Well, when I was in Durban, I spoke to an Ethiopian shopkeeper who had lost everything. His shop was broken into and it was ransacked. There was pretty much nothing left on the shelves. And it looked that someone tried to even torch the shop. But the shop belongs to a South African landlord. He was renting the shop out to the Ethiopian man. And there are many stories like that across KwaZulu Natal, which is where you'll find Durban, on the east coast of South Africa.

But there was considerable violence, and not just to property, but also to people?

Very much so. Five people died in the last two weeks, including two South Africans, might I say, who were killed during the violence. The South African mobs and looters had gone to shop after shop, which were owned by migrants - African migrants. And they looted them and they were taunting them, telling them that they're taking their jobs and their economic opportunities, they must go back to where they come from.

Is there something that the government can do to stop this happening?Like, for example, institute something that happens in a lot of industrial countries - a minimum wage, for example?


(Laughing) I have no regrets at all about the path I followed. But a balanced life ought to have more than just a, you know, a central focus of a career. I think it's healthy to have other interests.

So, it's therapy in a way.

Yeah, it's sort of stress management, I guess. It's difficult for me because I'm a beginner, so it's frustrating and humiliating. But at the same time, when a painting comes out good, you feel pretty good about it. So, it's - yeah it's good.

Now, as I said at the outset, you were controversial during your tenure at the CPA running Iraq basically right after the war ended. And I'm just wondering - I don't want to go back and forth through the allegations, but I'm just wondering, you know, it's been several years since you've returned and I'm wondering, do you have any regrets or would you do anything differently?


Yeah, but - of course it comes into play. That's what the IG is supposed to do. And under this statute, the acting director of national intelligence has an absolute duty not to exercise discretion, but simply to pass this information on to the intelligence committees. And he's not doing it.

So if - under the statute, there's a clear violation. What the Justice Department is presumably saying when they tell him not to do it could be one of - one or both of two things. One is, this is privileged information. I - when we don't - can't evaluate that without knowing what it is. And the other is, well, the IG is just way out of his remit. He's beyond - he's acting beyond his powers. And they'd get. . .

So how would you advise Congress to act next?

Oh, with Congress - if it wants to do that, there's a couple of options. You can try to litigate this, which I think will - the courts will not want to get involved in it - whether Congress can impeach the acting director. The president's not the only person subject to impeachment. Any federal officer can be impeached. What the Congress is saying is, we don't like the way this man's behaving. He's not doing what the statute says. And their remedy is quite limited, but the Constitution tell you - you don't - tells the Congress, you don't like it?Impeach the man.


Exactly. That's what we did in this particular study. We looked at one aspect of vocal behavior, which is whether the mouth is open or closed. And we looked at living dinosaurs - birds. We have 10,000 species today. Most of them vocalize, sing with an open mouth. But some birds produce sound with a closed mouth. They actually inflate different structures that allow them to resonate, often at lower frequencies than many other birds. But we also needed to look at alligators and crocodiles as the closest cousins to dinosaurs.

Well, I have actually heard alligators bellow and make a terrific noise.

Well, exactly, and that bellow is a closed-mouth sound. So when we think of our T.  rex, we don't need to imagine just simple cooing. But there are a variety of generally low frequency sounds that are produced in this way.

Do you think there are other things about dinosaurs that we've gotten wrong for a long time?


It's definitely a tough business. He saw it was a tough business, and he just thought one of the most secure fields would be medicine, and my parents always kind of pushed for that.

I imagine in the midst of all this now, you're - you guys are feeling pretty secure about that choice.

It's really a shame, everything that's happened, especially here in Michigan. I mean, I have so many friends and different family members and family friends that - of course, everyone is really nervous right now with the way the economy is going, with the way the auto industry is going. But yeah, it's definitely nice, thinking that, you know, I'm going into a very secure field.

What's it like to be a student in college in Michigan right now, in the midst of thousands of jobs being lost?


Yeah.

So you want the organism - it's like taking a portrait, that's sort of how he thinks about it. But of course your microorganism doesn't see it that way.

So you have to figure out how to get them to sit still, and that requires sort of propping up the cover slip with little dots of Vaseline. That's his trick. But you want to sort of squish it just enough so it doesn't move but not too much so that you run it over, essentially.

Well, you don't want to kill the. . .


With Republican lawmakers unable to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President Trump has taken several steps to undo it. Just before the weekend, he refused to pay the subsidies to insurers that helped keep premiums down for low-income people. And, also, the administration is cutting funding for outreach to those who want to sign up when open enrollment begins next month. The Affordable Care Act provides money to organizations that help people navigate the health care system. In fact, they're called navigator programs. Last year, they received $63 million from the government. The Trump administration has cut that funding by 41 percent. I'm joined by Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, she's executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, which oversees a navigator program. Welcome.

Thank you.

And your program's budget was reduced by how much?

Seventy one percent - nearly $1. 2 million dollars. And it was a significant reduction.


If you've had trouble keeping up with the latest news on potential contact between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, you are not alone. Developments have been relentless. Just Friday night, The Washington Post reported that White House adviser Jared Kushner may have tried to set up a secret line of communication between the Trump transition team and the Russian government. But it's not just the constant stream of news. It's also the concepts themselves that are opaque. We've invited Jonathan Turley to the studio to help us clarify. He's a law professor at George Washington University. Thanks so much for being here today.

Thank you very much.

All right. Jared Kushner has gone from a "person of interest," quote, unquote, to a focus in the investigation but not confirmed as a, quote, "target. "

(Laughter).


One of the things that we're looking at is how multicultural Houston is and how many different types of communities live here. Have you seen that change over time?

Yeah, it's become more diverse - more ethnic restaurants coming in onto the scene, more Vietnamese restaurants, more Arabic restaurants, more Japanese restaurants, more Chinese restaurants. Besides that, there has been a great influx of Indian and Pakistani population. So yes, things have changed. One thing hasn't changed. I still don't like sloppy Joes.

(Laughter).

You know.

I hear that you're thinking of retiring.


But your hands were cold?

Very cold.

That decision to try to turn around, you thought you could have summitted, but you might have endangered your hands?

I know I could have summitted. Yes, however - yes, I wasn't willing to lose my fingers or a tip of a finger, even, for the summit of K2.


How long do you think it would take you to build, and get operating, a system of the kinds of satellites that could deliver a significant amount of electrical power down to earth?

It might be quite a few years, maybe in 10 years. It's an enormous job. In fact, it's comparable in size to another moon landing and place a base on the moon. But it has a very significant output if we are successful.

Former NASA engineer, Glenn Smith, on his plan for space-based satellite collectors to beam solar power down to earth. Glenn, thank you.

OK, Alex. Good day.


You're welcome.

Remind us, please, about some of the allegations facing Secretary Zinke because they have been building.

They have. One Washington-based ethics watchdog tallied 17 different investigations and controversies around Zinke. The one everyone will be - will remember are the really expensive doors. The Interior Department apparently spent $139,000 to replace three sets of doors. But the bigger issues were related to whether he had travel or financial dealings that were unethical or that favored industry and somehow benefited himself. Those are ongoing. And there was a concern or a thought, a very real likely concern, that congressional Democrats were going to take those ethical quandaries a lot more seriously and would be investigating when Democrats took over the House.

Yeah. So that might prompt the decision now in addition to any effect the president might want to have on the news cycle?


It's amazing the way it works.

I agree. Now, Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday is looming, and there have been all this celebrations now. Supermodel Naomi Campbell, who I guess according to court records will hit anyone on the head with her cell phone, was supposed to be a presenter at this big concert but was removed from the list. Give us a quick sense of why.

Well, Mandela was a little upset that when she got arrested the last time she had on a hat with the numbers - his prison cell number or his inmate number from prison, and he was a little disturbed about that. But she didn't present, but she did attend an event last night. So, I mean, you know I think he was - you know people was sort of worried about you know what it would like if she was on stage, but she was there because they're very close, she and Mandela so.

Ah, close enough to get hit with the cell phone?


So what's the difference between steganography and - I'm interested in the origin of the word steganography. Can you take that apart for us?

Well. . .

Stega-, sounds almost like a dinosaur.

Certainly. It goes back to the Greeks, and it basically means hidden writing. So - and what it often gets kind of mixed together with or lumped together with, is encryption, and it's kind of - they're like close cousins, and they're trying to do the same thing, but they have slightly different approaches.

And that was my next question. What is the difference between steganography and encryption?


Well, certainly, I think in the case of missing children, in the case of some kind of criminal act. But this is just to sort of - hey, this person came in and applied for a driver's license. And they have a Latino last name, and you might want to check that out, you know?So. . .

But can you have one without the other?I mean, once the state responds to this kind of request, can it pick and choose?

That's a question, I think, for lawyers. I don't know. I don't know how they would. I mean, I think that any legislation that we had would have to address that - under what circumstances would this be allowed?

At this point, where does that leave some of the people who advocated for this law in the first place?Are they having regrets as you are?Are you hearing from them?


And any idea how long it'll take until we can see the Afro emoji?

It's a pretty lengthy process. I hope that they're listening. And I hope that they know that we all really want this.

Rihanna Jones, freelance writer and Afro emoji proponent, thank you so much.

Thank you.


