Has this ever been done before, I mean, even with other types of energy like oil and gas for example?

That's not how we have historically done oil and gas use or exploration. Again, we're talking on public land. It's not been how we've done it. It is the way we've tried in recent years to think about the Endangered Species Act. Instead of looking at each little place when a question comes up and say is this an endangered habitat, is this a problem, look at large areas, ecosystems, chunks that make sense together.

Try to highlight what the problems are in that area so that subsequent development proposals are not - don't start from ground zero. Information's been gathered and looked at in a more systematic way. I mean, programmatic environmental impact assessments have been allowed ever since NEPA passed back in the 1970s.

It hasn't been used very often. I think that the Interior Department should get a lot of credit for using it this time.


It seems simple at the outset, and we seem - we take it for granted. I mean, we're fortunate enough to be able to exercise our sense of taste and smell three times, if not more, a day. But what "Taste What You're Missing" is about is really stepping back, slowing down and understanding a little bit more about the mechanisms of what make up the concept of flavor, taste.

And so what I hope this book does is teach people a little bit more because we know that with greater understanding comes greater appreciation. And so the bottom line takeaway from this book, I hope, is a greater appreciation for food. And I'm not talking about just those meals where we go out to a fine restaurant, we - we're spending a lot of our money to have a special occasion meal.

I'm talking about those mundane meals that we have every day because there's joy and incredible sensory experiences in everything we put in our mouth.

1-800-989-8255 is our number if you'd like to talk with Barb Stuckey, author of "Taste What You're Missing. "And let's get right into this then, and talk about what is wrong with the way that most people taste food. What you're saying, we're not taking advantage of just eating a plain old meat-and-potatoes hamburger or something like that.


It's 2075, and America has been beset by flooding linked to climate change. The president has banned the use of fossil fuels. The southern states have broken away looking to protect the coal mining industry, and a rabid civil war is taking place. Omar El Akkad joins us now to talk about the dystopian world he created in his new book "American War" and what inspired it. Welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

The main character of the book is a young girl. Her name is Sarat Chesnut. She lives in Louisiana in what is known in the book as the free southern state. Who is she at the beginning of the novel?

She - of all the characters I've written, she's the only one who came to me sort of fully formed. At the start of the book, she's six years old. And to me, she's sort of this very curious, trusting, defiant young girl whose chief attribute is this kind of rebellion against unknowing. She wants to know as much as possible. And the central arc of the book is essentially her life and how her desire to know - her curiosity is sort of used against her during this war.


Well, self-employed people are often other people's discretionary spending. In other words, if I'm cutting back, and I had a trainer who was coming to my house three times a week, maybe now she's coming in twice or once. That hits her bottom line. So we know that, essentially, self-employed people, if they're discretionary spending, are going to be on the front line.

The message for them is to diversify your portfolio to make sure that now, if you're counting on one person, let's get three lined up. Let's be more flexible. Let's deal with issues about how you might provide different kinds of payment schedules and other kinds of things.

But self-employed people, whether they're personal services, which we've just talked about, whether they're business services, the people who do the graphics artwork, who do the editing and other things, they're going to have to dance on a dime. Because, basically, when people start cutting budgets they're the easiest ones to cut.

Now if you're self-employed - and there are many people who have started, you know, any number of businesses - if you're self-employed, either like you said, doing personal services or running a small business with other employees who work for you, what can you do to sure yourself up financially?


One last question, and I'll let you go. You know, this being sequestration day, are you concerned about budgets that you control in your committee, science budgets, that they might be slashed?

Of course - well, let's put this in perspective. We're talking about across-the-board cuts of about 2. 3 percent, and while it may mean more in certain areas, nevertheless, you know, it's regrettable, I wish we weren't having these kinds of cuts, they could have been avoided. I still think we need to cut spending, but we need to do in a smart way, not across-the-board way. And we could have set our priorities up if there had been a little bit more cooperation from the White House and from the Senate.

The House of Representatives has actually twice passed offsets to the sequestration. The Senate has not passed anything. And the administration hasn't come up with any specific alternatives to the sequestration; only the House has. So if they can't come up with a better idea, let's go with the House idea, and we could have avoided it.

All right, well, I'm certainly not one to debate the politics of this with you because as you know we'll get nowhere. But I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today and wish you good luck in deciding - because I think, you know, maybe the public really does believe this is a national priority about finding that asteroid with our name on it.


Well, many of the discussions I've had with other educators is that many times, we have to have a partner - or if we are single, that our partner's income supports our teaching habits, if you will. Certified teachers with master's degrees teaching in their district for 15 years are still making around $30,000 to $35,000 within their district. To have that amount of education and that amount of experience and be paid that wage, that's not a livable wage.

Arizona is a right-to-work state, which means unions don't have much power to negotiate there. Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma are, too. These are all states with Republican legislatures. And we've seen actions by teachers recently in those states, as well. Do you wish you had a union speaking for you?Would that be an answer?

The reason why I got involved was because of the teacher-led grassroots movement. We have been supported by other organizations. Arizona Education Association, which is our union - our teacher union here in the state - have been supporting us. Do I wish that a union was representing us?I'm glad that they are supporting us.

Why do you think this is happening now in places like Kentucky and West Virginia and Oklahoma and now Arizona?


How did you feel when you found out, this summer, about the abuse of children that was going on in Pennsylvania not far from places you knew?

Yeah, it hurt reading the report because I was reading about these parishes that I went to growing up. I was born in '96, so growing up, you would hear kids joke about, oh, you know, priests molesting kids and whatnot. But I never knew that there was actually a - anything behind that. I just sort of thought it was people making fun of a religion. And then I didn't learn, honestly, until recently that the abuse scandal is something that was real and something that the world has known about since - what?- I think it was the early 2000s, whenever the Boston Globe or whatever that newspaper is broke the story. I didn't know that that was a thing. It wasn't something I'd ever been exposed to, so I wasn't really aware of the fact that this is a problem that was going on in my church. You know, it's unthinkable.

And it's hurt your faith?

I think that's a difficult thing to answer. I will say that it has hurt my faith in the Catholic Church. I don't think it has actually hurt my personal, religious faith. I'm just starting to see less of a connection between what I believe and the teachings of the Catholic Church.


Good to be with you, Scott.

So who came out of that debate looking strong as we look ahead to Iowa?

Two people in particular, Trump and Cruz, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Trump is no longer the dominating personality that he was, but he's still the name leading in national polls and in most of the early states. Cruz, though, is the central figure in this particular debate if only because he was the object of most of the attacks from the other candidates. And he is masterful at slipping the punch, changing the subject, turning the criticism back onto others.

What about all the time he had to spend, though, going back and forth about whether he's even eligible to run for president?


Yeah, thank you.

So tell us what the article said.

Well, it's very interesting. It's in the Jesuit magazine La Civilta Cattolica. It's a very historic magazine, the Jesuits, of course, being the same order that Pope Francis - an order of priest that Pope Francis is a part of. And what's very interesting is that these two authors are known to be quite close to him. One, Antonio Spadaro, was the person who interviewed him in 2013 and made a big splash. And what they're saying is that they're concerned about ties between fundamental evangelicals and, kind of, right-wing Catholics in the U. S.  that are focused only on very neuralgic issues and kind of dividing in politics.

And the article, I believe, specifically talks about xenophobic and Islamophobic views.

Yeah. What the authors say is that, you know, Pope Francis has really been trying to create a culture of dialogue encounter, really working with people across all the spectrums. And what the two authors in this article are saying is that these right-wing groups in the U. S.  have been really doing the opposite. Where Pope Francis is trying to build bridges, they're trying to build walls. And they're playing up concerns about migration, about refugees. And they're kind of operating in the exact opposite way of the pope which, for a Catholic, is obviously a very strange thing.

All right, this article also directly mentions President Donald Trump and his adviser Steve Bannon. What does it say about them?


Yes. The big topic, of course, is what he'll say about the president's unfounded claims that Barack Obama wiretapped his phones. He has also accused British intelligence of wiretapping his phones on behalf of Barack Obama. There's been no evidence produced for those claims. The British have pushed back against them strongly. People on the Hill say they have not seen any evidence of this, and Comey will be asked about that first and foremost.

OK.  And over at the Senate, the first hearings for President Trump's nomination for the Supreme Court - what kind of reception is he going to get?

Well, that's going to be the big event of the week. Neil Gorsuch, who has been nominated by Donald Trump, is going to be asked a lot of questions about his views on executive power, about Donald Trump's comments disparaging judges and the entire court system. This is one of Donald Trump's most important early initiatives. The Republicans have 52 votes in the Senate. They say if they have to change the rules so they won't need 60 to confirm him, they will do that. So it's going to be very, very hard for the Democrats to stop him. But this is just the first of many, many judicial vacancies that Donald Trump will have the opportunity to fill because of the age of judges on the bench right now and the number of vacancies.

And something else we're looking at, obviously, is what's happening on Thursday - a much anticipated vote in the House. They're voting on the repeal-and-replace legislation for Obamacare. Does Speaker Ryan have the votes?


The regime does blame rebels for escalating this bout of violence. And, as you say, there's a lot at stake here. It's a place that's swollen with civilians. A lot of people who've fled the fighting elsewhere in the country have taken refuge here, and aid workers are saying it would be a catastrophe if a full war took hold here.

