as private industry. The EPA’s policy, like those of other technical agencies within the government, is designed to encourage its scientists to participate in the scientific process. To that end, the agency’s official policy is to ”encourage publication and presentation of research findings in professional, or scholarly journals and at professional meetings.” There’s a growing concern in the scientific community and among environmental organizations that the new administration might take aim at climate change research in particular. Trump has previously called climate change a hoax created by China to hurt the U. S. economy, though he later said he had an ”open mind” on the issue. In the weeks before his inauguration, groups of scientists rushed to copy and preserve federal public climate data out of fear that it would be purged. Ericksen said that under Trump, the EPA will focus on its ”core mission, which is to protect the environment and protect human health.” When asked if climate change fit into that, he repeated that they’ll focus on the core mission. Pressed further about whether specific research on issues such as climate change could be withheld, Ericksen told NPR that ”it’s premature to comment on a hypothetical before we’ve even had the time to look at what’s currently happening in the [agency].”

Tom Coleman is busy pruning branches off pistachio trees that aren’t budding at an orchard just north of Fresno, Calif. He farms and manages more than 8, 000 acres of pistachios across the state. ”Here’s an example of some hanging down nuts from last year that just wouldn’t come off because of the position on the tree, so we want to remove that,” says Coleman. Coleman worries these trees won’t get enough sleep this winter. Crops like pistachios, peaches and almonds need a certain amount of cold weather every year. This is what the agricultural industry refers to as chill hours. Frigid temperatures between 32 and 45 degrees help set buds that will turn into flowers in spring, then into fruits and nuts in summer. The problem is that there is a decrease in the amount of hours needed for tree crops to reach these temperatures. Coleman’s trees need more than 700 hours of sleep every winter, but for the past four years, many have slept less than 500 hours. ”And as result of that, they do not bloom uniformly. When they don’t have uniform bloom, it can dramatically reduce the yield,” says Coleman. This is a problem that farmers are facing across California, and if it continues, the prices for these products could go up. Multiple University of California studies predict that within 30 to 50 years it may be too warm to grow many tree crops where they now flourish. Agricultural scientist Eike Leudeling found that climate conditions in California by ”the middle to the end of the 21st century will no longer support some of the main tree crops currently grown.” He says farmers will either need to find alternative crops or establish ways to mitigate warming temperatures. UC Davis researcher Hyunok Lee, whose study was published in the journal California Agriculture, found that winter temperatures are increasing more than at any other time of year. Her model looks at the year 2050 in Yolo County. ”Our agriculture will continue,” Lee says. ”But if you look at . . . 20 years or 30 years, the pattern may change a little bit, crops may move a little bit north.” She says tree crops like walnuts would be harmed the most, but annual crops like tomatoes could benefit from rising temperatures. For growers with huge investments in trees that have life cycles of 25 years or more, this is a big deal. Farm adviser David Doll, of the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is trying different things to get the trees more sleep. He has experimented with overhead sprinklers and even painting the trees white with liquid clay to reflect sunlight. ”This is something that could impact a lot of farmers over the next 10 to 40 years,” Doll says. ”It’s already impacting farmers on random given years across the state.” This problem is so prevalent that deniers really can’t get away from it. Crops have failed because of warming temperatures. (Doll explains more about chill hours here.) In 2015, California’s pistachio industry was hit hard by a lack of chill hours. As a result, the crop was nearly split in half. The UC system and the pistachio industry have invested about a million dollars to figure out how to cope with warming temperatures. UCANR farm adviser Craig Kallsen is trying to breed a pistachio tree that needs less sleep. ”We’re trying to use the other species of pistachios to see if we can come up with something that has a requirement. It’s pretty hypothetical at this stage,” Kallsen says. ”We made quite a few crosses this spring and we actually hope to put a trial in a area.” It’s not just pistachio trees that aren’t getting enough shuteye. Kern County farmer Steve Murray says his cherries may suffer this year because of a warmer winter. ”Initially it was looking like 2017 was going to be a disastrous year, because not only were the trees not getting chilling, they were actually heating up,” Murray says. ”When the sun hits the wood, the temperature of the wood can be 20 and even 30 degrees warmer.” Murray says the only real solution is for the temperature to drop. And to complicate the matter, many researchers and farmers say there isn’t enough understanding about why the trees need sleep. Plus, a decrease in the amount fog in the region also keeps trees from staying cool. That has to do with rain. Back on Coleman’s 160 acres of pistachios, it has rained so much that a large creek has formed in the middle of his property. He’s hoping the ground is saturated enough for fog to form this winter, which would lower the temperature around his trees. ”The fog is a good thing because it keeps a uniform cooler temperature on the ground, but we just haven’t seen that over that last several years ” even with the rain,” says Coleman. For Coleman the facts are evident: The climate is warming and he has to adapt his practices. ”I know that there are people that think that global warming is not man made, but regardless we have to deal with it. I think that making plans around it is necessary,” says Coleman. These trees that he’s prided himself on since the ’70s could live well beyond him and his children. He’s taking warming temperatures seriously, because what happens with the climate today could mean severe cuts or total crop loss in the coming decades. The story comes to us from KVPR, an NPR member station in Central California.

