And some news from the art world now. The secretive artist Banksy is known for the political street art he paints in cities around the world. On Friday night, one of his paintings of a small girl and a heart-shaped red balloon just out of reach went to auction at Sotheby's in London and sold for almost $1. 4 million. But the room and, presumably, the painting's anonymous buyer were in for a surprise. I asked New York magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz to explain.

As it was being sold, and the hammer went down over $1 million, suddenly, it started to rumble and buzz, and the canvas sort of disappeared down into the frame and came out beneath it shredded. It was fantastic.

What was the reaction?

Well, I think people were horrified, amazed, shocked. The market is such a kind of dumb organism. People in the market buy what other people in the market buy. And suddenly, one of the things they are buying changed. So he pranked them. Maybe it is only a prank, but, God, it felt good.


Oh, yes. In the business environment where you have a rational time schedule, then you have more productivity per hour worked. In Spain, we are the last ones in Europe in productivity per hour.

I wonder what you'd say to Americans who may have a romantic view of the siesta, who on any given workday inhale a sandwich while they stand looking at their computer screen.

Well, that is terrible too. I think we need one hour to have lunch in a decent way. This is very good, but not two or three hours that we have here. The hope to be similar to you and all the European countries beside us because really we need that for health, for family. We will have more time for having this life that we want to have. And for sure, you could have also some more time to have the lunch which is healthier.

Nuria Chinchilla is an economist and professor of management at the IESE Business School in Barcelona. Thanks very much for joining us.


They have to do this because if they don't do this, they end up rolling back into the dung pad. And there's a lot of beetles there, all competing for this very valuable resource, and it's very likely that they get their dung ball stolen after quite a fight often. So they must get away from the dung pad in a straight line. That's the quickest and the most efficient way of leaving the dung pad, and so it's critically important for them that they do this. And so the stripe of light in the sky helps them to do this. They can actually orient with respect to it and orient in straight line away.

So what happens when it's a cloudy night and they can't see the sky?They just don't go out that night?

No, they do but they roll in circles. So it's actually a very dangerous night indeed for dung beetles.

But thankfully, in South Africa where we were working, cloudy nights are not all that common.


Honestly, it looks totally different than a Porsche looks like today. It looks more like a carriage.

Now, why was this powered by electricity as opposed to gas?

In the time when Ferdinand Porsche invented the first cars, there were three engine types competing to each other. This was gas, steam and the other engine was electrical power. And for Ferdinand Porsche, his true interest was in the field of electricity, and so he was very keen on creating very efficient electrical cars.

Efficient, so that was a consideration even then, in 1898?


I stopped the clocks because, A - my contract was running out, and, yes, I am eligible for retirement 'cause I'm 72 now. But the hand-wound ones, they're big cast iron weights. If the weights, when they run out, fell over, it would take three men to reconnect all the wires going through the pulleys and things, so it was on a safety grounds that I stopped them.

Why did you stop both hands at 12?

Well, I stopped them at 12 o'clock because every time I get a clock on my working license, and my father-in-law before me, people seem to think, oh, that clock is at 12 o'clock. And they look at their watch or something, and they'll say, oh, it's stopped. Whereas if I left it at any time, they don't seem to pick it up quick enough.

Well, Mr.  Mitchell, may I ask, are there a lot of other people doing a job like yours or is that number dwindling these days?


So when we are forced to cut, we have to decide which is the best way to do it. We can do a shallow cut, like 10 percent 20 percent of the full ration. Or we can do a deep cut if we think the contributions will not be coming in anytime soon. The difficulty with doing a deep cut is that over the longer period, of course, people will become malnourished. Their immune systems will be suppressed. And if the cuts continue, or they're getting absolutely no food from WFP, inevitably, over time, they will fall sick. And, ultimately, many people will perish.

So - I mean, forgive me. It's one thing to make appealing ads that people are in danger of starving to death. What you're saying now is, because there's a crunch for aid, people are in danger of dying slowly.

That's what, in the end, will happen to the most vulnerable. It's the women and the children who will go first. The difficulty about the situation confronting us in 2018, however, is that it comes on the heels of 2017, when the world really pulled itself together, and our donors and donors for other organizations stepped up and provided a lot of funding because we were facing what was said to be the greatest humanitarian needs. . .

Yeah.


I assume, Sean, you're not going to have anyone there kind of pulling in the CNN-type touchscreen - pulling up results from various provinces. When might we get a really solid indication of who the next president of Afghanistan will be?

You're right. It is going to take some time here. We should start to get some basic, preliminary results in the coming days. But the actual count won't be completed until April 20. But once that's released, there's going to be several weeks of challenges, and a period where another body evaluates fraud and complaints and challenges from candidates. And May 14th is when the final, certified results of today's vote will actually be released. And most analysts are convinced that there's no chance any of the candidates will get more than 50 percent of the vote today, which means the top two candidates will go to a runoff, probably to be held sometime in June; meaning, we're looking at sometime late summer, early fall, actually, before we know who the next president of Afghanistan's going to be.

NPR's Sean Carberry in Kabul. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Scott.


Yeah. So when Governor Richardson in 1994 - he was a young congressman, and he was in North Korea for his first visit. At that time, a helicopter was shot down by North Korea, and two American pilots were taken. One was killed upon the impact, and the other one was alive. And Governor Richardson stayed there on assignment by President Clinton to negotiate for two weeks.

And when he got the pilots back, he got an invoice. And that invoice included a lot of legitimate things - hotels, meals, transportation, fuel - and one line about ammunition. And the governor asked the North Koreans, what is this about?And they said, well, somebody needs to pay for the bullets we used to shoot down the helicopter.

So it's - again, it's not unique. And I have to say, we all followed last summer the return of American servicemen. We've been involved - the governor has been involved in this effort. We're currently involved in more of these. The North Koreans charge for those as well.

How are those payments understood in diplomatic terms?


Many of the trees were completely defoliated. It's crunchy leaves. It's trees uprooted. You see the moss has all dried. So it's a shock to the system. And it takes many, many years - could be a century or two when we see full recovery of tree species on those areas.

What about all of the animal life?Could you tell how badly it was affected if things survived?

We saw some birds that had died. And then, days later, we were able to see some of the birds kind of flying around. They're very, very visual because they have these bright greens and colors that you can pick up from the brown background. And they are just scavenging for fruits right now.

We mentioned that Puerto Rico depends heavily on rainfall coming through El Yunque. How does the defoliation of all the trees there affect the water supply?


But I have to say, every time that I think, OK, now is the time I'm going to get in, this is a great buying opportunity, as everyone tells me, every time I look at the stock market, it's gone down again, and I think, phew, it's the end of the day. Thank goodness I didn't buy in today. But then the next day, it happens again.

Yeah, I know. It's depressing. Looking at this market, the market is a reflection of worldwide psychology. So clearly, people around the world are depressed right now, and they're not optimistic about the future, which is sad.

But in the long run, the things that will make the most money are not pieces of rock like gold or liquids like oil or cash, which is just pieces of paper, but real growing companies that are servicing strong demographic trends.

It's impossible to call a bottom. Yes, all these stocks that are cheap could get cheaper, but now is certainly one of the best times to buy stocks that we've seen in the past 70 years. I mean, it's incredible, which is why Warren Buffett is out there buying stocks right now.


And so the children - we have 9,000 children in freedom schools around the country, but many of them are going to go out tomorrow, including Washington, D. C.  and then their state capitals and go see their senators and congressmen and say it is time to cover every child. Not some. God did not make two classes of children.

Tell me about tomorrow's day of social action. What specifically is it going to look like and where is it going to be?

Tomorrow is a civic participation day, they will be going to see their senators and congressmen and others. March into their offices and saying that it is time for every child to have healthcare. All should have the same benefits. All should be able be born with good healthcare.

They are going to tell them how upset they are that children died last year from dental abscesses that just didn't get treatment because children fell through the bureaucratic cracks. And while all of us at the Children's Defense Fund want universal coverage for everybody in America, which is long overdue, children can't wait while we debate for another two, three, four, five, 10 years, for universal coverage for everybody. And so next year they're going to be considering again the funding for the Child Health Insurance Program, but we want to make sure that any consideration of that program will say we're going to cover every child. Right now.


It would basically just restore a tax on stock compensation income in our city. And this is a tax that actually existed prior to 2012, when we started granting tax breaks to grow the tech sector in our city. And the revenue would be used to address the growing inequality crisis in our city, to expand affordable housing for working-class and middle-class residents, to support and stabilize our small businesses here in the city that are struggling and haven't benefited from the same tax breaks.

And just to be clear, you've written this proposal so that this tax would apply to IPOs that have already recently happened, like Lyft and Pinterest. And we should note that your proposal still needs to be passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and then it would go directly to the voters on the ballot in November.

Exactly. I mean, it's still - there's still going to be a lot of public process and debate about this.

OK.  Now, one of your colleagues on the board of supervisors told the San Francisco Chronicle that it's, quote, "arrogant" to think that tech companies won't leave the city if they are taxed more aggressively. Are you worried about that risk, that your tax proposal might drive some tech companies out of San Francisco?


. . . In terms of choices. I mean, am I wrong about that?

You know, that research is still in the early stages as well. And I don't want to undermine it or underplay it, but you have to think about things sort of globally. And one thing that you can do is - if you're concerned about sunscreen use is you can just be extra careful about covering up.

