Five hundred pages, yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't seem so simple. Republicans seem pretty certain that the tax bill is going to pass. How big a victory would it be?

You know, it's a pretty big deal. All year, Republicans struggled to get anything done, even though they had full control of the federal government. Now they have this big accomplishment they can point to. And I think that was part of the reason here. You saw a lot of Republicans like Bob Corker of Tennessee saying, I have big concerns, but I'm going to vote yes. A lot of people in Congress just wanted to get a victory. But look at the polling. It's not a popular bill.

It's not.

And you can already hear the Democrats putting together their campaign message against this. I mean, they were going to argue Republicans haven't done anything in Congress. Now they can argue the only thing Republicans have done so far is big tax cuts for the wealthy. So you can hear the messages already.

Indeed, you can. Big deal for the Republicans, but it's not the only issue to come up this week. There's a government funding fight that we're looking at on the horizon and the ongoing Russia probe. And this weekend, we're seeing more pushback against the Mueller investigation.


O. J. Simpson denied bail and a judge sentencing him to 15 years in prison for his armed robbery, kidnapping, and assault convictions. Is it just our imagination or are we seeing more black faces in the fashion magazines these days?Could we call it the Michelle Obama effect?And the Grammy nominations went primetime this year. Could the star-studded event lure viewers back to watch the awards?Here to get us up to speed on all of that and more is Allison Samuels, a national correspondent for Newsweek magazine. Allison, always a pleasure.

Thank you.

So, O. J. , O. J. , O. J. - 15 years. What do you say?

I say that I think this is a moment for history, because so many people felt that he got off the last time that I think a lot of people feel like this is just sort of the circle, you know, just sort of a coming back around.

You know- well. It's hard to come up with the right words isn't it.

Yeah, it is. And to see him earlier this morning crying, you know, pleading, sort of apologizing for everything that happened, it just really did take you back to, you know, 10 or 15 years ago or 13 years, I think, when he was actually acquitted. And you know, he seemed certainly sorrowful, but I just think, you know, America has just been listening and living with this guy for so long that they're sort of tired of him. I don't think he has that same type of sympathy that he got the last time, particularly from the African-American community.


What's this program, Becoming a Man, meant to you and other students and your friends?

It means a lot. It gives you insight of how to be a man and take care of your business and have integrity, visionary goal-setting and respect for one another. It helps you be more aware of who you are and what you could do with your life.

Tell us a bit about your life, could you, and your family.

I'm the youngest of six, which is hard to be sometimes, because you get bossed around by everybody in the house. Come from a single-parent home - my mom. Dad was never around. I have sickle cell anemia, so I persevered over that. We had good times and bad times, you know, just like any other family. But we're very close.


The oldest one, the one I've been studying the longest, is called cosmological natural selection and was in fact the subject of my first book in 1997, "Life of the Cosmos. "And in that hypothesis, under that hypothesis, universes reproduce by giving birth to new universes inside of black holes, which is an old idea in the field.

And each time that happens, I presume that the laws of nature or the numbers that characterize them change slightly. And then one has a scenario very akin, very analogous to natural selection. One can derive consequences from it.

So every time there is a black hole, and there are many, many of them in our universe, correct?

An impressively large number of them, at least a million times a million.


The body of Lucille sits in the body of Thelma. Her life circled there in the lap of her mother, who wore 12 fingers just as she wore 12, just as the baby inside of her as she sat in the body of Thelma wore 12.

Lucille there in the middle, lived her light-filled life, never losing her daughter seat, dying on the very day Miss Thelma died. All the daughters and sons, who long left the movies, all the poets black, who sought their lives only ordinary, recount their long calla lily fingers every day, wring their jewels into jewels hands, circling the unbroken light-filled two-headed body of the woman who keeps keeping us.

"The Ordinary Body of Lucille" by Nikky Finney, our guest. I have to ask you, jewels into jewels. That line is in italic.

Hmm. Yes. That's a line from Ms.  Clifton's poem. And it's - I just - I love it so much. It's one of - a thousand favorite phrases of hers.


Joining me now is Christoph Schott, who directed that report for Avaaz. He's on the line from Brussels. Hi, there.

Hi, there. Good to be here.

Good to have you with us. So give us some examples. What kind of things did you find?

We found a very, very large set of different type of content from actual disinformation. We saw, for example, a video of migrants destroying a police car, viewed 10 million times, when, actually, that was out of a movie - years old. And people kind of got a misrepresenting, like, picture of reality where they thought this type of content, both very hateful or, actually, outright lies, is very popular in the community. And that's what really concern us - that these disinformation networks out there share this content so far and wide so quickly that it reaches millions of millions of Europeans every single day.

Right. I mean, you found it was reaching people in Germany and Spain and France, Italy, the United Kingdom - all over Europe.


Next week, hundreds of thousands of students, armed with number two pencils. . .

. . . will sit down to take the SAT. An important section of the college entrance test is the essay portion. And students have just 25 minutes to write it. Anne Ruggles Gere, who oversees the writing program at the University of Michigan, is not a fan of the essay section. She says that high schools now teach to the test and as a result encourage a generation of bad writers. We spoke with Professor Gere, who was in the studios of WUOM in Ann Arbor, and we asked her how the SAT encourages sloppy prose.

I think that it does it in several ways. Because when you're writing in only 25 minutes, you don't have time to develop a clear, complex idea. You don't have time to think about an audience. It makes students think of writing in the most simplistic, reductive ways. It emphasizes length of writing. It emphasizes use big words and be sure to follow a very simple formula.

So, the students will use it as an opportunity to use the word sesquipedalian over and over or show off their vocabulary and stuff?


That's correct.

. . . Epstein's lawyers. OK, because I was asking about Epstein's lawyers.

Oh. Well, he - they aren't saying anything right now. They haven't seen the charges. So until they see the charges, I don't know how much they really want to say. They want to understand what they're up against to start with.

And so what are the lawyers for the victims saying?

Well, like I said, they were shocked, stunned. I don't think - I think that they suspected that something was happening with the Southern District of New York, which was investigating this and brought the charges. But I don't think they thought that it would happen this fast. I thought they thought it would be a very long process to try to get him. That's what makes me suspect that maybe they have a very good witness on their side.


Well, generally speaking, you're going to have 100,000 dollars insurance in most financial institutions. There are a very a few uninsured institutions. I believe there are credit unions that are privately insured, but they're rare as hen's teeth. By and large, it doesn't matter. As long as you stay under the 100,000 dollar limit, I think you'll be fine.

I'd be curious to see what Goldman's teller window looks like and whether they give away toasters, but I somehow think it will be a little different from the corner bank.

When the government says, for example, that it has moved to secure mutual funds and people need not worry about their money, how can the average person have confidence in that right now?

Well, to be specific, they're really only backing money market mutual funds. And even more specifically, I believe that some of those have to - the ones that do have to pay into the fund that insures it.


But second, I said you have to step up, Mr.  President. The moment you jump into this issue, you learn how complicated it is, how many decades in the making it is. But this is on our watch. This is our time, and these are your constituents, Mr.  President, just as they are mine.

And so to me, this is an opportunity to educate, an opportunity to pressure. And whether it is out of his heart or out of the movement that we build or just out of some people's disgust - because disgust for all of us should be in our hearts right now that we let Americans live on our streets and in shelters in the richest country on the face of the earth. So we will push, push, push this president and this administration to join this fight until the last day we're around.

That is the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti.

Mr.  Mayor, thanks so much for talking to us.

Great to be with you, Michel. Thank you so much.


You really take us through every single phase of a relationship.

I went through every single phase in the writing of this thing, so. . .

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I went through a breakup with a longtime, like, best friend. And it was, for the first time in my adult years, really in a place where I didn't have anyone to text after the show to be like, it went great or, like, I tripped. But, like, it was a strange sort of loneliness. And I wanted the songs to show that because I felt like I was going to feel less lonely by sharing in a way.


So, there's a whole big huge chasm which some of us live in part of the time at least, where where's this music?Where is the new soul music?Where are the people that are writing the classics that are going to be around in 20 years, and 30 years, and 40 years?

Well, in addition to your own songs, you have sung other folks' work. And in 2004, you sang on a tribute album for Luther Vandross. Here's a little bit of "Forever, For Always, For Love. "

(Singing) Do you remember The love that we once had?Well, if I had the chance to love you again, I'd make your heart forget I was ever thereÉ

I still miss him.


(Laughter) Well, punctuation cooking may be a bit different, but I call it a great deal of those dishes where people have little bottle and they do little dots and the little comma and question mark all around.

(Laughter).

And basically, there (laughter) is no sauce to dip your bread in. You don't really know what those things have to do with the food. When I cook, I like people to be able to identify the food. I like people to feel comfortable. I want people to look at my food and start salivating and starting thinking of a marriage of that food with a certain type of wine and so forth. But in molecular cuisine, this is fine. I mean, up to a certain extent - a meal or two this way, but after a while, I just want to go out and have a taco and a beer (laughter).

(Laughter) As I was reading your book, you know, Julia Child - your friend and co-conspirator of many years - was famous for telling us, remember, nobody sees you in the kitchen.


