People are still debating 70 years later about whether or not FDR's New Deal actually corrected the Great Depression or whether it was World War II.

Finally, Mara, let's take a look ahead. What is next on the president's agenda?And what else will he be talking about and promoting in the weeks to come?

Well, he has the State of the Union, the big address to Congress next Tuesday. He has what's called a fiscal responsibility summit on Monday, which is kind of an extraordinary thing where he's going to be trying to explain to people how after he's increasing the deficit by trillions of dollars, how at some point in the future he's going to bring it down so that we don't basically become like a Banana Republic and inflate our way out of this mess.

In other words, the solution to the immediate crisis, which is deficit spending, is going to cause another problem that has to be solved down the road. He's also going to be rolling out his budget next week, which will have some parts of his health-care agenda on it. And of course, tomorrow, he will be talking about housing in Phoenix, Arizona.


Well, he had his archenemy, a man by the name of Julian, who he claimed had tricked him out of this magical cheese that he had made. And so I eventually got around to visiting with Julian and found myself being able to slowly release myself from Ambrosio to tell it.

You took your kids to Guzman a couple of times, and so they also got to know the place and Molinos' family, right?

Yeah. Those are some of the best memories of having done this book. I was in love with our children being young and living forever, and I knew the minute I broke the spell, time would start again. The minute you put an ending on a story, you have to walk out into real life, and, you know, that's where you feel the real losses, and I think that I was probably hiding from that a little bit, too.

Did writing this book, meeting this man, spending time in this place, change you?


Absolutely. No question. When I first started to sing, the last thing I wanted to do was sing my dad's music. And ironically, when I was signed to a label, it was Capitol Records, which I thought that they would be like, oh, you got to sing your dad's music. But they did not. . .

He made Capitol Records.

He certainly did. The house that Nat built. But they did not insist on that, whereas I went to two other labels and they said, well, are you going to sing your father's music?And I said no. And it took 15 years into my career before I felt comfortable and confident enough to even attempt at singing my father's music.

Like a lot of famous fathers, Nat King Cole was often away from home. He died when Natalie was just 15. She had some rough times in the years that followed, sometimes making her own name in all the wrong ways with drugs and drink. But she sought help and she persisted, having her own R&B hits in the 1970s before she recorded a 1991 duet with the recorded voice of her father that sold over seven million copies and won many Grammys.


The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi continues to oppose proceeding with impeachment, and there's no law that says she has to go forward if a majority of her caucus wants it. And something that you do hear in the nuance of these statements from members of the House is they're not putting a lot of pressure on the speaker. They're not vocally opposing her strategy, going after her. They're saying this is where they are personally, and, in fact, she's given them permission to do so. But they're not saying, you know, the leadership is wrong, and we've got to push this through. So there is some patience, I think, that allows the speaker to continue to move the process forward.

So she is still the engineer.

She is. I. . .

But not necessarily plotting the course. I told you this analogy would be hard to take.

(Laughter) Well, she has very firm control over the caucus of House Democrats. And, so far, they have deferred to her, even if they differ with her on where this train, as you put it, is likely to end up.


Aw. We mentioned that you worked for President George W.  Bush, who advised John McCain. In your circle of friends, people there at the Hoover Institution - without violating any any confidences - your friends and colleagues - is your opinion widely held or are people who ordinarily would support the Republican candidate talking about voting for Hillary Clinton?

I think this is a real time of crisis for Republicans. It's hard for many of my friends to think about supporting Donald Trump. And it's very hard for many of my friends to think about supporting Hillary Clinton. In fact, I would have indulged the luxury of writing in one of my terrific nephews for president if I hadn't seen that the polls during the British referendum were off by 12 points. And my concern that (inaudible) be accurate, and everybody's vote's actually going to count this election.

Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She joined us by Skype. Thanks very much.

You're welcome.


In the U. S. , the Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to wind down its quantitative easing, and keep short-term interest rates near zero. If that last sentence made your head spin, don't worry - there's a computer game for that. Actually, a whole slew of them.

They're games created by central banks, from the ECB in Frankfurt to the Cleveland Federal Reserve. And, as you might tell from that theme music, they are not quite "Grand Theft Auto. "Jason Karaian reviewed a few of these games for the online business news outlet Quartz. He joins us from the BBC in London. Mr.  Karaian, thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

We heard the theme music to a game I believe is called "Economia. "


So what I did was incorporate the superhero, but have them have HIV in real life situations, if the person were to have it. So they would have the same illnesses, the same sicknesses, and even some of the characters may die from AIDS or something like that.

So, the book really shows you - I have in one scene where you see one of the characters is about to have sexual relations with a woman, and he - I show a condom. I talk about. . .

Robert, I'm sorry. We have to wrap it up here. There's so much to talk about. . .

I'm sorry for that.


So who is this father we're talking about?

Well, his name is Bashirul Shikder, and he's an American dad who is from Florida - lives in Florida. And four years ago, his two children - one of them was just an infant less than a year old - were kidnapped by their mother and taken to Syria, where she came to join ISIS. He's been trying to get his kids back since then. And then last month, he received the awful news that his wife had been killed in an explosion. His kids are injured with burns to their faces. So he came to Iraq. We followed him there, you know, next door to Syria where he was lobbying U. S.  officials to try to help, trying to locate these children who are somewhere in Syria.

Now it's been confirmed by - well, now multiple sources tell us - but I should say that it's not yet fully confirmed - that these two children and a half sister they now have are actually alive and still in Baghouz. Of course, the offensive on Baghouz has just started again, so this is really every parent's nightmare. What he is hearing is that the kids are there; they're being bombarded. But they're with a family who doesn't want to leave.

Wow. So this father might be watching U. S. -backed forces basically try to take out territory where his children might be still holed up somewhere.


Antivirus experts are calling Flame one of the most complex threats ever discovered. Once a machine is infected, the operator of the malware can expand its functionality almost like adding apps to a smartphone. Its operators sent out another app with orders to erase it this week, leaving no tracks behind.

Much like Stuxnet, Flame is also believed to be the handiwork of a nation-state. Why are antivirus experts so concerned about Flame?How does this malware tool, spy kit(ph) and eavesdrop?Who's behind Flame, and who are they targeting, and why is it being compared to Stuxnet?

That's what we're going to be talking about this hour. Our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. My guest is Kim Zetter. She is senior reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, security and civil liberties. She's currently writing a book about Stuxnet and joins us from Oakland, California. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

Thank you.

What makes Flame different?

Well, different from the average run-of-the-mill malware that criminals use?


I think it's very important for people to unplug. Setting aside the whole question and dangers of addiction, let's assume you're not somebody who is addicted, but you are still constantly plugged in. The downsides are likely to be, first of all, no time to think, no time to just reflect on what you feel, what you think, what you've been experiencing. And wisdom really comes to us through the process of reflecting on our experience and our feelings and thoughts. So, I think people are in danger of not being able to become wise if they don't take time to think.

Plus there is this huge factor of engagement with other people. We are we're social animals. We need to be connected. There's something called limbic resonance, which is kind of an energetic resonance that gets set up between two people when they are engaged in a positive and constructive way with each other and they are able to develop the relationship. And we know that when people do not have enough of that engagement with each other, they suffer depression and they suffer in other ways. So, getting unplugged allows you to get reengaged with real people in your life that matter to you.

Let's talk a little bit about how online addiction can work in tandem with other addictions. I'm thinking about gambling. There's now all sorts of online gambling. There's also pornography.

Right.


Now turning to economics, the housing market is in a shambles. Oil and food prices are skyrocketing. The U. S.  dollar is slumping, and stocks are on a bumpy ride. Gloomy economic news is most of what we hear these days, but the choices that you make can transform your relationship to money, even through these tough economic times. Here with some big picture advice is author and economist Julianne Malveaux. She is also the president of Bennett College. Great to have you on again.

Good to be with you, Farai.

So before we dig into some practical methods that you can help turn around your economy, let's get a good picture of what's going on. Many experts say that we're already in a recession. Do you agree with that?

The data don't suggest that we are. But for African—Americans in particular, you know, when some people have a cold, other people have a fever. We have seen negative growth. We have seen high unemployment rates. We have seen the impact of gas prices over $100 a barrel. And so I think that whether we're in a technical recession or not, people are feeling the pinch of an economy that is not doing well.


Does this raise the hopes that, you know, you might be finding more exoplanets that are more like Earth because there seemed to be a little period going through here with astronomers that they were saying it may be a little more difficult than we expected, or there may not be as many in that sweet spot as expected?

Yeah, I think the arc of discovery is showing us that there's actually a lot more than anyone would have hoped. And finding them this close and this soon and this easily, as we improve our techniques, is telling us that virtually every star has planets, and a lot of systems probably have planets similar to the kind we're seeing here.

And so yeah, that greatly raises the ante in terms of the likelihood that there are similar Earths out there around stars. There's more planets in the sky now than there are stars.

A couple of questions: Does a planet have to be like, quote-unquote, "like Earth" for it to be habitable?


They're voting for him for various reasons. A, he was a very big Maidan supporter. He was clearly pushing the opposition to take a very pro-European and pro-Western stand. He was helping with those victims during the fights. He was basically becoming one of the faces of Maidan. And that's one of the reasons why people are actually voting for him. The second reason is because he is an oligarch where, actually, now they can turn to.