So I know for my own kid, the swimsuit I got for him has long sleeves. And I'm always putting, like, a big hat on him. So you're telling me that's not overkill.

That is not overkill. That's actually a great idea. You know, there are a lot of sun-protective clothing on the market now, so that will help protect the environment 'cause you're using less sunscreen. And it will also help protect you against any potential problems with sunscreen ingredients.

In the end, how big a deal is this study published by JAMA?


Absolutely. And that's on the left and on the right. You have your most liberal members of the House and Senate and your most conservative members of the House and Senate essentially joining hands coming 360 on this thing and saying we're all the populists here. We're not the centrists. We're not the establishment. We're speaking for the angry little guy. And there's some irony in that perhaps, and some discomfort when, you know, you look over and see who you're in bed with on this thing. But politics makes that kind of bed fellows, and we're certainly seeing it in this particular context.

Ron, we only have a few seconds left, but both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain voted for the provision. Is that good enough cover for them I guess during the campaign?

Well, it certainly makes it less of a presidential issue, and that had been a big problem, frankly, in the politics of it last week. Once you inject the White House contest into this, everything kind of tends to blow up.

That was NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving. He joined me from our headquarters in Washington, D. C.


Well, you have roots in the South, so what are some of the food prep and food producing traditions of the South that you think we need to reconnect with?

Yeah, for me, it's really about helping people remember and as you said, reconnect with these issues - or these ways of connecting with the land and producing our foods that we saw just a couple of generations ago. As Will Allen said, you know, most people in America were producing their own food. And when I think about the African-American community that I grew up in, you know, my grandparents had practically an urban farm in their backyard. You know, everyone on the street was growing some type of food, small plots, people had mini- orchards.

And you go back to the same neighborhood now and it's, you know, practically a shell of itself. And I think we need to just kind of like remember that the way that people are advocating for eating local, healthy, sustainable food, you know, these ways that many of us were eating. And this isn't just about African-Americans. I think that a couple of generations ago a lot of us were eating this way, and we just need to get back to that.

Well, some argue that the locally sourced organic food movement is elitist and out of reach for the budget of lower-income city folks. So, what do you think?


Well, it's a wide hurricane. So we expect impacts on both the east coast and the west coast. But the major impacts are going to be in the Florida Keys, particularly the lower Keys - then into the Naples area and then up the coast more into the Fort Myers area and into - early in next week into the Tampa area.

What do you see over the next 24 hours?

We see that it'll make this final turn. And we'll really be able to zero in on where that core is going to go. There's still a little bit of uncertainty, but we're looking most likely that the biggest impact's along southwest Florida.

What are your biggest concerns?Mr.  DeMaria. We have, of course, this whole constellation of effects between the winds and the storm surge and the flooding.


It was the claim that Clinton had been personally responsible for people's deaths that set off alarm bells for Russell. So he decided to do some fact-checking.

I came to the realization pretty quickly that someone may have been probably lying to me on social media.

It turned out there were many false stories circulating that year. But Russell was skeptical of claims that Russia had anything to do with them until lists of Russian troll accounts began to appear online. He was shocked.

My god, they're right. They're exactly right. What they've been telling me about this is literally happening. I can go look this stuff up. It's right there.


I didn't. I've always had the theory that the shower scene works as well as it does because just beforehand, you have this quite long supper conversation between Normal Bates and Marion Crane - Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh - which is the quietest, calmest moment in the film.

And it lulls you and it prepares you for the shocking, violent moment that is to come.

And so I went for that scene because I think it's a beautiful, beautifully acted scene and really, the heart of Anthony Perkins' performance. And I think that sometimes, an actor is essential. I don't know who else could have played that part.

That's interesting. So it's not the stab in the shower or the bridge blowing up that stays with us.


Yes.

. . . He did in a helicopter crash in 2005. A lot of people loved John Garang, a lot of people didn't. Do you have to worry about that when you design currency?

Absolutely. And in my visit there, he was universally respected, if not loved. He was really the only national hero they could agree to. So he actually appears on all denominations of the money. So he's the only really unifying hero of South Sudan.

What about other symbols that you have to include?

So there's the flag. The flag is a carryover from the People's Liberation Army, so that was an easy symbol. So it's a six color flag that people really used during the second civil war, and it's a natural rallying point. So that's their symbol. And when you're a new nation, you're defining your sort of, like, territory. So this, like, updating of signs was really a big deal, so they made banners and they made these sort of, like, 10 signs to say South Sudan.


Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I will definitely take what the defense gives me.

And, again, the up-tempo scoring machine that Grinnell College is, is that what attracted you?You were originally at another school.

Yeah. Yeah, I was. One of my friends had played basketball here and told me about the system. And my ability to kind of create for myself off the dribble fit perfectly in the system, and I made the right decision.

And this is a kind of funny day on a lot of campuses as they empty out kids going home for Thanksgiving. But I wonder if you had any reaction from your fellow students, from your teammates, from professors?

Yeah. They're all kind of in shock, similar to myself. I don't think reality has really set in yet, although it's starting to.


It's really - it's really unlike any other church in the city and, you know, very, very few in Europe. It's not simply a church. It's almost like stepping into a kind of medieval marketplace inside. It's enormous. It's - there's always a hurly burly. And there's always a - you know, numerous things going on in there.

Well, now, we were seeing reports that officials are saying the fire might be connected to the renovation work going on in there. You've reported on the renovations for Time. What kind of shape was the cathedral in before this fire?

Well, you know, for years they have been saying that the church was in terrible shape. And in fact, church officials had taken me up onto the roof not that long ago, when I was reporting this for Time, to show me how pieces of the building were simply dropping off. They described the gargoyles, the medieval faces on the side of the church, as being like ice cream melting in the sun. They would simply, like, drop away. The church had no money to replace them or restore them. And so they were using, like, PVC pipes to just, you know, stick on the side of the walls where the gargoyles had been. And. . .

Oh, my goodness, wow. I mean, Notre Dame is one of the most iconic symbols of Paris. Can you talk about the cultural significance of this cathedral for France?


Yeah. Well, I mean, as you said, Dorian was moving west across the Caribbean toward Puerto Rico. But as of this evening, Puerto Rico's main island has been spared a direct hit. The storm did pass over two small island municipalities off of Puerto Rico's eastern coast, Vieques and Culebra, and also caused widespread power outages in the U. S.  Virgin Islands. Just a little while ago, the National Weather Service lifted its hurricane and tropical storm warnings for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. But as you mentioned, forecasters now say that Dorian is heading toward Florida and could be a dangerous Category 3 hurricane affecting that state by this weekend.

We said that you're in Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan. Can you just give us an idea of how things are looking there?

It's cloudy, a little rainy but mostly calm at this point. The streets are empty because, you know, schools and government offices closed, and most businesses closed today too. Some of the only people out on the streets are security guards. The plan was to have schools and government offices closed through tomorrow, but the governor has now reversed that decision because things seem to have been - are calm now and there's no longer a big risk here in Puerto Rico.

OK. So it sounds like Puerto Rico might have avoided the worst with this storm. But, you know, there are still two months left in the Atlantic hurricane season. It's been almost two years since Hurricane Maria. How prepared is Puerto Rico to handle another big storm, should one come?


Well, we obviously have our seismologists and the geologists which look at the pattern and the history. And ultimately, we start with looking at all the faults that are in the Bay Area, the proximity. In the Bay Area, we have two very large faults, frankly. One of them is the San Andreas Fault, which produced the 1906 earthquake, which runs a few miles away from the Golden Gate and runs up and down the coast of California, goes all the way down to Southern California. The other one is the Hayward Fault, which is in the Berkeley Hills, and is also a major earthquake.

So those quakes, we basically look at their seismic hazard, if you will, and from that generates the possible or potential seismic hazard. And then we get intensities that, based on the soils that we have, based on the history of ground motions that we recorded, we come up with those intensities at very different frequencies I was talking about earlier.

(Unintelligible)

And then from that, we generate a spectrum that ultimately gets used to generate multiple, different simulated ground motions. That we take our structure and in a computer model, we run that structure and we subject this with those displacements. And the computer model is intended to do the equilibrium, statically, at every instant in time, microsecond. And the target would be that we know what the forces are in our structure and what the displacements are in our structure.


Now, what about the bloggers who are, you know, in our camp. What story are they hitting?

Well, in the Democratic side, among bloggers, the Web site Blogpolls, which measure these trends, posted about Hillary Clinton outnumbered blog post about Barack Obama, leading up to last weekend, South Carolina primary. And interestingly, on January 24th, two days before the voting started in South Carolina, posts about Bill Clinton spiked and they equal the numbers of posts about Barack Obama. But after he won in South Carolina, post about Obama spiked and he's been the most blogged about candidate ever since. Now, on the Republican side, John McCain has been and is the most blogged about candidate.

What about on News and Views, our own blog?

Well, lot of issues people are talking about. They run the spectrum. They're talking about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's text message scandal, suggesting an affair with his female chief of staff, which could lead to perjury charges. We called it textual healing on our blog.


First of all, there is a lag time of - it's several months before raw material costs work their way all the way through the system. And farmers will be quick to tell you that they only get 20 cents from every food dollar. The rest of it goes to processing and labor and transportation. So all of these other factors also effect what we're paying at the grocery store.

