Do these reports of surveillance irritate some special sensitivities in someone like Chancellor Merkel, who - after all - grew up in the East German police state?

Oh, definitely. I mean, this is a very serious situation in the trans-Atlantic relationship. I mean, these reports have started to come out in the summer, but it has been taken to a new level now because I think what Americans underestimate is A, how sensitive not just Chancellor Merkel but Germans in general - and Europeans, actually, in general - feel about privacy violations, particularly as they're handed out in Germany, where some people actually lived through two dictatorships in a row and are very concerned about government surveillance and snooping.

But you've reported in Der Spiegel, though, that Germany does its own surveillance, doesn't it?

Oh, that is true. And I don't think anyone in Germany, or even in Europe, would deny the idea that each and every country has its own intelligence apparatus. And there are some countries in Europe - like the United Kingdom, for example - that is even accused of spying on other Euro member-states. However, I think there are stricter standards among allies. I have spoken to many people that are very familiar with intelligence issues; and they all agree that there is, to the best of their knowledge, spying on American leaders, and spying on members of Congress, and spying on trade delegations. So just to say, well, everybody does it, I don't think that really does justice to these new revelations.


And in talking to Smith, he's really thought a lot about what - why we have such a strong reaction to looking at embryos, and he's found this firsthand. I mean, and he gets emails all the time and sort of unpacks these questions, like, you know, is it - when you look at these pictures, does it strike you as more human or less human than you would have imagined, he asks. This is what he asked audience when he shows them. What is your experience with seeing these pictures in the past?You know, he said imagine 300 or 400 years ago, would - how would people imagine what an embryo is?This is a technologically. . .

Yeah. Yeah.

. . .  mediated experience.

And not only that, he's taken the technology faster - further, as you show. He's done MRIs, right?


. . . Was impelled by government programs that said to people, every American should be in a home.

It was certainly promoted by low-interest rates. And that's the Federal Reserve's domain. So you can see there's a huge left-right alliance potential here, and it really is unstoppable. And in the past, it's succeeded.

You say despite being identified as a liberal, when you run for president, you've gotten actually more - you say, more votes from Republicans than Democrats.

Yeah, when I had this write-in effort in New Hampshire in 1992, yeah, I came in about 51 percent of my votes were Republican, 49 Democrats. And the explanation's really quite simple. I don't campaign in generalities. What I do is I go down where people live and work and say, look, you're a Republican. You don't like federal regulation. Right, I don't like federal regulation. You have a car?Yeah. Well, if the auto company discovers a serious dangerous defect in your car after you bought it and the auto company doesn't recall it, would you favor the government requiring General Motors or Ford or VW to recall it?Most of them say yes.


Does an event like this and forecast like that have the effect of concentrating the mind of not just financial planners. . .

. . . but people in Congress making these decisions. And I hear a little laugh.

You would think it would. And in the past, it has. I mean, as they gotten closer to the deadline, enough fear spread that they could pass something or do something or kick the can or whatever. But this time, one of the things that makes this time feel different is that there really are a lot of House Republicans who say, ah, let it default. It'll just shrink the government, will be all good. And it is an act of - I don't even know how to describe it. It's insanity.

Yeah. Well, Austan Goolsbee, I believe, used that word. Quick last question, if we could. So, October 17th is a real deadline but you think some of the effects, potentially, will be down the road.


Well, the Princess Infanta Cristina is King Juan Carlos' youngest daughter. She's 48. She and her husband had sort of a fairytale love story. They used to be popular in the glossy magazines here. Her husband is the Duke Inaki Urdangarin. He started a nonprofit foundation organizing sports conventions and it's through that foundation that he and a colleague are accused of embezzling $8 million.

Prosecutors believe they did so by creating shell companies. Now, where the princess comes in is that for at least one of those shell companies she was a co-signer and co-owner. So any fraud committed by that company, she would be 50 percent responsible. Now, that's the money laundering charge. The tax fraud involves the couple's personal expenses, everything from renovations on their $8 million mansion in Barcelona, vacations, down to small things like Harry Potter books for their kids, which were allegedly paid for through these shell companies and on which they allegedly did not pay tax.

This hearing today is similar to what, in the U. S. , we would call a Grand Jury proceeding. So the judges are trying to determine whether to formally charge the princess. And if they do so, she'll then go on trial. The process is underway as well for her husband, the Duke, and both face up to six years in prison if charged and convicted.

Lauren, can you help us appreciate the reaction of the Spanish public at this point?


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

And to hear the president - last week he tweeted something that would make it seem as though he thinks that tariffs may be good on their own. He says that the U. S.  is under no pressure to make a deal with China. China is under pressure to make a deal with us. Quote, "Our markets are surging. Theirs are collapsing. We will soon be taking in billions in tariffs and making products at home. If we meet, we meet. "

That's NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Thank you so much.

You're welcome.


Well, you know, we had lots of time to prepare the movie, so we knew what we wanted to do. But then, you know, in a very pragmatic way, I am with the actors, and he is with the cinematographer. And most of the time, it's very fine. But sometimes - like, I don't agree with the one framing, and he does not agree with some direction of acting. And then we start yelling at each other, and it's really bad. And then, you know, we are so angry that, you know - like, we pray God that the other one will - dies. And then we sleep, and then that is the day after. And then we are friends again.

Well, let me ask you about working with actors because unlike your graphic novels - when you can move people around - the actor shines through.

Absolutely.

And does that change?Is that a little frustrating for the creator of the material?


Well, they have these antifreeze proteins, and as far as we know, what they do is bind to the surface of any seed ice crystal that might otherwise grow. And they stop it from growing because they've coated the ice with the protein.

Because it's the crystal, the actual, physical presence of the crystal that kills off the cells?

Well yes, that ice crystal gets too big. It will definitely do serious damage to the organism, whether it be a fish or an insect. It will eventually kill it, yeah.

So the protein coats the ice crystal and sort of locks it up from freezing or becoming larger?


You've been working, as we mentioned, on the Voyager mission since its genesis. What has kept you with this program all that time?

Voyager - well, Voyager is science. Science is about discovering things, about understanding what's around - what our neighborhood is like, what the universe is like. So as a scientist, this has been a wonderful journey because, especially during the encounters with the giant planets, every day there were a flood of discoveries. Next day - more discoveries. So as a scientist, this has been an incredibly wonderful mission to have been on. And even today at great distances, Voyager is still doing things no spacecraft has done before and still presenting us with puzzles that we are trying to sort through.

They are still on a voyage. Where are they now?

Well, this was a mission - we had a four-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn. We had two spacecrafts so that we would have a high probability of at least one succeeding on its four-year journey to Saturn and, of course, both have succeeded and exceeded by a great amount.


Yeah.

It's a little more controversial in the Senate race because it looks like bad ballot design might've cost Bill Nelson mightily because Broward County. . .

Yeah.

. . . Is a very Democratic county. And they had a tremendous number of undervotes - that is, no one voting in the Senate race - because it appears that a good number of people, perhaps as many as 20,000, might have missed the Senate race because it was in the lower left-hand corner right under the instructions. And if you look at the Senate race compared to all the other races, it got fewer votes in Broward County, even compared to. . .


Most Americans will cast our ballots on November 8, or will we?Early voting begins in some states as soon as the end of this month. Twenty million ballots might be in the hands of voters by the end of September. After several elections with early voting, can we see what impact it might have on the political system and even the final result?

Paul Gronke is a professor of political science at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He's founder and director of the Early Voting Information Center. He joins us from Philadelphia. Professor Gronke, thanks for being with us.

Absolutely, good to talk with you, Scott.

Is it your impression so far that one party or one campaign is better prepared than the other right now for early balloting?

I think so. The Democrats really ramped up their operation with the Obama campaign in 2008, and they really got a very good data operation. Rick Perry led the way with the Republicans in some work in Texas to start to track Republican voters and connect them with whether they've cast their ballots early.


I don't know why anybody thinkS that a presidential candidate would be playing presidential politics. But his feeling - McCain's feeling is that he's talked to enough House Republicans who probably liked the fact that McCain got involved, felt that there was some possible - if not a framework, some advancement towards a goal, towards a solution and we shall allow him to go down to Oxford.

So, what do you expect to see there tonight?

Well, you know ostensibly, the subject is foreign policy, national security. But you know that - with this on everybody's mind and certainly the voters' minds, with less than six weeks to go, the questions will be about the bailout. I suspect though that - I'm not convinced that neither McCain nor Obama really know exactly what to do with it. And hopefully they won't play the blame game, which is so much of what's going on in Washington right now.

Well, let me ask you, how important does this debate seem now at this moment. I mean, maybe it's just simply blown away by the financial story.


Well, I'm glad to have a job. I'll put it that way.

You know, that's a good thing.

Businesses and institutions have now shed jobs for the last 13 months in a row. Last month alone, we lost nearly 600,000 jobs. Nissan is the latest to announce big cuts. President Obama, Dr.  Malveaux, has warned of double digit unemployment rates. It seems like everytime I have you on the show we ask the same question. How high is unemployment going to go?

