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I still have a great deal of hope and optimism because I truly believe that the action of Rosa Parks and the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. inspired so many of us to find a way to get in the way. When I was growing up, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents told us when we asked about segregation, racial discrimination, `Don't get in trouble. Don't get in the way.' But Dr. King, Rosa Parks and so many others gave us examples like getting in the way, and that's why I was inspired to meet Rosa Parks at the age of 17 in 1957. As a matter of fact, I met Rosa Parks before I met Dr. King. I didn't meet him till 1958 at the age of 18. And I don't know where our nation, where we were would be as a people if it hadn't been for those nonviolent action in Montgomery 50 years ago.
When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management. (Laughter) We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony. The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns β€” (Laughter) Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise. (Laughter) Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right? (Laughter) Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself. Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments β€” busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book. One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day. But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?" "Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "No β€” can't you see how busy I am?" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. To get at this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she "had it all" β€” that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. Of course, right? But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, "Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice." And rather than say, "I don't have time to do x, y or z," she'd say, "I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority." "I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority." If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. (Laughter) Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices, I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there. So how do we do that? How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater? Well, first we need to figure out what they are. I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. The first, on the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual performance reviews. You look back over your successes over the year, your "opportunities for growth." And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's performance review now. And you can do this for your personal life, too. I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter. (Laughter) Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. Don't send it. (Laughter) Please, don't send it. But you can write it. And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year. And now we need to break these down into doable steps. So maybe you want to write a family history. First, you can read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. Or maybe you want to run a 5K. So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. And then β€” this is key β€” we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them. I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a "low opportunity cost" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now." (Laughter) But we are willing to think about what those should be. So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. Career, we think about; relationships, self β€” not so much. But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in. Where you plan them in is up to you. I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. I get that. And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering. There are 168 hours in a week. Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week β€” that leaves 72 hours for other things. That is a lot of time. You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you're working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You say you're working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure? (Laughter) There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours. (Laughter) You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours. So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV. But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm not sure who to put that question to. And I think in terms of very old cases, the statute of limitations, unless it's for a crime like murder, would have expired. So it would be little to go on, Antrell. Thanks very much for the call. We appreciate it. And we'd like to thank our guests today. You most recently heard from Mark Vukelich, who's the unit chief of the FBI civil rights unit. Also with us here in Studio 3A, Mark Kappelhoff, chief of the criminal section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Very kind of you gentlemen to come in. Thanks very much for your time today.
Yeah. You know, that's really the next stage in our research is what will happen when things like, you know, future trends in global warming and population growth. How will that change the dynamics of the hot spots? I think we will see infections moving into new areas. We'll see vectors that the insects that carry those infections moving into new areas. I think most people - most scientist agree with that. But I don't think places like the Mississippi Delta are going to see very large significant outbreaks because, you know, we are in a country that can afford air-conditioning and, you know, nets on the windows. And we can afford anti-malarial drugs. I think that climate change spells problems ahead for a lot of other countries that can't afford those treatments. And you know, and I think that they're all messages to - with this sort of approach, we can target a little bit better the limited resources we've got to maybe get ahead of the curve on the countries that are going to be suffering from that.
First of all, I would like to say that a very large number of Pakistanis, including my whole family and friends, we did appreciate and strongly support you when you were in power. We recognized that after a long time, the country had a leader who was honest and sincere, and we very much hope that you will return one day soon as the country's elected leader. My question pertains to the madrassas, which are commonly regarded as a breeding ground of the Taliban - most of them anyway. I believe that at the time you were in power, you had a plan of getting the madrassas to adopt a more liberal curriculum, teaching the arts and sciences along with a small component of religious education.
Well I think, you know, I hope - I hate to generalize here, but I think you look at a lot of issues that would resonate more with women, I think the Democrats have a better - have historically had a message that seems more to appeal. And also it's a - a lot of times Republicans get branded like we're uncaring, or we're, you know, just a party of saying no. And so I just think, again, the Republicans can do a much better job - I don't think this is African-American, I think it's women in general - of how they can communicate to women, and I think that's one of the open issues.
The Justice Department declined to comment for this story. But a spokeswoman pointed us to what former Deputy U.S. Attorney Larry Thompson told the Sentencing Commission back in 2002. He said it would send the wrong message to lower the penalties for crack cocaine. If you want to do anything, he said, raise the penalties for powder cocaine. There's been a reluctance in Congress to touch the law at all. But more voices are calling for change. Senator Jeff Sessions, the conservative Republican from Alabama, is one of them. He's introduced a bill that would reduce the differential between crack and powder cocaine from a hundred to one; to 20:1.
We, over the last 40 years, have ended up with a tremendous amount of space in our homes and smaller families than we had four decades ago. So do you really need all the space that you're living in in your core residence would be the first question I'd have that couple answer. And then, sure, I like the idea of getting a second home. You have to evaluate your financial situation. And, of course, we're unlikely to see anything like the returns from an investing standpoint in real estate over the next 10 years that we saw over the last 10 years. But as long as you're aware of your - keeping in the bounds of your overall financial plan and really evaluating whether you need all that house you're living in today, I think sure, you should be looking to really enjoy the second half of your life.
Here are the economics for the program. Where it's worked, families are usually given a supplement amounting to a third a quarter of their income. In Mexico, that could be a few hundred dollars. In New York, it means four to five thousand dollars a year for a single mother of two. The philosophy behind the program strikes at something deeper than a few thousand dollars, though. In this country, public opinion is almost exactly split on the question, what causes poverty. An equal number of people say it's the poor people's fault as say it's due to circumstances beyond their control.
Well, I think one of the things that helped - there were seven people in the family, and each person had a different love of the camera - or total dislike of the camera. And we were able to balance our time with each person so that we didn't become too overbearing to them. Lance and Bill enjoyed the camera. They did not have any problems being on camera. Other members of the family were very shy and hesitant, and so we would just not give them as much focus as the other two. And so that helped a lot, to have seven different personalities to film.
I think that there definitely are a lot of strikes and walkouts in Amazon fulfillment centers in Europe. We're definitely seeing a little bit of this movement in the United States. One Amazon warehouse manager that I interviewed had told me that, on Prime Day, the facility that she was working in, people were handing out flyers that they wanted to stage a mass walkout on Prime Day about two years ago and that the managers had been ordered to kind of collect the pamphlets and get rid of them. You know, the flipside to that is that if people - I think if people were really, really concerned and they heard that these type of conditions were going on, I think that you'd see more boycotts. I think consumers are definitely interested in the story, but I'm not sure if it's going to stop them from shopping on Amazon.
When they finally put this substance into my IV, there were, I think, 14 or 15 people in the room. It was this moment of incredible tension. And I felt something. It was almost a high. It was this incredible, magical warmth that spread through my arm. And I could feel it spreading, you know, through my arm and through my chest. And it was a wave of relief as pain was erased literally with every heartbeat pushing a little bit farther. And within 10 minutes, I was completely recovered. I felt fine. And they were able to discharge me just a few hours later. So it was the first time they'd seen a black widow bite that didn't need to be admitted. I was discharged at 3 a.m., and I went home, and I collapsed into bed. And I woke up at some point the next day and went downstairs to make a cup of coffee. And I saw a spider crawling on the floor. And right there was a male black widow. And I took a few pictures of it, and then that guy had to go.