Then Clark Carrington(ph) chimed in from Dar Salam, Tanzania. He wrote, I'm an African-American living in Tanzania and totally rely on Farai and crew through podcast to keep me informed about what is going on in the U. S.  and the world, for that matter. However, Farai's much more than a female African-American voice. She is an informed progressive and an insightful mind.

And finally, we go to a fan in Saudi Arabia. Ibrahim Sadik(ph) heard a re-broadcast of a conversation we had on Latin jazz and sent us this. I wish to thank News & Notes for the excellent program on Latin jazz as well as the month-long treatment on jazz. I currently live in Saudi Arabia and enjoy News & Notes, which is rebroadcast during my morning commute. It provides a refreshing entry for the morning. I hope that the coming months will bring about a turnaround in the U. S.  economy that will allow kaleidoscopic programs such as News & Notes to remain on air.

And that's it for letters. So wherever you are, please keep your thoughts coming over the next few months.

To write us, just log on to npr. org and click on contact us. When you get there, you'll see lots of shows to choose from. Make sure you pick News & Notes when you write to us.


So why do you think people should care about this?And. . .

(Laughter).

. . . Apologies for being trite about it. But. . .

Yeah, I know.


And this email from Daryl: I used to be a student of Vernor Vinge, a wonderful professor. I'm legally blind. He writes, I'm wondering, how would this work with those individuals?We do have iPhone apps that can give turn-by-turn navigation, but all those other features of Google glasses would not be present.

Sort of two possibilities there: One, is the sort of thing that I was talking about, learning to use the devices that you have and that you are wearing. That depends on the plasticity of the human brain. We're quite capable of learning new tricks and cooperating with the devices that we have to get results that we may be barred from getting in other ways. The other approach to this sort of thing is to actually look at where the blindness happens. If the blindness happens within the eyes, then you want to just go a little bit upstream from that and see whether the neurons behind that are still capable of responding to stimulus and then figuring out how to stimulate them directly without the light.

If that's gone, then you're talking about something, perhaps, much harder, which is to go upstream from that and look at the beginning of neuron interpretation of sight that's happening within the brain and actually making your input at that level.

Have you signed up for Google glasses yet?


You know, it can be a little dangerous at times. A lot of times you're setting your ladder in the ice and you're looking for a dry spot to put the ladder. And sometimes you use a van and you try to back the van up or at least get the tire up against the ladder so that you don't have any chance of that ladder skipping out on you. And, you know, in the elements, you get a little hasty sometimes 'cause you're in a hurry. And that's where, you know, you've still got to take your time. At its coldest is when you're at your busiest. I've been out 12, 13, 14-hour days before. You learn to dress for it.

How do you dress for a 14-hour day in let's say 25-degree temperatures?

Well, it can be tricky because there's times you're coming into a warm building, and you're way overdressed, and you begin to sweat. And if you start to sweat, it can be really bad when you go back out in the elements 'cause now you're really cold so you need to bring some dry socks. Usually, I'll wear some thermals. I'll wear multiple layers, and I'll take layers off, put layers back on.

What about this method for keeping your hands warm?(Blows on hands).


And the cable operators, the cable television news operations, CNN, Fox, MSNBC are going to in a tremendous competition to see which one of them can call it first, and that's going to pull the broadcasters over. So I don't think people in California can expect that the East Coast will not be talking about a winner, if there is a clear winner, before the polls close in California. Now, that isn't necessarily a good thing, I'm not trying to put a. . .

Right.

Put a happy face on it, it does make people in California feel angry to hear the race declared over hours before the polls close in that state. But because it's going to be on the Internet just about every where, and I suspect we'll start seeing it on cable television, it's going to be hard for the networks to resist the temptation to do the same.

Ron just quickly, there's been some last minute news. Senator Obama's grandmother passed away after a long battle with cancer yesterday. And a state personnel board in Alaska issue a report saying that Governor Sarah Palin didn't abuse her power, did not abuse her power, in the firing of a public safety commissioner. Do things like this, last minute developments like this, affect the race at all?


Yes, I do. And one of the ways it could be would be to have more women in the House and in the Senate. We saw back in the early 1990s after the Justice Clarence Thomas controversy, Anita Hill's allegations - led a lot of women to say, why weren't there more women on that committee passing judgment on Anita Hill's accusations?- because there was not a single one. They were all men. And why can't we have more representation for our gender when we are, after all, half the population?

That led to the so-called Year of the Woman - 1992 - in which a record number of senators who were women were elected and a large new number in the House. And that we have seen somewhat rise and continue to rise. And the number of women who are in the Senate today is the highest it's ever been, but it's still a minor fraction. And it's still a minor fraction in the House. And as women become more politically active, they become more politically attuned - they are seeing these things, and they are realizing that they need to be represented in Congress to have full power and full equality in this society.

NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.

Thank you, Scott.


I thought, how can I thank them?So I just jumped off the curb and popped up a salute. And I saw tears rolling by on their faces. And that's what kept me driving throughout that salute until the last bike rolled around me. And then both sides of the street just rushed me and said thank you, Marine.

So tell me about yesterday. Did you pick a certain place where you're going to be?

Yeah, it's become my memorial post. It's at 23rd and Constitution, right behind the Lincoln Monument.

And you're full uniform.


One thing in the filing that might undercut that is a detail where she had booked a hotel room with the company card in Washington, D. C. , for an event. She changed her travel plans so that she was no longer coming for the entire time. And one of the nights in the hotel room that she had booked, Duncan Hunter went and had a tryst with one of the individuals that he was having an affair with in the hotel room that she had booked. So her knowledge about all the spending that was being done doesn't necessarily add up with what his theory is for the defense.

What's next in this trial?And in the meantime, is there any sign that Duncan Hunter would consider resigning?

He has not shown any interest in resigning. We haven't seen that. Right now it's on pace to go to trial in September. It's possible there will be a plea deal before then. It's not looking great for Hunter. But that being said, there's very little chance that any plea deal would not involve any jail time, so of course he would have to resign. He won reelection last year and seems very much focused on getting past this, so we will find out.

That's KPBS reporter Max Rivlin-Nadler reporting from San Diego. Thank you.


So in lieu of a car czar, there will be this Presidential Task Force on Autos. Who will be heading up that group?

It will be headed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, the two top economic people in the Obama administration. It'll also pool staffers from several different departments throughout the government, including Transportation, Labor, and the EPA.

You mentioned Tim Geithner, Larry Summers. Both gentlemen already have quite a bit on their plates. Isn't there some concern about taking on the auto industry in addition to everything else?

There may be some concern, but I don't know if they have any choice. Just Friday, the supplier industry came to Treasury and put forth a proposal where it would receive up to $25 billion in aid. It did so because it was warning that given the production cuts the automakers have been forced to make this year, there may be a wave of bankruptcies in the supplier industry. They may need aid before the end of February.


So the parents as well as one coach have agreed to plead guilty in connection with this scheme. And according to one of the plea agreements at least, they may serve a few months in jail as well as paying fines and restitution. And Felicity Huffman, the actress, as you heard, is one of the more high-profile people accused. But others, including Lori Loughlin, another actress from the TV show "Full House," is among those originally accused who is continuing to fight the charges.

What are we hearing from the parents?

Well, two of those who plead - pled guilty today issued very contrite statements. Huffman's statement reportedly said, I am in full acceptance of my guilt - deep regret and shame. And she also reiterated that her daughter had no idea.

This story has gotten so much attention, and it seems to have really resonated with students and parents. Why do you think it has had such a big impact?


And a very talented sister who I think is quite equal to the task of containing Schwarzenegger.

Well, here is my question to you. You talked about the state controller, who - you are very correct - said that he would defy the governor's order and not roll back those salaries. But can he do that?Can he get away with defying the governor in this way?

Well, he has his own constitutional authority, and I think that this may be a case that goes to the California Supreme Court. I mean, if he chooses - now, the challenge will be this. If he chooses not to issue checks on Schwarzenegger's executive order, can checks be issued at all?And that's a constitutional question. I don't know the answer to it. But you have these two key state officials clashing, both of them elected by the people of California. And I fully expect that there will be a compromise before the 1st of September, Tony. Again, I think that the governor is posturing. The governor has always been a fiscal conservative. He is not pleased with the way the budget negotiations are going. So he is making a point.

And he is making it, apparently, on the backs of some of the state workers, it appears.


Well, I think anyone of any political stripe would say that the U. S.  just has too many mass shootings, it being noted one is too many. But there's one every few days. The Republican Party controls the House, the Senate, the White House. Shouldn't the party that controls government see reducing mass shootings as a matter of national security?

I believe we should take a look at - yeah, absolutely. This is a problem of certainly domestic security, national security. And I'm concerned about firearm deaths. I'm also concerned what I've been witnessing, too, in Europe and elsewhere, where people take vehicles and they drive them into crowds and kill many people. I mean, we have, sadly, you know, very evil people in this world who will do terrible things. Sometimes they're motivated politically. Sometimes they're mentally ill. Sometimes, in the case of Las Vegas, we simply don't know what motivated this guy.

Well - but why give people who have mental problems the legal capacity to get dangerous weapons?

Well, they - actually, you know, like I said, they're not allowed to. This person who has been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution is prohibited. . .