You know, when you have the central government break down, the people need some kind of stability. And that's not going to be civil society. It needs to be something bigger than that. And the oligarchs are coming, very interestingly, back in the picture by that. The question is not whether Poroshenko is going to win and why he's going to win - what he's going to do with his mandate. If he understands that he needs to bring in a new generation of Ukrainians and do the reform, I think Ukraine is going to be in a very good place.

Balazs Jarabik is a scholar and analyst we reached from Kiev. Thanks very much for being with us.

Thanks, really, for having me.


Yeah, yeah, for sure. I definitely had it going last night.

And where do you hope to take it next?

Well, I think the rest of the season here, I'm going to be a marked man. I think I'm going to face a little bit more double-team. It's going to be. . .

I was going to ask you, are you going to get a double team on Sunday, yeah.


The story many Americans learn as kids may reveal a lot about America's role in the world. It's a story involving Theodore Roosevelt. Before he was president, he volunteered to fight in a war. He organized the regiment in which he fought. The Rough Riders went ashore in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

On one level, this is an adventure story. Clay Risen of the New York Times felt there was more to it, that a story from the days of steam engines and horses and colonial empires was still relevant. His new book is "The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders And The Dawn Of The American Century. "

Who were the Rough Riders?

The Rough Riders were a unique volunteer regiment that was formed in the first days of the Spanish-American War. At the time, the U. S.  military was really small, and they needed to bulk up really quickly. So the U. S.  Army went out and recruited cowboys, athletes, people who you could train pretty quickly. And a lot of it was the brainchild of Theodore Roosevelt.


So crack down on the doctors, but make sure there's a support system ready for their patients.

Absolutely. And the thing is - and this is so beautiful - is that when you get to watch lives change. For myself, you know, I used to get up every single morning thinking, you know, where am I going to get my pills?And that occupied my entire day. Now, keep in mind, I was a practicing physician. So I had some other things to do. And that's what people who are, you know, who are addicted are facing every single day.

And now, you know, providing them with quality help and watching them change their lives is one of the most fun things that I've ever been involved with. We need to make that opportunity more widespread. We need to decrease the stigma around stepping out and ask for help. And also, Sacha, we need to make evidence-based treatment available without the stigma that goes along with it.

That's Dr.  Steven Loyd. He's based in Nashville, Tenn. Thanks for talking with us.


He gave him something called Ward's White Drops which didn't do anything. The poor bishop died a few months later, and Dr.  Hunter was the one who performed the autopsy. And he collected the bishop's rectum for whatever reasons and he preserved them in formaldehyde. And when he started his museum, it became one of the main things on exhibit and it's still there.

Hmm. For - yeah, for all of us to take a look at.

Mm-hmm.

What made this an outstanding candidate?Just the story like that, for your. . .


I don't want to give away how your story seems to resolve itself toward the end, but I think a lot of people would ask you why do you even talk to your mother now?Why do you care what she thinks?

Oh, my God. I love my mother to death, and I'm a writer and I'm a black, American writer, and I would not be a writer, a reader or teacher had my mother not loved me enough to instill a practice at an early age. And this book, in some way, is like her investment coming full circle. She really believes that reading and writing can save us. And I don't know if that's true, but I know I'm a writer. I know I'm an American reader, and I wanted to use my words to try to talk to her and try to tell her that we can be better. We can be better if we give ourselves a chance to walk honestly together. And that's what I tried to do with this book.

Kiese Laymon - his book, "Heavy: An American Memoir" - thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you so much for having me.


. . . Didn't make millions. I know he made a lot - who ran Bernie Sanders' campaign.

Yeah, I think it's a question of, you know, does money tempt you to do things that you might not otherwise do?

Well, you've been there. What do you say?

I like to think that you need to stay grounded, right?You need to stay grounded. You need to say to yourself, am I doing what matters to the country and our future?Or am I just thinking about just pure self-interest, the amount of money that I can amass for myself and my family?


Very good, thank you.

So, tell me a little bit about this new report you've done.

This is a very timely paper. I'm sure many people don't know, but there are essentially three different laws that are governing transracial adoptions in the United States.

We just signed on to the Hague Convention for international adoptions, which stipulates that preservation of one's culture and heritage is important, and requires 15 hours of prospective adoptive parent training.


And for some young women in those societies, it was that just order. Those kind of dashed hopes were exploited. And part of the appeal of ISIS, I think, in those early days in countries like Tunisia and for girls like Nour, was that there was no other way to be politically active, to be a feminist of any kind. It was the only door that was open.

I was about to mention the story of Nour. She was a high school dropout from Tunisia. And you make the point in the book that she was sort of rebelling against a secular state. And it was her way of expressing her female identity.

Exactly. So Nour grew up in a Tunisia that was highly authoritarian but secular. So Nour was religious. She wanted to cover her hair. She went to school wearing a headscarf. And she was thrown out of high school for that because the headscarf was banned in public spaces like that in Tunisia before the 2011 uprisings.

You described this shocking scene where she's actually attacked by her teacher.


Her fencing tutor, when she is 13, makes her his mistress. Julie says he gave everything I desired and quite a few things I hadn't known existed. Oh, my word.

(Laughter) He was her father's boss. And he was one of the great nobleman of France at the time, a very, very powerful man. And all of a sudden, she was the very young mistress and was moved into Paris so that he could keep her separate from his wife, but she wanted more. And so very quickly she got bored and she ran off with her fencing master.

Yeah. There's a lot of fencing in this book. As soon as I say that, I realize metaphorical but also actual fencing in this book.

Well, I used to fence as a kid. It's one of the reasons I know about her. I fenced all through school and college, but I have to say that I'd - when I'm writing the fencing scenes, I do jump out of my chair and grab a foil - I've still got my old swords - and I act out the scenes for myself just to make sure that they make sense.


The European soccer championships are being played in France right now, but events in the stands among fans are also making news. European soccer's governing body has given the Russian team a suspended disqualification and a fine of 150,000 euros for the behavior of dozens of Russian fans who've clashed with supporters of other teams. A number of Russian fans have also been arrested and deported from France.

Marc Bennetts is a journalist who's based in Moscow. And he spent time with Russian fans. He's the author of "Football Dynamo: Modern Russia And The People's Game. "He joins us over Skype from Moscow. Thanks so much for being with us.

No problem.

Aren't the British the original soccer hooligans?


They can get federal aid. They can get the Pell Grant. In Illinois, they can get state aid, which is up to $5,000 year. And they can qualify for university aid. They can qualify for university scholarships for needy students.

What's been the reaction to your story so far?

There's been a lot of outrage. The thing is there's only a finite amount of money. It's not limitless. So that is true for federal aid, state aid and university aid. So money that is going to these families who would not otherwise be eligible for it means that that's money that is not going to a student who really needs it. In Illinois, for example, last year, there were 82,000 students who were eligible for the state grant who did not get it because the state ran out of money.

Have you heard from federal aid officials?Has anyone weighed in on this?


As it stands now, it's getting bigger and better, and I am very hopeful that it would stay that way. At the same token, I know that it takes a smart business person to run a successful business. So it's all about how you position yourself. I'm continuously networking, and meeting with people, and developing relationships with some very prominent people. So therefore, business is prospering, and I will continue to do that.

But it would seem to me - and perhaps you can offer some clarification on this point - that there are a lot of people who are in business such as yourself, who are good at what they do, who are conscientious, who are working hard and yet who find themselves, for whatever reasons, not doing and not being as successful as they would like. And there must be something that separates you from them besides, perhaps, your business plan and your enthusiasm. Is that realistic?

That is very realistic. I mean, I think that goes with any position. You have singers, actors, and a lot of them have been in the business for years and have never made it, if you will, because certain people have it and certain people don't. You either have a drive and a knack for really connecting with people and making some things happen for yourself. Or you can be as talented as the next person, but you may never go anywhere with that talent if you don't have the right connections, the right personality and the right know-how.

You said that you've lived near the Obamas in Chicago, in the High Park area, right?


I want to say the same thing that Al Pacino says in "Godfather" - that every time he wants to quit the mafia business, they pull me in. And every time I want to retire, some customer comes and tells me how much he enjoyed the food. And there I am, back to the drawing board, trying to think of something new to make and put on the menu. I'm working on a few more things, whereby I could have a Himalaya goes West kind of restaurant. Yes, it's contradictory to what I said - that I want to retire. And then I want to. . .

I was about to say.

. . . A part of me wants to open a second place where everything is Indian and Pakistani-style hamburgers, Indian and Pakistani-style fried chicken, Indian and Pakistani-style pizza. I've already done some tacos, some tamales with the Indian spices. So sky's the limit. As long as there are other ethnic foods to draw from, I'll be busy.

That's chef Kaiser Lashkari, speaking at his Houston restaurant, Himalaya.


Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And this email from Mark in Burnsville, Minnesota: Is there a middle ground?Either you believe in evidence-based science or you don't. Some people seem unwilling or unable to accept facts that confront their belief systems and would rather live in a world that matches their internal security beliefs than deal with reality.

And I don't think, Jon Foley, you disagree with him on the science, but you disagree with him on the approach.