Well, initially the response was more or less along the expected lines. Those who are opposed to this kind of religious extremist jihadism were on one side, and those who supported were on the other. And there was a considerable number in between, whose response was, shall we say, unknown or unexpressed. Now what we are seeing is that in the vicinity of Abbottabad, where this hideout was, people are very skeptical. They are disbelieving the version that has been put out. They say it may be just a ruse. It may be that this was not Obama(ph) at all and so on and so forth.
The background sounds of greetings from friends, relatives, wives and children, he said, was so chaotic that any real description of the reunion will have to wait for another day. There was no explanation from the Defense Department as to why two of the Bosnians ordered released remain at Guantanamo. Lawyers for the group theorize that the three men who are home now are Algerian-born Bosnian citizens, while the two still at Gitmo are Bosnian residents, but not citizens. Ironically, one of the men still at Gitmo, Lakhdar Boumediene, was the lead plaintiff in the case that led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling on detainee rights. He was stripped of his Bosnian citizenship in 2006. For the past two years, he's been on a hunger strike and force-fed. His lawyer, Mr. Oleskey, says he's down to 129 pounds.
I disagree with him on that. What we have to do is look at means testing. And that is there are 40 million people receiving these programs who probably can't afford to pay any more or to have benefits reduced because it's their main source of support, you know, in retirement. But there are 10 or 15 million people at the upper end of the income spectrum who are retired, who do have substantial private assets, who do have substantial pension and other sources of income. And given the fiscal circumstances we face, they're going to have to share in the sacrifice. They're going to have to have their benefits cut back.
Well, it's a good idea to get a corporation to get in on this. I mean, we're at very early stages now. I helped developed this ball. I put the finance into the R and D of it. It seem to me a no-brainer, you know, because a lot of kids and refugee camps in Africa and the rest of the world, they play with footballs made of newspapers or with rags, and they do a very good job. But to give them an indestructible ball is something that will last for a lifetime, that they can use to teach their own kids football with a mentor. There's a mentoring program. So I think it's a wonderful project. And I'm very proud to be a part of it. I'm hoping we'll get a corporate response soon, particularly with the World Cup coming up in South Africa in June. It would be an ideal vehicle.
It's like any other kind of music. Don't forget, for the first half of jazz's existence, for about the first 50 years it was primarily dance music. And also someone once asked Count Basie to define his music and Basie's response was three words, tap your foot. So I guess what I'm leading up to is, you know, we tend to over-intellectualize jazz. The fact is that there are all different kinds of jazz, some that are more accessible and approachable than others. But the most accessible of those are perfectly approachable and understandable to anybody with open ears and a foot that they can tap.
I think you're absolutely right. There's got to be carrots and sticks. And apparently right now the only think that people are looking at is the stick. And I don't believe the North Korean government is necessarily going to budge because, you know, the U.N. Security Council has issued sanctions. I think we've got to go back to the process by which we begin to try to talk through some of these very difficult, global challenges, like how do you make sure that that region of the world is safe and how do you limit opportunities for every country, including the United States, to use their nuclear arsenal to pose as a threat to other neighboring nations.
Amy, let's continue this when we come back from the short break. If you - we're going to continue this discussion about what's happening with families during the recession. If you'd like to give us a call, the number is 800-989-8255 or send us an email to talk@npr.org. I'm Lynn Neary, it's Talk of the Nation from NPR News. This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington. From time to time we talk about how this recession affects your life. Today, your relatives in a recession. Few things split families the way money can, especially when one person has it and the other doesn't. What's happening in your extended family and how did you resolve the problem? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, and our email address is talk@npr.org. Amy Dickinson is with us, she writes the syndicated column "Ask Amy" for the Chicago Tribune. And these days she's on a book tour promoting "The Mighty Queens of Freeville," her memoir. And with us on the phone, Nancy Molitor, a clinical psychologist. Before the break, Amy, you were responding to our caller, Laura. She's contemplating taking her brother in for the second time. And you were starting to say, the second time around do it a little differently.
But, you know, if people are finding community in them, that's great. In Seattle, these places, a lot of them are under 200 square feet. So they are very small. They're starting at about 600 and going up to $700 and above. So they're not necessarily all that affordable. And they're really only for some people. They're for singles; you cannot have even a single mother with a child in them. They're only for young singles who are healthy. There's no elevators. It's just, it's a very particular type of person who's able to go live in them. We've heard from some seniors who are living in them, if they're able-bodied. If you're in a wheelchair, there's not a lot of units available for you. So it's a very specific kind of person who can and will live in these, which is great, but we want variety in our neighborhood.
So, that's one of the things we really got quite excited about in the work was that basically we also found effectively the opposite gene. There's a gene that could turn the whole thing off and then we found a gene that could turn this specific type of cell off, and what was really nice about that was by studying that process we could actually show that this was important, that this fifth type, it didn't just happen to be in the right place at the right time. You really have to have that type to get a good antibody response because if we turn, if we flip this off switch, if we, you know, if we forcibly turn on this off switch gene, or in fact what we just did was we just added that gene so that it was just on…
German neo-Nazis identify with the NPD, the National Democratic Party, which the Domestic Intelligence Agency describes as racist and anti-Semitic. In recent years, it has gained political traction, which analysts attribute to growing German animosity toward immigrants. NPD, which calls itself a national resistance party, now has elected representatives in two regional parliaments in the former East Germany. In elections last fall, the NPD won seats in every county council in the eastern state of Saxony. NPD leader Udo Voigt says the party is no longer isolated in German society because people here reject the multicultural model he claims has been imposed by the United States.
David Grossman, an author whose books include, See Under: Love, and Sleeping on a Wire. He joined us by phone today from his home in Jerusalem. We're talking about today's election in Israel. In a few minutes time, we're gonna be joined by our political junkie Ken Rudin. If you have questions for him about American politics our number is 800-989-8255, that's 800-989-TALK. And the E-mail address is talk@npr.org. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And we go now to Amman, Jordan for another view. Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian columnist for the Jordan Times and the Jerusalem Post newspapers. He's also director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah on the West Bank. Thanks very much for being with us.
Coming up this Thursday, TALK OF THE NATION holds a special Katrina-related broadcast. A live studio audience will be here for a conversation with leading thinkers on the lessons that Hurricane Katrina has taught us about race and class in our society. Then New Orleans jazzmen join us to perform the displaced music of their city. If you'll be in the Washington, DC, area this coming Thursday, September 22nd. if you'd like to join the in-studio audience for these programs, send us an e-mail with `Audience' in the subject line and include a way that we can get in touch with you. That's a TOTN special broadcast with a studio audience this coming Thursday on TALK OF THE NATION. There's news out of London today about the ongoing investigation into the July 7th bombings. According to Metropolitan police, three of the four men responsible for the attacks may have conducted a practice run on the London subway on June 28. Surveillance videos showed the men taking the same route on the London subway that they took on July 7th.
I think the first thing I would say is that we need to teach people and teach everyone how to be better critical thinkers, how to use information, how to understand pieces of information and how to look at information and work out whether it's good or bad information. That for me is the first step. But I don't think that's going to be enough. I think if you kind of go along with this idea that conspiracy theories are more likely to emerge when people feel disaffected, when people feel alienated, then the natural outcome of that - the natural answer to what we should do is that we should be promoting greater democratic access. We should allow for everyone to be part of a democratic process in which they have a say, in which they have a voice. And once you start to have that, I think you will start to see the conspiracy theories start to diminish.
