Before the pardon, he was thinking about working through the Justice Department to help Arpaio off. And this was not because, necessarily, the merits of the case. The Washington Post reports that this was because the president saw Arpaio as an ally, a loyalist who needed to be protected.

You mentioned Congress comes back after Labor Day. Do you think Republicans go it alone and maybe pass what laws they want and then send them up to President Trump for his signature at this point?

When it comes to tax reform, Congress will take the lead. The White House is not trying to outline the details. Look for Congress to try to set where the rates are on corporations and on individuals and just try to get the president to sign it so he can maybe get a victory. That's what they've been seeking in Congress. They weren't able to get health care through. They're going to try to get a simple tax care package through.

Robert Costa is national political reporter for The Washington Post. Robert, thanks a lot.


If someone's going to walk into a synagogue, as they did in Tree of Life, and murder Jews at prayer, there's a good chance, you know, given gun violence in this country and who it's coming from in this particular moment, that that person's going to be a white supremacist. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't worry about, for example, at the University of Virginia, Jewish students being prevented from joining a minority student coalition to fight white supremacy because they were smeared themselves as white supremacists for supporting the state of Israel. I'm worried about that, too.

Are you conflating people who are opposed to Israeli policy towards Palestinians with anti-Semitism?

I'm not. I myself am deeply opposed to the occupation of the Palestinian people. I believe that they have an indigenous right and claim to the land. And I'm on the record in many columns in the Times as being very opposed to various policies of the Netanyahu government, and I was cheered by the election this past week.

What I am opposed to is an ideological movement that insists that only one nation-state in the world doesn't have the right to exist, and that that nation-state is home to the largest Jewish community on planet Earth.


To tell you the truth. On my part it was such a rarity that even I had not thought about the unassisted part of the play. I realized at the time that it was a triple play. You know, it was all three outs, but had never really thought about the unassisted part because it was such a rarity that no one ever really talked about them.

Ron, was that moment it for you in your baseball career?Is that - what could be better than that?

Well, there were some real good things that happened to me in my career. I had a fairly long career. I played in the major leagues for almost 15 years so - but I was "Rookie of the Year" in 1960 and that was. . .

That's pretty good.


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

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

I have. A smaller one in Colorado is Conundrum Hot Springs. After it became a spot for people to easily find on social media, the amount of visitorship (ph) went up really high. And since this is a very remote location where people kind of hang around for a long time in the hot springs, they ran out of places to go to the bathroom. As a result, Conundrum Hot Springs had to be shut down for a little bit while park rangers were up there with shovels to relieve that issue.

Meaning they were building bathrooms because people were just, like, basically. . .


This sounds pretty controversial and like something we want to hear about.

Yeah, it sounds really futuristic, doesn't it?

It does. It does. Let's start with the basics, though. When we say scientists want to synthesize genetic codes of living organisms - that's a big mouthful - including humans, what do we mean exactly?

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.


A controversial memo by House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes is out, and the spin is on. Most Republicans say the memo demonstrates bias and abuse at the FBI. Democrats say it's a malicious and misleading effort to undermine the investigation of the special counsel Robert Mueller. Ron Elving, senior editor and correspondent on the Washington Desk, joins us. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.

Good morning, Scott.

How do you characterize it?

Well, I'd call it a political document. It's meant to be catnip for people who want to believe that this whole business about Russian interference and collusion with elements of the Trump campaign is somehow bogus and can somehow just be made to go away. Now, the memo itself says that the FBI tried to get warrants to spy on Carter Page, who was an American citizen who advised the Trump campaign on foreign policy and that it based that bid on a dossier prepared by a British spy and paid for by Democrats.

Now, the memo leaves out a lot of facts about that dossier, but the most important thing is that the memo itself makes clear that the FBI had reasons to look at Carter Page all the way back to 2013 and other reasons to be looking at ties between Russian agents and the Trump campaign involving other people quite apart from the dossier. So the accusations of anti-Trump bias as the motive for the investigation at its very beginning are undercut by parts of the memo itself.

So more bluster than bite?


But with the war on women that we are experiencing all around us, the fear, and it's very real, is that when Roe falls, those enjoined provisions would rise like zombie laws and come into effect. So we really had to clean those out of our statutes and ensure that there's a firewall around Illinois that protects women's reproductive health here in Illinois.

The Reproductive Health Act says fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses don't have independent rights. Now, opponents of abortion rights in Illinois and elsewhere, as you know, might look at this bill and say, where do you draw the line on when a fetus counts as a person, or do you?

Courts over the years have actually spoken directly to this. Without that provision, without that distinction, there is a risk that a fetus and a woman would be cast as adversaries from the very beginning of pregnancy. And so it's important that there be those protections so that a woman can carry out a pregnancy making her own independent health decisions, whether that is carrying a pregnancy to term or not. So that was one of the pieces that I think folks had trouble understanding.

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


Thank you for having me with you.

So, let's start with what exactly they are.

Okay. Fibroids are non-cancerous tumors. They're growth of muscle within the uterine wall. And sometimes they can be the size of a dime, and because of their location, they give you severe symptoms. And rarely, they can get to be the size of a basketball before they're recognized.

That's sounds pretty horrific.

It can be. It's amazing how much difficulty they can give to women that, in general, women can have severe menstrual bleeding - the kind of bleeding that keeps you home from work or keeps you from being able to do your daily activities - or they can press on a lot body structures. And they are very common, and it's surprising that so few women know that they have fibroids and that their symptoms may be related to them.

Now, research shows that about 25 percent of women in America are going to show some symptoms of fibroids, but they occur a lot more often in black women than white women. How much more often and why do scientists think that is?


Well, Freedom Caucus has 40 votes. There are more than 200 House Republicans. Shouldn't you compromise with them?

Well, sure, and we're more than happy to. The way this will end up is that we will end up with a speaker that all of us support. It may be Paul Ryan. It may be somebody else. But keep in mind that the things that we're arguing for are things that most people in the conference want. One of the things that struck me since we started this debate I guess about two weeks ago now are the number of moderates and centrists in my party who have said to me, you know what?

We want the same thing. We're frustrated with this lack of process. We're frustrated with just being a rubberstamp for somebody else's idea. And I think that's why you're seeing such a difficult time replacing Mr.  Boehner is that this lack of satisfaction with the job, the lack of satisfaction with what it means to be a member of Congress runs much, much deeper than just the conservative wing of the party.

So the way you explain it, this isn't over conservative principles. It's over mundane House rules.


You want to cook them until you see a little red in the butter. It's changing.

Next - chopped tomatoes. Once the tomatoes get juicy, he tosses in the greens. They've already been boiled in plain water.

If you look at the greens, they're not cooked to death. I want them to have a little bit of character, so we'll add the greens.

And finally - homemade chicken stock to finish out the sauce, which I call pot liquor.

Everything is about the sauce. You create that flavor, then I can put collard greens in here. I can put any green I want 'cause the base is really, really good.


So for a couple years now, Topps has had an app - say it ain't so - for baseball card-collecting and trading cards. These are virtual cards, not the cardboard ones that come with a stick of gum. I mean, it's called a Bunt, and you've tried it out. Tell us what you think.

Oh, it does - I should point out the packs do come with a stick of gum. It's just a virtual stick of gum.

Don't try to chew that gum.

No, that's what I was (laughter) - the whole thing is basically just an exercise in using your imagination, if you're old enough that you need to imagine for this stuff. If you're 13 to 25, which is, like - 80 percent of the Bunt users are - then I don't imagine there's anything weird about a piece of virtual gum showing up on your phone, exploding and then turning into baseball cards.

Well, it's been around for a while. I mean, can Topps call Bunt a success?


Well, I've read that you just - you know, you loved tinkering with cars from the time you were a teenager.

Yeah, ever since my dad can remember. He said I must've been about 4 or 5 years old, and there was somebody in the neighborhood working on the car. I was usually standing on the bumper, under the hood and pointing at things and wondering what things were and sometimes even giving my own opinion of what I thought was going on.

So from your teens into your 40s, you become an increasingly successful auto repair entrepreneur and businessman. What makes you, in your 40s, wind up in medical school?

I really wanted to grow the business or - I didn't really know exactly which direction I wanted to go into, but I felt like I needed some foundational training in business if I were to do this correctly. So I ended up checking out some local colleges to see who had a degree program and came across Ursuline College in Pepper Pike.


So having become an overnight success after what 35, 40 years of writing poetry, you've also gotten opportunities. Tell us a little bit about "At War With Ourselves. "

Oh, my goodness. Well. . .

. . . I was sitting in my car one day, and I got a phone call from the University of Maryland. And they were - they are one of the four schools that has been chosen to celebrate the sesquicentennial end of the Civil War. And the call - the caller told me that they had already commissioned the Kronos Quartet to be a part of this celebration and that they also wanted to invite the amazing musician Terence Blanchard and Nikky Finney to be a part of whatever we were going to create to honor the end of the Civil War, and would I be interested in joining this band of beautiful musicians.

And I forgot that the windows were rolled up in the car and I, you know, the temperature went from - I don't know - 90 to 130. And I just raised my hand to the opportunity.


If that was the concern initially, I've never heard it expressed in recent years. There are now so many people who have gotten out, and their stories have been corroborated by, you know, so many of these different people who've escaped that it's, you know, North Korea is as bad as they say, and perhaps even worse.

