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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
OK, staying with developments from Russia, let's turn to this one. Today at an airport in Turkey, a Russian plane pulled up next to an American one. From each plane, a prisoner emerged and walked across to the other. The U.S. returned to Russia a pilot convicted of drug smuggling charges, sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Russia returned to the U.S. 30-year-old former Marine Trevor Reed, who was serving time for assaulting a police officer. He has maintained his innocence. And this was a remarkable prisoner swap for any moment, but especially during this time of war in Ukraine.
With us now, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price. Hey, Ned.
NED PRICE: Hey, Mary Louise. Thanks for having me.
KELLY: The U.S. has been trying to get Trevor Reed home the whole time he's been detained there, nearly three years. What was the breakthrough?
PRICE: Well, I can only speak to this administration, and the release of Trevor Reed and the return of him to his family has been a top priority ever since we came into office in January of last year. And today, once again, we made good on our commitment to bring home an American who's detained unjustly around the world. We've done that in places like Haiti and Burma and Afghanistan and Venezuela and now, today, Russia.
And so the news we received and confirmed this morning was really the result of months of concerted effort across this department on the part of our special envoy for hostage affairs, Roger Carstens, and his team, on the part of the White House, on the part of our embassy in Moscow and our ambassador, John Sullivan, and many others across this government.
KELLY: And again, can you share any details in terms of what it was that broke the logjam?
PRICE: Well, again, this was the result of months of discussions with the Russians. The president ultimately had to make a very tough decision, but he made the decision to bring home an American whose health was a concern of ours. It was a source of intense concern. And he made the decision to deliver on that very commitment to resolve these cases and to reunite Americans with their loved ones.
And so what I can tell you right now is that Trevor Reed is on a plane on his way home. He's accompanied by our special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and he'll be back in the United States later today.
KELLY: And what is his health condition? How's he doing?
PRICE: Well, he's in good spirits. As you might imagine, he's relieved. He was able to speak to his family as soon as he boarded the plane. I know that he's looking forward to speaking to them. I think as you saw, he was able to walk himself onto the plane, and he'll receive the care he needs when he lands in the United States.
KELLY: You described this as a tough decision for the president. And I'm curious why. Was the sense was that the U.S. would have liked a better deal, would have liked Russia to release more Americans?
PRICE: Well, of course, we're always trying to see the release of Americans who are unjustly detained. And there is another American who's unjustly detained in Russia, Paul Whelan. We're working tirelessly on his case. We're working tirelessly to support Brittney Griner, other Americans who are detained in Russia and elsewhere around the world. Ultimately, this was a decision that was predicated on the fact that, again, this is someone who had been unjustly detained for nearly two years, whose health was in poor...
KELLY: Nearly three if I'm not mistaken.
PRICE: ...Condition. Right, for more than two years - whose health was in poor condition. And ultimately, the president did make the decision to commute the sentence of a Russian smuggler who had served the majority of his sentence...
KELLY: Yeah.
PRICE: ...For a nonviolent drug crime. He commuted it. And that in no way diminishes the import of the finding of his guilt.
KELLY: Since you brought up the other Americans being detained in Russia, Paul Whelan - and I heard you say the U.S. is working tirelessly to get him out because he's being unjustly held. You also mentioned WNBA star Brittney Griner. Secretary Blinken did not mention her in his statement. Is the U.S. view that she is also being unjustly held in Russia?
PRICE: Well, Mary Louise, each case is unique. And in the case of Brittney Griner, it is distinct from Paul Whelan. It's distinct from the from the case of Trevor Reed, really from any other case. Brittney Griner is a case we've been working on ever since we learned of her detention earlier this year. We've been working through our embassy in Moscow to secure consular access. A member of our embassy team was able to visit with her recently. We're continuing to press the Russian government for consistent access to her, so that we can check on her condition. We do understand she's been consistently able to see her legal team, but we in turn are in close contact.
KELLY: So the U.S. is working is working to support her, but you're not going to wade into the waters of whether the U.S. believes she's being unjustly held.
PRICE: Absolutely working to support her. We're in regular contact with her legal representation, with her broader network as well, to provide her with what she needs.
KELLY: OK. Just very briefly, does this signal any softening in the relationship, any goodwill?
PRICE: I wouldn't say that at all. This was about one thing and one thing only - it was the release of Trevor Reed. As I said before, this was a deal that was orchestrated by our special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. That's the key word in his title - hostage. And that's what this was about.
KELLY: We've been talking with Ned Price, spokesman for the State Department. Thank you.
PRICE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/state-dept-spokesperson-on-the-prisoner-exchange-that-returned-marine-vet-trevor-reed | 2022-05-12T15:25:04Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Wimbledon, the oldest and most prestigious tennis Grand Slam major, has barred Russian and Belarusian tennis players from participating in this year's tournament because of the invasion of Ukraine. The sports world has been taken aback by the All England Club's decision. The ramifications are huge for tennis. Several top players, including men's player Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev and women's player Aryna Sabalenka, have been banned from the tournament.
Our next guest, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, is nine-time Wimbledon singles champion Martina Navratilova. Welcome to the show.
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA: Thank you very much. Thank you.
SCHMITZ: The men's world No. 1 player, Novak Djokovic, has criticized the All England Club's decision, as have you. Tell us why you think this decision was a bad idea.
NAVRATILOVA: On an individual level, I just think it's a step in the wrong direction because you're punishing individuals for being from a particular country where they had nothing to do with the country's policy. I just don't think this solves anything. It just adds kind of more negativity to the whole situation, as bad as it is.
I understand where the Ukrainian players are coming from. They don't want to play against Belarusian or Russian players, but maybe the Russian players - you know, they've actually spoken out against the war at some potential personal cost, but that doesn't seem to matter. So it's just - I think it's an overreach, and I think it's not helpful.
SCHMITZ: It should be noted here that neither the French Open, which starts in a few weeks, nor the U.S. Tennis Association seems to be planning a similar ban. Why do you think the All England Club made this decision?
NAVRATILOVA: I am not sure where it started. I've heard some rumblings that it was more political than anything else, but I don't have the facts. So this is just kind of innuendo or rumors. But I just find it kind of hypocritical for some of the people involved that they now find a moral compass where they were doing business with Putin's Russia for decades and only pulled out a couple of weeks ago.
SCHMITZ: Right.
NAVRATILOVA: So it's like - really? And for the Russian players, and the Belarusian players even more so, you know, they're getting defaulted by proxy or banned by proxy. And imagine if the whole tennis world did that. They would only have one choice, which would be to leave their country.
SCHMITZ: Right.
NAVRATILOVA: I went through that in 1975, and I don't wish that on my worst enemy.
SCHMITZ: Yeah. And your opinion on this matter is given even more weight, I think, because you grew up in the former Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. And at the age of 18, you requested and were granted political asylum in the United States. How does your personal experience impact your insight into this?
NAVRATILOVA: Well, it's obviously massive because when I defected in '75, it was a one-way ticket. I did not know if I would ever see my family again or how long it would be when I would see them, just making a phone call was an adventure. So I spoke to them maybe once every two or three weeks, and I did not see my mom for four years. I did not see my dad and my sister for five years.
And it was 11 years before I was able to go back to compete in the Fed Cup, which is now the Billie Jean King Cup, which is a competition between teams. And then we played Czechoslovakia in the finals, and the people ended up cheering for us more than the Czechs because it was all a political statement. Basically, I stuck it to the communist regime by leaving and succeeding. But it was a one-way ticket, so I lost all that time with my family that I could never get back, and it was brutal.
SCHMITZ: It's interesting this year in tennis. We've had sort of political controversy after controversy. We've had the Djokovic, you know, vaccination issue. We've had the WTA deciding not to play in China. What do you think of how this has just all sort of come down in the matter of months?
NAVRATILOVA: Well, it's funny. Again, sports and politics, whether they want to be intertwined or not, they are, which is why a lot of these countries that have questionable human rights record, like China, like Qatar, like Russia, like UAE and Saudi Arabia are getting the Formula One races, China getting Olympics twice, Russia getting the World Cup, Qatar getting the World Cup. They get validated by having those events. And how you treat your athletes, you know, makes a difference. Politics and sports are intertwined. That's why it's just so heartbreaking that athletes that are trying to do the right thing are still penalized.
SCHMITZ: Martina Navratilova, thanks so much for your time.
NAVRATILOVA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/tennis-legend-martina-navratilova-talks-about-wimbledons-ban-on-russian-players | 2022-05-12T15:25:11Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Some Texas families with trans kids are leaving or are considering leaving the state. That's because Texas Governor Greg Abbott called parents who get their kids gender-affirming care child abusers and said they should be investigated. Houston Public Media's Sara Willa Ernst reports these families don't see a future in Texas.
BRIAN: Got both the bugs.
SARA WILLA ERNST, BYLINE: Mom, dad and the kids are huddled in their TV room in Austin. Eyes are glued to a video game. The dad, Brian, is managing the controller, but it's his kids who are the real brains of the operation.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Inaudible).
ERNST: Brian and his wife Susan are the parents of 5-year-old twins, including a transgender girl who started expressing gender variance at age 2.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Well, I think I like (inaudible) best.
ERNST: Their daughter has grown out her hair and changed her pronouns. She isn't old enough for puberty blockers, but Brian and Susan are still worried about getting reported to Child Protective Services, which is why they asked we only use their first names.
BRIAN: I don't want to leave. On the other hand, if we had to, I know we'd be OK. Yeah, it's just kind of crummy.
ERNST: Only in recent months, conversations about leaving Austin have become plans. That change happened in February when the governor and AG started calling gender-affirming care child abuse.
SUSAN: My worst fear had come true with no warning and no time buffer or anything.
ERNST: Fear describes most of the past year for Susan and Brian. They followed bills in the legislature that sought to criminalize gender-affirming care. Those ultimately failed, which led to the governor's directive months later. An injunction currently puts these investigations on hold, but Susan isn't hopeful.
SUSAN: I just can't picture a situation in which this doesn't get worse.
ERNST: Susan and Brian, who both work in education, are looking for jobs in states with stronger civil rights protections for trans people.
SUSAN: It never crossed my mind that we would go anywhere else, but I can't do that anymore.
ERNST: So now they're preparing to say goodbye to Texas.
SUSAN: I can't think ahead to a time when my kids are older. I can't imagine buying a home. I don't even feel comfortable taking a job here.
ERNST: Susan's heartbroken to leave her sister and the kids' grandparents. Moving elsewhere is on the table for many others, says Shelly Skeen with the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal.
SHELLY SKEEN: I really can't think of any parent that I've talked to that hasn't considered this.
ERNST: But not all the 50 families her group is working with have the means to relocate.
SKEEN: Takes a pretty big toll on a family 'cause you're taking your kids out of school and you're bringing them to a completely different place. You've got to maintain an apartment. People just can't do that.
RACHEL: I definitely don't feel like I'm on the other side of it (laughter). I wish.
ERNST: Rachel, her husband and their three kids are from North Texas. She and the kids have just moved to Colorado. That's because one of the children is nonbinary and another is a trans teenager on hormone therapy - the kind of treatment the governor is targeting. And because of that, Rachel asked we only use her first name as well.
RACHEL: This time has been, like, a slow unraveling of stress.
ERNST: They're staying with family until they find a house. Her husband, who works in IT, is still back in Texas until he can relocate.
RACHEL: We still have so many things that are in transition - just feeling really paranoid about, you know, any connections that we have and how those could bite us.
ERNST: The difficulty of letting go is balanced by the welcome she feels in Colorado, such as gender-inclusive bathrooms at the school she's considering for her kids. She believes that now her family has a real shot at happy, healthy lives.
For NPR News, I'm Sara Willa Ernst in Houston.
(SOUNDBITE OF BETA RADIO'S "HERE TOO FAR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/texas-families-with-trans-kids-are-leaving-the-state | 2022-05-12T15:25:17Z |
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
State officials in Texas are working to pull money away from companies accused of boycotting the oil and gas industry. It's part of a trend in some red states to target financial firms that practice climate-conscious investing. Mose Buchele reports from member station KUT in Austin.
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: Last spring when state politicians proposed the idea, it seemed simple. Texas public money, they said, should not go to groups that withhold business from oil and gas, one of Texas' biggest industries. Here's how Republican State Representative Phil King put it in a committee hearing.
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PHIL KING: This bill sends a strong message to both Washington and Wall Street that if you boycott Texas energy, then Texas will boycott you.
BUCHELE: But to figure out which financial firms to boycott, it helps to have a list. So after the bill passed, the Texas Comptroller's Office started writing one up. Here's where things stopped being so simple.
SHERRI GREENBERG: This is not obvious. You're really going to have to do a lot of research.
BUCHELE: Sherri Greenberg is a former Democratic state representative who used to help oversee the state's pension fund. She says one example of how tricky the law is is that not only do financial firms need to be vetted but so do the investment plans they offer.
GREENBERG: Take Wells Fargo, for instance. If they have any mutual funds or exchange traded funds in their portfolios that prohibit or limit investment in fossil fuels, then that is problematic.
BUCHELE: The task of finding who qualified for the boycott proved so complicated that the comptroller's office hired a consulting firm called MSCI to get a list of companies taking aggressive climate action. But as state officials negotiated a price, they realized that they could be breaking the law by trying to implement it. That's because MSCI itself has aggressive climate goals that may put it on the boycott list. Emails obtained by the investigative reporting group Floodlight show how Texas state lawyers and MSCI had to come up with a workaround to the law to work together. I asked Greenberg what that says about the new law.
GREENBERG: It says it's difficult to implement and hard to research.
BUCHELE: The comptroller's office agrees. In an email, it wrote, this process has proven challenging given the scope of firms that we've been tasked with analyzing. Texas comptroller Glenn Hegar also accuses firms of talking out of both sides of their mouths, telling both climate-conscious investors and Texas state officials what they want to hear. But critics say Texas is also trying to have it both ways, that the new law has key loopholes and exceptions. Rob Schuwerk leads the North American office of Carbon Tracker, a group that advocates for moving away from fossil fuels.
ROB SCHUWERK: When you look at the statute itself, it's got an exception for, for example, ordinary business decisions.
BUCHELE: What that means is if a company decides not to invest in oil because it thinks it will make more money elsewhere, then it won't be targeted by the law.
SCHUWERK: It's obviously intended to scare asset owners and asset managers into not divesting. But I think if you were to divest because of financial reasons, that's an ordinary business decision for an asset manager or an asset owner.
BUCHELE: But those loopholes don't mean the law won't have an impact. Similar rules have been proposed or adopted in at least seven other Republican-led states.
LESLIE SAMUELRICH: You could see how it could have a chilling effect, and some investment firms might be worried about it.
BUCHELE: Leslie Samuelrich is the president of Green Century Capital Management, a group that helps run fossil-free mutual funds. On the day she spoke with NPR, she had just received a letter from the Texas Comptroller's Office full of questions about her firm's investment practices, one of hundreds the agency recently sent out. That's just the kind of attention most businesses would simply rather avoid, says David Spence, a professor of business and regulation at UT Austin. He says a lot of financial firms are now trying to please both red-state politicians and meet demands from others, including clients, the federal government and international community to be proactive on climate.
DAVID SPENCE: They have to figure out how to walk a tightrope that may even be disappearing, you know, that may be impossible to thread that needle anymore.
BUCHELE: One option, of course, is to simply stop trying to thread that needle. Samuelrich says fossil-free investing is not going anywhere. And if her company ends up on a Texas boycott list, that might just attract more business her way. For NPR News, I'm Mose Buchele in Austin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/texas-targets-financial-firms-that-practice-climate-conscious-investing | 2022-05-12T15:25:18Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Ice cream, butter and yogurt sales are up in the U.S. America's dairy consumption has been rising for decades and so has the carbon footprint. The country's dairy habit now accounts for about 2% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. A new research project from the dairy industry aims to bring that number down. Rachel Cohen from member station Boise State Public Radio reports.
RACHEL COHEN, BYLINE: It's a few weeks before Kurt Heward will plant corn to feed his company's dairy cows in southern Idaho. He jumps out of his truck to admire the soil.
KURT HEWARD: And when I can just step on that shovel, put it down all the way in there easy, and I can pull it out without all this work, it just makes me happy.
COHEN: Heward will use a no-till planter on this field, just like he's done the past few years. It drives the seeds into the ground more gently versus a tiller that digs it up about a foot deep first. Healthy soil can absorb and hold on to a lot more carbon dioxide than if it's overworked by agriculture. It also saves Heward money because it means fewer drives in his tractor.
HEWARD: If we can get across the field in one pass and get the same result, then we're winning.
COHEN: It saves about $50 an acre, maybe even more with high fuel costs. Heward has also planted triticale as a cover crop to blanket his fields all winter, which he says prevents water and wind erosion.
In the U.S. Department of Agriculture greenhouse in Kimberly, Idaho, Abigail Baxter is researching how practices like Heward's could help the climate. She holds up a white gas chamber that looks like an upside-down mixing bowl.
ABIGAIL BAXTER: We have these little set-sized collars that we put into the soil, and then that sits right on top of it.
COHEN: Figuring out just how much carbon dioxide healthy soil can store is tricky. That's part of what Baxter's measuring when she carts the chamber around southern Idaho farm fields. She's also comparing how fertilizers contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
BAXTER: And then when you go to take a measurement, this part of the chamber closes, and it vents it through these two analyzers to get a measurement of the different gases.
COHEN: Cow burps and manure are the main sources of dairy's emissions, releasing lots of methane. But the dairy industry says growing crops for cows makes up about a quarter of its footprint. So if this research can prove farmers like Kurt Heward are taking more carbon from the air and keeping it in the ground, it could help the dairy industry reach its goal of greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050. Farmers could even sell so-called carbon credits to other industries, basically get paid to offset carbon dioxide pollution by maintaining healthy soils that absorb more of the gas. Kurt Heward likes that idea.
HEWARD: I thought, well, I might as well jump on the bandwagon of selling carbon credits to someone that needs them, I guess.
COHEN: Carbon markets are still fairly new in the U.S., and the biggest ones don't currently pay for holding carbon in soil. This year, the Biden administration announced a billion-dollar climate smart commodities program, which includes a goal of expanding carbon markets and specifically for farmers.
Cathy Day, the climate policy coordinator for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, agrees that farmers should be part of the climate change solution, but she says incentives that just focus on one component, like carbon, are not looking at the system as a whole.
CATHY DAY: They can help people to experiment with cover crops the first time, for example, but they're not getting that longer term change to more holistic systems that help farmers to be more resilient to climate change over the longer term.
COHEN: Day says there are government programs that mentor farmers over several years and pay them to adopt more complex cropping systems and to integrate cows onto the landscape, which she says can help with air and water quality. There's just not enough funding for everyone who wants to take part. Groups like hers hope those initiatives get a boost in next year's farm bill.
For NPR News, I'm Rachel Cohen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLAKO'S "MOONCHILD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/the-dairy-industry-aims-to-be-carbon-neutral-by-2050-heres-what-it-means-for-farms | 2022-05-12T15:25:25Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Biden administration is spending the week explaining the plan to lift pandemic restrictions at the border. These are the restrictions known as Title 42. They were first put in place back during the Trump administration. Opponents say that ending Title 42 is a bad idea, and they are challenging the plan to do so in court and in Congress. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas is defending it to lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week.
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ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: With the Title 42 public health order set to be lifted, we expect migration levels to increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants. We will continue to enforce our immigration laws.
KELLY: So among the questions in play, what may happen to people seeking asylum at the southern border - also, how the politics will play out here, especially with midterm elections looming.
Well, let's bring in two of our correspondents who have been watching this closely - NPR political reporter Deepa Shivaram and NPR's Joel Rose, who covers immigration. Hey, you two.
DEEPA SHIVARAM, BYLINE: Hey there.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hi.
KELLY: Joel, you first - lay out the basics. How does Title 42 currently work, and what is the gist of the plan to end it?
ROSE: Sure. So this is a Trump-era border policy that started more than two years ago. It allows immigration authorities to bypass normal immigration procedures in the name of protecting public health, you know, and rapidly expel migrants without giving them a chance to seek asylum under U.S. law. Immigrant advocates say that has forced migrants back to danger in Mexico or in their home countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that Title 42 is no longer necessary, and the Biden administration has been preparing to lift the restrictions on May 23 and insists, you know, as you say, it does have a plan to deal with a likely influx of migrants.
This is actually the second time DHS has released a plan. This one has more details, more emphasis on enforcement of immigration laws that were on the books before the pandemic. And it seems, you know, intended to counteract the message we've heard a lot from Republicans and also from some Democrats that the administration has no plan.
KELLY: Yeah. Deepa, jump in here because Democrats have been asking for this plan. There are a lot of Democrats who are also nervous about the current plan. What does that look like? - explain.
SHIVARAM: Right. So since DHS has released these new details, we haven't heard much of a response from Democrats. And the White House actually held a briefing call with Capitol Hill yesterday after this updated plan was released. But the same Democrats who were expressing these concerns haven't really responded yet. And meanwhile, Republicans are filling that void with their own rhetoric about how this is, quote, "Biden's border crisis."
This is what Republican Senator James Lankford said earlier today.
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JAMES LANKFORD: It is policy insanity what they're doing. The plan that we were given yesterday, this plan statement that came in from Alejandro Mayorkas, this plan that was supposed to define out for us is not a plan at all. It's basically how they're going to move people into the country faster.
SHIVARAM: And Republicans keep pointing to the part in the plan where Mayorkas acknowledges that the rise in migrant encounters at the border is a strain to the current immigration system.
KELLY: Joel, right now, Title 42 is in place, and we're seeing enormous numbers of migrants being apprehended at the southern border. Who are they?
ROSE: Yeah, the majority are from Mexico and Central America, but, increasingly, they are coming from even farther away places like Cuba, Venezuela, even Ukraine. They are often fleeing violence, corruption and poverty in their home countries; things, by the way, that the Biden administration says have very little to do with U.S. immigration policy.
But many Republicans disagree with that. They argue that these are, overwhelmingly, economic migrants who are really here to work and who are filing flimsy asylum claims in order to, you know, sort of game the U.S. immigration system.
SHIVARAM: Right. And what immigration advocates are also saying here is that Democrats are losing out on an opportunity to define where they stand on immigration and supporting asylum-seekers, which is something that won them elections in 2018 and 2020. So while Democrats have a chance to stand their ground on removing Title 42, they haven't been a united front on that at all. And what these immigration advocates are saying right now is that that might have a detrimental impact on Democrats turning out their base voters in the midterm elections this November, especially at a time when voter enthusiasm is pretty low for the party.
KELLY: Well, we mentioned legal challenges. I know several states have challenged this plan to lift Title 42. Where does that stand?
ROSE: Yeah. So far, those challenges are going well for the states. More than 20 states have joined a challenge filed by Arizona and Missouri and Louisiana. The federal judge in Louisiana who is hearing that case has granted a temporary restraining order to stop the Biden administration from beginning to phase out Title 42. The judge also says the states are likely to prevail on the bigger question of whether or not the CDC went through the proper process to end Title 42.
And, you know, this is not the only example of the Biden administration trying to end a Trump-era border policy and having a difficult time in court. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Biden administration's attempt to terminate the policy known as Remain in Mexico, which forced migrants to wait south of the border for their immigration court hearings. The Biden administration tried to end that policy, too, but was blocked by a federal judge. And, you know, immigrant advocates say this is like the dead hand of the Trump administration and its allies continuing to tie the hands of the Biden administration when it comes to the border and asylum.
KELLY: And meanwhile, Deepa, speaking of places where this could be challenged, the White House has said if Congress wants to weigh in and get in on the act here, they can. Are they likely to?
SHIVARAM: Right. So we've seen Republicans already hold up a COVID relief bill, trying to add in a vote on Title 42. That happened before Easter. And it's possible that we see it again with Congress voting to provide more aid to Ukraine soon. So that is a possibility.
But even though the White House has said that Congress could act legislatively on Title 42, we heard press secretary Jen Psaki say earlier this week that, you know, one way or another, Biden isn't really ready to dismiss or sign potential legislation on Title 42. So it's kind of adding to this sort of confusing element of the White House's messaging on Title 42 as well. But the thing to keep an eye out for this week, especially tomorrow, is this House Judiciary Committee hearing where DHS Secretary Mayorkas is going to be speaking, and there will be some partisan politics playing out there as well.
KELLY: And just real quick, Joel, the timing here - I mean, if the plan does end, how quickly could that happen?
ROSE: Well, the - Title 42 is supposed to end on May 23, but a lot of time for things to happen in court or on the Hill between now and then.
KELLY: Indeed, so much in play. NPR's Joel Rose and Deepa Shivaram, thank you, you two.
ROSE: You're welcome.
SHIVARAM: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/the-future-of-title-42 | 2022-05-12T15:25:31Z |
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The United Nations' secretary-general was in Moscow yesterday for talks with President Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister. The focus of those talks - trying to ease the civilian suffering in Ukraine and setting up humanitarian corridors. From Moscow, NPR's Charles Maynes reports.
CHARLES MAYNES, BYLINE: U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Moscow, acknowledging serious differences with Russia over events unfolding in Ukraine.
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ANTONIO GUTERRES: But that does not limit the possibility to have a very serious dialogue on how best we can work to minimize the suffering of people.
MAYNES: Guterres' main proposal - have the U.N. oversee efforts to evacuate civilians along humanitarian corridors that have repeatedly broken down amid acrimony between Kyiv and Moscow. The secretary-general pointed to the plight of Ukrainians trapped in a steelworks factory in the city of Mariupol, where Russian forces have laid siege as a crisis within a crisis. His office later issued a statement claiming President Vladimir Putin had agreed in principle to a U.N. role.
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PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Speaking Russian).
MAYNES: Yet in the televised portion of his meeting with Guterres at the Kremlin, Putin said the U.N. chief had been misled about Russia's humanitarian efforts in Mariupol and blamed Ukrainian fighters for preventing any civilians from leaving the area. Putin also explained to the U.N. diplomat Russia's legal justifications for sending troops into Ukraine after Guterres called the move a, quote, "invasion." Russian authorities have criminalized that description of the military campaign, arguing its troops are on a limited humanitarian mission to protect Russian speakers in east Ukraine. In fact, the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine seemed the lone point of consensus during the secretary-general's visit, including during this exchange with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Here's Guterres.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GUTERRES: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian troops in the territory of the Ukrainian Federation.
MAYNES: Lavrov leaned into his microphone and added.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SERGEY LAVROV: (Through interpreter) This is true, I can confirm this.
MAYNES: It was a rare point of agreement in a visit marked by few.
Charles Maynes, NPR News, Moscow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/u-n-secretary-general-goes-to-moscow-for-talks-with-president-putin | 2022-05-12T15:25:37Z |
Updated April 27, 2022 at 1:24 PM ET
In Poland, after a long train trip to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was blunt about U.S. goals in the conflict in Ukraine.
"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," he said Monday.
The United States and its allies now believe Ukraine can win the war against Russia. It's a significant change in thinking, bolstered by the successes of the Ukrainian military in holding its own and pushing Russia's military back from Kyiv, over the course of two months of combat.
"We believe that we can win — they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support," Austin said.
The U.S. is rushing in long-range artillery, other weapons and ammunition as the battle shifts to the east and south of Ukraine. Washington has delivered $3.7 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February, according to the State Department. The most recent deliveries include howitzer cannons, which Pentagon officials believe will be useful in the flat terrain of eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who also visited Kyiv last weekend, has repeatedly said the war in Ukraine would be a "strategic defeat" for Russian President Vladimir Putin and will leave Russia weakened.
This marks a shift for the U.S. in its war aims, which originally were to help Ukraine defend itself against a larger, stronger power, and now involve defeating Russia. The shift is aided by massive U.S. arms shipments to the Ukrainian forces. That raises the risk of potentially widening the conflict, analysts say. It increases the threat of a weakened Russia resorting to the use of nuclear weapons and could further destabilize an already fragile global economy.
"We don't want Russia to be a total basket case, reviving the sort of loose nukes fears of the 1990s and so on, or to become an incorrigible international spoiler," says Samuel Charap of Rand Corp.
At some point, Ukraine might want the U.S. to ease up on sanctions against Russia if that will help Kyiv reach a negotiated settlement with Moscow.
The sanctions and arms shipments could also provoke a more direct confrontation between Russia and NATO. It is difficult to know where Russia's red line is. "Nobody knows what step ... will send Putin over the edge," Charap says.
Russia says Western military aid convoys into Ukraine are "legitimate targets" but has not not managed to slow the shipments.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said no one should underestimate the possibility of a nuclear confrontation and that he viewed NATO as being engaged in a proxy war with Russia by supplying Ukraine with weaponry.
State Department spokesman Ned Price described the statement as "deeply irresponsible" and a "continuation of the Russian government's very clear attempts to distract from its failure in Ukraine."
Eventually, the U.S. and Russia have to start talking again, says Rose Gottemoeller, a former U.S. arms control negotiator who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. "I do think at some point we are going to have to reopen some discussions with Russia, at least about constraining and controlling nuclear weapons and see where we can go from there, because it's not in our interest to have a great big pariah state with nuclear weapons," she told NPR.
For now, though, the Biden administration wants to help Ukraine defeat Russia.
Gottemoeller, a former deputy secretary general of NATO, says she's betting on "NATO's military industrial complex against the Russian military industrial complex." But she says allies need to be ready for "a big investment of resources and a big investment of time."
The Kremlin has already suffered one big loss, she says. Putin wanted NATO pushed back to its 1997 lines, before the alliance opened its doors to former Soviet bloc countries.
"Instead," she says, "he has a NATO more coherent, more together and more resolved to work together to really defeat this threat to its partner, Ukraine."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/u-s-war-aims-shift-in-ukraine-and-bring-additional-risks | 2022-05-12T15:25:38Z |
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Meanwhile, Ukraine's army is fighting intense battles in the east and the south to stop Russia's invasion. And while the war rages on, there is a debate happening over the future of Russian identity and culture within Ukrainian society. Some say it's time for Ukraine to shake off Russian influence and dismantle monuments that celebrate Russian culture. NPR's Brian Mann has the story.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Oleksandr Babich walks through the center of Odesa, a city of baroque architecture now reshaped by sandbag checkpoints and daily air raid alerts.
OLEKSANDR BABICH: (Non-English language spoken).
MANN: He points to a house where the writer Nikolai Gogol lived while writing "Dead Souls," one of the great novels of Russian literature. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin stayed on the other side of the street.
So how deep is Russia in the roots or the DNA of this city?
BABICH: (Non-English language spoken).
MANN: "Odesa has always been a melting pot," Babich tells me. "Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian - it's difficult to say exactly whose city it is," he says. As one of Odesa's leading historians, Babich is part of a conversation happening at all levels here - in government, on social media, in literary journals, and in cafes - over how Russian identity should fit into the future of this city. The city was built by the Russian Empire and, like most people in Odesa, Babich grew up speaking Russian. It's still his primary language. But he's fiercely committed to Ukrainian independence and furious about the carnage being caused by Russia's army. This is something I hear a lot from Russian speakers here - a sense of betrayal - confusion over what to think about their own heritage and history.
(SOUNDBITE OF RESTAURANT AMBIENCE)
ATEM DOROKHOV: All the good stuff that we know about Russian art, literature, etc. - it has been wiped out by the current deeds of the current regime.
MANN: Atem Dorokhov (ph) is a young online marketer I meet over coffee. Like a lot of people here, he doesn't just speak Russian; he has deep family and historic ties to Russia. He says this debate over how Russianness fits within Ukrainian society started simmering eight years ago, when Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.
DOROKHOV: Of course, events of 2014, the current events - they made this gap larger between Russian and Ukrainian speaking, right? But it's normal. It's understandable.
MANN: A big question here in Odesa is what to do with all those big cultural markers. There's a huge statue of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, a woman viewed by many Ukrainians as an oppressor. The famous Potemkin Stairs, one of the city's must-see tourist sites, are named after a Russian battleship. Dorokhov compares the debate here to the fight over Confederate monuments in the American South.
DOROKHOV: The U.S. example was very good - very good. The history is very complicated, with a lot of oppression, a lot of mass killings. Same here. Ukrainian culture has been pressed by Russia over hundreds of years.
MANN: Many monuments from the Soviet era have already come down in Odesa. The city created a commission to sort out what to do with remaining markers of Russian identity. Many of the Russian speakers I talk to say they hope to see the city's Russian heritage reinterpreted and put in a new context, not torn down. Volodymyr Yermolenko, one of Ukraine's leading philosophers and journalists, agrees.
VOLODYMYR YERMOLENKO: I think it's time to talk about it. I'm not a big fan of a war with monuments.
MANN: Based in Kyiv, Yermolenko, too, spoke Russian as his first language. He thinks, for a city with deep Russian roots like Odesa, the monuments are less important than modern influences like the internet and movies and pop music.
YERMOLENKO: They should be in the Ukrainian culture and information space and not in the Russian culture and information space, you know? That means the music that you listen to; that means the movies that you watch; the books that you read.
MANN: It's important to note this conversation is happening when people in Ukraine are frightened and angry. Russian cruise missiles have struck Odesa repeatedly. Ukrainian officials say some Russian speakers have been detained for allegedly aiding Moscow or sharing pro-Russian propaganda. Officials declined to tell NPR how many are held or on what charges. Still, a remarkable thing about this debate over Russian identity is how thoughtful it sounds - how nuanced. The historian Oleksandr Babich says that's possible because Ukraine is free and embraces its multicultural identity.
BABICH: (Non-English language spoken).
MANN: "If Odesa were captured, this conversation would not be possible," Babich tells me. He points to the houses where Pushkin and Gogol stayed and says, "the Russians would hang me from one of these buildings."
Brian Mann, NPR News, Odesa.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/ukrainians-debate-the-future-of-russian-identity-and-culture-within-their-society | 2022-05-12T15:25:45Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
All this month, we are meeting the four finalists for this year's National Youth Poet Laureate. Today we have the West regional ambassador.
JESSICA KIM: I'm Jessica Kim, and I am the 2021 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. I just turned 18, and I live in Los Angeles, Calif. I'm a visually impaired Korean American writer.
I first started writing poetry when the pandemic first hit. It was a sort of survival mechanism in a fragile, fearful and sometimes frustrating world. And by moving around a lot and being visually impaired, I felt excluded from my communities and suffered in silence for a long time. But when I started writing, especially about my vulnerable identities, I was drawn to the autonomy of having control over my story and haven't stopped writing since then.
"Broken Abecedarian For America" - in that abecedarian, each line goes in alphabetical order from A to Z, so there would typically be 26 lines. But in my poem, I kind of played with the idea of breaking the abecedarian. So my poem is a 52-line piece with each alternating line going from A-B-C-D.
(Reading) America doesn't have a body, just the rupture from a pistol, broken like a mother's backbone. One night, I returned home to find her collapsing into her own tongue, a second-hand language she bought for a dollar.
I love breaking traditional forms, and I really wanted to portray the brokenness of American society by breaking that form. I think the fragility around American society, especially as a Korean American immigrant, as someone who's really uncertain of living their daily lives as an American but also not as an American kind of really intrigued me. So I was playing with that idea, that dichotomy of being so uncertain and fragile in America.
(Reading) At home, a mother afraid of school shootings says, be careful, as if I am not already full, tight stomached. Pulling my body closer to her is because it's the only unhardened object within reach. Unlike America, I inhabit a body I wish to vacate, and I know this isn't the answer she is searching for. I am defeated again when the syllables of the American dream vibrate like bombs ticking, ready to burst.
In the end, I want people to take away from my poems that I'm in for a revolution. And I'm going to change the world in my own small ways, one step at a time.
KELLY: That's Jessica Kim, finalist for 2022 National Youth Poet Laureate. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-27/youth-poet-jessica-kim-is-in-for-a-revolution | 2022-05-12T15:25:51Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
For nine years, I lived in a giant apartment complex called the Summit with thousands of other people in the city of Shanghai. My family and I left China months before the pandemic, but I still stay in touch with some of my former neighbors through the group messaging platform WeChat, which is where I saw this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Chinese).
SCHMITZ: That's a government drone elsewhere in Shanghai, warning people who were singing from their balconies. The message says, please comply with COVID restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.
HA CHUONG: One of the only ways, honestly, to survive this lockdown is to have to see it through some kind of humor. These get circulated, and we almost laugh at them.
SCHMITZ: Ha Chuong was one of my neighbors. She and her husband, Nadav Davidai, and their two kids have had to maintain a healthy sense of humor lately as Shanghai approaches its sixth week of a citywide COVID lockdown. China still maintains a zero-COVID policy, which, for Ha and Nadav, means they haven't been able to leave their apartment building since April 1. Since then, the Summit apartment's WeChat group has taken on a new life as an information hub for food delivery and required COVID testing, as a place to complain together but also to help each other out and for whatever levity they can find. I asked both of them about that.
CHUONG: Well, for me, it's been really a kind of lifeline. We had no connection to the outside world. And so this WeChat group - it was really nice because, you know, there are obviously some people that I knew there from before. But then there was, you know, all these other new neighbors that kind of came out and made it interesting and helped us through this time, like, helping with the group buys and helping with just making sense of, you know, when the testing was happening. We even started a Friday night trivia group, which was - you know, which was quite nice. I think that happened about, like, two or three weeks into it. And then we figured out, oh, my goodness, you know, this is going to continue, and we really need to do something social beyond just the chats.
NADAV DAVIDAI: So there's these nice moments of kind of levity and community mixed in with what-the-heck-is-going-on type of stuff. So we've been tested 10 days in a row. Today was the first day in 11 days we were not tested. And they bring in the medical teams, the doctors, to do the testing. But the people to come call us, knock on our doors and get us downstairs and then check us off - all of those are residents. And one of those residents - he's wearing those dabai suits - right? - the, like, head-to-toe...
SCHMITZ: Yep - the Tyvek suits.
DAVIDAI: Yeah. And, you know, he - every day, we'd see him, and he was chatting us up. He's fully bilingual, really kind of engaging. And he's doing this every day on top of his work. We never met this guy before in our lives. And then it turns out he was one of the people in our quiz night...
SCHMITZ: (Laughter).
DAVIDAI: ...That virtual quiz night I mentioned (laughter). And even then, I didn't recognize him 'cause he - you know, when we see him, he's, like, head to toe with hazmat. And the next day, he saw us, and he was like, oh, that was a great quiz. I was like, David, is that you?
SCHMITZ: (Laughter).
DAVIDAI: And that's how we got to know David. And, you know, I think once we get through all of this, we'd love to have dinner with him and other people that we've never met. I can kind of picture us going and hugging a whole bunch of neighbors that, previously, we'd never talked to just because we've all now gone through this together.
SCHMITZ: Wow. You have two young children. How have they handled this?
CHUONG: Yeah. It's been tough for them. At first, it was, you know, a 48-hour lockdown. And actually, I have to credit a meme that was going around about how there would be a four-day lockdown. And in the meme, it's these people who are playing Uno. And if you played Uno before, you know that there's, like, these plus four cards - right? - these plus four, plus four, plus four cards (laughter).
SCHMITZ: Right. Yes.
CHUONG: And so there was a meme going around about, you know, how many days are you going to be in lockdown? And it starts with - the government says, four days. And then someone's holding the cards, and it's plus four, plus four, plus four. And so our oldest, who is 9 years old - she had heard about this meme through her friends. And so she was joking about it. And that actually, in the end, really helped her mentally get through to it because every time she asked, how many more days now, and we're on - I don't even know. What day is it today (laughter)? We started April 1. The days are all blending. But yeah. So she - you know, she's getting through it because she's thinking about that Uno meme and saying, plus four, plus four, plus four.
SCHMITZ: In a video shared on the Summit WeChat group, workers in blue Tyvek suits began to erect metal barriers at the entrance to your tower, which is by far the largest tower in the complex because somebody tested positive the day before you were all able - all set to be let out to wander the complex's courtyard for the first time. Let's listen to the response from your building as they were erecting these barriers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Screaming).
SCHMITZ: So this is the sound of dozens of people screaming from their windows in protest. And that protest actually worked. The workers took down the barrier. Tell me about that incident.
CHUONG: Yeah. I think to kind of set up the mood of how we were feeling in the tower, the hard lockdown started April 1. And on April 1, we were announced that we had a case. And so we were good, and we had been following all the rules and had gotten tested and everything. And there had been a couple of other cases that popped up. And so by the time, you know, this came about that the - I think it was on a Thursday night or a Friday night. The day before, like you said, they had announced a new case, and it came out of the blue.
And then when they brought the fencing in, that was, for me, like, one of the lowest points so far in this lockdown for me - is, like, they were going to fence us in. And it was just all that pent-up frustration inside of us. You know, we felt like they didn't have any compassion for us by erecting this fence in front of us. And so this is why we were screaming or at least why some of us were screaming. But, you know, thankfully, they listened, and then they took it away shortly after.
SCHMITZ: You all have been locked in for five weeks now, going on six weeks. And we talked a lot about some of the physical limitations to that. I want to talk mentally. What kind of impact has this had on folks there?
DAVIDAI: You know, it's been tough for us. And as Ha said, we've had highs. We've had lows. And, you know, kind of keeping it together day in and day out without knowing where this is going and kind of getting the ball to roll down the hill again and having to restart over and over and over kind of thing has been tough for us. But I can only imagine for those that are in other situations that are more difficult than ours. Some of these people that are in our building and in the same situation or same location as us - very different situation - are completely separated from their house, their families. There are those that have had medical issues come up.
SCHMITZ: And some who have been sent to quarantine centers, right?
DAVIDAI: Absolutely. Yeah. One perspective that I think maybe people back in the U.S. don't get very much is - they see this, and this makes for horrible optics, as we talked about. But we felt incredibly lucky to be in China. From March 2020, when we came back from Singapore, until a month ago, it was the best place to be in the world.
SCHMITZ: Yeah.
DAVIDAI: Like, well...
SCHMITZ: There was no COVID there.
DAVIDAI: We lived normal lives to the point where it was the reverse. It was like we kind of felt bad about it in times because people were really struggling everywhere, and we were on vacations in really nice places. And our kids were in school from May and didn't miss a day of school. And so, I mean, the zero-COVID policy was really beneficial to us. It was a real boon for us for a long time. And it feels very different now, obviously, but kind of on balance. I don't know.
SCHMITZ: Those are my former neighbors and friends, Ha Chuong and Nadav Davidai, who are still in lockdown from their apartment in Shanghai. Thanks, you guys.
CHUONG: Thank you, Rob.
DAVIDAI: Nice to speak to you, Rob.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOM MISCH AND YUSSEF DAYES' "KYIV") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/2-shanghai-residents-share-how-theyve-handled-the-citys-lockdown | 2022-05-12T15:25:57Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah is one of the most well-known voices of Egypt's 2011 uprising, but he's spent most of the past decade in prison. His case symbolizes what human rights groups call systemic repression under the current Egyptian president. Alaa's sister, Sanaa Seif, is here in the U.S. to promote her brother's new anthology of his writings, many of them letters written from prison.
SANAA SEIF: He's been deprived of books, reading materials, sunlight, fresh air. He's not allowed a clock. He's not allowed to be, like, aware of time.
INSKEEP: The book is called "You Are Not Yet Defeated." Seif herself has been imprisoned three times, and she spoke with Leila Fadel.
SEIF: It's very inhumane. The level of inhumanity differs on who you are - a boy or girl, high-profile or not. Unlike others, I had, like, access to a few things that helped me cope. But you have to fight over every little right.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
And ultimately, your crime was that you criticized COVID conditions in the prisons, right?
SEIF: We've heard a lot of rumors that prisoners were suffering from COVID, and that was before - like, before the vaccine. And we were very concerned about what was happening inside. And there were no visitations. And knowing prison, I know this - the cells are very unsanitary. I know the number of people inside each cells. They're always stuffed with people. And then at some point, we knew that one of the employees in the prison where Alaa is died of COVID, and we were very, very worried. And during that time, they also banned Alaa of letters.
FADEL: So you had no access to him.
SEIF: Yeah. Yeah, we had no access, and we didn't know whether he was alive or not. So we decided to sit-in in front of the prison gate until we get a letter from Alaa - me and my mother and my sister. And so they brought hired, like, thugs to us - a woman dressed in civilian clothes. And they beat us up and they, like, forcibly removed us from in front of the prison gate while the guards and officers were watching. And they charged me of spreading false news, rumors about prisons not taking precautionary measures for COVID and for insulting a public official, which is the officer I insulted while being beaten up. It's quite absurd.
FADEL: So you're here in the U.S. because of the release of your brother's book, an anthology of his writings, his letters, his interviews from 2011, the time of the uprising against Mubarak to today. And he's one of the faces of Egypt's revolution, really - a vocal critic of every Egyptian regime, from Hosni Mubarak to the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who's the architect of an unprecedented crackdown on human rights in your country. And what he's in prison for is essentially for his activism, for his words, and yet this book is being released. Do you worry that this creates a bigger risk for your brother, for your family?
SEIF: The regime is so stubborn with Alaa. They've built up so much over the years of trying to create an example of him for the rest of us, like, for whoever believed or participated back in 2011, that I don't think anything will make his situation worse. So I'm not worried, no. Actually, I think, on the contrary. Having his ideas translated to, like, an English-reading audience might show that the Egyptian regime claim that they're taking all of these emergency measures because they're fighting terrorism or whatever their claims are - if you read Alaa's book, you'll see that they are not dangerous ideas at all, actually.
FADEL: What do you hope comes from this book, from putting his words into English, to an American audience, to a global audience?
SEIF: This is a critical time for him where we think there might be hope for his release, and we believe attention right now is really needed. I think for the audience themself - like, for the reader - there's value in what's in the book because I think our experience, the uprising - so, yes, we were defeated. But I think in our defeat, there's also inspiration for others who have not yet been defeated. This is the whole idea behind the book.
FADEL: You spoke about Alaa being on hunger strike since April 2, and that actually has helped his mental state and his ability to cope in prison. Could you speak more about that?
SEIF: The moment he decided to go on hunger strike, I think he became in a much better mental state because suddenly he's, you know, back to being resilient. And whether this ultimately will lead to something or not, I don't think he really cares that much. He doesn't want to keep complying to this humiliation without fighting back.
FADEL: You know, in his book, he does write about how you're not really human in prison. You can make no choices for yourself. And so this is his choice. His hunger strike is his choice, the one he can make.
SEIF: Yes, that's exactly it. Because in prison, you don't have much tools. The only tool you have as a prisoner is your body. So, yeah, I think it gives him agency.
FADEL: You said to me that they want to make an example out of my brother, out of Alaa. What does that mean? What is the message by what they're doing to your brother?
SEIF: It's a message to a whole generation that thought they were capable of changing something in the country. And the message was received a long time ago. They're stuck in this moment in time.
FADEL: In 2011.
SEIF: In 2011. And it makes sense, honestly, because it was a very strong moment where change was actually really possible. And they are aware of that. And so it's like this nightmare that keeps haunting them.
FADEL: You come from a storied family of human rights activists. Your mother is a professor and political activist. Your late father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam - renowned human rights lawyer in Egypt. You're a human rights activist - your sister Mona, also. And in Alaa's writings, he says, from my father, I inherited a prison cell and a dream. And your family has had to pay a really heavy price for that dream.
SEIF: Yeah, it is a heavy price, of course. It's unbearable. But because a whole regime has decided to fight a family for their own existence - so in a way, you have no choice but - it's kind of - it's an inevitable thing. It's not a fight that you can walk away from. So you just have to bear it, and you have to fight back.
(SOUNDBITE OF OCOEUR'S "STAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/a-major-voice-of-egypts-2011-uprising-publishes-an-anthology-of-his-writings | 2022-05-12T15:26:03Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening the West with lightning-fast retaliatory strikes. He wants the U.S. to stop sending military support to Ukraine, and he's telling lawmakers in Moscow that actions like that pose a strategic threat to Russia. European leaders say Russia is already trying to blackmail them by cutting off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. While the move affects two relatively small countries, it comes with a warning for the wider European Union. But could it backfire? Let's start our coverage this hour with NPR's Jackie Northam.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Like many European nations, Poland and Bulgaria rely on Russian natural gas to heat their homes and run their businesses. But they were not willing to bend to Moscow's demand by paying for the gas in rubles instead of the usual dollars and euros. They're not Russia's biggest customers, so it was an easier move for Moscow to make.
JAMES WADDELL: These are the low-hanging fruit because these contracts are due to expire anyway.
NORTHAM: Even so, Moscow is sending a clear signal to bigger European nations, says James Waddell, the head of European gas at the London-based analysis group Energy Aspects.
WADDELL: It does show that Russia is willing to halt supplies if people don't subscribe to the new payment system. It is a warning shot for other, bigger buyers in Western Europe that, you know, they are willing to carry out their threat.
NORTHAM: But it's more than paying for gas with rubles, which would undermine sanctions the West has put on Russia's banks. Moscow is also retaliating against European nations for those sanctions and for supporting Ukraine. Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, says Russia is taking a risk.
JASON BORDOFF: I think using gas as a weapon, using energy as a weapon is shortsighted, self-defeating and shooting yourself in the foot from Russia's standpoint. It's why Russia, for the most part, has not used energy that way before, even at the height of the Cold War or the height of conflict between Europe and Russia.
NORTHAM: Poland had already started to wean itself off Russian gas. It and Germany have enough stored up to last a few months. But Bordoff says Moscow knows how powerful the eventual impact in Europe will be if natural gas supplies from Russia are shut off.
BORDOFF: If Russia were to really cut gas supplies to much of Europe, particularly Germany, it would cause severe economic pain. You're talking about potential recession. It's simply too difficult in the near term to find enough alternative gas supplies to fill that gap. So I think you'd be talking about potentially rationing of energy and sky-high natural gas and energy prices way beyond anything we've seen to date.
NORTHAM: But this could backfire for Russia in the long run. Its energy companies have built a reputation over the years for delivering oil and gas despite political tensions, says William Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia, currently with the nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
WILLIAM COURTNEY: Cutting off gas increases perceptions in Europe that Russia is an unreliable supplier. Gazprom and Rosneft, Lukoil, Novatek - they must all be fit to be tied by what's happening.
NORTHAM: Waddell with Energy Aspects says if Russia cuts off Europe, its most lucrative customers, it will need to go looking for other buyers, most likely in Asia. But he says Russia won't have much leverage after it's weaponized its energy.
WADDELL: If they're trying to sell most of that gas into China, I would expect the Chinese to want to have control over some of the gas fields in Russia and the export infrastructure to ensure that they are never cut off from Russian supply.
NORTHAM: In the meantime, it's a question of whether Moscow is willing to jeopardize its energy business and whether Europe will backtrack on sanctions and start paying in rubles.
Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/bristling-under-economic-sanctions-imposed-by-the-west-russia-fires-back | 2022-05-12T15:26:09Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
California is considering creating safe spaces for people to use illegal drugs. These so-called safe consumption sites are an effort to save lives as overdoses skyrocket. Lesley McClurg from member station KQED explains.
LESLEY MCCLURG, BYLINE: When Gary McCoy was 18 years old, he overdosed on heroin alone in a gas station bathroom.
GARY MCCOY: I immediately went back to my dealer's house from the hospital and bought everything that she had because it was the best heroin I had ever done.
MCCLURG: At the time, he was grappling with his sexuality in a conservative town in Virginia.
MCCOY: I wasn't quite in the closet, but I wasn't really open about the fact that I was gay.
MCCLURG: He spent the next decade high, homeless and near the brink. At 24, McCoy learned he was HIV positive. He was staying in a cheap hotel in San Francisco.
MCCOY: I weighed 110 pounds. I had psoriasis all over my body, injecting every day, couch-surfing when I could, trading sex for drugs or a place to sleep.
MCCLURG: When he didn't have anywhere else to go, he'd get high inside the bathroom stall at a public library.
MCCOY: I think if I had a place to go to where I could safely use, where people could see that I needed medical assistance, I think it would have avoided a lot of trauma.
MCCLURG: Just last year, more than 100,000 people died of an overdose in the U.S., which is why California lawmakers are debating whether to sanction safe consumption or safe injection sites. These facilities, where people bring their own drugs, look kind of like a hair salon - with lots of mirrors and sterile supplies.
ALEX KRAL: People are going to a booth. There's somebody there who is helping them.
MCCLURG: Alex Kral is an epidemiologist for the nonprofit research group RTI International. He's studied sites in more than a dozen countries.
KRAL: And then you have a second room where people can chill out, as they say - like, a chill out room or a place where they can be after they have used drugs.
MCCLURG: These facilities range from converted RVs to warehouses, always stocked with naloxone to reverse overdoses.