Haunted, I think, is the right word. One part of this guilt is that he's very, very hard on himself. At the massacre - after it, he nego - first, he negotiated a way out for the students who were remaining in the square. And that compromise, for which others have criticized him, probably saved a few dozen, if not a few hundred, lives. But then, he escaped to the diplomatic quarter and took refuge in the home of a foreign friend and later, felt terribly guilty about that because later, he learned that other - as he calls them, ordinary - Chinese stayed on the streets, tried to rescue the wounded and sometimes paid, themselves, with their lives, for doing so. So he's been very, very hard on himself for that point.
Well, when I first heard Justice Scalia's comments, my kind of initial reaction was that justices kind of often play this devil's advocates role while they're hearing oral arguments. But I spoke with our legal affairs correspondent, Nina Totenberg, who was in the court. She says people weren't really gasping. There wasn't a whole lot of shock in the room when Scalia was making those comments. But she did say a lot of times it's easy to see how people would think that the justices are kind of couching their own opinion in these arguments that they're making. And it's certainly with Scalia - you know, he's kind of a lightning rod as is. He's a consistently conservative judge. Liberals aren't, you know, really big fans of Antonin Scalia. So if you see him in a poor light like that, you're probably going to think the worst. And if you like Scalia, if you're a conservative, you're probably going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Recycling is one thing, but it's a little mundane, a little bit of a chore. But if you show people how to reuse things, then their minds are cranking along. And like she said, she's making great use of bottle tops. I mean, even a dispenser of tape, all that plastic and the little tape holder itself that we discard, there's all sorts of things. If you look around you can always make another use out of something. And that's why I try to design my books after that style of innovative reuse and fun. And also, you learn science at the same time.
Sure. I was flying to attend a conference in Rio de Janeiro. And on the flight from Jo-burg to Sao Paulo, two patients had low blood pressures. The first was a young woman who was dehydrated from having traveler's diarrhea and the second was more concerning. It was a middle-aged obese diabetic man. He was sweaty and dizzy. His blood sugar was normal - I did think I check that. But his blood pressure was really low. And my biggest concern was that he'd had a heart attack. I tried to put in an IV. One of the things you do when somebody has low blood pressure is you try to give them some fluids to support their blood pressure. And I just couldn't get the IV in. You know, this was a guy who's pretty obese; it was just hard to find a vein. And...
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. In California, Republicans have been working for years to bring Latino voters into the GOP fold. They were starting to have some success until Donald Trump. The Republican nominee's rhetoric around immigration is famously incendiary. He most recently attacked a federal judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuits because of his Mexican heritage. To talk more about how Donald Trump is affecting the Latino vote, we spoke with Mario Guerra. He's treasurer of the California Republican Party. Guerra has been at the forefront of the party's efforts to court Latinos. I asked him if he supports the GOP nominee, which is a complicated question for him. Here's how he responded.
Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I - it's really true. It is a lot about masculinity and identity and also giving people space to define that for themselves. You know, there's a lot of pressure on all of us, culturally, to - as we're born, we're constantly having this negotiation between who we feel we are or what we feel we are with what the world is saying and guiding us to be so that we all fit nicely into, you know, our categories. It's so much more complicated than that. And I haven't seen Don Shirley's archetype before. And that was something that was really attractive to me because he was multi-dimensional. If you look at Nina Simone - as much as we love and appreciate Nina Simone and her contribution to music and art, Nina Simone was never the Nina Simone that she wanted to be. She wanted to be a classical pianist. Don Shirley wanted to be a classical pianist. That's the experience of the black artist in this country - constantly being pointed and steered towards what is commercially profitable or where, socially, you're acceptable but not necessarily towards your talent and your freedom and therefore, eventually, the fulfilling of your own potential.
Very much so. And there's been such a revolution. The chapter in the book where I deal most specifically with genderism is in Ireland, where in 1970, every third child born in a Dublin hospital was a woman's fifth child. And by the beginning of this century, every third child born in Ireland was born outside of wedlock. There was this massive revolution in what was expected of women in Ireland. And it took place more or less about 50 years, were compressed into about 15. So daughters were born with entirely different expectations of what they should be able to do than their mothers. It's completely fascinating. Of course, gender is one of those identities that we're all involved in. I mean, everybody - you may live in an area where you don't know Latinos or you don't know black folks or you don't know Russians or Jews or whatever. But everybody knows somebody of the other gender.
The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan. And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave. And it became known as "Death Avenue" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the "West Side Cowboy." But even with a cowboy, about one person a month was killed and run over. So they elevated it. They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city. But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less. And by 1980, the last train rode. It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys β€” they say, at Thanksgiving β€” from the meatpacking district. And then it was abandoned. And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished. And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything. I went to my first community board meeting β€” which I'd never been to one before β€” and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer. And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down. So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line. And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition, but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it. And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street β€” which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic. But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape. At the time, there was a lot of opposition. Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down. I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement. Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case. This was after 9/11; the city was in tough times. So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case. And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong. We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build. So far it's cost about 150 million. And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city. So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million. That was enough. It really got the city behind it. It turns out we were wrong on that. Now people estimate it's created about a half a billion dollars, or will create about a half a billion dollars, in tax revenues for the city. We did a design competition, selected a design team. We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape. There's three sections. We opened the fist section in 2009. It's been successful beyond our dreams. Last year we had about two million people, which is about 10 times what we ever estimated. This is one of my favorite features in section one. It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave. And the first section ends at 20th St. right now. The other thing, it's generated, obviously, a lot of economic value; it's also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture. There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari. And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line. And this has been designed by Renzo Piano. And they're going to break ground in May. And we've already started construction on section two. This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees. The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city. This was just installed last month. And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan. And the city has planned β€” for better or for worse β€” 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around. But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people. And honestly, even though I love the designs that we were building, I was always frightened that I wouldn't really love it, because I fell in love with that wildscape β€” and how could you recreate that magic? But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special. Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line. And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside. But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other. Thanks. (Applause)
You know, I ride the subway in New York City every day, and I'll have to say that it's a question of how it's done. If they are to stop people and just ask, `What's in your bag?' and take a look, I think many New Yorkers will accept it. There is a heightened sense of anxiety out here because of what's happened in London, and I think that many New Yorkers are very worried about riding the subways. And you go to Grand Central, it wouldn't take much to have many people killed at once if there were a suicide bomber or some kind of a bomb in a backpack. So I think a lot of it depends on how it's done, and we have to watch carefully to make sure that there isn't racial profiling that accompanies this kind of a change in the procedures.
Well, I am given pause by that. The thing that we have to look at, though, is a motive of heart, the issue of love. And when I say love - if I move from the idea that I'm attempting to serve someone into an idea that I want to harass or hurt someone, there's a problem. I think I'm operating within a Christian character and within a Christian kind of framework or theology, and therefore I don't have fear, I don't have concern. But I am concerned about the anger I sense on the other side about this issue specifically.
Well, I'm not sure that it was a leap too far. But independent bloggers have a bit more latitude on what they can write because they're only responsible to the people who read their post, so to speak. I think that someone who is blogging for a news organization may have a little less of a leash, if you will, in that regard. So I'm not terribly surprised that this happened, although, I will tell you, I've seen and read far more harsh language on the Internet, on blogs, and I'm not sure that this is necessarily such a condemnable offense.
This is DAY TO DAY from NPR News. I'm Madeleine Brand. In the 1959 movie "The Mouse That Roared," the tiny country of Grand Fenwick goes to war with the United States and, to everyone's shock, wins. Well, in real life, something similar actually happened. The Caribbean country Antigua and Barbuda is one of the smallest in the world. Fewer than 70,000 people live there. And this tiny nation took on the United States not in war but in a major trade dispute. Antigua sued the US and won at least a partial victory, and as NPR's Adam Davidson discovered, it all began with a bookie from Long Island.
