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In London, A Stirring 'War Horse' Of A Drama

2010-05-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

In London, a drama adapted from a children's book took the theater world by storm when it premiered at the National Theatre in 2007 — and it's been enough of a hit in its current commercial run in the West End that a visit to New York's Lincoln Center is in the works. Set during World War I, War Horse is the story of a boy, Albert, and the farm horse he raises from a foal. Book and play alike track the two from the bucolic English countryside to the bloody battlefields of France, through the cataclysmic events of the Great War.

The book, though, is narrated not by Albert, but by Joey — the horse — who details his adventures for the reader. That made for some challenges when it came to bringing War Horse to the stage. In fact, playwright Nick Stafford's version is a very different animal from the book, according to two of the performers who help create the character of Joey.

"The horse was never going to talk," says Matthew Burgess.

And that's how Burgess and his colleague Toby Olie — both puppeteers — came to be involved.

'It Had To Be Done Visually'

The challenge was to create a believable character, to get the audience to invest emotionally in Joey's journey, without tipping over into pantomime — or indulging the anthropomorphic impulse.

"It had to be something that was done visually," Burgess says.

What they've done visually sent London's critics and audiences into raptures. The puppets are wondrous — life-sized, made of cane and canvas and metal, designed by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa and each manipulated by a team of puppeteers. They gallop and trot, snort and whinny, carry human riders into battle. They're at once highly realistic and completely theatrical.

"What's exciting about it is, you are aware of ... the human machinery, as it were, that's helping bring these animals to life," says Matt Wolf, critic for the International Herald Tribune.

Creating the illusion is complicated. Each puppet weighs well over 100 pounds without a rider, and it takes three operators to bring each one to life. Burgess plays what he and his colleagues call Joey's "heart."

"We have the 'head' — who is outside the horse — the 'heart' and the 'hind,' " he explains. "The heart being the front legs, and the hind being the back legs, [both] inside the horse."

Adrian Kohler, co-founder of the company that made War Horse's puppets, uses the techniques and tools of shipbuilding — his father was a shipwright — to build his creations.
The movement of ears and head, the flicking of a tail, the stamping of the hooves — these all communicate a horse's emotions. The puppeteers spent a great deal of time learning about horse behavior, says Olie, who depending on the night is either the head of Joey or that of a thoroughbred cavalry horse, Topthorn.

He ticks off the various ways he and his colleagues did their research: "Two weeks puppet training before rehearsals with the actors start. A lot of YouTube videos. Visits to the King's Troop stables. Monty Roberts, the horse whisperer, came into rehearsals."

And the puppeteers don't just set out to move like a horse. They have sound like a horse: whickering, knickering; whinnies. "Snorty, blowy stuff," as Olie puts it.

After a while, Burgess says, the teams kind of become the horse.

"There are hours of work that we do — predominantly with breath," he says. "Breath is the key to making the team work. ... When we change breath, or we change the rhythm of the breath, we know that the horse has changed its emotional state."

An Emotional Story For Those Steeds To Bear

Of course, none of the work spent getting the horse puppets to behave like horses would mean anything without an emotional story to tell around them. Robert Emms plays Albert, the boy who loves his horse so much that he runs away to join the Army after his father sells Joey to the British cavalry. Albert — like Joey — learns about the horror of war.

"He goes on a massive emotional journey to find the horse again," Emms says. "It's not a happy ending, by any means. ... They've both been scarred."

Yet Albert, Emms insists, is a symbol of hope and courage. His faith that he'll locate Joey gets tested severely on the battlefield, but it doesn't falter. And he makes real sacrifices to pursue that reunion.

"I know that sounds incredibly corny," Emms says. "But it's one reason that the show, for me, every night is a joy to do."

Albert's sacrifices aren't the only ones the story honors and mourns. World War I marked a pivotal point in the evolution of warfare. Mounted cavalry began to disappear, and trench warfare and tanks increasingly made their mark. Horses became more and more redundant, and animals like Joey saw their roles reduced to beasts of burden. And still they died.

"Eight million horses died during the first World War," says puppeteer Matthew Burgess. "And that shouldn't be forgotten."

If War Horse has anything to do with it, London audiences — and starting next March, their counterparts in New York — will remember it for a long time to come.

-excerpt from NPR

A Life Without Fear

2010-04-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

The drama class had just gotten out, and everybody was standing around talking when Jessica noticed her 9-year-old, Isabelle, making her way over to an elderly woman Jessica had never seen. The woman was neatly dressed, most likely just a well-meaning suburban grandmother who had come to retrieve a grandchild on behalf of an over-extended parent, most likely a perfectly harmless person.

Isabelle, as she usually did, exchanged hellos and struck up a conversation. It was the usual post-drama-class conversation until about two minutes in. Then Isabelle dropped the bomb.

"Will you take me? Can I go home with you?" Jessica heard Isabelle plead.

Driven To Trust

Jessica's daughter, Isabelle, has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder with a number of symptoms. Children with Williams are often physically small and frequently have developmental delays. But also, kids and adults with Williams love people, and they are literally pathologically trusting. They have no social fear. Researchers theorize that this is probably because of a problem in their limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. There appears to be a disregulation in one of the chemicals (oxytocin) that signals when to trust and when to distrust.

This means that it is essentially biologically impossible for kids like Isabelle to distrust. (NPR is not using full names in this story for privacy and safety reasons.)

"They don't have that kind of evolutionary thing that other kids have, that little twinge of anxiety like, 'Who is this person? What should I do here?' " Jessica explains. "They just don't have it. She just doesn't have that ... early-warning system."

For Jessica, there are good and bad things about parenting a child with this kind of personality.

For instance, when Isabelle was younger, she was chronically happy. She smiled at anything. She loved everyone: family, friends, strangers. She reached for them all, and, in return, everyone loved her. Strangers would stop Jessica to tell about how adorably loving Isabelle was.

In those days, Jessica says, she and her family were more or less tolerant of Isabelle's trusting and loving nature. "We would try to restrain her, but it was somewhat half-heartedly, because we didn't want to embarrass her by calling her on the carpet about how open she was," Jessica says.

The Danger Of Unconditional Trust

But as Isabelle got older, the negative side of her trusting nature began to play a larger role. A typical example happened a couple of years ago, when Jessica and her family were spending the day at the beach. Isabelle had been begging Jessica to go to Dairy Queen, and Jessica had been putting her off. Then Isabelle overheard a lady just down the beach.

EnlargeJesse Neider for NPR
Isabelle practices training the family dog, "Betsy," with her dad.
"She was telling her kids, 'OK, let's go to the Dairy Queen,' " Jessica says. "And so Isabelle went over and got into the lady's van, got in the back seat, buckled up and was waiting to be taken to Dairy Queen with that family."

Jessica had no idea what had happened to Isabelle and was frantically searching for her when the driver of the van approached her and explained that she had been starting her car when she looked up and saw Isabelle's face in the rearview mirror.

The woman, Jessica says, was incredibly angry.

"She said, 'I am a stranger, you know!' " Jessica says. Essentially, the woman blamed Jessica for not keeping closer watch on her daughter -- for neglecting to teach her the importance of not getting into a car with someone she didn’t know. But the reality could not be more different. "It's like, 'My friend, you have no idea,' " Jessica says.

In fact, because of Isabelle, Jessica has had to rethink even the most basic elements of her day-to-day life. She can not take Isabelle to the dog park. She tries not to take Isabelle to the store. And when the doorbell rings, Jessica will leap over a coffee table to intercept her.

It's not just Jessica and her family who must be vigilant. Every teacher at Isabelle's public school has been warned. Isabelle is not allowed to tell them that she loves them. Isabelle is not supposed to tell other schoolchildren that she loves them. And there are other restrictions.

"She's not allowed to go to the bathroom alone at her school, because there have been numerous instances of girls with Williams syndrome being molested at school when they were alone in the hallway," Jessica says. "And these are like middle class type schools. So it's a very real problem. And, you know, I'd rather her be overly safe than be on CNN."

Raising A Child With Williams Syndrome

Jessica spoke with me for over an hour in the family's home in their woodsy, suburban neighborhood while we waited for her three children to come home from school. Then, just after I turned off my recorder to take a break, I felt two small arms circle my neck from behind. It was Isabelle. She had crept in from school and was giving me a hug.

I turned around, and quite suddenly, the room was filled with questions. Who was I? What was I doing here? Which TV show did I like? Did I know the Muppets?

Then Isabelle took my microphone in her hands. She had decided to sing me a song:

"You're my friend ... You're my friend in the whole world," she crooned. "You look so nice and so beautiful and so sweet."

When Isabelle speaks, she has a slight nasal slur. She also has some cognitive issues. Though she goes to a regular school and sits in a regular third-grade class, her attention is very jumpy, and she needs aids to help her.

These cognitive issues make Jessica's job more difficult. Jessica has decided that the most important thing for her to do is to teach Isabelle how to distrust. For years, that has been her life project -- a battle pitched against biology itself.

Jessica and her husband have made Isabelle books about how to behave around strangers. They have rented videos, they have bought educational toys. They have modeled the right behaviors, constructed sticker charts and employed every other trick they could possibly think of. But distrust, it seems, is almost impossible to teach their child. Sometimes Isabelle manages to remember not to tell perfect strangers that she loves them. Mostly, she doesn't.

But Jessica is determined. "We just have to restart every time," she says. "It's just what we have to do."

It's what they have to do, Jessica reasons, because she won't be around to protect her daughter forever. And though Isabelle trusts the world completely, the world is not a place worthy of complete trust.

Even in their current life, Jessica says, there are moments when she realizes that she's just an instant away from something terrible.

"We live a very sheltered life, but I can think of times when we were at the pool and I turn around to talk to someone, and I see her practically sitting on some man's lap at the pool, and he looks very uncomfortable," Jessica says. "And I just think: This is not good."

Unconditional Love, And A Mother's Worry

Fortunately, Jessica says, the experts tell her it will eventually get better. She needs to just keep at it. One day, they tell her, Isabelle will be able to learn not to feel distrust, per se, but to master a set of algorithms that will allow her to safely navigate the world. She will learn, for example, not to get into a car with a stranger if she has become lost or disoriented, but to ask some person in a uniform for help instead.

In the meantime, Jessica says there are plenty of rewards to this life -- a life with a child with boundless love and trust.

"She'll ask me, 'So how are you today, my darling?' " Jessica says. "And it just makes you smile."

In fact, late in the afternoon on the day I visited, everyone in the family gathered in the kitchen to eat dinner. Isabelle, who loves music, decided to play a CD.

The CD player stuttered then came to life, and Isabelle approached her father.

"Will you dance with me, my sweetie?" she asked.

Her father picked her up in his arms. He spun her round and round.

-excerpt from npr

Pollen Count Is At Its Highest In Years

2010-04-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

Across the United States, the pollen count is at its highest level in years. Dr. Phillip Gallagher of Allergy and Asthma Associates of Northwestern Pennsylvania talks to Steve Inskeep about why the pollen count is so high, and what people can do to gain some relief.

-excerpt from NPR

Anger, Frustration Grow As Travel Crisis Spreads

2010-04-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

As air travelers remained stranded Monday across Europe, airlines grounded for fifth day by a volcanic ash cloud said EU officials had made a costly overreaction to the crisis.

At a meeting in Paris, the International Air Transport Association said European transport officials had shown "no coordination and no leadership" during the crisis. Over the weekend, Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines carried out test flights without passengers and reported no damage from the ash eruption originating from a volcano in Iceland.

Heard On Morning Edition
April 19, 2010
Airlines Question Flight Ban Due To Volcanic Ash
[3 min 7 sec]

April 19, 2010
Cost Of Canceled European Flights Adding Up
[1 min 50 sec]

"It's embarrassing, and a European mess," IATA CEO Giovanni Bisignani told The Associated Press. "It took five days to organize a conference call with the ministers of transport and we are losing $200 million per day (and) 750,000 passengers are stranded all over. Does it make sense?"

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said at a series of meetings on Monday officials would "try to outline corridors, if we can, based on the evolution of the cloud, to allow the reopening of as large a number of flight paths as possible, as quickly as possible and in good security conditions."

However, a senior Western diplomat told the Associated Press that several NATO F-16 fighters suffered engine damage after flying through the volcanic ash cloud. The official declined to provide more details on the military flights, except to say that glasslike deposits were found inside the planes' engines after they patroled over European airspace.

Some smaller airports reopened Monday but authorities in Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands - home to four of Europe's five largest airports - said their airspace was still closed. Britain said it was keeping flight restrictions on through early Tuesday, while Italy briefly lifted restrictions in the north then quickly closed down again after conditions worsened Monday.

Britain's Royal Navy said it was deploying warships to bring its citizens who have been stranded in the continent for the past week back to across the English Channel. For them, returning to Britain by sea is the only option.

European carriers have been the hardest hit, but flights from around the world are routed through major airports on the continent and the crisis was estimated to be costing the global aviation industry at least $200 million per day. IATA officials say the costs are higher than the three-day disruption of air traffic after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

London’s Heathrow was the first major airport to shut down and British Airways said it was losing $30 million a day. The airline said carriers have asked the EU for financial compensation for the closure of airspace, starting last Wednesday.

Officials are concerned that the ash can damage jet engines and could cause commercial jetliners to crash.

Air freight, a mainstay of many "just in time" assembly lines, also has been hammered by the shut down in traffic. Kenya's fresh flower industry is losing $2 million a day and fresh fruit from Africa destined for Europe is reportedly rotting in warehouses. Still economists say Europe's economic recovery should not be derailed unless the disruption lasts for many weeks or months.

The loss of air transport to Europe has also wreaked havoc in countless other ways.

Some U.K. schools may not be able to reopen after spring break because teachers and students are stranded in holiday destinations.

Motorists cannot get their cars fixed because foreign parts can't be shipped in.

Kenya's fresh flower industry is losing $2 million a day and fresh fruit from Africa destined for Europe is rotting in warehouses. Still economists say Europe's economic recovery should not be derailed unless the disruption lasts for many weeks or months.

The airlines are pressing European governments to loosen restrictions, but there is no indication that aviation authorities will immediately comply. Airspace over Paris and the north of France remained closed until Tuesday and British Airways and Lufthansa cancelled all flights on Monday.

Eurocontrol, the air traffic agency in Brussels, said less than one-third of flights in Europe were taking off Monday – between 8,000 and 9,000 of the continent's 28,000 scheduled flights.

About 63,000 flights have been cancelled since Thursday.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines said it had conducted four successful test flights Sunday through a "gap" in the layer of microscopic dust over Holland and Germany.

Lufthansa flew 10 empty long-haul planes Saturday to Frankfurt from Munich at low altitude, between 10,000 and 26,000 feet, said spokesman Wolfgang Weber.

"We simply checked every single aircraft very carefully after the landing in Frankfurt to see whether there was any damage that could have been caused by volcanic ash," Weber said. "Not the slightest scratch was found on any of the 10 planes."

Scientists say that because the volcano is situated below a glacial ice cap, magma is being cooled quickly, causing explosions and plumes of grit that can be catastrophic to plane engines, depending on prevailing winds.

In 1989, a KLM Boeing 747 that flew through a volcanic ash cloud above Alaska and briefly lost power to all four engines. They were restarted at a lower altitude and the plane landed safely.

-excerpt from NPR

Turning Chicken Poop Into Power

2010-04-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

In a dimly lit chicken house, John Logan stands surrounded by thousands of fluffy, yellow, week-old chicks. They're among 275,000 chickens he raises on his farm in Prentiss, Miss. Every 38 days, he ships off a batch to the chicken processor Tyson Foods.

Every year in the United States, 9 billion chickens are raised and sold for food. Their poop has become a problem for the environment.

Several years ago, Logan noticed the phosphorus content in his groundwater had become too high, because of chicken fecal contamination.

"I said, 'I got to do something,' " the farmer recalls. "I can't be putting this on the ground. Now, I have a river right here. What's to happen when that phosphorus overload washes into the river, which then ends up in the Gulf of Mexico?"

Logan considers himself a conservationist. So he turned to the idea of a manure digester, which is something cattle ranchers have been using to turn cow manure into energy. In the past, chicken manure had been mixed with other manure types and then converted into energy, but it had never been used on its own.

Logan worked with researchers and scientists at Mississippi State University to develop and patent the first successful chicken poop digester.

Now, every day, 4 tons of chicken manure are fed into the digester, which resembles a silo. The poop is heated, then mixed with bacteria, which produces the methane gas that is then converted into energy.

EnlargeCourtesy of Greg Gibson, Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation
A chicken digester on John Logan's farm heats chicken manure and mixes it with bacteria, producing methane gas that is converted into energy.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been promoting the use of manure digesters since 1993. But a complicated patchwork of local, state and federal energy policy rules has discouraged people from using them, according to Chris Voell, an EPA program manager. He says with some changes, "instead of 130 digesters around the country, there could be thousands of digesters."

Congress is also considering a fix to the Federal Clean Water Act, which would affect the way poultry operations deal with chicken manure. Bill Satterfield, executive director of the Delmarva Poultry Industry trade group, says new rules would improve the way chickens are produced.

"The more options that chicken growers have in handling the manure in a proper and environmental manner, the better off they are, and the better off the industry is," he says.

