Yes, it might take time. It might take a long time. It might - the effort to do that might outlast a presidency. If that's true, all the more reason to begin this now so that we can see results in my lifetime.

So this is a hugely ambitious proposal that you are laying out now. And there will be people who ask, why is it that a two-term mayor of South Bend, Ind. - a town that many Americans won't have even heard of - a white guy, is the person who can heal America's deepest wound that has caused hundreds of years of inequities?

Frankly, it's twice as important. If you're a white candidate, it is twice as important for you to be talking about racial inequity and not just describing the problem which is fashionable in politics but actually talking about what we're going to do about it and describing the outcomes we're trying to solve for. I think we'll know we're getting somewhere when this is not regarded as some specialty issue that candidates of color talk about or that we only talk about when addressing voters of color.

This is a conversation that, frankly, white America needs to have too because white America needs to face the roots of these inequities and the fact of systemic racism all around us. It's the air we breathe.


From NPR News, this is Day to Day. The ethics problem at the Interior Department continues to unfold, specifically in the little-known but powerful Minerals Management Service. The Interior Department's watchdog reports that employees in that division accepted gifts, they steered government contracts to friends, and they had sexual relations with oil and gas-company representatives. Joining us now is John Dimsdale from Marketplace, and John, first, what is the Minerals Management Service?I hadn't heard of it until yesterday.

Well, it's responsible for collecting royalty revenues from companies that extract oil and other minerals from federal property. And last year, they collected 11 billion dollars from the oil and gas industry. So, it's a big source of revenue. In fact, sometimes Minerals Management is the second largest source of income for the federal government, second only to the IRS. And remember, this scandal comes just as Congress is debating whether to allow more oil drilling, especially on the Outer Continental Shelf under the ocean.

That's right. So, let's go into the details of this scandal. What did the Interior Department's inspector general find?

Well, this report makes it sound like a very dysfunctional place. It alleges cocaine and marijuana use, and even promiscuous sex between government employees and the industry that they oversee. The inspector general says the relationship between the industry and the revenue collectors is supposed to be at arm's length, but most of the oil-company people that investigators talked to said they bought meals or drinks, entertainment, for government employees.


The best thing you can do is to reach the end of the campaign and have people say, well, we got a fair look at the candidates from the beginning to the end. We got a fair look at the two nominees of the major parties. We got a fair look at the third party candidates. And we got a fair look at all the competitors back in the primaries. I don't think you can say that at all is going to be exactly the same number of minutes devoted to each.

For example, Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate will not get nearly as much coverage as the two major party candidates. And we will try but we will probably not achieve absolute perfect mathematical equalness of numbers in the minutes and seconds to go to each of the two major party candidates, but we will try.

So, NPR's White House correspondent, Don Gonyea is with Senator Obama in Jordan, today. So, is his reporting there going to get the bulk of the news today?

Not really the bulk. There will be a four-minute report from Don Gonyea on All Things Considered tonight. We did get him briefly into the newscast that you've just heard a few moments ago. And we did get a little bit of an update to what he had done for this morning's Morning Edition. But we also had a discussion of John McCain's campaign on in Morning Edition right after that. And there will be a discussion of what John McCain is saying right this minute at his note town hall in New Hampshire on that same All Things Considered tonight, of about the same length as Don Gonyea's report from Amman, Jordan.


That's what bothers me. That's what bothers me big time. Whereas Obama does come across as definitely more stately, more of a statesman, more of a, you know, someone you'd want in the White House. And that's my dilemma. It's - I would love to vote Republican, but I'm just not convinced this is going to - that would fly. So it's almost like I'm going to toss a coin.

Barbara Zimmerman, an undecided, although less so, voter in Ohio. Barbara, thank you.

Thank you.

I do hear people ask of these undecideds, what are you waiting for?We're collecting answers at the show's blog, npr. org/daydreaming. Who's undecided and why. Npr. org/daydreaming. More to come.


That's an excellent question, and we're particularly challenged in this regard. On the Princeton campus, we have the only Civil War memorial in the world, as far as I know, that lists the names of students who died both for the Southern cause and the Northern cause but without indicating the side for which they died.

So the official Civil War memory as it was encoded on this campus was what we would call a reconciliationist memory. Each boy was equally right. Each boy was fighting for the side that he believed in. And it's a way of remembering the Civil War that completely erases slavery as the cause of the war and the great moral stake of that war. So this tension between remembering and commemorating is front and center in a monument on our own campus.

And so what are your thoughts on that tension?

(Laughter) I don't think we need to change our Civil War monument. I think it's an artifact of a particular historical time, and I think it's a wonderful starting point for a conversation about why Princeton chose to remember her alumni in that particular way.


It's something that I think I've kind of really kind of gotten used to it over the years. But back when we really started taken off, it would be really strange to walk into a room with 20,000 people and you were the only African-American person in the room. I mean that happened a lot. And it's one of the things where I really had to come to grips with it.

I mean, I chose this life. I chose this job. This is what I wanted to do and, you know, I just - now it's no big deal, it's just the way it is. I love my job and I'm not going to change my job. So that just comes with the territory.

There's so many, what I call racial sharing moments going on right now and we, you know, we take them seriously, but we can also laugh at them. But sometimes have you ever felt that people ask you to be their guide into some greater understanding of blackness?

Oh, absolutely. You know, I've been playing Hootie & the Blowfish for 23 years, and we, you know, we've been doing' it. And I think my friends use me as a - like you said, as a vehicle to experience - and I know a lot of people that probably when they met me were pretty racist people, that are now really good friends of mine.


Well you know, I'd been rapping for years. I mean, since grade school and so forth but I, you know, I really didn't make my professional outing until college. At that time we were just, you know, all hanging around at the college radio station, listening to music and writing songs and none of us had really released any albums yet. And it just dawned on us that, you know, given the state of the industry, if we weren't going to put out our records then our music would probably never get heard. And fast forward 10-plus years later this is it.

So what was it like performing for the first time in a venue, not in a dorm room, not just with your friends, where were you and what was that like?

I think the first, what I would consider the first show was - I was the very first act on a show at a club here in San Francisco called The Stone. And on that bill it was pretty amazing. I mean I was absolutely first in order on a bill of like …

Which is a blessing and a curse.


Yeah. Moving on to Merriam-Webster. They've added 1,700 new words. I can't begin to keep up with that, but I do want to ask you about this one in particular - eggcorn?

Eggcorn. Maybe we should spell it. E-G-G-C-O-R-N. It's defined as a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakingly used in what seems like a logical or plausible way for another word or phrase. It's been around since about 2003. It's a play on how some people say the word acorn, and a linguist thought, well, it makes a little bit of sense. An acorn looks kind of like an egg. Let's come up with a word for another word or phrase when it's reshaped but kind of makes a little bit of sense if you think about it. So here's a classic one - some people will say all intensive purposes when they mean all intents and purposes.

There's a website I found called the Eggcorn Database - has more than 600 of these. Some of my favorites include self-phone.

(Laughter). That's perfect, actually.


So many things were surprising, Scott, including the willingness of hard-core partisans in both parties to overlook big, obvious problems for their candidates in the primaries and in the fall. And I've been amazed that, for example, the willingness of so many evangelical Christians, people who wanted to emphasize social issues, to embrace Donald Trump with all of his history and all of his attitudes.

Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls. But the last Washington-ABC News poll showed that she is less trusted than Donald Trump despite the fact that the news industry has documented many lies that he's told during this campaign. How has she run such a strong campaign despite the lack of trust?

One could be cynical and say some of us don't expect to trust our politicians. But look, this is the presidency. And in weighing the balance of assets, her experience does matter to many. She projects determination. She has the support of a united party - unusually united - and a newly popular first couple campaigning for her. And finally, there is her historic appeal to women.

Ron, ratings for news have been through the roof during this campaign. Will you miss it or may the campaign maybe not be over on Tuesday?


The billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein has been taken into federal custody related to sex trafficking. According to The Daily Beast, who first reported this story, Epstein was arrested yesterday and will appear in court tomorrow to be charged in connection with sex trafficking minors. This comes more than a decade after accusations first surfaced that Epstein had paid dozens of young girls for sex. But he avoided federal criminal charges and significant prison time in a plea deal that continues to draw criticism for its lenient terms. For more on this, we called Pervaiz Shallwani, one of the Daily Beast reporters who broke this story. And he's with us now.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

And I'm just going to start by saying that the details may be disturbing to some listeners because this does involve accusations about the treatment of young girls. So, having said that, Pervaiz, as briefly as you can, what are the allegations that first surfaced against Epstein in 2007 and 2008?


And, of course, this comes just a few hours after the president announced a new acting chief of staff. And I emphasize the word acting because that's unusual.

Yeah. So Mick Mulvaney is the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Until recently, he was also the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but - which he wanted to destroy. But then a permanent head of that agency was confirmed. And so then he only had one job. Now he has two once again. He will be the acting chief of staff. According to the White House, he will do - he will only focus on chief of staff work. He will not do budget work. His deputy there will do that. But he will continue to be in that job - or both jobs. And presumably, the president will be looking for a more long-term chief of staff, though long term is all relative, especially in this administration.

NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith, thanks so much.

You're welcome.


My grandparents were raised during the Great Depression and spent the rest of their lives hoarding rubber bands, bacon grease, and batteries. It used to fill me with embarrassment that they would actually rinse out Zip-Loc bags and reuse them. Poor people, I thought. Don't they know there's always more?I was raised in the disposable generation of styrofoam boxes and plastic water bottles. If something ran out, you simply got a new one.