And what happened was the people rose up, and over a decade, built the force to create a constitutional amendment for direct election for president. And - for Senate. And I would say right now, that that's the same thing that has to happen. We need a constitutional amendment, because the Supreme Court has attributed: You can't limit money, because you limit speech. It's wrongheaded, in my view, but there it is. You need a constitutional amendment that says federal, state and local governments may limit the amount of money in a campaign. And if you take the Occupy movement back and the Tea Party - the Tea Party has passions for civic programs. I would rather have a specific program, idea, getting money out of politics that attracts passion to it than have only passion. Ideally, you want both.
And I was supposed to fight all this, huh? No way. Twelve-year-olds couldn't stand against all that. Just wasn't fair. When my stepmother saw the operation didn't turn me into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state. It took me years to get my life together. Through it all, I've been haunted by questions. Did I do something to deserve this? Can I ever be normal? And most of all: Why did my dad let this happen? In 44 years, we've never discussed it once, not even after my stepmother died.
Right. Especially if the surge is serious, it can't just be two or three months. In other words, if this - as some of the more dovish senators have said - if this were a two- to three-month surge to protect troops by way of beginning a withdrawal, that will be one thing. If this is a serious escalation designed to change the course in Iraq, then it's more than a surge. It is an escalation of the war, and I hope that in this debate we get another factor discussed, which is Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a real mess right now, and as Senator Biden said when I talked to him, if you're going to surge troops anywhere, Afghanistan would be an awfully good place to do it because of the resurgence of the Taliban.
Well, one thing that could happen is a little bit of a rebound of global production from the main producers if supply holds up, if there aren't bad climate shocks. Interestingly, this year the U.S. is experiencing more or less average temperatures so far, not the torrid temperatures we've had in recent years. But the rest of the world is having the hottest year on record. So who knows what going to happen to the total grain supply worldwide? We are at such low inventories. We have such a fraught financial market. The dollar is so weak, the number of people demanding food is so large that another bad accident of climate shock could really be devastating. On the other hand, I'm not forecasting that because a good harvest could somewhat ease these conditions.
So first, we should say that it's difficult to test for Zika. And unfortunately, Haiti is in a really difficult position. They just simply don't have the laboratory capacity to be testing numerous samples from pregnant women or from women who are coming in with symptoms of Zika. Tests simply aren't getting done. The other problem here is that the doctors have been on strike for the last four months, so people haven't been going to the public hospitals at a time which would probably be some of the peak transmission of this virus, if you look at what's been happening in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. So for sort of a confluence of factors, these tests simply aren't getting done. And so there simply is not the information as to whether or not people really have Zika here or not.
He was very clear from the start that this was his intention. He said he knows that the act that he undertook were unusual, that it was outside of the democratic process. He's disclosing information that the law says you shouldn't disclose. And his attitude is that he believes he did absolutely nothing wrong. He did the right thing in his view. And that therefore if somebody does something like he did, the public will rightly want to know why. And because he feels like he did the right thing, he doesn't want to hide in shame or try and evade public detection. He wants there to be a debate triggered around the policies that are very consequential and yet very secret, or at least were secret, until he helped begin to expose them. And he wants to help drive that debate. And he thinks that by coming forward and explaining himself that that will help fuel those discussions.
This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the majority of rape victims never report the crime. But those who do decide to help police find their attacker can face a difficult series of interviews and examinations. Victims can spend hours in a clinic or a hospital, speaking with counselors and cops, and be the subject of a search for physical evidence, hairs, bruises, fibers, fluids, material that's collected into a rape kit. And while victims submit to this process in good faith, in fact, many thousands of rape kits are never opened, and evidence which could identify a rapist often sits untouched in police-department freezers. Sarah Tofte spent time researching this process at the Rape Treatment Center at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center in California, and wrote about it last month in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times called "Lost Promise for Rape Victims." If you've been through this as a victim, health professional, or in law enforcement, call and tell us your story. Our phone number is 800-989-8255. You can also send us email. That address is talk@npr.org. Or you can share your experience on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.
Liane, this is something the White House started over the summer. And the idea is to have a more natural interaction with voters than some stiff East Room event at the White House. Of course, there's nothing terribly natural suddenly showing up in someone's backyard with a whole bunch of TV cameras, but the idea is to reach out to people who are frustrated with the economy - and there's no shortage of those. Mr. Obama's going to be going Albuquerque, New Mexico; Des Moines, Iowa; and Richmond, Virginia - all states where the unemployment rate is below the national average - in the case of Iowa, well below, but also states where Democratic lawmakers are facing some tough battles for reelection.
This one definitely came out of the blue. Nobody had an inkling that Senator Dorgan was going to walk away. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of speculation about how much money was going to be spent on a race between Senator Dorgan and Governor John Hoeven, who has been basically seen as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. They thought there was going to be a lot of money poured in the race. And all of a sudden here it's five minutes to 5:00 yesterday afternoon and Senator Dorgan announces he is not running for re-election. And it sent the entire state into a tizzy and there's a lot of scrambling going on in both parties.
Let's talk about the military first. They are in a chaotic mess, to be quite frank. It is lots of groups of rebels. They come together un some operations, they argue among themselves on others. It goes from, you know, secular, defected soldiers to downright jihadis with links to al-Qaida. And there is no real command structure. The political part of the opposition is trying to very quickly bring themselves together. They feel that momentum coming. I was in the town of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, it's in Turkey, and was able to meet with some of those political leaders, was able to cross the border and meet some more in Aleppo Province. This is where the financial capital is, Aleppo, a town that was four million. Many of those people now have left.
Eric, I want to turn us to one last topic. Detroit schools facing an estimated 408 million dollar shortfall next year. There's a plan to cut nine percent of staff and teachers are asking for, you know, folks to hold off. Three hundred people already got layoff notices. Part of it is a question of whether or not the staff should have been scaled down over time as the number of students got smaller. But from your knowledge, did the number of students get smaller because of demographics, in terms of, you know, how many people are in Detroit, or was it that people just are leaving the public schools, or both?
In London's high court today, Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown took the stand for the first time to defend his work and his reputation. Two British authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, are suing THE DA VINCI CODE publisher, Random House, for copyright infringement. They claim Brown, an American, stole the central theme for his religious thriller from their 1982 book, THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL. Both books explore the controversial theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and produced a child whose bloodlines survive to this day. Since the court case began, both books have been flying off the shelves here and abroad. Katherine Rushton is a reporter from Book Seller Magazine. She was at the court today when Dan Brown took the stand, and she joins us now. Katherine, Dan Brown has been sitting in this courtroom watching all this. He finally got a chance to speak for himself. What did he say?
The real John Edwards doesn't just sound different than the usual stump speech. He looks different. You almost never see him in a suit and tie in these Webisodes. Instead, Edwards' opening remarks are delivered in jeans and a button-down Oxford, rumpled just so as he kicks back inside the cabin of his campaign airplane. In theory, it's a savvy play to young voters who hangout a lot on the Internet. And I get it. Slip the bitter pill of politics into the bottomless Slurpee that is viral video. But in practice, the real Edwards comes off a lot like the unreal one. The air of casualness these videos try to peddle is just too carefully cultivated. These shorts are a world away from the traditional 30-second political spot. Shot with a shaky Handycam and ambient noise licking all over the audio, each episode is about five minutes of not so verite. We're supposed to see what Edwards is like away from the podium, just hanging out with young campaign staffers. In another clip, he's visiting a refugee camp in Uganda.