As for Logan, he isn't just raising chickens anymore. He sells digesters through his company Eagle Green Energy. They cost $500,000 each, but Logan says they're worth it because the savings add up.

The month before he started using the digester, he says, his power bill was about $8,000. The next month, it dropped to about $200. And "the next month, I got a small check from the power company," he says.

Logan's operation has even gone global. In addition to four digesters operating in Mississippi, and two others in the works for customers in Maryland and Delaware, Logan is working with companies in Italy, Australia and India.

-excerpt from npr

India's Rag Pickers Compete For Lucrative Trash

2010-04-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

In India's capital New Delhi, many impoverished people spend their days picking through garbage — looking for anything that can be recycled and sold. But now there is competition. A battle between rag pickers and new corporate "waste managers" is raging over the trash of the affluent.

-excerpt from NPR

Why The Animal Critic Gives The Panda An F

2010-04-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

For too long, Jacob Lentz thinks, certain animals have gotten by on good looks and charm, while more impressive species are ignored by children and stuffed-animal manufacturers.

A couple of years ago, Lentz and friend Steve Nash set out to right this wrong. They began a blog called Animal Review.

It's exactly what the name implies: reviews of critters, not unlike reviews of cars or new gadgets, complete with letter grades. The ladybug gets an A-. The bald eagle gets a C+.

Their blog has now become a book, also titled The Animal Review. Lentz tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that being a good animal critic is "more of an art than a science."

"It takes at least two years of blogging to really get good at this," he says. "I can't expect laypeople to just start judging animals accurately. It's probably best left to me and Steve."

Part of that professional skill involves knowing which animals not to tick off. "I'm not going to be the one who gives the king cobra a B+," Lentz says. "And I have no interest in upsetting a great white shark. I only have good things to say about those animals.

"If they're listening, I just want to tell them that I think they're amazing. And whatever they want to do is great," he continues. "There's a ton to recommend them to anyone, whether they're planning to kill you or not."

Panda: F
"Pandas have absolutely no interest in reproducing. They rarely mate," Lentz says. That goes against the raison d'etre of a species. "We spend all this money flying these animals around the world, trying to convince them to mate, and we could spend it on a lot of other stuff.

"Second of all, they eat bamboo. They're not supposed to eat bamboo. Their bodies are not adapted to digest cellulose, but they hang in there with the bamboo. But the result of that is that they have to eat a ton of bamboo," he says. "They don't have a lot of energy to do things, like to mate.

"That could be Nature kind of hinting around the fact that they should collectively shuffle off this mortal coil."

Octopus: A
"We gave the octopus an A because it would make a great superhero. They're supersmart, they can solve puzzles, they can remember things.

"They can change their bodies, so they can slip through tiny crevices," Lentz adds, "and they shoot ink. There's all sorts of cool stuff with the octopus that doesn't get talked about enough — because we're spending all our time talking about pandas."

King Cobra: A+
"The king cobra, largest venomous snake, makes nests. It's the only snake known to make nests, and good for them. I mean, great. I think that's amazing. They can inject enough venom to kill an elephant. You have to respect that."

Great White Shark: A+
"The great whites, they're the largest predatory fish," Lentz says. "They sometimes jump out of the water. They're one of two shark species that will get airborne, which, I'm pretty sure, is because they're trying to attack airplanes. But that's awesome."

Rhinoceros: Not Yet Graded
Rhinos have yet to receive their grade, but preliminary findings look good. "Prima facie, I'd give a lot of credit to the rhino because it has a horn. That's impressive. It's big. It's really big. I've also read that they hate fire, which I think is interesting. Like, they'll try to put out fires if they can, so you know, they're trying to help.

"I'd probably be inclined to give them a pretty good grade."

Alpaca: F
"Some people really like alpacas, but they're dopey, dumb animals," Lentz says. "The reason they fail is because I blame them for the conquest of South America."

To explain, "The conquistadors show up with less than 200 men, and they have horses. And somehow they overthrow tens of thousands of Incan warriors in, like, two hours. Because the Incans, you know what animal they had? The alpaca. Not much help in a battle with conquistadors."

Lentz notes a particularly negative reaction when he failed the alpaca on the blog. "We got a lot of angry, angry, angry comments from people," he says. "Including a few threats, which I found delightful — which I don't think is the right reaction to something like that."

Clam: C
The clam doesn't get a great grade, Lentz says, "but given it's a clam, that's pretty good. The more we learned about how clams exist and stuff, the more you had to hand it to them, because they just kind of sit on the bottom of the ocean, they filter plankton, they live forever — I mean, the oldest clam was over 400 years old.

"We should all calm down about complaining about our lives," he concludes. "The clam's OK with it. I mean, you wouldn't want to filter plankton for 400 years. And the clam does it."

Jellyfish: C-
The jellyfish is one of the latest entries on the blog. "You gotta give it some credit, because it's kind of gotten a lot done — without a brain," Lentz says. "It literally does not have a brain. And yet they're still chugging along. Hanging in there and killing a lot of fish. And terrorizing bathers."

North American Mountain Goat: B+/A-
"The one animal that we were sort of blown away with was the North American mountain goat," Lentz says, "which doesn't seem that exciting, because it's a goat. But the truth is, it has a lot going for it." He gives it particularly good marks for "high altitude procreation."

"Mountain goats in other parts of the world," he adds, "are really gaudy. It's just too much. They have giant horns that look like corkscrews.

"But the North American mountain goat has very understated horns, keeps just a plain white coat, and it's very understated."

-excerpt from NPR

Brand Obama: A Hit Abroad, But What About Loyalty?

2010-04-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

During the 2008 presidential campaign, efforts to brand Barack Obama were ubiquitous. T-shirts, music videos and posters declared "HOPE" in big blue letters. The opposition tried to brand him, too — as a mysterious untested outsider and, although provably false, as a Kenyan citizen and a Muslim.

Since the Obama family moved into the White House, the Obama brand-management project has become more complicated.

'A Person, Not A Product'

White House officials have mixed feelings about describing the president of the United States in terms usually applied to shampoo or chain restaurants.

Political adviser David Axelrod has privately described his job to reporters as managing the Obama brand. Yet Axelrod once chided another top White House staffer for openly discussing the Obama brand. According to The New York Times, he told former social secretary Desiree Rogers, "The president is a person, not a product."

Harvard business professor John Quelch understands this ambivalence. "You certainly don't want to market the president as if he or she were a box of breakfast cereal," says Quelch. "However, the principles are relevant in both spheres."

Quelch recently wrote an academic paper, "Can Brand Obama Rescue Brand America?" He argues that the Obama brand matters, whether the White House openly acknowledges it or not.

For example, President George W. Bush tried and failed to persuade dozens of countries to accept Guantanamo detainees. But in the past year, many governments across Europe and the Middle East changed their position and agreed to take prisoners. The American request did not change, but receptivity did.

One senior official, who has worked on closing Guantanamo in both administrations and refused to be quoted by name, believes this is unquestionably the effect of the Obama brand and the boost it has given America's brand internationally.

"The general international view seems to be that it's OK to admire America again," says Simon Anholt, who consults with governments on their national identities.

Anholt conducts an annual survey of national identities. In his most recent one, taken after the 2008 election, the United States had risen from seventh place to first. Anholt argues that standing brings tangible financial and diplomatic consequences.

"If the country's name is in good health, then people are more likely to invest, to buy American products, to visit the United States to study and to work there," he says.

The White House has worked hard to leverage Obama's life story into a strong national brand for America. In his first year in office, Obama visited 21 countries, more than any first-year American president before him.

In Egypt last year, he addressed the Muslim world.

"I'm a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims," he told an audience at Cairo University. "As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the Azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk."

The Brand Does Not Equal Approval

But selling a brand and building longtime brand loyalty are different things. A presidency is built on thousands of specific decisions, every one of which can alienate people who believed in the Obama brand.

Environmentalists were disappointed in the president's decision to allow offshore drilling. Peace activists decried his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

In Yemen, Khaled al-Anisi recently told NPR he lost hope when the president decided not to release any more Yemenis from Guantanamo prison.

If the country's name is in good health, then people are more likely to invest, to buy American products, to visit the United States to study and to work there.
- Simon Anholt, who consults on brand identities of various countries
"Obama give the people hope, and they live one year with this hope," said Anisi, who directs the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, a legal organization that is pressing for the Yemeni detainees' release. "Now the people start to think this is not Bush problem or Bush administration mistake. It is the mistake for all American people, Democrats or Republicans. All of them are the enemy."

The artist Shepard Fairey helped establish the Obama brand, designing the iconic red and blue poster of Barack Obama gazing into the distance with the word "HOPE."

"The brand is promised utopia almost," says Fairey.

He views a brand as a simplistic invitation to learn more about a complicated person or a product. Whether people like what they learn is a different question.

"When you look at all the different warring ideologies and complexities of different people's needs and agendas," says Fairey, "it is impossible to please everyone in the way that "Have a Coke and a Smile," or any other great slogan, can."

And Quelch of Harvard says that even if everyone identifies Barack Obama with "hope," "change" and "Yes We Can," "the approval rating and the strength of the brand may not be quite the same thing."

"When we're talking about brand, we're talking about what does the brand stand for," Quelch says. "And when we're talking about approval, we're talking about whether or not I approve of what the brand stands for."

If people believe that Obama equals change, that is good branding. If they hate the change that the health care overhaul represents, good branding could equal bad approval ratings.

-excerpt from NPR

Pope Stays Silent On Sex Abuse Scandals

2010-04-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

As allegations of child sex abuse charges continue to mount against the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict has avoided any mention of the scandal. There are allegations that the Vatican tried to cover up the abuse claims. At the start of Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square, the dean of the College of Cardinals said Benedict was the target of what he called "petty gossip."

-excerpt from NPR

New England Struggles After Record Flooding

2010-04-01T08:30:00.001-07:00

Parts of New England are still underwater after heavy rains. March was one for the record books in much of the region.

Three days of steady rain in Rhode Island caused the Blackstone River to swell dramatically — sending waves of water crashing down Valley Falls in the town of Cumberland, just north of Providence.

"Wet, scary, rushing beyond my imagination of what a river can do," said Laurie Levebvre of Cumberland, who was stunned by the sight.

"This might impress some of these young guys out here that don't underestimate Mother Nature," Levebre added. "Mother of all mothers."

The Blackstone had crested at 15 feet by Wednesday and caused only minor flooding. But the situation was much more serious to the south, where the Pawtuxet River crested at a record of more than 20 feet.

The high water also shut down parts of Interstate 95, which links Boston and New York.

Schools and government offices have been closed for business, and some neighborhood roads remain submerged.

"We're setting new records as we speak," said Don Carcieri, Rhode Island's governor. "We have set a record for rainfall in the month of March — over 16 inches of rain. This is historic in our state."

The flooding ends a month of unprecedented rainfall across the Northeast. Boston, New Jersey, New York City and Portland, Maine, recorded record rainfalls in March.

In Cranston, R.I., David Alviano used a wet-vac to suck up water in his basement, which has leather furniture, children's toys and a new tile floor.

"Just remodeled it about a month ago," he said. "All new furniture, all the kids toys are soaking wet, all the new rugs — they're all trash."

Alviano has been fighting a losing battle against the water since Tuesday.

"It doesn't stop — it just keeps coming," Alviano said. "It's still coming through the floor. The ground's saturated and it's got nowhere to go, and it's just pushing through every little crack it can get through."

Those without wet-vacs or sump pumps have as much as 6 feet of water in their basements. Outside Alviano's house, the rain-swollen Pawtuxet River turned many lawns into lakes.

According to Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, 140 homes have been evacuated, and city workers have been working without a break since Monday.

"They've been sandbagging, making sure the residents have access to sandbags," the mayor said. "My fire department is exhausted. They've been on the go with a lot of rescues, moving people out of their homes. My police are exhausted too — so it has a big impact on all the services that we provide."

Then, in a cruel irony, a state that has seen nothing but rain and water for days is being asked to conserve water. That's because the floodwaters are overwhelming sewage treatment plants in several cities and towns.

Mayor Fung asked Cranston residents to cooperate. "We're asking them to try not to do their laundry, no dishwasher, try to limit toilet flow as much as possible — that can help out with conservation of water."

Elsewhere in Rhode Island, hundreds of people were evacuated from a neighborhood in Coventry because of fears that a bridge upstream would collapse.

That's just one of 185 bridges that civil engineers need to inspect. They'll be able to do that when the waters recede after some of the worst flooding the state has seen in more than a century.

-excerpt from npr

Finding A Job Is Hard For Even The Most Educated

2010-03-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Getting a degree in down times can be a liability for some who can't find jobs and have massive loans.

The conventional wisdom that getting a degree helps your career is not quite panning out for Shana Berenzweig.

The 33-year-old quit her job at the Texas Medical Association to get a master's in public administration at New York University. She worked part time, graduated nearly two years ago and moved back to Austin, Texas. So far, she hasn't been able to find a job.

A Rarified Elite

"It's very scary to be in this position," says Berenzweig, who is trying to make payments on her six-figure school loans with some assistance from her parents and by cobbling together babysitting gigs.

Berenzweig's education puts her in the rarefied elite among job seekers. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 5 percent, which is less than half of the 10.5 percent rate for high school grads. But now she sometimes considers that degree she paid so dearly for a liability, at least when it comes to some jobs. She takes it off her resume when applying for waitress jobs.

"It's almost like people are just going to assume that because I have a master's degree, I'm going to ask for money," she says. "Or if something better comes along, I'm just going to jump ship."

With the unemployment rate at 9.7 percent, sustained unemployment is afflicting even some of the most educated. Some fled to graduate school recently as a temporary safe haven from the economy, only to find themselves still without jobs. Many are applying for low-paying or nonpaying internships to try to fill in gaps in their resumes.

A lot of people who are qualified for more higher level jobs are settling for more entry positions, and so that's a roadblock for new graduates.
- Blair Coward, an American University senior
New Graduates At A Disadvantage

American University senior Blair Coward visited several employer booths at a recent job fair. She has a couple of summer internships lined up, but is finding that few employers have any full-time, entry-level jobs open.

"A lot of people who are qualified for more higher level jobs are settling for more entry positions, and so that's a roadblock for new graduates," Coward says.

In August, Coward, who will graduate magna cum laude with a degree in international economic relations, will not only be unemployed, she'll lose her housing. "I'm quite terrified," she says.

Instead of standing in line alongside her, many of her classmates are opting for more schooling, Coward says.

Higher education comes, of course, with many benefits. Some degrees are still in demand and command high salaries, especially engineering.

Still, today's economy will force many graduates to settle, says John Irons, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. Young people who start their careers in a bad economy tend to accept jobs at lower wages, and that leaves them at a disadvantage with their salary for about a decade, he says.

The scarring has another effect — in the same way that people who lived through the Great Depression might hoard food, people affected by this Great Recession might feel less willing to leave their jobs. They might stay in jobs that aren't a great fit.

EnlargeYuki Noguchi/NPR
Recent and soon-to-be college grads attend a job fair at American University. With the unemployment rate at 9.7 percent, sustained unemployment is afflicting even some of the most educated.
"I think the recession in a way is pretty traumatic," says Max Caldwell, managing principal for Towers Watson, an HR consulting firm. The healthy response, he says, is for graduates to start managing their own career development, and rely less on employers to provide training and advancement.

Is More School The Right Choice?

Matt Jones wishes he had a career to manage. Right now, he'd take a job even if it didn't make use of his new law degree.

Jones graduated from Michigan State University's law school two years ago and has not been able to find work outside of AmeriCorps, where he worked for several months. He has the financial and emotional support of his family, his fiancee and her family, but he still thinks "many times a day" about how and when he might find a job.

Jones says he's cut back on as many expenses as he could. And he thinks the austerity has also made him a more spiritual person. "That's been a nice source of comfort," he says. "But it hasn't gotten any easier."

"There's been a lot of soul searching, especially in the last six months," he says. "Did I make the right decision going to law school?"

-excerpt from NPR

Click! Polaroid Snaps Back On The Scene

2010-03-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

One of the most famous names in photography is trying to make a comeback.

Polaroid, the company that popularized instant photography, has struggled in recent years and even announced it would stop making its famous instant film. But starting Thursday, a partner of Polaroid is selling instant film and Polaroid is selling a new image.

When it comes to image, it's hard to top Lady Gaga: singer, fashion maven and self-marketing dynamo. She's been recruited by Polaroid to helps spice things up.

A Polaroid instant camera makes a strategically placed cameo in Lady Gaga's latest music video for the song "Telephone"; Lady Gaga snaps a photo of Beyonce with it.

Polaroid Corp. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School
When Polaroid's creator, Edwin Land, debuted his first instant camera in 1948, people thought it was a miracle.
Earlier this year, Lady Gaga signed a deal to be a "creative director" for the company. She also reportedly has an equity share in the company. It's a good deal for both sides. Lady Gaga might get some money, and Polaroid gets a big boost in its effort to be cool again.

History Of Polaroid

In the 1960s and '70s Polaroid was the height of cool. It was the Apple of its day. The company was known as a creative innovator and its founder, Edwin Land, is often compared to Apple's CEO Steve Jobs. When Land debuted his first instant camera in 1948, people thought it was a miracle.