One, make sure you fill out all the federal forms correctly and thoroughly. Two, report all your income to the government. Those will be the two big headlines. Three. . .

That's the law, right?

Yeah, that's - follow the law is clear. Three, it really hasn't affected the lobbying business, per se, even with President Trump. There's so much uncertainty out there that businesses and individuals want people representing them in Washington who are just kind of aware of what's going on and looking after their interests.

Well, that raises this question. During your lobbying career, you lobbied, I gather, for broadcasters and beer wholesalers. As we noted, Mr.  Manafort specialized in lobbying for foreign strongman, including Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, Moscow's man - Moscow's plant in Kiev. Question might sound naive - I thought ambassadors were supposed to represent the interests of foreign powers in Washington, D. C.  How did lobbyists become part of it?


And yeah. Like I said, the video can be used for good. And that's why I think the premise of body camera footage is good. But where problems emerge is when government officials and police officials push back against making that footage public because that's the whole reason. The reason is to bring transparency to police interactions. And if government officials push against that, it goes against the entire premise.

One of the very interesting points that you make in your book is that the federal government has investigated alternatives to lethal force and improving police-community relations for decades. I mean, you highlight a report that was commissioned by President Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 in response to the Watts riots. And you said that it proposes really not so much an emphasis on technology but an emphasis on relationships, on communication and teaching police officers how to communicate better with the public, how to - it's more of like a - I don't know what word to use. Would you say humanistic approach?And. . .

Absolutely. That's a great word for it.

And that you say that there's - these kinds of - these techniques have never really been implemented because they were deemed to be too expensive. But you also point out that technology is expensive. The police departments spend a huge amount on these technologies that you say don't work. So what - my question to you is, why do you think these techniques have not gotten more traction?


Right. So this is a very powerful story, also. And I think that this story is about the way that women devour their own, in some ways, and - particularly in small towns and in towns where sex is seen as a detriment.

Yeah. There were a few stories in here that I did not love, and there was a moment where I was starting to question your judgment in pulling them all together, I will confess. And then I got to one titled "To The North," and it just knocked me out. I mean, it's about a boy and his summers on the beach and how he grows into a man. And his character is forming. It's fantastic if I - in my view. And I gather it's one of your favorites, as well.

It is my very favorite in the book. But you know, also - so part of what our arguments were - were about showing sort of the larger artistic growth of a writer. And so I have to admit there are some stories in this that aren't my favorite, either, but they seemed important in terms of Nancy Hale as a round person and showing her work through time. "To The North" is exquisite. I just found it full of repressed longing.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder to you, as someone who writes very well-received short stories, is it inspiring, or is it daunting to come across somebody else who could write a short story that was pretty darn near perfect?


Well, no, I don't think so, but it's really not just about resignations. What people really want to see is a change of the system, not just a personnel change. But what we know is that even if we magically fixed Ferguson overnight, it would be an island of justice in a sea of injustice.

At the same time, Mr.  French, how do you keep the public safe?How do you get anyone to become a good police officer if they're getting - if they feel they might be shot by the citizens?

You're absolutely right. I mean, the tragic thing here - and this is the crisis that we find ourselves in in St.  Louis - is that communities need police; especially communities with high crime, like many of our communities do have it in St.  Louis. We need police. And an order for police to be effective they need the trust of the community. And so what I feel like is we have not acted quick enough. That in fact we had an opportunity over this fall and winter to do a lot of this hard work before we get into what is traditionally the high crime times of spring and summer. And it's been warm here for a couple of days and we've already seen a very high spike in crime, including the tragic death of a 5-year-old boy. So we've got a lot of work to do and we need to get to the business of doing it very quickly.

How has the protest movement changed - maybe in terms of what its objectives are - and are there different factions now?


Mr.  Zandi, you served as an adviser for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign, and now you've been working with the Democrats in leadership. I'm wondering, what sort of advice are you giving them for how to get out of this situation?

Well, I think the most important thing is that government policy needs to be very aggressive. We need a concerted, comprehensive, and consistent response to our economic problems. The crisis is very severe and significant. And without such a response, we're going to be in the economic soup, so to speak, for a long time to come.

And specifically - I'm sure there's many things you've suggested - could you give us a couple of highlights of concrete plans?

Well, the thing that's on the drawing board right now is the economic stimulus plan, and I think we do need a very large plan that would include increases in government spending and tax cuts.

To add to this troubled economy, we now have the latest unemployment figures out this morning from major metropolitan areas. Here's how they look. In November 2007, 18 areas reported jobless rates of at least seven percent. In November 2008, that number jumped to 121. Which areas have seen the highest unemployment rate?


It was for people who are sort of touched by this. And when you saw what goes into it, you will understand. I mean, it's a week of sanding and scrapping and chiseling. It really - it was kind of an amazing process.

Yeah. And it's a beautiful video you made. It's up there on our website at sciencefriday. com. You can watch how they build the bikes. They talk about the bamboo where they - they're bringing in from Vietnam and choose it, right?

That's right. Their cream of the crop, they say.

You imagine going bamboo shopping?


That's true. Actually, the crime rate in Norway isn't really that high, so the police helicopter is actually more of a surveillance helicopter. It doesn't really carry people. But there is, as you found out, afterwards, there is a kind of - or should be a kind of co-working between the police and the air force, which didn't. . .

Didn't work, yeah.

. . . as it should (unintelligible). And there are also, on different areas, a lot of other routines that really didn't work as they were set up to be, so there had been a lot of criticism. And I think very much on the political side has changed and will change in the months and years to come because of what happened.

One, final question. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed to be the commander of a group of extremists in Europe. He called them the Knights Templar. Any evidence of that?


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer sitting in for Scott Simon.

The Silk Road, the centuries-old trade route that the West traditionally associates with Marco Polo, is believed to have brought silk and pasta from China all the way to Italy. Of course, it didn't happen quite like that. History always depends upon the teller of the story. And we have a new version from Jen Lin-Liu. She's an American food writer who lives and works in China.

She's written a book called "On the Noodle Road," and she joins us now from our bureau in Beijing. Welcome to the program.

Thank you, Linda.


Well, the number one thing I see in crime scenes is there are people just trampling all over the place. Everybody is touching something and there's just lots of discussions and stomping around right inside of a crime scene that we would never allow.

Anything else occur to you?

It's surprising to me how many people believe that most suspects will invoke their right and remain silent when in fact they don't.

Gee, what's the psychology behind that, do you think?


And what did Ben Bernanke say to you in terms of admitting that perhaps that was a mistake, or anything else?Did he say to you that he made any mistakes along the way?

Well, I think he did, you know - as I say, the sort of news in the article was that he did concede that the Fed and he had been slow to understand really what was going on with this subprime crisis. I mean, it's easy to be critical. A lot of people on Wall Street didn't understand it, either, a lot of people in the Treasury Department. In fact, it's very hard to find anybody at all who really understood the full scale of this, you know, going back six, twelve months.

There were people saying that there was going to be a housing, you know, a housing collapse. I'd even said that myself. But nobody really realized how intertwined the financial system was with the financial markets. And nobody realized that a drop in house prices would basically render much of the American financial system insolvent, which is what has happened.

John Cassidy is a staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine. His article on Ben Bernanke is in this week's issue. Thank you very much.


And what do you serve?I said $5 bowls of cereal, but expand on that menu if you could.

We sell 120 different cereals from all over the world. So we import cereals from America, from New Zealand, from Australia, from France, from Israel. We import cereals from all over the world, so it's a real experience coming in here because the walls are just littered with cereal memorabilia, toys that you used to get in the boxes. It's a real experience.

Now, I don't for a moment expect you to identify with the people who attacked your store. But can you - can you see where fancy bowls of cereal would kind of fit into their agenda about the world, their neighborhood changing right before their eyes?

I can see their point, but there's also a Versace shop that has just opened up around the corner. They're complaining that people in the area can't afford to come here and afford four pounds for a meal. But there's a Versace shop open around the corner and I think it's - very, very few percent of people in this neighborhood would even be able to walk in there and buy anything. I know I couldn't.


So where'd that song come from?

That song - Frank Rogers is my producer, and we got together - it was the first time we had met each other, we were talking about what kind of record I wanted to make. And I told him I really wanted to make a country record, and that was the first song we wrote together.

You know, we're both really happily married guys, and you listen to that song and it's a big divorce song. And people think the theme of country music, you know, my baby left me, my dog left me, and all that stuff, and so we just wanted to write a real basic country shuffle, and we came with "All I Want" and I love that tune. I love playing it live, you know, and having Brad Paisley play it on the record was an amazing thing. And I'm a big fan of that tune.

You, I understand, got a phone call from Maya Angelou?I don't know anything about it, but I was told to ask about it by my producer, Devon. So there must be something there. What's the story?


Well, myelin is a very complex membrane made by a cell called an oligodendrocyte, and the oligodendrocyte puts out processes that wrap around nerve axons. And the real thing that myelin does is it facilitates the electrical conduction down those nerve axons. And being a complex membrane, there are multiple lipid and protein components within that membrane that end up being attacked by our immune system in this disease.

Mm-hmm. So what you have done, at least in these early tests of nine people, seeing that it doesn't really hurt the people, is that you trick the body in a way into saying all those antigens that we normally attack, those are part of us. Let's not attack them.