It was an amazing list. This started around 1910. There was a long list of books, and, at the start, they were things that sound pretty ordinary now, the things you mentioned, titles of things like "Tom Swift and His Airship," "Tom Swift and His Wireless Message. "My favorite is "Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone. "If you read "Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone," which is written in 1914, it sounds like you're hearing the description of Skype or Google Hangout.

The boy inventor invented this in 1914 fictionally, but the details are surprisingly similar.

Are people still reading those books, the Tom Swift books?

That's a good question. There were two big series. The first series started in 1910, went up to about 1940. They updated it in the 1950s and '60s with things like "Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship," "Tom Swift and His Giant Robot" and on and on. Those petered out. And they started up a few later, but the later ones just got off into sort of fantasy.


Well, I would say that he is a guy that tends to see silver linings in dark clouds. And, you know, this is a man that, in private business, had 10,000 lawsuits over his career, so I think he has a unique ability to sort of quarantine in his mind the impact some of these things have.

And what's the risk in that?

Well, I think the implications, again, is that it's not just about Zelenskiy. It's not about the Ukraine. It's not about Rudy. It's - the can has been opened. Now we have to see if there's good soup inside or worms, right?They're going to be looking for stuff - the House Democrats - that are not going to be very glowing and positive about the president. So if we think these revelations are not good - and now they might get an expedited subpoena power with the impeachment process under way. It's not good.

Does the seriousness of this cast a shadow on the White House?Are they concerned about what, for instance, is going to be coming out today?


Well, the Republican reaction is pretty typical. Whenever we see Donald Trump act like a stress test on democratic institutions, Republicans in Congress are usually silent. They don't seem to be concerned by the president involving himself in an internal investigation or openly calling for the Mueller investigation to end unless they are Republicans who are not running for re-election. So we have heard some criticisms from Republicans who are planning to retire. In the past, Republicans have come to the defense of Attorney General Jeff Sessions because the president has relentlessly humiliated and criticized him. And Republican senators have stood up for Sessions. He's become a kind of proxy for the rule of law. What we don't know is if firing Bob Mueller is a kind of red line for Republicans in Congress. That's really the big question.

So what do we know about the Justice Department?What are they saying about all this?

Well, there has been pushback from former DOJ officials who say this firing was inappropriate. We also know how Andrew McCabe has reacted. He said he was singled out and treated this way because of what he witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. He says that he was fired to undermine the credibility of the Mueller investigation. We also know that McCabe made contemporaneous notes just like his boss, James Comey, did. All FBI agents are trained to do this. And coincidentally, James Comey is about to embark on a book tour, one of the highest-profile book tours ever.

Yes.


This is WEEKEND EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan is Mitt Romney's choice to be the next vice president. Mitt Romney's campaign made the announcement earlier this morning, calling the ticket America's Comeback Team. Romney and Ryan are expected to appear together, for the first time as a ticket, at an event in Virginia later this morning. And we will be broadcasting that event when it happens.

But for more on the choice, we're joined by NPR's Ari Shapiro, who is with the Romney campaign. Good morning, Ari.

Hi, Linda. We're just in line waiting to get into the motorcade to head to this event here in Norfolk.

Now, these scenes - set the scene for us. As is going to be quite a, I guess, a made-for-TV kind of an announcement.

Totally. It's going to be aboard a ship called the USS Wisconsin - perhaps a coincidence that Paul Ryan represents the State of Wisconsin in the House of Representatives. As you say, the comeback team, the two of them are going to appear for the first time as the ticket together, having campaigned quite a lot earlier together in the process, especially in the Wisconsin primaries, where they just had a great rapport - better, in many people's opinion, than any of the other surrogates.


That was the timeline that the president laid out today.

That's correct. Yeah. So it's a pretty tight time schedule in which they'll need to do a lot of development. I mean, there's nothing there. The area where they're going to develop the city is a protected forest. But there is not much infrastructure, apart from one highway that runs through it. So everything needs to be developed from scratch, which is going to be a massive challenge.

That is Erik Meijaard of the environmental consulting firm Borneo Futures. Erik Meijaard, thanks for talking to us.

Thank you very much.


You definitely - I mean, mosses definitely occur down there and hepatics, as well. But as far as I understand, there's a very limited flora down there. It's not like the Canadian Arctic, where we're in an Alpine sector of the Canadian High Arctic. So there's a lot of diversity, a lot of meso- and microhabitats for the bryophytes to survive in.

What would you - what would be a home run, a grand slam for you in this field?What would really you like to find?What would, you know, besides. . . ?

I think what would be really fascinating is that if you could go under a melting glacier that was 100,000, 150,000 years, maybe 200,000 years old, and you actually found macrofossils, what would be called macrofossils underneath the glacier and be able to rejuvenate them. That would be pretty amazing.

Yeah, about the mosses that you found. Are all mosses like this, or is this a particularly hardy species of moss that you've discovered in the ice there?


No. He said that he doesn't knock out his defense of assistance. That's kind of a Buddy did.

Bill Rhoden, thank you very much.

Hey, Tony, it's always a pleasure.

That was New York Times sports columnist William C.  Rhoden. Bill's books include "Third in the Mile: The Trials and Triumphs of the Black Quarterback. "He joined us, as always, from our studios in New York.


But it feels more than a tribute to a great man. It's more about the nature of friendship and how you navigate fundamental differences with people that you care about.

Yeah. What we had that we loved together so much, you know, the things that we shared, the loves that we shared, you know, for literature and for sports other than basketball. But, you know, he was an English teacher. I was an English major. So we had that, and that was a tremendous bond. And it enabled him to reach into my life and for me to have insight into his life.

You write in this book though - and I'm quoting here - "he didn't quite understand that when you are black in America, everything is about race. "You got to know him at a time when the civil rights movement was underway. You were finding your voice on race, but he disappointed you on that issue along the way at times.

Well, I don't think coach disappointed me so much as sometimes he didn't understand how race could affect somebody. And he didn't see that until he was with me, and we went through incidents where he saw that geez, he wouldn't like to have experienced that.


Oh, my goodness.

And it's been another brutal cycle. And the rhetoric is really intense. What do you hear?

What I hear and what I see and what's been the case for me for, gosh, two or three years now is that we are all having these conversations about big news of the day that dances around race and never really engages with it. I think, for me, the biggest example this week was President Trump's comments about possibly altering the 14th Amendment, which we know guarantees birthright citizenship. And so, you know, the history of that amendment is rooted in race. And I think a lot of folks have been really lacking to talk about that. But this amendment was passed for black people to give slave descendants the right to be citizens. And so we cannot talk about this adequately without talking about the racial history of the amendment, but even that is not enough.

Why not?Explain.


Midterm elections are always a little tricky for pollsters. What do polls about national issues and inclinations mean when control the House and Senate will be decided district by district and state by state?But this time around, there's even less data and fewer polls to analyze. NPR's Domenico Montanaro joins us. Thanks very much for being with us, Domenico.

Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Fewer polls?

Yeah. There are fewer polls this time around, and that is a real problem. I mean, when you look at the fact that newspaper readership at a local level is dwindling, their revenue is being cut, they were the ones who used to fund a lot of these polls, especially in congressional districts. And on a statewide level, there are dozens of fewer polls. So take them all with a grain of salt.


Yeah. I know Chicken Street. But tell us what you saw at the site of the bombing.

When I heard it, I came out from the store, and I immediately saw people running from the direction of (unintelligible) the smoke billowing into the air. So I walked in the opposite direction towards the smoke. And the closer I got, the more damage there was - obviously, broken windows further away from it - and then closer to it, you know, cars on fire and completely crushed by the force of the explosion.

And then at the ground zero of the site, you know, a number of bodies that was in the immediate vicinity - I saw probably 12 to 15, all, you know, really just mangled and - you know, almost as if they were melted together. It was just a pile of bodies - you know, most of them dead, some of them still alive. I even told one man who was trying to make a phone call, you know, in this morass of bodies.

And then all around, there was, you know, the usual chaos that infuse these attacks - security forces running around with their weapons drawn, general chaos, smoke and noise, car alarms, and, you know, small explosions of oxygen tanks and petrol tanks exploding. And, you know, within a few minutes, you have these - I guess you'd call them first responders - rushing in to take the injured and the dead away.


But this radicalization on the Internet is something that the FBI has been talking about for years, and it hasn't been licked. And clearly, this is an example of that since we know that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, spent a lot of time on the Internet, on jihadi websites.

And again, if he says anything to the investigators before he's Mirandized, that is nothing they can use in a case against him. However, given the mountain of evidence - including this video that's been described to you - they may not need it.

Well, it's funny because depending on which lawyer you talk to, they will disagree with your first supposition; which is, that it's not admissible if you evoke the public safety exception. In fact, part of the reason for the public safety exception, instead of just talking to somebody without Mirandizing them, is that some of that information may well be admissible. But in this case, this is a bit of a slam dunk. They have video on this young man, and he's going to have a hard time saying that he wasn't involved.

NPR counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, with us here in Studio 42 - our very first guest in Studio 42. Thanks very much.


. . . (Laughter) In our house. And suddenly, we're being taken to go and see "Gone With The Wind" in the cinema.

(Laughter).

So for me, I just remember this incredible sense of vertigo and glancing at my mother constantly, like, is this OK?Are we allowed to do this?

