One of the other things you mentioned in the book, among many, is that al-Qaeda might become the world's first terrorist nuclear power without possessing a single nuclear weapon. And I suppose the answer to that is in part what you just were describing.

It is. What's interesting is that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has said that al-Qaeda is the CIA's top nuclear concern. Now that's a fascinating comment. Obviously, that assessment is based upon intentions rather than capabilities. Insofar as we know, al-Qaeda has no nuclear material, has no knowledge to put together a nuclear bomb, but it is the number one nuclear concern because it is believed that if it had a nuclear bomb, it would use it.

You know, it's been a number of years now, seven since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two questions. First is, how did Americans view the threat of terrorism back then, and how do they see it now?And how effective have the agencies like the Department of Homeland Security been in preventing another terrorist attack?

Well, in terms of our perceptions of terrorism, terrorism has been a concern for a long time for Americans. But the concern would spike, of course, in the wake of some spectacular episode, you know. The sabotage of Pan Am 103 in 1988, or the destruction of the American Embassies in Africa in 1998, and then it would quickly diminish.


Tell us about that nuanced way.

Sure. What is important here is that the Kurds of Syria - look, I don't want to get in too many alphabet soups with you, but let's call them the PYD, as they're known in English - are indeed an offshoot of the PKK, the Kurds of Turkey. The PKK are the internationally recognized terrorist group, the avowed enemies of the Turkish state. For the past many months, the United States and most of our other coalition partners have drawn a distinction between the PYD, the Kurds of Syria, who have been battling against ISIS very fiercely since last October, on the one hand, as people that we needed to work with and on the other hand, the PKK, whom we recognized years ago, as an enemy of our Turkish ally. That distinction is really important to us, and the Turkish government practically have accepted that distinction.

Has something changed with Turkey?Because the last time we spoke with you, Mr. Ambassador, it was to ask you if Turkey really was an ally in the effort against ISIS.

Well, I think there can be less question of that now. The United States' larger strategy with respect to Syria in the region remains to be articulated beyond the need to defeat and destroy ISIS. The Turks continue to see the strategic problem in different terms but now very much including the need to defeat ISIS. So there's more common ground than there was before, and it's more overt and explicit.


. . . as a humorous guy, for example.

No.

Back in the old days of apartheid.

Although lots of the things the racist rulers said were very funny. I don't think they intended it that way.


Shanta, thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me.

So we just heard Ward Connerly and he strongly disagrees with your position. He says that people shouldn't be treated differently in hiring and education because of race and that you've actually mischaracterized the deposition you did with him on October. How do you respond to that?

I think our characterization, my characterization of the deposition was completely accurate, and I think what Mr.  Connerly was saying was a complete non-sequitur. The truth of the matter is where affirmative action programs have been eliminated like in the University of California system. There's been a tremendous drop in black and Latino student enrollment in all the graduate law and medical programs and at U. C. Berkeley and UCLA and I think it's just disingenuous and dishonest to say that black and Latino students are now being matched with colleges that they're academically able to go to.


How embarrassing. How. . .

I love how you mention the head rag because it's like. . .

Exactly.

In my family, it was like - it's a disgrace to the race when you leave the house with your head rag.


That is correct. This is a safe, sound and solid pick. And, you know, that's pretty much evidence that this was a decision made by the head and not by the heart - and maybe not entirely by Donald Trump's head alone because he likes to say he's most comfortable with decisions he makes on gut feelings.

And he's been very interested in a couple of other prospects that he feels a lot of affinity with. Newt Gingrich, as you know, Chris Christie have been very much in the running. Those are both much better known names. And they might not add much to Trump's political assets, but they would certainly be dynamic personalities on stage with him.

So the Pence choice was widely reported on Thursday and then sort of denied on Thursday night and then announced on Friday, after all, by tweet. What's going on with that?

Well, you know, it's been reported by CNN and NBC that Trump himself was undecided on this issue as late as Thursday night. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has refused to say when the choice was really made, only to say that it was made by Donald Trump before he sent out that tweet on Friday morning.


(Reading) You and your partner go to see the film "The House We Live In. "You asked a friend to pick up your child from school. On your way home, your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window, watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed. You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no, it's not him. He's met your friend, and this isn't that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know he's called the police. Your partner calls your friend and asks him if there's a guy walking back and forth in front of your home. Your friend says that if anyone were outside, he would see him because he is standing outside. You hear the sirens through the speakerphone.

Ms.  Rankine, are these encounters all things you've experienced?Or is it a mix of experience and imagination?

There's no imagination, actually. Many of the anecdotes in the book were gathered by asking friends of mine to tell me moments when racism surprisingly entered in when you were among friends or colleagues or just doing some ordinary thing in your day.

I mean, it must've been hard emotionally cataloging these racist verbal attacks, both for you and for your friends, and to get them on paper.


(Reading) Dad, a devout fan of television shows like "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza," was disappointed when he discovered that cowboy hats were no longer in style. And he sadly stowed his first American purchase, a brown 10-gallon hat that he bought during a layover in Houston, in a suitcase and under his bed. Mom arrived in America expecting peace and love. She had fallen for the music of the Beatles and The Beach Boys as a high school student in Lagos while listening to the records that her businessman father brought back from his trips abroad. Though she had imagined a country where love conquered all, where black people and white people live together in peace and harmony, mom and dad arrived instead in a place where there were no other black people for miles around, a place dominated by a religion they never heard of before. But this was America, and they were in love.

(Reading) They moved into a small apartment in Ogden, Utah and started a family. I came first in 1981, and my brother followed in 1983. Dad attended his classes during the day while mom took care of us at home. Occasionally, she explored the city while pushing my brother and me along in a double stroller. Soon enough, we were all walking hand in hand.

The book is in many ways, though - I mean, it's set against this backdrop of this larger place where they're there, they fit in in some ways. . .

Yeah.


What's the latest this morning, Jennifer?

Well, at the scene of the attack, they are cleaning up. The walls and the floor are covered in blood. The tables and chairs have been pushed aside to get to those dead and wounded. We didn't even get a death toll until this morning. That attack happened on Saturday night at a crowded wedding hall, more than a thousand guests there. Right now, we have families burying their dead, including 14 members of one family alone, so a pretty devastating attack here in Kabul.

And the Islamic State claimed that it carried out the attack, right?

It did claim that it carried out the attack, and it named the bomber as well. This is a group that has targeted the minority Hazara, mainly Shia Hazara, community again and again, and this was another instance of that. It claimed that it sent the suicide bomber into the wedding hall.


Lastly, Mara, I have to ask you because it just seems that, week after week, tensions between this administration and the press grows more hostile. You're in that White House briefing room day in and day out. How would you describe the atmosphere?

The atmosphere is tense and contentious, but it always has been between the White House press corps and the press secretary. I think that the Trump administration has taken this to a new level. You have a president who considers the media a foil, calls the mainstream press the enemy of the people, fake news, dishonest, disgusting, horrible people. So part of his political strategy is to demonize reporters and the media. So, of course, that's going to show up in the briefing room.

That's NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Thank you, as always.

Thank you, Lulu.


All right.

You know, Cory Booker is the latest Democrat to get in, but most of the conversation this last week was about Howard Schultz, who calls himself a longtime Democrat - lifelong Democrat - but who is talking about running as an independent.

Try and avoid any latte jokes. He didn't exactly make a good first impression with a lot of people, did he?

It is no joke to a lot of Democrats. They're seeing a Schultz candidacy as a spoiler, a way to split the anti-Trump vote and re-elect Trump. And most of the positive commentary about Schultz's candidacy has been coming from the other side, including the president, who sent out a tweet questioning Schultz's smarts and saying he didn't have the guts. And it just might sound like the way to goad somebody to run, especially if someone really would like to see Schultz in the race.

Seemed clear this week more than ever that the directors of U. S.  intelligence agencies see the world differently than President Trump does, doesn't it?


Our unlikely shrew story comes from his new book, "This is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens and Other WTF Research," where he's collected all sorts of scientific studies you can't take seriously but you can't dismiss either. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Marc.

Hi, Ira. Did I just hear you say the Animals of Improbable Research?

Did I say?I don't think I did. But maybe I did. I'd be happy to have - put that in there.

OK.  We, believe it or not, get a lot of letters addressed to that.


Professor Ferguson, what about those Americans - and I daresay - according to polls, they number into quite a large amount who feel, if I might boil it down this way, the United States doesn't need a strategy because it has no business doing anything?That this is a tragic human situation, but it does not involve the national security interest of the United States.

The reality is that allowing Islamic State to become an authentic state is very dangerous indeed for the United States because this is an organization more dangerous than al-Qaida and has the potential, unlike al-Qaida, to become a really major political force if we allow Islamic State to become more state-like. I think ultimately the United States will regret bitterly not having acted sooner to stop it.

Does Vladimir Putin, whatever else might be said of him, have a sharper strategic vision than President Obama?

Putin is essentially aiming, I think, to present the United States with a stark choice - ISIS or Assad. That's why I think Putin is directing his fire now at the non-ISIS opponents of the Assad regime, the people we at least thought we were going to help. And I think that's clever because we are in the position of wanting neither Assad nor ISIS. I don't think that's in fact an option. I think we are going to have to decide, and I think we have to prioritize the destruction of ISIS.