That's correct. Yeah. This study (unintelligible) many years of work at our laboratory trying to develop efficient ways to induce what immunologists call tolerance, which would be only inactivating the immune cells that are carrying out the autoimmune disease - in this case multiple sclerosis - without down-regulating responses to bacterial antigens, viral antigens, et cetera, that we really depend upon to keep us healthy.

Most of the current therapies that are used in multiple sclerosis are in one way or another collectively called immunosuppressive therapies that act in one way or another to try to suppress the immune response to dampen the autoimmune disease, but in the consequence of use over a long term make people more susceptible to everyday infections and to higher rates of cancer.


The opposition and outrage over families seeking asylum being separated from their children at the border of the United States broke open this week. Laura Bush said, our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores. President Trump did what he said he couldn't - sign an executive order to stop separations. But how long will that hold, and what will happen with those families who've already been separated?

Erika Pinheiro is an immigration lawyer with a group called Al Otro Lado, the other side. She joins us from Tijuana. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

Have you seen a case where parents have been reunited in the United States?


There's a group of Americans who've been dubbed the Young Invincibles. They're not, of course. But they are young, healthy and people the administration needs to buy health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The new health insurance exchanges opened October 1st and officials want at least 2. 7 million of the seven million estimated new enrollees to fall inside that 18 to 35 age range to keep insurance rates low.

The president and Hollywood stars have made special appeals to this group, nicely reminding them that those who choose not to enroll have to pay a fine. In 2011, over 18 million of these young adults were not insured for health care.

We spoke with Lisa Dubay, a fellow at the Urban Institute, about why many have not had coverage.

Only about 11 percent of the uninsured Young Invincibles aren't purchasing coverage because they think they don't need it. Most of them are saying they're not purchasing coverage because it's unaffordable. So I'm not convinced that they're not going to enroll. I think they probably will enroll. If the rates are good and they look like they're going to be low with the subsidies, I think that we will get Young Invisibles to come in. And they have a lot of options.


Have you been - has there been any retribution for that kind of storytelling?

Actually, there has not been overall. There has been certain individuals from the book who have contacted me, who now are upset, because they figure can immediately identify them. But prior to the book, and while I was writing it, I did reach out to the majority of the people in the book, and, you know, inform them that I was writing the book, and how I was depicting them in the book.

And I told them that I was changing their names and - you know, and I read to them their descriptions and things of that nature. So a lot of people were very supportive in the beginning, and a lot of people are still continuing to be supportive.

But I think, you know, because now the book, you know, is festering, people are starting to read it, they're getting to pick out and, you know, identify certain people in the book. . .


I want to kind of mention quickly the things that are floating out there as rumors and are not confirmed. Again, these are things that people are talking about and are not confirmed. There are many people who immediately assumed this is a terror attack. Tovia, this is not confirmed.

Not confirmed. Nothing about the cause of this, whether it was some kind of unintentional explosion from down in a manhole or something or whether it was a bomb. The police do tell me that the bomb squad is on the scene, as you would expect, along with police and fire and rescue, but they are not talking about the cause. They - a briefing is coming soon but it's taking some time to maneuver down there and also to collect some good information, some hard data about what's going on and numbers of injured and the rest.

What agency are you speaking with to confirm what's going on?Is it the Boston Police Department?

Boston police is who I have been talking to. The hospitals are confirming that people are on their way as well.

This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.


That Sean Combs did. Were you guys benefiting from that?Was your family - was your son actually able to get some of the money that came out of that project?

Excuse me. Well that was actually the only reason that I decided to do the record with Paul, because this was still at a time when I was - I just kind of shut everything down. I have been working on my second album prior to B. I. G. 's death.

And I didn't go back in the studio, until he called me and asked me to do this record. And the one line that, you know, that caught - got me and hooked me was all the money is going to go to the kids. All the royalties will go to CJ and Siana(ph). So yes, they do have trusts set up where the royalties from that song go into that trust. . . TEXT: CHIDEYA: What is the thing that you're most proud of, that you've done as a writer and a recording artist?

Mm. Most proud?Wow. I think that I'm proud of the fact that I didn't even really - you know, when I actually got my record deal with Bad Boy, Puff heard me sing one line, and I wasn't there in any capacity of auditioning or anything. I was just the baby's mama in the lounge, and my opportunity came.


Back-and-forth, funny lines, that sort of thing. So it was quite clear what that was. And also accompanying that were three videotapes, one of which was of Governor Bush doing a Tim Russert-style interview in his shorts. I watched that for a few seconds, and I realized I shouldn't be having these materials. And so right after that, I called up our campaign manager, and I said, we've got some problems here. I've gotten stolen materials. And my lawyer came not long after that, and we decided that we needed to turn those materials over to the FBI.

Not just the FBI, also the press, right?You guys sought sort of transparency in this.

Yeah, well, we issued a very noble-sounding press release recusing myself from that. But we didn't disclose any of the materials. That actually - they left my office at about 1 o'clock. The FBI came over to interview me, oddly, that day, and I had found myself in an odd position of explaining to the agents why this was a crime. They were unfamiliar with it. And they didn't realize that these debate materials were probably some of the most valuable things in the United States at the time. And eventually Louis Freeh became the agent of record. He was the FBI director.

I want to follow up on that point because while you acted out of an abundance of caution, President Trump was considerably more nonchalant, let's say, about the idea of receiving dirt on an opponent. Were you surprised when you heard his comments?


And I gather these are specialists, not just regular line firefighters.

Yeah, that's correct. We send - they usually run out of incident management team people, so the teams of planning officers and operation officers and incident managers who actually organize and manage the battle against the fire but also aviation specialists and fire-behavior-type specialists. So they are the type of people that they need and run out of when they've got, you know, the fire activity that they see this summer.

Are the Australian, American and Canadian approaches to firefighting sufficiently similar that you can swap personnel like that?

Well, they certainly are. And we've been swapping personnel particularly with United States since the year 2000. So we've done quite a few deployments from Australia to the U. S.  and Canada. And we've also had Canadian and U. S.  folks come across to Southern Australia and help us.


Yeah, he was a loner. He was very studious in high school. He was a brilliant student and a bookworm. Obama has a reputation for having been a bookworm himself, so maybe there's something there.

Right. Something.

Yeah, it's a little silly to read too much into this. But it's - if you look too deeply into anything, you'll find metaphors, right?So. . .

Right. Spinning a web, any size. Catching Republicans just like flies. I don't know.


Yeah, we're looking at how people make movies through a microscope. And I hadn't really thought about this much before this week, but there's a sort of long history of this, and there have been a few real pioneers of this field. And one of them is a guy, a photographer called Roman Vishniac.

And you may know this name because he's famous for sort of a very different kind of photography. He took portraits. He has a picture of Einstein that's pretty famous. And he is famous for documenting Jews in Eastern Europe for World War II.

But it turns out that he also was this huge science buff, and he made these educational movies funded by NSF and others for classroom use, and a lot of them featured his micro-movies, these movies that he did in his New York apartment through the microscope with, you know, pond scum that he collected I don't know where, my guess would be Central Park, just looking at some of the footage.

Right, and so then he trained - this moviemaker trained his camera into the lens of the microscope.


Before that, he'd been seen frequently, but always waddling with a really bad limp. He was clearly in discomfort, and finally the North Korean authorities said he is in physical discomfort. So there's something up. We don't quite know what. The speculation is he's had surgery, he's ill, ranging right through to there's been a coup, and he's lost power or certainly being shunted away from power. That's the speculation.

Now, we're talking about somebody who - as my recollection is - he's on television every two minutes. So this must be a tremendous vacuum in the lives of North Koreans.

That's right. The print media in North Korea is still putting all these statements thanking the supreme leader in that sort of glorious way they do, praising him for, for example, the pretty good performance of the athletes in the Asian games a week ago. So all that stuff is still coming out. There's no devaluation of him by the state media. But he's not there. Now, having said that, his father disappeared from sight at odd times as well. And sometimes that was seen as being a mark of his strength in that he felt that he was so strong that he didn't need to do all this stuff.

Is this a matter for particular distress because, after all, we are talking about a nation that's either a quasi-nuclear power or might be a nuclear power?


You got a sinus infection but you taking a yeast infection medicine figuring if you lay down, it'll work its way up.

Do you believe in Mars and Venus, the whole idea that men and women are totally different?

I really do. And if I can get women to understand that every man that sleeps with you is not going to love you, then half of us will be all right.

What about the other half?

I mean, the other half - they won't get it. They think that every man that sleeps with them is going to love them. And if I could get women to understand that just because a man sleeps with another woman it doesn't mean that he doesn't love you. If I can get them to understand that, then we'll be all right.


The rules were meant to give people more control over the data that the Internet providers collect about them. Telecom and cable companies were supposed to start getting explicit consent from customers before selling some of the more sensitive information, things related to finances or health. And there were other requirements for increased transparency and security.

So they were going to have to get your actual consent before they could sell that information, right?

The technical term was opt in.

So given that those rules won't be going into effect, does that mean, let's say, my Internet provider - say Comcast - can sell to an advertiser a package that says here's what Lulu Garcia-Navarro reads online and watches on TV?