But, you know, I would like to say that the stories are also inspiring. You hear these terrible things, and sometimes I go to sleep at night thinking about the horrible stories I'd heard about life in North Korea. But at the same time, it's very positive to think that after six decades of totalitarian repression, there are people who are still longing for freedom and have the courage to go after it.

Yet it raises the question of the many more who are still inside that hell on Earth.

Indeed. And the 24,000, 25,000 who have gotten out are a drop in the bucket when you consider there are still 25 million people enslaved in North Korea. However, the North Koreans who escape are small in number, but they have provided a huge service, two ways. One is that they've educated all of us about the reality of life in North Korea. Nobody can say today that we didn't know. We now know about the gulag. We know about the way the government uses food as a political tool. We know all of this.


Then we got a letter yesterday about the discussion we had about multi-racial identities in America. Charles Johnson in Cary, North Carolina gave us this perspective: At some point in talking about racial identity, when do we mention that all people, according to the latest research, we are all Africans, whether you call yourself European, Asian, et cetera. The research shows we all have a common African gene.

And finally, we got a few letters about a segment we did last week called Race and Privilege in an Age of Obama. Paul Gustman(ph) in Miami, Florida wrote us this: Your guest infuriated me by first calling America a place of white supremacy, and then saying that a dialogue was needed between the races. Maybe the gift of Barack Obama is that he avoids the accusatory code words that may feel cathartic to utter, but do nothing to further inter-racial understanding and acceptance.

And that's it for letters. Thanks for writing, and please keep your comments coming.

And here's how you can exercise your right to vote - your vote on what we're doing online, that is. Go to our program page at nprnewsandnotes. org and click on a segment. Then click on the Comments link and give us your thoughts.


Yes. I mean, this piece - I mean not only me played I think every piano student started with this piece. But actually, this piece is not just a ringtone, you know?This piece is a real beautiful, masterful piece.

Now, just listen to two different ways that Lang Lang showed us you can play that familiar melody. The first time, he's going to hit all the right notes. But the second time, his fingers will tell a story.

Because you can just put your hands, you know (playing piano).

It's quite easy, you know?But it's very hard to make (playing piano).


And it also allows the Republicans now to use this process called reconciliation, which means they can pass the tax cut out of the Senate with 50 votes. So now - as you said, now they have to construct the bill. They have a bill that - right now all the elements that you talked about, including the repeal of the death tax, other elements - that's about a $4 or $5 trillion tax cut. And yet they're allocated $1. 5 trillion. So they've got to figure out how they're going to smush $4 trillion dollars in tax cuts. . .

Yeah.

. . . In a $1. 5 trillion box. So we'll see how that happens.

Well, if this were to fall through, how devastating do you feel that would be for your party?


Oh, absolutely. I mean, you've been very lucky as a Cubs fan. You've always had Wrigley Field, which is an intimate stadium. And that's what these new stadiums are trying to recreate. Even Yankee Stadium, if you go on their website today, Scott, they actually tout the fact that home plate is 27 feet closer than in the old Yankee Stadium.

So they bring in the home plate. They bring in the sidelines. Everybody's much closer to the action, but they're also closer to the danger. And they haven't had a corresponding increase in the safety precautions up the lines.

Does the netting remove what can be a very exciting play in foul territory - the catcher, the third baseman, the first baseman, reaching over and snagging a pop foul?

You know, maybe there's some of that. I think there's some fear that players won't be able to make quite the plays that they were in the past. You know, we've lived with netting behind home plate. And those are the best seats in the house. And they're always filled. You don't hear catchers complaining too much about the netting behind them. The seats up the line are just as dangerous.


What changed your mind because you did start college for a while?

Well, ever heard of the Three Cs?Civilian Conservation Corps, that was started by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at that time the president of the United States. And he started that program to get young boys like me off the street and try to put them in places where they could learn a trade. And I joined that, and that's when I started to learn about gasoline engine, diesel engines and heavy equipment.

That probably served you pretty well when you went into the military. How did you get into the military and what did you do once you went in?

After I left the CCC camp, I went to the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. That's where I learned to run engine lathe and I made part for ships. And I wanted to volunteer for the Army, but I was drafted. And drafted and was sent to Camp Ellis, Illinois where I take my basic training and went to - overseas in a quartermaster service company in Germany, first France.


Yeah.

So trains stopped running. Water supplies were disrupted. Gas stations couldn't pump gas, so there were long lines at those stations that could. Phones and the Internet were disrupted. It happened on a day in Argentina - in parts of Argentina, where there were gubernatorial elections. These actually still went ahead, but people had to use their cellphones. . .

Wow.

. . . To give themselves enough light to vote by. And it also happened on Father's Day, when people were hoping to go out for Sunday lunch but had to cancel because, you know, restaurants and businesses were shut. It took all day to get the lights completely back on; they are now back on. But people have a lot of questions about what precisely happened and what's going on in the region.


Syria continues to suffer. Russia now mounts military strikes against the Islamic State that also help shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, whom they support and whom the U. S.  says must leave. President Obama says there's no meeting of the minds. Niall Ferguson, the historian, has been critical of what he considers the president's lack of policy. Professor Ferguson joins us from the studios at Harvard. Thanks so much for being with us.

My pleasure.

You write the great flaw you see in President Obama's Syria strategy has been, I'll quote, "his insistence that the only alternative to doing next to nothing was all out invasion. "What alternatives do you think he's missing?

Initially, it was a relatively straightforward proposition that the United States should give military assistance to the opposition, to Assad, the free Syrian army. And that was something the president resisted. And the last throw of the president's dice came this year when he was offered by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the option to cooperate against Islamic State. And the president essentially said no to that. I think it's fair to say that the president has divert (ph) - I put it this way - that he was playing solitaire while everybody else was playing chess. And unfortunately it's now much, much more difficult to intervene effectively than it was at the outset of the Syrian Civil War.


Do the crime, do the time, that's the old line, right?But convicted perpetrators are still afforded basic human rights while serving out their debt to society. The Southern Center for Human Rights recently filed suit on behalf of a group of prisoners in Decatur, Alabama. The presiding judge describes the county jail as, quote, "A Slave Ship. "There, the sheriff is accused of starving his prisoners so he could pocket the profits off a lean kitchen budget. Joining us is Lisa Kung, the executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. Hi, Lisa.

Hi, how are you?

I'm good. So this case has just stunned people across the world. I couldn't believe it myself when I read about it. But I understand that there is a Depression-era law on the books that made this kind of profiteering legal. Tell us about the law and the details of the case.

Sure. That's right. Alabama has this arrangement where the state pays $1. 75 a day to the sheriffs - directly to the sheriffs for every person they have in his or her jail. Now, you and I know it's hard enough to come up with three meals a day for $1. 75, and what makes Alabama special is that it allows these sheriffs to take any of the money that they don't spend on food and put it straight into their own pocket.


A friend offered this thesis, and I wanted to test it on you. One never before factor in the financial meltdown, is the information revolution. We all know so much, so quickly online, that the surge of bad news begets more bad news, because we don't ever have time to digest it. What do you think of that?

I'm sure that's true. I'm sure that a lot of people who spent a lot of time online as I sometimes do, feels sort of inundated with bad news, and often see that they just want to step away from the computer monitor, lest it sort of reach out and bite them. I think it's probably also, though, possible to overstate the difference between this and earlier times.

Well, how is that?

If you think about the Great Depression, let's say for example like - as everyone is nowadays, during the Great Depression, you also had instantaneous forms of communication. You had the telephone and most notably, you have the telegraph, and I think most people have probably seen pictures or motion pictures with ticker tapes and giving sort of instantaneous stock reports.


Yes, that's right. The president showed up a little late this morning and left the summit before it was over. And before leaving, he made a statement to reporters that sounded a lot like one of his rallies in America's heartland. He said America is the piggy bank that everybody is robbing and vowed that that was going to end.

And if that message were not enough to rile the other leaders, he also said that he thought the G-7 ought to re-admit Vladimir Putin's Russia, saying he thought it would be, quote, "a real asset. "

Well, Ron, remind us why Russia was kicked out, or, I guess, technically suspended, anyway. It wasn't just for soiling the carpet.

Russia was suspended in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea, which was one of a series of Russian aggressions against its neighbor Ukraine. That was a clear violation of international law. So the other seven countries gave Russia the boot and imposed a number of other sanctions. Then, early last year, Russia said it wasn't even interested in being in the G-8 anymore anyway.


Two and four.

What happens when school comes along?

That is the million dollar question in so many cities. My wife is extremely active in the local schools and extremely supportive of our extremely local schools right next to our house, which are, as we speak, being shut down and consolidated and struggling. But that is why a lot of people are leaving the city because they see a better school system, even as D. C. 's improves. In many inner cities, schools improve, they see a better system just outside of town. So, we happen to be in with our two kids an excellent charter school. The downside there though, and this is a very interesting discussion, is that we not have a bit of a commute. My wife typically drives our kids to school. And she says, you know, I didn't move to the city to be a suburban commuter.

It strikes me. Towards the end of your book you have this beautiful section about a beautiful urban vision of - a lot of people remember - Mary Tyler Moore walking the streets of Minneapolis - and you're going to - and throwing her hat up in the air.