How did working on this make sense of your childhood for you?


Well, in short, yes, sort of. This river is high because of extreme rain. So when it rains here now, it rains more than it used to in the past. And that's in line with what we would see under climate change conditions. The National Climate Assessment predicts that when it rains, it's going to rain more in the future because warmer air can hold more moisture.

And actually, already, we're seeing that in the Midwest and along the East Coast. Sometimes 50% more rain is falling in a single rain event than used to earlier this century. I hear a lot of flood plain managers use the word unprecedented. It's the kind of rain that we just haven't seen in the past.

What does this mean for places in the Midwest and South?

Well, there's a lot of stress on infrastructure that really was not built to hold this. So all along the river, along rivers like this, there are levees. And in places like this, they were actually built to make sure there's enough water for barges to ship things down the river. They really were not designed to hold back floodwater at all, and they really weren't designed to hold back this amount of water for this long.


As a trained economist, as you do your personal budget, what do you figure paying $60 a month would force you to do without?

If I was not looking to change my career at all, if I was tending bar and making the income that I'm making right now, I would maybe save a little less, maybe, you know, buy a cheaper brand of dog food. It wouldn't affect me too much. It would be something that would make money a little tighter. But it would be an important reason, just like having lights on in your house makes money a little tighter. It's an important thing to spend it on, you know.

As now, I'm looking for career work in Philadelphia, in the D. C.  area and New York area. So with interviews and that job hunt, there's a lot of travel expense, whether it's taking a train or jumping in the car, and going and staying for a night or staying for a couple of nights. So every little bit, when I want to be able say: Hey, you want to interview tomorrow?Absolutely, I'll be there first thing in the morning. All of my income is focused on launching this career that I've spent the last several years of my life preparing for.

And are there other ways in which you live differently, Mr.  Kreider, because you're worried about twisting an ankle?


According with my investigation, the first responsible of this crime was the 27th Battalion in Iguala, in particular, the colonel that received the phone call from the drug lord ordering him. You have to rescue my drugs. I pay you for this. You have - I don't know what you have to do. I want my drugs back.

Have they faced any consequences?What have they said to your findings?

Even now, the Mexican government is nagging (ph) in all the ways possible that the army - they were present. The real persons that were involved on that crime are not in jail. And I think if we are able to understand, if we are able to send to these people to jail, maybe we will be able to stop all these abuses of power and human rights violations.

You have been an investigative journalist for many years. It is an incredibly dangerous profession. We've seen so many journalists in Mexico killed. You are now living in Italy for your own safety. You have received threats. Are you worried about what this will mean for you and your family?


There is a - after so long under dictatorship, and it was certainly not just Mr.  Mubarak but his predecessors all the way back through Nasser and before it had a king and, well, effective British rule before that, there's been one person in charge of Egypt for a very long time.

Yes. And, you know, people wanted that to change. And one of the things we heard a lot of in Tahrir Square today is we didn't oust Mubarak to get an Islamist dictator - oust a secular dictator to get an Islamist dictator. And Morsi was elected, but the idea is to have a democratic process. One of the complaints also about the draft constitution is it gives too much power to the president. And now people are saying, we want to be represented; all of Egypt, not just the Muslim Brotherhood.

Is there any indication that at this point, the president and the Muslim Brotherhood will reconsider?

So far we're not seeing indications of that. Of course, as you mentioned, yesterday, the president's spokesman kind of came out and tried to explain the decrees. One of the decrees basically said, any law or decision I make from now until the constitution is written or a parliament is in place has - there is no way to challenge it in courts. He said, actually that's limited to sovereign act. What sovereign acts mean, though, is so vague and unclear. And it really didn't appease his opposition.


Yes, yes. And he stood up here and if you can see over in the distance you can see a copula - that's where the Confederates were. That's only a half a mile away. Some sharpshooters go up here, shooting at anything that moved along here. So somebody took a shot, and as you can see from this monument here, the guy standing next to Lincoln was hit and he was wounded. Imagine that that sharpshooter back there had been just a little bit more accurate. He could've very easily have killed the president. And then what?I mean, you know, can anybody name who would've become president?I don't think so. It would've been the Vice President Hannibal Hamlin.

Whoa.

Has anybody ever heard of a Hannibal Hamlin?

It sounds like a burger place.


Wow, is this the same thing that happened a couple of years ago, or am I just imagining this?

Now, we've had actually more stratospheric warming events in the past decade than we generally have in the past. This is somewhat of a new science, we've only been able to study the stratosphere since the '50s. So we don't really have any statistically significant time periods to be looking at. But we are seeing that these are occurring now almost every year. We're seeing them about every two years in the past. Now we're seeing them almost every year for the past decade.

And so this is becoming a more common event. So I'm not exactly sure what timeline you were looking at, but we did have a stratospheric warming event in 2011.

Yeah, is there some event that actually triggers this to happen?


Rod Blagojevich appealed for his sentence to be reduced last year. A judge refused, saying his long sentence is deserved, but Blagojevich's lawyer attached letters from a hundred other prisoners who spoke of his kindness and spirit. He was at the top level, wrote a man who identified himself as a convicted drug dealer, and now he is in prison with so many true felons and he accepts that as fate with his head held high, no ego, no arrogance and, most importantly, with humble humility.

A portrait of Rod Blagojevich in ornate, official hallways could remind governors who follow why citizens can be cynical about politicians. It might remind politicians not to think that getting elected endows them with honesty, wisdom or character. And, yes, it might give a disgraced politician a little recognition for finding a way to make his life useful to others.

(Singing) The warden threw a party in the county jail. The prison band was there, and they began to wail. The band was jumpin' and the joint began to swing.

The King. You're listening to NPR News.


The law now differs whether the gun being purchased is a handgun or what is broadly defined as a long gun. So the law is that if it's a handgun, you need to be 21. But long guns - rifles, shotguns and assault-style rifles included - that's 18. And after Parkland, where the perpetrator was 19 and legally purchased an assault-style rifle, there has been a call to raise that minimum age for assault-style rifles and all long guns.

What about arming teachers?What changes to the law would be required?

That gets complex. We do have the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which was signed with the first President Bush. But it allows for some discretion at the state and local level. And some states allow individual districts to set their own policies. And so we at The Trace of reported on districts in Ohio that allow certain designated teachers and other school staff members to access guns. Texas is another state where that happens. So, in fact, there are some states where there are guns in schools accessible to some teachers and staff members.

Have there been gun laws that have been rolled back by the Trump administration?

The big picture under Trump is that not much has changed, which is interesting because Trump had such strong backing from the National Rifle Association. And they have two big priorities. One is something called concealed carry reciprocity. And the upshot is that if you have a license to carry a concealed gun in your home state, every other state would have to honor that license and vice versa. That does pass the House in December - not taken up by the Senate.


Thanks for having me.

Does presenting Rabbit like this make your character into a kind of everywoman that spans all experience?

I was thinking of her not necessarily as an everywoman, but as Vietnam itself in certain kinds of ways. The book is very much about a character who can hear the voices of the dead. And I was very interested in trying to transform Vietnam from the perceptions that we have about it in the West. Typically, you know, when we think of Vietnam here in the United States, we think of it as a metaphor. You know, it's synonymous with the idea of a quagmire.

And we think of it as our problem.


Yes. I will be a compulsive gambler until the day that I die.

So, how - what changes have you made in your behavior specifically to avoid going back to where you were?

Well, that's the good thing about the program. We do have a recovery program. We do have people in there that help with financial situation, emotional situations, etc. I needed to have completed the 12 steps of recovery and on a continuous basis at least 2 meetings per week. I need to know what the other people who are coming in or still suffering and that the disease is still out there. And by attending meetings, I will always know and I will never forget that compulsive gambling still exists for the compulsive gambler.

Well, sir, thank you for sharing your story with us.


I hate to see it fade out.

Yeah, me too.

There's another story that really sounds like it has to be made up, about the driver who brought a hotshot guitarist from Macon, Georgia to Stax for a session.

Yeah. The driver kept bugging the musicians in the studio to give him a chance. And someone had promised him, OK, buddy, you know, chill out for a second. You'll get your chance. When nothing happened with the big talent, people had already started packing up their cars when they remembered, oh yeah, we got to let this guy try.


Yeah, a lot. Yeah, last time, remember, there was not a single question in the major debates.

Right, across all the debates.

No. No, not at all. This time, a lot of differences. A big one would be President Trump. I think what we're seeing is, in part, a backlash to his rejection of climate science and his real push for fossil fuels.

Pulling out of the Paris climate accord, et cetera.


And how do you do that?

Well, on the behavioral side, that means helping them go from being in this setting to open air and open - eventually open water. We would take them through a very careful process of getting used to the transport units, getting used to being on a crane and in a truck and then in a tank on the dock. Eventually, they might even take drives around Baltimore to get used to the idea that they're going to be mobile since they've have not done that before.

The other aspect is the physiological adaptation, and that's a very complex and laborious process. Every - all living organisms have a microbiome associated with them. That's all the microorganisms that live around us and on us - bacteria, fungus, spores, larvae, et cetera. Dolphins do too and, in fact, in seawater, it's quite present. And the water that they live in now, which is man-made saltwater, it's fairly sterile. And of course, the ocean is not sterile.