Oh, this is amazing. So this is where a lot of people who have fled violence arrived in huge numbers, thinking that this might be their one last safe. . .

Right.

. . . Space. And if there are that many civilians there - like, what do we know about these airstrikes so far?How badly are civilians being hit?


But in addition to that, that same instrument can actually also just suck in Mars atmosphere and can look for methane. And methane is definitely something that we think is primarily associated with biological sources, obviously here on the Earth.

There are some ways in which methane can be created without, you know, living organisms, and so we need to be able to differentiate between the two. But yeah, Mars, there have been investigations done from here on the Earth where we're looking through telescopes at Mars, and we see indications of methane.

And I think hopefully, like I said in the first, next few days, we'll begin to at least see whether or not we can detect similar things.

You know, when you touched down, there were people who were talking about gee, this looks just like the Southwest, down in the desert there. Can you smell it, as if it might be the Southwest?Is there any way to say gee, it smells like the Southwest?


No, no. I just - it's always - to me, it's just the joy of storytelling. And I don't think about it. Getting things in on time has never been a problem for me, so I don't worry about it. You know, I remember watching Morgan Freeman when he did the two Alex Cross movies. And he's so confident that he's going to knock the scene dead, and I'm really confident that I can tell a good story now, so I just don't worry about things.

James Patterson. His book for young readers: "Middle School: How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli and Snake Hill", co-written with Chris Tebbetts. His adult book, "Second Honeymoon", with Howard Roughan. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you. Nice talking to you.

You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.


Many Brazilians are angry over millions of dollars that the country has invested in the World Cup and upcoming Olympic Games while millions still live in abject poverty. Yesterday, we asked Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota about this issue.

Well, for the first time in our history, we are in the position to eliminate extreme poverty in Brazil, and this thanks to the social programs that were undertaken during the Lula government and now are being intensified and broadened. So Brazil is quickly evolving into a middle-class society. And I think there is a widespread view that they reflect aspirations by citizens who have benefited from rising living standards for improvements in their lives.

But let me renew the question.

On the sports issue, yes. It's not easy to succeed in bringing the World Cup, or the Olympic Games, to your country. And these campaigns, they were based on very widespread popular support. I think it's very important, also, to highlight that these big events are not an end in themselves. As foreign minister, I've been in touch with countries such as the United Kingdom or the Russian Federation, to ensure that the improvement in infrastructure and housing can be converted into urban improvements. Let's also remind ourselves that these big events generate employment. They will bring large number of tourists to Brazil. So, I think that the majority of Brazilian society sees the benefit in hosting these events. Now, if there are views that are critical, I think they deserve to be heard as well, to the extent that they are expressed in a peaceful manner.


Well, I think we're at an interesting crossroads, because modern medicine has had to acknowledge that there are other forms of medicine because of the way people are spending their dollar. People spend more money seeing alternative practitioners than they do in seeing their primary care doctors. They make more visits to alternative care. The problem is now, that modern medicine is seeking to determine what's efficacious. It's seeking to try to squeeze everything into a biomedical model, in terms of testing and creating whatever evidence that, you know, they need to create, to write an article.

But you can't really do this with energy medicine. So I think that what's going to happen is you're having stronger associations of people that are naturopaths, chiropractors, people doing craniosacral work. So what's happening is that people are getting skills in areas that are allowing them to encroach on things that have previously been treated just by modern medicine. So when you - so people - clinics and hospitals are going to have to move more in the direction of an integrated medical facility.

Well, Dr.  Kokayi, great to talk to you.

I appreciate the time and just to share and put those ideas out there.

Dr.  Kamau Kokayi is the medical director of Kokayi Health Center for Holistic Medicine. He also hosts the New York radio show Global Medicine Review.


And no problems for their ears?

Well, there sometimes are problems for their ears. I mean, whenever you hear a kid screaming their brains out behind you or in front of you on a plane, probably that kid is having air pressure problems. And what happens is that, if they can't pop their ears very well - that is, popping your ears is equalizing the pressure in the middle ear with that in the atmosphere around you, which we mostly do by making those funny little motions with our jaw and swallowing and things like that - little kids often don't know how to do that.

What can happen is that, as the pressure in the plane drops, the pressure in the middle ear remains at sea level, and so the ear drum gets stretched. And ear drums don't like to get stretched. Sometimes they get stretched badly enough so that they can even tear, although that's really quite rare. One of the things that it does lead to is terrible pain sometimes for kids. I always recommend that parents give kids something to drink and sometimes just sort of chewing on a candy increases saliva, so that you swallow, and it allows pressure to equalize.

OK, so for kids who are not healthy, what about them?


And so he's been - there's a debate. I've said, you know, I don't know - it's ongoing. I don't know how active it is, you know, about whether he should be given credit for the germ theory of disease.

Instead of Pasteur, who came later.

That's right, yeah.

Yeah, oh, so he saw something, didn't know what they were, but he thought that's how they - this spread from one person to another, through these little worms or something.


They do now. But in researching - doing research for the piece, I asked several of my colleagues. And it turns out that very few doctors actually do keep these kinds of lists. But subsequent to the report, actually, I learned of one physician who writes obituaries for his patients. He usually waits until some time has elapsed after the patient has died, and then he goes back and I think looks through their chart and actually writes his own obituary about the patient.

Does it help you see your patients as people to do this?

Absolutely because when I remember the patients that are on my list I think about their family members with whom I've interacted and, you know, what was involved in the suffering and illness as they approached the end of life.

Now that you've written this piece for the Shots blog and done this interview, are you prepared for the patient who says, I just don't want to wind up on your list?


Now, the big moment has come for Andy Murray and, of course, the hopes of all Britain are riding on him. He plays Novak Djokovic. What do you think's going to happen?

Well, I picked Novak Djokovic to win but these two, there's really very little to separate them. The pressure on Andy Murray, the pressure on this entire country to finally break the curse of not having a men's major champion at Wimbledon - the last champion to win here was Fred Perry in 1936. The women a little bit better; Virginia Wade in 1977. But the hopes and dreams of this country - it's so personal here - is to finally have a champion. And Andy Murray lost last year to Roger Federer. This year he's got a chance, but he's going up against the best player in the world. It's not going to be easy. He's going to have the entire crowd supporting him but at the same time, he's got a huge task in going up against Novak Djokovic, who's played in eight of the last - I'm sorry, now nine of the last 12 major championships. He's the best player going. Andy Murray has a huge, huge task in front of him.

Thanks very much, Howard.

No, my pleasure. I could watch tennis all day. It's the best.

Howard Bryant of ESPN. com and ESPN the Magazine, on the line from Wimbledon.


Well, I think everybody knew something was coming. I did not have specific knowledge of the timing or the nature of the strike. But - so there may have been notification to the speaker and the majority leader but not to Congress generally.

Do you feel that Congress should have had a chance to weigh in?

I think it's very important to distinguish what the strike was and what it wasn't. It was specifically narrowly focused on chemical weapons and chemical weapons production. That's been out of bounds in military years for over a hundred years with a few exceptions. Had it been a more general strike on the Assad regime, an attempt to change the calculus in the civil war, I believe that would have definitely required congressional approval. But I think the narrow strike to maintain the principle that countries around the world have recognized for so long that chemical weapons are out of bounds, I don't think that was a case where congressional approval was necessary in advance. But had it been a different kind of strike with broader implications, I'm one of those - along with a group of others in the Senate - who strongly believe there needs to be congressional approval.

Well, let me ask - I assume the president would have won that vote, right?


Absolutely. I mean, people should waste less of what they buy. I mean, it's estimated that the typical family in the U. S.  tosses out about $1,600 of groceries a year. And the report out today from the U. N.  finds that food waste may contribute up to 10% of the human-made greenhouse gas emissions. So we have a whole bunch of tips on our website to help you shop smarter and waste less in your own homes.

That's NPR's Allison Aubrey.

Allison, thanks for sharing this with us.

Thanks so much.


And is this going to encourage changes at other state universities?Is this going to encourage more lawsuits?

I think it's hard to gauge. If you were one of the conservatives who wanted to challenge affirmative action, I would think this is a little depressing. You spent years trying to get a case at the Supreme Court, and you don't - you know, it's not much of an incentive to do it again.

I think it may encourage a few big states, as I mentioned, to try to move away a little bit from weighing race and trying to find a way, like this top 10 law, rewarding top graduates, find a way to bring in more minority students but without giving an explicit preference in the admissions policy.

Now some will remember there was another case I think from the University of Michigan that was also broadly about affirmative action. Does the Texas case supplant that, or are we awaiting a decision on the Michigan case, as well?


The closest, I think, that the really strict mechanical scientists have come to that is eye tracking. And in eye tracking, they're really dealing with the most rudimentary kind of illusion perception. You know, they're saying, well, because we have now equipment that allows you to see exactly the focal point of the eye at any given moment, they have people watch videos of magicians, and they track the position of the people's eyes.

And they discovered - there are a couple of worthwhile things they have discovered. They have discovered, for example, that when a magician makes a straight movement from one point to another, the human eye looks at the first point and then dashes to the second point but doesn't really pay attention to the journey between those two, whereas, if the magician moves in a curved pattern, the eye follows the movement all the way. So that seems to me - that is the most profound revelation that I've heard from the people who are doing this sort of really lab-y, techie kind of stuff.