Well, so practically that's unlikely. You might have seen some stories of activists pouncing back against the lawmakers who repealed the rules. Folks were raising tons of money online, tens of thousands of dollars, to presumably buy the browsing history and other data about those lawmakers themselves - sort of you sold our privacy, well, we will buy yours. But that's not exactly how this market works. You can't go to Comcast and say, give me everything you've got on Senator Jeff Flake. And frankly, the advertisers don't really sit around and say, let's go after Lulu or Alina. They say, let's go after all women in a particular age group in the Washington area, and then, they buy ad targeting for individuals in that cohort.

OK. So what data do Internet providers actually collect then?


I don't think that that's what Israel really wants. I don't think they've made that decision. But I think we know in these circumstances things could escalate, get out of control, despite the intentions of the parties who are involved. And in this case, I think Israel was hoping that the Palestinians would stop firing rockets sooner than they have. They may feel compelled to do more, but that would obviously be an extremely dangerous bet.

These events, of course, are occurring at a time when there is an election coming up in Israel. Help us understand popular opinion in Israel on this subject.

Well, I think from an Israeli perspective, there's a consensus that it was simply unacceptable to live under the constant threat of Palestinian rockets, which led to as many as a million Israelis having to sometimes take shelter. So, there is that uncertainty, that constant sense of insecurity, even though the number of Israeli casualties have been extremely low. But that was something that most Israelis were not prepared to live with, and that's why you were finding this wall-to-wall, this quasi-unanimity behind this operation.

Help us understand Egypt's role. The Egyptian prime minister came to Gaza yesterday. Obviously, under the Mubarak regime that would have been unthinkable. What's Egypt's role in events now?


Again, going back to the example of Dayton, you said getting people together in one room did not work so well there.

Oh. You know, we had an opening banquet, which we had in this museum. I mean, it was an air museum, so, ironically, above the head of one the Serbs, we had a cruise missile, which had recently. . .

That was quite a coincidence. We didn't mean to do that. It had to do with the seating chart. But anyway, it all went very well and we saw that President Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia, was talking to President Milosevic. So we thought, wow. This is going to be easier that we think, you know?Hold the food order. We think we can get out of here pretty quickly.

So the next day, we brought them all together, and they all screamed at each other so much so that I said to Holbrooke, we better not try this again. He said, you're not kidding. This could be the end of the whole conference. So we never did it again, until the very last day when we asked - when we had an agreement, and the three leaders of the three, what we called, warring factions, which a term they never liked, got together and actually initialed the Dayton Peace Accods.


But so yeah, so toilet seats and pillowcases are very, very similar. We tend to find more species associated with our mouths on pillowcases and more species associated with feces, with gut microbes, on toilet seats. But in any given house we might or might not be able to distinguish those two. And in general, you know, these places that we sit, that we lay down, they sort of fill with species that fall off of us, you know, biased in one way or another toward a specific part of our body.

But it's kind of this mark we leave on the world everywhere we go, and presumably it's the same on planes, it's the same in our cars.

It sounds like our dogs leave a mark, too.

Yeah, so one of the really interesting things for us was to try to figure out what explains why your house is different from my house, why any house is different from any other house. And there are lots of things that you can imagine might be important, you know, the size of your house, your air conditioner, the number of people in your house, whether you're a vegetarian.


I mean, as far as I'm not a Catholic, but the pope can do whatever he likes. But the gospels are pretty clear in the Greek that the original translation - lead us not into temptation - is the best reflection of that biblical Greek. It's a subjunctive verb. It's used in the second person, addressed directly to God. And it really does say, do not lead us into temptation. Please - I hope that you do not lead me into temptation. And that's really what the Greek says.

And what is the Greek, by the way?

(Speaking Greek). That's the end of it. That's the addition - (speaking Greek). There's an addition. So for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory is a later addition. So originally, when they translated the text - the King James version - they thought that that bit was original, but actually, it ends with deliver us from evil, so that for thine is the kingdom is sort of - it's a doxology that was added on later.

Yet another change.


So it's not unusual for hospitals to sue patients for unpaid medical bills, but there's so much striking about this situation. Like, what are some of the things where - that stands out about this about how unusual this is?

So Methodist is really aggressive in their use of the courts to collect on these debts. Once they get a judgment, they will hound a patient from low-wage job to low-wage job to try to garnish their wages, and that's what we saw with the main character in our story, Carrie Barrett. I call her Ms.  Carrie. So Ms.  Carrie had surgery in 2007, was sued in 2010. And since then, the hospital has actually added $18,000 worth of interest to her debt. So not only do they add, you know, $5,000 in attorney's fees - they're also accruing interest even as they know she works at low-income jobs.

So part of how this works is Methodist gets the judgment, and then they filed a garnishment order. The employer can return that garnishment order saying, basically, this person doesn't make enough to even have their wages garnished. Ms.  Carrie's employer was telling her she's not even making more than enough to have her wages garnished, and Methodist kept after her. It was like they were just waiting to see if she made a little bit more money so they could take it.

And they also are affiliated with the United Methodist Church. I mean, there are three bishops, as I understand from your reporting, that serve on the board. Did they have something to say about this?


What is at the top of your to-do list right now today?

Right now, we continue to monitor Dorian. As you well know, you know, we continue to go up our East Coast. We're positioned to support all four states. Florida is looking fairly good right now, however, they still have some impacts.

But we really don't want our citizens to, you know, fall asleep on this storm. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, they're going to feel the blunt of Hurricane Dorian - a lot of rain, a lot of surge and a lot of wind primarily down on the coast. But, you know, these things can that create weather hazards well inland, so - and they're doing a great job of being prepared for that. So we're focused on supporting our states, supporting our locals.

Four states is a long stretch of coastline. This storm is so big. How does that affect your preparations?


As we started reporting on this, I mean, everyone in higher education seemed to say, like, yeah, it's a problem - we all knew that it was a problem for so long, and nothing has really changed the system, changed the culture. Could this be the moment?Or is there a feeling in the field of education that, I mean, it's just so entrenched that it's going to be very hard to change the system?

Well, I have seen a lot of conversations about kind of how do we get low-income students to kind of get into college?It's certainly renewed a conversation around legacy admissions, which is the system that gives extra points to students whose parents or siblings already attended a specific school. And there's also a renewed interest in schools that don't require the college entrance exams like the ACT or the SAT, though the College Board, the company behind the SAT, says using an outside assessment actually makes it harder to pull off fraud.

But even this idea of college as nonprofit status, like, should they have this if they're not really an open-access organization or serving the greater public?So these are kind of the things that I'm keeping an eye on, and we'll see what happens.

All right. Quite a story to follow. NPR education reporter Elissa Nadworny. Thanks so much.


Now, we're going to head east to New York. NPR's Robert Smith spent the day in the raucous Harlem Armory yesterday. He joins us now. How are you doing, Robert?

I'm doing great. And no offense to Cheryl; she's talking about the hometown pride for Barack Obama. They like to point out in Harlem that before he moved to Chicago, Barack Obama went to Columbia University and lived in East Harlem. So, there you go.

All right. Well, how did they process this spectacle yesterday?

"Process" is a tame word for it. It was an out-and-out party. Everything from giant video screens on 125th Street; there were big events at the Schaumburg Center for Black Culture and at the Apollo Theater. I went to a schoolchildren event at the Harlem Armory, and if you can imagine the sound of about 5,000 middle-school students in a concrete bunker like the Armory screaming at the top of their lungs, you can imagine, it not only hurt your ears, but it was a little hard to follow the inauguration with that much excitement in one place.


You know, this is a very opaque system in Iran. And it's tough to sometimes know to what extent an action was sanctioned from the very top. And in some ways, President Trump gave Iran an out by saying that this was just a big mistake. This was a misunderstanding.

Could have been a junior officer somewhere or something like that.

Exactly.

Could it have been a junior officer somewhere?


I've got to ask you a high hard one, as they call it in baseball, Monsignor. Can you understand if a number of faithful Catholics stand up during Mass tomorrow and tell their priest, look; I'm sorry, father, but what moral authority do you or does the church have to tell me anything when it's hurt so many people who loved it and concealed those crimes for decades?

You know, I certainly understand it. That was what Cardinal Cupich said, actually. He said that if the church doesn't get this right, its moral authority is shot. And so why we're having a global summit on an issue that the church says this is in the front burner and we - they don't do global summits on anything. So the church is trying to say, yeah, this is important, and if we don't get this right, it's over.

Are you concerned the church is going to lose its moral authority over this issue or has already lost its moral authority?

Well, I'm sure it has. It has with many people. There's no question about it. And right - and I think the church has a responsibility, say, to clean up its own act before it tells other people how to act. I totally agree with that.

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti of the Catholic University of America, thanks so much for being with us.


That's right. Even as he says he's open to talking with China, the president has left in place this latest round of tariffs, and the tariff rate is still 15%. That's up from 10% when the tax was initially announced.

Trump is also threatening to raise the tariff rate on another $250 billion worth of Chinese imports that are already being taxed at 25%. Trump wants to raise that to 30% on October 1 unless there's some kind of deal between now and then. U. S.  and Chinese negotiators are supposed to meet here in Washington sometime this month in September, but we haven't seen a real date yet.

How is all this affecting businesses, consumers?