But this year, we are re-evaluating not just how we spend our money, but also the lessons we pass on to a new generation. The other day, I made Emmeline a skirt out of a men's sport coat once sold exclusively at the Watergate Hotel. You can't buy that kind of fashion statement at Target.

On our most recent trip, Emmeline's glowery mood changed when she happened upon a shirt decorated with farm animals and said, ooh, now doesn't this look nice?I examined it and agreed, asking, what do you want to do with it?Emmeline twirled her toe on the speckled Formica floor and thought it over for a moment. A smile widened on her face, oh, I think that will make just the prettiest dress. Her latest outfit cost a dollar 50.

Mike Adamick is a stay-at-home dad living in San Francisco.


Well, Katie Couric is set to interview Sarah Palin, so we're taking folks' questions. We want to know what they think Katie Couric should ask. We've got video interviews with singer Eric Benet and Glynn Turman who won an Emmy over the weekend.

He did.

Yeah, we're going to revisit that video. And we have more video interviews coming up with the cast of Spike Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna. "

Oh, sounds like some good stuff.


Israel is saying the same. The Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the parliament today that Israel is essentially in a state of all-out war with Hamas and that Israel has no intention of stopping with their campaign as long as Hamas continues to fire its rockets.

And meanwhile, Israeli soldiers are massed along the border. Is it expected that there will be a ground war?

Israeli officials are saying that it's certainly possible, and they have closed off the part of Israel that directly borders Gaza. They've created a military zone there. It's been closed to all civilians and to reporters, so we don't know exactly what is happening there now.

And what is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni saying?


You know, let's come back to the Large Hadron Collider because if you talk about things, if you talk about this theme, there's much more to the universe than meets the eye, the other one that you know well is the prediction from string theory and similar theories that there are extra dimensions. And one of the ways to look for things like extra dimensions or shadow universes is to look for the leakage of material from our universe into their universe.

And let me use the LHC. One way to look for evidence of extra dimensions would be to carefully look at collisions that take place at the Large Hadron Collider and look for some of the energy to disappear. And what's interesting about that technique is when I put there's - when I say there's much more to the universe than meets the eye, the top of my list would be neutrinos, and we now know neutrinos exist. We can't see them with the eye, but we can build detectors to detect them. And the original evidence for the neutrino was missing energy in beta decays that were observed in the early part of the last century and then poly-hypothesize this particle, the neutrino. And eventually, we built detectors that were sensitive enough. So this technique of looking for energy leaking out of our universe going elsewhere is a very powerful technique for looking for things that we can't see.

Michael Turner, a pleasure as always to come have you come on and explain this stuff to us. Thanks a lot, Michael.

Glad to be on.


What's the recipe for a star?How do you make one?

Really all you need is cold gas and to be left alone essentially.

If the cold gas cools enough and nothing heats it up, then it should turn into stars. And so this cluster is a perfect star factory because it has a tremendous amount of cooling happening and very little heating. And so it's going to provide just a tremendous amount of this cold gas fuel for stars.

What's the difference between a galaxy and a galaxy cluster?


So a startling turnaround. Any sign, though, that this is the bottom, and that things might be improving?

So far, nine U. S.  banks have failed this year, and most analysts don't see any indication that either the housing market or the credit crisis have hit bottom yet. In fact, there's a respected company based in the U. K. , it's called Begbies Traynor. It specializes in insolvency issues and corporate rescue and recovery, and that firm has just issued a research note suggesting there could be - get this, an average of 100 small banks failing in the U. S.  each year for the next three years, and their note calls that far from inconceivable.

The data released yesterday by the FDC - by FDIC, by the way, showed 117 banks and thrifts are now considered to be in trouble, and the FDIC warned that conditions will worsen, although it did say a majority of U. S.  banks will be able to weather the storm. 98 percent still have an adequate stock pile of money by the regulator's standards.

Well, let's talk more about the FDIC. It, obviously, is the insurer of banks of deposits up to 100,000 dollars, but with all these banks in trouble, is the FDIC in trouble?


Explain to me why that's a problem. I think defenders of the president would say Jared Kushner has a direct line of communication to the president of the United States, who will actually listen to him.

And that's OK. But that means that Jared Kushner, if he is going to play that role, should at least be informing the president by informing himself, by learning about the issues, by studying the issues, by doing the homework.

What was the personal calculation for you coming out publicly and speaking out about why you resigned as ambassador?Other foreign service officers have not chosen the same route. They have sort of quietly left.

That's correct. And that was my intention. There was an official at the Department of State who read my private letter of resignation to the president. And we know that this happened because it was published by Reuters. And it was there that I wrote to the president that when I was a junior officer, I had signed an oath to completely and fully implement foreign policy, even policies with which I might have disagreed. And then my instructors made clear to me that if there ever came a time when I could no longer do that, I would be honor bound to resign. And that time has come.


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. This week, Republican front-runner Donald Trump warned that there would be riots if Republican leaders reject him as the nominee, even if he's ahead in the delegate count. He was talking about the possibility of a contested convention. If Trump fails to get to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, things are going to get complicated - Byzantine even. And if you are an unbound or unpledged delegate - that is a delegate who can vote for whomever you want - you're probably about to get a lot of phone calls. Matt Micheli is one of those unpledged delegates. He's also chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party. And he joins us now from Casper. Welcome to the program.

Thank you, Melissa.

What does it mean to be - for you to be an unbound delegate?You're essentially a free agent, right, when you go to the convention.

That's right. We still represent the state of Wyoming and we - the results of what the Wyoming people want, I think, is what we will all try to do. But there's no law or no limits on who we can vote for at National Convention. We are free agents.


Well, crown-of-thorn starfish are found across much of the Pacific Ocean and Indian Oceans. They are - they're about dinner-plate size, multiple arms, have little thorn-like spines coming out of them. They're also quite venomous. So the last thing you want to do is touch one and have it prick you, and it can cause paralysis.

But the important part for the corals is that these things are wonderful eating machines. They move slowly across the reef. They actually invert their stomach onto the corals and dissolve the coral tissue, you know, digesting it as they go. And they leave (technical difficulties) white behind them as they move forward.

So they're like little bulldozers.

Yeah, it's sort of like bulldozers. It's almost more like having a wave of people with flamethrowers going through the brush. You know, the coral physically is left behind, but it's all dead.


I have no idea. I have no idea at this point.

You're just waiting for a call?

Any call from anyone, anywhere.

So are you actively out looking for something else more stable?


Well, the highlight of the tour was going inside the number four reactor, where they're in the process of removing spent and unused fuel rods. And they were trying to show me and trying to show the public, first of all, that they've reinforced the whole structure against any further earthquakes or tsunamis, that they are safely removing the fuel rods that are in there, and that they are trying to block contaminated water from flowing from the mountains through the plant and into the Pacific.

Did you see the other reactors?

The crucial ones I could not go into, and reactors one through three suffered partial meltdowns. And as a result, there is so much radiation in there that they cannot send people in there to look. They have to use robots and remote cameras to try to find out what's going on. But they still don't know exactly how bad the damage is from those partial meltdowns. They're not going to start dealing with that part of the thing until 2020, and the whole process of shutting down the plant could take 30 or 40 years, by TEPCO's estimates.

And what problems have they been having just recently even in the clean-up?


He was a Christian gentleman. And he was the paradigm of the Christian gentleman. He didn't have - he had no mean bone in his body. I'd never heard - you would hear him perhaps talk a little bit askance about someone. But he - but I never heard an ad hominem attack or caustic comment come out of him. He had a beautiful soul. And it was always radiant and on display.

Yeah. In the minute we have left, I sometimes would look at him, and it was hard to imagine him as the very young, teenage, just graduated from a prep school who enlisted and became the youngest flyer in the U. S.  Navy.

The youngest flyer and a decorated aviator at the age of 20. If you see those photos which have been playing across screens today, he looks like he's 14 years old.

Yeah.


Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan were both 29. For years, they worked desk jobs in Washington, D. C.  - Lauren at the admissions office at Georgetown University, Jay at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In their travel blog, they wrote that they wanted to live life on simpler, more deliberate terms and see the globe in an inexpensive, sustainable and gratifying way. They wanted to bike it. Back in 2015, Jay Austin showed an NPR reporter around his house as part of a feature on the tiny house movement.

That's the parlor over there, seating for about seven or so, two couches.

All 143 square feet of it. Jay Austin believed in tiny homes.

I think it's really been great to have kind of not a very complex, not a very expensive space but to have the ability to have easy access to nature. If I am feeling like I have cabin fever, I open my front door.


Dr.  Ahmad Tarakji leads the Syrian American Medical Society, which operates hospitals inside Syria. He is an American, and between trips to Syria, he told us hospitals are targeted despite efforts to shelter them.

We try to put those hospitals underground, as we found that they are the primary target of any military operation. But also, you cannot do that in every single hospital that's there inside Syria.

So you just said that hitting hospitals would be the primary target of any military operation. Did I understand you correctly?

That's perfectly correct. When there is an intent to displace people, then hospitals start to get targeted and in a pattern that's very predictable. We've seen it before in Aleppo. In addition to putting those hospitals in underground structures or in caves hospital (ph), we share the location, the coordinates of these hospitals with the U. N.  agencies, with Russia, with the United States, as they both are leading the humanitarian task force in Syria.