Essentially the department is assuming that the volatility in the prices for energy and commodities is going to be with us for a while, at least through the middle of next year. In other words, the recent trends of lower prices for oil and other commodities isn't going to last, and if you look at today's spike in the price of oil, that's a good case in point.

John, you mentioned how we'll be seeing this at the grocery store. What about at restaurants?

Well, that's interesting. USDA forecast compares prices of food at home with those away from home. And in 2005 and 06, restaurant price and inflation was much higher than in grocery stores, but that changed last year and this year and supposedly will continue next year. Restaurants are now raising prices more slowly than grocery stores. Basically, restaurants are trying to absorb some of their higher food costs to cushion the blow to their customers and to keep them coming in.


. . . And because I've written certain things. And now I know that certain people in Saudi Arabia that I can't even name, people who work at the Royal Court, are putting names on a list, people like me and others. And these people are now blacklisted in this country. And we know it. I mean, we all know it, OK?So this is it. This is what's at stake.

Why do you think this is happening now?

What's different now is certain regimes, even if they were fierce and bold and sometimes ruthless with their own opponents, did not do this level of things abroad or in the daylight, OK?Mubarak could make opponents disappear in Egypt. He would never dare to touch someone in the streets of London or Berlin. The Saudi leadership used to kidnap some princes for family reasons in Switzerland or elsewhere, but they would not kill someone in the streets of Paris or Rome, OK?So this is now different. These countries today feel that they have withered an extraordinarily enormous storm, which is the Arab revolution that started in 2011, OK?So they are today on a full-blast quest and hunt against anybody who could threaten their political existence.

If the West specifically and the United States don't react forcefully to Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance, what do you think the effect will be?


I'm Farai Chideya, and this is News & Notes. The UNITY Convention, considered to be the largest annual meeting of journalists around the world, kicks off tomorrow in Chicago. The convention brings together the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian-American Journalist Association, and the Native American Journalist Association.

This year's theme is a new journalism for a changing world. Joining us to talk about the gathering is UNITY president Karen Lincoln Michel. So Karen, can you give us a diversity report card of how the industry is doing overall regarding journalists of color?

Yes. The Radio-Television News Directors Association just released a survey yesterday that showed that there were some slight gains that were made in television among women and minorities. And I'm not sure if that also showed if the work force is shrinking in broadcast, but there some gains made there. But it's still below the levels of people of color in the U. S.  population.

There's a recent employment survey of minorities in the newsroom done every year by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. And this year's showed a very slight increase in the number of people of color in supervisory positions. Now granted, the whole industry shrank by about 2,400 positions, and nearly 300 of them were people of color. But in this climate, I think you need to build on small gains like the slight increase in people of color in supervisory positions.


Yeah. But you keep going and you keep going with the help of your friends and your family and something like songwriting, your art. It gives you purpose and meaning in life.

There must be moments there you say, well, let's hang it up?

You know, as we talked - as you mentioned grief as a companion, without putting it in a tidy box, grief also is a guide. And I think it helps you relearn how you are in the world. And, you know, that's just how you use the things that you have, at least that's how I have.

An organizing principle, in a way.


How?What happened?

Well, it was taught by a professor who was also a resident at a Cleveland clinic. He was an interventional radiologist. And he was teaching part-time at Ursuline. And when he came in the class, he just lit up. He was dead tired, eyes were bloodshot red. He would just oftentimes come off of his shift, straight to the college to teach. Just his enthusiasm for medicine, his breadth of knowledge about the human body was just so fascinating to me. And all of those ideas when I was a kid of wanting to become a physician and my intrigue of how things work just came rushing back.

And within that first hour, I came home and I told my wife, honey, I need to do something in medicine. And I wasn't exactly sure if it was going to be nursing or a physician assistant or become a medical doctor. But I just knew that I was going to have to pursue this further if I wanted to live life with no regrets.

I'm going to guess when you walk into Cleveland Clinic Akron General it's not lost on you that there are not a lot of African American physicians.


You can see the hurricanes. . .

That's right.

. . . the tornadoes and things and try to connect the dots themselves if no one else is going to connect the dots for them.

That's exactly right.


My pleasure.

So take us back to 2001 when the Enron scandal broke. What had the company hidden, and how did it come to light?

The company has hidden the fact that it was making up most of its earnings, and rather than having solid profits as it reported, it was actually losing money. And the way this came to light was that some people with the Wall Street Journal had trouble understanding what the company was doing - started raising questions about it. And then the Securities and Exchange Commission, which I suspect reads the Wall Street Journal very closely, began looking into it, and then the whole thing just sort of blew off and exploded.

There are a few names that we remember from this case. Give me an example of a couple of the folks who - a lot of folks said that the hubris was amazing, not, you know, when people were finally identified. So who were some of the key players in this?


And both of those things are true and not true in about equal measure. What happened instead was that Russia didn't embrace democracy. Russia didn't embrace freedom. And that's what I tried to write a book about, which is a difficult task - to try to write a book about absences.

I didn't know until reading your book that the Putin regime has incinerated food in a country with a history of famine. Why?

It wasn't extraordinary then. This was a few years ago after Putin had introduced counter-sanctions in response to the Western sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. And the counter-sanctions were very much designed to make Russians feel the brunt of sanctions - right?- because the sanctions that are imposed by the West wouldn't necessarily sort of mobilize the population against the West.

Yeah.


Well, what happened is I - we plan an escape. It was really, really dangerous. The movement that we're struggling in became tribal and so, you know, you see soldiers who are turning on each other. And so we decide, look, I rather go and die where my family members are. We were, like, around - between two to 400, I think, and only 16 people survived. And the way some died of starvation, dehydration and a lot of things that attacked us on the way that we weren't prepared for.

You wound up at a place called Waat.

Yeah, when I arrived in a place called Waat and I met a British aid worker called Emma McCune. And so Emma McCune was the one who smuggled me into Kenya and put me in school, so she disarmed me.

So when you heard the news that 3,000 child soldiers may be gradually released in South Sudan, what did that make you feel?


Your own ministry was, at one point, attacked by a crowd. Does the government have a policy, when it comes to dealing with protesters - particularly if acts of violence occur?

Yesterday, as soon as I became aware that the ministry was being attacked, I came back and I asked for reinforcements, which were immediately provided. So, we managed to have a situation where no one was hurt and the crowd was controlled relatively quickly. This kind of degradation or attacks against the building, such as the foreign ministry, which is one that inhabitants of Brazilia and Brazilians in general are very proud of - it's an icon of modern architecture - are entirely unacceptable. And that for manifestations to carry a message that will be seriously heard and taken into account, they cannot include this kind of behavior.

Antonio Patriota is the foreign minister of Brazil, speaking with us from Brazilia. Thanks very much, sir.

Thank you very much.


In the late '70s and early '80s, the Mutiny Hotel in Miami was the place to be seen and to drop scads of cash. Everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Led Zeppelin to Teddy Kennedy might be found at the Mutiny's exclusive, members-only nightclub. It was a palace of decadence and intrigue, and it quickly became a hub for Miami's exploding cocaine trade. Journalist Roben Farzad charts the rise and fall of the Mutiny in his new book "Hotel Scarface. "Roben, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me.

And Miami is your hometown. Why don't you describe what had become of the Mutiny Hotel when you first saw it when you were a teenager in the early '90s?

I mean, I grew up with much of the rest of the world experiencing Miami Friday nights on "Miami Vice. "That was the it show of the mid-1980s, kind of a Hollywood MTV-ized representation of a lot of the ugliness and cosmopolitan splendor (laughter) that we had of Miami at the same time. But right before I left off for college up north in 1994, I had a job just downtown in Miami, and I was stationed in front of this abandoned building. And, really, for the first time in my life I feel like I was truly, truly haunted.


Well, we'll see, won't we?I think that the issue here is really is how you talk about it, and how you educate. For instance, food banks for years have done this. I might say, without naming the names, one of the leading best-regarded brands in the large, national food industry, they basically recover the food within their stores; cook it up; and put it out on their hot trays the next day and offer that at, you know, at fair full prices. That's the stuff that we're going to be talking about. We're talking about taking and recovering food. Most of what we offer will be fruits and vegetables that have a use-by date on it that'll be several days out.

Well, customers nevertheless have to consume the food pretty quickly.

As you know, when it comes to bread, most of America, if they didn't buy the bread yesterday, already has it out of code at home. And we all know, if you put it in the refrigerator, it can last for weeks. Milk lasts for days. You know, it all depends on the temperature of your refrigerator, frankly.

Yeah.


Well, I think his biggest mistake was that he was a very strict controller of how the theory was handled by his disciples. In other words, he permitted no deviation or modification of his theory or methods, and he didn't encourage any research to empirically validate his theory. So basically, people that followed him and embraced his theory had to take it on faith.

A somewhat lesser-known figure I found fascinating to read about, Dr.  Benjamin Rush, the only doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence. I guess he's known as the father of American psychiatry. But I've got to tell you after reading about him, I wonder why a pretty good medical school is named after him.

Again, we have to understand that to view things through the lens of the 21st century, it puts things in a really - a different light. Benjamin Rush was a physician, and what he did was to really take seriously the plight of people who were mentally ill. He wasn't a psychiatrist. He was a physician. The problem is is that the knowledge was so limited at the time, they really weren't able to gain any traction in understanding the underlying basis of severe mental illnesses. And so they came up with these ideas and these treatments that now seem to be either cockamamie or cruel.