Yep. Mary Tyler Moore brings up a couple of really interesting things. The most interesting discussion is - I mean, what TV shows did I watch when I was a kid?"Gilligan's Island," "Partridge Family," "Brady Bunch". . .

Well, say what you will about "Gilligan's Island. "That was a walkable environment.


Yeah. Well, there are definitely multiple factors. You know, about a decade ago, China passed their renewable energy law. They started to really grow wind and solar as the future strategic industries. And now they're the largest in the world. They install by far the most wind turbines and solar panels in the world. So they really can see that this is a future growth area, that this is something that they can export to other countries. And it has all of these environmental benefits. So of course, to them, it just makes sense to do it.

So they see jobs in green energy.

That's right. You know, there's 3 million renewable energy jobs in China. That's the most in the world. Renewable energy jobs around the world, including in the U. S. , are growing much faster than the overall job market. So there are definitely areas for growth.

At the same time, China is the world's largest coal user and producer, isn't it?


Absolutely. In fact, that is advice that students are given. Be sure and use the longest possible word you can. Don't settle for anything simple. And often what they end up doing is inventing a great deal. I've talked with teachers who have evaluated these, and one was telling me a story about this student who wrote about his whole family dying in a plane crash. Well, maybe that happened but it's entirely possible that it didn't.

I'm wondering, professor, those who are on the College Board say in fact they don't believe there's a formula, there's not shortcuts and the people who are doing the reading know how to spot gimmicks.

The teachers that I have talked to who are scorers certainly do know how to spot gimmicks. And I think that's why the teacher who told me the story about the whole family killed in the plane crash was spotting the gimmick. But that that doesn't prevent students from trying to use those gimmicks. They're trying to, in some way, make themselves distinctive and capture the attention of readers who, at best, are going to be skimming what they're reading because the scoring process for the SAT requires the scores - if you are hired as a scorer, what you have to be able to do is to read 20 essays in an hour, which is three minutes per essay. And if you are trying to earn extra money, you get a bonus if you can read 30.

I certainly didn't know this. So, the graders get a cash bounty for being superficial.


We're hosting an online viewing party of sorts. For all those people who couldn't be among the 75,000 at INVESCO, I guess the next best thing to do is have your computer at your desk and join us. So we'll be linking to a stream of the event, and we'll host a real-time conversation.

So give that address again.

nprnewsandviews. org.

All right. Geoffrey Bennett is the web producer for News and Notes, joining me from the studios at the NPR west. Geoff, thank you very much.


Yeah.

You once said to (laughter) a contestant - I wonder if you even remember it. I'm going to do my bad Paul Hollywood imitation now. (Imitating accent) Your ganache lacks shine. So. . .

Yes, I do remember that.

Every now and then in the family, if we want to gently or comically upbraid each other, we go, (imitating accent) your ganache lacks shine.

(Laughter) Yeah, I mean - it was something. It was a few years ago, that. And it was to do with, obviously, with the outer coating on the cake. And the ganache is basically just chocolate cream. Normally, when you're dealing in a plain chocolate, so you can do 50-50. So 50 percent cream, 50 percent chocolate and just leave it to melt - and then pour it all over a cake. It sets, and you get a beautiful shine. You've got to be careful when you're setting it, and that's where it came from.


Well, what Bill Lockyer, the State Treasurer is telling us, and what the governor is telling us is that we are in real trouble right now. Lockyer has said that we will not be able to meet payroll by the end of this month unless something is done to unfreeze the credit markets and the state is credit worthy.

I mean, it's the eight largest economy in the world. But they've been unable to obtain the normal short-term financing to meet cash flow needs. And when the state runs out of money that means that cities and counties and school districts also run out of money.

Has the state ever had to do this before, go to the federal government and say we need money now, help us?

I think this is unprecedented and certainly the state ordinarily would be solving their cash flow needs out of the regular market, not from the federal government. And what the governor is saying is that he would be asking the federal government to serve that role for the state of California.


And a few facts to guard those younger than you and me. Britain seized the Falklands in 1833, illegal then and illegal now, according to Argentina, which calls them the Malvinas. Every Argentine school child learns Islas Malvinas son Argentinas, but the roughly 3,200 residents adamantly insist they and the Falklands are and will always be British. But Jackson Diehl, none of that has changed since the end of the war three decades ago. Why has this dispute reemerge now?

I think it has to do with Argentine politics more than anything else. The reason the Argentine junta in 1982, military generals in charge at the time, invaded the Falklands, was they were desperate to distract popular attention from the fact that the economy was tanking and that they were losing their legitimacy. Now we have a civilian government in power, which, to its credit, doesn't want to invade the Falklands, but it has the same difficult economic problems again and it has the same problems with potentially losing legitimacy at home. And this is a very easy way to distract people.

This time, though, there is no hint of military action.

There isn't. And I think the interesting thing about this government is they have cut the Argentine military budget so severely in the last few years that even if Argentina wanted to invade the Falklands, they would be incapable of doing so. So that's one good thing.


Who is Chuy Garcia, and does he have to show that he's not just a protest candidate now?

He has been around for a long time. He was a state senator. He was a city council alderman. He is now a Cook County commissioner. Was he widely known all the way across Chicago?No, he has not been. But he is a solid and serious individual, who's been in government for a long time. He was not the first choice. The first choice to run against Rahm Emanuel was the head of the Chicago teachers' union. . .

Yeah, Karen Lewis.

. . . Karen Lewis, who is charismatic, African-American and has been at war with Emanuel from the beginning. But she developed a brain tumor. And the person who became the anointed one was Chuy Garcia.


Kristen's reporting illuminated that one of their co-founders had been accused of harassment by multiple women. He was still very much part of the agency when Kristen's reporting came out. Soon after, he was suspended. And then a few weeks later, he quietly resigned. There are reports specifically from women that he groped them, that he made - I mean, I don't even know if I can repeat the comments that he made. There is one photographer from the agency who cannot speak about what she experienced because she has been silenced by an NDA.

A nondisclosure agreement.

A nondisclosure agreement.

We should say that he's denied those allegations. You followed up with your own report on this. So you've been looking into this. And I'm curious what the industry's reaction has been to your story and Kristen's story.


Here to tell us more about that report is the vice chair of the commission, former senator from Missouri, Jim Talent. Welcome to the program, sir. And if you could tell us a bit about this report. It states that the biological threat to this country is greater than the nuclear one. What sort of biological threat are we talking about?

Well, people normally think in terms of like Anthrax, and that's the most visible potential pathogen. There's others that could be used, smallpox, for example. And one of the dangers is that, with DNA synthesizers that are available and dual-use technology all over the world, it's becoming increasingly easy to isolate pathogens, old or new. It's technologically easier to weaponize.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you conducted the research for this report?

We're a follow onto the 9/11 commission, congressionally created, bipartisan. The report was unanimous, and we interviewed hundreds of people who travel all over the world, everywhere from the national labs in Sandia, to London, to Asia, to Russia interviewing people.

And then we all, each of us on the commission, has experience in this area as well. And what Congress wanted was an update on the assessment of the threat and then recommendations about what can be done to reduce it.


Do you feel confident that a vaccine could essentially contain the outbreak?

We are confident that the vaccination is a good complementary measure. So by the time we started the vaccination, we already had a number of cholera cases. What we are trying to prevent is an outbreak of huge proportions that would essentially make our entire health system collapse completely.

Dr.  Ilesh Jani is director general of Mozambique's National Institute of Health. Thank you for speaking with us.

Thank you for having me.


I have another on-the-other-hand that may have presented itself this week. A lot of people said if the president doesn't enforce what he said would happen, if Syria crossed the red line and used chemical weapons, then Iran would think that the United States was insincere and would develop a nuclear - continued to develop a nuclear weapon system. This week, the new Iranian president says: We're not interested in nuclear weapons; I want to shake President Obama's hand. Does it suggest that the administration has done something right?

I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And in Syria, you saw Assad fear an American strike and make a deal that he probably would not have made otherwise. In Iran, you see after four years of Obama's threats, and more than the threats to use military force, or the threat to keep the option of force on the table, you have four years of very, very hard edge sanctions imposed by the about administration on Iran.

And so, I think that they're taking Obama fairly seriously. We'll see what happens down the road, if they continue to take it seriously. But the credibility issue is not quite, at the moment at least, what some people thought it would be.

Jeffrey Goldberg who writes for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg among other publications, thanks so much for being with us.


All right. Give me - we just have time for one tip for online dating, something you should do or shouldn't do.

One thing you should do is be yourself. Never ever, ever post any picture that's like five years old and 50 pounds lighter or heavier than you are. It's like your picture should reflect who you are, and the way that you write your profile should reflect who you are as a person, as well as the person that you're trying to attract for a date. Things you should not do, never have someone meet you in your home on a first date that you've never met before. Don't give out any specifics. I say, don't tell someone where you work unless you want them to come and visit you there.

Right.

Don't give them your address unless you want them to come and visit you there as well.


Exactly. And the nice thing with the study was that we got to find out what was characteristic of healthy sinus cavities. And what we saw was that there was this enrichment for lactic acid bacteria and many other bacteria. But they're the ones that stood out to us because they were most depleted in the disease stage. And so we moved the. . .

Is this the bacteria that you find in yogurt and things like that?

Yeah, yeah. It's a relative. It's one of them. There are many, many lactobacillus species. But the one that we focus on is one - actually, we focused on the one that's used in making sake. (Unintelligible).