"It completely changed the relationship between people and photography and cameras. The impact of something like that, I think, is difficult to understand today," says David Bushman of the Paley Center for Media in New York.

When digital photography came along, Polaroid struggled to keep up. It came up with its own digital camera, but the camera wasn't very good, according to Mark McClusky, a senior editor at Wired magazine.

"When you think about digital cameras you think about Canon and Nikon, and then you think Sony and Panasonic and Kodak. Polaroid sort of never enters the conversation. They aren't a player," he says.

In 2001 Polaroid went bankrupt. The company was sold only to go bankrupt again. The biggest blow to Polaroid fans came in 2008 when the company stopped making instant film. By then, Polaroid was little more than a name. But in business, names have value, and the right to that name was purchased by a holding company, which licenses the Polaroid name to manufacturers that make things like TVs, picture frames and digital cameras.

But instant film was not dead yet. A group of Polaroid fans and ex-employees formed a company called "The Impossible Project." They took over an old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands and started making instant film again, using a different process because the original Polaroid chemicals were no longer available.

"I'm sure if you made a phone call to some of the old research people from Polaroid, they would assure you that we were mad," says Andre Bosman, who heads The Impossible Project.

New black-and-white film is now on sale, and color film is coming soon. Bosman says the new film is clearer and crisper than its original film. But that may not be what Polaroid enthusiasts want. Photo historian Claude Cookman says part of the appeal of the classic Polaroid film is its less-than-perfect images.

"The colors feel quite different," Cookman says. "They are not crisp and clear and [it] has a certain retro feel to it in terms of its color and its size. And I think this is a really important dimension of it."

Bushman of the Paley Center for Media agrees. He says in this day of HDTVs and digital photography, there's something quaint, otherworldly to traditional Polaroid film.

"It has a very nostalgic value to it for that reason," he says.

Eking Out A Market

Polaroid's Scott Hardy says there is a market for instant film — even if it's a small one. But the company's not banking on film alone. It sells other products, including a digital camera with a built-in instant printer. But McClusky is skeptical that Polaroid will become a household name again.

"It seems unlikely to me that Polaroid's going to regain that status in the marketplace. You know, stranger things have happened in this world but they have a long road ahead of them," he says.

Whatever happens with Polaroid, at least it's got Lady Gaga along for the ride.

-excerpt from npr

Bump For Cash: Phones As Virtual Wallets

2010-03-23T17:54:00.000-07:00

The use of mobile phones to exchange money is a main theme at this week's wireless industry conference in Las Vegas. Last week, PayPal introduced an iPhone app that lets users pay for items by tapping their handset against another phone.

As Mario Armstrong tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer, the PayPal app is similar to the old days, when people with Palm Pilots used an infrared beam to share contact info between devices. Bump Technologies introduced software to simplify that process. The new app uses software from PayPal and Bump to let registered users conduct a transaction via their phones.

To prevent unauthorized use, the app requires a password for every transaction. But, Armstrong said, "as mobile payments and using mobile devices to pay for transactions rises, we will obviously see more types of security threats in this area."

So, with sophisticated phones that can use this software becoming more prevalent, will shoppers soon be tapping their phones against the cash register at stores, instead of using a credit card? That's already happening in some countries, from Austria to Korea, Armstrong says.

In the United States, Starbucks is running trials in some markets, allowing customers to use their phones as their Starbucks card. And Arkansas has become the first U.S. state to let people use their phones to pay for e-government services — everything from probation fees to property taxes.

As for Bump, Armstrong says he's given it a try — and he concedes that the idea of zapping real money around by using virtual gestures can take some getting used to.

But, he said, "the convenience is really incredible — the ability to transfer funds on the spot, or look at multiple accounts on the spot — to be able to have almost a virtual wallet at your fingertips."

-excerpt from npr

Boomerang Kids Drive Rise Of Extended Family Living

2010-03-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

As jobs have disappeared and houses have been foreclosed on, many Americans are sharing space to save money. A new study by the Pew Research Center found the number of people in multigenerational households grew by 2.6 million between 2007 and 2008.

But the bad economy isn't the only reason more homes are filled with several generations; the trend has been under way since 1980.

In a roomy townhouse in Northern Virginia, the Anderson family exemplifies what demographers say is a cultural shift. Jackie Anderson, 23, graduated from Penn State last year. Given the horrendous job market, she pretty much planned on ending up back with her mom and dad. These days, she certainly sees no shame in that.

U.S. Population Living In Multigenerational Family Households

Source: Pew Research Center
Credit: Stephanie d'Otreppe/NPR
"Most of my friends that are from high school are still around this area, and most of them do live with their parents as well," Jackie says. "And I know a good number of them up in Pennsylvania do the same thing."

The recession has hit young workers especially hard. But Jackie's mother, Chris, says long before the bad economy, she had always expected her daughter to move back in.

"I thought when she graduated she would want to build up enough money to get a place of her own, to get a car, all the things she wanted to live comfortably," she says.

Generation Gap Closing

The Pew study found that the share of people in multigenerational households has grown by a third since 1980 — to 16 percent of the population — and young adults like Jackie are leading the way. The center's Paul Taylor says baby boomers may have come of age protesting just about every conviction their parents held. But, he says, that generation gap has virtually disappeared among their children, the so-called "millennial" generation.

"It seems rather admiring of older adults," Taylor says. Millennials "believe older adults have values that are better than their own. At some level they're becoming buddies with mom and dad, and they may not find it so unusual to still be living in their childhood bedroom."

These so-called "boomerang kids" aren't the only ones driving the trend of extended family living. Older adults are also slightly more likely to share such households. Demographers say the generation that gave birth to the baby boomers has a lot more kids to potentially move in with.

Another big factor is the increasingly large share of the population made up of immigrants, who are far more likely than native-born whites to live with grandparents and grandchildren.

"Particularly among Hispanic families, they are looking for larger-sized homes," says Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. "And some of the Asian communities are just accustomed to living with grandparents in their home countries, so they're adopting it here as well."

Yun says home sales were the same last year as in 2000, even though the U.S. population grew by nearly 30 million. Clearly, he says, people are moving in with each other instead of buying their own place.

Jackie Anderson recently found a job and is planning to move out … sometime.

"I'm kind of playing it by ear," she laughs. "I'd like to do it maybe around the summer — that's a tentative date."

Her dad says she'll have her parents' blessing when she goes, but they like having her around, and they're not going to give her the shove.

-exerpt from npr

The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime

2010-03-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

When you think of cutting edge, 21st-century workplaces, chances are a county government bureaucracy does not come to mind. But the Human Services and Public Health Department of Hennepin County, in Minneapolis, Minn., is engaged in about as radical an experiment with flexible work as exists.

One morning late last year, the lobby was packed with people applying for food, housing and other public assistance. But down a hall, in a grayish-beige cubicle farm, it feels like a ghost office.

"Here's another one, empty," says supervisor Ann Zager as she guides me among vacant chairs and black computer terminals. Her staff of 13 determines eligibility for assistance, and half of them are not here.

"I mean sometimes I don't see or hear from them for days," Zager says.

Zager has figured out that she needs only five or six staffers at a time to handle face-to-fact client meetings. Everyone takes turns being in the office, and otherwise schedules themselves as they wish.

"At first it was really hard for them," she says. "They would come to me and say, 'Ann, I need to take off next week, or I need to do this.'" Zager would remind them that if they were not scheduled to be in the office, they did not owe her any explanation.

"It was hard for them to believe I really don't care!" she says.

Hennepin County is practicing what's called a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done. The state of Minnesota signed a contract for the program last year as part of a campaign to reduce rush hour traffic on 35W in Minneapolis. Nationwide, 3 percent of businesses now say they have a ROWE, though as far as participants here in Hennepin County know, theirs is the first public agency to adopt it. Many are ecstatic at the way it's working so far.

Non-Traditional Time

More In This Series
PART 1: More Employers Make Room For Work-Life Balance
March 15, 2010
Can Working Moms 'Have It All'? Ha!
March 14, 2010
In a northern suburb of Minneapolis, county program manager Kara Terry has made her kitchen table a home office. Nearly every evening after dinner she brings out her laptop, typing away as she oversees her three sons doing their homework. They are in elementary and middle school, and Terry says she's never been able to spend so much time with them.

"Oh gosh, I can go and have lunch with Brandon," she says, "or volunteer at the kids' school, and still get my 40 hours in. I just do it at a non-traditional time."

Back at the county offices, human services representative Anna Reynolds is giddy about not having to make her 50-mile commute every day, which often meant arriving home past dinnertime.

"I don't have to come home and find my little bit of cold leftover sitting aside," she says. "It's really nice to have hot food, and fresh food, and to eat with my family."

Making Flex Time Work

So where did this radical work system come from? It was created by two human resource workers who became frustrated that the daily grind wasn't only constraining, it was also inefficient.

"There's this belief that if you're at work, you're doing work — and people are not," says co-creator Jody Thompson. She says 80 percent of companies' lost productivity is from "presenteeism" — when someone is physically in the office but mentally somewhere else.

In the early 2000s, Thompson and her colleague Cali Ressler were working at Best Buy and charged with creating a flexible work strategy there. They soon decided that letting some employees telecommute or have a four-day week wasn't working. Ressler says when managers grant these special favors to some but not others, co-workers become jealous, and the work atmosphere can be hostile. What's more, she says those who get the flexibility are stigmatized, since a lot of managers don't actually believe the employees are working if they can't see them.

Their solution was to give everyone — from managers on down — the same flexibility. Best Buy adapted this results-only program at its headquarters, and Thompson and Ressler later left to create their own consulting firm.

Productivity Spike

At Hennepin County's social services agency, not everyone welcomed the dramatic change.

"I didn't like it at all because I feel we're accountable to the taxpayer," says Bob Brinkhouse, a child-support officer who's been with the county for 17 years. He admits he's "old-school," and felt that "someone should know where we're at during our eight hours a day."

ROWE Basics
Want the extreme flexibility in your workplace? Here are a few things to expect from a results-only work environment:

All meetings are optional. Read that again if you need time to absorb it. ROWE's creators insist on it, even though plenty of managers have backed out of the program when they learned of this. Staff are still responsible for what happens in meetings. They say if it's worth it, they'll come. But they also soon discover how many hours they'd previously wasted in unnecessary meetings.

Results have to be defined. When you can't judge someone's effectiveness by how many hours a day they show up, you are forced to look at what they produce. Managers and staff say they've had to jointly spell out explicit tasks or achievements and specific dates for them to be completed.

You must change the way you communicate. You may get more work done at home without all those office distractions, but if you need to communicate something, it's a lot easier when your colleague is in the next cubicle. Before the Human Services and Public Health Department of Hennepin County, in Minneapolis, Minn., launched ROWE, staff did a test run: They spent one day in the office pretending they were all working alone, communicating only via e-mail, instant messaging or phone.

Every day feels like Saturday. This is a favorite ROWE tenet, though it begs the questions: When does the work happen, and couldn't every day also feel like Monday? ROWE's creators point out that many of us are incredibly busy on weekends, but we feel more relaxed because we are in control of our schedule. So ROWE lets you set your schedule every day, fitting in laundry, conference calls and errands as needed.

Brinkhouse also worried that some colleagues would fall behind in their work, or worse, take advantage of the freedom, a sentiment echoed in snarky letters to the local newspaper. (One essentially asked, "How are you going to waste my tax dollars now?")

But Brinkhouse and the two child-support colleagues on his team forward their phones and use instant messaging to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. To his own surprise, he's come around.

"The way it works," he says, "all three of us could be home and it wouldn't affect anybody. Now, one drawback is, I get lonely at home. It's too quiet!"

Clearly, something is lost in a ROWE workplace: Call it an intangible synergy, or that spontaneous brainstorming that can accomplish more than a dozen e-mails ever could. But there is a strong business case for a results-only work environment.

Zager, whose staff processes Hennepin County's public support cases, says her unit receives about 8,000 pieces of mail a month.

"Before we started ROWE," she says, "we were about two, 2 1/2 weeks out on processing. We are now down to five days or less," she says. People were just more productive.

In fact, productivity jumped so much, rumors flew about possible layoffs.

Work-Life Balance

In a pure results-only workplace, no one needs to track their hours, and paid time off disappears. Who needs it if you set your own schedule?

Flex Work Options

Chart: What Are Flexible Working Options?
For those who lament that working 9 to 5, as Dolly Parton once sang, is all takin' and no givin', there are options for a more flexible arrangement. Don't know your flextime from your job share? Here, a quick primer.

But as a public agency, Hennepin County employees must still put in 40 hours a week. And as a union shop, no one has tossed out carefully negotiated vacation and sick leave benefits. Employees, though, say their leave time is piling up, so this might force the issue.

Another hitch: Old attitudes about work die hard, so a lot of time is spent trying to change them. In a basement conference room, two dozen county workers line a U-shaped table as trainer Ashley Everett engages volunteers in a role-playing exercise.

"Tina, let's talk about Tammy," she says. "Oh my gosh. Tammy only shows up at maybe 10 o'clock during the day. I mean, geez, does she ever work?"

Taking her cue, Tina shakes her head, "No, not really." The others erupt in peals of laughter as they recognize such routine office gossip. But Everett says in a results-only system, for all they know Tina was up until midnight finishing a company report.

In another role play, Everett pretends she's just entering the office, as a colleague says, "Ten o'clock and you're barely getting in?"

Everett turns around and delivers a devastating comeback line: "Is there something you needed from me before 10?"

The others laugh even louder and offer up a round of applause.

Sometimes at sessions like this, as the possibility of a new way of work sinks in, results-only co-creator Ressler says she's seen boomer-aged men break down and cry.

"They realize they've not seen their children grow up," she says. "They've given up hobbies, they've given up dreams to play the game. We don't want future generations to look back on their lives and have so many regrets that they cry."

-excerpt from npr

How 'The Hidden Brain' Does The Thinking For Us

2010-01-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

After making a silly mistake, it's not uncommon for a person to say, "Oops — I was on autopilot." In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there's actually a lot of truth to that.

Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR's Steve Inkseep — conscious and unconscious, pilot and autopilot — and we are constantly switching back and forth between the two.

"The problem arises when we [switch] without our awareness," Vedantam says, "and the autopilot ends up flying the plane, when we should be flying the plane."

The autopilot mode can be useful when we're multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us. Vedantam says that when we interact with people from different backgrounds in high-pressure situations, it's easy to rely — unconsciously — on heuristics.

Racial categorization begins at an extremely early age. Vedantam cites research from a day-care center in Montreal that found that children as young as 3 linked white faces with positive attributes and black faces with negative attributes.

"Now, these were children who are 3 years old," Vedantam says. "It is especially hard to call them bigots, or to suggest that they are explicitly racially biased or have animosity in their hearts."

Vedantam says the mind is hard-wired to "form associations between people and concepts." But he thinks that the links the children made between particular groups and particular concepts were not biologically based — those judgments came from culture and upbringing.

"We tend to think of the conscious messages that we give children as being the most powerful education that we can give them," Vedantam says — but the unconscious messages are actually far more influential.

He says that for every 50 times a year a teacher talks about tolerance, there are many hundreds of implicit messages of racial bias that children absorb through culture — whether it's television, books or the attitudes of the adults and kids around them.

"And it's these hidden associations that essentially determine what happens in the unconscious minds of these children," Vedantam says.

'Take Back The Controls'

In American society, colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality.

"Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways."

Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures. ... I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself.
- Shankar Vedantam
Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode — as long as you are aware of when it is on. His book, The Hidden Brain, is about how to "take back the controls."

So if the human psyche is just a big constellation of conscious and unconscious cognition — which thoughts represent the real you?

"Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures," Vedantam says. "I know that I think of myself that way: I know why I like this movie star, or why I voted for this president, or why I prefer this political party to that."

But doing research for this book changed all that, Vedantam says.

"I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself. And it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind's intentions."

-excerpt from NPR

Death, Desperation Mark Haiti's Dark Hours

2010-01-16T04:31:00.000-08:00

The lone morgue in Port-au-Prince is filled to overflowing, while a mass grave outside the city holds thousands of bodies. Yet three days after a titanic earthquake, the death count has barely begun in Haiti’s capital.

Hundreds of U.S. troops reached the city on Friday, but the nascent international aid effort had yet to show much impact and residents were becoming increasingly angry and impatient.

Photos: Rescue And Heartbreak In Port-Au-Prince

Amid reports of scattered looting, Haitians were in a desperate search for food and water, even as bodies still litter the streets.

Vox Haiti
Voices Heard Above The Earthquake's Roar
Urgent needs are being met in piecemeal fashion. Makeshift medical clinics — most of them outdoors — are struggling to cope with the injured, often with few or no medical supplies.

"Haiti is dead, is dead, is dead, is dead, is dead. Everything is breaking down," Philippe Mercier told NPR's Greg Allen. "It's like somebody who lives in the street, you know? Eat on the street, drink water on the street. There's no pure water."

Hundreds of thousands of survivors in this desperately poor Caribbean nation are believed to be homeless. Many have fashioned makeshift shelters on the sides of city streets, in parks, and wherever else they can take refuge as aftershocks continue to rattle the city.