KRAL: There have been probably tens of millions of injections people have done in these sites over the last 35 years, and no one's ever died of an overdose at one of these sites.
ANNE MARIE SCHUBERT: You can call it what you want to call it. It's an open drug scene.
MCCLURG: Anne Marie Schubert is the district attorney in Sacramento County.
SCHUBERT: The fact that we're considering allowing our government to essentially aid and abet the illicit use of drugs that are killing our citizens, I find shocking.
MCCLURG: Schubert says providing a haven for drug use sends the message they are safe. She's pushing for something else.
SCHUBERT: We need to get people to the point where they get treatment, even if they don't want it. It doesn't mean you throw them in jail, but you've got to have court-ordered treatment.
MCCLURG: She says current law does not allow judges to order nearly enough people to get help. The last time safe consumption was on the table in California, a bill made it all the way to Governor Jerry Brown's desk in 2018. He, a Democrat, vetoed it. Now, another Democrat, state Senator Scott Wiener, is trying again.
SCOTT WIENER: What we want to do is for people who are already using, that instead of having them use on the sidewalk when your kid is walking by, to give them a place where they can go inside, so if they do overdose, they don't die.
MCCLURG: Wiener's bill would pilot sites in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles. It has passed the Senate. Now it's in the state assembly. A recent cost-benefit analysis done in San Francisco shows that every dollar the city spends on safe consumption would save $2.33.
WIENER: Our hospitals, our emergency rooms, our fire department, our ambulances are all spending huge resources on people who are using on our streets.
MCCLURG: Because, Weiner says, they overdose and end up in jail. Gary McCoy was one of those frequent flyers. Now that he's in recovery, he's a huge advocate for safe consumption sites.
MCCOY: I don't know if I would have stopped using sooner, but I certainly would have been in much better hands.
MCCLURG: McCoy finally limped into treatment when his drug dealer nudged him to go. Today, when he strolls through San Francisco, he always chats with people getting high on the streets. He lets them know there's help available. That's the real service outreach workers at safe consumption sites could provide.
For NPR News, I'm Lesley McClurg in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUS GUS' "CHANGES COME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/california-is-considering-safe-injection-centers-to-help-alleviate-overdose-crisis | 2022-05-12T15:26:15Z |
Political divisions over lifting Title 42 are playing out on on Capitol Hill, where DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, known for its heated partisan confrontations.
The public health order has been blocking many migrants at the border since the start of the COVID pandemic. And while the Department of Homeland Security has released a detailed plan on how to handle the likely influx of migrants expected at the border once Title 42 lifts on May 23, Republicans and some Democrats have been vocal that the plan isn't enough.
At the hearing, Mayorkas addressed the administration's plan.
"Under this administration, our department has been executing a comprehensive strategy to secure our borders and rebuild our immigration system," Mayorkas said in his opening remarks. "With the Title 42 public health order set to be lifted, we expect migration levels to increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants."
Mayorkas said the administration will continue to enforce immigration laws, but said, "We inherited a broken and dismantled system that is already under strain."
He said the department has "effectively" managed the border but immigration reform can only come from Congress.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the committee, accused Mayorkas of being "out of touch" with the American people and other Republican members expressed similar outrage at the administration's handling of the border.
Democrats on the committee have so far defended the department's plan once Title 42 lifts and have been critical of Republican members' lines of questioning, which has left little time for Mayorkas to fully answer.
"Just in case there's any mystery about why you're not being allowed to answer questions or why they're not interested in your reference to data ... they're not actually interested in that," Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island said.
"There's a whole plan about what this hearing is about and it's about creating Fox News spots that they can use for politics," he said.
On Wednesday, Mayorkas testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee and was also met with aggressive questioning from Republicans who repeatedly used the word failure to describe the administration's handling of the border. Some Republicans called on the secretary to resign.
It's also possible that Mayorkas will face pressure from Democrats who support lifting Title 42 and have been critical of any attempts to delay to ending the order.
Progressive Democrats, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Veronica Escobar of Texas, are planning to hold a news conference after Mayorkas testifies Thursday afternoon.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/dhs-secretary-mayorkas-faces-a-partisan-divide-over-title-42-in-capitol-hill-hearings | 2022-05-12T15:26:21Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Many workers now have the ability to ditch the traditional office and work remotely. And cities across the country have been trying to attract these workers with cash and other perks. Zeninjor Enwemeka from NPR's Planet Money podcast reports on how one of those experiments is working out.
ZENINJOR ENWEMEKA, BYLINE: Libryia Jones is big on going to new places. She even started her own travel company, though usually she's thinking about far-flung destinations - that is until a friend told her about a program in Tulsa, Okla., for remote workers. And it was offering money.
LIBRYIA JONES: You'll get $10,000 to come and live in the city. So, you know, that definitely piqued my interest.
ENWEMEKA: That $10,000 was a big incentive. So she applied to the program, which is called Tulsa Remote, and a visit sealed the deal.
JONES: It just felt a lot like home. I just - it felt comfortable. It felt easy.
ENWEMEKA: So Jones left Atlanta and moved to Tulsa last summer. Cities across the country are trying to attract workers like her. They're also offering lots of money and other perks, like free workspace, gym memberships, babysitting services, even home-cooked meals. Many of these programs popped up during the pandemic as more people could work from, well, anywhere. And that's a game changer, according to Raj Choudhury. He's a professor at Harvard Business School who studies remote work.
RAJ CHOUDHURY: For decades, smaller towns in our country have lost talent to the large coastal cities. And now there's an opportunity for talent to flow back and rebuild these communities.
ENWEMEKA: Choudhury says for years, cities competed to attract companies. They'd offer up incentives - like, say, tax breaks - all in the hopes of getting some multibillion-dollar company to open up a headquarters or a factory and create lots of jobs. Choudhury says now cities are trying to compete for workers. But do the incentives work?
CHOUDHURY: Honestly, I think that initial incentive is just a headline. It grabs attention. What towns and communities need to do is invest in public infrastructure - in your parks, in your schools, in health care facilities in these communities. And I think if I were mayor of one of these towns, that would be my priority.
ENWEMEKA: Choudhury says when he studied the Tulsa program, he saw the city invested in developing green spaces, including a 66-acre park with lots of amenities. Tulsa Remote also built up a community of 1,500 remote workers over the past four years, and Jones is a part of that.
So you got $10,000 to move to Tulsa. What did you spend that on?
JONES: I bought a house (laughter). I looked at that as an opportunity to get back into investing and to, you know, reinvest in homeownership.
ENWEMEKA: A recent report shows for every dollar spent relocating someone, the city got back $13 in new income, tax revenue and jobs - like Jones. She's hired four people.
JONES: So I hired a copywriter to kind of revamp all of my website and all that kind of stuff. I've hired an operations manager. I've also hired a social media marketing person and a photographer. And they're all really great.
ENWEMEKA: People in the Tulsa program are supposed to stay for at least a year. Ninety percent stay longer. Jones isn't sure how long she'll stay, but she's in no rush.
Zeninjor Enwemeka, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRAMEWORKS' "ALL DAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/encore-cities-like-tulsa-okla-are-paying-people-to-move-there | 2022-05-12T15:26:27Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
At this dramatic moment, Daniel Yergin is with us. He's vice chairman of S&P Global and author of acclaimed books on the energy industry. He joins us via Skype. Mr. Yergin, welcome back.
DANIEL YERGIN: Thank you. Good to be with you today.
INSKEEP: We heard the Russia move called a warning shot. Europeans have also called it blackmail. How would you describe it?
YERGIN: Well, I think it is a major sign that Putin just a couple of weeks ago said that Europe can't do without energy. I think he's demonstrating with this that he will use energy as a weapon or try to use it. But...
INSKEEP: Is it likely to work?
YERGIN: Well, I think in the case of Poland and Bulgaria, they have easy alternatives, so it really doesn't have much impact. In fact, Poland will buy gas from Germany, which actually will be Russian gas. But I think you have to assume that when Putin threatens things, he will act upon them in his current sort of crazed and irrational manner.
INSKEEP: That seems like a reasonable assumption, particularly after watching the invasion of Ukraine that seemed to make sense to no one else but that made sense to Putin, and then he went ahead with it. And yet I do notice that they have only cut off gas to two countries that did not use that much of it. Does that imply that Russia itself is afraid to go all the way?
YERGIN: Well, I think the - what's going on with the other countries is, can you find a way to - and some of them where you open a bank account at Gazprom Bank, which is part of Gazprom...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
YERGIN: ...The Russian energy giant, and you put euros there, and somehow they convert them. So it's an iffy situation right now. The European - EU telling companies, don't violate our sanctions. But I think that many companies will, if they can, open these accounts to keep the gas flowing for now. But as the German economics minister says, we have to be prepared for a larger cutoff and a larger - you know, that Putin will, you know, use the energy weapon, which is quite different from what has been Russia's brand for half a century, which is we're a reliable supplier. They're demonstrating that they're not a reliable supplier.
INSKEEP: Do you think it is likely that large European companies are going to go around the desire of their governments or the desire of the European Union and try to find some way to evade the sanctions?
YERGIN: I think that's already happening. I don't think they're going to do it against their governments; they're going to do it in consultation with their governments. I think Germany has very interestingly said that it could do without Russian crude oil, but it needs natural gas. And so I think no company will do this without the approval of their government.
INSKEEP: Is the energy weapon a weapon a little bit like nuclear weapons for Russia - they can't really use them without destroying themselves?
YERGIN: Well, I think Putin is - you know, is behaving in an apocalyptic manner. And his thesis now is that the West is out to destroy Russia. So he might do something like that. But I think that's the longer - the bigger point is that Europe - Russia is going to lose Europe as a market. The Europeans are determined to no longer be dependent upon Russian energy. Only question now is time, and I think that timeline has gotten shorter as this war has gotten more horrible. Putin is talking about, well, I'll shift my gas supplies to Asia. That will take a lot of time. And so I think, ultimately, he could be stuck with gas that he can't sell because of his actions. And by the way, when he does go to China and say, will you buy some more of my gas, the Chinese will drive a very tough bargain.
INSKEEP: Sure, because he doesn't have other customers. You said an interesting thing there, though, Daniel Yergin. You said that Europeans are already determined to shift away from Russian gas. Might take them a while, but they're determined to do it. I wonder if that becomes a part of Putin's calculations, then. I am recalling that before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin was threatened with all manner of sanctions and, at least in public, persuaded himself and said this explicitly, the sanctions are coming anyway - in effect, they're going to go after us regardless, so we might as well invade. That was the logic of that statement. Is it possible that could be the logic of Putin's thinking now? I'm going to lose this energy weapon eventually; I might as well use it.
YERGIN: Well, I think that's a very good point because, of course, up until recently, Europe has been talking anyway about leaving natural gas, moving more and more to renewables. He's decried that. So he may actually say, well, we're not going to have this market there in five years anyway. So - but I think in the current situation, as the pressure - as Germany sends weapons now to Ukraine, the likelihood that he will strike back greatly increases. And I think the Europeans, whatever they say it may - they have to be prepared for that.
INSKEEP: Daniel Yergin, even before the developments of the last couple of days, you said that energy markets around the world were in crisis. And I do understand that there's a lot of pressure and that prices are up. But what do you mean by crisis?
YERGIN: Well, crisis means that prices - price of gas, natural gas in Europe, is five times normal, that the balance is very precarious in global markets because even before this war began, these markets were very tight. And crisis means disruption, means shortages. And I think that risk is there. What is happening - to me, what's got a lot of attention is the cutting off of gas to Poland and to Bulgaria. What's not gotten so much attention is that the German economic minister said, we can do without Russian crude oil in a matter of days. Three or four weeks ago, they said that wasn't possible. The German government has consulted very closely with energy companies and figured out, what are the alternatives? Where can you get supply from? So the one that they can deal with most successfully in short term is crude oil because there's a lot of other oil in the world. When you get to natural gas, you get to the kind of situation where, if Putin actually really acted upon it, you could shut down German industry if he really cut off gas.
INSKEEP: Who, if anybody, benefits from this crisis - Persian Gulf nations, China, somebody else?
YERGIN: Well, I think that China doesn't because it's paying higher energy prices, although with the shutdown, the lockdown in Shanghai and in Beijing, in a sense, their energy consumption is going down. Obviously, short-term revenues go up for energy companies, and it gives them more money to invest in alternatives. I think what you see Germany doing, something - they're saying now they're going to build terminals to receive natural gas, LNG from the United States, but it'll take a year or two to get those built. But I think that in the short term, what Europe has to do is look at what are alternatives to using natural gas and electric generation, which means a short-term expedient, means using more coal.
INSKEEP: More coal.
YERGIN: Yes.
INSKEEP: And in spite of their desire to fight climate change, they might be going for more coal.
YERGIN: Well, I think you - that your language is right. You're fighting a war now, which is immediate, and climate change is longer term. So I think they're going to have to do expedient things. And Germany is basically already doing that, saying, we're going to extend the life of our coal plants, at least till this conflict gets over.
INSKEEP: Coal industry could be a winner. Daniel Yergin, it's always a pleasure talking with you.
YERGIN: Thank you.
INSKEEP: Thank you so much. He's the vice chairman of S&P Global.
(SOUNDBITE OF THRUPENCE'S "FOREST ON THE SUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/experts-expect-putin-will-try-to-weaponize-its-energy-resources | 2022-05-12T15:26:34Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Food and Drug Administration is one step closer to ending the sale of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in the U.S. Today the agency proposed banning the sale of all menthol tobacco products, and the Biden administration is signaling its strong support. Public health advocates say this will save lives, especially among Black Americans. NPR's Allison Aubrey joins us. Hey, Allison.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Hi there, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Hey. So I don't smoke, but I have tried cigarettes, and I've tried menthol cigarettes. And the distinguishing thing is that they taste like mint. They taste good...
AUBREY: Right.
KELLY: ...And not as harsh as tobacco. Is that what makes them so popular?
AUBREY: That is definitely part of it. I mean, it's just easier to start smoking if cigarettes have a soothing, even pleasant taste. And it's harder to quit, too.
KELLY: Yeah.
AUBREY: Nearly 19 million people in the U.S. smoke menthol cigarettes, and anti-tobacco advocates say a ban would be the single most important action taken by the FDA in recent years to curb smoking and all the disease caused by it. Here's Erika Sward of the American Lung Association.
ERIKA SWARD: Simply put, it's a big deal. It will save lives, especially in Black and brown communities in the United States, and it will reduce youth smoking. It will also lead to fewer people being diagnosed or getting lung disease, cancers and heart disease.
AUBREY: And advocates have really been pushing for action on menthol for years now.
KELLY: And to her point, Allison, that this will really save lives, especially in Black and brown communities, do we know why a disproportionately high number of Black Americans seem to use menthol products?
AUBREY: Well, marketing and advertising practices really help explain this. I spoke to Portia Reddick White of the NAACP. She says the tobacco industry has targeted marketing in Black communities going back to the 1960s. Her group wrote a letter last week urging the FDA to ban menthol cigarettes.
PORTIA REDDICK WHITE: The tobacco industry - over the years, they have been ruthless with their targeting. They actually have targeted in many ways - advertising, discounting prices that appeal or sponsoring events or actually giving money to Black educational institutions and civic leaders.
AUBREY: Now, the NAACP says it stopped accepting funds from the tobacco industry over two decades ago. But a lot of these practices have continued, and the group says the consistency of the tobacco industry efforts has harmed Black Americans.
KELLY: Is the tobacco industry likely to challenge this proposed ban?
AUBREY: Well, tobacco companies definitely oppose the proposal, and it would not be a surprise at all if they challenge the rules in court. A spokesperson for the tobacco company Altria - that's a spinoff of Philip Morris - said in a statement that banning sales of menthol products would push them into unregulated criminal markets that she said don't allow for any regulations. But, you know, public health and anti-tobacco advocates pushed back. They say the evidence to show the harm of menthol cigarettes is pretty overwhelming. Here's Dennis Henigan of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
DENNIS HENIGAN: I believe that the science is so strong and the life-saving potential is so well-established that these rules will be finalized and they will survive court challenge.
AUBREY: The FDA will open the rules up for public comment for 60 days, Mary Louise. But advocates say it could be several years before a menthol ban is put in place given opposition from the industry and the regulatory process.
KELLY: Thank you, Allison.
AUBREY: Thank you.
KELLY: NPR's Allison Aubrey reporting.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE DELI'S "5:32PM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/fda-proposes-menthol-cigarette-ban | 2022-05-12T15:26:40Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Among the dignitaries and diplomats, all the bigwigs who gathered beneath the stained glass of the National Cathedral for Madeleine Albright's funeral here in Washington this week, was the president of Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili. She leads what is a small country in the southeastern corner of Europe, a country that shares a border with Russia and has a history of being invaded by its far-bigger neighbor. Now, I had Zourabichvili in her capital last month. She sat for an interview with us in her offices at the presidential palace in Tbilisi, and she was outspoken both on events in her country and in nearby Ukraine. She's also a champion of women's rights of female leaders on the international stage. So we have invited her back.
President Zourabichvili, welcome to Washington. I am glad to speak with you again.
PRESIDENT SALOME ZOURABICHVILI: Thank you. I'm also very glad to speak with you.
KELLY: Now, I know you're here for a number of reasons but primarily because of Madeleine Albright's funeral. And I wish she were here to join us in talking about strong female leaders because she certainly was one. Did you know her?
ZOURABICHVILI: Yes, I did. I did know her in my previous functions. And she was extremely promoting the women leadership the way we understand it. She was also very much outspoken about the rights of those countries that were formerly in the Soviet Union to have and defend their independence. So we had many things - and as a refugee that had left a country, a totalitarian country, she also understood very well what human rights and a nation's rights means. So there were very many common points.
KELLY: Well, and what do you think the role of women leaders in conflict is? I mean, what do you think they bring to the table that is different?
ZOURABICHVILI: I think that they bring a different perspective. And in the 21st century, to see a country that is invading another one is something that, to me, looks very anachronic. And I think that women have a more maybe realistic view of what the world can do in solving conflicts and post-conflict situations, which also is a very important issue.
KELLY: Yeah. I guess we could note that there have been past strong female leaders of Russia who've also invaded. Catherine the Great (laughter) would come to many Ukrainians' minds.
ZOURABICHVILI: (Laughter) That's true. What is important is not the fact of being a female leader. it's whether we bring to the different issues that we're dealing with a different attitude. And that was certainly not the case of Catherine the Great or of some of the past women leaders.
KELLY: Well, speaking of female leaders, you held meetings today on Capitol Hill, including with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
ZOURABICHVILI: Another woman leader, yes.
KELLY: Indeed. What is it you want American lawmakers - Pelosi and others - to know about your country, about its place in the world right now?
ZOURABICHVILI: Well, I have a very simple message here in Washington, which is that we understand, and we are in full solidarity with Ukraine. We want the maximum support of the United States for Ukraine because Ukraine should win. And I am glad to be here today in Washington, the day when President Biden announces the $33 billion support to Ukraine. And I think that it's a very right and timely decision.
But what I want to convey is that it's important that while dealing with the Ukraine issue, while helping Ukraine to win, it's important not to forget two other countries, Moldova and Georgia, that are the two other associate countries to the European Union that are there at very sensitive places - one in the Caucasus, the other one close to the Ukraine war region - and that those two countries are the two countries that are not protected by either the NATO Article 5 or by the European Union direct solidarity, at least as yet. So at this time, I think it's very important that the support of the United States is outspoken to both our countries. Moldova has - and I just talked to Maia Sandu a few hours before. Their problem is...
KELLY: The female president of Moldova, your counterpart there.
ZOURABICHVILI: Yes. We need our partners to be outspoken in their support to our positions. We are not at war. We do not intend to be at war. But we need to be on the map.
KELLY: One of the ways that war in Ukraine is already impacting your country is refugees. Georgia is hosting tens of thousands of refugees and more coming every day, many of them women, the majority of them women. What are you doing to meet their needs?
ZOURABICHVILI: We're offering them everything, from hosting them to schooling of the children to medical facilities. And on top of that, they are very well received because we have these old cultural ties. So they are, I think, feeling as much as home as possible, and we want to make them feel as much as home as possible.
KELLY: Yeah. Last thing, President Zourabichvili. So many of the predictions for this war have turned out wrong, including the prediction that Russia would win and win really easily and fast. What are you watching for as we are now, sadly, into the third month of this war?
ZOURABICHVILI: I'm watching the tragedy of the war, but at the same time, the fact that it has really changed all the calculus that had been made by everyone, including by the Russian leadership, that they would win easily. Then now there is a second stage where they thought that they could take over the eastern side, at least, easily, and that's not happening. So all their predictions have been wrong, including on the fact that the West would be disunited. And nobody's disunited, and everybody is doing everything that they can. And I think that's the recipe for what I hope will happen - is a Ukrainian victory.
KELLY: Salome Zourabichvili. She is president of Georgia. She's here in Washington this week. Madam President, good to see you. Thank you.
ZOURABICHVILI: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/georgias-president-wants-the-world-to-remember-the-countries-near-ukraine-during-war | 2022-05-12T15:26:46Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
One year ago today, FBI agents showed up at Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan apartment with a search warrant. They took computers and cell phones from both his home and his office. Giuliani is not only a former mayor of New York City, he was also a lawyer for former President Trump.
NPR's Ilya Marritz is here now to catch us up with this high-profile investigation. Hello, Ilya.
ILYA MARRITZ, BYLINE: How's it going?
SCHMITZ: Rudy Giuliani has not been charged with any crime. So tell us; what is the potential crime here?
MARRITZ: Prosecutors are looking at possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This is a law that says anyone lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign government or foreign interests has to report that work.
Rudy Giuliani never registered for his activities in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019, but as we know from news reporting and also sworn testimony at President Trump's first impeachment, Giuliani was very active in Ukraine, working to gather information and then make damaging claims about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. We know he was in close contact with several current and former officials in the Ukrainian government as he did this. And this appears to be the activity prosecutors have been focused on.
SCHMITZ: And in terms of Giuliani lobbying the U.S. government, what do we know about that?
MARRITZ: Well, we know he was in direct contact both with the Department of State and the Department of Justice at - around this time, feeding them his Ukraine materials. He was sending so much stuff to the Trump Justice Department. It went so far as to set up an intake process just for him.
Now, Giuliani has always insisted he followed the law and did nothing wrong. But if we think about it, this is kind of a dicey situation. In 2018, Giuliani becomes personal lawyer to the president, Donald Trump.
SCHMITZ: Right.
MARRITZ: He's also traveling overseas a lot to Ukraine and other places. Foreign officials know he has access to the president. He's the president's lawyer, after all. And he does this while maintaining a long list of other clients around the world who are not the president.
SCHMITZ: So you've mentioned Ukraine a few times. What other details do we have about what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine on Trump's behalf?
MARRITZ: If we think about this kind of big picture, 2019 - that's the year Trump was impeached. But only a few months earlier, he had asked Ukraine's newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, someone we all know very well now...
SCHMITZ: That's right.
MARRITZ: ...To do us a favor. And when Zelenskyy didn't announce investigations of the Bidens, Trump froze military aid to Ukraine. Trump was acquitted in his Senate trial, but that year, prosecutors began investigating Giuliani for his Ukraine activities, which were really a prime driver of the pressure campaign. And according to filings from Giuliani's own lawyer, investigators are specifically interested in his actions around the then-ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.
SCHMITZ: And she testified at Trump's first impeachment. How does she fit into this?
MARRITZ: Yeah. Her testimony was really memorable for her composure as she described being the target of this smear campaign by Giuliani, saying - basically saying she was corrupt.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARIE YOVANOVITCH: I do not understand Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me. Clearly, no one at the State Department did.
MARRITZ: In fact, Yovanovitch, I have to say, was known as an anti-corruption leader in Ukraine. But Giuliani's campaign against her did appear to succeed. She was removed from her post without warning, recalled to Washington. And Giuliani has admitted in an interview that he, quote, "needed Yovanovitch out of the way." Why that was is probably something of great interest to investigators.
SCHMITZ: So briefly, Ilya, here we have a year after the FBI search of Giuliani. Is 12 months a long time to run an investigation without seeking an indictment?
MARRITZ: If you want a yardstick, the last time a personal attorney for President Trump was searched by the FBI was Michael Cohen...
SCHMITZ: Right.
MARRITZ: ...Back in April of 2018. It took just four months to get a guilty plea from him for tax evasion and campaign finance crimes. This probe is clearly moving a lot slower. It's very complicated. The war in Ukraine may also play some role in slowing things down. We don't really know. But what legal experts tell me is this is not an unusually long time. They want to get this bulletproof.
SCHMITZ: That's NPR's Ilya Marritz.
(SOUNDBITE OF COCABONA'S "HOWL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/giuliani-is-still-under-investigation-a-year-after-the-fbi-raided-his-home-and-office | 2022-05-12T15:26:52Z |
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Gustavo Petro, a former left-wing guerrilla and the front-runner in Colombia's presidential election next month, is promising to shake up Colombian society.
And to be sure, there's a lot that needs changing. About 40% of Colombians live below the poverty line and the country has one of the world's largest gaps between rich and poor, according to the World Bank.
"If we continue along this same path, the country will fall into the abyss," Petro said in a recent interview with NPR. "People are disillusioned, which is why I am at the top of the polls."
An opposition senator who is now in his third run for the presidency, Petro, 62, has spent his whole life challenging the status quo.
Entering politics from the left isn't easy
He grew up in Zipaquirá, a mining town just north of Bogotá, where he was dismayed by its poverty. But for decades, government repression as well as a power-sharing pact between traditional parties made it extremely difficult for leftists to break into politics.
That's why in 1978, Petro joined the April 19 Movement, or M-19, one of several Colombian rebel groups that formed in the wake of Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba. His rebel nom de guerre, "Aureliano," was inspired by a fictional military officer constantly fighting losing battles in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
The M-19 carried out kidnappings, bank robberies and a disastrous 1985 siege of the Supreme Court that led to more than 90 deaths. But initially, the M-19 cultivated a Robin Hood image by assaulting supermarket trucks and distributing stolen milk in city slums.
Petro's main job was to stockpile stolen weapons and in 1985 was briefly imprisoned and tortured by the army. After his release, he also helped organize guerrilla cells in the cities and the impoverished countryside.
"I slept in the homes of poor farmers," he said in the interview, speaking via Zoom. "I hiked across mountains and Indigenous reserves. I was in daily contact with poor people."
Petro believes such close contact with average Colombians eventually made him a better politician. "I think a president should have these types of experiences," he said.
He led the capital through ups and downs
He would soon focus on electoral politics. Disillusioned with the war, Petro took part in peace talks that paved the way for the M-19 to disarm and form a left-wing political party in 1990.
However, running for office remained risky. Carlos Pizarro, who had been the M-19's top commander, ran for president in 1990 but was shot dead by an anti-communist gunman weeks before the vote. A month earlier, another leftist presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, was assassinated.
Petro surrounded himself with body guards and made his way into politics. He served nearly two decades in Colombia's Congress, where he earned praise for denouncing close ties between politicians and right-wing death squads. He finished fourth in the 2010 presidential election, then was elected mayor of the capital, Bogotá, in 2011.
It was a chaotic four years in charge of the capital. Although crime and poverty fell, Petro went through nine chiefs of staff and, at one point, trash piled high in the streets during his bungled attempt to reform the city's garbage pickup.
In 2018, Petro again ran for president, losing to conservative Iván Duque. But under President Duque, drug-related violence has increased in rural areas, a national strike shut down major cities last year, and poverty has swelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (The Colombian Constitution bars the president from seeking a second consecutive term.)
"The government's lack of capacity to deal with a national emergency just left a lot of people angry and upset. And I think that's what gives Gustavo Petro a real chance," says Sergio Guzmán, director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis.
Another factor opening the door for Petro is a more recent peace agreement, signed in 2016, that disarmed Colombia's largest rebel group known as the FARC. As the country's guerrilla conflicts have faded, Guzmán says, voters have become more willing to support leftist politicians who were previously viewed by some as rebels in disguise.
Should Petro win, he would become Colombia's first-ever left-wing president.
He wants to take on poverty and the environment
Many of his proposals have alarmed the country's business class.
Petro talks of raising taxes on the rich — and printing money — to pay for anti-poverty programs. To move toward a greener economy, he promises to stop all new oil exploration and to cut back on coal production, even though these are Colombia's two top exports.
"The fiscal accounts of Colombia depend on oil. It's as simple as that," Alberto Bernal, a Colombian economist, said on a video panel this month sponsored by the Council of the Americas think tank in New York. "What is Colombia going to do if you can't take oil out?"
Petro has outlined a 12-year transition period and says the country could replace the lost income from fossil fuels with a major boost to tourism, and improvements in agriculture and industry.
"I am proposing a path that is much better for Colombia," Petro told NPR, adding that his plan adheres to guidelines from last year's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
He is a critic of the U.S.-led drug war
He also spoke in the interview of forging a new relationship with Washington. Petro is a strong critic of the U.S.-led war on illegal drugs in the Andean region — though he provided no specific alternatives — and he wants to renegotiate a 2006 bilateral trade deal that he claims has hurt Colombian farmers and manufacturers. He also wants more help from the U.S. to protect the Amazon rainforest, part of which lies in Colombia.
Since giving up on guerrilla warfare more than three decades ago, Petro has followed the democratic rules yet critics continue to question his commitment to liberal democracy. For example, Petro commented on the campaign trail that his first act as president would be to declare a state of economic emergency, allowing him to bypass Congress and enact laws by decree to tackle hunger and poverty.
Critics try to peg him as a Colombian Hugo Chávez
Petro has also insulted journalists and recently called a Colombian TV commentator who questioned his plans a "neo-Nazi."
Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative former Medellín mayor who is Petro's main rival in the presidential race, did some name-calling of his own. In a March TV debate, he compared Petro to socialist leaders who have brought authoritarian rule and economic ruin to neighboring Venezuela.
"Petro: You are Chávez and Maduro," Gutiérrez said, referring to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. He also said a Petro administration would expropriate private businesses, a claim Petro denied.
An April 21 poll gave Petro 38% of the vote — well ahead of the seven other candidates competing in the May 29 election. But that's below the 50% plus one vote he would need to avoid a June runoff between the two top vote-getters from the first round.
His running mate would be the first Black vice president
Arlene Tickner, a professor of international relations at Rosario University in Bogotá, chalks up some of the criticism of Petro to a Colombian upper class that's running scared.
"They stand to lose some of their privileges, as should be in a genuine democracy that values equality and participation," Tickner says. "Remember that Colombia is one of most unequal countries in Latin America and in the world and it's shameful that we have not yet had a more progressive president."
Rather than threatening Colombia's democracy, Petro says he would open it up to new voices. His running mate, Francia Márquez, is an Afro-Colombian human rights activist who, if elected, would make history by becoming the country's first-ever Black vice president.
Indeed, Petro's political movement is called the Historic Pact — which Guzmán, the consultant, calls "a brilliant bit of political communication, because: Who campaigns against history?"
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/hes-running-to-be-colombias-1st-left-wing-president-heres-what-he-plans-to-do | 2022-05-12T15:26:58Z |
In film lore, movie moguls are nearly always pictured as tyrants, directors as dictators, producers as despots, so you'd think I'd be used to the notion of authoritarianism by now.
But this era of political autocrats has me rattled, not least because it will inevitably result in a raft of strongman movies in a couple of years.
Apparently, it has Jon Stewart rattled, too, at least judging from the speech he gave at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts when he was presented with the 2022 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
The banana peel in the coal mine
"Comedy doesn't change the world," he told the audience, "but it's a bellwether. We're the banana peel in the coal mine. When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first. It's just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat. Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things."
True enough, and it has me pondering how the arts have dealt with authoritarians through the years.
In Shakespeare's day, you had to be a fool to speak truth to power. King Lear's Fool, for instance, mocked the king's decision to give away his kingdom to his daughters. He'd been granted a dispensation to say what he wanted because no one took him seriously. He served at the pleasure of the crown.
Offstage, of course, so did Elizabethan playwrights. The spiritual descendants of those playwrights now work in the film industry, and at least in Hollywood, they don't have to worry much about catering to tyrants (unless you count studio bosses).
Casting a jaundiced eye on those who wield power
For the most part, depicting authoritarians as monsters is so axiomatic, it's become Hollywood's default position, whether absolute power is being wielded by Ian McDiarmid as a Sith lord, by Donald Sutherland as a despot who stages Hunger Games, or by Meryl Streep as a fashion editor whose iron fist comes sheathed in a velvet glove.
Casting a jaundiced eye on those who wield power has a long history in Hollywood, dating back at least to the 1930s when Charlie Chaplin caught a screening of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
The film's effectiveness at portraying Adolph Hitler as almost God-like terrified most observers, but Chaplin reportedly cracked up at director Leni Riefenstahl's excesses. As his Little Tramp already had the toothbrush mustache, he figured two could play at this game, and in his satirical 1940 comedy, The Great Dictator, he mocked the German Fuhrer by speaking German-accented gibberish as Adenoid Hynkel, the "Phooey" of Tomania. (He also played a lowly barber who was the Phooey's virtual twin.)
Mocking strongmen in an era of strongmen
Chaplin said in his autobiography that he couldn't have made the film funny if he'd known, then, the full extent of Nazi evil. But ridiculing Hitler as a clown, worked for audiences.
Chaplin wasn't the first comic to mock strongmen in an era noted for the likes of Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Three Stooges had just released a short called You Nazty Spy. And seven years earlier, in 1933, the Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup had cast Groucho as goofy tyrant Rufus T. Firefly in a satirical look at how nations were dealing with the Great Depression.
And astonishingly, that same year the entirely serious drama Gabriel Over the White House offered an approving look at a president played by Walter Huston (John Huston's father, Anjelica Huston's grandfather) who thought tyranny was the ideal way to lift the U.S. economy.
The film was financed by right-wing newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and admired by no less a progressive than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And though, under the guise of wanting the greatest good for the greatest number, it was essentially preaching fascism, it made a tidy little profit at the box office.
Taming despots while Nero fiddled and Rome burned
After World War II, this notion of a benign dictatorship couldn't play anymore for most audiences. And Hollywood fell back on time-honored notions. None more time-honored than that of Roman emperors persecuting Christians. For instance, Peter Ustinov's vainglorious Nero in 1951's Quo Vadis.
In the 1950s when Hollywood needed a despot tamed, it called on Deborah Kerr. Ustinov's ridiculous Nero was a lost cause, so while he fiddled and Rome burned, Kerr set about taming Robert Taylor's jerk of a Roman general, just as she would, a few years later, do her best to tame Yul Brynner's petulant Siamese monarch in The King and I.
Darkness and real-life dystopias
These were hardly realistic portrayals, but over the next few decades, filmmakers increasingly gave us films about the ousting of tyrants that were realistic: the struggle against Greece's military Junta in the film "Z," the wrenching last months of Argentina's military dictatorship in the Oscar-winning The Official Story, and a feel-good film called No about the Chilean campaign to oust Augusto Pinochet.
But perhaps no film about a despot hit harder than one set in the east-African nation of Uganda. In The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker won a Best Actor Oscar playing the corrupt general turned brutal dictator Idi Amin, taking audiences from his populist early days all the way to the paranoid reign of terror that earned him the moniker "the Butcher of Uganda."
Can comedy survive this new moment?
What nearly all these films have in common is a conviction that authoritarians must ultimately fail. In fact, way back in 1940, that's the sentiment that Charlie Chaplin used to end The Great Dictator. After clowning for two hours, and even dancing a world domination pas de deux with a balloon globe, he addressed the camera as the lowly barber who had, in an unlikely plot twist, switched places with the "Phooey."
And in his own voice, without any comic flourishes at all, Chaplin spoke for several minutes from the heart, about shared humanity, holding fast to ideals, and uniting in the name of democracy.
It's hard to imagine today how audiences received this speech in the run-up to World War II. Critics wrote that its lack of comedy broke the film's spell, but it's undeniably arresting as a capper to what became Chaplin's biggest commercial success.
And it's something I thought about when I heard Jon Stewart's acceptance speech for the Mark Twain prize — which you'll be able to watch for yourself on PBS on June 21st.
Stewart has built his career on directly and sincerely addressing his audience, leaving jokes aside at times, and posing queries like the one he posed — and answered — early in his remarks:
"Is comedy gonna survive in this new moment. I've got news for you. Comedy survives every moment."
Even, we all have to hope, moments where madmen run the show, and laughs catch in your throat.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/hollywood-and-tyrants-how-filmmakers-take-on-the-powerful | 2022-05-12T15:27:04Z |
Between fights over mask mandates and new legislation dictating how history should be taught, schools have become a battleground for America's culture wars. Recently, the Florida Department of Education announced that it was rejecting dozens of math textbooks because they incorporated "prohibited topics" or "unsolicited strategies," such as critical race theory.
New York Times national correspondent Dana Goldstein says Florida officials have given little evidence to back up these claims. Goldstein and her colleague Stephanie Saul reviewed 21 of the rejected math textbooks and found very little mention of race. Instead, Goldstein theorizes the objections related to the inclusion of topics concerning social-emotional learning.
Goldstein says the rejected textbooks addressed social-emotional learning in a variety of ways. "Some of them were quite awkward," she says. "There was one fifth grade math textbook from McGraw-Hill that had sort of a simple fractions question, and then right underneath it said, 'How do you understand your feelings?'"
Other social-emotional lessons were more seamlessly integrated. One high school textbook asked students to rate from 1 t0 4 how much they struggled with a concept. Another included cartoon figures encouraging students to ask a friend how they solved a problem.
"And then there were lots of references to this idea of grit, this idea of perseverance, and reminders to children that math is hard and they should keep going to find the answer," Goldstein says.
The goal of social-emotional learning is to provide kids with a set of skills that they can draw on when they face challenges later in life, Goldstein explains. But, she notes, some conservatives see it as something that opens the door to larger discussions about race, gender and sexuality.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed what critics have dubbed a "Don't Say Gay" bill, which prohibits school personnel from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. He also signed the so-called "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," which proponents say was designed to prevent both students and employees of private companies from feeling discomfort or personal guilt because of historical wrongs that have to do with race, gender or national origin.
Ultimately, Goldstein says, the convergence of politics and education is nothing new: "I'm the author of a history book about fights and debates about education since the 19th century till today, and one of the themes I draw out in my book is that there are always these moral panics over what goes on in schools, and we are definitely in a moment like that right now."
But, she adds, our current battles over education are coming at a particularly critical time, when many kids have lost a year and a half of in-person schooling due to the pandemic.
"Instead of coming back with a huge focus on getting kids up to par emotionally [and] academically, and bringing parents in as a support for kids who have lived through a lot the past two years, instead, we're seeing this huge focus in many communities on these culture war issues," she says. "It does call into question, for me, whether the classroom is just another front in this deeply divided and partisan political reality that we're all living through."
Interview highlights
On how right-wing activist Chris Rufo has made social-emotional learning a flashpoint for conservatives
Rufo ... has been instrumental in sort of putting out the idea that any discussion of racial inequity is, in fact, "critical race theory." Sort of introducing that terminology to conservative media and then, you know, pushing these laws that a third of states have passed, limiting how race, gender and sexuality are taught. ... From the critical race theory conversation, he then moved on to [a] LGBTQ set of issues and creating a real movement there to limit how those are talked about. ...
Mr. Rufo stated to me that while social-emotional learning "sounds positive and uncontroversial in theory, in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogy, such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism." He continued to say that the intention of SEL is to "soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of repression, whiteness or internalized racism, and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology."
I think one thing that really jumped out at me here was his notion that it would "soften children" to, you know, talk about their feelings and to encounter this social emotional learning content at school. A few people responded to my reporting on this saying like, this sounds really misogynist. Like it's almost it's too touchy-feely or too feminine for kids to talk about their feelings. But there's also an even more nefarious reading of this, you know, this idea of progressives or teachers as "groomers," which is circulating very widely in right-wing social media right now. The idea that somehow by talking about these different subjects and school teachers are sort of actively almost converting kids to gayness or to transgenderism.
On how many states in the U.S. choose their own textbooks
It's fewer than half that, at the state level, reject or accept textbooks for use. But Florida is one of the three big states that does do a process like this of accepting or rejecting textbooks at the state level. The other two are California and Texas. These three states really have a huge influence on what kids will see in textbooks, because the big publishers ... really want these states to approve their books so that they get out to more kids and more districts buy the books.
On how one rejected Florida math textbook addressed racial inequity
There's a lot of research showing that math anxiety is very real and that girls and kids of color feel it more than white males do. And another way that this is addressed was one of the few places where we did see race in the books. One high school math textbook had these mini biographies of mathematicians and all but one of them were of mathematicians through history who were women or nonwhite. Obviously, probably the majority of mathematicians through history were white men, so that was clearly a very purposeful decision, I think, to show kids that might have more anxiety about math, that, hey, this could be a career for you. Although that is in no sense critical race theory, as theorists would understand the term, I have seen throughout the country that any time that sort of white male achievement is underplayed in the curriculum, it can become a target of this movement.
On comparing a textbook used in California to an edition used in Texas
Just to talk about LGBTQ issues for a moment, the Texas textbooks do reference them in a few places, mostly in regard to contemporary debates over something like marriage equality. That is totally different than what you will see in California, which passed a law in 2011 that actually required schools to teach the contributions of LGBTQ Americans throughout history. In response to that 2011 law, the big publishing companies created thousands of words of new historical material on LGBTQ issues all throughout American history. So if you pick up a California book, you will learn about non-binary gender identities among Native American tribes in the 19th century. You will learn about same-sex families living as enslaved people. None of this would be covered in a Texas textbook. Perhaps most controversially, in California, you will learn about early gender reassignment surgeries in the 1950s. It's simply inconceivable that the state of Texas would ask publishers to include something like that in books. ...
The book looks the same, the cover's the same, the title's the same, the author is the same, but you turn the pages and you find these small differences, a paragraph here or there, but they can really give a really different view.
On Florida's Parental Rights in Education Law (which critics call a "Don't Say Gay" law), requiring parents to be notified if students go to mental or physical health services
Quite a lot of it is an attack on counseling services or social-emotional services that may be provided by schools. It requires schools to do this new bureaucratic thing, which is to create a list of all of the mental health or physical health services that are available on campus and provide that to parents and let them opt out of any element of it. And it also requires schools to immediately notify parents if students come to them for mental or physical health services. Again, it's very broadly and vaguely written. ...
The intention of those that wrote the bill would be to allow parents to object to schools affirming children's gender identity. So, for example, if a child who is assigned female at birth goes to a counselor and says, "I'm not sure I want to use she/her pronouns anymore. I want to maybe dress a little bit differently," the national standards of the counseling profession in the United States is to affirm that these are normal questions to have for that child. And if the child would prefer different pronouns, to use different pronouns, and to explore having the child dress in a way that feels right to that child.
Now, what those that wrote this bill would like to see happen is that immediately upon a kid raising any issue like this, parents would be immediately brought into the discussion, and it would be parents who would be allowed to drive what the response would be. So if mom or dad feel that, no, the message here is you're a girl, you're born a girl, you will always be a girl, and we are not affirming this questioning for you, that would be what the counselor would do and what the school would do. That is the intention here. But there is nothing in the bill limiting this parental control over counseling to gender issues. And I think that's really important to point out.
On the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," (Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed into law
This is an act that's supposed to prevent both students and employees of private companies from feeling discomfort or personal guilt because of historical wrongs that have to do with race, gender or national origin. And what it says is that that type of instruction or diversity training in workplaces cannot occur. ...
So discussions of white privilege, the idea that all white people, even those that may suffer from other forms of discrimination in their own lives, carry some privilege due to their skin color. That would certainly seem to be off limits by the way this bill has been written. Diversity trainings, which are popular in corporate workplaces and also popular at many schools, would not be allowed here.
On how the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" makes it difficult to connect history to current events
Learning history can be very difficult, very emotional, and can bring up very hard discussions and personal feelings. And so it seems very difficult for a teacher to broach some of these topics in their classroom while guaranteeing that students would not feel those feelings.
I will say that the bill does include language guaranteeing the right to bring up those subjects that you just mentioned, such as slavery or segregation or discrimination against women throughout history. But I think what it really is taking a target on is tying those historical topics to the present day, and specifically the framework that we are still living with the historical impacts of those discriminations, and we can still see that discrimination around us in various ways. That's the through line that is really targeted here.
Take the issue of segregation, for example. You'd have to be blind in America of 2022 to think that school segregation is over, or housing segregation, in which we have neighborhoods that are predominantly Black or predominantly white or predominantly Latino, is not here. Obviously, we are still living with the results of our history. And so it does seem to be that the purpose here is to not talk about that, to pull a shroud over the fact that history is not just in the past, but something that we live with today.
On how educators are responding to the debate over what they can teach
In some of the more conservative communities, where these fights have been really heated over the past year or so, teachers are really scared to speak out. It's not uncommon for me to come across a teacher who is commenting anonymously on some of these controversies, but who hesitates to speak out with their name attached. But you do see teachers who are brave, who go to the microphone at board meetings and who do speak to the press about why they disagree with these attempts to control what they do in the classroom.
I think there's no doubt that it's a scary time to broach subjects from American history, subjects from contemporary American life, or that are in the news in the classroom. I very often talk to teachers who hesitate to talk with their students about something like the Jan. 6 insurrection in the halls of Congress or talk about who won the 2020 presidential election because they know that it's just a super-charged issue in their communities.
Amy Salit and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/how-social-emotional-learning-became-a-target-for-ron-desantis-and-conservatives | 2022-05-12T15:27:10Z |
Dua Lipa has been waiting a long time to perform for fans. After putting out her second studio album Future Nostalgia in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic in a moment when most artists chose to postpone their releases, the English pop star is finally in the midst of a long-delayed world tour. And she's only now getting to perform her Grammy Award-winning record as it's meant to be experienced: on the dance floor.
Now, Lipa is also looking to connect more intimately with fans and collaborators beyond the arena stage, with media ventures that expand on her desire for being "of service" to her fanbase. Earlier this year Lipa launched Service95, a personal newsletter that offers curated lists of everything from her favorite books to restaurants, born out of her own passion for making recommendations to friends and family. She also hosts and records "At Your Service," an interview podcast that finds Lipa tackling weighty issues including politics and identity in conversations with authors, artists, designers and more.
The 26-year-old artist recently spoke with Morning Edition's Rachel Martin from her tour stop in Glasgow about how she chooses interview subjects for her podcast, creates her newsletter and shuts down self-doubt.
The following interview has been condensed and edited. To listen to the broadcast version of this story, use the audio player at the top of the page.
Rachel Martin, Morning Edition: I went to your show in Washington, D.C. and it was this collective experience that we had all been missing for so long. You had to have been feeling that too — you waited two years to perform these songs in these kinds of venues.
Dua Lipa: I've been dying to get out on the road, to finally perform these songs. When we finally got the chance to go out on the road in the U.S., there was this whole surge of excitement and adrenaline. It's like, wow, we finally get to do this.
When you were in D.C. and we met you backstage, your dad happened to have been back there. And I just asked him quickly, "What is this like to see your daughter up there in front of these thousands of people yelling her name, and in this floating stage wearing a sequined catsuit?" And he said, "I pinch myself, that this is her, that she's made this happen." Talk to me about your family and why it was important at some points to have them on the tour with you?
This whole journey has been really exciting to get to do it together. I think because of them, they've kept me really grounded. Nothing has changed in my home life and just my job is quite extraordinary.
Your family left Kosovo in the early '90s before the war?
In '92, they moved to Kosovo as the war in Bosnia was happening. My mom's half Bosnian, so her mom was in Sarajevo at the time, but they moved to London as the situation started getting really difficult in ex-Yugoslavia. Something that people forget all the time is, people don't really want to leave their country unless they really have to. It's really out of necessity.
Then I was born in '95. [My parents] had a great time in London, but they always had that idea in the back of their mind that they would always want to come back to Kosovo at some point. When I was 11, we moved back to Kosovo.
What was that like for you? When you're 11, you're old enough to protest — you have a world, you have friends and a life.
I was really excited about it. When you're in London at the age of 11, you're finishing year six and then you would go into a secondary school. All my friends were gonna go to different schools, and instead of going to a different school, I was going to a different country. Albanian was my first language, I spoke it at home, and then English was something I did in school and I spoke with my friends. It was just a very interesting and exciting period of my life. I was also really excited at the idea that people wouldn't find my name Dua as weird as they did in London.
It was different obstacles to overcome – learning chemistry and science and maths in a completely different language. Having assignments in Albanian is a lot harder than just speaking it at home. It took me a really long time to find my feet there. It's interesting going into that at 11 years old, but I think I wouldn't change it for the world because it really helped me become who I am.
When you were 15, you told your parents you wanted to leave. You told them that you wanted to move back to London with or without them.
When I think back to that, I don't quite remember the first conversation where I started the topic of, "I'm going to move to London and this is what I want to do." I do remember slowly saying to my parents that if I want to go to university in London, I would have to do my GCSEs in London – and my GCSEs are starting soon.
You wanted to go to London because that's where you thought you could make your music career happen, but you were savvy enough to know you needed to make a different argument to your parents.
[Laughs] I think yes, that's how my argument started. When I was living in Kosovo from the age of 11 to 15 I loved doing music, but I just felt like there was no way that I could really cut through all the noise without being in a place where everything was happening. I felt like I needed to be in London to make my dream a reality. That's what I felt like I needed to do and where I needed to be.
Where did that sense of confidence come from? Had someone come to you who you respected and said, you've got what it takes and you need to figure out how to make it happen, or was it internal?
People would tell me that I could sing, but it wasn't to the point of, you could make it or this could be something. It was a playground dream. It was something that I felt like I knew I wanted to do.
We call it imposter syndrome now, but it's basically suffering from crippling self-doubt, and all of us get it from time to time. Has that happened to you? Or maybe that's part of your success, that you just didn't ever let that creep in?
I have self doubt, I'm only human. [Laughs] Although I have a passion for what I do, because I really love music, when things start to get bigger and people start to have an opinion on something you love so much, then you start to listen to the background noise. In the beginning, when I first started, the response was like, "Oh, this is so good." Then, all of a sudden, there was like a turning point, and it just completely shifted and changed. Social media just kind of took over. There was this one little dance routine that I did when I was performing, and people took that one little snippet and decided to base my whole stage presence and who I was as a performer on stage.
I think at that point, there [were] moments of self-doubt, even though it was kind of unfair because a lot of the people that had sent in those messages or were saying things online actually hadn't been to a show. Social media is kind of run on this toxic currency of 'who can make people laugh at the expense of others.'
But it got to you, clearly.
Of course it got to me. I was at a point where I was so happy, I was doing everything that I wanted to, but then there were people who made me feel like maybe I wasn't good enough or I didn't deserve to be there, I wasn't cut out to be a musician. I realized that what anyone says doesn't actually matter. It was something that I learned during the period of writing Future Nostalgia — I was able to shut people out. Now, if anybody says anything, it doesn't even bother me. Nothing even cuts through, because I realized that if you're passionate about something and you're good at your job and you write from the heart, no one can take that away from you. I had to take myself off Twitter, but if that's going to help me and my mental health and allow me to thrive in whatever way I choose to, that has been a saving grace.
You are a busy woman. You are on tour for a massive hit album, you're going to have your first starring role in a movie this year and you are a podcast host. You have acknowledged that the guests you're talking to are these very super famous people who have done a whole lot of talking. You have said that you want to go deeper with them. Everyone can intuit what that means, but what does that mean to you?
The podcast journey has been interesting, and it's been something that I've been quite nervous about, but I've also made a pact with myself that I wanted to be outside of my comfort zone. We're all going through this very human experience, whether you're in the public eye or not. I have this belief that everyone can be of service to somebody else just by talking honestly about your experiences. I set out as it being just of service to other people, and I found that this has also been such a service to myself as well. It's been interesting in this season, there's been this common theme of duality with so many of my guests.
A lot of them have come from the children of immigrants, or having this kind of dual-nationality and [are] coming to terms with what that experience is — conversations making people feel less alone.
You interviewed a Yazidi woman, Nobel laureate Nadia [Murad], who survived being sexually assaulted by ISIS, and Amal Clooney, in her capacity as a human rights lawyer. These are heavy, sober conversations that do stand in contrast to your music in a lot of ways. These kinds of conversations, is it satisfying your curiosity in a different way than music does?