Well, I absolutely agree with him on evidence-based reality. I absolutely cannot - we - and never should have concede that. I'm a scientist, and I absolutely support the, you know, evidence-based view. That is one place where I will not back down on an issue at all. But I think it's really more of what we do about it and how we frame these conversations. So, you know, I will always stand by the idea that, yes, climate is changing. We are the cause of this. That is what the science is saying. That is absolutely true. We're not backing down from that at all.


The United Nations, in a new report, paints a picture of just how violent Venezuela has become. The U. N.  human rights chief says security forces have killed nearly 7,000 people over the past year and a half. She says, quote, "a shockingly high number of these were extrajudicial killings at the hands of what interviewees called death squads. "All as President Nicolas Maduro has vowed to stay in power.

NPR's Philip Reeves joins us now with more on that report. Philip, can you give us a little more detail on what the U. N.  team found in Venezuela?

Yeah. This takes a very broad look at the crisis in Venezuela over the last year up to this May. But a couple of things really leap out at you. One is the treatment of men and women in detention. The report says people are frequently arbitrarily detained and cites evidence of a variety of forms of torture - routinely used, it says - against prisoners by the intelligence or security services, others a form of punishment or to get them to talk. And that includes electric shocks, suffocation by plastic bags, waterboarding and sexual violence.

And the other striking section concerns those extrajudicial killings you mentioned. The Maduro government says, since the beginning of last year, some 7,000 people were killed in security operations, as you mentioned. And it says this was for resisting authority, as it puts it. But the U. N.  rights team believes many of these may be extrajudicial killings.


Hello.

Hello.

Now, the New York Times report that described your resignation in 1995 said that sources at the time said you had aroused opposition with your, quote, "emphasis on reshaping Planned Parenthood into a broad health organization that could compete in the era of managed care" - a focus that some of the group's affiliates felt would inevitably diminish their role as advocates for abortion rights and low-income women's access to health care.

Now, this week, in a letter explaining her ouster from Planned Parenthood, Dr.  Leana Wen said she had come to the organization to work on a broad range of health care issues but that, quote, "the new board leadership has determined that the priority of Planned Parenthood moving forward is to double down on abortion rights advocacy. "She's also said in an op-ed for The New York Times that she wanted to depoliticize abortion but that her approach seemed at odds with the direction the board wanted to go. What does this say about the trajectory of not just Planned Parenthood but also the abortion rights movement?

Certainly everybody would agree that reproductive rights are hanging the balance right now. It's a tough time, and there are two schools of thought. I think that the leadership at Planned Parenthood has to do what it thinks is right. I don't think there's a right or wrong. For my part, I would do what I did, you know, last time around.


Correct. We discovered to our surprise that the law was being used with fair frequency in an effort to prevent mass shootings. So we decided to focus on those cases, and we reported 21 of them. We can't prove that the recovery of firearms in most of those cases prevented mass shootings from happening, but we do know firearms were recovered or purchases blocked in most cases and the shootings didn't occur.

OK. So what we have here is not definitive proof that red flag laws do indeed work, but we have some anecdotal evidence that show they might be working. Could you give us an example of one or two of these cases you looked at?

Sure. A disgruntled former employee made credible threats to return to his workplace and kill co-workers. One of the employees of that company reported this to law enforcement, who determined that this person had just purchased a 12-gauge shotgun. And our mandatory 10-day waiting period before he could acquire the gun, there were about two days left. So during that time, law enforcement was able to go to a judge who reviewed the evidence, issued a restraining order and the purchase was blocked. So when law enforcement went to the man's house, they found 400 rounds of ammunition for that shotgun.

Wow. All right. So that's an example of maybe law enforcement intervening just in time so he couldn't get his hands on a gun that would have been used to perhaps kill his colleagues.


Yeah. That is right because he has been uploading a number of videos on YouTube. He was calling, basically, for the killing off of nonbelievers.

You talk about wanting the authorities to take action against Zaharan. But did you get any sense in recent years that he was attracting followers or that you saw men being drawn to radical groups?

At the time, you know, we thought that Zaharan was a loner and that, you know, he had no major following as such, except a few people in his hometown. But in 2018, December, we realized that there were basically a bunch of youths going around and damaging Buddhist statues. And we found out that Zaharan has been their mentor.

So this was in one particular village. You're saying that back in December of 2018, there were some young people who defaced some Buddhist statues.


A few hundred?

A few hundred?

A few hundred, yeah.

There is a composition on this recording "Fur Elise". . .


That's absolutely - and people are outraged at the written bylines. They just haven't taken that conversation from the words to the images.

You have cited a bombshell report in the Columbia Journalism Review by Kristen Chick. It documents assault, harassment, allegations against prominent men in the field. And you, I gather, were not surprised.

We all knew this. We all know how bad it's been. I've been in this industry for almost two decades. I've been paid less by men, overlooked on assignments that have been given to men. I've been groped and intimidated in the field and in the workplace by men. But I have been lucky for the most part. Kristen interviewed 50 women over five months, named two prominent photographers but, more importantly, detailed an industry that is rampant with physical, emotional, mental discrimination that is preventing women from being behind the camera, that is causing women to leave the industry but also that is signaling to women, this is the cost of business. This is what you have to accept if you want to do this job.

I want to drill down on one of the photojournalism agencies involved in these allegations. That's VII. It's an incredibly prominent agency, influential in the field. Can you remind us of what those allegations are about?


And since January, it's been a virtual storm of controversy. Not only these felony counts, but the city council is moving to have him removed. The governor of the state is now considering hearings to have him removed, and there's a petition drive in effect right now where they're collecting thousands of signatures to try and get him recalled.

So with all this negative publicity and apparent negative sentiment against the mayor, why doesn't he step down?

Most people in the know say that the reason that he does not step down is because being the mayor of Detroit helps him in his case, that he can leverage all kinds of things, not only fundraising things to help pay for his legal fees, but also that it helps his case that he is still in an official standing going into this criminal case.

Celeste Headlee, covering the latest in the story of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, now in jail. Celeste, thank you.


Think of it this way. So, I mean, if you had a bucket of rice, right?

Yeah.

And they're mostly white grains of rice. But in there, there are a few ones that are brown, and you know that a certain country tends to produce that mixture. Well, then you'd say I have some confidence this rice came from that country. It's like that, except that the ones that are a different color, they're not that easy to tell. You have to actually look into their genome along the many, many, many chemical letters, and you'll find a slight, slight difference. So it's very difficult.

So what is it that these scientists were doing?What were they creating along the way to try to solve the mystery of who had perpetrated this crime?


Yeah.

You know, so, yeah, I think that there are people who really enjoy - just like it's sort of a niche market that people like the Winter Olympics. But largely, I think a lot of people who couldn't tell, you know, an Olympic torch from, you know, a fire extinguisher are waiting to find out if - can we wrest the gold medal back in basketball?

Why do you think that is?I remember watching the Olympics growing up, you know, and as a young man, I mean, it was big, big deal. You wanted to watch all of it. That's how you learned about other sports that you didn't even know anything about was through watching the Olympics. But it seems of late that it's lost some of that. I don't know if it's because of the doping scandals and Marion Jones and others. Why do you think that our interest has changed?

That's a great question. But I think it's - what's happening in entertainment in general is that there's just so much on our palette. There are so much to choose from and to watch. You know, when we were kids, you know, back in oh-hundreds, you know?


Sure. There are a lot of things on the horizon right now. I know learning about the systems on the space station will be part of our training over the next two years. But, you know, right now, both Boeing and SpaceX are working on commercial crew vehicles, the CST-100 Starliner and the Dragon vehicle, so those are also possibilities. And then NASA itself is working on the Orion. So a lot of new, exciting things coming up that we could potentially be doing in the near future.

So what is your dream, though?If you could go anywhere, do anything in space, reality, you know, not even being a limit, what would you like it to be?

Honestly, right now, my dream is to go to space, so anything that NASA would give me if they assigned me to any mission I would be more than overjoyed.

I have a question because I'm the mother of a young girl who is fascinated like you were by space exploration. And especially to young girls of color, what is your message to them?


I don't know what you would do to keep them from doing it. If they can get in and steal stuff like this, how can they - how could you block the Internet down?I mean, I don't know.

Ronnie Hipshire is a retired coal miner from West Virginia.

Ronnie, thank you for talking with us about this.

Thank you. You have a blessed day.


It's time now for our Africa Update. The search begins for an African Einstein. In South Africa this week, at least two dozen people have been killed in a wave of attacks on foreigners and we look at Rwanda's new economic force, women. For more, we've got Roxanne Lawson, she's director of Africa Policy for TransAfrica Forum. Hey, Roxanne.

Hi, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. So let's talk about some disturbing news form South Africa. It's the biggest economic power on the continent and plenty of immigrants from other African nations are flooding into the country, legally or not. South Africans are accusing these immigrants of taking away jobs and causing crime, in some ways it's similar to a lot of the debates right here in the U. S.  Now, some South Africans are getting into brutal attacks on foreigners. At least 24 people have been killed in unrest that broke out a week ago. So what's the latest on the violence?

You're directly right that it actually is very much like what we see here in the United States with our migration issues. As of this morning, official reports that 217 people have been arrested, over 3,000 have been displaced and 22 people are dead.


Well, the call has gone out to our NPR listeners, who are either going to be repulsed or intrigued by what you're talking about here, Terry Lee.

Yeah.

That's toe master Terry Lee speaking with us from the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City, Yukon. Terry, good luck. Thanks so much.