No, it’s not a cover of ”Danger Zone” or ”What A Fool Believes,” but, yes, the Kenny Loggins and the Michael McDonald guest on the first single from Thundercat’s newly announced Drunk. ”Show You The Way” is a smooth piece of funk balladry that is at once ridiculous and sincere, announcing each singer before his verse — It’s ya boy, Thundercat Tell ’em how you feel, Kenny Ladies and gentlemen, Michael McDonald. And you know what? All three of them sound great and sound great together: different and generational hues of tender soul cascading across Thundercat’s crystalline production. ”These are guys that I’ve listened to and where I felt that I’ve learned that honesty in the music,” Thundercat tells Red Bull Music Academy. ”Kenny Loggins is one of my favorite songwriters.” McDonald joined the song at Loggins’ suggestion. Thundercat continues, ”I think one of the most beautiful moments of it was realizing how amazing Michael McDonald was. He would go through so many ideas and have so much to offer.” Drunk comes out Feb. 24 on Brainfeeder. Thundercat starts a U. S. tour on Feb. 12.

”Missed it by that much” — that could have been the simple explanation after American skier Robby Kelley lost control just before the finish line in a slalom race in the Alps in Austria on Tuesday night. But after Kelley crashed, thousands of people cheered him on as he hiked back up the hill to finish his run. ”I just want to cross the finish line every time I go,” Kelley said after the race, in comments relayed by the U. S. Ski Team. ”I basically always hike. It’s something I’ve always done. My parents told me to never give up, so I wanted to cross that finish line.” Kelley had the finish line in sight on his second run at the Schladming Night Race, but when his skis went sideways after a tight turn, the rest of him followed, sending him airborne before crashing down the mountain. But Kelley, who has skied as part of Redneck Racing and is known for his unique approach to skiing, wasn’t done. After his momentum carried Kelley next to the finishing gate, he picked himself up and began sidestepping back up the mountain. And with that, the crowd that had been largely silent upon seeing him crash began cheering for Kelley to reach the gate that he’d missed. ”I’m tired — very tired — but it was worth it!” Kelley said afterward. ”It was a great feeling to cross the finish line here. This is the best race of the year. I would have liked to be 48 seconds faster than I was, so I’m a little disappointed.” Kelley, 26, was the top American finisher in the Alpine Skiing World Cup slalom event, with other U. S. skiers either not finishing or failing to reach the race’s second run. Today, the Vermont skier’s refusal to quit is winning fans far beyond the Alps, after he posted a video of the unusual finish on his Facebook page. ”I am a high school ski coach and I preach to my kids that you NEVER quit,” one fan wrote. ”Thank you so much for showing such a great example at the highest level! !!! You ROCK. ..and I hope you crush the rest of the season!” This isn’t the first time Kelley has drawn attention for his unusual style in 2014, he published a video of himself tackling a local run in Vermont — but in the summer, schussing over grass and ferns, in his ski suit.