This was during the Gilded Age, and this - you know, the original 1-percenters in this country. They wanted - especially Western Pennsylvania - I mean, steel moved this country. Steel helped build this country in the industrial age. And that steel was in Western Pennsylvania and throughout Pennsylvania - and the titans of steel and of coal and railroads. And they wanted a club that their compatriots had out West. And so they created the South Fork Hunt and Fish Club. And they wanted to be able to go out boating and fishing. And so they're in the Conemaugh Valley. They dammed up a river, created an earthen dam. But it was not well prepared. And the people were concerned about it. And they said this dam could fail. And if this dam fails, it would be catastrophic.

There was a lot of rain, wasn't there?

I mean, we talk about rain of biblical proportions. I mean, it was more than a foot of rain. But the problem was in the engineering of the dam. There was no way to - on a methodical basis - to be able to release water. The water just kept coming over the spillway and eroding the face of the dam, which was holding in all the rock and stone. And that gave way. Within 40 minutes, 20 million tons of water was emptied and heading down the Conemaugh Valley at about 40 to 50 miles per hour.

And as the water threatened to burst through - of course, in those days, no radio, no TV, no Twitter.


Most certainly, you know, because when it's so many deaths and injured, emotions tend to run really high. And we're certainly worried.

But so far, have you heard of any incidents of intimidation or violence?

There has been a few minor incidents - nothing major. Pelting stones at a few mosques. And on Sunday itself, two shops were burned down.

Two shops, I think.


Good morning, Don.

So, we're talking about two senior officials here - the director of Navy intelligence and the Navy's top intelligence officer. Pretty amazing.

It really is amazing, Don. It's important to note it has nothing to do with their current jobs in Naval intelligence at the Pentagon. It was in their earlier jobs in the Pacific, the area where the investigation began. Yeah, we have Vice Admiral Ted Branch, who's a director of Naval intelligence. He was commanding an aircraft carrier strike group in the region; and also Vice Admiral Bruce Loveless, now serving as director of intelligence operations. He was serving in that area as well. And the allegations against him we're told involve personal misconduct. We don't have a sense of exactly what that is, but the other officer is charged, so far in the case, have been charged with kickbacks and bribes. It's important to note here, the admirals have not been relieved of command or had their security clearances pulled, but, again, they no longer have access to classified information and are now on leave.

So, remind us how this scandal has developed.


Yeah,. It's really amazing, yeah. It turns out he was, you know, an avid, you know, layperson but had great interest in butterflies and how they evolve and so on. And he suggested that butterflies moved in certain ways from between Asia and Europe and so on. And just about a couple of years ago scientists discovered that, you know, what he suggested is actually correct.

And how did he come up with that idea?I mean, was it based on fact?

He was really following - yeah, yeah. He was following, you know, the butterflies and, you know, and where - what kinds of species you find where and so on. He was really very interested and very knowledgeable in butterflies.

Mm-hmm. OK.  Let's move on to another famous guy: Lord Kelvin. Tell us who Lord Kelvin was and what his big blunder was.


Diddley first began performing on street corners, and by 1951, he'd lined up a regular spot at the 708 Club. He also took on the name Bo Diddley, which some say is a play on the Southern slang for the term, nothing at all.

In 1955, Diddley found his way into a recording studio and recorded the song "Bo Diddley. "That song became a number one hit for Chess records. "Hey, Bo Diddley" and "Who Do You Love?"followed.

(Singing) I walked 47 miles of barbed wire. I Used a cobra snake for a neck tie. I got a brand new house on the roadside. Made from rattlesnake hide. I got a brand new chimney made on top. Made out of a human skull. Now come on, take a little walk with me Arlene and tell me, who do you love?

Who do you love?Who do you love?Who do you love?


So, tell us about those. There's one called the U6, I understand.

Well, U4, U5, U6 and they are all subsets of - each one is the previous one plus another group of unemployed. So, to go from U3 to U4, we add a group of people called discouraged workers. These are people who have given up looking for jobs even though they want a job. Then there's a different group called the marginally-attached worker, and that's somebody who isn't looking for a job but wants one. And there's another group of people who are working part time, but want a full-time job, but can't find them. If you take the broadest measure, the U6 measure of unemployment, we're talking about 11. 8 percent, and those are numbers similar to what we saw in the 1970s. That's an ugly unemployment number.

Well, why doesn't the government count that number or use that number when reporting these numbers?

Do you really have to ask that question?


We're trying to create the largest long-term study of aging in dogs that anyone has ever done, with the goal of trying to understand how genes and environment determine healthy aging in dogs.

So it's not just that old rule of thumb that one year is seven years in a dog's life?

On average, that's true. One of the amazing things about dogs, though, is that there's tremendous variation. If you go to the dog park, you'll see large dogs and small dogs. They also vary tremendously in their lifespan. And we're trying to understand why they vary so much.

Big dogs, I'm told, live shorter lives than small dogs.

And that's unusual because if you compare different species of mammals, from elephants to mice, it's the large species that live longer. So dogs are doing things in reverse.

And no indication as to why that might be yet?


Investors are ecstatic about central bankers working there. Listen to this, the German DAX Index up about 10 percent, the French CAC 40, up more than nine percent. Now, they are both measures like the Dow 30, which on Wall Street jumped 500 points in the morning.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown put $65 billion of government money into three British banks. NPR's Rod Gifford is in London. We're going to him. Rob, hello. I think that people are saying it is this British plan, the so-called British plan that seems to be may be spurring a little bit of a recovery around the world. What is the British government doing, and what does it want in return?

Well, as you say, Alex, Gordon Brown is getting a lot of kudos from this, because he was the one who put this plan forward last week. What they're doing, as you say, is to put a lot of government money that is taxpayer's money, $65 billion worth of it, into three British banks into order to - they hope - free up the bank to bank lending, and the whole crisis of confidence that has struck British banks as it has done elsewhere.

In return - some very important conditions they want in return. Right upfront, leaders of these banks that have got into trouble must step down. Bonuses are being frozen for other executives who stay on and crucially, the demand that these banks maintain mortgage lending and small-business lending at 2007 levels, levels of last year.


Is President Trump right to blame the Fed. . .

Perhaps. . .

. . . For increasing interest rates?

Yeah. Perhaps a little bit on the margin. He's not wrong about that. So interest rates are still fairly low. The Fed raised its rate, its benchmark rate, to 2. 25 to 2. 5 percent, which is not - it's not, you know, like a hugely high rate. But they are starting to kind of cool the economy off a little bit. And, you know, for years and years and years, that rate has functionally been very, very close to zero. And they've been raising it slowly but surely. They've forecast that they are going to continue raising interest rates unless they see something in the numbers that really upsets them. So, yeah, you know, the Fed is not providing more help to the economy. It's looking at the economy and saying, hey, GDP growth is still 2. 8 percent per year this late in the recovery. We're going to keep on raising rates. And if there's a recession. . .


Yes. At the top of the mountains, we have cloud forests. These are forests composed of trees of low stature. They have the ability to withstand the strong wind conditions at the top of the mountain. They are very important in regulating the water cycling of the mountain and actually supplying the 20 percent of the water for Puerto Rico. These trees are completely covered by mosses and plants that sit on the tree trunks and collect water. And they can then kind of filter cloud water down the mountain. So many of these mosses and epiphytes were stripped from the tree trunks on the face where those winds were more intense.

I wonder, Dr.  Gonzalez, as you were walking through El Yunque looking at the destruction of this place that you've known so well for so long, what was going through your mind seeing it totally transformed?

Well, it's an amazing experience, but I think it's one of learning and regeneration. We already have seen the greening of the forest in some areas. We're already seeing that some species are lifting up. We know that some other species will come up and kind of make their way to more native or mature species of the forest to take over. So yes, it is a catastrophic event. But we know that there's going to be a recovery phase.

Dr.  Gonzalez, what about you and your family?How did you do?Do you have power?Do you have water?


You know, unfortunately, it's been demonstrated that there have been times when you have been personally dishonest during your time in office. So if voters highly value personal honesty, why would you be the right choice for them?

Well, I think that it's important to separate a mistake in life, which we all make. And, you know, I've come to believe that we all have feet of clay. We all wish we could rewind, play in a chapter of our life. The question is, is it a trend of continual misleading folks?Or is it an anomaly?And if you'd look at the whole of my life, what you'd see is the big standout is in 2009.

I think the question is, did I learn from it?Contrast it with the president has suggested in saying that there's nothing that he regrets. There's deep regret from my end, and I think what's equally telling is the people who knew me best, in the wake of that event, those very folks sent me to the United States Congress to represent them in Washington.

So you've made the debt and deficit your top reasons for challenging the president. So if it happens that either through your efforts or those of others, the president is not re-elected but let's say a Democrat who supports more expansive spending, for example, does win, will that have been worth it?


Mm-hmm. Some of the stories seem to have sort of a moral to them, like the one - mysterious one I'm going to call the rectum in a jar.

Yeah, this is the case of the rectum of the Bishop of Durham. If you go to London and you visit the Hunterian Museum, it's a wonderful, wonderful - one - in fact, one of the world's few remaining big medical museums. It's part of The Royal College of Surgeons of England. If you go and visit it, on display on the main floor inside a jar is something they call object RCSHC/P192. The label identifies it as being the preserved rectum of the Bishop of Durham, and we're talking about Thomas Thurlow, who was born in 1737, died in 1791. Would you like to hear the story of why it's in a jar in London on display?