And is it something you can use or you're already out there using and you just never had a name for it?

I suppose if I ever thought about the small journeys of things, I probably would use it. I rarely do.


. . . in the most efficient way.

Right. So the ones in the back may get an advantage by swimming behind the fish, but they, you know, pay the cost of not getting to food first. They also are safer because they don't get eaten first if a predator is coming right at them. So it's a complicated issue, and he's just looking at this one little piece, but. . .

It's fascinating. The video is - I call it the Pied Piper fish.

Yeah, absolutely.


I think there is. There has been a lot of talk here about that, not officially from the state board. But I think when you have both candidates kind of saying they would be open to it, it's really on the table. And the state board does have the ability to do this. They can call an election if - by law, if improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubts on its fairness.

And any idea when a new election might be in the 9th District?

So - right. We have no idea. And they have said they are mindful that the new Congress is supposed to be seated on January 3. But I think it's going to be probably very difficult if they do do an election to get it done that quickly. Another question is, kind of what kind of election would you have?Would you redo the entire 9th District. . .

Yeah.


And it's the same university where, in the early days of gene therapy, a young man did die in a very early gene therapy study that set the field back, like, a decade. So the last thing these researchers want to do is, you know, do anything risky. They're taking it very carefully, being very slow. They're going to follow these patients for a long time to see if it's safe and how well it's working.

All right. There's a lot at stake here. And this isn't the only study, I understand, that's trying to use CRISPR to treat diseases. What else is going on?

Yeah, yeah. It's actually a really exciting time for - in the world for CRISPR and medical treatments right now. There's about a half a dozen studies that are - have been going in China for cancer for a while. And now another half a dozen or so are being launched in Europe, in the United States and in countries like Canada that try to treat a variety of diseases. In the first one are blood disorders. One is known as beta thalassemia. That first patient was treated there in Germany recently. And then there's - another trial is going to be starting soon in this country to try to use CRISPR to treat sickle cell disease. So it's a lot happening right now with CRISPR and diseases.

And it sounds like it's still early days.


Yeah. So you know, scientists know how to read the genetic code. What they want to do now is what they call write the genetic code, write DNA. And what that means is they essentially want to assemble or manufacture genomes from the chemical building blocks it's made of for all kinds of living organisms, including, as you said, people. And they want to be able do it in their labs quickly, efficiently and cheaply so it becomes something really practical and easy to do.

Well, I guess the question is - why do they want to do this?But also, it sounds like almost acting like creators themselves. I mean, are they acting as - can they create something completely new?

Yeah, well that's it. They actually - that's what they want to do. They basically want to harness the power of biology to solve some of the biggest problems that faces humanity right now. It's a field of science known as synthetic biology. And basically, what they want to do is they want to be able to build genetic codes, sort of like the way computer programs program computers. They want to be able to write DNA, rewrite it - to be able to make organisms, living things, do whatever they want it to do.

OK. This does sound controversial. Tell us why.


Yeah. You know what I mean?It's difficult, especially when sisters - and often in the conversation it is said that, you know, you hear a lot about black women being narcissistic or black women being gold diggers. And when you talk to young brothers, they say that a lot. That conversation comes up. That happens. And then when you talk to black women who are accomplished, they're saying, I can't find a brother. I date outside my race because I can't find a brother willing to deal with me on my level. And everybody starts to become a little bit accusatory. You know, sisters are gold diggers, that's why they won't go out with a guy that's not a doctor as well. And you know, brothers are, you know. . .

Right.

Have too many options.

Well, Judge Toler, you know what?This could go on for a lot longer, but we have to break off. I think we're going to have to pick this up. What do you think?


You know, we like to be considered a young couple.

We are a young couple.

But I don't know about role model and the word role model, but I like the word responsibility. And Gina and I do feel a tremendous amount of responsibility in terms of the images we project, and the fact that, hopefully - you know, we get letters all the time, and I think one of the nicest letters we received was from one of our fans that watched the show that said, you know, you gals have really enhanced my marriage. Me and my husband, we get in the kitchen, we cook, and we spend time together. And it's those types of testimonies that really motivate Gina and I, and make us feel real good about what we're doing.

All right. Now, I want you to make my taste buds jump. I am not in front of any of your food, but I want you to describe this dish that sounds so intriguing, barbequed spaghetti. What does that taste like?


(Through interpreter) I'm worried because he doesn't want to go to school. And immigration might say I don't send him to school. So I try and convince him by telling him I'm going to buy him a "Peppa Pig" backpack. But he doesn't want to go. So I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't think I'm going to be able to get him to go to school this year, but maybe next year.

Well, he's 3. I'd say it's important to be with his mother.

(Through interpreter) Yes. I have him coddled. I'm taking care of him, so he forgets the moment he was taken away. The worst part about that is that he was taken while he was sleeping. He was sleeping along the way. So he woke up without me.

I'm sorry. They took your child while he was sleeping?

(Through interpreter) Yes. He was sleeping when they came for more kids. The other kids were older, so they stayed awake. But he's younger, so he was sleeping. And I was holding him while he was sleeping for a while. But when they took him away, he was still asleep. So he woke up without me.

So when he went to sleep he was - I'm having a difficult time with this. When he went to sleep, he was in his mother's arms. And when he woke up, he thought his mother had given him up.


For my country right now, I hope for the best. I really, really hope and I wish that this could have a solution that didn't include war. But honestly, after all these years, I'm really, really scared, really, really sad. But I think that it's the only way.

(Singing in foreign language).

If the military intervention happens, I hope that then - no innocents die in the process.

That was Venezuelan musician Lolita De Sola.


So instead, we inquired more. Where did you hear this?Where did you see this?Can you show me that?And when they showed us, I - the first thing we tried to do was say, I get why this seems funny on the surface, and I totally get why it's confusing. And they were also younger at the time, so they were probably a little more open than a kid would be at 16 or 17.

Well, you anticipate one of my questions as you talk about as youngsters age. I mean, don't teens manage to find a way to evade the best parental advice in any case?

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, what I hoped that we were able to build with our kids from when they were young is a foundation where they believe that when we say something is not great, maybe they disobey, but deep inside there's a little voice that's going to say to them, you know, I should question this. I should question why this seems so, you know, funny and, yet, I feel like I have to keep it a secret. But, you know, we have had parental filters on our computers and on our media. As the kids got older, we realized pretty much every kid can evade any filter.

What about the girls in your sons' classes?


Oh, yeah. Everyone - everybody is family, and the tribe itself is very into, like, community dinners and community events and just kind of making sure that everybody is involved with stuff, so it was like one big, huge family.

(Singing) And I wake up. I love you, screaming loudly, screaming softly, too.

Katherine Paul now lives in Portland, Ore. , and she just released her second album as Black Belt Eagle Scout. It's called "At The Party With My Brown Friends," and she told me that a lot of the music on the album has its origins in the music she heard on the reservation.

I guess I was just always surrounded by it. My family had a drum group called The Skagit Valley Singers, and we would host powwows. And I think for me, music is just a way of life. It's how we express ourselves. It's how we express our spirituality and how we live our culture.


Their arteries expand. They become these little reservoirs of fresh blood, so that even if the arteries get pinched off, they have access to oxygenated blood while their heads are turned. And they, of course, they need this. They have huge, you know, brains and eyes.

Right. Right. Yeah. So it's a great video. If you want to know how an owl does this, we have the whole thing right there. It's our Video Pick of the Week up there on our website at sciencefriday. com. Also it's up there on YouTube in our SCIENCE FRIDAY YouTube channel. You could watch it there.

Absolutely. Go to YouTube or SCIENCE FRIDAY or download our video podcast and you can take SCIENCE FRIDAY videos on the go.

There you go. And it's made by Flora Lichtman, who is now our correspondent and managing editor for video. Congratulations on your appointment.


Justice Alito wrote a dissent that was more tailored to - the federal immigration law does have a passage that says states may cooperate in the apprehension or identification of illegal immigrants, and Justice Alito said if you just read the federal law, you might have thought most of these provisions could stand. So his was a more modulated dissent.

And this also, of course, comes in the course of a national election. Any idea which side may be energized by this particular ruling?

Boy, Neal, your guess on that one is as good as mine. My impression that President Obama - several things he's done certainly would have energized the Latinos and some younger people on the immigration issue, and my impression is there's some - another bloc of voters who are very troubled by illegal immigrants.

And Lamar Smith, the congressman and head of the Judiciary Committee, has a statement basically saying this is why we need a new, stronger Congress to pass tougher immigration laws here in Washington, thanks to - these kind of decisions show we need stronger laws out of Washington.


Hurricane Dorian is pounding the Carolinas. Parts of downtown Charleston are already flooded. It has weakened since it hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm. At least 20 people are confirmed dead there, and that number is expected to rise as recovery efforts are just beginning. Parts of the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas are destroyed.

Alex Cepero stayed in the Abacos town of Marsh Harbour, thinking he could ride out the storm with his two dogs, but Hurricane Dorian destroyed his home while he was still inside of it. And I want to warn listeners that this is a wrenching story. Alex, thank you for talking with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

You're welcome.

