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Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly took the blame for the rocky rollout of President Trump’s travel ban on people from seven mostly Muslim countries. Kelly defended the ban in an appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, which he labeled a ”pause,” as lawful and constitutional. But he said he should have given lawmakers a heads up before the president signed the order. ”This is all on me,” Kelly contended. ”I should have delayed it just a bit, so I could talk to members of Congress particularly the leadership of committees like this to prepare them for what was coming.” Kelly rebutted criticism from lawmakers upset with how some travelers were reportedly treated at airports the weekend the order was put in place. He said no one was forced to stand for hours at a time and that the Customs and Border Patrol Agents under his command behaved professionally. He said the temporary immigration ban was needed because vetting in the affected nations was ”loose” and that many of the countries on the list were failed states. Asked why Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, was not on the list, he said they have ”very very good police forces and intelligence forces, so we know when someone comes here from Saudi Arabia who they are and what they’ve been up to.” Democrats pushed back. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, the senior Democrat on the panel, argued that the ban could put Americans at risk. Pointing to a picture of a young Somali girl holding a teddy bear, Thompson said she had been vetted ”for years.” Suspending the admission of people like her ”does nothing to make us safer,” Thompson said. ”To the contrary,” the executive order ”makes America less safe by serving as a recruitment and propaganda tool for terrorist groups.” Kelly said thousands of people who fought alongside ISIS in Syria could have the kind of papers that would allow them to get into Europe and then to the U. S. Kelly seemed to suggest judges might be too isolated to rule properly on the issue. He said he ”had nothing but respect for judges,” but ”in their world it’s a very academic, very almost in a vacuum discussion.” And Kelly added, ”Of course, in their court rooms, they’re protected by people like me.” Kelly also said it’s possible some terrorists have already entered the country while the court stay has been in place, but that no one will know until they act — or, as Kelly put it, ”until the boom.”

Outside the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle last Friday afternoon, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson suddenly found himself in the national spotlight after federal Judge James L. Robart had just imposed an immediate, nationwide halt to President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees. As camera shutters clicked, Ferguson played David to Trump’s Goliath. ”The law is a powerful thing,” Ferguson said. ”It has the ability to hold everybody accountable to it and that includes the president of the United States.” Now, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing Ferguson’s case against the Trump administration a decision is expected later this week. In the space of a few days, Ferguson, a Democrat just beginning his second term, has gone from unknown state attorney general in the far corner of the country to making national headlines. He told member station KUOW in Seattle it was an ”unusual experience.” ”I mean CNN called my mother in Seattle trying to track me down so they could talk to me on Friday night for example,” Ferguson said. Professional chess player, Ferguson and his team moved swiftly after Trump issued his executive order. Within 72 hours, they had drafted a lawsuit and rounded up declarations of support from companies like Amazon and Expedia. Ferguson compared the pace to his time on the professional chess circuit in Europe playing under the clock. ”This is what reminds me of that,” he told KUOW. ”When constitutional rights are involved you have to be willing to move quickly and play in that ’time trouble’ as a lawyer that’s what our team is doing.” Approximately 100 companies, more than a dozen states and 10 former national security, foreign policy and intelligence officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, have put their support behind Ferguson’s lawsuit. Ferguson got help rounding up that backing from Harold Koh, a law professor at Yale University. Koh says the effort began in earnest when a mutual friend put him in touch last Saturday with Washington state Solicitor General Noah Purcell, who works for Ferguson. ”And then suddenly it’s, ’Gee can you file something by tomorrow?’ and it’s on Super Bowl weekend too and I’m a big Patriots fan so my thought [is] try to get this done before the kickoff,” Koh joked in a phone interview. Soon the former U. S. officials were emailing around a draft declaration that condemned Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees as ”unnecessary” and harmful to U. S. national security and foreign policy. Koh says to file the declaration with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the former officials took pictures of their signatures with their phones and emailed the photos to submit to the court. Unlikely foil, Ferguson might seem an unlikely foil to the new president. At 51, he still has a boyish face framed by glasses and a mop of dark hair. But longtime Democratic political consultant Christian Sinderman, who has worked for Ferguson, says in many ways he has been preparing for years for a moment like this. ”You know there’s a Harry quality of Bob Ferguson, the glasses, the serious intent and the sense of almost destiny in standing up for what’s right and the little guy,” Sinderman said. This isn’t the first time Ferguson has gone up against the federal government in court. He repeatedly sued the Obama administration over the pace of cleanup at the Hanford nuclear site in southeast Washington. Hanford is home to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left over from plutonium production during World War II and the Cold War. More recently, Ferguson has made headlines at home by calling for a repeal of the death penalty and for proposing a ban on assault weapons. ”Higher ambitions” Ferguson grew up the sixth of seven children in a Catholic family in Seattle. His mother was a special education teacher and his father worked at Boeing. At the University of Washington, Ferguson was student body president. Before attending law school at New York University, he and a college friend, Brian Bennett, spent six weeks driving around the country with the goal of seeing a game at every Major League Baseball stadium. ”It was a trip in my old Honda hatchback and we made it to each one. My car broke down a few times, a number of stories along the way but we did actually make it to each ballpark,” Bennett said, recalling the trip recently. Bennett, now an attorney himself, describes Ferguson as fiercely competitive in everything he does. He noted that Ferguson won his first campaign for public office in 2003 by defeating the chair of the King County Council in Seattle — a fellow Democrat. Even before his lawsuit against the Trump administration, Ferguson was viewed as a likely candidate for Washington governor in 2020. Sinderman believes Ferguson is a tactician who looks for opportunities to both make a difference and make a name for himself. ”Since Bob first came into public life in Washington state, it’s been clear that he’s got higher ambitions than the current office that he’s working in,” Sinderman said. While Ferguson has vowed to take the case to the U. S. Supreme Court if necessary, it is also apparent that he and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee are prepared to go to court again if the Trump administration issues more executive orders on issues like immigration, climate change, voting rights or health care. As Inslee told The Washington Post recently, ”This is what the resistance looks like.”

Updated at 4:45 p. m. ET, The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has granted an easement allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, paving the way for construction of the final 1. 5 miles of the nearly pipeline. In doing so, the Army cut short its environmental impact assessment and the public comment period associated with it. In a Jan. 18 notice published in the Federal Register the Army had said it would accept public comments on the project through Feb. 20, still nearly two weeks away. On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process, and last week the Army said that it had been directed to expedite its review of the route. In a letter to Congress announcing the decision, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Paul Cramer cited the president’s memorandum, saying that ”consistent with the direction” in the memo, his agency would ”waive its policy to wait 14 days after Congressional notification before granting an easement.” He wrote that the Army would officially grant the easement as soon as Wednesday afternoon, at which point the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, would be able to begin construction. The letter noted that the nature of the project — which involves drilling a horizontal hole under a part of the Missouri River known as Lake Oahe for a diameter pipe — does not require a separate construction license. That gives opponents of the pipeline very little time to pursue legal action, as the Standing Rock Sioux promised to do after the president’s memorandum was signed. In a Jan. 31 statement, the tribe said it would ”vigorously pursue legal action to ensure the environmental impact statement order issued late last year is followed so the pipeline process is legal, fair and accurate.” A request by the tribe to halt the project was not granted by a U. S. district judge, as the Chicago Tribune reported. The director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which has helped organize demonstrations against the pipeline since last summer, released a statement promising to fight the Army’s decision. ”The granting of an easement, without any environmental review or tribal consultation, is not the end of this fight — it is the new beginning,” he wrote. ”Expect mass resistance far beyond what Trump has seen so far. . .. Our tribal nations and Indigenous grassroots peoples on the frontlines have had no input on this process.” On Tuesday morning, a post to the Facebook page for the Oceti Sakowin encampment south of the pipeline route told supporters of the protesters to submit public comments to the Army’s environmental assessment page. After the Army’s decision was announced, a post to the Facebook page for the nearby Sacred Stone Camp said, ”PLEASE, THIS IS OUR LAST STAND.” More than 70 people were arrested last week near the pipeline’s route, when the Morton County Sheriff’s office moved people off what it said was privately owned land.

The confirmation today of Betsy DeVos as the 11th U. S. secretary of education brought angry denunciations and firm pledges of support — no surprise for a Cabinet nominee who had become a lightning rod for Americans’ views about their public schools. Here’s our roundup, with excerpts from reactions around the country: First, DeVos herself tweeted shortly after her confirmation: And this tweet from Vice President Pence, who cast the vote in the Senate: President Trump tweeted his congratulations: The teachers unions, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union with 3 million members, issued this statement: ”Americans across the nation drove a bipartisan repudiation of the agenda for students and public education. Today’s outcome marks only the beginning of the resistance.” And here’s Randi Weingarten, president of the 1. 6 American Federation of Teachers: ” . .. DeVos shows an antipathy for public schools a embrace of private, alternatives and a lack of basic understanding of what children need to succeed in school.” Education groups, The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: ”We believe that Secretary DeVos will put students and families first and we look forward to working with her to ensure each child has access to a public school and a safe and supportive environment in which to learn.” Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, who now leads the Foundation for Excellence in Education: ”Under Secretary DeVos’ leadership, I am confident the federal government will loosen its grip on our education system and return power to the states and parents where it rightfully belongs.” Todd A. Cox, director of policy for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.: ”[DeVos] demonstrated a breathtaking dearth of qualifications to lead the Department of Education. From her lack of understanding of and commitment to basic education policy and legal obligations under critical federal civil rights laws, she demonstrated time and again that she was not fit to serve as Secretary of Education.” John B. King Jr. is the incoming president and CEO of The Education Trust and DeVos’ predecessor as education secretary under President Obama: ”Throughout the confirmation process, The Education Trust expressed concerns about Betsy DeVos’ commitment to fully embracing public education and to using the full range of tools at the Secretary’s disposal. . .. As the former Secretary of Education, I sincerely hope that Ms. DeVos will work hard to prove these concerns wrong and will lead the Department in a manner that protects fundamental civil rights and promotes opportunity and achievement for all students.” Conflicting views from the Senate, Lamar Alexander, . is the chairman of the Senate committee that handles education and a former secretary of education: ”I championed Betsy DeVos because she will implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind the way Congress wrote it: to reverse the trend toward a national school board and restore local control of Tennessee’s public schools. Under her leadership, there will be no Washington mandates for Common Core, for teacher evaluation, or for vouchers.” Sen. Al Franken, .: ” . .. she is the most incompetent nominee I have ever seen. Last night, I urged my Republican colleagues to oppose her nomination, because if we cannot set party loyalty aside long enough to perform the essential duty of vetting the President’s nominees, then I don’t know what we are even doing here.” The PTA, From a statement by National PTA President Laura Bay: ”National PTA is committed to working collaboratively with Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education to . .. advance policies that ensure all children reach their highest potential. Critical progress has been made to improve education, provide educational equity for all children and make sure every child is prepared for success. We cannot go backward.” The National School Boards Association, From a statement by Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director and CEO: ”This is a pivotal time in public education and our nation’s school children deserve the best education possible. We must and we can enhance public education by working together to find and implement the best ideas to accomplish this.”

Today the Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as President Trump’s education secretary, . Vice President Pence had to cast an unprecedented vote, after hearings that became fodder for Saturday Night Live after angry constituents swamped Senate offices with 1. 5 million calls a day after two Republican senators defected and Democrats held the floor overnight in protest. The philanthropist and activist from Michigan takes over the leadership and management of a federal bureaucracy with 4, 400 employees and a $68 billion annual budget. Now, the question is: How much will actually change for the nation’s 50 million public school students and 20 million college students? Perhaps her opponents should take a deep breath. The federal role in education policy is limited. Less than 10 percent of funding for schools comes from the feds, for example. That said, here’s what we’ll be watching in the coming weeks and months. On the higher ed side, The Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization. Three issues that may come up early in a DeVos Education Department: the role of college costs and enforcement of Title IX (which governs sex discrimination, including sexual assault cases). On the side, The headline here is: More state power. Regular readers of our NPR Ed blog know that the main education law was reauthorized last year as the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, which covers annual testing, among other things. The new law gave more authority to the states, at the expense of the federal government, to identify and remedy failing schools. The Trump administration has already paused the process of ESSA implementation. Republicans in Congress have moved to use a law called the Congressional Review Act to throw out the new accountability rules altogether. That leaves states in a situation that some Democrats and advocates have dubbed ”chaos and delay.” Other groups, including the National Governors Association, have said they welcome having still more authority at the state level. Some civil rights advocates have raised concerns that, in the absence of a strong federal hand, some states will be less vigilant than others in identifying and correcting historic educational inequities of race and class. DeVos’ responses to Sen. Patty Murray, . in her controversial written questionnaire, indicate that she comes down on the side of states’ rights: ”It is necessary and critical for states to have flexibility to determine how to identify and improve schools.” DeVos’ department may take a leaf from Arne Duncan’s book and set up a competitive grant program that encourages states to expand school choice. If so, we’ll likely be hearing more about the benefits of private, virtual, religious and schools. The school reforms DeVos backed in Michigan have favored charter school operators. And her husband previously held financial stakes in the and online K12 Inc. whose numbers she (erroneously) cited in defending virtual schools in her written answers to the Senate. The organization she chaired, the American Federation for Children, favors both vouchers and a device called ”tax credit scholarships,” which allows companies to offset tax liability by funding students to attend private schools. In Florida, which the AFC has called out as a model program, 70 percent of these scholarships go to religiously affiliated schools.

This story is part one of a investigation. Read part two here. Ellen Bethea sat alongside her husband’s hospital bed after doctors told her that Archie, the man she had been married to for almost five decades, wouldn’t make it. ”As soon as everybody else was asleep and I was sitting there with him, he passed on,” she remembers. ”So I think he kind of waited for me to be with him.” Bethea says her husband had several health problems and died of liver disease. Later that day in November 2015, the staff at the hospital near her Jacksonville, Fla. home asked Bethea something she hadn’t prepared for: Which funeral home did she want to use? Bethea had never planned a funeral before, but knew of only one in town — Funeral Home of Jacksonville. Some of her family and friends had used it and, she said, it had a good reputation. She and her family went there the next day. After meeting with a staff member, they walked out with a bill of over $7, 000. Bethea provided a copy of the itemized funeral bill to NPR. One thing quickly stood out, but only if you know something about Jacksonville’s funeral market. The cost of Archie’s cremation — $3, 295 — was more than twice the amount charged elsewhere in Jacksonville by the company that owns . The cremations are done in the same place and in the same way. In a investigation into pricing and marketing in the funeral business, also known as the death care industry, NPR spoke with funeral directors, consumers and regulators. We collected price information from around the country and visited providers. We found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress. Funeral homes often aren’t forthcoming about how much things cost, or embed the information in elaborate package deals that can drive up the price of saying goodbye to loved ones. While most funeral businesses have websites, most omit prices from the sites, making it more difficult for families to compare prices or shop around. NPR reporters also found it difficult to get prices from many funeral homes, and federal regulators routinely find the homes violating a law that requires price disclosures. In Jacksonville, and several other businesses in and around Jacksonville are part of a large, portfolio of about 1, 500 funeral homes and several hundred cemeteries. The owner and operator is Service Corporation International (SCI) a company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The firm claims 16 percent of the $19 billion North American death care market, which includes the U. S. and Canada. Company documents say it has 24, 000 employees and is the largest owner of funeral homes and cemeteries in the world. In Jacksonville, SCI sells cremations under the Memorial brand at large, luxurious funeral homes. The company also sells them for lower prices at storefront outlets under other brands such as Neptune Society and National Cremation Society. In communities around the country, it’s common to find wide swings in prices for funeral services. ”That to me, starts to cross a line into consumer deception,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a death care industry watchdog group based in Burlington, Vt. Slocum was talking generally about markets such as Jacksonville, where a company’s centralized crematory handles remains from a variety of differently branded outlets — from posh funeral homes to humble storefront cremation societies. The cremations are all the same, but some will cost much more than others, depending on where the consumer made the arrangements, and which of the company’s brand names appears on the invoice. ”You only get that lower price for the cremation society if you happen to know that it exists and is owned by the same business,” Slocum says. ”I’m not saying they’re doing something illegal, but I am questioning whether or not we can really say, ’Oh, they give a much higher level of service.’ ” The cremations arranged through all those outlets are performed in a large crematory at 517 Park St. in Jacksonville. The crematory’s supervisor, Troy Brown, wrote on his LinkedIn profile that the Park Street facility serves 14 funeral homes. ”Direct cremation is the same no matter where you go,” says Slocum. ”When we’re talking about situations where some consumers do not know or can’t find out that that same business offers the same service at a lower price, maybe at a similar location, that is when I would have a problem with it.” But Scott Gilligan, a lawyer for the National Funeral Directors Association, says comparing the two cremations is ”like saying all weddings are the same.” ”Just like if I want a hamburger at a gourmet place, it’s the same hamburger I’m going to get at McDonald’s. But it’s going to cost more because of the atmosphere, because of what is being done. It’s choices,” Gilligan says. According to Gilligan, when consumers choose a funeral home, they’re generally not making that decision on price. They’re looking at other factors, such as reputation and location. When it comes to identical services, such as Jacksonville’s cremations, which have different brand names and different prices, Gilligan says: ”Well, that is simply someone offering a service, or offering a division, which is going to cater to people who are looking for the price.” One thing the storefront and the larger funeral homes have in common is an upselling strategy. Both try to sell consumers packages that bundle together multiple goods and services. This makes all of the funerals more expensive. Bethea says it happened to her. ”Well, actually, I think they only showed us one package that they had,” she says. That package, known as the Honor Cremation Service, included a number of extra charges, including $495 for stationery and $345 for an Internet memorial. That price premium is a problem the federal government has tried to fix with ”the Funeral Rule,” a regulation in place since 1984. It requires itemized price lists. But funeral directors are still free to emphasize packages in the sales process, as they did with Bethea. ”You know, Archie didn’t have hardly very much life insurance — maybe 5, 000 — and I had, you know, a little bit of money in the bank, and it took everything.” SCI, whose officials declined to speak with NPR for this story, tells consumers in sales materials that buying a funeral package saves them money. But company executives tell investors a different story. In a presentation to Wall Street investors last year, the company said consumers spend an extra $1, 900, on average when they buy a package, versus an ”a la carte” funeral. For some context, the national median cost of a funeral with a burial, not including cemetery costs, is over $7, 000. SCI CEO Tom Ryan told investors: ”Think about society today. We are in a hurry, right? Everybody is on the clock . .. What we find is when we deliver these packages, people tend to spend more money because they’re buying more products and services.” He added that consumers, in fact, like the packages. ”And most importantly, we survey our customers, and the highest customer satisfaction scores come from people that select the packages. So we know we’re doing the right thing. The packages allow us to do that for all parties involved,” Ryan said. Company executives told analysts in July they’re rolling out a new system that also increases revenue. Packaging goods and services under multiple brands and setting different prices for identical services are strategies the company uses in many of its markets, which span 45 states and the District of Columbia. In Raleigh, N. C. for example, the company’s full service funeral home and storefront cremation office are across the street from each other. Crossing that street can save you — or cost you — $1, 895. Riley Beggin of NPR, Brian Latimer and Emily Siner of Nashville Public Radio, Marisa Demarco and Ed Williams of KUNM, and Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma contributed to this story.

Updated at 4:50 p. m. ET, A wall of dangerous storms is moving across the South, threatening communities in their path with high winds, severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes. The National Weather Service warned of severe thunderstorms and hail along the Mississippi coast and issued a series of rapidly updated tornado warnings for parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The NWS New Orleans Office is updating its Twitter account here with information for the U. S. Gulf Coast. The governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, declared a state of emergency after severe storms moved through the southeastern part of the state. Earlier Tuesday, the National Weather Service confirmed that multiple tornadoes touched down in and around New Orleans. The website for the electricity utility in New Orleans, Etergy, showed that more than 15, 000 customers had lost power. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu told The Associated Press that dozens of people reportedly suffered minor injuries, and a spokesman for the city’s Emergency Medical Services described those injured as ”walking wounded.” At 11:33 a. m. CT, the NWS office for New Orleans tweeted, ”Dangerous tornado on the ground in New Orleans East. Take Shelter IMMEDIATELY! !!” Kimberly Chaney told the AP she was trying to record a video of the tornado when her mother pulled her inside their home. ”Four of them huddled in a middle bedroom as the twister hit, knocking down part of the roof and blowing out the windows,” the news service reported. ”[Chaney] says their cars all were totaled, and her niece is worried because her computer was damaged with her homework stuck inside.” ”[Chaney] says she told her: ’It’s a natural disaster. Your teacher will understand.’ ” Images of the area published by the New Orleans showed funnel clouds, hail and dark skies. A video taken in one neighborhood showed twisted metal and downed trees, emergency vehicles and power lines crisscrossing debris. The newspaper reported at least one injury in New Orleans East. Outside Baton Rouge, local ABC affiliate WBRZ reported that two mobile homes were ”completely gone,” posting photos to Twitter of twisted metal in a tree and a toothbrush standing upright in the grass. Homes were damaged in the city of Donaldsonville, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where photos shared on the official town Twitter account showed a home without a roof, and wood and metal in the road.

At a roundtable meeting with county sheriffs on Tuesday morning, President Trump repeated a false statistic about the U. S. murder rate that he repeatedly deployed on the campaign trail. On multiple occasions Trump has suggested the murder rate is at a historic high, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. In fact, the murder rate is currently at less than half its peak. But here’s what Trump said to the county sheriffs at the White House on Tuesday: ”. .. the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? years. I used to use that — I’d say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesn’t tell it like it is. It wasn’t to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest it’s been in, I guess, from 45 to 47 years.” According to the FBI, the murder rate for 2015, the last year for which data are available, was 4. 9 per 100, 000 people. Every year between 1965 and 2010, the FBI reported a higher rate than that. In some cases, it was much higher. In 1974, 1980, 1981 and 1991, the murder rate was at least twice as high as the 2015 rate. Then it dropped dramatically: From 2010 to 2014, the murder rate reached lows, dropping from 4. 8 out of 100, 000 down to 4. 4. Last year, the FBI recorded an increase — back up to 4. 9. As NPR reported, that was a rise of 11 percent. Trump repeated inaccurate statements about the murder rate several times on the campaign trail. But he got it basically right in his victory stump speech, when he noted that ”the murder rate has experienced its largest increase in 45 years” — as we noted in our fact check, that increase was, in fact, the biggest in 44 years. But he got it wrong again at the sheriffs’ gathering. Even with an 11 percent annual increase, murder rates remain lower than at almost any point in the last 47 years.

At a gathering of sheriffs at the White House on Tuesday, President Trump joked about destroying the career of a Texas politician who is trying to set limits on an police practice. The remark came after a participant at the sheriff’s roundtable raised the issue of asset forfeiture — that’s when the government seizes ”suspicious” assets and keeps them, even if the person who had the item was never convicted (or even accused) of a crime. The resulting funds often go directly into police budgets. Taking property from people who haven’t been convicted of a crime is legal, but controversial. ”Police confiscate cars, jewelry, cash and homes they think are connected to crime. But the people these things belong to may have done nothing wrong,” NPR’s Laura Sullivan explained a few years ago. ”Prosecutors say the seizures are helpful tools to combat drug dealers and drunken drivers,” Laura wrote. ”But for people who haven’t committed a crime, the cases are expensive to contest and often disproportionately affect people without means or access to a lawyer.” One sheriff at the gathering mentioned that some critics have said the practice violates due process, and called for limits. Trump responded: ”I’d like to look into that . .. There’s no reason for that,” suggesting that only ”bad people” would want to reform or limit asset forfeiture. A few minutes later, the following exchange occurred, as transcribed by the White House: PARTICIPANT: Mr. President, on asset forfeiture, we got a state senator in Texas who was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we can receive their forfeiture. THE PRESIDENT: Can you believe that? PARTICIPANT: And I told him that the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation. THE PRESIDENT: Who is the state senator? Want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career. (Laughter.) Okay, thank you. The remark made national headlines. The sheriff did not give a name. But one state senator in Texas who introduced such legislation, and could plausibly have been the subject of the conversation, told the Dallas Morning News, ”I don’t know the sheriff. Quite frankly, I don’t pay much attention to what Trump says anymore.” The sheriff who raised the issue, Harold Eavenson of Rockwall County, told the newspaper he didn’t take the president literally and thought he was just being ”emphatic.” ”He was making a point about how much he opposed that kind of philosophy,” Eavenson told the Dallas Morning News. ”I appreciated what the president said. I can assure you that he is on our side.”

A widely used blood test to measure trends can give imprecise results, depending on a person’s race and other factors. This test means diabetes can sometimes be misdiagnosed or managed poorly. Doctors have been cautioned before that results from the A1C test don’t have pinpoint accuracy. A study published Tuesday underscores that shortcoming as it applies to people who carry the sickle cell trait. Glucose levels in the blood rise and fall all the time, so it can be tricky to look at a single exam to diagnose diabetes or manage the disease in people who have it. But one test gets around this problem. The A1C test measures sugar that binds to hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells. It provides an average of blood sugar over the past three months, ”so this has turned out to be an incredibly powerful test, both for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes,” says Dr. Anthony Bleyer, a kidney specialist at the Wake Forest School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The problem is that the test results can vary, depending on circumstance. For example, people with anemia may get inaccurate readings. So do people who carry unusual types of hemoglobin, the best known being sickle cell trait. Eight to 10 percent of carry the sickle cell trait. But only people who inherit two copies of the sickle cell trait, one from each parent, develop the disease. And a few years ago, scientists realized that A1C readings for typically don’t match those from whites. They are generally higher. ”The test was really standardized based on white individuals, and there were just a small number of individuals in that study,” Bleyer says. And while the difference isn’t large, it can matter a lot, especially for people who are close to the line that defines diabetes. Someone who appears to be just under the line and diagnosed as having prediabetes may in fact have a higher level of A1C, which would push them into a diagnosis of diabetes. Vagaries in these readings can also be misleading for people whose treatment is guided by this test, because doctors may be overly aggressive in controlling blood sugar, to the point that a patient can end up with seriously low blood sugar. In a report published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, scientists at Brown University and the National Institutes of Health examined data from two large studies to compare test results of with and without the sickle cell trait. The studies used standard A1C tests that had previously been shown to give low readings for people with the sickle cell trait. The scientists were surprised to find how big a difference it made. About 4 percent of the people in the study who carried the sickle cell trait were diagnosed with diabetes, but they expect a test corrected for bias would have identified about 7 percent — nearly twice as many people. ”We were really shocked by that, honestly,” says Mary Lacy, a graduate student at Brown University and lead author of the study. ”That’s huge!” Likewise, they found 40 percent fewer cases of prediabetes than they expected among people carrying the sickle cell trait. The test readings are only off by a few tenths of a percentage point, but that was enough to push many people below the cutoff points that indicate diabetes or prediabetes. This observation is one reason doctors should be cautious in interpreting A1C results, researchers say. ”Doctors generally take the test fairly literally,” says Tamara Darsow, senior vice president for research and community programs at the American Diabetes Association. ”How much this impacts care and the interpretation of A1C results I think is variable.” The association’s guidance document cautions doctors that the A1C tests can be off by plus or minus 7 percent among people with unusual hemoglobin traits. As the new study underscores, that is more than enough variability to affect a diagnosis. So instead of making a snap diagnosis, particularly for doctors could additionally run some more traditional tests. Those aren’t influenced by race or sickle cell status (though they can vary for other reasons). ”Information together from all of these tests can be much more powerful than those taken in isolation,” Darsow says. The American Diabetes Association would ultimately like to come up with more concrete treatment guidelines, but for now their word to doctors is this: Be aware this is an issue and use your best judgment.

Beatrice Sanchez and Mariana Arias drive around their city, N. C. in search of a very specific population of residents: Latinos with prediabetes. The two women, both bilingual and Hispanic, are recruiting participants for a Type 2 diabetes prevention study called ”La Comunidad,” a local version of the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program trial that staved off diabetes through changes in diet and physical activity in about 50 percent of study participants. The results of that study suggested it was possible to fight a disease that affects about 29 million Americans without drugs and their side effects. It was more effective than using a common diabetes drug called metformin, which cut that number by just 30 percent. The Diabetes Prevention Program is ”still the gold standard,” says Mara Vitolins, an epidemiologist at Wake Forest University Medical Center in who is leading La Comunidad. When the results of the Diabetes Prevention Program were first published, Vitolins was eager to test this concept in her own city, but cost was a big challenge. The program required six months of counseling with case managers trained in nutrition or fitness, followed by personal visits every month for another year and a half. The first two years of intervention amounted to more than $2, 600 per person. To reduce the cost, Vitolins decided to focus on a part of the earlier program that relied on group counseling for her study, called Healthy Partnerships in Preventing Diabetes (HELP). ”The whole idea was to take something that was extremely expensive and find every way that we could to make it more community friendly and that it can be sustained,” she says. HELP replaced case managers with community health workers and group meetings to help participants lose weight and bring their blood sugar levels down. It worked. The study, which was completed in 2011, met goals close to or the same as those reached by the DPP for about a third of the cost — $850 per person. But the study was small, with only 301 participants, so it was impossible to tell if it lowered participants’ risk of developing diabetes. And the HELP study had another shortcoming. Though it was designed to reach a underserved population, it included very few Latinos, a group that makes up about 15 percent of residents. Latinos are more susceptible to developing diabetes at a young age according to CDC data from 2011, the average age for diabetes diagnosis among whites was 55, but 49 for Hispanics. To reach the Latino population, Vitolins launched La Comunidad in 2014, translating the HELP program materials into Spanish. But she knew she needed to do more than just change the language. So she hired Arias and Sanchez as recruiters and ambassadors to the city’s Latino population, which includes undocumented immigrants. ”We’ve got to establish communication,” says Sanchez. ”We’re targeting a group of people that are very cautious.” The team determines whether the participants’ levels are high enough to be classified as prediabetic. Some are turned away because they are pregnant or unknowingly already have diabetes. Pregnancy was not an issue in Vitolins’ former study because the average HELP participant was 60 years old, says Vitolins. But most of the people joining La Comunidad are in their early 40s. ”We’re finding that the Latino community, especially the women, are qualifying at a younger age.” The project team is also finding that more Latino women than men qualify for the program. They speculate that Latino men may have more physically active lifestyles, keeping them from developing prediabetes. After qualifying, La Comunidad participants meet with a registered dietician. They also visit an outpatient clinic for general health assessments and blood work every six months for two years. The first recruits finished in May. But the bulk of the work happens during group meetings, which are held weekly for the first 24 weeks. After that, members gather once every other month for the rest of the study. Topics cover everything from basic nutrition to what kind of shoe is best for particular workouts. Group members share their own advice and experiences. One woman could not afford to buy prepared food, says Carmen Vazquez, a health adviser who helps lead the group meetings. Despite limited resources, she still manages to eat healthy and exercise. So far, she’s lost 40 pounds. ”She has been an example to the rest,” Vazquez says. The meetings help participants become aware of how foods and activities affect their bodies. ”One of the major emphases of the program is to be sure people take control of their own life,” says Vazquez. Information may have been missed because of health disparities, language barriers or just lack of education, and ”We are trying to fill that gap.” Vazquez is quick to point out that she and the other health advisers are laypeople — in fact, her background is in fashion. Vitolins says this is one of the keys to making the program affordable. ”It didn’t matter that the person leading it didn’t have a high school degree. It’s the fact that that person can communicate a message.” The ultimate goal of studies like La Comunidad, Vitolins says, is to determine whether techniques are helpful from both a health and medical reimbursement perspective. In March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that Medicare would cover preventive programs that meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) requirements, such as data reporting. Vitolins agrees that programs must have good data to support their use. ”We’re testing before we say everyone who’s in the Latino population should use this approach,” she says. ”We want it to be effective.” Not everyone shares Vitolins’ enthusiasm. Richard Kahn, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says it’s too early for Medicare and health insurance companies to be covering such programs, since they delay diabetes rather than prevent it totally. ”The question which is unanswered is whether that delay actually makes a difference,” Kahn says. Another question is whether weight loss in the first few years of a program makes a difference if participants just gain it back, which many do. ”We need more studies about how the body regulates weight.” In the meantime, Vitolins focuses on getting the message of diabetes prevention out to people who may not know their risk. Estimates vary depending on how blood glucose is measured, but the CDC reports that 86 million Americans are prediabetic, and many don’t know it. ”With the numbers that we think are out there, every single program that shows efficacy should be at the table,” Vitolins says. Amanda B. Keener is a freelance science journalist who writes for Nature, The Scientist and PBS. org.

If a refugee commits a crime, will a federal judge have blood on his hands? President Trump says yes. After Judge James L. Robart temporarily blocked an executive order that stopped all refugees as well as visitors from seven countries, the president wrote on Twitter: ”Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!” That’s an emotionally charged line, but problematic. If ”something happens,” and if anyone is blamed, the person most likely to be held responsible is the president. It’s his job — not a judge’s job — to defend the country within the confines of the law. Before going further, we should note that the risk of ”something happening” because of the court ruling is limited. The judge’s temporary move does not allow very many people into the United States. Well before the ruling, the president’s temporary travel ban for refugees and travelers from seven nations had partly collapsed amid protests and administrative chaos. Huge categories of people initially affected, such as green card holders and Iraqis who aided the U. S. military, are now being let in regardless of the judge’s instructions. The people still affected were ordinary visa holders from the seven nations plus refugees, who were not coming in huge numbers to begin with. Now some can come, but only after the U. S. has vetted them using techniques refined since Sept. 11. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. in recent years have not been linked to refugees or visitors who were radicalized in the seven countries targeted by Trump’s order. But suppose that ”something happens” with one of the new arrivals. Who knows an individual could become radicalized. It would be understandable for some to blame the ”court system” — understandable but wrong, according to Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor. Fried was the solicitor general — the government’s official lawyer before the U. S. Supreme Court — during the Reagan administration. ”If [an attack] were to happen it would be the fault of the law,” Fried told NPR’s Morning Edition, ”because the judge would have determined that the law requires this.” The job of the courts is to interpret the law — not to bend it to the demands of public officials. The president is still the one who coordinates military, intelligence and law enforcement assets to stop terrorist attacks and is supposed to figure out how to do so properly. Some presidents have tried to operate outside the law when national security demanded it. In 1952, for example, President Harry S. Truman memorably asserted, ”The president has the power to keep the country from going to hell.” That was his rationale for seizing control of the American steel industry. The Korean War was underway, steelworkers were threatening to go on strike, and Truman said federal control was essential to continuing the production of war material. His move was challenged before the Supreme Court, which was unmoved by Truman’s case. The court found no law under which the president could seize private property in the way that he had done and rejected his seizure by a vote, even though several justices had been appointed by Truman himself. But here’s the rest of the story: Despite the court ruling, the country did not ”go to hell.” The United States did not lose the Korean War. Truman had to find other ways to get his job done within the law. He is remembered today as a strong president. Trump now faces the challenge Truman did. Of all the possible issues on which he could have focused the attention of Homeland Security officials at the start of his administration, he chose the travel ban. Now that his initial plan has been temporarily blocked, he can fight in court and hope for a more favorable ruling. (Fried, by the way, thinks Trump might get it.) He can ask Congress to change the law. Or he can conclude that travel bans are not so smart after all, and ask counterterrorism specialists for better ideas. No matter what happens, his job doesn’t change, and citizens, who are his employers, expect him to do it. While the president does not have ”the power to keep the country from going to hell” in any way he likes, he does have the responsibility to keep the country from going to hell while acting within the law. Upholding the Constitution is itself part of keeping the country from going to hell. Whatever happens, another saying by Truman will apply: ”The buck stops here.”

Israel’s parliament has passed a law that retroactively legalizes almost 4, 000 settler homes built unlawfully on private Palestinian land in the West Bank, a move that critics say is a massive blow to any future peace deal. The Knesset approved the legislation in a vote Monday evening, at a time when Israel has ramped up plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank. It has announced plans for thousands of homes since President Donald Trump was inaugurated nearly three weeks ago, to the cheers of Israeli hardliners. Settlements are broadly viewed as an obstacle to peace by Palestinians and the international community. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes the measure as a ” bill.” Rights groups have vowed to challenge it at the country’s Supreme Court. The U. N. says settlements on land captured by Israel nearly 50 years ago are illegal under international law. Some settlements in the West Bank were built with prior Israeli government approval the homes in question in this law were built in illegal outposts on Palestinian land. According to the Knesset, the Palestinian landowners would be forced to accept compensation, either financially or in the form of ”alternate plots.” The vote is another major victory for Israeli . According to The Associated Press, Israeli Cabinet Minister Yariv Levin called it ”a first step in a series of measures that we must take in order to make our presence in Judea and Samaria present for years, for decades, for ages.” Judea and Samaria is the biblical name for the area that makes up the occupied West Bank. Even as Israel plans for thousands of new settlement homes and has now retroactively approved others, it began the process of demolishing the illegal Amona outpost last week, sparking scuffles between settlers and security forces. Like the homes described in the new law, Amona was built without prior government authorization. However, the text of the legislation specifically excludes Amona and any other buildings that previously received final demolition orders from the courts. The measure caused an outpouring of scathing criticism from the U. N. human rights groups, Palestinians and other members of the international community. Israel’s own attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, has called the law unconstitutional and said he ”will not defend it in the Supreme Court,” according to the BBC. ”This is a political decision. and the political message from the Israeli prime minister and his very extreme coalition is that they’re not heeding the law of the international community,” Hussam Zomlot, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told NPR’s Joanna Kakissis. ”Tonight it became clear that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to compromise the future of both Israelis and Palestinians in order to satisfy a small group of extreme settlers for the sake of his own political survival,” said the Israeli human rights group Peace Now. ”By passing this law, Netanyahu makes theft an official Israeli policy and stains the Israeli law books.” U. N. Mideast envoy Nickolay Mladenov said it ”opens the floodgates to the potential annexation of the West Bank,” according to the AP. ”It will have a drastic legal consequence for Israeli and for the nature of its democracy,” he said. ”It crosses a very, very thick red line.” The beginning of Trump’s term has appeared to embolden ’ plans for settlement expansion. Last week, the White House issued a statement saying that it does not consider settlements ”an impediment to peace,” but it added that ”the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond the current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.” According to Reuters, a White House official stated that the Trump administration will now ”withhold comment on the legislation until the relevant court ruling.”