Yeah. Psychiatry over the years has been back and forth on if mental disorder - for example, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia - is inherited.


Our reporters do OK because we report in English, but the people who reach everyday Venezuelans through radio and TV are under enormous pressure and censorship. And now, they're aiming - they're taking aim at the Internet as well. Earlier this week, there was a crackdown on Twitter. Twitter was shut down throughout Venezuela. Instagram was spotty. The state ISP wouldn't allow people access to these critical sources of news.

Tell us about Juan Guaido, head of the National Assembly. How did he become the main challenger to Maduro?

He is a smart, young guy. He's an industrial engineer. He's 35 years old. His grandparents were members of the military a couple of generations ago. So he has this kind of family understanding of what military codes and military conduct and sort of the military lifestyle it's like in Venezuela. And that really scares the regime because he knows how to speak to military officers. And we're all very clear that this will ultimately come down to whether the mid-ranking members in the military go to their generals and say, sorry, your time is up.

Francisco Toro, who's editor-in-chief of the news site Caracas Chronicles, thanks so much.


All right. I want to take a quick detour. Staying with Secretary Rice, she spoke at a conference this week concerning HBCUs, or historically black colleges and universities. And she championed more diversity among diplomats, saying, I have lamented that I can go into a meeting at the Department of State, and as a matter of fact I can go into a whole day of meetings at the Department of State, and actually rarely see somebody who looks like me. And that is just not acceptable.

So Emira, do you think that having more black people in diplomatic positions will change, for example, Africa policy?

Well clearly, we have had Condoleezza Rice at the top of the ticket, right?She has been the lead in U. S. -Africa policy and broader U. S.  foreign policy. And that has not necessarily improved U. S.  relations with Africa. If anything, this administration has had a more militaristic approach to Africa under Condoleezza Rice. So it is important to make sure that there are a range of views represented in foreign policy, a range of views that will bring about a more responsible U. S.  engagement with the continent, and with the rest of the world.

And so, yes, it would be great to have more people from black and brown communities in those senior places, but it is important what their views are, what their foreign policy agenda is. I think we are now in the 21st century, where we have to push forward to say, we demand, really, that the U. S.  engages in a more responsible way with Africa and the rest of the evolving world.


"The Interview," a bromance.

Tamara, are these mostly symbolic sanctions?I mean, North Korea's already under significant sanctions.

Significant. There have been four UN Security Council resolutions adopted since 2006, as well as two U. S.  sanctions programs. These are largely targeted at North Korea's weapons development - nuclear weapons development. So you could easily argue that these new sanctions are just piling onto a pretty big pile already.

U. S.  officials insist, though, that these are new and different because they name 10 individuals, most of whom work for the country's main arms dealer. They say that this naming them is going to make it very hard for those people to do business basically anywhere in the world. The White House also says that there are more sanctions yet to come.


So, you know, so I think that all those things have - there's just been a confluence of just, you know, just a cynicism, I think.

So, will Michael Phelps be the person who emerges as the American with the greatest number of gold medals and, you know, sort of the Mark Spitz of the new millennium?

Well, you know, they were kind of hyping that last time, too. And don't be surprised. You might think that, from our standpoint - our meaning the United States and marketing - people would love to say, well, who's the American who's going to kind of put us on the marketing tip?And I think that that's part of the problem, too, Tony, is that we're focus - we want Michael Phelps to win because there's marketing, where - you've got a lot of Chinese swimmers, man, who are just waiting to ambush Phelps. So, on paper, it looks kind of good, but who knows?Allyson Felix may be the American who emerges as sort of the star and the salvation of our hopes over there.

Well, the race with Tyson Gay and - God, I'm kind of blocking on the name of the other runner who's the fastest man in the world at the moment - that ought to be pretty interesting.


What do you think - if this decision is permanent, what do you think the U. S.  will miss by not being a member of UNESCO?

Oh, I think the U. S.  will miss a lot. It's a big loss for the United Nations family because we are part of this family. It is a big role for multilateralism. But I believe it is also a loss for the U. S.

Irina Bokova is director general of UNESCO. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much for inviting me.


The other thing that we're doing is making a mouse that has Beatrice's exact genetic variant so that we may be able to recapitulate what Beatrice has so - you know, with the muscles and that sort of thing - and then study that mouse in great detail. And also. . .

You're - I mean, you're making an actual, physical, fur-covered mouse?

Yeah. In fact, I just saw a picture of four of the pups today. They carry Bea's identical variation. Mice live to be 2, and so if they develop heart problems or vascular problems or other problems, we'll be able to know that - if we're not able to find other Beatrices.

A lot of people, I gather, are very happy for you and certainly, for Beatrice, but is this necessarily a good example for other families that have a sick child?


. . . That it's biased especially against people of color.

Correct. And to be sure, we need to take great care to be refining our use of risk assessments as much as we can. But the alternative is to do it the way we've always done it, which is to rely on judicial hunch and money, which, of course, makes no sense.

Judge Morrison, you've been on the bench here in D. C.  for 40-some years?

Almost 40 years.


So ultimately, it ended up ruining my life in every capacity. It's affected my health, my family, my emotional and mental well-being and, ultimately, even jobs. You know, I've been offered all these amazing jobs of a lifetimes that I fought really hard to get and I beat out other candidates for. And each time the job would be offered to me, it would then be retracted because of my connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

So that's what led me to finally come forward because I had just reached a point where I was like, you know, this man was out buying second islands and second airplanes just to show off while I was struggling to feed myself and couldn't even get myself a good job because of him, you know?

Right. How did you feel when you found out about Epstein's death?

It was definitely not a good moment. And it's still not, you know?Even every single time I hear those words, there's a certain amount of anger that shoots through my blood that I can't explain.


Firefighting is dangerous - raging flames, choking smoke, hot, floating ash - but what about the long-term health effects that persist after the fire's been doused and firefighters have gone home?The Chicago Tribune investigated links between fighting fires and deadly cancers that can catch up to those first responders long after they leave a scene. Karen Ann Cullotta reported the story, and she told us she started looking into it after two firefighters in the Chicago area died.

I wrote obituaries for both of them, and I was kind of taken aback that they were both young, and these were what was being called line-of-duty deaths cancer deaths. So I started asking around different fire departments and saying, you know, is this something you're seeing?Is this something that's being talked about?And without exception, every department I spoke with said this is pretty much all we're talking about.

Is it the toxic smoke?What is it?

Yeah. So there's just - there's a lot of questions - unanswered questions. And while there's been research into this for years, it's still unfolding. They've always known that, of course, inhaling smoke is dangerous. But now, these studies are looking at these toxins that are in the smoke and that settle on the skin. So it's not just inhalation. It's actually getting into the skin and into the blood stream from exposed areas.


Well, Secretary Kerry has been talking about this idea of a transitional government. It's kind of - if you remember, back in January they tried a ceasefire that was disrespected by both sides because it told people to stop fighting. It didn't address why they were fighting, which was to control the government.

So now there's a conversation that Kerry's having with both President Kiir and over the phone with the rebel leader, Riek Machar, saying, OK, you guys need to sit down and discuss a transitional government that will include both tribes, but - at least we're reading between the lines here - probably not include either of you guys. Now, whether he can get that across might be possible. The U. S.  does have a lot of power in this region. But it really does depend on these two sides sitting down.

Greg, the U. N.  special adviser says there's, quote, "the risk of genocide. "That will make a lot of people wonder if we're on the verge of another Rwanda or Bosnia.

One very chilling account was before the recent massacre in Bentiu. Rebel commanders were said to have used a local radio station to tell men to commit acts of rape against women from the ethnic opposition. That reminds people of Rwanda. The true fear - and this is already happening - is that this hate speech will blur the line between civilian and combatant.


The militant group ISIS, the Islamic State, has lost much of the territory it held when it was, as reporter Azadeh Moaveni says, running a kind of killing spree in Iraq and Syria. But many of the young women and girls that left their homes to join ISIS view the group differently.

The story I wanted to tell is how it unfolded in the lives of so many young women as kind of, in a very perverse way, an empowerment project.

Moaveni's new book is called "Guest House For Young Widows: The Women Of ISIS. "It follows some of the girls who left their families in Tunisia, Germany and England to join the caliphate. We begin with the story of the Bethnal Green teenagers.

These were a group of young high school students. They were 15. They went to school in a very urban, dense neighborhood of London. They were straight-A students. They were popular in school. These were not girls who you would think would be really susceptible, but a lot of them also had absent fathers.


When you hear the Spanish word quinceanera, you might think of poufy, pink dresses, big, boisterous family parties and a traditional rite of passage for 15-year-old Latina girls. A new HBO documentary series takes us inside the modern quinceanera. There are profiles of an East LA teen boxer. OK, so she does wear a pink, poufy dress, albeit with boxing gloves. There's also a rodeo duo and a transgender coming-of-age story. One of the girls whose quince was featured in the HBO series, "15: A Quinceanera Story," joins us now from Fort Myers, Fla.  She's Rosi Alvarez.

Welcome.

Hi.

Hi. And we also have the filmmaker and director Matthew O'Neill on the line from New York.


Pretty soon the island will be a donut.

In other words, there'll be land surrounded by a hole filled with water.

Oh (laughter). Is it hard for you to go back to Martha's Vineyard as a visitor?