Thirty years ago, when I visited - talk about extreme, I visited Antarctica, researchers were - actually I didn't go in there with them, but they were diving below the ice of one of the lakes there, it might have been Lake Vanda, I know I visited it, it's been a long time ago, to study the life under the ice, and that was really fascinating. And it looks like they've continued to do that for at least three decades because this week, researchers described a community of bacteria that make their living frozen inside an Antarctic lake. It's super-salty, there's no sunlight. It's about negative 13 degrees Celsius, talk about extremophile, and their home is sealed off from the rest of the world for, oh, about 3,000 years.
We know that speaker - that majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, is putting together a plan that would cut just as - enough, about $2.4 trillion, to be able to raise the debt ceiling - and remember, those two numbers have to be paired to get through the House - to raise the debt ceiling enough to get us through 2012, through the elections at the end of that year. And so what's interesting about this is, remember, last week, early in the week, we had this sort of - there was the biggest day on Wall Street for the Dow in a long time, this sort of excitement over the possibility of a grand bargain, a big deal. It fell apart Friday, and we seem to have nothing. After two days of whispers and negotiations and burnt-up phone lines here in Washington, it appears that we now have two possible plans, one from each party. And each house - each chamber of Congress is trying to pass its own plan and dare the other chamber not to pass it as we come ever closer to this deadline.
My question is that, over the next couple of years--you know, it might take, you know, between five and 10 years--people are telling me, anyway, that there's going to be a great merger between the Internet and the living-room television, where, you know, if you will--if you can conjure this up in your head, putting your cable connection, you know, from the Internet right into the back of your TV so that the whole World Wide Web is available from your Barcalounger and your big flat-screen TV. A producer like you--what I look at in the future is, why wouldn't you develop a series for broadband distribution if people could watch it, you know, in a high-quality fashion in their living room and spin off a little group that actually sold ads, and your company collects all that revenue and maybe shares it with, you know, someone on the Internet, but basically cuts the network out of the equation?
I've covered this issue now for over 30 years, and it just seems to me like inertia keeps these two states going without a consensus on a different way to nominate presidents. And because each state sort of has a lot to say about how it does that, it's impossible to get a national consensus, to get a national bill through the Congress. This process just keeps going on. And so I think if we were to look at 2012, get this away from personalities of '08, you could create a system that's a little different. But getting agreement on it would be difficult, and absent that agreement, these two states will continue, I think, to play an early role.
Right. And now he's got to draft a fantasy baseball team. And he did it on the drive home. Like, he's being driven and he's doing it on the phone, which is not an easy way to draft to begin with. To his credit, though, he ended up finishing second that year. It's weird, David: It would never occur to me that I would have something in common with Senator Santorum, and I had a great conversation with him all about fantasy baseball. It's amazing how fantasy sports can bring the most disparate people together and give them sort of a common bond.
Well, you know, all of this starts with a long debate we've been having for decades about evolutionary psychology and the differences between men and women. And there's this vast body of research out there on this subject. And it shows, first, mostly, there are no real significant differences between men and women on abilities, on the ability to do math, on IQ - pretty much the same. There are some minor differences between populations, mostly in levels of interest, not in levels of ability. And - but these are all about populations. You can't tell anything about a person, about an individual from any of these studies. Who should work at Google? Who should not work at Google? Who's good at tech? And James Damore...
That's true. Japan, Seoul and the United States all protested immediately. A spokesman for South Korea's president called it a reckless act that poses a serious threat to security on the Korean Peninsula. The South Korean military was put on alert. The Japanese government's spokesman called it extremely regrettable and said that despite putting a satellite in orbit, this amounted to a ballistic missile test. President Obama in Prague used similar language, also calling it a missile, and he urged North Korea to refrain from further provocative acts. China's reaction was slow. It took a couple of hours before Beijing released a statement and was much cooler. It called for restraint all around and clearly did not express concern like Japan, South Korea and the U.S. did.
Then the psychologists made it difficult for the volunteers to visualize the dilemma. They distracted them by making them visualize something else instead. When that happened, the volunteers stopped making emotional decisions. Not having pictures of the moral dilemma in their head, prompted them into rational, cost-benefit mode. In another experiment, Greene and Amit also found that people who think visually make more emotional moral judgments. Verbal people make more rational calculations. Amit says people don't realize how images tip the brain one way or another. And that can create biases we aren't even aware of. She asked me to imagine a scenario.
Well, I can help you. I'm right here and I just had a meeting with the Nike country folks in Spain. And in China, basketball is the number one sport. In Europe, the number one sport is soccer or what they call football. And most of the Europeans that are really good end up in the NBA. And so where Europe probably was a very strong basketball market five, seven years ago, it's probably waning a little bit because soccer has picked up so much momentum. They had the World Cup in Germany. And soccer's participation has grown in Europe where basketball has declined a little bit.
And so you get a Dutch oven. You brown the meat. You take it out. You throw in a bunch of onions and carrots and celery. Saute that. Put the meat back in - glug, glug, glug, wine, turkey stock, top on, in the oven for about three hours at 300 degrees till it's fall-apart tender. You take the top off. You hit it with the broiler - crispy, crunchy on the outside. And then you kind of almost just pull the meat apart and shred it and put it on a platter and spoon all that wonderful juice all over it. And it was by far the best thing I ate all Thanksgiving.
Well, Benedict was welcomed at the airport by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. They spoke for about 20 minutes and both expressed a desire to deepen dialogue and understanding. The most important encounter of the day was Benedict's meeting with Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs, Ali Bardakcioglu - he was among the Pope's harshest critics over Benedict's remarks, last September, that many Muslims saw as suggesting that Islam is violent and irrational. In the text of his speech, in English, Benedict reiterated what he had said last year, in a meeting with Muslims in Germany, that the dialogue between Christians and Muslims is a vital necessity. He also spoke about one of the crucial issues of his visit, the problem of religious freedom in Turkey. He said freedom of religion is the necessary condition for the loyal contribution of all believers to the building up of a society. In his remarks to the pope, Bardakcioglu said that inter-religious dialogue can develop only when there is mutual respect.
Hi, there. Well, I was calling just to comment on the fact that my mosque - and I agree with the young lady on the - your guest, that Muslims need to do more to reach out. And what we do at my mosque, for instance, is because we've been there in the community since the 1950s, we invite people over for iftar dinner. We invite the community in so that there is no avail, so that when they watch the news and see Osama bin Laden, they realize he is not the pope for Islam, and they have a greater understanding. So more outreach needs to be done, absolutely, on behalf of Muslim communities. And it relates directly to this mosque that, you know, potentially will be built in Manhattan because we have to keep in mind that this man, Abdul Faisal, is a Sufi, and his wife is there along his side at all times, and she has a great role in everything that he does. And we need to understand that the Sufis are moderates. Just like what happened in Lahore, Pakistan, not too long ago, a Sufi mosque was bombed. Muslims killing Muslims as well.
When Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 27 years ago, it created a secret court to review the federal government's plans to carry out surveillance within US borders. Any spying done without a warrant from that court is a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years in jail; that is unless there's a statute that authorizes such warrantless spying. On Monday President Bush argued he's acted within that law. President GEORGE W. BUSH: Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is absolutely. As I mentioned in my remarks, legal authority is derived from the Constitution as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.