When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 War, no Israeli citizens had lived in the territory for nearly two decades, since an earlier war. But in 1968, a small group of religious Jews rented rooms at the Park Hotel in Hebron for Passover, saying they wanted to be near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites in Judaism (as well as Islam and Christianity). The Israeli government reluctantly allowed them to stay ”temporarily.” From that beginning, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews now reside in the West Bank, citing religion, history and Israel’s security among their reasons for being there. But the Palestinians, along with the rest of the world, see their presence as one of the key obstacles to a peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state. The issue returned to the headlines when the United Nations Security Council recently voted 14 to 0 to condemn Israeli settlements. The United States, which often vetoes resolutions critical of Israel, abstained and allowed the resolution to pass. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, unleashing a stream of accusations against the Obama administration. U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry defended the U. S. position Wednesday in a lengthy speech that repeatedly admonished Israel over settlements. Here are seven key things to know about the settlements: 1. Settlements are growing rapidly, The term ”settlements” may conjure up images of small encampments or temporary housing, and many have started that way. But they now include large subdivisions, even sizable cities, with manicured lawns and streets full of villas often set on arid hilltops. Israel is constantly building new homes and offers financial incentives for Israelis to live in the West Bank. When the Israelis and Palestinians first began peace talks after a 1993 interim agreement, the West Bank settlers numbered a little over 100, 000. Today they total around 400, 000 and live in about 130 separate settlements (this doesn’t include East Jerusalem, which we’ll address in a moment). They have grown under every Israeli government over the past despite consistent international opposition. leaders like Netanyahu have actively supported them. Moderates and liberals have also allowed settlements to expand, though usually at a slower rate. The settler movement is a powerful political force, and any prime minister who takes it on risks the collapse of his government. You can click here to see data on the settlements and a detailed map from Peace Now, an Israeli group that is opposed to settlements and closely monitors them. 2. Settlements complicate efforts for a solution, Critics of settlements say they’ve intentionally been established in every corner of the West Bank, giving the Israeli military a reason to be present throughout the territory and making it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. The settlement locations and the roads that connect them make Palestinian movement difficult. The settlements are just one of many obstacles to a peace deal. Drawing boundaries, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and myriad security questions — including terrorism — are equally challenging, if not more so. And as the settlements grow, it will be increasingly difficult to remove a large number of them, a tactic known as ”creating facts on the ground.” 3. The distinction between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Shortly after the 1967 war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank and had a population that was then entirely Palestinian. Israel declared the entire city to be Israel’s ”eternal and indivisible” capital. No other country recognizes Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, with the United States and others saying the city’s status must be determined in negotiations. This is why the U. S. and other countries have never moved their embassies to Jerusalem. Most are in Tel Aviv. The Palestinians, meanwhile, claim the eastern part of the city as their future capital. Around 200, 000 Israelis now live in East Jerusalem. Combined with the roughly 400, 000 settlers in the West Bank, about 600, 000 Israelis now live beyond the country’s 1967 borders. That’s nearly 10 percent of Israel’s 6. 3 million Jewish citizens. While the Israelis tend to speak of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as two separate entities, the Palestinians regard them as a single body — the occupied West Bank. 4. What does Israel say about settlements? The settlers and their supporters cite the Jewish Bible, thousands of years of Jewish history, and Israel’s need for ”strategic depth” as reasons for living in the West Bank. They also note that Israel took the territory from Jordan, which has since relinquished its claim to the West Bank. Therefore, the settlers argue, there is no legal sovereign in the territory. However, no country, not even Israel, considers West Bank settlements to be sovereign Israeli territory. As we noted, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and administers it as part of Israel. But Israel has never annexed any other part of the West Bank. The settlers want to be formally incorporated into Israel, but that would ignite a major controversy. For now, Israel regards the West Bank as ”disputed” territory that has been under the Israeli military since the 1967 war. 5. How about the Palestinians? From some Palestinian cities, there are clear views of Israeli settlements — and new construction — on nearby hillsides. And in most settlement neighborhoods, there are wide areas of empty hillside closed to Palestinians, which Israel says are necessary buffers for security. Palestinians see them as visual proof that their independent state is being taken from them. Palestinian leaders have opposed peace talks in recent years while, as they see it, Israel is building on land that is part of those talks. 6. Has Israel ever dismantled settlements? Yes, on a few occasions, most notably in 2005, when it removed all 8, 000 settlers from the Gaza Strip. Israel decided these small, isolated settlements were too difficult to defend in a territory where the Jewish residents accounted for less than 1 percent of the population. The evacuation of the settlements was deeply divisive within Israel, and Israel’s security forces had to drag some settlers from their homes kicking and screaming. The episode demonstrated that Israel could remove settlers, but it also showed how much friction it creates inside Israel. 7. What are the proposed solutions? Kerry on Wednesday outlined the general approach: land swaps. Under this scenario, the largest Jewish settlements, which are near the boundary with Israel, would formally become Israeli territory. In exchange, Israel would turn over an equal amount of its current land that would become part of a Palestinian state. In addition, settlements deep in the West Bank, far from Israel, would be disbanded. It would be a difficult political move for an Israeli prime minister, but it would also be difficult for a Palestinian leader to accept a peace deal without removing settlements. Greg Myre is the international editor of NPR. org. Follow him @gregmyre1, Larry Kaplow is NPR’s Middle East editor. Follow him @larrykaplow

Women with breast cancer who are at high risk for having a BRCA mutation that raises cancer risk often don’t get genetic testing, or even a chance to speak with a genetic counselor who’d help them weigh the necessity of such a test, a study finds. Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancers, and women with close relatives who have had those cancers are considered at higher risk of having BRCA mutations themselves. Both the National Cancer Institute and the United States Preventative Task Force recommend that those patients talk to a genetic counselor about whether or not to get the BRCA test. But the study that surveyed newly diagnosed breast cancer patients found that while 80. 9 percent of patients wanted testing, only 39. 6 percent had had a counseling session, and 50. 9 percent had a genetic test. The test results could help guide treatment, as well as future efforts to prevent more cancer. When asked why they didn’t get tested, the majority of the 773 patients said it was because their doctor didn’t recommend it to them. Just 13. 7 percent of them said the test was too expensive, and 10. 7 percent said they didn’t want it. The researchers say this suggests a disconnect between oncologist and patient, whether it be assessing BRCA risk isn’t on the physician’s radar, or that they just don’t find it important. The study surveyed 2, 529 women overall. ”Those numbers were really striking to us,” says Allison Kurian, an associate professor of medicine and health at Stanford University, breast cancer doctor, and lead author on the study, which was published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. ”This really emphasizes the importance of cancer doctors in this process, and that patients get evaluated and tested the way they should be.” Kurian notes that the study only got the patient side of the story, not the physician side, so it’s unfair to assume the doctors are the sole cause of this disconnect. But by making genetic tests and counselors more available to patients at risk for BRCA, and making physicians more aware of the mutations’ implications, the gap between the need for and accessibility of genetic testing in these patients will shrink, she says. Hospitals need to make sure breast cancer patients are screened for BRCA if they need it, says C. Anthony ”Tony” Blau, a professor of hematology at the University of Washington who specializes in breast cancer and was not involved with the study. The screening shouldn’t be on the patient or the oncologist, he says, but rather ”it should be part of the system. Hospital administrators don’t typically do things that save patients’ lives, but this could be one of those things.” Testing for the genes even when patients are already diagnosed with breast cancer and are at high risk for BRCA can be helpful, says Kurian. ”Knowing a patient has BRCA1 or 2 affects how we treat the cancer she has,” she says. ”We might give her different medications or different surgery options.” That knowledge can also help physicians keep an eye out for ovarian cancer, which occurs 11 to 17 percent more often in women with BRCA mutations and is difficult to diagnose early. It also lets oncologists keep an eye out for new cancers and treat them more effectively. ”Cancers sneak up on you,” Kurian says. If a woman is flagged during BRCA screening due to her family history, ”finding out she has a BRCA gene would let us start screening her as early as 25 years old. If we do find a really tiny cancer, she’ll probably do a lot better and need less therapy in the long run.” And because the BRCA mutations have a chance of being passed down from parent to child, a patient carrying BRCA1 or BRCA2 is likely to pass it down to further generations as well. In screening breast cancer patients for BRCA risk, ”the implications aren’t only for the patient presently affected by breast cancer,” Blau says, ”but for their families and generations of descendants. The potential impact is enormous, and missing the opportunity to test for it is a big deal.”

Comedian and actor Irwin Corey, for whom the word ”however” was the perfect opening line, has died at age 102. With an impish grin and wild hair, Corey was a nightclub and fixture who worked with stars from Jackie Gleason to Woody Allen. His admirers ranged from Damon Runyon to Lenny Bruce. Corey died Monday evening, his tells NPR. The comedian had been sick earlier this year — but he’d been sent home from the hospital after seeming to recover. His last meal, she said, consisted of ice cream and egg drop soup. It’s impossible to provide a short explanation of Corey’s surreal brand of comedy, which was most potent when delivered in his seemingly nonsensical stream of non sequiturs. But the breadth of his career hints at his creative genius: Who else could have appeared in the 1976 film Car Wash, two years after accepting a National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive Thomas Pynchon? Billed as ”the World’s Foremost Authority,” Corey’s guise as an professor offered a way to poke fun at multisyllabic jargon and those who use it. When political or scientific authorities seemed to annex a chunk of language, there was Corey to claw it back — a very human antidote to our complicated modern times. ”Sometimes, I forget what I’m talking about in the middle of a word,” Corey said at his 100th birthday party, which was attended by WNYC contributor Jon Kalish. Corey mixed social commentary into his playful approach to language — as at his birthday party in 2014, when he said, ”Ten years ago, we had Johnny Cash. We had Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Today, 10 years later, there’s no cash. There’s no hope. There’s no jobs.” Here’s how legendary theater critic Kenneth Tynan once described Corey: ”a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin’s clown with a college education.” Born in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1914, Corey and his brothers and sisters grew up in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. After extreme poverty forced their mother to put her children in the home, she paid a monthly fee to help provide for them. Corey’s beliefs led to him being blacklisted in the 1950s. Decades later, he was found to be panhandling in a Manhattan street. He told The New York Times that he donated all the money he collected to charity — often, to a cause that benefits children in Cuba. As Corey explained, he was asking for change around the corner from his home, navigating East 35th Street with his walker, handing out free newspapers and, over the years, collecting tens of thousands of dollars. When a reporter asked him why he hustled for change, he seemed confused. ”Why?” Corey repeated — and after a pause, he said, ”I want to help people out.”

Everyone expects Congress to change the Affordable Care Act, but no one knows exactly how. The uncertainty has one group of people, the homeless, especially concerned. Many received health coverage for the first time under Obamacare now they’re worried it will disappear. Joseph Funn, homeless for almost 20 years, says his body took a beating while he lived on the street. Now, he sees nurse practitioner Amber Richert fairly regularly at the Health Care for the Homeless clinic in Baltimore. At a recent visit, he mentioned that he’d been having some chest pains. ”And when exactly did you quit smoking?” Richert asked. In December, he said, when he moved into his first apartment in decades. That was a big change for the . Last winter, Funn was living outside and trudging through deep snow for days. His left foot got so swollen, he could hardly walk. ”It was frostbite,” he recalled. ”I thought when you had frostbite, it’s like when you turn purple and blue. But when I came to see Dr. Amber, she said, ’No, that’s when they have to cut something off.’ So I was like, ’Whoa!’ ” Funn was admitted to the clinic’s convalescent center to be treated. The staff also signed him up for Medicaid, the government’s health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Like many people who are homeless, Funn was uninsured. But under the Affordable Care Act, Maryland is one of 31 states and the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid to cover nondisabled childless adults. Health Care for the Homeless President Kevin Lindamood said that before Obamacare, only 30 percent of the patients they saw had health insurance. The group provides health care to people without homes as well as others who are in transition to more settled lives. ”Now [it’s] 90 percent of our clients, from 30 percent insured to 90 percent insured, either through Medicaid or Medicare,” he said. ”That’s a transformation.” He said the change allowed Health Care for the Homeless to open new clinics, including one for dental care, and to double the number of clients that can be seen. The group also hired more outreach workers to encourage homeless people to come in for help. Homeless advocates have argued that better health coverage should eventually reduce costly emergency room visits. They also say coverage can help people get off the streets by dealing with chronic problems, such as mental health issues, that might keep them outside. Lindamood said his clients are now worried. ”We’re working with very vulnerable people who are now coming to us, hearing the news in general and saying, ’Wait a minute, I just got access to care. Does this mean I’m going to lose it?’ ” he said. Republicans have promised to replace Obamacare but haven’t said how. President Trump has said no one will lose coverage. But White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has also said the administration hopes to turn Medicaid into a block grant — meaning states would get a set amount of money, along with more control over how to spend it. The approach has supporters. ”I think there’s a good case to be made that states will have more money to devote to the truly needy folks, because states will be more aggressive, in reining in wasteful expenditures, reining in unnecessary expenditures, reining in fraud,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian CATO Institute. But others are skeptical. Barbara DiPietro, policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, says block grants will likely mean less federal funding for Medicaid, forcing states to make tough choices about whom to cover. ”So when we talk about no one will lose coverage, that’s heartening,” said DiPietro. ”But the details are always very important. What does that coverage look like? The population we serve typically falls through the cracks.” Almost 900, 000 patients are served by Health Care for the Homeless projects around the country. At the end of 2015, two years after Obamacare went into effect, about half those patients had Medicaid coverage. Joseph Funn said losing Medicaid would be a hardship for him, but he also thinks there are a lot of people on the streets of Baltimore who are worse off than he is. ”I can see them cutting me and giving the money to the people that need the most help,” he said. Now that he has his own apartment, he plans to get healthier so he won’t need as much care.

If you’ve heard of interval training, you can probably thank Martin Gibala, professor and chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, whose research has helped popularize the exercise technique. Interval training comes in many different flavors, but the general idea is to alternate periods of relatively intense exercise with recovery, either exercise or rest. It can be a much more efficient way to get the benefits of exercise than longer workouts at an easier pace, says Gibala. And it’s not only for athletes it’s been studied in sedentary adults and people with heart failure, Type 2 diabetes and other ailments. In his book The One Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That’s Smarter, Faster, Shorter, which comes out Tuesday, Gibala explains the physiology and history of interval training and includes a dozen workouts. And yes, one of them is based on just one minute of hard exercise (with another nine minutes of recovery periods and ) which in a small study conducted by Gibala and colleagues improved markers of health comparably to a session of steady, moderate exercise. We talked to him about the benefits of and misconceptions about interval training. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. When people talk about interval training, what do they mean? Broadly, there are two main types. High intensity interval training, or HIIT, would be intensities that are generally higher than what we see in public health guidelines. It’s a heart rate exceeding 80 percent of a person’s maximum, but not going all out. Sprint training is harder than that — an pace. Which provides the bigger benefit? Clearly there’s a between intensity and duration. The more intense the effort, the less duration required to reap the benefits. So sprint training is the most efficient, but it’s not for everyone. It’s less widely studied. We know a lot more about the adaptations the body makes with HIIT. Do we know what’s going on in the body to make these short bursts of exercise effective compared to longer sessions? I’ll talk about the muscles, since that’s what I know most about. The underlying cellular and molecular events largely seem to be similar. You want to create more mitochondria, to increase the capacity of muscles to burn sugars and fats. You can trigger that in different ways. You can do moderate intensity exercise, which continuously stimulates the muscle for a prolonged period of time. Or you can do short, very intense bursts of exercise. Or you can do something in between. Generally speaking, the results are the same. The fuel gauge can slowly drop over time or drop really quickly if you step on the gas really hard. The same basic process is triggered, but in less time with intervals. What is the biggest misconception or myth you see about HIIT? People tend to view intervals only as this very intense exercise. That either scares them off or it makes them think that type of exercise isn’t suitable for them. The point I try to make is that interval training comes in different flavors. Even with interval walking, there’s some evidence that it’s the better way to go in terms of blood sugar control and boosting fitness [than steadier, slower walking]. But of course you should check with a doctor before starting a new exercise program. [People with unstable angina, for example, are not likely good candidates for interval training.] In some quarters, I see a move to demonize traditional cardio. That’s clearly wrong. The public health guidelines are based on great science, but only about 15 percent of the population is listening. So I want to give people more menu items to choose from. What if you are training for a 10K or even a marathon? Can you get by with interval training? Could you run a marathon by only training with intervals? Yes, but I’m not sure you’d run the best marathon that’s in you. Elite athletes will still use a blend of about 80 percent traditional continuous training and about 20 percent interval training. It goes back to time efficiency. If time is restricted, it’s a good way to train. But there are health risks of higher intensity exercise, especially for older people or those with health issues. What should people watch out for? I talked to Paul Thompson (the director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut) about this. He says that if it comes down to remaining sedentary or doing something, you’re better off doing something. But acute exercise [temporarily] elevates the risk of an adverse event. That’s more than offset by lowered risk during the rest of the day, when you’re not exercising. But you don’t know if you’re silently at risk. So it comes down to common sense. If you’re older or just starting out, gentler forms of intervals are a good way to benefit. There’s competing evidence on whether interval workouts are more or less appealing for people than slower exercise: They can save time, but are also more uncomfortable. How do you get over that? Even I don’t want to do it every day! Sometimes I want to go for a walk in the woods with my dog. But people have a misperception that exercise is only good if you have 45 or 60 minutes at a time. You can fit exercise into life, rather than structuring life around exercise. Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer based in Brooklyn, N. Y. She’s on Twitter: @katherinehobson.

As he wends his way through the crowded alleys of a neighborhood, Jakarta Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama stops to pick up a young Muslim girl in a headscarf, as residents and reporters snap pictures. He stops at a local mosque, where an all team strikes up a groove with drums and tambourines to cheer him on in his campaign for . None of his supporters seem to mind that Basuki, commonly known by his Chinese nickname, ”Ahok,” is Christian and an ethnic Chinese — the first time such a person has governed the capital. Why should they? Indonesia is proud of its reputation as not only the world’s most populous nation, but also the most tolerant and moderate in the Islamic world, home to millions of Hindus and Christians as well as Shiite, Ahmadiyya and other minorities within Islam. But even as he campaigns for the governorship, Ahok is standing trial, accused of blasphemy against Islam. If convicted, he faces a maximum jail term of five years, and very few people charged with this offense in Indonesia manage to beat the rap. Last September, Ahok told a group of fishermen that politicians who quoted from the Quran to say they should not vote for a were lying to them. But he also told the fishermen to vote their conscience. Ahok, who has a reputation as a blunt speaker, later apologized, saying he had no intention of insulting the Quran or Islam. But some Muslims took offense, and hundreds of thousands took to the streets in three massive rallies against Ahok that convulsed central Jakarta in November and December. Demonstrators continue to congregate at the courthouse where Ahok is on trial. Coils of barbed wire and riot police separate and protesters. ”God said, ’Do not vote for someone outside your group to become your leader,’” says Helmy, who goes by one name, selling Islamic flags at the protest. ”So it is forbidden for us to vote for a .” Many Indonesians dismiss the ethnic and religious overtones of Ahok’s case, describing it as simply a political contest. One of Ahok’s biggest critics has been former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Though retired, he remains a formidable power broker. And his son, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, is Ahok’s chief rival in the election. Ahok’s case has also uncovered racial tensions and stereotypes. Many of his critics fear that Indonesia is at risk of political and economic domination by a minority of Chinese elites. Ethnic Chinese account for about 1 percent of Indonesia’s population. Under the dictator Suharto’s rule, they were subject to discriminatory policies, including a ban on public displays of Chinese language and culture. Since Suharto’s fall in 1998, Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese have made a comeback, even as the protests have been accompanied by an increase in racial epithets aimed at Ahok and other Chinese. Many other Indonesians believe Ahok’s case cuts to even deeper constitutional issues that define Indonesia as a nation. In a lunchtime interview in the midst of a busy day of campaigning, Ahok says that Indonesia has already made these choices. The nation decided at its founding in 1945 to be a secular republic, based on the concept of ”unity in diversity.” ”They want to develop another ideology here in this country,” Ahok says of the Muslim hardliners pushing for his conviction. ”They want to force the implementation of Islamic law in this country. That means they want to dig up our present foundation and build another one. How come?” Rather than being angry at his situation, though, he says he’s proud his case is putting these crucial questions before the Indonesian public. ”I’m happy that history chose me for this position,” he says. ”You couldn’t buy it.” Ahok was not elected to his current position. He was Jakarta’s vice governor until 2014, when . Joko ”Jokowi” Widodo was elected president and Ahok automatically took Jokowi’s former post. Jokowi’s trajectory is one that Ahok has said he wouldn’t mind following. Like Jokowi, Ahok has built his official track record and popularity by providing services and reforming government. Ahok has cleared slums, including Jakarta’s infamous red light district, cracked down on endemic official corruption and shored up the capital’s crumbling infrastructure. As Ahok campaigned his way through her neighborhood near East Jakarta’s Cibubur River, Muntema, a resident who goes by just one name, smiled approvingly. ”I’m very grateful that when we get sick, we no longer have to pay for health care,” she says. ”Also, the river here used to flood when it rained, but now that doesn’t happen since the governor sent workers to dredge it.” Ahok himself says although helping the poor is very important to him, his real aim in politics is to offer Indonesians a sort of civics lesson: ”How to educate the people to vote for the clean, transparent and professional politician.” Those who support Ahok and Jokowi see them as representative of this new breed of politician. And some analysts see Ahok’s trial as the revenge of the old breed. ”This is the deep state of Indonesia reacting to an outsider president,” says Andreas Harsono, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Jakarta. By ”deep state,” Harsono means an alliance of the military, Muslim organizations, paramilitary groups and government bureaucrats. The deep state, Harsono adds, exists beneath the institutions of Indonesia’s democracy, as well of those of other Southeast Asian nations, where younger voters are demanding more political participation from the entrenched elites who have governed their countries since the Cold War era. Particularly worrying, Harsono notes, are reports that the Indonesian military has been giving military training to the Islamic Defenders Front, a vigilante group that has been at the forefront of the protests against Ahok. A similar alliance of the military and Islamist groups in 1965 led to the worst political violence the country has ever seen: a purge of suspected communists that killed up to a million people. The verdict in Ahok’s trial is likely to come sometime after next week’s gubernatorial election. Even if he wins that election, he faces a maximum jail term if convicted of blasphemy. Whether Ahok could then serve out his term as governor is unclear.

The wall of silence in Indonesia surrounding one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century is beginning to fall apart. A forthcoming report by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights estimates that a purge of suspected communists during the killed between 600, 000 and 1 million people. The violence reshaped Indonesia’s political landscape and affected the course of the Cold War, just as the U. S. was escalating its fight against communism in Southeast Asia. ”We conclude that there have been gross human rights violations, which can be classified as crimes against humanity,” says Yosep Adi Prasetyo, the commission’s deputy chairman. He says the report places the blame squarely on Indonesia’s military dictator Suharto, who died four years ago. ”We found that the military and police were involved in the killings, as well as forced disappearances, rape, forced movement of people, torture and other crimes,” Prasetyo says. A major general in the Indonesian army at the time, Suharto ousted Sukarno, the revered Indonesian independence leader and the country’s first president, in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of senior Indonesian generals on Sept. 30, 1965. Suharto blamed those murders on the Indonesian Communist Party, then the largest in the noncommunist world. Suharto also suspected Sukarno of complicity in the killings, which the perpetrators said were to prevent the generals from launching a coup attempt against the president. The military, under Suharto, then ordered that communists be hunted down. Survivors Fight To Clear Their Names, In central Jakarta, a handful of survivors live together in a nursing home. Every week, they gather outside the Presidential Palace to demand justice. At the time of the purge, Bujiati, who goes by just one name, was a village chief on the rural outskirts of Jakarta. She had previously worked as a factory worker for the consumer goods firm Unilever. ”If you were diligent and worked hard, people would accuse you of being a communist,” she recalls. Bujiati, now 86, survived six years in a prison, and later in a hospital ward for mental patients and a leper colony. Tumiso Nitikarjita Lukas was then a law school student. Like many young people his age, he supported Sukarno. For this, he was arrested and tortured. But he refused to admit to being a communist because, he says, he wasn’t one. ”The government must admit the barbaric acts it committed against its citizens and provide rehabilitation and compensation,” he says. ”We are still waiting. Our demands are not like what you see broadcast in the news. We keep it simple.” After his arrest, Tumiso was exiled to a remote island where he planted rice, built roads and cleared forests until his release in 1979. After that, he worked secretly as a tutor. People implicated in the campaigns are still barred from working as teachers or civil servants, and in one of the most respected of Indonesian professions: puppet masters. Communism And The Cold War, Tumiso believes Indonesian authorities wanted him to confess to being a communist in order to get assistance from the U. S. government. At the time, the U. S. government was openly supportive of Suharto. It feared that Indonesia, with its big oil reserves, large population and strategic location, would be the next ”domino” to fall to global communism. ”The end of Sukarno was of great significance in terms of the Cold War for the Western powers,” says Katharine McGregor, an Indonesian history expert at the University of Melbourne in Australia. ”And for that reason, people also saw things more in black and white terms of ’it’s just communists being killed’ — there wasn’t a lot of outcry from the Western world.” There has long been speculation that the CIA assisted in the purge, but hard evidence is lacking. McGregor notes, however, that there is much clearer evidence of U. S. government support for an rebellion by dissident army officers on Indonesia’s outer islands in 1958. In particular, Indonesian forces shot down a bomber over Indonesian territory and captured its pilot, American Allen L. Pope, along with documents linking him to the CIA. Indonesia sentenced Pope to death but later handed him back to the U. S. Many Opponents To Investigation, The purge of 1965 effectively eliminated Indonesia’s political left wing. Under the three decades of Suharto’s authoritarian rule that followed, Indonesia was a country without independent women’s rights groups, effective trade unions and other civil society institutions, and few channels for citizens to participate in politics. Even today, efforts such as the human rights commission’s to the killing of communists face opposition from people such as Tribowo Soebiandono, the vice head of a group of military family members. ”We believe that we must still maintain vigilance against the threat of communism,” he says, speaking at his group’s office. ”This country is on the brink of collapse. Honestly, corruption is rampant. I don’t want to go pointing any fingers, but we can figure it out for ourselves.” Mainstream Islamic groups have also protested the National Human Rights Commission’s report and opposed any of the killings. The commission’s study says that at the time, the military mobilized members of these groups to help kill communists. The Islamic groups and the communists were at odds over ideology, and over the Islamic establishment’s large landholdings, which were a target of the communists’ land reforms. A Question Of Justice, It is too early to tell whether anyone will be put on trial for the killings, or whether victims or their families will get any compensation. Human Rights Commission’s Yosep Adi Prasetyo says the commission’s mandate was simply to investigate, and it had enough trouble just doing that. ”It’s going to be difficult because the president’s is one of the perpetrators that must be held accountable for the massacre and other crimes,” he says. Current Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s was a general who played a major part in the campaign to eradicate communists. The general himself estimated that the purge killed some 2 million people. Indonesia is sometimes held up as an example of one of Asia’s more successful transitions from authoritarian state to democracy. Myanmar, for example, is looking to Indonesia as it begins its own such transition. Whether anyone is ever held to account for their crimes, and whether the victims ever get any justice, the victims say they have one overriding concern: that their country learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating this horrific episode in the future.

In the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a gravel road leads to a fence. Type in a key code, and a gate scrapes open. Undo a chain to get behind another. Everything here is made of metal, because the residents of this facility are experts at invasion and destruction. They’re wild pigs, aka feral swine, wild hogs or Sus scrofa. And biologists at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins have invented a promising new way to track the invasive animals by looking for tiny traces of them in mud and water. Biologist Morgan Wehtje points to a boar who’s asking her to scratch his bristled back. At 280 pounds, he weighs about as much as an NFL tight end. ”His name is Makunakane, which means ’Big Papa’ in Hawaiian,” says Wehtje. The smaller pigs, like a female named Bobbie Socks, weigh about 150 pounds. They’re dense and compact, says Wehtje, ”which is why if they were to run at you they’d take you out.” Wehtje and her colleagues study the biology and behavior of these pigs, which were raised in captivity. They’re playing in the snow and scoping out the fence with their wet snouts. But their wild, much less cuddly counterparts are destroying the landscape in most U. S. states — inflicting an estimated $1. 5 billion in damage per year. These animals will eat anything, from rows of corn to sea turtle eggs, to baby deer and goats. ”People don’t realize that wild pigs are voracious predators,” says Jack Mayer, a biologist with the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S. C. who has studied wild pigs for 40 years. ”They will run down and kill and eat lamb, sheep, goats, calves, domestic chickens.” And more. ”Pigs will eat humans,” says Mayer. ”It’s been documented in combat, remote area homicide situations and plane crashes. Pigs will go in and feed on human carcasses.” They are ”opportunistic omnivores,” Mayer says. ”If they can get their mouth around it and it has a calorie in it, they will eat it.” In Texas, feral pigs are tearing up suburban yards. In Louisiana, they damaged levees by digging for food. Pigs came to North America 500 years ago with early explorers as a source of food. Centuries later, the Eurasian wild boar was introduced to parts of the U. S. by sports hunters, and today’s feral swine are ”a combination of escaped domestic pigs, Eurasian wild boars, and hybrids of the two,” according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Once female wild pigs are about 6 months old or so, they can produce as many as a dozen offspring per year. For a number of reasons that haven’t been completely nailed down, their populations have really exploded in the last 30 years, Mayer says. There are now at least 6 million wild pigs across the country, with established populations in 35 states. State and federal legislators have funneled a lot of money into controlling and eliminating these animals because of the trail of destruction they leave behind. But controlling them can feel like an infuriating game of because they move a lot, reproduce quickly and are smart enough to learn to avoid traps and bait. They’re also sneaky. ”These things are very secretive,” says Mayer. ”A lot of people didn’t know about wild pigs until they walked out their front door on Sunday morning and saw that it looked like somebody on drugs had rototilled their yard.” But the pigs may have met their match. Kelly Williams, a biological science technician at the National Wildlife Research Center, is going on these hogs. She and her colleagues at the National Wildlife Research Center have recently developed a way to keep tabs on the animals without ever even laying eyes on them. All she needs is a scoop of water. ”So, for example, right now in New Mexico the forest service is out collecting water for me,” says Williams. ”All they have to do is carry around a little Nalgene bottle, scoop up a water sample and ship it back to me.” Pigs love water and mud. They drink it, play in it and roll in it to keep heat and bugs away. When they do, they leave bits of themselves behind — drool, skin cells, hair and urine — like a wildlife crime scene. Each of those bits contains pig DNA. ”We know pigs are pretty messy, dirty animals, so they might shed more DNA than a coyote lapping up water or something,” Williams says. She worked with wild pigs at the National Wildlife Research Center to identify these tiny bits of DNA — called ”environmental DNA,” or eDNA — which can sometimes be detectable up to a month after a pig has visited a site. Ecologists have used eDNA to monitor invasive fish in the Great Lakes and endangered whale sharks in the Arabian Gulf. Williams’ colleagues developed a version to track the presence of Burmese pythons in Florida. Wild pigs are one of the first land animals to be tracked so extensively using eDNA. Williams starts with a bottle of dirty water, mixed with a solution to preserve the DNA inside. ”Sometimes it looks like chocolate milk,” she says. ”Sometimes it looks like lemonade.” Williams spins down all the solids in the liquid sample, amplifies the DNA inside, and compares what she finds to 125 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA that could only belong to a pig. At the end, she gets an answer: ”Yes, pigs were here,” or ”No, they weren’t.” She then passes the results along to people like Brian Archuleta, a wildlife biologist with the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in New Mexico. Archuleta has a goal for the new year: wild pig annihilation. ”Total elimination by the last day of September of this year,” he says of his goal. Archuleta is not joking. He covers eastern New Mexico, which is not only thousands of square miles of desert, mountains and sand dunes, but also right next to Texas, which is teeming with pigs (not to be confused with javelina, a smaller, unrelated species native to the Americas). To track wild pigs in his region, Archuleta used to have to repeatedly send people out across deserts and mountains to place cameras, use dogs to sniff them out, and bait traps with tubes of corn. ”The eastern side of New Mexico is a big place — lots of country. We are looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Archuleta. But recently, he just had a few people go out and collect water, and then shipped the samples to Kelly Williams. With the results he got back he was able to narrow the search to about 10 square miles in the desert, and another small area in the mountains. Next, Archuleta booked a helicopter, hired some sharpshooters and flew over the areas where pig DNA had been found. They shot eight hogs in one place and 13 in another. ”There are unknown places in New Mexico that I’m sure have pigs that we just don’t know about,” he says. He’s hoping the new eDNA sampler will help him find every last one. Meanwhile, Kelly Williams is already on to her next challenge. She’s working on a way to use eDNA to track another elusive species — the Nile monitor. These hissing, lizards are expanding their reach in Florida. They eat endangered owls for breakfast.

Updated at 10:25 a. m. ET on Feb. 7, A newly released report by Amnesty International alleges a widespread and systematic attack by Syria’s government against its civilian population, including murder, torture, enforced disappearances and extermination carried out at a military prison called Saydnaya. The report’s executive summary opens with this grim description: ”Saydnaya Military Prison is where the Syrian state quietly slaughters its own people. The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government. Since 2011, thousands of people have been extrajudicially executed in mass hangings, carried out at night and in the utmost secrecy. Many other detainees at Saydnaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care. The bodies of those who are killed at Saydnaya are buried in mass graves. It is inconceivable that these and systematic practices have not been authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government.” ”Every week, and sometimes twice a week, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their cells, taken over to another building on the grounds of the prison and hanged to death,” report author Nicolette Waldman told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. ”On top of this, the conditions at the prison . .. are actually calculated [to] deliberately [subject] detainees to inhuman, repeated torture and the deprivation of food, water, medicine and medical care so they are dying in massive numbers even on top of these hangings,” she explained. Reports of torture and disappearances in Syria are not new. But the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has ”increased drastically” since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says ”at least 17, 723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.” The victims — political dissidents, journalists, doctors and aid workers — were perceived opponents of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Waldman called on the Assad regime’s most powerful ally, Russia, to use its influence to stop what she called ”war crimes.” ”We can’t be sure about what kind of efforts Russia has made [already],” she said. ”However, as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council . .. it’s very difficult to believe that they could be supporting this type of massive crimes against humanity and war crimes.” On the basis of its own investigation, Amnesty International estimates that between September 2011 and December 2015, between 5, 000 and 13, 000 people were executed without legitimate trials at Saydnaya. The report says the organization has no evidence of executions after December 2015, but based on information that the facility is still being used to imprison dissidents, ”there is no reason to believe the executions have stopped.” The report includes graphic details of systematic beatings, rapes and psychological degradation, not to mention the denial of food, water and medical care. Omar, a former detainee, described it this way: ” ’[A]t night, we could hear them beating them again with the tank belt [an improvised tool made out of tyre tread, which is attached to a wooden handle] and the green pipe. We knew the sounds that each made. First we were thinking the people were being released or taken to the civilian prisons. But at midnight, we heard the sound of torture again, and we thought they were dying, because the sound of the torture was so strong. They were beating them in a monstrous way.’ ” ”I think some of the most chilling aspects of the research, for me, was hearing the same exact procedures [multiple times],” said Waldman. ”This is how you corroborate these testimonies, because basically people saw and heard different aspects of the same thing happening again and again.” The report is based on a yearlong investigation, beginning in December 2015, of the violations reported at Saydnaya. The organization interviewed 84 people in total, many with firsthand experience at Saydnaya including 31 former detainees, four prison officials or guards and 22 family members of former or current detainees, as well as Syrian judges, lawyers and doctors familiar with the facility. All but two interviews with witnesses were conducted separately, says the report. Most interviews were conducted in southern Turkey, with others in Lebanon, Jordan, Europe and the United States. The Amnesty International report says the organization attempted to contact the Syrian government in January 2017 about the allegations raised in its report. But the organization has received no response.

When Mana Heshmati isn’t working as an engineer, she’s cooking traditional Iranian food through her ” ” Peace Meal Kitchen, a dining series based in Detroit. It’s a way to expose diners to her Iranian heritage and dispel misconceptions about the often misunderstood country. She held her first in April to the delight of fans who ranged from the city’s foodies to Iranian nationals who were craving a taste of home. Her dinners mostly feature traditional Persian cuisine, but she’s also delved into other misrepresented regions, such as an event last fall. But a mission that started as a culinary cultural exchange has shifted in the wake of President Trump’s executive order barring travel from seven nations. ”With the election,” she says, ”[the dinner series] is transforming into a platform to positively impact the community.” At a over the weekend, Heshmati’s Peace Meal Kitchen filled a bar in Detroit’s Eastern Market district with the herbaceous aroma of traditional ghormeh sabzi, a Persian beef stew with herbs and spinach. Outside the door of the bar waited long lines of diners, all hungry to show their solidarity with immigrants affected by the executive order, which calls for restrictions on travelers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. They feasted on sabze khordan, a salad of fresh herbs, radish and sheep feta served with fresh barbari, an Iranian flatbread, seer torshi, a side dish of aged pickled garlic, and other dishes. In all, Heshmati and the event organizers raised more than $700, most of which is going to the ACLU of Michigan. They sold out of food within two hours. Peace Meal Kitchen is just one of hundreds of food businesses across the country that are taking the opportunity to raise funds for the ACLU, which in the days since Trump made his announcement has raised more than $20 million nationally. Metro Detroit is home to one of the largest Muslim immigrant populations in the country, including large concentrations of Iraqi, Yemeni, and Iranian immigrants, many drawn over the years to jobs in the automotive industry. More recently, parts of the area have welcomed a small number of Syrian refugees. Among the diners at Saturday’s event were Norris Howard and Latasha James, who heard about the dinner from a Facebook page. ”I grew up here and am so familiar with Middle Eastern food and culture,” says Howard, 29. ”To have something like this, we would be remiss to not support it.” James says she has friends who, even though they were born in the United States, have encountered instances of discrimination when wearing a traditional hijab. ”To hear the intolerance, the stigma, it’s just so sad,” she says. Carolyn Anahid, 54, of suburban Troy, Mich. went to the dinner with her husband and their two adult daughters. While not normally the types to hit up the city’s trendy scene, the family says Peace Meal Kitchen’s cause seemed necessary. ”My daughter mentioned it, and that part of the profits would be going to the ACLU, so we immediately said we’re going to be supporting this,” says Anahid. Anahid says her family’s first reaction when Trump announced the travel restrictions was to check in with anyone they knew who might be impacted. ”For everybody who cares about this, there’s that electric reaction of, ’Oh, my god, where is everybody, what’s going to happen next?’ ” For the Heshmati, using food as a means of discourse is a more organic, less intimidating way of addressing issues about identity and politics. ”Food has always been used as a bridging tool throughout many cultures throughout history,” says Heshmati. ”It takes out some of the stigma of some of the politics. It helps people reach a new level of understanding about a different culture. Food makes everything approachable.” Serena Maria Daniels is a freelance journalist based in Detroit.

Many resettlement agencies are relieved refugees can once again come to the U. S. now that a federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspended the refugee program. So far, the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a request by the Trump administration to restore the temporary refugee ban. But this open door to refugees could close at some point depending on what the courts decide. Many refugees and workers at resettlement agencies are stuck in limbo. ”I don’t know how long I will have this job, because we are thinking there will be some layoffs if this continues,” says Omar Mohamed, a case manager for Church World Service of Lancaster, Pa. Local agencies worry they will no longer get the federal funding they need to provide services not only to new arrivals, but also to refugees still getting settled into their new country. Mohamed says there’s still a lot of work for case managers to do with refugees after they move into their new homes. ”Everything is new to them — this new culture, new people, new language,” he says. ”We have to teach them from zero.” Mohamed Muhumed’s family arrived in the U. S. about three weeks ago. He recently moved into a apartment in Lancaster with his wife and their four children. An orphan at three years old, Muhumed fled Somalia and waited 23 years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia to be resettled. In 2014, after multiple interviews and security screenings, he finally moved, by himself, to central Pennsylvania, where he now works as a driver. His wife and children joined him in Lancaster 10 days before Trump announced his temporary ban on refugees. ”I feel very, very happy,” says Muhumed, who adds that his family had ”good luck” to arrive before Trump’s executive order. In Philadelphia, Paw Wah doesn’t know if she’ll ever see her family reunited. She escaped persecution as a member of the Karen community, an ethnic minority in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Last year she moved out of a refugee camp in Thailand with her husband and their three young children, leaving behind their eldest daughter. Wah was planning to make a meal of fish paste, vegetables and soup to welcome her daughter to Philadelphia in late January — until Trump issued his refugee order. The flight to the U. S. for Wah’s daughter was canceled and hasn’t been rebooked yet, according to staff at the Nationalities Service Center, a refugee resettlement agency in Philadelphia that would help her once she gets off the plane. Betsy Jenson coordinates donations and volunteers for the agency. She says that while they’re waiting for more refugees, they’re certainly prepared, given the uptick in donations of clothing, furniture and household goods they’ve received since Trump’s election. They’ve also heard from a lot of people in Philadelphia who want to help. ”We actually just closed off our volunteer applications for the moment, just because we’ve sort of reached capacity,” Jenson says. In Lancaster, a group of leaders from different refugee communities recently met to discuss what more they can do. ”We, the refugees and immigrants that are qualified to vote, we have to show at the polling stations in numbers, because politicians look at numbers,” said Joseph Sackor, a former refugee who fled civil war in Liberia before he became a U. S. citizen. Sackor added that it’s time for more refugees to register to vote once they get citizenship and to reach out to elected officials — for themselves and for others hoping to build a new life in America.