First of all, are you OK?Were you injured or hurt during the storm?


Well, what keeps you up at night?What do you worry about?

Well, I'm worried that this process is getting chaotic. Two and a half years ago, Great Britain had a referendum, decided to leave the European Union. But it did not decide what kind of future relationship it wanted with the 27 member states.

And because this was all about free trade, you have to know that half of the trade of Great Britain is with the other 27 EU member states, and the other half is with other countries in the world, foremost among them, the U. S.  and China. We're one year and four months into the negotiation process. And here, finally, is the proposal of Great Britain - what future relations should be. That's a bit late in the process. This particular proposal should have been there on day one.

Now, at the moment, there are 3 million EU citizens living in Great Britain, and about 1. 2 million British live in EU countries. Their rights are undefined, so it's not clear what they can do. And as you get closer to the deadline, these people are really worried. And by the way, there are industries in which there are quite a few foreigners, so if you take them out all at once, you may also have a problem keeping it going.

In the Netherlands, we know we have 30,000 businesses, mostly small and medium enterprises, that export only to EU countries, Great Britain included. That means that they've never seen a Customs and Excise control officer. They will have to get used to go through Customs and Excise.


Yeah. I think what's really interesting is that when you look at the team that won four years ago, part of why they won was that they had a very strong defense. They went 540 minutes, several games without conceding a goal, whereas this U. S.  team comes into this tournament having actually conceded a lot of goals when they play good competition.

So what the U. S.  is doing right now is kind of focusing on the attack. They have a lot of really strong attacking pieces. Players like Alex Morgan can score a lot of goals. So I think that's kind of their game plan is just outscore their opponents even if they end up conceding some goals this time around.

And we mentioned that they're battling on a number of fronts, not just on the pitch, that this lawsuit against U. S.  Soccer was filed three months ago. Can you tell us a little bit more about the underlying complaint?What is it that the players are alleging?

Yeah. So the players have filed a lawsuit alleging institutionalised gender discrimination. And there are sort of two pieces to it. The easiest piece to understand is the non-compensation issues. So it's things like the women alleging that U. S.  Soccer has been flying the men's team to games on charter flights, whereas the women have had to fly on commercial flights - having the men play most of their - almost all of their games on natural grass, whereas the women have had to play a significant portion of their games on artificial turf. And players say that artificial turf is more harsh on their bodies, harder to recover from.


Right. So we're talking about the acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire going before the House Intelligence Committee tomorrow. Now, he's been on the job all of one month. And so far, his role has been to block the whistleblower complaint from going forward and reaching Congress. But there are signs that he doesn't necessarily agree with this position, that it's lawyers who've made him sort of take this position.

He's not a chatty guy. But last night, he issued a statement saying, I am committed to protecting whistleblowers and ensuring every complaint is handled appropriately. So that sort of statement came out of the blue. And then today, there was a report that he had threatened to resign if he was told to go before Congress and stonewall. He quickly responded and said. . .

You mean if the administration had blocked him from testifying before Congress.

Correct. Correct. And so he said that was not true. He said he didn't consider resigning. But it's certainly going to make for a very interesting day tomorrow to see what he says when he goes before the committee.


But you came over so young.

Yeah. I came over when I was really young. So obviously, you know, growing up in the British environment, I've absorbed a lot of their culture. You know, because it's just a natural thing. You kind of - you hang out with, you know, the local, you know, people from the U. K.  or whatever. So naturally you're going to pick up a lot of their habits and their ways, but you know, first and foremost, I always see myself as, you know, African.

And I know - well my parents never let me forget that anyway, you know, because we do - we had all the kind of culture, and just general kind of grounding, you know, installed in us at a very young age. So I've always kind of carried that with me anyway as I've progressed in life. But I always look at it as, you know, an advantage really, because I've had the privilege of experiencing, you know, my African culture in life, and, you know, I've had the opportunity of experiencing being British, and, you know, growing up in the U. K.  And now I'm, you know, experiencing kind of some of the flavors of the U. S. So I always look at it like, you know, it's a positive thing.

All right, Hilary, thanks so much.


The United Nation says it's made an agreement that will gradually release 3,000 child soldiers from an armed group in South Sudan. The children are between 11 and 17 years of age. They have spent their childhoods fighting and killing for a group called the South Sudan Democratic Army Cobra faction. Jonathan Veitch, UNICEF's South Sudan representative, says these children have been forced to do and see things that no child should ever experience. Sudan has a long history of civil war and using children for war. Only a few of the thousands of children who get captured and dragged into the conflict manage to escape. Emmanuel Jal did. He's now an actor and musician in Toronto, who had a role in last year's film "The Good Lie. "He was 8 years old when he became a child soldier.

Most of us have seen our homes burned down, have seen terrible things happen. So, I mean, I witness one of my aunt raped in our home area. And witnessing and seeing my home village burned down and then when we're told that I'm going to be given skills and a gun to fight the people who did that to my homeland, there was not much for me to be convinced.

What was life for you like as a child soldier?

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


And now it's letter time. Our editor Sasa Woodruff is here with me. Hey, Sasa.

Hey Farai, how's it going?

I am great. So, what are listeners filling our inbox with this week?

We got a few letters about the interview you did with Rick Warren this week. Celine Welch(ph) in Fort Worth, Texas, wrote into say she was a fan of the show, but not of the interview you did with the influential pastor.


Are they willing to let people die over that principle?

Oh, no. No, you don't - but to who - and that's such an interesting - I love that you got right to the college dorm part of the argument, you know - are you going to let people die?No one's going to let people die. You know, there's talk about - oh, my gosh, the Trump budget cuts Meals on Wheels. Meals on Wheels gets 3 percent of its funding, approximately, from government sources. Ninety-seven percent is people want to take care of their neighbors.

I. . .

People are not going to let their neighbors die.


Yesterday, we reported on the U. N.  Security Council meeting that took place on Friday. The topic was Kashmir. It seems like there was not really a consensus on how to move forward on this issue. Did you have a sense of how the residents of Kashmir would like - what role they would like the international community to play in this conflict, if any?

I think that a majority of Kashmiris are really, really tired of the violence. Many, many years ago, there had been a lot of hopes on Pakistan. But I think that hope is gone. Once the ban on communication is lifted, when Internet is restored, many are expecting to see a few - at least a few clashes between protesters and Indian security forces in Kashmir.

That's journalist Rahul Pandita. He was kind of to join us from Delhi.

Rahul, thank you so much for speaking with us about your reporting.


You know, it hurts them both because many of the voters just don't understand how this can be happening. They know the president wants it. They know the Senate majority wants it or says it wants it. But the Senate just can't muster even half its votes to do it, and they can't bring all the Republicans to bear on it. So something is not right. Either the mojo of the president isn't working or the mechanism of the Senate is not working, and to some degree, both are true.

Is there any reason why Democrats now might want to sign on to any kind of bipartisan health care effort when their own plan has been saved?

Yes, absolutely. The Democrats need to go forward with some kind of bipartisan solution because there are many real problems with the execution and the administration of Obamacare. Now, Patty Murray, the senator from Washington state, has been working with Tennessee's Lamar Alexander in the Senate. And he's a Republican. He's the chairman of one of the committees that's relevant here.

And, of course, a lot of the Democrats are aware of these shortfalls. And there are counties with only one insurance company and counties where it's not clear there are going to be any insurance companies. And some of that's been overblown, but there are real problems. And, of course, any bill, any large program, any law needs to be revisited and amended, and the parties need to get together to do that.


It's a common misconception that there is some sort of missing server from the DNC hack, but it's not true. The hack involved 140 cloud-based servers, and they were all decommissioned in 2016. There was no single server that was, you know, stolen in the dead of night and smuggled to the Ukraine or something. This was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the technology involved and the firm involved. And trying to make sense of it is almost impossible because it's not really a logical idea.

What's remarkable about the president referring to the DNC hack of 2016 and a 2019 call to a foreign leader?

I think it just goes to show you how much he, like the rest of us, is stuck in this social media feedback loop that started with that election.

What do you mean by that?


Duane, why don't you describe to us some of the work that you did with actual cases when you were at the California Department of Justice?I mean, what was your job, literally and physically?

Literally, I went to the scene of the crime. I was often the one who collected all the evidence. I also did photography of the crime scene. I did not do fingerprints. There was usually a technician who did that. Back at the laboratory, I would take all that evidence that I collected and inventoried, and I would begin a systematic investigation of that.

As an example, one case in the middle of my career was a triple homicide, and it was a great case from the physical-evidence standpoint. There was bullets. There was blood. There was saliva on cigarette butts. There was hair. There was soil. And I got to basically do it all. And what was really interesting is I presented all these evidence to the jury, laid out a scenario for the crime.

And during the time I was testifying, the defendant called his girlfriend and confessed the crime to her, and then threatened her with death if she ever talked. Well, five minutes later, she called the DA and told the DA about the confession. And she came in to testify at that point, and what she testified to was basically what I had testified to from the physical-evidence standpoint.