Sure, you don't want the whole - that to be the second sentence of every every paragraph about you.

O'CONNELL: Yeah, Billie Eilish, who has Tourette's syndrome. . .

Right, which since I announced it, which I only announced it because I was, like, this needs to be cleared up. And of course, I said in that thing that I don't want it to define me or be who I am or whatever. And of course now, it's everything everybody talks about all the time. So it's great. And people keep asking about me about it in interviews.

O'CONNELL: (Laughter).


Very often that's the case, certainly in surface sediments if they come from a lake or from the sea. They're the waste product. We can test them by looking at various isotopes. So there are different isotopes of sulfur, and there's a specific pattern of the isotopes of sulfur that's characteristic for this particular pathway.

And we were able to find that, and not only that but in some examples of the material we looked at we could see little sort of bean-shaped cells, not much more, again, than a micron or a thousandth of a millimeter across, which were sitting on the tissue on the cells of material that was itself being consumed.

So we hypothesize anyway that these may be the creatures caught in the act of eating other creatures.

And so the world was filled at that time with these microscopic creatures, right?


You might, you know, you might call it so. I'm not their official and so I'm not particularly knowledgeable about, you know, all the reasons that go into this. I think that, in a way, it is hedging its bets, but I don't think that Jordan or any other Arab country's under any illusion that the regime will survive.

And what about potential remedies if, indeed, the country is strained to the breaking point - and I think that's probably an exaggeration - but nevertheless, strained in any case. Is the government of Jordan calling for remedies like a safe zone to be established along the - in Syrian territory, along the Jordanian border?Is it calling for no-fly zones?

No, not so far. No-fly zones and safe zones, as you know, will require a military intervention by, you know, by someone, by the international community, by NATO forces, by the United States or by Arab forces. They are not as easy to defend as they are to establish. So Jordan has so far not called for no-fly zones, but it has said it will go with the consensus of any international effort to try to remedy the situation.

Syria, of course, is not Jordan's only neighbor. Its also bordered by Saudi Arabia - both Saudi Arabia and the gulf states have been rather more active in supporting the Syrian opposition. Have they been putting pressure on Oman?


And there was "Hip-Hop: Hot On The Runway," which was - HOT107. 9 had a fashion show with a lot of artists, yeah, at Compound, with Ray J.  Whitney Huston showed up. This is the live music scene as of last night. But at that same last event, at Compound, someone got shot. And there was incredible security at all of these events.

You go in there and you have to pass two or three people. And you know, the crowd is not - you can't say it was all young kids at Compound or it was - you couldn't even point out who in the audience could have done that because it was a very mixed crowd, in a lot of ways in terms, of economic strata and that kind of thing.

And in the end of the night, as a matter of fact, I woke up the next morning and saw on the news that someone was shot there. The guy was in critical condition at this time. So, you know, it's rough, but the same time, those were great events, three events in one night. And that is not atypical in Atlanta, you know, on a given week.

You know, do you think it is affecting the scene?And certainly violence isn't limited to hip-hop clubs, and it isn't new, but does it affect the ability of the audiences to go out?Or are they just like, hey, this is part of what it is and I am willing to go out anyway?


Alison Stewart's written a book that may make you contemplate whether to keep the book when you're done or give it to the Salvation Army. The book is "Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair With Stuff. "Alison Stewart, the award-winning journalist, who's worked for every network, including this one where she hosted the beloved Bryant Park Project, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Scott.

This begins in your parents' basement.

It does. I had the task, as many Gen Xers and baby boomers do, of having to clean out my late parents' basement. And they were elegant, sophisticated people with a lovely home in Princeton, N. J. , but their basement - if I could have poured concrete in it and said I didn't know what happened, I would have. It was a severe junk situation. And they were children of the Great Depression and it was clear that that had made an impression on them and they really could not part with much.


So as an AP world history teacher, I know that, with the way that the exam has been, students have had the opportunity to really dive into content in their deep past - right?- and look at things all around the world and draw comparisons through them. And with this change, those things will no longer be assessed. And we're really just cutting down history to about less than 600 years.

Doesn't a good teacher like yourself already have to leave out a lot if you're dealing with 10,000 years of history?

Yeah. I mean, teaching history is a lot about making choices based on what you're teaching and what lens you're teaching it through. But I think what College Board will need to focus on is to really train teachers in how to teach students how to ask big questions and how to, you know, organize the material and thematically so that we can understand the context of the world that we live in today because it's complicated. And it includes all people. And we can't just look at it from what's happened in the last 600 years.

What about schools that might say, look - we can offer courses in history that is essentially pre-Columbian?Let's say year 0 to 1450 - and offer the AP course from 1450 to current day.


But any discussion of regulating it?

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, the organizer did bring in a bunch of bioethicists to attend this meeting to really remind people of the concerns people have about this. And for example, one of the bioethicists got up in the opening stages of the meeting to remind people that this is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," and people could sort of draw a connection between these two events in their minds. And so they had to be really careful. They had to be really transparent to make sure that society has an open debate about this sort of thing before it gets too far down the road.

All right, Rob Stein, NPR Health correspondent, thanks so much.

Oh, sure. Great being here.


Do you believe the United States has a moral obligation to accept people who, for whatever reason, find that they can no longer live in their home country?I mean, over the past couple of years in particular, you've heard Republicans say, time and again, America can't be the solution to every person's problems. How do you respond to that?

I think we have a moral obligation to do our part, which isn't to say we should take every persecuted person in the world. We can't do that. But we can do far more than we are doing at the moment.

And our laws - going back to language that was drafted in the days after World War II when, collectively, most of the world felt pretty awful about the way we turned Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi government away - we adopted laws that said if you reach the United States and you have a well-founded fear of persecution for one of these particular reasons under the law, we won't send you back. And I think we do have a - both a moral and a legal obligation to respect that.

And this country has a history of refugee resettlement that is a beautiful part of our heritage. It's - the Statue of Liberty - that sonnet from Emma Lazarus that says, give me your poor, your teeming masses yearning to breathe free. I'm not saying take the whole of the world's refugees. But last year, when we actually ended up taking fewer than 23,000 refugees, that was less than one-tenth of 1% of the more than 25 million refugees in the world.


You've been on this beat for a while.

I have, a decade or so.

Any - ever seen anything like it?

Wow. I think this is a story I will tell the grandkids about covering.


Exactly. He's betting on this, and he's No. 1 in the polls.

I gather you were a protester in 2011. Do you believe these democratic elections are going to come closer to realizing the dreams that brought you into the protest movement?

I'm not thinking that these elections in 2019 will change anything major. But on the grand scheme of things, we're showing to the people in the Arab world that they can be free. We are writing this beautiful story of an Arab Muslim country that is able to sustain its democracy, that has a president that died. And after 48 days from his passing, we're having the elections being prepared, as the constitution mentioned. We didn't see a single boot (ph) in the street, no gunshots - nothing - no coups.

And we need the U. S.  and other allies to just realize that whatever we're doing here is a blueprint for the region as well.


And then, just a few days later, you're back on the set at your television show, "Ryan's Hope. "

Yeah, possibly more harrowing than the birth itself in terms of my sense of loss, my sense of disequilibrium, my understanding that the size of what I had done would never leave me. The dimension of the decision was not only epic, but infinite. And whereas my teacher had promised me that the work would lift me up, in this particular case, three days after the birth of that baby, being handed a tiny stunt baby by the studio nurse and told to start a monologue when the light goes off. And the monologue is a promise of fidelity, endurance, love and maternal care.

I guess we should say that your character on this television show also had a baby.

Well, of course. Anybody who watched "Ryan's Hope" at that time knew that Mary Ryan was pregnant, and many millions of people did watch me, in fact, carry this child to term. But at any rate - yes, many, many people watched me have that baby and then come in and claim another baby altogether as my own as Mary Ryan.


North Korea is on the verge of a nuclear breakout. It has an arsenal estimated in the mid-teens. It's been assiduously testing ballistic missiles. It does have reach. It could target America's regional allies. The real inflection point here is that by 2020, they could have a hundred nuclear weapons instead of the mid-teens with long-range ballistic missiles that could reach the U. S.  homeland, which would make it a game-changer for the United States.

Well, how?

Well, it would allow them to directly target the United States. And that's a level of vulnerability we've never had from a state like North Korea. I mean, when I got into this business, I couldn't have conceived of a state like North Korea, essentially a failed state, having a nuclear arsenal approaching half the size of Great Britain's.

We're left with, really, three bad options - one - you know - bomb, negotiate or acquiesce. And the military option is so prohibitively costly it could lead to a catastrophic second Korean War. And when we can't - when we won't negotiate, we end up in that third box of acquiescing to the development of North Korean capabilities. And I believe there's a moment - a conjunction of factors that call for a pivot to serious diplomacy.

Well, what would that serious diplomacy look like?I mean, I - the United States would have to - what?- accept a. . .


Tired (laughter). No, I feel OK. I mean, I feel good. I mean, I thank God that I'm still walking around and drinking a lot of wine.

Well, I ask because you say that this is probably your last cookbook.

Well, yes and no. I mean, the last cookbook like this which takes a long time to do, but I still hope to do some little thing with my daughter, maybe the lesson of a grandfather, you know, showing her how to do simple thing that we've done together. I have a great deal of fun cooking with her so maybe a little book. Certainly, some video will come with that, yes, hopefully.