In fiction we seek a paradox, the familiar in the foreign, new realities that only this one particular author can give us. Pachinko, the sophomore novel by the gifted Min Jin Lee, is the kind of book that can open your eyes and fill them with tears at the same time. Pachinko, for those not in the know, is one of the national obsessions of Japan, a dizzying cross between pinball and a slot machine, wherein small metal balls drop randomly amid a maze of brass pins. There’s a comic feel of Rube Goldberg to the device, but the final effect is oddly mesmerizing. The urge to play can quickly become an addiction, and of course the game is a perfect metaphor for the ricochet whims of fate. Owning pachinko parlors becomes a way for the clan depicted in the novel to climb out of poverty — but destiny cannot be manipulated so easily. We are in Buddenbrooks territory here, tracing a family dynasty over a sprawl of seven decades, and comparing the brilliantly drawn Pachinko to Thomas Mann’s classic first novel is not hyperbole. Lee bangs and buffets and pinballs her characters through life, love and sorrow, somehow making her vast, ambitious narrative seem intimate. ”History has failed us, but no matter,” she writes in the book’s Tolstoyan opening sentence, hinting at the mix of tragic stoicism that is to come. During the second decade of the 20th century, as Korea falls under Japanese annexation, a young fisherman named Hoonie marries a local girl, Yangjin, ”fifteen and mild and tender as a newborn calf.” The couple has a daughter, Sunja, who grows to childhood as the cosseted pet of their rooming house by the sea in a tiny islet near the Korean port city of Busan. As a shy, vulnerable adolescent, Sunja is the prey of a formidable gangster named Koh Hansu. With features that make him look ”somewhat Japanese,” and elegant fashions such as ”white patent leather shoes,” Hansu embeds himself deeply into the remainder of Sunja’s life. He’s a Godfather, but also something of a fairy godmother. Most importantly, he provides a financial buffer when the family relocates to Osaka, Japan. Lee deftly sketches a but oftentimes harsh new world of a Korean immigrant in imperialist Japan. Sunja gives birth out of wedlock to Hansu’s son, her shame erased at the last minute by marriage to a patrician, pastor. The entwined destinies of the gangster’s bastard and a second child, the son of a preacher man, become an engine that drives the story forward. Amid the nightmare of war, the people of Osaka deal with privations. ”City children were sent alone to the country by train to buy an egg or a potato in exchange for a grandmother’s kimono.” Sunja and her beloved Kyunghee have set themselves up in business making the flavorful national specialty of Korea, kimchi. Pickled cabbage serves as mode of survival, rising to symbolic importance alongside the pachinko game itself, organic and homey where the other is mechanical and sterile. The cultures, Korean and Japanese, clash. Sunja’s son, Mozasu, who owns pachinko parlors, will level with his best friend over fried oysters and shishito peppers, in a passage that lies at the heart of these characters’ dilemmas: ”In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make, or how nice I am.” Lee is at her best describing complex behaviors and emotions with unadorned, language. ”Isak knew how to talk with people, to ask questions, and to hear the concerns in a person’s voice and she seemed to understand how to survive, and this was something he did not always know how to do.” There are horrors in Pachinko — a lengthy prison term is marked by gruesome torture — but the core message remains ultimately one of survival and hope. ”Pachinko was a foolish game,” Lee writes, ”but life was not.” The reader could be forgiven for thinking that the reverse might also be true. This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja’s best kimchi. Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is known to have cultivated ties with parties in Europe, like the National Front in France. He also seems to have forged an alliance with Vatican who oppose Pope Francis’ less rigid approach to church doctrine. The New York Times reported this week on Bannon’s connections at the Vatican. Before becoming White House chief strategist, Bannon — who is Catholic — was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he called a ”platform for the .” That’s a movement associated with white nationalism. During a visit to Rome a few years ago, Bannon struck up a friendship with the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a traditionalist who has emerged as one of Pope Francis’ most vocal critics. Bannon hired Thomas Williams, an American former priest, as Breitbart’s Rome correspondent. Williams belonged to the conservative Legion of Christ, which was roiled by scandal when it was revealed its founder had been a pedophile. Williams recently told his own story on an Italian TV talk show: In 2003, he fathered a child, but he kept it secret until he was outed by a news report. He then left the priesthood and married the child’s mother — who is the daughter of the former U. S. ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon. In July 2014, Bannon addressed a conference that was held inside the Vatican but was sponsored by a conservative Catholic group. Speaking via Skype, Bannon painted an almost apocalyptic vision of the state of the Western world. ”We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which, if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.” A barbarity, Bannon added, that would completely eradicate ”everything we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2, 000, 2, 500 years,” and which he clearly spelled out a few minutes later: ”We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” This is language that Pope Francis has never used. The pope has repeatedly urged European countries to welcome migrants — who are, in the majority, Muslim — and he has championed the rights of the poor. A year ago, Francis criticized candidate Donald Trump for wanting to build a wall along the border with Mexico, saying, ”A person who thinks only about building walls . .. and not building bridges is not Christian.” But that’s not Bannon’s worldview. While most Breitbart reports on the pope have been neutral, headlines about the pope when Bannon was in charge included: While Breitbart and Bannon seem to be making common cause with Roman Catholics who are on the outs with this pope, these Vatican are not very powerful. Nevertheless, Pope Francis’ supporters inside the Vatican worry that following Trump’s election victory, the pope is a little more isolated — a lonely progressive on the global stage. They say this has emboldened his critics both within and outside the Vatican, who have become more vocal. For example, just last week, mysterious posters cropped up around Rome. The photo showed the pope looking uncharacteristically very grouchy, and the unidentified author — using a Roman street dialect — accused him of acting in an authoritarian manner and showing lack of mercy, despite the fact that Francis has made ”Mercy” the unofficial slogan of his papacy. Francis has not reacted. But in a surprising move, on Sunday, he issued the very first papal blessing for the Super Bowl. It was a video message in his native Spanish — not in Italian, which he usually uses for official messages — in which he said such a sporting event ”shows that it’s possible to build a culture of encounter and a world of peace.” The Italian media labeled the message ” .”

The racial wealth gap has been measured and studied for decades. One fact has remained the same: White families build and accumulate more wealth more quickly than black and brown families do. The reasons for this are multiple and . They start at slavery and traverse the historical and deliberate exclusion of people of color from the economic institutions and government programs that helped white Americans build wealth and pass it on to successive generations. Segregation and redlining by banks made it impossible for many black and Latino families to secure mortgages, for example. The GI Bill, which helped establish an American middle class by helping veterans pay for college and buy homes after World War II, mostly excluded people of color. The results are stark. In 2013, the median white family held 13 times as much net wealth as the median black family and 10 times as much wealth as the median Latino family, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Just a decade earlier, the disparity was 7 to 1 for black families, and 9 to 1 for Latino families. A study released this week by the think tank Demos offered new points of analysis on the disparity, one of which was particularly sobering. In comparing the wealth held by white families to that held by black and Latino families with two parents, the authors found that: The median white family had roughly twice as much wealth as the median black or Latino family with two parents. This ratio is interesting for a couple of related reasons. First, it demonstrates that the financial advantages that come with marriage, like having two earners, qualifying for tax breaks for dependents, and the ability to share expenses, are insufficient to close the racial wealth gap. Second, as the study points out, the data call to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report ”The Negro Family.” In it, he attributed poverty among to the structure of black families and the fact that many were headed by single mothers. Moynihan argued that the widening gap between black Americans and white Americans would persist so long as ”the deterioration of the Negro family” did. This premise has often been used to advance the argument that personal responsibility and social respectability are the solution to racial and economic inequity (see: Bill Cosby, et al. ). Yet decades of research have demonstrated that this is a faulty premise and cannot explain away the racial wealth gap. The Demos study reiterates this point. ”Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure,” the authors note. ”The benefits of intergenerational wealth transfers and other aspects of white privilege . .. benefit white single mothers, enabling them to build significantly more wealth than married parents of color.” The study uses available data to illustrate other ways that have proved inadequate to close the racial wealth gap. Attending college, working full time, spending less than whites ” none of these have been enough to help black and Latinos even begin to achieve parity with white Americans in this regard.

Two lawyers, three judges, thousands of ordinary Americans: On Tuesday night, oral arguments in Washington v. Trump attracted an unusually large audience for legal proceedings. The case centers on President Trump’s controversial executive order that would temporarily bar all new refugees from entering the U. S. as well as visa holders from seven countries. Those restrictions are currently not being enforced, after a federal judge granted the states of Washington and Minnesota a temporary restraining order blocking the travel ban from going into effect. It was that temporary restraining order — not the travel ban itself — that was being debated in the arguments Tuesday night before three judges on the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But along the way, the lawyers and judges raised a number of larger issues — some of which, for the many nonlawyers listening along, might require a little context or explanation. Here are a few key questions that were raised, directly or indirectly, during the arguments: How many Muslims would be affected by the travel ban? (And does it matter?) During oral arguments, Judge Richard Clifton suggested that the seven countries named in President Trump’s travel ban make up less than 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population. Clifton’s ”quick penciling,” as he described it during the hearing, is close. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen made up just more than 12 percent of the world’s Muslim population in 2010, based on NPR’s analysis of the latest data compiled by the Pew Research Center. During the hearing, Clifton questioned whether the travel ban could be considered religious discrimination against Muslims if the majority of Muslims worldwide were not affected. Here’s how Washington state Solicitor General Noah Purcell responded: ”Your honor, the case law from this court and from the Supreme Court is very clear that to prove religious discrimination, we do not need to prove that this order harms only Muslims or that it harms every Muslim. We just need to prove that it was motivated in part by a desire to harm Muslims.” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says there is case law that backs up Purcell’s argument. ”There is no precedent for the ridiculous suggestion that discrimination against members of a religious group becomes constitutionally acceptable whenever only a small percentage of that religious group is victimized,” Tribe tells NPR. ”The entire course of jurisprudence under the Religion Clauses is incompatible with any such arithmetic approach to the issue.” What rights do noncitizens have under the U. S. Constitution? As he wrapped up his initial remarks, August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, said that in some cases, noncitizens have ”no rights” that the state of Washington could try to protect. Cornell University Law School professor Stephen says that’s basically true. He explains that the constitutional rights of noncitizens exist on a sort of spectrum. ”At one end of the spectrum someone who’s never been to the United States, even for visiting Disney World, really has no rights,” he tells NPR. ”On the other end of the spectrum would be somebody who’s been given a green card . .. they have a lot of constitutional rights.” But it’s more complicated than that. It matters where someone is. Someone in the U. S. — even illegally — has constitutional rights, such as the right to due process and the freedoms under the First Amendment, says. Even people who aren’t in the U. S. and never have been might have ties to a U. S. resident or citizen who has rights of his own — as the state of Washington pointed out in its arguments. What are the limits of presidential power? The Department of Justice argues that the president has broad powers when it comes to immigration and national security. In court filings, and again in oral arguments, the DOJ suggested that it was inappropriate for judges to ” ” the president’s judgment on national security issues. But the judges seemed to be interested in the limits of those presidential powers, as well as when ” ” would be called for. ”Could the president simply say in the order, we’re not gonna let any Muslims in?” asked Judge William Canby. Flentje replied several times that that’s not what Trump’s executive order does. ”I know that,” Canby said. ”But could he do that?” He kept pushing for an answer to his hypothetical question. Flentje conceded that a different plaintiff — specifically, a ”U. S. citizen with a connection with someone seeking entry” — might be able to sue for religious discrimination in that situation. What proof is there that Trump’s travel ban is motivated by concerns over terrorism — and what evidence that it’s meant to block Muslims? The Justice Department argues that the temporary travel ban on travelers from seven mostly Muslim countries is necessary to protect U. S. national security. But Judge Michelle Friedland pushed the government to support that claim. ”Has the government pointed to any evidence connecting these countries with terrorism?” Friedland asked the Justice Department’s lawyer. Flentje said that there is no such evidence on the record in this case. But he did mention an Islamic militant group based in East Africa that the U. S. government considers a terrorist organization. And he pointed out that Congress and the Obama administration had already authorized heightened security for visitors from these countries. Meanwhile, when Purcell argued on behalf of the states, Clifton asked him to lay out evidence for the states’ allegation that the order, which doesn’t mention Islam or Muslims by name, is actually motivated by religious bias. Purcell had described the evidence of intent as ”rather shocking” but didn’t go into detail. Friedland pointed out that the state included evidence in its briefs — including remarks from Trump associate Rudy Giuliani about what he said was the administration’s desire to impose a Muslim ban ”legally.” What might happen next? While Tuesday’s hearing veered into questions of constitutional law, the federal appeals judges are deciding only whether to reinstate Trump’s travel ban while the legal battle over his executive order continues. The 9th Circuit panel said it won’t be making a decision on Wednesday, but the ruling could come later this week. If the panel decides to bring the travel ban back, lawyers for Washington state and Minnesota could ask a lower court to grant a preliminary injunction to, again, suspend the ban, which could be issued as early as Feb. 18, according to this court filing. Regardless of what the appeals judges decide, the case is likely to end up before the U. S. Supreme Court.

President Trump addressed the legal battle over his immigration ban on Wednesday morning, saying the courts ”seem so political.” Speaking to a gathering of sheriffs and police chiefs in Washington, D. C. Trump said he had watched television coverage of the oral arguments before the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday night ”in amazement” and that he ”heard things that I couldn’t believe.” A panel of the appeals court is weighing a ruling by a lower court judge that blocked Trump’s ban while the case proceeds it is expected to issue its ruling later this week. ”I don’t ever want to call a court biased,” Trump said, adding, ”but courts seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.” Trump said he would not comment on the statement made ”by certainly one judge.” But, Trump said, ”right now we are at risk because of what happened.” He said that if the judges wanted to ”help the court in terms of respect for the court, they’d do what they should be doing.” Trump read parts of the statute that he says gives him authority to issue the ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations, as well as a temporary halt in refugee admissions. ”A bad high school student would understand this anybody would understand this,” he said. The executive order has been the target of dozens of lawsuits, including the one that prompted the stay. Addressing criticism that the ban was rushed with no notice to either the affected travelers or the federal agents who had to enforce it, Trump said he had suggested there be a notice but that ”the law enforcement people said to me, ’Oh you can’t give a notice,’ ” because then people are ”going to pour in before the toughness takes effect.”

Customers who walked through the door of Everyman Espresso, a cafe in New York’s East Village, last weekend got a pitch at the counter to support a fundraiser to help defend immigrants. ”We’re donating 5 percent [of our proceeds] to the ACLU in response to the travel ban,” Eric Grimm, a manager at the cafe, explained. Grimm was referring to the executive order issued by President Trump restricting people from seven countries from entering the U. S. Over 800 cafes around the country participated in the weekend fundraiser, which was the brainchild of Sprudge, a coffee publication and event organizer. Organizers say at least $400, 000 was raised — though only of the cafes have reported their tallies, so they expect that number to keep rising. ”I think it speaks to the wider moment we’re in right now,” Jordan Michelman of Sprudge told us. It’s a way of saying ”immigrants are welcome here,” says Sam Penix, the owner of Everyman Espresso. Penix says he wants to remind people that ”we’re a nation of immigrants, a city of immigrants.” And restaurants and cafes depend on immigrants as employees, too. The food industry is often the to employment for immigrants. An estimated one in four restaurant workers are according to an analysis done by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United using data from the Census’ American Community Survey for 2015. And the vast majority of farm workers are immigrants, many of whom are in the U. S. without legal authorization. The U. S. food supply depends on immigrants. Ben Hall, a chef and of the Russell Street Deli in Detroit, says lots of people don’t realize this. ”We can’t run a business without labor,” says Hall. Hall has designated his deli as a sanctuary restaurant, which is a nationwide movement aimed at promoting workplaces and helping protect workers from discriminatory acts based on their immigration status, gender, religion or other factors. It’s not just independent cafes and restaurants speaking up. Big brands have jumped in, too. Just After President Trump’s travel ban was announced, Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz wrote to all his employees assuring them ”we are doing everything possible to support and help” employees who are impacted by the travel ban. For example, Starbucks is offering free legal advice to employees with questions about immigration status. And the company announced plans to hire 10, 000 refugees over the next five years. The CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, who is sent an email to her employees after the travel ban was announced. ”We are an incredibly diverse organization, comprised of men and women from all walks of life and every corner of the globe — including the countries impacted by this new policy,” Nooyi wrote. Her email affirmed the value of diversity. ”PepsiCo remains a place where everyone feels welcome and anyone can succeed. These are values we will never abandon,” Nooyi wrote. She pledged to remain ”steadfastly committed to the safety, security and of all our associates.” As food companies decide how and whether to weigh in, some brands are finding that speaking up for immigrants and inclusion is good for business. ”This is a very important time and we really want to be part of this conversation,” says Sepanta Bagherpour, director of marketing at Nando’s a chicken restaurant chain. (He’s South African.) The company is currently promoting its Everyone Is Welcome campaign. Nando’s has 38 restaurants in the U. S. and 1, 200 internationally. When I walked by one of the Washington, D. C. locations, I noticed a big, bold sign in the storefront window that read: ”Nando’s is an immigrant employing, gay loving, Muslim respecting, racism opposing, equal paying, restaurant.” Bagherpour says the Nando’s brand — which began in South Africa in the waning days of apartheid — is built on social commentary. And he says this campaign has been good for business. The company says that traffic and sales have jumped compared to the same time last year. But taking sides in this national conversation has its risks. ”We’ve definitely seen push back,” says Russell Street Deli’s Ben Hall. After he was featured in a national business story on the sanctuary restaurant movement, he was slammed on social media. There were comments such as: ”I’ll never ever eat in your restaurant,” and ”I only want my food [to be] made by an American.” Hall says he was taken aback, but he realizes this conversation elicits strong feelings on both sides. And, in the end, despite the negative comments on social media, his deli has been more crowded than usual for this time of year.

School traffic never bothers Max Schneider. In the airplane he takes to class every day, his commute is pretty easy. It’s nearly 7:30 a. m. when a small, Piper Saratoga plane takes off from the mainland in Port Clinton, Ohio. Pilot Bob Ganley is on his way to pick up students heading to school. His first stop is Middle Bass Island, about a mile away from the school. Instead of a bus stop, Max’s father is dropping him off at the Middle Bass airport to meet the plane. On Western Lake Erie, there are only a few inhabited islands. The school on Middle Bass closed in 1982. So Max and four other students go to School, located on South Bass Island. Their school bus will be this Piper plane. Ganley has two students to pick up: Max, a and Cecilia, a . After landing in ’s airport, Max and Cecilia walk to a large yellow van waiting in the airport’s empty parking lot. They join two teachers who flew over from the mainland earlier. In the summer, golf carts and bikes carry thousands of tourists across these streets. But this time of year, there are only about 400 people on the island. Max’s mother, Katie, teaches English here. Her family lives on Middle Bass, but during the winter, she rents a place near school just in case the plane is unable to fly. ”If they know there’s weather coming in, they’ll stay just because they don’t want to be late for school or miss out on school,” she says. A flight to school on this island costs the Middle Bass school system nearly $100 per student each day. But Katie Schneider, who pays her own fare each week, says she and her husband have never considered making the move to . ”Middle Bass is our home,” she says. ”That’s where he grew up that’s where he was raised. That’s where our family history is.” School is much like any other school on the mainland. There are state tests, clubs and even prom. But Superintendent and Principal Steve Poe says it’s the smallest public school in the state. ”We have 81 students through 12,” he said. ”Average class is about a to eight students. That makes us unique with the individual attention our kids get.” Max’s class has only three students. And his sister Lucy’s class has just five boys and three girls. Because they live across the lake from most of their friends, Max says they try to make the most of their days at school. ”Living on the island, I don’t get to hang out with a lot of the kids a whole lot because I’m usually back on Middle Bass, and you can’t hang out when there’s a mile of water between you,” he says. Air transport also comes into play when it comes to the school’s sports teams. The entire community shows up for games to cheer on the Panthers. It all seems like a normal school event until an announcer thanks people from the opposing team for bringing milk to the island. That’s right: milk. That’s something even more appreciated when living on an island three miles from the shore.

Sunrise, sunset: light into darkness, darkness into light. This perpetual cycling through archetypal phases of yin and yang, light slapstick and dour melodrama, is what lends Batman his unique mutability. His fellow heroes are a more stolid lot. They tend to pick a lane and stick with it. Not Batman. Dude’s ephemeral. A veritable will o’ the wisp, that guy. For 78 years we nerds, devout students of his endless adventures, have witnessed him phasing through this cycle on the comics page. But when it comes to shaping the idea of Batman — how he exists in the public consciousness — it’s TV and movies that matter. And it’s possible to see that same cycle at work there, too, if you know where and how to look for it. Every turn of the cycle occurs for a reason, as a reaction to the phase that came before. 1966: Camp Crusader, The ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West brought the Caped Crusader before the eyes of the wider world in a huge way. A huge, goofy way. The network and studio executives behind the series didn’t create the show out of any particular love for the character. In fact, they considered Batman — and superheroes, and comics themselves — to be disposable junk culture. They approached the creation of the series from the outside: producer Bill Dozier read a few Batman comics, and decided to reproduce them exactly — but with a tone that treated them like serious drama, like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in tights. They made him a square, a cop in a cape, a representation of the Establishment. He drank milk, lectured Robin about pedestrian safety, and would never think of the Batmobile. That tone, and the campy silliness it engendered, made the show a sensation, albeit a one. Everything about the show’s approach angered Batman’s hardcore fans, however, and their resentment would live on long after the series went off the air. It was so strong, in fact, that it threw a long shadow from which Batman is only now beginning to emerge. 1989: Throughout the ’70s and ’80s the Batman of the comics existed as a spirited refutation of everything the ’60 TV series had stood for. This new Batman was a brooding loner (Robin had shipped off to college) who haunted the urban night. It was this Batman that director Tim Burton picked up on, in creating the 1989 Batman film starring Michael Keaton. His Dark Knight was truly dark, and somber, and goth — and also, with respect to to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman — kinda kinky. 1990s: Camp Strikes Back, When director Joel Schumacher took over the series, he attempted to pull Batman back into the light, although the light in question was neon pink. In homage to the 1960s series, he upped the campy archness, restored Robin to the mix and — in a move that has enshrined him in nerd infamy — slapped some nipples on the sculpted musculature of the . The reaction of the hardcore was swift and savage. They took to the nascent internet to demand that future films treat the character as seriously (read: as grimly and grittily) as the comics had been doing for years. After a brief fallow period, they got their wish. 2000s: Batman, Bedimmed, Director Christopher Nolan’s beginning with Batman Begins, seemed like a mission statement for the complete refutation of Schumacher’s Batman — and by extension, of the ’60s series as well. By leaning into a rugged, vision that prized somber practicality over anything that smacked of stylization or — God forbid — flair, Nolan gave the hardcore fans the Batman they loved in the comics. This was a Batman who would be taken seriously (read: who was very, very serious). The fans proved fiercely protective: Several critics who dared to suggest that the somberness of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, in particular, smacked of bloated pretension were greeted with death threats. 2017: LEGO My Ego, And so we come to The LEGO Batman Movie, which is just the latest attempt to bring the broody Batman out of his cave, into the light and sun of the upper world. But this attempt is fundamentally different. The creators of the 1966 TV series brought condescension to Batman. Tim Burton brought a determination to remake the character in his own, outsider image. Schumacher brought camp and areolae. Nolan brought a grayscale dourness. Every one of them came at the character from the outside, and imposed their vision on top of him. The screenwriters and director of The LEGO Batman Movie, on the other hand, come at him with 1. a very specific comedic sensibility and 2. a deep, deep, deep knowledge of the character’s history that, it turns out, is indistinguishable from love. Their Batman is something else, as well — something important: a complete tool. He’s a jerk who takes himself far too seriously, a brooding loner who insists, at every opportunity, upon his own consummate awesomeness. This is not merely a characterization — a ”way in” to the character they’d teach in screenwriting classes. It is a pointed critique of the dour, sulky, militantly humorless Batman that has existed in the public consciousness for nearly 40 years. It is also, more to the point, a slap in the face of the hardcore fanboy culture around him, a culture that insists only one ”true” version of the character exists, and stubbornly clings to the conviction that they ”own” Batman. Which is to say: It’s a reminder — a not particularly gentle one — that this stuff was always supposed to be fun. Consider this, as well: The plot of this movie involves Batman learning that being a dark, disaffected, brooding loner isn’t enough. He needs to make human connections, needs to let other people in. In a very real sense, it’s about Batman transitioning from an arrested adolescence as a sulky goth, brooding alone in his room, into an adulthood that requires him to join society. Which is probably why, despite the movie’s deep, abiding and aggressive silliness, The LEGO Batman Movie stands as the most emotionally mature Batman film yet made. It’s also one that might — that just might — manage to end the eternal cycle of Batman, once and for all. Because no matter how savagely it lampoons the Dark Knight as an egotistical jerk, it so clearly comes from a place of deep knowledge that even the fanboy will have no choice but to respect it. Nolan, Burton, Schumacher, even the creators of the 1960s Batman TV series were outsiders looking in the team behind LEGO Batman are not. And that matters, because of a very simple, abiding truth first recorded, I believe, by Pliny the Elder, namely: Game recognize game. In other words: I strongly doubt that any will be able to gin up much in the way of frothing nerdrage over a film that includes a frickin’ cameo.

Used to be, you could count on two fundamental truths: 1. Superheroes were jocks. 2. People who loved superhero comics were nerds. Sweeping generalizations to be sure, and they grew steadily less and less true every time, over the last 75+ years, superheroes escaped the comic book page for radio, television and movies, where they found themselves embraced by a wider, less obsessive audience. Yet superheroes remain physically attractive, impossibly fit, and they tend to dress to highlight their low . global audience, on the hand, belong to a stubbornly species that’s less hot, more indolent, and far, far lumpier. So while simple explains some of the superhero’s appeal, there’s always been more to it. Because for as long as superheroes have been around, their creators have striven to make them relatable. Mostly, this takes the form of infusing these perfect specimens and their dazzling abilities with generous doses of . That’s the Marvel formula, famously: great powers, great responsibility . .. and great agita. That approach quickly bled out to DC’s heroes as well. Today, on movie screens, DC’s heroes glower at one another from deep inside black clouds of shame and regret. And even on the comparatively sunny spate of DC superhero shows on the CW (Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow) beautiful heroes get put through familiar trials marked by guilt, jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy. That’s one way to make us care about superhero stories. It’s the default approach. Another way — one adopted by NBC’s sitcom Powerless, premiering tomorrow (Thursday the 2nd) at 8:30 ET — is to sideline the superheroes altogether, and instead focus on the mundane, lumpish humans who get caught up in their wake. Here’s To The People Who Flinch, From the genre’s earliest days, creators would often shift a story’s point of view from that of the title’s nominal star to a supporting character, bit player or background extra. The opportunity to tell a story entirely from the perspective of Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Alfred the butler or even an doggedly working to defeat his city’s resident served to add variety to the formula. More recently, entire comic book series have featured these views of worlds in which powerful beings fly overhead. In the ’80s, Marvel’s Damage Control by Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colon focused on the workers who repaired property damage caused by brawls. The 1994 Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, examined the Marvel universe through the eyes of one newspaper photographer. In 1998 DC’s Chase by Dan Curtis Johnson and J. H. Williams III followed a government agency tasked with keeping humans safe from threats, while 2002’s Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Michael Lark and others revolved around the detectives and beat cops who picked up the pieces left by Batman and his enemies. Powerless doubles down on this narrative approach in a way that, while dutifully checking familiar sitcom boxes, manages to inject some brightness into a genre long dominated by a steroidal glumness. The show’s opening credits serve as mission statement: On a series of iconic comic book covers, the camera pushes past the big jamoke in tights hogging the spotlight to find some hapless background bystander, scrambling for safety. Here, those hapless bystanders are represented by the jaded, staff of Wayne Securities. Owned by the Bruce Wayne but run by his preening, incompetent cousin Van (a twitchily funny Alan Tudyk) Wayne Securities is a tech firm losing the battle for market share against Lexcorp, whose products it habitually rips off. This is because the assorted lab techs in its Research and Development department (Danny Pudi, Ron Funches and the very funny Jennie Pierson, who’s not featured in the opening credits but deserves to be) have lost their competitive drive after years of having their ideas serially rejected. Enter: Emily (Vanessa Hudgens) the plucky but new Head of Research and Development, determined to get her team to innovate — and to like her. Both prove uphill battles. The bones of this thing are familiar — there’s a lot of Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope in Emily’s dogged eagerness, a generous amount of The Office’s Michael Scott in Van Wayne’s doofy and the whole angle will seem very familiar to those still carrying a torch for the late, lamented Better Off Ted. But if you’re a new workplace comedy determined to find itself, you’d be well served to draft off those three shows in particular. The cast hasn’t jelled, yet, though there’s every indication that Hudgens’s Emily and Christina Kirk’s sardonic office assistant will fall into a nice chemistry. There’s pleny of Easter Eggs for the nerds in the audience: a ’ cameo by Marc McClure (Superman the Movie’s Jimmy Olsen) as Emily’s dad a newspaper headline reading ” Luthor Vows to Make Metropolis Super Again,” and a bit appearance by Starro the Conquerer (DC Comics’ resident giant ). These elements work best when they’re breezed past, and work considerably less well when the show slows down to wink at them. There’s been some behind the scenes (creator Ben Queen departed before production began) there’s a disjointed quality to the opening scenes especially (marked, unfortunately, by the of main ”I know what you’re thinking” cliche that promptly, and mercifully disappears) and the show’s special effects are not, particularly. But that’s okay. Because the minute this show becomes about its special effects, it will be over. If this show is going to work, it’s going to have to stick to what this first episode does best: remain inside the office, with the people who staff it, and leave the — and the dour depressiveness — outside.

Seattle’s City Council has voted to not renew its contract with Wells Fargo, in a move that cites the bank’s role as a lender to the Dakota Access Pipeline project as well as its creation of millions of bogus accounts. As a result, the city won’t renew its contract with the bank that expires next year. The unanimous vote will pull the city’s more than $3 billion in annual cash flow from the banking giant, the council says. Seattle says the bidding process for its next banking partner will ”incentivize ’Social Responsibility. ’” Not long after Seattle’s vote, the City Council in Davis, Calif. took a similar action over the pipeline. It voted unanimously to find a new bank to handle its roughly $124 million in accounts by the end of 2017. On the same day the two cities moved to cut ties with Wells Fargo, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. As NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported, that clears the way for construction of the final 1. 5 miles of the nearly pipeline. ”Protests in Seattle against the Dakota Access Pipeline project have been large and frequent, often organized by local tribal members,” member station KUOW reports. ”Protesters, many of them Native people from Washington state, share the concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which says the pipeline would threaten tribal water supplies, land and cultural sites.” Wells Fargo has been in the headlines since last fall over a scandal involving bank employees creating fake accounts in customers’ names to bolster performance results and boost bonuses. While other banks are also involved in the pipeline deal, Wells Fargo’s recent history seems to have helped make it a target once again. Seattle’s plan to stop its dealings with Wells Fargo comes months after the city canceled a $100 million bond deal between its electric utility and the bank. That took place last fall, when the treasurers of California, Illinois and other entities said they would freeze their dealings with the bank — in some cases, for a period. Wells Fargo’s commercial banking manager for Washington state, Mary Knell, tells KUOW that she’s disappointed in Seattle’s new move, noting that the bank is bound by its contract with the pipeline project. Knell tells KUOW that the bank has ”enhanced our due diligence on projects such as this to include more research into whether indigenous communities are affected and that they have been properly consulted.” Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant, who spearheaded Seattle’s move away from Wells Fargo, says a rally against the bank is scheduled for this weekend. And after noting that Wells Fargo is ”one of the six primary financiers of the private prison industry,” Sawant ended a statement about the bill’s initial passage earlier this month with a note of caution, saying, ”All of the big banks are terrible, and, as long as we have capitalism, our contracts will be with institutions that put corporate greed over human need.” Days before Seattle held an initial vote on divesting from the bank, Wells Fargo announced plans to donate $500, 000 to five of the city’s nonprofit groups that work to revitalize Seattle neighborhoods. When Seattle Council member Debora Juarez spoke of voting against Wells Fargo, she repeatedly cited a need for integrity — even as she acknowledged the small direct impact Seattle’s move will likely have. ”For a company whose deposits totaled more than $1 trillion last year, it’s a drop in a very big bucket,” Juarez said in a statement. ”But for Seattle, a City whose budget is approx. $4B. voting to withdraw our funds . .. money that covers the biweekly payroll of $30 million for about 12, 000 employees — is an opportunity to send a message.” In Davis, the city’s report on the possibility of cutting ties with Wells Fargo noted that Philadelphia and Minneapolis are also considering the same move. As for Seattle’s future options, KUOW reports: ”It’s not clear which financial institutions the city will work with in the future. More than a dozen other banks are connected to the pipeline, including CitiBank, ING, Chase and Bank of America. ”City Council members including Sawant, Mike O’Brien and Lisa Herbold are interested in contracting with a credit union or public bank. Both of those options, however, would require a change to state law.” In addition to complaints about the pipeline and its business practices, Wells Fargo was hit with a lawsuit at the end of January that accused the bank of ”illegally denying student loans to young immigrants who are protected from deportation and allowed to work and study in the U. S. under a program created by former President Barack Obama,” as member station KPCC reported.

The words were those of Coretta Scott King, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But they resulted in a rarely invoked Senate rule being used to formally silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren, . On the Senate floor Tuesday night, Warren read aloud from a letter Scott King wrote in 1986, when King objected to President Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful nomination of . S. Attorney Jeff Sessions to a federal district court seat. Sessions, now a Republican senator from Alabama, is President Trump’s nominee for U. S. attorney general. Warren was speaking in the debate leading up to Sessions’ likely confirmation by the Senate on Wednesday evening. King wrote that Sessions used ”the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” — and that was the line Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would later cite in his objection. ”I call the senator to order under the provisions of Rule 19,” McConnell said after interrupting Warren’s speech, in which he said she had ”impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama.” That objection came nearly 30 minutes after Warren was initially warned about impugning Sessions by Sen. Steve Daines, . who was presiding over the Senate at the time. Rapping on the presiding officer’s desk, Daines had initially cut Warren off some 20 minutes into her speech. ”The senator is reminded that it is a violation of Rule 19 of the standing rules of the Senate to impute to another senator or senators any conduct or motive unworthy or becoming [sic] a senator,” Daines said, apparently reading from a note on his desk. ”Mr. president, I don’t think I quite understand,” Warren replied. ”I’m reading a letter from Coretta Scott King to the Judiciary Committee from 1986 that was admitted into the record. I’m simply reading what she wrote about what the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be a federal court judge meant, and what it would mean in history for her.” Daines said his interruption was a ”reminder” that didn’t necessarily apply to what Warren had just said. ”However,” he continued, ”you stated that a sitting senator is a disgrace to the Department of Justice.” Warren replied that the comment seemed to have been made not by King, but by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy — whom she also quoted — ”although I would be glad to repeat it in my own words,” she added. Without mentioning that the flagged statement had been made before Sessions was a member of the Senate, Daines — repeating the words of a female staff member who seemed to be reading aloud — sought to clarify the rule’s scope. ”The rule applies,” he said, relaying the staffer’s words, ”to imputing conduct or motive through any form or voice.” He added, ”Form of voice includes quotes, articles, or other materials.” Warren replied, ”So, quoting Sen. Kennedy calling Sessions a disgrace is a violation of Senate rules? It was certainly not in 1986.” ”In the opinion of the chair, it is,” Daines said. As Warren began to speak, he added, ”And the senator is warned.” That formal warning set up the later interruption — and the forced termination of Warren’s remarks. Warren sought another clarification, as to whether she is allowed to ”accurately describe public views” and statements about Sessions. Again taking cues from the same staff member whose words he repeated, Daines replied, ”The chair has not made a ruling as respect to the senator’s comments. The senator is following process and tradition by reminding the senator of Massachusetts of the rule and the things of which it applies.” ”So, can I continue with Coretta Scott King’s letter?” Warren asked. ”The senator may continue,” Daines replied — granting a permission that would turn out to be . Some 23 minutes later, as Warren spoke about Sessions’ vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, McConnell addressed the chair to object to Warren’s remarks — specifically, her earlier quoting of Coretta Scott King’s words. By that time, Warren had finished reading King’s letter more than 10 minutes previously. As The Associated Press reported: ”Quoting King technically put Warren in violation of Senate rules for ’impugning the motives’ of Sessions, though senators have said far worse stuff. And Warren was reading from a letter that was written 10 years before Sessions was even elected to the Senate. ”Still, top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell invoked the rules. After a few parliamentary moves, the Senate voted to back him up. ”Now, Warren is forbidden from speaking again on Sessions’ nomination. A vote on Sessions is expected Wednesday evening.”

When Senate Republicans silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren, . during debate over the nomination of Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general, they sparked a furious response — but also used a rule that’s meant to encourage civil debate. Senate Rule 19 includes this prohibition: ”No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” While there is much room to argue Warren’s specific case, the rule itself is one that many of us would do well to live by. First, the facts. Warren spoke on the Senate floor. She criticized Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama and the nominee to lead the Justice Department. Warren read a letter from Coretta Scott King, written in 1986 as Sessions sought a post as a federal judge. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s widow had questioned Sessions’ work as a federal prosecutor: ”Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters.” As she read the letter, Warren was warned by Sen. Steve Daines, . who was presiding over the Senate at the time. Warren asked Daines how it could be improper to quote a letter from the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. and she was allowed by Daines to continue reading the letter. Later in Warren’s remarks about Sessions, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, appeared in the chamber to stop Warren for violating Senate Rule 19 and the Senate, in a vote, supported McConnell. Warren was silenced — at least on the Senate floor — though she was soon reading the letter again on social media. According to Senate Republicans, Warren impugned the ”conduct or motive” of Sessions, who is expected to be confirmed as attorney general Wednesday night. Warren’s supporters saw a stifling of dissent, and asked how the mere reading a letter could violate the rule. It’s a fair question: Can’t a senator refer to the public record? But set aside her specific case for a moment, just to focus on the purpose of the rule. Rule 19 forbids an especially corrosive form of verbal combat. Any student of interpersonal relations knows that questioning another person’s motives escalates an argument. Think about the difference between saying ”You’re wrong” and ”You deliberately lied.” Or consider the last two words of a line spoken by a furious husband in the comedy A Christmas Story: ”You used up all the glue . .. ON PURPOSE!” This reality applies to politics. Think of President Trump this week, who made a false claim about the media — that the media fail to cover terror attacks — and then suggested nefarious motives. ”It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” the president said, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. ”And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.” Rule 19 is meant to prevent this sort of statement, at least on the Senate floor. Granted, such a rule can seem hopelessly outdated in an era of acid remarks on social media. It can also seem like a needless luxury at this moment when the political stakes are so high. We all need a full and ruthlessly honest debate. If there was ever a time to avoid tiptoeing around the issues, that moment surely is now. But we also need civil debate. And in the Senate, lawmakers have learned to sting each other within Rule 19. If they have an insult to fling at another member, they simply disguise it as a compliment. In 2001, as a reporter covering the Senate, I witnessed a particularly brilliant exchange on the floor between the late Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Kennedy fiercely criticized Hatch’s position. Hatch responded by saying Kennedy was wrong, and then adding a few lines of ”praise.” ”[Reality] doesn’t stop bombastic arguments, nor should it. I love them myself. I love to see the distinguished senator from Massachusetts get up there and everybody’s almost positive he’s going to blow a fuse before he’s through. He has a right to do that, and I admire him for doing it. I admire the way he supports his special interests. And I love my colleague, as very few in this body do.” Senators on the floor, and onlookers in the gallery, burst out laughing. Nobody missed Hatch’s point. Nor did anybody call out Hatch for a violation of Rule 19. Sen. Kennedy offered his own lines about Sen. Hatch. When the exchange was over, Kennedy — who was an old friend of Hatch — walked over and hugged him.