With that kind of teaser, how could I not?

OK. The - that particular Bishop of Durham was a rich and powerful man. And he came down with some ailments and called in one of the celebrated doctors of the day, John Hunter, a man who, years later, went on to found this museum. Dr.  Hunter examined him and told him he had an incurable disease and that it was bad news. The bishop did not want to accept this news, so he was very insulting to this doctor and instead went and insult - and consulted a cattle doctor who gave him some kind of nostrum.


Oh, thanks. We're professional seguers here at NPR.

You took my breath away there.

Well, speaking of age, though, you're - you play a geezer in this picture.

Yeah, but I'm the youngest in the cast.

Really, I'm the baby.


Well, that's definitely, you know, kind of a hip-hop beat, you know, club beat. What's the music like?

Man, the music, this thing, the box set that I ended up receiving, the music is unbelievable. And that's been part of also this hype that you talked about, too, Farai. Like, how come this game is so popular?Well, you know, they have some of the best musicians, some great independent artists that are on air. So the music soundtrack that you play, you are driving a lot throughout the game, so you can change stations. You can change genres, and so you're discovering new artists and you're listening to some of your favorite artists. And the music soundtrack of this thing is scored like a movie.

I mean, this development cost about a 100 million dollars to develop this game. So this is really showing a monumental shift in the amount of money being allocated to even develop a game. We really haven't heard of numbers this high before. But we're talking about a video-game industry that rakes in about 18 billion dollars a year. So it's not a small industry.

Wow, well, speaking of billions of dollars, they came. They asked. They got a no. We are talking about Microsoft's 44. 6-billion-dollar offer to buy Yahoo!, and Yahoo!said nener nener (ph), and cut an ad deal with Google instead. So, should Yahoo!have taken the offer?


It does.

It worked out.

So, first of all, just - as you said, you're just coming back from this conference. Could you just give me - just overall, what are you hearing from your colleagues, particularly your former colleagues in the courts, about how this system is functioning now?How do they experience this backlog?Is it this unending flow of cases that they can't do anything with?Or - how are they experiencing this?

Yeah. You know, the American Bar Association just put out a report on the immigration courts recently in which they said it's a dysfunctional system on the verge of collapse. And that was, basically, agreed to by everybody at the conference, including sitting immigration judges. What the judges have said is that the new judges being hired are pretty much being told in their training that they're not really judges, that instead, they should view themselves as loyal employees of the attorney general and of the executive branch of government. They are basically being trained to deny cases not to fairly consider them.


You know, there were a handful of people who did voice displeasure with some of the proposals mainly because of what they felt like was ambiguity in the language. But generally I think that there was a sense of relief a little bit within the room but also an acknowledgment that what they put forward today and what they're working on is by no means a final solution to this problem.

I mean, the leaders acknowledged that. They also briefly kind of acknowledged the fears and skepticism of this group of survivors and activists who have been calling for more drastic action for more than a decade now. So while there was relief and, I think, a little bit of a feeling of accomplishment, I think there are many people in the room who know that this issue is far from over, and they're going to have to do more.

And what about outside the convention center?I gather there have been demonstrations going on. Have you been able to get out and speak to anybody outside?

Yeah, so there's a group of survivors, activists, and they're really - they've been - they're kind of the core group of people who for decades now have been asking for reforms and really warning about this issue. And so while they kind of acknowledge that this is a good step in the direction, there really are some - they - you know, they view it as a systemic and institutional issue that isn't going to be fixed with a few pronouncements and resolutions and new committees.


Well, yes, of course, I have. I had to. When I realized that I wanted to write this novel and this is the way I wanted to do it, I wanted to use the monarchs - OK, we'll say it - the monarchs as a device. I, of course, had to be able to describe this phenomenon infinitely, in many different ways, and to express in language how amazing and how beautiful it is.

So I had to go and see that, and I did go to Mexico and spend time on the mountaintops in Michoacan, where these - the whole species or the whole population of eastern monarchs congregates in the winter. And so I had to be able to recreate that. So, yes, I have seen them. And it's - it is a wonder of the world.

Hmm. You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY, on NPR. I'm Flora Lichtman, talking with Barbara Kingsolver about her new novel, "Flight Behavior. "

It comes through as a real phenomenon in the book, too. I mean, it just seems - you can see why people would look at it and think it's a miracle.


Here's a small piece of the big picture. We ask you our listeners to write in with stories about how you're doing these days financially. We call the series The Real Economy. We've heard from more than a 150 people, among them Jon Diebold in Cincinnati. Jon, what station do you hear our show on there?

91. 7 WVXU.

Well, thanks for listening. And you lead a pretty busy life there at work and at home. You own a small restaurant. How are things?

Well, it's been rough. The economy, I think, is affecting everyone and certainly those with discretionary disposable income.

Yeah. Do you do a lunch business there?


Martin Evans covers the case for the Telegraph. Thanks so much for being with us.

You're welcome.

Now, I think a lot of us in the United States remember this robbery because allegedly the alleged burglars used an industrial power drill to break through the vault. How did they conceal that?

They did indeed. Well, this robbery took place over Easter weekend in April, which is a long bank holiday weekend - a five-day holiday in the U. K.  All the businesses would've closed for four or five days. And around 8:30 p. m. , the alleged gang arrived in a van and started loading equipment in the street. Now, to any passerby, they would have perhaps looked like workmen carrying out some sort of repair work.


They're using bank loans at a 15-year low. That is a response to tightening lender standards and so small business owners are increasingly turning to credit cards to finance their businesses which are obviously have much more high and volatile interest rates. It's one of the reason we've been advocating for credit card reform. Because of the acesss and restrictions to credit card capital, they're not expanding their businesses, hiring new employees, cutting back on business travel. You know, it runs the whole gamut.

So if these aren't expanding and they are having trouble getting loans to expand, what does that mean for their employees?

I'm not sure that it's come to the point yet that many are cutting back on employees, although some percentage is. But you know, I think a lot of small businesses are not hiring new employees at the moment, just sort of bunkering down and hoping to weather through this economic storm.

So, if I'm a small business and I need a loan.


. . . To be biased against the LGBTQ community. What's your response to that?

Well, first of all, my response is - I'll take this from one of the independent people who responded to me saying, that's all I need to know about Beto O'Rourke. And this guy's out shopping for a candidate that he can support. But he said, if Beto doesn't want to come and speak to a group like yours, he goes, I don't need to listen to anything more. When Mayor Pete Buttigieg comes out and says, you know, we're definitely going to consider the invitation, I think that opens up people's minds.

But the other thing I would say - and it's one of the reasons we're doing this forum and inviting Democrats - is instead of casting out rhetoric about, well, these guys believe in one man, one-woman marriage, these guys believe God has a design for sexuality, let's go to what the reality of it is. Even on deep disagreements, I think America needs to see that we can fundamentally disagree without being disagreeable or without being hateful and divisive.

How do you respond to the fact that many people who adhere to other religious traditions - progressive religious traditions or even religious traditions outside of Christianity - consider the current administration demeaning, abusive to people outside of a group of core supporters?And they are troubled and hurt by the fact that white evangelicals are such a strong base of support for this president when he engages in conduct that they consider so hurtful. How should they think about that?


Finally, Mike, the Super Bowl is usually one huge party. But given the current economy, do you think it'll be as big of a celebration?

Officially, they give figures that are absolutely impossible to check about how much the Super Bowl adds to the economy. $300 million is one of the official totals. But I've read different economists saying the impact on a local economy is very small. And I have informally talked to some limo drivers and talked to some people who work in hotels. And they said, you know, a year ago, if you told them the Super Bowl was going to be here, they would've thought they'd all be booked up by now. But you can still get a limo maybe on Friday and Saturday, maybe not Sunday going to the game.

So it does - and another indication is that there used to be two huge parties sponsored by Playboy and Maxim, and Playboy is not having its party. So that's the economic indicator of this Super Bowl, that Playboy is not having its party.

NPR's Mike Pesca in Tampa, Florida for this weekend's Super Bowl. Thanks Mike.


Well, it's a heck of a lot more. So the total incentive package, when you include some training grants and other things like that, is $7 million over 10 years that they're being offered now. What critics are complaining about is that it appears from a certain perspective that the state is essentially rewarding Carrier, even as it ships some of the jobs to Mexico anyway. From another perspective, they're retaining, you know, a thousand jobs at least. And those jobs do produce revenue for the state through state income taxes and sales tax, and the state would argue that it - and Mike Pence would argue - that they come out ahead still on that.

I'm wondering if that doesn't make sense to you, given the fact that if those employers just left the state, there'd be no tax revenue for the state of Indiana to tap, and even more people losing jobs.

This is the gray area of economic development. You know, how many of these workers would find other jobs in this state?And in terms of these incentives, you know, these don't even appear to be the primary factor in Carrier's decision to keep these jobs here.

Is it felt that the most persuasive argument was the fact that United Technologies, which is the parent company of Carrier is a federal contractor and needs to have good relations with the federal government, which Mr.  Trump's about to head?


Hi - so glad to have you with us. And let me start here. Just to recap this war of words, Iran says the U. S.  is lying about where the drone was shot down. The U. S.  says Iran is lying. How are we likely to know?How will this be resolved beyond a take one person's word over the other situation?How do they figure that out?

