So you were recently in Michigan speaking to autoworkers. The Detroit News quoted you as saying that the labor section in the agreement is actually better than NAFTA, but it still needs improvement. So can you just give me one or two ideas of what more needs to be done in your view?

Well, as it currently stands, the agreement can't be enforced. And there are three levels that it must be enforced at. One, Mexico has to show us not only that it can pass laws but that it has the wherewithal, the infrastructure and the resources to be able to implement those laws and give workers a chance to better their wages and working conditions because if they don't do that, no matter what the agreement says, it's - it won't matter. It won't change workers' lives in this country.

The second part is, the agreement's enforcement provisions need to be dramatically strengthened. The International Trade Commission's report recently confirmed what we already knew - that without a way to hold all three countries accessible, this deal isn't worth the paper it's written on. And under this agreement, any party can block a panel. A panel is the arbitrator that decides the dispute, the trade dispute. And if you can't ever get it decided by a third party, you can never actually implement it.

And then the third level of enforcement is that workers need to be able to enforce this trade agreement to make it better so that it works for us so that if somebody violates the agreement in Mexico or Canada, we should be able to stop their products at the border.


Yes.

They got very close.

Yeah. They got way too close. It would've been an absolute disaster, politically, politically - never mind anything else - for Mr.  Lincoln if the Confederates had just marched into Washington, you know, burned Washington. And that could have very easily had happened. Grant would have been disgraced. Lincoln might have lost the election in November because this would be such an embarrassment, psychological impact would've been incalculable.

I want to talk about Lincoln and I think that there's a monument up there to Lincoln's role in this battle.


Thank you.

In general, these hearings, the questioning has been chopped up into five-minute increments back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. Do you think this works, especially for something where we know that there are two very distinct narratives and a great deal of polarization?

I think it can be very productive given the fact that they are planning for it. They are rehearsing. They're having mock sessions - at least the Democrats are, Republicans may be doing something similar - because the five-minute increments are highly disruptive. A trend of questioning tends to peter out at - given five-minute switch from the Republicans to the Democrats and vice versa. So I'm looking for a rather smooth hearing on this one.

Do you think by rehearsing what the Democrats are trying to do is sort of develop a line of questioning and try and get a coherent narrative in place?

Well, the first part of this hearing, I actually testified back in June, and I know that the Democrats at least are preparing for these sort of things in a very conscientious way. And I learned it because they said, listen; when you're out there, we are going to ask you questions about A, B, C, D and E.  And they said they would have graphics for that. I didn't watch the hearings after I testified, but I did see the graphics when they were asking me about them. And that's really a process of building a record as well of what is very important to understand in this event.


Now, the economies in Africa, let's say, in the Caribbean are different, are they not, from either the U. S. , Europe, or Asia?And I'm thinking, for example, of the $1 million notes being printed up willy-nilly in Zimbabwe. How has the global downturn affected them?

Well, just on Zimbabwe for a minute. Zimbabwe has a whole host of problems that are really quite unrelated to the credit crunch and the financial crisis. These are big problems that have been in the making for a long, long time because of an economy that's been run into the ground.

But more generally, Africa and Latin America are being hurt, but it doesn't seem quite as bad for example, as those in Eastern Europe, their debt levels are not as high. While they're hurting some because of the big fall in commodity prices - I mean, we've seen for example the first negative growth in South Africa since 1998. But I don't think these are as hard hit because the financial exposure in this part of the world is not as great as let's say it is in the U. S.  certainly, in Europe, and parts of emerging Europe.

Is that what is allowing some countries to be - I hesitate to use the word financially successful at the moment, but allowing them to compete in a way that they had not been able to before?


And I'm wondering how to square the situation now with - I remember interviewing you last year. You had a new book just out on Libya. You were telling me. . .

Yeah.

. . . This did not feel like a country at war, that markets were open, that there were signs of normalcy in Tripoli. That has now changed with these latest developments.

Tragically yes. I mean, of course the country's always had problems. But through international assistance and a U. N. -brokered effort, things were improving in Tripoli modestly. Libyans have a way of getting by. And of course that has all been reversed, so of course now you're seeing electricity blackouts, I mean, displaced. The militias have a newfound presence in the capital. So the country's really been put backward.

I should mention you were just in Libya for a few weeks last month, in Tripoli.

That's right.


Well, Zach looked at them and said, you know, these look like Sexton. But they don't look like the Sexton I've read. So even from the beginning, we had a very clear idea that we might have found something special here. So the next step was to reach out to other more-established Sexton scholars who hadn't seen them. And that was when we got really excited. They put us in touch with her daughter and literary executor Linda Gray Sexton, who also said, I have never seen these, either.

So Anne Sexton, as we've said, is one of the poets that really introduced the idea of confessional poetry, poetry that's personal - so much about the I. How do these poems fit into that emerging style?

Well, I think one of my favorite things about Sexton is how she kind of emerges almost fully formed, right?So she wasn't a childhood poetry writer. You know, before she even started taking a poetry class where she's writing for therapy, 12 years after that, she's winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. So what these poems show is, yes, her development but also very much her initial poetic power. In 1957, she presents her mother with a sort of homemade book of poems. And she says this was the first year of Anne Sexton, you know, poet - and that's before she even starts publishing - and then very shortly after has a meteoric rise to fame.

So I guess I'd like to know what these poems are about and something that really moved you. Can you give us an example?


Well, to be quite honest with you, at the end of the day, when you're looking at a product that is an adult product - and that's how we see it - the adult has the ability to choose.

But why blueberry, vanilla and cherry - why those flavors?

Actually, you know, we have quite a few individuals that like the blueberry. For me, it gets old quick. So therefore, I have, like, more coffee flavors. But the point is cherry and strawberry are actually fairly popular flavors amongst adults.

And when we're talking about flavors, we're not talking about those kind of flavors. We're talking about the cotton candy type of flavors. We steer away from any flavors that expressly go after a particular target market audience. And those flavors we obviously will never carry, never made and will never participate in our lineup.


We're getting a rare inside view of a massive Taliban attack in Afghanistan earlier this month. In that assault, the Taliban nearly succeeded in seizing control of a key provincial capital - city of Ghazni, about 90 miles from the Afghan capital, Kabul. In a matter of days, the Taliban offensive was halted, but the death toll and destruction were immense. Hundreds of Afghan civilians, police officers and soldiers were killed. U. S.  Special Forces and Army played a key role in crushing the attack. Nine of them were hurt - among them, two who sustained what will be lifelong injuries. Time magazine correspondent William Hennigan was reporting in Afghanistan at the time and was allowed to travel with the Green Berets to Ghazni. They had gotten a call that several Afghan helicopters were down. And they headed out to secure the area.

As they approached the city overnight, they were seeing that the city of Ghazni was on fire. And they knew that they had quite a fighting force to go up against. And the signs were readily apparent. Aside from the great fire that was burning in front of them, there was craters, IEDs, trucks that were standing like tombstones in the middle of the road. So the ODA had to muscle their way around these vehicles in order to push through to the city.

The ODA being the Green Beret unit.

That's correct. And while they're doing that, in comes mortar fire and RPGs and AK-47 fire. So it was not only a difficult task to punch into the city. It was also quite deadly because of the ambush that they had walked into.


Right.

. . . in their noses, and that was because it was reflected back to visible light.

Oh, interesting.

But now, we're able to micronize that. And when we do that, we're able to make those molecules smaller, and you can focus just on the UVB and UVA, which is important for sun protection.


It's the 100th birthday of the Pulitzer Prizes this year - the centenary of a prize that can change the life and the career of a journalist, a photographer, a biographer, a dramatist or a poet. In the latest conversation in our series to mark the Pulitzer's big year, we welcome Gregory Pardlo. He won the Pulitzer for poetry last year for his collection of poems entitled "Digest. "And he joins us from our studios in New York. Greg, thanks so much for being with us.

Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Can we hear a bit of your work, maybe from the poem "For Which It Stands?"

Absolutely. (Reading) "For Which It Stands" - for a flag, I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow. Fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?


You know, we - we're in constant communication with our states. I know South Carolina has done - and all the states, for that matter - but South Carolina, they've done a very proactive job. North Carolina is really going to amp up the messaging on evacuations. Florida has, and Georgia. So, you know, we will be able to tell what those evacuation rates are, obviously working with our state. The states and the locals are the ones that actually call for those evacuations.

Right now, it seems to be going well, but it always could go better. You know, if you're in a danger or hazard area, you know, I ask you to take those warnings seriously, and evacuate and protect yourself and your family.

Jeff Byard of FEMA, thanks for speaking with us today.

Thank you so much.


There is a level of acceptance for some. So one young woman I met joined the all-women's force after being brutalized by her husband, who was part of ISIS. On the other hand, the women who were foreigners and even the real hardcore last holdouts in the fight against ISIS who are in this town of Baghuz, which had basically an apocalyptic end. They ran out of food. They ran out of water.

And what you see now from the women who were part of that is that all of the crimes of ISIS - you know, enslaving girls, raping women, beheading people on the streets, the hangings - that was not enough really to make them lose confidence in the head of ISIS. But the fact that children whose families belong to ISIS starved to death while leaders had food, that is what's making people very disappointed, very disillusioned, especially the women I've talked to.

Are there people who still support the caliphate despite all that they went through?