Well, one of the things that has, unfortunately, happened with some of these anointed leaders who are very successful at leading these movements is they've managed to kind of undermine the scientific enterprise. And if you look at what Ken Ham does with Answers n Genesis or what the Discovery Institute does with Intelligent Design and so on, they make so many negative comments about how scientists are biased, how science is all about the assumptions that you bring to the data rather than the objective examination of the data. They make a big deal about scientific revolutions in the past that have overturned well-established ideas, and so on. So they've created an impression that is very widely shared among evangelicals, that science is not really very trustworthy. And Al Mohler, the Southern Baptist leader, has made a - gotten a lot of mileage out of talking about how the subtle results of science today will be replaced by something different tomorrow. So there's this sense that if you don't like a scientific idea, you've got lots and lots of justification for setting it aside. I think that's one of the reasons why climate science, for example - which everybody wishes wasn't true, because we don't want to have to pay the price that it will take to do deal with that. But so many evangelicals reject global warming, even though that has not even a remote tangential connection to anything in the Bible or their faith. And one of the reasons for that is that they just don't trust science as a whole. So when the National Academy of Sciences comes out and says, look, we all agree that global warming is real, they say, well, OK. We'll just wait 15 years, and then you'll change your mind, just like you always do.
Well, you know, at the human level, 80 percent of the investment in the Chinese markets is mom-and-pop, so the people who got in late to this market have been gored. The good news, though, is that the Chinese stock markets are a much smaller percentage of the economy than, say, in the U.S. and other developed countries, so it doesn't have as immediate an effect on things. It's also worth pointing out the Shanghai Exchange is down about 30 percent, but it's still up since the rise last year. So so far, this isn't a full-blown crash. What we have to do is see how the rest of the week goes.
Yeah. Google is not starting from nothing. It has hundreds of millions of Gmail users. And with Gmail, it has a pretty good representation of the people you communicate with and therefore, your kind of quote/unquote social graph. When I signed up for Google Plus it recommended 500 people for me to invite. You know, and once I invited those 500 people I got another 500 people. So it has a huge install base that it can start from. Now that weve had several years to sort of understand, you know, how a social network will work, it let me design things from scratch in a way that it's just sort of cleaner. It's like moving into a new house instead of into a cluttered house. And so you can kind of, you know, buy the kind of furniture you like and you can use, you know, decorate things the way you like. And so, in a way, for me, my social circle is more fairly represented on Google Plus.
It will become an increasingly more important issue as time goes by. Latin America in contrast, say, with Asia, is less integrated into the production chain. So the falling in exports of Latin America are essentially the fall of commodity exports. And they are not very intense in employment. However, as the tsunami of the global problems propagates through Latin America, unemployment will start picking up in other sectors eventually including in the non-tradable sectors like services and so forth. So, in countries like Mexico, surely, the impact is already being felt given its proximity to the U.S. In other countries, it's coming with some delay. But, unemployment and recession are the name of the situation for Latin America, not financial meltdown.
Well, I think what you're seeing is a reassembling of the natural environmental majority, which came together in the 1970s, as you said Neal. And was then, in the β€˜80s and β€˜90s, consciously splintered by an effort by the reactionary right to split off people like hunters and fishers, small town church goers, people in rural America, culturally, even thought they, in fact, share concerns about mercury, about grotesque factory feed lots, about global warming. What's happening at the state level now is that national environmental majority is being reassembled. The fact is, those Idaho state senators who voted to ban coal weren't elected to ban coal, but once elected they realized their public demanded it of them and they acted.
They then moved to what we call contingency testing behavior, which the best way to describe that is an animal moving its head in and out of mirror view as if it's asking itself, why is the animal in the mirror doing the same thing that I'm doing. And then the hallmark that we look for, the self-directed behaviors. In humans, obviously, when you go to a mirror, you might try and pick food out of your teeth, pick a booger out of your nose, whatever you would do in front of a mirror. Chimpanzees do very similar things. Elephants, on the other hand, we weren't sure what to expect, but what we saw was one elephant, Maxine, for instance, grabbed her left ear and pulled it slowly towards the mirror as if she was inspecting it. And all three elephants did a lot of trunk in mouth displays. Taking their trunks and sticking them into their mouths.
Well, the first I always tell people is calm down. Everybody falls into one of three categories, either A, you are going to get a refund, in which case the deadline doesn't really apply to you, B, You are going to owe, but you actually can afford to pay it so you're going to need to cut them a check and file an extension and take care of it as quickly as possible, and the third set of people are the ones who are usually the most nervous and upset by it, and that's the ones that think they owe and don't believe they can afford to pay it. Now those people need to especially calm down and begin to take time to gather their documents so they can possibly reduce that tax burden as much as possible.
So these are the people who I would describe as the puppet masters. This, of course, bled into government, the use of propaganda by government. Edward Bernays, for instance, was actually hired to carry out the publicity that made it possible to carry out the 1954 coup in Guatemala against Arbenz, and that has been something that I think mainstream media as long(ph) as the public has been reeling from ever since. I think the bulwark against it was the high rates of literacy and the capacity to be literate. Now we are seeing, you know, with the death of newspapers, of newsprint, with the decline in the publishing industry, a culture that is increasingly shifting towards an image-based culture, one where they confuse how they're made to feel with knowledge. And in image-based cultures - I mean which totalitarian societies are in essence image-based cultures - it's very hard to distinguish between propaganda and ideology, especially when you become unmoored from literacy.
I typed in her zip code and found that no fewer than 52 plans were available. They all had different premium prices, deductible levels and coverage policies. These are all displayed for you in endless tables on your screen. But these tables don't tell the whole story. Your best deal also depends on the number and type of drugs you're taking, whether they're available generically, and how each plan ranks your drugs in a four-tiered pricing scheme. And of course, all of this is superimposed on the flow of benefits through the year that Congress mandated. You may remember hearing about this. First, there's a deductible period where you pay everything. Then, the plan pays a lot for a few months. Then, you fall into this so-called donut hole and you pay everything. Finally, if your drugs cost more than $4,000, the plan starts paying again. Simple, huh?
Now picture this, you're in law school, you're about to listen to an hourlong lecture, so you break out your laptop and you begin typing away. The efficient use of technology sounds brilliant to most of us here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, especially since back in the day we worked our fingers to the bone scratching out notes in pencil or pen or practically carving on stone tablets. All this clutter on the keyboards and all those other tings and beeps and sounds computers make are driving some professors crazy. And there's a growing movement to limit the use of laptops in college classroom.
Well, I mean, I think the problem here is there are varying degrees of quality in secondary education. And I think the - some of the young people are opting out of high school not because they can't compete, because they understand that they're not getting a very good education where they are. So I think the bigger question is what sort of skill set is required these days to do well in college? And if you don't have a high school degree, is there a way that you can step up once you're in college, let's say a two-year college, so that it will make you college eligible so that you can get a college degree.
So there's an - another reason why last week's decision is getting so much attention is right in its wake two other prominent companies were sued under the same theory. You know, Conde Nast, the very prestigious publishing house, you know, which publishes the New Yorker; and Warner Music, another prestigious music house, they were sued. And at Conde Nast, you know, Conde Nast in ways tried to get on the right side of things after the initial wave of interest in unpaid internships a few years ago. It announced it was going to start paying its interns $550 a semester. So it could say our interns are not, you know, unpaid. We pay them. But nonetheless, these two interns sued Conde Nast - one who worked for the New Yorker, one who worked for W magazine - saying, you know, I worked 100, 200, 300 hours during the semester, and even while receiving $550 during the semester, that did not meet the $7.25 an hour requirement of the minimum wage.