Heard On 'All Things Considered'
January 15, 2010
NPR's Carrie Kahn Reports From The Port-Au-Prince Morgue
[5 min 3 sec]

January 15, 2010
Haitians Shaped By Years Of Poverty, Corruption
[2 min 40 sec]

January 15, 2010
NPR's Greg Allen Reports On A Woman Pulled From The Rubble
[2 min 56 sec]

"There are just thousands of people out on the streets," said NPR's Jackie Northam from Port-au-Prince. "Every inch of the grass in this city is now taken up with people who are just huddled down because they have nowhere to go."

People trapped under rubble are being rescued in many cases by their neighbors, as Haitians pull together. Roberta Joachim, a worker at Haiti's National Library, was carried into the hospital by several men whom she had never met. Another former stranger made calls to her hometown in Gonaives, a place far from Port-au-Prince and largely unaffected by the earthquake, in an effort to let someone know that the young woman from the provinces was still alive.

In the ruins of the Montana Hotel, American Dan Wooley and Haitian Lucson Mondesir were trapped side by side in adjacent elevator cars. In the darkness, they talked and encouraged each other until a rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., arrived.

There is still no firm count of how many people perished in Tuesday's magnitude 7.0 earthquake. The international Red Cross has estimated that between 45,000 and 50,000 people were killed in the quake, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday there was no point in speculating about the scope of deaths or injuries until more information was available.

At least six Americans have been confirmed dead, including one U.S. diplomat, but the U.S. casualty count is expected to rise.

So many corpses have been brought to the morgue at the national hospital that hundreds have been stacked up outside in piles that snake around the corner of the building.

"There are dozens of people lined up to try and attempt the gruesome task of identifying their loved ones," NPR's Carrie Kahn reported from the scene. "It's a horrific sight to go in and experience that many dead people in all levels of decomposition."

U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian government officials have begun to collect some of the corpses and taken them to a mass grave on the outskirts of the city. Haiti's president has said that 7,000 bodies already have been buried there.

The Two-Way Blog
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"It's not enough, so other sites must be created," David Wimhurst, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission, told NPR's All Things Considered.

But the needs of the dead are simple compared with the care required by a staggering number of injured survivors. And many obstacles exist. Taking a lesson from the South Asian tsunami, governments and humanitarian agencies have been quick to rush sophisticated, pre-packaged field hospitals to the earthquake zone, but there’s a real danger they could simply stack up at the overtaxed Port-au-Prince airport.

Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, urged well-meaning donors to send something other than mobile hospitals, at least for now.

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"We need to avoid gaps and duplication and not waste the money of the donors," Byrs said.

Among Haiti's chief needs: surgeons who specialize in crush injuries, and nurses. Many of Haiti's medical personnel were killed or injured in Tuesday’s quake.

The human help on the way is moving slowly.

Interactive: Quake Damage From Above
Hundreds of U.S. troops already have arrived in Haiti, and several thousand are coming over the weekend after President Obama ordered an initial $100 million relief effort.

The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier also arrived offshore, with 19 helicopters and the capacity to produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of desperately needed drinkable water.

"There are going to be many difficult days ahead," President Obama said on Friday, after speaking with Haitian President Rene Preval. "As I told the president, we realize that he needs more help and his country needs more help — much more."

Bowing to pressure from Congress, the Obama administration said Friday that tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally will be allowed to stay for the next year and a half. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said they're being granted temporary protected status, or TPS. That means that none will be deported to their devastated homeland for now. But any Haitians who attempt to flee to the U.S. will be sent back.

Back in Haiti, U.N. peacekeepers have seen "sporadic episodes of looting," according to Wimhurst. The Brazilian military, which makes up the largest contingent in the United Nations peacekeeping force, warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting.

Indeed, some looters — young men and boys with machetes — roamed downtown streets on Friday.

"They are scavenging everything. What can you do?" said Michel Legros, 53, as he waited for help to search for seven relatives buried in his collapsed house.

There was still little evidence of aid being distributed downtown, and U.N. officials warned that Haitians are becoming increasingly fed up.

"Unfortunately, they're slowly getting more angry and impatient," Wimhurst said of the Haitians. "I fear we're all aware that the situation is getting more tense as the poorest people who need so much are waiting for deliveries. I think tempers might be frayed."

On the streets, Haitians expressed growing fears about their safety, particularly as there continues to be little sign of local police presence. Fueling these concerns, an estimated 4,000 prisoners were believed to have escaped from the collapsed main prison.

"We're worried that people will get a little uneasy," said gas station attendant Jean Reynol, 37, explaining his station was ready to close immediately if violence breaks out.

Haitians also complained that they see little evidence that their government is functioning, but U.N. officials insisted that the Haitian officials were working behind the scenes.

"The Haitian government is functioning on a daily basis, believe it or not, even though the prime minister's office has been demolished and the president's palace has gone down and the ministries have collapsed," Wimhurst told NPR's Melissa Block. "In spite of all that, they've regrouped very fast. They meet every day at 7 o'clock in the morning."

U.S. officials said that U.N. peacekeepers will have the main responsibility of maintaining security in the capital, but the U.S. military will take a lead role in coordinating relief efforts. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that he does not expect a hostile reception.

"Particularly given the role that we will have in delivering food and water and medical help to people, my guess is, the reaction will be one of relief at seeing Americans providing this kind of help," Gates told reporters on Friday.

The full extent of the damage is becoming clearer as relief workers fan out into more corners of the capital. Some 15 areas of the city have been hit particularly hard, with at least 70 percent of the buildings destroyed, according to assessments by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One empty lot in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where a building stood only a few days earlier, has been turned into an impromptu bathhouse where people gathered around a hose, filling buckets.

Rescue teams were continuing to extract survivors from crumpled buildings, but a lack of heavy equipment means that many people remain trapped. Rescuers from the Dominican Republic stood outside the wrecked Interior Ministry building where at least two people were believed to be alive amid the rubble.

"We can't do anything because it's a difficult situation there," said Miguelina Tactou, one of the rescue workers. "Our people can be in danger."

Gerald Emil Brun survived a three-story fall after the collapse of the building that housed his architectural and engineering firm, Tecina. His colleagues were not so lucky.

"We are recovering about eight cadavers so far from our building — senior engineers and architects, a lot of them are gone," he said. "The way the construction industry goes in Haiti, we are probably responsible for 3,000 families. Now it's all down. It's all gone."

In what has long been the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, shock was giving way to despair.

"We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering," said Sylvain Angerlotte, 22. "We don't have money. We don't have nothing to eat. We need pure water."

Aid flights have been landing steadily at the Port-au-Prince airport. From Europe, Asia and the Americas, more than 20 governments, the U.N. and private aid groups were sending planeloads of high-energy biscuits and other food, tons of water, tents, blankets, water purification gear, heavy equipment for removing debris, helicopters and other transport.

In all, governments and international agencies have pledged more than $400 million in aid. The American Red Cross also reported a dramatic outpouring of support from the American public, saying that it received nearly $35 million in donations in the first 48 hours after the quake struck.

The massive international effort also yielded a rare diplomatic detente between the United States and Cuba, after Havana agreed to allow U.S. medical evacuation flights to fly through Cuban airspace to reach the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay.

But the port in Haiti's capital is too badly damaged to be used for aid deliveries, which has severely restricted the pace of relief supplies. Some flights into Port-au-Prince had to be diverted — and the airport had been forced to halt flights several times on Thursday and Friday — as the tarmac filled up with airplanes and jet fuel ran short.

Aid workers are beginning to worry that they are running out of time.

"There is a huge amount of people in need, but my fear is now how we're going to get to them all," Hauke Hoops, the regional emergency coordinator in Haiti for CARE, an international aid group, wrote in a dispatch from Port-au-Prince. "This is one of the biggest disasters I've ever seen, and it is a huge logistical challenge."

The WFP began organizing distribution centers for food and water, but by Friday, it was only managing to feed about 8,000 families a day, according U.N. officials. The U.N.'s Ban acknowledged this was just a drop in the bucket. The WFP is planning to scale up its efforts in to feed 1 million people within 15 days, and 2 million within a month.

But aid workers have been blocked by debris on inadequate roads and by survivors gathered in the open out of fear of aftershocks and re-entering unstable buildings.

"The physical destruction is so great that physically getting from Point A to B with the supplies is not an easy task," Emilia Casella, a WFP spokeswoman in Rome, said at a news conference.

- NPR's Greg Allen, Jason Beaubien, David Gilkey, Jackie Northam, Carrie Kahn and Michele Kelemen contributed to this report, which also includes information from NPR wire services

A Race Against Time For Aid In Haiti

2010-01-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

Aid was trickling in slowly to earthquake-ravaged Haiti on Thursday, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming the relief efforts.

Several planeloads of medics and search-and-rescue teams have already landed in the devastated capital of Port-au-Prince, and as many as several thousand U.S. troops were on their way to the Caribbean nation.

President Obama said Thursday that the U.S. government was launching "one of the largest relief efforts in our recent history" to help stricken country, but that it would take "hours, and in many cases, days" to get the aid there. He authorized $100 million in emergency aid for Haiti.

But in Port-au-Prince, there were few apparent signs so far of an organized plan to bring food and water to the 3 million or so Haitians that the International Red Cross estimates need emergency assistance.

"There is no government aid out here bringing anything to the people," said NPR's Carrie Kahn, reporting from Port-au-Prince. "They've been three days now without food and water."

Kahn said survivors were wandering the streets in desperate search of water, food and medical care.

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"You go into every building, you do down every corner, and there are people wailing, crying, bandaged up, and there are no doctors to help them," Kahn said.

She visited one clinic packed with several dozen patients lying on mattresses on the floor, many of them bleeding and moaning, but there were no doctors in sight. One 8-year-old girl lost her whole family —11 people — in the quake.

At least eight of Port-au-Prince's hospitals have been heavily damaged. The aid group Doctors Without Borders treated the wounded at two hospitals that withstood the quake and set up tent clinics elsewhere to replace its damaged facilities. Many of the hundreds of Cuban doctors stationed in Haiti also worked to treat the injured in field hospitals.

"This is much worse than a hurricane," said Jimitre Coquillon, a doctor's assistant who was working at a separate makeshift triage center set up in a hotel parking lot. "There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to die."

There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to die.
- Jimitre Coquillon, a doctor's assistant at a makeshift triage center
But aid will likely be slow to arrive. Deliveries of supplies by ship to Port-au-Prince were impossible because the capital's port was so badly damaged, according to United Nations officials. The city's airport is open but straining to handle dozens of incoming flights of supplies and rescuers.

Meanwhile, bodies were strewn on almost every street. The body of one mother was covered with the corpses of her children.

"People have nowhere to put them, so they wrap them in sheets and cardboards in the hope that the authorities will pick them. People have also piled bodies in front of the city's main hospitals," Cedric Perus, the humanitarian coordinator in Haiti for Oxfam, an international aid group, said in a statement from Port-au-Prince. "Bodies may stay under the rubble for a long time because it is difficult to access some sites and heavy lifting equipment is in limited supply."

There was still no reliable estimate on how many people were killed by Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 quake. On Thursday morning, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told several TV networks that she feared that tens of thousands of Haitians had died. Earlier, Haitian President Rene Preval had said the toll could be in the thousands. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press the number could be 500,000, but conceded that nobody really knew.

"Let's say that it's too early to give a number," Preval told CNN on Wednesday.

Erika Santelices/AFP/Getty Images
A U.N. soldier walked along a street a day after it was destroyed by the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake Tuesday in Port-au-Prince.
The first American death in the quake was confirmed by a State Department official, who said that at least 164 U.S. citizens have been evacuated. Hundreds more are awaiting flights out on Thursday.

Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort including military and civilian emergency teams from across the U.S. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was expected to arrive off the coast Thursday, and the Navy said the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan had been ordered to sail as soon as possible with a 2,000-member Marine unit. An advance group of more than 100 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division will leave Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Thursday to prepare for the arrival of about 3,500 more from the division by Sunday.

Speaking directly to Haitians, Obama said, "You will not be forsaken."

A U.S. military assessment team was the first to arrive, to assess Haiti's needs.

"We are going to do everything we can to maintain order," Clinton told CNN.

The global relief effort did pick up some steam Thursday with the arrival of an Air China flight carrying search-and-rescue teams, medics, trained search dogs and aid supplies. But it took six hours to unload the aircraft because the airport lacked the needed equipment, a possible sign of more bottlenecks ahead.

A British flight with a government assessment team and 71 rescue specialists along with heavy equipment arrived in the neighboring Dominican Republic. The crew prepared to head to Haiti. A Los Angeles County Fire Department 72-member search team left for the Caribbean island nation late Wednesday.

The United Nations released $10 million from its emergency funds, even as U.N. forces in Haiti struggled with their own losses. The U.N. headquarters building collapsed in Port-au-Prince, and at least 16 personnel are confirmed dead, with up to 150 still missing, including mission director Hedi Annabi of Tunisia and his chief deputy, Luis Carlos da Costa.

"We'll be using whatever roads are passable to get aid to Port-au-Prince, and if possible we'll bring helicopters in," said Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the U.N. food agency in Geneva.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the city overnight, jolting people awake.

Doctors stitched up head wounds on several children at a hotel compound where many surivors gathered for the night. "It was just excruciating to hear them screaming out in pain, calling out to their parents for help," reported NPR's Kahn. "You hear moans throughout the night."

At another site, about 200 survivors, including many children, huddled in a theater parking lot using sheets to rig makeshift tents.

Police officers carried the injured in their pickup trucks. Wisnel Occilus, a 24-year-old student, was wedged between two other survivors in a truck bed headed to a police station. He was in an English class when the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. and the building collapsed.

"The professor is dead. Some of the students are dead, too," said Occilus, who suspected he had several broken bones. "Everything hurts."

Around the city, ad hoc medical centers sprung up, including one at the airport where U.N. workers, foreigners and Haitians were being frantically treated.

Hundreds of patients were lined up in cot after cot in covered hangers, NPR's Kahn reported. One man arrived in a wheelbarrow; another made it after being trapped in rubble for 16 hours.

Doctors who arrived from Miami on Wednesday evening hustled to treat the injuries, which included broken limbs, spinal damage and internal bleeding. In the space of just a few hours, at least four people died of relatively minor injuries that doctors said would have been treated easily in a more advanced facility.

But calls from other victims seeking help from emergency services weren't getting through because systems that connect different phone networks were not working, according to officials from a telecommunications provider in Haiti.

Calls were being placed sometimes 15 to 20 times from the same phone, which was "painful to watch," said Jyoti Mahurkar-Thombre, Alcatel-Lucent's general manager of wireless voice.

About 3,000 police and international peacekeepers worked to clear debris, direct traffic and maintain security in the capital. But law enforcement was stretched thin even before the quake and would be ill-equipped to deal with major unrest. The U.N.'s 9,000-member peacekeeping force sent patrols across the capital's streets while securing the airport, port and main buildings.

Looting began immediately after the quake, with people seen carrying food from collapsed buildings. Inmates were reported to have escaped from the damaged main prison in Port au Prince, said Elisabeth Byrs, a U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman in Geneva.

-excerpt from NPR

For Rural Adults, Health Care Is Wishful Thinking

2009-12-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

by BRITTANY HUNSAKER

My 19th birthday was a bittersweet occasion. That day, I officially aged out of Kentucky's insurance program for low-income youth.

As luck would have it, I developed a health problem almost immediately. Pain in my teeth spread to my head and neck. Headaches made it impossible to concentrate in my college classes. I couldn't see well enough to drive. Going to the doctor or dentist costs more than my weekly paycheck from a fast-food restaurant. I had to choose between oral surgery and textbooks that semester. Textbooks lost, but luckily I made it through that class.

When it comes to health care, I do have options — just not good ones. In the rural county where I grew up, it's not just youth who don't have insurance. Adults, unemployed or underemployed in minimum wage jobs, are also without coverage. You can get health care there if you're in a dire situation — say, if you're pregnant or recovering from drug addiction. I know a few girls who got pregnant just to afford a doctor's visit, or had another baby just to keep their health insurance.

I am not financially or emotionally ready to bring a child into this world. But I feel like I am being penalized for getting an education while others are rewarded for their reproductive capabilities.

A sick workforce only intensifies an already sick economy. It's hard to work when you can't afford eyeglasses for your astigmatism, dental work for your rotting teeth, or medicine for pneumonia.
My friend Willa Johnson is also in college and uninsured. Going to the doctor to check a cough is a luxury she can't afford. Last spring, she started feeling sick. By the time she went to the emergency room, she had full-blown pneumonia. A week later, Willa found herself in the emergency room again. She'd torn the muscles around her rib cage from coughing. Seven months later, Willa is not completely healed. Her cough is painful to hear. Still, she worries more about the bill collectors calling for those ER visits than her health.

Brittany Hunsaker, 22, is part of the Appalachian Media Institute. She grew up in Whitesburg, Ky., and currently attends the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Her essay was produced by Youth Radio.
My friend Brian Hobbs just graduated from college, and he's about to lose his insurance. He won't be able to afford the prescription for his glasses. What happens if he gets sick? Brian is scared he won't find a job that pays enough to cover rent and food, let alone annual insurance.