I want to say yes to your question, but I also feel like both the music and the podcast, they're different parts of who I am — they just make up me. As for scratching the itch of curiosity in terms of the podcast, these are things that just interest me. These are conversations that I want to have with people. I feel like social media, there's such an influx of information, and sometimes it's really hard to grasp things that interest you. Things that you should be supporting. That was kind of where I started getting a bit foggy in terms of the activism side. If you claim to be an activist, or somebody who will speak up about any injustices, then you have to speak up about everything and you have to do it imminently and immediately and if you don't, you're not supporting, and you're not doing it.
Did you feel that pressure?
I feel like that's just the air of social media at the moment. I think it's not allowing people the opportunity to really learn about every cause and understand what's going on and then really speak from the heart. It's just like: immediate response has to happen, use your social media.
Could you imagine writing songs that are more reflective of the causes you care about or politics or the cultural moment that we're in?
I think if it makes sense in the moment, then yes. It's not necessarily something that I'm going to get into, writing political music. I like to make music that makes people feel good. I like to tell stories about things that have happened to me in order to make people feel less alone. With [the song] "Boys Will Be Boys," that was something in the moment I felt like I needed to write. I felt like I was talking about what it's like to be a woman and something that maybe people don't really understand in certain aspects. I was able to put that in a song and that felt right to me. But music, when I write it really depends on what I'm going through in the moment — and if the song is good enough to make the album.
Service95, as you noted, is this so-called "concierge service" [for] everything from restaurants to what nonprofits are worth donating to. This is probably a crass question, but was this something dreamed up by a publicist who kind of knows you? Or was this something that was really a passion project for you?
That's really funny. It's definitely a big passion project of mine. It's something that I've been writing down for about two years. It's something that I do for my friends anyway, wherever they are in the world, they would message me and be like, "Okay, I'm here." Where's the best places to see? I thrive on that. I love doing it. I'm weirdly, freakishly organized with my calendar. Like, everything's down to the hour. I think so many people, you can do anything as long as you compartmentalize and you plan and you know what you want. You can write it down and you can make anything possible. There are enough hours in the day. Sometimes I wish there were a few more, but you can always do it.
How long will you do it? Are you working at a marathon pace so that you can do this for a really long time? Or are you just like, I'm going full bore now and we'll see what happens in five years?
This is everything that I do. I feel everything I do is just to set myself up to just keep doing this for as long as I can. There's no time limit and there's no what-ifs. I'm going to work hard until this turns into something really special. It took me a long time to get here, but you have to nurture the things that you love and you have to work hard. Every day I get a bit more confident in my craft and who I am as an artist.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/in-dua-lipas-ever-expanding-world-theres-no-time-limit-and-theres-no-what-ifs | 2022-05-12T15:27:16Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Scientists from around the world released a major report this month on how to stop climate change. For the first time, they found that getting rid of fossil fuels may not be enough. Carbon emissions may also need to be vacuumed out of the air. The idea is controversial.
Here to explain why is Lauren Sommer from our climate team. Hey there, Lauren.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Start with the why. Why do scientists think this is going to be necessary to vacuum or soak up carbon emissions?
SOMMER: It's because global emissions need to fall really fast. Basically, the world needs to get to net zero emissions by mid-century. You know, that's to avoid things like extreme sea level rise and much more dangerous heat waves and storms.
But some sources of emissions are trickier than others to get rid of, like farming, for example. It releases emissions from using fertilizer and disturbing the soil. And by mid-century, you know, a technology for carbon-free airplanes and ships may not be widespread yet.
KELLY: I see. OK. So because those sources of emissions aren't likely to be eliminated in the near term, they need to find a new way to pull them out of the atmosphere.
SOMMER: Yeah, exactly. Because you can kind of think of the atmosphere like a bathtub. That's how Katherine Calvin, senior climate adviser at NASA, describes it. The bathtub is already too full, and adding more emissions is like leaving the faucet on.
KATHERINE CALVIN: If you want to stop the water level from going up, you either need to turn off the faucet or scoop out as much water as you put in. The same is true of climate. If you want to stop temperature from rising, you either need to stop carbon dioxide going into the system or scoop out as much as you put in.
KELLY: OK, so scoop out, vacuum up. How exactly would this work? How do you do it?
SOMMER: Yeah, there are a few ways. We're already surrounded by really powerful carbon sponges, and that's plants. You know, restoring forests and wetlands and mangroves can help soak up a lot of carbon. But the trick is you have to protect those ecosystems so the carbon dioxide stays locked in there.
And then another way relies on new technology to create giant vacuums, basically. There are these huge machines that suck in air and filter out the carbon dioxide so it can be stored underground in geologic formations.
KELLY: That sounds like a huge project and also a really expensive project. How feasible is that, these giant vacuums?
SOMMER: Yes. It's still unproven, so that means it's expensive, and it also needs a lot of energy. And then some climate activists also worry that, you know, focusing on that technology, on carbon removal distracts from the need to cut back on fossil fuel emissions now. It's kind of like a get-out-of-jail-free card for climate change. That's how Genevieve Guenther, the founder of the climate advocacy group End Climate Silence, describes it.
GENEVIEVE GUENTHER: This is influencing many industrial countries to just sort of, you know, kick the can down the road and make it seem as if we don't need to act urgently and unequivocally right now because later, there will be this technology.
KELLY: So Lauren, given all these issues, do these carbon vacuums sounds like they will ever be a central strategy, a main strategy to fight climate change?
SOMMER: Yeah, probably not the main strategy. You know, the major road map that just came out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that that sort of removal technology will be a small piece of the puzzle. The most crucial thing is to rapidly reduce emissions by getting off coal and natural gas and switching to renewable energy like solar and wind. And it's kind of gotten to the point, though, that time is running so short. You know, tackling climate change requires every strategy in the book.
KELLY: Thank you, Lauren.
SOMMER: Thanks.
KELLY: That's Lauren Sommer from NPR's climate team.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BAD PLUS' "AVAIL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/is-sucking-carbon-from-the-air-the-key-to-stop-climate-change-some-scientists-say-so | 2022-05-12T15:27:22Z |
Updated April 28, 2022 at 3:40 PM ET
It's been exactly one year since federal agents searched the home and office of Rudy Giuliani, the former lawyer for President Trump and a key Trump ally.
In the 12 months that followed, Giuliani has not been charged with any crimes, but there is no indication the high-profile probe is winding down.
Earlier this month, Giuliani was reported to have helped investigators by unlocking several devices. Meanwhile, a retired judge appointed by the court spent months reviewing Giuliani's claims of privilege over seized materials.
While prosecutors have said little about their work, Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello, indicated in a court filing last August that investigators are focused on Giuliani's activities in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019, when he was a key player in an effort to gather materials harmful to the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden. Costello's filing specifically mentions former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was the target of a smear campaign amplified by Giuliani.
Giuliani told the New Yorker for an article in December 2019: "I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way. She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody."
Giuliani had been under investigation by prosecutors in New York since about 2019 when they charged two of his associates
Giuliani had been under investigation by the Southern District of New York since at least 2019, when prosecutors from the same office Giuliani once ran charged two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with campaign finance crimes (they have since been convicted.) Subpoenas issued at the time and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal indicated prosecutors were simultaneously examining Giuliani's overseas business dealings.
Also that fall, the House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry against President Trump for "soliciting the government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States presidential election to his advantage."
A parade of witnesses described Giuliani playing a key role in that effort, with the help of Parnas and Fruman. Giuliani refused to be interviewed by investigators.
Trump was impeached, but acquitted in his Senate trial.
The following year, Giuliani represented Trump, this time in his effort to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani promoted baseless claims there had been widespread fraud. He has since been sued by voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion, and by elections officials in Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Giuliani's lawyer described the FBI's move as "legal thuggery"
In 2021, Giuliani suffered a series of setbacks. In January, The Washington Post reported that Trump was no longer covering Giuliani's legal expenses. The following month, a Trump aide, Jason Miller, said Giuliani was no longer representing Trump as an attorney.
Since then, courts in New York and Washington, D.C., have suspended Giuliani's law licenses.
On the morning of April 28, FBI agents showed up at Giuliani's Manhattan home with a warrant to search the apartment and his office. They seized 18 electronic devices. Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello, described the move as "legal thuggery."
As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, Giuliani built a media-friendly profile, staging "perp walks" and taking on prosecutions of mob bosses and Wall Street figures.
In 1993, New Yorkers elected him mayor. Giuliani further built his tough-on-crime reputation with aggressive policing policies. In September 2001, in the final months of Giuliani's second and final term as mayor, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Giuliani projected calm while connecting with people's pain. Oprah dubbed him "America's Mayor."
In the years that followed, Giuliani built a business giving speeches and lending his imprimatur to policing and security projects around the world. A campaign for the 2008 Republican nomination for president fizzled, but he continued to make speeches, endorse products and work for international clients.
In 2016, Giuliani became a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign. In 2018, President Trump took him on as his personal attorney to respond to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/last-year-the-fbi-raided-giulianis-home-a-year-later-hes-still-under-investigation | 2022-05-12T15:27:29Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Eighty years ago, American and Japanese forces fought an epic battle at Guadalcanal in the South Pacific - a battle to gain control of the Solomon Islands. Today, the islands are once again a focus of international concern - this time over fears of China getting a toehold there. NPR's China affairs correspondent John Ruwitch reports.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Last week, China and the Solomon Islands announced that they'd signed a security cooperation agreement. According to Beijing, it's a perfectly normal thing for two sovereign, independent nations to do. Here's Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.
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WANG WENBIN: (Through interpreter) China's Solomon Islands security cooperation is open, transparent and inclusive and does not target any third party.
RUWITCH: Details of the agreement have not been made public, but a draft was leaked last month, and it set off alarm bells in Australia and the United States. If the final version is unchanged, China will be able to deploy police or soldiers to the Solomon Islands for training and to help maintain order. It could also make naval ship visits.
Despite denials from Beijing and Honiara, there's concern that China could eventually even open a naval base there. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that would cross a red line, and senior U.S. officials visited the Solomon Islands to explain Washington's stance. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink was one of them.
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DANIEL KRITENBRINK: We told the Solomon Islands leadership that the United States would respond if steps were taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power projection capabilities or a military installation in the Solomon Islands.
RUWITCH: China has been cultivating relations with the Solomons and other Pacific Island nations in recent years, quietly converting economic clout into diplomatic cachet. Its navy has been growing rapidly, too, giving rise to the perception that America's far bigger footprint in the Pacific is under threat.
TARCISIUS KABUTAULAKA: Western countries have had dominance in the region for a long time, particularly in the post-Second World War period.
RUWITCH: Tarcisius Kabutaulaka is a political scientist at the University of Hawaii.
KABUTAULAKA: And so China's increasing influence and its assertive influence in the region means that it's challenging that dominance.
RUWITCH: And that's a big deal, according to Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Even without a military base in the Solomons, an established Chinese presence there - with the government's blessing - will change the dynamic in the region.
ANNE-MARIE BRADY: It has a number of impacts. It will have a chilling effect across the Pacific. It puts Australia at risk. You know, remember the Cuba Missile Crisis?
RUWITCH: It will give China a perch near key shipping lanes - and right in between the U.S. and its allies.
BRADY: It could enable China to cut off Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Island states from the U.S., and vice versa, and could have a major impact on the Indo-Pacific strategy of the U.S.
RUWITCH: But there's a potential catch. Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is behind the security deal and has pushed for better relations with China. He cut ties with Taiwan in 2019. That proved unpopular and sparked violent protests in November. Graeme Smith is a fellow at the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs. He says there's an election coming up in the Solomons soon, and Sogavare's security deal with China will loom large.
GRAEME SMITH: Politically, will it play well for him? It's really hard to say. I mean, no - and this is a fun fact - no Solomon Islands prime minister has gone to an election and come back as the prime minister.
RUWITCH: But whether or not he or the deal survive, China's presence in the region is likely to keep growing.
John Ruwitch, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/leaked-draft-of-an-agreement-between-china-and-the-solomon-islands-has-u-s-concerned | 2022-05-12T15:27:35Z |
Moderna announced Thursday that the company has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a low-dose version of its COVID-19 vaccine as the first vaccine for children younger than age 5.
In a study involving about 6,700 children, the company said two-doses of the vaccine administered 28 days apart to children ages 6 months to less than 6 years triggered levels of antibodies equivalent to what has protected older children and adults.
"We are proud to share that we have submitted for authorization for our COVID-19 vaccine for young children," said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna's chief executive officer, in a statement. "We believe [the vaccine] will be able to safely protect these children against SARS-CoV-2, which is so important in our continued fight against COVID-19, and will be especially welcomed by parents and caregivers."
The vaccine appears to be about 51 percent effective for children ages 6 months to less than 2 years, and 37 percent effective for those ages 2 to less than 6 years, the company says.
"That means that you're going to reduce your chances of getting disease by about a half. That's very important for these kids," Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna's chief medical officer, told NPR in an interview.
While that level of effectiveness is lower than many had hoped, it's not surprising given the study was conducted when omicron was the dominant variant, company officials and others say. Omicron can evade immunity better than previous variants, resulting in more "breakthrough" infections among vaccinated older children and adults.
But "the levels of antibodies that we see clearly shows that we should have very good protection against severe disease and hospitalization, which obviously is what counts most," Burton said.
The FDA will probably convene a committee of outside advisers to consider the request. The FDA is also awaiting data from Pfizer and BioNTech about the effectiveness of three doses of a low-dose version of their vaccine in children younger than age 5. Two doses proved ineffective, disappointing parents of young children eager to vaccinate their children.
While officials had hoped to make a vaccine available for this age group by the end of April, the FDA is now expecting to consider it in June once all the data have been submitted, according to an official familiar with the issue who is not authorized to speak publicly.
The possibility of a delay has angered many parents of young children, who are frustrated and anxious that they haven't been able to vaccinate their children even as mask requirements have been dropped and infections are creeping up.
Some lawmakers have urged the FDA to act more quickly.
But it remains to be seen how much demand there will be for the vaccine. Only about a third of parents of children ages 5 to 11 have vaccinated their children even though they've been eligible for months.
"We have very reassuring data. This is an unmet need here for these young children. They have no other opportunity for protection right now. So I would be hopeful that the FDA will take the data, do their normal very thorough but excellent review, and approve this as soon as possible," Burton said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many independent infectious disease specialists have been urging more parents to vaccinate and boost their children. Even though the omicron surge has receded, and children are less likely to get severely ill, the virus can still pose a serious health risk, they say.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/moderna-asks-fda-to-authorize-first-covid-19-vaccine-for-very-young-children | 2022-05-12T15:27:41Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have news this morning from the vaccine-maker Moderna. The company has asked the FDA for emergency use authorization for its vaccine for little kids. It'd be the first COVID shot available in the U.S. for children younger than 5. NPR's Allison Aubrey is covering this story. Allison, good morning.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so how effective is this vaccine, at least according to Moderna?
AUBREY: Well, the company says two kid-sized vaccine doses spaced about a month apart led to a strong immune response, with antibody levels similar to what they've documented in adults. There were about 7,000 children in this study. Moderna says the vaccine was about 51% effective in preventing infection in babies 6 months old through 2 years and about 37% effective in kids 2 up to 6 years old. Now, this might not sound so great...
INSKEEP: No.
AUBREY: ...But much of their data was collected during the omicron wave, when there was a drop in vaccine effectiveness overall. I talked to Moderna's chief medical officer, Paul Burton, about how the company views the results.
PAUL BURTON: I think the levels of antibody that we see are very reassuring. They should provide good protection. And even the vaccine effectiveness - while it's lower than we have seen, you know, with previous variants, it's certainly what we see in adults, and we know that they have good protection against severe disease and hospitalizations.
AUBREY: Which is what's most important, he says. So, again, not perfect here, but the company emphasizes the strong antibody response in these young children.
INSKEEP: What do pediatricians, independent of the company, say about that?
AUBREY: You know, because the data has just been handed over to the FDA, details of the clinical trial results have really not been available. But generally speaking, pediatricians have been waiting for a vaccine for this age group. I talked to an infectious disease pediatrician in Oregon, Judy Guzman-Cottrill, about what she calls the unmet need.
JUDY GUZMAN-COTTRILL: There are still so many high-risk infants, toddlers and preschoolers with chronic conditions who are still being admitted to the hospital because of COVID. And it's frustrating to continue to see these kids with chronic lung disease and other conditions get so sick when we know that COVID vaccines are so incredibly effective at preventing hospitalization.
AUBREY: She says, while it is true that most kids have only mild sickness from COVID, about 20% of the kids who have been hospitalized with very serious inflammatory disease following COVID are younger than 5 years old. So she says, in her mind, there's an urgency to getting vaccines for these very young children, and pediatric groups have really echoed this message.
INSKEEP: I guess we should be frank here - some parents just aren't going to do this because some parents have not had their older kids get vaccines when they were available. But some parents, as we know very well, have been extremely anxious to get this protection for their children.
AUBREY: That's right.
INSKEEP: So what's the FDA timeline?
AUBREY: You know, the agency has a lot to review right now, Steve. Pfizer has been testing its three-dose regimen in young children because the company concluded two doses of its vaccine didn't lead to the protection they had hoped for, so the FDA will analyze this data and now all of the Moderna data. So, you know, it's not lost on the agency that, as you just said, lots of parents and pediatricians have been waiting for this. And Dr. Paul Burton at Moderna says the agency will be very careful in its review, but it could happen pretty swiftly.
BURTON: You know, we've seen them review applications within, you know, four weeks, so it might be that by late May they would be in a position to come to a ruling.
AUBREY: But, of course, that timing is up to the Food and Drug Administration, and June may be a better estimate.
INSKEEP: Allison, thanks.
AUBREY: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Allison Aubrey. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/moderna-requests-fda-authorization-for-its-covid-vaccine-for-very-young-kids | 2022-05-12T15:27:47Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Germany's determination to never forget the atrocities of the Holocaust have been at the center of their postwar success. But the Nazi legacies of Germany's biggest car companies highlight the country's challenges to make good on that commitment.
David de Jong tells this story in his new book, "Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History Of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties," and he joins us now. David, welcome.
DAVID DE JONG: It's good to be here.
SCHMITZ: The backbone of Germany's economy is its car industry. And David, you've been reporting on the families who run Germany's biggest car companies for years, and you've written that you're shocked at what you've come to learn about them. Give us an example of what has shocked you.
DE JONG: During my decade of reporting on this topic, I think what shocked me most is the brazen whitewashing that still happens today by global consumer companies like BMW and Porsche and the families that control them who are maintaining global foundations in the name of their patriarchs, such as Ferry Porsche, who designed the first Porsche sports car, or Herbert Quandt, who saved BMW from bankruptcy. Their business successes are celebrated, but their war crimes they committed, or the Nazi affiliations they had, like being voluntary SS officers, are omitted on the websites of these foundations or to media prizes or to corporate headquarters these families maintain.
SCHMITZ: And there are real humans behind these car companies with clear and direct ties to Nazis, like the Quandt family, who you just mentioned, who owns a majority share of BMW. They are the richest family in Germany. And the grandfather of the current majority shareholders was close to Hitler and used labor from concentration camps in his factories, yet his family continues to defend him. Why?
DE JONG: It's - I think it's very hard for these heirs to distance themselves from their father and grandfather. They live in the shadow of these people. They didn't make their fortunes themselves, so their entire identity derives from the fortunes that were created by their father and grandfather, Gunther and Herbert. And to disavow the family patriarchs is basically to disavow their own identities. So that is my best guess because they didn't want to talk to me for the book.
You know, they drew their businesses from a corporate headquarters outside of Frankfurt named after their grandfather, Gunther Quandt. And they award an annual media prize, where some of Germany's most prominent journalists sit on a jury of, after all this became public knowledge.
SCHMITZ: And why isn't the German government holding these companies accountable?
DE JONG: The German government isn't holding them accountable because, I mean, that's not their - to what extent, is the question, is that their role? - or - and also, is that in their best interest, right? I mean...
SCHMITZ: Right.
DE JONG: ...These families are Germany's and Europe's, and to an extent, the world's most economically powerful business families. The BMW Quandts are the largest political donors to the CDU, Angela Merkel's party, and to the FDP, which is currently in government. So it is not, you know, in the interest of the German government to criticize these families for whitewashing their histories.
SCHMITZ: I live in Berlin and in my neighborhood, the streets and sidewalks are peppered with stolpersteine, which are stumbling stones, which are small stones in the sidewalk in front of houses where Jewish families were dragged out and sent to concentration camps. These are all over Germany. They are also criticized for being window dressing.
In the cases that you've investigated with the richest families who own Germany's largest car companies, what would be an acceptable acknowledgement? - are we looking at monuments, reparations? What do you think should happen?
DE JONG: I think at the bare minimum, the global foundations that these families maintain, and their companies, should be transparent about their history, at the very least. I mean, you learn about history by showing the good and bad. And by only showing that Herbert Quandt saved BMW from bankruptcy in 1955, but not showing that he planned, built and dismantled a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, or that he had the responsibility over battery factories in Berlin where thousands of forced and slave laborers were used, including female slave laborers from concentration camps, you learn nothing about the history. You know, that is, at the bare minimum, what we can expect from these families on a global level, not only on the German level, is historical transparency.
SCHMITZ: That's David de Jong. His new book is "Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History Of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties." David, thanks so much.
DE JONG: Thank you, Rob.
SCHMITZ: After we spoke with de Jong, we reached out to the Quandt family for comment. A spokesman claims the family has been transparent about its Nazi past and donated millions to commemorate the fate of forced laborers from World War II. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/new-book-examines-the-link-between-german-business-families-and-nazi-fortunes | 2022-05-12T15:27:53Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Russia cut off gas supplies to two European countries, and the head of the European Commission says she got the message that sends the rest of Europe.
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URSULA VON DER LEYEN: It comes as no surprise that the Kremlin uses fossil fuels to try to blackmail us.
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Ursula von der Leyen spoke after Russia cut gas to Poland and Bulgaria. Russia is responding to economic sanctions by the U.S. and its allies. It has not yet cut off gas to countries like Germany that use a lot more of it. Russia itself depends on the profits to pay for its war in Ukraine.
INSKEEP: NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam joins us. Jackie, good morning.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So we just heard this called blackmail. How is Russia describing the gas cutoff?
NORTHAM: Well, they say it's justified. A few weeks ago, it began insisting that Europe pay for natural gas with rubles. And by doing that, instead of paying with the usual dollars or euros, you know, it would undermine sanctions that Europe has imposed on Russia. And Poland and Bulgaria, you know, they refused when their bill came due, and so they were cut off. I spoke with an analyst, and he said, you know, these are easy targets because even though Bulgaria and Poland depend on Russian natural gas, they're not huge customers, not like, say, Germany. And both countries have some gas stored up now. But I talked with an energy analyst named James Waddell, and he's the head of European Gas at the London-based analysis group Energy Aspects. And here's what he had to say about what's important about Russia's move.
JAMES WADDELL: It does show that Russia is willing to halt supplies if people don't subscribe to the new payment system. It is a warning shot for other, bigger buyers in Western Europe that, you know, they are willing to carry out their threat.
NORTHAM: So, Steve, this is about, you know, Russia raising the specter of a European energy shortage and, you know, all the high prices and the economic slowdown that that could bring, even if it could cost Russia, too.
INSKEEP: Well, yeah, let's talk about that. When the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia, there was a lot of concern there would actually be some blowback, some harm to the people imposing the sanctions. Could it harm Russia to impose this blackout on gas supplies?
NORTHAM: It could, sure. I mean, energy is Russia's biggest export. Natural gas sales to Europe bring in about $400 million a day. So it's an important part of the Russian economy, and Russia needs to sell gas. But it also makes customers start to doubt the reliability of Russia, you know, as a reliable supplier of natural gas. Russia could try to find new customers, like China, but in the past, China has really hammered out low prices for any Russian crude. Now it could ask for more control over production, just to make sure that it's never cut off, which is, you know, what Russia's threatening to do with Europe now.
INSKEEP: What are Europe's options?
NORTHAM: Well, there's some talk that European gas companies may try to find a workaround, see if they can figure out some sort of exemption. But the European Commission is really pushing that Europe remain on board and refuse to pay in rubles. Countries like Poland are trying to line up new sources. They've been actually trying to do that for a while now, to get other ways of getting gas in there. Countries like Germany say they're going to step up and diversify their sources of natural gas, but that's not going to happen overnight. So we'll just have to see what Russia is going to do. If - you know, if Germany's bill comes due and it doesn't pay in rubles, let's just wait and see what Russia does.
INSKEEP: NPR's Jackie Northam. Thanks so much.
NORTHAM: Thank you.
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INSKEEP: President Biden would like to end the application of a pandemic policy at the southern border.
MARTINEZ: Yeah, it's known as Title 42, the public health order that's blocked many migrants at the border during the pandemic. The administration says it should be lifted, though many people have been waiting to get in. Republican-led states have resisted, and a judge has temporarily blocked the administration's move in three states. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy blasted the White House's plan to end the policy during a visit to Border Patrol agents in Texas this week.
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KEVIN MCCARTHY: If Title 42 is lifted, it will be much worse. It's not just unsustainable now; it'll be uncontrollable then. And if a Democrat believes it should be lifted, come here.
INSKEEP: Some Democratic lawmakers have been reluctant to lift Title 42. NPR's Deepa Shivaram joins us now. Good morning.
DEEPA SHIVARAM, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK, so you're talking with us today because Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of Homeland Security, is supposed to take questions before Congress. What is he expected to say in defense of the administration's attempted move?
SHIVARAM: Right. So DHS secretary testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, and today he's in front of the House Judiciary Committee, which is known for its pretty heated partisan debates. So today we're likely to get even more of a partisan divide in questioning from Democrats and Republicans. Jim Jordan, the lead Republican on the committee, wants Mayorkas to focus on data of border crossings since Biden took office, and he wants answers from the secretary on the administration's plans to handle the border once Title 42 is set to lift, and that day is supposed to be on May 23. And his questioning is likely to fall in line with what we heard yesterday from Republicans, who repeatedly used the word failure to describe the border. And some have even been calling on Mayorkas to resign.
But on his end, Mayorkas has put out more detail on how DHS will handle the influx of migrants at the border, and he's also talking about increasing their capacity to process new arrivals and adding law enforcement officials on the border. And he said yesterday that the administration has been, quote, "effectively" handling the border. But he's kind of in a position now where it's really hard to explain away the policy of all of this stuff from the administration when the political division has been so loud.
INSKEEP: Well, it's not hard to imagine if Title 42 is lifted and if there is any kind of rush or any kind of chaos, anything out of the ordinary, that it would dominate cable TV news for quite some time in the middle of a midterm election year. How is the politics affecting this?
SHIVARAM: Right. So things have gotten pretty complicated in the last few weeks for Democrats. More moderate members of the party have been calling on Title 42 to be extended and saying that the White House's plan so far isn't sufficient. But meanwhile, immigration advocates are sounding the alarm on the risks of a lukewarm approach to Title 42. They say that Democrats standing up to Republicans on issues of immigration and supporting asylum-seekers is what helped them win elections in 2018 and in 2020. Here's what Vanessa Cardenas, the deputy director of America's Voice, said to me earlier this week.
VANESSA CARDENAS: In an election year where margins matter, Latino voters and other voters who care about this issue are going to be profoundly disappointed.
SHIVARAM: And she added that the party could lose some of its base voters, and backing away from the message now could be detrimental for the party in November.
INSKEEP: The date the administration is looking at to lift Title 42 is May 23. Is that a real date?
SHIVARAM: Right. So May 23 is the day to keep in mind right now because that's the deadline that the CDC has set. But we're waiting to see what a federal judge's ruling could do to change that. And there's a potential here for Congress to act legislatively with some of these other bills coming up, where they could slip Title 42 in for a vote.
INSKEEP: Deepa, thanks so much.
SHIVARAM: Thank you.
INSKEEP: NPR's Deepa Shivaram.
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INSKEEP: You know, the U.S. economy has a lot going for it, but you wouldn't know that from GDP numbers coming out this morning.
MARTINEZ: Now, the Commerce Department is expected to report slower growth in the first three months of the year, maybe even a contraction. Is that as bad as it sounds?
INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now. Scott, good morning.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: How bad are today's numbers likely to be?
HORSLEY: If you just looked at today's report card, you might think the economy had fallen into a ditch. Forecasters expect to see little or no growth in GDP, maybe even a decline for January, February and March, which is a big letdown after the sharpest growth in decades last year. But economists say that's not as worrisome as it might sound. The first-quarter slump is mainly due to some technical factors involving trade and business stockpiles. If you look deeper at how consumers and businesses are doing, it's actually pretty good. Certainly, the omicron current wave of coronavirus infections did drag on the economy in the early weeks of the year, but Ben Herzon, who's a senior economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, thinks we're in for a much more upbeat spring and summer.
BEN HERZON: People are taking their masks off. People are getting back to consuming the services they were consuming before the pandemic. And that's a pretty powerful push that will help to propel consumer spending and GDP, broadly, higher into the second half of this year.
HORSLEY: You can see that people are eating out more. They're buying more airline tickets. Also, the job market is very strong. Unemployment's low. Wages are rising. Certainly there are challenges for the economy, but overall, it's proven to be surprisingly resilient.
INSKEEP: What about inflation, though?
HORSLEY: Yeah, that's one of the big challenges, and it's a big reason that many people say they're gloomy about the economic outlook, even if they're still spending pretty freely. You know, there's a nonprofit business-mentoring service called SCORE that just did a big survey of small-business owners. They found more than half are raising their prices on average by about 11%. I talked to a business owner named Becky Rawls-Riley in Olathe, Kan. Her company sells hats and head wraps that are popular with motorcyclists and gardeners. She had to raise her prices a bit this year because she's paying her workers more and because her materials cost more. But so far, she says, sales have held up pretty well.
BECKY RAWLS-RILEY: When we talk about inflation impact in our business, there are some who will buy, who will buy, who will buy. If you wear a hat, you wear a hat, you wear a hat. Headbands - same thing. Some are watching their pennies.
HORSLEY: This past weekend, Rawls-Riley had a sales booth at the Tulip Festival in Wamego, Kan. She's glad to see more of those festivals are back in business this year. Typically, she travels to craft fairs in seven states, but she does say she might cut back a little bit on the most distant travel because of the high cost of gas and hotels.
INSKEEP: Did you pick up a head wrap when you were talking with her, Scott?
HORSLEY: (Laughter) I did not.
INSKEEP: Oh, OK, well, you can do that a little bit later. Now, the Federal Reserve has started raising interest rates. How does that affect everything?
HORSLEY: Well, it's already having an impact on the housing market. Mortgage rates have now topped 5%, and that is going to be a drag on home sales in the months to come. The Fed raised rates by a quarter percentage point last month. It's expected to follow up with another half-point rate hike this coming week and more interest rates to follow after that. What the central bank is trying to do here is engineer a so-called soft landing - that is, slow the economy just enough to cool inflation without tipping it into a recession. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged last week that won't be easy or straightforward. One thing that should help, though - many Americans are still sitting on a lot of extra savings, money they didn't spend during the pandemic, and that's money that could help cushion the fallout from inflation and prop up spending in the months to come.
INSKEEP: Scott, thanks so much.
HORSLEY: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/news-brief-russia-cuts-gas-exports-title-42-hearing-gdp-preview | 2022-05-12T15:27:59Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
For years, police departments have been trying to diversify their ranks, trying to hire more officers who are not white and male. Today, the California State Senate voted to make it possible for police departments to hire people who are not U.S. citizens. NPR's Martin Kaste has more.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: U.S. citizenship has long been a presumed condition of employment for sworn police officers. Most states make it an explicit requirement. One of them is California. But now the majority Democrats in the state legislature are working to remove that condition. State Senator Nancy Skinner says she introduced the bill when she heard about police departments unable to hire non-citizens who were otherwise qualified.
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NANCY SKINNER: Given that we allow this same category of people to serve in the military, to serve in so many other professions, there's no reason to deny a person who is otherwise legally authorized to work from serving as a peace officer.
KASTE: The bill is aimed at non-citizens who have the legal right to work here, such as permanent residents who haven't naturalized or people who came illegally as children but now have work permission under the DACA program. The California Police Chiefs Association supports the change. Like chiefs across the country, they're struggling to find enough new recruits.
But some opponents doubt that this is really about staffing. The immigration restriction group Californians for Population Stabilization calls this an effort to, quote, "blur the lines between citizens and non-citizens." Others oppose the bill on philosophical grounds - for instance, Republican State Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh.
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ROSILICIE OCHOA BOGH: There's a reason why we - there's certain spaces that we require people to be 18 years old or 21 years old, U.S. citizens and so forth. And that's because when you take that oath to become a citizen of this country, you're swearing allegiance to this country and what it stands for.
KASTE: But during the debate today on the Senate floor, Democrat Sydney Kamlager called it hypocrisy to celebrate diversity while insisting that only citizens can be police.
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SYDNEY KAMLAGER: And I would just like to remind my colleagues that it was full-blooded American citizens who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and tried to overthrow the government.
KASTE: The bill passed 29-8 and now goes to the California Assembly.
Martin Kaste, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/non-u-s-citizens-could-become-police-officers-in-california-if-this-bill-passes | 2022-05-12T15:28:05Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The state of Florida exacted retribution on Disney for expressing an opinion. Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would end Disney World's status as an independent special district. The area essentially governs itself. It has ever since 1967, when a state law allowed Disney to provide services and avoid nearly all state regulations. Now that's been revoked after the company criticized an unrelated state law. But will the state's plan work? Here's NPR's Greg Allen.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: For decades, Disney held a special place in Florida's culture and politics. Because of its clout and popularity with families of every political party, few elected officials questioned why the state gave it the authority to operate its own private government with the ability to tax itself and issue municipal bonds - that is, until last week when Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill passed by the Republican-led legislature to end Disney's special status.
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RON DESANTIS: That was really the first step in what's going to be a process to make sure that Disney should not run its own government.
(APPLAUSE)
ALLEN: DeSantis and Republicans in the legislature were open about why they were taking aim at Disney's private government structure - the Reedy Creek Improvement District. They're upset over the pledge by the company's CEO to work to overturn the Parental Rights in Education act, a law critics call "Don't Say Gay." DeSantis said Disney had, quote, "crossed a line." But even before he signed the bill into law, there were lots of questions and few answers about how you dissolve an independent special district with nearly $1 billion in outstanding bonds and whether it's even legally possible to do so. Municipal law expert Jake Schumer says DeSantis's plans run afoul of federal and state contract law and the terms under which the district was created.
JAKE SCHUMER: The state of Florida very clearly promised they would not mess with Reedy Creek. They wouldn't alter their powers. They wouldn't abridge their powers. They wouldn't interfere with their ability to basically self-manage.
ALLEN: Most especially, Schumer says, Florida promised not to interfere with Disney's ability to collect taxes and to pay its bondholders. It's a legal conflict, he says, that will have to be resolved in court.
Disney made some of the same points in a statement it posted with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board last week. It's the only comment from the company so far on the measure targeting its special status. Disney said the 1967 law setting up the independent special district ensured the state could not limit its ability to collect taxes and service its debt until all bondholders were paid. Fitch Ratings agency this week warned it may downgrade the bonds because of concerns about political pressure. Among those most alarmed at the recent developments are officials in Orange and Osceola counties, which under the new law would get most of the district's assets - its roads, sewage treatment facility and power plant - and its nearly billion-dollar debt. Jerry Demings is Orange County's mayor.
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JERRY DEMINGS: We are just like everybody else. We're trying to understand what the legislature truly is trying to do in this case. But I believe they have not adequately contemplated the ramifications of what they have proposed at this point.
ALLEN: Orange County's tax collector says homeowners may face a rate increase of 20% in order to pay the debt in a state that already has high property taxes. DeSantis dismisses those worries.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DESANTIS: Under no circumstances will Disney be able to not pay its debts. We will make sure of that. Do not worry about that.
(APPLAUSE)
ALLEN: DeSantis says the bill doesn't take effect until more than a year from now, so there will be plenty of time to work out the details.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRAMEWORKS'S "ALL DAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/plans-by-florida-republicans-to-end-disney-worlds-special-status-may-not-be-legal | 2022-05-12T15:28:11Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The White House is asking Congress for 33 billion in aid for Ukraine. Much of that money would go towards replenishing Ukraine's weapons - something that Polish farmers are also trying to do. NPR's Joanna Kakissis has our story.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRACTOR ENGINE TURNING OVER)
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Krzysztof Dec checks a tractor on the farm where he grows wheat, corn and beets in the Polish village of Korzenica, just nine miles from the Ukrainian border. When the Russians bombed a Ukrainian military training center near the border last month, Dec felt the shocks as he walked on his land. He's got three young boys, and he worries about nuclear war.
KRZYSZTOF DEC: (Through interpreter) This war has changed our lives and routines dramatically. The first thing we do every day is check the news and see what's happening on the front line.
KAKISSIS: He wants to help Ukraine survive.
(CROSSTALK)
KAKISSIS: And so do his friends Jan and Ewa Toborowicz, who run a dairy farm in a nearby village.
(SOUNDBITE OF COW MOOING)
KAKISSIS: The couple is housing several Ukrainian families on their farm.
EWA TOBOROWICZ: (Speaking Polish).
KAKISSIS: "Farmers feel the weight of this war," Ewa says, "because we know what it's doing to food insecurity around the world." But there is a much more immediate need - helping Ukraine's soldiers who are running out of supplies. Ewa's son Mikolaj says that's the main mission now.
MIKOLAJ TOBOROWICZ: We can help them to be better organized on the battlefield. Maybe more people will survive.
KAKISSIS: Across the border in Ukraine, Artur Harmider was tackling the same question. He's from the western city of Lviv and is plugged into Ukraine's supply networks.
ARTUR HARMIDER: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: Speaking by phone, Harmider tells us that Ukrainian soldiers expect the war to last for months at least and are running out of equipment.
HARMIDER: (Through interpreter) The soldiers text or call to tell me what they need. Requests include basics, like ammunition or ski masks, and more serious items, like thermographic cameras and drones.
KAKISSIS: Harmider had struggled to source this equipment. It's very expensive and also hard to find. Back in Poland, Mikolaj Toborowicz talked it over with his parents and Krzysztof Dec - the first farm where we met. Dec immediately started calling suppliers.
DEC: (Through interpreter) We reached out to larger farms and big companies, and they responded really positively. Some companies agreed to donate tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. This shows just how important it is for Poles that Ukrainians win this war.
KAKISSIS: A few weeks ago, Mikolaj loaded the first batch of donated equipment into his van and drove it to Lviv. Ukrainian drivers picked it up from there.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: For a week or so, Krzysztof Dec wondered what happened to the delivery. He talked to his sons, ages 7, 8 and 9, about the night goggles, the bulletproof vests, the helmets.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Speaking Polish).
KAKISSIS: The boys imagined this equipment was protecting warriors against a very bad dragon, which is what they call Russian President Vladimir Putin. The equipment reached a Ukrainian territorial defense unit in Sumy, a vulnerable northeastern Ukrainian city just 30 miles from the Russian border. Dec was thrilled to see photos of the soldiers holding up the equipment he helped secure.
NATALIA: Hello? (Non-English language spoken).
KAKISSIS: We reached Natalia, one of the soldiers in Sumy. She gives only one name.
NATALIA: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: She says the night vision goggles have been especially helpful in spotting ambushes.
NATALIA: (Through interpreter) If we get even one such thing, it helps save not only the citizens' lives, but also the lives of fighters.
KAKISSIS: She says she hopes the farmers don't forget about them, and they have not. Dec says they're already planning their next delivery. Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Korzenica, Poland. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/polish-farmers-along-the-ukraine-border-have-stepped-in-to-help-source-war-equipment | 2022-05-12T15:28:18Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. You, too, could own some of the magic of "Harry Potter." An auction house is selling 109 sheets of paper thought to be the only surviving part of a galley proof of "Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone." A galley proof is an early version that a writer uses to make corrections. This one comes with a letter from a children's book reviewer who asked for a finished copy so she could tell lots of people about it. Apparently, they heard. It's MORNING EDITION.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "HEDWIG'S THEME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/proof-sheets-of-the-first-harry-potter-book-are-up-for-auction | 2022-05-12T15:28:24Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
In its quest for weapons to fight off Russian forces, Ukraine has recently turned to the world's sixth-largest arms exporter, South Korea. But so far, Seoul has only agreed to provide nonlethal aid. As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Seoul, South Korea's relations with the powers that surround it have put it in a dilemma.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a virtual and quite specific appeal to South Korea's parliament.
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PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KUHN: "You have something that can be indispensable for us," he said - "armored vehicles, anti-aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship weapons." Zelenskyy noted that South Korea also suffered an invasion by North Korea during the Korean War.
Kim Jong-dae, a former defense official and visiting professor at Yonsei University's Institute for North Korean Studies, says that this historical parallel resonates with South Koreans. And besides, he says, South Korea's chief ally has urged it to sell Ukraine weapons.
KIM JONG-DAE: (Through interpreter) I personally confirmed through the South Korean Defense Ministry that the U.S. acting ambassador has made the request to our government.
KUHN: Ukraine is especially interested in purchasing South Korea's Cheongung surface-to-air missiles. They're made by a company owned by the same family which owns LG Corporation, South Korea's fourth-largest conglomerate. But Kim says South Korea doesn't have stockpiles of those missiles to sell Ukraine, so they'd have to come off the front lines, where they're arrayed against North Korea. Kim Jong-dae explains that there's an added complication.
KIM: (Through interpreter) LG developed homegrown weapons with weapons technology transferred from Russia. In that sense, Russia has been the company's partner for the past 20 years.
KUHN: In other words, Ukraine wants to use South Korean missiles developed with help from Russia to kill Russians. Chun In-bum is a retired South Korean army lieutenant general. He says that Seoul's chief concern is this.
CHUN IN-BUM: If we provide lethal weaponry to a country that is in conflict with Russia, and Russia decides to provide technology to North Korea, that would affect the delicate balance that is created between these three countries.
KUHN: For example, Kim Jong-dae points out, North Korea could use some help figuring out how to deliver warheads from an intercontinental ballistic missile onto their targets.
KIM: (Through interpreter) North Korea has succeeded in putting missiles in orbit, but it doesn't have reentry technology yet. But that can be solved if Russia sends just five of its engineers.
KUHN: Kim notes reports that Russia has asked North Korea for ammunition and missiles. Russia has denied those reports, but Kim says such a thing is not inconceivable.
KIM: (Through interpreter) Just as Ukraine is asking South Korea for military support, Russia can ask North Korea for help. The probability is about the same.
KUHN: Kim says South Korea's dilemma is a bit like those faced by India and Israel, both of which have refrained from sanctioning Moscow. India relies on Russian weaponry in its confrontation with Pakistan, while Israel fears Russia could give more support to Iran.
The Ukraine issue will be an early test for South Korea's incoming president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who takes office next month. He says he wants to make South Korea more of a global player, but he could be constrained by the situation in South Korea's immediate neighborhood.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Seoul.
(SOUNDBITE OF DYLAN SITTS' "PEPPERMINT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/south-koreas-immediate-neighbors-are-impacting-the-military-help-its-giving-ukraine | 2022-05-12T15:28:30Z |
The Biden administration is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support for Ukraine authorized so far, according to senior administration officials.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/the-biden-administration-more-than-doubles-funding-request-to-respond-for-ukraine | 2022-05-12T15:28:36Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
People near Flagstaff, Ariz., are nervously watching a nearby wildfire. High winds in the forecast there could cause it to grow rapidly. Large fires also threaten homes in New Mexico, and a prairie wildfire has already destroyed homes and farmland in Nebraska. This earlier-than-normal start to the spring wildfire season is being blamed on an extended drought made worse by climate change. As NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, scientists say much of the West is now experiencing the driest conditions in 1,200 years.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: The fire season, if you can even call it that anymore, typically starts around now in the Southwest before the summer monsoons arrive, if they do. But the fires are igniting weeks earlier and lasting longer because the winter snow is melting sooner. That means the fuels, the brush, is already extraordinarily dry.
PARK WILLIAMS: From a fire perspective, the dice are now loaded for another big fire year in 2022.
SIEGLER: This is Park Williams, a UCLA professor who's studying the fallout of this 23-year megadrought in the Western U.S. Scientists now know that megadroughts like this one were common here historically and that much of the 20th century was actually relatively wet. That coincided with an explosion of development and a long and still-standing U.S. government policy to stamp out wildfires.
WILLIAMS: We did a great job for a hundred years stopping fires. But we, despite our best efforts, are losing control of the fire regime in the West. There are too many trees, and it's too warm. Things are drying out, and we're getting a lot of fire.
SIEGLER: Williams predicts we'll have another long, expensive, destructive and smoky summer, and there's no indication things will improve in the coming years, either. But fire experts caution about calling this current crisis, where we're seeing upwards of 10 million acres burn every year, unprecedented. Lincoln Bramwell is the chief historian for the U.S. Forest Service.
LINCOLN BRAMWELL: There's more people in the path of these fires, and that can make them more destructive.
SIEGLER: Bramwell bristles a little at the now-popular term in the news media of a megafire to describe the destructive fires like the deadly 2018 Camp Fire or last December's Marshall Fire near Boulder, Colo. It suggests they're unprecedented when they're really not. Before we got so good at fire suppression, he says, upwards of 30 million acres tended to burn in the West every year.
BRAMWELL: Culturally, we have a hard time wrapping our heads around that because we've kind of expected that this doesn't happen. And if it does happen, there's a lot of resources that will come out and try to save the day.
SIEGLER: The game-changer, though, is human-caused climate change that's making these fires potentially much worse. And in some parts of the West, you're seeing a big shift in how fire managers are trying to manage the public's expectations because of it.
BRIAN OLIVER: Everybody's very much on edge.
SIEGLER: Brian Oliver is the wildland fire chief for Boulder, Colo., which has seen scores of close calls with wildfires already this spring. Climate change has meant erratic weather swings here. Last fall and into the winter, he says, it was drier in the Rocky Mountain foothills than in Death Valley. He says firefighters should not be expected to stop these fires.
OLIVER: I equate that to trying to fight a hurricane, right? We don't mobilize a force to go turn a hurricane around, right? We get everybody out of the way, and then we try to come back in and clean up after we can.
SIEGLER: And fire scientists say the times we do successfully stop a fire before it gets out of hand, we just leave more fuels on the ground for the next ignition.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/the-southwests-spring-wildfire-season-has-started-earlier-than-normal | 2022-05-12T15:28:42Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Trevor Reed, a U.S. citizen and former Marine who'd been imprisoned in Russia for 985 days, is back in the United States today. Russia released Reed in exchange for a pilot who was serving time in the U.S. on drug smuggling charges. We want to turn to a man who was left behind, another U.S. citizen and former Marine, Paul Whelan, who's serving a 16-year sentence of hard labor in Russia. Whelan was detained in a Moscow hotel in 2018 and was accused of spying. We're joined by Paul's twin brother, David. David, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DAVID WHELAN: Thanks so much for having me.
SCHMITZ: First of all, David, how are you, and how is your family?
WHELAN: Well, yesterday was a bittersweet day. It was a very hard day. And today we're sort of back to work. You deal with the events that take place, and then you move on. I think it was hard for my parents to learn that Paul wasn't going to be coming home and then having to perhaps not break the news to him but have to be the ones who get the message, which is, why was I left behind?
SCHMITZ: And so you mentioned that you were in touch with your brother. How is he doing?
WHELAN: He is probably as well as you could be in a Russian labor camp. They don't provide nutritional meals, and they don't really take too much care of the prisoners. There's a lot of corruption and other abuse. So I think he does his best to stay out of people's way. And before the sanctions hit, we were able to get money into his prison account and on his phone card. So hopefully for the near future, he'll be able to be all right.
SCHMITZ: What do you mean by that? What - can you explain what this card is and how that works?
WHELAN: Prisoners in Russian prisons have, like, a prison bank account where family can deposit money so that the prisoner can buy things from the prison commissary. We have a process of transferring money to the State Department. The State Department transfers it so that it's available to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and then Moscow disperses money as needed into those two accounts. And so it's a thin pipeline that allows us to support Paul. And if anything disrupts that, if the staff in Moscow leave, if sanctions stop us from making those sorts of transfers, it makes it much more difficult.
SCHMITZ: Yesterday NPR spoke with State Department spokesman Ned Price. He did not offer a lot of information about your brother's case. Have they been more open or provided more details to you and your family?
WHELAN: No. And I think that that is not too much of a surprise to us. I think the communication that we've had from the Biden administration, certainly in the last 15 months, has been substantially more than we had in the first two years of Paul's detention. But the - it happens sporadically. And it happens mostly at the lower level, the care and feeding end of the spectrum - so weekly calls with the U.S. embassy staff in Moscow, regular interactions with the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Office.
SCHMITZ: Right.
WHELAN: But less so at the top and less so to know about what sort of decisions are being taken or discounted, what options are available or which ones aren't.
SCHMITZ: For those listeners who don't know, can you remind us about the circumstances of Paul's detention in 2018? Why was he in Russia, and what happened?
WHELAN: Yeah, it's a bit tragic. He had volunteered to go with a fellow Marine to help the Marine who was having a wedding in Moscow. He was going to the wedding, and then he was going on to St. Petersburg to see some other friends. And then he was coming home. And the night of the wedding, before the wedding even started, he was entrapped by the security services, by a friend who he had had in Russia.
SCHMITZ: Wow.
WHELAN: And he disappeared. And that's when we first learned about it.
SCHMITZ: Wow. I mean, that just sounds so traumatic for you and your family. I mean, how has his time in prison since 2018, you know, affected your family financially?
WHELAN: Well, unfortunately, every family has to look at its resources right from the very start. And the first thing we realized that - we might not be able to trust the government lawyers that had been given to Paul. He was assigned a Russian-speaking lawyer only on the first day - so obviously not a lot of thought put into what Paul's defense would be since Paul doesn't speak Russian. But we also very quickly came to the realization that we couldn't afford for a private Russian lawyer. In essence, we had to make decisions about whether, you know, our parents would be able to retire or take their money out of their retirement to pay for these sorts of things. And we have decided to try and be a little bit thrifty in that.
SCHMITZ: Right. You know, you and your family have been fighting this fight for a few years now. How has the war and Russia's war in Ukraine impacted your efforts to try and get your brother released?
WHELAN: It hasn't really impacted too many efforts. The U.S. and Russian relationship is in a terrible state, but it is still in a state. And I think Trevor Reed's release shows that there is something actually going on there. But the war itself - Paul is in a labor camp, and it's become a little bit more difficult. There are fewer options, for example, to use things like Western Union, who have pulled out of Russia. But we - the care and feeding flow seems to be continuing so long as that relationship still exists.
SCHMITZ: Right. So you've noted that Russia has long wanted the release of Konstantin Yaroshenko, the Russian prisoner traded for Reed. Do you know of any other Russian prisoners in U.S. custody who could be traded for your brother?
WHELAN: Oh, absolutely. Paul has made it clear - that very first weekend before he was given consular access, right after he was given an FSB-appointed lawyer, he was told that he was being arrested in order to be exchanged for Mr. Viktor Bout, the Merchant of Death, and for Mr. Yaroshenko. And so it really has been the entirety of the time that he has been detained that those two names have come up repetitively from the Russian side in Russian media, from Russian government officials that those were two people they wanted returned. And then there's been a slightly changing cast of characters. At one point it was also Roman Seleznev, who is the son of a Duma legislator. So there are other people, but it's usually been those two.
SCHMITZ: So Paul was actually told this by an FSB lawyer upon his arrest that, look; we're basically arresting you because we want some Russian prisoners released from the U.S.
WHELAN: Absolutely. That's what he has relayed to us. And based on the fact that they charged him with espionage, which was probably the most ludicrous thing they could have charged him with, and the whole mockery of justice that has gone on since then, I don't think there's any reason to doubt.
SCHMITZ: What's next for you and your family in your fight to get Paul home?
WHELAN: Well, I guess we continue to do what we've done day to day. In the same way that Paul, in order to survive over there, is going to have to look at one day at a time, I think that our family has to do the same. And hopefully those days don't accumulate too far. And I think that that's sort of where we are questioning a lot after Trevor's release yesterday, which I'm so thrilled for. But it really puts into perspective, are there limitations to what the U.S. government can or is willing to do? What are those difficult decisions against which President Biden came up against? It's given us a lot of things that we need to be considering.
SCHMITZ: That's David Whelan, the twin brother of Paul Whelan, who is imprisoned in Russia. David, thank you so much, and good luck to you and your family.
WHELAN: Thanks. It's been nice to be on.