Making sake?


It has been nearly 17 years since Brooklyn, New York's Crown Heights neighborhood was engulfed by riots and recriminations. The neighborhood is a mix of Caribbean-Americans, black Americans, born in the States, and orthodox Jews. In August of 1991, a rabbi's motorcade hit a seven-year-old Guyanese boy named Gavin Cato. He later died from his injuries. Some neighbors believe that the Jewish ambulance crew that arrived slightly before the city ambulance should have taken Cato to the hospital. Within hours of the boy's death, a mob of young black men killed Yankel Rosenbaum, a young orthodox Jewish divinity student. Stores were looted or burnt and dozens of people were injured in the subsequent days.

Flash forward to the present. In the last few weeks, a series of new incidents, admittedly much smaller ones, have put Crown Heights on a small boil. Can members of the black and Jewish communities ease the tensions, and are they willing to try?In a few minutes we'll hear from two of those community leaders. But, first, here to help us untangle the latest Crown Heights affair is New York Post editorial writer Robert George. Hi, Robert.

Hi, Farai, how is it going?

Good. And why don't we talk about this in context. You know, you have the 1991 tensions that broke out, now what exactly is going on today?


That's right. She's protesting and enlisting the support of past Republican nominees and other leaders on her behalf. But the threshold was finishing top three in Iowa or pulling in the top six in New Hampshire or top six nationally. And she fell short in all those metrics.

What do you foresee tonight?

In a sense, there are still two tiers. You've got Donald Trump and Ted Cruz at the top. And then the three remaining governors, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich, all chasing the fastest-rising star of the field, Marco Rubio. Now, Ben Carson will be there - maybe something of an afterthought, although it will be interesting to see if he calls out Ted Cruz for Cruz's campaign telling people that Carson was dropping out on Monday just before the caucuses began. There's been a bit of a controversy over that. And Trump has said that it taints Cruz's victory there.

The downside to getting more attention, like Marco Rubio, is more criticism. And he seems to get more direct criticism from his opponents as he rises in the polls.


Sounds like a fun gathering.

Lots of pollsters in a room - I'm sure there's jokes. What makes this new effort such a big deal?

Look, this is the first time since 1992, when all the media organizations bought into one National Election Pool, that there's going to be competition. And it's a totally different approach to measuring the electorate. They're launching it, by the way, they announced, in all 47 states where there are elections this fall for statewide elections in these midterms. And it's a massive undertaking that really is - you know, just talking to people here - starting a crackup of American election polling.

That's fascinating. What is different, though, about what Fox News and the AP are doing?


Being a congressional Democrat from Alabama has been a lonely occupation. Representative Terri Sewell, from the district that includes Selma and parts of Birmingham and Montgomery, was the only Democrat in the state's congressional delegation until this week, when Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore for the U. S.  Senate. Representative Sewell joins us from her district. Representative Sewell, thanks so much for being with us.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

Doug Jones thanked you specifically for helping bring African-American voters to the polls. Do you want to take a victory lap and tell us how you did it?

(Laughter) Well, listen. This was an amazing victory for Alabama. It was a victory, I think, for decency - common decency. And it shows that Alabama was willing to put principle over party. I was very excited that my district overperformed. And I was particularly excited about the African-American turnout. You know, I think that people understood that the stakes were high. This administration has had a negative effect on our community. It's reversing a lot of the Obama-era progress that we've made. And I'm just very pleased that people showed up and showed out.


Well, I think there are bad memories, and there are ghosts. And it's such an interesting place to visit. There are people who go back to that Superdome now not because they want to, but because they have to, to try and make a living. One guy I met, Raymond Smith, he has no choice but to strap a beer tray around his neck and go up and down the aisles, you know, shouting for beer during games. And he had to live through Katrina inside the Superdome. And it is not a happy memory for him in any way. It's something he suffers with. But for the rest of the community, it is also a symbol of redemption in some ways or if not redemption, reclamation.

I promise not to take this personally. World Series - two parks you'd have to go back and forth between. What would you choose?

Well, as a Yankee fan, I suppose I should say Yankee Stadium. But if the ballpark is the sole measure of where I want to be, then, unfortunately, it has to be Fenway. And, you know. . .

It takes a lot for Yankee fan to say that, right?I appreciate that.

It does. But you know what?Fenway really is a magical place. And they've done a tremendous job with their renovations. And as perfect as the symmetry might be of going back and forth between Wrigley and Fenway, I'm going to say PNC Park.

In Pittsburgh?


OK.  You have been witness to debate preparation sessions, however. So, when does the work really start for these events?

Well, I tell you, it's something that's ongoing from the very start of the general election. Because the best way to debate effectively is to know what your opponent is going to say. So, everyone in each campaign has been paying attention to the interviews the other opponent has been giving, the speeches that they have been making. And about a month ago, they started compiling a briefing book. This is about four inches thick, it has tabs covering every issue, everything that the campaign has put out about it, everything your opponent has said about it, and it's a way to get you briefed on all the issues. As you know, tonight, 90 minutes, everything is on the table.

Yeah. So, what are the key points a debate prep team likes to address right away?I was wondering if there is like a set list, or does it really depend on the candidate and the race?

Well, hands down, no matter the juxtaposition of your candidate or the charisma they may or may not have, it always comes down to two things, and that's the verbal and the non-verbal.


You are a brave man. You think there's going to be any political spats at your table?

Well, the entire house becomes the table with that many people, so we won't actually have room for argument. Anybody who wants to bicker will have to go outside.

John Dickerson is the chief political correspondent for slate. com. Thanks, John, and happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving to you.


Well, we approach this as sort of a three-front challenge. We changed policy in this state last year. Seven bills were passed that give us more control over prescribing. It gives law enforcement more authority over pills coming into the state. This litigation is going to give us money to deal with the epidemic. And lastly, when we identify prescribers who are being reckless with their patients. . .

OK.

. . . Or running pill mills, we're prosecuting them.

All right. That's Oklahoma State Attorney General Mike Hunter.


The site of the wreck of the Houston's been known for quite some time. Why just the official confirmation now?

Well, the Navy became concerned over the years that the wreck was being salvaged by trophy hunters and commercial concerns overseas. Recreational dive companies have been leading dives on the Houston as well as the Perth, for years. But they began to fear for the integrity of the wreck. And it is a war grave. It's also custody of the U. S.  Navy, even though it's been undersea for more than 70 years now. And so what they did was, they launched an official expedition to document the state of the wreck and the first step in that process was to authenticate the identity of the ship, and so that's what made headlines this week.

Captain Rooks received the Medal of Honor for what?

He led the Perth into battle on that night and was quickly fallen upon by a far superior Japanese naval squadron. They had several heavy cruisers, a whole bunch of destroyers and the Japanese were masters of the art of nighttime naval combat. They would demonstrate this time and again through the early months of the war.


Thank you.

You begin by saying that you think making laws to get rid of guns just might be impossible.

Well, I think we should try but we already have 300 million guns in circulation in America. So, if tomorrow or in January Congress somehow banned the sale of all new guns, we have 100-year problem. Even if you have gun buybacks - they'll buy back five, 10, 20, 30 million guns - we have a terrible, tragic situation where the country is awash in guns. So, very little on the gun control agenda is actually going to make a dent in that, unfortunately.

Your most controversial points certainly now is that you say more people ought to be trained to fire back at an assailant and be able to carry guns for that purpose.


I think it is a serious threat. I don't see strong evidence that it has increased as of late. Iran has the ability to act via proxy organizations towards United States troops, diplomats, other assets that might be in the region. It also has the mechanisms to act against our partners and against our allies either directly or through the proxy organizations that it has a relationship with.

And paint me a little bit of a picture of what that map looks like when you describe Iran's proxy organizations in the Middle East.

So Iran's strongest relationship is with Lebanese Hezbollah. That allows them to have a measure of influence both to act in Lebanon, to act towards Israel from Lebanon but increasingly to act in other countries where Iran has essentially deployed Lebanese Hezbollah troops to, including Syria.

It has also been improving its relationship with Houthi rebels in Yemen, though its ability to direct or control the Houthis is still very limited. And it has long-established relationships with Iraqi militias.

Does Iran have control over its proxies?


The Endangered Species Act has saved animals and plants, including the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the black-footed ferret, since Congress passed that legislation in 1973. But some of those conservation efforts have come at a cost to ranchers and farmers. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has introduced a bill to include state involvement in the process, which some ranchers say has made it difficult for them to protect their herds of sheep and cattle. Bill Kluck joins us now. He's the sheep committee chairman of R-CALF USA. And he's been ranching for 35 years in South Dakota. Mr.  Kluck, thanks for being with us.

Thank you for having me.

How in your judgment has this act infringed on your ranching?

One of the main things that the sheep people face is the predators. And coyotes, wolves will impact your herd and kill lambs and so forth. It's kind of hard to imagine. But, at one point, I was trapping as many coyotes in a year as when I had sheep running on the land. And this is one of the things that this Barrasso bill seemed to address is the threshold level and not letting that level be like a mirage that you never really get there.


Correct.

Yeah. So we'll have to wait to see how that happens. Thank you very much, doctor, and good luck to you.

Well, I'm delighted to be with you and your audience. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa is professor of neurosurgery and oncology, director of the Brain Tumor Stem Cell Lab at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.