Well, the rate we're going it can get to double digit. The last time we've seen anything like that was in 1981 in the early Reagan years. And double digit unemployment is no joke, but Tony, many people believe that we have really already crossed the line. If you look at the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor statistics, they come up with these alternative measures. So, we know that the unemployment rate is 7. 6 percent. But then if you add people who are marginally attached, that's like people who are working part time, but want to work full time and people who are discouraged workers and have dropped out of the labor force, we get up to a number that's more like 14 percent, 13. 9 percent. So when we look at all the hidden unemployment, we're already well firmly into that double digit area.


Yes. It's - there's a sovereignty aspect to that long-standing confrontation. You know, both sides have been pitied against each other for a long time. The new leader, Park Geun-hye, has made it clear - has been quite explicit actually about naming human rights as an issue that would have to be dealt with in North Korea. But she's also reaching out a hand and is likely to offer opportunities for dialogue with North Korea as a way of stabilizing the inter-Korean security relationship.

Stabilizing that relationship means, of course, leaving all those millions of people in North Korea in, well, dire conditions.

Well, that's true in the sense that Park is not pursuing the alternative of total confrontation. At the same time, you know, the one thing that I think seems to be clearer up to now is that none of the countries have been willing to risk that sort of military confrontation in order to drive external change in North Korea.

Has China, the most influential outside force in North Korea, has China handled the new leader more warmly or more distantly than his father?


Now, I guess we need to explain what hedge funds are.

Hedge funds are investment vehicles usually for very wealthy people. In fact, in the first paragraph of every hedge perspective it says, this must not be money that you need for living. This is money that you want to risk - this is a roll of the dice. The hedge funds have very few restrictions of the sort that ordinary brokers have.

So even though Wall Street seems to be blowing up or it did yesterday, the hedge funds are doing just fine. And these Masters of the Universe are ensconced happily in their Greenwich, Connecticut mansions?

Well, right now, they are swimming the tightest defensive positions they can. They're like turtles pulling themselves back into their shell just trying to wait this thing out. They could be hurt badly. In fact, today is one of the four times a year that people can take money out of hedge funds. Usually there's a certain fixed percentage that they can take out at any one time. That's for the protection of the fund itself. But still, there could be enough taken out today to seriously hurt a lot of hedge funds.


Do you have to be a certain kind of person in order to do this and do it well and get satisfaction from it?

You know what?I don't think so. I think that it could just be anybody. Anybody that genuinely wants to - that inner feeling of just feeling complete and feeling loved, basically. When you feel the love with - inside, then ultimately, it's easier to kind of give to other people and to do this type of work, and I think it's a component that we're all built with.

You've done it for ten years, can you do it for ten more?

Absolutely. Absolutely.


Although there has been some criticism that this team represents a very centrist, pragmatic approach instead of a more ambitious approach that maybe you've been calling for.

Well, they've been talking pretty ambitious so far. We'll see. They are centrists, that's for sure. Within the Democratic Party, nobody would look at this group and say, that's a bunch of lefties.

That is certainly right, but I think they're thinking big. And you know, in Geithner's case, along with Bernanke, at the Fed they've been doing big. The Fed has been doing one unprecedented, amazing thing after another.

Yeah, to mixed success, though.


You've also written a book about geoengineering as a way to deal with climate change here on Earth. Do you think people should try and terraform Mars so we can live there?I mean, that is clearly something that has been floating around for a while.

I think it's impossible to think about Mars without thinking about this because, you know, the great myth of Mars is a myth of geoengineering. The great myth of Mars is that Mars was once alive and slowly dried out and that the Martians tried to do something about it. So, you know, the idea that the Martians have an environmental problem and want to solve it is fundamental to how the 20th century thought about Mars. And it's been kind of fundamental to how we imagine the future of Mars. It's very hard to imagine a human future on Mars as it is, but one thing that matters a great deal is - although I think that it's quite unlikely that there's any extant life on Mars, that's something you really want to have a very good handle on before you even start thinking about terraforming it.

Oliver Morton is the author of "Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination And The Birth Of A World. "And he's an editor at The Economist. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

It was a pleasure, Lulu.


And, my gosh, you've had an interesting careers.

Well, I did science at school, largely, when I was a teenager and I became a doctor. I did five years medical school and became a doctor and was terrified for every single second of my medical career. I'd seemed to emerge from medical school with a qualification but nevertheless, I seemed to know nothing and was so scared and. . .

(Laughter) Forgive me, I'm so glad I didn't blunder into your practice.

Well, do you know, patients liked me 'cause I was really jolly and nice and what they didn't realize is they'd probably been much better off with some mumbling introvert who actually knew something. And in fact, I dreaded it. And my only happy day as a doctor was one sunny summer day where we got no admissions at all and I sat on the lawn outside the hospital and read "The Longest Journey" by E.  M.  Forster. That was the only happy day, and in the end, I didn't go back. And I thought, well, what could I do?I'm not qualified for anything else. I thought, the only thing I've done is comedy. And I applied for and got a job with BBC Light Entertainment in radio.


Well, we've been calling the local hospitals. We've been following social media, posting missing persons ads. I think my cousin and I are going to be trying to head up there in about a week if we haven't found him and post missing persons on our car and just sort of drive around the areas up there in hopes that maybe we'll get some word.

What's he look like?What should we know about him?

He's a private man. He's lived in Paradise for over 40 years. He's very friendly. He's kind. Long hair, full beard. I guess he's about 5'10". Thin, maybe 160 to 170 - I would guess somewhere around there.

Yeah. And how are your parents doing?


Yes, absolutely. And to all of who are - and even though I don't do it anymore, I mean, it's like really once a clown always a clown. Once you've been a real performing clown you realize you've tapped into something big and universal and eternal. It's a frustration to us because clown, which was a word that used to be associated with joy and laughter and happiness, now has a lot of negative connotations to it. You know, you got characters like Crusty the Clown on "The Simpsons" and there are members of Congress.

By the way, isn't it amazing this year I think there's a record number of members of Congress who are retiring at the same time there's a shortage of clowns?What doesn't work here?

I'm reacting almost reflexively with regret and woe over a clown shortage. But I'm wondering, I mean, you know, there are not as many shepherds as there used to be. Is this just - to my knowledge - is this just something we have to. . .

They certainly are in my living room.


There - while we cannot see the fire any longer from where we are, and it's very, very smoky. There's a ton of ash. There has been a ton of ash. Everyone's lungs are, you know, feeling constricted. The dogs are coughing because it's so thick in the air. So the scene itself is still dismal, for sure.

But people are helping each other.

People are coming together. You know, when there's an emergency like this, if the fire happens too fast and you can't get out in time, you have to set the horses free.

Well, you got to put halters on, you got to label them. Those can burn off in a fire, so we actually handwrote with a Sharpie pen on all of our horses hooves the phone number. If there is some marking on the horse on - with ink, then we can identify, at least, who to call to find out where the horse will eventually need to be, or to let that person know that we have that horse.


Ukraine, I think, has enough storages of gas for this winter, but nevertheless, it's a long-term issue that Ukraine really has to address.

Yeah and it owes billions to Russia, doesn't it?

It owes some on the contracts it has and there's a negotiation going on at the moment between Russia and Ukraine on those contracts. But the fundamental point for Ukraine is its energy efficiency levels are very low. If Ukraine could get to Western European levels of energy efficiency, it would actually need to import very little gas at all.

But how do they do that?


Are you swaying now?

Just a little bit, within legal bounds.

So what happened?

We had a noise complaint from a neighbor from people speaking too loudly on the sidewalk. And when the police came out, they issued two summons, one for violation of the New York City noise code and one for violation the Cabaret Law, which in the context of bars and restaurants, prohibits musical entertainment, singing, dancing or other forms of amusement without a license. And that license is very difficult to obtain and was only possessed by about a hundred bars and restaurants out of more than 25,000 in New York.


What should people really be thinking about in terms of the drivers of heart disease?

Well, you know, the things that we know so well, like obesity and diabetes and smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and sedentary - lack of exercise, those are the biggies. They're not going to go away. They are so much more overshadowing this tiny and questionable effect of blood group.

And of course if there was a blood group effect, which is quite questionable, as you already pointed out, we don't have a whole lot of control about that, but we do about much of our lifestyle.

Are these things, do they work in concert together, or is there sort of one big driver?


Well, thank you.

As we note, you've got some photographs of some very splendid interiors, including, for example, the New York Public Library. But maybe less to be expected, tell us about the Handley Regional Public Library in Winchester, VA.

Well, I have been born and raised and lived all my life in California. And so the American Civil War is something quite distant from my experience. But I'm always amazed when I travel in the east, the closeness of that period. So this was a library in Winchester that was built by a Confederate sympathizer and then, the library itself is this beautiful structure, both inside and out. But the walls inside were covered with portraits of Confederate generals, which really was sort of astonishing to me, and to see again, the closeness of that history.

Did you ever feel, in shooting pictures of public libraries, that you have been in the process of documenting a vanishing species?


It was really beautiful.

My daughter's a dancer. And so she - we invited her dance teachers. And we invited my family. And we gathered beneath the full moon. And we did many of the rituals that are described in the book. And we offered, and we created space. And we sat in circle together.

This book is written in verse. And one of the most moving things that I saw is that you referenced a poem that I had never heard of until I read it in your book. I want you to read the last stanza of it.

We stand at the heart of the forest beside the stone pool, waiting for Venus, the smoking star, to glimmer above the trees. Remove your clothes. Let down your hair. Bask in the moonlight, naked as the day of your birth - virgins, maidens, women.