A day after Senate Republicans invoked a conduct rule to end Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as U. S. attorney general, a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King urging the Senate to reject Sessions’ nomination as a federal judge is gaining new prominence. Warren was reading aloud from the letter by King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when she was interrupted by the presiding chair of the Senate, who warned her of breaking Rule 19, which forbids members from imputing to a colleague ”any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” The warning mentioned Warren’s earlier quote of Sen. Edward Kennedy, who had called Sessions, then a U. S. attorney, a disgrace. But it was King’s letter that — more than 10 minutes after Warren finished reading it aloud Tuesday night — prompted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to call her out of order. That resulted in Warren being silenced on the Senate floor. In his objection, McConnell cited King’s accusation that Sessions had used ”the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.” Consisting of a short introductory note and a formal statement, King sent her letter to Sen. Strom Thurmond, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, in March of 1986. In it, she urged senators not to confirm Sessions — whose nomination did indeed fail. King’s letter was posted online by The Washington Post. Early in her statement, King wrote, ”Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U. S. Attorney, from his voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” Toward the end, she wrote, ”Based on his record, I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made everywhere toward fulfilling my husband’s dream that he envisioned over twenty years ago.” The contents of King’s letter have been circulating for some time now — it made headlines last month, as Sessions faced confirmation hearings for the post in the Trump administration.

As part of our celebration of Black History Month and culture, we turn this week to how the influence of Africa has been interpreted in various Latin and Caribbean cultures. The music of West Africa, where a majority of those enslaved in the Americas came from, was diffused through both an indigenous and Spanish filter to become the distinct sounds and rhythms that we know today. Cumbia, bachata, mambo and son jarocho are all quite distinct from each other and are still very vibrant expressions of tradition. But, more importantly, they also inform and influence a tidal wave of new expression, mixing with electronic, rock and jazz to form the musical bedrock of Alt. Latino. In this week’s show, we dive into the vaults of Smithsonian Folkways, the record label dedicated to American folk traditions of all kinds. Our guide is Folkways curator emeritus Dan Sheehy, who knows a thing or two about music and culture: He has traveled extensively to produce many of the great recordings in the archive. Don’t think that this music and these recordings are dusty museum relics. Musicians throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and the U. S. make this a living, breathing document of where we come from and who we are today. And while the history and musicianship of these songs are certainly worthy of intense scrutiny, don’t forget that it is all basically dance music! So you can listen to the songs individually below, or boogie down with this funky mixtape, where the songs flow from one to the other for optimal dancing pleasure. But I suggest you loosen up a little first: That traditional merengue is quite fast and will definitely challenge your skills.

The International Committee of the Red Cross says six of its staff members were shot dead and two are missing after their convoy was attacked by unknown assailants in Afghanistan. The Red Cross workers were on their way to deliver livestock materials when they were attacked near the town of Shibergan in the northern province of Jawzan, close to Afghanistan’s border with Turkmenistan. Reuters reports that the area has been pounded by snowstorms in recent days. The ICRC says ”it is not yet clear who carried out the attack or why.” The provincial police chief, Rahmatullah Turkistani, tells The Associated Press that the attack ”was likely carried out by Islamic State militants, who have a presence in the area.” The news service adds that no group has claimed responsibility for the attack and that the Taliban says it was not involved. The ICRC has worked in Afghanistan for 30 years, NPR’s Greg Myre reports. He says its neutrality ”is widely respected, with rare exceptions. But the group says it’s putting aid operations on hold while it assesses the attack.” ”We need to understand more clearly what happened,” ICRC Director of Operations Dominik Stillhart tells the BBC. ”But. .. this is one of the most critical humanitarian contexts and we will definitely do everything to continue our operations there.” ICRC President Peter Maurer says, ”These staff members were simply doing their duty, selflessly trying to help and support the local community.” He adds: ”This is a huge tragedy. We’re in shock.” Greg reports that ”civilian casualties have been on the rise throughout Afghanistan, and this shooting came just a day after a suicide bomber struck at the Supreme Court in Kabul, killing at least 20.”

There’s no way to avoid it. As the cost of college grows, research shows that so does the number of hungry and homeless students at colleges and universities across the country. Still, many say the problem is invisible to the public. ”It’s invisible even to me and I’m looking,” says Wick Sloan. He came to Bunker Hill Community College in Boston more than a decade ago to teach English full time. He says it felt like he quickly became a social worker, too. ”When I first got here, I was always told that we should never miss a chance to give students food,” he says. ”I foolishly thought at the time they meant Doritos and cookies. It’s protein that they’re after. It’s crazy.” Bunker Hill is home to one of 25 food assistance programs on Massachusetts’ public college campuses. That leaves just four public campuses across the state without one. One student at Bunker Hill, whose name we aren’t using to protect her safety and privacy, was living in a shelter in Boston last summer when she first decided she wanted to enroll in classes here. But she says that shelter didn’t feel safe. ”If I wanted to get good grades, if I wanted to get a good education, I needed to be at a slightly safer shelter,” she says. She was put on a long waiting list for a bed at a youth home and finally got in after six months. That’s when she enrolled at Bunker Hill. Now she’s majoring in math. ”I knew that I really loved learning, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to fit into the education system.” She says she has been pleasantly surprised by Bunker Hill, though. ”This is a really good place to figure out where you might go with your education,” she says. Across the country, college administrators are increasingly seeing students like her. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin surveyed more than 4, 000 undergrads at community colleges across the country. The results? Twenty percent of students reported being hungry, 13 percent homeless. Sara a sociologist who led the research team, says it’s not just that college students need to work while in school. ”It’s that they’re working, and borrowing,” she says, ”and sometimes still falling so short that they’re going without having their basic needs met.” says she believes state and federal governments should work together to help college students find a place to live and something to eat so that they’re ready to learn and, eventually, graduate. ”Most people think, ’Well, if you’re really poor, and you really don’t have money to eat, you can get food stamps,” she says. ”What they don’t know is that for a college student, who doesn’t have children, to get food stamps requires that they work 20 hours a week.” And that’s exactly what the student from Bunker Hill has managed to do. She’s putting in 20 hours a week at a physics lab close by and has recently saved enough to rent an apartment with two roommates. She says she still needs help affording tuition and transportation. ”I don’t really need a whole lot of this or that. It’s nice, but what helps me the most is people thinking that I’m going to make it.” And her classmates and professors, she says, who allow her to feel like a normal college student.

Student parent. Ever heard that term? It’s used for a student who is also a parent, and there are nearly 5 million of them in colleges around the country. That’s over a quarter of the undergraduate population, and that number has gone up by around a million since 2011. It can be really, really expensive to be a student parent, especially if you need to pay for child care while you’re in class. In some states, child care for an infant can cost as much as $17, 062 a year, according to a report by Child Care Aware of America. Add that on to the cost of college tuition — both private and public — and the financial strain of getting a college education becomes a huge burden for parents. So much so that only a third of student parents get a degree within six years, often citing mounting debt as a reason for dropping out. ”What it comes down to is that college becomes a bit of an impossibility for a parent who needs child care to go to school,” says Barbara Gault, vice president and executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, an organization that’s done a lot of research on student parents. The primary source of federal aid for child care nationwide comes from something called the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — specifically for parents and families. A block grant means that every state can develop its own eligibility requirements, which means it’s tricky to know if you qualify. States have unique rules attached to the CCDBG — basically a bunch of extra hurdles student parents have to clear. Gault, along with a team of other researchers at IWPR, recently compiled requirements from all the states to get a snapshot of what student parents are up against. Here’s what they found: Gault says these restrictions are tough, but points out that even if they were revamped and a student parent could easily qualify, the demand for CCDBG money is really high. Student parents must spend time on waiting lists that can take months, even years. ”We need bigger solutions to these problems,” says Gault. ”These rules and restrictions in a way just exemplify how little we’re thinking about the educational needs of parents.” The landscape isn’t completely bleak for student parents. A few states have their own funding set aside specifically for student parents — Minnesota has had a grant available for almost 30 years. A handful of colleges offer free child care. And if Donald Trump follows through on his daughter Ivanka’s call for child care reform, that could help out student parents, too. But while grant and subsidy money can be helpful, it’s usually just a drop in the bucket. Even for student parents who are able to get federal funding for child care, most are still paying thousands of dollars out of pocket, Gault says. And where do college students usually get pocket money? Student loans.

If President Trump wants to keep his promise to send new detainees to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, there’s plenty of room. ”We haven’t received any orders to take additional detainees in,” says Navy Capt. John Filostrat. ”But if given the order, we could go ahead and comply.” Filostrat, a spokesman for the island lockup, took reporters on their first tour of Guantanamo’s prison camps since Donald Trump became president. It was a ”windshield tour,” meaning journalists could only view the camps from outside the high, topped and fences that surround them. Still, this was a rare opportunity to see how things looked around the same prison that President Obama during his last months in office had raced — unsuccessfully — to empty. Trump wants the opposite. He warned during the presidential campaign that the U. S. is threatened by a lot of ”bad dudes” whom he’d send to Guantanamo if they were captured. And since his election, his administration has circulated a draft order that could pave the way for a new generation of inmates. The first thing that strikes you about Guantanamo’s officially designated ”Detention Center” is how provisional the place still looks 15 years after the first captives were brought there. Metal shipping containers and tents are the only housing for a rotating guard force that, despite the dwindled prison population, still numbers around 1, 100 — about 27 guards per current inmate. ”This was an expeditionary mission,” Filostrat says. ”Expeditionary means overseas, so it’s a temporary overseas Joint Task Force that’s been going on for 15 years — that’s the conundrum.” The dilapidated state of things reflects conflicting policies. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama sought to shut down Guantanamo’s prisons. Congress, bowing to constituents who opposed any transfers of Guantanamo inmates to the U. S. passed laws making it all but impossible to do that. But far from winding down, Guantanamo’s prison complex these days is gearing up. Construction projects suggests its ”expeditionary” era is ending and the notorious prison complex may be there to stay. A new permanent dining facility for troops is being built to replace a ramshackle improvised chow hall. Part of Camp 5 — a lockup with isolation cells for ”noncompliant” captives — is being converted to a hospital wing. Cement mixers ply the roadways. Another thing that jumps out is the stark contrast between the sprawling scale of Guantanamo’s prison camps, the staff who runs them and the relative handful of prisoners. Camp 6, which can house as many as 175 people, now holds 26. Five of them were deemed eligible for transfer to another country by an board, but Trump has made clear he wants no more prisoners leaving Guantanamo. Camp 5, next door, is empty — but it could hold roughly 80 prisoners. So even though Guantanamo received its last new captive in March 2008, today it could accommodate about 200 more. U. S. government officials did not give a precise number of vacancies, and some people stuck in Guantanamo’s limbo do not believe Trump should try to fill them. ”I think it’s an awful, awful idea,” says Colleen Kelly. Her brother, William Kelly Jr. died at the Windows of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. For nearly five years, she has watched a newly constituted military commission so mired in pretrial wrangling that it has so far failed to bring to trial five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the attacks. If the U. S. does capture terrorism suspects under Trump, it should charge, hold and try them in the United States, Kelly said. ”We have a system of justice in this country that has been tried and tested,” she says. ”For more than 250 years, it has served us well. And the military commission, as much as there is an earnest effort by the prosecution, it’s all untested — and to have that continue on and on, it’s an awful idea.” The military commissions have led to only eight convictions. Three of those rulings have been overturned entirely three more, partially. Ten Guantanamo inmates are at some stage of a military commission proceeding. Seven of them have yet to see their cases even come to trial. All 10 of those who stand charged before a military commission are being held, along with five others, at a secret site known as Camp 7 — not part of the windshield tour. Spokesman Filostrat says journalists are not allowed to view Camp 7, even from the outside. ”It’s classified,” he says. ”I can’t even tell you where it is. I’ve never been there myself.” All of Camp 7’s occupants have been designated ”high value detainees.” They share another dubious distinction: According to a synopsis of a Senate study of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program, all were previously held and harshly interrogated at ”black sites,” clandestine prisons in various countries worldwide. As a result, while five men in Guantanamo are facing trial and possible death penalties for plotting mass murder, the U. S. government is now being pushed by the defense to provide classified evidence that those men were subjected to interrogation methods widely seen as torture. In short, as the government is prosecuting the defendants, the defendants are prosecuting the government. ”What this case has demonstrated, if it’s demonstrated anything, is that torture makes criminal cases virtually impossible to prosecute,” says James Connell, attorney for Sept. 11 defendant Ramzi bin . ”In fact, it’s fair to say that torture and due process are mutually exclusive.” The case of the accused Sept. 11 plotters has paradoxically become the biggest criminal proceeding in American history and one of the most obscure and . ”When cases involve torture, they are also going to be festooned with a lot of secrecy, in order to protect the people who engaged in the torture,” says David Nevin, lead lawyer for accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. ”That slows down discovery, it slows down investigation, it slows down the nature of the trial and the hearings and everything — it slows everything way down.” Other relatives of Sept. 11 victims are, like Kelly, frustrated with the slow pace of justice, but they stand by the military commissions process, which has been revised three times. ”They need to take as long and be as painstakingly thorough as possible,” says Marvina Baksh, whose brother Michael Baksh died in the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center. ”I guess that’s just something we have to, in this instance, wait for the fruit to ripen and then it’ll be all good.” Baksh was speaking at a news conference in Guantanamo after watching, as a guest of the prosecution, the war court meet for just three hours in a session that had been scheduled to last two weeks. ”Please know that justice will be done in the end,” Brigadier Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor, assured Baksh and four other victims’ family members. ”And until then, we will not rest.” Trump’s draft executive order on Guantanamo calls for ”swift and just trial and punishment” of the accused. That has not been the chief prosecutor’s experience. ”I believe that we’re going as fast as the statute, and the procedures we have, enabled it to go,” Martins says. Asked whether Trump wants him to remain as Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, Martins is laconic. ”I’m here indefinitely,” he says.

A surprise winner has been declared in Somalia’s presidential election — Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, a former prime minister and the popular favorite who was running against the incumbent president. Somali lawmakers cast their votes in a heavily fortified airport in a country plagued by regular militant attacks. Twenty candidates were whittled down to three after the first round — including the incumbent, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who had been accused of . According to the U. N. Assistance Mission in Somalia, Mohamud won the most votes in the first round, followed by Farmajo, a former prime minister and the eventual winner. ”And even though the process was rife with corruption from all sides, a vote for Farmajo is seen as a vote against corruption,” as NPR’s Eyder Peralta reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Mohamud has conceded defeat. This is not an ordinary presidential election, Eyder says. Parliamentarians cast ballots, not ordinary citizens. Security is a huge concern in the face of ongoing militant attacks, and the capital Mogadishu is on lockdown, with major roads blocked to traffic. However, he adds: ”That this is taking place is still remarkable. The process has involved more Somalis, and in particular more women than even before, and it will put in place the final piece of Somalia’s central government. And that’s important, because Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central government since warlords overthrew the country’s dictator 26 years ago.” This is the culmination of a process that took months, as Reuters reports. It ”began with 14, 000 elders and regional figures choosing 275 members of parliament and 54 senators,” who then chose a president. The process has its critics. As Eyder reports, it’s been delayed four times because ”the security situation, corruption, political infighting, made sure that the government wasn’t ready to hold a nationwide election.” Eyder says groups have accused parliamentarians of selling their votes — particularly to Mohamud, who allegedly used government funds to buy them. If he had won, Eyder adds, activists would say that ”would send the message that corruption still rules in Somalia.” The Associated Press describes Somalis crowded around TVs, watching the process unfold. ”I hope they will not choose bribes over the interest of the people.” Ahmed Hassan, a university student, told the wire service. ”We need an honest leader who can help us move forward.”

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in November, questions have been raised about the lease he signed to operate a luxury hotel in the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D. C. The lease specifically says the lease holder cannot be a federal elected official. So critics repeatedly have called upon the federal General Services Administration to enforce its agreement, and make President Trump walk away from his deal to run the Trump International Hotel. But Trump appears to have come up with his own way of trying to solve the lease problem: He has created a revocable trust — and parked his vast business interests in it. The purpose of the trust is to create a firewall against allegations and to, in effect, remove himself from direct management of his businesses, such as the D. C. hotel. Documents now show that the president’s son, Donald J. Trump Jr. is the new president of the company operating the D. C. hotel. A GSA spokeswoman contacted by NPR had no comment on the status of the lease now that Trump has stepped back from direct management of his businesses and moved them into a trust. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But the new arrangement has only escalated the criticism because the trust’s tax ID number is Trump’s Social Security number, and Trump ”has the power to revoke the trust” to reclaim direct ownership. In other words, even if his sons or other business associates are named as the officers of the various businesses, the profits flow back to one person: Donald J. Trump. In fact, one of the documents says, ”The purpose of the trust is to hold assets for the exclusive benefit of Donald J. Trump.” Documents show that Trump resigned from positions in 488 entities as they were shifted into the revocable trust, and the trustees are his son Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. All of this has ethics experts fuming. Law professor Steven Schooner, who teaches government contracting law at George Washington University, says Trump is still benefiting from the lease, even though the hotel now comes under the revocable trust. Schooner says it’s ”far too easy to funnel money directly to the president and his family” via business deals involving the hotel. He raises another potential conflict: Under the lease, the hotel’s rent is to be renegotiated annually, based on financial performance. A GSA worker would calculate the new rent. The worker’s ultimate boss, the GSA administrator, is a presidential appointee. ”It’s an impossible position to put a GSA employee in,” Schooner says. Trump is unique among U. S. presidents in the extent of his businesses, an international array of buildings, golf clubs and merchandise emblazoned with his name. Sheri Dillon, an attorney for Trump, said at a Jan. 11 press conference that the president ”instructed us to take all steps realistically possible to make it clear that he is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit.” Ethics experts say Trump’s actions since then have fallen short. ”Donald Trump is managing his affairs in a way that enables, and frankly invites, people and companies and countries to send money his way, through his businesses, in an attempt to influence him and thereby influence U. S. government policy,” said Kathleen Clark, who teaches governmental ethics law at Washington University in St. Louis. Richard Painter, who served as White House ethics counsel to President George W. Bush, said that foreign governments, U. S. corporate lobbyists and others may choose to do business with the Trump hotel, as well as other businesses, in an effort to curry favor with the White House. Painter says the revocable trust is no solution only divestment will work. ”The president does not seem to want to do that, and he’s going to have to deal now with the conflicts of interest that come with ownership of these businesses. And some of those conflicts are illegal.” Painter is involved in a lawsuit alleging that taking money from foreign governments would violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause.

The official address of Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower is 325 Bay St. in the middle of the city’s financial district. Think of it as Canada’s answer to Wall Street. But the hotel’s entrance is actually around the corner. So instead of seeing a grand facade bearing the Trump name, what you see from the prestigious Bay Street side is a loading dock. This is just one of the many miscalculations that have undermined the Trump International Hotel and Tower, even before construction began in 2007. The soaring, glass and granite building has been plagued by financial setbacks, construction problems and legal woes. Investors have lost millions of dollars and have sued Donald Trump and the hotel’s developers. The Trump project was developed by Talon International, a Toronto real estate development firm run by two entrepreneurs. Alex Shnaider owned the company and Val Levitan ran the operations. Back when the idea for the project was first hatched, Toronto did not have a hotel. There was a growing demand for hotels with lots of marble and granite, fine linens, luxurious spas and restaurants, says Susan Pigg, a former real estate reporter with the Toronto Star who covered the saga of the Trump hotel. ”It looked great at the time because it was such a novelty for the city. Trump was a big, big name, it looked like it would be a huge success,” she says. ”But the whole thing was doomed to failure.” Pigg says right off the bat, there were problems with the site. The hotel plus tower is built on a small parcel of land wedged between two smaller buildings. She says the site was so rocky, construction crews couldn’t tunnel down as far as they would for building a in another part of the city. The building needed to be tethered underground, Pigg says, and parking was shifted to the first few levels. Part of the problem is that neither Shnaider nor Levitan had experience in hotel operations or construction. So it’s not surprising there were problems, says Toronto City Councillor Josh Matlow. ”There were parts of the building itself that fell down onto the street and actually shut down parts of our downtown at times, because there were concerns about the structure’s integrity,” he says. The developers signed a licensing agreement with Donald Trump similar to the ones for other hotels the president has been involved in. Trump has no ownership stake in the Toronto building. But his company, the Trump Organization, has a management contract for the property, and Trump licenses his brand — his name — for a fee. Investors bought condominiums in the tower that could be rented out by the hotel. The investors claim they were promised occupancy rates and returns on their investment. Toronto lawyer Mitchell Wine says those never panned out. Collectively, the investors lost millions of dollars. Wine represents 27 investors, and many are members of Toronto’s Korean community who speak very little English. ”I remember asking them through interpreters, ’Why did you invest in this?’ And all they said back was ’Trump, Trump, The Apprentice,’ ” he says. Wine says his clients felt the sales pitch misrepresented the project. He says they looked at the glossy brochures. They knew about Trump buildings elsewhere and thought he had the Midas touch. ”He’s splashed all over the marketing,” Wine says. ”My clients thought he was building the hotel, because he certainly gives you the impression that it’s his hotel.” Wine’s clients sued Trump and the developers. A lower court threw out the suit. But an appeals court ruled last year that the lawsuit could proceed. The Trump Organization has maintained that President Trump is not liable because he never signed a contract with investors. If the lawsuit does proceed, it may be difficult for investors to recoup their money. The Trump hotel is now in receivership and up for sale. Journalist Susan Pigg says the development was built for about $500 million, and it’s going for far less now, about $300 million. ”I’m not even sure they’ll get that,” she says, ”because who would buy a hotel like that, even at a discount, with all these lawsuits outstanding and no idea how this is going to be resolved?”

President Trump’s approval rating with voters may be the lowest on record for an incoming chief executive. But in one way at least, his popularity is improving a bit. The value of Trump as a commercial brand, although still very low, has ticked up since August, according to the Reputation Institute, which measures the worth of various business brands. As a brand name, Trump’s ”reputation pulse score” went from 31. 7 in August to 39. 1 in says Stephen vice president and managing director for the United States and Canada. Trump, the brand, is seen as aggressive, selfish and ambitious but also friendly, stylish and elegant, says. The pulse score attempts to measure the public’s emotional connection to various brands, by determining how much esteem, trust, admiration and respect respondents feel toward them. ”It’s a proxy for the degree to which you love the person or company,” says. The improvement in Trump’s score since last summer appears to suggest that his presidency is having an impact on his business ventures. Seeing Trump in a presidential setting has solidified his support among those already predisposed to like him, especially men, Republicans and those over 70, says. ”I think he’s probably benefited in many ways from the association with the presidential scene,” he says. ”[To] those individuals who really buy into brand Trump, it’s a further endorsement that he is very much a status symbol in what he represents to them.” Since his campaign for president got underway in 2015, Trump has taken numerous opportunities to showcase his various properties, appearing often at Manhattan’s Trump Tower and the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C. During his transition period, he interviewed potential Cabinet officials at his golf club in Bedminster, N. J. This past weekend, Trump attended a Red Cross ball at his resort in Palm Beach, and he watched the Super Bowl at the nearby Trump International Golf Club. The fact that Trump likes to frequent his own properties is no surprise to Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. ”He’s really a creature of habit, and is accustomed to living in this cocoon that he created a long time ago. He doesn’t really take the risk of encountering people and situations that are unfamiliar,” D’Antonio says. But it’s not lost on Trump that the publicity he receives as president is also very good for the brand he has spent years cultivating, D’Antonio says. ”I don’t think he’s let go of his interest in these brands at all. His supposed detachment from the business interests of the Trump Organization isn’t real. He’s very much invested in these enterprises. He remains the beneficiary of them. He’s a brand builder by habit, and the brand is his personality.” To be sure, Trump’s brand value remains very low outside his base. The Reputation Institute considers any rating below 40 as ”poor,” which means Trump’s pulse score is in the lowest category.

It was a familiar scene for many in New Orleans East, part of the city’s Ninth Ward. ”As helicopters hovered overhead and emergency response vehicles streamed into neighborhoods, it reminded them of [Hurricane] Katrina,” reported Tegan Wendland of member station WWNO in New Orleans. ”The area was hit hard by that storm, and now many families will have to rebuild again.” ”This house looks like it belongs in a Third World country somewhere. If you was to walk through and walk around, you would think a bomb went off,” Terry Eubanks told Wendland, standing outside her apartment. Eubanks was at the nail salon when the storm hit. Her apartment was completely destroyed. Officials said at least seven tornadoes touched down in the state on Tuesday, the biggest of which hit New Orleans East. The newspaper created this map. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Tuesday that more than two dozen people had been injured in the city, with additional injuries reported in other parts of southeastern Louisiana. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency on Tuesday. After an aerial tour over the affected area, he told reporters he was ”even more impressed that so few people were injured and there was no loss of life.” The National Guard is on the ground in the eastern part of New Orleans, helping clear roads of debris, prevent looting and protect returning residents from downed power lines, Maj. Gen. Glenn Curtis told reporters. Emergency responders were going house to house on some streets, checking for people who need help and marking homes with x’s and o’s to show they had been searched. Cathy McGraw’s home was badly damaged, she told the . She spent Tuesday night in a Red Cross shelter at a local recreation center and said she planned to return there on Wednesday night. ”Ain’t got nowhere else to go,” McGraw told the newspaper. Speaking to WWNO, Adriann Mitchell described the damage to her elderly parents’ home. ”The ceiling is caved in. The front window is out. And there’s just water all over,” she said. ”It’s just a mess.” Landrieu said at a news conference Tuesday that the affected area encompassed about 5, 000 properties, and that the city’s emergency workers would transition from rescue to recovery operations going into Wednesday. ”There are a lot of families that lost everything,” he said. As helicopters moved overhead on Tuesday, resident John Spears told the he was not impressed with the city’s immediate response. ”The city is a day late and a dollar short,” he told the newspaper. ”They should have people out here picking up debris right now.” In addition to the tornado that damaged New Orleans, tornadoes also touched down in Livingston Parish, near Baton Rouge, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and near four other southeastern Louisiana communities. National Weather Service forecaster Mike Efferson told WWNO that big storms are common in the South this time of year. ”It’s not extremely unusual,” he explained. ”The unusualness is just the strength of the tornadoes. We usually don’t get a lot of very strong tornadoes, but it looks like this one produced a lot of damage over a large area.”

Sure, the dictionary’s a resource designed to give an accurate accounting of words in all their many shapes and sizes, their definitions and their spellings. But whatever finality a dictionary’s thick binding implies, it’s destined to beg adjustment just as soon as it has been set, as words take shape, wither from disuse or simply fall in and out of favor. Case in point: With this week’s addition of more than 1, 000 words, will likely have to plan on a few more pages for its next print edition. That means we’ll just have to make space on our shelf for such a big book made bigger by humblebrag — ”to make a seemingly modest, or casual statement or reference that is meant to draw attention to one’s admirable or impressive qualities or achievements.” It also means we’ll finally see our belief in truther — ”one who believes that the truth about an important subject or event is being concealed from the public by a powerful conspiracy” — finally vindicated by its addition. And while they may not add up to a fully fledged conlang — or an ”invented language” — a few decidedly terms like snollygoster, bokeh and mumblecore have also found happy endings nestled among ’s new entries. Though, not to throw shade on poor snollygoster, but the looping oddball of a word for ”a shrewd, unprincipled person” isn’t all that new once a regular in the dictionary, it ghosted from the pages of ’s abridged Collegiate Dictionary more than a decade ago for its diminished use. It turns out even a word often used to call politicians dishonest isn’t everlasting. Credit Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly with its surprising revival, says. ”This time, the lexicographers were wrong,” the dictionary admits in something of a mea culpa. But then, perhaps such a reversal shouldn’t be that surprising at all. ”This is a significant addition of words to our dictionary, and it reflects both the breadth of English vocabulary and the speed with which that vocabulary changes,” Lisa Schneider, chief digital officer and publisher at says in a news release. To get a sense of that breadth, lexicographers ranged from the campus (safe space and microaggression) to the halls of power (SCOTUS and FLOTUS) from courts and rinks (airball and ) to the teeming Petri dish of language that is social media ( and ). Still, given ’s recent penchant for political trolling, the most useful word for the dictionary may simply be an old : snark. Here’s a glimpse of some more of the words, phrases and acronyms just added to the dictionary.

This story is part two of a investigation. Read part one here. Shortly after Ed Howard’s father was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer and given six months to live, Howard and his sister Kathy sat down and talked about what to do. One worry was their dad’s funeral arrangements. They decided Kathy would call around to some funeral homes to figure out how much their father’s arrangements would cost. ”I’d say, about three weeks later over the weekend I got a call from her nearly in tears,” Howard recalls. ”And she said that she had spent pretty much all day on the phone and on the Internet, simply trying to price funeral services, and she couldn’t do it. She actually just couldn’t get a straight answer about what products and services were being offered and how much they cost.” That’s not supposed to happen. A federal regulation called the Funeral Rule is supposed to protect consumers who have lost loved ones. Among other things, it requires funeral businesses to provide potential customers with clear price information. But an NPR investigation found that the rule goes only so far in protecting consumers, and that its promise of transparency often goes unfulfilled. After hearing his sister’s story, Howard confidently told her that he would take care of the price inquiries. After all, he wasn’t just any consumer. He’s a lawyer specializing in consumer issues for the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego. He’s also the group’s head litigator and lobbyist. Getting the information, he thought, would be pretty easy. It wasn’t. ”It took me as a longtime lawyer and a professional consumer advocate literally an day just to get a solid list of what funeral services were offered by nearby funeral establishments and how much they cost. Eight hours,” he says. Howard’s problem may have been frustrating, but it isn’t new. The funeral industry has been consciously nontransparent since at least the 19th century, when the National Funeral Directors Association prohibited its members from advertising in the newspaper. As recently as the 1960s, the association barred members from advertising prices. It agreed to end the ban in 1968, only after being sued by the U. S. Department of Justice. That culture of secrecy persists in what’s now known as the death care industry. A kind of strategic ambiguity about prices is part of the business model. ”The consumer stands firmly in 1951, because that seems to be the technological level and the transparency level that the majority of American funeral homes are stuck at,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the death care watchdog Funeral Consumers Alliance. ”In an era when you can go online and look up the price range for products as trivial as eraser caps for a pencil to a new smartphone, good luck finding anything from your local funeral home websites,” he says. In the days, the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule sought to fix that lack of price transparency, as well as rein in a variety of other abusive and practices occurring in the industry. The Funeral Rule, enacted in 1984 after years of resistance by the industry, requires that funeral businesses give consumers an itemized price list when they talk to them in person, and give them clear price information when they ask for it over the phone. The itemized list, known as the general price list, is meant to help consumers pick and choose what they want and filter out what they don’t. In recent years, federal regulators shopping undercover have found about 1 in 4 funeral homes break the rule and fail to disclose price information. That’s even though they risk large fines from the federal government. Slocum and others say it’s time to bring the disclosure requirements into the age of mobile platforms, searchable data and social media. Price lists, they say, should be online. Mandating that on the federal level would require an amendment to the Funeral Rule by the FTC. ”Remember, the rule dates back to the 1980s it’s a rule,” says Lois Greisman, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection division. In July, Slocum’s group and the Consumer Federation of America asked the FTC to revise the rule, which it called ”antiquated,” to require online price disclosures. But just as it did in the days of and big hair, the FTC may once again get resistance from the industry if it considers the requirement. ”I have to think that most of this is going to be market driven,” says Scott Gilligan, a lawyer for the National Funeral Directors Association. The industry group represents more than 20, 000 funeral directors around the country. ”If people want price information on websites, funeral homes are going to respond by putting it out there,” Gilligan says. ”But I’d rather do that because that’s my business decision than do it because I’m afraid of getting fined $40, 000 by the federal government.” At least one entrepreneur believes there is demand for online price information. ”We’re hoping that we can disrupt the funeral industry,” says Will Chang, who heads a Silicon Valley startup that has collected thousands of funeral home price lists and posted them on his site, Parting. com. He put together a team of workers to pose as consumers and repeatedly call funeral homes until, he says, most of them turned over their price lists. ”Sometimes it took months, and sometimes we couldn’t even get the prices at all,” Chang says. ”But we were able to get about 75 percent of all the funeral homes across the United States. Chang says he was shocked that many funeral directors wouldn’t even use email and preferred fax machines. In NPR’s investigation, we found that, too. The resistance Chang faced in getting the price lists means it could be challenging to keep them up to date. So, his strategy is to persuade funeral directors to partner with his site and pay him a referral fee. Some have reacted badly, even threatening to sue him. But others have been receptive. ”A lot of these funeral homes now have, you know, younger funeral directors in their 30s or 40s, and they totally get what we’re doing, and they’ve completely embraced us. So we feel very good about the direction of where the funeral industry is heading,” Chang says. In looking at the data he has collected, Chang found wild swings in prices for similar services. In our analysis of prices in several NPR markets, so did we. In the Nashville, Tenn. area, for example, the minimum fee for using a funeral home varied from less than $1, 000 to more than $4, 000. The cost of a simple cremation in that market started below $1, 000 and topped out at $2, 700. Surveys by Slocum’s group have also found large price swings in numerous markets. Since the Funeral Rule was last amended 23 years ago, there’s little evidence that the rule has made the industry more competitive or for consumers, even as it has mandated price disclosures. U. S. Department of Labor data analyzed by NPR show that since the Funeral Rule was last amended in 1994, prices have been going up faster than the rate of inflation. As for Howard, the consumer advocate who suddenly became a consumer, he went to the California Legislature in 2011, a year after his father died at age 76. He lobbied to get the state to require funeral businesses to post general price lists online. At first, the California Funeral Directors Association opposed the move. But a compromise bill passed and took effect in 2013. California funeral homes now must either post their price lists online or at least post a list of their products and tell consumers that a price list is available on request. Slocum’s group has found that most California funeral homes chose to post their actual price lists. Both he and the industry’s Gilligan say it’s too early to gauge the law’s effect on pricing and competition. Howard wants the federal government to act as well. ”The FTC really, really, really needs to get off its south pole and bring itself into the 20th and 21st centuries, and make this modest requirement a national requirement,” he says. Riley Beggin of NPR, Brian Latimer and Emily Siner of Nashville Public Radio, Marisa Demarco and Ed Williams of KUNM, and Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma contributed to this story.

He called himself an ”edutainer.” He had a knack for explaining difficult concepts — global inequality, climate change, disease and poverty. He used maps, humor and props like storage boxes and colored stones to tell the story of our world and to advocate for the poor: ”Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health.” Hans Rosling, the medical doctor, professor of international health and statistician who found joy in hard facts, died on Tuesday from pancreatic cancer in Uppsala, Sweden, surrounded by family. He was 68. Rosling had a colorful way of teaching. ”I can show you! Let me show you the world,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013, using stacks of bricks to show the narrowing gap between the world’s rich and poor. I had the privilege of seeing Rosling in person at a conference in Dar es Salaam in 2013. He gave an abridged version of the famous TED Talk he gave in 2006, which painted a positive view of development. He showed us that life is getting better for more people, if we only bothered to look at the numbers. ”Data is often better than you think,” he said in that TED Talk. In front of his PowerPoint presentation projected on the wall, he jumped and pointed from data point to data point, excited and breathless, like a tornado. His enthusiasm was infectious. The room was filled with global health bureaucrats and government workers who had probably seen it all — but he had captured their attention completely. And mine, too. Rosling, the of the Gapminder Institute, a global development ”fact tank” in Sweden, definitely made statistics entertaining — but above all, he educated the world about itself. Here’s a collection of some of his most popular video presentations. The best stats you’ve ever seen 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes, Global population growth, box by box, Where are the Syrian refugees? Why did Ebola spread in West Africa? Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine, What’s your favorite Hans Rosling video? Share with us on Twitter at @NPRGoatsandSoda.

As Republicans move to overhaul the health law, should people bother paying the penalty for not having health insurance when they file their taxes this year? Or will they be able to sign up on the exchange for 2018 after their COBRA benefits end? Here are some answers to recent questions from readers. I didn’t have health insurance for part of last year and thought I’d get stuck paying a penalty. Now the new administration is talking about not enforcing the insurance requirement. Could I really be off the hook at tax time? As long as the individual mandate — which requires most people to have health coverage or face a tax penalty — is the law of the land, you should pay the fine for not having coverage in 2016 unless you qualify for an exemption, said Tara Straw, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Straw also manages a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site, part of an IRS program that provides free tax filing services for low and taxpayers. Straw said she has heard that some tax preparers are advising people either not to pay the penalty or to delay filing because they anticipate changes in the law. Bad idea. ”It’s not a thing a reputable tax preparer would do,” Straw said. ”The requirement that people have health insurance or an exemption [from the mandate] is still in effect.” The confusion stems from uncertainty over Republican officials’ comments that they may do away with the individual mandate when they overhaul the health law. In addition, President Trump signed an executive order in January that required federal agencies to waive or exempt health provisions that would impose costs or penalties on individuals, to the extent permitted by law. One strategy that has been discussed has been to broaden the hardship exemption so more people would qualify for it, which the secretary of health and human services has the authority to do. However, Straw says that approach might run into trouble. ”A hardship has to mean something, you can’t say that everyone has a hardship,” she said. ”Complying with the law is not considered a hardship.” Some experts say changing the rules now could create even more confusion, since some people have already filed their returns. Those taxpayers might have to file amended returns, an extra expense if they use a tax preparer. ”Since the 2016 tax season is already underway, I would think it unlikely that the Treasury Department would say, ’Don’t bother paying the penalty,’” said Mark Luscombe, a principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax Accounting, an information services company. I’m currently on a COBRA plan that ends on Dec. 31, 2017. Then I was going to choose a plan on the exchange for 2018. If the exchange exists in 2018, do you think there would be a special enrollment period allowed for new like me when my current coverage ends? Under the health law, people who have certain life changes, including losing other types of health insurance such as COBRA, are entitled to a special enrollment period to enroll in coverage on the exchange. But in your case, you wouldn’t actually need a special enrollment period because your COBRA will end during the regular annual open enrollment period that is scheduled to run from Nov. 1, 2017, to Jan. 31, 2018. (This coverage comes from a federal law that generally allows people who lose or leave their jobs to stay on the company insurance plan for up to 18 months if they pay the full price of coverage.) Republican proposals to replace the health law typically include provisions that guarantee people will be able to buy coverage when COBRA or other coverage ends, said Timothy Jost, a professor emeritus at Washington and Lee University Law School who has examined and written about the proposals. Insurers are skittish, however, about some of the Republican ideas, such as eliminating the individual mandate, and the continuing uncertainty about what the individual market will look like next year. At this point it’s unclear what type of coverage will be available. ”The question is: Are the exchanges in place, are the subsidies in place and will premiums be affordable for those who don’t have subsidies?” said Laurel Lucia, manager of the health care program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. ”And will there even be an option to buy individual insurance in some parts of the country if no insurers are participating?” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Michelle Andrews is on Twitter:@mandrews110.