Among the thousands of projects undertaken to reconstruct Iraq, one case offers a good microcosm of the challenges and missteps that have bedeviled the multi-billion dollar rebuilding effort. In mid-2004, a California construction company, Parsons Inc., was given a project to built 151 primary health care centers across Iraq. The clinics were part of broader, ambitious effort to give all Iraqis top quality medical care. The $200 million contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers. Parsons used Iraqis sub-contractors, which usually hired local people to do the work. Ernie Robbins is senior vice president with Parsons, says the projected number of clinics began to dwindle quickly.
Since Hamas stunned Fatah in January's elections, winning control of the Palestinian government, the former ruling party has refused to turn over key power bases. Hamas, some analysts say, is seizing an opening to further weaken a divided and still reeling Fatah. This weekend saw two assassination attempts at senior Fatah officials. Last week, Hamas deployed members of its previously underground military wing throughout Gaza, ostensibly to control crime. The Hamas interior minister calls his men the security forces' support system. Fatah leaders denounce the move as illegal. Like many here, laborer Yusef Hashlin(ph) sees the recent violence as a precursor to a wider internal fight.
And that's being headed up now by Paul Steiger, former head of the Wall Street Journal, being funded by people like Herbert and Marion Sandler, George Soros' Open Society Institute. Do you trust them to do honest investigation? [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: As reported on 1/26/08 Weekend Edition Saturday, there is no connection between either Mr. Soros or his Open Society Institute and Pro Publica.] Well, they have said that their mission sounds certainly appropriate and nonpartisan enough to expose corruption in incorporations and government. Now, I have no doubt - to doubt the sincerity of that statement. But that being said, I mean, the Sandlers are devoting up to $10 million per year on this entity and they have made it quite well known - and as is their prerogative that they will, too - they have a certain agenda that they're pushing to what they would call as counter-the-vast right-wing conspiracy, just like George Soros, linking that to prerogative. So I find it hard to believe that we're not, at least, have a liberal-leaning orientation.
Well, it depends, because how bad it's going to be, but now I think that we should go and accept it if a storm happens, we should because last time we really weren't prepared. And preparedness really has a lot to do with staying alive and stuff like that. So now, if something does happen, I think we should have a plan, everybody should have a plan to get through it, so we can all be safe and maybe, if it does happen, we could come back here and live to tell the story. Different people went through different things. If some people went through worst things than others, so we can't really say that they're going to be back to normal sooner than others. So, maybe we'll give it time and time will show for itself.
Well, you know, I don't know that that rule has ever been followed for people of color. Black people have always been demonized. We have been felt to have been criminally intended, hedonistic, intellectually incapable. I mean it's very, very clear to me - and again, if you look at Thatcher's youth violence report that we worked on, 50 percent of all males under the age of 18 commit a felony-level offense. Now, what happens to the black youth is they go into corrections. The white youth go into counseling, or they go into community service. So it's clear to me that there is selective prosecution. If you look at drug use in this country, more whites use illegal drugs than blacks, but who's incarcerated for that drug use? The black kids are. So there is clearly - there has always been in this country a notion that black people were guilty until proven innocent. If...
No, the racist mentality of my nation, which we are trying to deminimize, and which we are trying to work toward changing, to eradicating to extol the virtues of America. I extol the virtues of America, but by no means can you shortchange the racist in the prurient interests of America. It is here. You know what I mean? It's deeply interred into the soil of this great nation, and as far as people of goodwill, our job and mission is to try to eradicate, in fact, to change that or alleviate it to the much degree, and to change the mind of those who have an unfounded prejudice against another fellow American. I should say it's extremely difficult without becoming embittered and feeling sorry for yourself or drowning in your own tears. You know what I mean? I look at the things that are happening today and I see what George Walker Bush, being the president of the United States, me, being an African-American, and I support him wholeheartedly, but they expect miracles in the days that they have--he's establishing democracy in Iraq, and they have never had voting as a privilege or even a thought for the entire history of their country. I think they've done exceedingly well to get as many people to the polls as they have got and they're mad at Bush 'cause it ain't happening faster. When all we got to do is look in the mirror of America and blacks are still fighting for the rights to vote.
And that was it. It's - it described the paper, the stock more than anything else. But it was a wonderful way to learn how to write because when I got into it in the early '50s, there were at least a dozen or - more than that. There were more pulp magazines. And - just in the Westerns. I didn't get into the crime yet. And so, you can - the better ones were selling - were paying $.02 a word. And so I must have sold at least, you know, 20 stories at $.02 a word. I sold one to the Saturday Evening Post. At that time, they paid 8.50 for the first - you, know, first story.
First of all, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say this is racism even, despite that the things that were happening were definitely racism. Like, there were slurs. And there were pulled-back eyes. And there were, like, singsong chants. And beyond that, you know, there was this additional layer of separation between my experience as a Korean-American and my parents' experience as white Americans. I really remember feeling as though I can't tell them. Like, it will hurt them. I have to protect them from this knowledge. And if I tell them, they might not understand anyway because they're white.
Well, polls open at 7 a.m., and they close at 7 p.m. That's Greek time. But we may not know anything until around midnight. Public opinion polls released on Friday show that the vote will likely be close. That doesn't mean that a clear result will actually clear anything up after all this. A yes vote would please Europe, but it might mean that the government resigns - the Greek government resigns, and that would force new elections, you know, a lot more turmoil. And no would please the government, but it would make it much harder to return to the negotiating table because, you know, the Greek government is comprised of leftists and right-wing nationalists, who have really vilified European leaders. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused them of blackmail. Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has called them terrorists. I saw a campaign poster for the No Movement - that's, you know, voting against austerity and against European leaders' proposals. I saw this campaign poster that portrayed German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as an ogre who drinks Greek blood. So I don't see how they will all be able to sit at the same negotiating table again.
You know, it's been a huge change as far as the things we have to do. As far as me, as cutting back, we've had to. I mean, through buying purchases, just farm machinery and just, you know, making this go and patching this and maybe letting that go and things like that. And retirement-wise, I think it's harder and harder to save today, nowadays. Fifteen years ago, I noticed what I used to put back made less money and I put more money back. And now it's rougher and rougher and rougher to save anything in this country. And I just - I don't know. It just seems like you turn on the evening news and it's - they're not in touch with what's going out here in reality with the people out here in this country.
Well, they call it in Venezuela Chavismo, and that's the big question: Is Chavismo going to live? And the vice president, Nicolas Maduro, I think he has the sympathy vote, he has momentum, and he also controls the purse strings, which Chavez also controlled, and that's what you need to win elections in Venezuela. The opposition also lately has been looking kind of weak. They lost a big election in December and they also lost the presidential elections in October. So if I were betting, I'd say that Maduro is probably going to win - which would mean six more years of what Chavez called a revolution.
Well, Grassley in the end withheld this amendment. There were 300-some amendments offered at the Senate Judiciary Committee's markup of the immigration bill, which went on for a good part of last month. About half of them were considered, and a little more than half of them were actually adopted, but Grassley decided to put this on hold because Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, said, well, she too thought that it shouldn't be limitless, the amount of time people have to apply for asylum. She said maybe two and a half year, maybe five years, and Durbin himself agreed that maybe there should be some other limit. They said let's talk about it. The other thing is that Grassley said those people who apply for asylum on frivolous grounds, if they're denied asylum, should not be able to get this registered provisional immigrant status, which would legalize the situation of some 11 million people here illegally right now under this bill.