You've got a section here about you cooking with your granddaughter.


And has the difficulties of the rebel forces, the defeat in Qusair, the prospect of a bigger defeat in Aleppo, has that concentrated minds on, well, we ought to get unified, otherwise we're going to be in serious trouble.

You would think, but it appears not yet. This is a very chaotic movement. The Free Syrian Army is a brand. It is not an army. And I have been reading accounts of the supreme military commander General Salim Idris, who is the Americans' favorite choice - the choice for funneling arms to the rebels. He was elected by commanders in December. His power on the ground is very limited.

It's certainly in Northern Syria. It is the radical Islamist brigades that have the most weapons, the most power, the most training. He is trying to build a force there hoping that the weapons that come to him from the Americans will give him some power that he - I read today that he had a meeting with commanders who were yelling at him. When you get these weapons, put them on TV so that we all know that they've arrived and then we'll have a transparent system. And he said, wait. In the military, you have to have secrets.

I'm not putting the weapons on TV. So you seen that he - I mean, I don't mean to laugh, but I. . .


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. European leaders meet in Brussels to discuss further sanctions against Russia. That's after Russia's military incursion this week in eastern Ukraine. Those Russian troops and their military equipment are widely believed to be helping separatist fighters and their new offensive in southeastern Ukraine. The rebels were able to capture a strategic town on Thursday. And NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is there. Soraya, thanks very much for being with us. Tell us about this town that was captured.

The town is called Novoazovsk, and it's a resort town on the seaside here - the sea of Azov. There about 13,000 people live here, although it looks very vacant at the moment. But what happened is, earlier this week, separatist forces came in. They fought with Ukrainians, who - and the separatists claim they fled fairly quickly. But the fighting was pretty intense for three days according to the residents that we spoke to.

And at this point, it's under the control of the pro-separatist forces. Now we actually saw somebody who looked - I mean, he sounded Russian. He had a Russian gun. There seems to be a mix of people here. Definitely not locals who are here. But the separatists claim that they do not have any Russians among them. That these are Ukrainian fighters who are here that are creating the new Russia and that all the weapons and tanks that we're seeing - and we've seen at least three tanks here. They claim that these are confiscated from Ukrainians.

Is the takeover popular?


Why change the law to assure social benefits will go to people, regardless of immigration status?

Immigrants contribute to our country economically. Immigrants pay taxes. And when we begin to unify our systems, I think that we will get more cohesive immigration policy, economic policy, political policy. I think that there's a political argument, an economic argument, a moral argument, for doing so. And I think it sends a message that if you contribute to our society, you should benefit from our society.

Now you're correct that immigrants pay taxes, and even people who are here without legal status often end up paying taxes. And yet, you can see the objection to that. Why should someone who is here illegally be able to claim Medicare, to claim Social Security, who knows what else?

Well, I mean, why should a billionaire who evades taxes collect Social Security, too?I think that what we can do is we can tighten up our systems and increase accountability. But what this says is that we will not discriminate solely based on immigration status.


What were some of the challenging parts of school?What did you find the hardest?

Reading, studying my lessons. You know, because I had to read more, you know, and because, you know, as you get older, your short-term memory sort of fails you once in a while. So to make sure that you got the material where you could reproduce it, you had to study a little harder and do a little more research.

So tell me what graduation day was like?

Oh, the best day of my life, I guess. Life doesn't get any better. Life doesn't get any better. With my family there, all my friends cheering me on, I felt like I was 16 years old. What a day. What a day. I was happy. Everybody was pleased. They gave me a good ovation. I really enjoyed it. I really did. I cannot explain to you in words my feelings.


Yeah. I mean, you know, I've been all over places talking about this because clearly as a scientist who understands the peer review literature and the president of the AMS, who recently released a 2012 climate change statement, I know that climate change is an issue and there are things that we need to be concerned about with human-caused climate change and the natural climate change.

But on tornados, the peer review literature is just not very mature on this right now. It's much more mature on the link between climate change and drought or heat waves or even the intensity of rainfall, and even more so as well on hurricanes in terms of the intensity of hurricanes, perhaps, increasing in the future. And if I were to cascade along that spectrum, scientific literature relating individual tornadic occurrence in climate change is very immature at this point

I think we have to be careful on that jump, although I know there's a tendency to do it. There is great deal of research ongoing right now at places like Purdue University or even by one of our doctoral students, Victo Gensini, here at the University of Georgia, looking at climate change and the type of environment that might emerge that could support, you know, tornadic storms, wind shear profiles that Jeff Trapp and others at Purdue have been doing this work as well. So that's sort of where we are, and I think we just have to be very careful on sort of causality for individual tornadic storms.

And that's where we have to leave it. Thank you for joining us today, Dr.  Shepherd.


I think it's going to move in a lot of different directions. There's a lot of things happening. Number one, the directors now are younger. And they usually tend to want to have the music that they grew up with, or music that they're into at that moment, in their films. So for me, I'm kind of open. I think, you know, if you have some music in your soul, and you're able to produce it however you can, you know, there's a musician there. I do miss, you know, the old days, you know, when you do a film, you get hired and the guy says, write some music, and you write music. And you come back and you talk about that music, but not in relationship to a committee deciding based on something that some kids in Pasadena thoughy. You know, so anyway.

Well, it sounds like a fascinating business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stanley Clarke, thanks for talking to us.


That's it. It's a very interesting technology. It shoots this - 125,000 laser pulses a second down at the rainforest canopy. Now - and then it measures the reflections. Now, 99 percent of what's reflected comes off leaves. But here and there, there are tiny gaps in the canopy where a laser beam can reach the ground, bounce off and go back up to the plane. And then with massive software processing, they're able to remove all the reflections from leaves, leaving only the ground.

And it's just incredible to see these scientists at work. I mean, you see this impenetrable rainforest canopy. And then with a press of a button, it disappears and you see everything on the ground. It's absolutely amazing.

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. They have to then process the signals that they receive back from the ground. As you say, most of them come back from leaves. And I think, what, they handed you the disc and you flew it out and gave it to the computer guy.

Well, that's right. And in fact, it is very complicated. The LIDAR machine has inside it a highly classified thing called an IMU, an Inertial Measurement Unit that was developed for the military for use in guided missiles. And in order to get an export permit for the plane, the State Department required that the plane be guarded by armed soldiers at all times when it was on the ground because this is a very highly classified piece of equipment. Because it's important to locate the plane in the air in three dimensions as it's flying to within an accuracy of about a centimeter. I mean, that's incredible.


More than two million homes were in foreclosure by the end of last year and that has left entire neighborhoods practically abandoned. Some homes have been vandalized, used as drug dens, swimming pools become fetid, and lawns choked with weeds. Cathy Cardenas has a solution to that. She wants to make some money too. She's the owner of a new company called Designer Home Tending and she joins us now from Salt Lake City. What is Designer Home Tending?

Well, Designer Home Tending is a completely no-cost service that we offer to real estate agents and their sellers. We put qualified home tenders in a home to clean it up, bring life back into the property, and this most of time helps the house sell a lot faster than it would just sitting vacant.

What's a home tender?

A home tender is a person who moves into a house, they manage the property, they move into it, they have to have beautiful furniture, they decorate it like a model home, they take care of all the lawn maintenance, getting to weeds down. They care for the outside of the house for - they pay the utilities, cooperate for real estate showing. So it's nice because it gives them instant relief to the sellers who were already circling hard enough just to make their mortgage payment. And then to have all these other - to be relieved of these other expenses is a great service, and by having a home tender there's definitely been proven that the house would sell 40 to 60 percent faster most…


We've got two foreign vessels in Iranian custody. We've got one Iranian tanker in British custody and no sign of the tensions cooling off. So what happens next is the big question and a lot of the options are not that great. I mean, remember, this is all happening in the context of the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign against Iran.

Trump has been saying the return of American sanctions on Iran and other pressures are all designed to force Iran back to the negotiating table to hammer out a tougher version of the 2015 nuclear agreement - that's the one Trump pulled the U. S.  out of. So far, Iran's unanimous response from the military to the supreme leader has been, nope, Iran doesn't negotiate under pressure. We're not going to do it. So we'll have to see if this continuation of commercial vessels being seized in the Persian Gulf adds more pressure for some kind of international response.

That's NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul.

Thank you very much.


Of course, we should all remember and commemorate the Russian sacrifices during the Second World War and the fight against Nazis in Europe. On the other hand, we all strongly regret that Russia of today has violated not only international law, but also the security architecture we built after the end of the Cold War by attacking Ukraine. And that's the reason why Western leaders, obviously, have to send a very clear message to the Kremlin.

You're also the former prime minister of Denmark. Does Denmark feel threatened by Russian ambitions?

Well, recently the Russian ambassador to Denmark stated publicly that Danish military vessels might be targets of Russian nuclear weapons. It's incredible that an official representative of the Russian Federation can make such statements. I prefer not to take such statements seriously. But having seen the Russian behavior first in Georgia and now in Ukraine, unfortunately, we do have to take such statements from Russia seriously. So maybe we don't feel a direct or imminent threat, but, of course, we feel intimidated by such unacceptable statements from the Russian side.

And let me ask you as a diplomat to try and adopt the perspective of the people right across the way, too. NATO staged large-scale antisubmarine war games off the coast of Norway this past week. British forces are on exercises in Estonia. Does this make Russia feel encircled?