Colin opens the door to his greenhouse in Mt. Vernon, Wash. and a rush of warm air pours out. ”Basically, it’s summer all year long here,” he jokes. a PhD student at Washington State University, and WSU professor Steven Jones have developed a new species: a cross between wheat and its wild cousin, wheat grass. They call it Salish Blue. Their goal was to make something that’s like wheat but grows back year after year. ”What it has to do is it has to work well for farmers, and it has to work well in the rotations and then it has to provide some sort of economic and nutritional value to the community,” explains. Normal wheat dies every year, and farmers have to till the soil and plant new seeds. Not only does that mean more work, but the process also causes erosion, which makes farmland less healthy and can carry sediment and agricultural chemicals into nearby waters. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union claimed it had created a plant exactly like wheat that kept regenerating itself year after year. ”It almost seemed like a superweapon,” says, ”so the U. S. and Canada started their own programs to try to develop perennial grain crops based on wheat.” But the Soviets were bluffing — ”and here we are in 2017 and still no perennial grain crops on a wide scale,” says. That’s where Salish Blue comes in. It’s a perennial, grain that adapts to wet weather, and it’s different from previous attempts because it’s genetically stable, says Oregon State University researcher Michael Flowers, who was not involved in the study. ”The exciting part is we now have something,” Flowers says, ”and the breeders can start putting selection pressure and selecting for those traits that we want to keep.” Not far from Washington State University’s Mount Vernon lab, Dave Hedlin has a farm where he grows vegetables and feed for organic dairy cows. He currently has a research plot of Salish Blue on his land. ”It’s kind of a thing,” he says. ”It’s pretty leggy. Some will be four feet or five feet off the ground, and some will be three feet off the ground.” Hedlin says he could use something like Salish Blue as winter food for dairy cows. The grain is not yet ready for human consumption, at least not broadly. That said, has made bread and cookies and shortbread out of it. And pancakes. ”Pancakes are my favorite thing to do with it,” he says. Because some of the seeds are blue instead of red or white like traditional wheat, the pancakes have a blueish tint to them. So, if Salish Blue takes off, we could all soon be eating blue pancakes. This story comes to us from member station KUOW and EarthFix, a public media partnership.

To go to space we need math. Lots of it. Most of us look in awe at the towering rocket ship strapped to the launching platform and forget the tremendous amount of work it took for it to get there — and, from there, to get into Earth’s orbit and beyond. Engineering, math, physics, chemistry, computer science: It’s all there, waiting for . Now, travel back to 1961, when the U. S. A. was behind the Soviet Union in the space race. It all started with Sputnik, a . silver ball, 23 inches in diameter, launched into orbit by the Soviets on Oct. 4, 1957. Less than a month later, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, with the dog Laika as passenger. Getting to the moon and putting humans into orbit was the next logical step. A sequence of space flights from the U. S. and the Soviet Union followed. This was no friendly competition. At the height of the Cold War, space was seen as the new frontier, the place to dominate — or be dominated. The stakes got higher when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth on April 12, 1961. This is where the hit movie Hidden Figures begins, in the heat of the race. NASA had been founded only three years earlier. The pressure, both political and public, to succeed was enormous. National pride was in the balance. Plus, in the midst of Cold War paranoia, who knew what the Soviets were planning to do ”up there?” The movie paints an accurate picture of the political expectations of the time, the widespread fear. But its beating heart is the science done by three ladies, all brilliant at what they did. Aspiring engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) accidentally spots a fault in the tiles of an experimental capsule. In the movie version, NASA was segregated in 1961. To go to the bathroom, human ”computer” Katherine Goble (played beautifully by Taraji Henson) had to scamper half a mile across the Langley Research Center facility. The amazing mathematician, the first ”colored” woman in the team, couldn’t even drink coffee from the same coffee maker as her peers. These people computed launching and trajectories by hand! And Goble was an absolute marvel at this, to the surprise, and even disgust, of her envious colleagues. Hidden Figures was deservedly nominated for best picture. Nice to see long mathematical equations flowing on a tall blackboard in a movie that has been so successful in the box office. I confess my embarrassment, while watching the movie, for not knowing any of this story. I mean, this is a true story every little boy and girl, especially girl, should know. How could I have missed this? The third in the group, Dorothy Vaughan, played movingly by Octavia Spencer, fought in vain to be promoted to supervisor, a job she was already doing in practice. Her break finally came when NASA bought an IBM 7090 electronic computer that no one, apparently, knew how to program. Dorothy, with a knack for mechanical contraptions (yes, computers at the time had many moving parts, levers, tapes, and connecting wires and plugs) learns how to set it up. A visionary, she borrows a book about FORTRAN at the public library, the programming language people still use today for launching rockets. (With some modifications of course.) She gains everyone’s respect and gets her promotion as supervisor of the programming department, bringing her other ”colored” girls with her. The movie builds up its narrative from connecting the three stories, playing with historical accuracy to get its message across. In reality, NASA wasn’t segregated when it substituted NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1958. Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor in computing in 1949. Mary Jackson completed her engineering degree in 1958, becoming NASA’s first black female engineer. Katherine Johnson had been in the Flight Research Division since 1953 and moved into the Space Task Group when it was formed in 1958. Her boss, played in the movie by Kevin Costner, was not Al Harrison but Robert Gilruth. John Glenn did ask her to check on the IBM calculations. So, the amazing thing here is that the true history of these three women is even more remarkable and trailblazing than the one portrayed in the movie. What the movie does, and does beautifully, is weave their professional and personal lives together, humanizing them, showing how science and deep emotions and feelings are perfectly compatible, something many tend to dismiss. The movie is a celebration of the human spirit, of the power of individual determination and drive, and of the need for a nation to stand together, to look beyond racial and cultural differences in order to face a new challenge. There is much ugliness portrayed in the segregated Virginia of the early 1960s, a somber echo of a past that is still so present and, in a new incarnation, that threatens to destabilize this nation once again. If there is a central lesson in the movie, it is that united we win that what makes America great is not segregation and intolerance, but openness and inclusiveness. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for Engagement at Dartmouth, of 13. 7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

FX’s Legion is a superhero TV show that resists admitting it is one. Which is both the most satisfying and frustrating thing about it. Here’s the setup: David Haller is a guy who hears voices in his head. It’s driven him to drugs, occasionally criminal behavior and a suicide attempt. (Alert TV fans will recognize the actor playing David as Dan Stevens, who was hunk Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey). Stevens cops a twitchy earnestness — and a pretty good American accent — as David, who has lived for years in a mental institution, but is ready to try life on the outside. We see him endure a visit from his sister and meet a cute fellow inmate whom he grows to like very much, even though she hates to be touched. Turns out, the voices in David’s head belong to other people. He’s a mutant who can hear others’ thoughts and control matter with his mind. The question that remains for David and the rest of the characters in Legion: Has he been fooled into believing he was schizophrenic by his unusual powers, or is he mentally ill in addition to being one of the most powerful mutants around? This is FX’s first collaboration with Marvel Television, and it takes place in the same fictional universe as the franchise. It takes some kind of stones to partner with the leading purveyor of entertainment and create a show which downplays its roots in the superhero world so thoroughly. As the first episode progresses, we realize David is in the clutches of evil government guys who may know more about his powers than he does. It’s a story we’ve seen many times before in movies like E. T. and Netflix’s surprise hit Stranger Things: An innocent with amazing abilities flees a brutal institution. Hopefully, David won’t have to escape on a flying bicycle. But Legion the TV show is created by Noah Hawley, the mind behind FX’s amazing adaptation of the movie Fargo. So the predictable nature of its plotting is often balanced by powerful visuals and unorthodox storytelling. In one scene, David destroys a kitchen with his mind, flinging utensils, food and appliances around in a detailed, shower that the viewer — and several characters — can walk through like a display. It’s a stunning sequence, in line with the show’s bold, seriously stylish visual sense. But it also looks a lot like ”freeze frame” sequences seen in lots of commercials — and in films like The Matrix. Similarly, the pilot’s opening sequence shows David’s struggles with his powers, depicting his slide from a smiling kid winning soccer trophies to a teen who blows out the windows of a police car with his mind, as The Who song ”Happy Jack” plays as soundtrack. The scene is awfully reminiscent of the opening to another superhero movie, scored by another rueful ’60s tune: Watchmen. (That film’s credits were set to the Bob Dylan tune ”The Times They Are ’ ”.) Unlike Fargo, which can sometimes feel like it is observing characters from a distance, Legion often puts the viewer squarely inside David’s head. But because of his mental issues, sometimes we’re not sure what we’re seeing. Is it a memory, or something happening to him now, or a vision of something happening elsewhere? That’s the same kind of confusing ”is it real or isn’t it” storytelling used in shows like Mr. Robot and Westworld. In the comics, the character Legion is the son of leader Charles Xavier. He’s a powerful mutant with multiple personalities, and each one boasts a different power. Hawley seems to have charted a different course for his TV version, though I hold out hope that we may see Professor X on the small screen this season or next. FX’s Legion seems to want it both ways: to draw comic book fans with a story set in the world, while avoiding some of the classic elements of the genre for people who don’t usually watch superhero movies and TV shows. Another new show, NBC’s Powerless, attempts a similar move, building a workplace comedy around the people who have to cope with the smashed buildings and derailed trains left behind when superheroes clash with villains. It’s a tricky dance these shows are trying, because most of these stories are ultimately about the hero pulling it together enough to beat the bad guys. And you only need to look at Fox’s tired, drama Gotham to see what can happen on a superhero show without the hero. Over its first three episodes, Legion seems very good, but not quite great. It’s a visually impressive program with a narrative style that just might revolutionize the superhero series on TV. But first, it has to elevate its core story above the kind of plots we’ve already seen so many times before. And it wouldn’t hurt to just admit it’s a show about superheroes, already.

Seeing a great work of art might quicken your pulse, but now New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hoping you’ll break a sweat, too. The Met is currently offering a ”Museum Workout” — part performance, part workout, part art tour. On a recent morning, 15 of us gather in The Great Hall before the museum opens. We line up behind two tour guide dancers — both wearing sparkly cocktail dresses and sneakers. A guy with a portable speaker stands nearby. He presses play, and with disco propelling us forward, we power walk, we punch the air, we daintily jog through the otherwise empty Met at 9 in the morning. There’s a lot of light, a lot of antiquity . .. and some stink eye. Museum security looks like they’ve never seen anything like this. ”We were approached by the Metropolitan Museum to make a dance,” explains Monica Bill Barnes, one of the workout leaders. ”We counteroffered, and asked to make a led tour that’s a workout.” Barnes’ dance company wanted to get people moving in the Met — and jumping jacks and yoga poses seemed a lot easier than teaching amateurs a complicated dance routine. ”It’s one of the most expansive spaces in New York City,” Barnes says. ”And to be able to move through all the different galleries, and the rooms and the spaces that they’ve created felt like such an incredible opportunity.” We power through a hall of busts — some with heads, some headless — in the fastest tour of a museum you’ll ever take. Most of the workout is spent jogging past priceless, important artwork, but we do slow down a few times. We pause to do squats in front of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, a portrait of a beautiful, pale woman in a long black gown — and I can’t help but laugh. Barnes absolves me, though. ”We’re sort of purposefully combining things that you don’t naturally put together,” she explains. Laughter is part of what she’s going for. After all, when you laugh, she says, that ”opens you up to experience things differently.” Speaking of ”different,” it took Monica Bill Barnes Company more than two years to get the Met on board with this idea. ”It’s really, ’How many inches are you from that work?’ ” Barnes says with a laugh. ”That’s where we had to do a lot of good, careful conversations.” The patience and planning paid off four weeks of the workouts sold out immediately. And I caught a few museum guards dancing along with us. Turns out, a little music and movement really can make you see things differently.

Painter David Hockney once said, ”It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.” On Thursday in London, a major retrospective at Tate Britain will give visitors the chance to see 60 years of the English artist’s ”doings.” Oils, acrylics, sketches, photographs, smartphone drawings — Hockney has worked in every medium. He’s one of the contemporary artists and his works sell for millions. To get to Hockney’s studio you go up, up, up a winding canyon road in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a neighborhood studded with stars’ homes — George Clooney, Kevin Costner and Marlon Brando back in the day. Hockney’s studio has five easels, some comfy armchairs and white walls brightened with his works. Never mind the ashtrays — the floor is carpeted with Davidoff cigarettes, chain smoked down, then stubbed into dark brown smears. (To make sure it’s really out, ”I always stub it out with my foot,” he says.) There are some splotches of blue paint on the floor — and more on the artist’s khaki pants. Hockney stands at a table turning the pages of a brand new Taschen publication called A Bigger Book — a nod to his famous 1967 work, A Bigger Splash. Two feet tall and a foot and a half wide, the $2, 500 tome includes reproductions of 450 of his paintings. Inside you’ll see LA swimming pools, palm trees, flowers, his dachshunds, the Grand Canyon, portraits of rich and not rich friends, landscapes in the U. S. and Yorkshire, designs for opera sets. He won’t linger over any of them and doesn’t pause to answer questions. He keeps turning, leafing through a life’s worth of works in vivid blues, greens, oranges and fuchsias. This is art he made from age 16 through his late 70s. He’ll be 80 in July and he still paints every day. He probably can’t not paint. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, he says the Tate show will be the largest retrospective he has ever had — after all, this one includes 20 more years of work. And as for whether there will be a big party for him in London? ”I’m not that keen on parties,” he says. ”I’m too deaf for them. I can’t really go to them. I don’t like all the fuss being made. I like doing the pictures — that’s what I like. But once they’ve been done, that’s it.” He doesn’t go out much now. Crowds are too noisy. Losing his hearing has been an isolating experience. ”I’m not very good at listening now,” he says. When he was younger, he was a lively fixture at parties and friends’ gatherings. Not so anymore. ”I can’t stand it and I just have to leave and go home and sit in a quiet bedroom,” he says. ”That’s what I do. Then I read. . .. That’s my life now. That’s what it’s going to be.” This is a portrait of the artist as a man — still with a twinkle in his eye, and plenty of joyous pictures left to paint. He still sees the world in the colors of Oz — hues so vibrant and alive that they look . What creative person doesn’t question whether he or she has anything left to say? David Hockney goes into his studio every day and has conversations on canvas, on paper, in photos, iPads. And art lovers across the world keep listening.

Political statements are easy to see when they’re on signs or buttons or in tweets. But then there are those that are hidden from view, until you log in to the right place. For example, when you look for new networks to get online. President Trump’s supporters and opponents have expanded their battlefield even to the choice of their own names — identifying their networks according to what they think of the president. Examples range from the followed by Trump’s name to the acronym ”MAGA ” which stands for ”Make America Great Again .” Although some may dismiss the practice as irrelevant, names could give a political statement to a far broader audience than sweater pins, bumper stickers or even tweets. After all, the average lifespan of a tweet can be just a few minutes. And these days politics is the kind of divisive topic that could easy ruin a family dinner, so many people decide to discuss it only with others who think the same. On the other hand, we constantly bump into perfect strangers’ spheres, either through their smartphones or routers. As any frequent flier knows, turning on the search and browsing the names of available networks in a crowded waiting room can be a humorous diversion. Also, it’s not strange at all asking for the local name and password when a friend invites us to come over. Answers may reveal something surprising, funny, or even shocking about our host. According to data from market research firm Strategy Analytics, 61 percent of U. S. households have networks installed. Some owners like to choose witty (or wannabe witty) names for their network, such as ”Martin Router King” or ”FBI Surveillance Van.” Reddit has countless posts about this phenomenon. names may refer to movies, music and pop culture, such as ”Routers of Rohan” (Lord of the Rings) ”Connecto Patronum” (Harry Potter) or ” is in the air” (the song ”Love Is in the Air”). In other cases, people name their to send messages to family members (”Mom, use this one”) landlords (”Kyle, fix our dishwasher”) or neighbors (”Get your own damn ”). While some people get extremely creative while choosing their name, others don’t miss the chance to send a clear political message. One recent example is ”Black Matters,” spotted on Reddit after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2012, wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal built a database of almost 75 million routers worldwide and searched for the occurrence of the word ”Obama” in their names. The result was a map of the political sentiment about Barack Obama, who at that time was campaigning for a second term. From ”Vote Obama in ’12” near Los Angeles to ”Obama Care Doesn’t Care” in Queens, New York, the names were pretty revealing of their owners’ political views. In the case of names, it all started far before Election Day. Last August, a network named ”Clinton Email Server” popped out at a Trump rally in Austin, Texas. Ironically, the network didn’t require any password. Clearly, it called to mind Hillary Clinton’s controversial use of an unsecured server. A list of ” ideas for Trump supporters” appeared on Twitter shortly after. On Election Night, the provided for members of the press at Trump’s event at the New York Hilton Midtown also took a clear stand about the expected outcome. The name of the network was ”Trump2016” and the password ”DJT4thewin.” After Trump had become a hotspot name was changed to ”Trump Won! HipHipHooray,” according to this tweet. In Colorado, a group of roommates renamed their network simply ”Trump!” At least one of them was not happy with the change, and tweeted her disappointment. Have you spotted a funny, a controversial or a political name in your neighborhood? Tweet us! Lucia Maffei is an NPR business desk intern.

Updated at 7:50 p. m. ET, A federal appeals court has unanimously rejected a Trump administration request to allow its travel ban to take effect. The appeals panel declined to overturn a lower court’s order suspending the president’s ban against entry into the United States by refugees and travelers from seven nations. The travel ban was put on hold by federal district Judge James L. Robart of Seattle, who issued a nationwide restraining order on Feb. 3. Robart said that the two states challenging the ban, Washington and Minnesota, had shown that their residents and universities were harmed by Trump’s action. The administration then asked the appeals court for an emergency stay of Robart’s restraining order. But the judges dismissed the administration’s request, saying that it had to show that it is likely to succeed in the trial court on the merits of its appeal. ”[We] hold that the Government has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, nor has it shown that failure to enter a stay would cause irreparable injury, and we therefore deny its emergency motion for a stay,” wrote the panel. President Trump tweeted his reply, indicating he will appeal. Trump also spoke briefly with reporters outside his press secretary’s office after the ruling was announced and, as reported by Reuters, called the decision political and predicted the administration would ultimately win. The result is a rebuke to the White House. In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, the panel vigorously quizzed attorneys both for the administration and for the state of Washington, the lead plaintiff, which originally filed the suit challenging the travel ban. The solicitor general for the state of Washington, Noah Purcell, argued that the travel ban is discriminatory and violates both federal statutes and the U. S. Constitution. He told the court that the judiciary’s role is to step in and check the abuses of the executive branch. But August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, argued that the president has the ultimate authority to protect the national security and that his action in that regard — namely, the travel ban — was unreviewable by the courts. In their ruling, the judges were unequivocal. ”There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our democracy,” the court wrote. The judges also said that the administration had also failed to show it would suffer ”irreparable injury” if its travel ban were not allowed to go back into effect. Acknowledging the government’s interest in combating terrorism, the judges nonetheless wrote, ”The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States. Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the Executive Order, the Government has taken the position that we must not review the decision at all.” The states challenging the president’s travel ban won on virtually every issue, says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. ”The order was unanimous. The panel found that the states had standing, that the executive order was reviewable by the court, that the U. S. was not likely to succeed on the merits and that it had not shown that a stay was necessary to avoid irreparable injury,” said Tobias. In a news conference, Purcell declared victory. ”What we argued is it’s the role of the courts to say what the law is, and to serve as a check on the executive branch, and that’s what the court has done in this opinion, in this excellent opinion, with this careful, thoughtful opinion that seriously considered all the government’s arguments and rejected them,” he said.

Archaeologists from the U. S. and Israel say they have found evidence that a 12th cave was used to store Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient manuscripts dating back to the time of Jesus. ”This exciting excavation is the closest we’ve come to discovering new Dead Sea scrolls in 60 years,” Oren Gutfeld of The Hebrew University said in a statement about the discovery. ”Until now, it was accepted that Dead Sea scrolls were found only in 11 caves at Qumran, but now there is no doubt that this is the 12th cave.” Since the late 1940s, when the scrolls were found in caves in the cliffs along the Dead Sea, scholars have studied them for insights into the history of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity. As NPR has reported, ”The scrolls appear to have been hidden in the desert near Qumran in the West Bank by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes that existed around the time of Jesus.” Although the 12th cave, excavated by a team from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Liberty University in Virginia, had previously been mapped, this is the most detailed study of its contents. ”Although at the end of the day no scroll was found, and instead we ’only’ found a piece of parchment rolled up in a jug that was being processed for writing, the findings indicate beyond any doubt that the cave contained scrolls that were stolen,” Gutfeld explained. ”The findings include the jars in which the scrolls and their covering were hidden, a leather strap for binding the scroll, a cloth that wrapped the scrolls, tendons and pieces of skin connecting fragments, and more.” Looters also left behind flint blades, arrowheads and a stamp seal made of a stone called carnelian, which offers clues about when and how the cave was used over the centuries. ”I imagine they came into the tunnel. They found the scroll jars. They took the scrolls,” Gutfeld told the BBC. ”They even opened the scrolls and left everything around, the textiles, the pottery.” ”Thank God they took only the scrolls,” he told The Washington Post. ”They left behind all the evidence that the scrolls were there.” In 2011, Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem made five of the hundreds of Dead Sea manuscripts available to the public online, as we reported.

Cary Dixon’s son has struggled with opioid abuse for years. At first, Dixon says, it was hard to know how to support him as he cycled through several rounds of treatment and incarceration. She says her life revolved around his addiction. ”It’s kind of like you’re on a parallel track with them,” she says. ”You wait for the next crisis you wait for the next phone call. You’re upset when you don’t get a phone call. You’re just — you’re desperate, and you’re in a state of fear and anxiety so much of the time.” Dixon, 52, is a former nurse who now runs a contracting business with her husband in Huntington, W. Va. At a 2015 forum on addiction in Charleston, W. Va. she told Barack Obama that addiction doesn’t just harm a person — it hurts a whole family. ”We neglect our marriages. We neglect other children in our home, who are thriving, because all of our attention is focused on addiction and substance abuse,” said Dixon, who later was invited by Obama to attend the 2016 State of the Union address as a special guest. The Dixons are not alone: They live in one of the cities hit hardest by the national opioid epidemic, in the state with the highest rate of deaths. In 2015, Huntington’s fatal overdose rate was nearly nine times the national average. Now, Cary Dixon wonders what the Trump administration will mean for families like hers. She says she voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in November, and she’s worried about President Trump’s talk of repealing Obamacare. She’s especially concerned about preserving the law’s coverage for alcohol and drug addiction treatment. ”I know that the Affordable Care Act needs [to be] tweaked, but to be repealed and to lose the gains that we’ve made would be harder on our community,” Dixon says. ”We’re trying to dig out of this hole.” And then there is the question of who will be covered: West Virginia expanded Medicaid under the health care law, adding more than 200, 000 people to the public insurance rolls — a 62 percent increase over the state’s Medicaid enrollment. If the law is repealed, and the expansion money goes away, those new enrollees could lose their access to basic health and mental health care. Dixon’s friend Bob Hardin, whose son has fought alcoholism for decades, shares her concerns. They met through a support group for family members of people struggling with addictions. Hardin, who is 73 and retired, has mixed feelings about the ACA, but he worries about any change to federal policy that would take away access to addiction treatment. ”It works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. But at least it’s there,” he says. Hardin wrote in Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio on his ballot last fall, but he’s hopeful President Trump will deliver on his promise to put more Americans back to work. He wonders if more jobs also might help people here keep busy, and off drugs and alcohol. Hardin spent years working in Baltimore before returning to Huntington, and he has seen the economy shrink while the addiction epidemic has grown. ”The change is phenomenal from when I left and when I came back,” Hardin says. ”It’s a tough place to get a job.” In addition to promising to strengthen the economy, Trump also campaigned on a promise to stem the flow of opioids into the United States by building a wall along the U. S. border. Both Hardin and Dixon are skeptical of that idea. ”A wall is not gonna stop them from doing what they do. And if you build a wall, they will adapt,” Dixon says. As West Virginia continues to fight the opioid crisis, Dixon says the state will need practical solutions, like more beds in drug treatment facilities, and reliable access to health care.

Decorations are sparse at Recovery Point, a residential treatment center in Huntington, W. Va. That’s why the bulletin board covered with photos of men stands out. The men spent time here, but didn’t survive their addictions. They’re all dead now. ”We keep a constant reminder in here for individuals who come into our detox facility. We have, ’But for the grace of God, there go I,’” says Executive Director Matt Boggs, pointing to the words on the board. Boggs, 35, would know. He started as a resident here five years ago, looking for a way out of addiction and homelessness. Recovery Point runs four facilities in West Virginia, offering nonmedical detox and residential treatment to people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. In Huntington, about 100 men at a time live in this former elementary school building in a neighborhood. There’s plenty of demand for facilities like this one West Virginia consistently leads the nation in drug overdose deaths. President Trump and other candidates addressed the nationwide addiction crisis many times on the campaign trail, sometimes with testimony from family members of those affected. Now, people who have been affected by the crisis, including the residents of Recovery Point, are looking to the president for help. Terry Lilly, 36, came to Recovery Point from Charleston, W. Va. Lilly was a computer programmer and then a manager at a nationally known company. He didn’t get hooked on heroin until his 30s, when he was playing music in bars and decided to give heroin a try, out of what he describes now as ”morbid curiosity.” ”It scratched my itch,” he says. ”It helped me deal with the emotional problems that I wasn’t dealing with, so it didn’t take long for me to give away my career, my house, my car.” Lilly’s recovery has been full of stops and starts. This time, he has been clean for four months. As he looks to the future, he’s worried about politicians’ talk of repealing the Affordable Care Act. He gets health insurance through the federal Medicaid program, which was expanded under the ACA and now covers more than half a million West Virginians — more than of the state’s residents. ”I’m not in a position to pay for that right now, but I have been in the past and I would like to be in the future,” Lilly says. ”So I really feel like this time in my life is what those programs are for, when I need a helping hand.” Medicaid doesn’t pay for treatment at Recovery Point the facility is mainly funded by grants and donations, and run in part by residents like Lilly who have already completed several months of treatment. But Boggs, the program’s director, says Medicaid provides basic health care for many of the residents here, and essential mental health care for issues that can complicate their recovery. If Republicans repeal Obamacare as they’ve promised, Boggs says he hopes there’s an equivalent replacement ready to go first. Some residents are hoping the federal government will address the challenge of society with a criminal record. For Jarrod Book, of Akron, Ohio, an alternative sentencing program is giving him a chance to clear his drug conviction. He says he’d like to see the new administration champion sentencing reform. ”Like nonviolent drug offenders who maybe, you know, messed up a little bit in their life,” Book says. ”If it wasn’t for something like that, I wouldn’t be here.” Book says he hopes the attention presidential candidates showered on the opioid epidemic during the campaign will help to destigmatize the problem. Aaron Pardue, 28, of Pocahontas, Va. hopes the publicity will bring more funding for treatment in communities across the region that are overwhelmed with need. ”For me it just seems like it’s a shame that it takes the politicians and the celebrities and all the bigwigs in this country, for it to start happening to them personally, before it becomes an issue for them to start dealing with it,” Pardue says. But Pardue, who has been clean for 15 months, says he can’t think too much about what the politicians might do. He needs to focus on his recovery. ”I mean I haven’t been living on Saturn or anything,” he says. ”I know what’s going on, but that’s one less distraction that I need right now.”

After President Trump blocked U. S. aid money from supporting any group that provides or ”promotes” abortion in other countries, The Netherlands announced it would launch a fundraising initiative to support any affected organizations. Now, several other countries — including Sweden, Finland, Belgium and Canada — have signaled their participation. The ”She Decides” fundraiser is the latest development in an international aid dispute that — as NPR’s Nurith Aizenman explained — has been playing out for decades. It centers on the ”Mexico City policy,” which blocks U. S. aid from being sent to any international group that provides or ”promotes” abortion. That can include providing information about abortion. Since 1973, the U. S. hasn’t allowed international aid money to directly fund abortions. The only question has been if groups can receive funds for other initiatives. And that has depended on who is in office — Republican presidents enforced the Mexico City policy, while Democratic presidents didn’t. When Trump entered office one of his first actions was to bring back the policy. As Nurith wrote last month, he also appeared to expand it: Previous versions of the policy only stopped family planning aid from being distributed to affected charities, while Trump’s memorandum seems to apply to all global health funding. Nurith wrote that it’s far from clear exactly how much money is potentially affected. The U. S. spends more than $600 million specifically on reproductive health, but spends much more — billions of dollars — on global health overall. ”It remains to be seen how much of that goes to groups that currently provide or promote abortion as defined by the policy — and that would opt to give up U. S. aid dollars rather than falling in line,” Nurith wrote. Shortly after Trump reimposed the policy, The Netherlands launched the ”She Decides Global Fundraising Initiative,” soliciting donations for reproductive health care in developing countries. It was explicitly designed to counterbalance the effect of the U. S. policy change. Funds raised by the initiative ”will be made available to organizations affected by the Mexico City Policy,” according to a website for the effort. In addition to inviting private donations, the Netherlands also pledged more than $10 million and said it would be working with other governments to boost the available funds. Since then, Denmark and Belgium have also pledged aid, bringing the total to more than $30 million, Deutsche Welle reports. And on Thursday, Sweden joined those three countries to announce an international conference related to the initiative, scheduled for March 2. ”We will mobilize political and financial support and show that there is a counterweight to the worrying developments we are seeing in the U. S. and in other parts of the world,” Swedish deputy prime minister Isabella Lövin said in a statement. (You may remember Lövin from a tweet showing her signing legislation while surrounded by women, apparently as a rebuke to the image of Trump signing the Mexico City policy memorandum while surrounded by men.) Canada is also participating in the launch, officials confirm to NPR. Reuters reports that Finland, Luxembourg and Cape Verde have also signed on to the initiative. Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, tells NPR that other countries working to counteract the impact of the policy doesn’t change the key fact, for groups, of American funds being withdrawn. ”Other countries are free to do what they want,” she says. ”The principle of the matter is that the United States is not endorsing abortion.” The ability of international aid groups to raise funds from other sources, in general, has been mentioned by groups as a point in favor of the Mexico City policy, as Nurith reported last year. Nonprofit groups, meanwhile, say it’s ”enormously disruptive” to have a funding source cut off suddenly, even if other funds are later available.

It’s President Donald Trump’s first official act on the abortion issue. On Monday, the new president signed a presidential memorandum reinstating the ”Mexico City” policy — barring U. S. aid from any group that provides or ”promotes” abortion overseas. The policy dates to 1984, when Ronald Reagan unveiled it at a United Nations Conference in Mexico City. The Trump version is even broader than the incarnations that previous Republican presidents have adopted. What does this mean in practice? To help make sense of it we’ve put together an FAQ. What were the rules on the U. S. funding of international abortion before Trump’s executive action? U. S. law has actually long prohibited the use of U. S. aid dollars to directly pay for abortions overseas. Specifically, in 1973 — in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion — Congress adopted the Helms Amendment to the law governing U. S. aid. That provision states that ”no foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” A foreign government or aid group that gets U. S. funding can still provide abortions overseas. But to do so it would have to use money from . S. sources. So what, exactly, is the Mexico City policy? The policy, as first implemented by Reagan, went further than the Helms Amendment in two key ways: First, it holds that if a group wants U. S. funding it must promise not to use monies even from other sources to provide abortions. Second, the group must also agree not to ”actively promote” abortion. In practice this has covered not just advocating for laws in favor of abortion rights but informational activities such as providing patients with referrals, counseling or information about the procedure. In contrast to the Helms Amendment, the Mexico City policy does not apply to foreign governments, only to nongovernmental groups that work overseas. So a medical center could be eligible for U. S. funding even if it were to provide or ”actively promote” abortion. Since Reagan introduced the policy, every time the U. S. presidency has changed party hands, the incoming leader has reversed his predecessor’s position. In what way is President Trump’s version of the policy possibly more expansive? The original version was specifically limited to family planning aid disbursed by USAID. Trump’s memorandum calls for extending the rules to ”global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.” How much aid money is at stake? As of this writing, the full implications are not clear. The U. S. spends more than $10 billion annually on global health — including $607. 5 million specifically on reproductive health. And it remains to be seen how much of that goes to groups that currently provide or promote abortion as defined by the policy — and that would opt to give up U. S. aid dollars rather than falling in line. But opponents of the policy are already warning that many groups will be forced to give up their funding. Adrienne Lee, a spokeswoman for abortion rights advocacy group PAI, says there would be ”devastating” consequences for the impoverished women for whom these groups provide a whole range of health services, including many unrelated to abortion, such as access to contraception. If the consequences to the people they serve are so severe, why wouldn’t these groups just agree to the terms of the policy and keep their funding? Here’s what Allison Marshall, director of advocacy for International Planned Parenthood, one of the largest recipients of U. S. reproductive health aid, has told NPR. She says that even though the group stands to lose about $100 million over a to period, complying with the policy would compromise the care it can offer. ”We’d have to stop telling women and girls when they came into our clinic what their options are,” she says. ”And we can’t do that.” What do supporters of the policy say? groups like the Family Research Council and the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argue that aid organizations that are willing to comply with the policy will spring up to fill any gaps that result. And they say the policy is needed to ensure that U. S. taxpayers are not supporting abortions overseas. Arina Grossu of the Family Research Council says, ”There’s a fungibility factor. The only way to protect taxpayer money from going for abortion is by reinstating the Mexico City policy.”

It’s a policy battle that has been playing out over three decades. In 1984, Ronald Reagan imposed an rule — known as the ”Mexico City policy” after the city where he announced it. The rule 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. Since then, every time the U. S. presidency has changed party hands, the incoming leader has reversed his predecessor’s position on the ban. President Clinton lifted it in 1993. President George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001. And President Obama rescinded it once more in 2009. Will Trump continue the pattern by reimposing the policy? Trump hasn’t taken a public position thus far. But when it comes to several domestic abortion questions he’s aligned himself squarely with groups. His pick for vice president, Mike Pence, is a staunch abortion foe — as is his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Georgia congressman Tom Price. Trump has also promised to appoint what he’s called ” ” justices to the U. S. Supreme Court, who presumably might favor overturning Roe v. Wade. And he has said he would sign legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and ending federal funding for Planned Parenthood’s U. S. activities. (Those federal funds go toward services that Trump has praised Planned Parenthood for providing, such as birth control and cancer screenings. But he’s said the organization should nonetheless be defunded because it uses other, nonfederal funds to perform abortions at its affiliated health centers.) Based on these stances, when it comes to the Mexico City policy, ”it’s widely expected that President Trump will put it back in place,” says Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of Global Health HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. At issue is not whether the United States can use foreign aid money to fund abortions overseas. U. S. law has prohibited that since 1973, when Congress adopted the Helms Amendment. Rather, with the Mexico City policy, President Reagan took that prohibition a step further: He issued an executive order that barred funding for groups that ”perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.” The term ”actively promote” has been defined to include both taking public positions in favor of laws and policies that protect abortion rights as well as informational conversations between health care clinicians and their patients, notes Alison Marshall, director of advocacy for International Planned Parenthood Federation, which stands to lose funding under the ban. ”When a woman or girl — and bearing in mind this could be somebody who suffered from violence or who has been married as a child underage — would go to see a health provider it would mean the provider could not talk to them about abortion, could not provide information, could not provide a referral to another provider [to perform an abortion],” says Marshall. And so, she says, each time the policy — which opponents have dubbed the ”global gag rule” — has been imposed, a large share of the nonprofit groups that work in the field have opted to give up U. S. support. Among groups, however, there is staunch support for the Mexico City policy. Deirdre McQuade is a spokeswoman for the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is among the groups urging Trump to reinstate the ban. It ”embodies the modest, widely accepted proposition that abortion is not family planning and should never be promoted as such,” says McQuade. ”Without the Mexico City Policy in place, the U. S. is currently exporting the destruction of life as a solution to challenges faced by families in developing countries. Poor women in developing nations don’t want help aborting their children. They’re calling for food, clean water, housing, education and medicine for their families.” McQuade adds that organizations that provide ”authentic health care services that honor the dignity of poor women and their families,” including screenings for cancer and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, should have no trouble complying with the policy. And groups that choose to give up their federal funding could seek private support, she says. For instance, she contends that when President George W. Bush reinstated the policy, IPPF ”was able to raise millions of dollars from private sources quickly.” Marshall counters that ”it was enormously disruptive because we faced enormous budget cuts very suddenly. And not just for [our group] but for other nonprofit providers, clinics had to be closed, staff had to be laid off. We just weren’t able to offer the family planning services to the women and girls who needed them.” Obama’s reversal of the Mexico City policy was accompanied by a new U. S. focus on women’s reproductive health in poor countries. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, the U. S. budget for the 2016 fiscal year included $607. 5 million in funding for reproductive health internationally, enabling an estimated 27 million couples in poor countries to get access to birth control and preventing about 11, 000 maternal deaths. A large share of that money goes to IPPF. If the Mexico City policy were to be reimposed, Marshall says, the organization would lose about $100 million over a to period for services it provides to women in 20 developing countries. These services mainly include care that is not related to abortion. But Marshall says complying with the terms of the Mexico City policy in order to keep U. S. funding is not an option IPPF would consider. ”We’d have to stop telling women and girls when they came into our clinic what their options are,” she says. ”And we can’t do that.” The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution, many of our worst infectious diseases didn’t exist. Here’s what changed. With the rise of agriculture, for the first time in history humans were living in close contact with domesticated animals — milking them, taking care of them and, of course, eating them. All that touching and sharing gave animal germs plenty of chances to get inside us. Take measles. Researchers think that up until about 5, 000 years ago, it didn’t exist. But its older cousin rinderpest, a cattle disease, did. When humans began spending so much quality time with cows, little rinderpest germs started jumping over into us. And a few of the germs had a mutation that allowed rinderpest to evolve from a cattle disease into measles, a deadly human virus. As if that weren’t bad enough, something else was happening around this time that supercharged the degree of damage this new measles virus could do. It has to do with the magic number of 500, 000. When the world’s first cities hit the mark, it meant that there were now enough humans living together that measles and other germs had a steady and potentially endless supply of humans to infect. Along with measles, scientists think other nasty diseases such as mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough all evolved to live permanently in humans around 3, 000 B. C. But our ancestors had no idea what the problem was — or how to fix it. See how humans finally get a clue, in Episode 3, coming Feb. 16. If you missed Episode 1, ”Early Encounters,” here’s your chance to catch up: What do you want to know about pandemics? Share your questions by submitting them in our special tool here. Our global health team will answer some of them in an upcoming story.