I tried out for baseball in the fifth grade because dad told me I had to. My uncle and grandfather, I still maintain, had tricked me into signing up. But it didn't matter to dad how my name got on the list. I was his son and I had to honor the commitment I'd made. See, I learned that year, without a doubt, I am no good at playing baseball. But the greater lesson was how great it felt to be a part of a team. I didn't even care that my team lost every game; except for the one in which I didn't play.
The God of Moses was not neutral about their captivity. The God of Isaiah and the prophets was still impatient with injustice and they knew that the son of God would never leave them or forsake them. But some had to leave before their time and Dr. King left behind a grieving widow and little children. Rarely has so much been asked of a pastor's wife and rarely has so much been taken away. Years later, Mrs. King recalled, I would wake up in the morning, have my cry, then go into them, the children saw me going forward. Martin Luther King Junior had preached that unmerited suffering could have redemptive power. Little did he know that this great truth would be proven in the life of the person he loved the most. Others could cause her sorrow but no one could make her bitter. By going forward with a strong and forgiving heart, Coretta Scott King not only secured her husband's legacy, she built her own.
Robin Wright first went to the Middle East when it was torn by war in the mid 1970s. Thirty years later, you might be tempted to say, so what's new? But in her new book, "Dreams and Shadows," the well-traveled foreign policy correspondent for the Washington Post and frequent visiting fellow at top universities and think tanks sees a whole cast of people who are subtly and effectively working for change in a host of places where it may not be immediately visible. Robin Wright, special friend of this program, always available to us, joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky, in for Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about Gulf War Illness. My guests are Lea Steele, a research professor of biomedical studies and director of the Baylor Veterans Health Research Program at Baylor University; Melissa Forsythe is a retired Army colonel and a Gulf War vet, and she's also research program manager and science officer of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program based at the U.S. Army Medical Research & Materiel Command at Fort Detrick. On the phone with us, as well, is Frank deGruy, he's a professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. We're taking your calls at 1-800-989-8255, especially from Gulf War veterans. Let's go to Manuel(ph), who's in Jacksonville, Florida. Hi, Manuel.
Well, thats right. And for the first steps, we will use sunlight to fly in a near-Earth orbit, may be out at the interplanetary space, missions to Venus and Mars and even the asteroids could be done this way, but ultimately you would run out of sunlight. And even though you can build up enormous speeds going out of the solar system, when you start to go out of the solar system, youre going to want to use a laser power system, a laser light that can focus a light over long, long distances, interstellar distances, and thats the way someday
The court would not allow recordings, sparing the American public the sound of a U.S. Army staff sergeant methodically and repeatedly confessing to murder. The words were prepared by lawyers but that made them no less chilling. For each victim, Bales read and re-read variations of the same statement. He said he left his base, observed his victim. He formed the intent to kill his victim and then he did kill his victim with a firearm. Sixteen times, Bales read that paragraph. Finally, the judge, Colonel Jeffrey Nance, asked him why. Bales replied that it was something he'd asked himself a million times, but that he had no explanation. He also offered no apology.
Right. Yeah. But I would say, Kelly, the difference is that you pay for your internet connection, right? You pay for your internet connection so you can then get on Google and look for your dress. Google watches that you're looking for a dress. They sell off that information. And then you see an ad for that same dress follow you around. If that bothered you, you could say, you know what? I'm going to use a different browser that doesn't track me. But you can't change who's giving you the internet, or if you do it's a huge hassle. And you probably don't have a lot of choice, right? We know that the telecommunications industry has been really consolidated. There's not a lot of competition there. And so you don't have to use Facebook when you go online, but you do need to use your internet connection.
Here's an email that we have from a woman named Phoenix(ph) in Mountain View, California: My grandparents were Nazarene, a stricter Protestant religion. My grandmother always kept her hair up in a bun out in public, and though it wasn't required by her religion, she told me saved something special just for her husband, to see her beautiful, long, red hair. It was a form of respect, like a little gift for him, to know no man could see those beautiful locks except for him. After he passed away, she cut all her hair off as a sign of respect for him, as well.
In the last few days, there's been attempts to get Sunni politicians who were previously opposed to the constitution to come out and say that it was actually an OK thing to vote for it. And what those politicians wanted were some substantive changes. So what they ended up getting was a guarantee that for the next four months after the next elections there would be an expedited process for a constitutional amendment, sort of a second bite at the apple for making changes that might be desirable. But of course once the constitution is ratified, there's no need to guarantee that that option will actually be exercised. So whether that's a strong guarantee for Sunnis or not is something that remains to be seen, and I think the voters will decide.
Absolutely, that is the biggest fear. And when you add in a lot of guns, an undisciplined military, child soldiers, long-standing ethnic tensions, you could have a terribly deadly civil war. But right now, we should say it's still a political conflict and there are signs today that it might have a political solution. Both sides have said they're willing to talk. We just heard from U.S. envoy Donald Booth. He spoke to press shortly ago. And he said he had Frank and open discussion with President Salva Kiir, the President Kiir is ready to begin talks with Riek Machar - unconditional talks. We should say though that even as these two sides are talking about talking, there's also a military battle going on. There are rebel-held areas. There are threats that there'll be more rebel-held areas. And so, it's challenging because you can't talk about diplomacy and also be trying to kill each other at the same time.
The week before last, Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, nominated to be secretary of Health and Human Services, went before the Senate Finance Committee for confirmation. And in addition to answering questions about reforming health care, reducing poverty, increasing adoptions, she was also obliged to make the following statement. After she and her husband sold their home for an amount less than the outstanding balance on their mortgage, they continued paying off the loan, including interest they mistakenly believed continued to be deductible mortgage interest. Well, that error and a couple of others, she testified, were corrected in their amended returns. Secretary Sebelius was among the many Americans who run afoul of the tax code. And while unpaid taxes can be the banana peel that causes the flop of many a nominee, they might also be a measure of just how complex the federal income tax system is.
I think it's important to realize, Rachel, that there is no end to this that's non-violent. The minorities in Syria - not universally, but generally - have tended to support the government of Bashar al-Assad, himself a member of the minority Alawite sect. And that's led to deep anger among Syria's Sunni Muslim majority and already you're seeing some evidence of sectarian killings, according to on the ground reporters. And that's sure to continue. So, I think the answer, if you could find a way to get a negotiated solution or path toward one, would be to have some international guarantees to the leaders of the minority communities, the Alawites and the Christians, that if you back away from President Assad, your community will not be slaughtered. Because I think that's, for the religious leaders, that's probably the primary concern now.
It is. It really is. And then you also have - it's a traditional day for workers - not so much to protest, but just to go out and march in the streets. And this year, the unions are, of course, calling on people to come out and march and reject Marine Le Pen, far right leader Marine Le Pen. However, they're not exactly endorsing her opponent, Emmanuel Macron. In fact, part of - half the unions do not support him. You know, he's - he says he's progressive, centrist. He supports the European Union. They say he is too capitalist, too free-market. And they can't support him. And so this year, there are a lot of people who don't want to support either candidate. And that's worrying because while Macron has an advantage - that's worrying to people who don't want to see Le Pen in power - if there's a big abstention rate, or people cast what are known as blank ballots, that could really help Le Pen. And I spoke with 65-year-old Parisian Philippe Gibert (ph) about this year's race. And here's what he said.