We went back a year ago, June, for a wedding of a young woman who'd been one of the children who had kind of grown up at our house. And going to that wedding really helped me feel a lot of peace about the island and about no longer having the same purchase on it because I realized that my psychological purchase is as real - maybe not as real as owning a piece of property, but it has a great deal of reality for me. Basically, I think that when the house was being sold, I was just so - I found that summer of 2014, I was in a state of what I call extreme mixed feelings. I felt very sad about losing the house.


Yeah, so in the final bend, Maximum Security drifted wide into another horse's lane. That caused a domino effect, disrupting the progress of three other horses. Country House's jockey, Flavien Prat, was the one who filed the objection after the race. So three stewards, which are basically, like, referees, reviewed the footage and interviewed the affected jockeys. Eventually, steward Barbara Borden gave a brief statement saying that they unanimously decided to disqualify Maximum Security, then walked away without taking any questions.

Wow, it sounds like a political conference. All right. Has anything like this ever happened before?

So one other horse was stripped of his title after the fact. That was because he essentially failed a drug test back in 1968. But no, this - this was a first. And the outcome of this year's Derby was just so unpredictable. The original horse couldn't even compete. And the second favorite, Maximum Security, lost even though he crossed the finish line first.

All right, so give us the story with Country House briefly. His trainer is named Bill Mott. Did you hear from him?


So you can actually go to their job section and look for opportunities with the Office of Personnel Management using their website. Now they say that these are for non-career positions, whether in the White House, or in any federal department, agency, or commission. So this is interesting. I mean you just fill out the form below and you know, right on this website. I'm looking at it right now, and submit if you think you should be working for Obama and Biden.

It looks like - and other folks on NPR have spoken about this as well. There are so many questions - basically you have to have apparently lived a life of a saint in order to be able to pass some of these. . .

Some way of putting it.

Litmus tests. I mean is that really true or does it just seem that way because they really ask you basically have you ever jaywalked, have you ever - of course, not literally, but kind of.

Right, right. Well, I mean the point is this. Look, why waste time?I mean they're going to do what they need to do to process applications the way the federal government would do anyway. So why waste the time?The point is be transparent. I think what they're also trying to say here is send a message, be transparent with us because we're going to find out one way or the other. We're going to look at - if we really seriously are looking at considering hiring somebody, we're going to look at their online footprint, and I do think that they actually do mean that. They are going to look at that online footprint.


Wow. I guess the submarine floats. It's still watertight.

Well, you know, we were wondering about that because, you know, it was built in America - built to last. So would it still be floating after all these years?And the answer is, yes, it is floating. Half of it is floating. So we had to strategically float some aspects of it and bury some aspects of it. The goal was to get the rudder to dig into the ground almost as an additional anchor point, which is something that, you know, for a bunch of museum professionals, you'd never anticipate having to do.

Now, I gather there is some concern if the Batfish were to break free of the lines you're trying to secure it with and - what?- float on down the river, what would - what are you preparing for here?

Well, that was a huge concern on Thursday and Friday. So some of the lines started snapping, and we were actually on-site when the lines started snapping, and it was probably one of the scariest things I've seen in my life. So it was in danger of floating down the river, which the main concern would be that it would float down and hit a dam. And if it would have hit the dam - see, Muskogee already had a problem with loose barges. Had they actually breached a dam, it would have wiped out communities completely instead of just giving communities time to evacuate.


Mercy. It could have been - could it have been prevented?Aside from maybe not inventing it, could it have been prevented somehow?

Great question, and yeah, here's the thing - the software flaw is something in the Microsoft operating system, in Windows. Microsoft released a patch for it way back in March. So in an ideal world, you would have installed the patch and been protected from this onslaught, this ransomware campaign. But obviously, we don't live in an ideal world, and it's not reasonable to expect every local IT guy to update immediately.

So 15 seconds we have left - we know a lot of people listening to us are online. What do they do or not do?

Well, absolutely backup your data. Have a way to have your data backed up in a trusted cloud provider or an external drive because the fact is if you backup your data, this kind of attack loses its fangs.


But you paint such a visual picture down the line. I mean, is there one moment, or does this sort of take a long time to bring that image together?

I mean, for this cluster, it actually was a very visual moment. I mean, the cluster was found and it was essentially just a number, like how massive the cluster is, and that was two years ago. But when we got the X-ray data, I mean, I was at my desk and the image downloaded, and I had up on my screen the X-ray image of the cluster. And it looked so different than any other cluster I've looked at. So it was a very visual a-ha moment.

Hmm. I read somewhere that - I think you were quoted as saying that it's sort of - it has - the name Phoenix, and that might relate to - also to how it's risen from the dead or something like that. Can you explain that?

Right. I mean, the reason it's named that is because it's in the constellation of Phoenix, so that's sort of traditionally how these types of systems are named or how they were named back in the day. But the name's appropriate because in the middle of clusters usually you have this really massive galaxy that was essentially the first one to form. So they formed billions of years ago, and now there's star formation around them. But they're pretty much dead, and they're only growing by sort of accumulating smaller galaxies or eating smaller galaxies.


Well, this, of course, has been something people have been looking for for a long time. Family members of those who were killed are calling it a victory. Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg said - this is a quote from him - he said, "he could have saved my daughter, and he didn't. May he rot in hell. "Jaime Guttenberg was one of the last to be shot that day, and so that's some pretty raw feelings here about all this.

What we heard from a - the current sheriff in Broward County, Gregory Tony, said it's never too late to - for accountability and justice. He also fired another officer who was involved at the school today, as well. He's not charged. And we heard from Florida Department of Law Enforcement head Rick Swearingen who said there can be no excuse for Peterson's complete inaction and no question that his inaction cost lives.

That's NPR's Greg Allen in Miami. Thank you for your reporting.

You're welcome.


I'm delighted.

The two countries have narrowed their differences and that presumably includes Crimea, Ukraine, Syria. How does narrowing their differences sound to you?

It sounds hopeful but far from definitive. We have a long way to go to resolve our disagreements on either one of these two issues. But at least it is movement in the right direction. And it has in it the potential for being quite constructive in its consequences.

Does it involve any change in Russian behavior or policy?


You know, we have gone from this is a media hoax and fake news to calling it a witch hunt to saying that it was business as usual to meet with Russians about dirt on Hillary Clinton to saying that maybe we need to get out that pardoning power. The president is tweeting about this just this morning. He says he has complete and total pardon power but the only crimes that have been committed so far have been those of the leakers.

And of course, the background here is that Robert Mueller's investigating team - he's the special counsel looking into the Russia connection - may be looking to the larger reality of the Trump world's financial relationships with various Russians. And that may be what's prompting all this talk about investigating the investigators or pushing back on some of Mueller's hires or even using the pardon power.

I'll bet that the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has had better weeks.

Oh, you know, indeed. We've had an overnight report, again from The Washington Post, that is based again on leaks from the U. S.  intelligence agencies. Apparently, there are intercepts of former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak reporting back to Moscow about his conversations with Jeff Sessions. We knew they had had conversations, but he has always said that they had nothing to do with the campaign. He was, of course, important to the Trump campaign for a senator who endorsed him. And he continues to stand by that statement this morning that he and Kislyak never talked about the campaign. But the Post says these intercepts show that Kislyak says differently.


The auto industry is perhaps the most prevalent of family businesses in Michigan. It's not uncommon for several generations of a family to work with the same carmaker. Alex Marinica is a junior at Wayne State University in Detroit. His father spent 20 years working for Chrysler. Alex, your dad recently took a buyout from Chrysler. What was behind his decision?

Well, I mean, obviously, it was a very hard decision to make. He'd been at the company for many, many years, and he really, really love working there. He thought maybe it was time to move on to some other things.

If you don't mind my asking about your career aspirations. . .

Sure.


Well, right now, you'll be happy to hear I don't think there is any danger. I think the concern is that as we continue to make progress then eventually there might come a point when they are as smart as we are or even smarter. And intelligence in general is a very powerful thing. It's what makes us very powerful relative to other animals here on this planet. It's not because we are stronger muscles or sharper claws that the fate of the gorillas is now in our hands rather than in the gorilla's hands. And so similarly, if we create machines that exceed human intelligence then those machines also could be very powerful relative to us.

Well, I was flabbergasted when I began to do some reading. Although you say it's not about to happen; it's a while away; it is possible that children listening to this broadcast in the back seat of their parents' automobile might have to confront this?

Yeah, so that's why I think it's very positive that Elon Musk and some other people are not saying it's time to actually start work out the technology that we would need to keep machines safe, even if they eventually reach human level intelligence.

I mean, what's to solve?What do you do?


People who read the exchange drove from all over to eat at Sichuan Garden, post praise for their food and service and suggest that the Harvard prof had too many degrees and not enough good sense or human grace.

By weeks' end, the sheriff of the Internet had surrendered. It's clear that I was very much out of line, Ben Edelman posted on his website. I am sorry and I intend to do better in the future.

And some Harvard business students, perhaps from chagrin, began a campaign for people to make $4 donations to the Greater Boston Food Bank. Maybe the next time Mr.  Edelman has Chinese food, he'll end the meal with a fortune cookie that says it is sometimes better to be wise then right.

(Singing) Everybody has the right to be wrong at least once. Everybody has the right to be dunce-like once-like. Not being too smart is no disgrace. What sets you apart is smiling with egg on your face.


It had some effect.