(SOUNDBITE OF UYAMA HIROTO'S "YIN AND YANG") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/trevor-reed-came-back-home-but-paul-whelan-is-still-imprisoned-in-russia | 2022-05-12T15:28:48Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Good morning. I'm A Martinez. The American Kennel Club says the dog breed Lagotto Romagnolo is affectionate and undemanding. Now, I ain't saying it's a gold digger, but a pup named Ollie that Adam Clark gave to his daughter in the U.K. was with the family for about 10 minutes when he started digging and came up with 15 gold pieces dating back to the 19th century, worth more than 7,000 bucks. Might need to check Ollie's breed. Sounds like a golden retriever to me. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/u-k-familys-new-puppy-digs-up-valuable-rare-coins | 2022-05-12T15:28:54Z |
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine have led to widespread accusations of war crimes. Some world leaders, including President Joe Biden and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have gone further and called it a genocide. The United Nations is investigating possible human rights violations. Here with us now, Matilda Bogner. She is heading this team of investigators and joins us now. Thank you so much for making time.
MATILDA BOGNER: Thank you.
MARTIN: What have you and your team found on the ground at this point?
BOGNER: Unfortunately, the longer this conflict goes on, the more violations we are finding. In the beginning, the main violations were related to the indiscriminate use of weapons; in particular, those that are used in populated civilian areas with wide explosive impact. We have documented over 5,900 civilian casualties, which include more than 2,780 killed and over 3,000 injured. And many of those have been in cases where the evidence leads us to believe that weapons were being used indiscriminately. We've also seen the destruction and damage to a lot of civilian objects, including in particular medical facilities. So we have civilians who have been unlawfully killed, sometimes in summary executions. We're currently investigating over 300 cases in more than 34 settlements across the country. We're also looking at arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances. We have documented more than 150 cases of those. So there's a range of different violations going on.
MARTIN: I imagine your team has also been looking into sexual violence as a weapon in this war. What have you found there?
BOGNER: We have also been looking at sexual violence. We have dozens of allegations. We have been able to confirm some of them. It is difficult to fully confirm sexual violence because it's often the type of case where victims don't want to speak publicly. And they're often not in safe areas where it feels safe for them to speak out or where they have received the services that they need. So it's difficult. But we are particularly concerned the areas around Kyiv where Russian forces were and then left. There are high numbers of allegations of sexual violence in those areas. But there are allegations in other parts of the country, too, and by both sides in the conflict, unfortunately.
MARTIN: Whether it's indiscriminant bombings, targeted civilian killings, rape, these are very, very grim things. And part of your work and your team's work is to hear people's testimony. Is there a story, without revealing an identity, but can you share the story of someone that has captured for you the nature of the crimes taking place?
BOGNER: We've been speaking to people who have been able to evacuate from Mariupol, and we've been hearing a lot of awful stories from them. One story was from a medical doctor who remained to work in the hospital, and he said that more than 90% of the patients that he was so-called treating, it was by telephone because they could not reach him. It was too dangerous for them to get to him. People have been stuck in basements without food, without water.
MARTIN: The word genocide carries legal weight under international law, and responsibilities come with that term with deploying it. Is what you're seeing evidence of genocide?
BOGNER: So far, what we've been documenting are individual violations of international human rights law, as well as violations of international humanitarian law, which may constitute war crimes. So far, we have not looked into the question of genocide in Ukraine. We have enough to try to document these individual cases. I think it will be something for courts to look at at a later stage.
MARTIN: When it comes to documenting the war crimes, though, how would they be prosecuted, under exactly what law and through what institution?
BOGNER: Well, there are different levels that which people can be prosecuted. Certainly, the government of Ukraine has already opened cases. Other countries can also look at that. Some of these crimes have universal jurisdiction, so different countries could also prosecute. But then there are regional courts. There's the European Court of Human Rights, and then there are international courts, such as the International Criminal Court.
MARTIN: Does it make a difference, though, that Russia is not party to the International Criminal Court, the ICC?
BOGNER: Well, it is a pity neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties to the ICC. However, Ukraine has given permission for the ICC to look into conflict-related issues within its territory. That happened before the 24 of February, when this international armed conflict started. But it can apply to this also. So the ICC is looking into what is happening in Ukraine at the moment. But at this stage, what is important is to ensure that the crimes are being documented so when opportunities arise in the future, then they can be prosecuted.
MARTIN: Matilda Bogner - she's heading a team of U.N. investigators looking into possible war crimes in Ukraine. She joined us on Skype. Thank you so much for making time.
BOGNER: Thanks very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/u-n-investigators-have-documented-nearly-3-000-civilian-deaths-in-ukraine | 2022-05-12T15:29:00Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
How has unrest in Jerusalem affected Israeli and Palestinian leaders? The unrest came at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, an area controlled by Israel and holy to both Muslims and Jews. The Israeli prime minister is Naftali Bennett. The Palestinian president is Mahmoud Abbas. Both face pressure to stand up for their side. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: The images from the most sensitive site in Jerusalem set the region on edge. Israeli police stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, responding to Palestinians who were gathering or throwing stones. Medics said more than 150 Palestinians were injured. Israel said it arrested hundreds. Then came the ripple effects - rockets fired at Israel from militants in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes struck targets in central Gaza. The unrest doesn't seem to be spiraling out of control yet, but it is causing political dilemmas for leaders on both sides, especially in Israel. One response came in the Israeli Parliament when a political party led by Palestinian citizens of Israel suspended its alliance with the coalition of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. I met Israeli political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin in Tel Aviv. She said doubts about the government's future are growing.
DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Everybody thought it was one tiny step closer to a very big possibility of coalition collapse.
KENYON: If the Al-Aqsa crisis did damage Bennett, one big beneficiary could be opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longtime former leader now on trial for corruption. Scheindlin says if elections are called, Netanyahu's party would likely do well. But he could still face problems putting together a coalition.
SCHEINDLIN: He will have to find all sorts of partners to go in with him. And there is always the same problem - as long as Netanyahu is standing trial, there are parties who will not sit with him or under him as the head of the government.
KENYON: Other analysts agree that low public regard for leaders in Jerusalem has been placed front and center by the events at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, says Israel's leaders urgently need calm to give themselves time to recover.
YOHANAN PLESNER: So as long as religious emotions continue to be evoked from the Temple Mount, it will be very difficult to stabilize the coalition. But if things calm down, I think it will become sort of a short episode in the coalition's ride.
KENYON: But Plesner also says he hopes the Arab party that suspended its role in the coalition, the Ra'am Party, is able to return to government because he wouldn't like to see an end to what he calls this important experiment.
PLESNER: Bringing the Arab parties into the Israeli coalition-making game is a game-changer in Israeli politics. It pretty much brings back the center-left parties into the political game.
KENYON: As for the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, observers say both have had to face public outrage and the perception that the extremists of Hamas are leading the fight against Israel. Former PA official Riad Jeraie (ph) says anger at Abbas is running strong. He was told a close aide to Abbas was recently prevented from praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque by worshippers angry at the apparent impotence of their president.
RIAD JERAIE: People understood that he can't do anything to deter Israel from committing violence in Al-Aqsa Mosque or in the church in Jerusalem.
KENYON: But Jeraie says people also believe that Abbas has no real political channel to Israeli leaders these days. So while they're disappointed in their president, they also have low expectations for what's possible. One question is whether some could seek out more extreme solutions. Some of the protesters at Al-Aqsa were carrying Hamas flags.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Jerusalem. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/unrest-at-the-al-aqsa-mosque-compound-puts-pressure-on-bennett-and-abbas | 2022-05-12T15:29:06Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Video games can amuse or distract, sometimes inspire, which means they engage the brain with tasks. So some researchers are hoping video games could help treat cognitive disorders from depression and ADHD to mental decline from aging. Keller Gordon reported about this for npr.org. Welcome, Keller.
KELLER GORDON, BYLINE: Hi, Rob. Thanks for having me.
SCHMITZ: Keller, you start by describing a video game developed at a lab at the University of Utah. Tell us about that.
GORDON: Yeah. So this isn't a game you get on the app store or PlayStation or anything like that. It's from a federally funded nonprofit lab that makes games dedicated to treating cognitive disorders, mostly those in aging brains. I spoke with Dr. Sarah Morimoto, who runs this program called Neurogrow. It doesn't exactly look like a normal video game. You've got a basic, colorful screen, and you might have to complete certain tasks, like watering a flower with a certain color watering can before time runs out. It's got a pretty rudimentary design, but it challenges a patient's memory and reaction time. And it's not supposed to be fun. It's therapy. But Dr. Morimoto thinks the results are promising.
SARAH MORIMOTO: I definitely feel like the science has been greatly advanced by working with video game researchers and designers.
SCHMITZ: So, Keller, that's the researcher. What do her patients say? What did you hear from them?
GORDON: Yeah. I spoke with Pete and Pam Stevens about their experience using the Neurogrow program. Pam had suffered a stroke in 2014 and wasn't responding to medication. Her neurologist gave them a pretty grim prognosis.
PETE STEVENS: He on two separate occasions over a two-year period had said there was nothing we could do. Just take her home and be prepared. She's going to die.
SCHMITZ: Geez.
GORDON: Yeah, it's pretty rough. But they weren't ready to give up. They found out about Morimoto's program in 2018. And after a few Neurogrow sessions, Pam would be exhausted, like she had just finished a workout. But it was helping. Now, Pam didn't say much to me in our interview. But Pete says he started noticing improvements in her mental health. Before our interview, Pete mentioned that Pam was actually reading a book on cognitive behavioral therapy.
SCHMITZ: Wow. That's a really good sign. So that's a government-funded project. Are private companies getting into video game therapy as well?
GORDON: Yeah. Let me tell you about one of them. There is Akili Interactive Labs, a very different organization with very different funding. They developed a game called EndeavorRx. This looks more like a popular mobile game, like Subway Surfers, or a game that's actually, you know, supposed to be fun.
SCHMITZ: Right.
GORDON: And the FDA actually gave EndeavorRx their blessing. They classified it as something that could be used to treat inattention in children with ADHD. But there are also critics. Some scientists call it a marketing ploy. They say patients who play the game will only really get better at playing games like it, like Mario Kart. Here's how Eddie Martucci, CEO of Akili, responded to that criticism.
EDDIE MARTUCCI: I think the reason there's skepticism is people have been burned by, like, marketing gimmicks, especially in digital health and especially in neuroscience and areas like ADHD. There's been a lot of snake oil, and over time, skepticism has dramatically decreased as we continue to research and show data.
SCHMITZ: So that makes sense. But where is this all going? Are we getting to the point where you will see video games prescribed by a doctor?
GORDON: Well, theoretically, the FDA has already allowed that for EndeavorRx. The company behind it got hundreds of millions of new capital in a merger. Dr. Morimoto's lab - again, out of a university - is very different. They follow an academic path. And Neurogrow is an experimental therapy that's still only available to a few patients. But they've got a lot of government funding - a $7.5 million grant. So watch this space. It's very likely to keep growing.
SCHMITZ: We will continue to watch. That's Kelly Gordon, who contributes to NPR's video game coverage. Thank you so much, Keller.
GORDON: Thank you.
(SOUNDBUTE IF FKJ'S "TUI") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/video-games-could-help-treat-cognitive-disorders-like-depression-and-adhd | 2022-05-12T15:29:13Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Much of the world's attention was on France last weekend, where Emmanuel Macron's reelection dominated headlines. But in the tiny alpine eastern European country of Slovenia, the party of Prime Minister Janez Jansa, a right-wing populist who is an outspoken supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump, lost the national election to the environmentally-focused party of Robert Golob. He is now set to become prime minister.
Here to talk about what this might mean for Europe is Judy Dempsey, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Thanks for joining us, Judy.
JUDY DEMPSEY: Thank you very much for having me.
SCHMITZ: This was a big defeat for a three-term prime minister. What about Jansa were Slovenian voters rejecting?
DEMPSEY: Slovenian voters had enough. They had enough of the kind of creeping populism, a kind of creeping authoritarianism that used the democratic system to kind of consolidate Jansa's power. They got fed up of the corruption. They got fed up of trampling on the media. But they've had enough of this political figure. They want a change.
SCHMITZ: So Judy, can you tell us - what kind of mark has Janez Jansa left on Slovenia?
DEMPSEY: The mark he's left is twofold. One is the ability of a leader and his party to actually erode democratic values. And secondly, the mark he's left is one of disappointment by Slovenia and the EU's eastern neighbors like Ukraine, like Georgia, poor Belarus, who have looked to the European Union countries as models of reform, of democracy and of accountability. These very issues are the ones that Jansa has eroded, and now hopefully they're going to be overturned with the new government in place.
SCHMITZ: There was 70% voter turnout for this election, one of the highest in the country's history, and they delivered what, to many, was a surprise result. Why was this result so surprising, do you think?
DEMPSEY: The result was surprising because Robert Golob is a new face. He's the head of the Freedom Party. He set up - he comes from the Green movement. He set up this party only last January. He's a former company manager. He was a new face. He spoke plainly, quite charismatic, didn't hold out any promises, didn't make any threats. He was just saying we need a new beginning.
And the 70% was phenomenal. It's very gratifying. And the voters went for him and they just decided that not only did they have enough of Jansa, but this is very, very important to understand political dynamics in other parts of Europe. No matter what the European Union does, it's people power that matters on the national level.
SCHMITZ: And of course, Robert Golob was the opposition candidate for prime minister and he, of course, he will now be prime minister. What can we expect from him?
DEMPSEY: Practical politics - rolling back the kind of efforts that Jansa did to impose a kind of populist, authoritarian structure on Slovenia, becoming a much more positive player inside the European Union and in NATO and actually distancing Slovenia from the likes of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other populist leaders. Above all, size matters, and small countries do have a say. They do have voting rights inside the European Union. And I think what Golob wants to say, to tell his EU interlocutors, we're back. We want to be constructive, and we want to actually restore or repair the damage done to Slovenia's democracy.
SCHMITZ: That was Judy Dempsey, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Thanks a lot for joining us, Judy.
DEMPSEY: It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/what-an-election-in-slovenia-could-mean-for-europe | 2022-05-12T15:29:19Z |
Updated April 28, 2022 at 8:36 AM ET
From inflation to the war in Ukraine, there seem to be plenty of reasons to worry about the economy these days, but things are looking pretty good for the busy Hotel Haya in Tampa, Florida.
Even with gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon, people are making the drive from neighboring states and flocking to the hotel.
"They've been saving their money during the pandemic, and now they want to get away, wherever it takes them," says the hotel's general manager, Peter Wright.
That may not be obvious from a new economic report card. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the nation's gross domestic product shrank at an annual rate of 1.4% in the first three months of this year — a marked contrast from the final months of 2021, which saw some of the fastest growth in decades.
But economists say that's not as worrisome as it might seem. Consumers continue to spend freely, and businesses are still investing, despite the sharp drop in headline GDP growth.
"We should not take that as a signal of the direction of the economy," says Ben Herzon, senior U.S. economist with S&P Global Market Intelligence. He notes that GDP was dragged down by a drop in exports, inventories and government spending.
"If we peel back a couple of layers and just look at underlying domestic demand, the economy looks to be picking up a little bit of steam," Herzon said.
Take Tampa. More than three-quarters of the city's hotel rooms were booked in mid-April, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, according to hospitality analysts at STR.
Strong demand has pushed the average nationwide price of a hotel room up more than 14% from 2019.
"We see a lot of staycations as well," Wright says. "There was a lot of pent-up demand, so we see a lot of local people coming for a few nights and enjoying the restaurant and the pool. They're looking to spend money."
"Buy and buy and buy"
While the omicron wave of coronavirus infections discouraged some people from traveling and eating out in the first weeks of the year, that has given way to what Herzon calls a "COVID spring."
"People are taking their masks off," he says. "They're getting back to consuming the services they were consuming before the pandemic. That's a pretty powerful push that will help to propel consumer spending — and GDP broadly — higher into the second half of the year."
At the Tulip Festival in Wamego, Kan., last weekend, Becky Rawls-Riley was showcasing a colorful collection of custom hats and scarves she makes.
"Everybody's back, which is great," she says.
Craft festivals are returning after a one- or two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that's a relief for Rawls-Riley, who depends on the events for both sales and customer feedback.
Sales were "gung-ho" in February, she says, but seemed a little softer in March and April.
"There are some who will buy and buy and buy," she says, while others are "watching their pennies."
Not everything is rosy, of course
That's not to say the economy is without challenges. Supply chains are still tangled, and employers are still struggling to find enough staff.
Rawls-Riley, for example, invested in new display racks this year, as well as industrial sewing equipment, but both were delayed by supply chain bottlenecks.
"If you can make a product but you can't display it so someone sees what you have, you're in trouble," she says. She also increased her prices to offset the rising costs of cotton, polyester and spandex, as well as higher wages for her employees.
"You can't hold your price forever," she says. "It's just not possible."
A survey of small-business owners by SCORE, a nonprofit business-mentoring service, found that two-thirds were facing rising costs from vendors and suppliers and that more than half had raised their own prices, on average by about 11%.
At Hotel Haya, Wright has also wrestled with rising expenses and the challenge of recruiting workers. Hotels and restaurants have been adding workers at a rapid clip in recent months, but the industry still employs about 1.5 million fewer people than it did before the pandemic.
"A lot of people left our industry for a lot of reasons," Wright says. "We have to be more creative than we've ever been in the past because there's such a shortage in the hospitality industry."
Inflation is still a headache
With strong demand and a tight labor market, the U.S. economy is considerably hotter than Thursday's GDP figure might suggest — too hot, in fact, for the Federal Reserve.
With annual inflation hitting a four-decade high last month, the central bank has begun raising interest rates in an effort to cool demand. The Fed is trying to rein in prices without tipping the economy into recession.
"That's our goal," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during a panel discussion last week. "I don't think you'll hear anyone at the Fed say that's going to be straightforward or easy."
The Fed raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point in March, and it's expected to follow that with a half-point increase next week. Higher borrowing costs are already weighing on the housing market, where mortgage rates now exceed 5%.
Pandemic lockdowns in China could also slow economic growth, potentially dragging out stubborn supply chain challenges and putting more upward pressure on inflation.
Economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics has lowered his forecast for GDP growth this year to about 3% from the 4% he was projecting in January.
Still, he says the U.S. economy has proved remarkably resilient to one challenge after another.
"There's a lot of cash sitting in people's bank accounts, and that should help them continue to spend and navigate any kind of storm that's blowing through," Zandi says. "And clearly the Russian invasion and the higher gasoline and food prices and inflation is a storm."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/why-this-economy-may-be-sturdier-than-it-looks | 2022-05-12T15:29:25Z |
Updated May 2, 2022 at 9:10 AM ET
On an angst-ridden night in the spring of 2020, Lori Ann Terjesen lay in bed worrying about the "imperative" to give voice to single mothers, hourly wage workers and other women bearing the brunt of traditional caretaking roles during the pandemic.
Severe restrictions were in place across the U.S. at the time, including stay-at-home orders, and no vaccine was yet available.
Women have been disproportionately impacted by a pandemic that exacerbated inequalities, according to the Pan American Health Organization. They have accounted for the overwhelming majority of health care professionals, caring for COVID-19 patients and facing an increased risk of contracting the virus: 72% of all cases among health workers across the Americas, according to PAHO data from January 2020 to January 2021.
Terjesen spearheaded a call for women to submit their journals and other physical and digital items to the National Women's History Museum, where she serves as vice president of education. She sees the project, which includes and reflects the myriad experiences of women, as an opportunity to create a more holistic picture of the time. She notes that history that is taught in schools in general is still male-dominated.
"The very act of saying there is an immediate, urgent need to ensure that women's voices are heard and collected and remembered in the retelling of this history and really calling that out as an action in itself is important," she told NPR's Morning Edition. "It's my hope that we will remember that there are voices that have traditionally been left out and that we immediately respond, saying, 'Your story has value. Please don't lose it. Please record it. Please share it with us.'"
The effort is known as "rapid response collecting," when museums acquire objects related to a major moment in history as it unfolds.
After nearly two years, the online museum, whose offices are based in Alexandria, Va., has received more than 500 submissions, some of which are exhibited online. There are handwritten journals, but also hand-sewn books, large canvas paintings, movies, audio recordings, quilts and even memes.
"We defined 'journal' very loosely and just asked women to journal their experiences in whatever medium made them feel the most comfortable," Terjesen said.
One thing they all had in common was how deeply personal the reflections were.
A security guard wrote about how she had to check the temperature of everyone entering a distribution plant and make sure they used hand sanitizer and wore masks. But despite being on the front lines, she wasn't provided with a mask.
An oncologist composed poems about the loss of a patient whose cancer was in remission but who died from COVID-19.
Terjesen recalled getting an email from a non-binary teenager saying "I'm a Gen Zer – my generation doesn't communicate with letters and journals... A lot of times, we just send memes to each other. And I said, 'Great, give me the memes.'"
Months later, that diarist ended up taking up paper and pencil to express their frustrations to a future reader. "That was a very memorable journal, and all it was is one letter," Terjesen recalled.
She expects the records will be invaluable to historians in the future as they document a pandemic that saw women double up on traditional caretaking roles, with schools and workplaces shuttered.
That sleep-deprived balancing act of working women is a familiar one for Terjesen, the mother of three young children ages three, six and eight years old.
But for all its pains, the pandemic has also taught some valuable lessons. Terjesen said it's changed her outlook on life.
"Another aspiration I would have for this project, as well as all conversations and considerations around women's roles, really is that we can be flexible, we can learn in different ways, we can work in different ways," she said. "There are ways to exist other than the 'go, go, go' kind of culture that we had before."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-28/women-and-girls-are-sharing-their-journals-to-create-a-herstory-of-the-pandemic | 2022-05-12T15:29:31Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Millions have fled the war in Ukraine and left the country. But some refuse to leave, despite shelling and the threat of a broader Russian invasion. NPR's Eyder Peralta takes us to the home of one family in Kharkiv, whose fight to simply stay alive has become their biggest act of resistance.
IRINA SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: One of the rooms of the apartment has been converted into a solarium. Before the war, plants climbed up to the ceiling, but the shockwaves of the shells and the missiles were too strong for their grip. They were ripped from the walls. Still, Irina Sudovtseva tends to them - she cuts them back. She waters them patiently. White roses peek out from behind bright-pink geraniums. Her pride and joy, though, is a pink bougainvillea. I tell her they're everywhere in Kenya, where I used to live.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Through interpreter) This one is really small, comparing to the huge Kenyan one, but still we're proud. It's our Ukrainian one, small one.
(Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: A tropical flower growing in Ukraine. She seems to get a thrill out of keeping something alive in a place where it shouldn't be.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian). (Laughter).
PERALTA: Hi. How are you?
SUDOVTSEVA: (Laughter).
LARISA: (Inaudible).
PERALTA: She walks out of the solarium into a back room where Larisa (ph), her 92-year-old mother, is reading an e-book - big print, but she still uses a magnifying lens.
The decision to stay in Kharkiv is grave. More than 700 civilians have been killed, and the fighting sometimes spills into the city. Buildings a few blocks from here have been blown up by rockets and missiles. Irina moves to the living room, surrounded by portraits, academic diplomas and pictures of the beautiful places she's gone sailing.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOM)
PERALTA: Is this what you hear all night?
SUDOVTSEVA: (Through interpreter) Pretty much all night. And also not only see - but we can have ability to see it.
(Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: So it's like New Year's every day.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: They've been living like this since 2014, she says. When Russia annexed Crimea, friends of theirs were displaced. Others were killed. She says it's a repetition of history. Through centuries, the Russian empire has claimed these lands.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Through interpreter) We knew that they going to come back. We knew that the Russians going to come back here eventually. If we have a choice between being fully taken, or we have a choice that we know they are coming to destroy us, you simply can't be afraid forever. There is no preparation that can get you ready that a bomb goes into your house. But you simply can't be afraid forever.
PERALTA: When this war started, Irina bought enough birdseed to last her months. She made a decision that she would keep tending to her plants and the neighborhood plants so they would bloom. So when this war ends and people come back, they'll still have some beauty.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Through interpreter) Our enemy probably thinks - and they want us to go into some deepest, deepest holes in this city and just be terrified. But they are mistaken. They are misunderstood. We are different kind of people. We are different breed.
PERALTA: When this war started, Irina talked to her husband and mom. Her mom had survived two strokes and a spinal injury, so they decided that she was too frail to get her out of this fifth-floor apartment. Instead, they decided they would stay and face the Russians if they had to.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: The next day, as a barrage of Grad missiles takes off in the distance, Irina's husband, Alexander Vdovichenko, takes a moment to teach her how to shoot a new rifle they got for this war. He's a policeman, so he could get drafted, and Irina might have to defend her home.
(SOUNDBITE OF RELOADING RIFLE)
ALEXANDER VDOVICHENKO: (Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: She takes one practice shot. She's 56, barely 5 feet tall. The rifle is almost her size. Alexander tells her, don't be deliberate. Shoot once and keep shooting.
VDOVICHENKO: (Speaking Russian).
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
(SOUNDBITE OF FIRING RIFLE)
PERALTA: Irina gives him a look of, I know this and takes off to see her mom, who is finishing her soup. One of the hardest things about this situation is that Larisa always stays in this room. Irina has made it beautiful with flowers and plants reaching toward the windows, with elaborate tapestries on the walls. But at night, when the shelling gets bad, they have decided that Irina and her husband sleep in the basement, and Larisa sleeps in this room.
LARISA: (Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: A missile strike doesn't worry her, she says. She's lived a long, happy life. But in the morning, when she's waiting for her daughter to return, her mind reels.
LARISA: (Through interpreter) So every time they leave, I ask, for how long? And if they don't come back to me, I wait for another 30 minutes. If they're not here after another 30 minutes, I start thinking that something bad has happened. And I think, just let it be. Let me die.
PERALTA: Irina tells her, I always come back. She reminds her mother that they had agreed to stay and to fight. But her mom says no one expected the war to build so fast, to be so violent. She looks sad.
LARISA: (Through interpreter) I've had a long life. It was a good life. But now I feel that by being alive, I'm taking life away from you.
PERALTA: Irina stops her before she finishes. She caresses her hand. Then she leaves her mom with her books. Larisa has been reading science fiction, which at the moment, she says, doesn't feel very strange. Irina returns to her bougainvilleas, to her birds, to her rifle. She says she wishes that these weren't the choices in front of them. She says she doesn't want anyone to think that they're making them because they're brave.
SUDOVTSEVA: (Speaking Russian).
PERALTA: "I can't say that we're heroes," she says. "We're just simply trying to live."
Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/a-family-in-kharkiv-refuses-to-leave-even-as-the-russians-shell-their-city | 2022-05-12T15:29:37Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Ramadan and its monthlong period of fasting ends this weekend, which means its closing feast is upon us - Eid al-Fitr. And for many Arabs, that means cookies.
REEM ASSIL: Super time intensive to prepare, but it has sort of the texture of a fluffy shortbread. And we stuff it with primarily dates. That's, like, the most popular filling. But I grew up having it with a walnut, sugar and cinnamon mixture.
KELLY: That's Reem Assil, owner of the Reem's California bakeries. She says her family used to make these cookies every year, not just at Eid but for other holidays.
ASSIL: Anyone who's made ma'amoul will know when you stick it in that mold, you have to slam it on the table. And it's, like, the most satisfying thing to get that cookie with the beautiful design but also to take out your aggression.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: Reem Assil's recipe for ma'amoul appears in her new cookbook, "Arabiyya: Recipes From The Life Of An Arab In Diaspora." She told us it's part cookbook, part memoir about how food helped her understand who she was as a Palestinian and Syrian now living in the Bay Area. But first, she told us a little about how she has often celebrated Eid.
ASSIL: It's the time of year that I joke that you don't see people who come to the mosque all year, but they come (laughter).
KELLY: Right.
ASSIL: You know, you wake up on Eid morning, and you put on a new set of clothing. It's like you're - it's like a rebirth. You know, every Ramadan is a chance to reset your life, and Eid is like your coming out. So everybody is kind of their best, happy selves.
KELLY: Give me the highlights of what's on your Eid menu this year.
ASSIL: Oh, so this Eid, I get to be with my family. So we are going to hopefully be making stuffed grape leaves, which is not my favorite to make, but I love doing it with people. It's another communal act of filling and rolling. We like to stuff everything.
KELLY: Right.
ASSIL: Definitely lamb and spiced rice of some sort - lamb is a very essential meal on the table - and, of course, our ma'amoul.
KELLY: Your cookies - there you go.
ASSIL: Yep.
KELLY: The whole Part 1 of the book is about Arab hospitality. It's titled...
ASSIL: Yeah.
KELLY: ..."How To Host Like An Arab."
ASSIL: Yes.
KELLY: Give me a - lay out a couple of the most important principles of that.
ASSIL: Yeah. I mean, the biggest tenet of Arab hospitality is that it's a virtue. You're supposed to make anyone who comes into your home, friends and strangers alike, feel like they are at ease and that they are safe and they have a sense of belonging. And I always say Arab hospitality is about abundance, just making folks feel like they're well taken care of. And it's like sweet torture, you know. Even when you're full, we feed you more.
(LAUGHTER)
ASSIL: Yeah. It's just there are so many situations in which, particularly in the Arab world, they don't have the privilege of abundance. So to be able to create abundance in the midst of political turmoil or occupation, Arabs really know how to make even hardships be delicious, nourishing meals. So...
KELLY: Give me an example. It - you get to cook with your mom for this Eid. If I got to show up - and I think everybody listening wishes we could come have (laughter) - come eat...
ASSIL: Oh, yeah. Come on over.
KELLY: Come eat. Yeah. OK, we will take you up on it.
ASSIL: Yeah.
KELLY: What would you be serving us? How would you welcome us?
ASSIL: Yeah. You got to - you have to host at the drop of a dime. So if you were at my mother's house, guaranteed, she would have something made and frozen. She would have chicken stock. I think she would probably pull out and marinate a chicken, stuff it with rice, get it in the oven (laughter) or make a one-pot, you know, chicken soup.
KELLY: Does your mom cook from your cookbook, by the way, or is she like, oh, no?
ASSIL: Oh, my goodness. Well...
KELLY: (Laughter) I knew how to do this before you were born.
ASSIL: Yeah. Well, you know, it's so interesting because my mom moved to this country coming from civil war in Lebanon, when she didn't - she, in fact, did not know how to cook. And she was, you know, kind of forced by her circumstances to learn. So I didn't - you know, I got my inspiration and my flavor profiles from my mom, but I didn't in fact learn how to cook from her. And so when I got older and learned these recipes, it was really nice. She would, like, call me for tidbits on how to make a certain dish.
KELLY: Oh, that's great.
ASSIL: And that made me feel really proud in my career. But my mom is an excellent - take what you have and whip it together. She was just so good at creating these meals that feel lavish in, like, 30 minutes or less. You know, I think for us, the joy of cooking is to cook on our own terms. And my mom always cooked on her own terms, and that's why her food was so delicious.
KELLY: Without wanting to start a war, I will note you write in your book about hummus, the chickpea dip that many Americans will be familiar with and which many Americans believe is Israeli, which it is, but it's also present in many Arab cultures. Talk to me about how you decided to write about this and what place hummus has in all this.
ASSIL: Well, you know, hummus existed long before the state of Israel was created in 1948, and so there is an intentional omission of Palestinian (laughter). And that invisibilizes (ph) me - you know? - the fact not just that Israeli hummus is the Trader Joe's hummus, the, you know, the Americanized versions of hummus...
KELLY: Chocolate hummus and - yeah.
ASSIL: ...Hummus being put in every - Yeah, chocolate hummus is, like, blasphemous.
KELLY: (Laughter) As an American, I will second that.
ASSIL: And it feels - yeah. That sort of, you know, whether intentional or not intentional, devoiding food from its - cutting it off from its lineage and negating a whole people that enjoyed and subsisted off of that food for generations is really dangerous. You know, for Palestinians, we don't have much left. You know, we - you know, a lot of our lands have been taken from us. Our - you know, we've been cut off from our foodways. So our food is like the last frontier of, you know, marking our identity. And so it's really important for me as a chef here in this country to be able to talk about that food and have people question where the food comes from.
KELLY: Gets into all kinds of interesting questions about how food, like everything else, is political.
ASSIL: It is. It's inherently political - you know, the fact that I am able to cook food that my grandmother couldn't cook because she was displaced from her homeland.
KELLY: Well, I love the - what I took away as one of your goals with this cookbook is the invitation to all of us to think about how any meal can be welcoming, can be a celebration over at Eid (ph). It's a really lovely way of thinking about food and the role it can play in our lives.
ASSIL: Yes, absolutely. I mean, when I created my restaurants, you know, seven years ago, I wanted anybody to walk into Reem's and feel at home, whether they knew anything about Arab food or not. And I hope that people get that out of this book.
KELLY: We have been speaking with Reem Assil, author of the new cookbook "Arabiyya." Congratulations on the book launch, and happy cooking this weekend.
ASSIL: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOUR TET'S "LOVE SALAD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/a-palestinian-syrian-chefs-cookbook-invites-people-to-see-any-meal-as-a-celebration | 2022-05-12T15:29:43Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The pandemic exposed giant gaps in the American health system. That may be part of the reason the United States leads the world in COVID deaths. The analyst Ed Yong says the results have revealed a longer-term problem even larger than the pandemic, the generations-long decline of public health in the United States. Writing in The Atlantic, he says people in the U.S. once thought differently than they do now about the underlying causes of disease.
ED YONG: So in the late 19th century, public health was a much more dispersed field. It had scientists, sure, but also a lot of activists, civil servants, a lot of public figures. The way they thought about health problems were informed by the social model of medicine, in which the factors that led to the spread of epidemics included things like poverty, poor sanitation, hazardous working conditions, poor education, political inattention. And they were sort of possessed of this crusading spirit, this idea that these problems, though vast, required action and active efforts to address.
INSKEEP: As you're talking, I'm thinking of Jacob Riis, this journalist in the late 1800s, who wrote this book called "How The Other Half Lives." And he was arguing that crowded tenements and windowless bedrooms and dirty alleys and so forth made people less healthy, contributed to their poverty and their death.
YONG: Absolutely. And I think this was quite a common view at the time. But that view started to fall by the wayside at the turn of the century because of the rise of germ theory, the discovery that many long-standing illnesses that have plagued humanity were the work of microscopic organisms. That gave people an easy target, a villain to focus on. And it meant that those knotty social problems could be ignored even now. Like, if you think about COVID, so much of our attempts to control the virus, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, have focused on medical countermeasures like drugs and vaccines. And there's been much less emphasis on things like paid sick leave, universal healthcare. That would address the sort of foundational social problems that were much more understood as drivers of poor health some time ago.
INSKEEP: Are you saying that this is a conflict between collective action and individual solutions?
YONG: Yes, partly. The idea is that you can collapse all the complexities about disease and the causes of poor health down to this battle between a host and a pathogen. And so you can treat it entirely as a problem of individuals. Now this is, I think, the wrong way of looking at it. Social issues like poverty and so on affect the kinds of choices people can make to protect their own health. And if you don't think about that, then the biomedical solutions, like the vaccines and drugs, don't have the effectiveness that they seem to have on paper.
INSKEEP: Is there a fundamental ideological problem the United States has here? We know about conservative resistance to collective action. But honestly, as the pandemic has gone on, the tolerance for that sort of thing has eroded in more liberal cities, as well. It does seem to be a universal thing that Americans don't like to be told what to do.
YONG: I think that is true. I have argued for a while now that America's particular breed of toxic individualism is, you know, antithetical to an effective pandemic response. You cannot think about infectious diseases solely through the lens of individual risk. They are fundamentally a collective problem because they spread and because people's circumstances constrain their choices. So their health is profoundly influenced by the choices of everyone else around them. If you think about this in terms - entirely in terms of what individual people can do, you're going to fail at this specific kind of problem.
INSKEEP: So help me define the problem now. When it comes to public health, what is it that we're failing to do?
YONG: There are several problems. The field is struggling with long term disinvestment. There's simply not enough money going into public health. And there hasn't been for almost a century now.
INSKEEP: Money to do what things, exactly?
YONG: Money to do the basics of the work, which are to prevent diseases in communities. So when COVID happened, the lack of testing, the inability to do contact tracing, the inability to really do community-based prevention work that some other countries did much better than we did, a lot of it comes down to lack of resources. Many people have rightly argued that public health needs to be more expansive. It really needs to start tackling these social problems, these social inequalities that are the bedrock of so many health problems, not just COVID.
INSKEEP: When we heard during the worst of the pandemic that poor communities were more affected by COVID, which in America tended to mean people who were more diverse, more people of color, was that a public health failure?
YONG: Yes, it is. And I think it's sort of a failure for all of us, this idea that the social conditions that underpin poor health persist over time, even though the threat of the day changes and even though medical progress is ostensibly made. And that's fundamentally because epidemics and medical interventions flow in opposite directions. Epidemics flow downwards into society's cracks, taking out the most marginalized people first. Medical interventions like drugs and vaccines rise up into society's penthouses. They go first to people with connections, power, privilege and money. And those people then move on from the problem before addressing the societal rot that actually made it worse. If you only look to drugs and vaccines as the solution to these problems without addressing the underlying inequalities, all you do is plaster over the problem for now and leave the same gaping wounds to get infected and fester the next time around.
INSKEEP: Are you suggesting that despite whatever we've learned in this pandemic, if there was another pandemic five years from now, it might go just as badly?
YONG: Yes. That is exactly what I'm suggesting.
INSKEEP: Ed Yong is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Thanks so much.
YONG: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF KONTAKTE'S "EARLY EVENING BLEEDS INTO NIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/a-review-of-the-pandemic-suggests-americans-have-lost-interest-in-public-health | 2022-05-12T15:29:49Z |
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. There are a lot of things we take for granted, and among them are our voices. We sing. We laugh. We yell at ballparks. And we talk all the time - on the phone, in the office, on street corners. And in doing so, we can damage our voices. Our guest, writer John Colapinto, has had his own experience with that, which you'll soon hear about. And he became interested in the voice, which is the subject of new book, "This Is The Voice." It's an exploration of the astonishing complexity of our vocal apparatus - how we form words, how babies learn to speak, how accents arise and how different kinds of voices affect us, which ones sound authoritative or sexually appealing or politically persuasive. Colapinto argues that the development of our prehistoric ancestors' vocal structures may have been the key to humans becoming the dominant species on the planet.
John Colapinto is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He's the author of the bestselling nonfiction book "As Nature Made Him" and the novel "About The Author." He joined me from his home in New York City last year to talk about his book, "This Is The Voice," which is now out in paperback.
Well, John Colapinto, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
JOHN COLAPINTO: Thank you so much.
DAVIES: I thought we would begin with the story that you tell in the book early, when you're 41 years old, I think, working at Rolling Stone magazine. And the publisher, Jann Wenner, is putting together sort of an ad-hoc rock band for a big staff party and asks you to be the lead singer. Had you done any singing?
COLAPINTO: I had, actually. I had been singing since high school just kind of casually. I sang in my school choir and so on. I played piano in coffeehouses in college. So I was, you know, somewhat - I could carry a tune. I even knew what projection was - you sort of making the voice big and filling a room with it. But I had never done any proper vocal warm-ups. And that's how I got into trouble when I was singing with Jann Wenner's rock band with Rolling Stone magazine. And I was being silent all day long. I would jump up at the end of the day, take the subway to our rehearsal space and then just start wailing over their cranked-up guitars and drums, I mean, 0 to 60 with my voice - just crazy. Anyone that knows anything about singing, proper singing, knows you don't do that. And I quickly developed a rasp and sort of hoarseness, which I'd had in the past and had cleared up. This didn't. Later learned that it was a vocal - I have a vocal polyp, which is started by a bleeding vocal cord.
DAVIES: Right. Yeah, and you describe it in one of the rehearsals. I mean, you know, Rolling Stone was a pretty hot commodity then. And the lead singer for the J. Geils Band drops by and hears you singing in rehearsal and gives you a little advice.
COLAPINTO: Yeah. He pulled me aside and said, hey, man, you don't have to sing full-out in rehearsal. Save something for the show. And, you know - and he was actually doing a guest song with us and I saw how he was doing it. I mean, just, you know, he was kind of quarter power - very, very smart. And I've never forgotten that.
DAVIES: Right. But it was new to you. And so you get to the concert, and you don't quite have the range that you did. You said it's kind of painful to listen to the tape from that, huh?
COLAPINTO: Deeply terrifying. I mean, there's nothing quite like the seconds and minutes ticking down to a performance in front of 2,000 people that include Yoko Ono and her son Sean and Paul Shaffer and Val Kilmer and countless others. And knowing that - you know, and knowing that there's something wrong with your voice. A certain high note in one of the songs, "Miss You" by the Rolling Stones, had been really, really hard to get over the preceding days. And it was just terrifying. I mean, I remember getting up in the spotlight and thinking, oh, Lord, I just hope this all happens. And, you know, somehow I kind of got through the performance. But, yeah, it's painful to listen to the CD because I can hear the tentativeness.
And this is one of the things about the voice and performing with a voice. We hear - all of us, actually - tentativeness, just anyone slightly holding back. You can't get away with those types of things without people recognizing something's slightly amiss. So it makes me wonder how professionals do it, especially people like opera singers, who are being listened to so closely by people with acute critical skills. Terrifying.
DAVIES: Right. It is an instrument, which is, I guess, what your book is about.
COLAPINTO: Yes, yes.
DAVIES: You have terrible laryngitis after the concert. And then you have this encounter in an elevator with a woman...
COLAPINTO: Yes.
DAVIES: ...Who just catches this right away. What does she tell you?
COLAPINTO: It was amazing. We were brand-new in the building. I said to her, what floor? - as one does in New York. You're going to push the button for someone. And those two words - she said, oh, you've got a serious voice injury. And I said, oh, you know, it's nothing. It'll clear up. And she said, no, no, no. You know, I work with Broadway singers and so on. And she said, I know what I'm hearing. And she read me like a book. She said, you know, I bet you get kind of tired at the end of a day 'cause you're using all your muscles. You're having to work harder with your back and your abs and your hip flexors, all of these muscles we use in order to actually push the air out when we speak. She even said, you know, I bet your neck gets pretty sore. And it had been burning, almost as if I had, like, scalded the skin. I mean, it was amazing.
But the last thing she said to me was, you should at least get a laryngologist to look at that because it could be something else. I grew up in a medical family. Something else is the approved euphemism for cancer or some kind of dangerous growth. So I immediately made an appointment with one of the top vocal surgeons in the world, Peak Woo. He looked in my throat with a laryngology instrument and said, you've got a pretty major polyp, which is a bump on the edge of my vocal cord.
DAVIES: Yeah. Well, let's go into that. How does a polyp like that develop? How did it develop in your case?
COLAPINTO: Yeah. You know, amazingly, this is one of the mysteries of the voice. So we still know so little about it. But as far as doctors understand, these polyps really begin with bleeding within the vocal cord itself, which is effectively a bruise. And if you bleed, you know, without any staunching of that bleeding, you can develop this scar tissue and this bump. The thing that's critical about that, though, for the voice is that our vocal cords don't produce sound like a violin string or a guitar string, a plucked guitar string. And it sounds like it might because we say vocal cord like a string-like thing. But in fact, the - it's a valve at the top of our throat that opens - that under pressure from the lungs, vibrates in this way that chops the air into these pulses.
So, I mean, amazingly, as you and I speak to each other right now, your vocal valve is open 'cause you're listening to me, and you're breathing. But the minute you want to ask me a question, you're going to shut your vocal valve quickly across the top of your windpipe. You're going to time that with a thrust of air from your lungs or more than a thrust, actually. One of the interesting things about us as a species is we can kind of eke the air out slowly. Gorillas can't do that. That's why they go (imitating gorilla). They - and they make these quick, short sounds. But we can draw out the air stream because we've got to put the consonants and vowels in.
Anyway, this chopping of the vocal chords - if you've got - of the air stream with the vocal chords, if you have a pure, clear singing tone like Barbra Streisand, let's say, you indisputably have very clean edges to your vocal cords. They meet flush. They chop the air really nicely. If you've got a lump on the vocal cord like me, you get all this extra turbulence. You get air passing through in funny ways. And you get pulls and all of these other things. The vocal cord is also burdened with this extra mass on it. So I cannot as effectively and smoothly change the pitch of my voice because we really do that by, you know, tautening it or slackening the tension on the vocal cord. And that's been kind of messed up for me, too.
DAVIES: You ended up later on doing a story in The New Yorker about this very subject - vocal surgery - and with a doctor who had treated singers who - famous singers, in some cases - who dealt with this. He took a look at you, saw this polyp. If you were to try and get this repaired, what would that entail?
COLAPINTO: It's quite remarkable what it would entail. And really, he not only explained to me what he would have to do, but I watched him do it to several patients of his. And what you do - what he does is he gets the person lying on their back, puts them unconscious and also introduces a paralyzing agent to the entire body because the slightest move while he's operating on a vocal cord will only make the matters worse because he'll nick, you know, healthy tissue or something.
But the person's lying on their back. And their head is tilted back. And then this instrument is introduced down the throat that pries the vocal tract open, then reaches down the vocal tract, the throat, with these tiny scalpels and little devices for plucking at the flesh. And he's got them in both hands. And they're on, like, long, knitting needle extensions that go down the throat. And he's looking through a stereo microscope that's aimed down there with a little light on it. And he's making these meticulously tiny movements with his fingers to do this astonishingly delicate surgery on these vocal cords.
And when you remove a polyp, he slices delicately through the outer mucous membrane that covers all of our vocal cords. And in there is this little lump that, interestingly, can - doesn't need to be cut out. It can be sort of scooped out with a spoon-like instrument. And then, once he's done that, he cannot sow the mucus membrane closed because it's too delicate. And so you, the patient, have to remain silent for six weeks afterwards so that everything can heal on its own. And that's my excuse, lame as it is, for never having had my polyp repaired. I just never saw the daylight for six weeks of vocal silence. Not to mention I'm a little bit scared of being operated on. But let's - you know, let's not admit that.
DAVIES: Wow. That's quite an undertaking. And, you know, some well-known singers have had surgery like this. It hasn't always gone well, right?
COLAPINTO: Totally true. Actually, famously, Julie Andrews was the sort of super-famous case when she was singing in "Victor/Victoria" Broadway play. And she was known - I mean, I should have used her as the perfect example of the pellucid vocal tone with the clean, clean chopping of the air. I can't even imagine what her healthy vocal cords had looked like. But she developed a bleed while she was doing that show. And she went up to Mount Sinai. This was before Peak Woo's tenure there.
And unfortunately, in the effort to remove the polyp, some healthy tissue evidently was removed as well, because when she came out and did her six week of vocal silence and then tried to speak and sing, lo and behold, she had a voice that was as bad or worse. And that happens. I mean - because it really is this exceedingly delicate surgery. So yes, it's a really - it's a big undertaking to do that.
DAVIES: So you opted not to get this intricate surgery and live with it. Just talking to you, I can hear a little gravel in your voice. How has this damage - which is sort of, I guess, unrepaired - how has it affected your life?
COLAPINTO: Yeah. Well, it was actually Zeitels that explained to me what it was doing to me. I mean, I really can't sing properly anymore with anything like the singing voice I used to have. I go off pitch and so on. But it was really in my speaking voice that he said, you know, you've got a lot of trouble there, and you don't know it. But you are doing all sorts of stuff to speak around your injury. And what he meant by that was I was dropping my voice into a pitch where the part of my vocal cord that would still chop the air cleanly would do that. But it meant that I was, to a degree, removing what people call - what linguists call the prosody from my speech.
And what that is is the musical up and down, the melody that we actually fit all the lyrics of our speech to. We don't really realize we're doing it until we hear someone talk like that. And you cannot listen to someone talk like that. It's boring. It's irritating. And you lose focus on it. So Dr. Zeitels said to me, because you're dropping your voice into this more monotonic range, you're really removing the emotion from your voice - or some of it. When he told me that, I was like, oh, boy. That's kind of scary. And to a degree, I - you know, I'm obviously still doing that because I have not had my polyp removed. But I'm not as raspy as I was. I mean, I really couldn't even produce what I sounded like when I first did the injury because it's become second nature. And that's the interesting thing, too. We - all of us do things with our voice sort of unconsciously that becomes sort of fixed in the signal.
DAVIES: You know, I - my voice matters in what I do. I mean, I talk on the radio. And I have, over the years, realized that I can't go to a ball game on the night before I go on the radio because I'm going to yell. And I'm going to get raspy. I stay away from really noisy bars or restaurants because I find it just strains my voice. And pretty soon, I'm speaking in a very low tone like that. So I guess a lot of us are walking around with some injury here, aren't we?
COLAPINTO: Absolutely. It's by no means singers, which he calls vocal athletes, who get these injuries. People who talk a lot, just because they're loquacious, you know, extroverts, get it. Schoolteachers get it heavily. So anyone that has a heavy vocal load in a given day is entirely susceptible to this. In other words, you don't have to be straining the voice, reaching a high note or even yelling over crowds. You probably know this. You've probably had moments of raspiness where you were doing nothing more than speaking at a cocktail party or something. I mean, so I guess this goes to how very, very delicate the vocal cords are and how much we don't really think of that.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with John Colapinto. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is "This Is The Voice." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. We're speaking with New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto, who has a new book about the human voice, how it works, how it evolved, how different voices affect us. The book is called "This Is The Voice."
So you write at - you've written about your own experience. But then you've done a lot of research into different aspects of the voice, its evolution, its structure. So let's talk a bit about that. What makes the human voice different from those of other animals, which, you know, after all, have a wide variety of vocal communication, some of them kind of sophisticated?
COLAPINTO: Yeah. I mean, really, the thing is our ability to shape the signal, that vocal signal, into the vowels and consonants that we then, you know, assemble into words and then structures that we call sentences, i.e., language. We do this thing where we're singing, but we're also shaping it into meaningful utterance. And no other animal can do that. It enables us to talk about what's going to happen tomorrow, what happened yesterday, what we hope to do 20 years from now, what we're worried about and so on. Animals, for all the sophistication of their vocal signaling - and it is more sophisticated than I had realized - are really making in-the-now utterances and proclamations about how they feel, you know, threats, the urge to mate and so on. They're kind of in the moment. But language permits us to talk about stuff that isn't there. And it allowed us to cooperate with each other in ways that, ultimately, permitted us to make things like cellphones and airplanes.
DAVIES: Before that, fire and, you know, agriculture and all that, right. I mean, right, there's a lot that you can do when you can communicate in a more sophisticated way.
COLAPINTO: Which was handy for a species that was slow-running and not very strong and that could just be eaten by lions and other things.
DAVIES: I had no idea until I'd read the book about how complex the physical structures are in our mouths and throats that produce the sounds that we use in everyday language. You need your mouth and throat to act independently, right? Can you think of any - give us a little example of the ways in which this all comes together?
COLAPINTO: Well, that's exactly right. The - really, what we're doing is - when we speak - is we're creating a buzz in our throat - that air pulse thing I was talking about - as our vocal cords chop the air from our lungs. And that drone - this, uhh (ph) - we can shape into A, E, I, O, U, which are the vowels of English, A, E, I, O and U. But we also can do these cool things with our lips and tongue where we make noisy sounds like puh (ph), puh and tuh (ph) and cuh (ph). And all of those involve the tongue or lips making contact with each other or almost making contact when we say sss (ph) or zzz (ph).
So we're making these noises that we're mixing with the singing-like tones of A, E, I, O, U. And as you point out, you know, things are acting independently of each other. I'm droning with my throat. But I'm arching and pushing forward my tongue for the vowels. But then I'm also hitting it and tapping it and doing all sorts of stuff to make the consonants. And then I'm timing all that in a way that puts together words and sentences. And we tend not to think of how remarkable that is.
DAVIES: Right. We get the buzz from our throat. And then all these amazing little subtleties that produce consonants with our mouths. A P, you're not putting the buzz. A B, you're giving it a little buzz. And...
COLAPINTO: I love that. Yeah. The voiced and unvoiced consonants, absolutely. And the tuh and duh are exactly the same gesture. What we also don't think of, almost more amazing, is that nuh (ph), nuh is the same gesture as duh and tuh. Why does it sound different? Because there's a little trapdoor at the back of our throat, back of our palate. And we open that up for access to the nose. And we send the sound into the soft nasal passages, which turns duh, tuh into nuh, nuh, nuh. It's coming through the nose. And likewise, muh (ph), which is just the buh (ph) sound, but, muh, you're putting it through your nose, incredibly. So I mean, the gymnastics of saying something as simple as give me the salt are just - it's kind of unimaginable.