And then we're going to measure not just their genotype and their environment - things like air quality, water quality, their social setting - but also all the molecular biology that might help us to understand how it is that genes and environment shape aging.

Do you have a dog, Doctor?

I have a dog. I had two dogs until last year.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Our 11-year-old Weimaraner passed away. By 11, he was pretty geriatric. I have an 11-year-old mutt. And when I take her to the dog park, people think she's a puppy. She looks like a 1-year-old. And she's still very vigorous.


Do you have any concern, Mr.  Levin, that if some of these alternatives you're talking about are used more frequently that you might have a situation where - and I'll be apocryphal here - a white college kid with access to means and a good lawyer can get a very light sentence and a kid from the inner city that lacks both will still have the book thrown at him.

Well, you know, that is an interesting question because this decision by the attorney general was one based on discretion. The public has as very low opinion of elected officials and so it's certainly the case is if you don't think much of Congress, you wouldn't want Congress' judgment to be substituted for your own if you're on the jury, especially given that it's the jury that has access to the specific facts of the case.

And certainly, though, as you mentioned, race should absolutely not be considered and we need to make sure every offender has quality representation for those who have appointed counsel. Ideally, they could have some say in choosing their own counsel with some type of voucher or something so we can make sure they get vigorous representation in court, that evidence that may exonerate them is presented.

Marc Levin is director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation Center for Effective Justice speaking with us from Austin. Thanks so much.


This seems to be something that President Trump does a lot. He doubles down on controversial comments.

And digs in. When someone tells him he's wrong, he especially digs in.

Yeah. Let's turn to trade now. There are reports that this administration is close to a new round of tariffs on Chinese goods, while they are still opening a new round of talks with Beijing. So what is going on?How should we read this?

Well, there might be something of a disconnect between the president and others in his administration. Others in his administration want to resolve what has been an escalating and ongoing trade dispute with China. What's being discussed here are $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese products. It isn't official yet, but according to many reports, it is coming. The question is whether these tariffs are a means to an end, the idea that you would be tightening the screws on China to get them to change their behavior and that then these tariffs would be dropped, or whether it's an end in itself.


He was an amazingly debonair guy. He was a man of society, as I came to figure out. He was a guy who attended functions at The Plaza for the Soldiers, Sailors, Marine Corps and Airmen's Association, the Petroushka Ball at the Waldorf, the Russian Nobility Ball, the Viennese Waltz Ball - all of these crazy events that, frankly, I had never heard of, but he was - had long-standing involvement with.

And he - this was his life.

This was his life. He was the organizer of these things. He would orchestrate table settings. He was the man at the door who would greet everybody. You know, he actually invited my wife and I to one of these events one time. It was one at The Plaza. And there stood Alan, right behind the reception table as you walked in: tuxedo, tails, you know, medals on his chest. He had served in the Air Force. And he - you know, he was the host of this whole universe, really. I mean, he was involved in numerous events like this.

And among those phone messages, you used to get messages from women named Muffy explaining what a grand, smashing time they'd had.


So not just a lost city, a lost civilization?

That's right. He emailed Michael back in Roatan, and I'll never forget we were returning from breakfast and this normally phlegmatic kind of skeptical scientist who is rolling his eyes at the whole idea that there is going to be lost city comes running out of his room, racing in his flip-flops, waving his arms and yelling, there's something in the valley. My God, I don't know what it is, but you've got to come and look at it. So we all went rushing over to this room and looked at these images. And I looked at them and I was actually thunderstruck myself. I mean, there is no mistaking what we were looking at.

We're talking with Doug Preston, an author and contributing writer at National Geographic, The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazines. He also writes for The New Yorker. "The El Dorado Machine" is in the May 6th edition. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And eventually, other target areas were also mapped and also revealed enormous structures - entire cities.


So even though there are contaminations or contaminants that can affect the meteorite, there is definitely a lot of information that you can learn about these. In fact, you know, a lot of times people wonder, you know, meteoritics is such a small sort of niche of very specialized science. But everything that we understand about the beginnings of the Earth, everything that we understand about beginnings of the solar system, what we're made of, what the planet's made of, the age of the Earth, all of that comes from studying meteorites. And, you know, we can learn a lot from that.

Would that be a good topic for a novel, do you think?

Absolutely. There are actually quite a few novels that have been written about meteorite impacts and, you know, microbes being carried over here from other places. And yes, there are science fiction books that I've certainly read very avidly about that, but, yes. . .

So what is the holy grail of a meteorite collector?What do you really wish for some day?


It's interesting, these papers that you brought with you, or sent to us, about how - these are the tricks that people use, and they can actually test out whether they work or not.

Yeah. These are things that a lot of good cooks probably know, whether they realized they know them or not. But exactly what these things are are a little fuzzy because everybody's a little different. There are some scientists in England and there are other groups, especially in the Netherlands, that have been running tests for years, and they tend to sound kind of bizarre. They'll prepare some food. They'll give it to different people to eat. And later, the people will realize that something else was changing while they were eating it, something in the atmosphere.

Mm-hmm. And they - in one test, they gave people some ice cream that tasted like bacon?

Yeah. This is - Charles Spence is the main scientist. He's at the University of Oxford. He teamed up with one of the famous chefs in England, and they made something which sounds really crazy, bacon and egg ice cream, which I'm told is really pretty good, tastes like bacon and eggs. And they served bacon and egg ice cream to a bunch of people. And they had them do some sort of rating about how bacony does it taste, or how eggy does it taste?And they would play sounds. And whenever they would play the sound of frying bacon, you know, that crackling sound, people would consistently say that the thing tasted a lot more bacony to them. . .


Well, at a Vatican briefing last Tuesday, the spokesman Father Frederico Lombardi used the Armenian term Medz Yeghern, which means the Great Evil. And he bristled when he was asked why he didn't say genocide. So when the prepared text of the Pope's speech last night used only the Armenian term, most of us thought that was a possible diplomatic overture toward Turkey.

In his actual delivery, the Pope added the word genocide. He said that genocide made possible by the twisted racial ideological or religious aims that darken the minds of the tormentors, even to the point of planning the annihilation of entire peoples. "That drew a standing ovation from the president of Armenia and the diplomatic corps.

The pope visited the genocide memorial today. What did he say there?

Well, it was a a very powerful scene. Francis stood with his head bowed in prayer next to the Armenian apostolate patriarch and a group of black hooded Orthodox bishops while musicians performed a mournful melody on an ancient Armenian flute that's called the duduk. Here's what it sounds like.


Yeah.

Well, we'll see what happens with the movie end of it.

Black Francis. He's written a new novel - if that's what you call it - together with Josh Frank and illustrated by Steven Appleby, "The Good Inn. "Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks a lot. I really appreciate talking to you.


So, we just heard Bill say, essentially, yes, this is a huge incident, but it doesn't compare with some of the other social issues. Do you think that there's two much focus on this?

No, I don't think that at all. I don't think it's an either or type of equation. Because in essence it's not that the outrage against this diminishes the outrage against rape or HIV or AIDS or any of those other things.

In fact, I would say that there, these things you know, rather than those the reaction against, to those things, being disparate, in essence what people are reacting to is a culture and, in essence, a series of events that have at their root a basic disrespect for black life, especially black female life.

So, you can't really separate something like rape, the AIDS crisis which disproportionately affects women, and this type of incident where the targets were, you know, poor black women. At their root is essentially the fact that they are continuing to be so devalued.


But we keep our faith strong and know that good things will, you know, eventually will turn and happen for us.

Scott, this is an expensive state to live in. California has high unemployment rates. Have you ever thought about maybe relocating, going someplace else?

Well, I have. You know, I was born and raised here in San Diego, and we just love it. But yeah, if - regardless of where the location would be, I would be willing to go anywhere - anywhere in the world for that matter, Afghanistan, Pakistan, anywhere that somebody may be able to offer me a job.

I saw some photographs of you in your condo. You've been packing up there, and I noticed behind the moving boxes, hanging in the window were some Christmas lights and some red ribbons. Are you still going to find some ways to celebrate the holidays despite everything that's going on?


You've got lots of reasons to be concerned about this economy, not the least of which is the fact that the Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has done yet another interest rate cut. And the question is, how many more cuts can he do?He has so many arrows in his quiver.

So, we're looking at a very fragile economy. And certainly, the employment piece is the most important piece for most Americans because most people don't have trust funds or extra money. Many who do have home equity have it tapped out. The way that 90 percent of us support ourselves is that we work every day, and increasing numbers of people don't have employment opportunities.

When you look at what's happening right now, there were - there have been times when there are certain, you know, white collar jobs that have really gotten hit hard, I'm thinking of the computer industry, the technology industry in the '90s when there was that dot bomb era. But is this really, for now, more of a blue collar job loss or is it mixed?

It's really a mixed bag. You see many corporations who are downsizing, they call it rightsizing, who are cutting even if it's by as little as 5 percent, Farai, it adds up. We see state governments also looking at a drop in revenue coming in because of a drop in tax revenue, and they are thinking of cutting in — may have already done some cutting.


And it's working. It's really working. So, I think that the new music coming out of Atlanta, the new kids that are coming up are really taking what we did in the past, over the past 20 years, and infusing it with the new, like they're erasing all the boundaries.