Well, for me it's almost anything that I'm sent and asked to click on in which somebody else is supposedly really embarrassing themselves. And I'm supposed to find this funny. I'm supposed to enjoy the spectacle. But it's just a physical response that I can't, you know. I clench sort of every muscle in my body and I can barely bring myself to watch it and then end up pressing stop. So, you know, examples would be the recording that was around this week of an employee of a cable company attempting to make a departing customer stay using all sorts of extraordinary arguments, I'm told. I'm told it was very embarrassing for the cable company employee. But I don't know because I can't bring myself to listen to it.

The guy who proposed marriage to a woman at the ballpark - you know about this one?

Oh, this is going to be a wedding proposal that is rejected in public, I think?

Yeah, that's it.


You've complained that the U. S.  through both Republican and Democratic administrations has ceded to Israel on most issues and, therefore, has never really been a fair and impartial third party. Has Trump, in effect, made what you consider to be unstated U. S.  policy simply more explicit?

He certainly has. One of the things that Trump has done is that he's brought to the forefront and brought to the - brought - made very apparent that the United States has never been an honest broker - not under Clinton, not under Bush and certainly not under Obama.

Obama was a president who gave Israel the largest aid package that Israel has ever seen. And it had also turned a blind eye to Israeli settlement activity. What Trump has now done is he's put it very much in your face and made it clear that the United States has never been and will never be an honest broker.

Trump, in one of his tweets, did say that Israelis would have to pay more, though, for the recognition of their capital, suggesting Israel will have to make significant concessions to Palestinians. Does that encourage you at all?


It's hard. It is really hard when every time you look up, three kids killed here, four people shot here, somebody getting killed right down the street, right around the corner. It's kind of discouraging sometimes trying to do as much as you can with the resources that you do have.

Boy, I mean, I think a lot of people listening, well, will be very moved, but, I mean, some of them have to be saying, wait a minute. The president of the United States is from the South Side. Don't people look up to him?

I definitely look up to Obama. Obama's a great guy. I never forget - March 31 I wrote the president. You know, I'm from your city, and we're dying down here every day. What are you doing up there to stop what's happening to us down here?And he wrote me back, a little girl in a little basement apartment in Englewood. He wrote me back.

I was able to use that letter to inspire the people that live in this neighborhood like me. Don't ever stop trying. And it just goes back to the movement. No matter how hard things get, no matter every day and I'll wake up and I look at the news and more people have been killed, more people have been shot, that just shows me that I still have work to do.


So, what was a moment that crystallized for you what it was going to be like?You're. . .

Mm-hmm.

You were all the way through it, right?From. . .

Yeah, I started there in kindergarten, and I went through all the way.


And, you know, I actually - I stumbled across an obituary from the New York Times for a Rough Rider, not even one of the famous Rough Riders. But it was from the '30s, and it went through his career. And it struck me that, you know, if here's a guy who's not even that famous, but he's significant enough that 40 - almost 40 years later, he gets an obituary in the New York Times. So what does that say about how famous and how significant these people were at the time?And what is that significance?So that really struck for me that match of thinking, OK, now I need to find the answer.

Well, were they hugely famous when the United States organized an army and invaded Cuba in 1898?

Absolutely. You know, there was this moment in 1898 where I think - and this is the significance of the war - is that it changed how America thinks about its military and about its role in the world. And it gave a positive spin to the idea that American can have a military and should go out into the world to intervene, to bring freedom.

And for a lot of people, even at the time - and editorialists wrote about this. They said the Rough Riders are emblematic of that new America, of this idea that we have this power and we have this - the strength and these values at home. And now we're going to arm them and take them out into the world. And to me, that resonates throughout the 20th century. Time after time, we do that same sort of thing.


Republicans are now working on a tax plan. If they're able to pass that, would you reconsider some of your some of your disdain for the. . .

Yes, absolutely. But going back to the other thing, you know, I think Steve Bannon has backed a lot of people that I am supportive of, like Hawley in Missouri, like Marsha Blackburn, like potentially what he's looking to do in Wyoming. In several other races, I think he's backing very strong candidates that have a great chance of winning. And I think the Arizona race is, at the very least, a toss-up right now. So - sorry, I - that's my completion to the earlier question. So your. . .

Yeah.

Your last question was, you know, will I come back into the fold and support McConnell if he gets tax reform done?I think there's a really good chance. I think the country needs tax reform. I think it's been a long time. And I think, to some extent, McConnell and his team can put the toothpaste back in the tube if they win. You know, my analogy for this whole thing is college football.


And if the court - the judges in the court find him insane, that would, he believes, invalidate his political arguments.

Yeah. It seems like that. Normal, it's considered to be less of punishment or it's actually, technically, it's not the punishment if they sentence you to - sentence you as an insane man and put you in a hospital because then you then aren't responsible for what you did. Anders Breivik, however, wants to be considered as a person who know - knew what he did on the 22nd of July.

And has scoffed at the conceivable punishment. As I understand it, he could get 21 years in jail if convicted and found sane and that he says, wait a minute, either I should be acquitted or I should be put to death.

Yeah. Instead that - but we can't really put anyone to death in Norway, but it's correct that there are maximum - maximum punishment is 21 years. But we also have what we call - I've been looking for the correct English expression, and I think it's called containment, which is a system where a person that is considered to be a threat even after a certain period of time, he can actually be held in prison indeterminate because the - we can't - it's not really considered safe to let him out again in the society.


In The New Yorker piece, you were quoted as saying, he's like a velociraptor. He has to be boss. And if you don't show him deference, he kills you.

It's true. It was an impression that I had. And I - that just of somebody who was very aware of his own power and very conscious of any potential threat.

You've been a diplomat for decades, and you've worked through both Republican and Democratic administrations. How is foreign policy, briefly, normally conducted in those administrations?How does the United States normally find consensus for how it deals with other countries?

Yeah, that's a really great question. And, you know, part of that is why you have so many senior people like me leaving the Department of State. This is not about a foreign service or a career diplomatic corps that feels that it must have the final say on all things. The State Department and the career foreign service are enormously patriotic. We are apolitical. We serve the president. We sign an oath that says that we will serve unconditionally the president and implement his or, in some future, her foreign policy. But we are involved. And our involvement is our value added. We live and work overseas. We speak languages. We tend to develop years of expertise if not in regions, then on specific thematic issues.


Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, we do excited about it. And in the case of Pluto, we're excited about it because Pluto could be a remnant from the early solar system. It could really tell us a lot about how we all got here. So, for me, this was really the highlight of the year, personally. I mean, we - you know, humanity sends a probe from more than three billion miles away, so far away it took four and a half hours just for the photos to make their way back at the speed of light. And, you know, this little probe gets these great pictures, sends them back and we learn just an enormous amount. It was very cool.

Now, I don't want to leave without talking about space cuisine. I understand there were important advances in the grub you get in space.

That's right. Space food is notoriously horrible to eat. It's all this vacuum-packed, freeze-dried stuff. It's sort of - they - they extrude it out of these packages and it comes out as a paste. It looks awful. But this year, they managed to grow some lettuce up there. And so for the first time, astronauts were actually allowed to eat it. They brought up a little balsamic vinaigrette to put on it. You know, this sounds kind of trivial. It is a little silly, but it's not as easy as it sounds. I mean, remember, plants, you know, grow on Earth and. . .

Well, we've all seen the movie where they had a hell of a time trying to grow potatoes on Mars.


Oh, no.

And I realized that she was checking to make sure it wasn't poisoned. It's the first time I ever lost it. And I found myself just talking through my teeth, saying, you know what?I don't give mind games, and I don't take them. You can take this coffee and drink it or you can throw it in the pot. And then she said to me, oh, honey. It was like she had to hear me at the edge of my capacity to believe it was me. And then she said, oh, honey, the fix I'm in, I can't trust the Lord Jesus Christ right now.

Oh.

I said, Nana, the fix you're in, you really can't trust anybody else (laughter). Like, this - it's not a fix.


I know you have to get through this fight now, but once that's over with, what's the next chapter going to be for you?

Oh, it's going to be coal mining. I've had a coal miner in my family from 1700. It runs deep in my blood. And I'm 44. And hopefully I'll find a coal mine job that I can retire from. That's my goal.

You know, Harlan County, Ky. , is the site of a mine protest that happened in the 1970s that went on for more than a year. So this is not only a long history of coal mining, it's also a long history of protest. Do you feel like you're a part of that today?

In some ways. We done our protest peacefully, but in Harlan, Ky. , we stand up for what we believe is right. That's been embedded in us from childhood up. You know, coal miners is brotherhoods. And we got a whole lot hanging in the balance here that we won't back down.


We're talking about huge issues here like, you know, what's the difference between the generations, between the Vietnam war generation and the younger generation?What's the role of African Americans in leadership in society?Is there a glass ceiling for women to break through?These are huge societal issues and they're being represented by these larger than life candidates.

Speaking of archetypes and demographics when it came to the primary season, how did Senator McCain stack up not just against Senator Obama, but also Senator Clinton?