DAVIES: John Colapinto is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book, "This Is The Voice," is out in paperback. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. Also, Justin Chang reviews the new film "Petite Maman" about an 8-year-old girl which imagines what it would be like if you'd known your parent as a child. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. We'll end this half with an example of truly impressive vocal gymnastics from Stephen Sondheim's musical comedy "Company," something a little more complicated than giving salt.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "GETTING MARRIED TODAY")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. We're speaking with New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto about the human voice - how it evolved, how it works, how we can damage it and how different voices affect us. His book, "This Is The Voice," is out in paperback. When we left off, we were talking about the evolution of the human voice and how we use our mouths and throats to vocalize, something we learn unconsciously.
How much information do babies in utero get from what they hear?
COLAPINTO: Incredibly, about 28 weeks gestation, when the auditory system is complete, they are picking up the mother's prosity - which we talked about that up and down movement of the melody of the voice. They're hearing some vowels and consonants, but they're kind of hard to hear. It's like listening through a wall. But they're also getting that sound not just through the airwaves that pass from the mom's mouth through her belly, but literally through her skeleton, through the bone conduction. So it goes down through her body and actually makes the liquid that the baby's in in the womb vibrate against the baby's body.
And if you really think about it, you know, a fetus in utero is really the only sensory input that it's getting from the outside world is sound, which is heard not just through its auditory system, which has developed at 28 weeks, but also against its body. So, you know, it is really absorbing an amazing amount of information bout how the mom speaks, how people close to her in the room speak that also get through. So babies are born, we've learned, with way more linguistic knowledge than we'd ever imagined.
DAVIES: And you note that there are studies that show that when babies cry - I mean, newborn infants - they reflect some of the tone and kind of melody of the different languages. A German baby cries differently from French baby.
COLAPINTO: Yes, exactly. Languages have sort of a trajectory of melody. French goes kind of upward. German goes somewhat downard. And so do the baby's cries of - that are born in those respective countries, remarkably. And it seems to be a way to sort of foster bonding with the mother. So she's hearing something that the baby's doing that's saying that's my baby, that's my language, that's, you know, that's who I look after.
DAVIES: And when kids, through trial and error, babies learn to make all of these consonants and vowels by just regulating the vocal chords in the throat and the movements of the tongue and the teeth and all of that, they tend to make - they learn to make sounds which are specific to their own language. Not all languages use the same vowels or consonant sounds, right? Are kids at a young age able to learn that? Is that one of the reasons that kids pick up languages simply but older kids and adults find it harder?
COLAPINTO: It's partly that. It's also because the baby brain is so - as neuroscientists call it - plastic. In other words, it's able to wire itself and rewire itself incredibly quickly, much quicker than people after puberty, let's say. The way that they're learning that complex gymnastics of making a P versus a B versus a muh sound, which all have that same, you know, gesture of the lips, but have the vocal chords either buzzing or not buzzing or the velum, which is that trap door at the back of the nose, you know. The way that they're learning all of that is through play. And I liked emphasizing that in the book because learning, we know, really comes out of play.
So what the baby is doing is it's been hearing mom and dad make the specific sounds of their native tongue. Let's say it's English. So they're hearing puh, buh, my, by. And they're hearing those sounds. When they start babbling, they actually are just making random movements with the vocal chords and the lips just for fun. But if they happen to go buh, they go, oh, wait. That's reminding me - because they've stored that sound because they've heard it so much from mom. They've heard it in the womb. They've heard it for, you know, a year - well, not a year. They start babbling before they're a year old. But they'd been hearing this for months after being born.
So they get super excited. They go buh. And they go, oh, I like that. And they go buh, buh, buh, buh, over and over. And what that's actually doing is it's not unlike learning how to ride a bike. First, you fall off, and then eventually you get it figured it out. And then eventually, you can't not know how to do it, and you, you know, what you've done is you've grooved it into this part of the brain that kind of fires the muscle memory. So you get all these muscle memories of buh and tuh and cuh. If you're French, you're getting slightly different ones. You know, you get those subtle (vocalizing) - you know, you're not getting two, you're getting tu (ph), tu. You're getting this weird - well, not weird, but a different tongue position.
DAVIES: Another fascinating thing about learning language is that when you listen to - if I were to listen to, you know, a long set of sentences in German or some language I have no knowledge of at all, I couldn't distinguish the words, right? They're just syllables that all run together. And for, you know, a baby learning English - same thing, right? I mean, it's just a bunch of noises. But they get it. How do they figure it out?
COLAPINTO: It's crazy. Yeah. It's a ribbon of sound that's completely unbroken. As you say, we know it when we hear a foreign language. What babies are doing, even as they're sitting there looking so cute and passive and useless, when they're first born, they're learning to that speech stream. And they're making statistical calculations. So they're hearing something that English does, for instance, which is that it tends to accentuate the first syllable of words - two-syllable words like baseball, birthday. It's rare that the second syllable is emphasized like surprise. That's a little less frequent in our speech.
So remarkably enough, those babies are - in English are hearing this buh-buh, buh-buh, buh-buh rythym - buh-buh, buh-buh, buh-buh. But a French baby's hearing exactly the reverse because the second syllable tends to be accentuated there. So part of what permits a baby to figure out that something is a word, at least what gives it a clue, in English is that they're hearing buh-buh. So they - OK, that might be a separate structure. But at the same time, they're doing something that's almost more remarkable, which is running a statistical analysis on the sounds that are adjacent to each other, which sounds complicated, but let me just say this.
The name Zbignu (ph) in Polish has the Z and the B right beside each other. English does not do that. It's illegal. Well, I say that, but if you say leaves blow, I say leaves blow - well, I've done it across the word boundary. Babies are paying attention to that. So English babies realize, oh, that z-buh (ph) doesn't come very often. In fact, it's very infrequent. So maybe that's a place where words split. So if you can imagine them absorbing, calculating around the rythm - buh-buh - and the sounds - leaves blow - then you can realize they sort of put these things together to start segmenting the speech stream. That's what linguists call it. They cut that ribbon into separate pieces. And then they can get to work assigning meaning to those separate pieces.
DAVIES: Something else fascinating about the anatomy of our vocal chords - you note that forming most actual words is anatomically impossible for newborns for several months. I didn't know this. Explain why this is.
COLAPINTO: Yeah, and it's because the voice box, or larynx, which houses the vocal cords, is way up in the back of the mouth, effectively. It's not where our Adam's apple is in an adult male. You'll note that that's about halfway down your neck, so that's where your vocal cords are positioned. But for a baby, they're way up in the throat. And the reason that matters is because those A-E-I-O-U sounds I was talking about are really made by reshaping the vocal tract, which is this tube that runs from our vocal cords to our lips and does a 90-degree bend at the back of the throat into the mouth.
That tube - we are actually making resonances, which really means that we're kind of highlighting particular notes in the vocal spectrum, both in our throat and in our mouth simultaneously. And so we're really blending these pitches so that, practically speaking, if I say E, I've actually made the mouth resonator very small by pushing my tongue forward and lifting the back of it - E. But if I say, ah, as doctors ask me to do to look at my throat, I say ah, and I'm actually making the mouth really big, but you'll note that I've pushed my tongue back, so I'm actually making the throat resonator small.
So why does that matter for babies? Well, they don't have a throat resonator, and it limits them to vowels that can only be made in the mouth. So that's around, like, ay (ph), ay - those sorts of sounds. And if you think about it, speech is possible only because we can do a range of vowels. So if I take the consonants H and D and put an A in between or an E-A or an I, I can get had, hid, head, heed, hot, HUD - and I'm only able to make those different words because my tongue is so mobile, and I'm getting different resonances from throat and mouth. Babies just can't do it.
DAVIES: And the larynx is high in a baby's mouth because it has to do with them nursing, right? I mean, they can...
COLAPINTO: Yeah, it's a beautiful reason. Everything is so beautifully enfolded here. When you're breastfeeding, you want to be able to drink, drink, drink, suck away without having to lift your head and take a breath. So what the baby is doing is breathing through its nose. Its mouth is there. The milk is coming in and coursing around the sides of the elevated larynx and going down around the sides and into the stomach. It goes into the esophagus, which is the tube that carries it to the stomach. So as the baby, amazingly, begins to move off of purely liquid food into solid foods, the larynx actually begins a migration down the throat, down the neck area until, oh, boy, I guess probably puberty, again, it's reached the adult place, which is in the middle of the neck. But it really does have to make that journey for vowels to become very, very clear the way we make them.
DAVIES: And kids are making vowels pretty clearly by the time they're, you know, in preschool. So if we need to have that larynx lower in order to make all the vowels that comprise our language, does that distinguish us from our primate relatives, you know, in prehistoric times?
COLAPINTO: Hugely. It - you know, if you actually listen to a chimp, as these scientists did that recorded them endlessly, they really are making kind of that ay, ah, E, uh (ph) sound I was talking about in the mouth. And the reason is because their larynx is actually where a baby's is when a baby's born. It's up, up, up in the throat, right sort of under the trapdoor to the nose. So they are highly limited in their ability to make vowels. It's a reason that, you know, "Planet Of The Apes" is just never going to be real...
DAVIES: (Laughter).
COLAPINTO: ...Because the larynx is definitely in the wrong spot for speech. But, yeah, and over the course of the evolution of primates into human beings, researchers remarkably have been able to study from fossil remains how the larynx actually kind of inched down the throat through the various species that led to us.
DAVIES: Let me reintroduce you again. We're going to take a break here. We are speaking with John Colapinto. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is "This Is The Voice." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking with New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto. He has written a new book about many aspects of the human voice, its evolution, how it works, how different voices affect us. The book is called "This Is The Voice."
There are some clear distinctions between male and female voices, at least most male and female voices at puberty, right? I mean, this is not something in our imagination. What are the anatomical differences?
COLAPINTO: Yeah. Well, men speak about an octave lower than women, and the reason why is because at puberty, the structures in the male voice, vocal mechanism, really explode in growth, not unlike how a male's muscles get big and they tend to grow taller than women on average. And that's really because testosterone and other androgens course through the system at puberty, and they attach to muscles and cartilage and other things, bone, and make them grow bigger. So if you've got a vocal cord that's longer - it's not unlike an elastic band that's long - it's going to vibrate slower and chop the air at a slower rate, and so you get a deeper voice.
Also, the human - the male body grows bigger on average, so the resonance chambers tend to be bigger. And so you get sort of a booming quality because the voice is kind of echoing around in larger structures, larger chambers. Female voices do go down a little bit at puberty, but nothing like the male voice because of the really, really big change that males experience at puberty.
DAVIES: And are there theories about why evolution would have directed things this way?
COLAPINTO: There are. And it really goes to stuff that Darwin talked about when we mate. You know, we - there's sort of two different mechanisms at work. We woo and attract a mate with sort of ornaments, but we also drive off competitors. And that - so males kind of get the other males out of the way. So if you look at stags or roosters, they actually have grown what Darwin called special weapons. So the antlers on a stag when they butt heads or these terrible sharp things on a rooster's claws and they kind of claw at each other and fight off the other males.
So really what happened was in the male voice, the belief is that this is actually a special weapon, partly. It was a way for men facing off against each other. You know, they would sort of be in an arms race to see whose voice could get lowest in order to threaten the other guy away. But interestingly, you know, the person that had the genetic accident of bigger vocal cords - just, you know, a lower voice just by virtue of biology - those would tend to win the contest competition and get to mate. So lo and behold, those genes get selected in our species and get passed along. And so you get, like - you know, you get this deep voice in males.
DAVIES: We haven't talked about song at all, which - I know you love music. You know, you sing. Do you think song among our ancestors is what led to language? Do we know about the interplay?
COLAPINTO: It was really Darwin that was the first to suggest that song and music was where language came from. People before that, theorists, tended to focus understandably on words because those seem like the - and indeed are the special thing. But it was Darwin's brilliant insight that probably the sort of melodic shape of sentences actually arrived first. And he theorized that because certain primates make these sort of incredible singing cadences, these ways of expressing anger, and as he put it, jealousy, rage, lust, you know, mating urges through melodic changes. And so it was really Darwin's theory that we sort of had this stream of meaningful melody that we then began to develop the ability to move our lips and tongue to shape words, a proto-language.
And he actually saw evidence for that in how babies learn to speak. Because if you think about it, little babies will say musical things, musical-sounding things, before they shape them into words. And the example with his kid was when the kid wanted food, it had a nonsense word, mum. But it would say, mum, mum. And he heard, oh, that's rising on pitch. And so he began to realize, yes, yes, that fits with what I was thinking. And so it was quite unique in his insight that that's what comes first and then we articulate.
DAVIES: You injured your voice when you were singing in a band among staff at the Rolling Stone when you were working there. You're now in another band.
COLAPINTO: (Laughter).
DAVIES: This is sort of coming full circle. Tell us about this.
COLAPINTO: Oh, yeah, the Sequoias. I was invited to join a New Yorker magazine in-house band. My fellow writer, John Seabrook, tapped me to do this. And I also play piano. So when I joined the band - my God, it could have been 10 years ago now - I was determined to just play keyboards. I didn't want to further damage my voice. I knew I mustn't be naughty. But of course, within the first rehearsal, I was, like, demanding to sing some songs and just wanting to because just the pleasure of it. I just love it.
And so I just insisted on singing with the band. And, you know, I think that in doing that, I almost inevitably further damaged my voice, especially when we got sort of frightening high-profile gigs, like the White House Correspondents Dinner Jam, which we were invited to do two years in a row - really exciting, but again, kind of nervous-making. And I sang in both of those Jams and emerged probably with a more (laughter) damaged voice, at least for singing.
DAVIES: Well, John Colapinto, thank you so much for speaking with us.
COLAPINTO: It's been my pleasure.
DAVIES: John Colapinto is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book, "This Is The Voice," is out in paperback. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film "Petite Maman" about an 8-year-old girl who enters a magical world after the death of her grandmother. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/a-writer-lost-his-singing-voice-then-discovered-the-gymnastics-of-speech | 2022-05-12T15:29:55Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Let's head overseas now. Pushback against Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers is rare. Critics sometimes disappear only to emerge frightened, unwilling to talk. So it is striking to see Afghans of nearly all stripes demanding the Taliban allow girls to attend secondary school. NPR's Diaa Hadid reports.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language).
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DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Afghan women and girls march in Kabul.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting in non-English language).
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting in non-English language).
HADID: They chant, "justice; we are sick of captivity." Women and girls were largely banned from secondary schools since the Taliban seized power eight months ago. Officials promised they could return in late March, but in the background, analysts say powerful hardline clerics demanded the ban be extended. For them, just the idea of teenage girls leaving their homes was unacceptable, although Taliban officials have suggested they changed their minds because teenage girls needed a more modest uniform to attend class, more than the standard headscarf they already wear. The girls found out about the Taliban's backtrack when they turned up to class. One teacher recalled the scene to NPR's Kabul producer Fazelminallah Qazizai.
UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: (Through interpreter) We told them they had to leave. The girls were crying. They pleaded, we are ready to wear burkas, but please let us stay.
HADID: Since then, there's been sporadic protests by young women. There's gatherings of scholars, intellectuals and feminists who call on the Taliban to change course. And in the past few weeks, a new cohort has joined their call.
IBRAHEEM BAHISS: Taliban-affiliated clerics are also pushing back against this decision.
HADID: Ibraheem Bahiss is an analyst with the International Crisis Group. He says these clerics come from all over Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
BAHISS: They're trying to convince the hard-liners that this decision is detrimental and they need to agree to opening girls' schools.
HADID: Like cleric Jalilullah Akhumdzada in Herat.
JALILULLAH AKHUMDZADA: (Non-English language spoken).
HADID: His son, Mualana Muhibullah, says his father issued a fatwa supporting girls' education because he felt the Taliban were giving Muslims a bad name by banning them from secondary education. The most high-profile pushback so far has come from a Pakistani cleric, Mufti Taqi Usmani, one of the Muslim world's most influential religious scholars. He sent a short letter to the Taliban leadership that was leaked to the media. He argues their ban is fodder for anti-Islamic sentiment and that girls can be educated in segregated institutions. The clerics are a lot harder to ignore than feminists, scholars or girls, and it's embarrassing for the Taliban to be chastised by so many scholars. Bahiss again.
BAHISS: That seems to be undoing the claim of the hard-liners that they are in majority or that the majority of clerics are with them when it comes to their decision to reverse the education.
HADID: It's clear there's also resentment against those hard-liners within the Taliban itself. At a gathering of senior Taliban bureaucrats that an NPR producer attended, they complained the ban was making them look incompetent and out of touch with how Afghanistan has changed. And it has changed after nearly two decades of Western-backed rule.
SAMIRA HAMIDI: There is a huge awareness on importance of girls' education. Women and girls, some of them have been leading the whole financial support for their families. And this all has happened only because these women and girls were educated.
HADID: Samira Hamidi is Amnesty International's South Asia campaigner and an Afghan woman. She says perhaps one reason why Afghans are largely uniting around the demand to send girls to secondary school is that just about every family has a school-age daughter.
HAMIDI: They all have teenage girls, and they are all traumatized right now. Even if you don't have a teenage girl in your house, if you have a daughter of a younger age - if this issue is not going to be resolved, there is no future for these girls.
HADID: The Ministry of Education says they're ready to open classes as soon as the leadership makes a decision. But it's unclear whether the hard-liners will relent and allow girls to attend secondary school because this pushback in particular by these Taliban-affiliated clerics is unprecedented. And so analysts say nobody knows what will happen next. Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Islamabad. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/afghans-unite-in-demanding-that-the-taliban-let-girls-attend-secondary-school | 2022-05-12T15:30:01Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
U.S. airlines seem to be poised for a big rebound after some brutal pandemic years. But while consumer demand is up, one notable supply issue could keep the industry from really taking off. Paddy Hirsch and Adrian Ma from our daily economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money, explain.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: It's an environment ripe with promise for the airlines, but profits the CEOs are predicting are not guaranteed. Airlines have laid off thousands of people during the pandemic and, while they have been hiring like mad to try and get ready for this summer, in a lot of cases they're not even close to where they need to be.
PADDY HIRSCH, BYLINE: Yeah, federal data from February found that airline staffing was down 2% from the same month in 2020. Now, 2% may not sound like much, but if demand's going to be the highest it's been in 30 years, as the CEO of United Airlines recently predicted it could be, then airlines are going to have to hurry up with the hiring if they want to reap the benefits. That means more flight attendants, more ground crew, more mechanics, all of whom have to be hired in one of the tightest labor markets in decades.
MA: And maybe the biggest challenge is happening in the nose of the aircraft. Pilots are in really short supply. Casey Murray is an airline captain with Southwest, and he's also president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union. This shortage has been on his radar for years, and Casey says the pandemic just made a bad situation worse.
CASEY MURRAY: All the airlines shed, through various voluntary programs, early retirements, and so now that we're back on the other side of it and the industry is recovering, it's really exacerbated and accelerated that shortage of pilots.
MA: Some airlines like Delta and Alaska - they're trying to be proactive, so they're creating their own training programs, and that way they can have their own pipeline. But Casey says all that's done is create another shortage.
MURRAY: Southwest is having problems putting people through the pipeline right now due to some issues with even hiring instructors to train.
HIRSCH: And all of this is a problem for airlines. I mean, if they don't have the pilots, they can't fly the planes. If they can't fly the planes, they can't sell the seats.
MA: And the airlines appear to be dealing with this problem in a couple of ways. First, they're squeezing their pilots, pushing them to pull more shifts and work longer hours. And pilots are obviously not happy about this. Alaska Airlines pilots are picketing. At Southwest, Casey Murray says his union just wrote the airline to say they want some systemic changes to be made to avoid pilot fatigue.
HIRSCH: Pilot fatigue? I don't want a fatigued pilot flying my plane - or a grumpy one, for that matter. Hayley Berg is an economist at the travel app Hopper. She says there's - a second way airlines are reacting to this pilot shortage is by taking a highly flexible approach to the market, reducing traffic on some routes and maybe even dropping routes altogether.
HAYLEY BERG: They're going to be figuring out, dynamically, where is there the most demand? Where should we be offering a few services a day versus maybe just one service a day? Where do we need a large wide-body plane versus where can we just service with a smaller plane?
HIRSCH: There's a lot at stake for the airlines here. If things go wrong - another COVID spike or a massive increase in fuel prices - demand could evaporate and put the airlines right back on life support. But if things go well this summer, it could put the airlines back in the black. So they're going to be praying for clear skies and a strong tailwind.
MA: Adrian Ma.
HIRSCH: Paddy Hirsch, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOKHOV'S "SPRING EVENING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/airline-ticket-prices-are-expected-to-keep-rising-for-several-reasons | 2022-05-12T15:30:08Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The state of Oklahoma is banning abortion again and again and again. Two separate bills have made it through the state legislature this week. Both allow lawsuits against people involved in abortions in the style of a recent Texas law. Weeks ago, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed a different bill that makes abortion a felony. Oklahoma is not waiting for a Supreme Court ruling on abortion that's expected later this year. So how much do these and other bills around the country matter?
Mary Ziegler is watching all this. She is a professor and legal historian at Florida State University College of Law. Good morning.
MARY ZIEGLER: Hi, Steve. How are you?
INSKEEP: How, if at all, are these laws in multiple states changing the availability of abortion?
ZIEGLER: Well, they obviously have a chilling effect because many people who are listening to this don't understand. If you live in the state of Oklahoma, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to think that abortion was already criminal. And SB8-style bills, Texas-style bills, can likely go into effect immediately, and that's going to have an effect not only in the state where they're enacted but in neighboring states as well because we know that there have already been people traveling from state to state because of restrictions already on the books.
INSKEEP: I'm just thinking about the map here. If you were in Texas, if you were affected by the Texas law and you decided to go out of state, one of the obvious places to go would be Oklahoma, which doesn't seem so safe anymore.
ZIEGLER: Exactly, yeah. So we're - and we're going to see more and more of this as time goes on, especially if the Supreme Court does, as predicted, overrule Roe v. Wade. We're going to see really kind of entire regions out of business when it comes to abortion.
INSKEEP: In a practical sense, how does that affect women who are in that situation, given the current state of medical science, which is a little different than it was, I suppose, in 1972?
ZIEGLER: Well, it's different insofar as there's now medication abortion, and there are non-governmental organizations abroad that make abortion medication available or will mail it to you even in places where it's illegal. So at least for early abortions, self-managed medication abortion can be a safe option. With that said, there are going to be people who don't have internet access. There are going to be people who need to have abortions later in pregnancy. There are going to be people who have complications when they do have abortions, even with medication. So that's far from a perfect solution for people seeking abortions, but it's definitely a game changer compared to where we were in the '60s and '70s.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about the implications of a Supreme Court ruling. You mentioned that it's been widely predicted that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. We don't know that. We don't know precisely what the court will rule. We don't know if there is some nuance or subtlety here. But we do know that for many years, multiple states have had trigger laws on the books that would automatically ban abortion in the event of a Supreme Court ruling that made it possible. Now we have this new raft of laws that have been passed in recent months. How does the landscape change on the day after a Supreme Court ruling if it does in some way reduce or eliminate Roe v. Wade?
ZIEGLER: Well, if it reduces Roe v. Wade, then things get really complicated because we have both sort of zombie laws, pre-Roe bans and trigger laws. All of those need Roe v. Wade to be overturned to go into effect. And that would, of course, raise the question of what exactly just happened, right? Did the Supreme Court overrule Roe v. Wade, or did they just cut back? Is, you know, partially overruling Roe v. Wade enough? And the different laws have different mechanisms for determining that. Sometimes the attorney general needs to weigh in. Sometimes it's not even clear what would happen. So on the day after, there would be a lot of chaos. You would imagine, if the overruling is clear enough, that somewhere, you know, within weeks or, you know, in some cases a month after the overruling of Roe, all of those criminal laws would go into effect, and you would see essentially, you know, massive shutdowns of abortion clinics across large swaths of the South and Midwest.
INSKEEP: I guess we could also see massive lawsuits, given the nature of some of the laws being passed.
ZIEGLER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we - and we would see - we would even see lawsuits, as I mentioned, about, you know, figuring out whether Roe v. Wade was, in fact, gone entirely or not.
INSKEEP: Do you assume that that chaos is in our near future, that the Supreme Court is going to change the Roe v. Wade standard in some way?
ZIEGLER: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would be shocked if Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land in a few years. I mean, I think it's really just a question of if it happens this year or in the next few years. I think there's really - I would be shocked if the Supreme Court saved abortion rights in the long term.
INSKEEP: Mary Ziegler is a professor at Florida State University College of Law, also attached to Harvard. Thank you so much.
ZIEGLER: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/as-more-states-restrict-reproductive-rights-abortion-options-dwindle | 2022-05-12T15:30:14Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
The economy has been flashing a lot of mixed signals this week. Prices are up. GDP is down. The stock market has been zigzagging even more than usual. And the Federal Reserve is poised for what's expected to be a big jump in interest rates next week. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now to try to make sense of all this. Hey, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good afternoon.
SCHMITZ: Scott, there was a big headline this week saying the U.S. economy actually shrank in the first three months of this year. How worried should we be?
HORSLEY: Nobody likes to see GDP going backwards. Some commentators even dragged out that scary word from the 1970s, stagflation...
SCHMITZ: Oh, yeah.
HORSLEY: ...Meaning the worst of both worlds, high inflation and stagnant growth. But, you know, that's not really what we have today. We do have the high inflation, but there's nothing stagnant about the U.S. economy right now. The main driver of economic activity, consumer spending, is still quite strong. People are spending differently now. They're traveling more than they were earlier in the pandemic, for example. Peter Wright runs a boutique hotel in Tampa. And even though it's costing more for his guests to drive there, he says a lot of people are eager to make the trip.
PETER WRIGHT: They've been saving their money during the pandemic, and now they want to get away. And we see a lot of local staycations as well, people that were pent up. We see a lot of local people coming for a few nights and enjoying our restaurant and enjoying the pool. And they're looking to spend money.
HORSLEY: Consumer spending jumped 1.1% in March, which was more than many forecasters were expecting.
SCHMITZ: So, Scott, it sounds like people are not being turned off by higher prices.
HORSLEY: In most cases, no. Obviously, some customers are more sensitive to price hikes than others. McDonald's said this week that the price of Big Macs and French fries has gone up about 8% over the last year. And CFO Kevin Ozan says some people are downsizing their orders as a result but not very many.
KEVIN OZAN: Consumers are definitely worried about inflation. There's no doubt about that. They're concerned about energy and gas prices. And we are keeping certainly a close watch on lower-end consumers just to make sure that we're still providing the right value for our lower-end consumers.
HORSLEY: Ozan notes people might be a little more tolerant of rising restaurant prices because the prices at the supermarket have been going up even faster.
SCHMITZ: So the Federal Reserve says it's determined to get inflation under control. What is it doing?
HORSLEY: Fed policymakers are expected to approve another increase in interest rates next week. The Fed's been keeping a particularly close eye on wages. It's worried that if wages continue to climb at a rapid rate, that could force employers to raise prices even higher. We got a warning light this morning when the Commerce Department reported that wages rose 1.2% in the first three months of this year. That's not quite as fast as wages were going up last summer. But economist Sarah House of Wells Fargo says it's still a pretty big increase.
SARAH HOUSE: I think this shows that the heat remains turned up on compensation costs. And importantly for the Fed, that's a more persistent source of inflation that they have to deal with.
HORSLEY: And the bad news for workers is, even though wages are rising fast enough to alarm the Fed, they're not actually keeping pace with inflation. So the average worker is seeing her spending power eroded by these rising prices.
SCHMITZ: So let me get this straight. If wages are not keeping up with inflation, does that mean that this will ultimately go to put the brakes on spending?
HORSLEY: Well, it could, but we're not seeing that yet, at least not on a large scale. Keep in mind a lot of people saved money early in the pandemic when they couldn't travel or eat out very much. And, of course, the government was sending out those big relief payments. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told Bloomberg a lot of that money is still sitting in people's bank accounts waiting to be spent.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BRIAN MOYNIHAN: A consumer with $1,000 to $2,000 before the pandemic average in their account now has $7,000 in the account. All that says there's a lot of dry powder on the consumer side. So that's the good news.
HORSLEY: Now, that saving shock absorber won't last forever, of course. People are saving less money now than they were a year ago. In fact, the personal savings rate in March was the lowest it's been in nine years.
SCHMITZ: That's NPR's Scott Horsley. Scott, thank you.
HORSLEY: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/consumers-spent-more-than-expected-in-march-which-is-helping-with-economic-recovery | 2022-05-12T15:30:20Z |
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Jacky Hunt-Broersma ran a marathon yesterday. She also ran a marathon the day before that and the day before that. She claimed a record 102 marathons in as many days. She did this even though she lost a leg to cancer. Her goal was 100 marathons. Then somebody else ran 101, so she did 102. And she is now celebrating by running two extra marathons to cool off. I think I'll go for a walk. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/despite-losing-a-leg-to-cancer-jacky-hunt-broersma-chases-marathon-record | 2022-05-12T15:30:26Z |
Updated April 29, 2022 at 8:56 AM ET
Dolly Parton hit a trifecta with her latest project Run, Rose, Run – it's a thriller, a studio album and will eventually be turned into a movie.
Parton wrote the album the same time she was writing the novel with author James Patterson.
Run, Rose, Run is about an aspiring country singer named AnnieLee. She moves to Nashville, trying to shake a dark past and make it big in music. She gets help from charismatic country star Ruthanna, who wears wigs and fake nails. Sound familiar?
"Ruthanna is very much my personality this day and time," Parton said. "And I'm hoping to get to play her in a movie that we are going to make from the book ... I don't think I have to do too much acting on that one."
Those plans are already in the works, with Reese Witherspoon announcing last month that her company, Hello Sunshine, will adapt the novel into a film.
Parton and Patterson spoke with NPR's Rachel Martin about the book, which is out now.
The following interview has been condensed and edited. To listen to the broadcast version of this story, use the audio player at the top of the page.
Rachel Martin, Morning Edition: A lot of the scenes take place in this dive bar in Nashville. This is where Ruthanna first sees AnnieLee. I just love the description of the place.
Patterson: I went to school in Nashville and back then the Grand Ole Opry was still in town. And in those days it was kind of small honky-tonk bars and you could not sit in one for 15 minutes without somebody coming in off the street and just sitting down and singing.
Dolly, do you have your own memories of places like that?
Parton: Oh, absolutely. And I think there are still plenty of bars just like that scattered around throughout the country where there really are still honky-tonks. And we've got some upgraded ones in Nashville now because everybody has a bar. But yes, I've worked in every little bar. I've done everything in my lifetime ... And so I've been in every bar, every kind of situation in the world. You kind of have to do that when you're starting out in country music."
When asked when she last visited a dive bar, Parton said with a laugh, "Oh, just the other day."
AnnieLee can't afford her own guitar, so she plays the guitar that's at the bar. And I notice kind of a throughline in the novel. There are these instruments that carry a lot of significance. Dolly, is there a particular guitar in your past or present life that carries a good story with it?"
Parton: Absolutely. I had a little Martin guitar. When I was seven years old, I got my first guitar and I love that little guitar. I wrote songs all the way up till I left home at age 18. I put it up in the loft of a house that we had with all the intentions of when I got rich or could afford it, I was going to get it restored and keep it forever. But unfortunately, the loft burned out of our house – mom and dad's house – and I lost my little guitar. So all through the years, I have still collected little baby Martin guitars because that's still my favorite guitar.
I love the portrait that is drawn in this book of the character Ethan Blake. These are the kind of session musicians who make the industry work. They are super talented, but they aren't the big stars. Dolly, why was it important for you and Jim to capture this in this book?
Parton: Well, I think that it's very important that you tell the truth. And that's kind of the way that it happens, even though, AnnieLee had a darker past than I did, of course. But almost everybody that comes here has a past and they're always running to something, and some are running from something. But mostly they're running to a future. And I certainly relate to the hard times of having to keep your eyes out for the snakes in the grass, the people that are out to just make money off of you, use you up, whatever. That happens all the time. But so I completely thought, what myself, that it is important for us to capture that. And James has done a wonderful job doing that, for sure.
Patterson: There's so much talent – and Dolly knows this better than I do – there's so much musical talent in Nashville and elsewhere, and so many people dream of making it. And some of them don't make it. And that's one of the things that drives this story.
At one point early in the book, Ruthanna is trying to test AnnieLee to see if she's got the real stuff it takes to make it. And Ruthanna is describing how tough life can be as a touring musician, especially when you're first starting out. And then, Jim, you wrote this line: Ruthanna says, "It's not a normal way to live." Dolly, have you given that warning to aspiring musicians?
Parton: No, I think that everybody has to walk that road according to their own rules and according to their own talent and what they're willing to sacrifice. But Ruthanna, she had told her to go home, get out of the business, whatever, I would never do that because I'll never crush another person's dreams like that because I know how serious they are. But that's another part of this book that I love, to show you that no matter how hard it is, that dreams do still come true.
Dolly, I need to ask, you were nominated to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Last month you released a statement saying, "Even though I'm extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated, I don't feel I have earned that right...so I must respectfully bow out." What do you do if, despite your objections, you're still inducted?
Parton: Well, I'll accept gracefully. I would just say thanks and I'll accept it because the fans vote. But when I said that, it was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for the people in rock music, and I have found out lately that it's not necessarily that. But if they can't go there to be recognized, where do they go? So I just felt like I would be taking away from someone that maybe deserved it, certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist. But obviously, there's more to it than that.
Kurt Gardinier contributed to this story.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/dreams-do-still-come-true-in-a-new-novel-by-dolly-parton-and-james-patterson | 2022-05-12T15:30:32Z |
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
I'm in Michigan because of a lie. It's a lie that still holds a lot of sway here, this false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Now, no evidence whatsoever has ever backed up this claim. But just last month, while on stage stumping for local candidates in the Detroit suburbs, Trump trotted out this same lie again.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: We did win, and we won big. We won big. And we won big in Michigan.
(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)
CHANG: Nope, Trump did not win big. He didn't win at all. He lost Michigan by 154,000 votes. And despite all evidence confirming this margin of loss, Trump's big lie has taken hold of and animated large swaths of the Republican Party all across the country, including here in Michigan.
ZACH GORCHOW: And you can look no further than what happened at state Republican convention on April 23.
CHANG: That's Zach Gorchow of the Gongwer News Service in Michigan.
GORCHOW: They're the ones doing all the work. They are the spine of the party. And they voted to back for secretary of state in the state of Michigan and attorney general in the state of Michigan...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Candidate for secretary of state, Kristina Karamo.
KRISTINA KARAMO: Thank you.
GORCHOW: ...Two unknowns, kind of fringe characters whose whole cause has been the election was stolen.
CHANG: Gorchow's talking about Kristina Karamo, who is running for secretary of state in Michigan, and Matt DePerno, who's running for state attorney general. Zach Gorchow, whom you just heard from earlier, tracks all things political in Michigan. And when I met him on a cold, gray day in the shadow of the Michigan State Capitol...
GORCHOW: ...Everybody who's got to be too in front...
CHANG: You're like a five-minute walk away from...
GORCHOW: Yeah.
CHANG: ...All your sources.
GORCHOW: Right, yes. Exactly. That's why it's important to be close to the Capitol.
CHANG: He walked me through one of the incidents here that had helped give rise to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
GORCHOW: First was what happened in a small county in northern Michigan called Antrim County. On election night in this county, which is a solidly Republican county, numbers started to show that Joe Biden and Democrats down the ticket were winning Antrim County by a substantial margin. Immediately, this went from, boy, this doesn't make any sense - what's going on? - to, among a set of President Trump supporters, this is a sign the election is being stolen.
CHANG: Now, election officials caught the mistake. They corrected it, and Trump won the county. Still, conspiracy theories did not stop there because more than 200 miles south in Detroit, chaos was unfolding at what was then known as the TCF center, where absentee ballots were getting counted.
GORCHOW: As everyone knows nationally, Republicans were tending to vote in person in 2020, and Democrats were using the absentee process. So it was sort of known there's a huge outstanding absentee ballot vote, and it's going to be heavily Democratic.
CHANG: And those votes did indeed take away Trump's early lead.
GORCHOW: And so I think that's what drove a lot of Republicans to go down to TCF Center in Detroit. And, you know, let's not sugarcoat this - suspicions about race playing some sort of a role in the factor because Detroit is, I believe, the nation's largest Black city. Most of the elected leadership out of the city of Detroit is Black. And so metropolitan Detroit is a very segregated place. And so there's long been this tension, assumptions - Detroit is corrupt. And when I say assumptions - by white suburbanites, by and large.
CHANG: And in November 2020, those tensions boiled over.
GORCHOW: Republican activists who have not been given permission to be in there as poll challengers descend on TCF center and are pounding on the doors demanding to get in. They do not have the right to be there, but they immediately start casting this as we're being shut out. Funny business is going on.
CHANG: Now fast-forward to today. This false idea that Trump won in 2020, it still drives much of the Michigan Republican Party, including the candidacy of Kristina Karamo. Remember, she's running for secretary of state, which means if she does win, she could be in charge of elections in Michigan.
How much power would she have over how elections unfold here in Michigan? Give us a sense.
GORCHOW: Considerable power, not end all, be all. Ultimately, the courts are the final arbiter of how the Michigan election law and the Michigan Campaign Finance Act are enforced, but you have considerable administrative authority. If the secretary of state believes that a local county clerk or local municipal clerk is not enforcing election law, they can come in and take over. That's a substantial power. And you could just imagine, you know, could Kristina Karamo - if she decides the Detroit city clerk, the Wayne County clerk, any of these areas that tend to vote heavily Democratic are not, in her view, enforcing the election law properly could cause considerable tumult.
CHANG: So how many other Republican candidates campaigning this year for the upcoming midterm elections - how many of them are mostly attacking the election of 2020 itself rather than their political opponents specifically?
GORCHOW: Well, in the governor's race right now, we have 10 candidates for governor, and most of them are not focusing on the election. There are a couple of fringier candidates who are making no bones about the fact they think the election was stolen. Garrett Soldano and Ryan Kelley would probably be at the forefront of that.
CHANG: Right.
GORCHOW: When you get further down the ticket, and you look at the races for the Michigan Senate and the Michigan House, you do have a number of candidates campaigning for Republican nominations who are all in on the election was stolen. They've been endorsed by former President Trump because they are campaigning on that basis.
CHANG: Well, given that there is a strong current in this state of people who believe the election of 2020 was stolen, are they concerned about not only this upcoming election, but elections going forward in terms of - you know, former President Trump used misinformation about the 2020 election in Michigan to try to overturn the election. And a lot of Republicans are still continuing to cast doubt. So what sort of concerns are you hearing from voters or politicians about the potential for a real crisis in elections ahead?
GORCHOW: There's a lot of concern out there about what's going to happen after these 2022 elections. Every county has its own board of canvassers that certifies their results...
CHANG: Right.
GORCHOW: ...Before the state does. And those folks are chosen by local political parties. And there's been a lot of good reporting done that in counties all across the state, Republicans who believe the election was stolen are getting put onto these boards.
One of the saving graces of the 2020 election was that the election was certified in all 83 counties by every bipartisan board of canvassers. And you just wonder, could we have a situation this November where some of these counties don't certify the election because of this idea that there's fraud - false fraud ideas? And it will definitely be a crisis.
CHANG: Zach Gorchow is executive editor and publisher of Gongwer Michigan News Service. Thank you so much for meeting with us today.
GORCHOW: It was great to be with you.
CHANG: And that board of canvassers you just heard Zach Gorchow talk about - well, on Monday, we're going to hear how a member of one board voted to certify Joe Biden's win in 2020 and then faced a backlash from her fellow Republicans.
Was there ever a moment of any doubt where you thought maybe I shouldn't certify?
UNIDENTIFIED CANVASSER: No, absolutely not.
CHANG: That's Monday on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/election-denialism-beliefs-animate-some-gop-candidates-in-michigan | 2022-05-12T15:30:38Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
For millions of people, working from home has not meant working fewer hours. Worldwide, the average workday has grown longer, about 49 minutes longer over the past year. And people are going to more meetings than they were before the pandemic began. What's more, data from the Census Bureau suggests that 30% of Americans are showing symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.
The team at NPR's Life Kit, along with journalist Celeste Headlee, consulted a therapist to get some advice on how to relax a little more and work a little less.
CELESTE HEADLEE, BYLINE: Amelia Aldao is a therapist in New York City who specializes in treating anxiety. Not only has she seen an increase in the number of patients complaining about burnout, she's experienced some of it herself.
AMELIA ALDAO: I'm a therapist. I run a clinic. I train students and other trainees. I do consulting for startups. And I'm the mom of twins.
HEADLEE: How old are the twins?
ALDAO: They are 3 years old.
HEADLEE: Oh.
ALDAO: I know. So - and I've been co-parenting, working from home, you know, in the pandemic and all that fun stuff. And it's been very challenging. And especially in my line of work - and this is something that my colleagues, you know, share as well - we are, you know, in the frontlines of people's emotional wellbeing.
HEADLEE: Aldao says one of her patients tends to overbook herself, a woman who overcommits and feels pressured to do everything she's asked to do. That pressure, Aldao says, comes from our internal voice - our parents, our families and our workplaces.
ALDAO: And it gets positively reinforced - right? - because the more she does, the more praise she gets, the more accolades she gets but, obviously, the more she's stretching herself thin. And she was getting to the point that she wasn't being able to fulfill many of these obligations.
HEADLEE: Aldao's suggested treatment was what she jokingly calls the year of no, playing off of Shonda Rhimes' bestselling book. Aldao encouraged her patient to find opportunities to turn down requests and then sit with the guilt she felt as a result, let the feeling pass through her.
ALDAO: Guilt - it's obviously a very, very problematic emotion. But like every other emotion, it sort of - it makes sense - right? - in the right context. So given that, it would make sense that we would feel guilty when we don't meet them or when we feel like we haven't met them. That's what guilt is there for, right? It's a signal that things are not going the way we think they should.
HEADLEE: Aldao recommends setting aside time every day to not be productive, to do something silly or fun. Schedule that time in the way you would a trip to the gym. It's easier to prevent the guilt, she says, than to grapple with it once you feel it.
ALDAO: Once it shows up, it's really hard to work with it because it's a very, very powerful emotion. So a lot of the work needs to be done upfront in a way so that we feel less guilty.
HEADLEE: The point of all this is not just to relieve anxiety but also to establish boundaries, to choose a closing time when your workday ends and the relaxation begins. Be careful about reading the news at that point, though. Aldao says some of the stress people feel now traces back to the chaotic news cycle. Her advice - walk away if you feel yourself tensing up, and edit your social media feeds.
ALDAO: Add more accounts that are fun and exciting and relaxing, right? So I don't know. Maybe it's more cooking or exercising or plans or travel or architecture.
HEADLEE: Dogs. I recommend dog accounts.
ALDAO: Dogs. There you go - dogs, cat accounts.
HEADLEE: Yeah.
ALDAO: You know what I mean? Like, the internet is full of cats, right?
SCHMITZ: That's therapist Amelia Aldao speaking to journalist Celeste Headlee. Celeste focused on overwork and how to relax during an episode of NPR's Life Kit. You can find it at npr.org/lifekit.
(SOUNDBITE OF JACK JOHNSON SONG, "UPSIDE DOWN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/encore-why-you-feel-so-guilty-when-youre-not-working | 2022-05-12T15:30:39Z |
Stocks sank on Friday, ending what has been a miserable month for markets, especially for Big Tech.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly 1,000 points, while the S&P 500 lost more than 3%, with both indexes posting hefty losses for April.
But it was a lot worse for the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which sank more than 4% on Friday and ended down more than 10% for April, its worst month since 2008.
The deep declines reflect a time of deep uncertainty at a moment when the economic landscape is changing rapidly.
Here are the top three things sinking Wall Street.
Big Tech is going from winner to loser
The pandemic was good for Big Tech earnings.
Buoyed by low interest rates and the sudden pivot to quarantines and remote work, companies from Netflix to Zoom had some banner months in terms of profits.
And what is good for Big Tech is generally good for markets given that information technology companies account for 28 percent of the S&P 500.
But things have changed — and swiftly.
The world is learning to live with COVID. Workers are returning to their offices. Demand for travel is booming. And restaurants are filling up again.
That means Big Tech is now competing with other demands on peoples' time.
Netflix shocked Wall Street last week after announcing it lost subscribers in the first three months of the year, the first time that's happened in more than a decade. The announcement sent shares down by more than 40%.
Other Big Tech companies have also reported disappointing earnings or outlooks, with a few exceptions, such as Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Amazon on Thursday posted its first quarterly loss since 2015, partly because people returned to shopping in physical stores, marking a sharp contrast to the pandemic when profits at the online retailer boomed.
Meanwhile, Apple posted very strong results, but its share price fell after it warned that COVID-19 lockdowns in China could impact supply chains, and hence sales.
The Fed is fighting inflation — and it could get rough
It's not just Big Tech earnings though.
The market has already been under pressure as the U.S. deals with its highest inflation levels in about 40 years.
Those surging prices have proven to be a persistent, pernicious problem for the U.S. and global economies.
But investors aren't just worried about inflation itself, which is at a 40-year high, they are also unsure about whether the Federal Reserve will be successful fighting it.
At the Fed's last meeting, the central bank decided to hike interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, but Fed Chair Powell Jerome Powell and other policy makers have since signaled they are preparing a much more aggressive response.
The Fed is now widely expected to raise interest rates by half a percentage point at its follow-up meeting next week, and markets are bracing for more rate hikes this year.
"I think that the market has wanted the Fed to fight this fight," says Lori Calvasina, the head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. "But I do think the market is unsettled by the idea of these big, chunky, kind of quick increases."
The Fed has a tricky job to do. The goal is to engineer a so-called soft landing. It's trying to slow down the economy just enough to cool down inflation.
But raising interest rates is never an exact science, and investors fear the Fed will be too aggressive and unintentionally tip the economy into a recession.
To be sure, a recession is still not seen as a likely outcome, but it's widely seen as a potential threat to the economy.
Then there's China and the war in Ukraine
If the prospect of recession wasn't enough, Wall Street is also dealing with a challenging geopolitical environment.
China is implementing stringent rules to fight a spike in COVID-19 cases. Shanghai has been under a lockdown for five weeks now and the government has closed ports and factories in some of the country's largest cities.
The consequences of that crackdown could have ripple effects around the world.
During the pandemic, supply-chain issues proved to be a huge problem, helping to fuel higher prices. Manufacturing slowed, and deliveries were delayed. Now, there is a fear that supply-chain issues could linger longer.
Meanwhile, Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to impact companies while putting pressure on commodity prices.
Since late February, Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, has traded above $100 a barrel. Previously, it was trading in the $70-to-$80 range.
But it's not just energy prices that have surged. Because of the incursion, and the sanctions and trade restrictions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, prices for grains and metals have also soared.
Apple CEO Tim Cook warned about the global challenges when presenting earnings results this week.
"I want to acknowledge the challenges we are seeing from supply chain disruptions driven by both COVID and silicon shortages to the devastation from the war in Ukraine," he said on the call.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/here-are-3-reasons-why-stocks-are-tanking | 2022-05-12T15:30:46Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
We recently asked you, all our listeners, to tell us about the people in your communities who enrich the lives of others. You wrote in, and today we introduce you to Jenna Fournel. Almost every Saturday morning, she pulls an old wooden table into her front yard and piles it with produce, about 30 pounds every week.
JENNA FOURNEL: There might be a basket of greens and a basket of beans and a basket of eggplant.
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
There might be peppers, many watermelons, flowers depending on the season. It all comes from Jonah's garden in Alexandria, Va., that she tends with her son Leal and her husband. There's also often fresh cookies and breads, and it's all free. Lisa Delmonico lives down the street.
LISA DELMONICO: It's just lovely. Like, you drive by, and it just looks like this beautiful bounty of generosity.
KELLY: The bounty, however, is rooted in grief. In the fall of 2019, Jenna's youngest son, Oli (ph), got sick with a rare disease. And in a matter of days, he died. He was 8 years old.
SCHMITZ: Jenna and her family were devastated. They realized they needed something to keep their hands and minds busy.
FOURNEL: We suddenly thought about the spirit of Oli.
SCHMITZ: Specifically, Jenna thought about one of Oli's school assignments that was returned to her after he died. He'd been asked to write about what he'd do if he got $100. He said he'd buy supplies for stray dogs.
FOURNEL: And we thought, what's a way to keep that spirit of loving kindness alive in our own lives and for others?
KELLY: Which led to the idea to expand the garden, a garden that Oli had loved, and give away its bounty. Then the pandemic hit, and Jenna and her elder son, Leal, had a lot of time to garden. One day while they were working, they decided to name it.
FOURNEL: Leal had the idea of calling it L&O Farms (ph), so the L for Leal and the O for Oli.
SCHMITZ: Jenna and Leal painted a sign and put out the boys' old picnic table with their produce. Soon, the neighbors caught on.
FOURNEL: Suddenly, the isolation of COVID felt less isolating because we had created this space for getting to know people and building our own - building new stories for ourselves in our lives at a time when we really needed that. And I think everybody did.
KELLY: Neighbors who'd lived near each other for more than a decade met for the first time at that farm table. Now they come every Saturday. Some have even planted their own gardens with seedlings from L&O Farms. Again, neighbor Lisa Delmonico.
DELMONICO: Jenna just started this, like, sort of movement in our neighborhood, and it's, like, the most lovely thing. I feel a sense of community that maybe wasn't the same before, and I really attribute it to Jenna.
KELLY: Jenna Fournel, who channeled her grief and late son's kindness into nourishing her neighbors.
SCHMITZ: And if you want to tell us about someone special in your community, you can reach us on Twitter at @npratc. There's a pinned tweet right at the top.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OCTOPUS'S GARDEN")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) He'd let us in, knows where we've been in his octopus's garden in the shade. I'd ask my friends to come and see. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/how-one-woman-turned-her-grief-into-nourishment-for-her-community | 2022-05-12T15:30:52Z |
There's an ad for Newport cigarettes from 2011 that features a young Black couple, smiling and flirting over a plate of burger and fries. Beneath them simply reads the tagline "pleasure!" A different ad in this campaign has another young Black couple, smiling over a park fence by some rafters while one of them holds a cigarette. Another ad features, yes, another young Black couple smiling and laughing – this time at a coffee shop.
Menthol cigarettes have been historically heavily marketed toward Black Americans. And that's had a strong enough impact that when the Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on menthol cigarettes yesterday, the agency specifically noted that the move would save the lives of 92,000 to 238,000 African Americans.
"It's a long time coming," said Keith Wailoo, author of the book Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette.
In 1964, federal regulators barred tobacco companies from advertising to their key youth demographic. That meant no advertising on college campuses. No handing out free loose cigarettes to people under 21. "It's then that the industry began to pivot aggressively towards targeted marketing in Black communities," said Wailoo.
"A lot of Black periodicals, like Ebony, became so dependent on tobacco advertising, that they were silent of the devastating impact of smoking in the Black community," he said.
And the push went beyond just imagery in magazines and billboards. Tobacco industries specifically found influencers in Black communities — Wailoo said it could be a barber, a bellhop — and gave them free samples, to build markets surreptitiously. The companies also sponsored events like the Kool Jazz Festival, that included an ad of Dizzy Gillespie next to a pack of Kools.
According to a 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 85% of Black smokers preferred menthol cigarettes.
The FDA had banned flavored cigarettes from being manufactured or sold in 2009. But menthol cigarettes slipped by because of a split in the Black Congressional Caucus -- many of whom looked to campaign donations and support, said Wailoo.
Yesterday's move by the FDA was encouraged by the NAACP, which sent out a statement earlier in the week noting the tobacco industry's "egregious marketing practices," including giving out free cigarettes.
"This pattern of activity continues today with expanded marketing strategies like supporting and providing sponsorship funding for events, supporting various Black leaders with financial support, discounting menthol products in Black neighborhoods, and abundant advertising in stores frequented by Black communities," reads the statement, which notes that the NAACP itself received funding from the tobacco industry until two decades ago.
According to the FDA proposal, the menthol enhances nicotine's addictiveness. And the flavor makes the cigarettes "easier" to use. The industry, according to Wailoo, knows them to be great "starter products."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/how-the-tobacco-industry-targeted-black-americans-with-menthol-smokes | 2022-05-12T15:30:58Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
The new horror movie "Hatching" began with a one-sentence idea.
HANNA BERGHOLM: A boy hatches a doppelganger out of an egg.
SCHMITZ: That's director Hanna Bergholm. "Hatching" is her directorial debut. She says when screenwriter Ilja Rautsi brought it to her, her immediate reaction was...
BERGHOLM: Super-cool idea. But I really want to change the lead character into a girl.