Well, first, there is, obviously, the release of the actual location data for where the BAMS or Broad Area Maritime Surveillance aircraft was flying. That - hopefully, it will be released shortly by Central Command. But part of it, too, Mary Louise, is the fact that there's absolutely no reason for this aircraft to have to fly over Iran to gather the data that the U. S.  military was interested in gathering.

You're saying there's circumstantial evidence that just - why would it have been there?- which tends to support the U. S.  position.

Well, right. And no U. S.  commander - speaking from experience - would put the aircraft in that kind of a situation. And for your audience, that reason is that, unlike aircraft - surveillance aircraft in the past, the kind of sensor systems that are onboard this drone are such that they can see dozens and dozens and dozens of miles away from the aircraft. So, you know, it's flying up above 50,000 feet over the Strait of Hormuz. It can monitor the entire strait plus see inside Iran without having to fly over it.


So are there other criticisms of her leadership that are not related to Brexit?

Oh, absolutely. There are vast criticisms of her leadership. Austerity is the single biggest criticism. It doesn't have popularity in many quarters anymore. But in terms of whether the criticism is balanced or gendered or, you know, this - a lot of people will say this has nothing to do with gender. Well, you have to remember 2017, the Daily Mail front page - Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon, who is the first minister for Scotland, and the front page of The Daily Mail said never mind Brexit, what about Legs-it. And it had a picture of the two women and comparing who had the better legs. So there is no way in which that is an ungendered criticism.

Have criticisms of Prime Minister May evolved over the course of Brexit?

Absolutely. So though she was not considered to be doing a brilliant job from the outset, there was a kind of national feeling that gosh, she was doing probably as well as most people could do. And then of course, the men who stepped back to give her power started circling again to take back power at the moment that it starts to seem like we might be moving towards Brexit, the outcome they want, or not moving towards it. And at that point, the language really, really shifted. And it stepped up. And you had people briefing against her.


Well, Shadow, my producer, who up until then had been noted for producing the Shangri-las, he didn't really try to get me too so much as he gave me a choice. He said if you will change black as night, because the opening line is face is clean and shining black as night. He said if you change that word black to anything - anything else I can guarantee you a number one record. And he said, but it's your choice. And a friend of ours was standing there and he said, quote, unquote, "you whore now, you'll whore forever," and that's a pretty strong words. I was 15 at that time. That was pretty strong. But from my point of view, hey, I was getting to make a record. How cool is that, you know?

Yeah.

When it was a hit or not was secondary.

Let me ask you, is that a scar, or is it just a lesson learned from then that carries with you today?


Immigration proponents hope that if we care as much about poor people outside the United States as we do about poor people inside the United States, we'll raise the level of care for both. We've seen, instead, as we have become more cosmopolitan in our sympathies, we've ended up caring as little for fellow Americans as for people everywhere.

It is precisely because we are not honoring our commitments and our promises and our obligations to our fellow Americans that I'm urging people to have a stronger sense of social solidarity. And the way you get that stronger sense of social solidarity is by making the meaning of Americanism stronger, and that means making it more of a national community. And communities have boundaries between themselves and the rest of the world.

You ground a lot of your argument, though, in white Americans' fears, really, about a country that's getting less white. So is limiting immigration the answer?I mean, doesn't that just play into those fears and then legitimize them?

I don't ground very much of my argument on that at all. What I ground my argument upon is a tendency of the human mind, perceived by psychologists in people of all backgrounds, to be stressed by rapid change.


If you can find these kinds of primitive organisms, could you find things like evidence of, like, ancient viruses that might have been around?

Well, that's an interesting question, and people have tried to look. The difference between what we've been finding and the virus is that the virus doesn't have a rigid cell wall to protect it. It just invades other things that have cell walls. So it makes it much harder to see and much harder to fossilize. It's often the cell wall or the protective material around it which goes into the fossil record.

But some of my colleagues have thought they have found viral-like structures, sort of polygonal-shaped structures a bit like modern viruses - very, very tiny, but have been unable to convince themselves and other people that no other explanation can be brought forward for these things. So that's still very much an open question.

But it would be nice if we could, but a little bit hard to really confirm it.


How do you bring to life the world three centuries ago?

I did a lot of research for this novel. I like to say that my research was wide, but shallow. I read a little bit of a lot of books, and a book that really helped me was "The Door Of No Return" by William St.  Clair. He took a bunch of archival research about the Cape Coast Castle, so it's a book that really just talks about what life might have been like in the castle in and around the 18th century. And it really helped me wrap my head around what it might have been like for my characters. And then the rest, I think, is just a wild and vivid imagination.

Yeah. And it must be said you don't - you don't spare African slave traders from villany, do you?

I don't. I think, you know, I grew up here in Alabama. And the conversation around slavery is much different here than it is in Ghana. So I think I was a little bit more aware of it or aware, I suppose, of the result of it than the people living on the coast of West Africa who didn't get to see, you know, what the results of the slave trade was. And yet they have this huge monument in Ghana to slavery - this Cape Coast Castle that still stands, that you can still take tours in. I wanted to talk about the Ghanaen role in it - the complicity on our side of things.


I don't know what a - difference between an executive order and a proclamation is.

Well, proclamations seem to be more rare. They do kind of echo of something royal, but it has basically the same effect as an executive order.

And how would this change what somebody who wants to apply for asylum must do?

Well, it's trying to bar asylum for people who enter the U. S.  in between ports of entry.


Seems like air conditioners break down when they're needed most - when it's hottest - and furnaces give out when it's coldest - when they have to pump out the most heat. What has this fearsome winter been like for a heating repair technician?We turn now to Doug Braford, who works all shifts in Cleveland, where temperatures hit record lows in February. Mr.  Braford joins us from the studios of the idea stream, WCPN in Cleveland. Thanks so much for being with us.

You're welcome. It's good to be here.

So tough few weeks?

Yeah, it's been a tough season this year. You know, it's definitely been a winter that's held on and really hasn't given us too many breaks.


In fact, he gets a little envious - doesn't he?- of seeing the closeness between the man and the wife as he's giving them the news.

He watches the man cry over her bed. And all he could think is that he, Toby, never wanted a spectacular marriage. He just wanted a regular one, and he feels that he's been deprived of that by the fact that his plan for his life, which - when he got married in his 20s - it just didn't work out.

You wrote an essay, recently. You had a revelation that your parents' divorce might have been the creative spark in writing this novel. How did that happen?

Well, you know, I thought that I was being a good cultural reporter by noticing the friends of mine who were coming to me and telling me that they were getting divorced, had this whole new way of dating, that they - you know, when my mother got divorced in her early 40s, you know, she felt so old. And here they were showing me how much life they had in them left. And I thought I was doing the kind of responsible journalist thing, which is writing about the cultural moment. And, along the way, people would ask me questions. They would say, why are you writing a divorce book?And I thought, well, no. I'm writing a book about marriage. . .


You actually provided some recommendations. Give me an example of one or two of them.

Well, one of the important things is that the stops go well. That the police are professional, that they're there and it's clear that they are trying to serve the public. Mistakes will happen, they'll pick the wrong person up, someone will happen to fit a crime suspect description, but the way the police conduct themselves needs to be extremely professional. Very polite. And one of the recommendations I made was that they hand the person a receipt when they make a mistake that says I've made a mistake, here's my name, here's the name of my supervisor, here's his phone number, give him a call. Here's how you file a complaint, this is why I stopped you. You're wearing a white T-shirt, black jeans, that's the same description that I just received over the radio. And that can go a long way to improving things.

Give me one more.

Well, the other thing was that they need to find out who these 15 officers are and take some action to resolve those issues.


Well, what they didn't admit is if they wanted all this capital, why have they spent $7 trillion - these companies in stock buybacks since 2005 - which is double the federal government's current entire budget if they needed capital for productive investment?Stock buybacks do not create any jobs. They don't create any productive investment. And they're a signal to corporate observers that, while people like Tim Cook know how to make a lot of money for the company, they don't know really what to do with it other than to enhance their own executive compensation package.

Still, it's a remarkable turnaround for Apple, isn't it?I mean, just a couple of decades ago, I think they were on the brink of extinction.

There's no doubt. It was a great turnaround. But under Steve Jobs, stock buybacks were prohibited. He paid himself very little. When Tim Cook came over, everything changed. And while they know how to make enormous money with their overpriced iPhones, they don't know how to productively use it. And Marxists of many decades ago would never have dreamed that corporations would pile up all this capital and not know how to use it productively.

Mr.  Nader, do you own an iPhone?


And I took it a few steps further and then did research and found that it wasn't that uncommon for people who were related to, you know, Russian immigrants or children of Muslims or practicing Muslims to experience racism in high school afterwards. It tends to be that people are looking for someone to blame.

Let me ask about Rez's relationship with Fatima - sort of begins as a crush. He tutors her in chemistry. And then the chemistry takes over, if you catch my (laughter) - my drift. They're equally brilliant, too. What are they seeing each other?

I think Rez is at the point where he's realize that the American idea of himself is not going to pan out. And he looks to Fatima, and he sees her. And she has never had an American idea of herself. She's had an idea of herself as belonging to her family and belonging to sort of a Middle Eastern subculture in Southern California and staying within the clan.

And he looks to her and sees the ways in which this brings her strength. She doesn't try to have American friends or be an American teenage girl. And this makes her endlessly fascinating to him.


How fair or accurate is the idea that Joan Kroc gave away Ray Kroc's money to a lot of places and causes of which he would not have approved?