I just like to add one thing. Yellow Wolf is also a discovery of Kawan K. P. Prather, who was also at Le Face Records. So, it is like the story continues to. . .

The generations roll on.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.


Right.

. . . And the British Parliament. And British lawmakers are threatening to block it, which, again, means that we're in, you know, a gray zone of not knowing exactly what happens next. The European Parliament is likely to approve it because, again, all of their heads of state will have approved it tomorrow. So I mean, there are still huge, huge. . .

Yeah.

. . . Problems and difficulties ahead for Prime Minister Theresa May.


That's depressing, Marc. I'm Flora Lichtman and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR, talking with Marc Abrahams. So the world is getting worse based on Professor Trinkaus' studies. Is there any upside to this news?

The upside is he's still there counting. He hasn't given up on us. And. . .

The other thing is that these are really interesting reports. They're so short and they're written in clear language, and they've got numbers. And he's got all this data. He's got about 100 of these reports on different subjects. They're sitting there waiting for anybody to come along and try to make sense of the data. And some of them are really tiny things. He noticed that in the building where he worked in New York City, sometimes there would be some doors that were open and other doors that were shut. And he counted how many people, when confronted with a door that's open and a door that's shut, will go through the open door and how many people choose to go through the door that's shut so they have to open it themselves.

I liked this one, "Taste Preferences for Brussels Sprouts: An Informal Look. "And as you might have suspected, 54 percent of young students found the vegetable to be very repulsive. That's one of his findings. Does anyone cite his work?


It's a lot. . .

. . . Yes.

It's a lot of money to most people around the country.

And congressman, you know, if - let me understand this, are you calling for the outright abolition of the program?


Economics and public policy analysis, oddly enough.

What happens if you get sick?

Well, there's kind of the rub. That's the risk that you're taking, in that if something catastrophic or something major were happen, you know, I become a burden to the society around me because I wouldn't be able to afford it. At the same time, in some ways, I've already been a burden to society because, you know, I went to a state school in North Carolina. So my education was heavily subsidized by the taxpayers in that state.

So I have a responsibility now to produce more - whether it's economically or culturally - than I did before I earned those degrees. So I've got to weigh: Is the risk that I pose to society, if I get sick and I'm not insured, greater than the benefit that could happen if that $740 next year helps me jumpstart my career. And right now, I don't think that risk is greater than the potential benefit.

Boy, you were an economics major, weren't you?


They are fanatical about football hooligamisn in the same way that some people are fanatical about fine wines or foreign languages or current affairs. So they took their inspiration from the birthplace of football hooliganism. They're dedicated to their art of ultraviolence. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They work out specifically for, like, these encounters, as they call them.

Why do they want to be perpetrators of violence?

They say it's a way proving themselves. It's just another form of contact sport, you know?They have a tradition called wall on wall, which was when residents from two areas would gather and walk towards each other. And the object of the game, as it were, was to take out your opponent - take them out as in knock them down or render them unconscious. And as one football hooligan said to me, like, football hooliganism was made in Russia, it's just an extension of this wall on wall pastime.

How upset is the Russian government over what's been happening among Russian fans in France?


Well, nearby, we had flooding was the most significant problem we had here. And one our neighbor's patios turned basically into a swimming pool and the water was pouring into her home. And we took the wet-vac up and towels and other neighbors brought mops and we all pitched in to get her at least toward the stages of recovery. Of course, that will continue. And the emergency officials in Oklahoma City reported they had as much as eight, 10, even 12 inches of rain in just, you know, four hours or so last night.

What are the recovery efforts like today, Kurt?

Canadian County, just to the west of Oklahoma City, looks like it was the hardest hit by the actual tornado. Now, the flooding seems to have been worse in the metro Oklahoma City area. The response will depend on what we see. Now, of course, we also still have all those people in, you know, the Shawnee area and Moore, Oklahoma, of course, and in Carney that were hit by storms May 19th and 20th. That recovery is going to be even more of a mess now too because of what happened last night.

Well, the sad fact is Oklahomans know how to do this, don't they?


Well, tomorrow, it's going to be a lot of pomp and circumstance. There'll be a wreath-laying at Westminster Abbey. There'll be a state dinner in the evening with the Queen at Buckingham Palace tomorrow, a meeting with Prime Minister May. Of course, she's a lame duck, so we're not expecting a lot there on the policy front. The big thing tomorrow is going to be street protests.

And what are we expecting there?

Huge numbers. There are going to be buses coming in from around England. The streets are going to be jammed. Londoners, of course, very progressive - this is a cosmopolitan city. And they tend to really dislike this president. His anti-immigration policies, his things that he said about women - it just really rubs Londoners the wrong way.

We'll be seeing a lot of things that - a lot of signs, clever signs, which is what British protesters are known for. And we'll also see Tuesday morning the Trump baby blimp make a reappearance. This is the blimp of Trump in a diaper and crying and looking - he's in the form of a baby. Very popular, and I'm sure we'll see lots of people out there when that goes aloft in Parliament Square.


Well, it's interesting. What you find in the data is that Trump did very well among self-described evangelicals. But he did far better among self-described evangelicals who don't regularly attend church. Cruz destroyed him amongst evangelicals who go to church regularly.

And what's also important about that is there's a lot of evidence that white Americans who don't regularly attend church do worse economically and are much more pessimistic about the state of the country. And that's also what Trump tapped into, this sense of deep pessimism about the state of the country. And that pessimism is greater among Americans who don't regularly attend religious services.

And you just - according to your article, you don't see this in just one side of the political divide, do you?

No. What's interesting is that the same divide you see between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump voters, you also saw between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton voters. So if you look at white Democrats, white Democrats who went to church were much more - religious institutions at all - much more likely to be Hillary Clinton supporters. Bernie Sanders much more likely to win the votes of those who did not regularly attend religious institutions.


What - the more typical word that I hear from younger evangelicals is a sense of not knowing what to do. Many of them can't in good conscience vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. And I think that it's going to take several months before we even know what the answer to that is going to be.

Can you explain what part of Donald Trump's message is working with religious voters so that they would overlook maybe even some of their basic Christian beliefs to support him?

Well, I think it is the fact that many religious conservatives believe that the Republican Party has not only taken them for granted but made fun of them behind closed doors. And so I've heard from those who are supporting Trump their vote for Trump is really a vote to kind of shut the entire system down and start all over again. I think that's a very common sentiment.

Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention, thanks so much for joining us.


No. I mean, not really. We are in uncharted territory here in Kenya. When the court threw out the first case, it was the first time an African court threw out the victory of a sitting president. So, you know, this court has shown courage and independence. But the ground has shifted. The judges have been openly intimidated. And one of their bodyguards was shot last month. So they're under intense pressure. And who knows how they will rule?I think what we know for sure is that whatever they decide, it's bound to have serious consequences on the streets.

That's NPR's Eyder Peralta in Nairobi. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Lulu.

(SOUNDBITE OF EL TEN ELEVEN'S "THINKING LOUDLY"


According to the Census Bureau itself, the idea is to count everyone in the United States not just citizens. So if you only count citizens, that's going to reduce the power and resources provided to districts in places that have more people in the country who have immigrated here illegally. And those places would argue they need the resources and the representation.

All right. Well, let's talk about immigration. President Trump has also said his administration will move forward fairly soon with a plan to arrest thousands of migrant families in surprise roundups across major U. S.  cities. Meanwhile, DHS's IG report has shown terrible conditions for the people being held in custody. Is the president's reaction a problem for him politically?

Well, I mean, the more attention this gets, it certainly could. You know, the president is pretty, you know, focused on the fact that there haven't been, you know - on television, right?- this hasn't been something that you've seen a lot of network television cameras in. And if those conditions are things that are captured on TV, that is something that could change the narrative. But so far, the president feels like this is a winning issue for him.

Domenico Montanaro, NPR's lead political editor, thank you.


Assuming we know some it.

And that's it. And, you know, we know some of it a little at this stage. These are very early studies that are just almost like proof of principle, that clearly we're seeing the same trends across different mucosal surfaces in body. So perhaps there could be a unifying theory in this idea of restoring appropriate colonization patterns to those sites.

Well, let me ask you a wild question that just struck me. If you overly - if you're a mouthwash user and it kills everything in your mouth or any bacteria, 99 percent of the germs, it says, are you doing yourself a disservice?

I - we - nobody has looked at that. And it's - again, anything that perturbes these communities, you know, there's the potential for pathogenic organisms to outgrow in that kind of depleted diversity community. So it would be wonderful study. We don't study oral micro biota, but it would be wonderful study.


Now, I would imagine that most of these interviews took place in the South, and that most of these people were either octogenarians or something older at the time that you talked to them, were they?

Let's try centenarians.

Centenarians.

Centenarians. The oldest person I interviewed was 112 and I think the youngest was 86, a man named Christopher Sadox Wright(ph) in California. The 112-year-old, I was not able to include because she did not have all of her faculties. She didn't remember much about her family or her years as - you know, she didn't really remember much about yesterday.