Updated at 8 p. m. ET, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to President Trump, may have violated federal ethics rules Thursday when she urged shoppers to buy Ivanka Trump’s retail brand, following the decision by several retail companies to drop the line because of poor sales. ”Go buy Ivanka’s stuff, is what I was [saying] — I hate shopping and I’m going to go get some myself today,” Conway said in an interview on Fox Friends. ”This is just [a] wonderful line,” she added. ”I’m going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online.” Her comments drew sharp criticism from the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Jason Chaffetz. ”That is absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. It is over the top,” Chaffetz told reporters. Chaffetz and the committee’s ranking minority member, Democrat Elijah Cummings, asked the U. S. Office of Government Ethics in a letter to determine whether disciplinary action should be brought against Conway. ”Conway’s statements clearly violate the ethical principles for federal employees and are unacceptable,” the letter said. ”In this case, there is an additional challenge, which is that the President, as the ultimate disciplinary authority for White House employees, has an inherent conflict of interest since Conway’s statements relate to his daughter’s private business,” it said. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that Conway had been ”counseled” over her remarks. Conway, interviewed later Thursday, again on Fox, said she would have no comment on the counseling but had ”spent an awful lot of time with the president of the United States this afternoon and he supports me 100 percent.” Federal ethics rules bar executive branch employees from profiting off their positions, but the statute exempts the president. Conway, however, is a White House employee, and her comments urging people to buy the products appear to violate the rules, says Kathleen Clark, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. ”The ethics regulation says government employees must not endorse any product, service or enterprise,” Clark told NPR in an interview. She added: ”The broader rule is that government employees shouldn’t use public office for private gain. They shouldn’t use it for their own personal private gain or for somebody else’s private gain. Public office should be used for the good of the public, for the good of the country, for the good of the government, rather than singling out her boss’s daughter’s enterprise and encouraging people to shop Ivanka.” Clark also noted that Trump’s tweet Wednesday about his daughter was retweeted by someone from the official White House account @POTUS. ”That was a violation of the ethics regulation if it was done by anybody other than the president or the vice president. But even if the president himself did that, it was improper, because there he is using a government resource for his own personal vendetta,” she said. Meanwhile, the progressive group Public Citizen urged the U. S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether Conway’s comments violated the rules. ”Anyone harboring illusions that there was some separation between the Trump administration and the Trump family businesses has had their fantasy shattered,” said Robert Weissman, the organization’s president. ”Kellyanne Conway’s advertisement for the Ivanka Trump fashion line demonstrates again what anyone with common sense already knew: President Trump and the Trump administration will use the government apparatus to advance the interests of the family businesses.” In the Fox interview, Conway suggested retailers are dropping the line because of politics. ”They’re using her, who’s been a champion for women in power and women in the workplace, to get to him. I think people can see through that,” she said. T. J. Maxx and Marshalls told employees last week to stop using signs promoting Ivanka Trump’s brand and mix in her products with others the store sells to make them less prominent. Nordstrom has also said that it would no longer sell Ivanka Trump jewelry and clothing because sales have been disappointing. Neither the company nor Ivanka Trump’s brand released any sales figures. The line is still carried by other retailers. After Nordstrom’s decision, President Trump himself tweeted that his daughter ”has been treated so unfairly” by the chain, and his son Donald retweeted an article Thursday about angry store customers cutting up their credit cards. It’s not clear how shoppers will react to the clothing controversy. Outside a Marshalls store in Washington, D. C. a housewife from Argentina wasn’t impressed by all the controversy. ”If I like it, I buy it. If I don’t, I don’t,” said Andrea Ponzio, 47. ”It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t buy it because of any politics.” NPR intern Lucia Maffei contributed to this report.

A bit more than a decade ago, President George W. Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, found his credibility in tatters after it became clear he had misled reporters about the leaking of the name of a CIA operative. Even though he arguably had been set up by White House aides, McClellan resigned some months later. Why? Establishing trust between the White House press secretary and the reporters he or she works with every day is critical. As former Bush speechwriter David Frum tweeted advice for the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer: ”The smart press secretary will remember: He is rationed one lie per career. Use it wisely.” ”So why do it?” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked, urgently, insistently, repeatedly on Sunday. Why send Spicer out there to pick a fight with the press in the first full day of the Trump administration? Why have him make so many easily disproved statements all at once? Todd sought answers in vain on Sunday’s Meet the Press from Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Trump. She suggested that the hostility from reporters may force her to rethink her relationship with the press. Yes, Time magazine reporter Zeke Miller, serving as a pool reporter during a quick visit to the Oval Office, wrongly reported that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. on display during the Obama administration had been removed it hadn’t. Miller retracted the report and apologized publicly, saying his view of the bust had been obstructed. But Spicer and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus argued the incorrect report proved the media’s intentional unfairness to Trump. Conway called that bust bust fake news, as in an intentional hoax by all available evidence, it wasn’t. It appears to have been a reporter’s mistake, and a sloppy one. Would that government officials or Trump aides correct and apologize so promptly for their accelerating number of untrue statements. Take it as a given that the new president doesn’t have thin skin — he has no skin at all. Trump proved that once more in his own tirade against reporters at the CIA on Saturday. Trump said journalists had falsely reported a schism between the president and his intelligence services, though Trump himself had earlier compared the agencies’ behavior toward him to the policies of Nazi Germany. And Trump, together with his aides, accused the media of understating crowd sizes, poll numbers and ratings for his inauguration — all to allegedly lessen his stature. Many White Houses resemble an extension of their campaigns. This White House has to date made little rhetorical accommodation in the shift to governing. Trump labored to prove his crowds and ratings exceeded those for Obama and for Saturday’s protest marches. This singular campaign endures in office. And I think that accounts for the blasts at the press, even more than the reactions Trump brings to perceived slights. In the White House as during the campaign, Trump and his top aides attacked the press, attacked dissenters and attacked facts. Each fundamentally serves as an underpinning of democracy. Each attack agitates journalists and delights his most ardent fans. As Todd pointed out, Spicer’s complaints were largely petty: They were about crowd sizes. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace called the White House’s obsession with crowd sizes ”ridiculous.” But it put the press corps on notice in the most public way that the White House would treat it as an adversary — just as Trump did during the campaign. It serves to rally his core supporters. It sows confusion among the reporting ranks, as many journalists were sent to such things as lawn mats and magnetometers. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple argued Sunday on CNN that the Trump strategy is to challenge the small assertions so that it can dispute huge exposés to undercut them. The media cannot afford to overreact. They cannot get lost in the minutiae. And yet reporters also cannot let one falsehood after another fly past unimpeded — especially ones that clearly carry such importance inside the Oval Office. McClellan lost his job amid a scandal that involved the invasion of Iraq, personally vouching that White House aides had not disclosed the name of a CIA agent married to a critic of intelligence used to justify the invasion. They had. Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff was ultimately convicted of federal charges. On Saturday, Spicer marched out to mislead reporters and the public about a topic of no real consequence. What he had to say wasn’t plausible from the moment he opened his mouth. It was about the attack, not the substance. CNN did not carry his remarks live, offering a detailed dissection of his misleading and untrue statements afterward. It’s what real reporting looks like (and is a sharp contrast to the long, live broadcasts of Trump’s primary rallies that helped fuel his nomination). Conway, for her part, told NBC’s Todd that Spicer was offering ”alternative facts,” though he did not make an argument based on other evidence but served up untrue information. Whether presidential delusions or strategic lies, these claims were made in the face of countervailing evidence. But the real action is away from the assertions about crowd size and indeed away from the White House briefing room itself. The press, charged with helping the public make sense of those who govern, should pay close attention.

Ask anyone about his or her health care and you are likely to hear about doctors, hospitals, maybe costs and insurance hassles. Most people don’t go straight from ”my health” to a political debate, and yet that is what our country has been embroiled in for almost a decade. A study published Thursday tries to set aside the politics to look at what makes or breaks health insurance markets in five states. Researchers from the Brookings Institution looked at state markets, thinking that if the goal is to repair or replace the Affordable Care Act with something better, then it would be good to know what worked and what failed. ”The political process at the moment is not generating a conversation about how do we create a better replacement for the Affordable Care Act,” says Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spearheaded the project. ”It’s a really hard problem, and people with different points of view about it have got to sit down together and say, ’How do we make it work?’ ” The researchers looked at California, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, interviewing state regulators, health providers, insurers, consumer organizations, brokers and others to understand why insurance companies chose to enter or leave markets, how state regulations affected and how insurers built provider networks. ”Both parties miss what makes insurance exchanges successful,” says Micah Weinberg, president of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, who led the California research team. ”And it doesn’t have anything to do with red and blue states and it doesn’t have anything to do with total government control or free markets.” Despite the political diversity of the five states, some common lessons emerged. Among them: Health insurance markets are local, Insurer competition varied widely within states, with the most dramatic differences between urban and rural areas. The more populated regions tend to have more insurance competition and plans than rural areas. Fewer people live in rural areas, which means there are fewer hospitals, doctors and other health providers. As a result, insurance companies that do business in those regions have less power to negotiate prices with local providers, who are more likely to be the only game in town. ”Insurance companies don’t make money [in many rural areas] because they can’t cut a deal with the providers that will be attractive to the customers,” Rivlin says. ”And there just aren’t very many customers, so it’s not obvious what to do about that.” Republicans, including the Trump administration, have suggested that the sale of insurance policies across state lines is one way to boost competition. But that may be easier said than done, Rivlin says. ”The insurance companies would still have to have local providers,” she says. ”So a company in New York can’t easily sell in Wyoming unless it has providers lined up in Wyoming.” Consolidation kills competition Consolidation includes hospitals buying physician practices and large medical centers, and big hospitals buying up smaller hospitals. California offers a prime example of this. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where consolidation has reduced competition among hospitals and physician groups, consumers have fewer choices and higher premiums than those in Los Angeles, where consolidation hasn’t yet gobbled up so many providers. Underestimating demand from sick people really hurt, Insurance companies did not have any idea who would buy policies through the exchanges in the early years. And as it turned out, a lot of those previously uninsured sick people — more than insurers and policymakers had expected — raced to get coverage. As a result, researchers found, many plans incurred losses, with some companies reporting claims that were 50 to 100 percent greater than the premiums they collected. Making matters worse, a mechanism in the health law to reimburse companies for such losses in the early years proved inadequate. That caused a lot of them to leave the marketplaces. Under Obamacare, insurance companies could no longer deny coverage or charge higher rates to those with medical conditions. And during the first two years of the exchanges, insurers simply didn’t know how to price their policies because they’d rarely dealt with people who hadn’t been insured before, the researchers found. In Michigan, six of 16 insurers withdrew. And in regions of Texas and North Carolina, which had between five and nine insurers, only three remained. Some consumers may be ”gaming” the system, Three of the states — Florida, North Carolina and Texas — reported that generous special enrollment rules allowed many consumers to delay enrollment into a plan until they needed health care. And in Michigan and North Carolina, researchers found that some people signed up for a policy, used it, then dumped it when they had received the care they needed. That ended up leaving insurers stuck with expenses and fewer premiums than they’d anticipated. ”The challenge is some of the rules that were set up around the ACA made it easy to game the system, frankly,” says Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who was not involved in the study. Along with tightening the rules around special enrollment periods, Chen says he would like to see a return to pools for the sickest Americans, the idea being that removing the most costly consumers from the general risk pool will allow carriers to lower premiums for everyone else. But pools, which a majority of states operated before the ACA, are hugely expensive, Rivlin says. Another solution, she says, might be found by making sure a strong reinsurance mechanism provides payments to insurers that take on more costly customers. Narrow networks appear to be the new normal, By the third year of the exchanges, insurers in all five states are offering more narrow networks on the exchange than the plans that give access to more doctors and hospitals. These smaller networks of providers allow insurers to give more patients to participating providers in exchange for lower prices. But it also means consumers have fewer choices when choosing providers. It’s a trend that started before the Affordable Care Act, and one that appears to be taking hold in nearly every market as insurers search for ways to keep premiums down. The sky may be falling, but many carriers are still doing well One chapter in the Obamacare story involves those carriers that are making enough of a profit to reduce 2017 premiums. ”About half the insurers are making a ton of money on [the exchanges] and that’s how markets work,” Weinberg says. ”The idea that there should be winners and losers in a particular marketplace is something that Republicans should certainly feel comfortable with.” Medicaid plans come out winners Researchers found that regional insurers that originally went into business to care for those with Medicaid — the health insurance for the poor and disabled — are filling gaps after insurers fled in many markets. Molina Health in California, WellCare in Florida, Community Health Choice in Texas, ”appear to have thrived in the ACA marketplace environment,” the study says. Rivlin says the success of these plans is likely due to their experience caring for a often very sick population. They already had networks of local providers that allow them to provide care at a lower cost. As 2017 premiums went up, consumers became more willing to enroll in these more affordable, plans. California leads the pack, In the Golden State, which fully embraced all things Affordable Care Act, competition remained stable with 11 insurers offering coverage and only one — UnitedHealth — dropping out completely. And 2017’s average premium increase, while about 13 percent, was about half of the national average. Part of California’s success, Weinberg says, is due to its approach in deciding which insurers may join the market. And it got involved in negotiating the price of plans, which helped keep a lid on premiums compared with other states. This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Premiums for Obamacare plans sold by New Mexico Health Connections could rise as little as 7 percent next year, said Martin Hickey, the insurance company’s CEO. Or they might soar as much as 40 percent, he said. It all depends on what happens in Washington. Such is the vast uncertainty about how the Trump administration and Congress are approaching their promises to repeal, repair and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. There is ”pretty massive confusion,” said Hickey, whose plan is one of the few nonprofit insurance created by the ACA to still be in business. ”The more uncertainty they create, the higher the rates” will be for 2018, he said. Insurers have a hard enough time making the normal predictions of who will get sick and how much care will cost. Now the usual fog of rate setting is compounded by the possibility that basic rules of coverage could get overhauled or even disappear before anything takes their place. Consumers and patients could ultimately pay the price. The stakes include how much plans sold through the health law’s online marketplaces and similar coverage will cost in 2018 — or even whether insurance will be available. Challenges during the recently completed enrollment period, in which some carriers canceled plans and rates rose 20 percent on average, increase the urgency, executives say. ”This is nothing less than a nightmare scenario for the carriers,” said Robert Laszewski, a former insurance executive and consultant who works with large plans. ”The Republicans don’t seem to understand that they’ve got to stabilize the market.” Coverage for 2017, which has already been finalized, won’t change. People covered through insurance or the private Medicare plans for seniors won’t be much affected by the uncertainty. In some states, preliminary 2018 rates are due in less than two months. But prospects for policymaking clarity recede each day that Republicans deliver contradictory messages or fail to agree on a plan, industry officials say. While some in the party want to go slow on an overhaul and ensure they’ve thought out a replacement before abolishing the health law, others favor immediate repeal. If the administration and Congress scrap the ACA’s coverage requirement for most people or its subsidies helping people buy care, the market could deteriorate or collapse, say insurance consultants and executives. A month ago President Trump told The New York Times that Obamacare is ”a catastrophic event,” adding, ”we have to get to business” in repealing it. On Feb. 5, he seemed to advocate a more measured approach, telling Fox News that ”at least the rudiments” of a replacement would be in place by 2018. Even that could spook insurance executives contemplating plans for next year in the Obamacare marketplaces, also known as exchanges. They want to know the rudiments of a replacement plan now and details not much later. ”I don’t think there’s a real clear path to repeal or replace or repair or anything,” said Kevin G. Fitzgerald, an insurance lawyer with Foley Lardner. ”Some of our clients will probably move forward on the assumption that something will happen to maintain the exchanges more or less the way they are. Others may pull out early.” Big, national insurers have said it would be hard to commit to the marketplaces next year unless they get a much better idea of what they’ll look like. Several had already scaled back coverage for this year, leaving many parts of the country with only one company selling through the marketplaces. Continued uncertainty could prompt even those holdouts to bail, said Fitzgerald. ”If in those states those carriers decide, ’We’ve lost enough and we’re going to sit this year out,’ there are no exchanges,” he said. ”And that certainly is a possibility.” The Trump administration has proposed regulations, initiated in the last days of the Obama regime, intended to steady the market. Tweaks may include crackdowns on sick consumers who join plans outside periods and allowing insurers to charge slightly more for older members, Huffington Post and Politico have reported. Those changes — plus assumptions that Republicans will eventually have a replacement plan helping Obamacare patients maintain coverage — could reassure insurance companies, said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a consulting firm. ”I’m not saying it would be completely ” he said. ”You probably would see some plans get out of the market. But if plans start to believe there’s a solution, they’re going to want to stay in because getting in and out of the market costs money.” What industry really wants is certainty government will continue helping consumers pay for coverage — one of the most contentious and uncertain aspects. For two years the House of Representatives has legally challenged one type of subsidy — federal payments to reduce costs for income consumers. The Obama administration defended the subsidies in court, but insurers worry that Trump officials could drop the defense or that a judge could declare the payments illegal. Industry interest in the suit ”is incredibly high,” said Todd Van Tol, a partner with Oliver Wyman, a consultancy with many insurers as clients. The disappearance of those subsidies, he said, ”would likely trigger a fairly significant insurer pullback in fairly rapid order.” Even the most publicly minded insurers might cease offering individual Obamacare plans if an uncertain market threatened their financial stability, said Ceci Connolly, CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, a trade group of nonprofit carriers. ”We want to be able to do this, but if there’s potential for significant losses it would be irresponsible to maybe do it,” she said. ”There seems to be a growing recognition of the challenge ahead and also the need for stability, but boy — this clock is coming up fast.” Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can follow Jay Hancock on Twitter: @jayhancock1.

Updated at 2:49 p. m. ET, An Arizona woman who has lived in the U. S. for more than two decades was arrested Wednesday night after her regular with immigration officials and has been deported to Mexico. She was sent to Nogales, Mexico, on Thursday, reports Katherine Fritcke of member station KJZZ. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos’ deportation — which has been protested by dozens of activists, some of whom were arrested late Wednesday — is a glimpse of how immigration enforcement is changing under the Trump administration. She had had a deportation order against her for several years but was not considered a priority for deportation during the Obama administration. But two weeks ago, President Trump issued an executive order changing deportation priorities Garcia de Rayos is believed to be one of the first people deported under that expanded enforcement. The New York Times reports that Garcia de Rayos, now 35, was just 14 when she ”sneaked across the border” from a poor district in Mexico into southern Arizona. Her lawyer tells Fritcke that she missed the cutoff for DACA status by four months. Garcia de Rayos married a man who is also in the country illegally, and they had two children, who are U. S. citizens. In 2008, Garcia de Rayos was arrested while she was working at a water park, during a raid carried out by County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio’s workplace raids have been challenged in court as unconstitutional the case is ongoing.) In 2009, she was convicted of possessing false papers. In 2013, ICE says, an order for her deportation was finalized. But Garcia de Rayos was allowed to continue to live in Arizona, under supervision and with regular with ICE, as member station KJZZ reports. You may remember that former President Barack Obama instructed the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize some deportations over others. He told immigration authorities to focus on people in the country illegally who were convicted of certain kinds of crimes — including aggravated felonies, terrorism or gang activity. Crimes directly related to immigration status weren’t a priority, he said. In 2014, Obama said the goal was to deport felons, criminal and gang members, ”not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” (Obama still deported more people than any previous U. S. president, and last year The Marshall Project reported that most of those deportations involved people with no criminal conviction or whose only conviction was .) But on Jan. 25, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the secretary of homeland security to ”prioritize for removal” anyone in the country illegally who has been convicted of, or even just charged with, any criminal offense. That’s ”far broader” than Obama’s system, as The Atlantic reported. Garcia de Rayos realized the situation had changed when she walked into the ICE offices for her on Wednesday. The Times reports that an activist suggested she could go into into hiding or find refuge at a church, but she ”decided to face the odds.” ”The only crime my mother committed was to go to work to give a better life for her children,” Garcia de Rayos’ teenage daughter said, according to the Times. Then Garcia de Rayos and her lawyer entered the building, as supporters gathered outside the building. They waited for hours. In the evening, a van attempted to drive away from the ICE office. Immigration activists identified Garcia de Rayos inside and sat on the ground around the vehicle, the confrontation on Facebook. Several of the protesters were arrested. The group of demonstrators blocked the van’s movement for a while, but it later left the ICE office through a different route. On Thursday, Garcia was deported. Her daughter Jacqueline spoke at a press conference Thursday. ”To me it’s sad, seeing what this world has come to, seeing that this world has so much hate,” she said. ”Seeing my mom in that van, it’s unexplainable.”

Tuesday was a busy day for education policy. Betsy DeVos, you may have heard, was confirmed as secretary of education with an unprecedented tiebreaker vote. The House of Representatives also voted to throw out a lot of rules that were decided on just last year. These rules tell states how to comply with the new federal education law with regard to identifying and improving underperforming schools, as well as evaluating programs in higher education. And Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican representing Kentucky’s 4th District, introduced a bill in the House as well. Here is the text of that bill, in full: ”The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.” Speculation about DeVos and what her leadership might bring has generated millions of clicks this week. For insight on these other two developments, I called up David Schoenbrod. He’s a professor at New York Law School and the author of several books about the congressional role in crafting law and regulation. Spoiler alert: The Education Department is unlikely to be eliminated, particularly by a bill that declines to specify who or what would take over its $68 billion annual budget and the functions of data collection, oversight, civil rights enforcement and student aid, among others. ”Whatever you think about the Department of Education, the idea you could eliminate it with a bill is just posturing,” Schoenbrod says. ”Posturing is not something that’s just done by Democrats or by Republicans. It’s done by both.” This issue is personal for Schoenbrod. Back in the 1970s, Schoenbrod was staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, fighting for Congress to ban lead in gasoline — which made its way into air, water and the bloodstreams of children with harmful and deadly effect. Because legislators did not specify a timeline or a mechanism, he argues, enforcement was delayed by a decade. ”They voted for the symbolism but didn’t want to take responsibility for how it was done,” Schoenbrod says. In the field of environmental law, this form of kicking the can down the road is known as ”symbolic legislation.” The fate of these regulations, part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, is a slightly different matter. But it’s also something that Schoenbrod has experience with. The House is invoking an obscure power granted by something called the Congressional Review Act. As our colleagues at Planet Money recently explained, this 1996 law gives Congress the power to nullify any regulation passed in the last 60 days, with the president’s signoff. This basically comes into play only when there is a changeover of government, as we have now. President Trump has already paused the implementation of these ESSA rules, and the White House has reportedly said that he will sign the revocation if it passes the Senate. Will it? The lead senator on education issues is Lamar Alexander. The Tennessee Republican chairs the powerful committee that handles education. His office declined to say what he might do, but referred us to the public statements he made when these rules were finalized. He didn’t like the one. On accountability, he said, ”I will carefully review this final version before deciding what action is appropriate.” Noted. Schoenbrod has long advocated for requiring Congress to vote on the details of how laws are implemented. ”The Constitution was against taxation or regulation without representation,” he argues. But the Congressional Review Act as it now exists is different. It just gives Congress the power to throw the rules out, not the responsibility for making new ones. In this case, if the House bill passes the Senate and receives the president’s signature, it will then be up to the states to decide how to fulfill ESSA when it comes to defining, and correcting, schools that consistently perform below expectations. This ”could disrupt the progress states have made over the past year to transition to ESSA,” says Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, ”unless the U. S. Department of Education acts quickly and provides states with the clarity they need around the implementation of the law.” Given the upheaval, most states will wait until September of this year to submit their final accountability plans, which will be unlikely to go into effect until the school year, says Jeremy Anderson, president of the Education Commission of the States. Making their own policy, rather than simply enforcing federal rules, would be ”a big heavy lift for the states. It’s a totally different mindset.”

Updated at 3:20 p. m. ET President Trump started the day by blasting a Democratic senator who revealed criticism of Trump from his nominee to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Judge Neil Gorsuch told Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal that he found President Trump’s recent attacks on judges to be ”demoralizing” and ”disheartening.” Gorsuch made the comments during a private meeting, and a member of the Supreme Court nomination team escorting Gorsuch through the meetings also confirmed the remarks to NPR’s Tamara Keith. Even though Gorsuch’s team confirmed the comments, Trump says they were ”mischaracterized.” He also attacked Blumenthal for exaggerating his military service. While running for Senate in 2010, he was discovered to have falsely said that he had served in Vietnam. Blumenthal described his meeting with Gorsuch on Wednesday by telling reporters, ”He certainly expressed to me that he is disheartened by the demoralizing and abhorrent comments made by President Trump about the judiciary.” Gorsuch has been meeting with senators in preparation for confirmation hearings. Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska revealed even stronger comments by Gorsuch when they met. ”He got pretty passionate,” Sasse told MSNBC on Thursday. ”He said, ’Any attack on any of’ — I think his word to me was — ’brothers or sisters of the robe is an attack on all judges. ’” Trump’s attacks on the judiciary are highly unusual for a sitting president. Gorsuch has been a member of that branch of government as a federal judge since 2006. Senators will be considering whether he will remain independent should he be on the Supreme Court. Trump began his latest attack last Friday with tweets disparaging federal Judge James L. Robart, who temporarily blocked the president’s ban on immigrants from seven countries. Trump first called Robart a ” judge,” called his ruling ”a terrible decision,” and then suggested Robart would be responsible if a terrorist attack should occur. At the Thursday afternoon press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on the assertion that Gorsuch wasn’t specifically talking about Trump’s tweet about the ” ” Judge Robart, pointing to a statement from former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, . H. who is helping Gorsuch. ”The judge was very clear that he was not commenting on a specific matter,” Spicer asserted, though it’s unclear why the Supreme Court nominee would bring up criticism of judges unless to talk about the president’s recent statements that did just that. And the statements also contradict Sasse’s account of their talk. On Tuesday, three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments about whether to lift Robart’s temporary block on the president’s executive order. Wednesday morning, Trump switched his attack to them, or at least one of them whom he did not name. The president told a gathering of chiefs of police and sheriffs that he doesn’t understand how any judge could rule against him. ”And I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I won’t call it biased. And we haven’t had a decision yet. But courts seem to be so political and it would be great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right,” Trump said. The statement Trump referred to is the federal law granting a president authority to restrict who enters the United States. Trump’s attack on Blumenthal refers back to a controversy during the senator’s 2010 campaign. The New York Times uncovered at the time that Blumenthal said at a 2008 event honoring veterans and service members, ”We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” Except Blumenthal had received several deferments from going to Vietnam, and served in the Marine reserves, though not overseas. Blumenthal later apologized and said he meant to say, ”I served during Vietnam.” Blumenthal responded to Trump’s tweet in an interview on CNN, and Trump was apparently watching. The president sent out another tweet falsely claiming CNN didn’t ask Blumenthal about the controversy over his military record. Jessica Taylor contributed.

This is day six without police patrolling the streets in Espirito Santo, a state in southern Brazil. And hundreds of army troops have not been able to quell a spasm of deadly violence there that has reportedly killed more than 100 people. ”This is happening because the state’s police are — in effect — on strike because their family and friends are blocking access to their stations, in a protest over low pay and poor conditions,” NPR’s Philip Reeves reports from Rio de Janeiro. Police are prevented by law from striking themselves, according to the Wall Street Journal. ”Espirito Santo is generally seen as a safe, and fairly quiet, place compared to Brazil’s big violent cities,” Philip says. But now, ”schools and shops are shut, and some residents are saying they’re too frightened to leave their homes.” The governor has requested hundreds of additional federal army troops to try to regain control. A spokeswoman for the police union told Reuters that the homicide rate now stands at six times the state’s daily average. In addition to the murders, ”merchants say some 250 stores have been sacked” and ”video has captured shootings and robberies in broad daylight on city streets,” the Journal reports. The state retailer association estimates the chaos has cost local businesses about $28. 87 million since the start of the crisis, according to Reuters. Brazil is in the middle of a major economic recession — as we’ve reported, it’s the worst in generations. That’s likely a root cause of this current lawlessness, according to the Journal. The state government ”has aggressively cut spending to offset lower commodity prices” and the shutdown of four processing plants ”has exacerbated the budget woes.” Meanwhile, there are rising concerns that the breakdown of law enforcement could spread to other cities. ”If we don’t tackle this it will be here today and across Brazil tomorrow,” Espírito Santo Gov. Paulo Hartung told reporters, according to the Journal. ”We need a lot of cohesion and firmness.”

Thousands more troops and billions more dollars are needed to break the war in Afghanistan out of a ”stalemate,” the top U. S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress on Thursday. Army Gen. John Nicholson also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that outside powers have increased their meddling in Afghanistan over the past year, especially Russia, in ways that make it tougher for the U. S. government in Kabul to make and keep gains against insurgents. That’s why the U. S. and its allies must send more troops and spend more money to help the Afghan military become more effective at attacking and defeating its enemies and keeping control of the ground they capture. ”Offensive capability is what will break the stalemate in Afghanistan,” Nicholson said. He did not detail exactly how many additional troops are needed. The general’s testimony launched America’s war back onto front pages. The conflict has been going badly but has been largely overshadowed by the historic presidential campaign and inauguration of President Trump. The new administration’s policy on Afghanistan is a question mark it seldom came up during the election. When Trump visited the military headquarters at U. S. Central Command responsible for the war on Monday, he did not mention it. Nicholson’s high profile warnings to Congress on Thursday put Afghanistan back at the top of the agenda for Trump and national security adviser Mike Flynn. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, . complained bitterly Thursday that the deadlock Nicholson described was the fault of former President Barack Obama. In 2012, Obama decided to settle for ”Afghan good enough,” leading to a steady withdrawal of American combat troops. There are still more than 13, 000 NATO troops — including 8, 400 U. S. service members — deployed to Afghanistan, but McCain said he’s been warning all along that the force is too small. What Nicholson called a stalemate, McCain said, ”was predicted — predicted — by those of us who know something about warfare.” Afghanistan is dealing with many of its same longstanding problems. Its weak, often shambolic central government cannot survive without heavy international financial support. Its military, which Nicholson said is improving, cannot win decisively against insurgents in key places or contested ground — and takes such heavy combat losses that it cannot get up to its full authorized strength. Nicholson urged Congress to increase support for Afghanistan’s U. S. and trained air force, which he said would help it turn the tide. Even so, the Taliban’s leaders can still repair to their safe havens in the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan. They enjoy protection from the criminal Haqqani Network in places such as Quetta, out of the reach of major U. S. combat power. Some challenges are new, however: Iran has begun to support the Taliban in Western Afghanistan, Nicholson said, and it’s also recruiting Shiite Afghans to join its campaigns against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, ISIS also wants to spread roots inside Afghanistan itself. The Kabul government is fighting a nascent ISIS presence as it also fights the Taliban, but Nicholson said Russia has begun claiming that isn’t so. Moscow has begun ”a public effort to legitimize the Taliban,” Nicholson said, that is aimed at undermining Kabul among its own citizens and warning neighboring countries that ISIS could spill over into their nations as it did in the Levant. ”This is a false narrative,” Nicholson told senators. He alluded to ”reports” about Russia supporting the Taliban directly. Later, he added: ”I believe its intent is to undermine the United States and NATO.” He pointed out that U. S. and Afghan forces have killed a number of ISIS leaders in Afghanistan, as well as terror bosses from who continue to use ungoverned spaces there to plot attacks as they did before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The counterterror mission is working, Nicholson said. That has the troops, drones and resources needed. But he said the U. S. and NATO need to send more troops to continue training Afghanistan’s regular troops, so they can resist the Taliban’s attacks, keep control of territory and reverse the ”stalemate.”

Updated on Feb. 10 at 1:40 p. m. ET. If President Trump were to call a meeting of his Cabinet today, he wouldn’t need a very big table. Or, he’d have to invite a bunch of Obama administration holdovers serving temporarily in acting roles. With the Senate’s confirmation this week of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Tom Price to lead Health and Human Services, Trump now has just seven members of his Cabinet confirmed. By this point in 2009, President Obama had 12 Cabinet members in place and President George W. Bush had his entire Cabinet. The Senate confirmation process has been unusually slow. According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office, Trump has the fewest Cabinet secretaries confirmed at this point in his presidency than any other president at least since World War II. ”You can’t play in the Super Bowl if you don’t have your team on the field,” said Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that is tracking the Trump administration’s progress in getting staffed up. ”They are in the Super Bowl,” Stier said of the Trump administration. ”They are running the most important organization on the planet, and they don’t have their team on the field. They don’t have their critical people in place and that’s vital to being able to do their jobs appropriately.” The Trump administration would like to place the blame firmly on Democrats in the Senate. ”It would help if the Democrats weren’t working overtime to unnecessarily block our very qualified nominees so that we could put leadership in place at each of the agencies,” said White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an email. But that is only part of the story. Facing pressure from an activated base, Democrats have Trump’s nominees. In remarks on the Senate floor, Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York described Trump’s nominees as ”a historically unqualified Cabinet.” Trump went with a number of picks who had little or no experience in the agencies they would be tasked to run. In some cases the nominees actively worked against the missions of the agencies. Another thing that slowed down the process: Candidates for Cabinet posts are typically working with the Office of Government Ethics to identify and unwind potential conflicts of interest before their names are even announced. But that didn’t happen this time. Two picks still haven’t completed that process. And that’s only talking about the very top level. ”There are an extraordinary number of appointed positions that require Senate confirmation that the Trump administration has yet to even name somebody on,” said University of Akron political science professor David B. Cohen. ”I mean, we’re talking about almost 700 key positions.” So far just 35 have been named, says Stier of the Partnership for Public Service. ”If they don’t focus on getting great people in place that understand how to use government effectively,” he says, ”they won’t get done what they say they want to do and they won’t respond well to the crises that will inevitably come up on their watch.” But Trump is about on pace with Obama in terms of naming people for those spots, and even ahead of other previous presidents. Stier says vacancies near the top of agencies are undesirable but certainly aren’t unheard of. In 2009, he says, the Treasury Department didn’t get its No. 2 official confirmed until May — which he wants to make clear was a very bad thing, in the midst of the financial crisis. A White House official tells NPR the administration is not behind in picking undersecretaries and deputies, pointing to the past two administrations where many appointments didn’t happen until late February or March.

For all the talk of Hollywood smut rotting the moral fabric of society, it’s worth noting that, when the public demanded the industry embrace a franchise whose only claim to fame was smut, it chose instead to keep things . Fifty Shades of Grey, the first book in E. L. James’s massively popular trilogy of erotica that began life as Twilight fanfiction, gave Universal Pictures a golden ticket to push the boundaries of sex in mainstream cinema. Lord knows the fanbase wasn’t clamoring for the story. Yet when Sam ’s adaptation hit theaters in 2015, it submitted too much: to studio insistence not to push the film past an R rating to James’s limp, insipid plotting (though not, blessedly, to her grotesque ear for dialogue) and, ironically for a movie whose pivotal scene is a contract negotiation, to a stipulation in lead Jamie Dornan’s contract that the audience would never see laconic ubermensch Christian Grey’s . In short, the film was impotent. Now the contracts are out again for the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, and they must have been because it was filmed with a concluding entry set to hit theaters next year. Dornan and Dakota Johnson, as the now corrupted college grad Anastasia Steele, have returned, as have their mostly nude bodies — beholden to the same magic camera keeping her parts on full display while leaving his out of frame. But is out, having reached a creative impasse with James that was likely far more emotionally intense than the chemistry between Johnson and Dornan. In her place is James Foley, whose varied filmography includes relevant romance thrillers like Fear and After Dark, My Sweet as well as Glengarry Glen Ross, another film about folks desperate to, shall you say, get down to business. The second film is marginally better than the first, because it’s marginally kinkier. Whereas in more innocent times Ana ran out on her billionaire beau as soon as he exposed her to his whipping side, here she lets him guide her (and us) to far more insidious activities, including a bit with beads at a masked ball recalling the far smarter recent arthouse hit The Handmaiden. True deviance may remain outside the range of shades visible to this franchise, but at least Foley gets to shoot these escapades coherently, without the endless and that flogged the first entry’s attempts to titillate. (We still have to make do with Johnson’s parade of arched backs and flabbergasted as our only roadmap of the actual dirty deeds, but hey, it beats hearing about Ana’s ”inner goddess. ”) After walking out on her man at the end of the previous film with a gesture that redefined ”anticlimactic,” Ana has landed an assistant job at a Seattle indie publisher. But she slowly allows herself to be pulled back into Christian’s orbit, once the businessman makes clear he no longer has any interest in the dominance contract he spent the entire first movie pestering her to sign. As Ana lets Christian back into her life, despite her efforts to maintain her stature as an independent woman, she can’t put a cork on his need to dominate her every move: The man deposits large sums into her bank account without permission, has his company buy hers to give himself power over her place of work, and provides her with an endless wardrobe of designers for the aforementioned masquerade. Even when she fends off her boss’s advances and takes his place as the publisher’s fiction editor, she only does so with Christian’s aid: one male CEO calls another, and suddenly the young woman’s sexual harassment horror story can be believed. These tweakings of relationship power dynamics are intriguing, especially once Ana internalizes all this and still chooses to venture into her boyfriend’s infamous ”Red Room” herself. But the film soon sidelines them for a look into Christian’s past, a. k. a. ”Why am I turned on by weird stuff? There must be a simple psychological reason.” All the burn marks on his chest, the entirely unconvincing moans he makes in his sleep (Dornan remains as charismatic as an ironing board) — they point to a childhood characterized by paternal abuse, an addict mother who died young, and an icy older friend who saw fit to molest him as a teenager, thereby informing his lifelong approach to women. This Elena Lincoln, is given the obvious nickname ”Mrs. Robinson,” and is played with a small flicker of Anne camp by Kim Basinger. ”He needs a submissive in life, not just in the bedroom,” she growls at Ana, words of true emotional heft if ever any existed. Mixing elegance with filth onscreen is not an easy feat, and production designer Nelson Coates is to be commended for deftly balancing both. The silliness of a masked ball blends with the infantilizing sensation of doing the nasty on your man’s childhood bed the wonders of a boat sailing through Puget Sound clashes with the full, lurid kink arsenal of the Red Room. But none of this can cover up the essential thinness of James’s books, already stretched like gruel by the halfway point, when the narrative starts sagging uncontrollably. (The screenwriter this Niall Leonard, is James’s husband.) False dramas perk up, then fade away. One of Christian’s former submissives (Bella Heathcote) appears, then vanishes, to demonstrate how this bad boy drove all his old lovers mad. A death scare in a helicopter is far too silly to be anything other than a . This series, we are learning, is not truly for adults. If it were, we could do away with the tendencies more common among the book adaptations (like, er, Twilight). So Darker, like its predecessor, barely qualifies as a movie. But it’s not meant to be a movie, is it? What we have is softcore: Story of O with a Taylor Swift theme song. And while the sequel may be dirtier than the first one, in the world this series seeks to inhabit, it’s still child’s play. Perhaps Fifty Shades Freed will venture even more into the world of smut, but the good money’s on Universal getting out of the game without fully giving into its inner goddess. Might as well hang up the whips now.

President Trump met with airline executives on Thursday morning and had a message they were happy to hear, vowing to roll back regulations, lower corporate taxes and modernize the air traffic control system. Trump said his private pilot, ”a real expert” and a ”smart guy,” has told him that the government has been buying the wrong type of equipment in its effort to upgrade the current control system. He said U. S. airports ”used to be the best, now they’re at the bottom of the rung.” He also said there are no fast trains in the U. S. ”but if you go to China, you go to Japan, they have fast trains all over the place.” The Obama administration pushed to invest in rail in the U. S. but was met with resistance from Congress and several state governors. Trump said the U. S. has an obsolete ”plane system, obsolete airports, obsolete trains, we have bad roads,” vowing his administration will change all that. ”You’re going to be so happy with Trump,” the president said. Airline CEOs have long expressed frustration with the country’s airports, an airline expert told NPR’s David Schaper ahead of Thursday’s meeting. ”Airlines have been voicing complaints for a long time about the taxes their passengers pay and infrastructure falling behind, you know, but today’s meeting is a little unprecedented,” Joe Schwieterman of DePaul University said. [They’ll] actually have a new president’s ear who’s made some comments that he’s willing to think big.” The president reiterated past remarks that the U. S. has spent trillions in the Middle East and ”got nothing” — not even ”a little tiny oil well.” Trump also announced he would unveil his tax reform plans in the next two or three weeks, vowing, ”It will be phenomenal.”