Well, thanks very much for being with us, Serena and Olivier Blanchard. Serena Blanchard's hieroglyphics appears in all editions of the classic "Lectures on Macroeconomics," by Stanley Fischer and Olivier Blanchard. Pick up your copy. . .

. . . at your local airport bookstore.

Thank you both very much for being with us.


Me, party?No.

So, what's going on with this new netbook by VAIO?I've seen it all over, you know, the tech blogs, and I understand that you've taken a look at it, and tell us what it is, of course.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this Sony VAIO P is what they are actually calling the model number of this. This is smaller laptop. This is probably the ideal laptop size. It's kind of - it's larger than a typical BlackBerry, but it's smaller than your 15-inch standard laptop that you're looking - that you currently carry around. This is 1. 4 pounds, very, very light. It's only an eight-inch screen. So, most laptops usually starts off at 10 or 12 inches for the small. So, this is very small. It's very thin, Farai. I mean, you could put this in a purse or backpack, and it's so stylish. But really what's blown, I think, a lot of people away about this particular device is that, A, it's easy to carry; it runs with regular Windows operating system software on it; beautiful resolution, and it has built in Verizon High-Speed, what they call EBDO - it's a technical term - but basically cellular-broadband connection all built in to this one device. I'm just in awe, floored by this particular product.

You have a crush.


I know but that's exactly the dilemma I think a lot of comics are facing right now. It's, like, when things are even-keeled, then you can be edgy. But we're closer to that stuff. So it makes people a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more heightened.

So what happened in places when you were, like, in these places that you said you had a rough time?

Well, it's because, like, if you're not on the side of the liberal warriors, then people are going to be like, oh, well, this means you hate women. This means that, you know, he hates blacks. He hates Mexicans. He hates Jews. He hates gays. You know, and then you have, like - I'm at a club. And I'll say, hey, where are the Trump supporters?And if I say anything bad about Trump, then they're just, like, you know, cursing at me. And people are walking out. And I got - you won (laughter). Your guy's in office. Why are you storming out?I feel like if I handed out a paper before every show, and I said, tell me what you want me to talk about, it would be nothing on there. But it's just I've got to say, sometimes, it's not fun anymore.

That was comedian Erik Griffin.


May of 2014.

Wasn't open very long, was it?

No, it wasn't. They said it was an experiment.

I don't expect you to make any effort to understand Wal-Mart's point of view. We've done a number of these interviews over the years, and people complain when Wal-Mart's open. And so now they're closing. Can you see from their point of view?You're saying that, you know, Wal-Mart might say people complain whatever we do. They just don't like us.


I think a lot of people are afraid of science, really, which is bad news for everybody, because we really all need to understand a certain amount of science in order to make decent policy about the world we live in. But the truth is, translating scientific ideas from physics and mathematics and biology into vernacular English is difficult enough, and then translating it into fiction so that it's all there unobtrusively is extremely challenging.

And that was both a daunting and a really fun part of this novel, because I had to - in order to write about - in order to bring the reader into this world of scientists studying climate change in front of their eyes, they have to know something about the physics of why warm air holds more moisture. I wrote in this novel about the difference between correlation and causation. One of my pet peeves. . .

. . . with journalists who - when they report on science. There - this novel even mentions the ice-albedo effect. I was really excited listening to your previous half hour when I heard that word, albedo effect. That's in my novel. But it's not every easy to do, and it requires a certain comfort with the literature and with the subject to begin to translate that into plot and character and to make it really compelling so that people who might think they're afraid of science can read this novel, enjoy this novel without knowing that they're being educated in science.

I mean, it sounds like you felt compelled to really get the science right in this, even thought it's fiction, to get that accurate.


Yeah.

You've got the whole thing. You've got all of that.

(Laughter).

What - do you feel like there's some message in your story, perhaps, for other people who feel unloved by this country right now?


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

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

Well, it's possible, I think. I - you know, I think everybody is getting hurt. The only question is how much. And as we were saying earlier, the - many of the countries in Africa and Latin America seem to be, for the moment at least, being hurt less than countries in other regions like, say, Russia or Ukraine or Hungary. So, it's a matter of relative hurt rather than success.

Ah, that's a good way of putting it. Now, when trouble strikes immigrants and their families may choose to head home or they could be forced to return if their visas depend on having a job. What impact has the economic downturn had on immigration?


And eventually they found that the virus abided in giant fruit bats, a couple different species of giant fruit bat that were native to that part of Australia. The fruit bats had been roosting in trees, fig trees, eating figs and dropping pulp, dropping their feces and urine onto the grass beneath, and one of the horses had been staying in a pasture out there by those fig trees, had gone into the shade under the tree, had eaten the grass, picked up the virus, and then when she was brought back to the stable with the rest of her fellow horses, she passed the disease on to them, and they passed it on to the humans.

So it was spillover from a bat into horses. The horses became sort of amplifier hosts of the virus, and it spilled onward from them into humans. The mortality rate of that disease is around 50 percent.

And where is it now?I mean, has it popped up again since you wrote about it?

It has popped up, but like some of these diseases, it pops up, and there's an outbreak, a local outbreak, and the case of Hendra usually infects no more than one or two humans, might kill one out of two. In some of the other cases, like Ebola virus in Central Africa, it might kill a dozen or a few dozen people. There's been an outbreak going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this summer.


Well, the curfew has now been in place, you know, almost 36 hours. There are checkpoints every 300 meters. One of my Iraqi friends actually turned around to me and said, this feels like it was during the height of the invasion and the occupation of Iraq in. . .

Wow.

. . . 2003, 2004. It feels like, with so many soldiers out on the street, all that's changed is that the uniforms have changed. It's not American anymore. It's Iraqi.

Impossible to know where this might go next, of course, but in terms of the strategy that may be emerging among protesters, can you tell whether these seem organized?Are there leaders who are calling the direction of where things may go next?


Did you say oversized slingshots?

Yes, that's right. It's one of the more unusual things I've seen in the conflict. They are literally just giant slingshots that are being used to throw these pipe bombs further than they would be able to reach normally.

On the government side, I gather you've seen an escalation in the air war on that side too.

That's correct. Really when we first saw helicopters being used in April, they were being used very rarely. And later on in June, they started using large high-explosive fragmentation bombs that were being dropped quiet frequently. Moving into August, jets started appearing in the skies with larger quantities of bombs. Following that in mid-October is when we started seeing the cluster bombs being used to cross Syria.


Much less than the NFL football players got.

Far less. Far less. And, I mean, we - this is a big issue. I mean, in 2011, there were three guys - Wade Belak, Rick Rypien and Derek Boogard - who all died within six months of one another. They were all enforcers - two buy suicide, one from drugs.

And it really was a wakeup call to the hockey world and to people who do that job of fighting for a living. And they kind of looked at these titans of the sport to say, wait a minute, if those guys who we look up to, who we idolize, who we see as the toughest enforcers on skates can die from this, then maybe we can too. And that's what I get into with my first character, James McEwan. He kind of goes into a mental health tailspin because he sees these guys perish. And he goes, well, this could happen to me, too.

Some of the players you interviewed suggest ways to reduce fighting in hockey. They have solutions. Tell us about some of their ideas.


But what is likely to happen if the men succeed and these lawsuits gain class-action status?I mean, could it upend how these cases are treated?

I mean, if they did gain class-action status, which I personally think is pretty steep thing for them to get, I think that it could result in a lot of these either being kicked back to the school and these students and the survivors having to go through all of this again, and it also has a wider reaching impact as far as what students who are going through these circumstances see and think as far as reporting. And that's one of the things that I see as a concern.

Yeah. What message does it send to the victims?

Right. What message does it send to the victims who have already been a minority of people who report, and because the school didn't do it the right way, that their situation is not validated. And I do think that it can have a real chilling impact on other survivors reporting and coming forward and saying, as we have said in recent years, #MeToo because they think it just may come back and not matter.


In fact, no. My impression is that the fact that these asylum seekers and the poor conditions in which they lived became public, this is shameful and disgraceful for Hong Kong. And that is what makes them a target.

They're trying to get to Canada. And their association with Snowden may be creating problems there?

It's certainly possible. We completed all of their applications and requested urgent treatment because of their vulnerability in Hong Kong months ago. They initially told us that they were expediting the files. And then two months later, they said that they were not expediting the files. But they didn't say why. And this is why we've decided to go before the court to force the government to meet its commitment - one that our clients relied upon. And now they're at the 11th hour facing imminent detention and eventual inevitable deportation, and Canada is the last hope.

And what is your best guess as to what has prompted what seems like a change of heart on Canada's part?


Well, it's very worrying. We've got nearly 1,900 people infected, 1,200 people dead, and over the last several weeks, the rate of new infections has jumped dramatically. We're seeing more than 100 new cases every week. And that's because there is a lot of violence, gunmen storming Ebola treatment centers assassinating health workers. And there's this suggestion that a lot of the violence is actually coordinated, that Ebola is being used as a political weapon. And that's what's led to this really quite remarkable U. N.  decision.

You said remarkable. What's the significance of this decision?

Well, until now, the outbreak response on the international side has really been led by health officials, the World Health Organization. But the U. N.  does have a large peacekeeping force in Congo. And the deputy head of that, his name is David Gressly, that is who they've appointed to this new position that they've created. In other words, it's a recognition that they have to treat this as much as a political problem as a health problem.