Looking at my own future, I'm worried that my health will keep getting worse, that my teeth will keep bothering me, that I'll keep ignoring aches and pains, that I'll continue to just Google symptoms to see if things are serious enough to warrant a bill.

I grew up in one of the sickest communities in America, with the lowest life expectancy of any area in the United States. Lower than China or Mexico. Cancer, diabetes, addiction, obesity, depression all look like epidemics there, and that adds to my worry.

I don't think any position I'm going to get out of college will come with health insurance. I don't know a single friend from college who has a job like that. A sick workforce only intensifies an already sick economy. It's hard to work when you can't afford eyeglasses for your astigmatism, dental work for your rotting teeth, or medicine for pneumonia. We're constantly being told we are the future of the country, but we're starting out a step behind.

-excerpt from NPR

Flu Worries Pump Up Sales Of Hand Sanitizer

2009-10-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Concern over the H1N1, or swine flu, virus has been a big boost for companies that make hand sanitizer.

More than $117 million worth of the clear gels were sold in the United States last year, according to Information Resources Inc. of Chicago. The company's figures don't include retail giant Walmart, but they show that overall there was a 17 percent increase in hand sanitizer sales in the year ending Sept. 6. For August, IRI reported a 50 percent jump in sales over the same month in 2008.

Ohio-based Gojo Industries invented Purell, the best-selling hand sanitizer. The company still makes the Purell that goes into dispensers in hospitals and schools. (Johnson & Johnson distributes the Purell you buy in the grocery store.)

Recently, Gojo issued a statement saying the company was experiencing high demand, and it asked customers not to hoard its product.

"There is absolutely no need to stockpile product," said President and CEO Mark Lerner. "In fact, stockpiling could cause an actual shortage which, in turn, could threaten public health."

Gojo says it's ramping up production — keeping factories open around the clock and hiring more workers.

Look around the campus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and you can see why the folks at Gojo are so busy. There are hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere. The school has been hit with more than 565 cases of flu since classes started in August.

One administrator at the school took a lot of ribbing because he brought sanitizer with him to graduation ceremonies in May.

"We had hand sanitizer placed at two different positions as you were about to ascend the stairs to the stage and two different positions as you descended," says Paul Voakes, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

After shaking 15 to 20 hands, Voakes says he'd rub a little sanitizer on his hands to make sure any bugs he picked up didn't get passed on.

"To my knowledge, nobody got swine flu as a result of our commencement," Voakes says.

Lest you think buying a bottle of hand sanitizer is all you need to ward off swine flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says washing your hands is just the start. The agency suggests that you get a flu vaccination and avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. If you do get sick, stay home. And when you sneeze or cough, cover your nose and mouth with a tissue, then throw it away.

-excerpt from NPR

Fighter Jet's Noise Worries Some Potential Neighbors

2009-10-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

The Air Force says within a few weeks it will release a list of preferred bases for the next generation fighter aircraft, which is now being flight-tested. As many as 200 bases around the country are candidates for the F-35, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter.

Too Loud?
Hear recordings of F-35 landings in Valpraiso
But while many of the communities near those bases would welcome the economic benefits of the new mission, they would not be as welcoming to the noise the aircraft bring.

Air Force data suggests that, depending on altitude, the F-35 is three to 12 times louder than the A-10 attack aircraft. For some, it's the sound of freedom.

"This is our nation's defense," says Bruce Dusenberry, a member of the DM-50, a civic group that promotes the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson, Ariz. "This is the security of our freedoms. So that's equally important that we support our military for those reasons."

The group says it supports any new mission the Air Force plans in Tucson because of the importance to the local economy.

But some residents hear a different tune.

"If they love the sound of freedom so much, I'll be happy to sell them my house," says Gail Cordy, who sits on a community relations committee set up to work with the military over noise issues.

Each day, dozens of A-10's fly over Cordy's home in midtown. She figures about half her neighbors oppose louder flights, but are afraid to speak out.

"They don't want to be seen as unpatriotic," she says. "And that label has been leveled at us more than once."

It really is a sticky issue for any community leader.

"We'd be proud to be known as Fighter Town U.S.A.," says John Arnold, mayor of Valparaiso, Fla. The city is next to Eglin Air Force Base, another candidate for the F-35s.

Yet, Valparaiso is suing the Air Force over noise from the aircraft. The lawsuit claims the Air Force didn't adequately disclose its noise measurements in its environmental impact statement.

"We just take exception to the final [environmental impact statement], which put lots of noise over the city of Valparaiso," he says. According to Air Force data, he continues, the noise would make the city almost uninhabitable.

One part of the lawsuit was settled. Valparaiso is still asking for a more thorough environmental impact statement, which Kathleen Ferguson, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force, says it will get.

The decision on where to base the F-35 includes a lot of factors, she says, and noise is just one of them. It won't be the deciding factor, she warns.

"There is not a specific point in time where we eliminate a base from contention because of noise," Ferguson says.

Proximity to training areas will probably weigh more heavily — several bases in Arizona, for instance, are near the Barry Goldwater Air Force bombing range. And to some extent, she says, jet noise can be mitigated based on how and when the pilots fly.

The military could also soundproof homes under flight paths. But that won't help if you're in your backyard having a barbecue — which people in Arizona and Florida do a lot.

So community leaders in both places suggest they'd welcome a different mission for their hometown bases — like, perhaps, a smaller, quieter Predator drone.

-excerpt from NPR

Madeleine Albright's Jewelry-Box Diplomacy

2009-09-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

In her new book, Read My Pins, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reveals that she used jewelry as a diplomatic tool during her years with the Clinton administration.

"This all started when I was ambassador at the U.N. and Saddam Hussein called me a serpent," she tells Susan Stamberg. "I had this wonderful antique snake pin. So when we were dealing with Iraq, I wore the snake pin."

After that incident, Albright decided that it might be fun to speak through her pins. She went out and bought different costume jewelry.

"As it turned out, there were just a lot of occasions to either commemorate a particular event or to signal how I felt," she says.

There were balloons, butterflies and flowers to signify optimism and, when diplomatic talks were going slowly, crabs and turtles to indicate frustration.

After the Russians were caught tapping the State Department, Albright protested by wearing a pin with a giant bug on it. On days when Albright felt she had to do "a little stinging and deliver a tough message," she wore a wasp pin.

At one point, Russian leader Vladimir Putin told President Clinton that he knew what the mood of a meeting would be by looking at Albright's left shoulder. (Albright's pin with three monkeys, which she wore when discussing Chechnya, was meant to draw attention to the fact that Russia took a "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" stance toward the Chechen atrocities.)

The former secretary of state says that one of her own pins — an antique eagle pin with a complicated clasp — nearly sabotaged her at her swearing-in ceremony.

"I put it on, and there I was all of the sudden with one hand on the Bible and one hand in the air, and the pin was just swinging in the breeze. I had not fastened it properly," says Albright. "I was afraid that it would fall on the Bible."

Accidents aside, Albright says she loved expressing herself with her jewels. And, she adds, making fashion statements — and commenting on each other's attire — is not completely unheard of within a diplomatic setting:

"You think that the heads of state only have serious conversations, [but] they actually often begin really with the weather or, 'I really like your tie.' "

Excerpt: 'Read My Pins'
by MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

Chapter 1: The Serpent's Tale

The idea of using pins as a diplomatic tool is not found in any State Department manual or in any text chronicling American foreign policy. The truth is that it would never have happened if not for Saddam Hussein.

During President Bill Clinton's first term (1993 1997), I served as America's ambassador to the United Nations. This was the period following the first Persian Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition rolled back Iraq's invasion of neighboring Kuwait. As part of the settlement, Iraq was required to accept UN inspections and to provide full disclosure about its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

When Saddam Hussein refused to comply, I had the temerity to criticize him. The government-controlled Iraqi press responded by publishing a poem entitled "To Madeleine Albright, Without Greetings." The author, in the opening verse, establishes the mood: "Albright, Albright, all right, all right, you are the worst in this night." He then conjures up an arresting visual image: "Albright, no one can block the road to Jerusalem with a frigate, a ghost, or an elephant." Now thoroughly warmed up, the poet refers to me as an "unmatched clamor-maker" and an "unparalleled serpent."

In October 1994, soon after the poem was published, I was scheduled to meet with Iraqi officials. What to wear?

Years earlier, I had purchased a pin in the image of a serpent. I'm not sure why, because I loathe snakes. I shudder when I see one slithering through the grass on my farm in Virginia. Still, when I came across the serpent pin in a favorite shop in Washington, D.C., I couldn't resist. It's a small piece, showing the reptile coiled around a branch, a tiny diamond hanging from its mouth.

While preparing to meet the Iraqis, I remembered the pin and decided to wear it. I didn't consider the gesture a big deal and doubted that the Iraqis even made the connection. However, upon leaving the meeting, I encountered a member of the UN press corps who was familiar with the poem; she asked why I had chosen to wear that particular pin. As the television cameras zoomed in on the brooch, I smiled and said that it was just my way of sending a message.

A second pin, this of a blue bird, reinforced my approach. As with the snake pin, I had purchased it because of its intrinsic appeal, without any extraordinary use in mind. Until the twenty-fourth of February 1996, I wore the pin with the bird's head soaring upward. On the afternoon of that tragic day, Cuban fighter pilots shot down two unarmed civilian aircraft over international waters between Cuba and Florida. Three American citizens and one legal resident were killed. The Cubans knew they were attacking civilian planes yet gave no warning, and in the official transcripts they boasted about destroying the cojones of their victims.

At a press conference, I denounced both the crime and the perpetrators. I was especially angered by the macho celebration at the time of the killings. "This is not cojones," I said, "it is cowardice." To illustrate my feelings, I wore the bird pin with its head pointing down, in mourning for the free-spirited Cuban-American fliers. Because my comment departed from the niceties of normal diplomatic discourse, it caused an uproar in New York and Washington; for the same reason, it was welcomed in Miami. As a rule, I prefer polite talk, but there are moments when only plain speaking will do.

This excerpt from Read My Pins by Madeleine Albridght is used by permission of Harper Collins.

-excerpt from NPR

How A Professor Taught Me To Consult My Stomach

2009-09-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

I remember sitting in Shakespeare class, basking in my good luck. The wait list was nearly 100 people, but here I was, a new student at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., watching the legendary Fred Stocking in action. In 1979, Dr. Stocking was a year shy of retirement, an icon to four decades of students in this small college in the Berkshires. He was lean and meticulous, with a bow tie and thick white hair, and he lived Shakespeare — doting on Puck, thundering through Hamlet, and lifting our gaze from the crass pursuit of A's to the beauty of weathered truths.

He encouraged me to make writing my career, and then unwittingly shaped that career. It happened when I asked him a random question: "How do you determine a student's grade?"

"Well," he said, "I add up the grades for the essays, quizzes, the midterm and final. I average them out. Then I consult my stomach."

Consult my stomach. No three words have influenced — or haunted — me more. As a reporter, I try to apply Dr. Stocking's stomach test: Is the story I'm telling not just accurate, but honest? Does it reflect my conscience as well as the facts? I've failed more times than I like, but that standard has marked the north on my compass for the past quarter-century.

Read An Address Fred Stocking Gave To The Phi Beta Kappa Society At Williams College in 1977

A Touching Reunion

I lost touch with Dr. Stocking for 20 years. But eight years ago, Fred — who insisted I call him by his first name — and I began exchanging letters every few months. And so, when I was invited to give a talk for our 25th reunion three years ago, I asked my 91-year-old former professor to introduce me. It was a rainy afternoon; the auditorium was packed. The crowd hushed as Fred Stocking walked tentatively across the stage, clutched the podium, and leaned into the microphone.

"My name is Fred Stocking!" he said, and the place went wild. It was like a schmaltzy Disney movie.

Afterward, dozens of middle-aged alums, now doctors, economists, and lawyers, lined up to shake Fred's hand.

"You were my favorite professor," one said. Another added, "You made me care about ideas."

As for me, Fred's letters became a road map for growing old well. He began painting at 80, taking lessons every Tuesday. At 91, he played Gonzalo in The Tempest at the community theater. When his body began to fail, he watched the process with a sort of bemused detachment. "I've had a lot of horizontal time," he quipped in one letter. At his 94th-birthday party, Fred demonstrated his new motorized stair chair lift by waving like the Queen as he purred up and down the stairs. Later, with far more gusto than any 94-year-old should have possessed — and with uncanny timing — Fred belted out his trademark song from Broadway, "Lulu's Back In Town."

Never Stop Puzzling Over Ideas

As Fred's body shut down, he leaned all the more on his mind. It was a sort of tit for tat with age. You take away my driver's license; I'll read the new biography of Shakespeare. You dim my vision; I'll listen to books on tape. He was ecstatic when his wife gave him a new translation of War and Peace. He was 92 when I sent him an early draft of my book Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. A year later, he sent back a seven-page critique, musing on the limits of scientific inquiry, the flaws of religious doctrine and the nature of death.

It's been a privilege knowing you. I'll live on in your memory. It's the best kind of immortality.
- Fred Stocking
Fred approached his own death clinically. I can accept God as an idea, but not as a fact, he wrote. He was even more skeptical of the afterlife.

In early July, I flew up to Williamstown for what I knew would be my final visit. Fred lay on his bed, as faded as his sheets. We talked about Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He said he wasn't sad about dying. I asked him if he thought that his consciousness might survive death. I thought with death around the corner, he might have warmed up to the afterlife. He looked at me keenly, as if to say, "I may have grown old, but I haven't gone soft."

"What's wrong with mystery?" he asked.

Then he cleared his throat. "It's been a privilege knowing you," he said, and I burst into tears. Fred patted my hand. "I'll live on in your memory," he said. "It's the best kind of immortality."

Fred died a few weeks later. As I read through his letters the other day, I came across his favorite poem by e.e. cummings: "If Everything Happens That Can't Be Done." I don't have a clue what it means. But I keep trying to unlock it. Because that's part of Fred's genius. Never stop puzzling over life. Swim in big ideas. And of course, consult your stomach.

- expert from NPR

Argentine Cattle No Longer Just Home On The Range

2009-09-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Argentina's vast plains are bigger than Texas, and for more than a century, great herds of cattle roamed and ate to their hearts' content. That helped build up Argentina's image as the producer of lean and natural grass-fed beef.

But ever so quietly, Argentina is increasingly fattening its herd in American-style feedlots. Promoters say it's efficient, but some Argentines wonder if quality isn't being lost for the sake of quantity.

Each day, 12,000 animals from all over cattle country arrive at the Liniers cattle market on the south side of Buenos Aires.

Grizzled men on horseback herd them into pens. The bell then rings, announcing the start of yet another day of auctions. The animals are butchered immediately after sale, resulting in what Argentines call the best beef in the world.

Like this proud country, the century-old Liniers market is all history and tradition.

Tradition, though, is dramatically changing. Cattle that once grew fat on Argentina's great grass expanse are now heading to pens.

The future of Argentine cattle production in on display at the Santa Maria feedlot, south of Buenos Aires. A machine mixes corn pellets — high-protein, high-energy feed that is then delivered to troughs across 40 corrals, each one holding 200 animals.

The administrator, Sebastian Saparrat, walks under a bright blue sky, past young bulls and heifers. He says they consume 150,000 pounds of feed a day.

EnlargeSilvina Frydlewsky for NPR
Since 1901, cattle from across the Argentina's cattle country has been shipped by train and truck to the Liniers cattle auction on the south side of Buenos Aires. It is one of the world's biggest cattle markets, with 12,000 head passing through daily.
But Saparrat says it is worth it. When the cattle arrive at 8 months of age, they each weigh 400 pounds. Three months later, they each top 600, the optimal weight.

Some in Argentina aren't too happy about the trend. They say Argentina built a name brand by grazing cattle, ultimately producing lean, juicy steaks for consumers.

Claudio Schonfeld, a member of the tradition-bound Argentine Angus Association, says that grass-fed beef tastes better and is lower in cholesterol.

But Rodrigo Troncoso, general manager of the Argentine Feedlot Chamber, sees a big future for feedlots.

"The truth is that we produce beef [with] grass, also we produce beef with grain. We are known [for grass-fed beef] historically. We have to show the world that we can do all kinds of beef," he says.

Troncoso says a third of the 15 million head slaughtered each year now pass through feedlots — up three-fold from 2001.

The trend is the result of simple economics: The price of soybeans, corn and wheat skyrocketed in recent years and land owners made way for those cash crops.

At Tomas Leclercq's ranch in Magdalena, Argentina, practices are changing slowly. Many of the cattle at the ranch — which has been in continuous operation since 1888 — feast on grass all their lives. But Leclercq says that half of the animals now go to feedlots.

And with each coming year, he says, the number of animals he'll send to the pens will only grow.

-excerpt from NPR

Democrats Recharged, GOP Unmoved By Obama

2009-09-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

Congressional Democrats — energized by President Obama's pronouncement that "the time for bickering is over" — prepared Thursday for a final push aimed at crafting a massive overhaul of the nation's health care system.

"Yes it's messy, yes there will be starts and stops, but the good news from this speech gave the issue a kick in the pants," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told NPR shortly after Obama's joint address to Congress.

Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek said the speech gave Democrats a renewed sense of purpose.

"Walking away from the chamber tonight, members knew that they had a responsibility" not to "kick the can down the street," he said.

More importantly, some fiscally conservative "blue dog" Democrats, many of whom have questioned their more liberal colleagues on how to pay for a health care overhaul, liked what they heard.

heard on Morning Edition
September 10, 2009
Did Health Care Speech Accomplish Obama's Goals?
[5 min 13 sec]
The speech "called out some of the extremes on both sides to say you can't get everything you want," said Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota.

Listen To Obama's Speech, The GOP Response And NPR Analysis

Full Text Of Obama's Address
Sep. 9, 2009
Play-By-Play Analysis From The Two-Way
Republicans, however, showed few signs of wavering from their steadfast opposition to the Democrats' proposals. In their response to the president's speech, delivered by Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany, Republicans acknowledged the need for change while resisting "government-run" care.

"We agree, much needs to be done to lower the cost of health care for all Americans," Boustany said, adding that Republicans were ready to start over on a bipartisan effort.

"Replacing your family's current health care with government-run health care is not the answer. In fact, it will make health care much more expensive," said Boustany, who is also a heart surgeon. "That's not just my personal diagnosis as a doctor or a Republican, it's the conclusion of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the neutral score-keeper that determines the cost of major bills."

Others were more succinct. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NPR that he thought the president's speech was "a complete disaster."

"It made me think, quite frankly, that the president has lost his cool on this issue," he said.

Indiana Rep. Mike Pence said the president's renewed call for bipartisanship had "a few thorns on those olive branches," adding that it was "one more speech about a bad plan."

Even if congressional Republicans weren't swayed, early indications were that at least some average Americans were.

A snap CNN poll of 427 adult Americans who watched the speech indicated that 67 percent of those surveyed afterward favored Obama's health care plan, while 29 percent did not. That compares to a pre-speech breakout of 53 percent in favor and 36 percent opposed.

In the retirement community of Vizcaya in Delray Beach, Fla., retiree Judy Goldstein said she had been fearful of the rumors of "death panels" and was encouraged by what Obama said to try to clear up confusion.

"I was listening to all the negative things, especially since I am a senior citizen. I said, 'Oh my god, they are going to put me to sleep,'" she told NPR.

"I don't consider myself stupid, but I was really believeing it, because I did not vote for him," Goldstein said. "A lot of things about him I did not like, so I am glad I heard this tonight."

But at an Irish pub in Denver, where a group of libertarians known as Liberty on the Rocks meets every other Wednesday, T.L. James was among those unmoved by the president's address. He said he didn't believe Obama's nod to exploring tort reform that would limit malpractice claims.

"The tort lawyers form an important part of the Democratic power base for their elections. There is no way that he's going to do anything that is going to turn them away from the Democratic party," James said.

What is likely to be the most talked-about moment in the speech, however, came not from the president but from South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson, whose outburst of "You lie!" when Obama pledged no health care benefits would go to illegal immigrants shocked the chamber.

Wilson later apologized for his "lack of civility."

Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced the outburst as an extraordinary breach of decorum.

"There'll be time enough to consider whether or not we ought to make it clear that that action is unacceptable in the House of Representatives," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), said late Wednesday on WTOP radio when asked about possible punishment for Wilson. "I've talked to Republican members who share that view."

House Republicans did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but there was widespread condemnation of the outburst from members of both parties.

Appearing on ABC's Good Morning America on Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden said the incident made him "embarrassed for the chamber and a Congress I love."

Biden also said he thought the president's speech "debunked a lot of myths out there" including accusations the legislation being drafted would includes "death panels" for the sick and the elderly, and that it would also provide insurance coverage for millions of undocumented immigrants.

He predicted that health care legislation would be on the president's desk "before Thanksgiving."

-excerpt from NPR

Swine Flu Threatens French Tradition, Kissing

2009-09-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Fears of a swine flu pandemic are forcing counties to step up prevention measures. In France, a deeply-held social custom may be affected. Some companies and schools already have started discouraging the social ritual of kissing.

-excerpt from NPR

Fire Near Los Angeles Grows In Triple-Digit Heat

2009-09-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

A wildfire sweeping through the mountains above Los Angeles continued to spread Tuesday, burning scores of homes and threatening thousands more as well as a historic observatory housing some of the largest telescopes ever built.

At least 53 homes have been destroyed in the Station Fire as neighborhoods on the northern and southern flanks of the blaze were evacuated. Fire officials say it may take weeks to fully contain the flames.

The fire is by far the largest of several dotting the state. For six days, it has plowed its way through half-century-old thickets of tinder-dry brush, bush and trees just 15 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Some 12,000 homes are threatened and about 2,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.

heard on Morning Edition
September 1, 2009
Calif. Wildfires Spread, Homes Destroyed
[4 min 56 sec]
The flames threaten to climb Mt. Wilson, home to a landmark 100-inch telescope that was the largest in the world until 1948. It is also the site of most of the radio and TV station towers in Los Angeles. Firefighters were setting backfires and spraying fire retardant in the area to halt the flames' advance.

Dixie Dees, a spokesperson with the Station Fire Incident Command center, said the fire — which so far has destroyed more than 105,000 acres, or about 164 square miles, and is just 5 percent contained — was doubling in size every day and "behaving very erratically."

Fire spokesman Paul Lowenthal said Tuesday that the blaze is not expected to be fully surrounded until Sept. 15.

Crews fighting the blaze were also grappling with weather conditions that favor fire, such as temperatures topping 100 degrees and low humidity. Temperatures near the Station Fire were expected to hit 102 degrees Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.

EnlargeJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
U.S. Forest Service workers hike down a hill while fighting the Station Fire on Monday in Tujunga, Calif.
"It gets to a point in the afternoon with the wind coming up that it even makes its own weather," Dees said. "When the temperature goes up and humidity goes down and the wind comes up, which is what's happened in the last three or four days, that's kind of the perfect storm for very aggressive fire behavior."

Officials were looking for a break in the weather Tuesday and hope "Mother Nature cooperates," said CAL FIRE spokesman Daniel Berlant.

The swath of fire extends from the densely populated Los Angeles foothill communities of Altadena, La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Tujunga and Sunland in the south to the high-desert ranchlands of Acton.

Tujunga Canyon resident Bert Voorhees said he and his son were able to retrieve several cases of wine from the brackish water of their backyard swimming pool Monday, about all he salvaged from his home.

"You're going to be living in a lunar landscape for at least a couple of years, and these trees might not come back," the 53-year-old Voorhees said, wondering aloud how many of his neighbors would choose to rebuild.

Los Angeles County Fire Department, Google Maps
See A Map Of The 'Station Fire' Near Los Angeles
Two firefighters — Capt. Tedmund Hall, 47, of San Bernardino and firefighter Spc. Arnaldo "Arnie" Quinones, 35, of Palmdale — were killed Sunday when their vehicle plummeted off a mountain road. At least three residents who ignored an evacuation order suffered major burns.

Several fires across the state are much smaller and largely contained, but a new blaze in San Bernardino County — directly east of the Station Fire has engulfed 900 acres so far and threatens 2,000 homes.

-excerpt from NPR

Talking Back To Your Device Has Never Been Easier

2009-08-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

It's talk-back time.

Who hasn't spoken to their computer on occasion? I've heard some choice words exchanged with many a laptop, PC and even the occasional PDA. Most of the time all you get in response is silence.

If you're tired of having a one-way conversation with your screen, relief is in sight. It's been more than a decade since consumer versions of voice recognition software came on the scene, but there were many stumbling blocks — including limited vocabulary and the need to spend an excessive amount of time training.

But the technology has advanced to a new level and is changing how we interact with computers, cell phones and cars. And the integration of voice features could have a dramatic impact on making technology more accessible and ergonomically sound by changing the way consumer electronics are designed.

Advances And Obstacles

"We're right on the edge of a new era of conversational computing, where in certain circumstances your primary mode of interaction with a machine will be talking to it and having it talk back," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley.

EnlargeCourtesy of Mikkel Aaland
Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster based in Silicon Valley, says computer and consumer electronics companies are spending "serious money" on developing a voice recognition breakthrough.
He says the building blocks of voice recognition — computing power and algorithms — are steadily improving. So is interface design.

"No matter how good these systems are, they're not like talking to another human being," he says. So the design challenge for engineers and software companies is to guide people to ask the right questions and give the right answers.

The creator of much of the voice recognition software that's in use in devices is Nuance, a Burlington, Mass.-based technology company. There aren't many other companies with Nuance's reach in this sector. Yankee Group senior analyst Berge Ayvazian says Nuance became the dominant player in this arena by acquiring or partnering with "most of their former competitors," including Scansoft, Dictaphone and Philips Speech Recognition Systems.

Nuance's speech recognition software for PCs is called Dragon NaturallySpeaking (the Mac version is called MacSpeech Dictate and is sold through MacSpeech, which licenses Nuance's software). The company offers a variety of versions of the software, including ones tailored to the legal community for use with court transcriptions and for medical professionals who use it to dictate notes.

Dr. Carlo Tornatore, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at Georgetown University Hospital, uses it to dictate electronic medical records. As a result, these records are available immediately, and there's no delay in sharing them with other doctors.

So what's it like talking to a computer?

EnlargeNBCU Photo Bank
Michael Knight, played by David Hasselhoff, helped foil many schemes in concert with his sidekick, KITT, a talking car, as part of the TV series Knight Rider. Dialogue between man and machine is on the horizon.
"It takes a little time to get used to the idea that you're talking to a screen," he says.

Talking to a machine is a concept that's rooted in the popular imagination. Think of Star Trek and Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight, whose sidekick was a talking car named KITT.

Some professionals are using dictation software for longer projects. Dave Farber, distinguished career professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, uses MacSpeech Dictate to speed things along as he writes an oral history of his work. Even though he's a two-fingered typist, he says he wasn't always a fan of this kind of software.

"Up until very recently, I gave up on them," he says. "The error rates were too high. It doesn't do any good if you dictate and you have to correct most of it."

Farber says he made the switch because he was able to start using this software without an extensive amount of training and because he can work without generating a lot of errors. (Read NPR's review here).

Dragon works quickly, in part, because it uses predictive language modeling akin to Nuance's software, T9, which is used on billions of cell phones to predict the word you're trying to type when you send e-mail or text from a mobile phone.

Mobile Talk

Voice recognition is already integrated into a lot of things that we do with phones. Think about whom you talk to when you call directory service, when you book a flight or when you call your bank or credit card company.

Demand for more voice features has been growing especially within the cell phone industry. Voice dialing, which many people use to make hands-free calls on cell phones, is one area where the iPhone was behind the curve — until June, when Apple released its latest model, the iPhone 3GS.

Speech recognition capabilities on many of these phones, like the Samsung Instinct, are powered by Nuance's voice control software, which enables users to press a button to begin translating their words into text for everything from sending text messages to finding a song, or surfing the Web for a nearby business.

"If you can get decent voice recognition into phones, then you can start treating them as personal assistants, and that's going to change things," Farber says.

There's plenty of room for this market to expand: So far in 2009, Nuance estimates that more than 840 million phones were shipped with text messaging capabilities, compared to about 200 million that shipped with voice capabilities.

As cell phones and voice recognition software become more advanced, people are able to use voice commands without having to train the mobile phone first, says Peter Mahoney, a senior vice president at Nuance.

Read To Me

When devices read to you, they're utilizing text-to-speech functions. Amazon's Kindle uses Nuance's software to enable it to read aloud a book, magazine, newspaper or even a blog. You won't hear the voice of James Earl Jones — it's a synthesized computer voice.

Nuance says Dragon has been used by people with some kinds of paralysis and with multiple sclerosis to open up their communication possibilities by facilitating Web searches, e-mail and word processing.

"Dragon can even read back your words to you, so if you have difficulty reading because of dyslexia or some other kind of learning disability, it really enables that capability, too," Mahoney says.

Accessible And Ergonomic Features

The ability to use one's voice to guide a device also makes it potentially more accessible for the blind or visually impaired, provided that the buttons and on-screen menus are also navigable.

The blind community has a lot of concerns about the prevalence of touch screen interfaces for mobile phones and other consumer electronics and appliances because many devices effectively shut out those with impaired vision. (Listen to what Stevie Wonder has to say.)

"Voice recognition technology has really enhanced or increased awareness of accessibility," says Anne Taylor, director of access technology for the National Federation of the Blind.

It also puts blind and sighted users on "a level playing field," she says, because there is little or no training needed to start using voice recognition features.

"We can't fully rely currently on voice recognition technology just yet," Taylor says. "I do hope that one day we can, but at this point we still advocate for keyboarding."

Keyboards and mice, however, can create problems for your fingers and arms.

Alan Hedge, the director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics laboratory at Cornell University, says voice recognition technology can help reduce these kinds of workplace injuries.

"It plays an important role in reducing the load on other parts of the body so that you can work for a longer period of time on a computer system without running the risk of injury," he says.

Many companies now pay closer attention to creating ergonomically sound workstations, and Hedge says that has contributed to injuries going "way down." And while voice recognition technology can be part of the solution, Hedge cautions that overusing one's voice can also lead to injury.

Let Your Lips Do The Talking

Speaking comes naturally. As a result, one common thread with many of the products that now have a voice interface is the feeling of simplicity.

"We should make it the responsibility of the computer to understand us, versus making it the responsibility of us to understand the way the computer wants to speak," says Mahoney, the Nuance executive.

As speech recognition becomes more integrated into the devices we use on a daily basis, we may start to inch away from the keyboard and mouse. And that may foster a more collegial relationship with computers.

Now that's something to talk about.

-excerpt from NPR

Haggling Picks Up Steam During Recession

2009-08-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

Even before the economy slid down the tubes, Leah Ingram found new religion in haggling at stores. She and her husband, Bill, went from a lifestyle of second mortgages and plentiful vacations to economizing on everything from dentist's office visits to leather chairs.

"I think it is like sport for me," says Ingram, a freelance writer who lives in New Hope, Pa. Shedding the old way of paying full price is like learning to eat healthy and exercise, she says. For her, researching and scoring deals has even become a pastime.

"It's fun to see how much I can save on something that I really need," she says.

To document her new, cost-conscious lifestyle, she started a blog called "Suddenly Frugal" to document the myriad ways in which she saves money. In January, she plans to release a book on the same subject.

Given the state of the economy and climbing unemployment, you'd think haggling is also on the rise. But most U.S. shoppers don't bother. A recent Consumer Reports survey showed only 28 percent of Americans haggle over prices. A separate report from market research firm BIGresearch found 45.1 percent of adults haggle for things other than cars and homes.

However, the Consumer Reports survey found that consumers who haggle succeed as often as 83 percent of the time in landing a better bargain. Buyers had the highest success rate haggling on hotel rates and clothing, followed by jewelry, new cars and airfare and appliances, the survey found.

Those who are practitioners, however, say they enjoy more success than ever in an economy like this one.

Michael Soon Lee, author of a book called Black Belt Negotiating says he negotiates for everything, including eating out. He estimates he saves $2,500 annually at restaurants by negotiating deals with eateries he frequents — getting $10 back on average with every $100 he spends. He gets his doctors to cut him a break on medical bills and dry cleaners to offer him loyal-customer discounts. Lee even got a local gas station to give him a discount for coming in on its slowest days.

"I've talked to many, many vendors all the way from Nordstrom to Best Buy to car dealers to real estate sales people. Everyone is haggling now because this gives you an instant raise," Lee says.

In some cultures, haggling on price is a way of life. For many others, it can feel potentially embarrassing or inappropriate. But Lee says that's a loser's mindset.

"Before you go into the ring, you can't be afraid," he says, comparing the negotiating process to martial arts. "If you are, you've already lost. And you've got to recognize, in haggling, there's really nothing to lose. If you don't ask for a discount, the answer is already 'No.'"

Lee has other recommendations, including doing background research. Figure out how much you spend at a place, and go in armed with statistics. Tell a dry cleaner, for example, what your business is worth to them before asking what they can do for you. Know what their competition offers, and use that in the negotiation. Talk to a manager, or someone empowered to make business decisions.

Also, be comfortable with silence during the haggling process, he says. Sometimes a vendor will fold if you let them think about it over a long period where no one speaks. It's also important, he says, not to counter with a set number, which can just limit the potential discount you might get. Lee says customers should also negotiate for things other than price, like free delivery, or an extra service or feature.

Finally, he says, a good haggler needs to be prepared to walk away artfully. Don't just stomp off in a huff, Lee says. Slowly withdraw, reminding the vendor how much your business means to them, and what a shame it would be for both parties to lose out.

BIGresearch's survey showed a slight decline in the number of people who said they haggle for better prices. The percentage fell to 45.1 percent in April, from 50.3 percent a year earlier.

But retail stores are heavily discounting already in a way they didn't last year, which might affect how consumers behave, says Pam Goodfellow, a senior analyst with BIGresearch.

"Consumers don't feel quite the need to negotiate on price, because they know they're getting a good deal," Goodfellow says. People research before they shop, and use coupons more than ever, she says, but many people have also stopped buying some things altogether. The percentage of people who say they haggle for furniture is down, she notes, but that could be because furniture sales are down dramatically overall.