A lot of old-guard McDonald's people I've talked to are angry that Joan made gifts that, in their estimation, were more liberal-leaning than Ray, perhaps, would've liked, including her million-dollar gift to the Democrats - now - and her active work in the peace movement and building these peace institutes at both Notre Dame and the University of San Diego.

I don't think she did it to spite Ray or to get back at him at all, although I do know that during the course of their marriage, she said she suppressed her politics and her interests in some ways because she didn't want to seem untoward. And yet, that doesn't square up with the fact that she started this alcoholism education charity while Ray was clearly afflicted. So the dichotomy or the juxtaposition of all these odd facts with Joan is what makes her so interesting to me. She was a very complicated person.

Lisa Napoli, her book, "Ray And Joan: The Man Who Made The Mcdonald's Fortune And The Woman Who Gave It All Away. "


Hi.

So you're about to get underway with your lunch rush. What are the workers telling you?What are the conversations you're hearing there at the bar?

Well, they're like counting down the days and saying what are they going to do. You know, some people have no plans. They don't know what they're going to do. Then other people say they're going to move away because this is a dying town, and it's really frightening.

And what does that mean for you?

Well, I just hope that we can make it through. I don't know. We don't know what is in store - you know, the future has for us because we've already - when they cut the shifts back, we've already lost a lot of our business from over there. Now, there's going to be nobody, and we just don't know where it's going to go from there.


They are of course big spenders, but at the same time there are so many different kinds of collections as there are collections. Some collectors are happy, some are tormented. Some buy very little, while others can't help themselves. Why do people collect?Well, I once interviewed the great art historian Kenneth Clark and he once said that it's like asking why we fall in love. The reasons are quite so different. And it's very true.

Forgive a couple of stereotypes but are there a lot of Saudi princes or Russian billionaires on this list?

I haven't counted them all. One of my favorites is not Saudi and not a Russian prince. Let's call him Mr.  D.  He collects impressionist paintings and a good friend of mine was at his mansion not too long ago and the collector said before you look at them I just have to switch something on. And when he was exactly about five feet away from the Monet the sound system was activated and the room was abruptly flooded with Debussy.

Debussy?


There's definite bright spots. If you're Wal-Mart, you're doing fine. If you're Costco, you're doing fine. If you're Family Dollar, you're doing fine. If you're Dollar Tree, you're doing fine.

The consumer is trading down. Starbucks closes 600 stores, but McDonalds is doing fine. Bennigans closes all their stores. Steak and Ale closes all their stores, but Burger King is booming. There is a story out there. The consumer is in major trade-down mode. If you're in position to take advantage of that, you win.

What about hiring?Stores hire a lot of temporary workers around this time for the holiday season. What's going on there?

Well, we've got 82 clients. All of them, across the board, are planning to hire fewer people and for fewer hours. Hiring is going to be way down, inventory is down, sales is down; it's all down. You know, we've lost an average of 85,000 jobs a month so far this year. Unemployment is going to skyrocket, in our view, to 7 and a half, 8 percent. All the stores have canceled expansion plans, cutting back on investments. They're not opening new stores. They're closing stores, and they're slashing hiring budgets.


I'm Tony Cox, and this is News & Notes. Ending a relationship is never easy. The person breaking up often tries to use words to soften the blow. I'm not ready to be in a committed relationship or it's not you, it's me. And the person being dumped is left trying to figure out just where things went wrong. A year ago, author Rachel Skerritt decided that she wanted to get to the bottom of all of her ex-boyfriends' vague explanations for ending their relationships. So, she called the men in her past and asked them to tell her exactly why they stopped wanting to be with her. Rachel joins me now. Welcome to News & Notes, Rachel.

Thanks, Tony.

Rachel, why in the world would you want to know this?

Well, I'm a tough cookie. I should say that first off, but I'm also a writer and the idea came to me after that whole "He's Just Not That Into You" phenomenon, the book not the movie. And a lot of my friends were reading it as if they had found, you know, the answers to everything. Oh, he's just not that into me, that explains it. But there was this whole missing why piece, why not. And as you said, guys seem trained to give these stock answers so as not to hurt feelings, but I really wanted the real deal. . .


What was fascinating was that, although most of them, in their 90s, don't want to have German citizenship back, they were saying that their children and grandchildren are also applying.

I try to be careful with questions that are premised on what someone who is gone would think. But I'm going to chance one in your case. If your parents were here, what do you think they'd make of your decision?

I've been thinking about that a great deal. And my mother only went back to Germany once, and she only went back when my father said - my father was born in Britain - when my father said to her, Liesel, if you don't go to Germany now, I won't be alive, and I won't be able to come with you. And she went back. And she had an amazing time, and she saw her all old school friends. And what would she have felt?I think she'd have felt ambivalent, to be honest. My father would have just been completely relaxed about it, I think.

But it's been very interesting because my son feels very strongly that he wants German citizenship. My daughter's not at all sure. She can't see it, and she just says, you know, why would you want it, given the history?


Well, she's made her mission here to expand or improve transparency and ethical reform in the state government. As you likely know, Alaska has been just shaken by corruption scandals for the past couple of years. The FBI has been investigating state legislators, three of them are in jail for bribery now, more maybe coming.

So she sort of arrived on the scene in the middle of all of that, and push for new ethics rule in the legislature and her - one of her biggest goals in office is to get a big new natural gas pipeline. Something along the lines of the old Alaska oil pipeline, built so that Alaska can ship out it's natural gas.

But she wants that done in a more transparent fashion. She says she wants more outside energy companies coming and bidding on that. As oppose to sort of, deals struck among the elite, as she would say, you know, the old governor was accused by her of cutting a deal with the oil companies that just wasn't too favorable to Alaska, or so she said at the time, in terms of oil production taxes. So, she wants all of that to have a lot of more sunlight.

Well, speaking of sunlight, she's facing an ethics investigation of her own, is she not?


It's very interesting. I find it funny, though, because I found in America, you - mixed-race people are categorized as black until you achieve success. You know, like they wait for you to achieve success before they give you the black standard. That's the upgrade. Before then they say you're mixed. You achieve success and you get upgraded to black. And all the famous mixed people do it. Before they all were mixed. You know, like, you know, all those singers - Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey - they go, oh, you know, mixed, and then they become famous, they go black singers. Tiger Woods is a black golfer although he's mixed. He doesn't even refer to himself as black, you know?

And the most famous person is Barack Obama, mixed half and half, but you say America's first black president. But when he was running, they called him the mixed candidate, you know, which is very interesting for me. You see how the dynamic goes. And then now you get people going, oh well, he's not black enough. I go, what is black enough?What is, you know, it's a very interesting thing. And as a mixed-race child, I know, growing up in a world where people always say that to me, oh, you're not black enough. And they'll never say you're not white enough though. White is never an option.

We wish you success enough to be called black.

Thank you very much. Thank you.


So how much should they save?

I kind of break up savings into two major funds - the emergency fund, and that's the one you've always heard about, three to six months of living expenses. Start with just a little. Listen, just start with a month, and that means that you have enough saved up that if you lost your job, you could at least live on your savings for one month.

Then I suggest you have what I call the life happens fund. So that would be a fund that you put money in for like major car repairs or if something happens to your roof because otherwise, you're going to dip into that emergency fund, and when a true emergency comes, like a job loss - and millions of people know exactly what that means right now - that money isn't there.

All right. Let's say you want to do that, but you are living paycheck to paycheck. How do you look through your expenses and figure out what you can trim and what you can save?


Well, I think there's a growing consensus towards some form of certiship(ph), nationalization. I was very interested that Alan Greenspan, you know, noted as a conservative, has said that it looks like we will have no alternative for some of the banks but to nationalize them. And, this is what Sweden, Norway did, and it worked very well.

Why?What's the strength behind nationalizing banks?

First, you solve the problem of the misalignment between ownership and control. We provided to the banks now most of their capital, but we have no control, and they're going to be exercising using our money for their interest. And that's why we saw what we've seen in the last few months. We gave them a huge amount of money. We poured money into the banks, and they poured money out in the form of bonuses and in the form of dividends.

Now, if they were maximizing our interest, if they were maximizing the reason that the society gave them this money, they would have been using this money for lending or, the very least, for re-capitalizing the banks. That's why we gave them the money. But they were maximizing their own interest, and it was in their interest to pay this money out in bonuses and pay it out in dividends. That just illustrates the nature of the risk when there's a separation of ownership and control.


It's the most remarkable story of evil coming out of Russia that I've seen in a long time. And what it shows is that they're not just messing with the election in the United States or doping in the Olympics. But they've got their tentacles into just about everything everywhere. This is one story that shows that.

I have to ask you, Mr.  Browder, there are plenty of people - and we hear from them - who are skeptical about Russia being seen at the center of so many allegations. And they say the U. S.  and the West are just crawling back into a destructive Cold War mentality. How do you answer that?

Well, I mean, Russia was responsible for shooting down MH17. Russia was responsible for invading Ukraine. Russia is responsible for taking away the chemical weapons in Syria that they didn't take away. Russia was responsible for having honest athletes in the Olympics when they did the whole doping program. I mean, Russia is the one who is making the trouble. Russia is really a sort of a nonentity when it comes to - the economy is the size of the state of New York. Their military budget is 5 percent of the U. S.  military budget. We shouldn't even be thinking about Russia other than the fact that they're sort of putting their nose into every bit of terrible activity all over the world.

Quick question - but it's important to get along, isn't it?