There's lots of things, one that says who you are speak so loudly I can't hear what you say. Or St.  Thomas Aquinas who said everywhere you go preach the gospel, but only sometimes use words. Or even Ghandi who said be the change you want to see in the world. I just want to live my values the best that I can, and if I want to be a leader I want to lead more by example than just my words. So our biggest issue is public safety so I'm very lucky to have some great detectives who are with me all the time, and you know they are going to be with me, and they are cops, let me take them out with me in the middle of the night into our streets where the residents, I think, want me to be.

Well, Mayor Booker so glad you could talk again. Thank you.

Thank you so much, all the best.

That was Cory Booker, elected Mayor of Newark, New Jersey in 2006.


An impression, that's an interesting question there. And certainly, you talked about that room I was in, it was certainly interesting for me to be standing in there quite literally in the middle of this room surrounded by all these heads of state from around Africa. But I quite literally - I mean, the journalist in you kicks in - I'm there certainly covering it, but it kicks in and I made a beeline, I absolutely did, when I laid eyes on him. I went right over to him and certainly was curious to get an impression of him. But as soon as he determined and as soon as he understood who I was and what I was probably going to be asking him, his whole demeanor kind of changed.

He was there - and certainly, the Leo Sullivan Foundation and the Sullivan Summit is something you - it's not supposed to necessarily be political. And a lot of these heads of state agree to participate because - they are, they're looking for the betterment of that particular country that they're in. And it's all really something we're all supposed to get together and celebrate and try to help, and not supposed to really be a political undertone to any of it. So, I wasn't trying to create that, but still the journalist in me wanted to ask him some questions about what has been happening in Sudan, and certainly the Darfur region. But I never got that opportunity.

Sounds like he shut it down a little bit.

He shut it down like you wouldn't believe.


I am honored to be the district attorney of Brooklyn. But with respect to wrongful conviction cases, I have inherited a mess. I am currently investigating over 100 claims of wrongful convictions. Those numbers are staggering. And that's why I created the conviction review unit, and was able to convince a very prominent, well-respected law professor, Ron Sullivan, who's a law professor at Harvard Law School, to come down to Brooklyn and run my unit.

How do you go to the family of a victim of the original crime and tell them that the person or persons they thought killed their loved one didn't?

That was the hardest thing I had to do to. To sit down with the Blenner family and to let them know that the two defendants whom they believed for 29 years were responsible for the abduction, robbery and murder of their son and brother were wrongfully convicted was extremely difficult. And I pledged to them that I would do all I could to pursue the leads that we do have because we have leads to try to hold the people who killed him responsible.

How does a conviction review unit go about the business of looking at so many cases?


I got a glance over the weekend, and the sky was beautifully blue. I mean, really, it was wonderful. And the air pollution index for that day was exceedingly low. Also, it was like 17. That's lowest since I've been keeping track.

This, I think, has to do with changes in weather patterns that appeared to start somewhere in the first week of August. The arrival of rainfall and winds from the northeast and form the northwest, which would bring in cleaner air, and in particular lack of strong winds from the south that would bring up the heavy levels of pollution.

Yet, you've said earlier that the air pollution in Beijing mostly blows in from elsewhere. So these steps that the city officials have taken in recent months with changing traffic patterns and closing factories, really, that's not a factor here?

Well, you know, I've been looking at the day they very carefully tried to decide what is really going on this summer. We know that the controls did something. It's just that I, at least, am unable to pick out their effects in the data so far.


When we lose sight of the importance of our Constitution and upholding our systems of justice, then we slide a little bit - not to sound dramatic, but we slide a little closer to anarchy. We in the criminal justice field have a moral, ethical and legal responsibility to uphold our systems of justice. And that's for the victims. I frankly don't really care about Jeffrey Epstein. But I care about our systems of justice, and these kinds of things just can't happen.

That's Cameron Lindsay. He's a former warden at three federal facilities, and he's been in top leadership posts and numerous others.

Mr.  Lindsay, thanks so much for talking to us today.

Thank you very much, ma'am.


Well, it's a really interesting response. I mean, she didn't say that she didn't do it. She claimed someone had been hacking her Instagram account, but she was very upset, that she was pregnant and she was seeking legal advice.

Give me a little bit of a sense of how big a story this is in Britain today.

It's the story that everybody needs right now, and it appears that people just can't or won't think of anything else. You've got some of the most serious political journalists in the country joking that maybe we could get Coleen Rooney into No. 10 where the prime minister lives in order to work out who's leaking the Brexit stories that are dominating the front-page headlines. But, honestly, it's just been the respite we've all been hoping for. It's been pouring with rain and sort of doom and gloom in the headlines, and sometimes you just need a little bit of cheer. That's the tea from here.

That is Elizabeth Paton, European style reporter for The New York Times based in London. Elizabeth Paton, thank you.


In the book, you describe what could be seen as a very mundane moment. Stax's owner, Jim Stewart, seated at a small desk in a small office. And across from him at the same desk is a man named Al Bell. I'd like you to read just a little bit for us.

(Reading) Jim was white. Al was black. Jim owns Stax Records. Al was joining the staff to promote the records - get them played, get them sold. It was 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee, the heart of the American South. Throughout this wide region, race mixing was nothing short of an assault on the social realm. Inside Stax Records, whites and blacks had worked side by side for half a decade. People who couldn't publicly dine together were making beautiful music that the public - black and white - loved to hear.

There was a core group that became kind of a house band.

Booker T and the MGs.


Look. The president attaches himself personally to stories. In terms of numbers, he touts a lot of numbers there. We tend to forget that even under Obama, three American hostages were returned from North Korea. Hostages from Iran returned. There were a lot of them. Except that never before had the president personalized it.

That's Mickey Bergman, vice president of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement. He was kind enough to join us here in our studios in Washington, D. C.

Mr.  Bergman, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much.


Oh yes.

I just wonder if you have any thoughts about that, seeing the kind of presence of film versus what digital does nowadays.

We were shooting slides, chromes. So, it's easier to do these things, but you still need the eye, you need the reflexes, you really have to have a compositional sense. So, the expression is everyone is a photographer. Well, it does take a professional. I have to admit.

Michael Philip Manheim, the photographer, joining us from member station WBUR in Boston. Thanks so much for being with us.


Well, he risks alienating immigration hard-liners. But that's not necessarily the same category as Republicans. Immigration restrictionists have been some of Donald Trump's strongest supporters, whether you're talking about breitbart. com or Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham.

But some in that same sort of populist conservative media base - some Fox News figures, Rush Limbaugh - have actually been supportive. And many Republicans in Congress support this policy. Immigration is a very tricky issue. There's a reason that the last two presidents, Republican and Democrat, have tried very hard to reform the immigration system and failed.

However, you know, the irony is you have the House speaker, Paul Ryan, for example, coming out and saying, well, this isn't up to the president. This is up to Congress. And they're sort of irked that they've been left out, the congressional Republican leadership. But the irony is this is a thing they want to do. They do want to protect the DREAMers. And they do want to, even the Republicans, many of them - want to pass some kind of immigration reform.

I want to ask you a quick question. Before we move on, Hillary Clinton is on book tour. I like what I've read of the book. It's not a on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-one-hand-that kind of memoir. Are there political repercussions from anything that she said?


Good morning, Renee.

First, that citizenship question. In just a matter of days, it's been on, it's been off. Now the president says he wants it on again. What's going on there?

The Supreme Court said last month, you could have it but only with good justification. And the Supreme Court has ruled before that the census is supposed to count everyone and not just citizens, as it has always. Then, the president said yesterday he had four or five ways that he could get this question back on. But executive orders, which were one of the ways he mentioned, do not supersede court orders. So the president is still going to have to have something that pleases the court.

And yesterday, a federal judge in Maryland ordered further discovery in this case, meaning people from Commerce and the Justice Department are going to have to answer questions about this question, where it came from. And yesterday, in court, the lawyers for the administration admitted that, at this point, they don't know what to say.

The president has also been tweeting about another big story, the conditions at Border Patrol detention centers. Yesterday, he said many of the migrants held there were - and I'm quoting - "living far better now than they were where they came from and in safer conditions. "I mean, that's not what a report from the Department of Homeland Security's own Office of the Inspector General said this week. It - that report warned about dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention without proper food or hygiene or laundry facilities - very big difference.


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

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

So I think the Department of Education is now aware of it. The state financial aid folks are aware of it. The universities are on alert now. I think they will be looking closely at financial aid applications from students who mark that they are in a legal guardianship. But keep in mind, there are students that really are in that situation. So you don't want there to be so many restrictions that it becomes harder for those students to get the aid.

That's Jodi Cohen, reporter at ProPublica.


Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

And we should explain your district is one of the ones affected by the flooding.

It absolutely is. We know it's not good but the city rallies around itself and does what it needs to do.

Let me ask you about the recall, senator. What do you think happened?


I did not detect that in Putin's three-hour press conference. I did not see him saying we need to open up a second front in our confrontation with the West. I actually saw hints of him looking for a deal, hints of him wanting to be more conciliatory vis-a-vis the West. And so I didn't detect that, you know, we're in the corner and we're going to lash out. It was more conciliatory for Putin. I want to emphasize that.

Yeah. At some level, is this what American policy wanted?

At the beginning of the Obama administration - when I joined the government - this is exactly what we didn't want. We wanted a cooperative relation with the Russians that would be good for the United States, good for Russia.

