And it's most importantly for us, combined with great food, great food and dining experiences. And as more of our culture gets into more of the artsy and fine wine and fine dining experiences, wine is more of a part of that for all cultures.

Do you ever find people saying to you, OK, it's great that you do this, but your world is so on another planet. And what you do is so ridiculously specialized, I can't even talk to you because I don't know what you're talking about?

Definitely find less and less that. I think everybody in our - the mystique of wine and the exclusivity of wine, those barriers have been broken down, to a large degree, and people are less and less afraid to try wine and to have fun with it themselves.

They ask questions about some of the technical aspects of it. We're very fortunate as a family, and the other members of the African-American Association of Vintners are also from various backgrounds, and they get the same kind of questions that we do. . .


He wrote tons of letters. I bet there are a hundred thousand - hundreds out there signed, all the best, George Bush. Many of them are compiled in a lovely volume he did. His - you know, he was the son of a mother who insisted that he not talk - that one not talk about oneself. He was - so when it came time to write a book after he left the presidency, he didn't. . .

Oh, right.

His mother's ghostly influence was such that he felt it would be too puffed up to write a standard memoir. So he wrote a - he essentially published a compilation of his letters. I believe it's called - the title is "All The Best, George Bush. "Famously, in 19 - excuse me - '88, when he was running for president of the United States and he was home and in Greenwich for Thanksgiving, sitting around the table, telling, you know, pretty interesting stories about running for president, his mother rapped on the table and said, George, you're talking about yourself too much. Stop it.

Now. . .


Tomorrow, car sales numbers for November are due out, and they're not expected to be good. That could lead to more dealerships shutting down, and that could mean a big loss of revenue for local governments. For example, this year, the state of California has lost at least two billion dollars in sales taxes due to the drop in car sales.

To get a better sense of how local governments are coping, we're joined now by Marshall Bond. He is the city manager for Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Thanks for joining us, and why don't you tell us how many car dealerships are in Monroeville?

Just about every major domestic and foreign manufacturer sells cars here in Monroeville.

And so, how much of your budget comes from the revenue from car sales at these dealerships?

We have a business tax which obviously is, I'd say, probably of that - I'd say total tax is probably about 15 to 20 percent is based upon our related car industry.


Do you ever feel that way, you're just so tired of singing, but you know you have to because that song is so closely associated with who you are?

Well "Band of Gold" would be it, but by the time I get to the end of the show, and I'm coming back for that last encore…

(Singing) Now that you're gone, all that's left is a band of gold…

A lot of times, I will do "Band of Gold," and as a matter of fact, I - and I find that it's a good thing because I see people in the audience just light up, like (unintelligible)…


The storm was downgraded to a category-two hurricane just as it hit land. So, that's got to be good news for everybody there.

Oh, yes. The staff here, were all looking at the - upstairs in the ops room and stuff - They're looking at the weather, everybody's feeling much confident. Our field units - people who first responded are feeling better about the situation, we'll just wait for the past five - even more so that we can get crews out and do a real good damage assessment of the whole parish including the parts in the lower parishes, which will be closer to the eye itself.

Now that the storm has hit land, what are the projections for where it will go and how it will go over the next twelve hours?

Well, my understanding, it's going to slowly drift north, stretching north west and then a little more to the west, and there's a possibility that it may slow down and maybe even stall near the Louisiana, Texas line.


Hi, Tony. How are you?

Listen, people define hate groups in different ways. So two things for you, how does the Southern Poverty Law Center determine if an organization deserves this classification, and what kinds of groups are we talking about here?

Basically, our definition of a hate group is a group which in its platform statements or in the speeches or writings of its leader says that an entire group of other people by virtue of their group characteristics is somehow less. So in other words, a group that says, you know, all black people are criminals, all white people are blue-eyed devils, all the Jews are whatever, is a hate group by our definition.

Are we talking then about the Klan, Nazi skinheads, something different and new perhaps?


Exactly. And so this is how you get this agency in the middle of this fight with its current director leaving and trying to set something up to protect it on his way out the door.

So why is this complicated?Because directors leave agencies all the time and acting directors come in through clear lines of succession and then ultimately somebody else might be appointed. What's going on here?

Yeah. So Richard Cordray, the Obama-era appointee, was basically trying to protect the agency. And written into its founding document - written into the Dodd-Frank law - it says that when there's a vacancy, the deputy director becomes the acting director. So Cordray named Leandra English, who had been his chief of staff, to be the deputy director as he was walking out the door. Then, a few hours later, the White House announced that the president had picked Mick Mulvaney to be the acting director. He's the White House budget director, also an outspoken critic of CFPB - basically, saying at one point along the way that he thought it should be shut down.

Now the White House says the law's on their side.


Not solely, no. And this is something that is commonly, I think, misunderstood. The cornerstone of the healing profession and the physician is the patient relationship. But psychiatry more than any other really has an imperative to maintain the primacy of the patient relationship, so medications were extraordinarily important; they were miraculous developments, but medications alone can't do it.

Yeah. Between fever cures and induced comas and drilling holes in the skull and lobotomies, psychiatry has done some painful things to people in the name of science over the years, hasn't it?

Well, that's the point. That's why it's the untold story. In order for us to genuinely make a case for why psychiatry is a medical discipline that deserves sort of equal footing and respect as other medical specialties, we needed to fess up in terms of what the past was. And so in order to do so, we needed to tell the unvarnished history of the field and then describe why things may not have been helpful and in some cases harmful then, but why that's different now. And nobody should avoid seeking treatment if they think they need it because of uncertainty or fear.

Dr.  Jeffrey Lieberman has written, with Ogi Ogas, a new book "Shrinks: The Untold Story Of Psychiatry. "Thanks so much for being with us.


And could you please describe the dish for us?

Yeah, without getting into all the controversy surrounding the dish, basically it consists of guanciale, which is the cured, salted cheek of a pig, tomatoes, usually tinned or jarred, not fresh tomatoes, pecorino, which is sheep's milk cheese, and a little bit of dried hot chili pepper, which the Italians called peperoncino.

And it was, at one point, distinct to this area of Italy.

It's hard to be absolutely hard and fast about these things. But, yes, I mean, there was a version which is currently called pasta Gricia, which is without the tomatoes, and that's definitely from this region. And it's probable that the version with tomatoes, which is called Amatriciana now, is from the region. But some people think that the tomatoes happened in Rome. Rome has certainly taken the dish to its heart, and you'll often find it described as a Roman pasta.

And what's the controversy that you were trying to avoid?


Tracy Letts, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his play, has adapted it for the screen. He's also won a Tony for starring on Broadway in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"He plays a U. S.  senator in the latest season of "Homeland," and is a member of Chicago's Steppenwolf ensemble. Tracy Letts joins us from Chicago. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

You know, such a well-known play, but I'm afraid I don't think I've ever heard the story of how you came to write "August: Osage County. "

It's based on family history. My grandfather - my mother's father - committed suicide when I was 10 years old. And my grandmother descended into years of downer addiction, which had a horrible impact on my family and has ripples in my family even to this day. And watching all of that unfold as a 10-year-old certainly had an impact on me.


Well, we got some comments about a story we did on a reported drop of media coverage on the war in Iraq. Charles Durn(ph) in Doylestown, Pennsylvania wrote us this. I am amazed how the various reasons given for the reduced coverage skip the obvious. One of your guests said that coverage switched off the same week General Petraeus said the surge was working. The obvious reason is the press is not interested in success in Iraq, especially if it made Bush look good.

Caroline Madelle Bennett(ph) in Rochester, New York praised us for a guest on that same segment. I don't care for much of what NPR puts on anymore, but I want you to know that I appreciate your having Laura Flanders on this evening. She's one of the intelligent voices of which there are so few on radio, in broadcast news, commentary and analysis.

We got a couple of comments on the monthly series on jazz that we're doing. Last week, we talked about how radio stations were dropping jazz from their programming lineups. Melinda Kennedy, who listens on WMUE FM noted this. It's not the music that keeps me from listening, but the radio personalities that host the shows.

And Don Nickels(ph) from Wildwood, Missouri chimed in, jazz has not suffered. Most of the greats are gone, but other than that it is the same as it's been for decades. It is a black genre and has never made it out of that community. Should it have more exposure on the radio?Maybe. But if no one is listening, who will pay?Welcome to what makes the world go round. It's called capitalism.


Like, for example, in Denmark, they have these open sandwiches that they're very famous for. And they really say a lot about, you know, Denmark as a country, being a very rich agriculture region, and you see this on these sandwiches. You know, they're fully laden with a huge spectrum of different toppings, very sort of rich and opulent sandwiches that you can't even - you know, you have to eat them from a plate with knife and a fork, right?

Yeah.

And then if you go up to where I grew up, a sandwich there would probably be more of a, you know, a piece of flatbread with a layer of butter and a layer of cheese on it that you would eat standing up. And I think it's a very interesting thing, you know, those things that, you know, are kind of a broader concept exist in a big geographic region but that vary a lot depending on where you are.

Chef Magnus Nilsson of "The Nordic Cookbook. "Thank you, chef.


Scott, I've never seen anything like this really in China. I've been in and out of here for close to 20 years. And so I was talking to this low-level manager, and he said officials here were getting kickbacks to approve coal mines and other businesses.