Absolutely there are. And in fact, one woman from Egypt I met has four daughters. She was talking about how all they want is to go home, to go back to Egypt, to go back to the parks, to go see relatives. And she said to me, you know, I don't believe in Baghdadi. But I still believe in the caliphate.


For the second time in as many months, Mozambique is recovering from a deadly cyclone. In March, it was you Idai. This time it's Kenneth. Kenneth was a Category 4 cyclone when it made landfall in the north of the country last week. Devastating winds were followed by days of torrential rain and widespread flooding. The government says at least 38 people have died.

For more, we're joined by Deborah Nguyen with the United Nations World Food Programme. She's in Pemba, near the center of the storm's path. And to begin, can you tell us what the damage looks like on the streets of Pemba right now?

In Pemba itself right now it's completely flooded. It has rained for the past two days, which is making humanitarian aid difficult.

Currently you're involved with the teams who are distributing food. What kind of food are you bringing to people?And how are you able to reach them?


There is some. The question is whether what they see in their internal polls, the surveys they're doing every night in the 14 battleground states, whether what they're seeing is just a little glimmer or a hope that will sort of fade away, or whether it's kind of the beginning traction of perhaps a long shot, but perhaps a strategy that might actually pay off for Senator McCain.

You write about Senator McCain's pollster, a guy named Bill McInturff, who I gather is quite well regarded in the polling industry, and he's been sending out memos saying, I actually think things are getting better. There's also a new poll today, Mason-Dickson-NBC, on specifically Pennsylvania, and it finds the numbers there narrowing down to about a four-point lead for Senator Obama.

Well, that's exactly right. Bill McInturff has been, as some McCain aides described it over the course of his campaign, a bit of a wet blanket at times. When they thought things were going well, he would say, well, you know, the numbers are showing some weakness here.

But yet, in the last four or five days, it's kind of reversed. They've gotten emails in the morning that as delivers his reports from the previous day's survey, they've got good news in them. You know, women who make less than $60,000 are moving towards McCain. Men with some college education are moving towards him. And they're doing it in these battleground states.


And let's talk about the rivals themselves once they were in the Cabinet. You wrote about this this week in the Los Angeles Times in an op-ed. And you noted that, two years into Lincoln's administration, there was a full-blown crisis in Lincoln's Cabinet. What was that about?

Well, we reached this point in the middle of the war - it's December 1862 - when Lincoln actually says to one of his closest friends, we are now on the brink of destruction. And he was talking about a Cabinet crisis that was the result of this friction between these rivals. There was backbiting and intrigue, and it was ugly. Lincoln survived it, and that's why we tend to forget how ugly it was. But, you know, in the first two years of the conflict, the president is really struggling to manage these balky rivals.

And they're unable to, what, subsume their own egos to that of the president's?

You know, in retrospect, I think Doris Kearns Goodwin, you know, has a lot of wisdom when she says Lincoln had great personal strength to reach out to his rivals. But at the time, it was considered tremendous weakness and therefore, people in Washington at the beginning of the administration thought he was weak, and they tried to take advantage of it.


Hi, senator. How are you doing?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm doing great. So your two major competitors in this race have come to symbolize certain things. Senator Edwards paints himself as the candidate who's going to end poverty and Senator Obama's supporters say he's the candidate of change. So what do you symbolize?

Well, I think that I'm the candidate with the experience we need to make the changes we want. I don't think there is an either or here. That's a false choice. We have to look at each of us and what we represent and what we have done in our lives and what we believe we can do as the next president.


Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.

(Singing) X is the letter. Blue is the color. One is a number. Now is the time.

I mentioned back in the '60s then and it's still - news reminds me of the '60s. We're going out the world backwards. You know, we've got to change. We need a change. And every chance I get, I'm going to sing songs of change because, like I say, I feel like we're going out the world backwards.

Well, in fact, you know, to that end, the album art is actually a beautiful photograph of a group of young kids - African American kids on the outside of a chain-link fence. And they're looking into a park. It's a photo by Gordon Parks from 1956 called "Outside Looking In. "And, you know, I'm assuming that this was a park these kids weren't allowed to play in - right?- because it was segregated.


Well, you know, the Chinese economy has some major problems even in boom times. It's awash with corruption, enormous inefficiencies. It still has training wheels in many respects, and when an economic crisis hits a booming economy, it tends to make it more efficient. When it emerges, it becomes an even better competitor.

And we've seen this with other emerging Asian economies in the past - after the first oil shock in Japan. Japan really got its act together and became our foremost competitor then.

And how will this affect what's happening here in the United States in terms of manufacturing and jobs here?

You know, I think it is an economic question and a political question, and there are some uncertainties on how we will play our hand. The president-elect when he was talking about creating jobs at home, he was really stressing incentives on keeping jobs here, giving companies good reasons to keep jobs here.


Exactly. Well, they, you know, they have a head start in knowing at least that they're meant to be living in the nervous system, which means that there's a little bit of built-in safety and stability that may not quite exist in cells. They can become and kind cell to.

And how long are they effective for in the life of the mice they're injected into?

Well, in the mice that we've looked at, they were effective throughout the lifespan of the animal. So they were present, having their action and, you know, ultimately the animals do die. But it raises the question of, well, what about if we re-dose the animals?Would we have an even longer effect?Would we increase even the area that the stem cells were able to engraft in?Would we have a better effect?You know, that is where the investigations now need to go.

All right. Dr.  Snyder, thank you for taking time to be with is today and happy holiday to you.


I was listening back to some of the pieces that you've done in the past couple of months as we prepare for this broadcast. One of the things that China may have to change is the role of its banks. Banks like to take very few risks if possible, and that means investing in those big state-owned industries that have - well, they may not be spectacular returns anymore, but they are reliable.

Yeah. The banks do extremely well. You and I could sit back and run those banks and be very, very wealthy, though, communist.

The government sets the interest rates and so the banks can make a lot money. And if you're a Chinese person, you can't really get much of your capital out of the country. So where else are you going to put it?

One of the problems with the banks is that they tend to invest in state-owned enterprises. It's kind of part of their job, and it's less risky. But most of the jobs in China are really produced by private enterprise, as they are here in the United States. And it's much harder for them to get capital. So people are, in many ways, feelings that the economy is out of whack in a number ways and that there need to be some serious changes. The government knows this, but there are now very strong vested interests in state-owned enterprises and the banks. And so getting that done is not going to be easy politically.


Well, I think perhaps the most concrete thing here that's been agreed to involves the tariffs that were supposed to take effect on Tuesday. You know, the Trump administration has already put tariffs on a lot of the things that we import from China. They were supposed to go up on Tuesday. That will be suspended. That's the word that was used, but the tariffs that are already in place apparently will remain in place. And there are still additional tariffs that are supposed to take effect in December, and it's not really clear whether they will take effect.

Also, China has agreed to buy more agricultural products from the United States. The president said 40 to $50 billion worth. You know, farmers, of course, have been really hurt by this trade war, and the president has been really anxious to help them out.

The president and his advisers have been clear they wanted a big deal, not something piecemeal. Does this count - phase one of a big deal?

You know, I think it's progress. It means, you know, this is - phase one means there's going to be a phase two and possibly a phase three, which means there's more work to do. I mean, one of - the important thing to point out here is that, apparently, this deal isn't written down on paper yet. That has to be done over, President Trump said, the next three weeks or four weeks or five weeks. And, of course, the devil is always in the details with things like this, in trade talks.


Did we, maybe without noting it, pass a corner this week in which the Russia investigation - Mueller, Michael Cohen, all of that - has gone from examining if there was obstruction of justice to actual collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign?

That's why the Michael Cohen revelation this week seems to be so important. We've been talking about this for the better part of two years now. We've always been kind of dubious about whether or not there was an actual provable case of collusion, as opposed to obstruction. An active cooperation with the Russian interference would seem to be the collusion everyone's looking for. A lot of journalists and Democrats have thought it more likely that we would simply get an obstruction case, which might be easier to prove. But in the news of this week, we see a wider possibility.

NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.

Thank you, Scott.


Last year, Lolita De Sola made a hard decision; she left her home country and fled north to Mexico City. Because of the move, De Sola was able to release her first album, "Cattleya. "She felt she had to leave Venezuela. Her work there, her life was becoming impossible.

When you have a dictatorship or crisis, the first thing that goes away is culture because you need more food, you need more basic stuff, first, then culture.

Today's Venezuela, on the brink of collapse with President Nicolas Maduro refusing to give up power and the prospect of international intervention, with millions of people leaving the country and others so desperate for food they are eating from the trash, this is not the Venezuela Lolita De Sola remembers and longs for.

When I was little, honestly, it was magical. Now I realize how privileged I was to grow up in a place like Venezuela because it's beautiful. Caracas is a valley where you have the mountains and, in half hour, you have the beach. Also you have, like, amazing food. You have perfect weather. And honestly, I like a lot - my childhood - in that sense because I realized that Venezuelans right now don't have the same that I did.


What do you mean it knocked the - 'cause I always think of the bottled water market as being quite new.

Well, it's ironic. There was a big bottled water market in the U. S.  late 19th, early 20th century. It was basically seen as healthier, better for you. And this newfangled chlorination essentially made water really safe to drink for the first time, in some respects, ever. And as a result, tap water became a newfangled thing, which is very ironic, considering the reputation today of bottled water versus tap water.

Yeah. Why did bottled water become popular again?