So we will go through a long process, once we've selected a site, that will begin to integrate that water into the water they live in here so that eventually, when they leave here, they will be in water that almost completely matches the water that they'll be moving to.

I gather, Mr.  Racanelli, you've known dolphins, worked with them in a sense, since you were a teenager.


It's becoming a new Thanksgiving tradition. This year, like the year before, the newest installment of "The Hunger Games" movie franchise "Mockingjay Part 1" is an adaptation of the first half of Suzanne Collins third and final book in the series. And with the backdrop of what's been happening in the world, protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and shakeup at the Capitol - Capitol Hill that is. Audiences look for comparisons between the fictitious world of Panem and the real world. We're joined now by Stephen Carter, a professor of law at Yale, a novelist and columnist for Bloomberg View, where he writes regularly on popular culture. Stephen, thanks so much for being back with us.

It's my pleasure, Scott.

I'm just guessing you don't watch "Hunger Games" the way a lot of other people do.

You're right. I'm looking for tropes and ideas that are going to leap out of the film into public life. And one that's really striking about the "Hunger Games" franchise is how more than really anything else in recent years in popular culture, so many of the symbols - the nation of Panem itself with its deep wealth inequalities, the notion of the Capitol, this barricaded wealthy city and of course, Katniss Everdeen herself, the hero. All of these things have not only leapt into the public imagination, but they are regular features of political argument.


Yeah, bubbly jock. And an owl is a hoolet. And that, again, is based on the sound that it makes. And - but my favorite is a wood pigeon, is a cushie-doo.

That is an absolutely dead-on approximation of its sound.

Isn't it lovely?So a frog is a puddock and sparrow is a speug. So I've never used speug in a sentence, but when I was a boy, we used puddock. So I don't go around trying to convince everybody that my culture's better than theirs, but sometimes it suits my face better. It sits nicely in my mouth.

And explaining your culture, it goes with the way you do your material. You don't tell jokes, per se.


We started originally in one of the big, metal buildings that comprises our fair area. And then we moved to an old World War II hangar here at the local airport as a backup.

Wow.

So we're using both now.

Have federal officials said why they picked Deming?


You have to remember that this issue of sexual abuse has almost been, you know, an unspoken thing in British society. And really we don't have many tools for it. There are no public information campaigns, sex education is pretty poor, we don't have the tools available. We probably can't arrest our way out of this problem as one, you know, expert told me. We just have refused as a society to take it seriously, and we're surprised because when we look, we find.

Recognizing that there's a sanctified legal process that has to proceed, has anyone been disciplined for what sounds like pretty gross abuse and neglect?

No. And that is a big problem. The Council officials are saying there's not enough evidence or there's not a finger of blame being pointed at any individuals and no individual should resign - its collective. I mean, this is part of the problem of this process is that we don't actually have anybody taking the fall, taking the rap. And, you know, they've put themselves in positions where they're not liable to know the facts. The consequences of that just build up through the years. But you started off with 90 kids in this situation, you ended up with 1,400 kids being left to, you know, the worst kind of abuse.

Randeep Ramesh, who is social affairs editor for The Guardian newspaper. Thanks very much for speaking with us.


The president elect will need to pick someone else to become commerce secretary. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson took himself out of the running because of an investigation into how some of his donors won a lucrative contract. How serious a problem is this withdrawal for the Obama transition team?

Much less of a problem than they would have had had some of this come to light or if the seriousness of this grand jury investigation and the length of it had come to light after Bill Richardson had become secretary of commerce. So it's much easier to replace someone who is an appointee than someone who's already in the job, and there are a number of other people, quite a long list, many of them quite distinguished, who can step into this role, and I suspect we'll see a name this week.

Ron, let's turn now to the Senate. Roland Burris of Illinois, who was tapped by Rod Blagojevich, says he'll show up at the Senate door even though Senate leaders have said they won't seat him. So what's going to happen there?

At midday on Tuesday, unless something is worked out in advance, Roland Burris will come and attempt to present his credentials to the Senate to be seated along with the other new members who have just been elected in the November elections and some appointees since then.


Yeah. That was when I went over to Ukraine. When I signed the deal, my wife was pregnant. I knew the baby was coming middle or the end of October. You know, the team kind of told me that soon as the baby's born, I'll be able to scoot home right away, and it didn't work out that way. They kept me there for a few more weeks and then let me go home for five days.

Forgive me. You missing any teeth after 18 seasons?

I am not, no. I got hit in the face twice in practice. I always put my mask up in between drills. And one time, the trainer mistakenly threw the puck over the glass and hit me in the mouth. And then another guy flipped the puck from the corner when I was sitting there watching the coach explain a drill and hit me in the mouth.

Wow.


So, for instance, in our culture, there's really this idea right now that parenting is stressful, and we're all stressed out. Turns out not all mothers in every culture feel this way.

All right. Convince me.

OK. So a group of researchers have been studying Mayan families for decades because they've been really intrigued by this idea that the kids are so helpful around the house. And they wanted to figure out what the parents were doing to get the kids to be so helpful.

So for one of the stories in this series, I went down to the Yucatan and spent some time with some Mayan families. And right away, I was amazed by these moms. So a lot of them are raising four or five children. They're doing all the housework. They help out with the business, so they're doing work, too. And they totally didn't seem stressed. And I actually asked them, do you think being a mother is stressful?And the first woman, like, looked at me like I was an alien. She was like, what?Why would mothering be stressful?And I was like, oh, my gosh. Tell me your secrets (laughter).


What about William Thompson, Jr. ?Originally of Brooklyn, now of Manhattan. He actually won the Democratic nomination four years ago and ran an unexpectedly close race.

Oh, absolutely. And interestingly enough, he's been part of the New York political establishment for a very long time. You hear people refer to him as Billy, because he's William Thompson, Jr.  His father was prominent in politics, generally well-liked in very much a known quantity.

Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn, the public advocate.

An interesting man - I guess you could still call him a young man. I was about to call him a young man. I've known him since we were both running around in sneakers. But he was an aide to David Dinkins. He was the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate here in New York and served a couple of terms in the New York City Council. So, he's been in and around this stuff for decades and now he thinks it's his time to go for the big chair.


Look, next season the NBA's going to have to wait around for the Harrison twins - aren't they?- from the University of Kentucky?They announced they're coming back. What's going on - they want to stay in school?What'll they learn there?

(Laughter) Some actually do. It's ironic, isn't it, for Kentucky head coach John Calipari to - the man who's mastered the one-and-done phenomenon. He's so used to recruiting top high school players, grooming them for a year and then saying goodbye. But along with the Harrisons, four other key players from the team that lost the title game just this month, players who could have left, decided not to.

And in the meantime, Calipari has recruited another bunch of amazing high schoolers. So not only is Kentucky already the absolute preseason favorite for next year, it'll be a real challenge for Coach Cal to find enough playing time for his surplus of amazing talent.

And Tom, we lost Earl Morrall this week, maybe the greatest sub of all time, wasn't he?


If you stand outside the old DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Ga. , you can't miss the 30-foot-tall obelisk erected there in 1908. It's a monument to Confederate soldiers, and its inscription calls those men part of a, quote, "covenant keeping race," praising them as men of virtues in peace and in war.

Well, as of this month, there's now a contextualizing plaque alongside that obelisk. It reads, in part, this monument and similar ones were created to intimidate African Americans and limit their full participation in the social and political life of their communities. That marker was approved by vote of the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners. And county Commissioner Lorraine Cochran-Johnson joins us to talk about that decision.

Welcome to the program.

Thanks so much, Melissa. I am happy to be here.

The original vote by the county commission was to remove that Confederate obelisk, but ultimately, that ran up against a state law in Georgia. What does that state law say?


Well, we'll be sure to get those up on NPR News and Notes and nprnewsandviews. org. So let's talk housing. The U. S.  House of Representatives just approved a bill that some folks are calling the rescue bill. What does that really mean?

Basically, the housing bill will allow consumers to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages to get more affordable mortgage rates. And the mortgage interest rate for a 30 year mortgage is now hovering at about six percent, a little below six percent. You've got people locked into very high mortgage rates. You've got people who are defaulting because they can't pay. And basically, it will allow a renegotiation. And it will have the federal government guarantee these mortgages, which means that yes, a taxpayer at some level will pay if people default.

But basically, what we'll do is stave-off this horrible housing crisis that we're experiencing when we look at cities like Detroit. We look at other cities. When we see the default rates so high that we're really worried about the stability, Congress will, and Maxine Ward is of course, introducing some of this legislation because of the challenges that we're being faced in her own district. And so it's good legislation. The president and some other Republicans are against it. They've never been against providing money for anyone else. Bear Stearns got a break, why not people?

Some folks, though, are arguing that this bill could actually reward speculators who either are landlords, who own places in neighborhoods in trouble, or who want to buy up distressed properties. What do you think about that?


Well, we have shared the coordinates of health facilities, school facilities and so on for the very purpose to make sure they're protected. Sadly, several of these facilities received a direct hit. Actually, the secretary-general has called for a board of inquiry to investigate into these cases and to find out what had happened.