Consumers are still spending pretty freely. We got new numbers from the Commerce Department on Friday showing consumer spending grew at a solid pace in July. And that's encouraging because consumer spending has been the most durable pillar propping up the economy.


So is presentation, how you present the food, influence how it's tasting, you know?Does the fact that it's presented in - on a tray in an airplane at 40,000 feet mean it's going to taste different, or your expectations might be different?

Absolutely. Presentation is very important. And you bring up an interesting point about eating at 30,000 feet. The - as we all know, if we're lucky enough to get served a meal in an airplane. . .

. . . food just doesn't seem to taste right on an airplane.

Right.


Absolutely. And that's something that my father always stressed upon my sisters and me and that we've all thought it's very important that you should be engaged in the process. In this case it is a political process, because the process of electing our government leaders is one that will have a direct impact on whether we're here and what we do here. So it's fine to criticize, but at the same time if you're not engaged in the process I feel that's a real discredit to everything you try to protest against.

Do you sense a great excitement among the men and women there about the election?

Well, there's certainly a lot of open questions, a lot of us are wondering if Barack Obama's elected versus John McCain and vice versa, whether that will have an effect not just on this tour, but on future military careers because we have a lot of soldiers and a lot of officers who are planning to make a military career and I'm not one of them. I'm going to be leaving active duty when we return from this tour.

But for those soldiers especially, the big question now is, when and how soon they'll have to deploy to Afghanistan. Because many of these soldiers are on their third, some even on their fourth tour here to Iraq. And so now they're looking at another open ended involvement in Afghanistan. And so they've got a lot of questions about that and so we're really just curious right now what both candidates - what decisions they'll make.


The flu hits with the regularity of seasons. But it's hard to know when it will peak, and how it might spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to forecast yearly bouts of influenza the way that meteorologists predict storms. So they've set up a contest every two weeks through March, in which competing teams submit predictions for when the flu will peak and how intense it will be.

Mark Dredze is a professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University. He analyzes social media data, to try to learn about health trends. Professor Dredze, thanks so much for being with us.

I'm happy to be here.

So how do you use social media to make a prediction on a medical matter?


Hudson is confident that Broadway Federal Bank won't be harmed by the recent spate of bankruptcies and bailouts. Though the bank specializes in real estate and caters to minority investors, it never got caught up in the subprime mortgage game that has become the downfall of other banks.

In order to play in that game, you had to have large volumes and small margins, which has made mortgages like commodities. So the Countrywides, the WAMUs, the big mortgage companies, you would lose your shirt trying to compete with it. So, really, the small banks had to stand on the sidelines while a lot of money was being made by churning these loans and fees, and people were making huge amounts of money, banks were very profitable, and we weren't able to participate. But now, you know, the kind of like slow and steady feels very good right now.

Now, Hudson says he's starting to get a lot more calls from people who want to put their money in Broadway Federal.

Here's what used to happen in the old days. People would only put 100,000 dollars in Broadway because they knew that was the maximum FDIC insurance. They put a million dollars in Bank of America. They figured, well, I only - because Bank of America only has the same insurance as we do, only a 100,000. So they left 900,000 dollars uninsured because they said, well, that's Bank of America. I'm only worried about Broadway. I'm not worried about Bank of America.


Not letting anybody down - what do you mean?just being able to hold the salute for so long.

Yeah, maintain my position and in life. You know, it's much more than one day out of the year thing. The families that lost their loved ones, they're like, wow, my son wanted to be that. And it kind of honors them, in essence, because it doesn't let the sacrifice go in vain.

This seems to resonate with Korean vets, who are getting older now, vets from Vietnam, same thing - also Iraq, Afghanistan. I mean, it's all generations.

Yes, and it's very humbling. I was in a diner in Lexington, Ky.  And this guy saw a shirt I had with my salute on the back that said, thank you, veterans in all the wars. And he goes, I know that Marine. And I'm like, well, I'm that Marine. He started to cry. He said, please keep doing it. He had to give up his motorcycle when he came home from war. And now he bounces and tries to go to school and is trying to find his way.


Yeah. I mean, the choices - we take in quite a range of groups clan, the Nazi groups, other kinds of white nationalist groups by which I mean, generally more kind of the suit-and-tie crowd than you'll find with the clan in the skinheads. But we also include some very extreme anti-gay groups, some radical traditionalist Catholic groups, these are groups that believe that Jews are evil and so on, murdered God and what have you, and a number of other groups along those lines.

What's driving this growth in the numbers of hate groups?Is it the economy, social forces, a combination of both perhaps?

I think all of those things. During the last eight years or so, most of the period, these groups have very successfully and almost exclusively exploited the issue of illegal immigration. In other words, every clan group, neo-Nazi group out there has kind of put aside all other enemies to concentrate heavily on the so-called threat of people with brown skin coming here, to you know, kind of rape our daughters and destroy our society. That has begun to change in just the last year, especially since last fall when we had two major things going on, of course, the economy crashing and unemployment in particular getting worse and then of course, the election of a black man to the White House. Those things together have really created kind of perfect storm.

Are the number of hate crimes and the number of hate groups increasing on a parallel track?


And from New York, Serena Blanchard, as in: From Serena, 1988. Thank you for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

Now, Ms.  Blanchard, you were only 8. So how did you wind up getting cited in this eminent textbook?

I wanted to write a poem for my father's book. I wanted to write an introduction. Apparently, he was looking for some form of dedication page. So I was tying my shoe one day, and I came up with a poem, and I offered it to my father and to Stan. But I think Dad can probably explain the rest from there.


So I'm afraid he's not someone who looks at the situation in the same way that Western leaders do. He has different calculations, and he's trying to see if the Syrian state can be held together by Mr.  Assad. And I guess he will wait until it becomes completely apparent that that will not happen.

We're speaking with Fiona Hill, co-author with Clifford Gaddy of "Mr.  Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. "Her recent piece in Foreign Affairs, "The Real Reason Putin Supports Assad: Mistaking Syria for Chechnya. "You can find a link to that article at our website, go to npr. org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Now, there is some suspicion that Syria may devolve into, well, different little warlord states, including an Alawite state led by Mr.  Assad based in the western part of the country near the Mediterranean. That's where the Alawites, 12 percent of the population live, and that's the element from which Mr.  Assad's family comes as well. At that point in the game, what does Russia do?

Well, you know, it's a very good question. I think it will depend on whether Assad asks for some kind of recognition for that state as the rump state of Syria, with the expectation that the rest of the territory might be regained. And if you think back to 2008, Putin actually has a track record already established, a recognition of entity.


Me, too.

. . . when they would have lunch every day.

Thank you for saying that, yes.

So how did they help each other?


Of course. First of all, we created a group of specialized prosecutor and specialized law enforcement agencies, so we try to look at this unique phenomenon as a criminal network behind this. For this reason, we - first of all, we interview immediately the migrants when they arrive here in Palermo, in Sicily, Lampedusa and many of the towns that we are competent on - to get the material that we can use for the follow-up to our investigation - telephone numbers, identification, social network account - everything that we can use later.

And we build a trip, the route with the statements of the survivors of these terrible tragedies. But also, we had the corroboration of what we heard during our investigation directly from the traffickers operating in Africa - in Libya and Sudan - and also in Italy and in northern Europe.

Mr.  Ferrara, compared to La Cosa Nostra, are the smugglers well-organized?Are they - are they rich?

We are talking about a very structured criminal group. We are not talking about people that just put people in a boat and send them here. But we are talking really about criminal groups, very, very structured and very, very organized.


I'm Farai Chideya and this is News & Notes. The roots of jazz reach down on to the Mississippi Delta and the West Coast of Africa. Now, the many sounds that make up modern jazz can be heard virtually anywhere in the world. The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz keeps the music alive and nurtures the next generation of jazz musicians. And this weekend, the institute is honoring B. B. King, plus, holding the finals of its annual performance competition. Joining us now is Monk Institute President Tom Carter.

Hi. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. Yeah. You're right here in the studio. So we've been hearing a little bit of the great B. B. King, who I've had the pleasure of watching play. And you're honoring him in Los Angeles this weekend at a concert called 'The Blues and Jazz, Two American Classics. 'Tell me a little bit more about how got things structured.

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.


There's something magical about that part of a meal that really seems to have inspired the book. Like, the beginning, when everyone is, like, just arriving and gathering and, like, what you want to serve in a moment like that.

Yeah. I mean, even just hearing you describe it that way, it's the best moment of a party. So, you know, everyone's hugging and kissing, and there's catching up and clinking of wine glasses. And it's just the best moment. And I think when those first platters of food start to roll out of the kitchen, it's just a celebration.

Do you ever really sit down, or is it constant movement, like, more plates coming out and just kind of wandering around and eating and talking?

What I love about antipasti is that even in a restaurant, oftentimes they'll have sort of a big communal table in the center of the restaurant, and they'll allow you to come up with, you know, your plate and a big spoon and just kind of point to or pick through and serve yourself whatever you want from the antipasti spread. So that's kind of the most interactive moment of the meal, which is maybe also why it's one of my favorites.


My goodness.