This is a place where you have a lot of political players who've been jockeying for position against each other and against factions of the national government. And it seems like a lot of them have connections to these small armed groups all through the area that are said to be behind a lot of these attacks on Ebola responders. Basically, it's a way to destabilize the area as a way to gain power against your rivals.


The government created an aid program to help out farmers who are hurt by these tariffs. Have you benefited from that?

Certainly. It was a key part of filling the gap created by the harm that we felt from the tariffs and the money we were losing in that market. But I think most farmers don't want to rely on government aid packages, going forward. We would much rather have access to one of the world's largest users of soybeans.

When you go to the local - I don't know - coffee shop or supply store or Walmart and have conversations with other people in the community, how are people feeling these days?

Well, and that's - I really appreciate you bringing that up 'cause it's not just farmers who are affected by this. Small towns like Kulm, N. D.  - we are an agriculture community. Not everybody here is a farmer. We have many small businesses that rely on farmers - hardware stores, grocery stores. And when farmers struggle, everybody in these small towns starts to feel the hurt. When you talk to businesses who have been around for a long time, I mean, they - their bottom line is directly affected by whether farmers are making a profit or not.


Oh, I'm glad to be here.

So what's wrong with the research that said he had a special brain?

A couple of things. One is what we call confirmation bias, and that's basically saying what we all know - that if you really want to find something, if you look for it long enough, you will. So, for example, in the papers that claim the external shape of Einstein's brain was different. They start out with a fairly vague notion of what his cognitive specialties were and then go poking around in his brain until they find something - anything that sort of conforms to their previous expectations.

Was part of the problem that they knew it was Einstein's brain, and therefore they were predisposed to see things?

Exactly right, exactly right. It's rather like seeing faces or shapes in clouds. Those shapes really aren't in the clouds. They're in your mind.

Forgive me - what amounts to a philosophical question - why have we been fascinated by Einstein's brain matter over the years?


Now, Mr.  Trump often points out that the school, at least on the website, had an overwhelmingly favorable rating from former students. But the plaintiffs say that it wasn't like that at all.

Really, that's exactly what they say. They argue that the whole point to this school was to keep selling students increasingly expensive seminars. First, there was a free introductory course where students were told they could make tens of thousands of dollars in just a couple of months using Trump's investment techniques.

But to learn those, they had to sign up for another seminar that cost about 1,500 bucks. And at that seminar, they were sold another course that cost as much as $35,000. They claim that students were encouraged to go into credit-card debt and even cash out their 401(k)s to pay for these top-level courses.

The settlement was reached. Well, one of these suits was about to go to trial on Monday, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was, though attorneys for Trump wanted it delayed because he was too busy with the transition. But, clearly, his schedule wasn't going to get any easier once he became president. So the judge in the case was urging both sides to settle.


Cryo would be called - right crypto would - wow.

That's right. So we basically house lichens, mosses and fungi in this herbarium here. We have over 200,000 specimens here.

Two hundred thousand?And are these specimens popping out of the ice?Are they new species?

The ones that are coming out from underneath the glaciers?


So you had the U. K.  negotiating bilateral agreements with, like, Australia and Canada and India, right?And then I read you also had Germany forming its own bloc with members, countries that it had relationships with. And the U. S.  did something similar.

That's right. The origins of the British trading bloc really go back to World War I. And a lot of the considerations are of a military nature, a geostrategic nature. They were bottlenecked in some supplies, especially for the military, and that's why the British government was thinking more about how to secure its supplies. And that happened on the German side as well. Germany was preparing for war. They were gearing up for war, so they needed to make sure they had the right supplies, especially for the military.

Now, you write that if similar patterns play out today, we could see a, quote, "reorientation of world trade around China- and U. S. -centric trade blocs. "How likely do you think that is?

Well, it depends on the politics. The White House wants to have a more bilateral approach where the U. S.  deals with one individual country, as opposed to a group. And China now wants to create a system of its own. So that does include establishing a sphere of influence in Asia. And each of them will want to build up their own realm where they have the power in the region.

What do you think is at stake here?If this approach continues, what are your main concerns?


Initially, Manaf was very close to Bassel. I mean, he was his childhood friend. But when Bassel died and Bashar became the heir, obviously, the friendship and the loyalties were transferred to Bashar. And Manaf was by Bashar's side, you know, from the get-go.

You know, in 2011, when the uprising started, here, Manaf made the break and said, you know, I'm not going to be like my father, Mustafa; I'm not going to kill, you know, to preserve this regime. So he stepped back and eventually had to leave the country.

When you talked to Manaf Tlass, who was a loyalist for so long, what does he say is the moment when he said, I got to get out of this - this friendship, this country?

Initially, when the uprising started, Manaf was trying to convince Bashar not to use violence, not to actually shoot protesters. But the problem is, you know, Bashar was surrounded by these hardliners - his brother Maher al-Assad and his cousin Hafez Makhlouf. So this is very much a family affair ruling Syria. These people were for actually shooting people from the first day. And the idea was if you shot enough people from the first day, you would scare them off the streets. That was the logic.


I just want to complete that thought. You said, it's going to be a combination of private investment and higher taxes?

Not necessarily because we have something that I think we need to do in any event, which is to remove the giant subsidies from the oil and gas companies. We need to repeal the majority of the Trump tax cuts, which went to the upper, you know, income brackets - rather than working people - and did not produce jobs. So simply having some reform like that is what makes sense.

There are people who would say, yes, let's do this, and I will do my part. But there are Republicans and some Democrats who would not be so keen on having to pay any kind of higher tax in order to offset the costs of these climate proposals. Can you tell us now that you would absolutely not ask the American taxpayer to pay some of the burden here?

Well, of course not. Nobody who is going to run for office can make any statement about the future like that, and they're responsible if they do. But what I can say is that the majority of the investment will be private, in part because it will be required. Much of our plan does not involve public investment directly. It is a requirement that the public utilities get off fossil fuels. It is a requirement that the auto industry provide cars for us that don't pollute anymore.


Yeah, and you love short stories, too. I love short stories, I appreciate that about you. You seem to be - enjoy writing short stories.

Yeah, they're tough as hell, and, you know, as a sort of a practice, people in the publishing world discourage them. They're like oh, don't do it. But I can't help but root for the underdog. As a form, you know, the short stories and the linked short story collections is an underdog, and people don't think of it as serious. So I don't mind wading in there. It feels like a really good battle.

Do you see yourself sort of at some point - you haven't really played that much with the novel form, but, you know, a lot of different writers are experimenting with the novel form, you know, Zadie Smith just did with her book, new book "NW. "Do you see yourself playing with that form?

Well, sure. I mean, again it's probably the arrogance, you know, the narcissistic arrogance of an artist, but I feel that so far I've written one book, one novel, and it's a very strange - at a formulistic level, I think it's - it took a lot of risks. Now will I keep doing that?Hard to say. It's like sort of saying will I continue to be X, Y or Z. You hope so. You hope so, but you never know.


We have all been growing increasingly frustrated and upset about the direction of this country. Not just about policies, right?We're going to likely disagree. But it has been this bomb that I call it he has exploded within this country along racial lines. We have all been frustrated, and so we found a way to actually do something and say something and push back on this narrative around what we're saying about black and brown people as if this is not our country. No matter where our background is, what he's doing as it relates to immigrants - we felt like it wasn't enough being said, and so coming together, we thought our voices together would make a stronger impact.

Are you concerned at all that people will just dismiss this criticism of President Trump as a partisan attack?

You know, at this point, it doesn't matter. If they want to dismiss it, they can, but they are dismissing the larger point that was being made. He challenged our patriotism. He challenged the citizenship of those four women who are citizens of this country. He consistently challenges that when it comes to people of color. And so at this point, if somebody wants to dismiss it just because they want to see it through the lens of politics, that's a problem. But we elevated the fact that because we served this country and because we love this country, it doesn't mean that we have to sit quietly as we see things going wrong in this country.

Dru Ealons is a political blogger and strategist who served as a senior official at the EPA during the Obama administration.


And its search-advertising technology is probably the best on the web, so that made Yahoo feel like, hey, we actually have another option. Maybe we don't have to sell out. Maybe we can just utilize some licensing from our partner-slash-competitor and still be able to keep our brand intact. So, it all remains to be seen, but I think it may have worked out that they didn't do it.

Let me throw another company into the mix. What about AOL?After the big AOL-Time Warner merger in 2000, the combined company lost billions of dollars. Now, Time Warner dropped AOL from its name, fired the AOL CEO. Now wants to offload the company. Are any of these three companies we're talking about, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft, going to go belly up and buy AOL, you think?

You know, that's something that is highly discussed. AOL is going through some serious challenges. We've met with some of their executives over other projects that had to be put off, be delayed, in fact, because of some of these issues. Their headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, has now changed.

They've moved a lot of people out to New York City to try to play up a more of an advertising role and an advertising partner. So, I still think AOL has a strong brand, although I think that brand is with an older audience. I think they've been trying to reinvent themselves. Some of the acquisitions, though, in video has been really smart on their part, like Truveo.


The numbers you've tossed around show you how expensive. People have been able to do experiments. They've found all kinds of really interesting possibly valuable properties, but nothing, no industry is really going to start until they can make enough of this stuff cheaply to use it.