Well, we're interested in understanding, one, what are all the metabolites or small molecules that are under the control of the circadian clock in these post-harvest vegetables and fruits?So in things like zucchini and carrots and sweet potato, we would expect a different sweet of metabolites to be regulated by the clock. So we'd like to know what those are. And then we'd like to know what kind of conditions could be used to make this a practical - if it turns out that we can really make a difference in nutritional quality then. . .

Right.

. . . we would want to design a simply way to keep the clock running. And we know that plants can respond to just pulses of light in ways that can control or set their clock. And so we'd like to investigate what are the simplest ways that we can use to make this practical.

Well, we wish you good luck, Dr.  Braam.


What goes in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse - until the baseball manager writes a book, that is. It's Thursday, and if you haven't guessed, it's time again for a look at sports with our very own sports guru, the New York Times Sports Columnist, Mr.  Bill Rhoden. Mr.  Bill, what's up?

Hey, the great Tony Cox. How you're doing?

I'm doing great, man. Joe Torre, leaving New York as a beloved figure, but now he has written his autobiography, "The Yankee Years. "I know that he's been on his New York tour. People are buying the book. But, you know, some people are happy, some people not so happy.

Well, the people who are most important to be happy are happy. The publisher of course. . .

Anybody reading book, it's about selling books. And I, Tony, I sort of equate it to in football, the most important statistics for a receiver are yards after catch.


Yeah. And we owe a debt of gratitude, also, to Roger Hangarter of Indiana University, who gave us some other time-lapse of other plant motions. Because I started looking into this, and, you know, even the tulips in your vase are moving around if you speed up time. Their leaves are flopping. He told me this amazing story about sunflowers that I never knew. The reason that they are called that is that they actually orient towards the sun throughout the day. Their leaves do. So they start facing east and then end up facing west.

They have the ultimate solar panels.

That's totally right.

They figured out how to actually how to move with the sun. . .


What about the government ordering banks to rewrite some of these loans, or mandating them, I should say, or even buying back these loans?

Well, mandating is tough. I mean, we do live in a country where contracts are held firm and the government can't essentially say, we want you to void these contracts. I mean, the government could give some relief from a legal perspective that would allow people to modify more easily. Some people have argued what you say, that, you know, the best way to do this is to have the government acquire these loans and then it could do - it can make any changes it wants with a much freer hand than sort of doing this from a bully pulpit or from a sort of a threatening posture.

And Vikas, what about all the people who have already lost their homes and have nothing. Is there anything for them?Can they get any money back?

Yeah, certainly that's painful. I'm not sure that anybody is really talking about that right now. I mean, in the settlement at the states, there were countrywide - there were some - and there was a provision that countrywide would help these people find, at least in that case, rental housing. It's unclear whether they will be more - sort of done broadly for those people. I think the best thing that could be done is to alleviate the economic problems in the country so that the people will be able to, you know, not to lose their jobs or find new jobs, if they have already lost their job.


Southern Africa is reeling from a massive cyclone that hit more than a week ago. Some 700 people are reported dead across the region. But that toll is expected to rise. The scene has been described as apocalyptic, with hundreds of thousands of people affected in four countries. Massive flooding has hit Mozambique the hardest, and that is where Rik Goverde of Save the Children is. He joins us from Maputo via Skype. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. Hi.

Can you tell me what the scene is like there on the ground?

Well, the scene is as you described. It is catastrophic. Imagine that there's an inland sea now where there used to be land. People were sitting on roofs, in trees trying to escape the water. But they had nowhere to go. And helicopters are still flying to get them out of there, to get them to dry and - well, not dry - but mainland.


Two different things.

There's gun violence and then there's hate crimes. And they intersect, but they're not the same.

And as we heard from the congressman - or the former congressman - we are already seeing reactions questioning the president, what his administration has done to combat white nationalism, if anything, if he's done anything to fuel it. The Democratic presidential candidates, others including Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar, have accused the president of using hateful rhetoric. And it does come at a time where there is a rise in racial tension and white nationalist violence in this country. FBI Director Christopher Wray was on Capitol Hill less than two weeks ago in which he said they had made at least a hundred domestic terror arrests since just October. The majority of them were related to white supremacist violence. So it is coming at a time where both gun laws are an intractable debate in this country and racial tensions are at a - I don't want to say an all-time high but are certainly elevated at this very moment.

And so how does that affect the political calculus in Washington at this particular time?We are seeing Democrats obviously trying to get the nomination for the Democratic presidency and also of course Republicans running into 2020.


Yes, thank you.

We get it.

A lot of things in the book are things that I wrote about in my newspaper column. For about nine or 10 years I've been doing a column every week for the Guardian newspaper in England, and it's about any kind of unexpected, funny thing that I run across or people tell me about. And to do the book, I went back and grabbed a lot of these stories and then did some more digging to see what else have these people done.

Mm-hmm. Some of the stories seem to have sort of a moral to them, like the one - mysterious one I'm going to call the rectum in a jar.

Yeah, this is the case of the rectum of the Bishop of Durham. If you go to London and you visit the Hunterian Museum, it's a wonderful, wonderful - one - in fact, one of the world's few remaining big medical museums. It's part of The Royal College of Surgeons of England. If you go and visit it, on display on the main floor inside a jar is something they call object RCSHC/P192. The label identifies it as being the preserved rectum of the Bishop of Durham, and we're talking about Thomas Thurlow, who was born in 1737, died in 1791. Would you like to hear the story of why it's in a jar in London on display?


No. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson is not the final arbiter of all this. I think both countries do want to negotiate. The United States certainly does. And there are important actors within the Iranian political system that also do, including President Rouhani himself, who's been intrigued by the idea of negotiations with President Trump. Ultimately if they want to get out from under the sanctions, the only path out of that particular predicament is some kind of a negotiations between the two sides.

Do you think that the Trump administration is on to something when they say that a maximum pressure campaign will force Iran to the negotiating table?I mean, if you're saying Iran wants out from under these sanctions and negotiation's the way to get there, does that suggest the Trump administration is on the right track?

The maximum strategy of pressure has been tactically successful. It has put enormous pressure on Iran. It has even managed to slice Iran's oil exports - unlikely to get down to zero, but it will be close to zero. So at a tactical level, this certainly has been successful. And I think at the end of the day, it will probably press the Iranian government toward the negotiations. Now, what happens at those negotiations of course remains to be seen.

The other option is that it presses both sides to war, intentionally or unintentionally. Both sides say they don't want this. Iran's president restated that today. Do you think that war is a real risk here?


"VIC" (Member, Overeaters Anonymous): Hi.

Vic, I want to start with you, and I want to be very specific. Give me an example of a day when you completely lost control over your eating.

"VIC": It wasn't a day. It was the day before (Laughing) and that day and the next day. But anyway - OK, so I wake up in the morning, totally hung over. Dr.  Lerner - Marty - described very well, you know, having lost control. So, I wake up, I feel terrible, and the last thing I want to do, I think in my rational brain, is eat because I feel so bad. And yet, I know that if I take one bite of anything, I'll be off and running. And I'm scared. I'm really scared.

Let me just ask one thing. When you say hung over, do you mean hung over from overeating or hung…


No, that's not my cell phone. It's the sound of our space, kind of. It's a radio signal picked up by one of NASA's Radiation Storm Belt Probes. These probes are orbiting inside Earth's radiation belts, a hazardous part of space filled with high-energy particles. And these eerie, chirping noises are called chorus. Scientists have known about them for years. Ham radio operators have listened to them. But these are the clearest recordings yet.

Here to tell us more about these chorus recordings is Craig Kletzing. He's the F.  Wendell Miller professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa. He's also the principal investigator for one of the experiments on the Radiation Storm Belt Probes. Doctor Kletzing is joining us today from Iowa City. Welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

So before - well, let me just start with: What did we just hear?Explain it for us.


Yeah. So yesterday afternoon about 2 p. m. , I had actually one of our local news reporters at our paper come into my office. And he said, Anne, you have to Google Michigan chalking tires and tell me what you think. So it was a quick conversation and a phone call to our police chief to say, how do we make sure that we're compliant with it?The DDA, like many throughout the state, monitors all the parking throughout the downtown. So we currently hire a parking ambassador to monitor those spaces and make sure that people either park correctly or aren't parking over time.

And she was using the chalk method, I understand.

So yeah. What she usually does is, when she marks a car in, she marks the tire with a piece of chalk. And then she also takes down the license plate number and the time that the car checked into that lot or parking space.

Your parking ambassador who writes the tickets is a staff of one. How does this ruling affect her?


It's permissible. It's common. Popular culture has normalized cremation in a way 'cause - not only with the "Fockers" movies. There's also "The Big Lebowski. "That's famous with the cremated remains in the coffee can. And he goes to scatter them. And they come back in his face. That's based on reality. That happens. And now you can buy urns that are in the shape and with the same pattern as that coffee can if you're a "Big Lebowski" fan.

Oh. (Laughter) I'm not that big a fan. But I. . .

(Laughter).

Are there any states or cities where people are getting cremated more than others?


You know, so there is going to be several things in which we can benefit as a society.

I have about a minute left, and I'll get an idea of that cost. Let's say you have a $100,000 home. What - how much would it cost you to sink into it to do those things structurally that you're asking to do?