So we have detected neutrinos, and we have modeled them in such a way to convince us that they are not the dark matter. However, there are lab experiments going on looking for possible dark matter annihilation products. Now what does that mean?That means that - remember, we're in the dark about dark matter. We don't know what the real theory behind it is.

One possibility of the many, many possibilities that are - literally there is, you know, dozens of papers published on this every month about what could dark matter be. One of the possibilities is that dark matter decays somehow to some kind of regular, standard-model particle, and if it does do that, then we may be able to catch those decay products.

So for example, one possibility is we could detect neutrinos that were leftover after dark matter annihilated or decayed. And the way we would know those neutrinos are from dark matter and not from the sun is that they would be coming up from the center of the Earth. So they'd be coming from the wrong direction. And so there's experiments right now underway to try to catch these putative products of dark matter decay in the lab, and thus far, they have not really been successful.

So it's easier to look out into the galaxies and do it - experiment that way.


Obviously, when I was at FreedomWorks, we weighed in in supported of Ted Cruz very early in his primary challenge in Texas. So I'm a big Ted Cruz fan. But I think the fundamental differences between what I would call Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies - he's all about what he would do as president. And you never hear him talk about the Constitution, you never hear him talk about the Bill of Rights, you never hear about him and the rule of law. Whereas Ted Cruz wears that stuff on his sleeve.

How do you analyze Mr.  Trump's rise?What do you think he's tapping into?

Well, there's two things going on. One is a clear sense of economic anxiety and the feeling amongst a lot of voters that the country's headed in the wrong direction combined with a sense that Washington doesn't really give a damn. The other thing that's going on, which I think is more fundamental and I think both Republicans and Democrats are struggling to understand this, is a transformational moment in politics. It's more disintermediated. The party bosses no longer get to decide who the choice is. And with the ability to drive your own message and organize your own get-out-the-vote machine without the party's blessing, all sorts of candidates have become competitive. Donald Trump is definitely part of that, although he's sort of the odd man out because he's more of a cult of personality.

Is he though, at the same time, tapping into some of the sentiment that you and the tea party began to raise?


Look, if I were running the FBI, you know, I probably would want to have backdoors as well, so I'm sympathetic to the director's view. But there is risk if you put that backdoor in. There's no question you enhance the risk, number one. Number two, there are the privacy implications that are of concern to parties.

When you were working for the government, obviously you were institutionally on a different side of the argument. You were on the side of being able to get into whatever you needed to get into and find out whatever you needed to find out. What happened?Did you have a sort of a Saul of Damascus moment?I mean, did you always believe what you believe now?

My beliefs really haven't changed since I was in government. If anything, it gave me appreciation for how challenging it is for the government to balance and play the roles that it needs to, both wanting to keep the nation secure, both having the rights to collect extensive intelligence overseas, less so within the country. You know, the richness of that debate in many ways would, I think, make the founders of our country proud.

Rod Beckstrom was the founding director of the U. S.  National Cybersecurity Center. Thank you very much for this.

Thank you, Linda. Great to be on your show.


What makes a great building?

Well, what makes a great tall building is a building that stands out from the normal run of the mill stuff which is - which makes up most of the tall buildings that are being built in cities around the world. The four buildings this year that we've honored from each region are definitely breaking away from the norm.

Let's talk about - let me just remind everybody that this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. Let's talk about the Absolute Towers in a suburb of Toronto. These towers were named best tall buildings of Americas. They've been named the Marilyn Monroe Towers because of their sky-high curves. They're curvy-looking, yet they - the curves serve a function.

The curves do serve a function. And what's unique about these buildings is, again, against the backdrop of 99 percent of tall buildings being fairly boring rectilinear boxes, these are very curving organic towers, which look iconic and look incredible, but they serve a purpose.


I want to talk a little bit about the words that are used to describe wine. You know, normally we hear things like dry, oaky, buttery - I kind of understand what those mean. But sommeliers have a much more creative way of describing tasting notes that you might not hear in a restaurant.

Well, you get everything from the more straightforward fruits and vegetables. So it could be pomegranate, raspberry, blackberry, apple, pear, lemon. They can also range to the far more imaginative. There were times where I was sitting in a tasting group and I thought that I was hearing someone read from a Wiccan book of love spells.

(Laughter).

Burnt hair, desiccated strawberry, armpit, you know (laughter).


Which is what they do.

This is what they do, in the equivalent amount to one or 10 bad eggs or so. And they plated it out over time on these little plates. And if you put the sample on on the plate right after you add the salmonella. It looks like a lawn. I mean, the bacteria. . .

Petri dishes full of lawn.

(Unintelligible).


So that, and unfortunately too many people in the community, too many of my friends who are worried about global warming, have already taken a position on fracking. The fact is that natural gas can be made clean. It's not hard. It's much easier to do clean fracking than it is, for example, to make cheap solar.

So I'm hoping that the environmentalists who have started to oppose fracking, I think prematurely, can be won over and recognize that this has to be part of a worldwide energy policy. Natural gas also helps the Chinese because their citizens are being choked by the soot and other emissions of their coal plants.

So expediting a shift, this should be U. S.  policy, that we will help the Chinese make the shift from coal to natural gas. China, India, the developing world, this is absolutely essential.

And what about a shift to renewables?

Well, that's wonderful, and that will ultimately take the place of natural gas, but take China for example. Last year, they installed what everybody says was a gigawatt of solar. In fact, it wasn't a gigawatt because that's the peak power. Average in night, and it's half a gigawatt. Average mornings and late afternoons, it's a quarter of a gigawatt.


In this district that the Cook Political Report rated as an R+5 and was a lean-Republican until the weekend before the election, we won every county - even the most rural. There are people who supported us who have never voted for a Democrat before. We have people who will never, ever, ever, ever call themselves a Democrat.

People who voted for Donald Trump voted for you, do you think?

A hundred percent - hundred percent. And this is about representation and values. And for us, that issue was so illustrated with health care and what happened in the spring of '17 around Obamacare repeal and, you know, our prior representative's votes on the American Health Care Act.

Do you think you're to the left of the average voter in your district when it comes to health care?


We were both going after a kind of Everest. It's something big and difficult, dangerous for sure. The tribes were known to shoot at anyone who came into their area. On top of that, you've got to evade the Indian authorities who put them under protection. Plus, China has claimed that area, so there's a high military presence there. So the whole thing, if you're young and adventurous, it's kind of fantastic.

Tell me about John Allen Chau specifically and his motivations and what drove him and what surprised you about where he came from.

There's a number of different things. John was a huge outdoorsman, very capable. And he was particularly a kind of solo adventurer, did a lot of solo hikes for days at a time. And that actually turns out to be - in the missionary world, there's a kind of extreme sports end of the missionary world. It's all bro and dude and legit and hey and high-fives and scaling down cliffs to meet an uncontacted tribe. Very often, I've got to say, that story - the story that they're all trying to tell - is of the solo adventurer going into the jungle and finding the lost tribe.

Yeah.


I think the initiative is going to be very helpful in helping to solve these problems.

One last question about your new potential treatment using amyloid for multiple sclerosis. How far along - are we in phase one, have we got phase one studies, or have we not even gotten that far yet?

On this one we haven't reached phase one yet. We're still doing the toxicity testing. We're moving slowly because of the villainous reputation of these proteins. But as I said, someone over in Holland has taken this through phase one, and it looks - looks pretty good. They're doing it with alpha B-crystallin.

Well very interesting. Thank you, Dr.  Steinman, for taking time to be with us today. We'll be following this.


Thank you for having me.

You know, I've heard about this going on in Ithaca, New York, and the largest of these systems we're told is in Western Massachusetts. I believe they call it BerkShares there. They've circulated about $2 million in BerkShares in two years. So, how do you explain this idea of local currency to the average person?

Well, we talk about Equal Dollars as a community currency and bartering system that essentially serves as a companion to the U. S.  dollar. It's what maybe our ancestors did like seeds, gold, silver, copper, beads, cattle, diamonds, spices, things that people have used over the years and centuries to expand their current way of acquiring goods and services. It acts as a non-interest-bearing, spendable, transferable discount. And it…

How does it work in terms of, you know, going to the store?Can I get on the bus with it?Can I catch a cab?Can I buy a refrigerator with it?


Well, not really. I think the crowd that came here early in the day were peaceful. But this march was illegal from the beginning. The police never gave their authorization. So they had essentially warned everyone that anyone coming would be sort of in violation of the law. And so from early on, things were kind of chaotic. I think protesters have sort of dug in for what they had assumed would be a pretty violent night.

I've been seeing people basically pulling up bricks from the sidewalk and putting them in carts. I've seen people arm themselves with various iron rods and also umbrellas and create sort of shields out of wood that they found everywhere. I think what you're starting to see - you know, digging in on both sides here, between the police and also the protesters.

Are the protesters a cross section of Hong Kong, or are they one demographic, if you please?

Well, I think, today, I've actually seen quite a mixed crowd, which was sort of unexpected because, obviously, this march is - this protest was illegal. So we didn't really expect sort of to see kids or elderly people. But I have seen them.


My own judgment is it is a personal power struggle. President Salva Kiir is in power, and Riek Machar - he has been the deputy in the party and the deputy in the government. And in 2015, Riek Machar came openly talking about his ambition to become the president of the Republic of South Sudan one day. That led to his dismissal. That is the genesis of this problem.