SCHMITZ: So the lead character became Tinja, a tween gymnast living a picture-perfect life with her hapless dad, annoying brother and an intimidating social media influencer mother.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HATCHING")
SOPHIA HEIKKILA: (As Aiti, speaking Finnish).
SCHMITZ: One day, Tinja finds a mysterious egg in the woods, which she brings home and nurtures till it hatches. What comes out of the egg is a gooey, slimy creature who becomes Tinja's best friend until it starts causing trouble for her and the people around her. This is a film ultimately about a girl's transformation from childhood to adolescence. When I sat down with director Hanna Bergholm, I asked her to talk about how puberty lends itself so well to a horror movie.
BERGHOLM: We didn't really want to make a horror film where all the horror starts just because the girl has her first period and she reaches puberty. But we wanted her to be in the age when she's starting to change from being a child into a teenager. But her real problems are that her mother is so dominating and doesn't really allow her to be freely herself. So we really wanted to tell about this kind of twisted mother-daughter relationship that happens in the time when the girl is in, kind of preteen.
SCHMITZ: And in some ways, you know, the only thing scarier than the monster in this movie is the mother. Very early on in the film, she breaks an injured bird's neck without any emotion at all. And it sort of sets the tone. And she's very domineering and cold. She forces her daughter to practice gymnastic routines until her hands are bleeding, and she has really high expectations of her daughter. What were you trying to say about relationships between moms and daughters with this character?
BERGHOLM: Well, I really wanted to explore this kind of mother-daughter relationship where the mother kind of sees her daughter as something that belongs to her. And this mother has kind of unfulfilled dreams in her sport career and something. So now she sees her daughter as the opportunity to kind of fulfill her own ambitions. So I really wanted to explore this kind of relationship where she doesn't really see the daughter as a real person but instead of something that is there to fulfill her.
SCHMITZ: Yeah. And the mother is also really obsessed with her image and this idea of perfection. I mean, you see this throughout the film from the design of their house to the constant selfies she takes of her and her family for her blog. Why did you make that part of this film?
BERGHOLM: Well, in kind of very first screenplay draft, we were just telling about the family who is trying to keep up appearances, especially mother, who is trying to keep up appearances. And then I started to think that, what is today's way of keeping up appearances? And I think that is really social media. And then we made the mother into an influencer, and then everything started to kind of click into place. And also, I really wanted to design the whole look of the film to show the mother's world, how everything is so controlled that it's kind of too controlled and too pretty. So it starts to be creepy.
SCHMITZ: It's so controlled that after a while, you start to see the - sort of this ugliness through the creature and then also through the mom's - sort of her behavior, which is just...
BERGHOLM: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: ...Downright scary.
BERGHOLM: Yeah. Well, I think the mother is the real monster. And maybe the monster is the most normal person in the family.
SCHMITZ: Right, because the monster - it's a hatchling. It's a baby that's transforming into something.
BERGHOLM: Yeah. With our wonderful special effects team, we were designing the monsters. So that what I was describing to them - that I want this monster to be kind of like a smelly teenager that's raging to its parents and, at the same time, just wants to be cuddled and loved. And it's kind of all over the place with its emotions. It kind of shows everything that mother doesn't want to see in her daughter. So it's totally contrary to this perfect gymnast girl. And it's just disgusting and slimy and - but it's not all evil.
SCHMITZ: Right. Right. And it's - and then, of course, it makes its own transformation throughout the film. You know, the way that you introduce your characters puts the audience firmly on the side of Tinja, the daughter, who seems to be the only family member left with a moral compass, which, you know, in some ways is how it sort of feels to be an adolescent - that feeling that everyone around you is out of touch with reality and that you're the only normal person in your family. You're going through so many changes and the isolation and awkwardness that goes along with that time of your life. You know, in the United States, we don't see a topic like, you know, puberty and that transformation in films very often. You know, people don't really talk about it too much. Does this feel a little taboo to you at all?
BERGHOLM: Well, I wouldn't say that it's a taboo kind of telling stories about puberty and teenagers. But what I do think is kind of taboo is talking about kind of periods and menstrual blood and all those and slime. And so what I kind of wanted to do in this film was that, in the style of the film, I wanted to put everything that is considered feminine and lovely - kind of roses and pastel colors. And in the middle of this, there is this kind of just bloody and slimy, disgusting thing.
SCHMITZ: So this is your first feature film. It's gotten excellent reviews. Do you think there's more to do here? Will you continue to pursue these kind of uncomfortable topics like you did in this film?
BERGHOLM: Yes, I would say so. We are now - with the same screenwriter, Ilja Rautsi, we are now co-writing our next feature film. And that is also kind of a mother-child story because it's about a mother, a woman who gives birth to her first child. And this woman has very high expectations on how wonderful it will be to be a mother. But when the child is born, she suddenly feels that she can't connect with this baby. And the baby's weird and actually very scary, and she becomes convinced that this is not human. It's something else than human, this baby. And so I really wanted to tell about this difficult and painful side of motherly love in this new film.
SCHMITZ: Thank you very much.
BERGHOLM: Thank you.
SCHMITZ: Hanna Bergholm is the director of the new movie "Hatching." It's in theaters now.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HATCHING")
SIIRI SOLALINNA: (As Tinja, singing in Finnish). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/in-hanna-bergholms-new-horror-film-a-girls-adolescence-is-hatching | 2022-05-12T15:30:59Z |
The internet is replete with opinions on what happened in the latest celebrity drama starring director and actress Olivia Wilde and former Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudeikis, and yet many questions remain.
Did Sudeikis really ask for Wilde, the mother of his children, to be served custody papers while she was onstage at the CinemaCon convention?
Do we believe the Ted Lasso star, who is beloved for his nice-guy character, when his representatives say he thinks the whole incident was "inappropriate"?
In an effort to answer these questions, NPR spoke with Bill Falkner, owner of Clark County Process Service, based in Las Vegas, where Wilde was served. (His firm did not serve Wilde.)
Falkner admits that processors can go to great, and sometimes strange, lengths to deliver legal documents on behalf of their clients.
"I've seen some odd things," Falkner, who has been in the business since 2015, told NPR over the phone.
But, he concedes, this incident was more public than anything he has ever seen. (More than 4,000 industry people were reportedly in the audience, watching as it all went down.)
The manner in which the Wilde-Sudeikis case was handled makes Falkner "curious about what other methods and what other attempts had been made" to serve Wilde prior to the onstage drama.
"I have never come across a client or been involved in a serve where this would be the first thing we do," he explained.
Usually, a process server will try to serve a person at that individual's home or place of work.
"This is like a last-ditch effort," he said about the unusual way Wilde was served.
What happened at CinemaCon, exactly?
On Tuesday night, while Wilde was onstage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas to introduce her newest film, Don't Worry Darling, a woman got up from the audience, walked to the lip of the stage and slid a manila envelope toward her.
As she bent down to grab it, she said something along the lines of, "What's this, a script?"
It certainly wasn't.
Turns out the envelope contained legal documents "drawn up to establish jurisdiction relating to the children of Ms. Wilde and Mr. Sudeikis," Sudeikis' representatives told the Los Angeles Times.
Wilde appeared unfazed by the mystery envelope's contents. While it could have been a mortifying moment in Wilde's life, she simply carried on talking about her film.
Since the very public interruption, Sudeikis' representatives have said he "had no prior knowledge of the time or place that the envelope would have been delivered as this would solely be up to the process service company involved and he would never condone her being served in such an inappropriate manner."
The rules of process serving
In Falkner's business, how someone is served papers is up to him, Falkner said.
He said he prefers consulting with clients and their lawyers on the manner of delivery, "because if we don't make clients happy, they don't come back."
Rules on when and where a person can be served vary from state to state. Falkner said while some states forbid service on Sunday and others limit the hours during which someone can be served, that's not the case in Nevada.
According to Falkner, who said he has served his share of famous entertainers, a loose code of ethics is in place that says a processor should use good judgment and not "do things that are inappropriate or cause undue attention or anything like that." But there are no real ramifications for violating that.
Tracking someone down
When he finds himself in hard-to-serve situations and can't get close enough to an individual to deliver documents, Falkner said he finds it useful to loop in the client as well as their attorney to discuss new strategies.
"It gives me a certain amount of coverage" and ensures that at the end of the day he still gets paid, Falkner said.
Like the man who served Wilde on Tuesday, Falkner said he has been part of a plan to track someone down at a Las Vegas casino.
It usually goes like this: "They say, this person is going to be at this venue at this time, and then we do research and find out how much tickets cost and things like that." Next, he bills the client, or the client offers to pay for an entry ticket in advance.
"And then you just have to try and get as close to somebody as you can to serve them."
In other words, when it seems impossible, get creative.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/inside-the-world-of-process-serving-explaining-what-happened-to-olivia-wilde | 2022-05-12T15:31:06Z |
Netflix has laid off some of its staff, many of them recently hired women of color. They were working on the streaming service's new fan-focused website, Tudum, named for the sound of the Netflix logo.
Tudum launched in December to take fans "behind the"streams," with articles about shows and films streamed on Netflix. For example, the site recently featured a story on the toddlers in the Japanese reality show Old Enough! There was a story with a "scoop" about the final episodes of Frankie and Grace, and a rundown of who's crushing on whom in the teen series Heartstopper. Tudum also included a story about the history of the food in Bridgerton Season 2, and another highlighting the show's slow-burn romantic moments.
Some fans are just learning now about Tudum, complaining Netflix didn't do much to promote the website. And some of the writers and editors who lost their jobs were told the layoffs were part of Netflix's plan to restructure its marketing department. The news comes shortly after announcements that the streamer has lost subscribers, and that its stocks took a nosedive.
When asked about the layoff, a spokesperson for Netflix wrote, "Our fan website Tudum is an important priority for the company."
Well. I just was laid off from a significant contract originally intended through August so I’m looking for stable work… and rent. I need rent.
— Nichole 🍞🍯 (@tnwhiskeywoman) April 28, 2022
The site is still up, but one team of 10-12 writers and editors were laid off. They worked on the culture and trend section of Tudum. They are experienced journalists who previously worked for Vulture, Vice, Teen Vogue and The New York Times. Some were book authors or had their own pop culture podcasts. Most, if not all of the team were Black, Latinx or Asian women.
"They went very out of their way to hire high level journalists of color who have quite a bit of name recognition and a lot of experience and talent. In some ways, they were just buying clout to lend credibility to their gambit," one member of the team told NPR, just hours after being let go. The member said they had signed a non-disclosure agreement when hired and so did not want their name used.
Everyone on the team had been recruited by Netflix with promises of editorial independence, exclusive interviews with Netflix talent, and secure, well-paying jobs.
It seemed like a dream job at first, they said, working with a diverse staff for good pay and loads of resources and opportunities.
"We were courted pretty aggressively. They sold us on the most amazing thing that you could want as a culture journalist or entertainment journalist. They just sold something that seemed impossible anywhere else," they said. "But the biggest selling point was the pay."
But in the short time the website has been around, they said the vision and the strategy changed. "They started tightening up little by little. And then just it became clear. It's a content marketing job, essentially. That would have been fine if from the get-go they made that clear."
Instead of being able to write about anything they wanted concerning Netflix content, they were told not to say anything deemed controversial, even if it was the subject of a documentary, for example. And any mention of films that aren't in the Netflix library were deleted from the site.
I actually had a piece-in-progress for Tudum—one that took me months to have the capacity to write—about Kanye & grieving a parent after their death. So if any editors want this piece let me know. It took ~A LOT~ of emotional labor so not accepting less than $1/word. Thanks.
— Nneka M. Okona 🇳🇬 (@afrosypaella) April 29, 2022
"They created a very jargony corporate environment in which everything is extremely positive. So instead of saying, 'No, don't do that,' they say, 'Do you think that's something we should be doing?' " they said. "Still, I'm really proud of a lot of the stories that were done under even those sort of tight parameters that were set and that constantly moved. A lot of great work was done because they hired extremely talented people. And so this more than anything reads as a lack of investment into a project that they didn't properly plan for or properly set up."
The writers and editors were full time or part time, on contract or on staff, and say they had no notice before losing their jobs. They were offered just two weeks of severance pay.
"People upended their lives for this," the ex-Tudum worker says, noting that just last month, many had been given promotions.
Netflix recruited me seven months ago only to lay me and a bunch of other talented people off today. I’m going to take time off to just exist, so please get in touch if you’ll have editing and content strategy opportunities open after August. EvetteDionneWriter@gmail.com
— Evette Dionne (@freeblackgirl) April 28, 2022
Now they're scrambling to find new jobs, sending out tweets asking for employment.
This isn't the first streamer to lay people off in the past week; something similar happened with CNN+, though in that case, it wasn't just one team, but the entire new streaming service.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/netflix-promised-good-jobs-at-tudum-now-one-of-its-teams-has-been-laid-off | 2022-05-12T15:31:12Z |
It is an odd thing, to write an appreciation for a series when you're not entirely sure if it is a great television show.
And yet, here I am, dissecting the complicated legacy of Netflix's Ozark, which drops its final seven episodes on the streamer today.
I've been a fan of the show since its very first episode in 2017, when Jason Bateman offered a compelling and resonant portrait of a man under serious pressure: Marty Byrde, a financial manager and secret money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel is forced to move his family to the Ozarks after his business partner tries ripping off their boss and gets killed for his trouble.
But now that we are near the end of that journey, it's likely Ozark will be remembered more as a clever thrill ride – a captivating collection of showcase scenes for a cadre of superior actors – than a series with a coherent message.
And that's a shame, because the difference between good and great for this series can be measured in the way it has morphed from an intriguing character study into a series of escalating and increasingly outlandish threats to a family sinking into a morass of criminality. Kinda like "Breaking Bad: The Family Edition."
Marty's mission early on was to launder $500 million in five years, to prove he was indispensable to the cartel and uninvolved with his partner's skimming. When the show first began, his kids were clueless about what their father really did for a living and his wife Wendy, played by a resilient, acerbic Laura Linney, was mostly focused on holding the family together.
What a difference four seasons can make.
A family steeped in criminality
As the show's final episodes drop today, the Byrde family is fully immersed in a complicated scheme to free cartel leader Omar Navarro from federal custody, neutralize his smart, ruthless nephew Javier, establish themselves as powerhouse (completely legitimate) philanthropists and repair a rift between Wendy and the kids caused by her decision last season to engineer the murder of her brother, Ben.
There's more: Julia Garner's tough-as-nails Ruth Langmore – a character who started as Marty's sometime assistant, before falling in love with Ben and splitting with the Byrdes over his death — is distraught over the murder of her cousin Wyatt by Javier, vowing revenge against him and the Byrdes.
It's a lot – even on a show known for giving viewers quite a lot.
Netflix released every episode of this final batch to critics in advance, so I have seen the series finale. To be honest, I didn't like it as much as I hoped I would. Shows which have as many plotlines in motion as Ozark can feel rushed in their final episodes as they plow through circumstances to reach the finish line.
This is especially true for Ozark, because so much of its appeal springs from the kinetic pace of deadly obstacles thrown at the Byrdes. In just one episode from earlier in the season, Wendy and Marty recover from seeing Navarro's lawyer shot in the head (washing her brains and blood out of their hair), only to meet Javier, who heads to the Ozarks and kills the local sheriff, just as a private investigator shows up looking for Navarro's now-missing attorney.
When one of the biggest attractions of a series is its forward motion, any move toward a conclusion can feel anticlimactic.
Ozark's frenetic pace also keeps you from thinking too much about how nonsensical the plotlines have become. Consider this storyline from the final batch of episodes: To keep her children from leaving town to live with her father, Wendy checks herself into a mental hospital.
But she's already noted the family is days away from a big gala intended to establish their charitable foundation and can't afford to spook big donors with any whiff of scandal. So why is she willing to risk news getting out that the organizer of the foundation checked herself into a mental hospital just before a huge event?
In another moment, Marty threatens to tell a cartel bigwig something about Ruth that would get her killed – exactly what is a bit of a spoiler — unless she steps in to help convince their kids not to leave with Wendy's father. After Ruth takes action, Marty visits her again and the two share a laugh over their bizarre history – even though she still partially blames the Byrdes for her cousin's death and also blames Wendy for having her father killed.
That's part of what makes Ozark so tough to swallow, sometimes. Characters often act in ways that don't make a lot of sense, mostly to move the plot from one point to another, or to get two characters together in a powerful scene.
It's also a by-product of storytelling in the age of Netflix, where producers expect fans to consume multiple episodes at one sitting, requiring a steady stream of revelations and twists across a great span of installments to keep things moving along.
The story 'Ozark' is really telling
There are some big deaths in the series' finale (again, saying who would be a spoiler). And it's true that Ozark's high death toll has turned watching the series into a guessing game about who gets whacked next – including what happened after the family got in a massive car crash, a flash forward that kicked off the current season.
But those deaths also serve to concentrate the show's focus on the family. Ozark has a lot of in common with Breaking Bad, but one place where it diverges is in the impact of criminality on a family. On AMC's legendary hit drama, Bryan Cranston's Walter White justifies his turn from high school science teacher to methmaking mastermind by insisting he was doing it to secure his family – until he was forced to admit his actions atomized his family and he did it all to validate himself.
Ozark is telling a different story. Here, I think criminality ultimately unites the Byrdes – you'll see how, when you watch the final episode – sending a message about how some people can succeed in the face of rampant wrongdoing that feels depressingly true to our times.
I'm also troubled by the show's treatment of characters of color. Nevermind that all the Latinx characters are murderous cartel members — in particular, Alfonso Herrera's magnetic take on handsome, smooth-talking psychopath Javier reflects an emerging character trope I've also seen on Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, in Tony Dalton's handsome, smooth-talking psychopath cartel leader Lalo Salamanca. What few Black characters the show has had are basically sidelined in this last batch of episodes, limiting the range of people we see in odd ways.
In the end, right down to the final scene – which feels like a bit of a callback to The Sopranos finale, I'll be honest – I did still care about these characters. I wanted to see who lived, who died and how their stories ended, regardless of all the reasons I had to dismiss what was going on.
That's a tribute to the actors, including an increasingly powerful Linney as the most ruthless member of the Byrde family and Garner, whose reveals of the emotive heart underneath Ruth's spitfire façade have been particularly captivating this season. (A special shout out to Richard Thomas, who TV fans will know as wholesome John-Boy Walton from the '70s-era family drama The Waltons, who excels here playing Wendy's hypocritical and secretly abusive father.)
Let's also tip a cap to all the great actors whose characters got whacked along the way, from Esai Morales' cartel underboss Del Rio to Janet McTeer's ill-fated attorney Helen Pierce and Tom Pelphrey's woefully overlooked turn as Ben – a character with bipolar disorder who saw the true horror of the Byrde family business clearer than any of them.
These actors and the wonderfully delicious circumstances producers put them in, kept me watching every second of every Ozark episode, even when aspects of show didn't quite meet the definition of exceptional TV.
And it's also why I'll miss the series, which somehow found a way to make a family's descent into ruthlessness entertaining, compelling and telling, all at once.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/netflixs-ozark-ends-as-a-thrilling-yet-disappointing-take-on-a-criminal-family | 2022-05-12T15:31:18Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Ukrainian officials are calling the latest attack on Kyiv a, quote, "postcard from Russia" and an insult to the United Nations.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Attacks on Ukraine's capital had mostly stopped until yesterday, and then missiles landed in the heart of the city. Now, why would that be an insult to the United Nations? While the U.N. secretary general was in the city yesterday. Antonio Guterres was trying to negotiate humanitarian corridors for civilians in a different besieged city.
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ANTONIO GUTERRES: Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis. Thousands of civilians need lifesaving assistance. Many are elderly, in need of medical care or have limited mobility. They need an escape route out of the apocalypse.
MARTINEZ: Joining us now from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, is NPR's Frank Langfitt. Frank, let's start with the latest attacks where you're at, what's being called a postcard from Russia. What's the scene like there?
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Well, the scene, A - this is an apartment building that's over 20 stories tall, and the bottom three stories were hit by a cruise missile that came out of Crimea and knocked out the bottom - basically, the bottom of this apartment building. You can see the rebar hanging down like strands of hair. And one person was killed in the attack, and nine people were injured. And what's interesting, too, A, is this is next to a factory that makes missile parts but also makes vacuum cleaners, of all things. And it looks to me, as far as I can tell, that this missile missed the factory.
MARTINEZ: Missed the factory, OK.
LANGFITT: Yeah, as far as I can tell.
MARTINEZ: Wow.
LANGFITT: I mean, it's hard to see inside, and there does seem to be some damage inside. But as far as we can tell, this missile hit a building.
MARTINEZ: The U.N. secretary general, Frank, said he was hopeful to establish a humanitarian corridor after his meeting with the Russian president earlier this week. What message is Russia sending with this attack?
LANGFITT: Well, it's obviously at the very least, not very respectful if you have the head of the U.N. here and you're firing a missile within hours of a press conference that he gave with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And I guess I want to point out, we are in the center of the city. This has not been a place that's been hit that hard. That said, Zelenskyy's office said that they are expecting today to get civilians out of the Azovstal steel plant. There are about a thousand civilians living in a basement. It's really a 15-mile maze of bunkers and tunnels. And our colleague Joanna Kakissis has actually been in touch with a soldier in the basement there who said there were airstrikes yesterday. A makeshift hospital could not keep up. There are 500 wounded fighters, very little food, water or medicine. Of course, with these humanitarian corridors, as we found, the challenge is the Russians may sometimes agree but then actually end up attacking those corridors.
MARTINEZ: You know, we've been doing this for three months now. That's where we're at in this point. And you've been talking to military experts in Ukraine and elsewhere in your travels in Europe. How do they see this all playing out in the coming months?
LANGFITT: Yeah, it's a really good question. Basically, they see the Russians making a big push in the east, in the Donbas region, as we've been talking about, try to take control of much of the south and try to hold what people see as sham referenda to basically argue that these territories that they're taking are no longer a part of Ukraine but independent or pro-Russian, get as much territory as possible, effectively, to take what has been a failed military operation up until now, show it back home as some kind of a victory. Now, Ukrainians, of course, they're going to use all these huge armaments that they're getting from the U.S. and NATO allies to hold as much ground as possible. Nobody expects a negotiated solution any time soon. I was talking to Oleg Ignatov. He's with the International Crisis Group. This is how he put it.
OLEG IGNATOV: They don't know how to stop this war right now because both sides still hope that they can or will be able to win this war.
LANGFITT: And of course, there are going to be more and more weapons coming, perhaps for years, from NATO.
MARTINEZ: That's NPR's Frank Langfitt in Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv. Frank, thank you.
LANGFITT: Good to talk, A.
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MARTINEZ: All right, President Biden is urging lawmakers to send more money to Ukraine.
INSKEEP: He'd like the United States to send $33 billion on top of billions already sent.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: So we need to contribute arms, funding, ammunition and the economic support to make their courage and sacrifice have purpose, so they can continue this fight and do what they're doing. It's critical this funding gets approved and approved as quickly as possible.
INSKEEP: Just by way of comparison, the entire annual Russian military budget, the budget for all of Russia, is thought to be around $65 billion. If Biden's request is approved, the United States will have sent a total of 47 billion to Ukraine in just a few months.
MARTINEZ: NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid has been following this development. The president has asked for $33 billion. What does that include?
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Well, a bulk of it, roughly $20 billion, is security assistance. That includes things like ammunition, armored vehicles and unmanned aircraft systems. Some of the money is also geared toward helping clear landmines and other explosive remnants that Russians have left behind. Most of the remaining $13 billion is going to be divided up between economic assistance and humanitarian assistance - you know, things like medical equipment and safe drinking water.
MARTINEZ: All right, so President Biden has now settled on what he thinks is needed. What's been the response so far?
KHALID: You know, well, ultimately Congress has to agree to these funds. Our colleague Kelsey Snell, who covers Congress, says her initial read from Senate Republicans is that they are not, in theory, opposed to the dollar amount, but they do have some questions. Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa is one of those Republicans.
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JONI ERNST: General top line is important, but I want to know the devil in the details. We have to make sure we are providing them what they are asking for, what they actually need and can use.
KHALID: You know, broadly, I will say, to date, there seems to be bipartisan support in Congress for Ukraine, but it does seem like any final bill will take some negotiation, and Kelsey tells me that could take some weeks.
MARTINEZ: All right, so $33 billion sounds like a lot, but in the big picture, is that enough money for Ukraine?
KHALID: You know, the White House anticipates that this money, the $33 billion, could last Ukraine about five months. But, you know, to your question - is it enough? - experts I spoke with said it's really hard to tell. It depends in part how the war plays out. Liam Collins is a retired U.S. Army colonel who helped advise Ukraine's Defense Department from 2016 to 2018.
LIAM COLLINS: I think the U.S. has done a pretty good job of helping out Ukraine in terms of what they need. The pace of support has been sufficient. But it's going to need to - you know, it's going to need to go on for a long time, and people shouldn't get tired after a couple months.
KHALID: You know, as you heard him say, nobody really knows how long this conflict could go on - months, possibly even years. And a key question is whether there will continue to be bipartisan support from the American public. Experts also tell me, you know, there is a sense of urgency. If negotiations in Congress take weeks, that could prove perilous for Ukraine. I did ask the administration if there's any way to, say, provide a line of credit, move some of this money to Ukraine ASAP and then pay it back. I was told that's not an option. Congress does need to approve these funds in order to keep aid flowing to Ukraine. I will say, you know, I expect us to hear more about this next week. The president is traveling to Alabama to visit a Lockheed Martin plant that makes Javelins, and I'm sure that this is going to be part of his pitch.
MARTINEZ: NPR's Asma Khalid. Thanks a lot.
KHALID: Happy to do it.
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MARTINEZ: The stories that put schools in the news may not reflect the concerns of parents with kids in school.
INSKEEP: A lot of discussion about schools centers on culture war political issues, like teaching racism or discussing gender. But a national poll by NPR and Ipsos out today finds that those issues are not the main concerns for most parents of school-age kids. A large majority of parents reported being happy with their children's schools and what's being taught there.
MARTINEZ: Anya Kamenetz from NPR's Education desk is here to tell us all about the results. So what are parents saying about schools?
ANYA KAMENETZ, BYLINE: Yeah, so this poll follows up on one that NPR commissioned a year ago from Ipsos about how the pandemic is continuing to affect the nation's students. And we found some real bright spots, as we keep coming back from the worst of the pandemic, and there's also a few curveballs here. So on the good side, compared to 2021, more parents are saying their child is ahead in school, and fewer say they're behind, and that's true whether we asked about math, reading or social skills, mental health and development. In fact, a growing number, almost half of parents agree with the statement - the pandemic has not disrupted my child's education at all.
MARTINEZ: So that sounds really encouraging, though is there any truth to that?
KAMENETZ: You know, I should say that this rosy view is a bit at odds with what we know from test scores and attendance. A lot of children do have learning to catch up on. Still, this kind of thinking is in line with a whole lot of polling that goes back decades. Parents do tend to express concern about education as an abstract issue, but when you zoom in closer, they're happy with their own kids' school and, even more so, their kids' teachers. So in our poll, 88% said, my kids' teachers did the best they could during the pandemic, given the circumstances. And more than 4 out of 5 said, my kids' school has actually handled the pandemic well.
MARTINEZ: Wow. Now, Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, they've turned parents' rights into a major political talking point. Did your poll find a lot of interest in that?
KAMENETZ: Not really, no. So more than three-quarters of respondents agreed - my child's school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics. We asked about gender and sexuality, race, U.S. history, patriotism, and in each of those cases, it was fewer than 1 in 5 parents who told us, yeah, I'm concerned; the school's teaching these topics in a way that is not consistent with my family's values. And a much larger group, about 1 in 3 in each case said they didn't know. In other words, maybe not a lot of detailed conversations going on about this at the dinner table.
MARTINEZ: What about the partisan divides? I mean, are these controversies something that Republican parents maybe are particularly concerned about?
KAMENETZ: So we did hear from parents like Christine in Wisconsin. She asked not to use her last name because she says she's afraid of her children being retaliated against.
CHRISTINE: You know, there have been snarky comments about white privilege.
KAMENETZ: She also doesn't approve of her son, who's in high school, being asked things like...
CHRISTINE: What pronouns do you prefer to use to refer to yourself?
KAMENETZ: But the fact is - and the pollsters were surprised by this - there were actually few partisan divides in our poll. Most parents are satisfied, most feel well-informed. And the small group of parents who were unhappy with how their school's tackling racism and U.S. history, those were just as likely to identify as Democrats as Republicans. In other words, for every parent who thinks their child's school is too, quote, unquote, "woke," there may be one who thinks it isn't woke enough.
JIM ONDELACY: They kind of whitewash the way that history is taught to their kids.
KAMENETZ: So that's Jim Ondelacy. He's a Native American and a Democrat who lives near Fort Worth, Texas. And he is one who wishes his son's high school went more in depth and taught more about the nation's history of racism and oppression.
MARTINEZ: NPR's Anya Kamenetz. Thanks a lot.
KAMENETZ: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/news-brief-missile-strike-biden-wants-more-ukraine-funding-education-poll | 2022-05-12T15:31:24Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Good morning. I'm A Martinez. It's one of the most iconic movie costumes ever made, the blue and white gingham dress that Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in "The Wizard Of Oz." One of them was given to the drama department at Catholic University and forgotten until it turned up in a shoe box during an office clutter clean-out. At auction next month, the dress is expected to go for at least $800,000. Now, if it could be paired with Dorothy's ruby slippers, you could literally look like a million bucks.
It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/one-of-the-dresses-from-the-wizard-of-oz-is-up-for-auction | 2022-05-12T15:31:30Z |
The writer and director Céline Sciamma makes beautiful movies about girls and young women navigating the complexities of gender and sexual identity. You can tell as much from their titles: Tomboy, Girlhood, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Her wonderful new film, Petite Maman, is no less focused on the inner lives of its female characters. But it's also something of a departure: This is Sciamma's first work to earn a PG rating, and it's both the best family movie and the best movie about a family that I've seen in some time.
It tells the gently surreal story of Nelly, an 8-year-old girl played by the remarkable young Joséphine Sanz, who has long brown hair and a sharp, perceptive gaze. Nelly's just lost her maternal grandmother after a long illness. Now, she watches as her parents go about the solemn task of packing up Grandma's house — the very house where Nelly's mother, Marion, grew up years earlier. To pass the time, Nelly plays in the woods surrounding the house. It's there that she meets another 8-year-old girl, who also happens to be named Marion. She's played by Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine's identical twin sister.
This eerie encounter naturally raises a lot of questions: Who is Marion, and why does she look so much like Nelly? Is this forest the backdrop for a modern-day fairy tale, or have we slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum? Sciamma is in no hurry to provide the answers. The title Petite Maman — which translates literally as "Little Mom" — provides a bit of a clue. But one of the pleasures of this movie is the way it casually introduces a series of strange events as if there were nothing strange about them at all.
At times the movie feels like a live-action version of Hayao Miyazaki's anime fantasies like Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro: full of childlike wonderment, but also very matter-of-fact in its approach to magic. Rather than being puzzled by the situation, Nelly and Marion simply accept it and become fast friends. You accept it, too, mainly because the Sanz sisters have such a sweet and funny rapport onscreen.
Sciamma's camera follows the girls as they run around the woods, gathering leaves and branches to build a hut. Eventually Marion invites Nelly over to her house, which looks an awful lot like Nelly's grandmother's house. There, the girls giggle as they cook up a messy pancake breakfast and act out a hilariously elaborate murder mystery. Few recent movies have so effortlessly captured the joy and creativity of children at play.
Petite Maman itself plays a kind of game with the audience, and you figure out the rules as you watch. You learn to tell the girls apart based on slight differences in hairstyle and the colors that they wear. You also get to know a few of the adult characters hovering on the periphery: At one point, Nelly introduces her father to her new best friend, and if he thinks there's anything weird about this, he doesn't show it. Meanwhile, Nelly's mother — the older Marion — has temporarily left the house, needing some time to herself to grieve her mother's death.
And without a hint of didacticism, Petite Maman reveals itself as very much a movie about grief, about how a child learns to cope with sudden loss and inevitable change. It's also about how hard it is to really know who your parents were before they became your parents. But in this movie, Nelly gets the rare chance to see or perhaps imagine her mother as the sweet, sensitive, independent-minded young girl she used to be.
Although Petite Maman is decidedly different from Sciamma's art-house touchstone Portrait of a Lady on Fire, they're structured in similar ways: In both films, two female characters are granted a brief, even utopian retreat from the outside world and something mysterious and beautiful transpires. If that's not enough of an enticement, you should know that Petite Maman runs a tight 72 minutes and achieves an emotional depth that eludes many movies twice its length. It's funny, sad, full of enchanting possibilities and over far too soon — sort of like childhood itself.
Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/petite-maman-is-the-best-and-most-surreal-family-movie-youll-see-in-a-while | 2022-05-12T15:31:36Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
People from around the world are flocking to a small Kentucky town. It is QuiltWeek in Paducah, an event that's been on pandemic pause for two years. Now quilters and residents are welcoming it back with open arms. Derek Operle with member station WKMS reports.
DEREK OPERLE, BYLINE: Paducah has a long history with fiber arts. It's known as Quilt City USA and is home to the National Quilt Museum and is just one of two UNESCO creative cities for crafts and folk art in the U.S. Simply put, QuiltWeek here is like a big music festival but with sewing machines instead of amplifiers, and it temporarily doubles the population.
The quilters are here to see the best the art form has to offer, checking out art quilts and specialty fiber art exhibitions, local fabric shops and the latest top-of-the-line sewing machines. That's where you'll find Marlene Beeler, standing next to her award-winning quilt Some Enchanted Evening.
MARLENE BEELER: There's 1.6 million stitches in the blocks - OK? - and in the center. And then this here is a border print.
OPERLE: The quilt took the Sutter, Ill., resident more than 500 hours to make. It's a sparkling blue, black, gold and purple floral work named after a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific," and it's done entirely in metallic thread. Oh, and she made a jacket, pants and purse to match.
BEELER: And it's embellished with 23,000 Swarovski crystals in seven colors, and they are put on one at a time.
OPERLE: Twenty-three thousand crystals, each no bigger than a pea, stitched in by hand. Beeler is just one of the thousands of quilters milling around the city's convention center. Most of them are over 50. And when you look around the crowd, you still see a few wearing masks. Chris Shimizu came here from Carmichael, Calif.
CHRIS SHIMIZU: I think this was a bucket list for all of us, and...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yes.
SHIMIZU: ...We haven't been able to go to a show in the last two years.
OPERLE: Shimizu has been quilting for 30 years, but this is her first time in Paducah. Here she is talking with her friend Catherine Anderson, a quilter from Bend, Ore. They both bought their tickets nearly a year in advance.
SHIMIZU: This is where you go to appreciate the art because some of these, I wouldn't do in a million years, would you?
CATHERINE ANDERSON: Not only appreciate, but to get inspired, don't you feel?
SHIMIZU: Yes. Yes.
OPERLE: This event provides a massive economic boost for the city, with an estimated impact of more than $25 million.
Bill Schroeder III runs the show's parent company, the American Quilter's Society. Though he's younger than a lot of the attendees here, he's probably been to more quilt shows than almost any of them. His grandparents started that group nearly 40 years ago, and he acquired the family business last year.
BILL SCHROEDER III: I bought this company for this week. And I know what this show does for the community, and I didn't want to see it die.
OPERLE: Of the estimated 30,000 attendees, more than 4,000 people from 48 states and eight countries signed up for classes here this week in fiber arts. Schroeder takes that as a good sign that interest in the often-overlooked art form may be on the rise, despite the two-year hiatus before this week's event.
For NPR News, I'm Derek Operle in Paducah, Ky.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/quiltweek-is-finally-back-on-in-kentucky | 2022-05-12T15:31:42Z |
The highest ranking transgender official in U.S. history will give a speech in Texas Saturday, urging physicians-in-training to fight political attacks against young trans people and their families.
Adm. Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, will make a speech in Fort Worth at the Out For Health Conference at Texas Christian University.
In prepared remarks shared exclusively with NPR, she writes: "Trans youth in particular are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate. Fifty-two percent of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020. Think about how many of them thought it was better to die than to put up with any more harassment, scapegoating and intentional abuse."
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (En Español: 1-888-628-9454; Deaf and Hard of Hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 74174
Political attacks against trans young people are on the rise across the country. Over 100 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state houses this year, according to an analysis by Freedom for All Americans and the Guardian. Many of these legislative attacks use scientific language to justify their political aims, she says. In her prepared remarks, she concludes: "The language of medicine and science is being used to drive people to suicide."
Levine is a pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist by training. "I'm not a political person," she tells NPR. But in this context, she says, when young trans people are being attacked by their own governments, she thinks medical professionals "need to stand up and be more vocal — and that's exactly what I'm going to do."
NPR spoke to Levine before she flew to Texas about what many Americans still don't understand about sex and gender, how federal policy can counterbalance anti-trans legislation in the states, and how she sublimates personal attacks to drive her advocacy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
You will be speaking at Texas Christian University on Saturday at the Out For Health Conference, which was founded and organized by medical students. Why this event and what is the message of your speech?
I think it's a tremendous opportunity to speak with young professionals about health equity, diversity and inclusion.
One of the biggest messages I have at this time is really to speak about the challenges that the LGBTQI+ community face, particularly youth. The challenges come from very disturbing – and frankly discriminatory – laws and actions that many states are taking that are potentially dangerous, and costing the lives of young people. I think it's a very important message to give young physicians in training.
In your prepared remarks, you write, "Anyone who believes that words are not the same as actions, who believe that LGBTQI people should just toughen up, should walk a mile in our shoes." What would people learn from walking a mile in your shoes?
For some people, I think that these issues of gender identity are beyond their experience. They don't understand it, and so they fear it, and that fear can lead to negative feelings and emotions. My goal is to educate about the LGBTQ+ community in general, and to educate about the trans community – that we are people just like everyone else.
We are doctors, we are lawyers, we are business people, we are teachers, we function in every part of society and we're all just doing our part and living our lives and working towards the common good. And that might help dispel some of this fear and some of this discrimination.
"To walk in our shoes" is to have empathy for other people. I am such a big fan of diversity in all of its different aspects. I think diversity helps society. It helps any community. It helps any business, school, governmental agency. We have this beautiful tapestry of diversity in the United States. And so I think that it really is incumbent upon us to have empathy and compassion for those that are different from us.
Pew did a survey in 2021 that found that most Americans think that whether someone is a man or woman is fixed at birth. Most Americans also say they don't know anyone who is trans. There's a gap of understanding. Is there a role for the federal government in closing that gap?
I think there's a role for community, medical and public health organizations to educate the public about these issues.
[Most people's] experience might be that there is a simple binary of male and female, but it is actually much more complicated.
There is sex. You might think that that is simple, but it is not. There's chromosomal sex, there are [primary] sex characteristics, secondary sexual characteristics. Of course, there are individuals as part of our LGBTQ+ community who are intersex. And so it is multi-dimensional.
Then there's gender. Gender is really that self-concept in terms of your gender that is also multidimensional. There are sex roles, which have changed tremendously in our society over the last 50 to 70 years. And then there's sexual orientation – whom one is attracted to and wants to have intimate relations with – and that is also multidimensional. We want to educate people about those somewhat complex features and help them understand our rainbow family.
Texas has been one of the loudest states in going after trans kids and families. The state has investigated the parents of trans kids for child abuse. Families have moved out of the state because they felt unsafe, and the state attorney general attacked you recently on Twitter. As a trans person, how are you thinking of all that as you head to Texas?
I use all of those challenges and sublimate that into my work. Those egregious actions, one might say insidious actions, that are politically motivated and really harm trans and gender-diverse youth and their families – I take my feelings about that and I put it into my advocacy and our policy work to support trans youth and their families.
We have a president, President Biden, who sees us and supports us. We have a vice president, Vice President Harris, who sees us and supports us. Secretary Becerra of the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Cardona of the Department of Education – really across the administration in the federal government, it is just remarkable how supportive they are to the LGBTQ+ community.
But we are seeing in many states – including Texas – laws and actions which are discriminatory, politically motivated and they need to be fought against.
How?
So, for example, [the federal HHS] Office for Civil Rights has issued a formal interpretation of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, where it says you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, and that includes sexual orientation and gender identity.
People who feel that they are being discriminated against can contact the Office for Civil Rights, and they will open a case and investigate. And so we encourage trans and gender-diverse youth and their families [who] are feeling they are being discriminated against in Texas or any other state [to] contact our office.
In addition, [federal agencies] are looking at Title IX – particularly in the Department of Education and the Department of Health – in terms of support for sexual and gender minorities. We are going to be looking – throughout the administration – at policies that, again, support, affirm and empower our community.
Prior to this role, you were the secretary of health in Pennsylvania. A lot of people might not realize that you in HHS are not in charge of, say, the Florida Department of Health. That's not how it works. Do you think that is a problem in the case of trans youth?
We have a republic in which the states have a lot of individual power. One thing we learned through the pandemic is how important it is to coordinate between local, state and federal public health authorities. When they're not coordinated, that makes our work very difficult.
These negative and discriminatory actions and laws are politically based. It's not public health-based. It's not medically based in any way.
[In medicine], there is an evidence-based standard of care for the evaluation and treatment of trans individuals, whether they're youth or adults. That standard is set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH. The last formal standards of care were [released] in 2011, and we expect the new standards of care in 2022.
There are many other standards set by organized medicine, for example, the Endocrine Society, which is an international organization of hormone specialists – endocrinologists – has a standard of care. There have been comments from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, from the [American Medical Association], from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association – [all] in support of evidence-based standards of care for [gender-affirming] treatment.
So when, for example, the surgeon general of Florida puts out a statement based upon political considerations, that is not appropriate. We need to stand against that both from a medical and public health point of view.
As you mentioned, the Florida Department of Health published a fact sheet last week about trans health and cited many studies (although many groups have refuted its claims). When your office in March published a fact sheet, it also cited many studies. Where is the research on this? Is there a dispute?
I will disagree that there are many studies cited in the Florida statement – there are a few studies. I've looked at them. A lot of them say that we need more research. We agree. This is no different from any other medical field in which there's a research base that might inform a standard of care for treatment of other conditions, whether that's diabetes or hypothyroidism or other hormonal endocrine conditions – those change over time as the research changes.
When you look at the forthcoming WPATH standards of care and you see the hundreds and hundreds of articles, you will be able to see the difference between the research base for the standards of care and the few studies cited by Florida.
There is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.
Idaho, Alabama, Arizona and other states have introduced more than 100 bills related to trans kids this year. There are bills about what can be taught in schools related to sexuality and gender – the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills. Some limit gender-affirming treatment to young trans people. Others limit trans kids' participation in sports. What do you think is happening in these states with all of these bills?
I think that they're all related in terms of their political motivation, and trying to stigmatize a vulnerable community — and particularly to stigmatize LGBTQ+ youth. We have a mental health crisis in this country, particularly among our young people, with increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, suicidal behavior. Our surgeon general, Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, highlighted that in a surgeon general's advisory in December of 2021.
One of the most vulnerable groups of young people are LGBTQI+ youth, and particularly – the focus of many of these issues – trans youth. We need to affirm them. We need to empower them because they are at risk, and they have a very high rate of suicidal thought and we have to act to prevent them from harming themselves. [We have] to support those young people and their families.
You said on a podcast recently that "being trans doesn't have to define who I am." I've heard from trans friends and colleagues that it can be exhausting to have to explain your personal experience and talk about gender all the time. How do you think about this part of your job and your role?
I am honored to be the assistant secretary for health, and a four star admiral and the leader of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. I recognize that I am the first openly transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate and to have these roles. It is a privilege. I want to use that – how fortunate I am to be in these roles – to work toward the common good in all of the different medical and public health issues that we've been discussing and more.
I understand the significance of my role to stand up and be counted as a very open and proud LGBTQ+ individual and openly transgender woman. And to use that to support more of our vulnerable LGBTQ+ community in all ways that I can.
[Talking about it] doesn't bother me. I mean, I've been in these [public] positions for seven, eight years now, and so it doesn't surprise me. I'm used to it.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/rachel-levine-calls-state-anti-lgbtq-bills-disturbing-and-dangerous-to-trans-youth | 2022-05-12T15:31:48Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. Thirty years ago today, four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. It sparked five days of riots across Los Angeles. But there was another case, not as widely known, that helped set off the unrest. The same month that King was beaten, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by a store clerk in South Central Los Angeles.
Here's her grandmother, Ruth, who the kids call Madea (ph), remembering the day she sent Latasha to the store.
RUTH HARLINS: I had said, get some orange juice. But when she got there, the lady said she had seen her put something in her backpack. And she had the money in her hand to pay the lady. But when she turned around to leave, the lady shot her in the head, and she died.
MARTINEZ: Latasha's brother Vester and her sister Christina were 10 and 8 when she died. They came to StoryCorps to remember her.
CHRISTINA ROGERS: Latasha was so popular. I felt as though she was a celebrity because everyone knew her.
VESTER ACOFF: One of the favorite memories we had was when we used to be in the living room dancing and lip-syncing over music like a talent show.
ROGERS: And we would have, like, spelling bees. We would sit down, and our grandmother Madea would give us spelling words. And we knew Latasha would get them all right. She was just that smart.
ACOFF: You know, she was a caretaker. She cooked. She made sure we did our chores, did our homework. She made sure other people had before she had.
ROGERS: I remember we were at the park, and that's where the ice cream truck used to come. And a little girl didn't have enough money. And I remember Latasha buying that little girl an ice cream.
ACOFF: Yeah.
ROGERS: Walk me through the day Latasha died.
ACOFF: That morning, Madea - she asked me to go to the store. And I had a basketball game. So after that, I'm at the free-throw line, and our cousin T ran into the gym screaming. Tasha died. Tasha died. I ran out the back of the gym, ran home.
ROGERS: She was killed. The hardest part about losing Latasha was not having that older protective sister that I had. She was just always a motivating factor in my life. I just knew that I was blessed to have an older sibling that looked after me, that loved me. And I want people to know that Latasha was an honor roll student. She wanted to be a lawyer. She wanted to buy our grandmother a big old house. She had dreams in life.
MARTINEZ: That's Christina Rogers and Vester Acoff remembering their sister Latasha Harlins. Latasha's killer was convicted of manslaughter but served no jail time. This conversation will be archived at the Library of Congress. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/remembering-latasha-harlins-whose-death-helped-setoff-unrest-in-los-angeles | 2022-05-12T15:31:55Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Ukrainian officials are calling the latest attack on Kyiv a, quote, "postcard from Moscow and an insult to the United Nations." Attacks on Ukraine's capital had mostly stopped until yesterday. And missiles landed in the heart of the city. Why would that be an insult to the United Nations? The U.N. secretary general was in the city at the time. Antonio Guterres was trying to negotiate humanitarian corridors for civilians in a besieged city.
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ANTONIO GUTERRES: Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis. Thousands of civilians need lifesaving assistance. Many are elderly, in need of medical care or have limited mobility. They need an escape route out of the apocalypse.
MARTINEZ: NPR's Frank Langfitt is in the Ukrainian capital, and he spoke to us from the scene of an attack.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: A cruise missile came in here. Clearly, it was aimed at a factory behind me, which has made missile parts in the past. But it flew in and actually knocked out the bottom floors of a residential apartment building here. In fact, you can see the whole front is torn off. And you can see the rebar hanging down like hair. Not very long ago, workers came out with someone in a body bag and loaded it into a van. And so this looks like, you know, an attempt to take out military capacity from, you know, the Ukrainians that ended up injuring a number of people and at least killing one.
MARTINEZ: The U.N. secretary general, Frank, said he was hopeful to establish a humanitarian corridor after his meeting with the Russian president earlier this week. What message is Russia sending with this attack?
LANGFITT: Well, it's obviously, at the very least, not very respectful if you have the head of the U.N. here and you're firing a missile within hours of a press conference that he gave with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And I guess I want to point out, we are in the center of the city. This has not been a place that's been hit that hard. That said, Zelenskyy's office said that they are expecting today to get civilians out of the Azovstal steel plant. There about a thousand civilians living in a basement. It's really a 15-mile maze of bunkers and tunnels.
And our colleague Joanna Kakissis has actually been in touch with a soldier in the basement there who said there were airstrikes yesterday. A makeshift hospital could not keep up. There are 500 wounded fighters, very little food, water or medicine. Of course, with these humanitarian corridors, as we've found, the challenge is the Russians may sometimes agree, but then actually end up attacking those corridors.
MARTINEZ: You've been talking to military experts in Ukraine and elsewhere in your travels in Europe. How do they see this all playing out in the coming months?
LANGFITT: Yeah, it's a really good question. Basically, they see the Russians making a big push in the east, in the Donbass region, as we've been talking about, try to take control of much of the south and try to hold what people see as sham referenda to basically argue that these territories that they're taking are no longer a part of Ukraine but independent or pro-Russian, get as much territory as possible, effectively to take what has been a failed military operation up until now, show it back home as some kind of a victory. Now, Ukrainians - of course, they're going to use all these huge armaments that they're getting from the U.S. and NATO allies to hold as much ground as possible. Nobody expects a negotiated solution any time soon.
I was talking to Oleg Ignatov. He's with the International Crisis Group. This is how he put it.
OLEG IGNATOV: They don't know how to stop this war right now because both sides still hope that they can or will be able to win this war.
LANGFITT: And, of course, there are going to be more and more weapons coming, perhaps for years, from NATO.
MARTINEZ: That's NPR's Frank Langfitt in Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv. Frank, thank you.
LANGFITT: Good to talk, A. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/russian-missile-hits-kyiv-just-after-the-head-of-the-u-n-spoke-there | 2022-05-12T15:32:01Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
President Biden faces growing criticism and legal challenges to his decision to lift Title 42. That's the public health order imposed by the Trump White House to keep migrants out of the U.S. during the pandemic. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was called to Capitol Hill to defend the Biden administration's decision to rescind it.
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ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: With the Title 42 public health order set to be lifted, we expect migration levels to increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants. We will continue to enforce our immigration laws.
MARTINEZ: However, Republicans such as Kevin McCarthy say if Biden rolls back Title 42, illegal immigration will get worse. And now a growing number of Democrats also want the president to leave it in place for the moment at least. Maria Cardona is a Democratic strategist with the Dewey Square Group. Maria, back in 2020, Democrats railed against the Trump administration for using Title 42. Now some of them want Biden to keep it. So what's up with the 180?
MARIA CARDONA: Well, hey, A. First of all, good morning. Buenos dias. Thank you for having me. Look - from the very beginning, Title 42 was a health policy. It's a public health authority. Never was it intended to be an immigration policy. But what happened was that under the Trump administration, who were focused on divisive, fear-based, xenophobic immigration policies, they implemented it as a way to keep migrants out. Now what we're seeing is the Republican Party, as per usual, want to continue to weaponize Title 42 to increase fear among their xenophobic base, which is the only way they know how to mobilize it, and try to use it against Democrats. Democrats understand this.
MARTINEZ: So why are Democrats - yeah, why are Democrats seemingly, some of them, going along with it, though?
CARDONA: Well, as you know, we are looking at a very tough midterm for Democrats. So they understand what the GOP is trying to do here. And they know that as they weaponize immigration, they're going to use it against them in the midterms. But, look - there's no question that the majority of Democrats - frankly, every single Democrat and I hope some commonsense Republicans, though not enough - really want to focus on solutions, A, and solutions require a comprehensive immigration policy that focuses on increasing security at the border and then looking at commonsense ways to regularize the flow between people who want to come here to work, the need for people to come here to work, all focused on making sure that it is done in an unchaotic, safe manner, humanely at the border, which is what the majority of Americans want. Republicans are focused on fear mongering and weaponizing immigration.
MARTINEZ: But so on that - yeah.
CARDONA: They should try to focus on solutions.
MARTINEZ: Maria, so on that, over the years I've talked with dozens of immigration advocates who always seem to have the same lament - that D.C. will always find a way to kick the can on immigration reform. If Title 42 in this case stays in place, despite President Biden's campaign promise to end it, how can voters trust anyone that makes immigration a campaign pillar?
CARDONA: That's a really good question, A. What they can look at is the history of this and look at the parties and the leaders who have actually tried to push real immigration solutions. Democrats tried to do this back in 2013. We were on the verge of passing comprehensive immigration reform with a handful of, back then, commonsense Republicans who helped pass it in the Senate. When it got to the House, as you recall, it was Republican president of the - leader of the House, John Boehner, who essentially told President Obama, I'm not going to bring this up in the House because I know it will pass with majority Democratic support, and I can't have that. That is not leadership, A. So what Americans can count on is that Democrats will always come forward with real solutions. What they need to push is their Republican leadership to stop fearmongering and help the Democrats come to the table with Democrats...