Yeah, absolutely. The best way to see the primary campaign, you know, the first five months of this year is really too see it as a three-way race rather than a two-way race. And basically the major contest was between the young, attractive, good-speaking oratorical black man and the experienced glass-ceiling breaking woman, and the wily grizzled vets came in, sort of had a third place role there, but nevertheless got some coverage. If you rank - once ranked the number of minutes that they got, Obama got most of the - Rodham Clinton got second, and McCain got about half as much as Obama got.

All right. Just very briefly, what do you see ahead in terms of the parity or lack thereof for Obama and McCain?


Well, the room did. Supposedly, the reporter from the New York Times, who had been hanging out in the back and sort of lightly paying attention, came tearing up the aisle and said, do it again. . .

. . . which he did.

How did the Polaroid change taking pictures?

Well, it was a huge revolution, at the time. And people immediately started to play with it. You know, it was a craze from the very beginning. The first camera went on sale in - the year after that demonstration, in 1948. It was rolled out in November. And they sent in a big lot and they said, well, it's the day after Thanksgiving; these should carry you through until Christmas. And they were gone before the store closed that day. So it took off immediately. You know, fine artists began to embrace Polaroid, right from the beginning. One of the first enthusiasts, who saw one of those early demonstrations in the late '40s, was Ansel Adams. And Adams immediately signed on as consultant to Polaroid. And he stayed in that role until the end of his life.


Well, assess how they're looking at the move by the Treasury department, the moves really, of last week and of over the weekend, and of today. What is the world thinking?

The world has its fingers crossed. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. The world is basically saying this has to work. I mean, that's why you saw last week for instance, not just the Fed put up a whole bunch of capital, inject liquidity into the system. You saw all the other European and many of the Asian central banks do likewise. The world is terrified. They need this to work.

Well, what about the Democrats who are saying look, hold on, we need to do this right and not rush into it. Is that?

Well, first of all they are going to rush into it, one way or the other. And so what the Democrats have done - have said, look you have your pet things that you care about, here are our pet things that we care about. We're not going to let you do this without, you know, helping home owners more than you have, without doing something about renting an executive pay for all these executives who were involved in this mess. You know, that's a legitimate thing for them to say. It's still going to get rushed into, because this things going to be passed by the end of the week, is my guess because everybody wants to go home and run for re-election and also because the country really needs it to pass.


Yes.

. . . And that makes the process here entirely unconstitutional. So due process rights are an important part of our Constitution, and they apply to any one of us who's in the middle of a criminal proceeding, for example. But this is different. We're not in a grand jury. The president's not about to be indicted, at least not anytime soon. The process that is underway is the very early steps - what the House has chosen to call an inquiry into whether or not there should be a more formal move to impeach the president.

Although, I mean, if Pat Cipollone were here, he would argue, A, President Trump is an American. He is entitled to the same rights as any American citizen. I'm reading from Page 1 (reading) therefore he has - he enjoys the basic rights guaranteed to all Americans, which would include due process under the Constitution.

Well, the Constitution doesn't say that either, OK?What the Constitution says specifically with respect to impeachment, it says that the House of Representatives - and I'm shortening the sentence - the House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment - period. There's a period at the end of that. And there's no sentence following in that. . .


I want to get into one other really fascinating part because we're running out of time, and that's is when you did this preliminary work in mice before you did it in humans, you used nanoparticles instead of white blood cells.

Well, we used both, actually. We developed over many years the use of the white blood cells as carriers for the antigens to knock down the autoimmune response. But more recently, we used nanoparticles that we think are surrogates of these apoptotic white blood cells. So they actually have the same efficacy in mouse models of both preventing and treating animal models of multiple sclerosis.

The advantage, of course, being that these nanoparticles can be manufactured under FDA-approved conditions and can be pulled off the shelf, the therapy is less intrusive than withdrawing, you know, billions of cells from a patient and manipulating them in a blood bag and re-introducing them.

So when do we get to a human trial of whether your technique works, in this phase two where you actually. . .


Didn't Elon Musk know all this before he sent out that memorable tweet on August 7?

Well, a lot of people think he should have. Let's go back to that August 7 when he sent out that tweet and said I'm considering taking the company private, funding secured at $420 a share. And analysts immediately were very dubious that Musk could pull this off. Where would he get the 10 billions of dollars to take the company private?Did he really have the funding secured as he claimed?And that is something that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating, according to multiple reports. And Musk said at the time - or Musk said that two-thirds of the investors would stick with Tesla if it went private, but he really had no way of knowing that.

And why did he want to take the company private in any case?

Well, he's always chafed at the demands of Wall Street - the quarterly earnings reports, the pesky questions from analysts. He famously called one analyst's question boring and boneheaded on an earnings call earlier this year. But perhaps even more than all this, Musk. . .


Well, so what I got really interested in was that when the coat showed up, it showed up in a black plastic package from China Post. So I thought I was buying a coat from some brand that represented itself as kind of this modern gentleman. You know, I was expecting it to have its headquarters, you know, in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles or something. And this thing is shipped direct from a technology park in China.

So I kind of started thinking like, well, what is this brand?And I started diving into this new class of online retailer that use a tool called Shopify, which allows anyone to kind of spin up a retail store in five minutes; sucks products in from a service called AliExpress, which is sort of like Amazon but in China, and it's dedicated to kind of the export market for Chinese and other Asian manufacturers; and allows - basically - consumers in the U. S.  to take a different route into this manufacturing ecosystem, which makes so many clothes, which makes so many consumer goods, in Asia.

When you ordered this coat, were you genuinely surprised to be able to trace this stuff back, or was that the whole idea?

Well, no. I was genuinely surprised. I was literally - I had been tagged in the Facebook advertising system, which Instagram also uses, as someone who likes to buy clothes. And what I came to find was that this is a pretty widespread phenomenon.


He had time to rethink the music of his youth after an injury forced him to lay off the piano for months. Music triggers memories. And when the 36-year-old sat at our piano, the music triggered his.

I still remember my first teacher. Professor Zhu told me, you know, now you'll learn those pieces. But every 20 years, you got to come back and to rediscover what can you do with it.

And I was like, that's crazy. Come on. I already know. I mean, I know those pieces by heart. I know how to play this piece. Why should I play it, you know, 30 years back?And now I realize - oh, my goodness - I mean, I have to because those pieces was kind of my best friends, and I need to know them better.

This piece by Mozart takes Lang Lang back to his first-ever piano recital. He started early. The recital in China came when he was 5.


Right.

In south L. A. , it's black-Latino. Do you think that the NAACP will or should reach out to particularly other people of color to try to form coalitions?

Well that's been something that Julian Bond has been emphasizing throughout his chairmanship. I'm not sure the various precedents, the CEOs understood it. But it's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And Du Bois said at the beginning of the century that it was not jut black people, but black, brown, yellow all the colored races that had to work together. So I think that - and Jealous comes from a community and background where he is very much aware of that. I think the NAACP needs to do it, whatever the tensions are, whatever the issues are, whether it's housing or whose turf is available to whom, or immigration or whatever it is, jobs. I think the NAACP has to that, and I think Ben will do that.

Now, when it comes to civil rights, I talked to a young activist who is very much within the black community. His entire focus is on young black men and yet he hates the term civil rights. He thinks civil rights, the term, has undermined civil rights, the movement, because it's outdated, in his opinion. What do you think on that score?


Well, I think that Dr.  King was trying to reinforce the troops, so to speak, who were fighting in the trenches of racial warfare. To believe that the movement was bigger than any man or any woman, any individual that there was a collective will of the people being exercised through their individual talents, gifts and sensibilities. But that the movement couldn't be tromped, that his death would only strengthen the movement. That the death of any other figure would in no way diminish the greatness of the cause for which they were willing to die.

He was willing to die for his people. He struggled back and forth with that death and what it might mean. But he was signaling to the rest of them that, you know, he wasn't an egomaniac. He wasn't a guy who was trying to say I wanted to be the messiah, even though people had made him that way.

And then, thirdly, I think, what he was suggesting, Farai, is that the cause in which we are invested will, in many cases, cause people to suffer. And that we shouldn't lie to people about the nature of that suffering, but that suffering could ultimately be redemptive. Martin Luther King Jr.  after all was quite famous for telling black folk constantly that the black blood that would be shed could indeed redeem the nation.

Now, you bring up the term automortology, and you talk about the ways in which Dr.  King essentially gave his own eulogy, not just once but several times. Tell us why that was important to him.


We're playing the waiting game. We had a submarine try to break loose on us in Muskogee, and it's a completely unique problem. When you talk to the state emergency management officials, they don't know how to handle a World War II submarine.

So let's paint a picture for people listening, trying to imagine what you are able to see. Usually, the Batfish, which is how many feet long?

Three hundred eleven feet long.

Normally, it sits in the middle of a big kind of lawn - meadow. Is that right?


What options does the U. S.  have?

Sanctions are a key part of maximum pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been advancing. And sanctions have never been as tough - tougher than now. They're broad. They target sectors. They try to cut off North Korea's efforts to earn hard currency to support their economy and their nuclear weapons program. And there is anecdotal evidence that the North Koreans are starting to feel the pinch. And I think the Olympic outreach is in part a sign of the fact that they're feeling the pinch of sanctions and that they saw outreach as a way to try to get South Korea to agree to loosen sanctions implementation or try to lure South Korea away from the maximum pressure campaign.

Jung Pak, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Thanks so much.

Thank you.