President Salva Kiir is from the ethnic Dinka majority, the largest tribes in South Sudan, and Riek Machar is from Nuer, the second largest tribe. And, you know, in South Sudan, these two tribes - they constitute the majority of the - of the army. That is why fighting took place with the support of these two big tribes who dominated army.

There are 12,000 U. N.  peacekeeping troops there already. The proposal is for another 4,000. I gather a spokesman for the South Sudan government says they're opposed because this would be neocolonialism. Help us understand what he means by that.

Well, the government is saying it is an attempt to colonize South Sudan. It is an attempt by the American government to change the regime or the regime change. That is what the government is saying, but I don't know whether that is the intention. This morning, I had an opportunity to interview the U. S.  ambassador - the South Sudan ambassador, Molly Phee - and she categorically denied that.


So Flame has - so far they've found about 20 modules that can be swapped in and out, and they do everything from turning on the internal microphone and webcam on your computer, this way that they could record conversations that you have over Skype or conversations that you have in the room, in the vicinity of the computer.

It takes screenshots of your communications. They seem particularly interested in any email communications or instant messaging communication that you do. It also turns your computer into a Bluetooth beacon. So if you have Bluetooth enabled on your computer, they will turn that on and do a discovery for other Bluetooth-enabled devices in the vicinity, such as a phone, and they will use your computer to then siphon the contact information that is in any phone in the area.

Wow. Wow.

Why all those things?I mean, what's the reason for that?


Yeah. That was something that I really loved about this script, actually, when it came in was the World War I element of the movie. It's depicted very realistically and shows the - you know, the horrendous elements of that war. But also, it - because of him suffering from trench fever, it has this hallucinatory element to it whereby you're kind of getting glimpses into his dark imagination and what he might have actually been witnessing instead of the reality around him at that time.

Yeah, the battlefield becomes kind of Middle-earth's Mordor in many ways.

Yeah, yeah, completely, which - I mean, he always said that that war wasn't an allegory for his work and the lands he created. But at the same time, I mean, obviously you're always influenced by experiences like that.

What do you do when you go into a biopic like this?


Absolutely agree - I mean, the 20,000 Democrats that are running for president are all not going to make it to November of 2020. They have donors. They have staff. They have consultants. They've done ads. They've spent a lot of time debating and out and about. So if they need or want to make a switch to a Senate race, they're going to have all the resources in place to do that.

Well, I mean, that - you're suggesting they're warming up for a Senate run by running for president, which. . .

Well, in a year like this when you have Donald Trump, I mean, that is I think - and there's a lot of people that are looking at it going, you know, this is my shot. It's not going to be everybody's shot. But I also think you have to look at the map in totality, particularly for Democrats. They're not defending a ton of seats, and they have a lot of pickup opportunities. Colorado is probably at the top of the list. You have Arizona with a guy like Mark Kelly who had an amazing launch. You have a state like Maine. You know, I think there's a lot of positive on this map for the Democrats as well.

Twenty-two presidential candidates and there might be more by next week.


Yes. That was one of my big questions. Is that's possible?Or do we just make up strategies to pretend that we're leading normal lives?We were all carrying coins in our pockets to be able to call from a payphone if there was a bombing and say I'm OK.  We were spending more and more time indoors. So, we changed our way of living social lives. And we also changed the way we were sons and daughters because we knew that something could happen to your loved ones. So, no, no, there were not normal times. But it's astonishing, this capability humans have to pretend. It's very useful, by the way, but I don't know if it's entirely what we should do.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez. His new novel is "The Sounds of Things Falling. "It's translated by Anne McLean. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you very much, Mr.  Simon. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.


ou're also seeing some extreme moves by companies like Advantage Consultants who basically say, hey, we can supply you, Mr.  and Ms. Candidate, with an army-full of bloggers ready to get your campaign out on the blogosphere 24/7. It's just - it's like the wild, wild West right now on the Internet.

Is that - I mean, of course, all fair - all is fair in love, war and politics. But is that cheating in a way, you know, blogs were created initially as if, like, I'm just going to express what's in my heart. And now, it sounds as if what you're saying is that there is a lot of people who are saying, I'm going to create the appearance that people are speaking from their heart.

Yeah, and, you know - and this is - gets into astroturfing and a whole bunch of other terminology behind what's the real message of these types of Web sites. You're right. The organic nature of a blog was to be something that was transparent, that wasn't agenda-driven. And obviously, when you start looking at politics and campaigns, it's agenda-driven. So now, they're looking at these tools being PR machines, more than this transparent, here-is-a-look-into-my-life type of outlet that it used to be.

Speaking of transparency, there is some information that campaigns don't always give out, like where their money is coming from. And tell me about OpenSecrets.


Thanks so much for having me.

OK. So the economy's no doing so well. Is this the opportune time to launch a major cable channel?

Well, it probably isn't. But all things being equal, I think that Major League Baseball has been lucky enough to garner a very good deal for them in the sense that they're negotiating with a number of carriers. As mentioned, it's the largest cable launch in history.

And so, even with advertising difficulties, they'll have a very strong revenue stream out of subscriber fees. And so, it's probably good for baseball. And they're hoping, I'm sure, to ride this out and have a long-term goal of making it a very profitable and successful launch.

Well, baseball certainly has a lot of games during the season. So what kind of programming will we see?


It has not. I think that's an appropriate term. And I think a lot of that happened in the beginning because there was just a lot of misinformation about our agreements because, at the end of the day, their perspective is we are siphoning off resources from our current students in order to, quote, unquote, "teach these students. "And so we wanted to make sure and assure our community that that is not happening. Any resources that we're providing to Southwest Key is actually coming through other district resources and is indeed not taken away from current students.

How do you answer the reservations of people who say - look - you're just encouraging families to undertake a dangerous journey across the border because if their children wind up on the U. S.  side, they're going to get an education?

It is our moral obligation, our legal obligation. That's the only lens I'm looking through.

Explain that legal obligation to me, if you could.


Hey, Farai. How's it going?

I'm doing great. So, we survived the election and we keep on trucking. What are folks saying this week?

Well, as you can guess, we got several letters reacting to Senator Barack Obama's White House win. Here are a few responses we got on our web site. Alisha Brown wrote: Tonight I thank my dad for never being home as a kid because he was always gone registering people to vote. White people have no idea what the kids of civil rights leaders feel right now.

Then Diana McClone(ph) chimed in on a Web discussion about Senator Obama's racial identity to say this: I don't care if the person I voted for is green with polka dots and three eyes. So long as they convince me that they have the better plan for our country, they have my vote.


Well, I don't think anybody really knows, except the two of them, because it was a meeting without staff, without any advisers present. Senator Feinstein came out this morning and spoke to reporters. She hosted the meeting at her home. She said that it seemed very cordial. The two sat in comfy chairs in her living room.

They sipped water. They talked for about an hour and that they were laughing as they left. So, we know that the mood was fairly pleasant, and what Senator Obama's advisers tell us, is that they talked about how to move forward and how to achieve party unity, and how to bring together the factions of the Democratic Party that had supported each of the two of them separately, how to bring them both together to now beat John McCain in November.

So, was it a bargaining session?Was it my votes for a VP slot, something like that?

Well, actually, we're told by Senator Chuck Schumer who's an ally of Senator Clinton's in the Senate that no, they did not discuss the vice presidential chatter. It's hard to imagine that they didn't though, given the fact that it's what's everybody - it's what everybody's talking about right now.


This is Day to Day from NPR News. I'm Alex Cohen. One of the world's most celebrated playwrights, Harold Pinter, has died. Pinter was a mainstay on the London theater scene since the 1950s. His works include "The Birthday Party," "The Homecoming," "The Celebration," just to name a few. Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Here he is accepting that award.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. I think it's not necessarily either true or false. It can be both true and false.

The obscurity of those words is Pinter in a nutshell. His plays were light on plot, often taking place in a single room. Pinter offered no easy explanations for why characters acted the way they did. His dialogue was known mostly for. . .  pregnant pauses. In fact, the word people have come to use to describe that sort of tension in silence is Pinteresque. Here's Pinter in an interview with Charlie Rose, joking about the way some people reacted to his work.

When I went to see a production of my play, "No Man's Land. "I went into the bar in the interval. And a man and a woman - I couldn't escape, you know. They stand - stood in dead silence for a while. And then the man said, Oh, well, not as boring as the usual Pinteresque.


A tall building may become synonymous with a place, but it doesn't mean that it's born of that place. You can almost pick it up and put it in any city around the world and it would become synonymous with that city. And it denying thousands of years of vernacular architectural tradition, you know. . .

Yeah, yeah.

. . . to relate to environment and all these other things. So that's where the 95 percent figure, an arbitrary figure, comes from.

The Twin Towers in Abu Dhabi received the tall building innovation award. These buildings carry their own sunscreen, in a sense.


These companies have existed before, but there's a lot more from these appraisal management companies. So the lender and mortgage broker has to send the order to them, this middleman, and then they go find an appraiser in your local area to go look at your house.

Now, there's a lot of concerns that these appraisal management companies are not the answer. They are not going to fix this problem. There's not a lot of regulation of these appraisal management companies, so some states are trying to fix that. We don't really know who's getting into this business. Are these the people to be entrusting this doing important job to?

So let's say you're a consumer. Let's say you're a person who's looking to buy a home, sell a home, or you want to refinance. What can you do to make sure you're not dealing with an appraiser who's got other motivations?

Well, first of all, you want to be very direct with your broker or lender and ask them, who is doing the appraisal on my house?You want to know the name of the company. Is it a company that they have a relationship with, a business relationship?Is it a company the lender partly owns?And certainly, you want to get a copy of that appraisal. And certainly, borrowers also have the ability - they can go seek out an independent appraisal.