Yeah.

They were using shell companies to invest. So what they were basically doing was - they don't really care about the real economy. They were just looking for ways to profit. And so you sort of see this breakdown in the system where you've got the wrong incentives and corruption is driving a lot of this.

Have you been able to talk to people, Frank?


He wound up in a room in Jordan for 45 days and sent along the most dangerous road in the world and then become some kind of global symbol.

And then what happened to Kamala?

To be a widow in Nepal, you're pretty much - you become the property of your husband's family after you get married. And if he dies, you're sort of treated that way, sadly. So she was completely isolated by his family. She was cast out. She wound up at a home for widows and their children in Kathmandu, an ashram. I found her there in 2005. She was so devastated, she couldn't even look at me.

I went back to Nepal in 2013 to write about the same supply chains feeding guys making cameras for the iPhone 5 in Malaysia. And some of the families that I wrote about at the time and got together and - was this woman, this magnetic woman who lit up the room, who was leading the conversation that everybody was deferring to. She was cutting off the men, which you also don't see much of in Nepal. And I didn't even recognize her.


Well, I think they're convening a panel tomorrow to discuss it once more. Declaring a public health emergency of international concern has big implications. So the closing of borders - you know, these are border towns. People - their livelihoods are dependent on being able to cross borders and do business.

Yeah.

Refugees who are fleeing armed conflict in DRC not being able to come into Uganda. So it - there are some serious implications on making that declaration, and I'm sure those will be considered.

How hopeful are you that this outbreak can be contained?


I think his great forte is understanding the problems that we face. He's had great experiences. You know, he was raised - a good part of his youth was in France. He speaks French fluently and understands Europeans quite well, and his being the Allied commander in Europe was absolutely a perfect fit. And he can expand that in giving advice in problems, literally, all over the world.

I read that James Jones went to Georgetown University, where he played basketball. Do you have any sensed of maybe whether he and President-elect Obama might discuss security issues over a game of hoops?

I wouldn't doubt it. President-elect Obama would also find he's a competitor. That ought to be an interesting basketball game.

Congressman Ike Skelton of Missouri. Thank you.


That's right. And the U. S.  scientists had been very disappointed in the '58 Brussels fair because they felt the Russians had outshone us in terms of science. And they said we need to do something. And the Seattle guys came along and said, we want to do a fair. You want a science fair. That's what this will be about. The Space Needle was designed to be a symbol of the kind of uplift that science and technology represented to the world.

When they broke ground on the Space Needle, it was literally the same time that the Berlin Wall was being built. And it became this kind of symbol about the difference between us and the Soviets. They were putting up barbwire. We were putting up a vista to the world.

Talking with Knute Berger on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow here at - in Seattle at the Pacific Science Center right next to the Space Needle. If it were to be built today, would anything be built differently about it, structurally or design-wise or is it almost a perfect needle?

You know, I asked the engineer who's still alive who worked on it. I asked him that exact question. I said what would you today?And he said, basically, we wouldn't anything different. He said we could take some of the weight out of it. They overbuilt it. He. . .


Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me.

One of the things you've written about is complicity in the power establishment. But also, you believe some women have been complicit - people you call game girls.

I do indeed write about the way that many of the women - including myself - many of the women I know are wrestling with the ways in which we have participated in this system or not participated in this system. So many of us - if not all of us - have engaged in this in one way or another, whether we were the objects of harassment or assault, whether we decided to stay silent and not report assaults - sometimes in an effort to not get the backlash that many women got when they did file complaints. But if we did that, then did we enable the perpetrators to do it to other women who are our younger colleagues or who came after us?If we did not participate - if we rebuffed, did that hurt our careers?


Well, there is actually a pretty good and well-established hypothesis about what actually happened 1300 years ago. There was giant lake of fresh water that spilled into the North Atlantic - this was sort of leftover water from the last ice age - and all this water affected the ocean circulation in the North Atlantic and stopped a conveyor belt of both water and air that was bringing warm air up from the equatorial regions to higher latitudes. And that's been the leading hypothesis for what caused this event, which is called the Younger Dryas. And so, somehow or other, they would have to figure out how the comet impact/collision event would fit in with this pretty well-established idea that there was this huge burst of fresh, cold water that went into the North Atlantic.

So, how will all this get sorted out?

Well, more data are needed, I think, is what scientists are fond of saying, and this is certainly a case where that is true.

NPR science correspondent, Richard Harris, thank you.


Well, it certainly, was fine with you because I'm reading from your book here. This is what you said about non-African-American writers. Quote, "I have learned over the years as much about African-American life from non-African-American writers as I have from African-Americans. "That's interesting.

Yeah, I've read some very important books. I mean, there've been some very important scholars in my field which I deal with African-American studies. There've been some very important non-African-Americans who have written in that field and - who've done tremendous, pioneering work in that field and who were important. And I've learned a great deal from them as a result. I feel no reason to discriminate against them in any way. I remembered that John Hope Franklin once told me that in the south African-American colleges he said were he called - were integrated so he called them, these islands of civility. I like to think that the volumes that we're putting out are sort of islands of civility where, you know, lots of people can, you know, be shoulder to shoulder.

Gerald Early, thank you very much. Good luck with this project.

Thank you very much.


It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm one of many people who are running the Dog Aging Project.

What do you folks hope to learn?

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

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


And what we found in these focus groups was that most people, Democrats and Republicans in this - in the sort of middle of the spectrum, they did think there was something there with the investigation. They thought it was a good thing for it to be investigated. Maybe some of the Republicans felt it was going on too long. But you see this in polls as well. People generally supported the investigation, thought it was merited. And they were confused by it, frankly. They weren't - they weren't following all of the twists and turns of it.

It's a hard story to follow (laughter).

Even for those of us whose job it is to follow it, it can be confusing. And that's certainly true for the public. It wasn't that it was confusing and therefore shouldn't exist. They thought it was a - it was a good thing. But they certainly could not tell you every twist and turn.

NPR conducted a poll with PBS News Hour and Marist. And that poll found that 78 percent of Republicans are now satisfied with the investigation, 35 percent of Democrats and about half of independents. That seems to have literally flipped the script. Is that similar to what you heard?


Last week, the French ended their rotation at the head of United Nations Security Council. Their permanent representative, Ambassador Gerard Araud, had one preeminently difficult issue on his agenda while in charge. And, of course, that was the question of what to do about Syria. Ambassador Araud joins us from his office in New York City. Mr. Ambassador, thanks very much for being with us.

Good morning.

Mr. Ambassador, first, of course, there seemed to be more reports of civilian deaths every day in Syria. How frustrating were these last few months for you?

It was extremely frustrating because we have seen Syria sinking into what is now a real civil war. And we have desperately tried to avoid it because this country has an incredible potential for violence, violence within Syria and unfortunately also beyond the borders of Syria.


Well, actually, we - there's three records on the chart, the chart of this year. Within the top of 30, you have Flo Rida, and then there - a couple of other songs that were charting this year were Alicia Keys and one by Timbaland with "One Republic. "

So, you know, in the - if you look at the top ten, one thing I'm happy about in terms of grading on the curve, if you look at the top ten, every decade that this chart has touched, is represented here. We have one from the 50s, and we also have the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, and this decade represented.

But yeah, there's ample representation of recent hits here. One from this decade in the top 10 being by Mariah Carey, "We Belong Together. "

All right, what is changing about the music game with digital distribution?Does it affect how people buy singles, and what might be on the top 100 in the next 50 years?


This is News and Notes. I'm Tony Cox. According to the American Medical Association, addiction is the most untreated treatable disease in America. It doesn't discriminate, affecting people without regard to race, sex, or economic status. And many addicts manage to function everyday without others knowing who they are. But how do they do it?Today, we continue our series on addiction with a look at functioning addicts. We're joined by Ed Storti, the author of several books and a certified alcohol and drug counselor and intervention specialist. Ed, welcome to News and Notes.

Thank you, Tony.

Let's begin with this. Give us an example of what a functioning addict is?

I think the functioning addict is one that's out there, they're on the freeway, they're going to work, they're trying to do the right thing, but ultimately, they're living in fear, they're living in emotional turmoil. Many find a way to sedate their feelings sometimes at night or early in the morning. But overall, they're still pulling it off. Meaning, folks haven't caught on or it takes for some folks, years and years. Personally, my youngest patient has been 12 years of age. My oldest patient has been 94 years of age. And I was just working with a group of people that the family said we need to intervene on this 82-year-old female. And I said when did you start noticing problems and issues with her and they said, well when she was about 41 years of age.


It's hell seeing 6, 7 years old burying their own dead. Nobody's going to give them questions when they're beginning to ask questions. Simple questions - why are we here?Where's my mommy?That's when you get to know, like, these are children sometimes when the terrible things happen.

So on the one hand, they're killing people and on the other hand they're still children.

>>JAL They are still children, but, you know, they've been - they've grown really fast in terms of - to be trained to be killing machines because - the only thing is children don't know you die once. And also - AK is also a terrible gun that has been invented because young people can carry the gun - 8 years old can fire an AK47 that's as good as a 20-year-old.

How did you get out of that?