Well, one of the species that - or one of the challenges that's called out in this report are declines in the populations of pollinators around the world - so birds and bats and bees, quite literally. In the United States and Europe, they're declining by about 40%. In most of the rest of the world, we don't have good data to know how much they're declining. But about a half a trillion dollars a year - trillion with a T - in agricultural products depend on those pollinators. So you can do things in your own backyard to make them pollinator friendly, to plant the right kind of plants and grasses and flowers that those species of bees and birds depend on and not use pesticides that harm them.

Obviously there's a clock running, though. I mean, time is short.

Everything - well, the challenge is we need to do it. We need to do it now. And we need to do sort of everything at once. One of the cheapest, most readily available and cost-effective things that we can do to both solve the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis is, first, stop deforestation and, second, restore forests and then, third, change our agricultural practices to increase soil carbon and soil health. And the interesting thing is that can actually increase productivity to feed a hungry world and make our agriculture more resilient to climate change. So the point is there are a bunch of things where nature is actually the best solution provider to the climate crisis if we manage it right.

Andrew Deutz is the international director of government relations at The Nature Conservancy.


The letters A-A-P-L no longer stand for the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world. The price for a share of Apple, Inc.  declined throughout the week, until Exxon reclaimed the top spot on the NASDAQ. Now, this news comes after Apple posted revenues that were lower than expected. And meanwhile, that other tech giant, Samsung, has been growing even larger. Samsung had a record-breaking report of its quarterly profits this week. Joe Nocera joins us - an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and financial expert. He joins us from Sag Harbor, New York. Joe, thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me, Scott. And how the mighty have fallen.

Well, all right. First, let's take a measure of that. Exactly how huge was Apple last year?

Apple was by far the most valuable company in the world, far exceeding Exxon and everybody else. Its stock has tumbled not quite in half but it's basically gone from the low-700s to the mid-400s, and in the blink of an eyelash. It's really been very, very quick - the last maybe three months this has taken place.

Now, all of this, you know, being said, the reported profits this week are on the scale that a lot of companies would envy.


Well, what do you say to those people who find that analogy overblown, who say whatever drawbacks Vladimir Putin has a democratic leader, on the other hand, he hasn't undertaken to extinguish an entire people the way Adolf Hitler did?

Certainly in 1938, Adolf Hitler had not yet undertaken the Holocaust. In 1938, his arguments were reversing unjust borders, uniting old German speakers with the motherland, correcting historical injustice. This the same kind of argumentation Mr.  Putin uses. Now, of course, as of today, the analogy with Hitler remains overblown and may it remain so. Having said that, I really do not see an example of this kind of blatant land grab in recent post-war European history.

Any concern that Ukrainians who feel anxious might wind up fleeing to Poland?

We've had our first 100 refugees, Tatars from Crimea, entering Poland over the last couple of days requesting political asylum, and we expect more. If the situation on Ukraine's eastern land borders with Russia flares up - and I'm pretty sure it will - it won't be very difficult for Mr.  Putin to whip up trouble there to make proper conduct of presidential elections impossible - then I can imagine that the numbers of refugees will not be in the hundreds but in the thousands, and Poland is Ukraine's major outlet on the European Union. So, yes, the country is getting prepared to receive and accommodate refugees. But, of course, we hope that they will not arrive.


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. This week, new reporting revealed that the electronic communication we may think is private is actually not. That includes everything from our medical records to banking information. The National Security Agency has been able to crack encryption technology, giving the government access to the private details that we type into encrypted websites. Now, we know this because of documents released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These documents resulted in a story that was published simultaneously in yesterday's New York Times, the Guardian, and on the website of the nonprofit news organization ProPublica. They did so despite the objections of intelligence agencies. Jeff Larson of ProPublica co-authored the article and he spoke to us from New York. And we began by asking him whether he knows how many of these encrypted sites have been cracked.

We don't actually know exactly what the NSA and GCHQ have cracked. They. . .

GCHQ is the British equivalent of the NSA.

Right. Yes. They protect this information with a special classification level. We can only sort of infer by the fact that they say that they've cracked vast amounts of encrypted communications traveling over the wire.


Well, I was interested in medicine ever since I was a young child, but, you know, life kind of gets in the way. The neighborhood where I grew up wasn't really conducive to producing medical physicians.

Did - this is East Cleveland you're talking about, yeah?

Yeah. East Cleveland, yeah. It was a pretty impoverished neighborhood. And so just not many opportunities to go into medicine there, but I ended up in the automotive career just by happenstance.

Well, I've read that you just - you know, you loved tinkering with cars from the time you were a teenager.


Is racism a problem at the Air Force Academy?

Racism is not a problem at the Air Force Academy. Somebody that decided to put hateful speech and someone that clearly is thinking small and someone that does not embrace our values as an Air Force Academy or as the United States Air Force decided to write something on a message board. And writing something on a message board is not going to take away our values or threaten our institution.

General, may I ask, without giving away anything you've discovered, do you know who wrote those messages?

We do not know who wrote those. The investigation is ongoing. We are fairly certain at this point based on handwriting that one person did write on the boards, but the investigation continues right now as we speak.


As you alluded to, the printing of the census has begun, without the citizenship question. Isn't that a logistical hurdle, a financial hurdle to this going forward?

So the Justice Department represented in court that the forms had to start printing on July 1, and they in fact started printing. So what would have to happen if the citizenship question were added is the printing would stop, they'd have to junk all those forms, and they'd be behind. The plaintiffs had argued in some of the cases, well, we could really start printing as late as October in order for it to be in time. It would be yet another reversal by the government if they took the position, yeah, now we agree with the plaintiffs; the printing can happen later.

Rick Hasen is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. Thanks for speaking with us.

Thank you, and happy July 4.


Oh, yeah. Now, the - no, you've got two different, very distinct threats. You've got the homeland, you know, converted through the internet or perhaps with some of the mosques or some of the individuals here in the United States. But no, it is clear from, you know, all kind of open-source reporting and other information that is available.

But I wonder if you can name - I don't know - even one instance.

The - no. You have the folks a couple of years ago that came across from Vancouver. But just because they have not yet executed a terrorist attack. . .

That's the Canadian border.


You know, thousands of people around the world are facing these situations now. I mean, these people who left lots of countries to go overseas and connect with ISIS or fight for ISIS or marry people involved with these extremist organizations, they're coming back. Do you have advice for your officials in other parts of the country, or perhaps even the world, about how we should start thinking about this as a society?

Well, I think first and foremost that it has to be a focus area, and, A and B, that it has to be very well-funded. We can't think of this as an issue of the day, and then a 24-hour news cycle passes, and it's not the topic that's hot in the media attention at the moment. Every time that we stop or we don't continue to move forward when a catastrophic event occurs, then we're going to be in a situation where asking the same questions - what are we doing?Why aren't we doing more?What should be done?

That's Kevin Lowry. He is the former chief probation officer for the U. S.  District Court in Minnesota. Mr.  Lowry, thank you so very much for talking to us.

You're welcome. And thank you.


Just quickly, do you think the president will stay on message when he announces this this afternoon?

Well, if past is prologue, often, he gets off message or does not stick to the script. But sometimes, in the Rose Garden, he sticks to those teleprompters. So, you know, you never know. But he certainly has a lot of ideas about immigration.

NPR's Tamara Keith.

Thanks, Tam.


As a Bears fan, I would also immediately pick on the Green Bay Packers fan.

Right, exactly (laughter) - and, you know, I might finger someone who was wearing a Raiders jersey. But, you know, that's just my unconscious bias, right?And so I leaned on my training, and I just looked for those signs of a potential threat. I engaged him in a conversation. He was able to respond to my questions completely normally. And then once he took his seat, I walked by and I carefully observed him again. He was completely casual. He was not sitting stiffly in any way. He had his headphones on, and he was watching the game. Someone who believes that they are about to die generally doesn't turn on football.

And to recap, using football terms, this was very rare in your flights.

Absolutely - absolutely. More often you'll get biases against people who are larger or mothers with crying children. There's all kinds of cultural issues that you come into contact with. And part of being a flight attendant is understanding what is and is not your job to judge.


I'm - so far, pretty much silence, but I also think that this is very different from the past allegations. This is something that will be much harder for Republicans to defend without looking even more craven than most voters. . .

OK.

. . . Will tolerate. You know, we can't base our foreign policy on whether foreign leaders are willing to do political favors for the president.

And we'll have to leave it there. Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey. Thanks so much.


It's nutritionally vacuous. It's unhealthy. Why would you eat iceberg?Iceberg is pathetic. Iceberg is, you know, lettuce for people who have no class or no taste.

In 1894, the Burpee seed catalog introduced iceberg to the world. It was advertised as hardy, rich, flavorful and, most importantly, durable.

From the moment of its introduction, it transformed the face of American lettuce consumption. And for decades and decades and decades, it was overwhelmingly the lettuce that was consumed in the United States of America.

Eventually, iceberg's popularity became its downfall.


It doesn't want to concede to American pressure because it fears that if it concedes under pressure, that's going to project weakness and invite even more pressure. And so for that reason, you've seen, rather than Iran capitulating or compromising, they've begun escalating. But I think the endgame for both sides is - there's really no alternative to coming back to the negotiating table.

And there has been a string of headlines from the region involving Iran in recent weeks. This incident with the British tanker, of course, comes right after the U. S.  says it brought down an Iranian drone. Of course, Iran disputes that version of events. How connected are these events?