Men are more likely to use alone; women more likely to use with a partner. When you use alone and fentanyl is present - since it kills people so quickly - it can stop breathing in less than a minute - it's very dangerous when you're alone.

So if you're with someone else, at least there's the chance that someone might call 911.

Or use Narcan, or naloxone, the drug that reverses the opioid - the overdose themselves, yes.

Yeah.


The likelihood that the law was going to get struck down was one of the factors that contributed to the council's decision to repeal it. But there were also many groups that came together to push for the repeal.

Mr.  Muchmore, I'm told you also have a laundromat in your bar.

I do have a small laundromat in the back. It's a New Orleans thing. I grew up in New Orleans, and there a lot of the bars have laundries so that while you're doing your laundry, you can have a beer or a coffee and get to know your neighbors.

How are you going to celebrate?


Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked the queen to suspend Parliament - a very British coup, as many of his critics say, or a way to force Parliament to work out Brexit three years-plus after voters voted for him.

Or perhaps a device to get Parliament out of the way and allow Boris and the Brexiteers to finally leave the EU even without a deal. And the EU has said it is done negotiating. So this fall, Britain may leave the European Union and do it in the most disruptive and unpredictable way imaginable. So for the residents of Britain, this is rather like watching a hurricane bear down on them, feeling helpless to stop it and unable to escape.

The romance between the president and Fox News seemed to have everything going for it. What happened?

(Laughter) It does seem to have cooled. Weeks ago, the president started complaining about the opinion polls he saw on Fox News. They were showing his approval rating as low as most of the other media and academic polls. So he called that fake news.


It's possible, but for the active vaccines, yeah, that's correct.

Is there a lot of research that's going on in this field?

There is. It's sparse. There are some groups that have been working in this for a number of years, but like I said, it's - the research requires a lot of different initiatives. So it's not something that a group who's just doing chemistry or immunology can do. You have to kind of meld together chemistry, immunology and neuropharmacology to kind of look at this overall process.

And is there great interest?You say there might be interest if you can develop this in - for people, the drug companies, because it's given later, might be interested in it as opposed to giving, as you say, prophylactics to drug addicts.


Good morning.

Well, what was the reasoning by Judge T. S. Ellis?

Well, Ellis made clear in his sentencing that Manafort's crimes are serious. He wanted to spell that out clearly. We're talking about tax fraud, failing to disclose a foreign bank account and bank fraud. The tax fraud, in particular, Ellis said is basically stealing from every American who pays taxes. That's a serious crime.

But Ellis also said that, you know, you take all sorts of factors into consideration when coming up with a sentence - general deterrence, you look at the entirety of a defendant's life. And he said, in Manafort's case, he's a first-time offender. Otherwise, blameless life.


Your narrator and her husband are audio journalists and archivists. The husband declares they have to relocate to fulfill his project to tell the story of the Apache nation. But she finds a story, too, doesn't she, in a woman named Manuela who has two daughters.

That's right. The narrator and mother of the kids who are travelling in this car from New York towards Arizona towards the old Apacheria has met - in her daughter's school had met a woman called Manuela. And she's been working with her husband on a big sound project recording all the languages spoken in New York. And she asks this woman, Manuela, if she can record her. This woman speaks (unintelligible) which is a very rare Mayan language. And the woman says fine, but in exchange, she asks her to translate some documents, legal documents, of her daughters who are on their way from Mexico to the U. S.  border.

And these two girls, when they arrive in the U. S.  border as happens with all the kids that arrive here seeking asylum, are first placed in an ICE detention space - an icebox they call them colloquially. And then these girls are transferred to a shelter. And at some point, they go missing. So the narrator of the novel becomes deeply involved with looking for these two girls, helping Manuela look for her daughters.

I made a note of your line. The son says that if they ran off, he said ma would start thinking of us the way she thought of them, the lost children, all the time and with all her heart.


(Laughter).

And that's exactly what I did and never really looked back from there really.

Yeah. What did you like about it?What do you like about it?

Actually, I quite like the early morning work because I don't - I'm happy in my own skin. I quite like solitude. I don't mind spending time with myself. But I think what it was is it was going to work when there's no one on the road. So I could drive to work, no one on the road - very quiet - go to where - the team were there. We had a lot of work to do. I was very proud of what I did, and I picked it up very, very quickly. And it was lovely looking back on the bakery and looking at all the croissant, the afternoon tea, the breads - and looking at everything that you've made and thought, do you know what?I'm proud of that.


Good morning, Linda.

Who is Loretta Lynch, and does she have the chops to do this huge job?

Linda, she's been the U. S.  attorney in Brooklyn twice - once during the Obama administration now and previously during the Clinton years. And this district she covers serves 8 million people. It's huge. So she has a really long record of prosecuting people, including policemen who brutalized Haitian immigrant Abner Louima back in 1997, a lot of old-school mobsters in Brooklyn and Queens, the man who tried to bomb the New York City subway system a few years ago who had ties to al-Qaida, and more recently, Linda, Congressman Michael Grimm, a Republican from Staten Island who she's prosecuting on fraud charges. Grimm was just reelected. He pleaded not guilty in that case.

Now lots of lawyers were lining up to lead the Justice Department. So why did the White House decide to go with Lynch?


Do the doctors in these cases have any sort of ethical obligations with regards to the number of embryos?

I think they really do. Mega multiple births - seven, eight babies - are, as you pointed out, hugely risky, very dangerous to the mother. I don't know of any case where some of the children were not severely disabled as a result of prematurity or complications. The doctors have to try and do what they can to avoid it. And to be blunt, anybody who would transfer embryos - seven or eight embryos at a time - into a woman, I think, is basically close to malpractice.

And if you super-ovulated a woman using drugs, you've got to monitor that woman very, very closely. And if you see too many eggs, I think you need to advise them they better not have sexual relations or artificial insemination. They're going to make too many babies.

So if that took place, if the latter took place, what could they say to the mother and what they can legally do?I mean, isn't really up to the mother whether or not she carries these babies?


Lettuce is an incredibly water-intensive crop. And the relationship with climate change and drought. . .

And even gender.

Iceberg in particular has managed to transcend these unfairly feminine connotations that salad-eating has taken on.

So as you reconsider iceberg's place in the fabric of our society and on your table, Rosner urges you to think even beyond the delicious wedge salad. She suggests stir-frying your lettuce, pickling it or blending it into a cold soup. And even if lettuce experimentation isn't for you, you can still try to let go of your leafy, green pretensions. Not everything has to be arugula.


Hi.

So we're going to start off with a letter about a rule known as the 72(t) rule. It comes from Joan Fantasia(ph). She lives here in Los Angeles. She's a retired journalist from the L. A.  Times. She's 53 years old. And she asks, can you explain the 72(t)?There is no way I can hold out until age 59-and-a-half to get my 401(k) money. What's going on here, Michelle?

Well. The 72(t) rule is a rule from the IRS that states that if you have an IRA, an individual retirement account, you can withdraw a fixed amount of money for a minimum of five years or until you're 59-and-a-half, whichever comes last. That's an important point. So, let's say you're just a year into this and you turn 59-and-a-half, you still have to play out that five-year rule. So it's whichever comes last. And basically owners have to still pay ordinary income on the distribution, but you don't have to pay that 10 percent penalty. So, since she's so close, she could utilize this. But you have to be very, very careful about that because if you miscalculate and you don't take enough or you take too much, you're going to be hit with that 10 percent penalty.

Here's a more general question. This comes from Loreen Lynn(ph). And she says, I am a fool with money. Is there a general book or books that cover the basics of finance?What do you recommend, Michelle?


Henry Ford believed in it, didn't he?

That's right. And then he was forced by the courts to retract.

You take a look at these forgeries, and you're struck by the fact that they took a lot of work, discipline, creativity - qualities that you would like to think could be used more responsibly and honorably.

Yeah. In fact, that was our conclusion as a working group. And what we determined at the end was just how incredibly creative this activity is. We think of it as destructive, right?We think of it as deceptive - fabricating or mutilating history. But in a sense, that's also what historians have been doing for various personal motives or political motives over time. But in any event, even in that destruction, there is this kernel of the imagination and the desire to find ways to persuade other people to believe things - even preposterous things - as the truth, or at least to be plausible. And I think that's where the power of forgery as a category of human expression really, I think, looms large in our history.


Wow. So that must have even surprised the researchers, I imagine.

Yeah, well the big thing is nobody really has any even guess about how the brain is able to do this. They did some similar experiments where they weren't turning somebody's world upside-down, they were - they had goggles that reversed right and left. So everything that was on your right is suddenly on your left.

And again, the first few days were just madness from the point of view of somebody doing this. The whole world is reversed. But after a few days, the brain adjusted to it.

Amazing. And so when they took the goggles of him and he had to go back to the normal life, how long did that take?


I was like, is this really happening?I also was quite bothered by the fact that folk would actually take advantage of community organizers working, like, to shift the landscape of violence and discrimination that is happening in our country.

As an activist, are you concerned that people possibly outside of this country are using social issues, which are divisive, and trying to sort of pit people against each other?

That is the worry. It's a huge concern. And it's unfortunate. But this is the age of technology that we're living in. And with any business practice, you want to do your due diligence with the folks that you're partnering with. It's just better for our work that this has happened because then we get to elevate our work and be more intentional with the communities that we serve.