So you have companies like Altria, a tobacco giant, that sent four representatives right in the middle of this decision-making process. Altria, several years later, went on to buy a 35% stake in the company Juul, which was the most popular e-cigarette among teens. So you certainly see representation from the tobacco companies showing up at the Office of Management and Budget during this time frame.

Can I just clarify that, 'cause I think many people might find it curious that the tobacco companies were involved here because I think a lot of people have the impression that e-cigarettes are an alternative to tobacco products?I mean, the whole point was to get people to stop using tobacco products. That's not true?

Very interesting point that you make. And that's a question that many federal officials are trying to get to the bottom of right now. Even in Congress, Senator Durbin is on top of this issue. You've seen companies like Juul arguing that they are an alternative to tobacco, that they're even a safe alternative to tobacco. But, of course, giant tobacco companies have a large stake in the company. So a lot of people are wondering the same thing you're wondering - how can that be?

So when you approached former Obama administration officials to ask them what happened there, what did they say?


In other words, says Ambassador Hill, the error was to call for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad. Christopher Hill joins us now from his office at the University of Denver, where he's dean of the School of International Studies. He's former ambassador to Iraq, Macedonia, Poland and South Korea, a former assistant secretary of state as well. Nice to talk with you again.

Good to talk to you.

And you concede in your piece that President Assad should be tried for war crimes. How can he be part of a diplomatic solution?

Well, that's not a concession on my part. I'm simply pointing out that the conflict in Syria is a pretty complex one. And the issue often is not how do you get rid of these guys, these dictators, but how do they get there in the first place. And when we start looking into Syria, you see that it wasn't quite the same pattern as Moammar Gadhafi or even the situation in Egypt or some of these other places associated with the Arab Spring, you have a very complex problem. And to this day, some couple years later, you have a lot of people fighting on Assad's side, and they're not fighting on his side because they like him, support him, want to see him continue.

They just fear the future even more than they fear him. And so I think the problem was that in calling for his ouster, we didn't explain what would happen the day after he's gone.


From NPR News, this is News & Notes. I'm Farai Chideya.

It's Uncle Sam to the rescue, but what is the long-term fallout for your mortgage or your community?We're talking about an unprecedented takeover. The federal government has seized the reigns of mortgage giants Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae. Together the companies hold nearly half of the country's mortgages. And here to break down the bailout and other economic news we've got Keith Reed. He's a business reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and he blogs for BET's finance page, Dollar Out Of 15 Cents. Keith, how are you?

How you doing, Farai?

Good. Now give me a really quick hit on what these two entities are and how they've worked with the government until now?


No, and to be honest, when we get into the 80s, people start taking off work because this is hot. This is, you know, incredible summer weather. We have to go enjoy it. And then so to make the jump up to 90 degrees was watercooler talk. Everybody - that's all you're talking about is how hot it got. Did you hear it got to 90 degrees?So this is a big deal for us.

Do you have air conditioning up there in Anchorage?

Most people don't in their homes. The office buildings do, naturally, but your regular home, my home doesn't. So I had to open windows. I have one little, tiny fan. You cannot find a fan on the shelves in stores in Anchorage. They're all bought up. As soon as they get some in, every store says they go out within an hour.

Well, how about the land around you?How prepared is it?I mean, I gather there are fires.


The fear is magnified by a third factor, which is uncertainty, and the uncertainty level is enormous right now. We're really at the brink. People don't know - are we entering an inflationary environment or a deflationary environment?We really don't know what's going to happen. And the potential outcomes are so different and so huge in their consequences that there's just an enormous amount of uncertainty, and that magnifies the fear. People say, I don't want to play this game if I don't have any idea where it's going to head.

Haven't there been studies that show that people are more motivated by fear than by the lure of profit or the lure of gain?

Exactly. People are twice as afraid of taking a loss or afraid of the pain of taking a loss as they are of the feel of pleasure of taking a gain. So what you have in the markets is the effect where as stocks drop and people become more and more into negative territory, they're both afraid of taking the pain of a loss but at some point, as they're riding down, they're losing stocks, they capitulate. They finally throw in the towel and say, that's it. This is too much pain. I can't take it anymore. It's one explanation for why bull markets tend to be long and trending while bear markets like this are rapid and short.

So how do we get out of this?How do we get out of this negative feedback loop?


No, no, and I think my guess is that a good part of this was done before the president made that announcement. It is the case - immigration law is so complicated, and so much of it is unclear that it certainly argues, as Obama said today, that this is something that Congress should go back and try to come up with some clear and more comprehensive immigration reform law, but maybe, as you know, that's for some future Congress.

The critics, those who were in the minority on the 5 to 3 part, those included Justices Scalia and Thomas. Did either of them say anything interesting in their dissent?

Justice Scalia said a lot that was interesting. He said, here's a quote. "As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory subject only to limitations written into law by Congress. "He took a very strong view - he mentioned it at the argument - that a sovereign state has the sort of authority on its own to arrest or kick out unwanted people.

I had never heard that before. I didn't think states had that power. But Justice Scalia wrote a very strong dissent, sort of arguing for this is a sovereign right of Arizona, and we the Supreme Court shouldn't step in and block what they're doing.


And in addition to all else, the administration's actually delaying an entire piece of the website for another entire year?

That's right. Small businesses were supposed to be able to sign up online to enroll their employees through the federal website starting this month. That was already delayed from October 1st. Now, that won't happen online until next November. They can still compare plans online but they'll have to use paper applications and go through an insurance broker or an agent or an insurance company directly, unless they're one of a handful of states that actually has its small business exchange up and running. The administration's been pretty candid about this. They've said their top priority is to make the website work for consumers first. Pretty much everything else taking a back seat.

NPR's Julie Rovner. Thanks so much.

Thank you.


And I did. And it hurt me. And I've cried. I've made defendants cry. I had the whole courtroom crying once because my sense of hurt was so real and so immediate.

And everybody talks about the problem in general or their dealing with one person, I used to get the individual en masse, day after day after day. And after a while - now, if you don't care, it's fine. But once you do care, it is exasperating, exhausting, and you feel a sense of complete impotence in dealing with the issue.

What do you think about the debate that goes on in our community around this?Because Judge Arrington has now appeared at an event with Bill Cosby, who's been a big critic of what he sees as the negative sides of black behavior.

So, when you look at this, you look at your experience with seeing the same people go in and out of court, with having people come on your show and disrespect the idea of trying, do you think that the debate that's going on right now in our community is going to produce change or could it divide us, where some people say, I don't need your judgements?


So we're getting 40 new mutations per generation in these 2,000 necessary genes for intelligence is what you're saying, and over the millennia, these things add up.

Exactly. I mean, that is - you made one jump there that is not correct, and that is that the new mutations are not necessarily in the intelligence genes. They're just spread out randomly over the genome.

I see.

They have a certain probability of hitting these - this group of genes that are the cognitive genes so that among those genes, we know that they behave like links on a chain, that is if any one of them is mutated there is a cognitive problem.


What a coincidence. Serendipity.

Absolutely. So this is a very festive lab and we asked if they would look into this and they did, several times over, for us. And so we have the results on Video Pick of the Week is originals of our sample size of one - we should be clear - experiment into this.

Right. And you found that if you out enough - spike your eggnog enough, should we. . .

Well, yes. So you can go to our website for the recipe. But after - the key to this, and actually, we'll have - let's have Vince Fischetti, sort of, give us a little background.


When we had a transfer of presidencies in this country, when Barack Obama came in four years ago and George W.  Bush got aboard the helicopter and left town, well, George W.  Bush has pretty vanished from the American political leadership. He wrote a book, did pretty well with that. I gather he gives some speeches, but he plays no great part in the American political system. Bill Clinton has been playing a little bit more in this election.

But in the meantime, Mr.  Hu Jintao on his way out - really, on the way out?He will be a member of the Standing Committee. He's not going to be president. He's not going to be chairman of the party anymore, but?

He still may have a pretty strong role in the military. There's also the former president of China, who I covered back in the '90s, named Jiang Zemin who's from Shanghai. He has been front and center at the Party Congress. He's been out and about. He's in his mid-80s. He's playing role in terms of lining up who's going to take over. There's a lot of horse trading, but it's very, very opaque. And the average Chinese person really doesn't have any sense of where it's heading.

So you're getting this new generation of younger leaders, but the gerontocracy, the old leaders, behind the scenes, they're still playing a role.


But I understand the point that you're making. She drill - she drilled that into. . .

You know what I'm saying?She drummed that - she drilled that into us. . .

There you go.

One blow, you go. You don't examine; you don't wonder. You run, and you come home, and then we talk from there. And that needs to be - you have to have a line in the sand that is clearly drawn from a young age. And I don't think that happened.


Well, a number of the Iraqis have wished us a happy new year. They know that New Year's is a pretty big deal for us. But right now, our new year is coinciding with the Ashura pilgrimage, which is a Shia holiday. And so, a number of the Iraqis are making their way down to the holy cities in Najaf and Karbala.

And the loudspeakers on a lot of the mosques are broadcasting prayers pretty much all day and all night. So that makes it a little bit interesting when we try to sleep, but we know that that's a real large holiday for them, as well.

Right. So I don't know if you can characterize it, but what's the general mood there among the soldiers as the year turns?