For us, it's a question of trust, and it's a question of protection when we say - when we give these coordinates, we expect that all parties in the conflict will respect them. And when that doesn't happen, that's really a significant problem for all and, most importantly, for the people who find themselves - that we have had incidents of ambulances receiving direct aid. Hospitals, doctors, nurses would be in the middle of an operational procedure or who had gone to this place for medical treatment and to find themselves being bombed inside the hospital or children in the school. That's something that is really totally unacceptable.

Panos Moumtzis is the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis. Thanks so much for being with us, sir.

Thank you for calling me.


. . . Say, the state agriculture commissioner. It just doesn't make sense.

Well, forgive my naivety. But don't all parties weigh in on ballot design?Or are those days - am I living in the age of Pollyanna aspirations?

Well, they have - they do have the ability to at least protest. They have the ability to see it at the time. The ballot is sent out ahead of time to say, hey, here's what the ballot looks like. And the Senate campaign of Bill Nelson did not complain.

President Trump has said there's evidence of election fraud. Is there evidence?


What are you doing to shore up the levees themselves?And are you inviting residents to help?

Really, what we're looking at now is quick response-type actions - things like, you know, sandbags, sand and gravel filters that'll help increase the pressure and keep water from seeping through the structure itself. We've got National Guardsmen that have been mobilized and are on the levee 24 hours a day, along with our engineers. You've got local first responders, police, firemen doing the same.

In terms of the actual community members themselves, we really aren't having members of the public out there, other than the mobilized guardsmen actually helping with the effort. In fact, some of the local officials are really sort of encouraging local residents to stay away from areas that are experiencing any sort of issues with the levees. They want to try to minimize any sort of impacts that may occur for the public at large.

So we've seen reporting about the last time this district saw this kind of flooding. It was back in 1986. I think the levees then had to hold up something like 12 hours. We're way past that now. So how should we be thinking about whether or not these levees are strong enough?


Yes. We got involved and that's 25 years ago. And it took us about 25 years to get it done. We met monthly. And - well, actually, we met like biweekly and just phonetically translate it - every word in the New Testament to Gullah.

Can you read something for us, a short passage?

Well, why don't I read just the first few verses of the Lord's Prayer that most people are familiar with?

That would be wonderful.


A young upstart reporter at a national news network, a political newcomer fresh from Hollywood, his opponent - a female senator firmly rooted in the establishment, a ratings-obsessed media mogul - does any of this sound familiar to you yet?Amazingly, Alisyn Camerota, a veteran news anchor and host of CNN's morning show "New Day," started writing her new novel years ago. And now the book "Amanda Wakes Up" seems like a crystal ball. Alisyn Camerota joins me from our studios in New York. Welcome to the program.

Thank you, Lulu. Great to be with you.

So are you psychic?(Laughter).

Well, there were many times, many times in the writing of this that my agent editor and I thought I was. But I think, what it turns out, is that there are some perennial favorite themes in politics and in presidential races. And I hit on them because you can predict with some certainty what will come back around.


. . . and you put your own video together out of this.

Right. So he has this whole collection of different embryos at different stages, and they - you measure age of embryo based - its postovulatory age. So it's very hard to tell exactly when the embryo was conceived, but you can kind of estimate based on ovulation. And so you look and you can see after 28 days what it looks like, after 42 days. And he's put together, actually, these sort of amazing time lapses so you can watch these changes over time.

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.


Oh, we anticipate that to be the case. We've demonstrated this with antibodies, monoclonal antibodies. I mentioned enzymes already. And so we anticipate quite a range of potential utility for therapeutics.

So you think this a game-changer for storing drugs?

Well, we are very optimistic, yes. I think it could certainly have a major impact.

I want to thank you very much for taking time to be with us today, and good luck to you. It's very fascinating.


You know, Latin America used to be the region of crisis where crises used to be the most frequent and most sinister. And this time around, Latin America is being hit from an outside shock, and the shock finds Latin America in a relatively strong position in terms of its domestic policy frameworks. So, the shock this time is very interesting for Latin America, contrast with its past where domestic financial system and domestic policies are not a source of trouble, independent source of trouble. Therefore, the shock is coming from outside, it's hitting Latin American countries that are most open and small and have greater exposure to the U. S.  markets…

Now we're seeing…

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

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


I saw that statistic in National Review.

Oh, that's another fine magazine.

And give me some credit for reading National Review.

I personally - I think. . .


The biggest thing that's happened in the last 50 years is a lot of mechanization that has been aimed at trying to save labor for farmers. At the same time, farm operations have gotten bigger. You can do more with this high-tech equipment and do it with fewer people. What that means when you have fewer people on the farm is that you have less need for all the things that you need when you have a community. You don't need as many doctors and nurses. You don't need as many schoolteachers. And we're now reaching a point where the farmers who have remained on the land are quite isolated and often face long trips just to get to any place where there might be a school or there might be some sort of cultural activity. And it leaves them relatively separated from the national conversation, even as the politics of the country and of the world directly bear on their lives.

How does that impact them and their views on the rest of the country?

I think one of the things that has certainly happened is that when you lose your population, when the towns start to die, you lose your local newspaper. For the towns that were large enough, you lose your local radio station. So now the way that the news arrives to farming communities is through AM radio, which is often conservative talk radio. And it arrives via television and the Internet. And that means that those local issues get less coverage, and they make it into the national conversation less. But it also means that all of the polarization of our current political moment has made it all the way down to these tiny communities.

And how is that played out?


You know, that sign has really drawn a lot of hatred. It seems there are some of these signs and events that seem to engender a lot of anger, you know, backlash. And I think that's kind of what we're witnessing in this country as a whole right now. There is a certain amount of backlash. It's kind of this idea of we want to take it back or we want to - this is ours. It's almost like wanting to say, you know, you have this icon or this symbol, and we don't like it. And so we're going to take it back or we're going to deface it or we're going to erase it. Which is really fascinating when you think about it. You know, like, we don't like this history, so we're going to try to erase it.

The we you're talking about there is white people, and you're linking this to the broader, you know, rise we have seen of certain white nationalist, white supremacist groups.

Yeah. I think there's been - within recent years, I mean, the - those groups have been emboldened to be able to speak more boldly that, you know, kind of some of their white nationalist or white supremacist views and things like that and be bold about it.

That's Jerry Mitchell. He runs the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jerry Mitchell, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me, appreciate it.


Right.

But a lot has happened. How are you feeling about President Trump's stand on immigration now?

Well, look. I said that my position is nuanced. I believe immigration is good for the country. There are aspects of President Trump's immigration proposals that I agree with. I do believe in fencing. It does work. It has shown that it works to disrupt illegal entry.

You mean the wall, the proposed wall.


It's very vegetal.
Vegetal.
Yeah.
That's a word?


Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Now, President Trump tweeted last month, all agree the U. S.  president has the complete power to pardon. So how did the Founding Fathers intended for the presidential pardon to be applied?

Well, they saw it in several ways. They obviously set up a system with pretty robust checks and balances. And the pardon power was intended to be part of that. Where the justice system had produced a miscarriage of justice, it was possible for the president to step in and provide a check against the judicial branch. Or framers like Alexander Hamilton saw the pardon power as a policy instrument. You know, if you had a rebellion or some kind of insurgency, the offer of clemency might restore tranquility to the Commonwealth, as he put it. So there were both reasons of individual mercy and broader public policy that have motivated the use of the pardon power over time.

So then how is the pardon of Joe Arpaio different from other presidential pardons?


I have to say, I'm a huge believer in the laws of political physics. The first one is gravity. And the sheer idiocy of what he said seems to me - it is going to drag him down. The second one is momentum. And you saw yesterday what was clearly a coordinated message on the part of Senator McConnell, Senator Cornyn and Governor Romney, to say, you've got 24 hours to think it over, buddy. They left the buddy out. Think what's best for you, what's best for your family, what's best for the Republican Party. They didn't say that, not necessarily in that order. It's the way we're thinking about it. And it may be that Mr.  Akin will hold on past close of business today. But I have to say, I'll be just stunned if he is the nominee who's on the ticket in November.

The deadline is 5 P. M. , Central Time. Ruth Marcus, thank you very much.

Thanks a lot.

Ruth Marcus is an editorial writer for The Washington Post. She joined us from a studio at the newspaper. Her piece is called "Self-Preservation, Meet Cynicism. "You can find a link to it on our website. That's at npr. org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.


Eric, good morning.

Yeah. You know, I'm reminded, the Chipmunks did a version of that (laughter). . .

(Laughter). Did they really?

Maybe we'll get to hear that.


Well, you know, everything was coming from me, so it was a big more relaxed. The process was very organic because, you know, I didn't intend to write a book or to create these paintings for a book. I was just doing this out of the love for the subject.

But, you know, the more and more I became familiar with this story that, you know, I figured that I really wanted to tell this story in a book and share this story with others because it was so inspirational. It's a great story of perseverance and innovation and pride and excellence amidst adversity.

When African-Americans were confronted with a ban from playing Major League Baseball at the end of the 19th century, they loved baseball so much that they wanted to form their own league. They wanted to form their own grand stage which would allow them to play baseball for a living. And that grand stage became the Negro Leagues, one of the most profitable and successful African-American-owned businesses of all time.