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrives Thursday in Washington for talks on Friday with Donald Trump, an effort by this longtime Asian ally to get a better read on the way forward with the unpredictable new U. S. president. The trip comes just a week after the Trump administration made its first appearance overseas. U. S. Defense Secretary James Mattis traveled to South Korea and Japan to reassure them of the security alliance between the U. S. and the Pacific countries. ”We had very candid, frank, but very warm discussions,” Mattis said. He struck a friendly tone with leaders in Japan and South Korea and his positions diverged from Trump’s comments during the campaign, when he criticized the amount Tokyo pays for hosting some 50, 000 U. S. troops. ”Why don’t they pay 100 percent?” Trump said last August. ”Japan has been a model of of burden sharing,” Mattis said. He also played down the possibility of any U. S. military action over contested islands in the East and South China seas, saying issues should be ”left up to the diplomats.” ”I don’t see any reason right now to think we cannot maintain stability in the region, especially with China,” Mattis said. While Mattis was making his trip, his boss, President Trump, was criticizing Japan in the press and on Twitter. In an interview, Trump accused Japan of manipulating its currency to help its exports, and took aim at Japanese carmaker Toyota for planning to build a plant in Mexico. ”There’s always this thing in the Trump team of the good cop and the bad cop. Mattis is the good cop and Trump can be the bad cop, so maybe it’s all for theater. Who knows?” says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Sophia University. ”Trump tweets something and the whole conditions are going to change. So we are getting into a situation that is really not accountable. Trump is not held accountable to anybody in any significant way at the moment.” Japan denies deliberately devaluing its currency, the yen. Abe said ahead of his Washington trip that he would explain Japan’s monetary policy in this week’s talks. It’s part of a summit that’s expected to be heavy on trade issues. ”What Abe has to impress [on] President Trump is basically money, basically jobs. We in Japan will invest X amount of money in the U. S. as long as you have our back in Asia. You have our back against North Korea, you have our back against China,” says William Pesek, the editor of Barron’s Asia. To get the security Japan wants, Abe will present a package of ideas for investing as much as $150 billion into U. S. infrastructure, including rail projects. President Trump made improving infrastructure a key campaign pledge. ”We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports. That, believe me, folks, is what our country deserves,” Trump said in a speech last August, But some of Abe’s ideas are expected to be projects that are a tough sell in the U. S. Trump may want to see rail, but buyers in American states and cities are skeptical. ”Americans have never been all that interested in rail,” Pesek says. ”This is a repackaging of what we’ve seen before. There’s nothing new or innovative here. What’s different is you have a very transactional government now in the U. S. You have a transactional [Japanese] prime minister, and it will be interesting to see the extent to which they can strike deals.” The will be conducted in a traditional setting — at the White House — but will move on to Trump’s private golf resort in Palm Beach, Fla. That’s where the two leaders are expected to continue their discussions over a round of golf.

With the Dakota Access Pipeline now cleared to cross under a reservoir in the Missouri River, one of the two Native American tribes fighting the pipeline has filed a legal challenge to the plan, according to the Associated Press. The Cheyenne River Sioux ”filed a legal challenge in federal court in Washington, D. C. on Thursday,” the AP says. Along with the Standing Rock Sioux, the tribe has taken a stand against the pipeline on the grounds that it poses a risk to their water supply and would infringe on sacred land. The move comes one day after Energy Transfer Partners, the builders of the pipeline, formally received an easement from the Army Corps of Engineers. That prompted the company to start drilling beneath Lake Oahe, the reservoir in the heart of the disputed area. ETP spokeswoman Vicki Granado says the company expects to complete work in that portion of the pipeline within two months — and that it could be in service within three months. The pipeline consists of some 1, 172 miles of diameter pipe that will carry crude oil from North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. As NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported this week, the Army’s public statements about the pipeline changed markedly after President Trump was inaugurated: ”In a Jan. 18 notice published in the Federal Register the Army had said it would accept public comments on the project through Feb. 20, still nearly two weeks away. ”On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process, and last week the Army said that it had been directed to expedite its review of the route.” After the Army Corps of Engineers granted the easement, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s chairman, Harold Frazier, issued a statement that promised to carry on the legal fight. ”It is clear that the coyotes which have been hiding in the shadows are taking advantage of this full lunacy,” Frazier wrote. ”We will have to renew our fight and spend more of our precious resources resisting this onslaught yet again.” The heated dispute over the pipeline has resulted in at its proposed path — along with a campaign calling for people and public entities to cut ties with the banks that are funding the pipeline project. As we reported Wednesday, that campaign led two cities — Seattle, Wash. and Davis, Calif. — to pull more than $3 billion in annual business from Wells Fargo.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says the U. S. needs to ”do a better job to vet” residents of seven countries that the Trump administration has temporarily banned from entering the U. S. In an interview with Morning Edition host Rachel Martin, the retired Marine Corps general said the ban, which has been blocked by a district court order that is now being reviewed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ”is not based on religion in any way.” He said the seven countries — Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Yemen — are unable to vet their citizens and ”provide us with information that we’re comfortable with.” Kelly said the administration is considering requiring residents of the seven countries to provide lists of the websites they’ve visited and their passwords, to enable officials ”to get on those websites to see what they’re looking at.” Kelly said some of the other ”ballpark things” that his department is considering include looking at applicants’ social media use ”to see what they tweet,” as well as financial information and cellphone contacts so that officials can check the numbers against databases kept by the U. S. and the European Union. Kelly took the blame for the rocky rollout of the travel ban, and as he said in a hearing on Tuesday, he admitted he should have prepared congressional leaders ahead of the policy’s implementation. He told NPR that in the future he will tell administration officials, ”OK, give that to me and I will roll it out and I will tell you how I’m going to do it.” Kelly said the rollout will include notification to select members of Congress and the press. Kelly showed a willingness to work with the news media that has not been evident from some other members of the Trump administration. It is ”very important to engage the press,” he told NPR, ”because if you engage the responsible press, they will help you write an accurate story.” It may ”not be the story you want,” Kelly said, ”but it will be an accurate story.” Kelly said ”the great success” of the U. S. has been people from diverse backgrounds coming here ”following every kind of religion,” or ”not following any religion at all.” Asked about President Trump’s comments that his promised border wall was ”getting designed right now,” Kelly said he is traveling to the Southwest this week to speak with Customs and Border Protection agents. He said those he has spoken with so far have asked for a barrier they can see through so they can react quicker. ”You can’t build it all at once,” he said, but the administration is deciding ”where to put it immediately given financing” and construction capacity. Kelly said any wall ”has to be backed up by people, and it has to be reinforced, if you will, by technology.” As the former commander of U. S. Southern Command, Kelly said it ”breaks my heart” when he hears about people from Central America who have lost their lives trying to enter the country: ”It’s a humanitarian thing to me to somehow create an environment that deters them from leaving.” Kelly said the U. S. ”has a moral responsibility” to help people in those nations economically, with investment. He also said the drug demand in the U. S. is creating most of the problems in countries to the south, and even ”if we don’t care about” drug use here, ”we ought to care about what it does to other countries.”

Luther Strange will go from being Alabama’s attorney general to being the state’s junior senator, as Gov. Robert Bentley says he will appoint Strange to the seat vacated by Sen. Jeff Sessions — who’s slated to be sworn in as the new U. S. attorney general Thursday morning. ”I am greatly honored and humbled to accept the appointment to Alabama’s Senate seat vacated by Senator Jeff Sessions,” Strange said in a news release from the governor’s office. ”Senator Sessions’ commitment to public service is nearly unparalleled in Alabama history and his departure from the Senate leaves tremendous shoes to fill.” In choosing Strange, Bentley is making the pick many had expected. But the situation has also been a topic of talk both inside and outside of Alabama, because Strange has worked on several prominent legal cases — including an inquiry into allegations that Bentley had an affair with an aide and possibly used state funds to either facilitate the relationship or cover it up. Those allegations led to an effort to impeach the governor last year — an effort that was put on hold in November at the request of Strange, who said his office was conducting its own investigation. A special election to choose the permanent holder of Sessions’ vacated Senate seat will take place in 2018. Bentley and Strange are planning to address the media at 10 a. m. ET Thursday, the governor’s office says. Strange ”is expected to be a conservative voice in the Senate much like his predecessor,” NPR’s Debbie Elliott says. ”He’s chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and has been active in fights against federal environmental regulations, Obamacare and transgender bathroom directives.” Strange filed Alabama’s appeal against federal court rulings that made marriage legal nationwide — although the state’s chief justice at the time, Roy Moore, was the most outspoken public critic of that change. In addition, Strange served as the coordinating counsel for the Gulf Coast states in the litigation and settlement stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Both Strange and Bentley were first elected in 2010. There have been calls for Bentley’s resignation since last March, when allegations of an affair were made by the recently fired head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. As Debbie reported last spring, ”Bentley, who is 73, denies a physical affair. But he has admitted to making inappropriate remarks to his former senior political adviser, Rebekah Caldwell Mason. And tape recordings of those conversations have been made public.”

The Senate has confirmed President Trump’s nominee Jeff Sessions to be the next attorney general, bringing an end to a bitter confirmation fight that has dredged up past accusations of racism against the Alabama senator. The vote was largely along party lines, with only centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia voting yes. Sessions himself voted ”present” on his own nomination. During the past month, Democrats have brought up the past allegations of racism against Sessions, which sank his nomination by President Ronald Reagan three decades ago to be a federal judge. The . S. attorney admitted he had made insensitive remarks and called some top civil rights groups such as the ACLU ” .” In his confirmation hearing, Sessions pushed back, saying that his comments were taken out of context. ”I did not harbor the kind of animosities and discrimination ideas I was accused of. I did not,” Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee, though he admitted that, ”I didn’t know how to respond and didn’t respond very well” during his first failed confirmation. However, his nomination had drawn some strong and unprecedented rebukes from his colleagues across the aisle. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, . was formally silenced by the Senate after she read a letter Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1986 objecting to Sessions’ ultimately unsuccessful nomination to the federal bench. The unusual rebuke came because of a rule barring senators from using ”any form of words impute to another Senator.” Last month, Sen. Cory Booker, . J. became the first sitting senator ever to testify against a fellow senator’s confirmation, arguing he has concerns regarding Sessions’ commitment to defending minorities, the LGBT community and voting rights. Rep. John Lewis, . the legendary civil rights leader with whom Trump got into a spat just before his inauguration, also testified against Sessions. Sessions is the former Alabama attorney general and was first elected to the Senate in 1996. He is one of the most conservative senators in the GOP conference and has been an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration. It was that shared worldview that led Sessions to become the first senator to endorse the billionaire real estate mogul back in February 2016. One of Sessions’ former top aides, Stephen Miller, left his office to work for Trump’s campaign and is now a senior White House adviser for policy who has had a heavy hand in crafting many recent executive orders. With Sessions’ confirmation, Trump will have one of his closest allies at the Justice Department at a critical time when the president needs help defending his controversial immigration and travel ban in the courts. Last month Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, after she announced she would not defend his executive order on immigration, replacing her with Dana Boente, the top federal prosecutor in suburban Virginia. Now, Sessions will assume the role of overseeing the defense of the executive order that halts people from seven countries from coming into the U. S. and stops any resettlement of Syrian refugees. Over the weekend, a federal judge temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect. On Tuesday night, Washington v. Trump was heard before the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Department of Justice argued that the president has wide purview over immigration and implementing national security measures and that the ban should be reinstated.

Updated at 6:35 p. m. ET, On Thursday, a panel of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that upheld a lower federal court’s decision to temporarily block a Jan. 27 executive order on immigration. The order suspends admissions for 120 days, bans Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocks travelers from seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia — for 90 days. The order also capped the total number of refugees allowed into the country this year at 50, 000, far lower than the 110, 000 that the Obama administration had allotted, as we’ve reported. In a tweet, President Trump signaled that his administration would appeal. On Friday, an administration official told NPR’s Tamara Keith that the White House is reviewing every option, including a possible appeal to the Supreme Court on the lower court’s temporary restraining order, and the administration is confident it will win on the merits of the case. The official also says the White House expects to issue other executive orders ”that will keep the country safe from terrorism.” Here are five key takeaways from Thursday’s ruling: 1. White House DENIED, From the judges’ ruling: ”[We] hold that the Government has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, nor has it shown that failure to enter a stay would cause irreparable injury, and we therefore deny its emergency motion for a stay. . .. ”For the foregoing reasons, the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal is DENIED.” Lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the ban on travelers from the seven countries needed to be reinstated as a matter of national security. The 9th Circuit panel did not accept that argument, writing, ”The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States.” 2. Administration’s ”shifting interpretations” didn’t help, The judges said the court could not ”rely upon” statements by White House officials about how the executive order would be implemented, given the changing initial statements about whom the order would affect. From the ruling: ”At this point, however, we cannot rely upon the government’s contention that the executive order no longer applies to lawful permanent residents. . .. Moreover, in light of the government’s shifting interpretations of the executive order, we cannot say that the current interpretation by White House counsel, even if authoritative and binding, will persist past the immediate stage of these proceedings.” Since the executive order was signed, different officials have offered varying guidance about whom it affects. For example, the initial word was that green card holders, those who are permanent legal residents in the U. S. would be barred, but the Department of Homeland Security later said green card holders could come and go if they obtained waivers. Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced that White House Counsel Don McGahn had issued ”authoritative guidance” and that green card holders ”no longer need a waiver because if they are a legal permanent resident they won’t need it anymore.” The judges also questioned how the federal government was making decisions on the implementation of the travel ban, writing, ”The White House counsel is not the president, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the executive departments.” 3. Judiciary has authority to review Trump’s order, Attorneys for the Justice Department said both in briefings and during Tuesday’s oral arguments that courts lack the authority to review the president’s travel ban, as NPR’s Joel Rose reported. But the court wasn’t swayed by the argument that the president’s order is unreviewable. From the ruling: ”[T]he government has taken the position that the president’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections. . .. There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy. ”It is beyond question, that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action.” 4. States can challenge the ban, The states of Washington and Minnesota argued in their lawsuit that individuals, businesses and universities were directly hurt by the travel ban. ”For example, professors from the state university system who were overseas when that order took effect . .. could not get back into the country,” NPR’s Joel Rose reported. The judges agreed that the states had a right to challenge the president’s executive order on those grounds. An attorney for the Trump administration had argued on Tuesday that the states do not have standing to challenge the executive order because it was ”well within the president’s power.” From Thursday’s ruling: ”We therefore conclude that the states have alleged harms to their proprietary interests traceable to the executive order. The necessary connection can be drawn in at most two logical steps: (1) the executive order prevents nationals of seven countries from entering Washington and Minnesota (2) as a result, some of these people will not enter state universities, some will not join those universities as faculty, some will be prevented from performing research, and some will not be permitted to return if they leave.” 5. Religious discrimination claim wasn’t considered, The issue before the panel was fairly narrow: whether or not to overturn the lower court’s temporary restraining order. The lower court’s decision was based in part on the states’ claim that the executive order discriminated against refugees on the basis of their religion, and in so doing violated the Constitution. While Thursday’s ruling didn’t really consider that issue, the panel did acknowledge what it called the ”serious nature” of the religious discrimination claim: From the ruling: ”Washington also alleged that the Executive Order was not truly meant to protect against terror attacks by foreign nationals but rather was intended to enact a ’Muslim ban’ as the President had stated during his presidential campaign that he would do. ”The Government has not shown that it is likely to succeed on appeal on its arguments about, at least, the States’ Due Process Clause claim, and we also note the serious nature of the allegations the States have raised with respect to their religious discrimination claims. We express no view as to any of the States’ other claims.” Here’s the full text of Thursday’s ruling.

President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be spending their weekend getting to know each other at in Palm Beach, Fla. And that’s really the purpose of the club: to allow people to socialize at a spectacular estate built nearly a century ago by a wealthy heiress. The White House says the president will personally pick up the tab for his guest’s visit, thereby avoiding a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. That clause forbids U. S. officials from taking payments from foreign governments. Still, Trump will get something from the Abe visit: global attention to his exclusive club, which has fewer than 500 members. Robin Bernstein has been a member since the Trump club opened in 1995. ”It’s exquisite,” she says. ”Everything is done to perfection, from the imported stones from Europe. I don’t think Marjorie Merriweather Post spared any expense when she designed and had it built.” The magnificent home was built in the 1920s to be a . With its roof, arched doorways and soaring tower, it’s been described as a ”Moorish fantasy.” When Post, whose family made a fortune in the cereal business, died in 1973, she left her home to the federal government for use as a ”winter White House.” Several years later, the high expense of maintaining the property led the government to return it to Post’s foundation, and it was put up for sale. In 1985, Donald Trump became the buyer, picking up the estate and an adjacent beach property for some $10 million. Darrell Hofheinz, who covers real estate for the island’s paper, the Palm Beach Daily News, says Trump got a deal. ”If you can imagine 17 acres that has been really beautifully maintained,” he says. ”The house itself — the estimates ranged 124 rooms — the rooms have soaring ceilings. The stonework from the exterior is amazing. Plus, it has a tower.” From the tower, the view extends from the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean, hence the name . In Spanish, it means ”sea to the lake.” In 1995, Trump converted the residence into a private club with tennis courts, its own beach, a dining room and guest rooms for members. Recently, the club doubled the price of memberships to $200, 000. Trump also put in a ballroom, helping make the club a prime venue for Palm Beach society. Bernstein says, ”I’ve been to concerts there — Bocelli, Beach Boys, Kenny G, Jay leno. Throughout the years, it’s just been really fun.” Charities pay a hefty fee to hold their events at . Hofheinz, of the Palm Beach Daily News, says, ”I think sometimes people forget that private clubs are open to make money, and that’s what President Trump opened the club to do.” For groups that hold fundraisers at Trump’s presidency has created problems. The American Red Cross had to defend its decision to hold its event last week at the club. The Cancer Institute is going ahead with its fundraiser later this month but is promising to avoid ”controversial venues” in the future. For Palm Beach residents, Trump’s decision to make his ”winter White House” is a turning out to be a headache. Trump’s visit last weekend shut down the island’s main thoroughfare, paralyzing traffic and hurting businesses during the tony enclave’s peak season. The town’s former mayor, Jack McDonald, says locals are starting to understand what hosting a president means. ”I’ve actually seen some comments from members of the club who are very upset about what this has become. And it’s going to get worse,” he says. Palm Beach officials say they’re working to improve traffic when Trump is in town. And he’s doing his part. He’s putting in a helipad to get him from the airport to his estate without a motorcade.

Updated at 2:30 p. m. ET, At a joint news conference Friday, President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought to shed any perceptions of mistrust between two countries that have been longtime allies. In no uncertain terms, both leaders upheld their friendly relations — both diplomatic and personal — as an alliance with a bright future. The U. S. friendship is the ”cornerstone of peace and stability in the Pacific region,” President Trump told reporters gathered in the East Room at the White House. The news conference capped a morning of discussion between Trump and Abe in the Oval Office, and it anticipates a round of golf they plan to play Saturday at Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. During Trump’s second visit from a foreign leader since taking office, both men covered some of the lingering questions Trump has raised about their countries’ alliance — from security agreements to monetary policy. ”Bilateral cooperation is essential,” Trump said — a point echoed later by Abe, who promised to ”deepen bilateral relations” by establishing a dialogue by their respective . Key to that cooperation, both leaders asserted, will be Japanese investment in the United States. That includes a promise from Abe that Japanese automakers will create jobs stateside, and that Japanese money and technical will help the U. S. infrastructure spending promised by Trump — including a lighthearted pitch for the maglev trains that have become iconic in Japan. As NPR’s Elise Hu reports, that promise is part of a Japan hopes to effect with regard to another key issue. ”To get the security Japan wants, Abe will present a package of ideas for investing as much as $150 billion into U. S. infrastructure, including rail projects. President Trump made improving infrastructure a key campaign pledge.” Those issues of security, mentioned by Elise, were also brought to the fore Friday by both leaders. ”Thank you for hosting our armed forces,” Trump told Abe at one point — a shift in tone from his presidential campaign, during which Trump lamented that Japan and other allies ”do not pay us what they should be paying us, because we are providing a tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune.” Elise notes that U. S. Defense Secretary James Mattis also took a friendlier tack in his visit to the country last week, when he said that ”Japan has been a model of of .” On Friday, Trump similarly emphasized Japan’s security in the region, mentioning his ”very warm conversation” Thursday with Chinese Xi Jinping — and the good relations that may come of it — as being of benefit to Japan. He and Abe both asserted the importance of ”freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, where Japan has been unnerved by perceived Chinese encroachment. Of course, even at a conversation nominally about relations, Trump could not escape questions about his travel ban, which has been put on hold while a lawsuit works its way through federal court. On Thursday night, the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary restraining order that suspended the ban. ”We will continue to go through the court process and, ultimately, I have no doubt we will win that particular case,” Trump told reporters Friday. He also suggested the administration would be announcing something related to ”additional security for our country” — though he did not clarify. Meanwhile, however, he was content to laud the ”good bond, good chemistry” he is developing with Abe. ”I’ll let you know if it changes,” Trump added, ”but I don’t think it will.”

Updated at 3:45 p. m. ET, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U. S. in December included a discussion of U. S. sanctions imposed by Barack Obama, according to new reports that contradict what the White House has said about the matter. The sanctions included the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats when they were announced in late December, they drew a notably muted response — and no retaliation — from Moscow. Citing current and former U. S. officials, The Washington Post reports, ”Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were interpreted by some senior U. S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.” The question of the contacts’ legality largely rests in the Logan Act, which bans unauthorized U. S. citizens from communicating with a foreign government ”with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government . .. in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” The Logan Act was passed in 1799 — but there are no recorded prosecutions under the law. It’s been known that Flynn had contacts — text messages and at least one phone conversation — with the Russian ambassador before President Trump’s inauguration. The White House has said nothing improper took place, although its explanations for those contacts have shifted. In an interview this week, Flynn twice flatly denied discussing sanctions with Kislyak, the Post says. But the newspaper adds that Flynn’s spokesman later gave a more nuanced response, saying that Flynn ”indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” The topic has evolved over time: When NPR’s Tamara Keith reported on the issue on Jan. 13, she said, ”Sean Spicer, the spokesman and incoming White House press secretary, insisted all of this contact happened before President Obama announced the retaliation, and, as a result, Obama’s move to expel 35 Russian diplomats wasn’t a topic of conversation.” Those sanctions were announced on Dec. 29 within hours of saying all of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak had taken place on Dec. 28, Spicer clarified to NPR that a phone call between Flynn and Kislyak had taken place ”around the same time” the retaliation was announced. As to whether the two discussed the U. S. sanctions a potential Russian response, Spicer told Tamara it was ”doubtful.” After Obama imposed the sanctions, a retaliation seemed certain. Russia’s Foreign Ministry mocked the U. S. president online and recommended an expulsion of 35 American diplomats. But Russian President Vladimir Putin said, ”We will not expel anyone” — and invited the children of U. S. diplomats to visit the Kremlin’s Christmas tree, as NPR’s Lucian Kim reported. Lucian added, ”Putin said in his statement he will work to restore . S. relations based on the policies of incoming President Donald Trump.” On Sunday talk shows last month, when Vice President Pence was asked about the controversy, he said on CBS’s Face the Nation that it was ”strictly coincidental” that Flynn and the ambassador spoke around the time the sanctions were levied — and, he added, ”they did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.” Today, an administration official tells NPR and other news outlets that Pence had based his response on conversations he had with Flynn as he prepared to appear on the show. Responding to the most recent reports about Flynn, California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the allegation that Flynn might have secretly discussed ways to undermine U. S. sanctions ”raises serious questions of legality and fitness for office.” And if Flynn or other officials have misled the public about the matter, Schiff said, ”his conduct would be all the more pernicious, and he should no longer serve in this Administration or any other.” As the story of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak emerged last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence announced it would investigate allegations that Russia meddled in the U. S. elections the FBI has also been looking at the charges. The ranking Democrat on that Senate panel, Sen. Mark Warner, released a statement Friday saying the new reports ”underscore both the gravity and the urgency” of its investigation. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, who’s filing a story on the Flynn allegations for today’s All Things Considered, says she has reached out to senior Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Rep. Devin Nunes of California declined comment through a spokesman. As of Friday afternoon, she hadn’t heard back from Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. Pence and others in the incoming administration dismissed reports that members of the Trump team had been in touch with Russian officials during the presidential campaign. Shortly after the election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted telling a news agency, ”I don’t say that all of them, but a whole array of them, supported contacts with Russian representatives.” Flynn’s relationship with Russia has drawn questions before — particularly after the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency shared a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala in Moscow for the news channel Russia Today. On Friday, the Kremlin delivered a rather unenthusiastic denial of the Post’s story. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reports TASS media, ”said his understanding is that ’there were certain conversations (between Flynn and Kislyak)’ though ’it is better to double check the information in the Foreign Ministry.” ”Other than that the information is not correct,” Peskov added, according to TASS. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly contributed to this report.

President Trump and his top aides can’t seem to shake the Russian bear that follows them around. It put its paw on the scales of the U. S. presidential election last year, according to the U. S. intelligence community. It cost Trump his manager, Paul Manafort. And now the connections between Trump’s camp and Moscow might mean that another top aide, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, could be sent off to Siberia — metaphorically. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff of California, said Friday that if reports are accurate about Flynn’s contact with Russia’s ambassador ahead of sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama late last year, ”he should no longer serve in this administration or any other.” If more Democrats — or, critically, Republicans — join Schiff in calling for Flynn to step down, Trump could have the first big staff crisis of his new presidency. How did we get here? What might happen next? Here are the five things you need to know about the unfolding imbroglio over Trump, Flynn and the Kremlin. 1. Mike Flynn’s conversation, The story begins before the Trump administration even took office, as the outgoing Obama administration was wrapping up a last bit of ugly and difficult business. Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered his intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the U. S. presidential race, America’s top spies concluded. They did so by hacking into the email accounts of Democratic and former national security leaders and releasing what they stole. With the investigation concluded and the case made in public, Obama was under pressure to retaliate. He did so by expelling some Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover, closing sites they were using outside Washington and New York, and imposing economic sanctions on Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU another spy service, the FSB and their top leaders. Meanwhile Trump, Flynn and Mike Pence and the administration in waiting were getting ready for the inauguration and their own assumption of responsibility. On Christmas Day, before Obama announced his punitive measures against Russia, Flynn communicated with Russia’s ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak. That they talked is not in dispute. The issue is what they said. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that their discussions included, if not a warning by Flynn about the pending new sanctions, a promise that whatever Obama did, Trump could undo once he was in office. If Flynn was negotiating with the Russians on behalf of an administration not yet in power, that could technically be against the law — though it’s a law no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking, the Logan Act. The conversations also expose the Trump administration to more charges about secret collusion with Moscow. A spokesman for Flynn told the Post that he didn’t remember all of what was discussed and that it’s possible sanctions might have come up. But on Jan. 15 Pence said categorically on CBS’s Face the Nation that Flynn and Kislyak did not talk about sanctions. 2. The Watergate rule, One of the oldest saws in Washington runs like this: ”The is worse than the crime.” A senior administration official told NPR on Friday that Pence’s comments on Face the Nation were based entirely on the vice president’s discussion with Flynn — in other words, that Flynn owns the substance of what the White House said publicly in explaining his contact with the Russian ambassador. America’s intelligence services monitor the communications of foreign agents, and the detail about Flynn’s communication with Kislyak was reported (also in the Post) even before Trump took office. The Trump transition team said Flynn had only wished the ambassador Merry Christmas. Then the Trump camp said the two were making arrangements for a phone call between Trump and Putin. The Trump team talked about an invitation from Moscow for the U. S. to join peace talks about the war in Syria. The timing of the conversations, as Pence explained on television on Jan. 15, was ”strictly coincidental.” Now Flynn has said they may have talked about sanctions, but he doesn’t remember, and Pence is taking himself out of it, saying all of this is on Flynn. What also isn’t clear is what Trump might have known or when he knew it. Did Trump order that these conversations take place? Or was Flynn acting on his own? 3. What we don’t know, What hard evidence exists about any of this? The Washington Post and New York Times quote unnamed current and former national security sources who say they know what Flynn and Kislyak discussed — is there a transcript somewhere? A recording? Flynn’s explanation to the Post that he doesn’t remember the full discussion only raises eyebrows given that Putin responded to Obama’s démarche by taking the high road. Instead of retaliating by expelling Americans or taking other such measures, Putin did nothing. Is that because he knew he would get a better deal from Trump? ”It is regrettable that the Obama administration is ending its term in this manner,” Putin said at the time. ”Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family.” Trump weighed in on Twitter with praise for Putin, calling him ”very smart!” If the White House knows there is a recording, or a transcript or other information about Flynn’s contacts that substantiates the news accounts, Flynn could become too hot to handle. If it believes he can ride this out, it does not want to hand Democrats any kind of victory. 4. Palace intrigue, Trump’s White House team is still getting its sea legs. Trump is the unique president to never have held a government or military job and is still learning the basics of how the federal behemoth works even as he also tries to wield it to achieve his goals. Part of that unsteadiness is a scramble inside the president’s inner circle to determine who gets access to him and who has his imprimatur when acting with people outside the White House. Flynn, who had Trump to himself as national security aide during the presidential campaign, now has more competition from Defense Secretary James Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, chief strategist Steve Bannon and others. The leaks, responses and counterleaks in the press and on TV are the public face of an internal struggle for power. Compounding the difficulties for Flynn are resentments that may still be simmering against him across the Potomac River in the U. S. intelligence community. Obama fired Flynn after a chaotic run as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, during which he is said to have made enemies with his in the Defense Department and at least one rival spy service: the CIA. Flynn appeared to get the last laugh when he befriended a presidential hopeful who won a surprise victory and brought him into the White House. But to the degree there are unsettled scores within the intelligence community, his troubles might not be over. 5. Where does it all lead? Trump has never hidden his admiration for Putin or his public desire to improve America’s relationship with Russia. He — and voters — knew that Flynn had traveled to Russia after leaving his DIA job and had appeared on Russia’s propaganda arm, RT. Americans accepted the outcome of the election as legitimate and many supporters welcomed what they viewed as the disclosures by WikiLeaks of information stolen by Russia’s hackers. The political dilemma for Trump, however, is that Russia turns into a bad penny, popping up everywhere and never giving him room to maneuver on his own. Separately this week, Reuters reported that Trump didn’t know about the 2010 New START (strategic arms treaty) when he spoke to Putin on the phone — then denounced it anyway. The top U. S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress about Russian meddling in Afghanistan, which he said was intended to undermine NATO. Russia has increased its military attacks in Eastern Ukraine. Trump risks appearing as though all he does is react to initiatives taken by Putin. The other political danger for the White House is losing control of the story. Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the news reports ”underscore both the gravity and the urgency” of his committee’s investigation into ties between Trump and Russia. And his colleague Chris Murphy, . said separately he is glad at least one other investigation is taking place — the one being done by the FBI. NPR correspondents Tamara Keith and Tom Bowman contributed to this report.

The sudden deportation Thursday of an Arizona woman who had regularly checked in with U. S. immigration authorities for years has prompted a stark warning from Mexico’s government. Mexican nationals in the U. S. now face a ”new reality,” authorities warned in a statement. ”The case of Mrs. [Guadalupe] Garcia de Rayos illustrates the new reality that the Mexican community faces in the United States due to the more severe application of immigration control measures,” the statement reads. ”For this reason, the entire Mexican community should take precautions and keep in touch with the nearest consulate, to obtain the necessary help to face this kind of situation.” Mexico is urging its citizens in the U. S. to ”familiarize themselves with the different scenarios they may face and know where to go to receive updated guidance and know all their rights.” Garcia de Rayos, 35, had lived in the U. S. for more than two decades and her two children are both U. S. citizens. The has reported on the details of her case: ”In 2008, Garcia de Rayos was arrested while she was working at a water park, during a raid carried out by County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio’s workplace raids have been challenged in court as unconstitutional the case is ongoing.) In 2009, she was convicted of possessing false papers. In 2013, ICE says, an order for her deportation was finalized. ”But Garcia de Rayos was allowed to continue to live in Arizona, under supervision and with regular with ICE, as member station KJZZ reports.” That changed when she appeared for a on Wednesday, as activists and supporters rallied outside the ICE office. The next day, she was deported to Nogales, Mexico. Her deportation is seen as a sign of President Trump’s more aggressive deportation priorities compared with Barack Obama. The former president had prioritized the deportation of people who were convicted of crimes such as aggravated felonies, terrorism or activity in a criminal street gang. offenses were deemed lower priority. But Trump’s executive order on immigration, issued on Jan. 25, significantly broadens the government’s deportation priorities. It includes people in the U. S. illegally who ”have been convicted of any criminal offense,” ”have been charged with any criminal offense,” ”have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” or ”are subject to a final order of removal,” among other criteria. ”So certainly the scope of the executive order, if interpreted broadly, would be large enough to encompass most if not all of the unauthorized population,” Randy Capps of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute tells NPR’s Adrian Florido. Immigration advocates like Marisa Franco from the advocacy group Mijente fear that this is the start of a pattern. ”The battle lines have been drawn. We know that this case will be replicated in many places across the country,” Franco told reporters on a conference call. ”And we think it’s critically important for communities to take a stand.” Lawyers and activists say Garcia de Rayos’ deportation could make others in her position scared to speak with immigration authorities. In fact, her attorney Ray Ybarra Maldonado told Adrian that he will advise clients in the same position to seek sanctuary in a church. ”Or if you do show up, this is what’s going happen to you. But that’s gotta be the advice, because it’s no fun walking someone to the slaughter,” he said. Garcia de Rayos, flanked by her children, spoke to reporters in Nogales late Thursday. ”I’m doing this for my kids so they have a better life. I will keep fighting so they can keep studying in their home country,” she said, according to The Associated Press. ”We’re a united family. We’re a family who goes to church on Sundays, we work in advocacy. We’re active.” ”It’s a nightmare having your mother taken away from you,” her son Angel tells Fronteras. ”The person who is always there for you. Seeing her taken away in a bunch of vans like she was a huge criminal. It feels like a dream. But it’s reality and we have to face it. We have to keep on fighting for what we want. And yeah, we’re going to support our community and our mother. We’re going to keep on fighting.”

Migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean are sending more money to their families back home than ever before. These annual ”remittances” — as they’re called by analysts — topped $69 billion in 2016, according to central bank data compiled in a new report by the Dialogue, a Washington, D. C. . The money has been a lifeline for the national economies of many countries in the region since at least the 1990s, when Manuel Orozco, a political scientist who authored the report, first began tracking remittances. They climbed steadily since then, only to plummet when the Great Recession hit the U. S. economy in 2008. But they began to rise again in 2012. The 2016 tally is the highest amount on record and an increase of nearly 8 percent over 2015. About 40 percent of the money goes to just one country — Mexico — practically all of it sent by migrants in the United States. The recent surge is all the more notable because migration from Mexico has slowed to a crawl — with the number of migrants in the U. S. increasing by just 1 percent between 2010 and 2016 to a total of 11. 8 million. Also, says Orozco, the median amount that any given Mexican migrant sends hasn’t changed — about $300 at a go, 14 times a year, most commonly through a money transfer company such as Western Union. So what accounts for this surge in cash to Mexico? Orozco explains that a much larger share of Mexicans already in the United States are now wiring money back. In 2010 fewer than half of Mexican migrants sent money home. Today do. Orozco can’t be sure why. Though he regularly does surveys of Mexican migrants, ”I haven’t asked that question,” he notes. A possible explanation, he says, is that many Mexican migrants who would have gone back to Mexico are now staying put in the United States. His survey research indicates that from 2011 to 2016, the median length of time a Mexican migrant has lived in the United States increased from seven years to 12. Some migrants are deterred by rising violence back in their hometowns, says Orozco. Also, he says, for migrants who are in the United States illegally, stricter U. S. border enforcement under the Obama administration has raised the stakes of going home. Many now worry that if they leave the United States they’ll never be able to get back in. Whatever their reasons, Orozco posits that the fact that more Mexican migrants are remaining in the United States means many people who previously would have simply brought cash home in their pockets may now be sending it via money transfers. The growing importance of remittances is particularly significant in light of proposals that President Trump has floated to confiscate or otherwise target this flow in order to pressure Mexico into paying for an expansion of the border wall. During the campaign, Trump discussed various versions of the idea — including some that could potentially impact remittances to all countries, not just those to Mexico. As much as such a move would affect Mexico — for which remittances account for just over 2 percent of GDP — the ramifications could actually be greatest for the region’s poorest, most countries. Remittances make up nearly 20 percent of GDP for Honduras and El Salvador, for instance. And in the case of Haiti they account for .