So when you say due diligence, what does that mean, practically speaking?What are you doing differently?


So the very beginning of it sounded a lot like rap to me.

Yeah. It is about the rhythm of the lyrics, rhythm of the words.

You have been living away from your home in Iran now, for a number of years. So how has life in exile been for you?

Actually, I - from the first days, I just could use this world for myself, world of exile. Here in the U. S. , I got mostly concentration on my work. I got my - silent; I got respect. I got - many things. Definitely, I miss my mom, I miss my family, I miss my friends. But not the concept of Iran - it's dead for me.


And so when two clumps of free protons and electrons hit each other, they will slow each other down. But dark matter has no charge. That's why we can't see it because the only reason you and I could see anything, it's because there's charges that are being accelerated. That's what light is. But if something has no charge, it doesn't give off light.

So yeah, so in the Bullet Cluster, dark matter and galaxies stayed together just as they should, and in Abell 520, they do not, and that is a mystery as to why exactly that is. There isn't a comfortable explanation that can be readily arrived at.

Is there a theory about what may be happening, or just - you have to just think about it some more?

Well, so there's a number of things that could be happening. All of them are slightly disturbing.


It is very unusual. So we found out in a backhanded sort of way and then called up the Pentagon to say - hey, is this true?Have you guys not released that money?Yeah, well, it is. Well, why?And they didn't have an answer to that question.

All right. So let me fast-forward us along on our timeline to August 30. You wrote a letter on that date to Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget - OMB - also acting White House chief of staff.

Yeah. We wanted to have as much force behind the letter as possible, so we did it in a bipartisan way with me and ranking member Thornberry, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. We sent off the letter saying, you know, please release the money, and please tell us why you're holding it up.

Yeah, I've got this letter in front of me. It's straightforward, one page. (Reading) Please inform the committee why these funds are being held and when they will be released.


Well, we'll have to wait and see. The purpose, obviously, is to send a signal that those members of the armed forces that choose to work with the opposition, if they are under sanctions, will have those sanctions lifted. And those who might be facing sanctions would not face them if they chose to work with the opposition. We're going to have to wait and see how that's received.

How important is the support that this government has received from Cuba, and Russia and maybe other countries, as well?

It's important. On the Cuban side, some of the support has been exaggerated in terms of numbers. But without a doubt, the support they provide in the area of counterintelligence has been critical to. . .

They send intelligence agents to help work the streets of Caracas, or wherever.


Well, what he was accused of doing amid a custody battle with his wife, Mia Farrow, was of abusing his young daughter, Dylan, taking her into the attic and sexually molesting her. This had played out because of - there was a scandal that had happened just weeks, months before where Mia Farrow had discovered that Woody Allen had taken nude pictures of her daughter with her former husband, Andre Previn, Soon-Yi.

To whom Mr.  Allen's now married, yeah.

To whom Mr.  Allen has now been married for many years. And that tore the family apart. And so it was this sort of twin scandal, a Greek tragedy if you will, that played out at that time and has had these repercussions ever since.

How did The Hollywood Reporter - the features editor, Stephen Galloway, handle that part of the story?


Constitutional?

I think across the board. This is emblematic of the broader problem that we face, which is Congress not doing its job in pushing off issues that the American people want to adjudicate to the president who then uses dubious authorities to do things that he couldn't otherwise do. It's about the very basis, the very nature of our regime.

What effect do you think this declaration of national emergency might have on that?

I think it makes everybody just a little more cynical, right?Here we have a situation where Congress has been facing this issue for months. We had the longest shutdown in American history. And they chose not to do anything about it. So far as I can tell, people who opposed the wall didn't try to win that debate. People who supported the war didn't try to win that debate. And the president didn't seem to be overly interested in trying to win that debate.


Right. And it's because of a change in the law post-9/11 that made - that gave the State Department the ability to designate specific terrorist groups. And once that group was designated, they fell under the Patriot Act. And we could investigate - the FBI could investigate specifically individuals both in the United States and overseas that were involved in any kind of transactional or transnational terrorism events with more - a greater ability, I guess, to utilize the techniques available to us.

So what can be done?I mean, are there changes that can be made in the law that might help prevent an attack like the one we saw in El Paso?

Well, there are a lot of laws that apply right now to domestic terrorism, but most of them are state laws. They're not federal laws. There is no federal murder statute, for example, unless you are a federal official of some sort and you are murdered or there's an attempted murder on you. So the El Paso case, for example, is probably going to be prosecuted as a local homicide case of 20 counts of homicide, 22, however many victims we have, by the local DA. It's not a federal case. At this point, the FBI is kind of peripherally assisting that investigation. But they're not specifically involved in or going to be involved in the prosecution. Now. . .

Could the law change?I mean, could Congress pass a law that says that an act like this, when you kill this many people, is a federal crime?


Always a pleasure, Neal.

And how big is this change?

It is big. The previous record was in 2007, where a very large percentage of this ice melted away. This year, it's already bigger than 2007 by an area the size of Texas. This is - this really shattered that record which in itself was a pretty dramatic departure from the average.

And, well, if things melt, it's because things are warmer, right?

That is exactly right. And what happens also is the Arctic ice has been getting thinner over the years. And so it used to be that you can have some warm summers up there, and you wouldn't melt it all away because you'd have 10 feet or 20 feet thick of ice. And you'd melt some of it, but you wouldn't melt it all the way through. But because of this warming trend up there, it is where the planet is warming faster than anywhere else. The Arctic, what we've seen is the ice getting thinner up there. And so a fairly small pretubance will actually melt a lot of the ice because it's thin to begin with. You don't have to melt 20 feet of ice. You might melt three feet of ice.


Yeah.

That is just a staggering figure. Is the battle to keep San Francisco affordable already a lost battle?

That's a very good question, Ailsa. And I would - you know, I'm still optimistic that we can turn things around here and right the ship in San Francisco. We can't just keep supporting job creation and growth unchecked. And now in 2019, it's time for us to ask the tech sector to start paying their fair share in taxes so that we can support everybody to be able to live and thrive in our city.

San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar joined us from member station KQED in San Francisco. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

Thank you, Ailsa.


There are probably two or three important things. One is I think it gives you an insight into the company and what they do with the data they gather. Now, Facebook say they don't sell data, but they certainly make money out of it. And I think one of the things that concerned us was whether some of the developers that work with Facebook get preferential access to data depending on how valuable that relationship is. I think there was something else, which is potentially an antitrust issue, which is the dominant position Facebook has I think allows it to pick winners on its platform. There are big questions about the way in which they use their power. The final thing I think which is I think particularly significant is are users giving informed consent when they give data to Facebook?

Mr.  Collins, why should anyone be worried about that?Is it just what you would expect a business to do, maximize the information it has and reward the most promising relationships?

I think we all understand with these sorts of social media tools they're free to use, but in some ways, you're giving your data to the company. The company makes money out of that by selling advertising. But the question is are we giving up far more data than we realize?And then what happens to that data when the company has it?And I think it's right that we have some say and some protection over how it's used.

Do you feel Facebook has been honest with you?


As any historian will tell you, history is a living thing. And there's always a debate over how events can be interpreted and understood. Poland recently has gone a step further, legislating how to talk about one of the darkest periods in its history.

We are in a moment when we decide about how we're going to teach about and remember the Holocaust in the future.

Anna Sommer Schneider is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown. This past week, the country's president signed a law that would punish anyone who suggests Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. Critics, including Israel and the U. S.  State Department, say the law will stifle discussion about those atrocities and cover up the role of Poles who killed or denounced Jews during World War II. For Schneider, this debate is personal. In 1977, she was born in the same town as Poland's most infamous concentration camp.

Despite the fact that I was born and raised literally in the shadows of the gas chambers, there was very little information available for me at that time - what Auschwitz really was.


Well, you know, Lula to his supporters is an Abe Lincoln-type figure. He is the face of the working class that accomplished something. I mean, he was Brazil's first president who came from poverty. He ran for president three times and lost. And then when he finally got in, he had in some respects the good fortune of presiding over a commodities boom. And therefore, 30 million Brazilians came out of poverty and into the middle class during his presidency from 2003 to 2010. Since then, as you know, things have fallen apart. And he had a role in that, a role in the economic mismanagement but also a role in the corrupt ways of doing business in politics.

Remind us what exactly he's being accused of.

Well, Lula has five sets of corruption charges against him. And this one that he was sentenced for recently was - it involves a beachfront apartment that he was allegedly given access to with his family in return for considerations on a - what amounted to a government contract.

And it's part of, of course, a wider corruption scandal that has been uncovered that's really rocking Brazil at the moment. Tell us a little bit about the context in which this is happening.


In the 15 seconds we have left, if there's an agreement of some kind this weekend, does the debate just begin all over again in a couple of weeks over the debt ceiling?

Absolutely. We are sort of going through one crisis at a time right now.

Ramesh Ponnuru is senior editor for the National Review and a columnist for Bloomberg View. Thank so much for being with us, sir.

You're welcome.


And I was like, ooh, that's catchy. And I was like, uh oh. Song time. And I put my sandwich down, ran to my little studio and just got to work.

"Jaime" is a really personal record. It's named for the older sister Brittany adored, the sister who taught her how to play the piano and write poems. Jaime died of cancer when the girls were still kids.