"My first awareness of homosexuality was followed by reading James Baldwin. No reference was made to this, which I think in the context of this program would have been a reference for listeners. I appreciate some of the discussion, however a little historical perspective helps us better understand the present. "

And finally, we got a letter about our sports blogger segment. Last week they talked about Tiger Wood's win in the U. S.  Open despite a leg injury. Tiger is now taking some time off the green. Lyn Porter (ph) in Lenni, Pennsylvania wrote us this. "I just wanted to disagree with the comment that people who watch golf are really tuning in to see Tiger Woods. All three of us here who watch golf regularly comment that we want to see someone else have a chance to win. I think it will be interesting to see golf without Tiger. I enjoy his play and hope he recovers quickly, but I would like a little variety. "

And that's it for letters. Thank you for writing and please keep your comments coming.

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


Let's turn now to our regular sports commentator, an all-around know-everything-there-is-to know-in-the-world-of-sports expert, New York Times columnist Bill Rhoden. Hey, Bill.

Hey, great Tony Cox. How are you doing?

I'm doing great, man. Listen, we saw a lot of great retired players in Washington on Tuesday, NBA players like Magic Johnson, Kevin Johnson; football stars like Jim Brown, that we just heard; Mohammad Ali, they were all there. What do you make of their commitment to being a part of all of this?And is it just because of Obama that younger athletes are willing to step up front again and take political positions?

You know, I thought it was great to see those guys and it was a great interview you just did with Jim Brown.


. . . Version of this book. When I'm writing - whether it be these hundreds of songs or this, you know, 300-page collection of complete sentences - in order to do it, I have to pretend I'm alone. But when I sat down to record the audiobook, I thought, oh, I can't pretend I'm alone anymore. Now I'm really sharing my most intimate thoughts with whoever - which is insane. Get me out of here.

(Laughter) So you've always had this - this tension around intimacy.

Yeah.

You crave it so much, but it also scares you. I mean, the decision to shave your head - even this is about intimacy in some way, isn't it?Because when I think about a woman who shaves her head, it feels like a very powerful move. It also feels intimate. Like, hey, here I am. This is me. Like. . .


This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. Hillary Clinton is drawing more attention right now for the foundation that bears her family's name than her run for president. Clinton Foundation is under scrutiny for contributions from foreign donors that were made while Mrs.  Clinton was Secretary of State. During that time, a Canadian mining financier donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. He also secured a lucrative mining deal that required approval of the State Department while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. Joshua Green of Bloomberg News joins us in our studios. Thanks very much for being with us.

Good to be with you.

These connections were first unearthed, to my knowledge, by Peter Schweizer, who wrote the book that's coming out next week, "Clinton Cash. "The New York Times has been advancing the story. You certainly have at Bloomberg News. Give us, if you could, a quick picture about what's known about the relationship between the Clinton's and this Canadian business person.

Well, Frank Giustra is his name. I interviewed him about a week or so ago. And he explained to me he met Bill Clinton at a fundraiser for tsunami victims. He was dazzled by him, was invited to become involved in his charities and has in a very big way - not only pledging or giving tens of millions of dollars but also pledging half the profits of his mining company in perpetuity to the Clinton Foundation. He landed on the board of the Clinton Foundation and actually started up the Canadian wing, something called the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership.


Patricia is moving over Mexico, downgraded from the most powerful hurricane ever recorded to a tropical depression. She was less damaging than expected. Hurricane force winds were spared to the coastal cities like Puerto Vallarta. Daniel Lozano, the director general of the Mexican Red Cross, is overseeing the emergency response. He joins us from Mexico City now. Mr.  Lozano, you must be very busy. Thanks very much for being with us.

Thank you, Scott. It's a pleasure to be with you and the audience.

Can you tell us what's going on there now?

Well, as you mentioned, fortunately the hurricane downgraded very fast and we were expecting a greater impact in several cities and communities of Jalisco, Colima and the states around that area. But fortunately no major damages have been registered so far.


Correct.

How much money was that?

$175,000 for the coming year.

And specifically, you used that money in what way?


I don't know what you make of a recent letter some ICE special agents sent to Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen asking that the branch of ICE that deals with counterterrorism and drug trafficking, not deportations, be split off from the agency because of all the ill will.

Yeah. I have seen that. That was - that's an interesting consequence of another change that was made at the time that DHS was formed. In addition to splitting up the immigration entities, they also blended in the customs function. And so ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The same is true at the border. And that was a little bit of a shotgun marriage between the customs folks and the immigration folks that has not fully worked itself out. The customs people think that they have these - you know, they've got a separate set of responsibilities that are impeded by the immigration function.

Former INS general counsel Bo Cooper, thanks so much for coming in and joining us, sir.

Thank you very much.


That's the most egregious part of this scandal - is that she and her boyfriend Sunny Balwani, who was the No. 2 of the company, knew as they were rolling out the blood-testing services in Walgreens stores in California and Arizona that the blood tests were faulty. And yet they still went ahead with the rollout. And there were - I came across personally in my reporting more than a dozen patients who had health scares because they received bad results from Theranos.

How could so many smart people be fooled?

Well, I think she capitalized on this in part - it's not the only answer. But she capitalizes on this yearning there was in Silicon Valley and beyond to see a woman breakthrough in this man's world in Silicon Valley. If you look back over the past 30 years, all these tech founders that have gone on to be billionaires and icons are all men. Elizabeth Holmes was going to be that first tech founder who became a billionaire.

John Carreyrou - his book "Bad Blood" - thanks so much for being with us.


And so the bike industry in general thought that they could absorb the 10% increase that's been in effect for the last few months. And there's no way that they can absorb a 25% increase, so that will be borne by the consumer whether you're buying a $100 bike or a $10,000 bike across the board. There's no way that the industry can absorb that.

Can you give me a sense of what the price hike might be for a consumer buying, you know, the first or second bike for a kid, let's say?

Yeah. And so this does apply to kid's bike, too. You know that in general, the tariff burden will increase by probably $250 million, and so retail prices will be raised. And so if you consider, gosh, a $100 bike, which is a fair price point for most Americans looking to buy their first bicycle or a kid's bicycle, $100 is a lot of money for a lot of people. Who knows what'll happen?But if I had to look in a crystal ball, that price will probably go up to 125, 150.

And there are a lot of road riders or mountain bikers or anyone who is more of an enthusiast - they're paying $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 for a bike, and that same percentage price increase will apply to them as well. The bike doesn't get any cheaper because of the tariffs or the kind of bike riding you like to do. So bike prices will probably go up, you know, $1,000 on a $4,000 bike.


Like what?

Well, one of the first that we did was a tomb that the University of Pennsylvania museum excavated in central Turkey, which is believed to be either the tomb of Midas or his father, Gordias, west of Ankara. And it was done by the museum back in 1957 and had one of the largest Iron Age drinking sets in it that the excavators had the foresight to bring the residues in the drinking set back here to Philadelphia.

And it was one of the easiest excavations I was ever on. I just had to walk up two flights of stairs, gather up the residues, and then we started doing our analysis.

So you take the dregs, so to speak, out of the amphora - the jugs, and you bring it back to the lab, and. . .


OK, well, now there's criticism that these short-sellers may be contributing to the funny business in terms of, you know, driving prices down for these big investment banks.

You know, there's a ton of funds out there. There's a lot of cash out there. If the short-sellers are really driving prices to the point where stocks and companies are mispriced, there should be the countervailing, hey, this is a bargain, let's rush in and buy it. That hasn't happened, and in fact, if you look at the companies that have gone belly up in the past year, every one of them was either insolvent or had some major problem. Again, the short-sellers are the one who identified this.

Hm. Well, also, in some of those banks, you have traders, actually, you know - have what is the accusation out there that they contributed to the problem by short-selling these derivatives and by driving prices down across the board.

Well, there's two issues. One is short-selling in general, and then the other issue is naked short-selling, which - I'll give you the real short version of it. When you short-sell, you're doing the opposite of buying. You borrow stock and you sell it, and you hope to buy it cheaper and return it. Short-selling is legal. Naked short-selling has been illegal for many years. The only reason we have so much of it is the SEC has not enforced the rules against it, because there was a ton of money made by the biggest brokerage firms.


So who is the ultimate decision-maker here?And what is that person likely to be guided by, if you have any sense of that?For example, is there any precedent that either side could point to that might give us a sense of how this might proceed?

Well, there'll be several levels inside the U. K.  judicial system. There'll be a hearing before a judge in the U. K.  and then probably through an appellate level in the U. K.  And then, if history is any indication, if Mr.  Assange loses, he could then keep appealing all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights saying that his human rights have been violated. Historically, the British have extradited numerous individuals to the U. S. Although many of them and their defense counsel have argued that they would face unfair or improper trials in the U. S. , most of those have been extradited.

But in a few cases in the past, there have been individuals whose extradition from the U. K.  to the U. S.  have been denied. In this case, this will really be, I think, a battle royal because Assange and his lawyers will argue very forcefully that I'm sure particularly the Trump administration is coming after him for political reasons.

So, as you mentioned earlier, Assange has only been charged with one count of conspiracy. If he's extradited to the U. S. , could he face other charges here?And is that something that his lawyers might raise?


Yup. And then, suddenly, it came back, and then it went back down. And they scratched their heads for quite a while. And finally, what they realized is that there was so much radiation there that it was doing what's called saturating the detector. So it just couldn't count anymore. It was just overwhelmed. And then when they would go out of the radiation belts, it would come back down to a reasonable level that it was designed for, and it would start counting again. And so it took them a little while to figure that out. But once they did, that was the discovery of the radiation belts.