When author Viet Thanh Nguyen was 4 years old, he and his family fled South Vietnam and came to the U. S. as refugees. That’s about the same age his own son is now — and Nguyen wonders if his child will ever know the feeling of ”otherness” that he knows so well. ”I think it’s a very valuable experience,” Nguyen tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro. ”I wish, not only my son, but everybody, had a sense of what it is like to be an outsider, to be an other. Because that’s partly what gives rise to compassion and to empathy — the sense that you are not always at the center of the universe.” The refugee and immigrant experience is central to Nguyen’s fiction, and he weaves pieces of his own story into his new short story collection The Refugees. Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. On how Americans didn’t want to accept Vietnamese refugees either, Every new refugee to a society — whether it’s to the U. S. or some other place — is subjected to fear. They are the new outsider population, the new other. People of all backgrounds have a short memory — so when it comes to the Vietnamese, Americans now tend to think of [them] as being a particularly successful minority or refugee population that’s assimilated fairly well. They forget that 40, 50 years ago Americans . .. did not want to accept these Vietnamese refugees who they saw as completely foreign. Now there are new foreigners, Syrians and other people from the Middle East, people of Muslim backgrounds and the sense among many Americans is: Wow these people are completely different from us and they are not like the Vietnamese who are much more assimilable. And I think that’s very, very doubtful. I think the majority of these new foreigners, if given the opportunity, will . .. be able to assimilate and deal with American culture. Right now we are subject to a kind of new xenophobia that prevents us from seeing that. On the two lives that all immigrants live, There’s that sense of duplicity — the sense that there’s something happening within the community, the ethnic community within the family home — and there’s a different life that’s being lived outside among Americans. You have to wear a different face when you’re interacting with the larger culture and you can be more of yourself at home, or in the local market, or in the local church, speaking your own language. That was my sense growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in San Jose, that I could totally see that my parents were different at home versus how they had to speak and how they had to comport themselves when they were with Americans. On his family’s immigrant experience, There’s one short story in The Refugees that is based on my family’s life and it’s the only piece I’ve written up until that point that incorporated anything autobiographical. . .. The story ”War Years,” about the child of refugee shopkeepers and what happens to that family — that is drawn very much from my life and the lives of my parents. It was a very difficult story to write because I think my parents lives are worthy of writing about. I don’t think my life is worthy of writing about. It is a dark story and that was pretty much what it was like to be a Vietnamese refugee in San Jose in the 1980s that the politics of the war was not won, the war was not finished. People might like to think the war is done when a ceasefire is signed, but for most people who live through a war, it goes on for decades. On how politics follows immigrants to their new countries, In the 1980s the struggle in the Vietnamese refugee community was still very much over the fact that people thought the war could still be fought again. People were suspicious of the possibility of Communist infiltrators and that meant that there was a lot of fear in this community that your neighbor might be a Communist, that you better not be seen as a Communist. And on top of that, again, people were just trying to build their lives and yet they were still struggling under the shadow of trauma and the legacy of violence that they brought over with them. On how his son’s experience will differ from his own, I came over when I was four . .. my journey, my initiation into memory, into consciousness happened in the refugee camp in the United States in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. So I’m very much defined by this refugee experience, of this sense of loss — of losing a country, of being separated from my parents once I came to the United States, and living a life of that I felt to be a life of privation even though my parents provided so many material things. I look at my son and he has pretty much everything he could possibly ask for and want for and I don’t wish to deny him those kinds of things — but that means he will have a vastly different sense of security, of place, of identity than I had when I was his age.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s presence at an environmental conference in Alaska this week was cut in half, after the Trump administration’s transition officials ordered the change. The agency had helped to plan the Alaska Forum on the Environment — but days before it was to start, word came that half of the EPA’s 34 planned attendees wouldn’t be making the trip. ”We were informed that EPA was directed by the White House transition team to minimize their participation in the Alaska Forum on the Environment to the extent possible,” forum director Kurt Eilo says. The change has created awkward scenes at the conference, particularly at events meant to highlight the EPA’s role in Alaska, a state known for both its pristine ecosystems and its oil production. More than a thousand people attend the multiday event in downtown Anchorage each year, and the EPA is normally a major partner. This year, agency officials were scheduled to take part in about 30 sessions on everything from drinking water and sanitation in rural Alaska to climate change adaptation. In an emailed statement, EPA transition official Doug Ericksen says the decision to cut back is an effort to limit excessive travel costs. He says a review last week found that EPA spent $44 million on travel last year, including sending employees to 25 outside conferences. When officials learned that 34 employees were slated to attend the Alaska event, they slashed the number to 17. ”This is one small example of how EPA will be working cooperatively with our staff and our outside partners to be better stewards of the American people’s money,” Ericksen said. Some EPA staff whose plans to attend the conference were revoked would have come from Seattle or Washington, D. C. — but Eilo said others are based just blocks away from the downtown Anchorage site. Eilo himself was an EPA enforcement officer when he founded the Alaska conference two decades ago. He says this is the first time he can recall this happening. While he understands the impulse to review travel spending, he says the cutbacks also raise a red flag. ”There’s a lot of uncertainty among folks here at the forum,” Eilo said. ”There’s concern about the tribal programs, there’s concern about how we’re going to address things like climate change in the next upcoming administration.” As the Alaska Dispatch News reports, one panel discussion that was to feature six EPA staffers Tuesday instead included two EPA representatives. While the topic had originally been planned to center on the agency’s grant system, the officials instead fielded questions about changes at the EPA. The order to reduce staff numbers at the conference is the latest sign of a shift in priorities for the EPA under a new president. Days after President Trump’s inauguration, Ericksen said the agency’s scientists will likely need to have their work reviewed on a ”case by case basis” before it can be made public. On Thursday, the fourth day of the weeklong conference in Anchorage, attendees kicked snow off their shoes as they walked into the Dena’ina Center. Many were unaware that the EPA presence had been slashed. Organizer Elio acknowledges that the agency worked hard to minimize disruption from the change in plans. In the end, only one of the conference’s more than 100 sessions had to be canceled. The conference drew attendees who had flown in from Alaska’s rural communities where the EPA works with tribes to fund programs on drinking water, sanitation and trash collection. Breakout sessions focused on issues such as brownfield cleanup, emergency response and dealing with coastal erosion due to climate change. Billy Maines is the environmental coordinator for the Curyung Tribal Council in Dillingham, Alaska, who also serves as an adviser to EPA Region 10 on its tribal programs. He said the agency’s direct assistance to Alaska’s rural communities is vital. ”They’re trying to take up and clean up their dumps, landfills, trying to recycle and get what waste goes into their communities, out of their communities,” he said. Maines and others worry the cutback on conference attendees might be a sign of broader, and more painful, budget cuts to come. Trump’s nominee for EPA chief is Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has criticized — and repeatedly sued — the agency he’s now in line to lead. Pruitt’s nomination was advanced to the full Senate last week, after Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to attend meetings that were meant to hold confirmation votes on Pruitt. During his confirmation hearing weeks earlier, Pruitt said his past actions had been made out of concern for his home state and that if he were to lead the EPA, his decisions would be dictated by ”the rule of law.” Pruitt, who has questioned climate change, also sought to answer critics who have faulted him for that stance, saying in a January hearing: ”Let me say to you, science tells us that the climate is changing and that human activity in some matter impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue. And well it should be.” Rachel Waldholz reports for Alaska Public Media.

Science is knowledge. The practice of science is nothing more, and nothing less, than the earnest and thoughtful work of figuring things out, of trying to understand, of learning how things work. Scientists are people committed to this practice, or to a community of shared practice. They work together to understand. And understanding is a thing of immense power. If you understand why the car has stalled, for example, you can fix it. And if you know when the tide will ebb, you can escape the harbor. Science, thought of this way, is plural. It has shared tools, to be sure, such as observation, testing, the use of math and statistics. But science is as varied as the different phenomena that there are. The actual work of scientists in different fields — from protein crystallography to epidemiology to conservation biology to astrophysics — is splendidly varied. Some scientists I know are concerned about the generally of scientific knowledge in America today. And they are downright when they encounter, especially among politicians, people who challenge the value of science as a source of knowledge and, so, as having a role to play in policy deliberations. How can you decide what to do — how can you know where, when or how to intervene — if you don’t understand what’s going on? Science is knowledge. Why would you reject the good faith effort to understand? There is, however, a second meaning of the term ”science.” I am thinking of the industry of science and its institutions. Let’s call this ”Big Science.” Big Science is not just simply knowledge or the good faith pursuit of knowledge. Big Science is not only the handmaiden of policy, ready to serve in an advisory role. Big Science is, itself, the product of policy decisions. After all, funders choose to support some areas of research and not others. Moreover, a lot of research is not entirely disinterested. For example, a good deal of science is done in the pursuit of profit (e. g. in the drugs industry). I think we need to keep this in mind when we try to understand the widespread mistrust of science. I know many people, for example, who don’t trust research funded by the tobacco industry, or by the pharmaceutical industry. These doubters are not they are not in that sense. They question whether the science that is getting pushed is trustworthy, whether it is really the result of the pursuit of knowledge rather than the ambitious drive to secure patents, for example. I know people who use homeopathic medicines. When I bring to their attention the fact that there is no good science supporting the effectiveness of such remedies, they respond with general anxiety that the drug testing industry is dominated by vested interests in the pharmaceutical industry. Again, it isn’t that they challenge science they mistrust Big Science. Big Science has somehow gotten a bad name. Again, this is what drives the anxiety. While there is no doubt that there are ”science doubters” who irrationally speak out against vaccines, outright ignorance is playing a bigger role, as well as a general lack of education on risks. I wonder whether behind the irrational doubt, ignorance and fear of vaccines, there isn’t something — like a fundamental mistrust in the people in white coats — telling them it’s OK. Perhaps the problem is less the belief in bogus science about vaccines and this harm or that — and more the doubt about the impartiality of those who insist that there are not any such links. Ditto for genetically modified foods. Mistrust of Big Science seems to flourish at both extremes of our political community. I suspect that the mistrust that drives skepticism about GMO food, vaccines, and claims made on behalf of drug companies is the same mistrust of Big Science that leads some to dispute the claims of climate science, for example. The issue isn’t science. The issue is trust. Now, I am an unabashed admirer of science. Science is knowledge. Knowledge is good. I celebrate the culture that makes it possible to educate people to do what scientists do. And there is no doubt that science is of immense cultural value. Economic, military, commercial, medical. The U. S. is the power it is today in large measure thanks to its achievements in science and engineering since the middle of the last century. So, how do we combat popular mistrust of science? An obvious first step, it seems to me, is that science, or Big Science, would do well to own its past failings. There are ample examples of bad science, dangerous science. Race and gender have been allowed to play an insidious role in the history of medicine, even the very recent history, for example. From the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the use of black soldiers to test the effects of mustard gas. Or consider the case of Walter Freeman, inventor and popularizer of the transorbital (” ”) lobotomy as a treatment of mental illness he travelled around the country performing more than 3, 000 of these procedures. His mentor, Egas Moniz, who was one of the inventors of what came to be known as the lobotomy, was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine on the basis of this work in 1949. And we know that claims made on behalf of drugs by their manufacturers must be viewed cautiously. Also, the last few years have seen numerous scandals in science — from the Harvard psychologist who fabricated results to the growing appreciation that, at least in some regions of science, it has proved difficult to replicate findings. And then there is the fact that there are simply open problems. The problem of consciousness, for example, is widely thought to be one of the major outstanding problems facing science. The problem of consciousness, obviously, is a problem for biology. So there are mysteries at the heart of even an established science. And as my colleagues Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser here at 13. 7 have written, there are profound and unsettled questions about how to move forward and make progress in fundamental physics. This is not a bad thing! God forbid there were no more open questions. My point here is that we need to offer a view of the fact that science has a history: It is a human endeavor and it is not without blemishes. But probably the best thing we can do to gain trust in science is just to do more science, to do it better, and to carry on. Science requires no apology. Science is not a special interest. Science is the honest pursuit of knowledge, after all. The alternative to science is ignorance. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

Updated at 7:40 a. m. ET, By the time Ceree Morrison found hundreds of pilot whales washed ashore on a remote beach in New Zealand 250 to 300 of them were already dead. The rest remained alive on Farewell Spit, a long strip of land that hooks from the country’s South Island into the sea. The scene was devastating. ”You could hear the sounds of splashing, of blowholes being cleared, of sighing,” Morrison told The Associated Press. ”The young ones were the worst. Crying is the only way to describe it.” All told, about 416 pilot whales had stranded at Farewell Spit before they were found Thursday night, the New Zealand Department of Conservation said in a statement. Even in a country with one of the highest stranding rates in the world — about 300 dolphins and whales a year beach themselves, according to marine conservation group Project Jonah — the DOC says this is the third largest single stranding ever recorded in New Zealand. Farewell Spit, in particular, is ”sometimes described as a whale trap,” the AP notes. ”The spit’s long coastline and gently sloping beaches seem to make it difficult for whales to navigate away from once they get close.” As the tide rolled in Friday, hundreds of volunteers in the region attempted to send the surviving whales back to sea, pushing them out as the water rose high enough to do so and forming a human chain to try to block them from returning to the beach. Of the survivors, about 50 successfully swam back into the bay, while about 80 to 90 were restranded, the DOC says. No single cause for strandings is known, Project Jonah says, though the group explains that some factors are thought to include navigational errors, injuries from sonar blasts or fishing nets, and strong social bonds that can draw whole pods to follow wayward individuals into danger. The AP reports that volunteers were able to refloat about 100 whales on Saturday. The wire service notes that some whales that were refloated on Friday beached themselves again, but the Saturday morning tide may keep the latest group at sea.

In New Orleans, hundreds of families are trying to put their lives back together after a tornado touched down in New Orleans East on Tuesday. It tore up homes and businesses in a predominantly black neighborhood that was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. People like Aretha Conley are hoping it will be easier to rebuild this time around. Conley and her husband saved for years to buy their house on Read Boulevard. They each worked two jobs and took out loans. Conley’s favorite place in her small, home is the backyard. ”I love to barbecue,” she says. ”I love to give parties.” But now, her backyard is decimated. Tuesday’s tornado smashed down her fence, and pieces of her neighbor’s house are stuck in a tree. Half of her roof is gone, and the windows are busted out. She’s just thankful no one died. As cleanup workers drive loaders through the street, scooping up debris and fallen trees, Conley takes stock of the damage. ”Got up Tuesday, bring my granddaughter to school, going to work, thinking everything’s going to be OK,” she says. ”And come home to this.” When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Conley’s house took four feet of water. But she and her husband fixed it up and stayed put. They loved the neighborhood. There are a lot of people like her here it’s about 95 percent black. And that’s something State Sen. Wesley Bishop is proud of. He was at an emergency shelter where victims were sleeping on cots and picking up hot meals, water and cleaning supplies. ”Basically our black you’ll find a lot of folks concentrated in New Orleans East,” he says. ”Mostly homeowners and things along those lines, who’ve just worked extremely hard.” But life changed after Hurricane Katrina. Many people moved away and never returned. And many businesses in this part of town never reopened. That makes life difficult for people like Conley. ”Like, the weekend when I want to go out to eat — me and my husband — we have to travel so far to go to eat because there’s nothing out here,” she says. There’s a and some strip malls but not much else. And Bishop resents that. ”People shouldn’t have to go outside of this area to try to get the basic goods and services that they need,” he says. He’s worried after this recent tornado because he says his district didn’t get enough help from the government following Katrina. They got a few nice things, like help rebuilding schools and a big, beautiful sports and recreation facility. But the facility has been put to use as an emergency relief center, overflowing now with displaced families. Conley is staying with her daughter for now. They’re hoping it will be declared a federal disaster. ”I hope it’s better this time,” Conley said. ”I hope it’s real better.” And she hopes this time, it’s different. This time, she hopes New Orleans East gets the help it needs.

President Trump is defending the Jan. 29 Yemen raid, in which an American Navy SEAL was killed, as a ”winning mission.” He is also lashing out at Republican Sen. John McCain, who called the raid a ”failure.” Trump chastised McCain for talking to the media about it, saying it ”only emboldens the enemy,” and whacked McCain for not knowing ”how to win anymore.” The tweets come after almost a week of debate on the success or ”failure” of the raid. U. S. officials say they were able to gather helpful intelligence and that 14 militants were killed. But there were also multiple problems: The operation, the first authorized of the Trump presidency, also raises serious questions about the planning and of the current occupant of the Oval Office, as well as the truthfulness of information coming out of the White House. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Feb. 2 that the raid was planned last November — under the Obama administration — and that the goal of the mission was to get information. But neither is true, NPR’s Tom Bowman reports. Rather, the specific place of this eventual raid was identified in November as one to focus on. (Other potential places were also identified.) ”The goal of the raid was ” Spicer said Tuesday, ”and that’s what we received, and that’s what we got. That’s why we can deem it a success.” But the U. S. would not send in SEAL Team Six, the premiere commandos, to pick up some cellphones and computers, a U. S. official told Bowman. Part of the effort was to get top in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, leaders. While more than a dozen militants were killed, a top target, Qassim either slipped away or was not at the location. Rimi is the leader of AQAP, seen as a top recruiter and the terrorist in the world. Bowman confirmed that Rimi was ”one of the objectives,” along with disrupting planning and plotting, in addition to collecting material. What’s more, a U. S. official expressed concern that Trump made the decision over dinner. This should have been decided with rigorous debate in the Situation Room, the official said. Many remember the iconic photo released by the White House of former President Obama surrounded by advisers during the raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. The concern with the Yemen raid is the impression that this decision was made too cavalierly. ”Everything that could go wrong did” Last week, the New York Times reported that ”almost everything that could go wrong did” in the raid. NPR reported that it was ”described as chaotic” by local residents and it is under investigation by the U. S. military. Spicer, however, said it was ”a successful operation by all standards.” McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, though, characterized the raid as a failure. That led to another defense by Spicer on Tuesday. He called it ”highly successful. It achieved the purpose it was going to get — save the loss of life that we suffered and the injuries that occurred.” On Wednesday, he went further, swatting at McCain, and claimed an apology was due. ”I think anybody who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and [does] a disservice to the life of Chief Owens,” Spicer said. McCain responded with an anecdote from his time serving during the Vietnam War, during which he was held as a prisoner of war for more than five years: ”Unfortunately, the prison had been evacuated. But the brave men who risked their lives in an effort to rescue us prisoners of war were genuine American heroes. Because the mission failed did not in any way diminish their courage and willingness to help their fellow Americans who were held captive. Mr. Spicer should know that story.” McCain’s daughter Meghan leapt to Twitter to defend her father Thursday. Trump has taken on McCain before, showing little respect for McCain’s service. Despite McCain’s years as a tortured POW in Vietnam, Trump questioned McCain’s American hero status. ”I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said in July of 2015, shortly after announcing his run for the presidency. The New York Times, citing U. S. officials, also reported, ”Yemen has withdrawn permission for the United States to run Special Operations ground missions against suspected terrorist groups in the country. . ..” The AP, however, citing an official statement from Yemen’s foreign minister, didn’t go as far. Mekhlafi called for a ”reassessment” of the raid, but he said it was ”not true” that there was a demand for a halt in U. S. operations. ”Yemen continues to cooperate with the United States and continues to abide by all the agreements,” Mekhlafi said. Spicer contended at Wednesday’s briefing, ”American lives will be saved because of it. Future attacks will be prevented.” That may be how the raid is ultimately judged. The binary choice of success or failure in this instance is a false one. But the raid clearly did not go as planned — and the public posture of the White House does not indicate it sees lessons to be learned for the future.

When last spotted in his indigenous habitat, John Oliver was sharing his perception of 2016 and what was to come: a dystopian hellscape. All for laughs. Or largely for laughs, anyway. The British comedian is host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, and he embarks on a new season on Sunday night after a layoff. In an interview with NPR, Oliver reluctantly concedes that President Trump will define the shows this season. Oliver carries a distinctly liberal sense of humor and a distinctly serious sense of purpose about his satire in an age when politics, journalism and entertainment have often not just blurred definitions but have swapped numbers, apartment keys and Netflix passwords. Which leads him to such topics as opioid abuse, sketchy credit report company practices, pharmaceutical pricing, school segregation, Brexit, corruption in international soccer. ”If you described that, you wouldn’t watch it,” Oliver says. ” ’Look, here’s 20 minutes on civil forfeiture.’ That’s a hard pass for me.” Oliver says he’s trying to make comedy out of worthwhile subjects, generally apart from the politics in play. ”We want to look at the issue and its components first, and then much later on, maybe cast an eye on the politics attached to that issue,” he says. In the interview, Oliver talks about the ”alchemy” that occurs when he knits together the work of his comedy writers and his researchers (drawn from such journalistic outfits as The New Yorker magazine and the investigative site ProPublica) why facts matter more to him as a comedian than the president he’s about to lampoon the importance of Jon Stewart to his career (”the L. Ron Hubbard to my Tom Cruise”) and what truly gives him joy on the air. On what’s funny, There are some things that will always be funny. Teenagers falling off skateboards: funny. Nut shots: funny. Breaking wind: funny. The world cannot change those. Those three things are columns upon which humor is built. . .. When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it’s funny. Does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth. Now in terms of what is funny in terms of politics, that is a much more complicated question. . .. Sure, that’s going to be my world for the rest of this year. On facts and Trump I care about facts the way I care about oxygen and imbibing enough water a day to live. Everybody should care about facts. That is something all of us should agree on. That is what we’re wrestling with at the moment [with President Trump] right? It feels interminable to kind of talk about in theory other than to say we’re trying, we’ll give it a go, and we’ll see. It affects everything. . .. [There] is a long, revolting history of politicians wanting to use facts in a misleading way, or in the best way to advance their agenda. This I think is different. This isn’t just misleading, this is turbocharged. And the thing I’m much more concerned about is his sweeping dismissal of the press, which is not us, right? It’s not comedy. . .. Because the media is a very convenient scapegoat at the best of times. But it is going to need to be rigorously defended because we are about to need it more than we have done in quite a long time. On what works for the show, We generally traffic in things that are not immediately funny, right? We will bring a joke to something. So lots of the stories that we have focused on are not funny at the first, second, or 34th glance. Really, you know, whether it’s like chicken farmers or encryption or multilevel marketing — these are not immediately funny stories. Our job is to make them funny. . .. When we feel we’re doing what do what we do best, it’s highlighting stories that perhaps are or have been and where we can show people things they haven’t seen before. . .. One of the things that we looked at last year was the fiduciary rule in retirement savings, which, again, sounds like not a half an hour of television that you would be anxious to fall over yourself to watch. . .. Lots of the issues that we’re most attracted to are relatively timeless, right? They’re not necessarily issues that have been thrown up that week. And the problem with the electoral process being so long is that everything is presented as being a binary choice between two political parties. And that’s obviously absurd. But issues are far more complicated and there’s often much more overlap between two sides that could occasionally be diametrically opposed. On why Oliver delayed satirizing Trump in the 2016 election cycle, The problem is it’s . A presidential campaign sucks all the oxygen out of people’s attention span. And there was a lot more interesting things happening than presidential politics in 2014. . .. We didn’t want to get sucked into just reacting to what people were lazily talking about on the television because it was easy — the horse race. So the Sunday before Super Tuesday we wanted to make the case that if Donald Trump wins Super Tuesday, history points to the fact he will be the Republican candidate, at which point he is a significant political figure. We need to reckon with that. . .. Then we wanted to start engaging seriously with his policies. So we did a episode on the wall [along the border with Mexico]. He said he’s going to build a wall. You should take that seriously. This is now a significant political figure. How much is that going to cost? It’s going to cost a lot more than he says it’s going to. How effective it’s going to be? It’s going to be a lot less effective than he claims. . .. Right now, you might think he’s not going to build the wall. I don’t know what would make you think he’s not going to do it. On why his comedy fails without reporting, [It’s] like alchemy. That’s the ingredients with which we make this show. . .. At its best, you’re taking depth of research and then writers who can find a way to articulate that immensely complicated information in a funny, palatable way. . .. We rigorously absolutely every single thing in the show. Not just the things that you see over my shoulder, not just any statistic that you see in a clip on screen, but, you know, we independently everything that appears as a fact. So if there is someone saying on TV, ”I was screwed over by a car loan company because I signed this loan,” we will speak to the local news source to say, ”Does the person have documentation for that? Did you get it? If they don’t, or they don’t know, we will try and find that person and if we can’t back it up we won’t use it. So we are we are so deeply, down the process — way more deeply than anybody needs to care about, other than the fact that it matters to me, and to all of us that we do it because you can’t build jokes on sand or they collapse. . .. If you’re talking about important things that’s the very baseline of what you should be doing. . .. Any joke is worthless if it’s built upon a lie. . .. Sometimes we’re taking swings so big that if we get something wrong we’re in serious trouble. . .. If we get something wrong there that’s going to be the last show we ever do. On Jon Stewart’s influence, I started doing in college and writing comedy and I loved it. And then at some point I wanted to start blending what I really cared about and what I loved doing the most. And so that was politics — not necessarily in the party politics sense of the word. One of the people I admired most in the world at that point was Jon Stewart. And so he was the gold standard in my head of what you could do with comedy about the news. . .. There was a lot of horrendous versions of The Daily Show in England, but not resembling what he was doing in terms of . .. quality. And so to get hired by him was kind of to be hired by like some version of a hero or a mentor. . .. I kind of learned at his feet. He is the L. Ron Hubbard to my Tom Cruise — let me immediately retract that comparison. On being called boring by Trump, By any rational metric, I am boring. [He claimed] we invited him multiple times to be a guest on our show and he would never appear on our very boring, very show and the second half of that is an opinion. Again, I’ll probably agree more than I disagree with him there. But the first half is just demonstrably a lie. And I think even in one of our stories last year, we tried to articulate just how confusing it is to be on the receiving end of a lie that confident, because he seemed absolutely sure. And I was as sure that I had never invited him. But then I wanted to check. . .. It was just a totally empty lie which doesn’t matter at all, except for the fact that person with the tendency, the tenacity and the confidence to make that lie is now leader of the free world and has the ability to lie about things that matter a lot more than appearing as a guest on someone’s very boring, very show. On what brings him joy, The most joyful our show ever gets I think is when we traffic in stupidity. So whenever we’re able to waste HBO’s resources to a borderline shameful extent, that is where we’re really happy. . .. Building an entire Supreme Court for dogs, that made me so happy that so many adults with real talent and applying real time to that decided to build this for no reason other than the fact that we thought it was funny. And . .. that set was so beautiful — I can’t tell you how intricate and beautiful it was and how long it took to get each dog in the outfit and get the fake paws out. And it was so funny. So I guess at its root that is where we are the happiest: whenever we do something so magnificently silly that you can’t quite believe you’re getting away with it.

On Wednesday morning, a Red Cross staffer in Afghanistan pushed his vehicle’s panic button. Three Red Cross vehicles were heading to meet up with a convoy of trucks carrying ”winter feed” — food for livestock — in the remote northern province of Jowzjan in Afghanistan. The plan was for the Red Cross staff to help distribute the 1, 000 tons of feed, which is critical for farmers. In the winter, there’s nowhere for their animals to graze. Before the vehicles got to the distribution point, they were ambushed by armed men. The panic button sent an alert to Red Cross offices in Kabul, but efforts to reach the staffers by satellite phone and other means failed. ”We couldn’t get hold of them,” says Thomas Glass, head of communications for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan. Eventually, community elders, who keep in touch with the Red Cross office in Kabul, reported what little information they had. Six Afghan nationals were shot and killed — the driver of each vehicle and field staff accompanying them. Two additional field staff are missing the Red Cross is ”desperately” searching for them, says Glass. To learn more, we spoke to Glass, age 37, a Swiss national who’d worked in the country from 2010 to 2012 and returned to Kabul for his current tour of duty in October. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. What do you know about the attack? It’s extremely hard to have exact information. We don’t know the number of men, we don’t know the motives, we don’t know who is behind this. An Afghan official in the area said it was a group with ties to ISIS. We actually don’t know. We don’t have confirmation. Is there any chance this was just a random occurrence, that the attackers didn’t realize they were attacking Red Cross vehicle? The vehicles are clearly marked. This has all the signs of a deliberate attack. Red Cross workers have been attacked before in Afghanistan. But the loss of 6 lives at one time seems like another level of violence. It’s definitely a step further. We have 30 years of continuous presence in Afghanistan. So we are we are respected for our work. To have such a despicable attack, it’s shocking. We’re completely devastated. We’re having a hard time understanding why and how this happened. How do you decide if it’s safe to send out staff in an area where there’s conflict? We communicate with all parties in the conflict, all the weapon bearers. We notify them. We receive security guarantees. If it’s not safe to go, we don’t go. If it is deemed safe enough, we will try. The Red Cross has a full plate in Afghanistan, supporting health care, work, sanitation efforts and much more. The ICRC has now issued a statement that activities are suspended until Tuesday — and possibly longer. Certain activities, such as the treatment of patients at medical facilities, will continue. But any movement in the field, including the transfer of to hospitals, is on hold. Do you think the Red Cross might pull out of Afghanistan? We have to regroup, to get a sense of what happened — and how to continue our work without jeopardizing the safety and security of our staff. It’s clear that we’re not leaving Afghanistan. We are here for the Afghan people. So many innocent people are trapped by this conflict. We can’t leave them behind, that’s for sure. NPR experienced a loss in Afghanistan last year, when photographer David Gilkey and interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna were killed. And Afghanistan has the most attacks on aid workers per year — 101 attacks in 2015. What do you make of this? It’s not just in Afghanistan. War and conflict brings out the worst in people. And the work of humanitarian workers and journalists has become increasingly not just difficult but dangerous. We’ve seen more and more deliberate targeting of aid workers and journalists. Does a tragedy like this make it hard to sleep? These last few days have been so incredibly intense that as soon as my head hits the pillow I’m out. But I’m up at 4. The six victims were Afghan nationals. What has the reaction been among Afghans? What strikes me most is the resilience of the Afghans and the Afghan colleagues. This attack reinforces the belief that we need to continue our work, in the name of our deceased colleagues we need to persevere. Is there any one interaction with an Afghan that stands out? I went to a shop, and the shop owner come up to me, shook my hand and embraced me, shared his condolences and told me, ”This is not the true Afghanistan.”

There’s a vibrance to the current music of Esmé Patterson that I wasn’t expecting, having listened to her previous band Paper Bird. Gone are the banjos and remnants of folk music, and in their place are electric guitars — sometimes fierce and, here at the Tiny Desk, somewhat understated. She’s a relative newcomer to the guitar, making it part of her songwriting only since leaving Paper Bird. But all of this instrumentation is meant to be supportive, not . At the heart of these songs, from her album We Were Wild, is a reach for independence: I can’t sit still ’cause I’m no mountain, I can’t sit so still ’cause I’m no mountain, I can’t sit still forever, I’m no mountain, I’m human, I’m human If there’s a thread that ties Patterson’s songs together, it’s discovering who you are and standing strong. She’s doing that well — with a powerful and sensitive band that’s got her back. We Were Wild is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) Esmé Patterson (vocals, guitar) Alex Koshak (drums) Jeremy Averitt (bass) Jake Miller (lead guitar) Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Morgan Noelle Smith, Bronson Arcuri Production Assistant: A Noah Harrison Photo: NPR. For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.

Like many awards shows, the Grammys are about more than just honoring artistic achievement: They’re also about anointing ambassadors for a music industry that’s forced to evolve as quickly and constantly as trends and technology mandate. Of course, the awards also attempt to represent dozens of genres, from traditional pop to EDM to country to jazz to Latin music to classical to rap and beyond. The farther the Grammys stray from artists who dominate the mainstream cultural conversation Top 40 — your Adeles and Beyoncés and Chainsmokerses — the more narrowly they’ve historically cast their lot. Which is how an artist like modern bluegrass Alison Krauss can become the most awarded singer in Grammy history with 27 trophies to her name when the Grammy voters think of bluegrass and music, they think of Krauss and a handful of others rather than beating the bushes or scanning the press for discoveries. Same goes for Bonnie Raitt and blues in the early ’90s, or Metallica and metal for decades. When the Grammys decide that an artist qualifies as a genre ambassador — and, by extension, an industry ambassador — the trophies tend to pile up by the literal armload. Nowhere is the phenomenon of ambassadorship more easily spotted than in country music, which typically — but not always — merits at least one annual spot in the Best New Artist category. There, it’s possible to get a clear read on whom the industry at large views as the face future of country. In the past five years, the category has produced nominations for The Band Perry (2012) Hunter Hayes (2013) Kacey Musgraves (2014) Brandy Clark (2015) and Sam Hunt (2016) and this year features two choices in Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris. (No country artist has actually won the award since the Zac Brown Band in 2010.) Less frequently, an anointed country — setting aside Taylor Swift, who used to more evenly straddle the worlds of country and pop — turns up as an Album Of The Year nominee, like Lady Antebellum in 2011 and Chris Stapleton last year. But in 2017, Album Of The Year offers up the Grammys’ grandest country surprise in recent years. Many could have predicted Best New Artist nods for Morris and Ballerini — both of whom share some pop crossover appeal — but few anticipated Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth competing against four of the year’s true juggernauts: Adele’s 25, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Justin Bieber’s Purpose and Drake’s Views, all of which dominated A Sailor’s Guide To Earth (and most other records, for that matter) in sales, airplay or streams last year. Though Bieber got the lion’s share of the blame — as Bieber so often does — for keeping David Bowie’s Blackstar out of contention, Simpson’s record is the real dark horse here. Given how often the Grammys’ chosen genre ambassadors meet at a safe midpoint between critical acclaim and sales success, Simpson’s nomination — for a record that’s barely nudged country radio’s playlists, and for an artist who’s taken hard public swipes at the Nashville establishment — is a remarkable and welcome surprise. Maybe the Kentuckian’s philosophical and occasionally psychedelic musings drift far enough afield from country to qualify as rock and roll his Metamodern Sounds In Country Music was, after all, nominated for Best Americana Album in 2015. (For what it’s worth, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth is up for Best Country Album this year, nominated against Brandy Clark, Loretta Lynn, Maren Morris and Keith Urban.) But if Sturgill Simpson has become this year’s topmost anointed country ambassador, he’s done so without the full embrace of the Nashville establishment — and that makes his Album Of The Year nomination truly, well, bold. Ballerini or Morris could just as easily have taken that spot, and it wouldn’t have shocked very many people. So, can Sturgill Simpson — already arguably the Grammys’ biggest surprise this year — pull the biggest upset of all and actually close the night with an Album Of The Year trophy in his hand? It’s unlikely, but it sure isn’t impossible. Consider the last time Beyoncé was up for this award, back in 2014: She was up against three other massively popular in Sam Smith (like Adele this year, considered a frontrunner) Ed Sheeran (like Bieber, a massive pop star) and Pharrell Williams (like Drake, a ubiquitous presence). The winner that year? Beck’s Morning Phase, a languid dark horse with appeal for the Grammys’ older and more voters. Given the likelihood that Adele, Beyonce, Bieber and Drake cannibalize each other’s voting blocs, history could well repeat itself Sunday night. If he pulls off that upset, Sturgill Simpson will be more than just country music’s latest ambassador. He’ll become, at least for a while, the biggest story in music.

’s relationship with the Grammys began with a mutual dis. The year was 1989 and the Recording Academy, in recognizing the genre for the first time, decided rap’s revolution would not be televised. Will Smith, then known by his stage moniker the Fresh Prince, took it as a ”slap in the face,” the rapper said at the time. He and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s cuddly hit ”Parents Just Don’t Understand” went on to win the inaugural rap performance category, beating out industry peers J. J. Fad (”Supersonic”) LL Cool J (”Going Back to Cali”) Kool Moe Dee (”Wild Wild West”) and (”Push It”). But they weren’t present to collect their award. Along with LL and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince boycotted the big show. Nearly 30 years later, the Grammy Awards have yet to get hip (replacement surgery). The bad rap is warranted when it comes to the Academy’s failure to acknowledge the genre’s most deserving acts. The only thing worse than the blatant omissions over the years has been the clueless inclusions — particularly in the history of the best rap album category. Exhibit A: It took OutKast three classic LPs to earn a nomination (not including the group’s debut, released before the category was introduced in 1996) yet in 2015 the Iggy Azalea got a nod fresh out the box. And poor Macklemore. The dude is still living down his 2014 win over Kendrick Lamar’s classic debut, Good Kid, M. A. A. D. City. He apologized to Lamar for that win this year, he declined to even enter the race for his album, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, for consideration. Swayed by commercial juggernauts and great white hype more often than critical acclaim or street fame, the stars rarely align to produce such undisputed winners as Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP) Kanye West (College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) or Lamar (To Pimp a Butterfly). But this year may be different. Despite a wack record of consistency, the rap albums category casts a wider net than years past. Plus, it summarizes one of the biggest trends in the industry. In wildly divergent ways, five of the six nominees — Drake, Chance the Rapper, West, DJ Khaled and De La Soul — collectively tell the story of ’s digital dominance and disruption in 2016. One thing’s for certain: They don’t want DJ Khaled to win. When the radio made the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek last March, the online headline read, ”How Snapchat Built A Business By Confusing Olds.” Khaled, then 40, appeared in the accompanying photo looking slightly perplexed himself. Becoming the King of Snapchat is a #majorkey to Khaled’s nomination. With a personality as seismic as his anthems, the radio gained around six million followers in six months. He posted everything on the social media network from ”major key” affirmations to his misadventures while temporarily lost at sea one night on a jet ski. By fashioning himself into a ubiquitous digital presence, he expanded his fanbase and attracted a younger demographic. It’s translated to real currency in today’s attention economy. Already bigger than life in he suddenly became recognizable by soccer moms — and surely some of the Recording Academy’s voting bloc. It reflects a new industry reality in which music is viewed less as viable product than promotional. In such an environment, the king of is already the winner. Bless up. If history is any indicator, Drake’s a . The Grammys love a crossover star. And nobody crossed over in 2016 like the Golden Child. The numbers don’t lie and he racked them up across multiple platforms. In addition to being named the artist in Spotify history last year — with more than 4. 7 billion streams in total — Views and ”One Dance (feat. Wizkid Kyla)” reached No. 1, respectively, on Apple Music’s top albums and songs lists for 2016. Those rankings further magnify ’s distinction as the most popular genre in the world, according to analytics released by Spotify in 2015. The album cover of Views, featuring Drake sitting atop Toronto’s Canadian National Tower may have turned out to be a photoshop fake job, but the 6 God’s digital reign is real. No one in this category had a crazier year than ’Ye. The tour rants. The wifey Kim K’s diamond heist. The blue contacts and rainbow sherbet hair dye. The speculation fueled over his mental state. The hospitalization attributed to exhaustion. And, lest we forget, the puzzling Donald Trump photo op. Dude was all over the place. Maybe we should’ve seen it coming, considering the erratic and unprecedented rollout of The Life of Pablo. By design or disaster, Kanye wound up creating a new paradigm for digital albums: the neverending enabled by access restricted to streaming platforms. Leave it to the producer whose signature sound revolved around manipulated soul samples to stretch the limits of streaming technology. ”Ima fix wolves,” he tweeted the day the album was released exclusively on big bro Jay Z’s Tidal platform. Little did we know at the time that his tinkering — whether substituting a new chorus here, or adding a new song there — would amount to a listening experience as annoying as it is groundbreaking. Kanye’s approach to patching together an album well beyond its release date extended the life of the project. ”Life of Pablo is a living breathing changing creative expression. #contemporaryart,” he tweeted a month later. No doubt. As the first artist of any genre to receive a Grammy nomination for a release, Chance the Rapper has already made history. He’s up for seven awards, including best rap album, though Chance prefers to call Coloring Book a mixtape. It’s more than semantics. The distinction between the two has blurred in recent years as artists such as Drake and Future have released mixtapes that contractually count as studio albums. For too long, the culture allowed industry dictates to distinguish a mixtape of original material from an album simply because a major label wasn’t profiting from the product. But with mixtapes increasingly surpassing the quality and popularity of label releases, thanks in part to their availability via digital distribution channels, the industry is trying to get in where it fits. The funny thing is how Chance, who shows no signs of relinquishing his independence, has become a digital darling. His exclusive stream on Apple Music made Coloring Book the first album to crack the Billboard 200. Instead of making money from album downloads, he relies on tours, merchandising and deals with the likes of Apple to generate revenue. He’s designed a new blueprint for artistic control while simultaneously being the populist favorite. The Recording Academy literally rewrote its rulebook for him, so his chance of winning is pretty strong. De La Soul’s first new album release in 12 years has the honor of being the first digitally crowdfunded album to earn a Grammy nod. The group raised $600, 000 via Kickstarter, six times more than its original asking price. The oldest act in the category, De La’s inclusion is ironic for altogether different reasons. This is the same group whose classic back catalog remains in limbo, unavailable on digital platforms, due to the prohibitive costs associated with their classic LPs. De La’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, contains more than 60 samples, and those that were cleared were done so via agreements that predate digital streaming. Making them legal for today’s market could require costly renegotiations with copyright holders that Warner Music, current owner of De La’s back catalog, has declined to pursue. To add another wrinkle, the group produced And the Anonymous Nobody by recording 200 hours of material from their road band, Rhythm Roots Allstars, then sampling it to construct backing tracks. You’d almost have to be a De La fan to appreciate the unintended wit. Oddly enough, the wild card in this category isn’t a digital disruptor at all, but an artist whose release pretty much followed the traditional model. Easily among the top rap albums of 2016, Schoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP is also a breakout release for Q, an MC whose evolution has been woefully overlooked in part because his TDE labelmate, Kendrick Lamar, has emerged as the most important rapper of his generation. But being ”the yin to Kendrick’s yang,” as Pitchfork called him upon the release of his latest LP, comes across in superb fashion on Blankface. He’s a gangsta with a sense of humor and honesty. In a sense, a win for Schoolboy could be viewed as a win for the entire vanguard of underrepresented artists who found ways to circumvent the mainstream in 2016 — from Detroit’s trippy outlier Danny Brown to Atlanta’s rising 21 Savage to Chance the Rapper collaborator and Chicago ingenue Noname. Then again, I’d be less surprised if Schoolboy decided to play hooky from the Grammys altogether.