So, it was popular to a certain extent throughout the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. Bottled water in the sort of single serve and liter size that we think of really was a niche market in restaurants until the late 1970s. And Perrier really for the very first time put a lot of money into their marketing budget and they got very lucky with their timing, 'cause it coincided with the fitness craze. I mean, think about it. Jane Fonda and aerobics. And what happens to really push it long is that Nestle ends up getting in the act with Perrier; Coke launches Dasani; Pepsi launches Aquafina. And now all of the sudden what you have is mass distribution channels. Today - get this - per second on average, 1,500 bottles of water are being opened nationwide.


Sounds good, right?Sixty years ago this month, Miles Davis finished recording one of the most iconic albums in jazz. "Kind Of Blue" is perhaps Davis's greatest masterpiece. But it wasn't the only milestone recorded that year. John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus all cut timeless classics, which is why many fans consider 1959 the best year in jazz ever.

There are all kinds of think pieces about this - a new blog devoted to the subject, even a documentary film titled "1959: The Year That Changed Jazz. "So settle in. And let's listen to what 1959 sounded like. Our guide is Nate Chinen. He is editorial director at our member station WBGO. And he's with Jazz Night In America. Nate, thanks for being here.

Thank you, Rachel.

All right. Make the case. What makes 1959 so great?


And what's life like day to day in Fulton now?

Well, it's kind of like Groundhog Day. Every day you get up, it's - you see debris that's been removed on the side the road one day. And you think - well, we've really accomplished something. And the next day, the debris is right back out there again. So mentally, it's affected a lot of people, including myself, seeing all that - just take a hard time to get picked up.

Where are people living and sleeping?

Well, we've got quite a few people that have moved in with other family members. Some houses that have only been destroyed partially - some are completely to the ground. We've still got some living in hotels. We've got some that are living in tents and vehicles. We found out yesterday from our school district that quite a few schoolkids are homeless. You know, 67 percent of the property here has been damaged in some way - or more.


Yeah. That was the scene I went out. Before I did that song, Creed said, man, write a hit. I said, oh, sure, it'll be gold(ph). Because commercialism never really fazed me. I mean, playing songs that - in links that you knew everybody would like. I always wanted to be a true jazz artist, you know that. But Creed said, write a hit, so I wrote "Red Clay. "And all my friends who were jazz musicians, they said, man, you writing that square stuff. So I kind of - but that tune has earned me a living.

That's a great tune.

I mean - and it reminded me of my early childhood when I was back in Indianapolis.

They have red clay in Indiana?


OK, which theory do you want to start with?

Well, the ships became frozen in the ice and the crewmen set out on foot.

Well, we know that's true. Captain Franklin - Sir John - made a huge mistake trying to force the Victoria passage with that much ice. And he kept going when they could turn back to shelter. And it got them stuck in the worst possible place. So his error of judgment doomed those men.

What other theories are there?


My best friend grew up in the Philippines and celebrated Christmas in a really bizarre fashion - without Santa at all. On his first holiday in the United States, a relative happily shouted, come look what Santa did. And Joe froze, sure that someone had stolen all his toys. Well, how was I supposed to know, he told me. No one ever broke into our home to give us things.

This year, Emmeline is increasingly interested in these fledgling magical mysteries of childhood. We read "The Night Before Christmas" every day now, and I figured, if Emmeline could buy into the story of wingless, flying reindeer, she'd eventually come around to the notion that the fat guy from the mall could fit through a tiny gas pipe. In a family of jaded atheists, it was the true miracle of Christmas.

At the fireplace, Emmeline inspected the hole again, poking a hesitant finger through the opening. She looked up with unblinking eyes and asked, Santa fits in there?I nodded, whispering, Santa can do anything. Emmeline paused for a moment, smiling hopefully. But mommy said he just climbs in the window. At least we have another day to get our traditions straight.

Mike Adamick lives in San Francisco with his wife and their pint-sized doubting Thomas.


Well, it's very difficult to verify independently because some of the information he claims to be from within the inner circle of those around President Mugabe, but certainly it creates a lot of interest and in some cases, some of his predictions have come to pass in ways that really points to credibility on the part of this character.

For example, he had warned that individuals within the ruling party were plotting to kill a former minister of parliament, Edward Chindori-Chininga, and indeed within a week this official died in a suspicious car accident.

Now, I mean, saying that almost any politician of any prominence other than President Mugabe is vulnerable to being killed mysteriously, wouldn't that be a truism in Zimbabwe?

Yes, it is, but particularly if you look at the tensions in the countries we approach elections that will be held on July 31. So, yes, that is true.


I hope that there would be people who would come to the site, interested in building their family tree or learning how to start family research, who then would see an interesting article that they might not have thought they would read otherwise and dabble. And that there will be cross pollination between the two missions of the site that, you know, will make for some interesting dialogue and interesting experience for users.

Now, you've been careful to point out that when appropriate, you're going to make these links. But Professor Gates co-owns part of AfricanDNA. com. Do you see any ethical problems with your site steering people to his business specifically?

I don't, actually, at all, because we don't simply steer people to AfricanDNA. com, and there's full disclosure on the site that he's a co-founder of AfricanDNA. com.

But if you - if someone comes to the site and they click into the tab that - for DNA testing, they'll see several different places that they can go to to test their DNA, with links to those different companies. Actually, the option to link those different companies are actually presented to you before you click through to AfricanDNA. com.


I was singing that one time, and that line came out. I was like, we will always sing. We will always sing. And it's because when I think about the struggles that black Indigenous people of color face, that line of, we will always sing - that just kind of shows, no matter what, we're always going to be standing back up.

(Singing) Even when you look at me, your heart so full, I'll think of you from a nice place.

I know that you've been pretty vocal about being uncomfortable with white men at your shows.

Oh, yeah.


Visuals that related to Senator Obama in politics.

That's right - different iterations and paintings of Senator Obama. Ron English did one of him as kind of morphing into Abe Lincoln. You know, Shepard's hope thing, you know, was enormous. You know, I did one of Obama looking obviously very hopeful into the city. He's - behind him is a cityscape and rising is the sun. I wanted it to be during, you know, the sunrise. And so he's being backlit by the sun in warm light. And the reason I did the city is because, you know, he's from the city. He can relate to the city. You know, he was raised by a single mom on food stamps, which is much like my experience growing up in Harlem. And you know, he's - and I said I wrote "one" on it because he's really - he really represents one, you know, one global community, ethnically diverse, one nation, and really someone that we can, for the first time, being from urban life, relate to, besides Clinton, by the way.

Are you worried about they're being an element of hero worship to this?I mean, both in the fact that so many artists are depicting him, but also in the way that he's depicted.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not worried about it. I think there is a lot of hero worship, but in contrast to what's out there, you know, he is a hero.


No, because the guys used to sit on the porch and play their guitars and (unintelligible). And then would beat to the tap of their foot. So I kind of adapted that tanta-ta-tan-tum, tanta-ta-tan-tum(ph). I mean, because - I mean, my people - my relatives, most of them were from Jackson, Mississippi. So when they migrated to Indianapolis, they kind of brought a lot of that feeling.

When he said write a hit, that one song people know me all over the world, in Russia, Africa, Japan, all over the world, people, the first thing they say when they see me, "Red Clay. "

In the course of your career, you had, obviously, highs and you had some lows, and they've been described as personal problems. Without going into detail, are we to assume that those problems were substance abuse related?

Well, substance abuse, I wouldn't really say I had a problem with that. I mean, I would say that at one period in the '70s, I started partying, I was in Hollywood A-list(ph). And everybody would come up there, I mean, all kind of movie stars, all kind of football stars, basketball stars, actors. And I had a spot right there in (unintelligible) overlooking the (unintelligible). And the people that I had coming up there - now, the substance abuse, it was around because a lot of people who would come to see me would bring it. But I would never really say I had a habit or anything like that.


I was shocked by that on a number of levels. You know, the first thing that shocked people about the call, obviously, is the notion of the president withholding military aid and trying to bully the Ukrainians into doing personal favors. This is, obviously, a big deal. But in the middle of all that, what struck me and, as I say, even shocked me was his willingness to disparage our ambassador to Ukraine in a call with a foreign leader, referring to her as the woman and saying she was bad news and then vaguely but, frankly, ominously saying to the president of Ukraine that she was going to go through some things.

Let's give her name. It's Marie Yovanovitch. Tell us about her. What's her reputation in the diplomatic community?

So Marie Yovanovitch - and she goes by Masha. Masha was one of the most respected and longstanding members of our foreign service. She has, I think, been in the foreign service for over 30 years, served all around the world and most recently and in the most senior positions, obviously, as ambassador to Ukraine, until she was removed prematurely in May, but before that, also ambassador to Armenia and ambassador to Kyrgyzstan.

The State Department has said that the ambassador concluded her three-year diplomatic assignment in Kyiv as planned, that there was no kind of retribution or she was not yanked back unceremoniously. Why are there doubts on that in the diplomatic community?


Absolutely. It's going to be an incredible weekend. We have saxophone competition which we'll be talking about. But as a part of the competition, we also have a major tribute concert each year and this year, it's dedicated to B. B. King and to the blues. The blues have had a huge influence on jazz, and we established last year an education program in Mississippi Delta called 'The Blues and Jazz, Two American Classics,' which is the theme of this weekend. And there, we worked with young kids and really introduced them, originally in the Mississippi Delta to their great roots and heritage and the life of B. B. King, who is from Indianola.