Thank you very much.


We noted that you're a writing fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution. Is there a great story in every prisoner?

I think there's a great story in every human being. And that - so that - the same is true. There's a great story in every prisoner.

But the thing that I love about teaching there is just how - obviously, how much it means. The guys who are in my class - being able to sit down once a week for two hours and focus on their writing. And they've told me just to be in a quiet room, too, where, you know, I'll give them a writing assignment, and then we're quiet - they've told me that that, in many ways, is one of the things that is most valuable to them.

Without giving away the end of the novel, does Jodi go on with you in your life now?

She does to less of a degree. I mean, I think when I found the end of the book, I was able to let her go in some ways. I definitely still think about her.


Could you cite a single example of bias?

Sure. Andrew Weissman, the No. 2 member of the Mueller probe, attended the Hillary Clinton election night party. You would think with all the talented prosecutors to be asked throughout the federal system, we could likely assemble a team without having to pick the people who were engaged in the 2016 election to the extent that they would be at one of the candidates' election night parties.

Well, I mean - A, I don't know that; B, so he attended a party - I mean, public officials, like reporters - for example, I think in many ways, like representatives in Congress, who are supposed to be capable of independent and unbiased judgment when it comes to doing their jobs.

But members of Congress don't end up prosecuting people. And, you know, when you're dealing with a prosecution and potentially, you know, here, with the president the United States being investigated, I would think that you would want to avoid even the appearance of bias. And here, the bias seems to be significant. It's also laid out in the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.


So these are two guys who get along really well, who see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and who are already just starting to generate a lot of enthusiasm that was, frankly, kind of lacking in parts of the Republican Party.

Do you know how this decision was made, why Mr.  Romney was so silent for so long and then finally said, OK, it's Paul Ryan?

Well, that's the way it typically works. But we do know that he was, up to the last minute, vetting a few possible options. And interestingly, these options are sort of often divided into two categories: The safe which is Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rob Portman of Ohio, and then the bold, which might be Marco Rubio of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey. And Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is sort of in that bold category.

But, you know, the opposite of safe is bold. The opposite of safe can also be risky. And as excited as parts of the Republican base are about Paul Ryan, parts of the Democratic base are also really excited about being (technical difficulties) Romney, through proposals that Paul Ryan is made in the House that have been very controversial.

So he may add a little pizzazz to this campaign on both sides.


There are politicians from a wide variety of political parties that complain that the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who is an Arab Shiite, that he has simply too much power. And critics have taken to calling him a dictator on TV over the last week. They're comparing his style of governance to Saddam Hussein. And they're basically holding up ratification and calling for a reform proposal that would curb many of Nouri al-Maliki's powers.

Meanwhile, Maliki's advisers are accusing these parties of using the American-Iraqi Treaty as a way to twist the prime minister's arm. They're calling this a desperate ploy for rival politicians to try to win popular support from the Iraq people.

So, Ivan, what are the prospects now for this status of forces agreement?It's intended to replace a U. N.  mandate which governs U. S.  troops being there. It's set to expire at the end of this year.

Well, that raises a lot of questions. The Iraqi prime minister has said he will not extend the United Nations mandate. The U. S.  has threatened, from what we're hearing from some Iraqi lawmakers, to begin withdrawal immediately.


From NPR News, I'm Farai Chideya. For Wednesday, February 13th, this is News and Notes.

From NPR News, This s News and Notes. I'm Farai Chideya. The White House race only gets hotter, especially if you're John McCain. Yesterday the Arizona Senator picked up the Potomac primary wins in Washington, D. C.  and Maryland. He also took Virginia, where Mike Huckabee put up a good fight. The victories are edging McCain closer to the GOP candidate seat, and as for the Democrats, yesterday was all Barack Obama. He swept the Potomac Primaries and stacked up key delegate points. Joining me now to sort through the numbers is Ron Elving. He's NPR's senior Washington editor. Hi, Ron.

Hello, Farai.

So how many delegates did McCain pick up?

McCain picked up a little over a hundred, possibly as many as 113, depending on how they sort out Maryland. But he got everything in Virginia, all 30 delegates, despite the fact he only won by nine percentage points. That's the way the Republican rules work. You can win certain winner take all states, no matter what your plurality or majority may be, you get all the delegates. So he did that in Virginia and the District of Columbia and he'll get virtually all of the delegates in Maryland. So he picked up somewhere between 100 and 113 delegates. It puts him pretty much out of sight. He's got more than three times as many as Mike Huckabee.


Well, Lyrics Born, thanks so much.

Thank you. My pleasure.

Rapper and producer Lyrics Born's new album is "Everywhere At Once. "He joined us from the studios at UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

(Rapping) I came a long way From eating off-brand rice I came a long way From writing fourth grade rhymes I came a long way To get my pay grade high Baby, you ain't never heard me come the same way twice.


Not the algorithm?

Not the algorithm. He gets a little credit at the bottom.

How much of what I read every day in the L. A.  Times is written by an algorithm?

Well, the only places we really use it is for, you know, earthquakes, and just the initial reports, and if you are a reader of our homicide report, which tracks every homicide back since 2007, anything that we couldn't get further information on, that we just have basic details on, gets templatized into a robo-post as well.


Well, I brought it back from that evening on the island of Roatan, and he processed it. He had to crunch the data. There was also data that had to come from Houston that had been collected by them, and all those had to be combined to make this map. And he was working till the wee hours of the morning making these maps. And then the Internet connection was down so he went to bed. His name is Michael Sartori, by the way. He was a really fascinating guy.

But then he uploaded those images in the morning to Houston and the - one of the directors of NCALM, this organization, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, a guy named Bill Carter, was the first one to look at the images and he was in West Virginia. He was about to go out and buy a refrigerator or something, and this email came in with these images attached.

He looked at them, and he said, oh, my God. He was thunderstruck. He almost immediately saw in this valley pyramids, structures, buildings, plazas, terracing, roads. He saw this incredible amount of archaeological features that he recognized immediately even though he's not an archaeologist.

So not just a lost city, a lost civilization?


Thank you for having me.

Let's begin with the top line of the report. We certainly know retail is suffering. We see stores all over America closing. Midtown Manhattan is having problems with retail space. We assume it's online shopping and delivery. But how many job losses do you fix specifically to the role of private equity?

Well, we found that over the last decade, 1. 3 million people lost their jobs at retailers that had been acquired by Wall Street private equity firms and hedge funds. During that same 10-year period, the retail sector had actually added an additional 1 million jobs. So what we find is that in key areas, Wall Street firms are destabilizing retailers. Toys R Us is a good example. Toys R Us was highly profitable when it filed for bankruptcy. Their private equity owners had loaded the company with debt and did not really invest in necessary technology upgrades to support e-commerce and to make it viable.

Well, let's peel back a phrase like Toys R Us was highly profitable when it filed for bankruptcy. That wouldn't seem to fit in the same sentence. But how do you explain that?


Right, but it was not my choice to be here. And this is what people forget. I applied for asylum in 27 different countries around the world, and it was the government, the United States government, then-Secretary John Kerry, that canceled my passport as I was leaving from Hong Kong en route to Ecuador. And this locked me in place.

I believe they panicked. And I think the reason that I'm in Russia today is because what we know - this was actually publicly reported in 2013. Every time one of these other countries, one that the United States public would be much more comfortable with - a France, a Norway, a Germany - one of two people would call the Foreign Ministry of that country. And it would be either Secretary of State John Kerry or then-Vice President Joe Biden.

The idea here is they would go, look; we understand that he has been charged with political crimes. This means you don't qualify for extradition, and you almost always do qualify for asylum protections. And the government - we know you can do this, but if you do, we want you to understand there will be a response. We're not going to say what it will be, but it will be severe because we don't want to see the public seeing this guy as a whistleblower, which the public then was coming around to do.

You say the U. S.  government panicked. Did the U. S.  government panic, or just they felt it was important to the national interest of the United States to make certain you - your movement was limited?


Let's start with the AP style guide - maybe I should say the Associated Press style guide because we're going to be talking about abbreviations. Those sometimes present decisions, right?Do we always need the say Internal Revenue Service on first reference?Doesn't everybody kind of know the UN or FBI by its initials, or NPR for that matter?So AP has now ruled about BLT.

They have. We can say BLT on first reference. Now I should start out by saying that NPR - we have our own standards and styles, but we usually are in line with AP's. In this case, I found a reference going back, at least to 2002 by someone named Scott Simon. . .

(Laughter) Oh, no.

. . . Who referred to a BLT as a BLT without saying bacon, lettuce and tomato.

I bring this up though because, as I don't have to tell you of all people, Mark, there are initials that have entered everyday language because they're abbreviations for profanities.


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

And what about the value of closed-door sessions?Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and top adviser, met with the committee behind closed doors this week. What's the value of that to the committee even as it frustrates the public a bit?

Well, there are pluses and minuses to it. It's best if it's a preparation for a public session. Committee staff, for example, will do a behind-closed-doors questioning very thoroughly and minutely using documents in a way that you don't see so much in a public session. So it can be good preparation. It's also, in this particular situation, it's possible that there's a mixture of classified and non-classified material and you sort that out during the behind-closed-doors.

It sounds like you're describing a dress rehearsal or something like that.