So do Russians of means put all their money into London townhouses now?


Seems that this year, more Americans are making their electoral preferences known from the hereafter. Katie Falzone is vice president for operations at Legacy. com. They host obituaries for newspapers and funeral homes. She joins us now from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago, where, of course, deceased Americans can always vote. Thanks very much for being with us, Ms.  Falzone.

Thank you, Scott.

So has this really stepped up this election year.

It definitely has. I recently pulled some numbers from our site and found, you know, over the course of the past few election cycles, we've seen a huge increase. So the first year I looked at was comparing June to June numbers for the 2003-2004. We only had five references to political candidates in obituaries. This year, 119.


Yeah, kicking out all the intelligence officers, which we believe. . .

. . . And shutting their consulates.

(Unintelligible) their consulates, and we got rid of most of them. And we've seen a significant reduction in their intelligence collection here in the U. S. So the consulates were home base for that, and I think for the first time. . .

Not to get hung up on the numbers, but. . .


They have been evacuated. It tossed these trailer homes like tin cans. And there was one woman that said that she had turned in early and felt her bed bouncing. And she was evacuated and is staying elsewhere now.

The flooding - this is not restricted to just this small part of the state. This is the whole state of Oklahoma that's going through this. Is that right?

Yeah, 25% of the state has had at least 14 inches of water in the last 30 days. And if you look at towns in northeast Oklahoma like Skiatook - they've had 21 1/2 inches, Nowata 23 inches. It's just crazy. And this is all coming to a head in Tulsa along the Arkansas River.

And what exactly is happening in Tulsa?


Being an African-American police officer is one of the most difficult things that you'll do because there are African-American police officers all around this country and in this city who I talk to on a daily bases that, even before recent history, believe that there were issues between police officers and young black men. And one of the things that I think creates the problem - I've heard the word utilized a lot in describing the relationship - is that African-American men and particularly young men - say late teens to early-to-mid-30s - are - the word used is demonized.

And there are black officers that you talk to on a daily basis who will tell you that it's tough. I see this, and I still have to be accepted. I still have to be a part of the police culture, living in two worlds.

But I'll say that if you're a black police officer in America, there are some difficulties simply because you know that your race and gender has been on the receiving end of some very serious and questionable uses of force, whether they be deadly or just plain force used to make an arrest. So it is seen as something that - a burden that we carry as African-American men who also work in police profession.

Lieutenant Thomas Glover is president of the Black Police Association of Greater Dallas. Lieutenant Glover, thank you very much.


What Bonnie Raitt song, may I ask?

O'NEILL: "I Can't Make You Love Me. "

(Singing) Here in the dark, in these final hours, I will lay down my heart and I'll feel the power. . .

Kate O'Neill, who wrote about her sister, Maddie Linsenmeir in the Vermont Weekly Seven Days, thank you so much for being with us.


I do. Did you have to do a lot of reporting?

I did a lot of research. Of course, I'd - as I said, I went to see the monarchs and what that looks like. But I also did a lot of scientific research. I did - I read pretty much everything there is to be read about monarch butterfly migration, monarch parasites, monarch science. I've got all those journals on my desk in giant piles.

And I also - I sought out and gained the friendship of a very great scientist, Dr.  Lincoln Brower, who knows more about monarchs than anyone on the planet. And Dr.  Brower and his wife Dr.  Linda Fink were very helpful to me. You can imagine when I went to them to talk about this idea that I have some trepidation to go to a scientist and say, well, OK. I know that the species that you know everything about have never done this, but what if it did?You know, I didn't know if they. . .

Yeah. I can imagine.


I was going to ask you about that. The Senate has changed hands, but they have a few weeks. Sometimes the president does get lame-duck nominations.

It's possible. The White House is telling me they're not going to push or jam her through. They think Loretta Lynch is so noncontroversial that there is a chance the Senate will take her up in the next few weeks before the Christmas holiday. But more likely, they could start the process with Democrats in control. Pat Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee now, a Democrat from Vermont, could start the process. And then the nomination would continue into the new Congress. That's what happened with the John Ashcroft nomination to lead the Justice Department in the Bush years.

Well, now, as we note, she's not the first woman to head the Justice Department. That was Janet Reno in the Clinton Administration. Is she going to be the same kind of figure that Janet Reno was?Janet Reno was very separate from President Clinton, unlike most attorneys general.

Well, this is an important point, Linda, because the White House says she's going to be apolitical and independent. The current attorney general, Eric Holder, who's vowed to stay on until Lynch is confirmed as his successor, has really been a political lightning rod. And Lynch is more going to a steward.


So Beijing has basically made an offer to the people of Hong Kong that if they're willing to give up on dreams of greater democracy, they can be part of China's amazing economic rise, and they have offered them more integration with the kind of boom cities on the other side of the border in the mainland. The problem is that again and again and very dramatically over this extradition bill, the people of Hong Kong have said, no. They do not want that trade off. They actually are willing to protest and fight hard to maintain those freedoms that they still have.

So it's not even as though these protesters in Hong Kong are fighting for additional freedom. They're just saying we want to keep things the way they are. We don't want to see an erosion of the freedoms we do have.

That's right. I think it's important to be realistic. I mean, this has been an absolutely extraordinary - at times, very moving - protest by over a million people - overwhelmingly peaceful, very civic-minded, lots of different generations coming together. That's a fantastic thing and utterly unthinkable where I'm sitting in Beijing on the mainland - could never happen. But they are not about to get more democracy. They're not even about to get more freedoms. This is a defensive set of protests to keep what they have.

Interesting that you point out this would be very, very unlikely to happen in China. It makes me wonder, do the protests in Hong Kong pose any threat to China's leadership, to President Xi Jinping, to the Chinese Communist Party?Are they worried about this?


He was not playing with you, huh?

He was not playing with me. I wasn't playing with him either. I love him so much. He is such a beautiful spirit. He actually - he's writing what I've been saying in all my life. But he has - all songwriters have a different twist, and I like Ben's. I tell you, I like it a lot.

Let me play one, the first track on the album. It's called "Change. "

(Singing) Finger's on the trigger around here. Finger's on the trigger around here. Bullets flying, mothers crying. We've got to change around here. Get it straight. Be sure that you hear. Thing's going to change around here.

It seems like you had a good time with this song.


Well, on our blog, Dan Jones wrote, I was glad to be a witness to history being made, even if it was slightly marred by Hillary Clinton's refusal to read the writing on the wall and get out of the race. And Glenda Fraser wrote, it was America's moment, period. The big Obama story on our blog up to this point was his decision to leave his church, the United Church of Christ in Chicago. And on that, there was no consensus among our readers.

Now, we also started a new online series featuring submissions from our political contributors. So what's that?

It's called Political Positions, and each week, one of our regular political contributors weighs in with their take on the week's news. We started with a piece from Mark Sawyer about John McCain's stance on relations with Cuba, followed that with an open letter to Barack Obama written by Ron Walters about how to handle the white working-class vote, and now, we have a piece from James L.  Taylor parsing the support among black and white voters for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So some interesting perspectives that people should take time out to read.

Of course, Ron was just on our air.


That question is, what is the most disloyal dog breed?

I have some issues with the premise of that one, but let's get to your answer, first of all.

Well, this question is going to have to remain unanswered to a certain extent. No one really knows. And the problem is there are plenty of researchers out there who are studying the personalities of dogs, but none of them evaluate any kind of personality trait called loyalty, or anything like that.

It's a bit subjective.


But not far behind is the idea which really threatens the foreign service that has served this country pretty well over the years - that senior diplomats should be part of that political agenda. And if they don't, they have to get out of the way. Their careers will be curtailed. And a lot of these people, you know, are now serving at research institutes and universities around town because they are not being used. And that, therefore, is the message that it looks like they are sending.

So play ball or get out.

Play ball or get out. And then to find out on top of that the president is willing to disparage you and threaten, you know, things that might be coming your way; and on top of that, it now appears that the secretary of state was listening in on that call and, rather than defending his people, said nothing and did nothing and pretended like nothing happened and looked like he's part of it. And, you know, it takes a long time to build up an organization like this, but it can be destroyed very quickly. And I'm afraid that that's the direction in which we're going.

Philip Gordon, thank you so much for sharing your perspective.


So essentially, it's because we've designed the car around a typical male body. So the most commonly used car crash test dummy is based on the fiftieth percentile male, and that is too tall and too heavy. It doesn't account for things like the differences between male and female pelvises. Women often don't sit in what's called the standard seating position. They have to sit much further forward in order for their legs to be able to reach the pedals. And we haven't developed a seatbelt to account for pregnancy. So there were basically just all these ways that we have designed a car to ignore female bodies.

This isn't a conspiracy. This isn't people wanting women to die. No one wants their mum to get into a car and be in much more danger than they are. So the only way I think you can really explain it is this incredibly pervasive cultural bias that we just don't realize that we're forgetting women. We just don't notice it.

One of the things that I found interesting in your book, among many, is that obviously, data in the modern world is so important. We have quantum computers shaping all sorts of things in our life. But if the data is faulty that is being fed into these computers, then it could have an enormous impact on the algorithms that deal with so many things.

Yeah. I mean, that is a huge concern. You know, I have no confidence that the tech community really has a handle on how male-biased the data is upon which they are training their supposedly objective algorithms.