I think I would put in there about $5,000, which would give you hurricane ties, more anchor bolts, larger washers and metal ties between the wall plates and the studs. I would use more nails, six-inch (unintelligible), six inches on spacings, ring shank nails, and I think you have a fighting chance after that. Then you look at putting in a storm shelter, and you protect life safety, as well.

It doesn't sound like a whole lot to do. Thank you, thank you, Dr.  Prevatt, very much for your time today.

I really appreciate it, and you have a great day.


You've been following temporary staffing trends for more than two decades now. What sectors are relatively insulated from layoffs?

Well, the sectors that are most resilient are the higher-skill sectors, or if you can get into industries that are involved in education or health care or government. Those are the areas where you get the most bang. We're also seeing a nice increase in the mortgage-processing area, because one of the things the government's doing is lowering the conforming rate for mortgages. And so, there's kind of a rush to refinance.

When you say higher skills, are you talking about engineering, things of that sort?

Well, even within, say, clerical admin, there's always demand for good, you know, personal assistants. There's always demand for engineers or, you know, highly skilled folks. There are sometimes fewer jobs in those areas but for good people, you can get employed.

Now, geographically, where are the hot spots for temporary work?

We're seeing the best demand really around the D. C.  area. You know, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, of course the government's kind of gearing up, and there's lots of activity to, you know, take on some of these new projects. Another good area is Texas. Texas still has some residual goodwill related to energy and utilities. Beyond that, there is most of the - most every area of the country is feeling some pinch. Some of the toughest places are California, Nevada and Florida.


The White House appears to have been caught off guard by the book. There seemed to have been no unified strategy in some ways. I mean, they sort of just let the president take the ball and run with it.

Yeah. Well, look. This book - this is a question that I have - and I've been unable to get an answer from the White House since Wednesday - which is, how many people in the White House cooperated with this book?How many comms staff were in interviews - these interviews that Mike Wolff supposedly had - walking into the White House, roaming around, in his words?

They say he never met with the president in the Oval Office. Michael Wolff says he does. There's a lot of confusion about how much access and how much participation the White House had with this book. So they shouldn't be caught off guard, I think, based on the level of access that Wolff appears to have. And they haven't been quite forthright about what level that is.

I talked to somebody who was interviewed who said there was a comms person, somebody in the West Wing in the White House - there was a comms person in that interview with him. How many other interviews were like that?And I think that that - we should keep that in mind when we hear sort of these calls that this is this is tabloid trash, that nobody in the White House knew what was happening or that this was all Steve Bannon.


Now, there are literally thousands of these kinds of cases going back through history. Some that have, you know, withstood the test of time. What are some of the most famous ones in the U. S. ?

Well, you know, there's a very long list and you know, actually a colleague and I had a five-volume set on famous American crimes and trials that I can't go over all of them. But let me just mention a few. And I want to mention one in London as well. But for example, going back to the 19th Century, the Mary Rogers case. Here in Albany, we have Jack Legs Diamond, the prohibition gangster who was killed in Albany. We have a list of the short case.

Oh, the Black Dahlia, right?That's the Black Dahlia?

Exactly.


Well, people were definitely shocked by the results, but I think a lot of people here feel like this is an exciting change, and there's a strong feeling in Israel that this is going to bring the focus back to domestic concerns, everyday concerns. A lot of people here are kind of frustrated with the big existential foreign policy questions, and that's where Yair Lapid of his new Yesh Atid, or There's a Future, Party got a lot of his support.

And he is a former television broadcaster.

He is. He was quite a celebrity here, celebrity journalist, wrote a column and then was on TV and has really a lot of name recognition, and he's got a lot of kind of personal charm. People call him the ultimate Israeli. He's part of a secular Tel Aviv bourgeoisie and very attractive and sort of speaks well, and he managed to really capitalize on the kind of middle-class centrist concerns, some of which fueled the social protest from 2001 - 2011, excuse me, that brought something like 500,000 people to the streets of Tel Aviv.

And a centrist, as you say. What does that mean in terms of Israeli politics?


Well, it's - the prosecutors are saying that, essentially, they've got easier access to Julian Assange. He's no longer holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy. He's in custody in the U. K. , so it's more feasible. I mean, they haven't proven him to be guilty or innocent, but the evidence hasn't changed. It wasn't due to a lack of evidence that they decided not to question him. It was pure logistics.

As we mentioned, the U. S.  is trying to extradite him, as is Sweden. Is there a chance that there could be competing claims against him here?

Yeah. The big question is who's going to get the chance to speak to him first?And Swedish prosecutors at their press conference - they basically said, we're going to let the U. K.  decide, but it could well be that it's down to the home secretary in the U. K. , the interior minister, to decide which of the countries he thinks has a more pressing case. Should it be the rape charges, or should it be the hacking classified military secrets in the U. S. ?

And there are also time considerations here. Tell us about the statute of limitations.

Yeah. In Sweden, there's a certain time limit for different kinds of crimes. And for rape, it's 10 years. So there's about a year to go before that statute of limitation limit is reached, which means there really is a time squeeze on authorities.


Yeah. The O'Neal family says that it shows cold-blooded murder. There is certainly rough language. I saw about nine minutes of one video. I think a lot of civilians might - it's a confusing thing to see. It's a - it's a crime scene after all, and it begins with the police car being sideswiped by a car stolen by the young man. At least one officer thought he'd been shot at.

Right. And it is - it is, among other things - first of all, you do not see the shooting of the 18-year-old because the officer who did the shooting, the fatal shooting, which was a gunshot to the back, was not his - his personal camera, body camera, was not turned on for whatever reason. But you see the vantage point of nine cameras, some worn by police officers, some on the dash boards of the car. And what you see is the kind of adrenaline and mayhem of police officers trying to corner a suspect.

And so when you finally do see Paul O'Neal, he is on the ground, face down. He's being handcuffed. Blood is coming out of his back. An officer has a foot on one of his legs as if to restrain him. And there's confusion because police are saying to each other, did you shoot?Were you shot at?And so there is a kind of mayhem quality.

In the time we have left, police and others have suggested that some of this, once again, an increase in homicide is because many gang leaders have been jailed or killed. How does that follow?


A slow cooker does seem to be good for jam - doesn't it?- because it takes. . .

It is great.

. . . A lot of the drudgery out, yeah.

Yeah, it takes a lot of that stirring - and, you know, the worst thing you can do with a jam is spend an arduous amount of time cleaning fruit, getting it together and getting it into a pot and then torching and scorching the bottom of it because of an open flame and a little bit too high heat. The slow cooker really just mellows that out.


Well, yes, they are because the concern here is that if you do it for medical research, what's to stop other scientists to try to do it for other reasons, like, for example, to try to create designer babies that are taller or smarter or better athletes?Now, we're nowhere near being able to do anything like that. But the concern is that this could open the door to someday creating genetic haves and have-nots.

So, Rob, these CRISPR researchers are involved in projects that have tremendous promise to benefit our lives, but also raise very difficult ethical and moral questions.

That's right. That's right. And another example I could give you is I just got back from a trip to London. And there, scientists are using CRISPR to genetically modify mosquitoes that spread a mutant gene to wipe out the mosquitoes that spread the malaria parasite. And the idea there is to try to wipe out this disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, most of them children.

Now, the fear here is that they're using CRISPR to modify these insects with something known as a gene drive. And a gene drive spreads a genetic modification through an entire species really quickly. So something could go wrong. You know, it could wipe out an entire species of mosquito. And that could upset the delicate balance of an ecosystem some way that could maybe unleash some new epidemic or cause the ecosystem to collapse and cause famine.


That is very funny. What about dessert?Give me a dessert for the holidays that you love.

One of my favorite ones is this cornmeal and rosemary cake. So we use polenta corn meal and a little bit of rosemary. And you bake it, it becomes basically like a pound cake. It's buttery and rich. It's the holidays. That happens. Sometimes I stud it with some cranberries for some color, other times I do not. It depends on my mood. And then I top it with a balsamic syrup. So I reduce balsamic, gets nice and thick like a chocolate sauce, and then I pour it over the top. I can't tell you - breakfast, lunch dinner, whatever, snack, it is phenomenal. It's one of the those things I keep in my house during the holidays.

That sounds fantastic. So, you're a mother now, and your baby's first Christmas is coming up. How's that going to affect you to have someone - a little tiny one to take through the holidays?

You know, she's now about eight months, and so she's not quite a year old yet.


Inside the box is a hand mirror, which is made not from glass but of pumiced metal. It has a wooden handle decorated with gold. The Egyptians weren't alone. Through the ages, women have had their cosmetics and must-haves. Curator Jane Adlin said the French called their ornate cosmetic boxes necessaires.

You would find tiny little perfume flasks, combs, nail files, tiny scissors. These are clearly meant for the luxury market and were pieces that could have been owned by Madame de Pompadour or royalty, and were carried by their maids and brought out when the madam would ask for a comb or whatever.

Finally, someone placed the box on a table and drew up a chair.

When portables and tables come together and become the dressing table - and that's sort of late 1700s. And by the mid-1800s, the dressing table has become this sort of extraordinary furniture piece of the beginning of the era of the dressing table.


I mean, that's something that I wouldn't say I'm worried about, but it's definitely something that I'm thoughtfully considering, as well as I know my colleagues will be.

So how do you protect against that risk?