And now we have the probes to follow up. Thanks, Craig Kletzing, for joining us today.

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Craig Kletzing is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa.


Do the findings differ according to what you majored in or, you know, engineering versus philosophy?

It did. For example, if you look at in the middle of the career of someone, say, 15 years out after graduation, the typical earnings of an engineer is pretty close to $100,000 a year. The same is true of my field of economics. But if you were to go to teaching or social work, the figure is more likely $50,000 a year.

Dr.  Vedder, without getting you into trouble, you're a professor of economics. Does this lead you to ever tell your students you're wasting your money here?

Well, you've asked a delicate question, Scott, but I am at the age where I am tenured and semi-retired, so I guess I can say anything I want. I've tried to be honest with my students and I tell my students that there are risks in anything one does in life and any kind of investment one makes in life. And colleges are subject to the same kind of risks that investing in, say, stocks and bonds. Part of the risk, of course, is that 45 percent of those who enter college don't graduate within six years. And students who think they can major in social work then go get a fancy job and then live in an upper middle-class suburb are perhaps living a life that's devoid of much reality these days. And so I point this out to them. I don't tell them don't go to college, but I tell them there are risks associated with it and be cautious about piling up a lot of debt.


Yeah. I mean, that is the thing in this country. I mean, I know America quite well. And I think we have to reverse the absolute mirror image of the broadcasting and newspaper. When the debate was around about the beginning of this year about fake news, there was a lot of discussion about how, in this country, people are kind of used to fake news because - not that the newspapers are fictional, but they do take a slant on some stories. But the television media here, in particular, and the radio has been regulated to be unbiased and impartial since broadcasting began in the 1930s.

Some here in America would view this as an agency of thought police. Is there pushback against Ofcom in the United Kingdom?

There have been periods of incredibly busy activity from Ofcom. Recently, they have been turning quite a few complaints across to us and other broadcasters. That is not a reflection of Ofcom. That's a reflection of people who write to Ofcom. They're only making decisions if viewers complain. But it's not a form of thought police. It's a form of being objective. I think viewers in this country expect the television and radio broadcasting to be unbiased, accurate and impartial. And so that is enshrined in law. It's an expectation. And when they feel that the standards of broadcasting have dropped below that, they complain to Ofcom, and then Ofcom investigates us.

Ben De Pear is the editor of Channel 4 News. Thank you very much.

Thank you.


I was making decisions in my life that went against everything that I was raised to believe. And. . .

Like what?What kind of decisions?

Specifically religion - the religion that I was raised in. And I was disagreeing with it heavily. It was my whole world and everything that I was taught.

Did they understand?Even though it was painful, did they understand why you had to make that decision to break away?


Dr.  Michael Jacobson is president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group that advocates for safer and healthier foods. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me, Scott.

Looking back on these studies, were they just wrong?

The studies really skewed the evidence at the time. And I think it was unfortunate that these papers were published because they influenced the public discussion about the health impact of sugar.

The question that news of a study like this, I think, raises for everybody is, how do you know what information to trust?


I suspect that for many, many years, antibodies worked brilliantly. Infections have been really solved. And it didn't really matter very much how long you took your antibodies because they were - you got better, and it wasn't important. We are now worrying about resistance emerging. And so we now want to think much more carefully about how best to use the antibiotics we got so that they don't lose their activity.

I have a personal query about something else that we're always told - that we're not supposed to drink when we're taking antibiotics. Is that something that is also a folk wisdom or is there some scientific fact in that?

There are one or two antibiotics where they interact with alcohol. And they're not many of them. And by far, the majority of antibiotics that are prescribed have no interaction with alcohol. However, as a physician, I can never - you can never get me to say it's good to take alcohol. That's not what we're paid to do.

(Laughter) Indeed. Tim Peto, professor of infectious diseases at Oxford University, thank you so much for joining us.


Well, when it first was set up - it was set up to run international finance. And we had a very tightly regulated system of exchange rates and countries - if they wanted to change their exchange rate, had to get permission from the IMF. And so that was - I mean, that's a very powerful role. And this is all countries, this is not just poor countries. And that whole system collapsed in the early 1970s. But since then, as financial crises have proliferated, the IMF has stepped in as the principal emergency doctor for countries in trouble and it tries to figure out how the country has to change its behavior so that its finances get put on a more sustainable basis.

Where did it get its money?

The best way of thinking of the IMF is it's like a credit union that countries put deposits into the IMF, and then the IMF uses those deposits to help countries in trouble. And it's got about 400 billion of deposits and another 400 to 500 billion of borrowings. And that gives it close to a $1 trillion, which it can then apply to helping the poorer members who've got themselves into trouble.

You visited a couple of IMF missions - how popular are they in countries where they've taken a major role?


Oh, well, there are a lot of asteroids near Jupiter. You know, Jupiter orbits pretty close to the asteroid belt, for one thing. So that's a part of the solar system that's very cluttered with space rocks. And Jupiter ends up being a target for a lot of them because - mainly because it's such a big planet. It has so much gravity. It actually pulls some of these space rocks toward it.

What makes you not believe it was - might have been a comet?

Oh, well, it might have been a comet. The only way to tell the difference between an asteroid and a comet impact is to look at what kind of debris it leaves behind in Jupiter's atmosphere. Now - but the problem is, in this case, astronomers have been watching the impact site - the place where the flash of light occurred - all week long, and they've been looking through debris, but there is none. Now, if you could look at the debris and see what it's made of, you could say, oh, yes. That's material that's characteristic of an asteroid, or in the case of a comet, you know, comets tend to be very watery. And the debris cloud has chemical byproducts of water in it if a comet has hit. . .

Yeah.


Absolutely. So what the defense may try to do is say, what we're dealing with here is a criminal, a dishonest individual from start to finish. He is being sponsored - his testimony is being sponsored by the government. But you can't trust him. After all, look at all the things he's done. He's stolen, in fact, not only from others but from his own business associate, Mr.  Manafort.

And he gets some kind of consideration for testifying - immunity, right?

Well, what he gets is. . .

Maybe not absolute immunity, but OK, go ahead.


You described some playwrights, Beckett, for example, as somebody whose work seems to back away from you the closer you get it. But Miller's play, you say, is not like that.

No. It wasn't like - my experience with Chekhov and Beckett was just what you'd call - that they get harder and harder as you go. But with "Salesman," surprisingly, because it's fully as great a play as those others, it did welcome us and come toward us day by day. And then, we did a fairly smart thing, which is that we had a workshop just for ourselves for almost a month, and nobody ever saw it and we didn't perform it, but we just worked on it. And then as per plan, we went away for over three and a half months.

And then when we came back, we went into rehearsal and then finally got onstage and did it. And the three and a half months living and doing other things made a surprisingly big difference. It just sank into everybody and took enormous strides all on its own, and that was both exciting and surprising in its extent. And also, it was a clue to what was going to continue to happen, which is that it just burrowed deeper and deeper into the actors and they - into one another, and they have become a family. And they're - what goes on between them is - I've never seen - in my experience, I've never seen it quite like this.

Philip Seymour Hoffman obviously plays the lead role. Is - did the play come first or the actor come first?


It has.

Get out.

The time has flown. And you are flying. You are flying across the ocean. You are leaving us.

Great segue.


But some people might want the extra three months of the nine months option. Just look through and see what's offered. And the other good thing is, this is not one of those negative option kind of options. At the end of the six months or nine months, they're not going to automatically enroll you into a plan in which you have to pay, because the six month is worth about 60 dollars and the nine month is about 115 dollars. So they will absolutely stop it, and you have to say, I want this back. But listen, for six or nine months you've got someone looking through your TransUnion credit file, so it's worth it.

You know, Michelle, what you're saying is anyone who has applied for credit, essentially in the last 20 years, any credit card, is eligible for this. There is a benefit, including maybe some cash, sitting there on the table. You can write in and get it. That's it?

That's it. That's exactly right. And you do have to register for it. It's not automatic, and you have to go to www. listclassaction. com. And once you go to the site, you click on the link for Register for Benefits. And then they will email you and tell you later when you can actually start getting the monitoring service.

We will link to you and to this website at our site, that's npr. org. Michelle Singletary, personal finance columnist for the Washington Post and contributor to Day to Day. Michelle, thank you.


So, you're skeptical about a car czar. You think that there should be loans, though, with strict provisions attached to them.

Right, right.

What else?What else needs to be done?I mean, this is a massive, massive problem, and two of the three are facing extinction at this point.

Don't forget, what's putting them in this condition is the economic, you know, the economic condition of the nation right now. But the kind of fixed-cost structure that these auto companies have is massive, massive losses that have to do with what's happening to demand.


Yes. Launch is tomorrow at 4:55 AM Cape Canaveral time, which is where the rocket launches from, or, say, 1:55 AM California time. I'll actually be here in California at SpaceX headquarters at mission control. And so we have launch control at Cape Canaveral, and we've got mission control here at headquarters in California. So for the first nine minutes or so, the rocket will be ascending and delivering the Dragon spacecraft to orbit. And then the Dragon spacecraft will separate from the rocket and then - and begin orbital phasing with the space station, which will take a few days.