And then from there, that program has branched out nationally and we have public school programs in Memphis and Chicago, Kansas City daily. But with B. B. King this weekend, we're bringing a large array of artist to pay tribute to him. We've got everybody from Keb Mo and Robert Cray to the great Joe Louis Walker. Bono and The Edge are coming in to represent the rock community.

That's great.

And from the jazz community, it's Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many others. And we'll all be paying tribute to B. B. and his great influence on especially jazz music.


Well, yes, he was. Later I found out what he was really brilliant at, which was lying. He had a physics degree, a mathematics degree and an economics degree, I think, from three different Ivy League colleges. So, why doubt him?Especially once you've seen the props. Once you've seen the art, you buy the person.

He'd married to a successful woman named Sandy who paid all the bills. How could this smart woman be with this fraud?

I can only answer that question by telling you why I bought this fraud. He was charming. He had a story that explained everything. And so when she came into his life, he had perfected his act to the extent that he'd anticipated every question, had an answer for everything. So, it's like a magic trick. After you know how it works, it seems so obvious. But when it happening, you're enchanted.

There was a moment when he gave you the personal phone number of the president, and I forget what the occasion was - but he said go ahead, try it. You'll get him directly.


Something happened that I am deeply superstitious about, which is that I was editing the sort of final, final draft of the novel to send out before publishers, and it was night time. And suddenly my vision went white, and I had this incredible pain in my face. And it turned out what had happened was that lightning had hit the barn we were staying in, and it had gone through all of the electrical boxes. And it went up through my computer and through my headphones that were plugged in, into the side of my face. And that was not great, but it did save the document 'cause I think I grounded the electricity. Anyway. . .

(Laughter).

Well, all of this to say that I'm very, very superstitious about this, and I believe that the lightning gave me good luck with the book.

Yeah (laughter).


As a matter of fact, some of the Newark city council came to New York and also spoke with African-American politicians up in Albany about this guy's record. And that (unintelligible) pretty thoroughly.

Now, let me - we don't have too much time left, so I just want to ask you this. Is this a situation - you've obviously chosen to profile Mayor Booker - is this a situation where he has a political future outside of Newark?Do you se him moving in a direction where he will eventually run for some other office?

I think he absolutely means to. And I think he is one - all politicians brim with ambition, and he is no exception. I think he has chosen for himself a nearly impossible task. And if he manages to pull that off, it's a pretty solid credential.

All right. Peter Boyer, thanks so much.

Certainly.


Thank you. How are you?

I'm pretty good. Thank you. You must be stuck like glue on this, but, you know, you've played in three World Cups, including one of the wins for the U. S.  team in 1999. How would you describe what it's like to be out there on that field in that final game?

It's exhilarating, to be honest with you. And it's really interesting for me to watch on TV because on the game days, I feel similar to how I used to feel when I played just because I really still feel a kinship and a connection to the current team, even though it's been many years since I played. But I feel we're all connected and inspired by each other.

Well, what are your thoughts on this current team?


All right. A lot to discuss, I think. What do you make of the president's reaction to this book, from the press conference to Twitter to a cease-and-desist order to the book's publisher?

Well, I'll say it's classic Trump in that it is probably self-destructive - certainly not in the president and the White House's best interest to do so - but also entirely predictable. This is a man who has sort of built his entire public career around being involved in media spats like this. I think it was a - it was certainly a mistake initially for the president to issue a statement, as he did on Wednesday when these excerpts first started coming out.

Now the White House is trying to say - basically, since that very moment - saying that the book is tabloid trash, that there are a lot of problems. And I agree. There are a lot of problems with the credibility of the book. But that initial reaction and the engagement with the book has, I think, made this story even bigger than it already would have been.

And the book a best-seller. I mean, you know. . .


It's good to be here, Tony.

You know, you've been getting pretty hot under the collar about this issue, I understand. Why is it such a concern for you?

It's a concern for me because it's a misunderstanding that a lot of ex-convicts have. If you have a felony it has been in the past that often states do restrict or disenfranchise those who have a felony conviction. Those laws have changed over the years, and now in most states it's no longer the case, or there are means by which you can get your civil rights back. But a lot of people - a lot of ex-convicts or felons that I knew that ended up in my court system simply rested on the false notion that they did not have the ability to vote. And that ended and that kept them from further embracing or engaging in the community, and kept them separate, and apart, and not where they needed to be.

Is it a situation where an ex-felon is allowed - is entitled to have his or her voting rights restored, but the process by which those voting rights are restored is so cumbersome that they either don't know about it or they don't go through it?


You know, you're helping a lot of people, Mr.  Mayor.

Well, I hope I am. I don't see it, and that's what scares me most of all. We care about everybody. We have to reach out for all of them and try to be successful for them to help them be that support deal for them. It's not a positive day every day, but you have to make it into one.

The mayor of Fulton, Texas, Jimmy Kendrick - thanks so much for being with us, Mr.  Mayor. Good luck to you.

Well, I appreciate it. And just keep us in your prayers. It's always nice to have a prayer given for us.


The flaws that one makes, that one has, are more apparent. The mistakes one makes are more apparent when you've died. The sweet scent of marjoram sweeps away all the contradictions, but yet Jesse Jackson has been the most extraordinary rhetorical genius to articulate the vision, the virtue, and the value of black life in the American public square.

Al Sharpton has emerged in the last few years. Reverend Al Sharpton himself sees himself as part of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. , but at the same time, he worked up north, Dr.  King worked down south. Jessie Jackson, of course, worked in Chicago. And these two gentlemen then challenged some of the prevailing forms of oppression in the midst of a northern culture that had not yet tested its commitment to civil rights.

And Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton forced them to grapple with it. Jackson in Chicago, Sharpton in New York, especially focusing on police brutality and forms of white mob violence directed against vulnerable black people. Barack Obama…

And then - yeah, Barack Obama has a sort of different place in the…


How - let me just change gears because the title of your book is "Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines. "The last time you were on, you were talking about physics for future presidents. We're in a presidential debate year. Do you think this should be an issue, the talk about global climate change and global warming?

Oh I - energy, there's nothing more important in our world than the future of energy. We start wars over energy. Events like Fukushima and the Gulf oil spill have too much influence in our policy. We have to sit back and be thoughtful and think: What can we do?

For the case of global warming, I do believe we should take action, but most of the action that people are suggesting will not address the problem, and so we have to get the energy policy right. It has to be based in science and engineering and technology.

And what should that policy be?What should we do?


Well. . .

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: What differences when this occured?

Would it be the safest places to be like I mentioned before?

It would certainly be the safest place to be, and it would actually feel much like a joyride. The difference is that you're not necessarily planning on it.


Not initially.

No?It didn't come in handy?

Yeah. I mean, you would think that would be an easy thing, but man, you know, that's why they have somebody for that. You know, it definitely becomes a thing trying to get people out their trailer. They're nice and comfy.

Well, did you have any other experiences in the NFL that kind of helped prepare you for the role you do now?I'm taking not doing hair probably doing - doing hair probably wasn't one of those tasks since you all wear helmets, but. . .

Yeah. I mean, but look. You know, I had natural hair. You know, I remember when I was in the league, I had my hair long enough to where it could be braided. And, you know, every week I'd have to go and get it worked on and stuff. So, you know, I think for both men and women it's definitely something that's a big part of our life. But, you know, in terms of the connection between NFL and filmmaking, it's all very team-oriented.


Yeah, they weren't the sharpest.

All right, so now tell us about the most powerful horse in history. And this, as I understand it, goes all the way back to Roman times?

Right. This was, I think, the most politically influential horse. So it was proudly Incitatus, which is the horse of the Roman emperor Caligula. And according to historians of the time, his stable was made of marble, he had a collar of gemstones and his meals were oats mixed with gold flakes. And senators were forced to dine with him. And according to legend, Caligula planned to appoint him counsel before the emperor was assassinated. So it's almost as bizarre as the 2016 United States presidential election.

(Laughter) A. J. , I have to say, at least when it comes to horse racing, you got your money out of reading that Encyclopedia Britannica.

(Laughter).


Yes, we've had our wine chosen by the White House twice, most recently just over a week ago.

Now, that must feel incredible. But you also have, you know, obviously a much wider market. How did you get into this business in the first place?

From the roots of a lot of African-Americans. My grandfather was a farmer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my father was - and my grandfather were home wine-makers, basically. In the old days in the country, you grew your own vegetables to eat, you raised your own cattle or chickens if you enjoyed those things or wanted those things, and if you wanted alcohol you made your own wine or different alcohols.

It's a far cry from doing this as something that you drink yourself to doing it as the kind of business you have. And it's still a family business, isn't it?


The director of the U. S.  Census Bureau, John H.  Thompson, announced his retirement this week in the wake of a disagreement with Congress over funding for the 2020 census. The census is conducted every 10 years. The results determine how many seats in Congress and electoral votes that each state receives, and it helps guide how more than $400 billion is spent each year on education, health and infrastructure.

We're joined now by Robert Groves. He's former director of the U. S.  Census Bureau. He's now the provost of Georgetown University. Mr.  Groves, thanks so much for being with us.

Good morning. Great to be with you.

Congress has approved nearly $1. 5 billion to fund the census this fiscal year, and it's supposed to be the same for next year. Is that enough?