During a recent trip to Roger's Electronics in Flemington, N.J., Ingram, the freelance writer, admits that finding a killer deal — $700 for a stainless steel refrigerator with an automatic ice maker — dampened her need to haggle as much. She still tried negotiating away the $75 delivery fee. But when she failed on that count, she still happily handed over her credit card.

"Inside, I'm jumping up and down," she says.

-excerpt from NPR

Businesses Learn To Make Do With Fewer Workers

2009-08-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

The government is expected to announce Friday that the job market shrank again in July. With the jobless rate nearing 10 percent, most of the focus will be on layoffs. But there's another reason so many people remain out of work: Employers, still worried about the recession, are creating far fewer jobs these days.

At Seibel's Restaurant in Burtonsville, Md., waiter Joey Rosenberg is wrapping up the lunch shift. He fills pepper shakers and sweeps the dining room floor. Since the recession began, the 21-year-old seems to do a bit of everything.

"You're pretty much doing, at any given time, more than two jobs," he says. "Like today, we didn't have a buser, so I was bussing all my tables and everything."

Tomorrow, he shifts from waiting tables to working the register.

The reason is simple: Seibel's has 10 fewer workers today than it did at the beginning of the recession, so the remaining staff is picking up the slack.

Since December 2007, the labor market has seen a net decline of 6.5 million jobs. What's happening at this small, family-owned restaurant just north of the nation's capital is happening in workplaces across the country. Instead of replacing workers, employers are operating with leaner, more efficient staffs.

Fewer Job Openings

Lynn Martins, a co-owner of Seibel's, says the smaller workforce saves the restaurant $4,000 in payroll each month — a big help to the restaurant's bottom line, but tough for anyone who might want a job there.

"We probably stopped giving out applications a good two months ago," she says. "We were probably having four or five people a day coming in."

Job openings around the nation have plunged by more than a third in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In real terms, that means there were about 1.5 million fewer job openings in May than the same month a year earlier.

Martins says that until the economy turns a corner, she's reluctant to add workers.

"Looks like we're going to be able to make things work with the crew that we have," she says, adding that an employee who just left won't be replaced.

For the labor market to rebound, not only do employers have to stop laying off so many people, but they've also got to start hiring a lot more.

Shorter Workweeks

Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, says that's going to take time. The average workweek is now just 33 hours — the shortest on record.

Katz says many people on short hours are waiting for the economy to pick up so they can work more.

"Even when some employers start seeing improvements in demand for their product, they still have plenty of ability to increase the hours of their existing workers, before they need to start hiring new workers," he says.

"We really think this is going to be a gradual and slow climb out of the hole," says Cathy Paige, a vice president with temporary service giant Manpower.

Paige says that even when the economy improves, some of her clients won't staff back up to prior levels.

"For example, the casinos. We were there recently on a tour, and they don't have people making change anymore," she says. "They have machines to do that."

Paige says another client — a business services company — has responded to the recession by sending more work overseas.

"We've probably lost 30 percent of our workforce there. They called back a few people this week, but we used to get orders there for 200 or 300 people at a time, and now we consider a big order 25."

Making Do With Less

Martins says she always kept an eye on costs, but the economic downturn forced her to run a leaner business than ever before.

"We learned to do it with less people, they learn to cover more territory, they get better at their job, which kind of weeds out needing extra people," she says. "And sometimes more is not always better."

For businesses like Seibel's, that may be one of the biggest lessons — and legacies — of this recession.

- excerpt from NPR

Taxi Service Encourages 'Pay What You Want'

2009-08-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

A Vermont man has come up with a business plan precisely sized for today's economy. Eric Hagen is the owner of Recession Ride Taxi, and his sign reads "pay what you want. " Hagen says so far "nobody's stiffed me."Published reports say he is making a profit.

-excerpt from NPR

Snoring Can Indicate Treatable Sleep Condition

2009-08-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

Larry Barsh is a man with a new mission. The retired dentist from New York City wants to help Americans recognize that they may have obstructive sleep apnea, a chronic condition among snorers that disrupts sleep. Dr. Barsh started a Web site, SnoringIsn'tSexy.com, to help educate patients and help dentists play a role in identifying patients with sleep apnea.

Barsh says the vast majority of people with apnea don't know they have the condition. Dentists are in a unique position to help patients who might suffer from sleep apnea, he says. Typically, dentists see patients more often than physicians, at least two times a year for teeth cleaning.

For an estimated 12 million Americans, disruptive snoring signals the condition obstructive sleep apnea. iStockphoto.com
At Risk

The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 12 million American adults have obstructive sleep apnea. Among older Americans, the rate is especially high: at least one out of 10 over the age of 65 has it.

Doctors don't know exactly why sleep apnea occurs, but it is associated with obesity, aging and anatomy, says Dr. Clete Kushida, a neurologist and director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research and president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

The obstructed breathing can result from a variety of factors, such as a large tongue, a large uvula (that cone-shaped projection of tissue in the back of the throat) or a lot of large, crowded teeth. As muscles relax, which they do when people fall asleep — especially on their backs — the tongue muscles tend to pull back and block the airway.

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Snoring And Apnea

Snoring is a sign of apnea. Only about 5 to 10 percent of snorers actually have sleep apnea, says Barsh, but everyone who has the most common form of apnea — obstructive sleep apnea — snores. (People with central sleep apnea, caused by incorrect signals from the brain, may not snore.)

"Snoring is an indication of the possibility of a serious medical problem," he says, because sleep apnea is linked to heart disease, stroke, depression and diabetes.

Struggling For Air

During obstructive sleep apnea episodes, snoring patients become quiet for 10 seconds or more — and literally stop breathing. The silence is followed by choking or gagging sounds when the sleeper is partially aroused and breathing resumes. Finally, snoring resumes and the cycle starts over. This cycle can happen anywhere from five times an hour to sometimes hundreds of times a night. Because people with sleep apnea partially awaken to resume breathing, their sleep is fragmented and they are sleepy in the daytime. The lack of breathing also causes the oxygen level in the blood stream to fall, contributing to medical problems.

Treatments Differ With Severity

The gold standard of treatment for sleep apnea is called CPAP, which means continuous positive airway pressure. An air pump connected by a tube to a face mask, sort of like a vacuum cleaner in reverse, gently pushes air up through the nostrils and mouth into the upper airway, keeping it from collapsing.

But the CPAP can be loud and cumbersome, and many patients who could benefit from CPAP just don't use it. However, experts say, for those with severe apnea, it's the only effective treatment.

Surgical procedures can also help by removing excess tissue in the back of the airway or actually moving parts of the jaw or tongue forward. They're particularly effective with younger patients.

Oral appliances that reposition the tongue and mouth help some obstructive sleep apnea patients maintain regular nighttime breathing. Courtesy Dr. Mark Friedman
The Mouthguard

The third treatment option is an oral appliance, which looks much like a mouthguard used in sports or a dental retainer typically used after orthodontry.

"Research shows the oral appliance works to treat mild-to-moderate sleep apnea," says Kushida. Studies have been limited, but the appliances appear to not only treat apnea but also conditions associated with apnea, such as high blood pressure, he says.

There are many brands of oral appliances, but all of them work basically the same way, says Dr. Mark Friedman, who specializes in treating snoring and sleep apnea in Encino, Calif. He's also a professor of dentistry at the University of Southern California. He says the appliances work to keep the airway open and allow for comfortable breathing. They move parts in the mouth out of the way. They move the tongue forward by moving the jaw forward. So, the lower jaw juts forward a certain amount.

One Patient's Experience

Rani Stoddard found that an oral appliance drastically reduced her snoring and apnea. Courtesy Rani Stoddard
Rani Stoddard is one of Friedman's patients. She is a nurse who describes her husband as a gem, since he put up with her loud snoring for years.

"He says, on a scale of one to ten, I was like a ten plus on snoring," Stoddard says. Today, she wears an oral appliance, "and now I'm like a two," she says. "You know, a little mild, delicate (snoring) in the beginning and then ... it's quiet!"

Stoddard can't speak highly enough about the oral appliance. "I'm a believer!" she says, adding that now, she "sleeps like a baby." She says the appliance is comfortable and she can even take a drink of water while wearing it.

Although most sleep apnea is initially diagnosed after a study is performed at a sleep center and a physician evaluates the study, apnea can also be measured at home to determine how well treatments are working. To do this, the patient wears a compact device on an armband with two finger-sensors attached. The device measures a number of respiratory functions, including the amount of oxygen getting into the blood. Friedman reports that Stoddard's apnea has been dramatically reduced as a result of the appliance.

Friedman says the oral appliance is at least 60 percent effective for most patients. "For some patients, it's 100 percent effective," he says.

The Role Of The Dentist

Barsh says screening in a dentist's office takes only a few minutes and a few pointed questions, and dental hygienists can also be trained to screen for apnea. It involves asking whether patients suffer from high blood pressure, if their bed partner has ever observed them stopping breathing during the night, if they feel sleepy during the day and if they snore. A patient's neck size, particularly if it's large, can also be an indicator of apnea.

Friedman, a dentist who specializes in treating snoring and sleep apnea, also asks patients whether they are aware of dreaming during the night. Sometimes patients are confused about why a dentist would be asking such a question, he says.

"But people who don't dream often are not getting into REM sleep," says Friedman, If that's the case, he says, they're probably not getting good deep sleep either. And that, he says, can "lead me to have an inkling that the patient might have a sleep issue."

Since he started focusing on sleep disorders about six years ago, Friedman says the majority of patients with sleep problems are longtime patients. "You would be amazed at the number of people that we have diagnosed within our own practice," he says.

Special Training

Because a sleep-apnea appliance must be fitted precisely to the mouth, Friedman says it's important for a dentist trained in sleep medicine to fit the device. Dentists can take training at various academic centers, but the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, a branch of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, offers courses during its annual meetings.

Although there are many appliances advertised on the Internet and on TV, there are only about 60 FDA-approved devices. Of those, Friedman says, he considers only about six to be effective. And, Friedman says, if potential patients are interested in researching what types of oral appliances are available and most effective, the Academy website is a good place to start.

- excerpt from NPR

'Cash For Clunkers' Lacks Cash For Clunkers

2009-07-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

"Cash for clunkers" offered the owners of old cars and trucks up to $4,500 if they traded in their old car for a new more fuel efficient one. The clunker had to get 18 miles per gallon or less. The program only started a week ago, but car dealers across the country saw an immediate rush.

"The atmosphere around the dealers just reminds me of, you know, 10 years ago, when people were just flocking in to buy cars — especially in Silicon Valley," says David Horn, the general manager of Boardwalk Volkswagen in Redwood City, Calif.

However, Horn and many other dealers have put the "cash for clunkers" program on hold. Members of Congress have been told that the $950 million program is out of money.

According to Charles Cyrill of the National Automobile Dealers Association, many dealers are worried that they might not be able to get their reimbursements. They says there is a paperwork backlog in Washington. Still, they would like more money for the program which has been a boon for car sales.

"The timing of the "cash for clunkers" program could not have happened at a better time," Cyrill says.

Several members of Congress say they too are working to find more money for the program, but given the current strains on the budget this might be a difficult task.

-excerpt from NPR

Get The Most Nutrition From Your Veggies

2009-07-27T04:49:00.000-07:00

Tomatoes are certainly nutritious — a good source of the antioxidants lycopene and beta-carotene. But consider this: if you eat a tomato without adding a little fat — say a drizzle of olive oil — your body is unlikely to absorb all these nutrients.

Scientists at Iowa State University figured this out a while ago. They recruited graduate students to eat bowls of salad greens with tomatoes and various types of salad dressings — from fat-free to regular Italian. "Basically once a month for several months we'd show up first thing in the morning," recalls participant Gregory Brown, now a professor of exercise science at the University of Nebraska. Researchers put IV lines into the participants' veins and drew blood samples before and after they'd eaten the salads in order to get precise measurements of the absorption of nutrients.

"The salads all tasted the same to me," says Brown. But when researchers went back and analyzed the blood samples they realized that people who had eaten fat-free or low-fat dressings didn't absorb the beneficial carotenoids from the salad. Only when they had eaten the oil-based dressing did they get the nutrients.

Carotenoids are the pigments responsible for red-, yellow- and orange-colored fruits and vegetables. And carotenoids are also found in dark green vegetables such as spinach. The compounds convert to Vitamin A in the body, and studies have found that carotenoids have anti-oxidant activity which may help protect cells from damage caused by free radicals. Human studies have linked high consumption of fruits and vegetables to reduced risk of cancer.

Beta-carotene researchers were not particularly surprised by the findings of the fat-free vs. regular Italian salad dressing study. "We already knew that carotenoids were fat soluble," explains Wendy White, a professor of Human Nutrition at Iowa State University. The results helped reinforce the idea that a little fat is healthy.

Chop And Chew

There are other ways to help maximize the absorption of carotenoid nutrients. Chopping or grating breaks down the plant material. "The finer the particle size ... the better the absorption of beta-carotene," explains White.

The findings of nutrition research often go against the grain of trendy food ideas. For instance, many people have heard that raw vegetables are best. But if you're eating carrots, it may be helpful to cook them gently. The heat can soften the food allowing more nutrients to be released.

A recent study in the Journal of Food Science suggests that some cooking methods may be better than others. Researchers at the University of Murcia in Spain cooked 20 different kinds of vegetables six different ways. Then they analyzed how well the foods retained antioxidants. They found that microwaving helped maintain the antioxidants, whereas boiling and pressure cooking led to the greatest losses.

Green beans, beets and garlic all did well with heat — maintaining beneficial phytonutrients after most kinds of cooking. The antioxidant value in carrots actually increased after cooking.

Experts explain that boiling may allow nutrients to leach into the pan water that people end up tossing out, especially with water-soluble nutrients such as Vitamin A and the B Vitamins.

Eat Plenty Of Colors

As testing methods have become more sensitive, scientists have the ability to peer into our foods and tally up all the phytonutrients that may be beneficial. But experts say the ways in which our bodies may use and absorb these compounds are complicated. Therefore, many experts say it's best not to fixate too much on how food is prepared. Instead, focus on eating more plant foods — of all colors.

Jeffrey Blumberg, an antioxidant expert at Tufts University, says "What's important is that you find a way to cook that's palatable to you so you're getting lots of plant foods."

- excerpt from NPR

'Checkout' Girl Cashes In With Bestselling Memoir

2009-07-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

In a kind of supermarket Cinderella story, a cashier in France has become a literary sensation. Anna Sam has turned her ungratifying job into a humorous memoir. Now, her book has been translated into 16 languages and turned the 29-year-old into the author she has always wanted to be.

Tribulations of a Cashier is a sociological study of the grocery store world from the viewpoint of the checkout girl. In her book (whose English title is Checkout: A Life on the Tills), Sam dissects the behavior of the shopper:

It's lunchtime and your first customer of the day is stuffing his mouth with a tuna salad sandwich. Chewing noisily, his mouth wide open, you get a glimpse of every ingredient. When you ask to borrow his sandwich for a moment to scan the price, he takes one more giant bite before handing it over. So what's a little mayonnaise on your fingers and crumbs on your register?
Sam presents other shopper types — like the mothers who regularly warn their children that if they don't shape up they'll grow up to be nothing but a cashier, and the sleazeballs who hit on her while trying to steal CDs hidden inside their boxes of Camembert.

Despite the indignations, Sam says in some ways the job actually made her feel good about herself.

"It's a job where you see every people; it's a job where no one sees you. You see families very happy, families very sad. People are very nice, people are very bad. And at the end of your day, you say, 'Oh my god, I'm happy because I have a normal life; I'm better than I thought,' " she says.

In another chapter, Sam describes how scanning groceries can even help you get rid of those unwanted love handles.

By taking a job as a cashier you have also chosen the best route to a super new shape. The cashiers' perch is the perfect place to tighten those buttocks, build those biceps, and yes ladies, even firm up those breasts. Just compare yourself to a customer or a new checkout girl who doesn't have the firming experience you have behind you.
Sam began working as a cashier during college to support her literature studies. When graduation came and went, no other jobs were available. So she stayed on — and on. Five years passed. The work was ungratifying and mind-numbing — until she decided to write about it.

"I started to see my job different and to see differently people. When you start to explain it with humor, people say, 'Oh, what a funny blog, what a funny diary.' I think everything we live can be funny. We just have to see it with the good eye," she says.

Sam first started writing in a blog where she provided a running account of what went on in the world of a cashier. Her blog, Cassiere No Futur, attracted a large number of readers, then newspaper reporters. Soon, publishing houses took note, and Sam had several book offers.

Since her first book, Sam has become the toast of TV and radio talk shows. With her recently published second book, which is also about the supermarket world, Sam has now left her till behind for good. It wasn't all bad, she says. As evidence, she reads one of her favorite chapters about how the cash register beeping could sometimes transport you into a dreamlike state.

The store is packed, shoppers rush to and fro — their grocery carts squeak and rattle. A voice over the intercom barks out the latest sales promotions over a backdrop of jangling Muzak. The general brouhaha intensifies. The store is approaching its maximum sound threshold. The squalling of a brat tips it over the edge, opening the passageway to this other dimension.
Sam says her success has been a wonderful surprise. She is heartened to hear from cashiers who say they now find hope and humor in their daily grind. But what makes her happiest, she says, is that people tell her they now treat the checkout girl with respect.