Well, a lot of the soldiers are really looking back on this year as one where we've made tremendous progress. My unit in particular, when we left at the end of 2006, things were really rough, and there was a lot of sectarian violence. And we really didn't know which way this thing was going to turn.


It is John McCain's night tonight. He's got to deliver the speech. You're widely acknowledged as one of the best speech writers in the country. What would you - what would you ask of Senator McCain tonight?

We've had a wonderful opportunity to hear about his biography and he's been praised by others. Not a good idea, ever, to praise yourself. You show what you are. You don't tell people what you are. Now he has to make the case as to how what he wants to do connects with the interests of ordinary people. Through his - through the past half dozen years, McCain's interest in reform - he had a very keen interest in reform, but it's tended not to touch much on bread-and-butter issues.

Most people don't see a connection with their lives and, say, campaign finance, whether McCain is right or wrong. Now he needs to show, I care about the things you care about. I'm not just a Washington insider. And he needs to connect his agenda on healthcare - which is hugely important - on energy, on taxes, all of those things, the pocketbook of middle-income people who basically have not done that well out of the past eight years.

David Frum, former presidential speech writer for George Bush and a blogger at National Review Online. David, thank you.


There are 13 suspects being held in connection with these bombings. Is there much known about them?

Not much. Police say they've also uncovered a van that was used by the attackers, also a safe house. Three police officers were killed in a blast at that property. Officials say the suspects detonated explosives, killing themselves rather than being taken into custody alive. The big question is who those suspects are, whether these attacks were planned locally or internationally. And there's been no claim of responsibility. Sri Lanka's been through this before, though. It fought a 26-year civil war. And at the height of that conflict, bombings were common on shopping malls, hotels, attacks like this. And what's sad is that Sri Lanka was just about to celebrate 10 years of peace, 10 years since the end of that conflict.

Lauren, it was just five weeks ago that the mosque shootings happened in New Zealand. Do you have any sense of worldwide reaction to what happened in Sri Lanka?

Yeah. I mean, the Eiffel Tower shut off its lights tonight to pay tribute to the Sri Lanka victims. Messages of shock and condolences are pouring in, including from the New Zealand prime minister. President Trump also tweeted his condolences. He said, quote, "we stand ready to help" - exclamation point. Pope Francis spoke at St.  Peter's Square in Rome, saying that he wanted to express his loving closeness to the Christian community in Sri Lanka. He noted that, you know, many of these people were killed while they were praying, attending services on Easter Sunday morning.


No, so Wim van Egmond is an artist, and he was trained as an artist. He was a painter at first, and he was really into painting from these scientific illustrations, biological illustrations from hundreds of years ago. And he said, well, you know, I could just do this myself. So he purchased his first microscope about 20 years ago and since then has been kind of perfecting the technique.

But when he started, you know, he was also working with film, like Roman Vishniac. And, you know, when he had to look up what he was looking at, these organisms, he was looking in reference books, things that are just unthinkable these days, of course you would just Google.

So he said that, you know, progress has gotten much faster because now you can just look and see your result immediately. You don't have to develop your film, and - you know, and so he's gotten - it sounds like he's gotten - he's sort of refined his techniques much more quickly in the days of the digital camera.

Now I know you like to limit the size of your video pick to like three or four minutes.


This is the people we hired to.

Yeah.

We paid off.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't call it that. I mean, what they - it's so unprecedented. The way insurgencies end and the way the Sunni insurgency has ended is that it just sort of fades away, then they either come into the political process, or they go into hiding. They leave the country. They just put their weapons and go back to doing what they normally did.


Yeah.

. . . What role do you think Congress should be playing now?

Well, we've had this long debate - haven't we?- over the '01 and '02 AUMFs.

You mean the authorizations for use of military force?


I started the business as a hobby. I needed a break from the logical legal work that I was doing every day, and I decided as a creative outlet I'd like to start making spa products as a gift. I contacted a store in Canada, and they sent me some raw ingredients, taught me how to mix some things. I took them in to work, and people really liked them.

People often think of, say, Carol's Daughter, you know, and the spa-product industry being a woman's thing. But I also remember going down to cover Hurricane Katrina and there was a doctor, Dr.  Friedman, who - he and his sons would make soaps and things like that. What spoke to you about this business?Why did you want to do it?

I was looking for a sense of wellness, and I've always tried to take good care of myself. So, one of the things I would do is, I work very hard, but I also take good care of myself in a healthy way. So, one of the ways I do that is by going to spas. I've always been a fan of the product, and I was a great consumer of the product. So, in building my business, I knew exactly what I expected, as a high-end consumer, of the market.

Some people say, OK, spa items, beauty items, those are all things that people will cut in tough times. What have you seen in terms of the past year or so of your business?


And obviously, Florida is a very important state. It's no coincidence he's kicking off his campaign there. Where else do you expect to see President Trump in the months ahead?

So he'll be back in Florida; we know that for sure. It's a key state in that he isn't president without winning Florida, and he needs it for re-election. But you can also expect to see him in those other states that he won very narrowly in the upper Midwest - Wisconsin, Michigan. And the campaign is stretching. They want insurance. And at this point, they have money. They've been fundraising since Inauguration Day. And they are stretching, trying to reach into states you wouldn't expect, like Minnesota or even New Mexico and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton won last time around.

That's NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith at President Trump's rally in Orlando, Fla. Thanks, Tam.

You're welcome.


And so in my defense perhaps, you know, overly defensive, I said Anne(ph), just because some Negro preacher, got his hand caught in a cookie jar, that's not my problem. She said I can't believe you. I said, well, he wouldn't have been indicted if he wasn't guilty. She said, what?

So, how did it get to the point where you got on the bus, so to speak?

His secretary, Dora McDonald called back and said, oh, Mr.  Jones — I never met her, I heard her over the phone — she says, you know, Dr.  King, he enjoyed so much his visit with you. He's a guest preacher over in Los Angeles, and he wanted you to come and see him and hear him preach on Sunday. And so, after I got the message, I told my wife verbatim what the message was from Dora McDonald. And her reaction, again, she went on the offensive. She says, well, you may not be going to Montgomery, but you are going to that church.

So, I go this church of Reverend H. B. Charles, I think that's the name of the church, and I go into this church. I'm sitting there about the 25th row and so forth, and Dr.  King gets up after he's introduced, and he gets up and he says, brothers and sisters, the text of my sermon today is the role and responsibility of a Negro professional to aid our less fortunate people who are struggling in the South.


Many political figures tweeted thoughts and prayers just after last week's church murders in Texas. Just as immediately, there were many sharp responses. Wil Wheaton, the actor and writer who has more than 3 million Twitter followers, wrote Speaker Paul Ryan, the murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they'd still be alive - and added an expletive. Mr.  Wheaton later tweeted an apology for insulting what he called real people of faith.

David French joins us now, a senior writer for National Review, a Harvard law graduate. He received the Bronze Star for his Army service in Iraq. And Mr.  French, on this Veterans Day, thank you very much for being with us.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

You wrote this week that for people of faith, including those who were in that church, prayer is, in fact, a powerful response. How so?


And you'll vote again, yes, today.

I will, although I'm pretty peeved at the Senate for putting in the baloney tax extension. I mean, I can't believe that the Senate did that. I mean, how disgusting. But we're over a barrel, we've got to hold our nose. You know, we can't let the state of California go belly up financially.

There is a real risk though, congresswoman, that even if the House passes this it goes through, the president signs it - that it won't help, that it won't unfreeze the credit markets.

We're still going to have a problem. I mean, there is no question that there is already layoff. There's going to be an economic decline. There's going to be a recession. The question is how deep and, you know, is this going to be a catastrophe or is just going to be bad. This is not the last thing we're going to have to do.


But you're reporting the car companies don't want this to end up in the courts. How come?

So it takes a long time to bring a car to market. It takes five years to introduce a new product for these automakers. So they're planning years in advance. If you know what the regulations are going to be in five years, you can make decisions about what kinds of cars you want to bring to market.

If you don't know because it's up in the air and a judge could issue a ruling at any time that will change the regulation of your entire industry, then there's a lot of uncertainty. So even some carmakers who, again, were kind of skeptical about the original rules are really adamant now that they definitely don't want this feud, this back-and-forth, to continue.

They just want clarity. NPR's Camila Domonoske, thank you so much.


I think - and this is important to be aware of - you know, ISIS changed its messaging over time. And so there was women who went at different times, responding to different aspects of that appeal.

But I think a big part of the history that we have to remember is, in the Middle East, you know, ISIS unfolding in the wake of the collapse of the Arab Spring. And women were really central to those uprisings, to those protests. They didn't have a lot of - there was not a lot of space for women in a lot of the repressive orders in those countries before the 2011 revolutions. And you know, one by one, those collapsed into civil war, into greater repression. I think in the aftermath of that, ISIS emerged.

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

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


If that works for them - you know, Rick Barry obviously had a lot of success with that.

Yeah.

But it's definitely, I think, probably more difficult. But if you can master that, then do what you please. But it's definitely been easy for me shooting overhand.

Yeah. You do have two more years to break your own record, you know?


And this week on Africa update, we have more on the political crisis in Kenya. President Bush has pledged aid to Africa, but is it enough?And France extends an olive branch to Rwanda.