They're all interconnected. And essentially, the Trump administration's policy toward Iran has been to subject Iran to significant economic pressure and sanctions in the hopes that either Iran will come to the negotiating table and capitulate over its nuclear program or - I think there's some folks in the Trump administration, like national security adviser John Bolton, who would like to see the implosion of the Iranian regime.

And what Iran has done in response - Iran's supreme leader has been ruling for 30 years, and he's become pretty adept at these escalatory cycles. And he's adept at waving both the white flag of diplomacy and the black flag of radicalism and escalation. So on one hand, he sent his chief diplomat - Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif - he was recently in New York City, and he met with a lot of Western journalists. And he was talking about Iran wanting to pursue dialogue and diplomacy.


Jamal Khashoggi's eldest son was photographed meeting the crown prince earlier this week. For a lot of people, it was heart-rending to see. And it was announced shortly after he'd be allowed to travel to the U. S.  We gather, according to reports, he's arrived there. Is it possible someone told him pose with the prince and you can get out of here?

Absolutely. There's no question. The royal family had banned him from traveling since his father had left the kingdom to go into exile. And there had to be a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, including requests specifically by the United States and Secretary of State Pompeo to allow him to leave the country and join his brothers in the United States. Three of Khashoggi's sons are American citizens, and I gather the fourth son was not.

The head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, was in Turkey this week being briefed. What do we know about what she was told and what she did?

Well, the CIA hasn't provided specifics, but it's been widely reported that she listened to this alleged tape of Jamal's last moments and what happened to him inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. I mean, this is going to be a pivotal moment for the Trump administration. It has to make a very hard call - what to do about an ally that has been pivotal in three of President Trump's five most important foreign policy goals.


If Ms.  Sadler did - and that's something that the McCain family or Ms.  Sadler can comment on - those are private conversations, if, in fact, they happened. What I can tell you is that from the White House's standpoint, the alleged comments came in an internal meeting, and I can't comment any further.

In an interview with NPR on Friday, chief of staff Kelly said of undocumented immigrants, they're not criminals but not people who would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They're overwhelmingly rural people. In the counties they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English. They don't have skills. But as a number of experts have pointed out, that statement John Kelly made is just not true.

Look. We - no - we have low-skilled workers who come to this country all the time. . .

Low skills is different than no skills.

. . . Well, low skill - that's what the chief was talking about. We're talking about bringing in the best and brightest from around the world. That's not what is occurring now. But let's not pretend for a second we have a mean, heartless immigration policy. We have the most generous immigration policy in the world. So to pretend as though, somehow, we're closing off to the world is just ridiculous. What this president and what the chief of staff was talking about is we want people in this country who have a lot to offer the United States, who are the best and the brightest. And right now our immigration system as such - we don't get that.


Absolutely. This is a distinction that we don't want, in terms of being first in the nation in the ratio of African-Americans in prison. And it's my goal as the new governor to take this head-on and address it. And we have taken a number of important steps to trying to figure out the root cause. And as long as I'm governor, we will continue to make that a high priority.

Why is it important for you to put this issue front and center?

Well, historically, Iowa has actually been a leader on the issue of civil rights. In fact, we were one of the very first states to assure African-Americans the right to vote. So we - despite this distinction that we have right now - historically, we've been very progressive. And it's my hope that we can address this challenge and get back to leading the way in terms of opportunity and fairness and equality for all of our citizens.

What are you seeing in Iowa in terms of patterns within this pattern?Meaning, are there certain crimes that are more likely to show evidence of disparity between who's convicted than others?Are - what are the hot spots for you within this issue that you are addressing?


I guess they don't have to take it now - do they?- come to think of it.

No. No.

Archibald Cox, for whom you work, made a decision to speak directly to the American people back in 1973 before, you know, he was shown the door. Do you hope special counsel Mueller who has been, I think, famously reluctant to reveal anything about his investigation shows his face and makes a statement now?

No, I don't because the thing about Archie Cox is that he had a very clear mandate from the Senate to take the investigation all the way wherever it led and to report the results to the public. And Bob Mueller has the character and the courage and the skill. But he doesn't have that mandate. So he has to do what he likes to do, which is be quiet and bring in a heavy mallet with all the facts.


This is really speculative. We are not reporting on something we have been told by the White House.

Exactly.

What we're doing is we're trying to imagine a deal that the Senate Republicans could accept, that the Senate Democrats could accept, and that might have a prayer under certain circumstances of passing in the House - either because House Republicans decided they were so embarrassed by what happened a week ago with the failure of Plan B, or because they're feeling the pressure, they're feeling the heat. Or because they're looking at the polls. Or because they've just decided to give in. Or, John Boehner decided he would go with a mix of Republican and Democratic support. Let the whole House vote, not just the Republican majority as he's been doing.

And under those circumstances, this package might pass. OK. Here we go. 500,000, that's the cutoff. That would be the point at which income would be taxed at a higher rate. The 1990s rates, the rates from the Clinton era, would apply to income after a $500,000. Now, that's half of what John Boehner was saying last week.


So this didn't happen overnight. Russian agents start making covert research visits to the United States all the way back in 2014. They used that information to then begin these social media accounts about different political issues, and they start gaining momentum, getting hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of likes and follows, even gaining legitimacy and reach by getting retweets and engagement from people in President Trump's orbit, people like Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump Jr. , engaged with this content.

And then you think back to 2016 when these social media companies were basically saying, we don't have much of a role in election interference. And this report really shows that that's not true. This content was seen by as many as 126 million people on Facebook alone.

Now let's talk about the issue of hacking the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign. What does the report say there?

So this section got really technical, but the report detailed exactly how these Russian agents ended up getting a hold of these emails that ended up on WikiLeaks. It all starts with a phishing campaign. They're able to break into the account of one account holder with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and they basically leveraged that access into being able to start exploring the entire Democratic national party network between the DNC and the DCCC.


No. OK. The regime have been mistaken for certain things. We used to have corruption. It's not new. Everybody knows that. But most of the Syrians think that the corruption and the mistakes the regime have, it's not to be correct this way.

This way meaning. . .

Destroying the country, killing people.

What do you think about the regime killing Syrian civilians and perhaps with chemical weapons?


Oprah can pass the mantle anytime and still be a billionaire.

Definitely.

And an entrepreneur, multimedia business owner. Nonetheless, if you are that good at something, it's got to sting a little bit, doesn't it?

See, I don't think it does. I think that Oprah is at a point in her career and in her life where she's done what she wants to do. I think that that's why she felt comfortable coming out for Obama, because I think she understood that that might affect her ratings. I think, she felt like, you know what?This - I've succeeded far beyond anybody's expectations, so now I can take a stand and take the hit, if there is one to come. So, I think she's fine with it. I think she is looking forward to her next, you know, sort of you know, plateau, on, like, where she goes from here.


First, the president speaks to a joint session of Congress tonight. It's not officially a State of the Union speech, but it will have much of the same pomp and ceremony. The speech is at 9 p. m.  Eastern. It will be televised, and so Mr.  Obama's real audience will be you and I, the people watching at home. NPR's Scott Horsley's here now. He's also be monitoring the speech.

And Scott, I guess it'll be economy as the number one topic.

You know, there's really no escaping that. The president said yesterday that this is not the situation he or any new president would like to inherit, but he's faced with rising unemployment, you talk about those plummeting home prices, a record number of foreclosures. So he's going to be talking about the steps he and Congress have already taken, like the $787 billion stimulus plan, the foreclosure prevention plan he unveiled last week in Arizona.

He's also expected to provide some more detail about his administration's efforts to shore up the banking system. That's something that the secretary of Treasury rolled out a couple of weeks ago and has been criticized for not having enough details. So we may learn more about that and about efforts to strengthen and update financial regulations so we don't find ourselves in a situation like this again.


So this new leader - when he took over, what kind of things did he change?

He upped all the stakes, really. He decided that the Brethren were not being hardline enough, that they weren't being separate enough. And he enforced the rule that if you had a teenager in your house who had been raised in the Brethren but was not yet breaking bread - i. e. , fully compliant - you couldn't eat with them. You couldn't eat with non-Brethren outside. You couldn't go to the cinema or have radios or television or newspapers.

So effectively, he not only separated off the Brethren from all contact with the outside world - you know, they might have been able before to have worked for non-Brethren. Now they had to work for other Brethren. And there was a great deal more compliance and surveillance as well. There's a lot of mass confessions. There are a lot of punishments for noncompliant behavior.

Now, you mention you were born into it. And your father wasn't just part of it. He was a high-ranking leader. How high did his influence go?


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.

Oh sure, there are lots of different ways you could do this. And in fact, I mean, the story that's floating around, and I'm not sure if it's true or not, I haven't been able to dig deep enough to find out, is that during World War II, the censors would go through, and they would kind of change numerical tables.

So if somebody was sending a letter to someone in the theater and saying, you know, Johnny got good grades, got an A, B, a C or something like that, they might change them around a little bit. Or they might change, you know, put little changes just in case someone was trying to sneak a message in, you know, some table of data.


As for the money that AIG does borrow from the government, the interest rate will be lower. The interest rate the government charged before was very high, and the reason it did this was political. The government knew that taxpayers wouldn't like lending AIG money. So, they wanted to take - make some of the terms of the loan pretty harsh so no one could come back and say, you know, this was some kind of sweetheart deal. Well, now the rate is going to be much more manageable. The company will have more time to pay it off.