No, that didn't happen until after the article came out.

Really?

Yeah. I didn't get a ton of responses on Craigslist. I think people probably just saw it and thought it was a weird curiosity. And, you know, I didn't want it to be - I'm going, you know, I'm putting on my anthropologist hat and I'm going into black America and I'm going tell you what black America's like, because it really wasn't about that. It was more about - there are lots of different, you know, cultural bubbles that we live in and the Venn diagrams often don't overlap, and for some reason we don't seem to care about that anymore.

Almost every day, I see some newspaper article that has sent some reporter to some place where someone is having a racial moment. You know, whether it's. . .


This has been just week one of the trial. And as we noted, there's another Manafort trial ahead. And gosh knows what the fallout will be in reporting about the lobbying industry. But do you - is it possible, do you think, that the lobbying industry - is it some kind of break point, as arguably it was, let's say, a decade ago about the Jack Abramoff revelations?

It might be, particularly for foreign interests. I know that there's a lot of concern from the president on down of people everywhere trying to get at America and learn our interests and learn our secrets. And there may be some attempt to have more transparency about public lobbying for foreign interests.

I mean, the suggestion is, they'd just walk out on K Street, hire somebody, and that's how they'd do it.

Right. That's right. And I think people would say, I think we need to have a little bit more oversight. You know, we don't want individuals - American lobbyists - looking for secrets and then selling them to our foreign adversaries. It kind of reminds me in a way of, like, the 1950s. You know, we're all real nervous about what foreigners are doing, so let's pass some laws to make sure that America doesn't help our enemies.


Andrew, Ivan Golunov has been a vocal critic of the Russian government. But his arrest is, apparently, unusual.

Right. Yeah, I do think it's unusual. You know, when - attacks on journalists do happen in Russia and, you know, journalists have been beaten. They've been killed for their reporting in certain cases. But the idea that drugs would be planted on a journalist, that's a more unusual case here. It leaves sort of very little daylight between the journalist's reporting and kind of direct pressure being put on him by the government. So to be honest, I've been here for eight years, and I can't remember a case similar to this one. And I think that that in particular is what made people so angry about what's going on.

There wasn't even a requirement to sort of exact violence against him, but this idea that if Ivan can have drugs planted on him while he's walking through Moscow then literally anybody could have drugs planted on him, as well. And I think that that's what made people so nervous about the case, specifically among journalists, and that's why we've seen such a backlash.

Andrew Roth is Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian.


When you first started out, though, as - performing in those amateur clubs, what was that like?

It was great because it was new. You know, comedy in itself was illegal. We had a few satirists but no - first of all, there were no black comedians. I mean, as a black person you were lucky if you're allowed to speak, never mind tell jokes in public, you know?So we had a few white South Africans who challenged the status quo, guys like Pieter-Dirk Uys, who was a legend in the country, and he got arrested many times. You got arrested if you did that. So for us young-uns, we came up and it was just this free speech - we had verbal diarrhea, just run around and just, you know, I can say this now. I can say anything now and that's what we've been doing.

Where did you learn the technique though?

From my family. Storytelling is an African tradition. You know, you laugh. And if you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest amongst the nations who have been persecuted the most. In America, the stronghold of comedy was always amongst Jewish people. And that's what many Jewish families have said, is that without their food and their laughter, they wouldn't have gotten through what happened to them as a people, you know?And that's what happened to black people all over the world. As you learned to find joy in your pain, you know, that's where the music comes from. That's where the culture comes from. That's literally - with the oppression will come the laughter.


(Laughter).

. . . The future seems to be getting here, doesn't it?

Well, we've always joked on "Men In Blazers," Scott, that soccer has been America's sport of the future since 1972. But that future is very much now. So next Friday, next Saturday we are holding BlazerCon, which is kind of a Comic-Con but for football. You could say it's like Comic-Con but nerdier, where football fans from across America will come together in Brooklyn and meet with some of the elite global thinkers who are shaping the tectonic plates of football from the Premier League Chairman Richard Scudamore, Christian Siefert, who runs Bundesliga, the gentleman that runs Liverpool, Manchester City, Everton Football Club, as well as the U. S.  women's national team players, MLS owners. It's going to be an absolute cacophony of really exploring joyously the future of football globally, but more importantly, I guess for us, how this game is going to evolve in America in the next decade.

Roger Bennett, host of "Men In Blazers," thanks so much. Hope to talk to you soon, Roger.


The videos of the embryos. He does sort of time lapse of human development, and it was really fascinating to watch, going from this sort of little hard to, you know, nondescript ball to what you would recognize. . .

As an embryo.

. . . as an embryo or a fetus.

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow talking with Flora Lichtman about our Video Pick of the Week, and it's a - videos of embryos, all different kinds of embryos. So you got the film, the footage. . .


It's very different, obviously, from normal public sculpture. I have to use materials which obviously don't pollute in any way, that are friendly to the marine life. They're also durable. The idea, especially with a lot of the tropical pieces that make artificial reefs, is that they're going to be around for a very long time. Obviously corals, you know, can - hard corals can take ages to really get established.

Do the elements always behave as you would like them to?Is that a real challenge?

It works in both ways. I mean, obviously they're all designed to change and evolve in the ecosystem where they're placed. And sometimes that provides spectacular results. You know, we get sort of pink and purple corals and sponges and all these amazing things growing on them and morphing them. And that only adds to them. They really sort of then become alive. But also you're in this really kind of difficult environment. You're in the sea. So in tropical areas, you get big hurricanes, you get the surges of waves. And so with that in mind, you know, I really have to sort of program them then so they're fixed. And that can be a challenge.

I wonder, is part of the appeal you want to make to people with these installations, you have to work a little to see them?


Greetings.

The WHO says the crisis is worse than they'd estimated. What are you hearing?

Indeed. And Keiji Fukuda of the WHO is warning that the speed and the spread of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is unprecedented. And he says it has never spread as fast and over such a large area. We're talking about four countries. It started in Guinea and then crossed the border into Sierra Leone and then Liberia with a few cases in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. And he cites factors such as families hiding sick relative, as you said, Scott, instead of taking them early to Ebola health centers, which, of course, gives them the best chance of survival. And the WHO describes what it calls shadow zones. That medical workers cannot enter because of resistance from communities. And we've seen problems like that in Liberia - the hardest hit of the countries.

And what countries are blocking entry to travelers and how is that likely to affect them?


Well, speaking of that, sir, you're the only Democrat to support President Trump's nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel. Republican SEnator McCain won't support her. Why does she have your vote?

Gina Haspel has my vote. I sat on in intelligence, so I've been privileged as one of a hundred senators - there's only 15 of us to get to see the deep dive, if you will, into the intelligence. That gives me the comfort level I have. Forget about being a Democrat or a Republican. Here's a woman of impeccable career with the United States government, working in some of the most dangerous places in the world. She's done everything asked about. She didn't break any laws. No one said she's broken a law. They're asking her on her moral values. After 9/11, this was the rules of engagement of what they were doing for intelligence gathering. I have not found a reason for me not to vote for the most qualified person I've ever seen come before us in that agency. She was - she was not in charge. And everyone makes it look like she made these decisions. They were not her decisions to make.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Thank you, Lulu.


What are you going to do when your internet connection goes down?

We have actually, so far, been able - we have reporters who are also out of town that we're in touch with. We're determined that we're going to keep reports on this storm on the internet, no matter how we do it. We've got a lot of backup for that at www. dailycomet. com and at Houmatoday. com.

We're determined that we're going to keep reports on this storm on the internet, no matter how we do it. We've got a lot of backup for that at www. dailycomet. com and at Houmatoday. com. We didn't stop yet and we don't plan to stop.

You have reporters out trying to cover this story all over where this hurricane is going. There must be some point where you say and where the reporters say to you "Hey, I got to stop for a while because there's a hurricane coming. "


OK.  Let's talk taxes. The latest GOP tax plan sailed through the House of Representatives this week. It's now in the Senate. What will be the greatest challenge there. Could it fail there, or is it likely to pass?They need a win.

Well, they already have - the Republicans already have some problems going on with even some of their most conservative members. So you've got Ron Johnson from Wisconsin who's already said, I won't vote for this bill in the way it stands. Someone like Susan Collins objects to the fact that the repeal of the individual mandate - the health care mandate - has been attached to this bill. So while it passed through the House pretty easily, the Senate is an incredibly different climate. You have people like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake who are a little bit of - you know, they're sticking in the craw of Republican leaderships because they're - you know, they're sort of doing. . .

Deficit hawks. Yeah.

Yes, exactly.


China's been the fastest-growing major economy in the world for decades. That growth is slowing now. Last month's devaluation of China's currency shook global trading markets. And this week, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the U. S.  will hold China accountable for exchange rate fluctuations that caused the recent stock market plunge. But the numbers from China's state-controlled economy are always a little suspect. NPR's Frank Langfitt is traveling in western China to see what the real economy looks like outside of Shanghai. Frank, thanks for being with us.

Good morning, Scott.

And tell us where you are and what you're seeing, please.

Well, I'm in this place called Luliang. It's a city of three to four million, very large area, and it's coal country. There are mountains. There are factories. It's kind of a little like China's Appalachia in a way, except a big difference is until recently, the place was really booming. If you went back to 2010, GDP here was 21 percent. It was enormous. Last year, the place went into recession and was down actually 2 percent. And basically, the last couple days I've been driving all over the area, and the economy here is really a mess.