For more on all of this, we've got Bill Fletcher. He is a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and former president of TransAfrica Forum. Hi, Bill.

Hey.

So we just heard Ofeibea Quist-Arcton's report, very vivid report on the violence in Kenya's Rift Valley area. Can you tell us a bit more about that area?Give us some background on the ethnic groups that live there.


Well, I think what's wrong with it is manifold. Our social safety net is embarrassingly weak; it barely merits the name. We give unemployment benefits that are stingy by rich countries' standards over periods that are short by rich countries' standards. And something a lot of people don't know, only about one-third of the unemployed even qualify because of various eligibility requirements. And on top of that, people lose their health insurance, some of them lose their pensions and so on.

And, we have estimates now that the unemployment rate will go up to at least 8 percent now.

I think that's right. I think at this point, we'll be fortunate or skillful, depending on how you want to think about it, if we can hold the line at 8 percent. I think higher is probably likely.

OK. So let's talk about unemployment benefits, and what do you think President-elect Obama should do about extending those?


You know, I thought at this point that nothing the president did could surprise me. He surprised me. To say the least, it is a stunning lack of understanding and judgment on his part, frankly.

Can you just walk me through that why?

Well, look at who we're talking to. This is the Taliban. It is not a sovereign government. To extend an invitation to Camp David for a meeting with the president when they have not accepted a ceasefire, a full ceasefire, when they are very much in the business of killing American troopers and Afghan civilians. This is not the first casualty that we've had out there since these talks began. But to invite people like that under these conditions to Camp David to be hosted by the president of the United States - that to me was something unthinkable until, obviously, he thought it.

Do you have any sense of what role this meeting would have played in the discussions that have taken place so far?I mean, a lot of people are focusing on today sort of the optics of it. A lot of the people in the president's own party are having trouble with that - I mean, bringing the Taliban to meet at Camp David with the president of the United States. But substantively, though, what role would a discussion like this have played in trying to finalize these negotiations?


Yeah. He's a very open-minded and sweet kind of guy. He actually genuinely cares about the kids that he helped create. And he doesn't feel too detached to call us, like, his offspring. But he doesn't feel attached to call us his kids. So he calls us his ducklings.

(Laughter) Do you like that?

I love it.

And did he know that he had so many offspring when you first encountered him?


Yeah, it was. And you know, people did everything from bringing full-on sleeping bags to wearing what looked like, you know, fall clothes for a stroll in the park. People had very different strategies about what they were going to bring. They had very different understandings of what the security lines would let them bring in. There were huge piles of debris afterwards from things people couldn't bring onto the Mall. You know, it was organized chaos. I mean, it went off really smoothly considering, but there was certainly moments where people didn't completely know what to do, but there was no one who I've heard of who had a bad time. The only time that things are bad here is when you're trying to catch a taxi because there aren't any.

Well, you know, Metro police said there were no arrests, at least initially, as a result of all those people being there, which is remarkable in and of itself. You could have that large a crowd and everyone be that well behaved.

People were amazing. I saw these young brothers last night, and they were like, where's the Mall?And this is one o'clock in the morning. And I went, oh, there's not going to be any parking over there. They're like, we just drove from Chicago. Where's the Mall?I was like, that way. So, people just brought their A-game.

All right. Farai, thank you very much.


Yeah.

. . . And they're called casseurs - breakers. They love to smash windows. They love to tear stuff up. And actually, the interior minister said that Marine Le Pen - that's the far-right leader - sent out far-right, you know, hooligans to cause havoc. So she, of course, denies that. But in every demonstration in France, these young men - they wear hoods, and they love to come out. So there's definitely that element.

And I've been talking to people out here. You know, a father had his 6-year-old daughter out here. He's not out there smashing things. So they're angry. They feel like their march is being taken over. But I can hear them screaming, Macron resign, way up, chanting in the crowd. So yes, people are causing, you know, damage and havoc, but there are regular people who are just angry.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley on the streets of Paris. Eleanor, thanks very, very much for being with us.


No, no. I'm a member of the House of Lords, and I'm a proud British citizen. And, you know, if you want to meet monarchists, I'm about as monarchist as you can get. Now, I'm absolutely a proud Brit.

But I do want a German passport as well, which we're able to have, because I want to be able to travel freely throughout Europe. And I do feel that my ancestry is European. All four of my grandparents were German, and my mother and her parents came to this country before the war as refugees, and Britain was wonderful to them.

But now that I discover I am entitled to a German passport as well as my British one - I'm a proud British subject - that's what I'm going to do.

Is your decision impelled, or at least hastened, by the vote on Brexit?


Well, yeah. But you see what I mean?Because it is about perception and how we need to be - to understand what we're seeing before we can really see it, that's really key to understanding this whole issue of climate change and why we see or don't see what's right in front of us.

What drew you to monarchs in the first place?

I had really wanted to write about the subject for a long time. I live in southern Appalachia. I am surrounded by neighbors and friends - people I respect very much - who don't really understand climate change or believe in it, even though, as farmers, they're getting socked by it. We've had unprecedented, disastrous weather time and again. So it's such a strange contradiction that the people in our continent who are first to feel the harm of a changing climate are the last to be able to talk about it.

That was such a conundrum and such rich territory for a novel to tread, that I was just looking for the right way to get into the subject. And one morning, I just woke up with this vision in my eyes of millions of butterflies covering the forest behind my house. I just - I mean, I didn't actually see it. I imagined it. I woke up and there it was, and I knew that was it.


So this is the story. In Islam, you can't remove a picture which has a cross in it. That was my wife's understanding. She - that's what she gave me to understand. And she said, don't ever remove this. And then this restaurant became very lucky for us. We - from being hand to mouth, we became self-sufficient. So this proved to be a lucky painting. Plus, this was a colorful painting, and this was all we could afford at the time. So we want to keep it, and we want to keep that cross as long as I'm alive and kicking.

It's a sign of how so many communities have built Houston into what it is today - influencing each other, melding into something unique. Lashkari has applied that to the dishes he serves. His signature chicken curry, cooked in huge metal pots in his sweltering, fragrant kitchen, is made with Mexican tomatillos and cilantro. It's incredibly delicious. And we ate that along with the best saag paneer, a spinach and cheese dish, that I have ever tasted.

We do a lot of fusion right now. This restaurant is famous for its fried chicken. It's fried the Southern way, but it's - the chicken - the raw chicken is marinated with Indian spices. My white gravy is made with cashew nuts and almonds and coconut. So it looks like a white gravy of the chicken-fried steak, but it's totally different.

So Pakistani and Indian food with deep Texas roots.

Yeah, yeah.


We don't presume when we cover the news. But we see estimates. For instance, FiveThirtyEight has her close to a 90-percent favorite in terms of their poll aggregation. If we're just projecting forward - and again, we don't know - this could be a very bitter aftermath.

Forget about honeymoons. You know, I was talking - I convened a roundtable of former campaign chiefs of staff yesterday - Republicans.

And two of them mentioned to me that they thought within the first year of her being in office, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, would be under great pressure to bring articles of impeachment.

During that debate, Hillary Clinton kind of deftly avoided any real response on the Goldman Sachs speeches, on her husband's transgressions, if I might put it delicately, and accusations of pay-to-play relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. Do you think these are the kind of issues that might persist after November 8, whatever the result?

Absolutely. And, of course, the email issues, as well - we saw this report come out last week of a, quote, unquote, "potential quid pro quo" between the FBI and State Department investigators. This is something that I think Republicans are going to use to unite themselves.


In the end, has the IMF been a force for good?What has it done that might otherwise not have been done?

You know, I think the comparison is with what happened in the '20s and '30s - that was a world in which we did not have a international lender of last resort. And it was a world in which countries went bankrupt. There was a massive retreat from globalization, countries lost confidence in the way the international financial system worked. And I think the proof of how valuable the IMF has been is the onward march of globalization.

But you're aware of the fact that when the IMF meets, there are going to be protesters outside who are saying that globalization is the problem.

Yeah and I think they're mistaken. They are objecting to some of the cultural consequences of globalization. But I don't think anyone can object to an institution that's committed to preventing people from going under.


And I just am saying to my Republican friends, look, I get it. I understand that there's certain things that he's said that really you can't ever look that way, but take a look. We're still months away from the election.

Mr.  Kelly, if you were advising Donald Trump - and, you know, he might hear this - is there some magic sentence that he could come up with that would - that would help heal things over?

I think he's already worked in that direction. I - I've never met Mr.  Trump, by the way, but I have been watching him. I've watched a Donald Trump who's different today than the Donald Trump I saw three or four weeks ago. I think he is a man who does understand messaging. He understands talking to people.

And as I said earlier, Mr.  Trump's success was not based just on his own ability and his own talent. It was working with many other people to get to something that was mutually beneficial. I've watched Mr.  Ryan. And I said before, he has more depth than the Pacific Ocean when it comes to policy, but he also works well with people to get to some common ground that makes sense. I would just say this - and Donald Trump doesn't need any advice from Mike Kelly. Paul Ryan doesn't need any advice from Mike Kelly.


It's a natural product obviously. So a big thing in bikes is getting them aligned. And they said one of the things that took them years to figure out at Valid Cycles was how they get these poles all straight. So they had to build their own jig. I know that our bike geeks out there are going to like this.