Look. I think there is a very, very big leap between candidate Trump in 2016 saying, Russia, if you can hear this, show us the emails, and President Trump using his awesome powers to coerce a foreign government into interfering in our elections. You know, his defense to the Mueller report was that, yeah, Russia may have interfered but that he had nothing to do with it. If this story is true, here we have the president trying to force a foreign government to work with him against his political opponent in the United States. That's beyond unacceptable.

And you say, if it's true. . .

And yes, impeachable.

You say, if it's true, what powers does the House have to try to corroborate this claim?


How the hell would I know that?Do you know that?Do you think you could?Do you think I could?I just think that here is my choice. I'm not going to talk and say he should do this, he should - that's not my responsibility. I'm not qualified

What made you decide to get involved or to speak out now?

Well, because I - people have (unintelligible) asked me what I thought. Coach, how do you feel about this or that or whatever?And I'm the history and government major. I like history. I have never been a Republican or a Democrat. I don't care. I - what I want is the best person for the job. If it's a man or a woman, it's just the best person that I'd like to see get the job.

Coach Bobby Knight. We reached him yesterday, following his endorsement of Donald Trump.


Well, that's after Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History Of Time" which is a huge bestseller and many people read it, of course, but probably many more people didn't read it. It's sort of famous as a book that many, many people bought and didn't make it all the way through.

How does the index work?And we should also be very clear that this is completely unscientific and totally for fun.

Absolutely, yeah. So what I did was when you highlight books on your Kindle, when you highlight a sentence that you particularly like, Amazon is keeping track of that - I'm not sure everyone knows that - and Amazon records what five sentences in a book are the most commonly highlighted. So in a book that people are reading all the way through, it might be the case, that those highlights are scattered all the way through the length of the book. But if, on the other hand, there was a book that almost everyone was starting and reading a few pages and then putting down, then all of those highlights would have to be clustered in the first part. So what I did was just average the location of the top five highlights in the book - a very simple measure.

And that's publicly available data?


How are you with intimacy these days?Where do you seek it?Where do you get it?Is it still in making eye contact with strangers?Is it when you get on a stage?

I don't know. I am more ambivalent. I am - when I'm on stage now, I don't laser beam my eyeballs into other people's eyeballs. . .

(Laughter).

. . . like I used to. I mean, I used to victimize people with my eyeballs one by one.


Right, and how ironically that they were announced during Small Business Week - (laughter) - on top of everything else.

I didn't know that it was a Small Business Week. Tiffany, what is your best-selling luggage line there?

Right. Well, we - kind of the example I've used is, you know, so if we had a piece of luggage on our store that was at $400 and, you know, has now gone up to $440, but that $400 piece of luggage goes up to $500, then that becomes a really big price jump.

So how are you feeling?


Jim Kelly, the great old Buffalo Bills quarterback, can't remember the fourth quarter of the most important football game. And as he works all his life to get into that fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, and he can't remember.

Can't remember it, but it's on video. No, it's - I love Jim Kelly. I mean. . .

Yeah, I do too.

. . . He was a great player to watch. And he's in a special case because he's had several cancers that keep returning, and he's lost a son. He suffered in ways not of his own choosing. I mean, football was his own choosing. It was very poignant, though, because he told it, like, sort of joyously. He said, oh, yeah, we called it dings back then. You know, we call it concussions now and CTE, but no, no, no, it was great. I don't remember anything. I remember wandering back to the team hotel the day after the Super Bowl and wondering why I was there and not remembering - and he thought it was a funny story.


Credit's a basic input, just like fertilizer or fuel or labor. Farmers here need credit to be able to buy their fertilizer, number one, which is much more expensive than it used to be. Seeds, pesticides, everything - to have money to pay your employees every month. And so, when credit's delayed or not available, especially on fertilizer, it gets very complicated to be able to raise a crop. Nobody in modern agriculture can farm without credit.

And what's your credit situation like right now?

I have credit, but it was delayed. I've never had trouble getting credit here in Brazil. I've always paid my bills, and so credit's available for me. But this year, the credit promises were made, but then the credit wasn't going to arrive until it was too late to order the fertilizer and actually work out the logistics of receiving it. And so it's changed my plans a lot this year.

And timing is really essential for farmers. So, how is that going to play out there with your 2000 acres of soy?


Well, I only recently arrived, so I haven't seen the whole city by any means. But when I got here, I went straight to a demonstration on the city's east side. This was one of those demonstrations that have been called by Juan Guaido for what he billed as the biggest-ever demonstration in the history of Venezuela.

There were a lot of people there - thousands, possibly in the tens of thousands. But I have seen much larger crowds turn out for Guaido before. And so this was a smaller turnout. And I think the most noticeable thing about it is that the mood has quite substantially changed. Whilst these demonstrations for the opposition leader, Guaido, were before quite very lively - there'd be a lot of chanting, a lot of singing - now there's a mood of wariness. I thought it was more subdued.

And not far away from where I was, there were violent clashes underway between the security forces and a small group of anti-government protesters in which, you know, they were exchanging. . .

Yeah.


It's perfect.

Yeah, bubbly jock. And an owl is a hoolet. And that, again, is based on the sound that it makes. And - but my favorite is a wood pigeon, is a cushie-doo.

That is an absolutely dead-on approximation of its sound.

Isn't it lovely?So a frog is a puddock and sparrow is a speug. So I've never used speug in a sentence, but when I was a boy, we used puddock. So I don't go around trying to convince everybody that my culture's better than theirs, but sometimes it suits my face better. It sits nicely in my mouth.


His anatomy turns out to be such that when he tastes something, he experiences it as much more intense than someone who has a lower density of taste buds on his tongue and. . .

Well, let me go through - let me ask you - well, let me just remind everybody that this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. And I'm talking with Barbara Stuckey, author of "Taste What You're Missing. "Are you saying that we each have different numbers of taste buds on our tongues?Not - we all don't have the same number of taste buds?

We all live in our own private sensory world. So yes, the answer is we all have a different anatomy picture that really influences how we experience. . .

Wow.


Well, I mean, he has been followed by the Secret Service for all these years pretty much every time he goes out. But I think that's not a good use of Secret Service agents. And also, you know, here are some other questions - he's going to be staying in his mother's house, who's 89 years old. Is she going to be the one who's making him take his meds every day?Is there a gun in the house?I mean, I've never heard answers to any of these questions. And what happens when she dies?I mean, his brothers and sister have said they can then take over his care, but he could never slip away from them?Like I said, I think he's a very devious man and I think he's proven that.

Patti Davis, an author, most recently of the book "The Wit And Wisdom Of Gracie. "She joins us from NPR West.

Patti, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you.


And so these two ally's ships were absolutely overmatched. Rooks did not try to avoid the battle; he offered himself to it. And in the end these two allied ships were absolutely overwhelmed by the power that fell upon them - Japanese torpedoes and shells, hitting them left and right. The Houston was finally hit by four torpedoes, which opened up her hull to the sea and the ship slowly began to settle in about 140 feet of water to the site of the wreck that the Navy's exploring today.

And could you tell us, please, about the ship's chaplain because he won the Navy Cross.

He did. Commander George Rentz was the oldest man on the ship. He was 59 years old on the night the Houston was sunk. He was clinging to a pontoon that belonged to one of the Houston's floatplanes. This pontoon was riddled by shrapnel, was taken on water, but it was literally a life raft for about a dozen or more Houston sailors.

He said to the sailors who were with him, he said, you men are young. I've lived the major part of my life; I'm willing to go.


What the spoon is made of, of course, can change things because somebody else did some tests not that long ago with spoons made of different metals and found out that - what a lot of people believe - that different metal tastes different to your tongue - that for many people that's true. For some people, it's not so true. But they - these guys also played with things like what's the shape of the spoon?What's the color of the spoon?How heavy is it?All those things had some effect on people. The more interesting thing to me, at least today, is when people said the taste - that actually tasted different because of how it was served or what it was served in it. It was sweeter. It was saltier, whatever. You would think that couldn't change.

But it did. And one - I got about a few seconds here. But one of the more fascinating things, to me, from the study is that people were willing to pay almost 50 percent more for the same wine if it was served under a red light than if was under a white light.

Yeah, quite amazing, huh?And things served on different colored plates sometimes tasted sweeter to them.

Wow. Thank you, Marc. We'll see you again.


(Through interpreter) That's how it went. And that's, I think, why he's so afraid. I think that's why he's so afraid. And he's afraid that I just won't be with him.

When is your little boy's birthday?

(Through interpreter) The 8 of November.

OK.  My wife and I have a little girl whose birthday is November 2. And she will be 11 years old. And we sent her - I think she was about 3. We sent her to preschool because people said it was a good idea. And she hated it. So we stopped that after a few days. And now she's a straight-A student. And it's the best thing we ever did. She needed to be with her mother.


Well, Jo, when she came to Parliament in May 2015, she immediately began work on the Syria refugee crisis. She set up a cross party group of MPs to work on the issue. She was one of the first people to call for humanitarian aid drops to the besieged towns and cities of Syria. And she was instrumental in changing U. K.  government policy so that the conservative government has now agreed to take 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian refugee children who are in desperate need of our help, solidarity and support. And so in that short one year, one month in Parliament, she made a tremendous difference. People had already marked her down as a rising star in the Labour Party.