. . . the French press is hard to nail because there's. . .

Yeah.

. . . so many variables that are outside of your control.

Right. Right. And it's our Video Pick of the Week up there on our website, and it's beautiful animation.


Diddley was also known for his signature rectangular guitar. Over his lifetime, he was honored with many, many awards. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 20th on their list of 100 most influential artists of all time.

He was admitted to the hospital last May with a stroke and had a heart attack last August. He died today of heart failure at age 79 in his home in Archer, Florida.

(Singing) Now I'm a man, Made 21, You know, baby We can have a lot of fun. I'm a man.

That's our show for today. Thank you for sharing your time with us. To listen to the show or subscribe to our podcast, visit our website, nprnewsandnotes. org. To join the conversation or sign up for our newsletter, visit our blog at nprnewsandviews. org. News & Notes was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.


Hi.

Why are these talks in Norway so significant?

Well, for a long time, Juan Guaido has been saying that he's not interested in talking to Maduro. He doesn't recognize Maduro as Venezuela's legitimate president, arguing that the election that returned Maduro to a second term last year was a fraud.

So he's been concentrating on his campaign to oust Maduro. Step by step, you know, he unified the opposition. He mobilized sometimes huge crowds. He secured that recognition internationally. And the U. S.  backed him up with sanctions that have been really - have really hit the Maduro government hard.


Well, I think it's been a historical thing. It's not a new thing. Mental illness has always been a mystery. And in ancient times, it was considered to be some kind of supernatural phenomenon, demon possession. In the modern era, meaning the beginning of the 19th century, there was an effort to consider mental disorders as illnesses. But then when researchers attempted to see what the pathology of the illness was in individuals who, when they were living, were ill - when it came to mental illnesses, they couldn't find anything. And I think then what happened is that in the desperation of psychiatrists who, by and large, were the custodians of asylums - as an alternative, people sought treatments, but the treatments turned out to be in retrospect pretty barbaric. And it's only really been in the last 50 years that psychiatry has established a scientific foundation for itself and developed treatments that truly work beyond a shadow of a doubt and are safe. But the lulled attitudes still persists.

Yeah. No name is bigger still, in a way, than Sigmund Freud. What did he get right, and what do we now know was not as helpful?

Well, Freud is undisputedly a towering figure and the most famous person in the history of psychiatry. And in the absence of any scientific theory of mental illness, he introduced concepts that were completely novel to civilization and endure today as valid and have really been given new life in the context of cognitive neuroscience.

What did he get wrong?


Yes, it's a primate. It's actually one of the largest monkey species there are. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Rafiki from the movie "Lion King?"Rafiki is a mandrill. They have extremely colorful noses and rumps, and like I said, they're one of the largest monkey species.

Do the animals get something special to eat considering it's Thanksgiving?

Keepers that are responsible for the day-to-day care of the animals do make some special treats for the animals. For example, our gorillas, on a daily basis, they get sweet potatoes, and on Thanksgiving, they may add some nutmeg or cinnamon to the sweet potatoes to make it kind of reminiscent of being home with family on the holidays.

Barb Webber is working today at Disney's Animal Kingdom. Happy Thanksgiving, Barb, to you and your animal friends.


Right. So there are a number of animal indicators that people look at when trying to predict winter weather, and those mostly fall in the category of folklore. In other words, there aren't any studies which demonstrate any true relationship between animal behavior or, for example, acorn/squirrel behavior prior to winter and how harsh a winter it's going to be. One of the favorites is the wooly caterpillar. And there are those who say the brown segment in the middle of that caterpillar, if it's wide, it's going to be warm. If it's narrow, it's going to be cold. And that's a long-standing folklore, but there's really no established scientific literature which validates those sorts of predictions.

Myth busted here on SCIENCE FRIDAY. Thanks for joining us today, Jason Samenow.

You bet. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Jason Samenow is the chief meteorologist for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post.


Now, how does Ukraine come in?

It's very confusing, but let's see what I can do here. So on the Internet, things move really fast. It's like a huge game of telephone. So once this firm caught the attention of the far-right online, they discovered that it was owned by a Russian American man who had previously done some work for a think tank called the Atlantic Council. It's a D. C. -based think tank, sort of works alongside NATO. And it's a pretty innocuous place. It does research on misinformation and digital warfare, things like that.

And there's a Ukrainian oligarch who was on one of the advisory boards for the Atlantic Council. And it seems somewhere along the line, the Ukrainian oligarch became the owner of CrowdStrike. This is not true, of course. But when things are moving so fast online, facts start to combine together, and it becomes very confusing.

So the idea is people who are on the far-right, conspiracy theorists, went looking for a connection, went looking to say, who are these CrowdStrike guys?And once they do enough looking, they're able to find a Ukrainian oligarch who they say, aha, this is the connection. So what about this server that the president implied was somehow in Ukraine?I mean, he - on this call talked to Ukraine's leader and brought up CrowdStrike. What would he be looking for?


It could be. But there is nowhere for the new justices, the Trump justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, to hide. They're going to have to say more than they said at their confirmation hearings, and that's why it's critical. And it is likely that both of them differ from the swing justice of the last 15 years, Anthony Kennedy.

So DACA is another controversial issue. In November, the court's also going to consider whether President Trump can end the DACA program that shields immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. It's my understanding that the court isn't going to rule on whether the law itself is legal. So what's the issue here?

The issue is executive power. The issue is to what extent the Trump administration could reverse the executive action taken by Barack Obama and whether the Trump administration followed the correct procedures. So it will be read by the public as a key ruling on a Trump policy. And therefore, it's important.

And so finally, let's turn our focus to the coming week. The court is going to hear three cases related to workplace discrimination on Tuesday. And basically, the question for the court is whether the Civil Rights Act applies to gay and transgender people in the workplace. Is that the crux of the issue?

Correct. And it's a question of statutory construction - whether Title VII, passed decades ago by Congress to apply to discrimination based on sex, should also be read to apply to sexual orientation. This is the first time several of these justices are going to weigh in on gay rights.


Many of the smartest people in the world, the most engaged people in the world are also linguistically colorful, and sometimes you have to. . . .

Backtrack a bit. On that note, have you called the senator or spoken with the senator since. . . ?

I spoke with his staff. Our friendship remains intact and I do not want anything that was said in any guise to distract from his message and our support for his campaign.

Now during the '84 campaign you called New York "Hymietown" while speaking with a black Washington Post reporter, and you got a lot of heat for that. So, this I understand occurred when you spoke when you thought a mike was closed. So what have you learned about interacting with us in the media from all this stuff?


Confrontation between the two sides is always a risk. And there has been military confrontation between the United States and the Islamic Republic since the conception of the Islamic Republic, whether it was takeover of the American embassy, whether it was the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and, most recently, of course in terms of targeting American military personnel in Iraq. So that's the reality of the situation - that United States and Iran have always coexisted in a measure of a low-intensity conflict. However, both sides have always walked back from the brink in terms of total war, and I suspect it will be that way in this case as well.

So who blinks to get the two sides to the negotiating table, given that the rhetoric has been increasing; the violence has increased over the last month?How do they get out of this cycle?

Well, they were both heading toward the negotiations, and I think for the Iranians, a certain narrative of success was being established that could have served as a prelude to negotiations. Now comes again a series of American sanctions and Iranian responses.

Both sides at some point will get to their narrative of success. Iranians will suggest that they have withstood the American pressure and, therefore, they're prepared to talk. And the president has always been willing to talk without any conditions at any time. Then the Trump administration will also suggest that their policy of maximum pressure works. So at one point, when both sides declare victory, that's usually a prelude to the talks.


Interestingly, you get 100,000 dollars worth of insurance. After that, you would either have to move - you would really have to move to a different bank. Now, there may be a provision for pension funds, and that's a little bit different. But by and large, 100,000 dollars, if it's all in the name of the same company, is your limit.

So if you're concerned about that, you might want to spread out your bank holdings a little bit. You might want to put, you know, your payroll in one bank and your savings in another bank, and that would cover - you'd then get 100,000 dollars at each institution.

Here's a question that's similar to one that I asked you in our earlier segment. It comes from Rae Ann Albus Hunt(ph), who wants to know if any bank is safe these days. She's just starting her retirement planning and wants to know where she should invest her money.

Sure. Well, the answer is is that, yeah, you know, by and large, most banks are safe, and I think you really do have to trust the government guarantee.


Yeah. The deficit - you can think about that - that's just a gap between what the government spends and what it takes in. So if you outspend your paychecks a month, you might put the difference on your credit card. The government does the same. That's the deficit. The debt is like the accumulated credit card balance, the sum of all the deficits you've run in the previous months or years.

So the bigger that balance on the government's credit card, the more the government has to pay in interest costs. And that means it's got less money available to spend on everything else we want the government to do. What's more, if the government's borrowing a whole lot of money, that potentially means there's less money available for individuals and businesses that want to borrow. And that can have the effect of curbing economic growth. Economists call that the crowding out effect.

This was a huge issue for Republicans, and they seem now to have backed off of that.