Bike geek. They're going to love this.

Yeah.

But one of the question I need to ask you, as a bike geek yourself. . .


It's interesting. There was an e-mail sent around by a professor at Berkeley yesterday to a bunch of prominent economists saying that the IMF and World Bank are having their annual meeting starting tomorrow, and it was incumbent on economists to weigh in and give them some suggestions. I just finished reading this list of essays, 15 of them written in one day. And the universal common denominator is that everybody sees the crisis right now as devolving from limited capital in the banking system. It's just remarkable how much economists have at least pin-pointed that as the problem, but I don't think that this is rocket science.

It's not rocket science; it's economics. It's the dismal science. It's just - it's not the University of Chicago's way, and now, you're saying, well, maybe this week, it is.

Look, it's not the University of Chicago. Most economists don't think that the government buying firms and taking them over or risking taxpayer money with no protection - to say that, if things improve, the taxpayers will get their money back - is a wise idea at all. I'm not saying that, but economists are famous for, on the one hand and on the other, and if, on the one hand, the choice is to let the economy sink into a recession just to teach these irresponsible bankers a lesson, or the other is to actually use the taxpayer money to prevent it, that's a pretty easy choice.

Anil Kashyap, professor of economics at the famed University of Chicago. Thank you.


Well, that's a big part of the checkout of the - what we're doing for the first month or so is just going through and sort of systematically checking out each part of the rover, all of the science instruments, the basic mobility, capability, the arm, the different pieces just to make sure everything is okay after the voyage to Mars.

And then we'll start doing the science mission and really, in earnest, you know, start exploring the area around Bradbury's Landing. It's - in the case of ChemCam, we also get the benefit with the laser that we were actually able to do some early science measurements, as well. And so, as part of the checkout, we got science data in addition.

Do you have a rock in mind that you want to zap in earnest?

We did, yeah. Well, we actually zapped pretty much the area right around where the rover landed. And it's actually interesting to the scientists because the plume of the rocket engines actually, sort of, scoured out an area on both sides of the rover, which normally Mars is covered, all the surface area is covered, with a lot of dust.


I spent a lot of time reading, writing - self-education. I used the time to teach myself both criminal and civil law. And we lived on what we call an organized tier along the principles of the Black Panther Party, developing unity among the other guys on the tier. We taught guys how to read and write, which, you know, I think was my greatest achievement.

Mr.  Woodfox, how often were you gassed?

Oh, my goodness. Well, gas was a standard form of weapons that the security people used. So anytime you challenge inhumane treatment or you challenge unconstitutional conduct, they would gas you, you know. And depending on the severity of the confrontation, they would open up your cell, and they would come in and beat you down and then, you know, shackle you and bring you to the dungeon. And you probably would stay there a minimum of 10 days. The fact that I was involved in organizing a lot of the protests against - you know, along with Herman and Rob. . .

Friends of yours, fellow inmates who were in at the same time.


(Laughter).

. . . I like that. Mannish is good.

It smelled mannish.

And then a day later, General Eisenhower gave the go-ahead.


This week saw a victory for gun control advocates and a rare legal defeat for the firearms industry. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting can sue the manufacturer of the rifle used in that attack. The gun-maker is Remington Arms Company. The gun used is the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle. One of the plaintiffs in the case is David Wheeler. His 6-year-old son, Ben, was among the 26 people killed - 20 of them first-graders. David, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Melissa.

What does this news mean to you?

Well, it's complex. Of course, it's complicated. I have an emotional reaction and more of an intellectual reaction that, you know, bounce around in me at the same time. It's a relief, certainly, emotionally. But I understand the - or have some layman's understanding of the complex nature of this case. But more importantly, it's not what it means to me. I think it's what it means for all Americans, which is this is the justice system prevailing. This is the Connecticut State Supreme Court saying these people have a legitimate claim. And they deserve a day in court.


Joel Rising has surely had this experience. Many frequent travelers have, a screaming baby on the airplane. But what's that baby doing there anyway?Is it safe for infants to fly?Doctor Sydney Spiesel is a pediatrician and a professor at Yale Medical School, as well as a contributor to slate. com. And when we spoke earlier, I asked him if a new study out on this topic had any answers.

What the study says is, if you have normal kids, yes, you know, when you're flying, the air pressure goes down in a plane. It's as if we were walking around the top of a mountain that's maybe 5,000 feet.

The amount of oxygen that's available for absorption is about three quarters because of the lower pressures. About three quarters of that - of the same amount as sea level. And young children we know don't do quite as well with lower oxygen levels as older. But, in fact, millions of kids fly, and they really fly quite well without problems.

And no problems for their ears?


Well, there was a plant in our area a few years back that was trying to make a point to the importance of their plant in the community, and they did a payroll in cash and stamped their name on all the money. And I wasn't trying to show how important my business is to the town, but I wanted people to recognize what was going on, and I decided the $2 bills was just as effective a way. So we passed out the money. I had to call a meeting, and I don't call many meeting so my employees sort of went into panic mode. I think their imaginations were running away, so they were definitely shocked when we had the meeting and they got their $2 bills, and they went to town shopping with a vengeance.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think most employees dread those meetings these days, that they're actually going to get laid off or fired. . .

Well, they. . .

Instead of getting money.


There might be more by tomorrow.

OK. Yes. So do so many presidential campaigns suck up a lot of money and political talent from potential Senate races?

I think it's a good question. I think, on the one hand, yes. I mean, there are Senate races that need top-tier campaign managers, finance directors, field directors. Those folks who may be going to a presidential campaign because they see their opportunity are not taking jobs on Senate campaigns is definitely a problem. I think in terms of resources with the push to really cultivate these small dollar donors and use that to fund these campaigns, there's almost an endless supply of these folks. So I don't know that, from a money angle, they're sucking up resources. I think from a staff angle, it can be difficult. But you hope that on the flip side what you're getting are a lot more people who are engaged in working in politics than they might have been before.

Anne Caprara, formerly the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, now the chief of staff to the new governor of Illinois, thanks very much for being with us.


You may have seen it. The photo has been everywhere on social media - a gunman, this week outside a federal courthouse in Dallas. It's one of those pictures that makes you wonder just how the photographer got it. The gunman appears to be only a few feet away from the camera, a military-style rifle in his hand. He's decked out in tactical gear, wearing a face mask with a hole for his eyes, and those eyes appear to be looking right into the camera.

Soon after the photo was taken, the gunman was shot dead by law enforcement. No one else was seriously injured. To hear the story of the photo, I spoke to the person who took it, Tom Fox of The Dallas Morning News. He told me about the moment he first heard the shooter.

There was about three quick shots. And at the time, it sounded like backfire.

Like of a car or something, you mean.


Or probably not their wives, actually.

(Laughter) No, they were mistresses. They were wives. As as everybody explained to me, this was pre-AIDS. You know, the swinging '70s. Up to about '82, no one had kind of realized that promiscuity can bounce back and hit you in really deadly ways.

So, Roben, there's all this craziness and excess. But at the same time, of course, this cocaine trade brought a world of violence to Miami. And you talk about the murder rate in Dade County, which is doubling in just a couple of years.

You think about the combustibility in those wild cash profits. And on top of the fact, in 1980, Fidel Castro says that he's flushing his toilets on the United States. He unleashes 125,000 refugees - maybe 10,000 to 15,000 of those were criminals. Some of the most violent ones indeed had their weapons of choice tattooed on the inside of their lips. So Miami was really ill-prepared to handle that inundation. There were race riots going on. And amid all of this, you have the hot pursuit of cocaine, money and sex and speedboats. And lots of really deranged things, in 20/20 hindsight, happened in that midst.


As the biggest impact there?

From the tech sector in today's economy?

Yes.

Yeah, just job loss. It's been a major - I mean, specifically, you're looking at places that are - manufacturing is taking a hit. Companies are looking to do more with less. You are seeing just in recent news, other technology companies like HP and others are making some type of adjustments to - not only their work force but also to their strategies, in a good way though.


Latin America and Mexico. South America, by contrast is being hit with a delay. When you go to Colombia or Peru, people are aware of the bad news of the global economy, but in the local economy they do not feel the - the impact with great strength yet.

Now, we're seeing reports, for example, that say that unemployment has hit every sector in Latin America, even the bodyguards in drug-torn countries like Colombia are losing their jobs. How big an issue is unemployment?

It will become an increasingly more important issue as time goes by. Latin America in contrast, say, with Asia, is less integrated into the production chain. So the falling in exports of Latin America are essentially the fall of commodity exports. And they are not very intense in employment.

However, as the tsunami of the global problems propagates through Latin America, unemployment will start picking up in other sectors eventually including in the non-tradable sectors like services and so forth. So, in countries like Mexico, surely, the impact is already being felt given its proximity to the U. S. In other countries, it's coming with some delay. But, unemployment and recession are the name of the situation for Latin America, not financial meltdown.


For the last 40, 50 years, the education system has been translated into industry worker-producing system at high end, also, at low end, also. So - and that education system is becoming a reason to be tensed about the examinations themselves, the jobs, the admissions to the higher education classes, and every student was almost dying to get at the top positions. So all this was creating a lot of problem. So that's why we are not touching right now at graduation level; we are just touching about the bottom level - that is, starting from nursery classes to grade 8.