Now, in exchange for this, AIG will have to agree to restrictions on financial compensation for five top executives. AIG, as you may remember, got into a lot of trouble because it sent some agents on expensive treatments to spas in California right after receiving the bailout. So, this compensation is kind of a sensitive issue for the company.

And what about taxpayers?Can we expect to get any of that money back from AIG at some point?

Well, as I said, you know, the government is going to be buying $40 billion in AIG stock. The money will come from the big, $700 billion bailout plan that Congress approved in September. You know, some of that, taxpayers presumably will get back if stock goes up. You know, but nobody really knows.


So, what do you make of all these pardons?

These pardons are a typical old practice in Russia and the Soviet Union. But, of course, President Vladimir Putin made a wonderful publicity show of pardoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky and this was totally unexpected. There had been talk about another trial against him. And instead, now he's already in Germany.

Let me ask you about what seemed to be, from Mr.  Putin's point of view, a productive week. Ukraine's government, after weeks of some wavering, decided not to sign an agreement with the European Union and instead threw in with the economic aid package from Moscow. How do you read that?

Well, I think it's quite a victory for President Putin and also for President Yanukovych. What President Putin got, it was some kind of alliance with Ukraine. And he also got support for his kind of economic and political system, rather authoritarian and not quite run by the rule of law. And President Yanukovych, he got $50 million in a probably quite expensive loan, which means that he can keep going for 15 months more, until he has presidential elections in Ukraine.

I'm curious as to why Ukraine seems to be teetering. Because when the USSR split up, a lot of people said this is going to be a country with a lot going for it - almost 50 million people; it was considered the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union; coal, steel. What's happened?


What about the new government in Kiev. They issued a statement which is, as you described - at least through the translation - sounds like fighting words. What's their reaction been?

Well, there's not been more reaction than that except to say that earlier today, the Ukrainian president, the acting Ukrainian president accused Russia of trying to provoke a military conflict. This was before the vote in the Russian Parliament. And he referred to Russia's action in the past in other former Soviet regions with large Russian populations and said that Moscow's approach in Crimea is very similar to what Russia did before invading in other former Soviets areas.

So, a great sense of concern, a great sense of uncertainty of what will come next. It's not clear whether this is a still a political game or this is military brinksmanship.

And we're told, for example, that the U. N.  had I guess special representative Robert Sery was in Russia. He was supposed to head to the Crimea. Anything you've heard about negotiations to talk this thing through?


Is this - does this - this explanation of how it works, does this offer you and other scientists an opportunity to study other materials or find out other ways things might work and become semiconductors?

Absolutely. I think the reason we were able to figure it out is because we have these very powerful probes like this very high-energy, very powerful X-ray source and these supercomputers where we were able to look at the atomic level of how the atoms are arranged and when they're arranged in a certain way why they exhibit this behavior.

And we can try and reproduce that in other materials and maybe even enhance it in design from the bottom up, new types of materials that have very strange properties.

And I think it's quite fascinating the tools that you use. One of the tools you used was an aerodynamic levitation furnace. It sounds like out of a science fiction movie.


You know, we have everything we need to handle those challenges, to meet them. But it's the feedback that I've gotten from readers over the years that has just made me humble and really grateful that I have something to share.

One of the things that struck a chord with me in the book is when you talk about not being in the moment and always wanting to be more than, different than, and how we can slip into that mindset. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Farai, I missed so much of my life, particularly as a young mother. You know, when my daughter was born, I wanted her not to be an infant, but to be a toddler, and when she was a toddler, I wanted her to be able to button her own clothes and get herself dressed and help me get her out the door.

And when she was probably around 10 or 11, I wanted her to be 13, 14. And then I wanted her to be out of high school and in college. And when I looked back on that exquisite journey, I realize that I missed so many moments, so many precious moments because I wasn't present. My mind was always far down the road.


It sounded great. It's actually pretty good.

Isn't it?

Oh, I kind of shocked myself here.

That's Brad Leone of Bon Appetit. You can watch his show "It's Alive: Goin' Places. "Look for it on Apple TV or wherever you stream your shows.


Actually, it's - in the beginning it didn't look like it was really going to go anywhere. But more than 90 percent of courts have suspended operations now in Egypt, which will paralyze about 20 million cases. This is a nation of 80 million people, so really paralyzing the judicial system. The court system may put some pressure on the president to change the decrees he issued, which essentially, as I said, nullified the judiciary.

And so the political situation comes after a lot of the secular parties and some minority groups had walked out of the assembly that was trying to write the constitution.

Right. It's been a hard battle to write this constitution. When you talk to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, allies of the president, Muhammad Morsi, they say listen, we are elected. Our president is elected, the parliament was elected, the constituent assembly was chosen with a popular mandate, and the courts keep getting in our way. And they say in order to allow for this constitution to be completed, we had to cut out the courts. Right before the president issued these decrees, as you said, minorities, liberals, about a quarter of the constituent assembly walked out in protest, saying it's an Islamist-dominated body, which it is, and we don't agree with what's being put into the draft constitution. It limits women's rights, minority rights, and they take issue with that.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamists, say the liberals, the secularists and the minorities were dragging their feet, trying to run out the clock on the constitution.


UNESCO must have known in July when they declared the old city in Hebron a Palestinian world heritage site that Israel would object because they say that Judaism has a lot of links to Hebron and that this would create problems in the United States.

One should make a difference. In UNESCO, there are different bodies. So when you say UNESCO took a decision, I think the more precise will be to say that the World Heritage Committee took a decision. But on my side, I have done many - implement many initiatives to strengthen the - our ties with the Jewish people. I think if you look at the bigger picture, you will find also these important activities of the organization that I think makes it a little bit more complex just to be one-sided when when you judge us.

Well, I mean - I wasn't asking if you or UNESCO were anti-Semitic. I was asking if you didn't realize in July when the Heritage Site committee made the declaration.

Well, I personally realized it. But as I said, I'm not taking these decisions to the World Heritage Committee. But I did realize it.


And so having helped quietly and not so subtly to engineer his appearance and his victory as the GOP nominee, she then came yesterday as all of these Republicans were trying to get him off the ticket and saying, no, no, no, the voters of the state have spoken. Of course it would be terrible. There would be a terrible backlash if he were to be pushed off the ticket by these outside forces. So if you're an outsider, like me, you just - and a political observer, you really just have to giggle at this process.

Because Senator McCaskill is clearly hoping to keep the weakest possible candidate in the race.

Well, she's simultaneously making the argument, look, this just proves that we can't risk having this guy representing us in the United States Senate and saying - but he must stay on the ticket because I want to run against him.

As you pointed out in your piece, this was a tactic that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the United States Senate, used in Nevada earlier when he got the - was extremely fortunate to run against Sharron Angle.


It'll rip the shirt right off of your back one day and the next day it's so beautiful you can hardly stand it.

Gary England, master meteorologist of Oklahoma City. Thanks so much for being with us.

It was my pleasure.

You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.


Hi, Lulu. Thank you so much for having me.

It is an absolute pleasure to have you. Let's talk through this. There's already been some diversity in the emoji world. We have different skin tones included in emoji form. But why do you think an afro should be included too?

I think an afro should be included too because there's an entire community of people - black, Afro-Latinx, diasporic. We were just talking about the do for others. It's a lot of people that have hair that grows up, forward and spherically and, you know, defies gravity. And there's been - and there's just been a big dearth and lack of representation of natural hair and Afro hair in the media. And I think the lack of Afro hair in our keyboards is a subtle but constant reminder of that. You know, we're a world that interacts largely in digital spaces. And emoji are this universal language of self-expression and kind of the closest way to, really, inject our personality into our conversations. And the fact that a very large community and culture of people has no reflection of themselves in those conversations is something that I'm trying to change.

Describe the emoji for us.


Yeah. Marianne really is a kind of civilian commander, (laughter) in all ways, of this group, isn't she?

Yeah. In the preface of the book, we see the resisters originally coming together and starting to think of conspiring. And in the context of that, Marianne offers to be the commander of widows and orphans, should it come to that. And it's sort of an offer she makes somewhat in jest. It doesn't feel real at that time - that it could get to that level. But then in the end, her own words come back to haunt her. And that's what inspires her to bring the other two together and to keep searching for others, as well.

I want to be careful with historical analogies because Nazi Germany is the precedent that people - it seems of all political stripes - cite as the nightmare we want to avoid. But what about readers who see parallels between the 1930s Germany in your book and in history and anything we're living through today.

I think, for me, what I felt was really relevant when I was writing this book was the question of - what did ordinary Germans, the people whose lives sort of touched very peripherally on the darkness experienced during that time - and how did they let this happen?How did they either not see it or blind themselves to it?


OK, it's getting there. It's close.

Look - peaks are holding. Peaks are holding. OK. So let's scoop this out. We're going to make two. OK, what I'm doing here is I'm making a divot because that's where our egg yolk's going to go, but first we want to bake this for three minutes.

And we're going to put the salt on now?

Yeah, we can do it now. Sprinkle it to taste. And you know what?Let's do some cheese too because cheese is good.


And what's the story about how your parents met?

Well, they met in art school in Charlotte. . .

(Singing) In the '60s, black boots, mini skirt, blonde curls. Then when you went to art school. . .

And my mom would go and see him play. He was in a jazz funk band called Fungus Blues. And she would go. . .


Exactly. I mean, I have at least two publications on my resume that are no longer in existence. And I think a lot of reporters and journalists can say the same about theirs.