Yeah, and he's going to try to sort of and see if it can sort of go on where he picks up from the news to sort of, you know, sort of portray different events that are going on with them. So, it's - I'm looking forward to that, because I like RuPaul, so I think it's going to be really interesting.

It will be interesting. All right, what about the Screen Actors Guild strike?What does that mean for people who watch movies or people who make them?

I think, you know, it's going to be a problem. For us, I think, you know, again, TV is going to become even more important, and I think TV was going to become important anyway because of the recession. I think a lot of people - because they know it's really expensive to go out and see movies. So, I think it's sort of a bad time in a way just because of that. But I think, yes, reality TV is going to sort of become even bigger than it already is. And you look at the shows, and it's, like, you know, endless, the kind of shows reality TV-wise that are coming. And I think they sort of - you know, they have everything in place for that to sort of work out.


UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Reading) That they are endowed by their creator. . .

Those voices were recorded last year on the National Mall. This year, to celebrate the Fourth of July, we're examining the text of the Declaration of Independence, but not the parts you've heard over and over again. The smallest details of phrasing in that declaration were crucial. Many words carried hidden meanings, small proclamations meant to legitimize aspirations for independence and little barbs for the British. It's part of Mark Memmott's job to pay attention to how we use words. He's NPR's supervising senior editor for standards and practices. Welcome, Mark.

Glad to be here.

OK, point us to a word in the Declaration of Independence that we might not have paid that much attention to.

I should say right here that I learned a lot about this this week from Professor Stephen Lucas, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The word is necessary.


Once the canvassing board signs off on the recount and stamps it as completed, the loser will have up to seven days - calendar days, not business days - to file a legal contest to the recount. And it's very likely that that's going to be happening and accordingly, that we will not have a certified winner for some time in Minnesota.

Well, if you stick to that calendar and start filling in little blanks for January, do you actually go over into February when you're trying to figure out the schedule?

Well, I think that's anybody's guess right now. It just depends on what type of litigation is filed, if anything does come, and how long it takes to work it out.

Of course, Norm Coleman could say, could he not, well, OK. I'm a good sport. There it is.


The state has also promised that they will do spot checks after the storm to make sure that facilities that have gotten generators have those generators up and running. We've been told that the state has stockpiled additional generators in case some of those generators fail so that they have backups. And we're told that the Department of Health is also helping with that, too - the State Department of Health.

That was Miami Herald reporter Elizabeth Koh joining us from WFSU in Tallahassee, Fla.

Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining us, and thanks for your reporting.

Thank you very much.


Yeah, I think that's true. And I think any country would really struggle to deal with something this extreme. MSF was already in the country working with patients with HIV. And we're looking at Mozambique's emergency response for at least the next six months. But it's likely that it will take longer.

I mean, we've got to remember that people have lost their crops; people have lost their homes. And these are not wealthy people. These are people who - you know, many people live kind of hand-to-mouth, so their struggling is huge.

Caitlin Ryan is emergency communications officer for Doctors Without Borders. Responding to the situation in Mozambique, she's in the city of Beira this morning.

Thank you very much.


Hey, thank you very much.

Everybody who is an average taxpayer wants to know, how does this bailout affect me?So how does it affect the average taxpayer?

Well, it affects you in a couple of ways. One of which is is that, if it that if it works and the financial system does in fact stabilize and move forward, we're all better. We've averted a vast crisis. But it also does mean that probably down the pike you might be seeing higher taxes, you might be seeing higher inflation, you might be seeing a lower dollar. All of these things are potential possible fallouts from the bailout.

To follow that point a little bit further. Let's say you have a person who pays his bill on time - his or her bills on time - has a mortgage, has a small savings account and no major investments. What does this mean to that person?


Yeah.

. . . . Who have a record of accomplishment, who think that they can appeal to a broad range of voters. So what do you think you add to the race that isn't already there?

No, you bet. And why would I be the 37th or 24th (laughter) candidate or whatever it is?And I just got in now because I literally signed my last bill on Monday and had a job to do, getting Medicaid expansion and other things reauthorized. So I think I bring to the race - I think I'm probably the only one in the race that actually won in a Trump state. I mean, I got reelected in 2016. Donald Trump took Montana by 20 points. I won by four. Twenty-five to 30% of my voters voted for Donald Trump. And that's not, for me, changing who I am. I think I add to the race inasmuch as that people want government to function. I've been able to bridge divides in a very partisan time and get Republicans and Democrats to work with me to try to improve people's lives.

I think Joe Biden thinks the same. I mean, the former Vice President Joe Biden, who, obviously, has broad name recognition, you know, everywhere, who has been elected many times in his own right, never ran successfully for president. But I think he could argue that he ran successfully in Trump states - states that became Trump states - twice. And in addition to that, he's raising millions of dollars on his past name recognition. How are you going to compete with that?


I watched the movie "Concussion," and that kind of really gave me some insight onto what could happen if I kept on playing football and some of the injuries that could occur.

So nobody had ever spoken to you about this before - your coach, your family. It wasn't something that really was on your radar at all.

No, it really wasn't any of my concern. I wasn't really worried about it. You know, I had a head injury my junior year in football and then, you know, I kind of just shrugged it off, didn't think it was much of anything

So looking at the film with Will Smith, you thought, hey, I'm a football player. I'm, you know, in high school. And if I keep this up, something terrible could happen.


Well, Michelle, we are going to miss you so much, but our listeners, they'll still be able to keep in touch with you, right?

Absolutely. I'm going to still be doing my column for the Washington Post. You can go to WashingtonPost. com. I have my own personal Web site, michellesingletary. com. And I've got a book coming out in the fall that I hope people get a hold of because it will help you during this crisis and afterwards. It's called "The Power to Prosper: 21 days to Financial Freedom. "And I'm going to, hopefully, come to some communities, and I hope people come out for some of the book readings.

All right Michelle, it's been a great pleasure interviewing you and speaking with you over the years. I've just loved your energy and your advice, and I wish you the very best, and thank you so much for being on our show.

You're so welcome. I'm really, really going to miss it.


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.

So people have got stress trying to do a normal life during the day and have a normal job and then end up having to deal with the insurance companies and dealing with your mortgage companies and dealing with the assistance programs that you're trying to get help from that just takes repetitive, repetitive visits with to get things done. And it's not their fault. It's just the bureaucracy that's involved in everything doing nowadays.

Yeah. So they have to make repeated visits and work for a living all at the same time.

Yes, sir. It takes a mental strain on you. In my case, we sleep on a mattress in the back part of my living room 'cause the other half of my house doesn't have electricity and has got - you know, leaks like a sieve. And that's not a normal life.


What do you expect to see in the Basilica today?

Well, most of conservative legal Washington I expect to be there and also liberals who were Scalia's friends. That includes Vice President Biden. Antonin Scalia was one of these guys who really didn't care what your politics were. If you liked him, he liked you. He was not doctrinal in his friendships. And so I expect that it'll be somewhat mixed. Sen.  Cruz is said to be coming. I talked to one of Scalia's closest friends yesterday who said that Scalia certainly know who Cruz was. He's running for president. But, Cruz said he was going because he had this connection to the Supreme Court from when he was a clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist. And my source said, well, unfortunately, Scalia really didn't remember him from his clerkship at all.

NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, Nina, thank you.

Thank you, Linda.


Well, I talked to - obviously, I've been all over Iowa and New Hampshire. And most people really want to beat Trump. And I think if we don't stand up and say that we don't - you know, that Democrats don't stand for socialism, we're going to end up reelecting the worst president this country's ever had. And I feel sometimes a lonely voice.

But I think we've got to speak loud and clear that jobs matter. Our economy has to grow. And certainly we want to address income inequality. Absolutely we want to make sure that women have a right to choose, that civil rights and social justice are addressed aggressively. But we've also got to recognize to win in Ohio and Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin, we're going to have to, you know, get more to those kitchen table issues that have to do with, you know, somebody's job and - or how many jobs they're having to work just to balance their household budget.

And do you think your fellow candidates are not doing that?

Well, they're certainly doing it to a certain extent. I'm not diminishing climate change or - as an important issue or health care. But I don't think we're going to address climate change by guaranteeing every American a federal job, which is what part of the Green New Deal was. I don't think we're going to address the spiraling inflation in health care by forcibly telling 150 million people that we're going to take away their private insurance.


So right now, there are multiple congressional committees investigating this issue. We've got them on the House side. We've got a couple on the Senate side. I guess I want to know why is there a need for multiple investigations, and how do these congressional investigations differ at their core from what Special Counsel Robert Mueller is conducting?

Well, Senate Intelligence looks at intelligence matters primarily. Senate Judiciary looks at matters that fall under the broad scope of the Judiciary Committee. All these congressional investigations differ very much in function from what the Special Counsel Mueller does. Mueller works in secret and long, long deep studies of things like finances. And he doesn't bring his results public. If he finds something that's really important, he won't let you know until it's time to indict somebody. Whereas, the congressional committees when classification allows them to be in the open, they live for open hearings. They want people to know what they found.

And what about compelling witnesses to testify?The subpoena, is that a last resort thing or is it just a negotiating device?

Oh, the subpoena is the basic working tool of these investigations. It can be a single piece of paper that demands that the witness show up on pain of contempt. Or it can also be a subpoena of the kind that seeks documents, including digital material like emails. By bringing in a witness, they cut through a lot of the stalling. And by demanding the documents, they have the materials to pin the witness down in the questioning.