Minister Sisodia, who teaches a happiness class?

So there are 20,000 teachers that we have trained so far to take these classes, and they're taking these classes daily. This is 35-minute class, every day, first half of the morning. One class is for happiness class.

I have to ask, has any teacher said to you, if you want me to teach a happiness class, pay me more?That'll make me happy.


Some folks get a little bit cranky about having to work on the holiday. It's a day that, you know, most of us spend with our family and friends. How do you feel about working on a day that most people get off?

Folks that work in NASA have a common bond of a real passion for the space program. So, we wouldn't be here if we didn't have that. And obviously, we'd like to be with our families, but if we can't be there, then the next best place to be is working on a space mission.

So, you know, we've been doing a space station for 10 years straight, and there's been someone here every year for every holiday. And beyond holidays even, you know, one of the crew members on board is having their wedding anniversary just yesterday, and tomorrow's one of the birthdays of one of the flight directors working the flight.

So, we all kind of take care and bond together and take care of each other. And we're having a Thanksgiving dinner here that management's all bringing in for the flight controllers that are working, and we try to shift people out so that, you know, there's three shifts so that people do get some time at home.


So I'm going to plunge straight into another topic. That's gas prices. They rose more than six cents in one day following news of the damage to the Gulf Coast. There is a lot of oil industry there. Tropical Storm Ike also damaged that area.

Now, there is a question of whether or not folks are getting unfairly gouged. One gas station is said to have charged five dollars for a gallon of regular, and there are some other places in the damaged areas that don't even have gas. So is this price gouging?And I'm not just talking about the people in the effected areas, but people across the country.

There is some price gouging, I think, when you get to five dollars. On the other hand, when you're talking about what's happening with production, the fact is that there are almost immediate shortages. Gas stations have the gas that they have under their stations to pump, that's all they have. They have to get deliveries of other gas and it's more scarce, it costs them more.

So if someone decides, in anticipation of price rises, to raise the price on the gas under their station, that's not fair but it's somewhat reasonable. But when they take it from a few cents to five dollars, if it was being posted as $3. 65, which was the national average, and then you get up to five dollars, that does seem to be a bit much.


Good to be here, Scott.

So why didn't you just tell your daughter Ronnie let's train for a chili cook-off instead?

I tried. I tried, and she was insistent. She was in her first year at the great Georgia Tech studying aerospace engineering. She wants to be an astronaut. And she said, look, I've got to be fit. We have to do it. And I thought - past the age of 50, I just thought it was beyond me. I'd done it when I was young, but I didn't think I could anymore.

You are running six marathons in nine days, right?


That is the wildest story.

Ah, this is just wonderful drama, and the fact that now he lands on Broadway?Oh, come on. I mean, this is probably going to carry us through December. You know, just hope he doesn't get hurt, then all of a sudden it's. . .

(Singing) Da, da, da, da. . .

You know?


But the important part for the corals is that these things are wonderful eating machines. They move slowly across the reef. They actually invert their stomach onto the corals and dissolve the coral tissue, you know, digesting it as they go. And they leave (technical difficulties) white behind them as they move forward.

So they're like little bulldozers.

Yeah, it's sort of like bulldozers. It's almost more like having a wave of people with flamethrowers going through the brush. You know, the coral physically is left behind, but it's all dead.

Do they have any natural enemies that might, you know, come out and eat them?


Now let's turn to West Africa. For more than a decade, Liberia has been struggling to recover from civil war. It has a female head of state now, and it also has big supporters in the U. S.  One of them is Bob Johnson, who founded and later sold Black Entertainment Television. Now he's building a four-star beachfront resort near Liberia's capital, Monrovia. Bob Johnson recently told me why he decided to invest millions of dollars in Liberia's economy.

It's part of a commitment I made to President Johnson Sirleaf and the people of Liberia, to help Liberia recover from some 13, 14 years of civil war. And it came about as a result of my participation, as well as President Sirleaf's participation in President Clinton's global initiative that he hosts every year in New York. And the charter is, do something, small or large, but do something. And so my something is to help Liberia.

What are we talking about in terms of the kind of money it takes to make this happen?

We are putting in approximately 12 to 13 million dollars in the construction of this hotel and the opening of the hotel, which is scheduled for March of '09. It'll be an 86-room hotel, as I said, situated on the beach, great facility for everybody from government officials and expats who want to go back and visit Liberia, as well as business people who are looking to do business in post-conflict Liberia.

So, do you expect to get a tourist crowd eventually?


I think Senator Clinton is prepared to carry forward into her service as secretary of state the change of heart that she underwent in the last several years regarding the war in Iraq. She was for it in the first place. She saw it as necessary in the wake of 9/11. She was, after all, the senator from New York, and she was, I think, in fairness, we can say, anticipating running for president at some future date against a Republican who would try to make her seem relatively a lightweight on national security.

She has seen it all in a different light, of course, and in running for president in 2008, while she did not ever say she had made a mistake, and she never really repudiated her vote for the war, she did make it clear that she had changed her mind about it. So, I think that she is in harmony with the general thinking of the other members of the national security and foreign policy team here, including, of course, the president-elect himself.

Although the president-elect did say that there would be disagreements when it came to how to approach his foreign policy objectives, he doesn't seem to be shying away from that. Where are some of those disagreements?

There could be disagreements with respect to how we deal with foreign leaders who are particularly of a mind to give the United States fits, let us say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, for example, other foreign leaders perhaps who might emerge in Pakistan or might emerge in other countries who are not in power there now, possibly also including Iraq.


It is. And there's actually - turns out, there's a lot of responsibility with that because there are spectators everywhere. There are cameras everywhere. There's high winds, of course. They have to watch out for that. And anybody who doesn't stop when the yellow jersey stops, they're - they get in big trouble. And anybody who pees when there is too much wind or when they're in a group stuck somewhere, there are repercussions for people who sort of break these secret pee rules.

What other anecdotes do you have from other sports?

Well, the way I like to put this is there are nearly 3 billion gallons of urine evacuated on earth every day. And my reporting discovered that it seems like most of it ends up on an NFL field somewhere. Really, at any given moment, on an NFL sideline, there are probably a handful of players relieving themselves. They're sort of hiding in plain sight, whether they're going behind a towel or just going into their football pants or going behind an equipment case. You know, there are maybe 10 different techniques that football players relieve themselves during NFL games.

And wait, did you actually say that some of them just pee their pants?


As I don't have to tell you, because you helped negotiate the Paris Agreement, the United States pulled out more than a couple of years ago.

Well, actually, the United States can legally not pull out until November of next year. We, of course, certainly expect them to do so.

Be that as it may, what can be accomplished - how much does U. S.  withdrawal hurt?

Well, you know, the fact is that what you call a U. S.  withdrawal I call a national government withdrawal. I call it a White House withdrawal. It does not represent 100% of the U. S.  economy. Sixty percent of the U. S.  economy represented by many corporations, by many states and certainly by many financial institutions continue to decarbonize because they understand it is for their own good. It is for the strength of their economy and for commercial profitability in the case of corporations. The fact is that if the United States, as a central government, wants to leave the climate agreement and not continue the policies and the incentives for decarbonization, they're shooting themselves in the foot because other countries such as China, certainly, and perhaps even India are taking advantage of that vacuum and moving in.


So I pretty immediately - because I was done with school - packed my things up. I quit the job that I had and moved back to Philadelphia and basically spent the last six months with her. It was, you know, it's an around-the-clock job. It's very draining. And at the end of the day, the only thing I had time to write were basically one paragraph or sometimes a sentence - reflections. And I just started collecting them in this folder. And I didn't tend to do anything with them, but they all started to fit together in this large story.

I want to have you read from one of those vignettes, Page 31.

(Reading) I've often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality, you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you're out in public feeling, fine and free, inside, you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.

Tell me a little bit about what that passage means to you. What were you trying to say?


Saudi Arabia's changing explanations over what really happened to Jamal Khashoggi culminated this week with Saudi prosecutors saying that Turkish evidence shows his killing was premeditated. How could this affect the relationship between the United States, Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he's known?We're joined now by Robin Wright, a distinguished scholar at the Wilson Center and contributing writer for The New Yorker. Robin, thanks so much for being with us.

Great to be with you, Scott.

And let's begin with the crown prince. Is it possible he would lose power over the Khashoggi affair?

Well, there are four different options. One is that he stays in power, that the international furor eventually settles down, and he manages - kind of orchestrates his ability to stay on the throne. He is the de facto leader in Saudi Arabia because his father is aged and ailing. The second scenario is that he is replaced as crown prince, and there is precedent for that. Over the last three years, two other crown princes have been pushed aside in part to make room for him. There's a third option - that his powers are weakened, that the king appoints others in the royal family to assume some of the roles that MBS has managed to accumulate in his office over the last year and a half. And the fourth is that there's a kind of physical challenge as there was to King Faisal back in 1975.


Yeah, you know, there was a lot of that. From our point of view, what we were looking to do was to serve and engage readers. And it was not our intention to look in the window of another bookstore that might be five miles away. And some of the press like to say we opened up in order to put these people out of business, which I thought was ridiculous. But we kind of ignored it and just moved on.