No, no, no. We have also identified 39 other states that have been impacted crimewise by our kits that were found in Detroit. They're not all rape cases. We also have some homicides, some other types of cases that testing rape kits will also help to solve.

What have you discovered might help processing this huge number of rape kits?You need more money, personnel - what do you need?

Well, when we first started, there really was no road map. So we kind of had to put it together ourselves. And the first thing that is of notice, Detroit was a near-bankrupt city. And so we had no money. At that time, it cost anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 per kit back in '09 to test them. So we're looking at a multimillion-dollar problem just to get them tested. And it doesn't do any good to test them all if you're not going to follow up and investigate and prosecute them like you should have done - or like it should've been done - when this first happened. So those are the challenges we are facing. But my first challenge is basically begging and pleading with foundations, with Detroit businessmen and -women, with the general public - to basically fund the project.

Did you run into resistance from people who said, look, this sounds like a good thing to do, but Detroit's a city filled with good things to do?


Have they created new numbers?I mean, what kind of mystery can there be about this when, as far as I'm concerned, I thought all the numbers had already been assigned.

Ah. But it's like gossiping about your friends. It's not the fact that you have the friends, it's things you learn about them that you didn't know and you think, wow, have they been doing this all that time?

I'm surprised you have any friends after that, but go ahead.

I'm losing them as I speak, I realize that. What was really exciting about this was until, I think it was maybe April or May of this year, nobody had been able to prove that there were infinitely many of these pairs. And the question's been around for - in a sense, it's been around for thousands of years. It's been looked at in detail for 100 years. No one really came close to proving it. But then in May, this adjunct faculty member at the University of New Hampshire got pretty close by mathematical standards.


The show was political. I mean, it didn't shy away from really difficult issues, took sharp aim at President Trump on several occasions. Did that play into Netflix's decision to cancel it, do we have any idea?

I don't get any sense that Netflix canceled it over the political content. If anything, the political content is one of the reasons why they treated this cancellation a bit differently and a bit more gently than they ordinarily do - because there were not a lot of shows out there about a Latin American family with a predominantly Latinx cast dealing with these issues about immigration, LGBTQ issues. You know, every episode has some kind of hot-button subject. You know, one of the characters is a recovering alcoholic. Another has PTSD from serving in the military. So it touched on a lot of things.

And that was one of the things the audience loved about it. I don't think, based on a lot of the other content Netflix has, that that would have been a reason to get rid of it. I think it was purely a financial decision or, you know, whatever the finances actually were.

And the show can't just get plucked up by someone else.


About the South, I think what's missing is an attention to the ways that we have progressed but the paradox of that progress here for many folks. We're not getting to those deep structures because the South is so glittery now. We have Starbucks, and we have Whole Foods. And there are cranes in the sky, as Solange Knowles would say, all across the South. We're in the newest New South. There are lots of stories about growth and progress. But, again, at what cost?On whose backs?

And so about Memphis, I think what we miss is that because we have seemingly healed in the form of a museum, in the form of commemoration, in the form of reckoning with this assassination that we're on the upswing, that we're moving forward. But as I mentioned earlier, I feel that time has stood still and gone backwards and circled around us in a lot of ways here and that what gets missed is that there are people in the middle of this play of politics, in the middle of this history who are crushed but that still are striving in ways that are remarkable and beautiful. There is joy. There is dancing. There is singing. Sometimes, I hop into a church just to hear the sounds of joy that come out. And I think that gets lost in the way that we talk about the city in the national media.

Zandria Robinson is a sociology professor at Rhodes College and a Memphis native. Thank you very much.

Thank you.


So in 1996, there was something called the Dickey Amendment. And that resulted in federal funding being taken away for gun violence research. Even after Newtown and after President Obama had issued the executive order for the CDC to be able to study the cause of gun violence, there's still been a lot of hesitation to do that. You know, gun violence is responsible for about as many deaths as sepsis is. But funding for gun violence research is equivalent to 0. 7 percent of the funding that's allocated for sepsis. When you think about this in the big picture, we have such a public health crisis that we're dealing with yet not enough research and evidence that's being put into the system to figure out how we can develop solutions that are going to really make a difference.

You've actually experienced this from the other end. You were shot when you were 17. Tell me what happened.

After a high school football game one evening, I was nearly killed after being shot in the throat with a 38-caliber bullet. A lot of 17-year-olds don't appreciate the fact that they're mortal, don't realize, you know, kind of the importance of their family and other aspects like that. And when that injury happened to me, it really changed my life. It inspired me to want to be able to give other people the same second chance that I was given.

Dr.  Joseph Sakran is the director of Emergency General Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Thank you so much.


Well, that would be an interesting question. Right now, we make a decision. We say we're going to harden particular targets to make them difficult for terrorists to attack. So yes, terrorists do act rationally and choose another target - they choose a less hardened target. The question is whether it could respond very rapidly to changing information.

Large terror attacks take a lot of work and a lot of planning. And if the market predicted a high probability of an attack in a particular place, it's not as though it's a trivial matter for a terror group to suddenly switch all of its resources to another place. I'm not suggesting this would work. It would be a tool that would be used alongside other tools. And I'm just suggesting an experiment to see if it can improve the accuracy of intelligence forecast.

And what do you say to those people who say - my God, this is hideous?It's blood money.

It is hideous in a sense. It is. There's no question. I share the revulsion of people who say - but people shouldn't profit from this. On the other hand, if allowing people to profit from this, from making these predictions, improved our ability to predict, then it might be something worth trying because of the lives it would save on the other side.


So I shaved my head kind of as a social experiment, you know?And sure enough, no more hey, baby, you know?But suddenly I was public enemy No. 1. People thought I was a skinhead or some kind of punk that was going to break something or steal something.

People were visibly intimidated - which, again, here's a girl moving through the world, craving eye contact, craving human connection, even fleeting connection, passersby, you know?And so the fact that people no longer even would look me in the eye was - it really weighed on me, and it started to accumulate in my chest. Even people who are politely nervous just eventually enraged me.

(Singing) I am not an angry girl, but it seems like I've got everyone fooled. Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear.

You had - as you talked about in the book, you were struggling with this idea of how to make art and how to sell your art or even if you should.


It will need to come from all of those sources, but it also has to - we have to take into account that the economic policies that are encouraged in things like bio-fuel all drive up the cost of fuel. So trading policies, agricultural policies that force people to engage in a form of agriculture that destroys the land, increase the price of food and pushes us further towards a global crisis.

Well, Bill, thanks so much.

Any time.

Bill Fletcher is a senior scholar with The Institute for Policy Studies and a former president of TransAfrica Forum.


It's a love letter to my mother. I love my mother very, very much. She gave me everything. She was a wonderful mother. She gave me the most magnificent childhood in Edinburgh, and she had no pattern for that. She was suffering so much as a child. She was kept very closeted. Nobody ever told her anything of love. She was very, very solitary, lonely and unhappy child. And yet she invented herself and became this wonderful mother to me.

And at the same time, I felt that her version of events, which was utter doom and terrible villainy, couldn't necessarily be completely true because everybody's version of their story is slightly different.

Of course.

And so I wanted to turn it and turn it like a kaleidoscope to see whether I could see what these people's motives really were. And was it so terrible?


We're hoping that this research kind of paves the way to looking at novel high-speed adhesives. So how do you grab things - difficult things - very, very quickly?And so, like, if you were to grab something that's dusty, like a brick, or furry, duct tape's not going to be able to stick to either of those things. You know, you're going to have to use something like claws or grabbing mechanisms. But we think that with this new type of thick, viscous fluid coating a very soft substrate, that it will be able to grab oddly textured things very quickly. So in my mind, I'm dreaming of a - like, a frog tongue attached to a drone, and the drone can fly around and pick up packages really quickly and fly away.

Do you mind me asking - after a day in the lab - I'm just guessing- do you just want to go home and fast?I mean, it must be difficult to eat anything.

(Laughter) There are times that - especially in the beginning - where I had the smell of frog in my nose for at least an hour, and I couldn't eat anything. But by the end of the study, I'd been - you know, I was eating frog legs every week - part of the study.

Oh, no. Seriously?


Yes, absolutely.

What do you mean?

Well, I've been through a lot. People don't like talking about things that hurt. Usually we like to skip over that stuff because it brings up something that's unpleasant, but honestly it's the only way that I feel like some of those things have purpose because of somebody else's journey. And I really believe, you know, the quote from the Scriptures that says, all things work together for my good. All things work together for my good, not just the stuff I liked, not just the stuff that felt really great in the highs in my life that were wonderful, even not selling records has worked for my good because my ego is not in a place where you can't be in the same room with me and fit.

I'm not in a place that when I see an unwed mother at 17, that I go, she probably didn't have no mama that cared about her. I had a mama that cared and I could have been that girl. And because of knowing that it could have been me, when I see them the emphatically in heart is different than somebody else's who doesn't know what it's like to be that girl whose been manipulated and her innocence stolen from her. It was stolen from me, and I know what that feels like. And you feel by yourself, you feel damaged goods.


Now, for a general, basic financial book, get "Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People" by Jane Bryant Quinn. I love Jane's work. It's a really easy book to read. You don't even have to read it from beginning to end. You can skip chapters as it applies to you.