Yeah. Some of the Republicans who used to sound the alarm about rising deficits during the Obama administration seem less concerned about that now. I'm not sure if that's because they've gotten some new economic theory. It may have more to do just with who's in charge. During the recession, we saw dire warnings about debt-to-GDP ratios. Those turned out not to be true. A better question might be, you know, what are we running up the debt for?


Yeah. I think many of us were. But now to North Korea, which is slightly less joyful, as I said. We're seeing, suddenly, a list of demands from the North before this summit takes place - a halting of military exercises between South Korea and the U. S. They want the return of North Korean female restaurant workers in South Korea who the North claims were kidnapped. It seems we're having to negotiate before the negotiations.

You know, this is part of an old pattern of behavior. You know, the North Korea problem is a wicked problem, a deeply impacted, entangled problem. It's frustrated at least two American presidents - President Clinton and President George W.  Bush. And that's for a reason. And the reason is that nuclear weapons have actually been North Korea's business. They've been in the business of developing nuclear weapons, threatening the world with them and then shaking down the world for different forms of aid for them to either, you know, supposedly give up or mute or, you know, diminish their nuclear stockpile. And so it's just so hard for anyone to imagine that, having behaved that way for so many years, now they're about to give them up.

So is President Trump being played?You know, what does the Trump administration want out of the summit on June 12?

Well, you know, part of my reaction to it is - you know, Kim Jong Un, 35 years old - Donald Trump, 71 years old - alone in a room, negotiating nuclear weapons. What could go wrong?


When I got toward the end of my research, I tried to contact all the women that I had spoken with and just said, hey, would your husbands be willing to talk?The interesting thing about it was when I spoke to the women, they were all so enthusiastic and passionate. When I talked to their husbands, they were really nice, but they were so clearly disinterested in the topic. It wasn't that they didn't know that their wives are never frustrated with them. It just didn't seem particularly important to them. And I don't mean to imply that they were cold to their wives or indifferent to their wives. It just really didn't register as such a big deal.

Like a fact of life - like, this is just the way things are.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the women that I interviewed said to me, my husband sees we have an issue with this. But he considers it my problem. So he says to me, there's really nothing I can do, and it would be helpful if you weren't so bothered by this.

Wow. Let me ask you this. The amount of child care that men take on was actually rising in the 1980s and '90s. But then we did see it level off. So what happened?It seemed like we were sort of making some progress in this issue.


You bet.

OK. The rope broke in my hands.

The rope broke in my hands. I'm writing that down right now.

That's good to know I could be of some use. Dave LaBounty of "The First Line. "Thanks so much for being with us.


(Laughter) I'm not sure if that's a compliment, Steve. But thanks.

I don't know. If it means tough, if it means on top of things, it is you, Melissa. Own it.

Well, gosh. Thanks.

She's in Lyon, France. This is NPR News.


Mm-hmm. And. . .

. . . because the sound was different.

Yeah. And also, they - when they gave people different kinds of spoons, it affected what they thought about the food.

Oh, they've done all kinds of things. The spoon is actually a gigantic question, not necessarily important, but gigantic.


Well, due to the floods, some - probably some falling of the land and some mud that has been moving into the communities might be some of the situations that we might encounter there. And probably some roads that have been damaged and we will not be able to cross easily. So we expect probably some impacting in some households of those communities. So we still have to confirm that.

And when remote communities, mountainous communities, have to contend with flooding or worry about mudslides, can that interrupt, let's say, the food supply and create medical problems, too?

Absolutely, yeah, that's one of the consequences that we might face. We have been collecting some humanitarian aid in different points of Mexico, so we are ready to distribute food or even, if needed, some medicine to those communities. But at this point, we are collecting particularly food and some cleaning - personal cleaning supplies.

Mr.  Lozano, in the 30 seconds we have left, do you think the Mexican governments involved, both provincial and federal and, for that matter, your agency, were prepared for this?


Tell us a little bit about Steve Elkins.

Well, he's a filmmaker. He's an amazing person. He's one of these - he's a true adventurer. I guess he's sort of a kid who never grew up. I'm kind of like that too. I mean, I never stopped dreaming about finding lost cities and being the first one in Egyptian tombs and that sort of thing. And he's sort of like that. And he had fallen in love 20 years ago with this whole White City legend and had been trying to find a way into this valley where this JPL Scientist has been seeing something for 20 years.

And he organized an expedition. It was washed out by Hurricane Mitch. And then he heard about LIDAR, and he said, wow, this is the way to find stuff in the jungle. Instead of sliding on the ground, let's fly over this valley and see if there's anything in there. So he called me up and he said, hey, do you want to be part of this expedition?

And you, of course, agreed and ran down to Central America and ended up as, well, I guess, extra cargo in the back of a very rickety old plane.


The last 48 hours, President Guaido ordered security forces to restore constitutional order. That's what we saw. This was not a coup d'etat. This was a legitimate president recognized by the Venezuelans and by over 60 countries asking security forces to go on the right side of the Constitution.

And at this point, when you're talking about directing the security forces, do you know what proportion is still loyal to Nicolas Maduro?

This is a nationwide movement by the security forces. And the majority of security forces are with the people. Remember; these military men, lower and high-ranking, have Venezuelan families that don't have food on the table, that they can't find medicine. So they're deeply impacted by the crisis.

But if we look onscreen and see a crackdown and see people going after protesters, how should we see that?


Alan Dershowitz is a fine legal scholar. He's welcome on this show any time. But in any event, one had to make note of that. Way before Steven Spielberg and "Jaws," did - what's still called the Chappaquiddick incident in which a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, died when she was in the back of a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy, went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. Did that bring the worst kind of attention to the vineyard?

I think that that was when people first started to think about - see, the vineyard entered the world stage because of Chappaquiddick. And this kind of remote island that was a secret in many ways became not a secret. It was about three or four years later, I think, in '73, that Spielberg decided he wanted to film "Jaws. "And the vineyard came up as a setting because it was so authentic, although that word's kind of annoying these days. But it was so authentically weather-beaten and New England-y (ph).

And Spielberg had looked at some places on the West Coast, but a lot of the beaches there in the background might have a high rise. They were developed in some ways. This was an extremely undeveloped part of the world. It's tried to remain undeveloped, though now it seems as if almost every house there has a swimming pool. A friend of mine once said, and I quoted this, that "pretty soon, the island will be a donut. "

Pretty soon the island will be a donut.

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


Hello.

What's going on in your city?

Well, what's going on in my city is a similar dynamic of what's taking place in other cities across the United States right now. We've had 130 percent increase in homicides related to arguments and fights between individuals or groups unrelated to other criminal activity. They've got easy access to firearms. We've seen all of these cities have seen many more shots fired at each individual incident. Some places it's a fight over synthetic drug markets. So there are a number of variables, but they all revolve around a fairly narrow slice of these advantage communities that is very concerning.

Chief Flynn, not so long ago, you were getting credit for a low homicide rate. What changed?


Kids are natural scientists. They're natural born inquisitors. They like to find out about everything, and we just don't have a way of doing it. Maybe your math book can help do that. Have - do teachers use it at all and think about it?

We do have teachers using it. They say that they warm up the class with a math problem in the morning. We've heard all kinds of stories. There's a bus driver outside Chicago who actually puts the math problem up on a whiteboard on the bus every morning. And he has a bag of Oriental Trading prizes.

Right.

And the first kid on the bus to get it gets to pull something out of the bag. So it's really a movement that's spreading.


He hasn't always fallen right in line with Trump by any means. He hasn't always fallen right in line with Trump by any means. He's been critical of Putin over some gas projects that he's been involved in. He's been critical of Putin over some gas projects that he's been involved in. But generally, he has held the Trump line. But generally, he has held the Trump line. So I think this is going to be interesting to go in. So I think this is going to be interesting to go in. He did have that one key moment in the text chain where he came in and clearly stated this was not quid pro quo but then suggested they get offline. He did have that one key moment in the text chain where he came in and clearly stated this was not quid pro quo but then suggested they get offline. So. . . So. . .

Right. Right.

So we'll see what happens once he jumps in there. So we'll see what happens once he jumps in there.

Are people following this in Portland?Are people following this in Portland?I mean, how are they reacting?I mean, how are they reacting?


So I'm saying - it's not - that's not the - relevant. I'm saying that - people say this, that your argument is driven by concerns about being majority minority. I'm saying that decision's already made. The question for us is how do we make a success of this?And on present policy, we are in real danger of not making a success of it.

Let me give you a very, very concrete point of where we're going. So the peak decade for illegal immigration was the 1990s. Of the 45 million or so foreign-born people in the United States, about 11 million are here illegally. And most of them are probably, right now, under 45, but very soon, they're going to be reaching 65. The majority of the illegal immigrant population has been here for more than a decade. They're not going home.

So when they turn 65, what happens to them?Do they get a pension?Do they get health care?Or do we write them off?Making Americans of them is going to be a huge challenge. Otherwise, we're going to have a lot of old, sick poor people living amongst us with no agreement as to what their status is.

David Frum - his recent piece is on the cover of the April edition of The Atlantic magazine. David, thank you so much.


God bless them. God bless them both.

The next album. Yes, definitely. I'm very happy for her.

Halle Berry, I guess. Speaking of families, and, you know, issues like that, she won the best actress award at the BET Awards this week, but a lot of people are asking why aren't we seeing more of your baby?

Right.