Jumping forward a few years, the digital book revolution changed things tremendously. And at one point, Barnes & Noble put a lot of energy into its own Nook e-reader. . .

Yes.

. . . Thinking it would really kind of be its salvation heading towards the future. But it didn't really work out that way. You know, could it be that the future of books really is going to be good old-fashioned print?


Do not worry about that.

It's so hard to, like, finally put yourself in a place where you're ready to tell the world and then to feel like any justice that you would have gotten out of that has been robbed from you.

Do you think something can be done now?Is there something you want to see done now that would help you feel that justice has been done?

I don't know. People keep asking me that, and I keep going back and forth 'cause one minute, I'm like, no, there is no justice. My justice was - I needed him to hear what I had to say, and I'm never going to get that. But then there's part of me that's like, no, I'm going after this like a dragon, and I will find justice somehow.


Well, thanks so much for having me, Alex.

So, how do you and the retired general, James Jones, know each other?

My gosh, I think - I can't even remember when I first met him. It's been so long ago. I'm sure I met him when he was head of the legislative liaison over the Senate. But I really became acquainted with him when he became a brigadier general, and, of course, I followed his career. Of course, he served very ably as a commadant in the marine corps and then as the European commander, just been with him from time to time. And I just consider him a very good friend.

And what kind of a man is he?How would you describe him as a person?

A man of extreme integrity, high ability, good judgment, even temper, just admired him so through the years, and I just can't say enough good things about him. He is just an excellent choice, and he will give good advice to the president.


So tell us why. Why is it that some parts of the country are so twister prone?

Yeah. Well, the United States itself, we have this dubious honor of sitting right in the collision zone between really cold air masses coming down from Canada and moist, warm air that comes up from the Gulf of Mexico. And so the well-known Tornado Alley is a convergence zone, couple that with the position of jet stream and other factors that we as meteorologists look for, a dry, mid-layer or wind sheer, and you have the perfect ingredients for tornadoes.

Most tornadoes affect the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. And in fact, there is another alley we call Dixie Alley because if you look at a map of climatological occurrence of tornadoes, there are areas in the South as well that seemed to get quite a few tornadoes. But certainly this region, as you were leading into the story, was an area that we would've expected tornadoes for May 20th based on climatology.

Well, let's talk about the forecasting because one of the amazing parts of sort of science of this story was that hours before, the National Weather Service locally issued a warning that there might be a tornado. And it was pretty spot-on, it sounded like.


Yeah. It's the fastest and oldest field game in the world, as far as we're concerned, and the only sport that I can really compare to - and you've alluded to it yourself - would be lacrosse. And to American viewers or listeners, sometimes I try and explain it as ice hockey on grass except for the ball leaves the ground and travels at speeds of up to 140 kilometers an hour. It's extremely brave. They wear minimal padding. And it's a full-contact sport.

And tell us about the hurling stick because I've seen those. They're - if I may - to an American audience, they look a little bit like something you'd use to handle a pizza in a brick oven.

(Laughter) I've been told they look like a large spoon. It's a coral-shaped (ph) stick. And at the end of the - at the bottom, it's called a bas where you strike the ball. The ball is made of leather. And it's called a sliotar. The hurley's supposed to reach from your foot up to your hip and is generally about 33, 34 inches for a grown adult.

Do you think that hurling expresses some intrinsic aspect of the Irish spirit?


Oh, absolutely. The lactobacillus have been around for many years, thousands of years, perhaps millions of years, and they are already, you know, well identified as being able to survive in the human body and thought to be, quote, "beneficial," unquote, bacteria.

Mm-hmm. And it's just a question of testing this out, I would imagine.

Well, yes. So the investigators did test it on human cells, like in a petri dish, where they caused them to get inflamed and then show that by giving them this bacteria, that produces the LFn that decreased that, too. So they've done it in live mice. They've done it in human cells.

Right.


This may sound naive, but do you think it works?Do you think what you are doing makes a difference?

Actually, yeah. I had to say so, most of the time. A child just needs some attention, little bit of guidance, you know. And just needs to know that they are not alone in this world. You know, with all these things going on around them, despite the environment that they are living in. Just to know that somebody is there and somebody is willing to listen. And willing to, you know, say wait, you know, whatever situation you maybe in. There is - you always have a choice, you know?

Mario, thank you.

OK.


The technology is there, but it's rare. And there isn't - there aren't that many vehicles that can operate at these sorts of depths.

We realize you're thousands of miles away from the scene, but do you have any strong feelings about whether this ping is for real?

It's very difficult to tell. I've seen the pictures. I've seen the news report. I've seen the data that they're collecting. The fact that they have picked up two separate pinger systems - and bear in mind, the 777 has two pingers on board - does lee credence to the fact that this is probably, and I emphasize probably, the MH370 on the seafloor.

Simon Boxall, an oceanographer at Southampton University in Britain. Thanks so much for being with us.


It's "Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory. "And I love that phrase, damaged glory, and it comes in the context of a story where a drunk woman slurs into the narrator's ear, you deserve someone who will love you and all your damaged glory. What does that phrase, damaged glory, mean to you?

What I like about it - what I think it invokes - or evokes. Does it invoke or evoke?

I think it evokes.

Yeah. What I think the phrase vokes (ph) and then you can edit in an en or an E.


Human smugglers prey on the desperation of people who flee war and oppression. Human traffickers have made millions moving people across borders, without regard to safety. Thousands of people have died, locked in packed trucks or trapped in sinking ships. Remember the so-called ghost ships, crowded with Syrian refugees, set on a course to crash into the Italian coast.

Italian prosecutors are trying to track and arrest smugglers, arguing that organized criminal gangs who run these smuggling rings are mobsters and ought to be prosecuted like the Mafia. Using survivor testimony and wiretaps, six alleged traffickers are now on trial in connection with a shipwreck in which more than 300 asylum-seekers drowned. Gery Ferrara is part of an elite prosecution team in Italy, and he joins us from Palermo. Thanks very much for being with us.

Thank you for inviting me.

How do you trace these smuggling networks because I'm - I would guess they take some pains to disguise themselves?


Yeah. So one of those ideas is quite simple, and it's to make the ice bigger. These players out on the ice are massive and fast. And they're running into each other at incredible speeds. And the thought is that if you go to a larger ice surface like they have in Europe, like they have in Olympic hockey, that gives more room to skate, less strife, less collisions, things like that. So that's one idea.

But what it comes down to as well is just the administration of the game and an administrator who has influence over the rules being able to step forward and say, I'm going to put the health and safety of players first. And what they can do - just a few years ago in the Ontario Hockey League in Canada, they brought in a rule that says if you fight more than three times in a season, you're suspended for every fight subsequent to that.

And what do hockey players love most?They love to play the game of hockey. So when you take that away, it really cuts down on the fighting. And what you know what they did?In one season, with the stroke of a pen, they cut fighting in half. So it can be done. It simply requires vision and a courage of conviction.

Jeremy Allingham is a journalist with the CBC, and his new book is called "Major Misconduct: The Human Cost Of Fighting In Hockey. "Jeremy, thank you for talking with us about this.


You'd hear it - kind of like a whistling noise. And you'd also hear the trees kind of swaying outside the windows.

After the storm passed, they were able to return to their hospital room, where they slept through the night.

First thing in the morning, I went home to check on my house. I saw multiple trees down in our neighborhood. Some were even close to some of my neighbors' houses. But it was a relief when we found out that my house was intact.

They'd lost a grapefruit tree. Their yard was a mess, though, and the power was out. So Susie went to Gainesville to recover at her parents' house. Ben spent the week cleaning up at home and thinking about what preparations to make for the next hurricane.


Global warming?

Global warming, you know, is warming or changes in the, you know, there are two theories right now kind of competing, although it's probably some of the both. Natural cycles versus anthropogenic causes in global warming. And both have been identified in records of gulfstream modulation or the changing of its speeds.

If the water gets - just gets warmer, though, doesn't it expand the volume of it?

Yeah. Water will also - changing the temperatures, water gets warmer. We all know it expands and rises sea levels. So there's three causes of sea level rise. One, the land can sink or rise up. That will change sea levels of the coasts. Warming of the water, as it gets warmer, it expands, and sea level will go up. And you can add water essentially to the bathtub by melting ice sheets from the. . .


And she had been through family illnesses and the death of her husband and all these things. But she said that the comment, the Don Imus comment about "nappy-headed hoes," referring to her team at Rutgers, was the toughest thing she'd been through. How did you feel when that statement was made and hit the news?

I felt saddened again. I felt like, wow, are you serious?Like, here we are in 2007 and once again, I don't know if at times, we - and I say we, I don't know if black people or just we Californians or we some people - just feel like, wow, we've really passed that point. Like it doesn't really exist, or you don't experience it so much, that I guess when we do experience it, you're just like, you feel like you have to take another step back.

What do you see coming up?You've done modeling, been to the Olympics, you know, obviously you're a wife and mother. What do you see coming up for you?

I have the Lisa Leslie Basketball Academy, which is great because I never wanted to lend my name without being able to give back to the youth myself. And this is a place where the kids can come out and play. And they will be able to learn and go through drills. And I also have a camp. Also I see me doing public speaking. I really think that our youth needs to hear positive stories like mine, and just see that it doesn't matter what your situation is at home.