Now you had a unique way of preparing for the book, especially the way you got ready to do the paintings. Tell me how you used the uniform as a way to psyche yourself up.

Well, what I wanted to do was to shed new light on this subject and show this - share this history in a very new way, and I wanted to show new images from the Negro Leagues that have never been seen before. and the only way I could do that really was through this medium, the painted medium.


. . . We figured out that if all of these things operate as they have historically and retire according to their normal lifetimes, we'd have another maybe 650 billion tons of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere.

That sounds pretty ugly.

Yeah, that's a very large number because we can compare that to sort of the budget we have that the United Nations has identified as being safe targets; 1 1/2 degrees Celsius of warming relative to the preindustrial is considered the safe operating space right now. And this would put us in jeopardy of being beyond that.

I mean, I guess we're assuming that nothing will change, but couldn't there be big technological breakthroughs that could prevent temperatures from rising far beyond 1. 5 degrees Celsius?


You've been speaking with current and former EPA staffers. What is the mood like at the EPA right now?

It's not good. I think that - you know, one person told me that they worry that there is a lot of backstabbing going on. There is some paranoia about where these leaks are coming from because a lot of the information would have had to come from someone very close to the administrator. And so there's some finger-pointing over that. And then when you talk to the career officials - the people who have worked for EPA and previous administrations as well - they get the feeling that there's no way that leadership could be focusing on policy right now because they just have controversy after controversy to address.

Last week, Pruitt announced he would roll back Obama-era auto emissions standards. President Trump and his supporters really like what he's been doing at the EPA. He's been very popular among conservatives and the president. Just briefly, how have these ethics questions affected his ability to do his job?

Well, I think that - the people that I've talked to said that meetings were proceeding and that things were still moving forward. But it seems like this is all escalating. And there's a sense that more stories will be coming - that journalists are working on other tips that they have and that public records are going to come out and show even more of this. And so I think a lot of the things he's begun - those are things that could be in the courts for years too.


What are the odds that the Iranian leadership, after maybe some public demonstrations of disapproval, decides, well, you know, there's still a lot of overwhelming economic reasons for us to stay in this agreement with the European Union?

Well, the problem is there's still not overwhelming economic interests coming in. If European Union can somehow protect its businesses and come up with some mechanisms that could give Iran at least some promises and guarantees that - moving towards the future, there could be some economic benefits. And depending on that, I think if Iran believes - as President Rouhani actually put out a different statements on his Instagram and Twitter - what matters is national interests, economic interests, whether Europeans can guarantee it without U. S.  We would be willing to remain compliant to the deal. And the supreme leader actually put out a statement approving that, as well. So all eyes are on Europeans right now.

Should the Iranian government be worried about their survival?

I don't think so. Usually, when the crisis like this arises, it actually brings more unity than anything. And I think the more pressure and sort of the more isolation for Iran, it actually strengthens the regime in a way. You know, I don't think that this strategy that some people talk about - and they think that there is a possibility that this could bring about regime change - is at all anything likely. And I think having to deal with a short-term crisis with the hopes that this will bring change - I'm skeptical on that.


Nuns are also speaking out. We're joined in our studio now by Sister Simone Campbell, who was part of the ministry of the Sisters of Social Service and executive director of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice group. Sister Simone, thanks so much for being with us.

Great to be with you.

I have to ask - how do you feel this week about the church to which you've devoted your life?

Well, I have to say over the last few weeks, it's been really shocking and horrifying, and I have felt myself close to weeping at times. This week, I took a little solace in the letter from Pope Francis to the world saying - acknowledging the extent of the horror that has existed and a commitment to change. And I take heart in these remarks in Ireland as his very first statements that it is included because there was a worry he would not include this in his very first statements. So what this says to me is that the Vatican is beginning to get it in all its departments that this is not just those concerned with clergy, but the whole church needs to be changed. And I think that's what we're beginning to see.


I'm Farai Chideya, and this is News and Notes. Illinois Senator Barack Obama declared he was running for president back in February of 2007. Back then, he was the dark horse, long-shot candidate. Some people looked at him, and talked only about race. Other voters and pundits seem to try to avoid the topic.

Now, the economy is in meltdown, and much of the political debate has turned to mortgages and finance. But race is still there say the polls, and author and commentator Tim Wise says so as well. Wise is an anti-racism activist whose latest book is called "Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male. "Welcome to News and Notes.

Thanks.

So, your latest essay is called, "This Is Your Nation on White Privilege. "


So your position would be that your dean of students would be there, even if there were some Oberlin students who decided to have a Make America Great rally.

Absolutely. The content of the speech isn't relevant. And she's supposed to be a liaison to the police. And, in fact, the police contacted her staff to talk about this particular protest as it was happening. So it wouldn't matter whether they were there for a Make America Great rally or whether they were there to talk about some progressive cause. The content of the speech is not why we're there. It's there to be able to protect the community and to make it a lawful protest.

Racism is an ugly charge. Can you see why the Gibsons were upset by it?

Oh, absolutely. I - absolutely. If you're called a name that you don't believe is true, then I can absolutely see why the Gibsons were upset.


Now, let's talk a little bit about what has changed for you. During that Hayday, what was a typical day in your life like?And then now, as things are much more shaky, what's a typical day in your life like?

I think, in the HayDay, we saw - there was this healthy balance between supply of houses and the demands for houses on our market. And what I did typically see is working with a lot of first-time homebuyers during that period, people getting really great rate in the 4 percent (unintelligible).

And then, you know, in our marketplace, you know, Cleveland's generally really affordable place to buy a home and a good place for people to obtain - homeownership is attainable for a lot of people because here of prices of our homes in our area. You know, today, we see those same people losing their homes, and it's just a few short years later - and I think we can attributed to the products that they were put in; the loan products and the kind of irresponsibility of both the consumer and the mortgage banks. And…

So sorry to interrupt you. When you say loan product, you're talking about some of these subprime loans?


Well, you know, I'm a Republican, but I'm also Catholic. So for me, the religious side, if we went there, I would be very much be against the death penalty, very much pro-life. And I see the pro-life and the death penalty - you kind of have to be consistent, in my mind.

You talk about your Catholic faith and how you look at this question through that lens. Of course, there are people who think that religion ought to be set aside. But I think in reality, many people do look at it at political questions through the lens of their own values. But white evangelicals make up a big part of the Republican Party. There are a lot of white evangelicals there in Kentucky as well. Of course, many white evangelicals oppose abortion, so I'm curious how you make that case to them.

Well, and that's why I'm, quite frankly, focusing on the economics. - But when you start talking about the numbers, the numbers are numbers. And it's pretty clear in a state like ours where we have desperate needs to use the money in other places - to shore up our pensions, you know, to help with our school system - this is simply an area where I think if you look at it logically, we're not getting any benefit from a criminal law standpoint, so let's spend our money somewhere else.

So the fiscal argument might make the case where the moral argument is more complex.

That's right.


Sure.

We are always so grateful when you come on this show. I got to tell you - we got a lot of noes from Republicans who didn't want to come on this show and talk about gun policy, except, you know, maybe they'll go on Fox News. If the Republicans are proud of their record on guns, why not be interviewed about it?

Well, I can't speak for all of my colleagues on this. I mean, we obviously have a very serious violence problem in the country and particularly a firearm violence issue. And that - you know, we must address it. That said, we also have to respect the rights of people who own. . .

OK.


Well, it's tough, because right now, you want to go get out there and let people see that you have the fire and the bell, you really want this thing. But on the other hand, it's his grandmother, Alex, and his grandmother appears to be in pretty bad shape, near death. So, the notion that he is a compassionate, so I suppose that would play well, but people do want to see him. He's got to be on the media mix, so I guess he's going to have surrogates out there. Nonetheless, here's an opportunity again for John McCain to dominate the news.

I wonder if Senator McCain at this point could maybe pick up some attention by saying here's my team, here's the people I would put in the cabinet. Who's on his team?

Well, you know, it's pretty obvious, if you start right at the top, the people that have surrounded him now for some time. Here we're talking about people like Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. You can imagine Lieberman over at the State Department. You can imagine Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, over at the Pentagon as secretary of defense. In that way, what you see is that Senator McCain has a number of people that you could immediately point to and say that would be his team if he were to be elected.

And how about Senator Obama in that regard?


Shannon, of course, we're dealing with a breaking news event. And it's the inclination of and the policy of this news organization to be conservative rather than to be inaccurate. We know that people are going to see and hear another - other numbers that are out there. We are reporting what we can confirm at the moment. There is a suspect in custody. As I understand it, the area is still not considered safe. They're asking people to remain in their homes, yes?

That's right. They're warning people to stay inside their homes, stay away from the area of the synagogue. And also, reportedly, according to the synagogue's website, this was the busiest service, the most packed service of the week for the synagogue, the Saturday morning service. So we can expect that there were probably multiple people inside the synagogue at the time.

So there's a suspect in custody. Police at the same time have to be worried that perhaps someone else could be involved, and that's why the area - why they're still telling people to shelter in place.

That's right. Until, you know, fairly recently this morning, it was an active shooter situation. The details of the shooting, whether there were more than one person involved, we don't know that yet, or even a motive.


So how - are governments in general, from what we know from the past, responsive to seeing these changes in how people act and the problems people have?