OK.  Last question, Michelle. This comes from Jennifer Melsaff(ph) from Mulino, Oregon. She's married to a construction superintendent who recently was laid off. They're worried about their mortgage. The payments are about $650 a month. Jennifer has already turned a 30-year mortgage into a 12-year mortgage, which means she doubled each of her monthly payments. She asked if she should pay off the mortgage quickly, making higher payments now, or should she put the put the money into savings and stick to the low $650 payment.

Because her husband has lost a job, I would stop making the extra mortgage payments. They need to preserve cash until he gets another job. So if it takes longer for her husband to get a job, they have the money to pay for the everyday expenses like food and utilities and such.

Michelle Singletary answering your questions. Thank you so much, Michelle.


When I was in a refugee camp, I did everything to survive, you know. And me and my friends, we used to go and steal chickens, and we used to go and pretend to other staff, so just to make a living and I've reached here because of the horrible things I've done but I'm saying it's not great but sometimes we are forced to sin to make a living.

(Singing) We used to raid(ph) villages Steal in chickens, goats and sheeps Anything we could eat I knew it was rude But we needed food And therefore I was

Forced to sin, forced to sin To make a living Forced to sin. . .

You know, at this point in time you've seen so many things that other people haven't and you've written that into your music. Are you hopeful that your music can transform lives?


What was the basis on which you were denied?

They said that we need to request a formal tour. And this is the problem. You know, I was at Homestead yesterday - the facility in Florida that houses 2,700 mostly teenage migrants. You think about it - they do these guided tours only at very specific times when they have a lot of notice about when people are going to come through. I'm told that lawyers who represent the kids in there have to sign a nondisclosure agreement so that they can't talk about the conditions in there.

It makes you wonder, what are they hiding?Why do we keep seeing images of overcrowding and of terrible living conditions, and then journalists go in there on one of these guided tours, and everything seems to be fine?

You visited another community center where there are migrant families or children. What did they tell you?Have you been able to get any reports?Or did any people who'd been in those facilities have anything to say to you about what the conditions were there?


I think that for, me Hillary is a policy wonk. I'm focused on public policy, and I'm thinking about action and thinking about what people say, how they present themselves, and whether or not they sound really credible on hardcore concrete ideas and proposals. And she just emerges as that person for me.

So, Congresswoman, why did you change your mind?

Combination of things. We've been through a campaign period. Barack Obama has paid some dues, and he's rebuilt himself. We got to know a bit more about him. He is talking about issues. The campaign has done what campaigns are supposed to do, and that is to help the public get to know the candidate, what they stand for, what they're willing to do, and whether or not they are tough enough to stay the course. He has met the test. He's paid his dues. He's got the numbers, and he should be the nominee.

Now, we saw a lot of members of the congressional black caucus either switch their superdelegate vote or at the last minute declare, when they were undeclared. What do you think that was about?Why was there this, you know, even before the final election votes were in, why was there this rush to say, you know, to declare?


And, you know, one can argue about how effective this instance of dueling briefs might have been in illuminating that whole issue for the American public. But it certainly wasn't anything like what we've seen in the current instance where you have, to be quite frank, a blatant use of the House Intelligence Committee for the purpose of trying to pre-emptively discredit findings of the special counsel.

But then - I'm glad you mentioned the disagreement between the two parties about - with the phrase was - what?- enhanced interrogation. . .

Right.

. . . Techniques. Because it is, among other things, the responsibility of Senate and House committees to oversee government action and to step in and make corrections and, for that matter, alert the public when they think intelligence agencies are going over the line, isn't it?


Mr.  Jones…

Yes?

…when you think about the issues of justice and in - for so long, we as African-Americans have and many of us have debated what does justice mean in this life, what does justice mean in the next life, do you think that there is racial justice?Do you think that there will be racial justice on this Earth?

Yes, I do. I believe that we are at a profound transition point. Martin King would say today, there's no way we can make the transition to the 21st century unless we leave the baggage of slavery and racism behind.

And I think to talk about current events, I think that he would both be disappointed and appalled in what's going on in the political discourse. He would be disappointed because when the Senator Obama is criticized in the speech he gave in Philadelphia, Martin would say, well, hold on, America seems to be deeply afflicted by amnesia about how it cheated these African-American people over the past 20th century.

But I think he'd applaud the fact that Senator Obama did what should have been done earlier and needs to be done. You see what Senator Obama did, he walked into the national living room of America and acknowledged and then talked to the 800-pound gorilla of race relations that everybody knew was sitting in there for the 20th century.


I love it.

Yeah. What do you like specifically about reading your work to an audience that makes it different, perhaps, from writing it for the page?

It's like playing music to an audience. To play the music and not feel the responsive vibrations, something coming back, is meaningless to me. But what happens in a live context when you are reciting or reading your poetry, it's only partially complete when you're reading it. It's completed when it's received. And poetry's very much like music. It's vibration and frequency. And it affects us in ways that we don't altogether understand. But we know it's happening.

What kind of inspiration did it take to make you into a poet?Who did you read?When did you start reading, or did someone read to you as a child that made you love poetry?


So, does Teddy Roosevelt still come to life when it gets dark at the museum?

People would like to think so, and this is part of the imagination that you need to have when you're visiting a natural history museum. To go back to your point about whether the dioramas are old hat, well, sure. In one way they certainly are. They represent a very old kind of technology. But I look at it a little bit differently. It's a 3-D theater in a way that TV cannot be. We have a beautiful diorama of bison herds from some indefinite time in the 19th century when they still had large herds, and that is so realistic that you think, if you just saw an image of it, that it had to have been taken yesterday somewhere in Wyoming.

Ross MacPhee, curator of the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. Thanks so much for being with us.

Most welcome.


Well, what it does is it does away with the prohibition against rating on pre-existing conditions, meaning that if you have a pre-existing condition - and about a third of us do - that you could be charged a much higher rate for insurance. So let me give you an example. Somebody is working, they have insurance, and they have a catastrophic illness - cancer, some other calamity. They have to stop working because they need to get their condition taken care of. If they're out for 60 days, they lose their insurance. And now, they have to pay whatever the insurance company decides is the premium because they are - now have a pre-existing condition. Somebody in that situation may never be able to accumulate enough money to pay the very high premiums and get back on the cycle of having continuous insurance coverage.

Now, of course, Speaker Ryan looks forward to what are called now high-risk pools. These would be plans that are essentially devoted to try and accommodate people who have expensive and pre-existing conditions. You're not convinced that would do it.

Well, I think that the problem with those is in the fine print. First of all, very often they are not adequately funded. And many of the high-risk pools have lifetime caps, lifetime limits.

What kind of reforms would you like to make?


I think you maybe missed your calling as a cybercriminal, Scott. Criminals are always looking to, what is the formula that makes paying the ransom worth it to the person who I'm attacking?So I'm absolutely certain that you're right that you will see an uptick in at least attempts to do this in other cities.

Cities have computer experts, right?Shouldn't they be avoiding these attacks somehow?

I think it's a pretty sensitive issue. In the case of Baltimore, the mayor came out and publicly blamed the National Security Agency for having lost some exploits several years ago that had resulted in the attack that they sustained. But at the same time, there had been a patch available that the city hadn't put in place.

You know, nationwide, there was an enormous lack of people with cybersecurity skills. City governments aren't known for their enormously high salaries. So I think you'll see the competition at tech firms, at big banks making it very hard for these cities to have enough people in place.


Same for the rap charts and also pop. I mean, you said that this is a city that has an impact on black music. You know, Atlanta has made black music popular music. These are artists that are on the Hot 100, the biggest songs in the country. So, I am very hopeful.

Dee Dee, same thing.

Right. For me, you know, I look at the new emerging talents like Jazzpects and Hollywierd and Proton. You know, I see a whole new 'nother birth of musicians coming up, and again, just being on the live music scene last night, I was at the Smith's Olde Bar to see Anthony David and Jazzpects and Redlands and Proton and Yellow Wolf, which are all underground artists that are stemming away from the norm.

Jazzpects is fusing hip-hop and jazz. And Yellow Wolf, on the total opposite the spectrum, is a white rapper that is - he has a group called the Dixie Mafia that is a really, really - he is an excellent rapper, that is fusing a lot of the blue grass and country and, you know, middle-America stuff with hip-hop.


People call out sick, and they actually monitor how much an impact the video game has for the movies that were released, for how many people called out sick, and whether work or productivity goes down. So this isn't, you know, an isolated event.

You were mentioning the violence of some of the previous versions. Is it still the kind of game where, for example, you can shoot a police officer virtually?

Yeah. Absolutely it still is that type of game. I mean, this is a mature-rated game, which means, theoretically, that you cannot purchase this game unless you are 17 or older. So, it does have violence. It does have partial nudity in the game. And one thing that's caught some attention by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving in the game is - there is a component, or an element, where you can actually - you make a choice however, whether or not you grab a drink at a bar, and then go driving and then the screen simulates what that experience would be like. And so Mothers against Drunk Driving have stepped out on that.

But this is an adult title. There is - on the box, it says there's alcohol. There's drugs. There's partial nudity, intense violence. So you really want to be concerned if, you know, younger audiences are playing this game, you'd better make sure their maturity level can handle it.


Has the Catholic Church made enough progress in fighting abuse by its priests?That question has renewed urgency after George Pell became the highest-ranking member of the clergy to be formally charged. Cardinal Pell of Australia is a close adviser to the pope. He's been charged with sexual assault. He says he's innocent. Police in Melbourne aren't releasing the details of his accusers.