And we should remember, she had a young family, I gather.

Jo had two young children, age 3 and 5, and she was talking about how one of them had chickenpox only the other day. She (inaudible) houseboat with her husband Brendan and the children. And it is so hard for people to come to terms with this senseless death. And we are shocked to the core.

Campaigning has been temporarily suspended in the referendum that's coming up in just a few days about whether Britain should stay in the European Union or leave. Could you tell us something about the political atmosphere in Britain as you see it now as this important referendum approaches?


Yeah, yeah.

It's wonderful, first of all.

Thank you.

I've enjoyed it. The very first cut on here is a very intriguing track. It's called "Jailer," and some of the lyrics say, Jailer, I am in chains. You're in chains too. I wear uniforms. You wear uniforms, too. I'm a prisoner. You're a prisoner, too, Mister Jailer. Where did that come from?


Prop 8 was voters saying that they do not want to allow same-sex marriages.

Yes, traditional marriage only. A federal appeals court struck that down. And if the Supreme Court takes that case, they then might be faced with a bigger question about: Is there a right to marry for gays and lesbians?My belief is they're going to put that off a while. They're going to decide this question about DOMA, and legally - and then put off a little while longer the question of what about all the other states where gay marriage is illegal.

And just briefly, David, we have the Voting Rights Act, a very important piece of legislation in this country that could come before the court, as well.

Absolutely. And it's also an old question. It goes back to the '60s. Since the '60s, the South has been under a sort of a special scrutiny. If they change their election laws in any way, they have to get a pre-clearance or an approval from Washington. It - that law is one of the great laws of the 20th century. It changed the South.


So, I don't how it would go anyway.

You sounded fine to me. But let me ask you, because - in part because Allison is still here with me, and we always talk about this on Friday, these kinds of things. Do you know what you're going to wear?

I do, I do. I'm nominated in the Urban/Alternative Performance category, and I decided to just go with that. So, I've picked a young designer who is a good friend of mine. Her name is Carmen Webber of Sistahs Harlem, and she was on "Project Runway," actually, and we've been friends for years. She has made me a fantastic jumpsuit for the Grammys. That's all I'm going to say.

OK, OK.


Sure.

Because there are already a number of candidates who think. . .

(Laughter).

. . . Who are from the West. . .


Absolutely. They used to end up there in the French Riviera and big mansions in Europe. Now they tend to also end up in Europe but not in big mansions but in the criminal court - in The Hague.

And has that had the effect of making it more difficult sometimes to get rid of certain people?

Absolutely. They are - they don't trust now any promises that they will not be prosecuted or taken in front of a judge. And also, you know, the standards of human rights internationally have changed. And there is a very active community - globally - that chases after dictators and people that have violated human rights and have committed the crimes against humanity, which is the case for many of them.

Now, isn't the logic of that - the humanitarian logic of that - that knowing they might have to face criminal charges will discourage dictators from striking out at their own people?


What do your members want?

Well, they want the right to sit down and negotiate their terms and conditions of employment with the university. And just like any other workers, they have serious concerns about the way they're paid, how much they're paid, what their benefits are and how they resolve problems on the job. So these workers, you know, see an advantage to having the opportunity to sit down as equals at the bargaining table.

It sounds like they want more money and more benefits?

Well, certainly, those are key issues. But they're not the entire set of issues that they have, you know?There have been longstanding problems at the university in, you know, getting paid on time, getting ability to resolve a problem with your supervisor, dealing with issues of sexual harassment.


And I can tell you though when people of color hear white people say, I was taught to treat everyone the same when racism comes up, they're usually rolling their eyes. And they're definitely not thinking, oh, right, I'm talking to a woke white person right now. They're usually thinking this is a dangerous white person. This is a white person who has no self-awareness and is not going to be able to hold and affirm my reality, which is fundamentally different than theirs in a society which is deeply separate and unequal by race.

And you actually, in this book, very specifically target white progressives. You say that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. What do you mean?

Yeah. First, let's define a white progressive. In my mind, it's any white person who thinks they're not racist - thinks they get it, thinks they are less racist, who's listening to the show right now thinking of all the other white people that really should be listening to this show right now.

Right. It's never us.


I think that the protests need to go as far as we need to take them so that America begins to wake up, that this is a problem. You know, 45 said that this is a local issue and. . .

And by 45, you mean President Donald Trump.

Correct. This is a national epidemic. This is a national outcry of people and communities in pain.

Can you tell us something about Stephon before we say goodbye?


The banks can bring in their junky securities and swap them for cash or treasury bills. And that, on top of interest rate cuts, Bernanke thought would be enough to keep the financial system working until it healed itself. The strategy at the Fed was known as the finger in the dike strategy, keep the water out and eventually things will recover.

But obviously, you know things didn't work out like that. And in the spring, we had the great Bear Stearns crisis, and the Fed was forced to intervene to prevent them going bankrupt. Then, we had another few months where it seemed like things had stabilized, but this thing's like a disease. It goes away for a while, and then, you know, it comes back in a more virulent form.

In September, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, you know, all hell broke out, basically. And since then, we've had a sort of slow motion collapse of the financial system.

Now, this entire crisis has really tarnished Alan Greenspan's legacy, and he even admitted that his basic economic philosophy is now changed. What about Ben Bernanke?Does he deserve the same criticism?


You can point to the same thing in income, in housing, across the board. And if we're not investing very specifically to deal with that, we can continue to expect to see these inequalities to persist.

You are also arguing for a constitutional amendment that would ban the death penalty.

That's right.

Why is this part of a plan to empower black America?


Well, he sounds like a very ambitious entrepreneur.

I think they are, you know. I think the appeal of it, obviously, for entrepreneurs - this drop shipping model - is that it takes almost nothing upfront. You don't need money to buy the stuff. The tools online are very inexpensive, and it's this possibility that these entrepreneurs can get something for nothing - right?- that they can generate money basically out of thin air.

And not to make any comparisons, but I seem to recall that there was a time when J. Crew was a catalog retailer - didn't have any real stores. And now, of course, they've got plenty of them in addition to a very ambitious online retail site.

Absolutely. The way that I've thought about these Shopify stores is they're undoubtedly strange because they're new, but their model is fundamentally not that different from, like, a big corporate enterprise. It's just that the tools have democratized the ability for people to tap into the globalized economy. And so before, it took the idea of having a supply chain and having all these people who would know factory owners in China and all these other kinds of things - that took a lot of infrastructure.


The stakes are high and many citizens have concerns about voter intimidation and fraud. For more we've got Violet Gonda. She is a Zimbabwean journalist with SW Radio Africa, an independent station which broadcasts from London into Zimbabwe. She is currently on a night fellowship at Stamford University. Violet, welcome.

Hi, Farai, and thank you for having me on the program.

Let's back up a little bit into the history of Zimbabwe. In 1980 it became one of the last African nations to shed its colonial government, and when Robert Mugabe came to power he was among other things open to white farmers and other whites staying in Zimbabwe. Over the years he redistributed the land and a lot of people see the current economic collapse as a result of this land ownership change. But what other factors played into Zimbabwe going from where it was in 1980 to where it is today?

When Mugabe authorized the violent takeover of land, he basically directly affected millions of people. And then also the other issue were Mugabe's economic policies. For example, a bloated or rather large government means that not only did the economy suffer when he took over the farms but we also had a government that was living far, far, far beyond, you know, its means. Also the economic policies churned out by the regime were not in the best interest of the majority of the people but the best interest of the ruling party.


Well, we got a response from a listener in Athens, Georgia, when our bloggers discussed whether black media outlets were balanced when covering Barack Obama. Scott Dugan (ph) wrote us this. I am surprised to find no mention of the constant comments from the media and McCain campaign that Obama was behaving presumptuously during his trip abroad. To me, these comments are all short hand for calling Obama uppity. Why have you called the media and the McCain campaign out on this?

And this month we're doing a series on addiction. Vernon Martin (ph) in Hollywood, Florida, wrote in to say he liked the segment we did last week on functioning addicts. So many times we conjure the wrong view in our minds about functioning addicts. They're found practicing law, operating, or assisting in operating rooms, teachers, police officers, construction workers or any other person maintaining a career. As a drug and alcohol counselor, I have seen all of them.

And last week, we covered the news that Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sent to jail. Peter Williams (ph) lives in the Motor City and wrote us this. Your panel missed the point on Mayor Kilpatrick. The problem is not his unfaithfulness to his marriage. It is that he wrongfully fired three police officers who, while performing their duties, might have uncovered the affair. That is the type of abuse of public trust that warrants his dismissal.

And finally, Victor Emanuel (ph) in Inglewood, New Jersey wrote in about the interview we did about a black reporter who was thrown out of a John McCain event. Victor thought we cut the story short.


I think this team, by necessity, given the circumstances, is going to be focused more on the more immediate dual strategic challenges that could suck us into international adventures that will be devastating to our national interest.

And primarily, at the top of that list, I think you would put Iran.

Yes, and the Middle East, more generally; or perhaps now even some parts of the Sahara in Africa.

Now there are going to be crises like this situation that's developing in Algeria. We obviously still don't know a lot about what's going on there. But where do you see an opportunity to create - for a geo-trategic approach?Iran - everybody says there are a lot of options. None of them, very good.


No costume changes, no props.

Did you go into being someone who could be so mutable in part because you had to kind of - you had to have a place to escape, I'm assuming?