What was she like?

First thing I picture are her nails.


The big one was that they died of lead poisoning due to the canning of the canned tin goods. The problem with that - these guys hadn't eaten any tin food. It was only three months into their voyage.

It was a dire situation anyway you look at it. But, of course, in your book, it wasn't dire enough. You throw in an Arctic beast.

I do, an unexplained Arctic beast that we never see. And the reason for that is I wanted something to personify just the terror, the horror of the darkness, the five months of darkness, the terrible cold - 100 degrees below zero - the constricting ice that you had to listen to against the hull, you know, all the time.

What would be the best-case scenario for you if they find which ship it is?What would you like to know?


I know as far as me in the glamour I always go back to self-responsibility. It really does have to start with the person. They have to make a choice to want to get educated about HIV, and learn about it. And I really think that people should realize that it's a 100 percent - 100 percent preventable disease. It's a disease you don't have to get. It is something you have to acquire. So, I really want people, you know, to get that in their head. Like, quit blaming, you know, the media, or rap videos, or you know, school systems. It really has to start with you.

If you had to describe in one word what keeps you going when you're down, what would it be?

Life. You know, just me. I'm my own motivation, I'm my own role model, you know, I love me, and I'm very happy, you know, that HIV presented itself in my life. You know, a lot of people would regret it or whatever, but it really taught me self-love, self-acceptance, and self-responsibility. And that's the best thing I could possibly ask for.

Well, Marvelyn, thank you.


The yield curve has inverted for a full quarter, and that has been associated with predicting a recession for the last seven recessions. So from 1960s, this indicator has been reliable in terms of foretelling a recession. And also, importantly, it has not given any false signals yet.

So that would mean yes (laughter).

That means yes.

OK. So let me break down - let me ask you to break down what that means. What is the yield curve, and what does it mean when it's inverted?


We have frozen nonessential travel. We've frozen nonessential hiring. And we've also given all of our staff - 2,500 of them across the state - a 60-day notice of a furlough - that is unpaid leave time - to be taken sometime during the fiscal year.

You have asked state legislators to intervene. Have they, and are you optimistic it might make a difference?

It's going to be a very heavy lift in that overriding the veto requires three quarters of the legislature in combined session. So 45 of Alaska's 60 legislators need to override the veto.

The governor's argument is that these cuts are, A, necessary for the budget and, B, that they would allow the University of Alaska to be - and I'll quote him - "smaller, leaner but still very, very positive and a productive university. "If I'm hearing you right, you are not in agreement.


Is there any such thing as truly pure water from any source, bottled or tap?

Well, it's called distilled water, sure. It ends up actually not tasting very good. It's funny actually - for Aquafina and Dasani and actually the major bottled water brands, that's actually tap water that is passed through very fine filters. It's called reverse osmosis. And then the water actually is too clean to taste good. So, in the industry they call it pixie dust - they put some minerals actually back into the water to improve the taste.

So, clean water tastes bad.

Well, I mean, what's clean water, right?I mean, the water that we have out of our tap is clean. The water that we have out of bottled water is clean, right?The question is do you want water that has no contaminants in it all, which would be distilled, or water that's safe to drink?And the fact is we could certainly treat water if we wanted to, to the point where there's nothing in it, but we wouldn't be willing to pay the cost.


. . . Because I have Nusayba. And she is alive and smiling and well thanks to an anonymous live donor, who came through at the last second. . .

Yeah.

. . . And gave a piece of his liver, which is now in my daughter's belly. And she lives. What more can we ask for?My life is complete.

We can reveal his name, too, can't we?


So are you surprised by these numbers?Is there anything in the report we haven't really heard before?

Unfortunately I wish I could say I was surprised. But it's pretty much an extension of what we've known going back for decades now, and that is that our path of tougher sentencing laws and higher rates of incarceration has really continued unabated. And at this point, as this report points out, we stand alone on the global stage with really no other peers in terms of our use of incarceration.

Can you break down the numbers by race?

Well, that's where the numbers are most compelling and most frightening. The one in a hundred number that got most of the attention, one in a hundred Americans are in prison or jail, obscures the underlying trends and the geographical concentration of incarceration, particularly among low-income communities of color. And once you look for young African—American males, as the report points out, black men between the ages of 20 and 34, one in nine of them are in prison or jail on a given day.


There's problems, obviously, with monitoring the situation. The government won't let - of Myanmar - won't let international monitors in. And, in fact, the top U. N.  official responsible for human rights was barred from the country. Is that right?

Yanghee Lee, the U. N. 's special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, has been denied entry. A U. N.  fact-finding mission has been denied entry. If there was going to be a return - and this is premature - but if there was going to be a return, there would have to be some sort of international monitoring in place.

Myanmar sees most of the Rohingya as illegal migrants who originally came from Bangladesh generations ago. Bangladesh does not want them either. We're seeing a new generation growing up in refugee camps. In many ways, they are stateless people. Bangladesh is not giving newborns, for example, documents to show that they have any status at all in the country. So what is the way forward?

The bottom line is they - Rohingya have been in Myanmar for centuries. They have legitimate claims to citizenship there. And the notion that they're stateless or somehow they are kind of an alien people is nonsense. It is nonsense. It is a myth perpetrated by the authorities in Myanmar. So yeah, the government of Bangladesh should have policies that are tolerant and willing to take care of the Rohingya for as long as they need to be taken care of. But the culprit here is the government and the military in Myanmar.


Yeah. So Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in a press conference, announced the number of casualties in today's shooting here in El Paso. That number is 20 total casualties with 26 others injured. Authorities say the victims range in all age groups. The governor called this one of the deadliest days in Texas.

And what more do we know about the person who was taken into custody?

You know, from the authorities, we don't know much more beyond this was a white 20-year-old - 21-year-old male who was apprehended without incident by the El Paso police at an intersection just behind the Walmart. The state police is taking the lead on this investigation. But at today's press conference, the El Paso police chief say that they believe that this incident may be connected to a hate crime.

And why did they say that?


Yeah.

Well, Mayor Belangia, good luck. I hope I see Oriental someday. It sounds like a lovely place.

Please do. You will fall in love with it.

And I'll bring a loaf of bread for you.


I was - I did an interview on a radio station where one of the leaders of the class war was on there. They've protested outside housing developments. They've protested outside banks before and they get absolutely nowhere with it, but as soon as they threw paint on our shop, they hit the headlines. So I think they got what they wanted.

Why did you open up in this neighborhood?

Shoreditch is a really creative part of London. There's a lot of - new businesses start right around here and a lot of creative businesses as well. So it just seemed like our brand and what we wanted to do fitted in really well here.

And what do you serve?I said $5 bowls of cereal, but expand on that menu if you could.


And Mr.  Cohen has had his brushes with the criminal justice system before, hasn't he?

Well, I don't think it's fair to say that he has. I think that there are many people around him who have, ranging from members of his family to myriad business associates - associates of his in the taxi business. When he first got out of law school and started working as a personal injury lawyer in, I think, 1992 or 1993, the first job he took was with a personal injury law firm where the named partner was arrested on bribery charges within a year or two of Michael having arrived there. Now, Michael was a junior associate. You know, I wouldn't want to imply that somehow that related to him, but that was the first known instance of many that followed of Mr.  Cohen being around or being involved with people that got into a lot of legal trouble - other lawyers, business associates and so forth.

In the 30 seconds we have left, is he - is Michael Cohen in a position to know a lot about Donald Trump and The Trump Organization that they might rather not have the public know?

I think that's right. But I think we have to make a distinction between knowing a lot that they might not want the public to know to having information that represents evidence that can be used in a criminal prosecution, whether it's of people at The Trump Organization, Mr.  Trump's family or Mr.  Trump himself, who likely wouldn't be indicted under any circumstances because he's the sitting president.


We're talking with NPR foreign correspondent Deborah Amos, with us from our bureau in Beirut. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. But does that suggest that people believe that some sort of conference, some sort of agreement will freeze things in place, at some point?

Well, maybe if we get to Geneva 10 as many. . .

. . . analysts talk about here.

Not funny, but it's funny.


It is anything that is connected to the web. Dyn says that attacks against their data centers originated from tens of millions IP addresses associated with various web-connected devices, so things like closed-circuit TV cameras, DVRs, routers. And that's pretty new kind of denial of service attack. We've all been buying these new things, connecting them to Wi-Fi. Internet wonks will call this the internet of things. And, you know, experts have been warning that these things are never secure. And, well, this is the most visible example so far of what happens when hackers hijack a tremendous number of them.

Could this attack - could it have originated with a whole collection of gifted technologists or some guy sitting in his Jockey shorts in his studio apartment?

Like I said, we don't know who was behind it. But it was a very complex staged attack that co-opted lots and lots of devices in people's homes. The specific complexity of this issue was that the devices were around the world. And Dyn says that the final incident was finally completed and resolved. As of last night, they had kicked the hackers out of all of their data servers. But of course, now there's this renewed urgency to talk about what happens when we connect all these things through the Wi-Fi without giving much thought to their security.

And quickly, anything people can do to protect themselves?


But Alaphilippe seems to be digging deeper every day. He's a former soldier. And he's extremely tough, really affable, straight-talking. The things he's done - they've set on fire the passions of the people, really. He's just sort of gone on a rampage - these break-for-the-border dashes for the finishing line. And he's succeeded three or four times, and everybody's talking about him.