Joining us to talk about the case from Dublin and the broader questions it raises is Marie Collins. She was until recently on a papal commission dealing with the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Thanks for being with us.

Glad to be here.

So please remind us of your story. How did this come to be an issue in your life?


Michael Ben-Ari is his name. He has had links to the outlawed Kahane movement, which calls for expelling Palestinians. And the Supreme Court disqualified him from running in elections because of his racist statements against Arabs. His far-right party is called the Jewish Strength or the Jewish Power party, and it is still running in elections.

Oh. So this one candidate is gone, but that party is still there. Now, how does that affect Benjamin Netanyahu who you wouldn't describe necessarily as far-right but he is absolutely on the right side of the spectrum?

This actually could help Netanyahu in the polls. He has been seen as legitimizing this far-right party. He recently brokered a deal to merge the party with others on the right wing to consolidate votes and to help him win elections. His base is very fired up about the fact that this far-right candidate has been disqualified but that an Arab party is being allowed to run.

Oh, well let's talk about that very briefly, if we can, because we've heard some headlines to that effect - people on the right saying if you elect this center-left coalition, it's going to bring Arabs to power. In what way, if at all, is that true?


Oh, yes. You know, capitalism evolved into the Wild, Wild West form of capitalism in which regulation was relatively lax, I mean, which leverage in borrowing produced the combined phenomena where, you know, everyone assumed that prices of everything would always go up and never go down. Witness the phenomena with housing prices.

Now, all of that's changed. We've understood that there's a need for regulation, for control in terms of lending, and for an assumption of reduced expectations in terms of return. And so, yeah, capitalism as defined over the past 10 or 20 years, in which prices only went down for a year or two, and then they snapped back up and reached for accelerated and new highs, those days are disappearing quickly.

Bill Gross is Managing Director of Pacific Investment Management Company, which has more than $720 billion of investments. Bill, thank you.

Thank you very much, Alex.


Right. And I think you do see that. And it's interesting you bring up health care. The Koch network has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years running issue ads and other advertising themed around health care, pointing to that as a critical issue for them. And I think you're starting to see them move away from that, move towards touting the tax overhaul that Republicans passed last year as a big achievement. I do think that if the tax overhaul hadn't passed, Republicans would have a lot more problems raising money that cycle. I think that you're going to see some checkbooks more open because they were able to pass that.

Let's turn to the Democrats - you know, oddly less well-known' in terms of just these big names. But we do know Tom Steyer. He is the billionaire hedge fund manager who has become so familiar with his ads calling for the impeachment of President Trump. Where will his money be going?

Mr.  Steyer has said that he's going to spend 30 million to help Democrats. He is really supporting the idea of impeaching the president. And so taking the House would allow that to move forward. I think that you're going to see a lot of that money flow into House races, some into Senate and gubernatorial races, which are also important this cycle.

But we do have this split in the Democratic Party, as well, between sort of the more liberal wing, the more activist wing and the other part of the party which is, you know, more traditional. So how will that play out?


WHYY.

Excellent. And tell us a little bit about your situation. You wrote that you are a member of the sandwich generation. What does that mean?

Well, it means that I'm taking care of children, and I'm also taking care of an elderly mother.

So, you've got a lot of expenses. How are you coping with those expenses right now?


Now I'm more self-assured, and - but the thing now, which is funny, is that my kids sort of act the way parents, I think, act for most people, you know, when they're teenagers, that I sneak around dating under the noses of my kids. So when they're asleep in the other room, I can have a date and close the door and, you know, not have them know about it.

Have you ever been busted?

No. That's what I have locks on the doors. I'm very good about that.

One time when we were - you know, when I was engaged after the divorce, and I remember one night, the next morning my son said something like, you know, were you hurt last night?Something about the noises he heard the night before, and that was horrifying.


As a parent, or as a wife, or both?

Well, I mean, how can I answer that?I spend a lot of time at home, especially now that I have kids, so, I'm mostly confronting these situations that involve white people making assumptions about me and my children. But, you know, when we go into Boston, both with my kids and with my husband when he was, you know, my boyfriend, or my fiance, or whatever, and we were living in the city, yes, I think, you know, we certainly got our fair share of double takes and then some. And not very subtle, either, by blacks which I also find just as disconcerting, if not more so.

You mention towards the end of your article that you are hopeful, but not necessarily convinced, that everything is moving in the right direction racially. Why do you think that?

Well, I really just don't know. You know, I am very hopeful because I think that, you know, my biggest fear as a parent is that my kids will somehow feel squeezed between these two identities, and feel forced to choose one. And there are many stories of, you know, friends and acquaintances of mine who are biracial who go through these stages of, you know, rejecting their black parent or feeling embarrassed by their black parent. And then reading "Malcolm X" freshman year in college and then rejecting their white parent. I mean, it's a very common thing, or it's not uncommon, at least.


And how do you?

So what we found works the best is you need champions within that community. You need strong, influential voices that are going to say we need to accept these girls and women back, and the children. These are victims, it was not their fault. They're part and parcel of our society. So what we do is we identify not just the traditional religious and community leaders, but also those who have an influential voice amongst the women in particular in the community, so that they can become those carriers of the messages that these girls, these women, they deserve our support. They deserve our acceptance back. And then we can open up community dialogues so that people - we can't just dismiss that communities have fear. We must address it head on and allow communities to express those fears, but with religious and traditional leaders providing that voice of reason and tolerance so that these girls and women can come back into their communities.

Rachel Harvey of UNICEF in Nigeria. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much.


You know, he doesn't.

Well, he's not a reporter then - he or she or it. Yes.

He's actually very friendly.

Very friendly, really, and thanks the editor for improving his or her work?

He does. He even asks for changes.


Yeah. Why?

Dan is an institutionalist. He's actually not even a conservative. If you go look at his voting record, he's one of the more moderate members of our conference. But what he's been pushing is a more open and fair system, where more amendments are allowed, more debate is allowed and the Congress is allowed to work as a legislative body. It hasn't been done like that now for the last 10 years, and it certainly hasn't been like that since Mr.  Boehner was chairman (unintelligible). . .

Well, when you say Congress is allowed to work as a legislative body, you understand the frustration that I think very openly Speaker Boehner and some others experience that everybody was talking, but not a lot of business was getting done, that that was the result of all this give and take. And they think at some point, if you're going to be in government, you've got to govern.

Well, there wasn't any give and take. That was the problem. It was regular practice for us - and this doesn't get widely reported - but on a debt ceiling debate, for example, we would do nothing; we do nothing; we do nothing. And then three days before the debt ceiling limit was reached, Mr.  Boehner would walk into a room and say OK, here's what we're doing.


Dale Berra has written a book about his father and family - father most Americans know by just one name, Yogi - Lawrence "Yogi" Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher of the Mantle, Maris and Whitey Ford New York Yankees in the 1950s and '60s. Yogi was the American League's Most Valuable Player three times that became almost as beloved as an almost cuddly catcher who babbled with bewildering but good-natured malapropisms like, it's deja vu all over again. He went on to manage the Yankees, then the Mets. Dale Berra was himself a major leaguer with the Yankees, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Houston Astros, but he brought down his own career with drugs. His new book, "My Dad Yogi: A Memoir Of Family And Baseball" - Dale Berra joins us from New York. Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Your father famously said, I never said most of the things I said. The Yogi-isms - how did he talk at home?

To tell you the truth, Dad, as we like to say, is the most quoted man who never said anything. Dad was just Dad at home.


Oh, it's kind of odd. Really, it's quiet. The streets are quiet. There's this wariness, though, that, you know, death could burst from the sky at any second. Obviously, this is something that Israelis are experiencing as well with rocket fire there. But here, there are no warning sirens. There's not an Iron Dome to intercept anything. The military strength of Israel is tremendously more powerful than the military strength of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or other groups here. In some cases, Israel does warn people about strikes. For example, I spoke to a woman this morning whose neighbor is part of Hamas, that that person got a phone call this morning to get out of the house. He alerted the neighbors. This is sort of normal. She burst into tears. Her husband said, don't cry in front of the children. She took the kids to a friend's. She went to work.

And a normal life continues in the midst of all this?

Well, in some ways, it has to. If you aren't right next to a rocket attack, you might not even know it happens - or close enough by to hear it. I did speak to a man this morning whose, you know, baby came two weeks early three days ago. And he had to take the baby boy to the doctor last night at night. He had to do it even though he didn't want to be driving around at night. So, yes, people do carry on as they can.

And briefly - we don't have much time - but there have been similar flare-ups like this in recent years. Is there any sense of what's coming next in this conflict?


We understand investigators recovered one block - black box from the crash. And I gather there are two. What can that one box tell you?Do you need the second?

The one black box can tell us some good information. It's a quantum-engineering manufacturer recorder. And what we're doing now is that our recorder specialist is already working with the manufacturer to use their conversion software - it's not unusual to do this - to turn all of those zeros and ones into information we can use, such as the distance traveled, the throttle inputs, the brake system performance, as well as the speed.

So so many eyewitnesses say the train just didn't slow down when it came into the station. Has what you learned supported that view so far?

We don't have the information from the black box yet. And this is just one of the two event data recorders, as well as video footage, that we're collecting. They were forward-facing cameras on both the front and the back end of this train.