Donald Trump questioned John McCain's war heroism. He suggested that Senator Ted Cruz's father was involved with the Kennedy assassination. He slurred Senator Cruz's wife. What do you say to colleagues who just say, I'm sorry, our nominee just shouldn't be someone who talks like that?

Well, you know, and I've heard that from a number of people. And I've said to them, look, you know what, not asking you to fall in love with him. Let's just fall in line as a party because we're facing now the greatest challenge I think we've seen, not just as a party but our country.

And I'm more concerned with a Never Hillary (laughter) than a Never Trump. And I just don't understand how an Obama, Clinton or Sanders agenda would be good for the country. And I'm just thinking right now for our country, we need to come together. For our party, we need to come together.

Republicans have called Donald Trump a demagogue and a racist - prominent Republicans - for statements on mass deportations, Mexican immigrants and barring Muslims from the United States. What do you say to them?


Absolutely. In fact, Dr.  Landreth and his colleagues have replied to these four and said no, no, no, wait. I mean, while the general tenor is you've got four papers that didn't replicate our findings, there are elements of these papers that, in fact, do replicate their findings.

So, in particular, some of the behaviors improved in some of the animals that were tested in these other studies, and a particular form of the amyloid - the so-called soluble amyloid, or the oligomeric form of the amyloid - was in fact replicated in these other papers.

So Dr.  Landreth and colleagues are saying no, no, no. I mean, some features weren't, but in general, the basic premise was replicated.

Since that original study came out, did you have patients that actually came to specifically asking for this drug based on the reports they heard in the news?


Well, the main thing is it's this stew of ingredients that really never quite come together right. We have people from all over the world who come here to visit and to party and it's a lot of them just to live or to get away from something. Then we have the fact that it's basically a swamp. I mean, I live in a swamp. Right now, we have an infestations of Burmese pythons, gigantic snakes, roaming around the Everglades, and it just never, ever calms down. down here.

You make it sound like it's a city that's been only nominally reclaimed from the wilds of swampland.

It hasn't been reclaimed. When I first moved here, the first day of my life as a homeowner in South Florida, I walked out onto my lawn to get the newspaper, and on my lawn were crabs. Like, not just a few but hundreds and hundreds of crabs, and they were not happy about me being there because it turns out it was crab mating season. And they were, like, waving their pinchers at me, like, angrily, like, I wanted to mate with their women. I didn't want their women. Their women are crabs, you know. But they didn't know that - or maybe they were bitter about that. I don't know. But I remember sprinting back into my house barefoot, afraid to go out and get the paper. I thought where I have I moved?I lived in Pennsylvania. We had crabgrass. But here we have crabs.

You really love Miami, don't you?You're from Pennsylvania, but you really love Miami.


We have - what we've done is we have our reporters strategically placed in such a way that they are as safe as we could expect under the circumstances. We're certainly not going to ask them to do anything that's foolish. They're embedded with authorities at different places and so they're, you know, following the instructions of the emergency personnel that they are with.

When you say that 90 percent of the people have left the area, 10 percent haven't. Who's staying behind after the devastation of three years ago and why?

Some of the people who stayed behind or have said they're staying behind we've spoken to, are just very stubborn people who have said that they're not leaving, that they didn't have to leave for the other storms and that they're not leaving for this one. I've spoken with a few of them.

John DeSantos, city editor for the Daily Comet from Thibodeaux, Louisiana.


Yes. I mean, it's an insurmountable difference. I sell Canadian lobsters most of the year. I probably sell more Canadian lobsters than I sell U. S.  lobsters. But I can't sell Canadian lobsters to China either, which is kind of defeating the purpose. And conversely, they made it so the Canadians could sell a U. S.  lobster as a Canadian. So it's like you got double screwed. That's really disheartening.

Have you been in touch with your buyers or your former buyers in China?What have they been telling you?

We've tried to keep in touch with them all along because it's always been - you never knew when this was going to end. There was no defined end. And it's just gone on and on and on. And everybody was getting a little hopeful that we might have some resolution in the next couple of months. And we had the tweets this weekend, which pretty much put the kibosh on that. So you sink back into despair.

I imagine you have been tracking very closely every development of these trade talks. Have you reached out to the Trump administration or any members of Congress to tell them that things are getting extremely tight for the lobster business now?


You're right. I mean, by the time "Star Trek" came along I haven't - I'd met the love of my life, lost him, I had divorced my children's father; my boys were about 9 and 10. And I was just shot out of a cannon into the most extraordinary work I've ever done in my life or will ever be asked to do because nothing could more challenging, more arduous or rewarding than that part on that series.

Than being Captain Janeway.

That's correct.

I want to go back to your daughter, and you had her decades ago. It was clearly a different time. Do you ever think about how your life would be different if you had made a different decision?


All right. Let's run through two of the main issues. . .

Yeah.

. . . Briefly. One is Carter Page, the former Trump campaign aide. The Democratic memo contends Page was under surveillance for many reasons which initially had nothing to do with the controversial Steele dossier.

Yeah. I mean, I think - look, I think that everyone agrees that that's sort of part of what's going on here. Carter Page had long had contacts with Russian intelligence officers, apparently unwitting to him. At one point, it appears he may have been working with the FBI to talk about those folks. And so that has now come out. And it's pretty clear. We've known this for a while, though. These are facts that we've known or at least we've heard rumors of.


Yeah.

You're just sitting there going, wow!You know, if you just do a double take, you're like, that's him on screen. It was amazing. Just the way he held the mic, the way he stood in front of the mic, all of it was so much of Biggie.

I have to say, I can't wait to see it. I got a chance to interview Biggie at one of the big awards shows, like, 10, 12 - no, it's longer than that. Anyway, I'm old. But anyway.

Yeah, we all are.


And as for the question of who you scrutinize, it's fascinating. There's now an enormous case going on in Minneapolis I'll bet you've never heard of of a fella named Tom Petters.

I have not heard of him.

See. He's been convicted of a variety of things that seem to have scammed billions of dollars from hedge funds and many people in the twin cities who trusted him, and much of the Madoff thing is kinship because of what - you know, Madoff is Jewish, and a lot of Jews were in there. But this fellow was some sort of evangelical Christian - or is, I guess, and he got a lot of evangelical Christians.

It's - it is happening - I've been around 40 years, and I've seen it over and over again that people frequently scam their own communities because that's where they're trusted, and people don't do their homework on people they trust.


Exactly, after Dennis. And the greatest compliment a button-maker can get - she used it in her speech to the 1996 convention in Chicago.

You, of course, we'll stipulate, produce buttons for both major parties, yes?

We are an equal opportunity offender. We did I liked Hillary four years ago, but we did a very nice Chelsea button: don't tell mama but I'm voting for Obama.

Oh my God. Now, who pays for a button like that?


The size of the painting certainly is a huge challenge. And because we're capturing so much data with a variety of imaging techniques, we're generating terabytes of data that, down the line, we'll be using computer analysis and artificial intelligence to actually interpret some of the data. So that is a sort of a goal down the line to actually figure out the best way to look at this kind of information.

So shoring up IT.

That is certainly one of the goals. That doesn't mean to say that you still don't need the experts. In our Night Watch research team, we have experts of all different kinds - curators, art historians, conservators, scientists. You still need those experts, you know, for interpretation of the data. But I mean, you want to take away a lot of the manual work, a lot of the looking. And that's where artificial intelligence and computers will be very helpful.

Well, I'm sure Rembrandt couldn't imagine that. Right?


To the outside world, your mother, a progressive voice, but what was going on inside the family?

My mother was dealing with a lot of what black women were dealing with in Jackson, Miss. So from the outside, it looked like she was doing really well. She was on television - local television - doing political prognostication. She was in an abusive relationship. She did not make much money. She was dealing with what I would call, like, the shards of abuse. And, you know, when I was around 9 or 10, she started to whip me when I didn't do right. And she would always say she was whipping me because what I would face from police or white people would be even harsher.

And those beatings just I think started to get progressively worse, and I think that the beatings my mother was taking from life, from our town, from her partner, also started to get progressively worse. And I think the scariest part about it looking back is that we just didn't know how to talk about any of it. We didn't know how to talk about what we were doing to one another, and we didn't really know how to talk about what the world and our state was doing to us.

As the very title suggests, that the cost of trauma, including, for example, the beatings you endured from your mother, the beatings that she endured, all of that takes a toll on our bodies. What happened to you?


This has been a longstanding feature of Libya. The United Arab Emirates and Egypt had been backing General Khalifa Haftar - giving him weapons, conducting airstrikes. And the Tripoli forces have turned to Turkey, who's now providing weapons as well. And so it's a very cynical game, and Libyans are just paying the price for it.

And meanwhile, back to the migrants who, of course - as we mentioned, there's at least 44 who died in this latest attack.

Right.

They're trying to get to Europe. What now?I mean, as you mentioned, the EU has this policy of turning them around, and they end up back in these detention centers and then presumably - what?- trying to make the trip again.


So, I'm a little concern about that, especially with the amount of technology connections that they have made through this campaign, and the amount of donors that they've received through online mechanisms. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. But, clearly somebody is going to want that data Farai. There's no way out that the Democratic. . .