And then there is another Frenchman who is one of the favorites to win the race. Tell us about him.

That's right - Thibaut Pinot, very different, a very emotional man. And he fell into a trap a few days ago and lost a bit of time. But he's still in with a very big shot. So he's vowed to fight back on Saturday and may well get back into a position. Thibaut Pinot is about 28, 29 years old. He hasn't raced here for a while. He'd been racing in Italy. He really is a very, very popular man. And if he does win the Tour de France, he will be the most popular man in France.

Now, as we've said, the race is just past its halfway point, and a Frenchman has not won the Tour de France in 34 years. So what's the attitude and sentiment like among people in these small French towns where the cyclists are whizzing past?


So what you're hearing is a measurement that we make on our new mission. We just launched the Radiation Storm Belt Probes back in the very end of August. And we make measurements of the radio waves, and it turns out that these radio waves are in the same frequency range as human hearing. So we can take our measurement. We just turned into a WAV file or an MP3 file, and then you can listen to it.

Wow. And you have some other sounds as well, right?I think we have one ready to go.

What's that one?

That's a very classic sound for people in our field. That's something called a whistler, and it's been known for a very, very long time. And it comes about when a lightning strike occurs on the surface of the Earth. And that sends out a whole broad range of various radio waves, and they go up. And some of them can make it out through the Earth's ionosphere, which tends to reflect a lot of it. And as they move along out into space, it turns out the higher frequencies, the treble pitches, move faster than the slower, basier(ph) pitches. And so when they get to our satellite and measure them, what you hear first is that high pitch, and then it sweeps downward to lower and lower and lower frequency.


So you're doing a lot of logistics as well. As I understand it, Deming has declared a state of emergency. What does that do for you?What does that get you, if anything?

Well, the city - and remember I'm the county, that's the city.

Mmm hmm.

They did make an emergency declaration. That was just to free up some funding. And that was, you know, on the governor's word that we would be reimbursed in whole. And it was essentially just so we could spend money to help support these people until they're on to their next destination.


Well, I believe it ran in Automotive News. I'm not sure where else it ran. And I think what the company is trying to do is adopt a tone of, you know, humility and modesty and say, look, we know we've messed up in the past and that sort of thing. It's always a risky kind of thing to do. On the other hand, you know, they might get points from the public or from the politicians for honesty.

I mean, there's two issues here. One is how they're asking for what they're seeking. So I think some sort of attitude of humility here I think is appropriate. But the other issue, and probably the more important issue, is just what they're asking for. So I think, frankly, to ask for an open-ended blank check under some sort of a nebulous oversight board, even if they're asking in a humble tone, it doesn't really get the job done.

The danger here is that this is going to become a never-ending, you know, government-subsidized machine, if you will. The other danger is that conditions will be imposed will be sort of phony symbolic gestures, such as limits on executive pay, which in and of themselves are not going to do anything to revive Detroit.

Paul Ingrassia writes about the automotive industry for the Wall Street Journal. Thank you.


So I ran the numbers, and the numbers do check out. As far as on Instagram, Horseshoe Bend's popularity, be it in its hashtag or in its geotag, is normally 10 times as popular as anything else in that area.

But is that really a problem?Doesn't that popularity just mean that it might not be as unique, but it's still beautiful?It's still there. People can see it.

Well, popularity is very important. The outdoor world needs more visitors and better accessibility. The difficulty with managing that side of it is that construction can have adverse effects to the natural areas if you start doing different buildings and that sort of thing on top of it, but yes.

Is this an anomaly, though, when we're talking just about Horseshoe Bend or have you seen other spaces that have changed?


Well, in its basic form, it's an envelope that's been postmarked on a specific day - usually to commemorate an event - and then was signed by the crew. But why is it called an insurance cover is because it sort of served as a form of insurance. The Apollo 11 crew was the first to fly to the moon, and they didn't know if they were going to make it back. They had a meager personal insurance policy to protect their families, but to augment that they autographed these envelopes in the case that they couldn't return from the moon then their families could sell these, what would be, rare collectibles to augment whatever money they received from insurance.

And, of course, it's for a good cause in this case. It's not just that somebody needed the money.

Indeed, Rick Armstrong, one of Neil's sons, donated this to the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation so it's come somewhat full circle. The original purpose of this cover was to provide for the family and now the family is providing for the next astronauts.

And there is something that went to space, which is going to be auctioned off next week, isn't that right?


Well, you know, in my opinion, a geek is somebody who obsesses, and who tinkers and who tries to kind of take apart the world - whether that's, you know, in a literal way by disassembling things or reassembling them or in a figurative way by being a writer or a musician or something like that. And Tesla was sort of the embodiment of that. He was almost like a - sort of like a Steve Wozniak, in a way, in that he was kind of this brilliant workhorse that maybe early on was a bit naive about money. He wasn't really concerned with that. He was just concerned with seeing what he could do to the world and how he could change it.

And didn't quite get the same glory as Edison.

He did not, no. He was - he wasn't great at marketing himself, and he wasn't great at making money. He was brilliant. He was a genius, but he was not a businessman.

What does this site look like, this old lab of his?Are there things lying around like his tools, or a half-eaten bag of chips or something that could be auctioned off?


Are there any good reasons to use this?

There is a separate group here working on storing data in DNA. It turns out that DNA is really robust for long-term storage, whereas, you know, hard drives may die after a few years. You can conceivably store data in DNA for hundreds or thousands of years. And as long as life continues to be based on DNA, we'll always have a reason to read and write DNA. So it's sort of a technology that won't go obsolete.

So, I mean, we underscored the aspect of some kind of mischief or outright miscreants. But I wonder, you know, a few years from now, instead of having hard drives or storage systems, will people just carry around that information in themselves, in their DNA?

I'm not sure that people will carry around that information within them. But I do believe people will start using DNA for sort of long-term storage. So accessing data from DNA and putting data into DNA is a pretty slow process. And so you'll want to, you know, archive photos in there and things like that. But you won't want to use it for your day-to-day tasks, at least not for the foreseeable future.


This story starts in 2005. That October, 21-year-old Army Sgt. Erik Schei was shot in the head during his second tour in Iraq. The bullet shattered the top half of his skull; and his parents, Christine and Gordon, have been his primary caregivers for the past eight years. At StoryCorps, they remembered finding out about their son's injury.

I remember hearing the phone ring really, really early in the morning. It must have been 4, 4:30. And I saw you white as a sheet, shaking - all over your body - and I just said, is it about Erik?And you said, yes. And I said, is he dead?And you said, no. And I said, is he OK?And you shook your head.

It was a sniper that hit him. And it entered above his right ear and exited above his left.

Do you remember seeing him for the first time in the hospital?


Oh, it's inspiring always. This is one of the reasons why I wanted this book to come into the world. It's because, you know, there are so many brilliant writers now being forgotten. There's so many brilliant writers - contemporary writers who have not been given the platform they deserve. And the literary world is not zero sum, even though sometimes we are led to believe that it is. There's enough attention and enough love for everyone.

And I think that it's all of our duty, if we are given a certain amount of privilege, to say to readers, hey, look at this person you may not know. Please read this exquisite story, and I hope you will love Nancy Hale as much as I do. I hope you'll love other contemporary writers as much as I do.

That is the author Lauren Groff talking about the new book "Where The Light Falls: Selected Stories Of Nancy Hale. "

Lauren Groff, thanks so much. It was great to talk to you.


And those in dissent, which were Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, what did they say?

They pointed out that for about 400,000 voters, they would have to make a three-hour round-trip to get the kind of ID that they needed, that the state would except; for example, a Veterans Affairs ID or a four-year college ID. And in the end, wrote Justice Ginsburg for the three. The greatest threat to public confidence in this case is the prospect of enforcing a discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters. So that's what they said in the end; that they would have blocked this voter ID law from going into effect.

So an important decision, but an even more important one ahead at some point.

That's exactly right. This is a big deal for this election, a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration, which really had sought to block the Texas law from going into effect. But it doesn't mean they're going to lose ultimately.


Yeah, I've got a book going on, and I'm trying to work on some animation stuff. And, you know, and I don't need a crowd-funding campaign to do most of that stuff. It's just me and a couple cups of coffee at home on the computer. So I'm fairly low-budget with my needs at the moment.

Tell me a little bit about this book before we let you go. It's "How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You"?

Yeah. It's basically a collection of funny cat comics ranging from how to tell if your cat thinks it's a mountain lion. There is another one that will show ways to identify if your cat is a raging homosexual. So it's this kind of a mixed bag of weird cat. . .

News you can use, in other words.


Right, right.

. . . these invisible energies, these kind of cosmic influences and attractions and repulsions. So the notion was that the seed contained - you know, was pulled by the sun to drive up a clock. The seed was embedded in a cork in a tub of water, and it was shown, in certain cases, you know, to, when he displayed it, to - no matter which way, whatever you did with the cork, it would go right back and display the accurate time.

Wow.

But it was really a parlor trick because there was also a magnet embedded in the cork. And so if he had enough time beforehand to set this parlor trick up, before people arrived to see it, he would figure out, relative to magnetic north, where the sun would be, and he would set it up so that it would always show the correct time.