MARTINEZ: Right.
CARDONA: ...To focus on real solutions for the benefit of the country.
MARTINEZ: Speaking of leadership, though, 'cause President Biden is the leader of the Democratic Party, when it comes to moderate Democrats and also, say, vulnerable Democrats who want him to keep Title 42 in place and then progressive Democrats who aren't happy that there could be a delay or that it might stay in place for a while, how can he, as a leader of the party, find some unifying middle ground ahead of November?
CARDONA: I think he needs to continue to talk about what the solutions are. And this administration and, again, Democrats have put forward real comprehensive solutions. The administration has this in Biden's agenda. They have increased security measures to reduce the chaos at the border, to reduce the unsafety that is what - is happening now, right? Let's look at what Title 42 has done. Title 42 has actually caused a fourfold increase in the chaos at the border. It has - never was supposed to be a solution. So again, let's focus on what should be real commonsense solutions to this problem.
MARTINEZ: Democratic strategist Maria Cardona. Thanks a lot.
CARDONA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/some-democrats-are-joining-with-republicans-lobbying-to-keep-title-42 | 2022-05-12T15:32:07Z |
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Skyrocketing prices, shortages of medical supplies, power outages. Sri Lanka is facing a deep economic crisis. Poor policy decisions and the pandemic are partly to blame. Another reason has to do with the U.S. dollar. Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma from our daily economics podcast The Indicator explain.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: It was during the pandemic that Sri Lanka's problems really started to snowball. The economy shrank 3.6% in 2020, and a big part of that was the disappearance of tourism, which brings in billions of dollars every year.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Sri Lanka's local currency is the rupee, and so when American tourists arrive on the island for vacation, they swap their U.S. dollars for rupees. And their dollars then flow through the Sri Lankan banking system.
WONG: Now, a government needs foreign reserves for all kinds of transactions. We'll talk about two big ones. No. 1 - pay off foreign debt.
MA: Let's just say that I want to borrow money on the international market. Well, getting into the game really requires you to have U.S. dollars. So when I issue bonds to try to raise money, I issue those bonds in dollars. But that also means I have to make interest payments on those bonds in dollars.
WONG: But the country had a problem. More dollars flow out of Sri Lanka than come in. And this perpetual shortfall meant the country was always going in search of more dollars, especially when it came to keeping up with debt payments.
MA: Yeah, basically having to get new debt to pay old debt.
WONG: And then this treadmill of taking on new debt to pay off older debt - it was mostly fine before the pandemic. But then credit ratings agencies downgraded Sri Lanka. They were concerned the country was too risky to be a good borrower.
MA: Sri Lanka lost its access to international markets and couldn't sell any more bonds. A key source of foreign exchange which it needed for debt payments was now gone.
WONG: Sri Lanka started draining its reserves. And this created another problem because the second big way that governments use their foreign exchange is to pay for imports, all the stuff they buy from the rest of the world.
MA: To try and keep its foreign reserves from getting so depleted, the Sri Lankan government started restricting imports of certain goods like wine, mobile phones and furniture.
WONG: Chayu Damsinghe is an economist at a research firm in Colombo.
MA: Chayu says before the crisis, Sri Lanka would have enough reserves to cover maybe six months of imports. Now it's around a month or less. The decline in reserves has been basically a vertical drop.
CHAYU DAMSINGHE: There was a cooking gas shipment that required a $5 million payment that couldn't be cleared. And the ship had to be sent back, so - which is a ridiculously small amount not to be able to pay. Sri Lanka is - I mean, we should not have come to this level.
WONG: Earlier this month, Sri Lanka stopped foreign debt payments. This is the first time in the country's history as an independent nation that it's done that. The pause is helping free up scarce foreign reserves to pay for critical imports like fuel and even medical supplies. In the meantime, the country is getting short-term credit lines from India and aid from the World Bank. It's also in talks with the International Monetary Fund about a loan package.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SWEET OSCAR'S "DOWNTOWN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/sri-lanka-is-facing-economic-crisis-and-the-u-s-dollar-is-partly-to-blame | 2022-05-12T15:32:13Z |
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The reason that masks are now optional in many airports, subways and buses has to do with a law passed in 1944. It's called the Public Health Service Act. It authorizes federal health agencies to make and enforce measures to prevent the spread of disease, and that's what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was trying to do by mandating masks on public transportation during the COVID pandemic before a federal judge declared it an overreach of CDC authority based on her reading of the 1944 law. So what does that law actually say?
Lawrence Gostin is a professor of public health law at Georgetown, and he's here to explain. Welcome.
LAWRENCE GOSTIN: Well, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
SHAPIRO: Broadly, what exactly did this law do?
GOSTIN: Well, this is a law created in 1944 that gave the Public Health Service - because CDC wasn't even created then - the ability to prevent the interstate or international transmission of an infectious disease. You know, the country and the world had in its memory the 1918 flu pandemic. They realized that infectious diseases were one of the most serious threats, and they also realized that states acting alone, you know, can't prevent the spread of an infectious disease, so it gave the Public Health Service that power. And soon after the CDC was created, that power was then delegated to the CDC.
SHAPIRO: When this legislation was first being introduced, proposed, debated in the 1940s, did you see the same kind of tension we're seeing today over what the authority of the federal government should be?
GOSTIN: No. You know, I think that there was a very strong national agreement - Republicans and Democrats alike - that we needed a strong public health agency and that, while most public health powers do reside at the state and local level, what a state or a city can't do is prevent the spread of diseases across the United States or, in fact, coming from abroad to our nation's borders. And I think that, you know, that's why the Public Health Service Act gave the federal government, you know, very, very broad powers to prevent the introduction into the United States and the transmission of an infectious disease across the United States to do anything it deems necessary to protect America against the interstate or international spread of a dangerous infectious disease. And of course, by definition, COVID-19 meets that standard.
SHAPIRO: You believe that the judge misinterpreted this law. Do you also believe that the law, which was passed in 1944, needs updating? Is it out of step with the times? Does it fall short in some ways?
GOSTIN: Yeah. I mean, that's a good question, and I've been, you know, on a National Academy of Sciences Committee reviewing exactly that. So, you know, the answer to that is yes, I would like to see the CDC's regulatory powers modernized, and that we should learn the lessons from COVID-19.
SHAPIRO: Modernized can be - mean so many things. What does that mean in the way that you're using it?
GOSTIN: You know, what it means is that we give CDC all the powers explicitly that it will need in the next health crisis. If you think about the air travel mask mandate, it's an almost quintessential power that the CDC should have because you've got somebody, you know, boarding a flight in New York City and flying to Los Angeles. There's no state that can protect us.
SHAPIRO: And so that's where you would draw the line between that kind of a policy and something like the policy in Shanghai that says, you know, people can't leave their houses at all if there's a COVID outbreak or something like that.
GOSTIN: Absolutely. I don't - I do not believe that the CDC should have the power to reach into a state, regulate an individual, regulate a business so long as that state itself has the authority to do it. But what no state can do is prevent me from going from, you know, New York to New Jersey or from New Jersey to California. And that's why we need a national public health agency. And I do think we should be modernized. You know, I want to see a federal agency that's, you know, strong, powerful, decisive, uses science and protects us where states can't.
SHAPIRO: Lawrence Gostin, university professor of global health law at Georgetown and director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, thank you for talking with us.
GOSTIN: It's a pleasure, Ari. Thank you very much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/the-1944-law-behind-the-cdcs-authority | 2022-05-12T15:32:19Z |
Math textbooks axed for their treatment of race; a viral Twitter account directing ire at LGBTQ teachers; a state law forbidding classroom discussion of sexual identity in younger grades; a board book for babies targeted as "pornographic." Lately it seems there's a new controversy erupting every day over how race, gender or history are tackled in public school classrooms.
But for most parents, these concerns seem to be far from top of mind. That's according to a new national poll by NPR and Ipsos. By wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children's schools and what is being taught in them.
The nationally representative poll of 1,007 parents of school-aged children follows up on a similar survey NPR and Ipsos conducted about a year ago. In both polls, parents answered questions about the impact of the pandemic on their children, academically and socially, and about their schools' performance during this time.
This year's responses showed positive trends as the nation continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic. Compared to 2021, a growing margin of parents say their child is "ahead" when it comes to math, reading, social skills, and mental health and well-being. Fewer parents say their child is "behind" in those areas. In fact, in 2022, almost half of parents, 47%, agree with the statement: "the pandemic has not disrupted my child's education." That's up from 38% in 2021, and is a view at odds with that of most education researchers, who see big disruptions in indicators like test scores, college attendance, and preschool enrollment.
Education is a concern, but most parents say their own kids' school is doing well
For decades, voters have expressed concern in polls about the state of K-12 education in the U.S. But when you zoom in closer, parents seem to like their own kids' school, and they like their kids' teachers even more.
That's true in the NPR/Ipsos poll as well. Parents named education as their top concern after inflation and crime/gun violence.
However, 88% of respondents agree "my child's teacher(s) have done the best they could, given the circumstances around the pandemic." And 82% agree "my child's school has handled the pandemic well."
Parents feel well-informed about curricula, even when there's controversy
That satisfaction extends to hot-button topics. In the poll, 76% of respondents agree that "my child's school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics."
It really is a pretty vocal minority that is hyper-focused on parental rights and decisions around curriculum.
"It really is a pretty vocal minority that is hyper-focused on parental rights and decisions around curriculum," observes Mallory Newall of Ipsos, which conducted the poll.
Just 18% of parents say their child's school taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family's values; just 19% say the same about race and racism; and just 14% feel that way about U.S. history.
Christine, a mother in Wisconsin who participated in the poll, is a member of that vocal minority. She asked not to use her last name because she says she's afraid of her child being retaliated against.
Christine, who is white, says her son's teacher has made "snarky comments about white privilege. " She also doesn't approve of her son, who is in high school, being asked what pronouns he prefers to use. Switching to a different school or district would be tough for their family, so, Christine says, "hopefully we can do enough countereducation at home to have it not be detrimental to [his] growth and development."
There is a striking lack of partisan divides in the poll responses
As a pollster, Newall at Ipsos says big partisan divides are "all I see on every topic right now." She was struck by the relative lack of them in this poll.
Christine is the type of discontented parent who's most often reflected in the headlines: a cultural conservative. Yet in our poll, the minority of parents who were unhappy with how their school tackled racism and U.S. history were just as likely to identify as Democrats as Republicans. In other words: For every parent who thinks their child's school is too "woke," there may be one who thinks it isn't woke enough.
Jim Ondelacy is a Native American and a Democrat living in North Richland Hills, Texas, outside Fort Worth. He wishes his son's high school went more in depth and taught more about the nation's history of racism and oppression.
"It's more of a water-down effect ... [the teachers] kind of whitewash the way that history is taught to their kids," he says.
He wants the school to teach about the French and Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and about slavery during the Revolutionary War.
"They understand what's happening with Black Lives Matter ... but they don't really understand where it came from and how it started," he says.
The most partisan issue in our poll was gender and sexuality, but still only a minority expressed any concerns. Republicans are closely divided: 26% say schools are not teaching about gender and sexuality in a way that matches their family's values, while 22% say schools are (the remainder don't know or say schools aren't addressing those topics).
Among Democrats, a third agree with their school's approach to gender and sexuality, while only 11% disagree.
Taryn Chatel, in Belmont, Mich., is the mother of a kindergartner, and has a family friend who is transgender. She's hoping the school will introduce the idea of gender diversity, so it's not all on her as a parent. "I really hope the district can get behind a way of implementing this," she says.
The silent majority of parents is unconcerned
Republican governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia have helped make parents' rights into a major political talking point, and Republican-aligned groups like No Left Turn In Education and Parents Defending Education have continuously pushed these issues into the spotlight.
It's definitely an incredibly small minority that's being amplified with this large, well-funded infrastructure to appear larger and to appear to have more well-founded concerns than they do.
Ralph Wilson, a researcher who studies how partisan donors back the culture war, says these groups imply that they represent a silent majority of conservative-leaning parents. But that's not necessarily the case, he says.
"It's definitely an incredibly small minority that's being amplified with this large, well-funded infrastructure to appear larger and to appear to have more well-founded concerns than they do."
In fact, in our poll, about a third of parents say they "don't know" how their child's school addresses sexuality, gender identity, racism or patriotism. That's far more than the percentage who express any problem – in some cases, twice as many.
Carmen Shipley, in Grand Junction, Colo., says she "picks her battles" when it comes to her daughter's high school.
"I know there's been some controversy ... but I don't honestly pay much attention to that, as much as some others here."
She and her neighbors tend toward the conservative, and the local school board does as well, so she feels like everyone's on the same page. "I have no issues with any of her teachers ... I'm fairly comfortable with all of that."
Besides, she says, her top priority isn't the culture wars; it's making sure her daughter stays engaged with her studies and is prepared for college.
Taylor Jennings-Brown contributed to this report.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/the-education-culture-war-is-raging-but-for-most-parents-its-background-noise | 2022-05-12T15:32:25Z |
30 years ago Friday, the police officers who beat Rodney King were found not guilty — and people took to the streets in Los Angeles to protest. Here's how the Los Angeles Riots are still relevant.
Copyright 2022 NPR
30 years ago Friday, the police officers who beat Rodney King were found not guilty — and people took to the streets in Los Angeles to protest. Here's how the Los Angeles Riots are still relevant.
Copyright 2022 NPR | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/the-los-angeles-riots-still-resonate-after-30-years | 2022-05-12T15:32:31Z |
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The United States says it is supporting all international efforts to prosecute Russians for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, including at the International Criminal Court. It is the world's only standing war crimes tribunal, but the U.S. is not a party to it, and some in Washington oppose it, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: When the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice spoke at a recent U.N. meeting, Beth Van Schaack had a warning for Russian officials and rank-and-file officers.
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BETH VAN SCHAACK: The world is watching, and you will be held accountable. The United States is supporting a range of international investigations into atrocities in Ukraine.
KELEMEN: That includes, she said, the International Criminal Court. It may seem the obvious choice - the ICC, based in The Hague, was set up to prosecute war crimes when countries won't hold perpetrators to account. But the U.S. is not a party to the court, in part to prevent it from being used against U.S. troops. David Bosco, who teaches at Indiana University, has written a book about the ICC.
DAVID BOSCO: The Defense Department would prefer to keep the U.S. position clear that we actually don't think it's appropriate for the ICC to be prosecuting nonmember-country nationals.
KELEMEN: Neither the U.S. or Russia are members of the court. During the Trump administration, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the ICC to pressure it to drop an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan because U.S. personnel could be at risk of prosecution. A Russian legal adviser at the U.N., Sergey Leonidchenko, referred to that at the U.N. meeting Wednesday.
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SERGEY LEONIDCHENKO: Many of the participants of the - today's meeting praised the International Criminal Court, which is interesting, since at least two of the co-sponsors of today's meeting, the United States and the United Kingdom, did everything imaginable to shield their own military from the ICC's reach.
KELEMEN: In 2002, Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act to prevent the ICC from prosecuting Americans. But now, some U.S. lawmakers are eager to let the ICC get to work on Russia. Republican Lindsey Graham met recently with the ICC's lead prosecutor.
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LINDSEY GRAHAM: I think he has a good plan for those who are committing war crimes in Ukraine wearing Russian uniforms.
KELEMEN: The prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made the rounds both in Washington and in New York.
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KARIM KHAN: We should feel ashamed that in 2022 we continue in so many parts of the world to see violence that may constitute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. In the pictures at this particular moment, the focus is on Ukraine, but in many other parts of the world, we need to do better.
KELEMEN: The court was set up two decades ago to be a deterrent to would-be war criminals. That hasn't worked so far in Ukraine, says David Bosco.
BOSCO: Russian leaders knew that they were going to be under scrutiny, and obviously that didn't deter them. That doesn't mean the ICC can't have a deterrent effect in some situations. You know, I know that Ukrainian officials have been trying to send out reminders to Russian generals and commanders that, you know, The Hague could be an ultimate destination for them.
KELEMEN: Like Russia, Ukraine is not a member of the ICC, though it did give the court jurisdiction. Ukraine could try to prosecute cases in its own courts if it can catch the perpetrators. Other European countries could try the same. As for the U.S., it says it's helping to gather evidence for prosecutors in Ukraine or in The Hague.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
(SOUNDBITE OF PSALM TREES' "CALL WHENEVER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/u-s-supports-efforts-to-prosecute-russians-for-alleged-war-crimes-including-at-icc | 2022-05-12T15:32:37Z |
Several notable U.S. Senate candidates were working the crowd at an annual Lincoln Dinner celebration put on by the Lafayette County Republican Party.
The recent event, at a packed gymnasium in Wellington, Mo., was an opportunity for diehard GOP voters in the rural county outside of Kansas City to mingle with hopefuls seeking to succeed the retiring Sen. Roy Blunt.
Rep. Billy Long was among the Senate candidates. He was passing out stickers asking voters if they were "Fed Up" with what was going on in Washington, D.C., a campaign moniker he's adopted since first running for the U.S. House in 2010.
Long is banking on the possibility that the race will get so nasty that Republican voters will wonder, he said, if "there is a fat auctioneer in Springfield we can vote for."
"If I can get some oxygen and get the people to know who I am, I can win the thing," Long said.
Long may be right about the tenor of Missouri's Senate contest, primarily because of one candidate who was absent from the Lincoln Dinner: former Gov. Eric Greitens.
His most boisterous critics believe he can win a 21-person Senate primary — even though Greitens resigned from office in 2018 following a series of scandals.
He's hoping Missouri Republicans will flock to his message that emphasizes ties to former President Donald Trump's agenda and approach.
"We need fighters who are willing to do what it takes to take our country back," Greitens told reporters back in February. "To take our country back from the left — and also fighters who are willing to take on the establishment, willing to take on the mainstream media."
But Greitens can't escape the shadow of scandal.
His ex-wife Sheena Greitens last month filed legal documentation in which she, under oath, accused the former governor of emotional and physical abuse.
He has denied her claims.
But combined with the 2018 allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance issues, some Republicans worry that if Greitens were to win the primary, it would place a Senate seat considered to be safely GOP in jeopardy.
Others stress that concern over Greitens is about more than just winning or losing an election. They worry about what would happen if Greitens wins and is able to possess a national platform to promote himself and his views.
"Once he gets the nomination, he's just going to tell everybody, 'Look, you have no choice but to support me,' " said Stephen Webber, an official with the Missouri AFL-CIO and former state Democratic Party chair. "And he's betting that taking back the Senate will be a powerful enough factor for people to back him."
"This messy, dark story"
When Sheena Greitens' under-oath statements became public, Kay Hoflander, a former Missouri GOP chair, says she had difficulty sleeping.
After two days, she decided to do something about it: She issued a statement calling for Greitens to get out of the race. And she said she was pleased when several other high-profile women involved with the state Republican Party also called for him to exit the contest.
"Some day his children will see this messy, dark story about their family — and they need to know that there were people who stood up for their mom," Hoflander said in an interview.
Unlike 2018, Greitens, whose campaign didn't respond to a request for comment, has steadfastly refused to drop out of the Senate race.
Instead, he's claimed without evidence that his ex-wife is involved in a scheme involving prominent Republicans like Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell. Both Greitens and his campaign amplified this message — which Sheena Greitens' attorney called a "conspiracy theory" — in friendly media interviews, including with former Trump aide Steve Bannon.
Sheena Greitens said she has documentation to back up her claims — which are playing out in front of a judge to move divorce-related proceedings to Texas.
Other notable Republicans, including Missouri U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, have called for Greitens to depart from the contest. "If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate," Hawley tweeted in March.
"Burned a lot of bridges"
Concerns about Greitens' general election chances are only part of the story behind Missouri Republican angst around him.
After he became governor, Greitens made plenty of enemies among the state's political class — including elected officials like Hawley. He had a bad relationship with the GOP-controlled legislature, a body he derided as "third graders" after a contentious legislative session. Some of his policy initiatives alienated GOP figures. And many of his detractors found him to be profoundly hypocritical: Even though he chastised his opponents for relying on "secretive super PACs," some people connected to him started a politically active nonprofit that attacked sitting Republican legislators — and never revealed the funding sources.
"I think he has burned a lot of bridges," Hoflander said.
John Lamping is a former state senator who supported Greitens' gubernatorial bid, but is neutral in this year's Senate election. He said Greitens' estrangement from Missouri's Republican political class is a big driver in trying to get him out of the race.
"They'll say he'll lose in the general election — they're just trying to appeal to people's emotions," Lamping said. "The reason they don't like him is he doesn't care what they think."
Lamping said some of the things Greitens is espousing, including deposing McConnell as Senate Republican leader and repeating false claims that Trump actually won the 2020 election, are popular with GOP voters attracted to a "populist" and "nationalist" message.
"They look at the two parties as kind of a uni-party — it's a cartel," Lamping said. "The political class hates him for the same reason the political class hated Trump before 2016 — and hated him even more once he got into office. Because what they know to be true — and this was proven true in Greitens' case when he was governor — is he won't listen to the political class."
The Trump card
Though Missouri isn't that far removed from being a competitive state for U.S. Senate contests, Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020 by large margins.
The former president hasn't endorsed anybody in Missouri's Senate race, but is being courted aggressively.
Hawley, for instance, has spoken with Trump often about the contest, while the former president has appeared at a fundraiser for Attorney General Eric Schmitt. And Greitens has received support from prominent people in Trump's orbit, including Bannon, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump Jr.
Former President Trump put out a statement recently that praised Long, but stopped short of endorsing him. Long said Trump's backing could put him in a similar situation as Ohio's J.D. Vance, who saw his Senate fortunes rise after an endorsement.
But Long and Greitens have been behind in fundraising to Schmitt and Rep. Vicky Hartzler. (Both Schmitt and Greitens have supporting political action committees with millions of dollars to spend.) Most public polls show Greitens, Schmitt and Hartzler as the three top-tier candidates. The rest, including Long, are typically in the single digits of a race in which the primary winner could prevail with less than 30% of the vote.
There are other ways the major candidates are trying to stand out.
Hartzler received backing of key agricultural groups and top-level Missouri Republican leaders such as Hawley and former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond. She's developed a reputation for her socially conservative views, and used one of her first TV ads to stake out a position against transgender women playing women's sports.
Schmitt is also pointing to his legal advocacy against some of President Biden's agenda, including a scuttled vaccine mandate. He's also gone after COVID-19 restrictions in schools.
There are also two other candidates that are hoping to gain momentum: Senate President Dave Schatz, who dropped $2 million of his own money into the contest, and attorney Mark McCloskey, who gained widespread attention in 2020 when he and his wife brandished guns as protesters walked by their house.
"I don't like the drama"
Some attendees of the recent Lincoln Dinner noted that they're less interested in Greitens' personal drama and more curious about what the candidates are going to do about pressing concerns — such as how to bring inflation under control.
"The mudslinging doesn't really affect my pocketbook," said Mark Schroer, who works in Wellington's municipal government. "I want to know what they're going to do when they get to the U.S. Senate."
Eric Kolkmeyer, who runs a trucking company in Odessa, Mo., too is undecided on who he wants to replace Blunt. He said that he has some "favorites."
"I don't like the drama. I want the best candidate," Kolkmeyer said. "I want somebody who is issues-driven, that's personally aligned with me values-wise."
And even though some candidates like Greitens have castigated so-called insiders, Linda Niendick, who's Lafayette County's public administrator, said there's value in candidates making a direct pitch to GOP stalwarts like herself.
"If I get to know these candidates, I can talk to people that I know who haven't had a chance to meet the candidates — and that's how the good message is spread," she said.
Missouri GOP voters will make the final call in the crowded race on Aug. 2.
And at least two Democratic candidates, Lucas Kunce and Trudy Busch Valentine, have the ability to mount well-funded and well-organized campaigns in November.
St. Louis Public Radio's Sarah Kellogg contributed to this story.
Copyright 2022 St. Louis Public Radio | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/why-many-missouri-republicans-fear-eric-greitens-could-win-the-states-senate-primary | 2022-05-12T15:32:43Z |
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
President Biden says additional U.S. support for Ukraine carries a price tag of $33 billion.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The cost of this fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen. We either back Ukrainian people as they defend their country, or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine.
MARTINEZ: All right. Let's get some details on what the money will do if Congress approves it. On the line with us is deputy national security Adviser Jonathan Finer. Thanks for being with us.
JONATHAN FINER: Thanks very much.
MARTINEZ: All right. Let's start with the number, $33 billion. What buckets of assistance are you aiming to fill with that money?
FINER: Well, there's three main categories. First, and obviously, what gets the most attention is the security, military assistance that we've been providing to the Ukrainians since, frankly, far before the conflict began. There's another $20 billion or so that's set aside for security assistance to make sure that they have the arms that they need on the battlefield as the conflict shifts to a new phase with the Russians very focused, as you know, on the south and the east of the country. Second is humanitarian assistance, and that goes both to provide support for the Ukrainian people under very difficult circumstances inside their own country, as well as for Ukrainians who have left the country and are now refugees in countries on the periphery and for those countries that are hosting Ukrainian refugees.
A third category is for economic assistance to enable the Ukrainian government to continue to function. You know, it is hard for them under these circumstances to do basic things like collect taxes and generate revenues. And so we are providing some support so that they can continue to provide basic services for the Ukrainian people. And then there is also money for a range of other things like food security. What Russia has done inside Ukraine, which is one of the world's major producers of food and exporters of food, is diminished that supply and created a situation of insecurity. And so we got some funds set aside so the U.S. producers, U.S. farmers can produce more food and so countries that have relied on Ukraine can be provided with some support under these circumstances.
MARTINEZ: And after that first $20 million going to security assistance, $13 million, that's split up with the rest - topics two - three to four, right?
FINER: Correct.
MARTINEZ: OK. The House is out this week. When does the White House hope the Congress will pass this new package?
FINER: Well, look, I will leave that - those considerations to people on the political side of the White House and on the Hill who know those issues far better than I do. What I can say, though, is from the national security perspective, given that Russia has redoubled its efforts on the battlefield in the south and the east of Ukraine and given that we expect this fight to be very intense and to last for some period of time, we think there is an imperative to pass this funding as quickly as possible. And then we will deploy it to get it into the hands of the people who need it immediately.
MARTINEZ: When you say some period of time, how long does the Biden administration expect this to last?
FINER: I mean, the truth is, nobody knows for sure. But we expect that this conflict could last for a period of not just weeks but even months, and that we are going to need to show resolve, as both the United States has and the rest of the international community has, to continue to support Ukraine as it remains under attack by Russian forces.
MARTINEZ: If it continues months, as you say, or maybe even stretches into years, by showing resolve, does that mean an endless supply of cash for Ukraine, considering all the issues and needs that Americans have here at home?
FINER: So what I'd say about that is nothing is endless. We obviously live in a time of finite resources, as we always do. But the president has been clear that so long as Ukraine remains under attack by Russia, the United States will continue to provide support for the people of Ukraine as they wage this fight. We think that the level of support that we've provided up until now has enabled the Ukrainians to have a degree of success on the battlefield. We think we need to continue that. The funds that we have requested yesterday, which the president has said will last for the next five months, we think will enable us to continue to execute this strategy that has enabled the Ukrainians to have the success they've had up till now.
MARTINEZ: So just to be clear, as long as Russia is attacking Ukraine, President Biden is committed to trying to secure as much financial assistance for Ukraine as possible, regardless of how long that lasts.
FINER: What the president has said and what we will execute is support for the Ukrainian people so long as they are under attack from Russia.
MARTINEZ: All right. On the endgame, both money and strategy, I mean, how many more billions do you think it will take to help Ukraine get to a point where they can maybe be independent from us?
FINER: Well, I mean, again, I'm not going to speculate to the infinite future. What we've said is the money that we've requested yesterday, we believe, is enough to sustain this fight for the next five months through the end of this fiscal year. We've laid out the categories with some degree of specificity where they need this money. And we asked Congress to pass it as quickly as they can.
MARTINEZ: But can you understand how, you know, some Americans might feel like, hey, wait a second, I mean, this feels like an endless stream of money heading outside of the country?
FINER: I mean, we get this question from both sides. We get this question from the perspective of kind of why are you not providing more assistance, more support for the government of Ukraine? We think we have provided an amount that has enabled Ukraine to succeed. Russia had much larger ambitions when they started this conflict, to take over the entirety or nearly the entirety of Ukraine, to topple the government of Ukraine in Kyiv. In large part because of our support and because of the bravery in fighting that the Ukrainians have shown on the battlefield, Russia has had to scale back those ambitions. They are now very focused on the south and the east. And we think we need to stay on top of our strategy of providing the support to enable the Ukrainians to succeed. Again, nothing is infinite. Nothing is endless in terms of our support. But we think the level of support we've provided has enabled success up till now, and we think that we are going to continue it so long as Ukraine remains under attack.
MARTINEZ: And so what constitutes remain under attack? I mean, what's an acceptable strategic end to Russia's incursion?
FINER: You know, to a large extent, that is going to be defined by the Ukrainians themselves. They have had some negotiations with the Russians on this. We don't see a lot of progress in those talks. We think both countries at this point are inclined to continue fighting so long as Russia has objectives that the Ukrainians just simply will not be able to live with. But we, you know, are very closely in touch with the Ukrainians on their objectives for the battlefield. You know, they are the ones who are under attack. They are the ones who are trying to defend their territory and their country. They're the ones who will define their war aims. And we are providing support for those efforts. But it's not for us to sort of lay out what the end state of this should be. That is really something for the Ukrainians to decide.
MARTINEZ: All right. That's deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer. Thanks for taking the time.
FINER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-29/with-an-increase-in-funds-to-ukraine-the-u-s-aims-to-help-it-hold-off-russia | 2022-05-12T15:32:50Z |
You tell people you're going to John Waters' house in Baltimore to interview him and suddenly people are falling over themselves to be like, "Oh, you gotta tell me what his house is like."
Sure, if you know his work, it's reasonable to assume the man's got all sorts of homages to grotesque and filthy ideas around his house. Which he does... in the sense that his house (or at least his living room) was packed with books. Art books, history books, novels, all crammed into shelves or precariously stacked on top of any flat surface. The man behind the phrase, "If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't f– 'em," will truly never find himself at the wrong end of that situation.
That said, wrongness is Waters' specialty. It's there in all of his work, from his early short movies touching on the KKK and the JFK assassination, to the 50-year-old, landmark film Pink Flamingos, to his latest project – his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance.
The book is based on an idea that's been knocking around his head for a bit. At first, he thought it would be a movie, but he's done movies before. He's written books, too, but they were works of memoir or journalism.
"I just wanted to try something I hadn't done," Waters said. "Same reason I took LSD when I was 70. The same reason I hitchhiked across America when I was 66. Why not try to write your first novel in your mid-70s? I want to keep trying new things. Dare yourself."
Reading Liarmouth, at times, feels like entering a delirium (which is to say, it feels similar to watching a John Waters movie). One character will do something outrageous and another will one-up them and again and again until people are jumping up and down on trampolines, trying to murder each other, having sex with strangers and barking like dogs.
At the center of it all is Marsha Sprinkle, a woman who makes her living stealing suitcases from the airport. Marsha is uptight – anal, one might say. She hates bodily functions of all sorts – from bathroom stuff to bedroom stuff. Her partner, Darryl, has an unusual salary: he can have sex with Marsha once a year, "and this is that day, but she aint' paying him" said Waters.
Marsha and Darryl live in empty, foreclosed McMansions in Baltimore, unadorned with any art, so Marsha doesn't feel outshone. It's all fairly chaste, until an incident happens and Marsha goes on the run, meeting up with characters like Poppy, her trampoline-addicted daughter; Richard, Darryl's talking penis; Adora, Marsha's pet-loving mother; and a varied cast of relatively innocent bystanders who have their lives affected in terrible ways. It's...very John Waters.
The very idea of a "sensitivity reader" makes Waters groan. But he sent his book to one anyway.
The Waters-ness of it all remains un-diluted, if you, for some reason, happened to be worried that culture war debates over impropriety have gotten to the self-proclaimed "filth elder." But while he does bristle at terms like "trigger warning" or "sensitivity reader," he's not completely closed to the idea. In fact, he said he sent Liarmouth to one.
Imagine it! John Waters! Sending his first novel to a sensitivity reader! But whether that shows growth, or that Waters is selling out, or whether the whole thing is simply part of a carnival-barker-esque marketing routine, we'll never really know. He says the sensitivity reader never called him back.
Which isn't to say Waters is immune or indifferent to the social mores of today. There's an art and grace to tastelessness that requires a certain amount of sensitivity. For example, two of the innocent bystanders whom Marsha and the crew leave in their wake in Liarmouth were originally an Asian couple. But then, during the edit process, anti-Asian violence in America was in the news. So he changed the couple to an Italian-American one. "You cannot ignore that," he said, about being attuned to what he called people's "touchiness" about race. So instead he embraced it, to the point of ridiculousness, making sure everyone was included in the book. "Marsha even says, her victims are so diverse" he said.
There's a glee to Waters' writing. You can imagine him grinning as he pushes certain buttons, daring the audience to come along for the ride. That ethos has been present in all his work, but especially in his career-defining, 1972 movie Pink Flamingos. The movie stars the late drag queen Divine as she tries to prove herself to be the filthiest woman alive. Her main competition is a couple who live in a relatively tony Baltimore house, where they keep women chained up in the basement.
The movie is perhaps most famous for the scene where Divine eats dog poo, but don't let that moment overshadow some of the other wild things that happen – genitalia gets mutilated, chickens get involved in people sex (and then eaten afterward), and incest is a reward for a job well done. "It still works," Waters said, even 50 years later. "It is still alarming, and confusing in a way, and frightening almost. But joyous, I think, in the long run."
That feeling of joy is perhaps what's led much of his work to become cult hits (or even popular hits; he wrote and directed the movie Hairspray, which became a beloved Broadway musical).
So maybe it's not a surprise that Pink Flamingos has become a fixture in American cinema. In June, the Criterion Collection will celebrate the film's anniversary with a re-release and all the bells and whistles that usually entails, including an appreciation essay by film critic Howard Hampton. In an interview, he said Pink Flamingos had a lot to say about our current moment, particularly in the way the film balanced its edginess with compassion.
"John Waters' secret throughout his career is that there's not a mean spiritedness in his movies," said Hampton. "He embraces his characters. He loves their dementia. He delights in it, revels in it. But at the end of the day, there is a great feeling for these people."
At this point, Waters is used to Pink Flamingos getting praise from non-weirdos. Last year, the Library of Congress entered Pink Flamingos into the National Film Registry – alongside movies like The Long Goodbye, Wall-E, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. It is the way things go – the counter-culture becomes just the culture. And Waters isn't bothered by it. In fact, he thinks it's a good thing. "It gives all young people faith that you can think up the most outrageous thing. I haven't changed," he said. "It's just the acceptance of me has changed and the people in power in the room where it happens are all crazy people now, from my generation, that lasted."
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/a-lot-of-material-from-this-john-waters-interview-couldnt-be-published | 2022-05-12T15:32:56Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The personalities we sometimes ascribe to dogs may be mostly in our minds, not in their genes. AP reported on a study this week in the journal Science that said a dog's breed doesn't really contribute much to their personality. Golden Retrievers don't necessarily fetch. Beagles and huskies don't necessarily howl. Dachshunds don't necessarily speak with a German accent. Wait - I think I knew that.
There is a huge amount of behavioral variation in every breed, said study co-author and University of Massachusetts geneticist Elinor Karlsson. At the end of the day, every dog really is an individual. The study notes that humans began to breed dogs about 160 years ago to try to pass on characteristics like the color and texture of their coats. But that's all just cosmetics. Jeff Kidd, a geneticist at the University of Michigan, told the AP the correlation between dog behavior and dog breed is much lower than most expected.
Our French poodle, Daisy, sat on my lap as I wrote this and told me she's glad the stereotype of French poodles as slightly snooty Gallic snobs is scientifically unmerited. Then she took a sip of wine from her bowl and said, ah, you call this Beaujolais?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ATOMIC DOG")
GEORGE CLINTON: (Singing) Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah, bow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah. Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah, bow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/a-new-study-tells-us-to-hold-the-stereotypes-on-dog-breeds | 2022-05-12T15:33:02Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Russia's assault on Ukraine is now entering its third month with heavy fighting in the east and south. Last night, President Zelenskyy described in vivid terms one of the most devastated cities, Mariupol.
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PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: (Speaking Ukrainian).
SIMON: He said, "it's a Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins." We're joined now by NPR's Joanna Kakissis from Kyiv. Joanna, thanks so much.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SIMON: President Zelenskyy met with the U.N. secretary general this week to try to set up a plan to evacuate civilians from Mariupol. But any evacuation plans actually been put into place?
KAKISSIS: Well, you know, so far, all we know is that Ukrainian authorities are trying to establish evacuation corridors. And they've tried this several times with no success. And the situation in Mariupol is really dire. So there's so much need for an evacuation plan to happen because there are hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who are holed up in this underground maze under the Azovstal factory, which is this massive steel factory in Mariupol. Russian forces are constantly bombing this factory.
Hundreds of the Ukrainians there are wounded. There are women and children there. The youngest child is reportedly 4 months old. They're all running out of food, out of water, out of supplies. The group has sent out videos and photos on social media. And one photo is just so depressing, I just can't get it out of my head. It shows a toddler wearing a taped-up plastic bag as a diaper.
SIMON: And you've been in touch with a Ukrainian soldier who's inside the factory. What does he report?
KAKISSIS: Yes, I have. And he has confirmed all these terrible conditions. He calls the situation catastrophic. The soldiers' commander is now going to social media to beg Turkey for help since no one else has managed to get the group out. And, you know, let's not forget what's happening outside this plant. The Russians have bombed Mariupol into charred ruins. U.S. satellite images suggest there are mass graves outside Mariupol that are growing every day. And countries like Greece, which has historic ties to the city - they are pushing for the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Mariupol.
SIMON: Let me ask you about war crimes because the Ukrainians are investigating war crimes in other parts of the country at the same time. What's the latest on that?
KAKISSIS: So there are thousands of investigations into war crimes going on in Ukraine right now. Ukraine has many war crimes prosecutors who are going from town to town, from village to village to interview survivors of torture and of rape. They come with forensic teams to exhume bodies and then send those bodies to medical examiners. You know, and sometimes they don't have much to work with.
We spent a day with one war crimes prosecutor in Moshchun, a village not far from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. His investigators had discovered the partial remains of a person in the ruins of a house. And the prosecutor told me, you know, finding out how this person died is going to be incredibly difficult. And we may not even know for sure ever if it's a war crime.
SIMON: Yeah. But, I gather, Ukrainian prosecutors did have enough to bring war crimes charges in some other cases. Tell us about that.
KAKISSIS: Yeah, that's right. Ukraine is now looking for 10 Russian soldiers accused of murder, torture and rape in the town of Bucha, outside Kyiv. Ukraine's defense ministry calls them the despicable 10. Russian soldiers occupied Bucha for a month at the beginning of the war. And when the town was liberated, Ukrainian troops found mass graves and bodies lying in the streets. Ukraine's prosecutor general has released the names and the photographs of the accused soldiers. And she says Ukraine will do everything possible to bring them to justice.
SIMON: NPR's Joanna Kakissis in Kyiv - thanks so much.
KAKISSIS: You're welcome, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/after-three-months-of-conflict-the-ukrainian-city-of-mariupol-is-devastated | 2022-05-12T15:33:08Z |
The Great Zapfino is a circus performer whose act is called "The Leap For Life." When the book opens, he's climbing up a ladder, preparing to jump off a high-dive onto a trampoline. But when the ringmaster hypes up Zapfino's terrifying 10-story dive, Zapfino gets scared. He can't make the leap.
Instead, he climbs back down the ladder, goes to the airport and starts a new life in a new city, with a new job — far, far away from the circus — and tries to overcome his fear.
And all of that, everything that happens after Zapfino climbs back down the ladder, happens wordlessly.
Mac Barnett wrote 73 words in total for The Great Zapfino and nine of them are "Zapfino."
"It's definitely the shortest manuscript I've ever written," says Barnett.
In addition to the few words in the book, Barnett also wrote one page of notes — what he calls an "emotional blueprint" — with some suggestions for what might happen to Zapfino after he flees the circus, and how the ex-acrobat might eventually gain some stability. Barnett left illustrator Marla Frazee to fill in the details.
"That whole section was fascinating to me," says Frazee. "There was this whole middle to be puzzled out."
Passing off the middle of the story was a huge act of trust, says Barnett, but he and Frazee have known each other for more than a decade.
"Marla and I are both picture book obsessives," says Barnett. "I have so many memories of just like standing near a table full of snacks, talking to Marla for an hour or more, and the party sort of closing down around us as we just got lost in talking about what picture books we were reading, what picture books we loved as kids, what informed our work and how these things actually work. The magic of the form."
In addition to being an illustrator, Marla Frazee is also the author-illustrator of her own children's books, including Roller Coaster, The Boss Baby, and Boot & Shoe. She was awarded a Caldecott Honor for All the World and A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever.
Mac Barnett is himself a two-time Caldecott Honor winner for Extra Yarn, and Sam and Dave Dig A Hole — both illustrated by Jon Klassen.
Barnett and Frazee say they were excited to finally get to work with each other.
"I remember one of Mac's books... I was so jealous that I didn't have the opportunity to be the illustrator," says Frazee. "Then when I saw this text, I jumped at it."
When they started working on The Great Zapfino, Frazee and Barnett had a long discussion. "It was more an emotional and philosophical talk about how the book worked and how the book felt, than it was about any sort of technical stuff," says Barnett. He also gave her free reign to ignore all of his notes and suggestions.
"We were on the same page about what we wanted to accomplish," says Barnett, "and how that was executed was totally up to Marla."
One of those suggestions: to have Zapfino blend into everyday life after leaving the circus. Frazee disagreed. "I wanted him to remain Zapfino," she says. But where could Zapfino go in his circus outfit and still fit in?
Frazee immediately thought of Venice Beach, California. She had recently seen a photo of three kids rollerblading on a beach boardwalk wearing capes, and immediately knew Zapfino would blend in. The other thing Frazee had to decide: Zapfino's job. Since standard children's books are only 32 pages long, she knew it would be inconvenient to waste valuable real estate having Zapfino commute to and from work.
"I was real excited when I kind of came up with the idea that he could live on the top floor of this apartment building and be the elevator operator. Which would mean he doesn't have to commute back and forth too far," says Frazee.
As an elevator operator, Zapfino meets all kinds of people: happy families, rich people, poor people, children, people who fight, old people, people who are nice to him, people who are not, people with their dogs. He rides up and down in the elevator all day, every day, possibly for years — encountering a vast sea of humanity and having all sorts of experiences.
"Just finding himself in that process and overcoming fear," says Frazee. "Which is really what I think the book is addressing."
She envisioned The Great Zapfino as a graphic novel for young children — repeating panels of Zapfino in the elevator car help show the passage of time. And she decided to illustrate it without color. "There was something about the anonymous nature of what Zapfino craved that felt like maybe it should proceed in black and white," she says.
She used a black Prismacolor pencil on Dura-Lar for a smooth, dark line on a velvety soft paper.
When he first saw Frazee's sketches, Mac Barnett gasped. "Marla wrote so much and added so much to this world and to Zapfino's character," he says. "It's such a wonderful, weird feeling to be surprised by a book you wrote."
For her part, Frazee says she was grateful for the creative space in this book. "This one felt so personal to me," she says.
During their earlier conversation about the book, Frazee says she asked Barnett where this story about Zapfino had come from. Barnett told her that he was interested in writing about a character who feels out of place in his own story.
That idea is what stayed with Frazee. "I wrote it down. I thought about it a lot," says Frazee. "Because we all feel that way sometimes."
"It's a feeling that probably characterizes my whole life more than any other," she says. "Like, I never have felt ready to do the thing I was supposed to do next. And I have to go through all kinds of acrobatics to get to the place of being able to do the thing."
Even though most kids are probably familiar with the feeling — metaphorical or real — of standing at the edge of a high dive, being unable to jump. It's unusual, at least in children's books, for the main character to fail to do the one thing he is supposed to do. That's why, Barnett explains, the narration drops out.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," he says. "Nobody was prepared for Zapfino to do what he did." Maybe there was text for a whole other book written, one where Zapfino does the exciting thing we all expected him to do, but he flipped the script, and now we have to watch the rest of his story unfold in silence.
"I love to write about characters not rising to the challenge, at least the first time they try something," says Barnett. "And failure, I think, is interesting to me over and over again."
Zapfino, of course, is able to overcome his fears by the end of the book. But both Marla Frazee and Mac Barnett hope that kids — and adults — can learn from Zapfino that it's ok to fail, and to not do what everyone expects you to do.
"It is brave to say 'No, I'm not ready,'" says Frazee. "That's not a story that's told very often to us, as we're growing up. And I think it's important."
Samantha Balaban and Melissa Gray produced and edited this interview for broadcast.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/behold-the-great-zapfino-takes-a-big-leap-to-overcome-his-fears | 2022-05-12T15:33:14Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The loss of a father, the loss of a marriage and the complexities of fatherhood are some of the themes explored on "Break Me Open," the first solo project in four years from S. Carey, the drummer and backing vocalist for the band Bon Iver.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WAKING UP")
SEAN CAREY: (Singing) And I'm waking up in another man's lifetime - all that I failed to see. Will you hear my plea?
SIMON: Sean Carey joins us now from Eau Claire, Wis.
Thanks so much for being with us.
CAREY: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Eau Claire's a beautiful place. And a lot of this album was, I guess, inspired by what we'll call - what those of us who are from Illinois call the great outdoors. Is that fair to say?
CAREY: Yeah. My music's always rooted in nature. And it's a feeling. It's a feeling of connectedness. It's kind of the place where I feel the most human, the most alive, you could say. It's sort of like a church, you know? It provides head space for writing, inspiration from learning new things. And now especially, you know, it's time away from technology, which is really important, I think.
SIMON: Let's listen, if we can, to a bit of your song "Sunshower."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUNSHOWER")
CAREY: (Singing) Daily I still feel the silk sunshower dripping. Salt your eyes, my soft sunflower.
SIMON: My gosh, that's a beautiful song.
CAREY: Oh, thank you.
SIMON: And that phrase, I still feel a silk sunshower. Help us understand what that feels like and how you put it into music.
CAREY: You know, there's those moments when you're outside, kind of like when you see a rainbow, where it's, like, sunny, but it's - there's still misting or raining and you're - you kind of just feel a little bit outside yourself or feel small in the world. And I like to use those moments to inspire my music, my lyrics.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUNSHOWER")
CAREY: (Singing) I don't know myself before I knew you.
SIMON: You've said in interviews this isn't a divorce album. But you do reflect a bit on love. Let's listen to a little bit of your song "Where I Was."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHERE I WAS")
CAREY: (Singing) I see you still in dreams most nights. It's not getting easier with time. If you judge, please don't judge me from where I was.
SIMON: Was it hard to open yourself up like that?
CAREY: Yeah. I mean, absolutely - very hard, but something that I felt like I needed to do. And, actually, making the record and writing the songs was helpful. It was part of the healing process, for sure.
SIMON: And you lost your father, I gather, in the months leading up to this album. Can you tell us about him?
CAREY: Oh, he was - yeah, he was a great person, great dad. We had almost all the same hobbies and interests. So when we got together, it was just, you know, talking about fly-fishing, talking about wine, talking about sports, talking about camping, talking about music. He was an elementary music teacher and played a huge part in why I got into music and why my brother and sister are both musicians. And we miss him every single day.
SIMON: It's been my experience, when you lose a parent, you lose the pleasure of their companionship. It's also - inevitably, it reminds us we're next, particularly if we have children.
CAREY: Yeah. It's definitely put into perspective just how important being a father is. And I feel like - I mean, also the whole pandemic and everything. I feel like I've really been able to center in on what kind of dad I want to be. And, you know, being a touring musician, I just have to, like, make my time at home, like, extra special...
SIMON: Yeah.
CAREY: ...Make them the center of attention, not have distractions around and stuff, so the kids can feel it, you know? And you can feel it back.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BREAK ME OPEN")
CAREY: (Singing) And I'm in a daze. Almost numb, and I can't find the reasons. I still have you three. And now I know what I know. Break me open.
SIMON: Break me open. That's what children do, isn't it?
CAREY: Oh, yeah (laughter). Yeah, definitely.
SIMON: Well, that is S. Carey - Sean Carey. And his new album is "Break Me Open," out now.
Thank you so much for being with us, and good luck to you.
CAREY: Thank you - appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BREAK ME OPEN")
CAREY: (Singing) I won't let you down. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/bon-ivers-s-carey-releases-solo-project-break-me-open | 2022-05-12T15:33:20Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Why did the mountain lion cross the road? Well, that answer might be simpler than how it crossed the road. That's the problem that many of Southern California's big cats and coyotes and other wildlife have faced over the years as cities grew and highways expanded. California has broken ground on what's being billed as the world's largest wildlife crossing - more than 200-feet long and spanning over 10 lanes of traffic to help animals pass freely and safely themselves. Beth Pratt is regional executive director of the California National Wildlife Federation. Thanks so much for joining us.
BETH PRATT: Thanks for having me - really appreciate being here.
SIMON: Well, how does this work? Do the animals actually, like, have to push a button to stop traffic and cross or what?
PRATT: Yeah. We just put a sign up saying wildlife crossing this way. And - you know? (Laughter).
SIMON: They find it.
PRATT: You know, it's not far off. Word gets out in the animal world. And we've learned from decades of wildlife crossings what to do to help them get there, which is mainly put up fencing to sort of eliminate any other option. And we also do a lot of landscaping.
SIMON: Help us understand how this problem has grown over the years and why it becomes increasingly difficult for wildlife to get across places.
PRATT: Yeah. You know, when I was coming up in conservation 30 years ago, we - pretty much the paradigm was you put aside the Yosemite. You put aside a wildlife refuge, and you kind of create these islands of open space, and you check the box. We have space for wildlife, and you put the people in other places. We now know wildlife, large and small, need large landscape connectivity to be resilient just naturally, but especially in the faces of things like climate change, drought and fire. So what you see playing out in the Santa Monica mountains is the population of mountain lions there - they have been inbreeding themselves, likely to almost out of existence if we didn't do something because they can't get across the freeway to get dates outside their family. And we're seeing that same genetic isolation play out, though, up and down the food chain.
SIMON: Should anybody be concerned? When you talk about giving them free access, that means mountain lions are going to be climbing down from the hills and into swimming pools, which I know has been known to happen now and then.
PRATT: Actually, they already are. So Angelenos know how to live with mountain lions. P22 is under the Hollywood sign. He's strolled down Sunset Boulevard. So this crossing, actually...
SIMON: He's a - yeah, he's a celebrity in his own right at this point.
PRATT: He's the Brad Pitt of the cougar world. That's what I call him (laughter). But yeah, where mountain lions should be, they already are. It's not that we're bringing more. It's just that we're going to ensure they don't inbred themselves out of existence.
SIMON: And you'll be able to see the results almost immediately?
PRATT: I think so. They have, you know, almost 80% to 90% success rates. But I've also visited ones where literally they put it up, and the deer start using it two days later. A crossing in Washington State, the deer were trying to use it before it was even done.
SIMON: A totally personal question - do you have a tattoo?
PRATT: (Laughter) I do, yes.
SIMON: Can you tell us about it?
PRATT: Yeah. It's a tattoo of P22, the famous mountain lion. He's really been our poster puma for this campaign because he is one of the few mountain lions that actually survived crossing two of the freeways in LA, the 101 and the 405. You know, a lot of Angelenos can identify with the 405 impacting your dating life because you don't want to have to deal with the traffic. And that's what P22 symbolizes.
SIMON: Forgive me. I don't know - why the name P22? Is there a P21? Will there be a P23?
PRATT: Yeah. So P stands for puma, which is another name for mountain lion. Mountain Lions have a number of names, so it's gets confusing. Mountain lion, panther, puma - all the same animal. He was the 22nd cat tagged in the National Park Service study, and they're now up to about 104.
SIMON: Beth Pratt, regional executive director for the California National Wildlife Federation, thanks so much for being with us.