I do feel like that fear is overstated when it comes to the IPO tax. No. 1 - it's a very small tax. We're talking about 1. 5% on the immense wealth that'll be flowing in when these companies go public. I'm very interested in ensuring that we have a balanced economy here in San Francisco that includes a tech sector but also supports other sectors that haven't benefited from the same tax breaks.

Now, San Francisco is a city where a family of four earning $117,000 a year qualifies as low-income, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.


I don't think that realistically it means that they could crush them. Of course it would give Assad and his supporters more opportunity to attempt to crush them, but they haven't been able to crush them. And I don't think the balance of fighting over the last several years has been all that favorable to Assad. So I think more likely is an outcome in which there are more casualties, more destruction, more loss of life.

So what's the advantage in a six-month waiting period for a cease-fire?

I don't think they agreed to have a waiting period. I think this is a prognosis - a hopeful prognosis - and that might even entertain the notion that perhaps it could be sooner. I think if the United States and Russia, and Russia using its influence on Syria comes along also, then perhaps there might be more tangible progress in less time than six months.

And what are the common interests, as you see it, that the United States and Russia have in Syria?


Well, it's changed many, many things - color's absolutely everywhere. So, wherever I look there's music now. Going to the museum now, I can listen to an Andy Warhol, I can listen to a Picasso. And when I listen to music, it happens the other way around. I feel color, so it's changed the way they perceive not only (unintelligible). So, daily places, such as supermarkets, 'cause there's many, many colors there.

Mr.  Harbisson, you co-founded the Cyborg Foundation. What do you do and what do you mean when you list one of the goals of the organization to defend cyborg rights?

Well, now, cyborgs are a minority group. There are no laws defending the right to use technology as a part of the body. And then we want to defend the right of anyone who feels their right of wearing technology as part of the body has been in danger. In cases like not being allowed into a shop, for example, or not being allowed in a cinema, 'cause they think that they might be doing something illegal, or just the simple fact of being able to appear on your passport photo with your cybernetic extension if it appears on your head.

Now, I gather you can now appear that way on your passport photo?


ORDOÑEZ: Well, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was on shows this morning defending the administration, defending the White House, saying Democrats like Swalwell, who we just heard, are trying to score political points on the tragedy, saying that about some of the other Democratic candidates who are still in the presidential race. Mulvaney himself is calling the shooter a sick person and says drawing anything other than that is wrong or fair - trying to blame the president is unfair.

This was a sick person. The person in Dayton was a sick person. No politician is to blame for that. The people responsible here are the people who pulled the trigger. We need to figure out how to create less of those kinds of people as a society and not trying to figure out who gets blamed going into the next election.

ORDOÑEZ: And Trump himself, you know, at a rally in Charlotte last year, he said the White House didn't blame Bernie Sanders when one of his supporters went out and shot a Republican lawmaker during a baseball practice. They're saying they want the same type of response.

: And where does the White House stand in terms of policy solutions?


Now we'd like to meet one of the country's newly minted geniuses. We're talking, of course, about the latest recipients of a MacArthur Fellowship. People often call them Genius Grants. The fellowship awards $625,000 over five years to people working in any field who show extraordinary originality in their creative pursuits, no strings attached. One of the prizes went to attorney sujatha baliga. She spent much of her professional life studying and advocating for the use of restorative justice. That's a way of approaching a crime or an incident of wrongdoing with a goal of finding a resolution that centers healing for everyone involved, including the person who committed the crime or offense. And sujatha baliga is with us now from San Francisco. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. Such a joy to be on your show today.

I do want a mention that the MacArthur Foundation, who awards the Genius Grant, is among NPR's financial supporters. With that being said, you know I'm going to ask you what it was like to get that phone call. Where were you?What were you doing?

So here's the thing. I think I'm in a different situation than some of the other fellows because I had had this opportunity to bump into the director of the program in April. And she'd given me her card and asked me to be in touch about people who I really respected in my field. And so I was thinking, it was this amazing opportunity to lift up the names of people who are working to end mass criminalization or people who I've respected for decades, to try to get their names into her ear.


It takes a whole lot of land to produce meat. If you think about it this way, imagine around the globe all of the crop land out there - one-third of it is used to grow food not for people but for animals. It's animal feed. And when you combine the land needed to graze animals and feed them, this is just a whole lot. The World Resources Institute has estimated that for every gram of protein, producing beef can require 20 times the land and emit 20 times the emissions compared to what it takes to produce beans.

So are there certain types of meat that are better in terms of environmental footprint?Or basically is the suggestion that we should not be eating meat?

There are definitely better choices, and it does not have to be all or nothing. I just mentioned cows and other ruminants. They require a lot of land and feed. But they also release a lot of methane into the atmosphere. Every time these animals belch, a bit of methane goes up into the atmosphere. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.

So from an environmental perspective, options such as chicken and turkey can be better. It takes less animal feed to produce meat from these animals. They grow faster. They require less land. So when it comes to reducing the environmental footprint of your diet, you don't have to completely give up meat.


Iran announced today that it will soon exceed limits on its stockpiles of enriched uranium that it agreed to under the 2015 nuclear deal with the U. S.  and other nations. The Trump administration pulled the U. S.  out of the deal last year; other countries stayed in. And this new announcement is the latest sign that it might be falling apart altogether.

Joining us to discuss this is NPR's Geoff Brumfiel. He covers science and security. Hey, Geoff.

Hey, there.

What exactly did Iran announce today?


So basically it has to say, you know, our sticker price is this amount. If you have insurance, that cost may vary.

OK. But that's a good point. Do people actually pay that official sticker price in most cases?

So that's the drug industry's argument against this proposal. They say that because of insurance coverage, hardly anyone pays the price the Trump administration is forcing these drug makers to include in their ads. That price is often called the list price or the sticker price, as we said. Drugmakers argue that including that price would scare consumers off from even going to their doctor and asking about a drug because they'd see a sky-high list price, and they would think - I can't afford that; I'm not going to go to the doctor.

Well, now that's interesting because that could be bad for someone's health. But is that actually what the government may want in some cases - for a consumer to make an informed decision that this drug just seems really pricey for the benefits alleged with it?


And when you have spoken out publicly about it, you got a lot of backlash, very ugly stuff. Why do you think that hockey fans are so protective of this aspect back to the game when it seems like we should all be able to agree that if we can just be - keep players healthier and keep their brains safer, that should be a good thing?

Yeah. I think it's just - I think it's a resistance to change. That's really what it comes down to. But yeah, when I - I tweeted out about this in response to Don Cherry, who's a big pro-fighting guy here in Canada. And I got a lot of vitriol. It was ugly. I mean, it ranged from respectful disagreement to homophobia, sexism, misogyny. And that was kind of when I realized this truly is a cultural stigma, a cultural touchpoint and powder keg issue that needs to be investigated and discussed further.

The larger important issue here is the health of players. And the NFL and football have really dominated the conversation when it comes to concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, this this brain neurological illness. But hockey has this issue as well. Can you talk a bit about how injuries in hockey are factoring into this?

Yeah. I mean, I would argue that the NHL is probably lagging behind most of the other contact sports leagues as far as addressing this issue. There was a class-action lawsuit settled last year. But the players only got - who were involved - only got about $20,000 each and some promises for future medical testing and medical treatment.

Much less than the NFL football players got.


One is from Vaclav Havel. He's a ex-Czech president. And basically, it says for kids to surround themselves by people who seek the truth and then run from the people who have claimed they have found it. That's one of the quotes.

I talk to the parents, and I said, you know, everything has got to be non-offensive. It has to be a, you know, definitely acceptable for high school students. It can't be anything that's controversial.

So how much money have you raised?

You know, right now, I've raised $350, but I've been receiving numerous offers in the past week.


I'm Farai Chideya, and this is News and Notes. If a child commits a crime, even a serious one, should they go through the same justice system, and pay the same price as an adult?That's just one of a host of issues surrounding juvenile justice. Today is part of our ongoing series on criminal justice.

We look at how kids end up behind bars, and what other options judges have when faced with a young offender. For more, we have Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center. Welcome Carole.

Thank you. Welcome.

So, let's start with a little scenario. There is a 16 year old and his friend, who go into a convenient store. They ask for money. The clerk says no. The friend shoots the clerk. If the 16-year-old is arrested and charged, what are some of the possible paths that the justice system could take, with the person who was not the shooter, but who was part of this crime?


And this could sound obvious, and this could sound like a no-brainer. But the reality in Mexico is that whenever a journalist is killed, investigators - their first reaction is to always try to find a motive that is not related to journalistic work. So they find any other motive - economic motive or maybe a passion motive, anything except journalistic work because they don't want to admit that they have a problem of press freedom in their hands. But I think in this case it is really obvious why Javier Valdez was killed.

Yeah. This is going to sound naive. But why do you think it's important to do stories like that?I mean, drug cartels - people often prefer just to look the other way - don't they?

Well, yes. But if you don't report on them, then nobody else will. And it is not just the stories about the drug cartels. It is the stories about the consequences that they are unleashing in Mexican public life in every level. I live in a city that, for years, was the turf in a turf war between two drug cartels. And the effects of the violence that they unleashed was devastating for the city because investment never came in. Jobs were not created. Nightlife shut down. People stopped going out on the street. We all started to distrust from one another. Neighborhoods began putting up gates and fences, and so it was really disruptive.