You know, I think that's exactly what it was. I remember as a teenager that - you know, I was born in Germany. I lived in Japan 'til I was 10 and then, you know, moved to Iowa, which is where I graduated high school. But you know, just being surrounded by so many different cultures, I just found myself kind of being a sponge. And so, as an extracurricular activity, I ended up, you know, doing standup comedy, you know, telling jokes to my friends. And I think you're right. I think it ended up being an escape into these different characters to be able to make people laugh. And it kind of made, you know, kind of made me laugh on the inside as well, because everything on the outside was really, really hurting.

Can you either give us a snippet of a character, to be in character or show how you transition between characters?


Californians who are terminally ill can now receive a prescription from their doctor for drugs that will end their life. The End Of Life Option Act passed last year went into effect this week. It allows people that two doctors have said have six months or less to live to receive drugs to end their lives as long as they're found to be mentally competent. The person receiving the drug must give it to themselves.

Lonny Shavelson is a physician and author who's been teaching doctors around the state. He's also started a practice devoted to people who want assistance to end their lives. Dr.  Shavelson joins us now from Berkeley. Thanks very much for being with us.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

What - and what kind of questions are doctors bringing to you?


It's significant because you have a journalist who's killed in the line of duty doing some investigative work into a story he wanted to write. And as far as we understand, the people that he was investigating put out a hit on him, and he was killed. I mean, that's a very chilling reminder that we do - sometimes do dangerous work. And the project's main mission is to tell those people, if indeed they are the ones responsible, that you cannot kill the message by killing the messenger.

There has been a confession, hasn't there?And yet you remain unsatisfied. Why is that?

Well, the person who confessed was a very low-level member of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. He was a handyman. He originally told police he did not do the crime, and then after he was led to - he was allowed to meet privately with the bakery CEO, a 22-year-old named Yusuf Bey IV, this guy basically convinced him to confess. Now, whether or not he did the crime or not, we don't know. What we do know is, is that he did not do this by himself, as he has told police.

Now, what would you say is the latest in the ongoing investigation?Or is the investigation ongoing, since the police had someone who confessed, although your organization doesn't necessarily buy it?


In terms of the natural ecosystems, rapid changes coming, suddenly roads are getting built. People having the first time in nearly 22 years of warfare that they're able to get up and still moving around and finding markets and exploiting resources. Animals are resourced. They will be facing severe problems if poaching becomes more common that it already is, which is somewhat routine, and these things could be wiped out very badly in a few years, especially vulnerable species like elephants which are in so much danger elsewhere and even species that are quite rare and it's just only in South Sudan like certain kinds of antelope that were thought extinct and now have been found in South Sudan.

And there are - the ivory route is that these poachers come down and kill the animals for their ivory. It's taken then to Sudan, carved and sent to China.

Yeah. There's a city called Onderon(ph) - if I'm pronouncing it correctly - which has a traditional center of artisanal carving of ivory and export. So some elephant tusks do flow into Onderon and get shipped out from there to markets in the Middle East and China.

Yet, there are still large herds of elephants left in South Sudan. You saw one from an airplane.


Do you think the royal family can really survive in a time when we have other kinds of celebrities that cost the taxpayer nothing?I mean, clearly, a lot of hopes are being placed on not only Meghan Markle and Prince Harry but the other younger royals like Prince William.

I very, very sincerely believe that Britain couldn't do without them. There's such a deep attachment. They're sort of the very, like, emblem of history, of continuity. Unlike America, there's been almost a kind of - a certain kind of disregard for history. Britain has always fallen back on the past. It's always needed the past. So they're - I think that they will find a way for the royal family to continue to carry on that symbolism, at least.

I must ask you - are you attending the wedding?

I'm not.


Someone who might be a public interest lawyer who decides to go to Wall Street instead because the money is better there, someone who might like to be a teacher making a little money, but decides, instead, to take a job, you know, in retail sales or in corporate because again the money is there. They lose, but we all lose. And I think that that's the challenge right now is that the nation loses when we are not in a position to invest and provide opportunities for every young person, and again, I'd say not-so young person.

We have students at Bennett who were returning students in their 30s, 40s and even 50s. And so we want every student and every person to have the opportunity to maximize. This is the kind of economy where people really don't maximize; where, instead, as you said they're careful; they're hoarding, they're not spending. So even this little $300 of the so-called stimulus package is going to put out there, a lot of people are going to put that away.

Well…

A lot people are going to say, well, I'm not going to spend that money. I'm going to wait for a rainy day.


Thank you, Tony. It's a pleasure to be with you.

As I understand it, I should be singing "Happy Birthday" to you. Your birthday's Monday, right?

You know all the information, don't you?

It just means we did our homework on you. Happy birthday, Nneena Freelon.

Thank you, thank you.


Very infamous words. . .

. . . George W.  Bush famously used. And he used them the last time we were involved in a Middle East conflict, declared it accomplished. And it turns out it wasn't.

No, far from it. Let's turn to some other things that are happening this week. It's not been a dull week in Washington. The president spent this past week exhibiting a lot of fury and anxiety. And, indeed, that has continued on Twitter today about the special counsel investigation, which sprouted yet another inquiry this week, and the raid on his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

That's right. We're learning that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been the subject of a months-long criminal corruption investigation. We know that Cohen is in trouble for several things, including not paying taxes on his taxi medallion business. But Michael Cohen is about as close to Donald Trump as anyone who has been investigated so far. He's his personal lawyer. He knows all about the Trump Organization deals all around the world because he helped negotiate some of them. We also find out just tangentially that he even helped negotiate a deal between an - the vice chairman of the RNC and a model, who he had an affair with and got pregnant.


And it is important. Some people say that the administration is risking the advancement, that Iran is just playing for time as it has in previous discussions and spinning things out and asking for preliminary meetings and other discussions technical to - just to play this out as long as possible to continue their development, to continue to enrich uranium. And then that the administration is playing a game, saying, well, let's wait until November 5th.

Well, I think the administration has its eyes wide open in terms of Iranian negotiating tactics. And again, they have been clear that this is not an open-ended negotiation. This is not forever. I think they're going to lay down some markers that certain steps need to be taken as an - as evidence of good faith. And if they're not taken, then that's going to send a message that, you know, look, this isn't serious.

Since the last round of negotiations, Iranian officials have said publicly that Iran will insist on the right to negotiate to continue to enrich uranium to the 20 percent level. That is one of the issues that is very much under discussion at these talks. How much credence should we put in public statements by senior Iranian officials about non-negotiable positions?

I think, given what we know about the internal divisions within Iran on some of these issues and the - their negotiating behavior in the past where they've made outrageous public statements and then in negotiations walk right - walked them right back, I wouldn't put too much credence in those statements at this point.


I don't think that the Russian trolls sitting in a factory in St.  Petersburg have First Amendment rights to communicate without restriction on Facebook. I don't think that's the issue here. The question is are we being reasonable when we expect an open platform like this to be able to wholly protect us from being exposed to that kind of information?But I do worry about overreacting to this threat of propaganda. And I do think that on some level we have to trust our citizens to be able to separate fact from fiction.

Do you have any words for Americans who support free speech but don't know where to turn and who to trust on social media?

Well, one of the things that's been encouraging in the last two years is how much Americans have turned to more trusted sources of news. People really are looking for more reliable news sources. And that's a positive development. It's never been easier to find good, responsible, interesting news. It's never been harder to avoid the bad stuff. So, I just think that what we really need to be teaching here is citizenship and judgment. And I do have some faith in the American people that they're going to figure this out.

Ben Wizner, who's director of the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, thanks so much.


You know, that's a really great question. Our book hit No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list on Wednesday. And here I am having written this book and stepping into a different version of, you know, women's rights feminist icon. And it's something I'm really proud of because I had to really educate myself on what I believe to be true.

And so I - I don't know. I think that recreating a person's identity is happening on the daily. And I - for me - I want to keep breaking free from all of these identities and get down to that last one, which is human. And I hope that people out there feel the same way because we are all the same matter.

That soccer star Abby Wambach.

Abby, thank you.


Well, you're right. In the temporary workforce, for example, which is only something between 2 and 3 million of the employment, so that's a smaller portion, but temporary worker employment's down about 20 percent. When you look at total employment, it's down about 2 percent. So one of the things that temporary workers or contract workers or self-employed workers offer employers is flexibility.

So when there's a slowdown, when there is less project work, when there's less money available for financing, new projects, mergers and acquisitions, those kinds of things, the flexible workers generally take a harder hit than usual, and there's plenty of evidence to support that. You know, one measure of unemployment, which is called U-6, which would - includes people that are underemployed or are working temporary or part time because they can't find other work, that's up to like 13. 5 percent.

And we see that the average hourly - the average work week, at 33. 3 hours, is at a historic low. So, you're right, there's no question the flexible workers are taking it harder.

We haven't talked about pay, and in the few moments that we have left, let's talk about that. In terms of the temporary workforce, is the pay on par with those who are working permanently?Is it below?Is it, in some cases, higher?


Well, one of the big questions is going to be whether or not Donald Trump is able to turn out all of these new voters that he says he's going to be able to turn out. So if you look at the numbers on caucus night, if the numbers are about 150,000 or higher on the Republican side, people think that's a good day for Donald Trump. If there are 125,000 to 150,000, that's the number of people are saying could be good for Ted Cruz.

Democratic side, both Sen.  Sanders and Hillary Clinton seem to be getting good crowds.