Until now, most of the ways of making it started with this first step: Get some really pure, really expensive chemicals that you're going to mix in and do the next stuff. Huge expense. What Jim Tour down in Houston discovered and showed is that anything that's got carbon in it you can turn into graphene.

And to demonstrate that he meant anything, he did it with Girl Scout cookies. He turned those into graphene. He did it with chocolate. He got some chocolate half-dollar coins. He did it with dog feces from a miniature Dachshund, and he did it with a cockroach leg. And essentially he just got a really big oven, heated it up to about 1,000 degrees C and filled that oven with a little bit of this stuff, the cockroach or the dog feces, whatever, and a sheet of pure copper and a little bit of gas, left it for about 20 minutes, and viola, he'd made little bits of really high-quality graphene.

Wow.


They sense a market opportunity?

Indeed, it's a huge market opportunity.

You're from Costa Rica, which has been named U. N.  champion of the earth.

Indeed.


When you say that this law is intended to create a firewall around the state, do you think that this is where things are headed - where certain states will allow access to abortions and other states simply won't?

That's certainly my fear, and that was why this was so important to get passed before we adjourned. And, you know, ultimately, I've been working on this issue my entire adult life.

And I used to say, if Roe falls. And for the last year, I've been saying, when Roe falls. And it, frankly, still feels like a gut-punch every time I say it. But I think that there has been this very strategic and determined process by the other side to get cases into the pipeline that will ultimately lead to Roe falling.

Do you think that Democrats and people who support abortion rights have been outmaneuvered?


Well, we've had a number of things at home, and the one work, when I go through our front door, what I love is Jeff Koon's Bunny. It's polished stainless steel made to look like a blown up balloon bunny. That makes me smile.

You've set out this challenge for MOCA. You've said, here, I'll help you with this money, but you've got to make some changes. What advice would you give to the rest of this country - other failing business out there right now?

I think everyone has to recognize that we're in a different era. It means budgets have to be cut. We've got to have contingency plans, and we're got to ride it out. But I must say, this is the worst situation since the Great Depression, without any doubt in my mind.

Is there a silver lining in this?Have you seen any difference in prices - prices dropping?Has that helped you maybe acquire things that you wanted to acquire.


Well, about five years ago, when we started the project, it was actually the internal project name, and we had a series of scientists and engineers trying to think about how we could make glass tougher, more resistant to damage. And someone in the room just threw it out and said gorilla, and it stuck, and it became the product name.

And tell us about the history. Wasn't Corning experimenting with a super-tough glass back in the '60s?

Yeah, we sure were. Back in the early '60s, we had a product that we actually launched called Chemcor. The basic principles of trying to strengthen glass were the same, but we were targeting different applications to include automotive and safety glasses.

And so why is it not in automotive and safety glass?


Why do cockroaches flip over on their backsides when they die?

But I understand now, when it comes to answering the question of the year, you're not going to go with that one. Why not?

This happens every year. Readers write in and point out that some of the questions on our list have been answered elsewhere on the Web. It turned out this year that our top three vote-getters have all been answered elsewhere. So we had to default to question number four.

And what is that question?


Well, you know, when you talk about fascists, one would think that that movement and the fascism of Mussolini - its ideas might have been buried a long time ago in Italy.

Yeah, well, theoretically, in 1945 when the dictatorship fell. But, you know, Italy was never made to come to terms with its fascist past. There were no Nuremberg trials. And many fascist bigwigs just blended back into society. Italy had a large communist movement that had been the backbone of the partisan battle against fascism. So with the start of the Cold War, the allies feared communists would take over and did not push for a defascistization (ph) of society.

So today, there are several openly fascist parties running in this election. They probably won't overcome the 3-percent threshold to get into Parliament. But they're very visible. They were very loud. And they've, you know, reawakened the political ghosts of the past. They've emboldened other populist parties to use language and make proposals that, until recently, mainstream politics would have really considered unacceptable.

What happened to the moderates, though?I mean, why hasn't the outgoing ruling party, which is center-left, been able to showcase some real achievements that it's had?


That leaves a very unnerving feeling because, if they're on the loose, and they're on a suicide mission, and they're not - you know, they could strike at any point of time. So, it does definitely leave an unnerving feeling. As long as you're home, you're secure. But one doesn't know what to expect tomorrow.

Mr. Doctor, I understand that you are a Muslim. Is that correct?

That is correct, yeah.

So far, there has not been official confirmation of who's responsible for these attacks, but they have been attributed, at least in part, to Islamic militants. How do you think the situation there might affect Hindu-Muslim relations in Mumbai?


No. We all hang about. That's exactly the same as "Mrs. Brown. "People will call you, amazed that - you know, you read all about actors who stay in character all day and hide in caves, and then only come when they're called for and get the family to behave as a fill-in character.

Well, I have found with the vast majority of those great British actors, that they stand, telling stories at the side of the set, and they're called for. And they say, oh, look. The light's one. We've got to go. And they go and get straight into character. It's like stepping into an old shoe. And it's lovely. It's - especially Judi Dench. You know, we used to just stand screaming well after and then say, right, lads. Get yourself together. Right, then, action, and we'd be into it again.

And there she's queenly again.

And then she's a queen, yeah, and I'm a scruff.


Excuse me.

Present company excepted, of course.

All right, all right, OK, yeah.

But he constantly breaks his own maxim. It's huge fun.


(Laughter) Yeah, cover their ears please. So basically, the goal of "Where's Waldo?"is you're trying to find a guy that's always wearing the same clothes - you know, it's red and white stripes and beanie hat and everything. And I remember as a kid I'd spend hours poring over this book trying to find Waldo, you know, and, oh, my gosh, where is he?And so I finally decided, well, you know what?Now as a Ph. D.  student, I can actually analyze this and sort of find the optimal route to look through the page to find Waldo.

(Laughter) This is your revenge on Waldo, isn't it?

Exactly.

Randy Olson, a Ph. D.  candidate at Michigan State University, researching artificial intelligence. Thanks so much for being with us.


Yeah.

. . . To (unintelligible).

Correct.

So what has changed since then?What has happened now?What's causing these federal charges to be brought now?

I think, you know, a big part of this is, one, the #MeToo movement, but two, a bigger part of this is the Miami Herald's three-part series late last year that sort of got everybody interested in this, including the Daily Beast - and we've been working on this now for a year - that highlighted, one, the non-prosecution agreement, why these girls weren't given their day in court - essentially made the U. S.  Justice Department look bad.


Without warning, I sat down to my meal. The pot pie looked like something Martha Stewart whipped up. And served in her mother's best china, Christiane's potatoes au gratin with green chilies could've been an expensive appetizer at a fine restaurant.

Mm, mm. Oh my gosh. It's really good. It's kind of got like that Tex-Mex flavor to it, like jalapenos. . .

I think if you don't add the chilis. . .

Mm.


But a number of scientists say the issue has become so politicized that we're ignoring the real facts. They say study after study have shown that emergency contraceptives like Plan B inhibit or delay ovulation, they do not interfere with implantation.

Dr.  Kristina Gemzell-Danielsson has conducted some of this research. She's professor and chair of the Division of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and she joins us from Bergen, Norway. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

Thank you.

Are these abortion pills?


As the 2018 NFL season begins, professional football is still the most popular spectator sport in America. But it's declined 10 percent in viewership last year and is beset with tough questions about how the game destroys players while it earns billions of dollars and a continuing controversy over players demonstrating their social and political concerns during the national anthem. A sport once considered a source of national unity now inspires divisions.

Mark Leibovich, The New York Times Magazine correspondent who got the goods on official Washington, D. C. , in his bestselling "This Town," has turned his attention to the National Football League - his new book, "Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times. "He's in our studios. Mark, thanks so much for being with us.

Good to be here, Scott.

I have to ask you a hard news question first. An arbitrator ruled this week Colin Kaepernick's grievance against NFL owners could go to trial. He says NFL owners have been colluding to keep him out of the game. Does this case have what I'll call Mueller-like potential?


Yes. We are quite cognizant of that. And most fundamentally, we are not inducing anybody to commit a crime. We're not asking for somebody to take something that was top secret. People need to make their own choices about what they think inside the government deserves public attention. That's not a decision for us to make. It's a decision for them to make.

The Obama administration was accused of invoking the Espionage Act to crackdown on leakers and pursuing whistleblowers more aggressively than any other administration in history. So why didn't you make this call under that administration?

Well, first of all actually, we have had a page for a long time on our site encouraging people to send us documents and information, including in secure ways. So the answer to that is we have been asking people. Why have we pushed it even farther now?Well, one of the reasons that we've pushed it farther now is because we have been hearing about ways in which federal employees are being told to keep quiet. And if people are being told to keep quiet, well, that means that there's a good chance that relevant information is not coming out that should be.

Haven't there been gag orders during the transition of previous administrations too?


Well, sure, it has something to do with it. Most - these smartphone patent wars are really kind of absurd. What really usually happens and what ought to happen is that you get in a patent fight and you very quickly use the patent fight to cross-license the patents that the other guy has that you need. But Apple has been asking for something really quite extraordinary in these smartphone wars. They've been asking for an injunction to pull some Samsung products off the market. And that tells you how seriously Apple takes Samsung as a competitor. I should also add that I virtually do not believe that there is a judge in the United States that will allow that injunction.

It also, of course, is irresistible to note that these figures come when Apple now has a pretty much brand new CEO, Tim Cook.

Yeah.

Following the death of Steve Jobs.