Well, of course, governments try to have programs that start more or less automatically when the economy starts changing, particularly downward. So we have extensions of unemployment compensation systems. We have extensions of disability systems. We have attempts to shift investment to try to stimulate regions where it looks like the economy is starting to contract.

The current problem is, as with all recessions, it looks like it's starting to contract almost everywhere. So finding resources to help those places which are contracting worse means you're taking resources from places where the economy is also contracting. So it does create a public policy problem, but you do see the response that we are currently having, which is that the government will apparently borrow considerable amounts of money and try to stimulate the economy to try to soften this contraction across the country so that the population does not become more desperate than it is or needs to be.

All right. Professor, we are going to have to take a station break. When we come back, I want to ask you about the ways that we treat each other differently, that people in communities may treat each other differently, based on these kinds of stress. Again, we are speaking with Ralph Catalano of UC Berkeley about how societies react during hard times.


Yeah.

. . . Household where they can do a little more with their income.

So what kind of minimum wage jobs are we talking about?

So we find a lot of our families do have the fast-food restaurant jobs. But we do have families that also have certified nursing assistants. We have nurses on our program. We have families with professional jobs. They're moving up. But we do see a lot of the fast-food restaurant, airport low-paying jobs at this time.

Is there advice you'd give the federal government about a jobs requirement program?

I think introducing a minimum work requirement may be a good option in the long run, but you have to take it slow. You can't just roll it out, say I - we want to do this today and roll it out tomorrow. We will impact families tremendously. We may increase homelessness because this becomes a substantial burden on families, especially our low-income families. We would definitely have a social problem in this country if we rolled it out all at once.


Now, in both the Enron case and the Madoff situation, they're very different in some ways, but they both benefited at least for a time from the fact that a lot of people don't understand finance, and it's very difficult to understand. What do you think people need to do who are not financiers to understand why is it important to even understand the issue of finance, white-collar crime, and all of this?

White-collar crime matters because it affects all of us. Even if you happen to be a blue-collar person, you undoubtedly get affected one way or another - your investments, your company, your suppliers, your neighbors. Everyone gets affected by serious white-collar crime, and the old joke is, right, you walk into a bank with a gun, steal $50,000, they send you away for 10 years. You steal $50 million in some sort of white-collar crime thing, and you get, you know, five minutes and a warning from the judge.

I mean, that's an exaggeration. But that's the kind of thing that for years has annoyed people, including me. And somehow the - because there's been now so much of the stuff has surfaced, and there's such conscientiousness about it and in the case of Madoff largely because he scammed people that members of the media know. So you get really angry when your friends go down. I mean, I don't have any friends who were in there, but a lot of people in my business. . .

Right.


All the Neanderthals are quite closely related to each other, all the ones that have been studied genetically so far. But this individual, this Denisovan girl, is very distantly related to the Neanderthals. She's more distantly related than the most distantly related present-day humans that are on Earth today.

And so she is another group, and we also have a molar, a tooth from a Denisovan. We know she's - that tooth is from a Denisovan because we've extracted its DNA. And that tooth is a very big molar. It's much bigger than any modern human or Neanderthal molar. So they also had teeth that were different from either modern humans or Neanderthals.

So if you're a natural history museum, and you have your diorama of, you know, of ancestry, and you've got a Neanderthal there, do you now have to put a Denisovan standing right next to that Neanderthal?

I think you do, but you won't know what they look like.


Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Now, Mr.  Pruitt approached deregulation with enthusiasm. Quickly, could you just give us a sense of his principal achievements?

He had actually very few achievements. He has many proposals in the pipeline. But most are in the pipeline, and most are deeply flawed.

So not likely to go zipping along and become new regulations.

I think that many will probably be revisited and, if they want them to be successful, will have to be adjusted and pay more attention to the law and pay more attention to science and protection of the environment.


It's beautiful. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

There's one plant that needs water, I'm sorry.

That little machine, it actually - you can watch it work and twirl and do its little mechanical things and prints out little solar panels.

Yeah. So basically, you feed it this little silicon cells. It chops them up into little pieces. And then, I didn't know this, but you just take them and wire them in series. I mean, in fact, if you had them, you could manually make one yourself. The process isn't all that complicated. So we see how you would actually do this. You know, they couldn't bring all of the prototypes because some of them couldn't fit in a suitcase. Literally, they packed them in a suitcase. . .

And on the subway.

. . . and took them on the subway to my yard. But it's definitely worth a look. I think the other thing that was interesting to me is that it was funded - it's bankrolled by strangers. This was a Kickstarter project. So they put up a little video on the website Kickstarter and got over 1,000 people to contribute over $70,000 to make this. This is real bootstrap inventing.


You're speaking with us from near Manchester, England, at the moment, where there was an attack. You're based in London, where there's been another attack. Can you describe the mood?

The mood is very alarmed. I've been literally corresponding with hundreds of British-Muslim community members across the country. And there is a genuine feeling of shock beyond the last few attacks because of the severity of this and the frequency of it. And there is a sense - a real sense that something has to change.

Now, I know all sectors are feeling this. But, you know, what they're telling me is that, you know, we're going to have to face some difficult questions. Now the only thing is, how are we going to handle those questions?Is it going to be as a community, as part of wider society?Or are Muslim communities going to be a target?That's going to make a little bit of a difference here.

Just briefly - we only have about 30 seconds - how is the Muslim community reacting?This is the holy month of Ramadan, a time of prayer and reflection.


But even artists like Bone Crusher, who's very theatrical. He was on "The Biggest Loser" or - no, the "Celebrity Fit Club," "Celebrity Fit Club. "He was on "Celebrity Fit Club" and has such a wonderful personality. You have so - these artists that are first songwriters and musicians are so creative. They are so well-rounded and many of them you will see in other mediums.

Now, you are listening to NPR's News & Notes. I am Farai Chideya. In case you are just tuning in, we are doing a special roundtable in entertainment in the ATL with Dee Dee Murray. She is president of Murray Media Music. The company provides publishing service for musicians, writers and producers. And Sonia Murray, music writer at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Now, Dee Dee, what about the issue of being a woman in this industry?You know, I have many friends in the industry and I am just going to be real here. You know, one of them says, well, if I don't go to the strip clubs with the guys, I don't get the deal. Do you ever had to figure out where you draw the line in terms of how you are willing to make deals and where you are willing to make deals?

All of the time. As a woman, you always are faced with the challenge of upholding your morality in a lot of instances. And for me, I have had to go to the strip club with some of my clients that are males from California that only dreamed of coming to Atlanta and striking deals in these clubs.


Did you think twice?

I said - well, I didn't think - well, I said, sure, and I held it to the ground. And then I thought, this is not exactly what I signed up for, but, you know, you need to pitch in a little bit in these circumstances.

For a disease, a virus to spill over, is it just a matter of coming in contact with the right animal?Is it just chance, or does there have to be something special about the virus itself to be able to infect multiple species?

Well, some kinds of virus, yes, are better at this than others. And the scientists who watch the world for the next spillover are particularly vigilant about single-stranded RNA viruses, as distinct from DNA viruses that carry their genomes on the good old, stable double helix. RNA viruses, when they replicate, mutate more frequently. Therefore, there's more change. There's more genetic variation in the populations of those viruses. They replicate very abundantly, so their populations are large.


I really didn't feel safe because the Turkish government is very famous for hunting down those who oppose Erdogan. So, I mean, I just didn't want to really risk my life by going to Europe. But, you know, I talked to my team. I told them all, like, how many times I want to come because I want to be with you guys there, and I want to get a win with you guys. And then, later on, they came back with the news and said, you know what?I think the best decision is if you don't come. Let's just not risk it for one game.

Do you feel safe in New York and elsewhere in the U. S. ?

I have been getting last two, three days hundreds death threats, but I think I feel safe in America. But anywhere else in the world, I wouldn't really feel safe.

Did you say you've gotten hundreds of death threats?


But Zoe Wesloski(ph) emailed from Pittsburgh to say: I don't get it. I'm 39. This was not an option for my generation. Not only did I enter the job market without a college degree, but I found a way to survive. And when I left home at 22, I never went back. I found a way to make it through nursing school as a single mother in my 30s. She continued: I don't know what's wrong with this generation, but it sure as hell ain't the economy.

We also spoke with New York Times writer Alex Williams about the challenges of making friends after college. Anne Scranton(ph) in Blue Ash, Ohio, wrote: Everyone told me I'd make lots of mom friends when my kids got in school. But as a working mom, I found it tough to connect on weekends when many families are having family time. I decided to enroll in a leadership class held in the city where I work, and through that class, I've met other working families and folks of all ages and stages. Everyone needs to be open-minded in reaching out to people of all ages. We all have experiences to share.

And finally, Greg Alexander in Bloomington, Indiana reminded us that the beginning and end of the story of adult bonding is happy hour. It's good to go to a place where everybody knows your name. Cheers.

(Singing) Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see. Our troubles are all the same. You want to be where everybody knows your name.


Well, it occurred to me very early on in my career that there's no story to equal the story of Moses. At least, you know, to me and my background. So, I wrote some notes - this is back in 1951 - about something called the lawgiver, which I would hope someday to write. And I put these papers aside and glanced at them now and then, but I never thought I'd be able to do it because Moses was just beyond my reach.