For the Democrats, the thing to watch here is that Hillary Clinton has been in this state for two years organizing. They feel like they have their strong core base of support. They have Barack Obama's field operation there. Remember, he won this state in 2008. Bernie Sanders has a interesting complication because he's getting huge crowds. A lot of his supporters are young. They're college-age. The problem with them is that they're all concentrated in a few different places. He's winning more than a quarter of his vote right now in three counties. They're actually encouraging a lot of these kids to go back home so that they can filter out the vote in the rest of the state because the way delegates are picked, they need a little bit more of these kids to go back to other places. Otherwise, Hillary Clinton could wind up winning in rural counties and wind up beating Bernie Sanders, even though he might have a lot of vote concentrated in those cities.

All this concentration on Iowa - and I don't regret a moment on it. . .


Yeah, which politicians are able to do when required. She was very much a quiet remainer. She made one speech at the beginning and then vanished. It was almost as if she too was calculating and looking at the greater prize at the end.

Let's turn to the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader, has been accused of campaigning to stay in the EU just about as enthusiastically as speaker Paul Ryan in the U. S.  has been campaigning for Donald Trump.

Yeah. I think that's a - it's a perfect analogy. And he was a long-term euro skeptic, but his campaign was so (unintelligible). And he was asked on a tv show how important Britain remain in the European was, and this was at the height of the campaign. And he said, well, seven - seven and a half, and that went down very, very badly. You're not going to win votes like that, and he didn't. And there was a revolt in the Labour heartlands, in the industrial north areas, which have not done particularly well in recent years as manufacturing declines. And as a result, there was a huge uprising in the Westminster party and the houses of Parliament against him.

Yeah, his members of his shadow cabinet have been stepping up to resign.


My reaction to the reaction is that it was spearheaded by the Daily Mail, which is really an out-and-out - almost a racist enterprise. It's - Daily Mail has been one of the most strenuous advocates for Brexit. But they were also avoiding some of the serious themes of the piece.

Well, let's talk about some of those things. Diana was famously involved with Dodi Fayed 20 years ago. And there was a lot of talk then. Now Harry is marrying Meghan Markle, as we mentioned, who is biracial. So have things changed?What does that say about the United Kingdom now?

I think that Britain is in a very strange place because the royals are kind of - as somebody said to me from the families, they're sort of one bright spot. Like, they're young. They're dynamic. They represent something that's very sort of inspiring when everything else is actually very gray because there's been this sort of political convulsion that was Brexit.

Do you think the royal family can really survive in a time when we have other kinds of celebrities that cost the taxpayer nothing?I mean, clearly, a lot of hopes are being placed on not only Meghan Markle and Prince Harry but the other younger royals like Prince William.


That's fantastic. As you looked around, though, people might say, don't your teammates get a little jealous?Might they want to take a shot every once in a while?

Yeah. I mean, it was really cool. My shots were falling in the first half, and they kept feeding me the ball. And at half-time, I had 58 points and my teammates were more ecstatic. And they were so happy for me, and they said they were going to keep feeding me the ball. And so I couldn't ask for better teammates, how unselfish and willing they were to continue to give me the ball. And after the game, they were just as happy, if not more happy, than I was that a record was broken.

I wanted to read you a quote. You may have seen it already from Kobe Bryant who said, "That's crazy, man. I don't care what level you're at. Scoring 138 points is pretty insane. He added, "he must have been wearing the Mambas. Only the Mambas can have no conscience to shoot the ball that much. "The Mambas, as you know I'm sure, is the name of Kobe Bryant's shoe.

Yeah. Yeah. Kobe's - he was my favorite player growing up. So to hear him talk about my game was pretty cool.

No conscience though?Is that - that's the scorer's mentality?


Sam, in this book, you're telling the story of the Assad family, but you're also telling the story of another Syrian family. Tell me about this lost family and their relationship with the Assads.

The relationship goes all the way back to the early '50s when Mustafa Tlass and Hafez al-Assad were in their early 20s. They were cadets at the Homs Military Academy. And they basically rose up together to the pinnacle of power until - you know, Mustafa Tlass was up by Hafez's side all the way through. I mean, he was willing to kill for him by his own admission in his own memoirs. He played a crucial role in the passing of power from Hafez to Bashar.

So you have these two men, Hafez and Mustafa. And then they both have sons. And their sons are Bashar al-Assad and Manaf Tlass. Tell me about the relationship between those two men.

So Hafez al-Assad had four sons and one daughter, and the eldest was Bassel, and he was the one being groomed to take over power from his father, but he died in a car crash. So Bashar was summoned to Damascus to basically fill Bassel's shoes. I mean, initially, members of the family, even Bashar's own sister, felt he was hopeless. You know, Bashar was not equipped to inherit power.


Right.

. . . not to filibuster. If they do that, then something could pass the Senate in the next couple of days and be ready for the House to take it up on Sunday night. If the House were to then approve it - and that's a huge if, OK?

Yeah.

This is the cliff in the fiscal cliff. Thus far the House hasn't agreed to anything. Last week they wouldn't even agree to a plan from their own speaker that was only going to raise taxes on income above $1 million.


A woman named Rabbit is a kind of miracle. She was pulled out of the grave of her dead mother along the Ma River in Vietnam on the night of a full moon, when folklore says that a rabbit walks the moon. It was troops who'd begun to pull out, but Rabbit grows up in the landscape of leveled homes and shattered lives and barren poison fields in which her own life slips between present tense and parable. Quan Barry now reads from her new novel, "She Weeps Each Time You're Born. "

(Reading) On this we do not agree. Some of us say she was made manifest in a muddy ditch on the way to the pineapple plantation. Others say it happened hunkered down in a piggery, the little ones with their wet snouts full of wonder at the strange, bristleous being wriggling among them for milk. Either way, we bow to you. Believe us when we say life is a wheel. There was no beginning; there is no end. But we will tell you the story as she believes it occurred - under the full rabbit moon, 6-feet below ground in a wooden box. Her mother's hands cold as ice. Overhead, the bats of good fortune flitting through the dark.

"She Weeps Time You're Born" is one of Library Journal's six essential debuts of 2015. And Quan Barry, who is a prize-winning poet and a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, joins us from the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.


Yeah.

Now, from what I hear you saying, you don't want to clean it out. You want to get more stuff in there. You're going to be cleaning out the good bacteria, would you not?

Well, that is a possibility. Although if you have problems, you clearly have some bad bacteria there that would be - that you could possibly clear out as well. What we're thinking is that perhaps something like a nasal clear out with saline are indeed anti-microbial, coupled with these rehabilitation approaches. So when you it clear it out, that you reinstate the appropriate organisms at that site, that that might be the best approach we could take for treatment.

And that, you know, 15 percent of chronic rhinosinusitis sufferers are - have good outcomes and resolved their disease symptoms with anti-microbials. So clearly, we're missing a part of the picture. We're currently - there's something missing that we need to add, and we think it's restoration of these organisms that may actually maintain a balanced immune response of these site and protect these mucosal surfaces. We actually think that something kind of an equivalent of a microbial shield at these sites (unintelligible).


Have you been able to solve any specific problems in real time yet?I mean, you can see where, for expatriates, this is probably relieving to have something that you can do to help to try to help because it has to be frustrating to live outside the country and have your countrymen and probably your relatives going through all this. And you probably feel like, you know, what can I do?

Yes. So in the hackathon, we had 17 submissions. Three of them were completed, and four our ongoing. So like, you know, one of the ones that, you know, we're pretty excited is related to this Twitter data where people are, like, requesting medicines or offering medicine. A team built a Twitter bot that replies to those requests and try to match - do matchmaking between offer and the match.

That's exciting. I mean, I'm guessing this has been a fulfilling project for you. I mean, how has it made you feel to work on this and to see your work starting to grow?

Amazing. I think this is the best I've felt in a long time - to actively solve and engage with, you know, challenges in the country has been very gratifying for us as a team.


Well, the government, it's been a little late and a little ad hoc, you know, beginning with the bailout of Bear Stearns. You know, the solutions were simply antiseptic, one-off types of solutions that ultimately led to bigger problems, and now, of course, in the last few weeks, the potential for one giant massive solution, but the ad hoc nature of it and the timeliness of the response has been a little lacking, in my opinion.

Well, now, we have this $850 billion rescue plan, $250 billion of that going directly into banks. That's something that you have called for in the last month. The government is responding. Still, in the markets, you don't see a sense of calm, and you write about that. America is afraid, you say.

Yes. America's afraid. Investors are afraid, and, you know, the delicate combination between Wall Street and Main Street has reinforced the fear of each.

From what I read, a fundamental source of the fear is this continuing uncertainty about what assets are worth. You have offered to help the government with that?You said you'd do it for nothing. Have you heard back from anybody at the Treasury?Have they called you up to say, gee, great, thanks, let's go to work?

Well, there have been discussions, Alex. We haven't had any final decision. We hope to hear, I suppose, within the next 24 to 48 hours, and so. . .


Just tell me what a typical day has been like camped out there on the tracks.

Well, it's hot. It's been pretty hot out here. And then you got your rain. It's hot and wet, you know, kind of sticky. But we're coal miners - we're used to rough conditions and climates and water and all that stuff, you know.

Have local people in town been bringing you food?Have you been cooking out over an open fire?What's it been?

Yeah it's been - cooking out on a camp grill. People out of state's been calling in pizzas to the local Pizza Hut. And we've been supported well.


Right.

. . . Little inspiration pieces.

A road map.

Yeah, a little road map. You know, you want to make a right out of nowhere. . .