Then we're going to do, essentially, a flyby at the space station. Now, something that's important to appreciate is that the space station is actually zooming around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour. People sort of think it's just sort of up there and stationary, but it's zipping around the Earth at - it actually completes an orbit of the Earth every 19 minutes. So you can think of this like you're trying to synchronize speed with something that's going 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle.

And we've got to match the space station. As the space station makes more movements in its orbit, we've got to track those movements exactly. So we'll do a wide loop around the space station, establish communication - a communication link with the space station, have our docking sensors lock on and then the spacecraft actually plots an approach vector and will go in and pause at various points before finally going into dock with the space station.

And what time into the mission will it actually dock?


Deb, is there any kind of reassessment about what might be possible?The meeting's unprecedented, the atmosphere's been a real roller coaster, but what else?

You know, there's no expectation this is going to be easy. The Syrian war isn't confined to one country. It's a regional war. Two million Syrians are outside the country. More than half the country is displaced. Powerful extremist Islamists are in the north. Shiite militias from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq are fighting on the side of the regime. Some of the most important players are not even at the table. There's going to be lots of bumps. But I think you have to say that the fact that they are sitting down is a beginning, at least to start for a political process, something we have not seen in three years.

Anything that you're looking for, Deb, that you're going to flag?

Well, I think the idea is to keep everybody at the table this week. The most contentious issue, of course, is going to be negotiating a transitional government. And it's possible that that topic will either not be called that this week to keep everybody sitting down, but they're going to have to get to it at some point, and that's what I'll be watching for. When those discussions start, will everybody stay at the table?


And that is a big deal because a census is supposed to be a head count of every person living in the country. That's a constitutional mandate regardless of citizenship or immigration status. And those numbers determine how many congressional seats each state gets, as well as how almost $900 billion a year in federal funding for roads, for schools, how all that money is distributed around the country.

Right, so a lot of financial and political implications if you don't have the correct population number, particularly of certain minorities.

Exactly.

What are the two sides arguing?What's that what's the for and the against?


So you were ready to stand up for yourself?

Oh, absolutely, 100 percent.

Do you ever talk to the students that you went to college with recently, students who were maybe sometimes 60 years younger than you, about what you have lived and what you have gone through?Do you ever tell them these kinds of stories?

In some of my classes, some of the fellows would ask me about the segregated South. I would reveal to them, like in one instance, we had a history major and he was just tickled to death to learn this stuff firsthand from somebody who had actually been through it. Example, I used to tell him that at Norfolk Navy Yard, the drinking fountains and lavatories were all segregated - black, colored water and colored bathrooms, white bathrooms. And the white water always broke down and they drank the colored water.


So this will help the basketball players and then also the track events. But the good thing is obviously with these developments - the wheelchairs (unintelligible) through the people, you know, everyday people that use wheelchairs, and it will mean it's more lightweight for them to lift, say, in and out of vehicles.

And some of this stuff then filters in back to the general public.

Yeah, I mean, and that's a great thing, you know, the flow sort of from elite to high street, as we refer to it, is great. So you start seeing that, for example, with push bikes. We see a lot of that now available, helmet design from bikes, you say that. Swimwear is another thing that we see a lot of technology flowing into the high street.

Let's talk about swimwear because there was a kind of swimwear that was used and is now banned, and something new is taking its place.


Now what we didn't hear was a huge thunderous applause that you got from the crowd. Would you run for office again?And if so, what office?

I do - I would like to run for office. I really believe very firmly in public service. I enjoyed my years as lieutenant governor. And, you know, as a small-government Republican, really began to appreciate beyond the rhetoric of just saying, you know, I want a smaller government, but really focusing on how you make government work for people and how you make it efficient - more efficient partner in our daily lives.

And so I walked away from the office with a great appreciation for the value of public service and the importance that you can play in helping small businesses, in getting healthcare where it needs to be, and in dealing with problems of crime and the things that lead up to people to do things that create problems in their community, recidivism, and drug addiction, and things like that. So yeah, I'd like to get back to it. I'd like to run for governor of Maryland one day. And we'll see if that ever happens. But yeah, it's on the table. I don't know if it's in the cards yet, but it's at least on the table.

So you're chair of GOPAC, and it aims to elect more Republicans into office. So what are you working on specifically this time around?Are there any races or any strategies you're working on?


NPR's Dina Temple-Raston has been following this story, and she's here now. Dina, scientists and legal experts, they're saying that the evidence against Ivins is really far from foolproof, that there is no smoking gun. What are they concerned about?

Well, a lot of the scientists who have looked at this say that they couldn't - that the FBI couldn't possibly have ruled out everyone who might have matched the anthrax vial or had access to the anthrax vial that they matched to Ivins. And this is basically, without getting too much into the science, this is because anthrax, all you have to do is grow more. So if you had some anthrax, conceivably, from this vial that they linked to Ivins, you could have grown your own source of more of that.

They also can't place him in Princeton, which is where the letters were mailed from, and he has this very distinctive, cramped handwriting that they couldn't match the handwriting on the envelopes. The FBI said it was similar, but there was nothing conclusive there. And there's this broader feeling that he couldn't have possibly accomplished all of this on his own. The plan was too elaborate and too technical for one person to do by themselves.

So what does the FBI say to all those questions?


Yes. The ground has been too wet. Every time we turn around, it seems like we keep getting a rain shower that we don't need. But normally in the planting season, we have a four, five or six-day window of dry weather where we can go out and plant. And then it might rain. And then we'll have another four or five, six-day window. This year, we've only been able to plant on five different days now total.

So how much of your normal crop have you been able to get into the ground?

We're small compared to some of the other growers throughout the state here in Illinois. But we normally have everything in the ground. As of Monday, we only had about 25% or so in the ground tops, actually a little bit less than that.

So what are you going to do?As you said, like, normally, you've had your corn in. And then I guess you'd move onto your beans. What are you going to do?


Well, I know that my name is on the cover, but the Library of America was at least an equal partner, if not more. Reggie Hui there went into the archives, and he found every single short story she'd ever published in the most esoteric, small, little magazines. And John Kulka and Reggie and I had multiple really long debates and conversations about which stories to include. There were many passionate speeches on all sides, particularly mine. And we ended up with. . .

(Laughter) Battles to the death, I'm gathering. Yeah.

. . . Battles. Yes. It was bloody, but it was also joyous because we're - all three of us - just super fans of Nancy Hale's.

I mean, people always ask fiction writers - as you would know better than anyone - how much of your writing, how much of your protagonist is you. And writers always say, it's fiction. You know, I made it all up. But you write that with Hale, it's - it actually really matters to know what her life story was when you're reading these stories.


I decided to take matters in my own hands and decided to raise the funds that I need to get the materials that the kids need. The budget wasn't going to change. The only thing is, it was going to get worse. I had decided that I should advertise on my test, and I said, well, if you would like to put a quote or an ad at the bottom of my test, then it'd be kind of a mutual - they help the kids, and then I help them get a little bit of PR out of it.

And so the parents, they responded well?

Absolutely. Back to school night, I had one parent give me a $100 check, and she said, I hope this gets you started, and I actually had a lot of good comments, saying that's very creative and thinking outside the box.

And I've actually gotten emails from parents and one from my school district saying, you know, I am glad somebody is finally speaking up and saying that parents are having a tough time footing the bill for things that should have been paid for through their tax dollars and paid through the school system.

And what did the kids says?I mean, aren't they kind of bombarded by advertising all day long when they are not in school?

They really like the quotes, and they actually look forward to them. I've had students say, hey, what's going to be the next quote, and I tell them, you have to wait.


The writer Michael Kinsley, who's a friend of this program, wrote about the surge a few months ago. Look at the numbers before the surge. Look at the numbers after the surge. This is what the Bush administration calls a success. One hundred and thirty thousand Americans in Iraq at the beginning and at the end. This country will still have about 130,000 soldiers - American soldiers in Iraq. Michael Kinsley said, have we really succeeded anything or have we just kind of changed the metric in some way?

Oh my Lord. I mean, what we have in Iraq, and I just got back, you know, less than two weeks ago. What we have in Iraq is a government that is elected by its people. It's the only Arab-Muslim country of that type, of that form of government in that region. It will have a long- term security relationship and a strategic relationship with the United States and be aligned with the United States. That is a major positive outcome for us, particularly given the fact that in 2006 we nearly lost the country and suffered a humiliating defeat.

Things do look an awful lot different than they did two years ago. You had a significant role in that, in thinking about what should be done at a time when it was a very unpopular plan to be putting forth. No one was - there wasn't a very big cheering squad for that. I wonder if you sit back on an evening now and feel some kind of sense of satisfaction?What is that?'

Well, I think there were a lot of people that, you know, have a hand in it.


Why?You know, if you've screw it up, what?You, like, lost 99 cents or $5?I mean, that's money. I'm not saying that that's not important, but God, when I use the cooking - when I lived in New York, it's like, if I screwed up, it was $30 down the drain.

Many of Christiane's recipes come from her own imagination. Others are adaptations from culinary classics like the "Joy of Cooking" and "The Moosewood Cookbook. "She says she realizes the low-budget nature of her book may not be appetizing to all palates. The 99-cent price tag does have a bit of a stigma.

I feel the same way sometimes. I'm a snob. I'll admit it. And so, you know, sometimes if I cook it, I'm like, oh, I'm pulling the ham out of the can. I don't know.

And maybe it's the ham, maybe it's not.