He did. When I - the first time I called him up, the conversation went like this: Hello?Alan Feuer. And I said, hey, it's Alan Feuer. And he went, oh, good man. I've been meaning to call you. And he really did talk like that. That is absolutely how he spoke.

So something out of - well, a kind of a cross between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and London.

Something like that. You know, the way I pictured it was those, you know, those Preston Sturges movies where, you know, it's almost like an Anglophilic-New York accent.

Oh, we use to call it Long Island lockjaw.


Oh, yes. Nationally, and even locally, we sometimes just put everybody in the same group as just protesters, but there are a lot of different people out there for a lot of different reasons. And the vast majority of folks have been peaceful. We did see back in August and in November, and then again this week, some people engage in violence. And they do not speak for the majority of people. They do not represent the majority of people who have been out there. But it is a very diverse group, and people have different agendas.

Mr.  French, you, I gather, have a family - 4-year-old son. Do you want him to grow up in that St.  Louis area?

You know, this is a question my wife and I ask ourselves all the time. You know, we're educated. We, you know, have good incomes and we have chosen to live in a neighborhood I grew up in, which is a rough part of North St.  Louis. It's in a higher crime area. Its property values are low. There are a lot of struggles. And we've decided to stick it out and try to improve our community. But when we had our son four years ago, he really became for us an hourglass. He is, as we see, our timeline of when we really need to see real progress. And so for us, we always have a sense of urgency about trying to really improve our community.

St.  Louis Alderman Antonio French speaking with us from the studios of KWMU in St.  Louis. Thanks so much for being with us.


Here's a trivia question for you and I will let you go. There is a president, a former president, who is also - he's also joining this list of 25 recordings. Can you guess which president it was?

In recent history or past. . . ?

Recent.

Is it Bill Clinton?Because I know he did like. . .


It must be an interesting history to this whole steganography idea.

Yeah, people certainly have been playing around with this for, you know, thousands of years. And people have been sneaking messages in lots of different things. I mean, personally I was kind of inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe short story, "The Purloined Letter," and that's when I started to think about how you could do it mathematically.

But, you know, people have been, you know, taking this approach for a long time.

I notice that you might be able to - I think the Romans shipped apparent black wax tablets, and then you scrape off the wax, something's in there.


A judge on Friday, before his disappearance, had slapped him with a half-million-dollar judgment in relation to some of his previous business dealings. His wife had filed for divorce. His stepfather had also been buried on the same day that the judgment came down.

Mr.  Schrenker is from Indiana. His plane crashed in Florida. He landed in your state, Alabama. Where exactly will he face charges?

He already faces charges in Indiana from the secretary of state's office. He likely will face charges in Florida. The Coast Guard Investigative Services now are working with the Pensacola U. S.  attorney's office. They are tallying up the cost of the search for him. That will include manpower hours; that will include two helicopters, a boat and a cutter that they had put into the water. So, he will face a felony charge there, which has not been filed yet, of making a false distress call, and likely will be asked to repay the cost of the search for him.

Carol, has anything been heard from his wife or those who had invested money with him?


Yeah. They say that he's the fastest pitcher there ever was. It's just he really couldn't find home plate. I mean, some of the stories you learn about this guy, it reads like fiction. When he was - I think this is around 1960. He's pitching in the minor leagues, and he pitched so fast he ripped the man's ear off.

Oh.

Yeah.

And Steve Dalkowski didn't make it to the Hall of Fame because. . .


Reading this book, the thing that always shone through was that you never took no for an answer. You talk about, despite all your successes, always feeling like you might never be good enough, or that people were judging you. And yet, you always sort of came back swinging, sometimes literally.

I love the word no (laughter). Because of the ADD and the dyslexic, I couldn't follow anyone's formula at all. So no to me was the yes that I needed to hear. And I wanted to succeed so I could grow my team and grow my staff as well. And a lot has to do about Boston in general. I wanted to be somebody, you know?I think so.

Barbara Lynch - her book is called "Out Of Line: A Life Of Playing With Fire. "Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much.


Yeah, exactly. I'd like to see it.

Yeah. Well, if you have any other interesting labs, let Flora know.

Yeah. And I'd also like to thank everyone who sent in videos when we requested - I'm still going through them. So if you haven't heard back from me, it's not personal. It's coming, but they were really great, so thanks for sending them.

Yeah. Couldn't compete with the guinea fowl this week on a treadmill. So thank you, Flora.


Where does he publish his stuff?

Also in supermarkets - well, there are couple of journals that he published almost everything. The Journal of - wait, I've got to look these up now. Psychological Reports is one of them.

I just want to know because I feel like I might want to read them. I mean. . .

Oh, you should. You should, I think. I try not to tell people what they should do, but Trinkaus' reports are so interesting. Psychological Reports is the name of one journal and Perceptual and Motor Skills is the other journal. They are sister journals. He also gets annoyed in the street when he watches people driving. He got annoyed that somebody near his house - there were lots of somebodies - don't always stop, come to a compete stop at an intersection. So he sat at the intersection for several hours. There's a stop sign there, and he counted. Of the cars that come to this intersection, how many come to a complete stop and how many do not?


No. I think. . .

Misunderstood, misunderstood.

Misunderstood - that's what I'm here to do is trying to salvage the reputation of some of these Halloween monsters. So yes, Frankenstein I think gets a really raw deal in the reputation department. We all think of Frankenstein's monster as this monosyllabic idiot from the movies. But actually, in Mary Shelley's original novel from 1818, Frankenstein's monster was more of a sensitive intellectual type. He read Plutarch and Goethe. He was more Brooklyn hipster and less unfrozen caveman.

(Laughter) I hear - I sense a sequel coming on.


Well, in Vienna, people are extremely concerned. Although Vienna has a very long history as a Social Democratic city, it's known, in fact, as Red Vienna. But you know, the first poll since the scandal came out yesterday, and the Freedom Party lost 4% to 5%. But they're still polling at 18%. So their core supporters remain loyal and support their anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT agenda.

And is this all anybody's talking about?

Oh, my goodness, you can't avoid it. I mean, the cafe on the ground floor of my apartment building has painted up on its windows, we're going to Ibiza. Everyone's moved on from the shock to the speculation of the provenance of the video and the question of whether or not this vote of - motion of no confidence will go through.

Valerie Hopkins of the financial times speaking with us from Vienna, thanks so much.


It will be - the repercussions will, you know, be far and wide. As I said, the law has more than a thousand pages. It touches every part of the health care system. So it's not just these marketplaces that we talk about most of the time.

The most immediate impact is Medicaid expansion. More than 10 million people have gotten health care because states have expanded Medicaid to a larger population. The law guarantees that people up to age 26 can get insurance through their parents. That's popular - that would go away. Again, the pre-existing condition protections - insurance companies have to give people coverage for their existing health problems.

But then, it also controls what Medicare pays doctors. It authorizes the Indian Health Service. It determines whether companies have to make accommodations for breastfeeding mothers. It makes chain restaurants put calorie counts on their menus. I mean, it's everywhere.

Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of things have changed in American life.


Many people start off working either in tasting rooms or they work in a restaurant, maybe as a server. And then they want to know more about wines so they become a sommelier. Or they take classes for wine education. Or they become distributors for wine. Or they work for distributors for wine for different parts of the country.

We had a gentleman who went to Argentina and bought a vineyard and is starting to grow grapes and do it from the farming standpoint. Several of the members of our panel were growers, and so simply farmers, like growing tomatoes or growing roses in your garden, you learn how to cultivate vineyards.

Steve, thanks so much for your time.

Thank you for having us on your program.


And the question has to be raised. With his support - outspoken support - for Vladimir Putin, for Kim Jong Un, for President Duterte - forgive me - the president of the Philippines - not working well today - does the president send the message that dictators can do as they please?

The president - let's be frank - came to power promising to disrupt official Washington and the way things have been done, including in terms of our relationships with just about every other country. And that is a promise on which the president has delivered. And his base voters are delighted with it, even if it gives pause to members of Congress and people in the media and other observers.

Ron Elving, thanks so much.

Thank you, Scott.


You could also - I think this is a terrific time to be as diversified as humanly possible. You want a little in bonds, you want a little in cash, you want some in stocks, you want some in international stocks. That way, at least if part of the economy falls apart, there are other things that will boost your returns.

You mentioned something I want to follow up on again with you about diversifying your portfolio, if you have one. If you do decide to move your money, whether it's a portfolio or a small savings account, and you want to do it right now because you're not confident, where should you put that money?

Ah. Well, I think that if you're really terrified of everything, your local bank is going to insure your savings account up to one hundred thousand dollars, more if you have a retirement account. And frankly, if the government falls through on that, you probably have other things in your life to worry about than what your savings are doing, like where am I going to get my canned goods?

Well, that's an interesting - an interesting response. I'm sure you heard Bill Spriggs earlier talk about Goldman Sachs and the end of the investment bank as we know it. A lot of times - you know, the corner bank is not the institution that it once was, so we have commercial banks, we no longer have investment banks. Does it make a difference which bank, which type of bank you now put your money in, given the crisis that we're facing?