Don't let Sascha get a hold of the mass email list. And you know, start asking for Christmas presents or something.

Let me tell you, somebody in the Democratic Party. . .

I'm glad you clarified that. Somebody in the Democratic Party is definitely saying, hmm, that's a gold mine of data sitting right there.


And to do that you have to make time as a real thing.

Well sure because if laws can change in time, then there's nothing beyond time. And this is. . .

Yeah, I understand. How would then - how would the laws of nature then change over time?What is the mechanism that they would be changing or change them?

Well, since I'm a scientist, my job once coming to the philosophical idea that they have to change, is to invent hypotheses as to how they might change. And the whole point is that these hypotheses, since they're about the past, should be testable by observations we can make. So in the book "Time Reborn" I consider several of these hypotheses.


For sure. I remember I approached my mom with an article by the CDC and asked why, according to the CDC, vaccines don't cause autism and why mercury is not this extremely dangerous substance and poison found in vaccines that, you know, some people like herself would claim. And her response was simply, that's what they want you to think.

And I was just blown away that, you know, the largest health organization in the entire world would be written off with a conspiracy theory-like statement like that. And so moments like that I can recall back to, where I just thought, like, the concern with the evidence is not here.

When did you get vaccinated?When did you start?

I had two vaccines when I was 2 years old. My mom claims that one of those did not happen, or it happened against her will, and the only vaccine I should have gotten was a tetanus shot when I was 2. And that was it. Alongside that, I've never got any other vaccines - hepatitis, polio - anything.


South Africa has some very liberal policies. It has a very liberal constitution on migration and immigration. I think with that, though, is a history since 1994 of xenophobia and of a backlash against that very liberal migration policy. We saw in 1994 the Inkatha Freedom Party actually really try to take physical action, or threatened to take physical action if the government failed to crack down on undocumented workers in South Africa.

We saw similarly later on that decade a study that was done by the Human Sciences Research Council, an institute for security studies in South Africa, that reported that 65 percent of South Africans were in support of forced repatriation of undocumented migrants in their country.

And so I think that history - history of violence against not just Zimbabweans, but Somalis, Mozambiquans and Angolans has just played itself out in larger and larger ways here in the last couple of weeks. And that Zimbabwe has been, I mean, Zimbabwe and South Africa, both governments, have been trying to respond to this recent wave of migration. But their responses have not been enough.

Alright. I want to move on to an interesting initiative. Physicist Steven Hawking is looking for Africa's Einstein. What he wants to do with a bunch of entrepreneurs and scientists is to create Africa's post-graduate centers for advanced math and physics, places that don't exist yet. And it's planned to cost 75 million British pounds, or over 150 million U. S.  dollars. Hawking said, quote, the world of science needs Africa's brilliant talents. So what exactly is this plan going to do?


You know, like, you could sleep on concrete every day in your life, and if you try to sleep on a warm bed, you wouldn't be able to sleep because it's not cold.

Our story, Miracle on the Streets, came to us from independent producer Dmae Roberts and the NPR program Hearing Voices.

Coming up in the program, we switch gears a bit and get funny with "Saturday Night Live's" Andy Samberg. Samberg and two other very funny dudes are the band Lonely Island. They have a new album; it's called "Incredibad. "Maybe that means songs so bad that they're good. Our critic Andrew Wallenstein brings us a review. That's coming up later on in the program.

Day to Day returns in a moment.


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.

Mm-hmm. So you rushed this data off to the computer guy and he did his magic. How did you - what did you - when did you actually see the picture?

Well, I brought it back from that evening on the island of Roatan, and he processed it. He had to crunch the data. There was also data that had to come from Houston that had been collected by them, and all those had to be combined to make this map. And he was working till the wee hours of the morning making these maps. And then the Internet connection was down so he went to bed. His name is Michael Sartori, by the way. He was a really fascinating guy.


Yeah.

And I thought it was important to bring that to them.

When you approach prison administrators and ask them to distribute this inside their facility, what has their reaction generally been?Is there resistance?

Well, initially from some there was. I mean, here is this guy. He was formerly incarcerated. He comes out in less than a year, and he wants to bring material back in. . .


So a country that was bought by the United States 100 years ago - you're celebrating the centennial this year, and there are still so many other islands that are essentially controlled by European countries, as well - like the Netherlands, France and Britain - that were impacted by Irma. And we've seen a pattern in the response. How has the United States talked about it in your view?

The United States has talked about us as if we are effectively a colony, which is that we are secondary. We are perhaps secondary types of Americans. Now, we do carry American passports in the Virgin Islands, but we don't have federal representation.

We cannot vote for president for example. Our congresswoman, who - we vote for her - she cannot vote in Congress. So we really have no say. But I also think that this has to do with just the way that we are thought of in the national imagination as a place for a vacation and respite. And it's a beautiful place. The Virgin Islands is as beautiful as everybody says.

It is a gorgeous, pristine, absolutely divine place. However, it's a place where human beings also live. So, you know, when Americans travel to Europe, for example, they know that they're traveling to Europe to engage with the cultural history. When people travel to the Caribbean, they are often traveling to avoid the human beings and to just engage in the beauty of the space.

So they're in resorts. They're lying in the sun. They're drinking tropical, rum-infused drinks, but they're not necessarily there for the culture or to talk to the people who live there?


And, of course, this gourmet chef has, as his confidant, food critic, and food taster, his cat named Apollo. So as you can expect, everything goes wrong that day. The question is, can everything be put right?

And we'll leave it with that because, I mean, there's such a lovely surprise at the end that we should let people get to on their own. So Steinbeck - did he write a lot of short stories as well?

He wrote a good number of short stories, but this is one of the few that has some very fine, comic elements to it. When I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, is this John Steinbeck?I mean, nobody's dead; nobody's crying. There was some crying in this story, but a lot of it just was very funny. And he just manages to take a very simple theme and, with great turns of phrase, fantastic prose, turn it into something that - when I read it, I said to myself, this is a little gem. And I was just so, so excited to be reading this.

Yeah, I feel like it was - if someone suggested the topic, no other writer could have made it just shine and come to life in this really cool way.


We get to have some of these first-time discussions with parents where they didn't realize my student who graduates high school - wait a minute, you're telling me that they - in the state of Tennessee, they have the opportunity for two years or for a technical certificate program free of cost to me?And sometimes they tear up. Sometimes they're speechless. Sometimes I reach across the room and - to shake hands with two hands. Sometimes I give hugs to a mother who has nothing to say. She's shaking and she's crying. And these are lasting moments. These are the things that keep us going when otherwise it may seem we have a whole lot of bad news to deliver.

As an educator, Mr.  Leddy, do you have any concern that, you know, the mentality sometimes goes that because it's free, students - everybody involved might not take it seriously and treat community college as just a continuation of high school?

I've heard that. I don't share the view. At the high school level, where we are, and when we see the struggles the students have, when we see parents working two, three, four jobs to try to afford the basics, the subsistence needs for their families - that argument or that view kind of rings hollow. Our students are very appreciative. Our students feel that they're valued. They feel like someone is listening at the state level and someone is looking out for their futures.

The program is funded by the - by the Tennessee state lottery. So I guess if you want to - if you want to support education, buy a lottery ticket.


Not necessarily. Sinkholes can happen for many different reasons at different times. However, we do tend to see sinkholes occur more often during high precipitation events, so during a wet season, for instance. The - if you have a void underground and in the soil it tends to work its way toward the surface. And so then you have - and we don't necessarily see any kind of subsidence on the surface if it's a nice, tight, clay soil.

But when you add a lot of water to it, you're adding - you know, water weighs a lot. So you're adding that weight to that soil bridge, basically, over that void. And once you get to a certain amount of weight, it'll collapse. The other situation is during droughts. Water tables will drop, so that'll give you a little bit more instability for what's on the surface, but also clay holds water very well.

And during a drought, you might dry up the water that's in that clay. And clay, you know, that water is basically like a glue. It's adhesive. And if you lose that adhesion, you also can get sinkholes.

Is there a way to detect if you have a sinkhole under your property someplace?


Why is there - at least I can't come up with somebody who is quite like Mary McGrory, male or female, that's a columnist now. Or am I wrong?

You know, I think that the one thing that really stood out to me the most about Mary - and it literally got mentioned in every single interview I conducted for the book - was that she went out and did her legwork, that she went out there every day and talked to people and didn't just write a column from the comfy confines of her office.

Yeah, she wasn't just a pundit.

She wasn't just a pundit. Into her 80s, she was out there covering presidential primaries, having friends and family hurtle her over snow banks in Manchester. And I think that really distinguished her writing and her as a personality.


Well, actually, there are several sets of defendants. In the case of the manufacturers, the claim is that they created, through fraudulent means, a demand for opioids in the case of chronic pain, which was not the practice prior to their efforts.

And you said there's other targets of lawsuits.

Yes. The distributors and the retail sellers have also been sued. Where they have gotten into trouble is that they haven't monitored suspicious orders. And there have been cases where literally millions of doses have been shipped to small communities, clearly in excess of any legitimate demand.

If the federal government brings its own lawsuit against these companies as President Trump has called for this week - is that just going to duplicate what states and localities are doing?Or does the federal government have a different role here?