Yeah. You realize - I mean, maybe, I don't know - Gerard Baker, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, they won a Pulitzer this week too. He's hearing, maybe, this interview. He's certainly heard of you and your Pulitzer. What if he or another big-time newspaper editor found you and offered you a job?Do you hope for anything like that?

Well, I can't say that it wouldn't be a dream come true - it kind of would be. But, I don't know what I would do because that opportunity hasn't presented itself. And there's the other factor, which is, I like the job I'm at now. I work for USC Shoah Foundation, which isn't just some place to land. It's a pretty amazing place. It's, you know, really one of the world's leading institutions of Holocaust and genocide studies. Never thought I'd be there in a million years either, but it's turned out to be a very rich and rewarding experience. So the answer is, I - it's a very good question - I don't know what I would do if that happened.

Rob Kuznia, the Pulitzer Prize-winning PR man. He won the Pulitzer this week, along with Rebecca Kimitch, and Frank Suraci of The Daily Breeze in Southern California.


Correct. Well, you know, I have to say that when I go out and give talks, I say that Buchanan is the second-most consequential American - Washington being the first. Washington started everything or led the start to everything. And Buchanan led us into demise.

Plus, he didn't support Stephen Douglas as his successor. And the Democratic Party split into three, allowing Lincoln to win. Perhaps if he had supported Douglas, his rival, maybe Douglas would've won the next election. And Lincoln would've been - I don't know - an afterthought. But he might not have ever become president.

Just a very - wildly successful corporate attorney in Illinois.

Perhaps so.


Yeah. Well, a big one can come from any number of faults here in Southern California. So if you looked at a map of Southern California and wanted to imagine all the faults, just throw a pile of spaghetti down on it, and all those little strands would be faults all over the place. These - this set of faults is inland from the San Andreas.

And so there was a less-than-1% chance that we would've had an above-7. 0 magnitude earthquake yesterday following the 6. 4 on Thursday, and that happened. As of today, there is a less-than-2% chance that we could see another magnitude 7 today, but we're going to have to see how that shakes out.

The San Andreas is not directly impacted by these faults, as far as we know. But there are a whole lot of faults in that area that might've taken a strain of some of these smaller faults that - when they released all their energy, because that strain doesn't just go away. It has to go somewhere else. And some of the other faults in the area took it on.

And how much do we know at this moment in time, this early in the day, about what the damage is up there?


And that leads you to conclude what about guns?

Well, they are extraordinarily dangerous implements, and they have their place and they're effective tools for what they're designed for. But right now we've got very powerful weapons with lots of capacity on our streets that frankly don't belong on our streets or in our forests. You know, defending yourself from somebody breaking into your home is one thing, but you don't need a long rifle with 30 rounds attached to it to do that. So, you know, certainly some other kind of handgun will defend you just fine from somebody breaking into your house, but those other weapons are really meant only to be on the offensive and not just on the defensive. And so, you know, we ought to do everything we can to make sure that we keep guns out of the hands of those that are criminally intent and those that are mentally ill, violently mentally ill.

Senator Morse, what implications do you see in what happened to recall you?

Well, I think it's important to remember that this is really purely symbolic. The Democrats still maintain control of the Senate in Colorado. Obviously, we still have the House. These laws remain in place. So, really we just have the NRA attempting to send a message here. And I'm personally not listening.


I'll pull the lever.

So once you change the flow, and you don't need the stimulus, you don't need that storm anymore, you just try to wait for it to rebound, and that rebound could take weeks is what you're saying.

Exactly right. Right now we have a very meandering, very non-definitive jet stream, and so that's allowing a lot of this cold air to just kind of flow out of the poles down into the continental United States. And so until that circumpolar vortex re-establishes itself, that cold air is going to be free to spill out all across the planet. And depending upon where these dips in the jet stream occur, that's where the cold air will flow out.

And so I see a new cold event for the East Coast around the end of January, into February. It's going to be preceded by a very warm event, a very warm rain event, up into the 60s, and then as that wraps around that storm, we're going to get that cold snap behind it. So you're going to have a very dramatic change from February 1st, from like January 31st we'll be like 60 and rainy and then February 1st it's going to be in the single digits again and very cold.


But so. . . .

So I tried to do it. And, you know, I had like - I had some - added some, like, champagne yeast or something, this grape juice that I got. And it fermented, and it was alcoholic. But I - and I bottled it to carbonate. I'm looking at it, lightly shaking it, looking for, like, little bubbles. This was early and - in fermentation days. And I'm like, man, I think it's a dud; I don't think it worked, you know?And I go - I just literally went to go flip it. And as soon as I touched it, ba-ba-boom (ph). The whole thing, it turned into like - into sand. You know, it just, like, misted. There was red faux lambrusco on the ceiling, on the floor, a little microcut on my face from the glass. Chris was shellshocked - took him two days to talk.

It seriously turned to sand?That's what will happen?

Well, no. But, I mean, it just like - there was not - it, like, vaporized.

It vaporized.


Oh, my God.

And so I heard that, I'm like that's what this novel is supposed to be about. Basically, I worked on it for about three years.

In this 40th year anniversary, isn't it, of the fall of Saigon. . .

It is.


He is. But he also made a point when he put out a statement saying they would look at this is that he's still a very strong supporter of the Second Amendment, so I wouldn't expect a big fundamental change here. I think what he's saying is if they can present - and he's directed Republican chairmen to work with Democrats - if they can come up with something that can pass with overwhelming support in the Senate, he would be willing to bring it to the floor. But, again, he's not promising an outcome. He's just promising a debate.

So that's the Republicans. But briefly, Sue, the Democrats are really talking about this, not just as a gun debate but also as a hate crime, right?

Right. It wasn't just about guns. It was about race, and they have noted that there's things that they could look for this fall in spending bills to beef up how the government spends its resources to combat white supremacy. And that might be a different kind of debate we hear this fall.

All right. That's NPR's congressional correspondent Sue Davis. Thank you so much.


Is your area of focus because you believe, you know, what's the old classic Willie Sutton line: why do you rob banks?'Cause that's where the money is.

I would say it's more where the need is. For many years, we had invested in pharmaceutical companies, some device companies. With the advent of the Internet, it was time to bring technology, information technology to health care. You know, hospital systems, payers, physicians' offices were really in the dark ages of technology. I mean, back then, we were literally just wiring up physicians with the Internet in order to get them online. And I think our view is that with better information and information sharing, there's a better coordination of care. If you think about patients which bounce around to different doctors and then have the same diagnostic tests repeated three times, that doesn't help the patient. That only adds cost to the system. And when you have miscommunications between hospital systems and physicians, then you have poor care.

Is - forgive me for putting it in a simplistic way - is health care the new real estate?

I do think there's more innovation and investment going into the area. Some of that will be unwise. It always is in venture capital. We're investing in early-stage companies. Do I think it's a bubble?No, I don't think it's a bubble. I think there are so many ways that we can improve health care delivery today that it's worth a tremendous amount of investment in systems and information to do so.


The 767 is a workhorse of an airplane. It's been flying since 1981. Boeing has made more than a thousand of them. As passenger airlines sell off older members of their fleets, many 767s end up as cargo planes. And it's one of these leased to Amazon that crashed last Saturday near Houston. Three people onboard died. Yesterday, investigators discovered the cockpit voice recorder. We spoke with Todd Curtis, an aviation safety and security analyst and founder of airsafe. com, and asked if the 767 is a safe aircraft.

Generally speaking, yes. This is an aircraft that's been used in military versions, passenger versions, freight versions since the early 1980s. This is an aircraft that's had a lot of experience. It's been through a lot of vetting during the original design phase, as well as throughout its history. So there're, at present, no real issues on the level of the NTSB or the FAA being worried about this airplane.

What's known about this specific aircraft that crashed?It was 26 years old. Anything else about its history we know?

Well, this particular aircraft is typical for an older 767. That is, it went through several operators through its lifespan. And in recent years, after it stopped being a passenger airliner, it was converted to being a cargo airliner and had been flying for some time with Atlas Airlines, which, in this case, had the aircraft leased out to Amazon.


This country, Cameroon, acts as a source, transit and destination. Especially the Kumbo Diocese, as it is economically poor region. It's a source for many traffickers to have children from our region to take them to the cities, to the towns and to the other nations, especially to the Middle East, where they're exploited sexually, physically and mentally.

So they're taken from homes. They're taken from schools. What happens?

Mostly, they're taken from homes or from where they are working. If they are working in somebody's house, they lobby the girl, say that OK, there is a job opportunity in Middle East as a teacher or as a nurse. Then when they go, they go to a center called a kadama (ph). In Arab, it is called a slave. So they go there. They are bought and sold to various places to be exploited.

What do you do, Sister?What can your organization do?


Sure. So one rule that was actually finalized on Halloween at about 4:30 or so on a Friday has to do with confined animal feeding operations, and those are industrial farms. And basically it allows the companies that run those farms to voluntarily apply for permits to discharge waste from these industrial farms into streams, rivers and things like that. The sort of catch is that there is not really much enforcement in terms of whether, you know, the farm that's applying for the permit actually discharges enough waste to apply for that permit. So it really leaves a lot - a great degree of the discretion onto the industry itself. So that's one. . .

So it's deregulation?

Right.

Of course, the financial deregulation issue, whether or not - how much financial industry should be regulated is a big issue, but also, in California, you had a whole look and a proposition that passed that was about this kind of issue, about how densely animals should be kept together. But you mentioned reproductive freedom. What is the regulation change on that?