I think that some of the red lines for the Europeans relate to what Iran has threatened to do in its next phase of so-called noncompliance with this nuclear deal. And that relates to increasing the percentage threshold currently in place for enriching uranium. This is going to be a critical aspect of how Iran can expand its nuclear program. And that's where we might see the Europeans escalating this issue at the U. N.  Security Council.

But we're definitely seeing the rhetoric and the sounds from Tehran escalate as the U. S.  pressure campaign mounts on.

That's Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you for joining us.

Pleasure.


The bottleneck. That's this place where this column of ice fell. It tore away lines, fixed ropes that people used to get up and down there. This is a narrow passageway. So you were almost there. And how far is that from the peak of the mountain?

Quite a ways. But, of course, climbing times vary based on people's physical fitness and mental alertness at that altitude, as there's very little oxygen.

At the point where you decided to turn around, just below the bottleneck, the place that later became such a problem, how late in the day was that, and what were the weather conditions like there?

I decided to turn around at around eight o'clock in the morning. And it was - there, it was actually almost too hot. We normally (unintelligible) down suits because the temperature is around minus 20, even on a perfect day. But we were all quite warm.


We know that many refugees went back to the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, there was a mass exodus from Yugoslavia. People have gone back there. But the overall evidence is that 80% of the world's refugees leave their country for at least five years, 20% for at least 20 years. And I think we are dealing with both the crises of diplomacy and the crises of humanitarian aid, and both need to be addressed. Our belief is that America has a proud tradition on which to stand in doing both those tasks.

David Miliband is president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Rachel.


Absolutely. This is probably one of the most consequential elections in Israel in the last 10 years, since Netanyahu has been in power.

Daniel, thanks so much.

You're welcome.

That's NPR's Daniel Estrin.


You know, we don't do a lot of cookbooks on this show. Hugh Acheson's latest cookbook fits right in. It doesn't show much cooking. The chef is shown reading in a lawn chair, taking a hot bath, even playing the cello - at least holding the bow over one.

It's a book about what you can cook - if that's quite the word - while you do something else, even for hours. "The Chef And The Slow Cooker" is by Hugh Acheson, the acclaimed Canadian Southern chef who owns big-name restaurants in Georgia and is a judge on "Top Chef. "He joins us from WABE in Atlanta.

Chef, thanks so much for being with us.

It's great to be here, Scott.


Well, her name is Vivian Schiller, as you said. She's currently at thenewyorktimes. com. She runs that website. From my standpoint, it seems like a very impressive pick.

In her career, she's not only led the New York Times, she led Discovery Times Channel on cable, which was a joint venture. It did not play out, but it was very well thought of in terms of the journalism it did, and it sort of allowed the Times to experiment with operation in this multimedia world.

And before that, she was senior vice president, actually, at CNN, where she oversaw their long-form broadcasting, particularly the documentary work. Somebody who's a business manager, clearly, and yet very much steeped in the world of journalism and in the world of new journalism.

And it is a very quickly changing world, isn't it?First of all, there is a lot less money out there now than there was a year ago, right?With advertising falling. . .


I think that - you know I think that there a lot of lower pay guys who are, you know, for contracts who are taking - because in other words, you're getting it from somewhere, and this - the money that they're getting paid now is coming from last year. You know, that's what baseball does. I think we will see, next year, we'll begin to see the push back in terms of the long-term contracts, which contracts are taking a hit. But right now, as long as television is there and fans are, you know…

Well, yeah, but are the fans going to be there?Because I'm hearing that the NFL, NBA, major league baseball fans, they're worried that - the clubs are worried because people - season ticket holders who keep thing - whole thing going they may not be re-upping the way they've been in the past.

And that's when you will see - you will see the effect of that next year. You know, right now, baseball is still going on in terms of the salaries. They're going on last year's income, which was record-setting. Now, if they've got a downturn at the turnstile, you were going to see it next year. This time next year, we could be talking about some serious, you know, shrinking, withdrawals, you know, there could be a couple of teams that aren't cutting it. And I'm talking about…

That was danger.


We cannot tell each time because the publicly available data on Facebook is not - doesn't show you everything. But in many countries, like in Spain, it was actually pretty much two individuals running a coordinated network of pages to spread their message. One was a bit more publicly known. The other one was just, I think, a pensioner in some small island in Spain. And then we saw it all across. Like, it's very fringe-type, sometimes white nationalist. Again, we did not find much political affiliation - only in Germany, where even local and regional AFD politicians were involved in setting up fake and duplicate accounts and be friend with them. And that worried us, as well.

The AFD being that - the far-right party in Germany.

That's right.

Here in the U. S. , as authorities have tried to track disinformation across social media, a lot of the trail has led back to Russia. That's been very much in the headlines here. Did you find that in your investigation in Europe?


But it was this idea of, well, that's what America is. And it was a very prescribed, very male, very white identity. And it linked up with, you know, I think a very chauvinistic idea about what we do with our military. I think this is all intertwined.

What do you mean about what we do with our military?

Well, in the sense that there is this very shoot-first-and-ask-questions later attitude about when we go out in the world. So I think when we take our values into the world throughout when this happens, throughout the 20th century, I think that there's a lot of good to be said about the intentions on a basic level. You know, we are going to go help people. But oftentimes the idea that the answer is military force, I think that that comes out of a lot of the same idea that this identity of the military as a very masculine, a very - you know, very prescribed idea.

As you follow the news as a journalist over the past many years, which events make you think of this story of the Rough Riders?Which events have resonance?


It's - conservative - that about eight to 10,000 people died. And that this, to this day, is still the greatest natural disaster to hit this country in terms of devastation, in terms of death toll. It's almost hard to fathom how incredible - the power of this storm and what it did. It literally wiped a city off the map.

And you point out that after this happened, the idea that, you know, that Galveston really had only itself to blame. I mean, this was a natural port, and it was built on a sandbar. It was in most places only about 8 feet above sea level. And to have built it there in the first place would be crazy, and they rebuilt it anyway.

It really was a feat of engineering and of sheer willpower that they constructed a seawall - a 17-foot seawall that ran about three miles. But that wasn't enough. They realized that to protect downtown, they were going to have to raise it. So they literally raised about 500 buildings anywhere from 8 to 18 inches so that it was less susceptible to flooding.

As a weatherman, do you think that you can say now that what happened to Galveston is impossible, that it won't happen again?I don't mean that the storms won't happen again. I mean, Hurricane Katrina was a hideous storm that killed a lot of people, and the property loss was terrible. But do you think that the lessons of storms like that, but especially of Galveston, mean that the loss of life and property on that scale really isn't likely to happen again?


Well, I think everybody is kind of on pins and needles to see what's going to come out of it, see what direction Congress is going to go.

The union recently made certain concessions to help cut costs on their end, including suspending the job bank program, and that's a program where UAW workers can receive nearly full pay for up to two years if their jobs are eliminated. Why make sacrifices like that?

Well, I think the union has been a partner ion this thing. In fact, I was one to help negotiate the jobs bank originally, so I pretty well understand that program. But, if we can turn this thing around, we can keep those working that are there today, so there may not be a need for it.

Of course, any proposed changes would have to be ratified by union members. What do you think the chances are there that these changes would be approved?


So, what are we to make of Fabulous Fab and his verdict?

They finally got somebody - five years later, yeah. Unfortunately, it's quite the small fry in the grand scheme of things. The Goldman Sachs' trader who put together a deal that the SEC believed - and I think the evidence shows - was deceptive, at least to the people on the other side of the trade. And, you know, unlike everybody else at Goldman, he wrote some emails he really shouldn't have written and made himself a nice, big, fat, juicy target. And the SEC took full and complete advantage.

So, the Justice Department charges that hedge fund with insider trading and then shortly after that this happened. Are we looking at a trend?

Ah. Well, in terms of prosecuting individuals involved in the financial crisis, we are not looking at a trend. We are looking at an end-point. What the trend might be is that we have a new chairwoman at the SEC, Mary White, who's a former prosecutor, who has really beaten the drums about being tough on financial crime. And I think what we are seeing is the beginning of a new toughness by the SEC for which this victory gives them kind of, if nothing else, kind of a moral authority to say we can charge forward and there's a lot more financial crime out there that we are uncovering. And even though it's necessarily related to the financial crisis, we are going to be tougher. We're going to prosecute. We're going to bring tougher civil actions against firms and perhaps individuals. So, I think in that sense it does signal something new.


The inspector general also alleges that lucrative government contracts were given to friends and former colleagues of the bureau. And this isn't the first criticism by the inspector general of the Minerals Management office. Last year, that office was accused of making mistakes in the royalties that calculated for the industry. It saved companies more than 10 billion dollars. So, at the very least, this latest investigation gives ammunition to the people who say that the Bush administration is too close to the oil and gas industry.

And so, this directly affects taxpayers and consumers?

Well, you know, the head of the Minerals Management Agency says, no, that the agency has been collecting the proper amount of royalties, but the report says some oil companies were allowed to revise their payments downward after their contracts were finalized. And outsiders have to wonder why would the industry be giving gifts to employees of this agency, if they didn't want something in return?

OK. Still on oil, another story. OPEC announced it will be cutting production. What does that mean?

Well, they do want to cut production to keep the price high, but you know, Saudi Arabia said today that it isn't necessarily going to stick to those quotas and produce what the cartel imposed late on Tuesday. So, the prospect that Saudi Arabia might continue to crank out high levels of crude is pushing oil prices down, even as Hurricane Ike barrels down on the Gulf of Mexico.