I don't think he is. I haven't heard him talk about the Constitution or small government. It's hard to say you espouse conservative principals and small-government principals when you are saying that you think Canadian health care system works and it's wonderful.

An NBC Wall Street Journal poll shows that Mr.  Trump has a very high favorability rating among conservative talk radio listeners. Do you have listeners that say to you you're wrong about this?

(Laughter) Not yet. I have lots of listeners who say that I'm wrong on this, but that's OK. I speak my mind, and my opinion is my opinion, nothing more and nothing less. I look for a man of integrity, humility, who is rooted in the Constitution - because if you root yourself in the Constitution, we can't go too far left, and we can go too far right. We are held by principles we all used to declare we found self-evident.

Do you have any sense of rivalry with Donald Trump?


U. S.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran for the latest incidents and used strong language, calling them an attack on international peace and security as well as an assault on freedom of navigation. Iran maintains that it had no role in the explosions and called the U. S.  accusations part of a campaign against Iran. And all of this is taking place as the Trump administration is hoping to pressure Iran for what it considers better terms after earlier pulling the U. S.  out of the deal aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear campaign.

So in this moment of rising tension, we thought it would be helpful to get perspective from someone who's been involved in previous negotiations between the two nations. Gary Sick negotiated the agreement that ended the hostage crisis that began during the Carter administration. He's now a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Middle East Institute. Gary Sick, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

It's good to be with you.

How do you view what happened this week?


Oh, no. There was a rally last week, but it was a - that was a buffoon bus. And it was a - it was a freak show, to be honest with you. I mean, it really was bizarre. I mean, it was a bunch of people from out of town in a bus, you know, yelling and screaming. I mean, it really was not much of anything, but. . .

I just want to interject. They may not share that characterization, but go ahead please, sir.

Yeah, I'm sure they don't, but it's accurate (laughter). But I really had no serious challenge from the left or the right. My re-election prospects looked quite good, actually. Most of my colleagues have multiple opponents. You know, I had just one who announced in the right, and I had one who announced from the left, but neither of whom are particularly viable.

Why leave when, arguably, your voice - it's more important than ever that you be heard?


Oh. . .

. . . Believe and understand it should be.

. . . A large number.

But. . .


We're back with Donna Brazile and we're talking about superdelegates and how they can shape the Democratic nominee for president. Donna is a superdelegate, she's also a Democrat, and she's uniquely qualified to speak on those issues for that reason. Donna, welcome back.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I understand that you told the New York Times that basically your niece, among nine million other people, has been lobbying you. What does it feel like to get that — first of all, how did your niece call up?And, you know, did she know that you were a superdelegate. And what about all the other people who were calling you up?What do you say to them?

Well, first of all, I'm flattered by the amount of attention that we all are getting, not just the superdelegates but those who are out there running for pledge delegate today across the country. Look, Democrats are hungry of a victory. They want change. They are tired of George Bush and they don't want to see four more years of Bush/Cheney.


Sherrilyn, are you with us?

I am.

OK.  Any sign of polling difficulties that were out of the ordinary in a way that prevented people from having their say?

Well I think it's going to interesting to see what we learn over the next few days. In many ways because people were caught up in the euphoria of this election. I think some of the information is going to drip in.


And, of course, it's irresistible to point out Franklin Roosevelt, who, as you rightly point out, is considered one of our greatest presidents, still put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. Lincoln, our greatest president by universal acclamation, crushed civil liberties in many areas to prosecute the war. Are you just focusing on what Buchanan did wrong?

Look, nobody's perfect, of course. And, of course, one of the things I like to point out in the book is that Buchanan had some good traits, too. He wasn't just some evil jerk. He was the greatest party giver in mid-19th century America. He - even though he hated Douglas, there's nothing I could find in any of his papers where he bad-mouthed anybody.

He was a very civil guy. And so people liked him. So that's a plus, I would say. But his negatives was he had no knowledge of how to lead in any case. He waffled when we really needed him - the lead-up to the Civil War. And this was a really crucial time. And he really blew it.

Robert Strauss - his book, "Worst. President. Ever. "Thanks so much for being with us.


Fungus Blues - I love it.

Fungus Blues.

And they fell in love. And, you know, my dad, he was trying to find another way of living other than the one that he was in.

(Singing) Hustle was your middle name when you were a young man.

What was it about his current way of living at the time that was dissatisfying?


I'm Farai Chideya and this is News & Notes.

Condoleezza Rice holds historic talks with Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, and the South African president tries to get political rivals in Zimbabwe to reconcile. For that and more in our Africa Update, we've got Emira Woods, she is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Hey, how are you doing?

Hey. So great to be in the same room with you.

I know, I get to do it every now and then. And every time I do, you're wearing an incredible tailored African outfit. One day we will have to take a picture and put it up on our newsandviews blog.


Yeah, you're like daddy stubbed his toe. Go back to sleep.

Would you ever consider - it sounds like you have in the past, but at this point, are you looking to find love, and at what - how would that have to fit into you already having a family?

Yeah, I think about that a lot. And that's really the lesson for me from this book is that I'm still an incurable romantic, but I'm now an incurable romantic about my kids.

A lot of the pressure that was on my relationships before has been relieved now because I know that I'm not going to grow old alone. As long as I can keep my kids loving me, I've got that part taken care of.


Is there a sense, though, that this really could happen anywhere?

I certainly have that sense. And I worry about it all the time. It's a little easier to control if they're in their home where they're typically at, whether that be the school or whether their home environment. But you're exactly right.

Were you surprised that this should come up now?I mean, is the world so different today than it was a year ago or two years ago that people feel the need to really hold the kids at home and keep them safe?

I'm not judging anyone. And if they feel that way, they feel that way. It's surprising to me. I've gone to Washington, D. C. , and I've taken all my kids. So it's - I think they feel like this is my responsibility as a parent. I'll do it. At least, I know my kids are safe. And it's not falling on the responsibility of people that are not their parents. So if that's their choice, I totally understand that.


(Laughter).

. . . And who he, Mr.  Trump, says are helping to rig the election with biased media coverage in any case?

Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess that - I guess we are definitely - us corrupt journalists are definitely the ones who are in the danger zone here. But the real problem here is - let's presume - and all the polls are pointing in this direction - Hillary Clinton wins. You know, we could be having. . .

But - which we don't presume when we cover the news.


So what happened to the smell?Why doesn't the world smell like rotten eggs today?

Well, it's true that these bacteria are still active, and of course if you pass a blocked drain or something like that, you can see that smell, and it's exactly the same activity going on. Bacteria are eating other things, eating algae, eating other bacteria. And the reason you don't smell it is because the creatures that were living at the surface, the fossils that we first saw, were producing oxygen by photosynthesis.

And that oxygen has now built up to such a level that it destroys the hydrogen sulfide. So it doesn't normally get up into the atmosphere. You don't notice it very much. So that's probably the reason, really - there's too much oxygen, or it's being consumed by other kinds of bacteria a little bit further up the food chain.

Do we humans have similar bacteria living in our guts?We talk a lot about the human biome a lot on this program.


So tell me about this painting. Maybe take us back to 1982, when he was painting it at 21 years old, a few years before he died of a heroin overdose at 27.

It's 1981, 1982. You have this 21-year-old artist having their debut in New York, and it goes off like an atomic bomb. Basquiat, of course, is probably the only artist of color involved in any part of the art world at that time, and he was a spectacle to behold. I saw him on the streets of New York, and he truly was what he was called - a radiant child.

He's of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. He's been called America's Van Gogh. Talk about his importance to the art world.

Basquiat is an extraordinary example of taking his own identity growing up as a black man in New York, combining it with art history via a lot of expressionistic wild-style painting where every single inch of the surface is activated and coming at you with optical power aggressively so, really hard.


Well, I think the Senate has this advise and consent role. They have a constitutional duty to vet judges. The way that's principally done is by asking hard questions about how judges think about the law. There's a lot of yardage between saying, how are you going to rule in that DACA case?That would be inappropriate. There's something entirely different about saying, I'm trying to get a sense of how you think about your job and how you think about doctrines. So tell me a little bit about cases, particularly cases that are kind of set in amber.

If cases like Brown v.  Board are set in amber, what's the value of even asking the question?

Well, that is the right question. And I think there's a cynical answer, which is, look; it's just performance art, right?I think it's probably worth the caveat that if that's the case, if this was just always what we did, then there's some signaling - an important signaling - when you suddenly decline to do it.

Do you have any reason that any of these nominees that have evaded the question of Brown v.  Board being correctly decided - do you have any reason to believe that they would be in support of overturning Brown v.  Board?


Hi, David.

They are accusing the Vatican of some very serious things there, it sounds like. Tell me more about what prompted this.

Well, the Women Church World is the monthly supplement to the official Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano. Lucetta Scaraffia created it seven years ago. In her final editorial, she said the new editor of the main Vatican daily who arrived in December had published articles in the main paper that were in contrast with the supplement's editorial line. And then she wrote an open letter to Pope Francis, saying, we are throwing in the towel because we feel surrounded by a climate of distrust and progressive delegitimization. She added, it seems there's a return to the antiquated and arid custom of choosing women considered trustworthy from on-high, under the direct control of men. But the new editor of the L'Osservatore Romano, Andrea Monda, denied the charges that he'd tried to interfere in the women's supplement.

What more should we know about the founder of this magazine who's speaking out here?