PRATT: And thanks for having me - always fun to talk cougars. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/california-wildlife-get-their-own-highway-crossing | 2022-05-12T15:33:26Z |
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In China, authorities have been doubling down on their so-called zero-COVID policy, meaning they're trying for zero cases and zero deaths. Now, there's been an uptick in cases in Beijing. By global standards, it's a small uptick - about 50 a day. But the government isn't taking chances. It ordered schools closed and mass testing of the city's 22 million occupants. In Shanghai, meanwhile, a sweeping lockdown is causing outpourings of rage, even in a country as tightly controlled as China. To bring us up to speed on all this, we're joined now by NPR's China affairs correspondent John Ruwitch. John, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Hey. Good to be here.
MARTIN: You know, it just seems to me that what's happening in China is amazing. I mean, Shanghai has 26 million people. It's been basically at a standstill for a month. Now Beijing may be poised for a lockdown. Can you just remind us, why are authorities taking this approach?
RUWITCH: Yeah. As you said, the authorities are committed to trying to have zero cases and zero deaths, and it's worked for them. You have to remember that it's been a good policy for them for the past two years, for the most part. I mean, while the rest of the world has been experiencing big spikes and deaths, life in China was relatively normal, and the costs seemed pretty reasonable - right? - to people there. Yeah, there were lockdowns, but they weren't so big or so damaging. And for the Communist Party and Xi Jinping, the leader, they really took it as a boon. They seized upon it and played it up as a win, saying, you know, basically, look how great things are here while the rest of the world is in chaos, you know, implying that we have enlightened leaders who care about the people and implement smart policies that save lives. So what's happening in Shanghai has really highlighted the costs, the rising costs of that policy.
MARTIN: Can I ask you about something there? You're saying that the costs seem reasonable, and life in China was relatively normal. I remember seeing images of people being forcibly dragged from their homes by people in, you know, head-to-toe protective gear.
RUWITCH: Yeah.
MARTIN: Forgive me, but how is that normal?
RUWITCH: Yeah. I think what was happening in China up until the omicron wave was that, you know, people realized that these kinds of things were happening. People were being dragged away and taken to, you know, central quarantine centers. It's happening in Shanghai now, but it was happening on a smaller scale. The lockdowns were generally shorter. You know, that sort of - that normal existed for everybody except those who were being taken away, right? And in Shanghai, they've reacted with tough measures. Anyone positive is also being taken away to these central quarantine centers, whether they're symptomatic or not. You know, they're sort of back to square one. And the situation casts a light on messaging about the wisdom of Chinese policies, right? If they're going to have more of these lockdowns, if they're going to be more widespread, if they're going to last longer, what's the point?
MARTIN: And also, in Shanghai, I mean, there were reports about people not having enough food and things of that sort. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
RUWITCH: Shanghai was caught flat-footed. They originally thought that they could handle the pandemic by having very targeted lockdowns of just neighborhoods, of building complexes. That didn't work. They then thought they could split the city in two and do one-half lockdown while the other half was open. They decided quickly that wasn't going to work, so they locked the whole city down. And they just weren't prepared. And so there have been shortages of food and staples, and the flow of that stuff, you know, is much better now. There are areas where, you know, people are able to order food out, are able to get groceries, but it's not perfect yet.
MARTIN: So is there any sign that the government is rethinking its policy?
RUWITCH: Not yet. There have been some tweaks. They're trying to be a bit more nimble, but rhetorically, they're all in. And major changes do seem unlikely in the coming months. Xi Jinping has kind of staked his reputation on zero COVID to a certain extent. The problem is there's a cost, right? People are under lockdown. Those that are or under threat of lockdown are fed up. The economy is taking a hit. Take Apple, for example. The iPhone maker, you know, looks at China as one of its biggest and most important markets. It gets a lot of its devices made there. This week, it reported great earnings for last quarter, but it also warned that the COVID wave in China and the lockdowns could shave $8 billion off its sales this quarter.
MARTIN: This is always so hard to judge in a country where information is controlled, but do you have a sense among people in China about whether they think it's worth it? Do they still think these measures are worth it?
RUWITCH: I think there was that sense, but I think perhaps there's more people now questioning the approach that the government's taking. You know, one indicator has been this absolute outpouring of grief and anger and frustration that we've seen. There have been tons of videos that have popped up online - memes, photos of protest banners, you know, and much of it carries subtle but pretty clear political tones to it. And it's overwhelmed the internet censors in China. I spoke to Xiao Qiang about this. He's an expert in technology and censorship in China at the University of California, Berkeley, and he's actually been amazed by it, which is saying a lot.
XIAO QIANG: I've never seen that much materials on social media during any event, except this Shanghai time.
RUWITCH: The one thing he says was somewhat similar to this happened right at the beginning of the pandemic, when Li Wenliang, who's the doctor who was the whistleblower about the virus - at the time when he died, there was a great outpouring online.
MARTIN: So let's talk about Beijing. They obviously, I would think, want to avoid what happened in Shanghai. Are they going to be able to?
RUWITCH: Everyone's watching to see if they can. You know, they've taken proactive steps. They're, in theory, learning from the lessons of Shanghai. You know, they closed schools, as we mentioned, because some kids had tested positive. They're testing everyone in the city. They're closing neighborhoods. But people are nervous. I spoke with Jaime Chu, who lives in Beijing. She's 29. She works as an editor at an art museum there. And I asked her how she felt when cases started appearing in Beijing and the city said last week that they were going to conduct mass testing.
JAIME CHU: My immediate reaction was first annoyance and then paranoia and anxiety.
RUWITCH: And then became obsessed with this online map where you can look at Beijing and you can see where cases have been, where neighborhood restrictions are put in place, just to see how close they're getting to her.
CHU: And so I've just been basically refreshing this app every couple hours to see how it's spread and where the lockdowns have been showing up and kind of give myself a peace of mind or panic a little more.
RUWITCH: Panic, she says, because she's planning to actually leave Beijing at the end of May. So she's really nervous that if the city gets locked down, that's going to be a lot harder to do. So broadly, what happens in Beijing in the coming days is going to be a test of sorts. Everyone wants to avoid a lockdown, but experts say really, China can't keep playing this whack-a-mole game with the virus. It needs a more flexible policy.
MARTIN: That's NPR China affairs correspondent John Ruwitch. John, thank you so much.
RUWITCH: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF TORO Y MOI SONG, "BEFORE I'M DONE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/chinese-authorities-remain-committed-to-zero-covid-lockdown-policy | 2022-05-12T15:33:32Z |
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And finally, it's the last day of National Poetry Month for this year. We're sad, but we've loved the poems, as we do every year when we invite you to submit your original poems via Twitter and TikTok using the #nprpoetry hashtag. And every weekend, we've invited an accomplished poet to come and share a few of the entries that stood out to them. For our last conversation - for this year, anyway - we've called upon Dr. Fady Joudah. And yes, he is a physician as well as a poet. His latest poetry collection is called "Tethered To Stars." And he is with us now. Dr. Fady Joudah, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
FADY JOUDAH: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: You know, I saw an interview you gave where you talked about why you wanted to be a doctor. You said - this is in your childhood where you kind of embraced this idea. You talked about how you just wanted to heal people. And I remember you saying to your family, if you fall down, I'll fix you. But do you remember when you first started writing poetry and why?
JOUDAH: I remember when I first started memorizing poetry. I must have been 4 years old. And it was first in Arabic. And it was a response to a family environment. My father, my uncles, sometimes they would just tell me stories around verses. And sometimes they would offer me coins if I were able to recite or memorize and recite what I memorized, especially if it was a contemporary poem or a famous poem. And I realized when I did that as a child that there was something in me that was absolutely ecstatic about the music language makes in the mind. And I was never able to shake that off.
MARTIN: That's lovely. You know, I think it might be different in other parts of the world and in other cultures, but in this culture, poetry and medicine aren't usually things that people think of together. And I was wondering if one shapes how you do the other.
JOUDAH: I think it does simply because it is life. You know, being a physician is two things for me as far as poetry is concerned. It is face to face. It is being face to face with other people who are in moments of despair, in moments of grief, in moments of doubt or of elation, even on the edge of survival, even if it's a temporary survival, you know, you've recovered from a pneumonia. It doesn't have to be something as complicated as cancer or a heart attack. And being so close to people in those situations has taught me to listen and, you know, just taught me that the life we speak is full of poetry all the time.
MARTIN: Well, that's lovely. I also had this image of you wandering - well, in between rounds of kind of writing a poem in your phone or something like that, something that you would keep in your pocket.
JOUDAH: You would not be incorrect. You would not be incorrect.
MARTIN: Oh, good. OK. Because I just made that up. But I just had this image in my head of you kind of, you know, say, dipping into the hallway or something like that after visiting with somebody or, you know, checking on somebody or maybe - I don't know. Where do you dip into in a hospital, supply closet? Where can you hide? I don't know. There's no place. Where can you hide? Cafeteria?
JOUDAH: Well, I don't have to hide. No - at the nursing station.
MARTIN: Nursing station. OK. There you go. OK. All right. Well, let's get into some of the submissions. Let's start with a Twitter poem, one of the ones that you picked.
JOUDAH: OK. Do you want me to read it or...
MARTIN: Yeah. Please. Yeah.
JOUDAH: (Reading) They did not ask, can I fly? They did not ask anything at all. Instead, they just opened their wings and rose up, three cranes sharp against the sky.
MARTIN: And who wrote this one?
JOUDAH: PoetryForce.
MARTIN: PoetryForce. OK. Great. And what struck you about it?
JOUDAH: Its simplicity and its conversation with a eternal longing we have as humans with birds. We're almost always jealous of not being birds. And we can't quit, you know, we can't quit our fascination with birds. Nothing cures us of it.
MARTIN: Well, that's well said. All right. Let's listen to a TikTok poem you've chosen. It was submitted by a user who goes by Portman Toad (ph). Let's hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIKTOK VIDEO)
PORTMAN TOAD: (Reading) There are days I slink to the floor, just open and close the cupboard until there are moths in my hand and I can fold fingers in to crush them. A thin film of dust, I brush my palms clean.
MARTIN: OK. That's kind of brutal.
JOUDAH: It is.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: I wasn't expecting that. Why did you pick that one?
JOUDAH: Well, so we do also negotiate our grief. And if one wants to be kind of cliche and traditional in thinking about it in our modern age, one of the stages of grief is anger. And then the violence in the poem is really - is in the opening. I imagine it in four lines. I didn't see it written. So the first line and the fourth line are flanked by what maybe Samuel Taylor Coleridge would call the suspension of disbelief. You know, the hand is opening. The hand is closing. The cupboard is opening. The cupboards are closing. The moths are flying in and flying out. And before you question that, you're brought to clarity instantly. So the poem does this magical thing that poetry does about the suspension of disbelief and brings you back to this image, our relationship to the moth. We become the fire. This person speaking becomes the fire for this moth and crushes it.
MARTIN: Oh, yeah. I hadn't even thought of that. Oh, OK. Before we let you go, it's the final day of our celebration of National Poetry Month for this year. But people should keep writing. I mean, we're always so gratified that people send us this work and put effort to it. And as - you're a busy person, and you have multiple responsibilities that you're juggling. How do you find time? How do you find time to do this, to devote to your writing? And do you have some advice for other people who would say, oh, I just don't - I'm just too busy? I just don't - I just can't - I don't have time for that. What do you say? How do you make space for your art?
JOUDAH: I could answer in practical ways, but I will say to others out there, guard your madness. It might be the last - one of the last private freedoms we have. So, you know, let poetry guide you into a sense of freedom and then you'll write.
MARTIN: That was Dr. Fady Joudah, poet and physician. His latest collection of poems is called "Tethered To Stars." Dr. Joudah, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for helping us to celebrate Poetry Month.
JOUDAH: Thank you so much, Michel.
MARTIN: And to all who submitted poems throughout the month, we thank you so much. You heard what the doctor said - keep writing. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/fady-joudah-shares-his-favorite-nprpoetry-submissions | 2022-05-12T15:33:38Z |
Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:
Country star Tim McGraw travels back in time to '1883' with wife Faith Hill: The Paramount+ series is the first time McGraw and Hill have appeared together on screen. Before they filmed, they attended "cowboy camp," to learn the basics of riding horses and driving wagons.
CNN anchor Zain Asher looks back on the tragedy that helped drive her success: Asher's father died in a car crash in Nigeria when she was 5. Afterward, her mom raised four children on her own in a crime-ridden London neighborhood. Asher's memoir is Where the Children Take Us.
You can listen to the original interviews and review here:
Country star Tim McGraw travels back in time to '1883' with wife Faith Hill
CNN anchor Zain Asher looks back on the tragedy that helped drive her success
Copyright 2022 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/fresh-air-weekend-tim-mcgraw-cnn-actor-zain-asher | 2022-05-12T15:33:45Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Hernan Diaz's new novel "Trust" may move you to look differently at, say, a $5 bill. Why are we so confident it can buy a cup of coffee and a muffin? Because it has a story - a narrative, you might say - that money can buy what we need and perhaps what we want and eventually what we may dream about. But what is money, really? "Trust" is a book spun from four narratives - a novel wrought from the tale of the life of Andrew Bevel, a financial baron during the 1929 stock market crash, then his attempt to write his own story, then his secretary's memoir, and finally, the journal left by his deceased wife, Mildred. Let's ask the novelist to read from the secretary's memoir when she applies for her job.
HERNAN DIAZ: (Reading) Why work at a place that makes one thing when I could work at a company that makes all things? Because that's what money is - all things. Or at least it can become all things. It's the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities. And if money is the God among commodities, this - with my upturned palm, I drew an arc that encompassed the office and suggested the building beyond it is its high temple.
SIMON: Hernan Diaz joins us now. Thank you so much for being with us.
DIAZ: Thank you for having me - an enormous pleasure.
SIMON: What do the four narratives help us see that, let's say, the omniscient voice that includes four viewpoints wouldn't?
DIAZ: Well, the novel is concerned, to a large extent, with the distinction between history and fiction. The idea was to present a novel within the novel, a historical document, a memoir and a personal journal, and recruit the reader as a textual detective of sorts, have them ask themselves how reality itself may be the effect of a textual construction, may be the effect of different narratives.
SIMON: Bevel is not flattered to see his life become the stuff of fiction and a novel written by a man named Harold Vanner any more than William Randolph Hearst liked "Citizen Kane"...
DIAZ: Right.
SIMON: ...The Orson Welles film. But in a sense, can you understand that?
DIAZ: I can understand that, and I tried to be very sympathetic to this character. I tried at all times to avoid creating a straw man. I tried to give him humanity. I tried to give him certain dignity, despite his actions being so despicable. And I think this comes to light in his private life, in his marriage, because this is not just a sweeping picture of American politics or American finance at the time. It is also very, very much a story about intimacy, a story about marriage with his wife, who is, I would say, the central character of this book.
SIMON: And let us talk, then, about Mildred, who dies young and beloved. Did she win a lottery in life to become part of such wealth and be a patron of the arts and a philanthropist, or was she squelched somehow?
DIAZ: Hmm. Well, look; I find reading about wealth in America - both in history and in fiction - women have been completely and utterly erased from those narratives. If they appear in narratives of wealth, it is with mostly three preassigned roles - either as wives, as secretaries, or as victims. And I was interested in taking all these three positions - these stereotypical positions - and subverting them.
SIMON: Yes. I made a note of something she writes. She says, I discovered a deep well of ambition within. From it, I extracted a dark fuel. Oh, my word. Those are chilling words.
DIAZ: Well, I wanted to make sure that at no point Mildred was not a victim, was not a sacrificial lamb. And I think the passage that you just quoted shows her agency. And with agency comes responsibility, mistake or the possibility of making mistakes. And I wanted to give her that as well.
SIMON: So many characters believe in a market that, in, time sets values - and I mean it in both senses, in all senses - that sets values aright. Not just Bevel, the financial baron, but, in fact, his secretary's father is an anarchist. And he, in a way, believes in a marketplace of ideas, that the world will eventually cast off capitalism. In a sense, do novelists have to trust in that, too, that people will understand and find what they have to say?
DIAZ: I'm always a little terrified to assign intention to readers, and I have to leave this open to be received as it may. And I think actually, now that you mentioned this, Scott, the book is about this. The book is, to an enormous extent, about this man who's trying to control a narrative. And this is something that I found about wealth in general and wealth in America in particular. Great fortunes have the ability to distort and warp the reality around themselves. Furthermore, they have the power to align, to bend reality according to their own designs. I think, in fact, the greatest luxury good today out there is not, you know, mansions or yachts. It is reality itself.
SIMON: I mean, this week in particular, I'm sure it's occurred to you, the richest people in the world - they all happen to be men, by the way - Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos - all own major media platforms.
DIAZ: Of course, there was an intimate and immediate conversation between the book as I was writing it and reality as it unfolded on the newspapers. And I think those men - let's again use that word with great deliberation - that you mentioned are prime examples of this impulse of bending and aligning reality around a great fortune. And I think we could also tentatively define power as that ability to impose reality onto others.
SIMON: Hernan Diaz - his new novel, "Trust." Thank you so much for being with us.
DIAZ: Thank you, Scott - a pleasure and a great honor. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/hernan-diazs-anticipated-novel-trust-probes-the-illusion-of-money-and-the-truth | 2022-05-12T15:33:51Z |
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
You don't have to be a professional storyteller to tell a good story. And we all do tell stories constantly to our friends, our families, even our co-workers. For our Life Kit series, NPR's Elise Hu spoke with the directors of the storytelling organization The Moth, to find out how anyone can learn to tell stronger and more meaningful stories.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: It's hard to know which of our stories is worth telling. And that's the first consideration.
MEG BOWLES: We talk about, like, sitting down with an old scrapbook - right? - in your mind of your memories.
HU: That's Meg Bowles, senior director on The Moth team. She's one of the co-authors of The Moth's new book, "How To Tell A Story."
BOWLES: Your first kiss or, like, certain moments that just - memories that stick with you and dig in to that, like, why do they stick with you? Why was that important to you? And suddenly you start to see patterns of your story arise.
HU: Big decisions are a good place to find stories, so are embarrassing moments and mistakes. Think of times when things didn't quite go as planned. Within these kinds of prompts, you can begin to zoom in on a story worth telling.
BOWLES: What were the results of this event happening to you? Ultimately, what is the story about for you? Just gelling it down to one sentence that can really tell you what the focus of the story you want to tell is.
HU: That one sentence is your story's spine. When the story's central decision or moment is clear and so are the stakes, the structure can be dealer's choice.
BOWLES: You don't have to get too fancy with a story.
HU: Some stories start at the end. Others are a series of flashbacks that might jump around in chronology. Meg Bowles says the simplest route is often straight through.
BOWLES: Chronological sometimes is the best way to tell it, you know? Because you want to take people through the journey so they can experience what you experienced, you know, and feel like they're walking with you.
HU: Bringing the story in for a landing can be the hardest part to write.
SARAH AUSTIN JENNESS: Stories in real life usually aren't all tied up in a bow.
HU: That's Sarah Austin Jenness, The Moth's executive producer.
JENNESS: You just have to end the story in a different place than where you began. So there's the you that we meet in the beginning, and then there's the you that we're left with. And at the end we can see starkly what your change was, even if the change was slight. So at the end of the story, you're a different person.
HU: This kind of storytelling prep comes in handy in so many life situations. We have stories to tell in job interviews, on dates. We give toasts and eulogies. While these situations really range, a couple pointers reach across the various storytelling situations. Here's Jenness.
JENNESS: The best advice is, no complaining. You know, you want to find the moments that illuminated something new or surprised you. But no one wants to hear a list of grievances.
HU: And they say, keep it short and tight.
JENNESS: You're trying to show someone new what you value and who you are, and then your stories open it up for them to tell stories.
HU: The point of storytelling, after all, is to connect, share and meaningfully engage with others.
JENNESS: The Moth looks like a storytelling organization, and it is. But it's really a place where we ask people to practice the art of listening.
HU: The most memorable stories are the ones well heard. Elise Hu, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: You can find more tips and life hacks at npr.org/lifekit Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/life-kit-how-to-tell-a-good-story | 2022-05-12T15:33:57Z |
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Will big audiences ever return to movie theaters? That was the big question hovering over a gathering of movie theater owners this week. They met in Las Vegas for their first full convention in three years. John Horn from Southern California Public Radio has this report.
JOHN HORN, BYLINE: It felt a little like a reunion of Titanic survivors, and the setting fit - The Colosseum at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, where Celine Dion, who sang the blockbuster film's famous ballad, played for years. The thousands streaming into the arena this week were talking about different blockbusters, those that didn't yet exist. They had come to Las Vegas for CinemaCon, an annual convention for movie theater owners who are looking for hit films to bring customers back to their multiplexes. Few national businesses were as decimated by COVID as movie theaters. Tom Rothman is the chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Motion Picture Group.
TOM ROTHMAN: We went through a near-death experience.
HORN: Three years ago, domestic box office receipts totaled $11.4 billion. In 2020 and 2021, the combined ticket sales were just a bit more than half of that. Entire chains and mom and pop venues closed for good. Thousands lost their jobs. Ponci Gallegos is a national sales manager for American Licorice, the makers of Red Vines. Theaters and vending machines account for a little less than two-thirds of all American licorice sales.
PONCI GALLEGOS: It's been kind of dismal.
HORN: And all the while, movie fans bolted to streaming sites by the millions. At CinemaCon, movie studios bring in stars and show hours of film clips and sometimes entire movies, like the new Top Gun sequel, for theater owners hopeful their upcoming releases will lure audiences back to the multiplex.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TOP GUN: MAVERICK")
TOM CRUISE: (As Pete "Maverick" Mitchell) In three, two, one.
HORN: Spoiler alert - Tom Cruise's Maverick survives. And people are returning to theaters even if attendance remains well below pre-pandemic levels.
JOHN FITHIAN: The attitude in the hallways, the conversations with the members who operate motion picture theaters around the country and around the world then versus now is dramatically different.
HORN: John Fithian is the president and CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners, which stages CinemaCon.
FITHIAN: There's optimism about the coming movie slate. And there's optimism about our patrons coming back out to cinemas. Those are two things that we thrive on.
HORN: On December 17 last year, in the middle of the omicron surge, Sony Pictures released "Spider-Man: No Way Home."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPIDERMAN: NO WAY HOME")
TOM HOLLAND: (As Peter Parker) But how do you tell someone that you're Spider-Man?
HORN: The Sony-Marvel movie has grossed more than $800 million in domestic theaters so far. Without adjusting for inflation, that makes Spider-Man the third-highest grossing domestic release ever.
ROTHMAN: I would say the business doesn't survive and actually thrives. Not only can it survive, it can overcome a global pandemic, which it's in the process of doing.
HORN: Unlike most other studios, Sony preserved what's known as a theatrical window. That's the time, historically, around three months, from when a film hits the multiplex to when it premieres on places like Netflix or HBO Max. At CinemaCon, the studios pledged they would open their movies exclusively in theaters going forward, but movie-going habits might be irrevocably transformed. Well before the pandemic, theater owners were steadily losing customers. And even if Netflix just reported its first subscriber loss in a decade, overall streaming growth is staggering, up some 18% from a year ago, according to one new study. For NPR News, I'm John Horn in Las Vegas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/movie-theater-owners-are-optimistic-about-an-industry-return-at-this-years-cinemacon | 2022-05-12T15:34:03Z |
Melissa Ortega, 8 years old and known for her smile, walked with her mother on West 26th Street in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, Jan. 22, when shots rang out. Melissa Ortega was killed.
Vigils and memorials were held. Stories appeared. Within days, a 16-year-old — the alleged shooter — and a 27-year-old man, who was with him, were charged with murder. Prosecutors say it was a gang shooting and Melissa Ortega was killed in the crossfire. U.S. Rep. Jesús "Chuy" Garcia of Chicago said, "How many children must we lose before we change course?"
But within weeks, Melissa Ortega's killing got left behind in the accelerating crush of stories about COVID, inflation, and overseas conflicts.
Milton Coronado got to work on a mural.
"I knew I had to paint Melissa," the artist told us. "To remind us of who we lost. What we lost."
Coronado has painted many memorial murals in recent years, tributes to people killed by gun violence.
"Honestly, I've lost count," he told us. He paused then said, "Ten."
"We like to paint these murals near where the loss was, or near where the person lived," he says. "To keep them in our lives." His tribute to Melissa Ortega covers the side of a building three blocks from where the little girl was shot.
The first mural Coronado painted was of his father, Ramiro, who was shot and killed in Little Village when Milton was 21.
"When I painted Melissa," he told us, "I was giving honor and respect to her, and memorializing my dad, too."
The mural of Melissa Ortega shows a young girl with a shining smile, surrounded by fluffy clouds, bright flowers, red balloons, soft raindrops, and a rainbow below a bursting sun.
"I wanted to capture the purity, hope, joy, innocence, and creativity of a child," he said. And, in lettering like a child's, he painted a phrase from the bible. It translates from Spanish as: "The Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children."
"I like to paint living people too," Coronado told us. "But we turn on the news Monday morning, and it's in double-digits, all the people hurt and killed."
If Coronado were to try to memorialize every homicide victim in Chicago over the past 3 years, he would have to paint more than 2,000 murals. His art cannot restore life. But his paintings may help us keep people, and their hopes and smiles, alive in our hearts.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/opinion-painting-the-smiles-of-people-we-know-love-and-will-never-see-again | 2022-05-12T15:34:09Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster, has a new strategic goal. He wants the world to defeat dictators, beginning with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
GARRY KASPAROV: The price of stopping a dictator always goes up every day with every delay, with every hesitation.
SIMON: Garry Kasparov is 59 now and learned to play in the Young Pioneers Palace in Baku, Azerbaijan, when it was part of the former Soviet Union. He retired as the highest-rated player in the world in 2005. He was beaten and arrested by Russian police for protesting in front of the courthouse where the women of the punk band Pussy Riot were on trial in 2012. He's now a writer and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and lives in New York, spends a lot of time traveling the world, warning about what he sees as the threat of Putin's Russia to democracy everywhere. We caught up with Garry Kasparov as he spoke to a group at Goucher College in Maryland on Wednesday night.
KASPAROV: When the Cold War was won back in 1991, we forgot a simple thing, that the evil doesn't die. It grows back through the cracks of our apathy.
SIMON: After his appearance, we told him how people in the seats around us saw the water bottle put on stage for him and thought about Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who was poisoned through his water bottle. Other dissidents have been shot, pushed from windows or poisoned with radioactive substances.
KASPAROV: I'm happy my wife was not here because she gets really nervous when she hears journalists, you know, repeating this question. We all know the risks. She's responsible not only for me but for our kids. Our daughter - she's 15 1/2. And our son will be 7 this summer. And she also knows that I am who I am. So I have to do it, and I can make a difference.
SIMON: Garry Kasparov believes that severe Western sanctions should have been applied after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 and the next year, when Russian planes supported the Assad regime in Syria during that country's civil war.
KASPAROV: It's the, again, going backward. It's Syria, and it's Crimea. Crimea was the turning point, I think in Putin's mind. If he could annex the territory with no consequences because sanctions in 2014 just - and he - Putin was laughing at them. Then he could do whatever. I think the free world proved to be not just complacent but also too willing to compromise on our values.
SIMON: You don't believe that Ukraine is actually his strategic goal?
KASPAROV: No. Ukraine is one of the very important stations on his road to change the world, the global security infrastructure as it has been functioning since World War II. And for Putin, Ukraine is one of the demonstrations that he could reshape the map, redraw the map. And he could replay the Cold War and restore the Russian imperial glory. And nobody could stand against him.
SIMON: I noticed tonight you made a point of telling the audience, no, no, I don't want peace now. I want something different.
KASPAROV: I want peace, but I don't want us to say the peace can be achieved by stopping the war. The peace can be achieved by destroying the source of war. And unless we eradicate the source of war, there will be no peace. So peace can be achieved only by Ukraine restoring its territorial sovereignty, including Crimea and Sevastopol, and reparations being paid. As we speak, a Ukrainian city is being bombarded by Russian planes, Russian missiles. Each of them can destroy half of the city. And only then we can talk about lasting peace.
SIMON: Mr. Kasparov believes the way the world has rallied to support Ukraine might deter the designs of other authoritarian regimes.
KASPAROV: And I also think that this is not just about Putin and Ukraine. That's a signal to everybody else. By defending Ukraine, I hope we are defending Taiwan. We're defending many other places in the world where dictators are just scratching their just - you know, their heads, thinking, maybe we can take it.
SIMON: Garry Kasparov told us that because of his fame he feels a special responsibility to speak out against Putin's government.
KASPAROV: Because I think my country could do much better. And I know that it will take years, if not decades, to exonerate Russia from these crimes. And also, I believe that the war between freedom and tyranny will not end with Ukraine in battle. It will not end with the collapse of Putin's regime, which I believe is inevitable. It's a battle for our lifetime, and I hope Russia will be on the right side. Russia will stop being a permanent problem but could become part of the solution because we will be facing China. We will be facing other countries and looking at China, so-called Chinese model. And they will be challenging our way of life.
SIMON: The goal is not perfection, he says, but progress.
KASPAROV: We have a lot of work to do at home. That's the message that I think people like myself can bring to Americans and the Europeans that, yes, with all imperfection of our life, you know, it's still the only way to move forward because we know how to address the issues that are important for us, whether it's social justice, racial justice.
SIMON: He says tyrants can no longer operate behind the shadow of an iron curtain.
KASPAROV: Now we know everything. We know about gulag in Xinjiang. We know about genocide of Uyghurs. We know about all the crimes committed around the world, and we have to make sure that we'll be able to do more than mere talk.
SIMON: But we wanted to ask one more question of Garry Kasparov. Do you have a favorite Pussy Riot song?
KASPAROV: Look. It's - Pussy Riot made their name not because of the chord of their songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PUNK PRAYER")
PUSSY RIOT: (Singing in non-English language).
SIMON: Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster and chair of the Human Rights Foundation, who hopes for a future when he and all Russians can be heard without fear. We caught up with him this week at Goucher College in Maryland. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/outspoken-putin-critic-garry-kasparov-says-ukraine-is-just-putins-first-stop | 2022-05-12T15:34:15Z |
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As Russia's war on Ukraine continues into its third month, heavy fighting is concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine as Russian forces try to utilize their advantage in heavy weaponry like rocket-propelled grenades and artillery. Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers are training on new heavy weapons from NATO allies that they say will be crucial to their efforts to halt the Russian advance. NPR's Frank Langfitt is in Kyiv, and he's with us now to tell us more. Frank, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.
MARTIN: So first, could you just start off by telling us about the situation now on the eastern and southern fronts?
LANGFITT: Yeah. I mean, there've been no great changes today. The Ukrainian defense ministry says some small towns and villages are changing hands. Down in the south, Russia is pounding away with artillery around the port city of Mykolaiv. And eventually, what it hopes to do, of course, is take control of the Black Sea Coast. But if you talk to the United States and the U.K. defense officials, they say that right now, Russia simply doesn't have the firepower to do that in the south. But Roman Kostenko (ph) - he's a Ukrainian colonel working down there in the south - he says they're really feeling the pressure from the Russians right now.
ROMAN KOSTENKO: (Through interpreter) I'm going to the front almost every day. We are barely holding them back. If we don't receive the help our partners promised us in time, it will be very difficult - in particular artillery because the Russians have an advantage in artillery.
MARTIN: Well, speaking of that, the U.S. is sending 90 Howitzers to the Ukrainian military. Do we have any sense of the status of those weapons?
LANGFITT: Well, at least half were already in the country. And I was asking the defense ministry here in Kyiv if any have gotten to the front lines, and they said this is sort of just too sensitive. They don't want to talk about it. They're, of course, very grateful for these weapons. It's important to remember that Howitzers are, you know, very different than the Soviet-style weapons that the Ukrainians have relied on for many, many years. There is a need for training. U.S. has already trained about 50 Ukrainian soldiers on these weapons - training more right now.
And the Ukrainian military is shifting now - this is, I think, really important, Michel - from Soviet-style weapons to native-grade weapons and becoming increasingly what they call interoperable with NATO, which is they're able to work, you know, pretty seamlessly with NATO over time. And right now, they're helping defend NATO's eastern flank and increasingly sounding more and more like a part of NATO, in a sense, which, of course, is the exact opposite of what President Putin wanted. And this is how Colonel Kostenko put it earlier this week.
KOSTENKO: (Through interpreter) The Ukrainian army is probably the only army in the world which has fought such a strong enemy. In the future, we will pass on our experience to our partners on how to fight against the Russian Federation.
LANGFITT: And, of course, Ukraine is not going to join NATO any time soon. But if you look at what's happening on the ground, NATO weapons, NATO training right now, you know, the Ukrainian army is the vanguard protecting Eastern Europe from the Russians.
MARTIN: So you know, Frank, to that end, the U.S. and other NATO allies have poured weapons into Ukraine in the last several months. Does this indicate a long-term commitment to arming the country?
LANGFITT: It increasingly seems like it, Michel. On Friday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, he called Ukraine a highly valued partner and said NATO's prepared to arm the country in a conflict that he sees as lasting - potentially lasting years.
MARTIN: So, Frank, you've been reporting from Europe for some time now, and you've been traveling around Europe talking to analysts and government officials. How do they see this war ending?
LANGFITT: Not quickly. The consensus of people that I've been talking to just in the last week or so is, you know, this is a new phase of the war after the Russians were unable to topple the Ukrainian government. They're now in a phase of just taking as much territory they can. And people see this as very political and domestic for Putin wants to be able to present these as big wins at home and, frankly, to save face. The big problem, of course, is analysts here say there's no Ukrainian leader that would be willing to cede territory to Russia, given the, you know, very impressive performance of the Ukrainian army and the terrible suffering of many Ukrainian people in this war. So it's expected to grind on, at a minimum, frankly, for months.
MARTIN: That was NPR's Frank Langfitt in Kyiv. Frank, thank you.
LANGFITT: Good to talk, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/russian-troops-continue-push-into-east-and-south-ukraine | 2022-05-12T15:34:21Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Now it's time for more sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: The NBA playoffs. A major-league star gets a two-year suspension. And the first no-hitter of the year thrown by five different pitchers. Is that fair? NPR's Tom Goldman joins us. Tom, thanks so much for being with us.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
SIMON: Second round of the NBA playoffs begin tomorrow with a great matchup, the Boston Celtics versus fear the deer. No surprises in the first round, but it was still a fun one, wasn't it?
GOLDMAN: I never get tired of that. I think the deer may need to fear the leprechaun, actually, because Boston really looked good after sweeping Brooklyn. But yes, there was some fun in the first round. And a special salute, Scott, to the vanquished New Orleans Pelicans, a team with three fantastic rookies playing like playoff veterans, a rookie head coach who cried after his gutty team came up short against the No. 1 seed Phoenix Suns. The Pelicans gave it a great fight and with potentially their best player injured, Zion Williamson cheering from the bench. He sounds eager to rejoin this young, dynamic team. And when he does, they will be title contenders, guaranteed.
SIMON: Another big story this week - Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, announced he's going to step down. Does he want to spend more time with his family?
GOLDMAN: I think he wants out of a crummy job, Scott. Emmert has picked up a lot of critics in recent years as the face of an organization that's endured some very public defeats by the Supreme Court, by state legislatures. Public opinion of the NCAA has soured, and it is seen by many as an out-of-touch organization, especially when it comes to its long-held tenet of absolute amateurism in college sports. Even the NCAA understands change is coming. It's taking steps to rewrite its constitution, and now it's looking for a new president to preside over what many hope is a reimagined NCAA.
SIMON: Reimagined - certainly introducing an amount of professionalism, isn't it?
GOLDMAN: Well, yeah. You know, a lot is happening right now with this name, image and likeness deals for athletes really taking off. More college athletes in the major revenue-producing sports are entering the so-called transfer portal, which allows them to switch schools and not have to sit out a season as in the past. They're becoming more like free agents, and some college officials worry about things becoming semi-professional. One of the big questions as a result - how much amateurism should college sports retain?
SIMON: Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer suspended for two seasons after accusations of sexual assault. How did the league reach that decision?
GOLDMAN: Yeah. Well, after its own investigation, there don't have to be charges or a conviction - and there weren't in this case - for the Major League Baseball commissioner to hand down punishment. Two full seasons is the longest suspension since baseball enacted its domestic violence policy in 2015. The case is also of note because Trevor Bauer is the first player who will appeal his punishment in a domestic violence case. He has always denied committing domestic violence and sexual assault in two incidents of what was described as consensual rough sex with a woman. The woman says Bauer crossed lines. Bauer denies it, and we will see what happens on appeal.
SIMON: Five pitchers, five New York Mets defeated no-hitter against the Phillies, 3-0 last night. We have enough time to read their names, right?
GOLDMAN: Oh, yeah. And I was ready for that question. Starter Tylor Megill and then four relievers - Drew Smith, Joely Rodriguez, Seth Lugo and Edwin Diaz - you know, maybe it's more impressive than a single pitcher doing this...
SIMON: Yeah.
GOLDMAN: ...Because it shows five of them were on their games at the same moment. It is just the second no-hitter in Mets history and 17th combined no-hitter in Major League Baseball history.
SIMON: Most beautiful moment in sports of the week, maybe in life - William Contreras, little brother of Chicago Cubs catcher Willson Contreras, called up to the major leagues this week by Atlanta. They played the Cubs. And these brothers, who grew up playing baseball in the streets of Venezuela, came out to present their teams' lineups at home plate. See that video. There is crying and hugs in baseball.
GOLDMAN: And Wilson Contreras said the tears were because he's so proud they both made it to the majors, considering how hard it is to make it because there's so much competition among young Latin American baseball players. He said his whole family back in Venezuela was crying, too.
SIMON: Yeah. And I was for sure. NPR's Tom Goldman, thanks so much.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/saturday-sports-bucks-celtics-in-playoffs-ncaa-president-leaves-bauer-suspended | 2022-05-12T15:34:27Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"The Duke" is a film based on a true story that's become legend in Great Britain. The National Gallery spent 140,000 pounds to keep Francisco Goya's "Portrait Of The Duke Of Wellington" in Britain. And when Kempton Bunton seized the news that night in 1961, he is furious.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE DUKE")
JIM BROADBENT: (As Kempton Bunton) The taxpayer, your major, he was paid for that painting.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Since when have you paid any tax?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Welcome home, Kempton. You know what's going off here, exactly?
BROADBENT: (As Kempton Bunton) Toffs looking after their own, spending our hard-earned money on a half-baked portrait by some Spanish drunk of a duke who voted against universal suffrage.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Against what?
BROADBENT: (As Kempton Bunton) The vote. The duke of Wellington didn't want you to have a say in how this country was run when he was prime minister. Think what they could have done with all that money.
SIMON: Kempton Bunton believes that money would be better spent giving free BBC TV service to war veterans or the elderly. He's eventually charged with stealing the Goya masterpiece to make his point in a true-life story that's been the subject of books, musicals and as seen in "Dr. No" - talk about fame. "The Duke" stars Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren and Matthew Goode. It was the last film directed by Roger Michell before his death last year. And Jim Broadbent, the Oscar-, BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning actor, joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
BROADBENT: It's a great pleasure. Thank you.
SIMON: We should explain in America, the licence fee is an annual fee, a little over 200 U.S. dollars a year, to fund the operations of the esteemed BBC. Senior citizens, I believe, are now exempt. It is still a little chilling to see a scene in which licence police show up at a British household.
BROADBENT: Yes, it did. And it did happen. It does happen. And I think at the time, I think Kempton Bunton was fighting for the poor and the downtrodden. And now the BBC is under threat from the government and trying to - in some way, trying to dismantle the BBC and make it - and privatize it in some way. And I think in this day and age, Kempton Bunton would be fighting to defend the BBC and keep it going rather than undermining their licence fee situation. I think he's - basically, he's anti-establishment.
SIMON: When the film opens, he's a taxi driver, but he's fired for giving price breaks to veterans, isn't he?
BROADBENT: Yeah. Yeah. He's a good character. He's a - and he gets fired from another job for defending an Asian guy from a racist foreman. He's always putting himself on the line and getting in trouble for it.
SIMON: When Kempton Bunton goes on trial for the theft of the Goya, he does just about everything a defendant isn't supposed to do, doesn't he?
BROADBENT: Yeah. He's more than delighted to go on trial in the end. And he's got a platform. He's got a stage, and he's got a captive audience. And he makes the most of it. And when his, I think, grandson or - came to the screening in London, I said, well, would Kempton have liked this, this first night of the premiere of the film about his life in London? And he said, yes, he would have loved it. He would have been in clover. It'd have been exactly everything he had ever wanted.
SIMON: Did you want to try and capture the story, the person? What did you feel your responsibility is in playing an actual person?
BROADBENT: The writers have done a huge amount of wonderful research and come up with a beautiful script, but no one, apart from the family, knew exactly what Kempton was like. And so I basically took it as a piece of fiction, really, but - and played it just straight from the script and didn't have to do too much worrying about whether it was absolutely accurate for Kempton.
SIMON: He - or perhaps I should say you - gets to give a truly beautiful courtroom speech about what the British people can do when they're together.
BROADBENT: Yeah.
SIMON: What did you think when you first read that speech?
BROADBENT: As an actor, I thought, oh, this is a wonderful speech. But - and mainly, it was - it made me laugh out loud, inordinately, really. I mean, and that seldom happens, really, when you read a script, but I actually laugh and think, oh, this is going to be fun. Like, I would love to get into this. And it's - it comes from a very good position. It's got a lot of heart. And it's jokes but with a lot of meaning behind them.
SIMON: This film is drawing such praise and accolades and the inevitable reviews on social media sites, platforms. It must be hard - I - to think of the director, Roger Michell, not being able to be around for that.
BROADBENT: Yeah. It is heartbreaking. And it's - everyone who ever worked with him wanted to work with him again. He was a brilliant director but also a brilliant man. And he was - you know, the loss across the board in films and theater - he did - he directed a lot of theater, as well - is immense. You know, we all miss him, and it's still difficult to understand, really, and come to terms with his death.
SIMON: Without giving the ending away, although, obviously, it happened 60 years ago, and it's a fact of history, I found myself literally tearing up at the verdict when it was delivered in the courtroom. And maybe it's the times in which we're living, but I just - I thought, oh, my God, whatever our endless faults and crimes, in a democracy, the people rule.
BROADBENT: Yeah. I think the way that Richard and Clive, the writers, have presented their story and the - and Kempton's messages is wonderful. And I've heard there's an awful lot of people who've been tearing up, as well. I think it's - it does strike a chord with us at the moment particularly. In the press, we're so much bombarded with selfishness and self-interest that something as generous as Kempton's attitude to the world is refreshing and valuable.
SIMON: Jim Broadbent stars in "The Duke," which is in theaters now. Thank you so much for being with us, sir.
BROADBENT: It's a great pleasure. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/the-duke-salutes-the-british-legend-who-stole-a-goya-from-the-national-gallery | 2022-05-12T15:34:33Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Now we turn to pizza and a man who went in search of the best pie.
PETER REINHART: The best pizza that's ever been made in the history of the world is happening right now.
SIMON: Peter Reinhart teaches at a culinary school in North Carolina, and he's the author of a new book called "Pizza Quest." NPR's Neda Ulaby met him at a pizzeria near his home in Charlotte.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: This pizza philosopher wrote a book about his search for the very best pizza. But pizza, he says, is always good, no matter where you find it.
REINHART: It used to be, like, 99% of the pizzerias in America were good, and maybe 1% I would call great. And now there are hundreds around the country. The whole pizza scene is elevated to a whole other level.
ULABY: Like the pizza at Razza in Jersey City or Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix. Right here in Charlotte, this place, Geno D's, is run by an old-school pizzaiolo who grew up tossing pies on the Jersey Shore.
GENO DIPAOLO: Back in the day when I made pizza, you filled a bucket up. There were three handfuls of sugar, two hand - and that was it. I'm old school.
ULABY: But Geno DiPaolo says Reinhart taught him master baking techniques he'd learned in Italy.
GENO DIPAOLO: When Peter said to me, Geno, you nailed this, that made me - that brought me over the edge.
ULABY: He gets choked up talking about it.
GENO DIPAOLO: Like, wow. Peter, I - (laughter).
ULABY: Before Peter Reinhart became a revered figure in the world of pizza, he was a monk who lived in a semi-monastic community. As Brother Peter Reinhart, he wrote the first of more than a dozen cookbooks, three of which won James Beard Awards. His book, "Pizza Quest," he says, is fundamentally spiritual.
REINHART: For me, the word religion at its root level comes from the Latin word religio, which means to be connected to, to be connected to something greater than myself.
QUIENTINA STEWART: So there's ham in there. There's some fresh tomatoes.
ULABY: This is an appreciation of pizza that verges on mystical, says Quientina Stewart. She's a fellow baking professor at Johnson and Wales University who describes Reinhart as the Gandalf of pizza.
STEWART: Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. He is the pizza guy.
ULABY: You might remember Gandalf from the quest in "The Lord Of The Rings."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING")
IAN MCKELLEN: (As Gandalf) All you have to decide is what to do the time that is given to you.
ULABY: That means more than just eating. It means making something meaningful through pizza. Skeptical? Talk to Gina Maria DiPaolo. The 26-year-old runs this pizzeria, Geno D's, with her dad.
GINA MARIA DIPAOLO: It's just to fill people's hearts with love when you come. We want to make you feel like you're at home. Just munch and eat, relax, you know? Fill your heart, you know?
ULABY: No matter how you cut it, says Peter Reinhart, a slice of greatness is a path to awe, humility and joy. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOJI AND DIPLO SONG, "DAYLIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/the-gandalf-of-pizza-speaks-to-the-spiritual-side-of-comfort-food | 2022-05-12T15:34:39Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Grocery store prices are up 8.5% from this time last year, but that doesn't necessarily mean the people who actually grow our food are getting rich. From New Mexico member station KUNM, Alice Fordham reports.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Outside a supermarket in Albuquerque, everyone says groceries are more expensive.
LAURA MIRAMONTES: Produce, that's, like, by the pound especially has gone up.
FORDHAM: Laura Miramontes says food prices are a frequent topic of family conversation.
MIRAMONTES: Oh, my gosh. My dad - yeah, my dad's always complaining.
FORDHAM: He's supporting a big family. Another customer, Estevan Romero, also has a family and says he's changed what he buys.
ESTEVAN ROMERO: I guess tone it down. Stick to more beans and chili instead of, you know, the more expensive cuts of meat and stuff like that, you know?
FORDHAM: New Mexico ranks 45th in the states for median household income, so price rises hit hard here. But that doesn't mean inflation is good for the people growing the food.
I meet Don Hartman on his farm outside the town of Deming, N.M.
DON HARTMAN: Listen how quiet it is, and the birds singing.
FORDHAM: He loves it here. Usually his crops include onions, melons, and New Mexico's beloved green chili on about 500 acres in this river basin. But times are hard. And as he shows me around, I start to see why. First, there's the fertilizer tanks hooked up to his drip irrigation system.
HARTMAN: They're almost empty. That's why I've been pricing around trying to see what it's going to cost to refill them.
FORDHAM: The numbers aren't pretty.
HARTMAN: A load of fertilizer right now is running - a semi-load is about $16,800. The same load last year was $6,000.
FORDHAM: So that cost has almost tripled. Then there's the tractor, which runs on diesel. He gets through 15,000 gallons of that a year.
HARTMAN: Right now, 15,000 gallons of diesel fuel is $66,750. Last year it was $27,000.
FORDHAM: His margins were already tight. Challenges include drought and labor shortages. He lost money last year. But now supply chain issues and the war in Eastern Europe have driven fuel and fertilizer prices way up, and that's forcing Hartman to make tough choices.
HARTMAN: We grew 150 acres of chili peppers. We're back to - I think we're down to 115.
FORDHAM: He's also using less fertilizer. Will it be enough to keep the farm afloat? He doesn't know.
HARTMAN: Everybody's sweating right now because we don't know what's going to happen. And we're all trying to do the best that we can - cut corners, cut cost - to survive it.
FORDHAM: The price he gets for the crops won't reflect his soaring costs, says agricultural economist Anne Schechinger of the nonprofit the Environmental Working Group.
ANNE SCHECHINGER: The share of a food dollar that a farmer gets is so small that when, you know, we're seeing these prices of food go up in the grocery store, that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, farmers are really getting any more money for their own products.
FORDHAM: And, Schechinger says, farmers growing things like corn or soybeans get more government help.
SCHECHINGER: A huge disparity between these major commodity crops and the farm subsidies they get and then the specialty crops like fruits and vegetables and nuts.
FORDHAM: So Jay Lillywhite, a professor of agricultural economics at New Mexico State University, says things look bleak for those growing produce here.
JAY LILLYWHITE: I suspect that we will lose some farmers because those costs are going up.
FORDHAM: As well as economic hardship. That could even accelerate a nationwide trend of depopulation in rural areas, which would change the nature of a state like New Mexico.
LILLYWHITE: If we lose farmers, a lot of our culture in the state, the chili growers and, you know, our state vegetable and what we identify as, as a state - so yeah, the more we lose that, that will be a challenge. So it's not just economics, but it's also cultural.
FORDHAM: Hartman, the farmer, says he could get a regular job, but he sure doesn't want to.
HARTMAN: I could have went anywhere. I could have done 100 other things, but I chose to farm because that's what I love.
FORDHAM: It's not just a livelihood that's under threat. It's his way of life. For NPR News, I'm Alice Fordham.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/the-price-to-grow-food-is-soaring-with-inflation | 2022-05-12T15:34:46Z |
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The pandemic border restrictions, known as Title 42, were under scrutiny this week. Officially, Title 42 is not an immigration policy. It is technically a public health order to - that's intended to stop the spread of COVID, not to control migration at the southern border. But you might not guess as much from listening to the debate in Washington, D.C. NPR's Joel Rose has this report.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: In hearings on Capitol Hill, lawmaker after lawmaker blasted the Biden administration's plan to lift Title 42, the policy that allows immigration authorities to quickly expel migrants at the border on public health grounds without letting them ask for asylum.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVE CHABOT: The situation at our southern border is an unmitigated disaster, and I fear it's about to get a whole lot worse.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BURGESS OWENS: Removing Title 42 is wrong, reckless and plain stupid.
ROSE: And it wasn't just Republicans, like Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio and Burgess Owens of Utah, but a handful of Democrats, as well, including Representative Greg Stanton of Arizona.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GREG STANTON: It's clear to me that the federal government is not prepared, not even close.
ROSE: For two years, the Trump and Biden administrations have insisted that Title 42 is a public health order, while critics complained that it's really a border management tool in disguise. Even supporters of Title 42 now mostly agree. The debate that's playing out in Congress and in the courts is openly about whether Title 42 is an effective way to manage migration. And that argument is far from settled.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Title 42 is a policy failure, plain and simple.
ROSE: Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and other progressive Democrats held a press conference outside the Capitol this week urging the Biden administration to follow through on its plan to end Title 42 on May 23, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ordered. Immigrant advocates say Title 42 has not deterred migrants from coming to the border. In fact, they point out it has removed any penalties for crossing more than once. Tyler Moran is a former adviser to President Biden and co-founder of a nonprofit called the Immigration Hub.
TYLER MORAN: What we've seen since Title 42 has been in place is a huge increase in the number of people who are making multiple attempts to cross the border. And the overall number of people attempting to cross the border since Trump put it in place has only increased.
ROSE: Title 42 was in place when the Border Patrol set a record for apprehensions last year as migrants flee poverty, violence and corruption across Central America and beyond. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been expelled to Mexico, where many have been victims of kidnapping and other crimes. The Department of Homeland Security says lifting Title 42 will likely lead to another spike in border apprehensions. Republicans have seized on that prediction. Here's Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE JOHNSON: We'll be totally overwhelmed, be crushed by the sheer numbers and the weight of illegal immigration. And there will no longer be any border, any security here, any sovereignty at all. We won't have a country.
ROSE: Republicans accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, without evidence, of deliberately encouraging illegal immigration. This week, Mayorkas released a detailed plan to deal with an increase in migrants if Title 42 is lifted, relying on the immigration laws that were on the books before the pandemic. And Mayorkas pointed out that migrants have a right to seek asylum under U.S. immigration laws.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: My family are beneficiaries of those laws. We fled the communist takeover of Cuba to enjoy the freedoms and liberties and the democracy that makes this country shine. And we are intensely proud of our humanitarian relief programs.
ROSE: For now, the Biden administration is still planning to lift Title 42 in less than a month. But a federal judge in Louisiana issued a temporary restraining order this week, blocking the administration from beginning to phase out Title 42, which means it could still be in place at the border for a long time to come.
Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | https://www.keranews.org/2022-04-30/title-42-was-meant-to-slow-covid-at-the-border-its-being-used-to-manage-migration | 2022-05-12T15:34:52Z |
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