Mr.  Wouk, I mean, I don't think telling the story of Moses is beyond you. But I do want to point out that it's been done.

Well, that really was the trouble. It's been done to utter perfection. There's no matching the tale exactly as it's told in the five books of Moses. The key to writing it was there was no narrative voice so that, quote, "Herman Wouk," unquote, is taking no responsibility for what's being written. It's just various voices around a production rather of a movie about Moses.

Every time in this book I read an email or a conversation that seemed to kind of be mocking Hollywood, I thought about the movies that have been made of your books. And they've been pretty good, haven't they?


No. From a technical point of view and economic point of view, I think objectively one would say no. Psychologically and politically at this point, because this issue had become central for more than 10 years, if they give up on that, they would lose politically. So, at this point, it's a political psychological necessity.

They want to be able to say we're - we made a real deal, we're a real country, we can enrich uranium if we want.

Exactly.

Is that a good technical - technically speaking, given your knowledge in this area, is that a good precaution for so many nations to have?I mean, what's the step between nuclear enrichment for peaceful purposes and developing a bomb?


Yeah, a little bit. But, you know, he's not read em(ph) and freak brothers.

That would be a whole different story. That would say something different about his personality, I think.

Something a little more disturbing, I would say.

Yeah.


Donald Trump came to the mics and said, you know, he thought it was great that they were taking their country back again, obviously echoing his own campaign slogan of make America great again and saying that it might just be good for the Brits to have their currency dropped to a 30-year low in its value because it will make their products cheaper and will bring more tourists into the country. And then he talked a little bit about how some. . .

To his golf course, I believe he specifically said.

Some of those tourists might want to play golf in Scotland. And he happened to be talking about his own golf course there in Scotland and spoke about the virtues of that attraction.

The U. S.  Supreme Court, of course, had a decision this week which blocked the Obama administration's plans for immigration programs. Does that decision, and for that matter, do the results in the United Kingdom suggest something about the potency of immigration as a political issue?


What is - let's start with this. What is your personal collection to the work and the images in this book?

Well, to me this was a labor of love. I've been living in the U. S. I came back to England. It's my homeland. I came back to London, my home city, and I felt that the culture of the young black people in particular here were suffering from a kind of deficit, historically speaking.

There were younger people in my neighborhood who were bereft of history, who took their idea of themselves from watching their kind of generic hip-hop video material that they got from the video screen rather than really inquiring into the particular history and experience of our communities in this country.

As I looked at the book, I was trying to find a theme, and I don't know if I found one or not. What was, in your view, the major trends or themes that you saw unfolding over the century that are depicted in these photographs?


(Singing) I've got a question When you open your eyes And you see the Sunrise Are you strengthened?

'Cause the tear in your eye Is like a sad song Or a sweet lullaby Like the birds in the sky

Is it alright?Where has the love gone?Hold on. So I left my worries in the sand

Let's talk through some of the songs on your album. You're working with Victor Redwood Sawyerr.


No, there are hidden costs, of course. It's - basically what economists say is what you need to do is internalize the negative externalities, reveal those hidden costs. Make it so that at the meter, at the pump, we see the true cost.

Wouldn't the established energy companies go nuts?

It depends on who they are, of course. If it's a natural gas company or a company that has significant natural gas assets, they'd be excited about this if they thought it was going to be - really going to happen. That's our challenge at republicen. org, is convincing particularly some natural gas folks that really, this could happen, that the fossil fuels could become accountable. And, of course, when that happens, coal would fall much faster to the competitive pressure of natural gas. And the natural gas companies would make a lot more money off of their product. Is it the end-all?No, it isn't. Natural gas still has CO2 emissions. But it's 50 percent less emissions than coal. So that's an example of how fixing the economics would then fix the environmental consequence.

Mr.  Inglis, as you survey this field of Republican candidates for president, do you see and hear any who express your viewpoint on the climate change?


So explain to me how this system actually works.

Well, the first thing is to know what the weather is so you can know what the weather will be. That's the crux of it. So you need as complete observations of the global atmosphere as possible, which means coming from satellites and weather buoys and from sensors and airliners. And then once you know what it is, what you can do is then begin to run it forward in time.

But rather than just, you know, sort of being plugged into the supercomputers - you know, in comes the present, and out comes the future - the models are really a kind of ongoing concern. Every six hours, every 12 hours, they compare their own forecast with the latest observations. And so the models in reality are kind of - you know, they're sort of dancing together, where the model makes a forecast, and it's corrected slightly by the observations that are coming in.

And does anyone own these models and these satellites?I mean, is it part of a global web?Or does America have a certain piece of this and every country sort of have their own proprietary information that somehow gets passed along?


It's the most vegetal thing I've ever smelled.

Excellent. And we're going to add the ginger.

OK.

And then I got some mint. And then I got a little lime. OK, and then I'll do a little agave.


So two days ago, we were notified by our sheriffs, the Palm Beach County sheriff, through the Broward County sheriff. I believe they were notified by Border Patrol that 135 people will be sent each week to Broward County and Palm Beach County. The sheriffs then turned and notified myself as mayor of the county. And with that notification came no instructions on sheltering these people, feeding these people, housing these people, determining the health of anybody. Just, here's 135 people coming every week. Good luck. That's basically what the message has been.

What was your initial reaction to that?

Pretty much disbelief. Normally, when anything happens like this, the federal government contacts the state government, the state government then will contact the local county government, like us. In this situation, no protocol. There's been nothing communicated in those channels. We've contacted the governor's office. They have no idea. We contacted our U. S. Senators Scott and Rubio. They had no idea. We contacted our congresspeople. Nobody was informed by the Trump administration about any of this.

And did you get the sense that this is a done deal - this was not, like, a draft plan or a trial balloon?


Oh, yeah. There's just devastation to all the homes. Power lines are down, broken by trees. Just devastation everywhere. I mean, mold in the homes is already setting in. Just everything is destroyed.

Alison, do you worry about some of the chemicals and the detritus that's left behind?

I do worry about the chemicals. You know, none of us are by any means professionals, but there's fiberglass in the insulation. There's mold. We don't know if there's sewage covering, you know, these belongings are anything, but we do the best we can by wearing masks and gloves. And that's pretty much all we can do for now because you can't wait long to clean these homes up or it just gets worse. So we're doing the best we can now with the tools we have available to us.

Yeah. Alison Reagan, let me ask you. People in Houston and the rest of Southeast Texas have have won so much admiration from Americans this week for reacting to these terrible events with such courage and pluck. Is there something you learned about human beings, about your neighbors and strangers this week that you'd like to pass on to us?


Yeah. It was over in an hour or something, right?Yeah.

Exactly.

The emperor Augustus almost cracked up on your watch.

Yeah. That was - the Vatican exhibit was coming into the Met, some Leonardos, really fine, fine pieces of art. The Augustus was one big crate. And as the truck was coming down the ramp, you could see the truck driver was going too fast. And the top of the crate hit the concrete support beam in the garage, and all you heard was a crunching of wood. And my heart almost stopped.


It's a bit of a fly in the ointment for ethical Sarah Palin. There's - in the last month or so, there's been increasing attention paid to an incident in which her opponent say, she pressured her public safety commissioner to fire her sister's ex-husband. He's a trooper and what they're saying is that she was trying to get him canned. She denies this, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests - that things are a little more complicated than that and the legislature is investigating now.

Now, she's known as a maverick. She's bucked the establishment so in that way, she compares favorably to John McCain. And tell us a bit more about how she compares with him.

Well, she certainly loves his maverick image. She likes the fact that he challenges the party hierarchy as she has done, and so she's been early McCain supporter on that score. She's got more of a social conservative background than he does, and that may very well be why she's on the ticket because she's got more of those bona fides. But at the same time, some people in Alaska point out that in the two years she's in office so far, she hasn't actually made any big moves on the social conservative front. That she's, you know, she calls herself a social conservative, and certainly has those values, but (unintelligible) necessarily done a lot about it.

Social conservative, she's very pro-life.


I learned it from you, actually. yeah.

So if you're listening - donate blood, donate plasma, and you can save someone's life by being a live liver donor.

And as is written in both - I'm sorry (laughter) - oh, as it's written in both the Quran and the Talmud, he who saves one life. . .

It's as if you save humankind. So Shawn and his family have saved my daughter's life. My life belongs to them.


I've been embedded with U. S.  troops. And, as I don't have to tell you, you know, it's close quarters out there - in all ways - and soldiers are exposed to each other in all kinds of intimate ways. Does mixing genders just add an extra complication that combat can do without?

You know, I was forward deployed with Delta Force. I slept in some pretty crappy places, for lack of a better term. Is it a little bit of extra effort?Sure. You know, I'm not going to say that it's not. But when you look at the benefit, when you look at what you're losing, OK, the qualified, talented, amazing, remarkable women who walk into a recruiter's office and want to serve their country and are told you can serve your country but you have to pick from one of these jobs. It's just that you're a woman. But you know what?Every step of progress along the way in the history of our country, there have been people who have tried to make it more difficult, you know, integrated, racially or in any other, you know, situation that we've had to take a step forward in progress. There have been people that have made it more difficult. But the benefit just far outweighs.

Major Mary Jennings Hegar. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much.