Your newspaper was attacked, wasn't it?


And let's not forget that that's the heritage that Marissa Mayer comes from; understanding how to make search at Google ever more personal, ever more relevant. If she can do the same thing with news and make it more relevant to you, so that it's not a one-size-fits-all product anymore, that could be a big advance in the form.

So, let's say in a year or two the president of the United States has what - I don't know if it's a tradition - but often he will have lunch with the major network actors. Does Katie Couric have lunch at that same table?

Well, there's two questions there. One, is whether that is the judgment of importance in news. I think that we have to get out of the access game. But I still understand your question, which is will Yahoo be a presence in news as much as the other networks?It might take a while, but there's no reason it couldn't be. You know, there's a great, great blog called SCOTUSblog that covers the Supreme Court like no one else and they are struggling right now to get a credential to the Supreme Court. They do great coverage, highly specialized. And we've got to get past this idea that only big, old institutions are journalistic institutions. We have to work collaboratively with all kinds of new players.

Jeff Jarvis, media analyst and professor of journalism joining us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.


You know there are some including the West Point history professor, Lieutenant Colonel John Gentile, who say that it's not so much that we've sent in these extra troops or changed our strategy, it's that we got Muqtada al-Sadr's forces to have a ceasefire and we essentially hired 100,000 former Sunni insurgents to come onto our payroll and try to keep quiet.

That's an absolute distortion of what's actually happened. Look, I've been going to Iraq for the last two years, every three or four months for a couple of weeks at a time. I have spoken to the Sunni insurgent leaders and they have capitulated. There's not a white flag of surrender, but they have come into the political process.

Why did you come into the political process?Why didn't you continue to seek your political objectives using armed violence?Answer, because we couldn't win. One of them said, when Bush occupied Baghdad, we knew we didn't have a chance. Those are his words not mine. The awakening movement had already started in Anbar province, but the fact of the matter is with the catalyst of additional troops, that awakening movement, as you say, the Sons of Iraq.

This is the people we hired to.


Can I ask you just when you wrote this thread, what prompted it?What was the moment that sort of made you think, this is something I need to write right now?

I live in - I jokingly refer to it as the wilds of Connecticut, and there's nothing wild about it. But I live in the woods about 10 miles away from Sandy Hook. And when that incident happened, my daughter was in elementary school. My son was in middle school. The schools went into lockdown. I think I became radicalized on that day against gun violence. Every time one of these events happens, it affects me really deeply.

And so I found myself on the kitchen floor. My daughter wanted help with her homework, and I was sort of tweeting as she was reading me an essay she was writing. But it - I just felt like I needed to try to say these things in the best way that I knew how in that moment. And I - you know, there was no real forethought to it. It was just a kind of expression of deep, deep sadness.

Michael Ian Black is a comedian, actor and writer. Thank you so much for joining us.


OK.  Give us the background now. He has been charged with eight felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice.

Correct.

Remind us what happened.

Well, this all began quite some time ago. We're talking about a case that involves the firing of a couple police officers. And supposedly, these police officers were fired because they were investigating misconduct on the part of the mayor. And the mayor came up with a settlement, an $8. 4 million settlement that was paid out of the city's coffers.


What would happen in a civil contempt is that you would basically be trying to hold the attorney general - get a court order that he was in contempt. And the court would have a hearing. And Justice Department would intervene, and they would fight the contempt citation. And then the court would have a ruling. And that's how the process kind of operates theoretically. What normally happens is the court does not like to step into executive legislative disputes, and they will urge both sides to try to accommodate one another. I think it would only be if the court determined that the Justice Department was really in bad faith would they then hold the attorney general in contempt.

Let me ask you this. If this matter does land in court, if litigation is actively pursued, that could take months. It could take years even. And if the goal is to get information from Attorney General William Barr, how is this an effective strategy?Pursuing a contempt case could result in a huge delay, right?

I think the reality is is that the rules of subpoenas right now as we're discussing in many ways work in favor of the executive for the exact reason that you are hinting at in your question, which is they can run the clock. They can probably run the clock on the enforcement question for months, if not years. And they might be able to even run it up to the next election.

Right. So if the White House intends to stonewall, do you think it's even a wise strategy on the part of the Democrats right now to be talking about contempt?


Good.

They did have generators working, as did the airports. Now, officials are saying that this was a failure in the grid's interconnection system, which happened in the northeast, between two big installations there, and then triggered this unprecedented chain reaction. They don't think, by the way, that this was a cyberattack or any other kind of sabotage. But they don't exactly know what happened yet. They say it could be a couple of weeks before they do. We do know, though, that the grid and the infrastructure is not in good shape.

How are people responding to this odd Sunday?

Well, they're very angry, obviously. I mean, in Argentina, they're already facing really very hard times. Inflation there is among the highest in the world. The economy is - you know, they've got this boom-and-bust economy that's right now in such a mess that the government very controversially decided to sign on to this huge $56 billion IMF bailout. There are strikes and protests over President Mauricio Macri's austerity program, regularly.


Then, Francisco Lopez fired back with this. (Reading) Socialist, how interesting that we would call policies to get us out of the economic hole that when the political thought of the last 30 years has simply been welfare for the rich.

Then Qwende Madu(ph) chimed in with this. (Reading) Pure Republican haberdash. The government didn't require banks to make bad loans. They did so of their own accord. Furthermore, the stimulus package is not meant to replace private investment but is the last resort meant to show entrepreneurs that the economy is still viable.

And Walter Groppe(ph) has cheered our guest with this remarks. (Reading) Government got us into this mess. That means, Democrats and Republicans should they be trying to get us out of it?No, the government needs to sit down, shut up and learn.

Now, moving on to another story. Ann Powers(ph) in St.  Louise, Missouri wrote us after she heard us replay a Roundtable with African-American mystery authors.


And based on your experience, Ms.  Rosenberg, how much do France and the U. K.  and Germany want to be different than U. S.  policy in this regard?

Right now is the period of true testing of exactly that question. How independent do they want their foreign policy to be, given that there's a long-standing, close relationship between trans-Atlantic security partners and significant collaboration and interconnectivity in the economic sphere?So on the one hand, Europe wants to adhere to its own principles on foreign policy and economic relations, which lead it to diverge from the United States in the matter of this Iran deal. On the other hand, that may mean risking quite a lot.

Elizabeth Rosenberg of the Center for a New American Security, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you.


People are still talking about that controversial New York Post cartoon, which they said sought to spoof the economic stimulus bill. Some people saw it as racist. And we also want to hear from people about what they want to hear from us in these final weeks of our show being on the air, and they can send their ideas for segments, story ideas and interviews to our blog or through our Facebook page, News & Notes.

Can I throw you a curve?

Sure.

All right. I don't want to scare you. . .


Short word - yes. That is exactly what happened. And that includes in regular order a lot of backroom negotiation. And there is no guarantee of success for all of that, but at least if people know that they are back to what they need to do and know how to do best, sure, we could be right back here in three weeks with the difference being this far smaller chance of a shutdown. Now, they really ought to be able to do what they do best in that period of time, but if not, the president will be back in the same poker game with a far weaker hand than the one he just folded this week.

Roger Stone, one of the president's closest friends, a longtime adviser, of course was arrested yesterday, charged with lying to Congress, witness tampering, among other things. What does this tell us about the Mueller investigation?

It tells us that investigation is as robust as ever and moving forward. The former CIA chief, John Brennan, said yesterday he expects many more indictments in the weeks ahead, including some people who are household names. Now, the Mueller team is closely following the performance of some other actors like Paul Manafort, an old business partner of Roger Stone's. They say he has not followed through with the factual and truthful testimony he promised when he pled guilty on several counts last year. So that's another space to be watching.

Report from NBC this week - Jared Kushner got his security clearance only after administration officials overruled career security specialists. What do you make of this?


There is no good precedent for thinking that these peace talks will work well for exactly the reason that you have said. The Syrian regime and its allies should - have at no point countenanced the idea that Bashar al-Assad will step down. And then the opposition negotiating committee reiterated in London this week that they foresee a six-month transitional period at the end of which Assad is no longer the president of Syria. So that's a pretty big sticking point.

And starts on Monday?

Starts on Monday at sundown, which is also the beginning of the Muslim Eid festival, yes.

Alice Fordham in Beirut. Thanks so much.


So alphabetically, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, who'd you like?

You know, I liked the fact that they all came. The important thing for the Urban League was that each of these five candidates accepted our invitation, came, and I think offered a serious perspective from their own point of view. They came in here. They talked about race. They talked about economics. They talked about the criminal justice system. They talked about cities. These issues don't get discussed on the main stage in many, many political debates and discussions. And so why we wanted them here, so they could talk about equality, talk about opportunity, develop those ideas in a way that will not, and - or, I should say, historically has not happened in this campaign up until this point.

Mr.  Morial, another unarmed black man was killed by an officer in Cincinnati. I wonder if you have some ideas you want to bring to our attention about how to try to repair a shattered relationship between black citizens and police.

It's an American tragedy of untold proportions, particularly as we've seen it play out in the last two years. Our ten-point justice plan recommended that body cameras and dash cameras be mandatory for all law enforcement all the way across the country. But we also believe that more must be done when it comes to police officer hiring, police officer training, and police officer accountability. The community wants to and must trust its police if they're going to be allies is in what we all want, and that is safer communities.