-excerpt from NPR

New Treat In San Francisco: Parks Allow Food Carts

2009-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

Facing an $11 million budget gap, San Francisco park officials last week voted to allow long-banned food carts into the city's 200 parks. A monthly permit costs $1,000 or more, and vendors must prove that their food is "healthful" — a term that is not precisely defined.

-excerpt from NPR

Stress, Anxiety May Keep Women Smoking

2009-07-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Quitting cigarettes is not easy for anyone. But some studies show that women have a harder time keeping their no-smoking vows than men. Researchers don't know exactly why this may be the case, but they speculate that women are more sensitive than men to sudden emotional upset.

University of Pittsburgh psychologist Saul Shiffman says acute emotion — getting upset suddenly — can have a "big role" in getting women to pick up a cigarette.

"Relapse is the whole game," says Shiffman, who notes that among men and women who quit smoking without any treatment like nicotine replacement, about three-fourths return to smoking within just one week. "So, essentially the key to quitting is avoiding relapse," he says.

Shiffman says relapse starts with a single lapse — for example, smoking a cigarette during a period of not smoking, thinking that the return to smoking is temporary. Shiffman says people tend to have lapses when they're emotionally upset. He also says this seems to occur more frequently with women.

While data from federal household surveys show that men and women have approximately equal success in ultimately quitting smoking, mounting evidence indicates that women have a harder time when they actually try to quit.

He says the federal data just counts the "bodies, as it were," adding up how many people nationwide are ex-smokers at any given time. He says the federal data don't include the number of times people tried to quit.

Shiffman recently analyzed 12 clinical trials involving more than 4,400 individuals who were trying to quit smoking. Overall, he says, women had a 25 percent lower success rate on any given attempt to quit than men did.

Shiffman suggests the discrepancy in federal "ex-smoker" statistics and the studies he examined may simply reflect that women try harder to quit and more often than men, which ultimately accounts for an overall success rate that looks about the same for men and women.

Quit A Thousand Times

Chesapeake, Va., resident Tonya Guess says she has "a thousand reasons" to quit smoking. No. 1 is her 3-year-old daughter; Guess doesn't want her daughter to think smoking is "normal." "I want her to go 'yuck' when she smells cigarette smoke, says Guess. No. 2 is her health; Guess says she wants to live a long life and see her daughter grow up and get married. No. 3, she says, is her belief in God; she feels that she betrays God every time she reaches for a cigarette.

At this writing, Guess is on her sixth day without cigarettes, but she worries this attempt will end in failure. "I've tried to quit thousands of times, over and over again," she says, adding that she's tried the nicotine patch, the gum — just about "everything you can think of; it all works for about a week or two." And then, she says, something happens that makes her want a cigarette, no matter what.

"I'm hit with an emotion so intense that I don't think twice about it. Next thing you know, I'm back on cigarettes again," she says. And when that urgent craving hits, says Guess, "you don't think about your health or your child, you just think about that one cigarette; just one and I'll be fine again."

A More Complicated Addiction

Carolyn Mazure, a professor of psychology at Yale School of Medicine, is an expert on depression and addictive behaviors, and is principal investigator for the Sex-Specific Factors Core of the NIH-funded Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center at Yale, which was created to help people quit smoking.

She says cigarettes fill many roles for women who smoke. "Women often report smoking is helpful in reducing negative mood, even enhancing positive mood, managing the stress of daily life and also managing appetite and weight gain," says Mazure. "Women are looking to cigarettes to help them with those different situations, and as a consequence, it's often more difficult for women [than for men] to give up their cigarettes."

Mazure adds that depression and negative moods are more common among women than men. She says her research has shown that women are more "vulnerable to the negative effects of stress and are more likely to relapse back to smoking in the face of stressors" than men. "Women also believe that smoking will help them control their weight," she says.

Human Laboratory Work

Psychologists Mazure and Sherry McKee, both with Yale University, are involved in various studies looking at whether medications and therapy can help, particularly since women don't do as well as men when it comes to the popular first-line treatment for smoking cessation: nicotine replacement, like patches or gum.

With colleagues at Women's Health Research at Yale, they're now investigating whether certain medications can help women better resist cigarettes.

McKee directs the Yale Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory and is an expert on behavioral factors related to tobacco addiction. Specifically, McKee is looking at whether medications can help ease anxiety and therefore reduce the urge to smoke. In one study, men and women either receive an active medication to reduce anxiety, or a placebo.

Study participants are asked to relay to researchers details of a stressful situation that provoked them to smoke. Researchers then create a fictionalized account of that situation and present it to participants. Participants have cigarettes available to them but are asked to resist. Researchers record whether those taking medication are better able to resist than those on the placebo.

Other studies are looking at various types of medication, including drugs that suppress appetite, to see what might help women resist smoking.

McKee says researchers are also investigating whether certain talk therapies can help women. The therapies help people figure out how to cope when faced with a stressful situation in ways other than grabbing a cigarette.

Such therapy helps people understand that they can engage in activities other than smoking to improve mood, says McKee, "like exercise, reaching out and getting support from somebody, or engaging in a distracting activity like going for a walk." McKee hopes to have some answers both about medication and behavioral therapy within the next few years.

-excerpt from NPR

Turtles Delay Flights At New York's JFK Airport

2009-07-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

A runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport was shut down briefly Wednesday morning after at least 78 turtles emerged from a nearby bay and crawled onto the tarmac.

Grounds crews eventually rounded up the wayward reptiles and deposited them back in the brackish water farther from airport property, but not before the incident disrupted JFK's flight schedule and contributed to delays that reached nearly 1 1/2 hours.

"Apparently, this is something the tower has experienced before," said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jim Peters. "I guess it's the season for spawning."

The invasion began unfolding, slowly, at around 8:30 a.m., when an American Eagle flight crew reported seeing three turtles while taxiing out for departure. Before long, a chorus of pilots was radioing the tower to report turtles either on the end of a runway that juts out into the water, or approaching on the grass.

The FAA halted flights for about 12 minutes shortly before 9 a.m. while some of the turtles were cleared away, then quit using the runway entirely after getting new reports of "massive numbers" of turtles on the tarmac, Peters said.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman John Kelly said airport crews gathered up the turtles in about 35 minutes.

He identified the turtles as Diamondback terrapins, a species common to Jamaica Bay, which surrounds the airport. The turtles appeared to be about 8 inches long and weighed 2 to 3 pounds each.

Jets hit turtles a few times each year at JFK, usually in the final days of June or beginning of July, according to the FAA's wildlife strike database. There have been no recent reports of the strikes causing any damage to an airplane.

-excerpt from NPR

Getting Lost Is Totally Human. Try It

2009-07-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

"Let's get lost" is great when Chet Baker is singing about falling in love, but those three words can produce anxiety in anyone, even if you just make a wrong turn in your own hometown.

And we humans are good at getting lost because we are good at being so many places at once. As your feet wander down the street, your brain could be thinking about outer space or your vacation in Vegas or your backyard at home. So it's easy to zone out about where you actually are. But you can train yourself to be more conscious of your surroundings.

Colin Ellard just wrote a book on the topic: You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall.

Ellard, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo, took NPR's David Greene on a walk toward a woodsy area of Washington, D.C., to help Greene learn to appreciate being lost — which doesn't take long.

For example, if you want to remember where you parked the car, Ellard says, you can make up a story about something that's nearby.

"Let's look around here. Just paying attention to this house across the street — there's a nice little balcony. It's almost like a Romeo and Juliet balcony. You can conjure up Juliet," Ellard suggests.

"We've talked about that for 10 seconds," he says, so now it'll be easier to remember.

Ellard takes Greene deeper into the woods, and to test their sense of direction, they purposely veer off the dirt trail and walk several hundred feet into a stand of tall trees.

"When people are walking through dense vegetation, it can be difficult to know they're walking in a straight line," Ellard says. "You can make remarkable turns while thinking you're walking in a straight line."

That may not seem to matter — except, Ellard says, "There is a tendency for people to speed up in their movements, and if you march in the wrong direction, you get farther away faster."

Ellard's advice? "Once you're lost, your best decision is to stop."

But, he says, one of the hardest tricks for humans to learn is that sometimes, and in some places, it's OK to get lost — at least for a little while.

-excerpt from NPR

'Water Cops' Patrol L.A. For Violaters

2009-07-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

California is in the midst of one of its worst droughts in decades. Residents of Los Angeles are banned from watering their lawns during the day and can only use sprinklers twice a week. To enforce the laws, the L.A. "Water Conservation Team" has taken to the street in Priuses to find water offending scofflaws.

- excerpt from npr

Madoff Likely Won't Be Serving Time In 'Club Fed'

2009-07-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

Anyone who thinks convicted swindler Bernard Madoff will serve easy time in a "Club Fed" minimum-security prison should think again. He is unlikely to land in a cushy cellblock, and he will need to watch his back, consultants and former inmates say.

Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison for masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, will likely do no better than medium security and could even be assigned to a maximum-security facility if his safety is deemed to be at risk — and it may well be, experts say.

"I don't believe Bernie Madoff is going to give anybody any trouble in prison," says Ed Bales, managing director for Federal Prison Consultants LLC. "But the fact is: What are those other inmates going to do? Is he going to get killed? That's probably the No. 1 question."

Wherever he goes will be based partly on a point system that will give him positive marks for his age (he's 71), his college education and the fact that he has no history of violence. But the sheer magnitude of his sentence would likely offset most or all of the items in the plus column, experts say.

Another consideration is geography. Inmates are generally placed within 500 miles of home, which leaves some unpleasant options for Madoff, a New Yorker. The Lewisburg facility in Pennsylvania, for example, is an aging high-security prison known for its gang violence.

Madoff's notoriety and the nature of his crime will also work against him. At twice the age of most other federal inmates — most of whom were convicted of drug-related crimes and will serve a fraction of his time — the disgraced financier will find it difficult to make friends.

Marvin Ragland, a former inmate who served nine years for drug possession and trafficking, says white-collar criminals such as Madoff are "the low man on the totem pole."

"Everybody hates those kind of guys," he says. Ragland says the pecking order comes down to an unwritten prison code.

"The greater the crime against society, the worse you are treated," he says.

"This guy … told Grandma that he had a great [place] for her to put her money and that it would be safe and she wouldn't have to worry about it," he says. "Grandma's money is gone [and] now she's got to figure out who's going to take care of her. It burdens her whole family, right down to the grandkids."

But other inmates aren't Madoff's only threat, says Pat Nolan, who was the minority leader of the California state assembly until he pled guilty to racketeering for campaign fraud in the 1990s. He served two years in federal prison.

"I was in with several millionaires, and boy, the [corrections] officers really resented them," he says.

Nolan says Madoff will have to fight off the constant negative drumbeat from fellow inmates: "You are nothing, you come from nothing, you will be nothing, you lost everything."

Ragland says he has seen a lot of white-collar inmates cry in prison. They can't handle having to wait up to three weeks for extra paper to write on, asking permission to have a glass of water, or having to barter with other inmates for an ink pen. And they can't handle the violence or the loneliness.

Ragland, who is now sober and about to graduate from trucking school, says he only survived prison because he knew he'd eventually get out.

For Madoff, who will almost certainly die in prison, "it's going to be hell," Ragland says.

To make it in prison, Ragland says, you have to have something that Madoff doesn't. "You have to have something to dream of and hope for," he says.

-excerpt from NPR

Marijuana Vendors Lobby To Pay Higher Taxes

2009-06-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

In today's economy, it's hard to find anyone who really wants to pay higher taxes. That is, unless they happen to be in the business of selling medical marijuana.

In Oakland, Calif., marijuana vendors are actually lobbying for a higher tax on their product.

Take, for example, Richard Lee, the proprietor of the Coffeeshop Blue Sky, where anyone with a doctor's note can buy products much more relaxing than a jolt of java. How about 1/8 ounce of high-grade medical marijuana? That's $40 for the cannabis and $4 in sales tax.

Lee says the sales tax is just the price of doing business.

"My business pays $300,000 a year in sales tax, plus another half-million in payroll taxes — income taxes," Lee says. "So we estimate that all four dispensaries in Oakland pay over a million in sales tax already."

And now, the city of Oakland wants a bigger cut of Lee's action. Right now, medical marijuana dispensaries pay a city tax of $1.20 for every $1,000 they take in. In July, voters will decide whether the dispensaries should pay even more — as much as $18 for every $1,000 in gross receipts.

Lee and other dispensary owners not only support the proposed new taxes, but they're also the ones who brought the idea to city officials in the first place.

"We're basically trying to say that we are like other businesses, you know. We're here to pay taxes, create jobs and improve the community," Lee says.

Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan says the new tax could generate upward of $1 million annually and would make Oakland the first city in the country to directly tax medical marijuana.

"You know, in these economic times, we're trying to find revenue everywhere we can, and we're trying to keep our senior centers open," she says. "We're trying to keep public safety officials hired and with equipment that works, and so to have someone stepping up and say, 'We're willing to pay more,' it's a pretty beautiful thing."

It's not the first time officials have looked to marijuana to fill their tax coffers. A bill to legalize and tax cannabis statewide has already been introduced in the California Legislature. And state finance officials estimate that legalized pot could bring in about $1.5 billion in new taxes to the cash-strapped state.

Still A Federal Crime

But opponents of medical marijuana aren't convinced. Calvina Fay is the executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation. She says medical marijuana may be legal in California and 12 other states, but its sale is still a federal crime.

"I think it is one more step in creating the illusion that they are operating within the law, what they're doing is OK," Fay says.

Other critics of the tax proposal say the medical marijuana industry is looking for more than legitimacy. Ronald Brooks, the president of the National Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition, says the ultimate goal is the legalization of cannabis.

"Their strategy has long been that they just can't go to the voters right now in today's environment and say, 'Legalize marijuana.' But they know there is a growing movement that supports marijuana and, unfortunately, when you start to chip away at our national drug policy, you begin to have people believe that somehow this is safe," Brooks says.

Brooks won't get much argument from Lee. He says the Oakland tax proposal is written so broadly that it would cover anyone involved with growing and selling marijuana should it ever become legal.

"We see it as part of the overall picture of legalization, of changing the attitudes of cannabis. Instead of seeing it as an underground thing that people do to get out of paying taxes, we're trying to make it a regular part of the business of the city," he says.

A recent Field Poll shows that, for the first time, 56 percent of those surveyed in California support legalization of marijuana — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he's ready for an open debate on the idea.

- excerpt from NPR

Ousted President, Replacement Duel For Honduras

2009-06-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Honduras is now torn between two presidents: one legally recognized by world bodies after he was deposed and forced from the country by his own soldiers, and another supported by the Central American nation's congress, courts and military.

Presidents from around Latin America were gathering in Nicaragua for meetings Monday to resolve the first military overthrow of a Central American government in 16 years, and once again Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took center stage, casting the dispute as a rebellion by the region's poor.

"If the oligarchies break the rules of the game as they have done, the people have the right to resistance and combat, and we are with them," Chavez said in Managua, Nicaragua's capital.

There is a deep rift between the outside world — which is clamoring for the return of democratically elected, but largely unpopular and soon-to-leave-office President Manuel Zelaya — and congressionally designated successor Roberto Micheletti.

Micheletti rejected any outside interference and declared a two-night curfew, while Chavez vowed that "we will overthrow [Micheletti]."

Zelaya was seized by soldiers and hustled aboard a plane to Costa Rica early Sunday, just hours before a rogue referendum Zelaya had called in defiance of the courts and Congress, and which his opponents said was an attempt to remain in power after his term ends Jan. 27.

The Honduran constitution limits presidents to a single 4-year term, and Zelaya's opponents feared he would use the referendum results to try to run again, just as Chavez reformed his country's constitution to be able to seek re-election repeatedly.

Micheletti said the army acted on orders from the courts, and the ouster was carried out "to defend respect for the law and the principles of democracy." But he threatened to jail Zelaya and put him on trial if he returned. Micheletti also hit back at Chavez, saying "nobody, not Barack Obama and much less Hugo Chavez, has any right to threaten this country."

Obama said earlier in a statement that he was "deeply concerned" about the events, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Zelaya's arrest should be condemned.

"I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter," Obama's statement read.

For those conditions to be met, Zelaya must be returned to power, U.S. officials said.

Two senior Obama administration officials told reporters that U.S. diplomats were working to ensure Zelaya's safe return. The officials said the Obama administration in recent days had warned Honduran power players, including the armed forces, that the U.S. would not support a coup, but Honduran military leaders stopped taking their calls.

Zelaya said soldiers seized him in his pajamas at gunpoint in what he called a "coup" and a "kidnapping." The United Nations, the Organization of American States and governments throughout Latin America called for Zelaya to be allowed to resume office.

"I want to return to my country. I am president of Honduras," Zelaya said Sunday before traveling to Managua on one of Chavez's planes for regional meetings of Central American leaders and Chavez's leftist alliance of nations, known as ALBA.

Zelaya's call for civil disobedience and peaceful resistance appeared to gain only modest support in Honduras, where a few hundred people turned out at government buildings to jeer soldiers and chant "Traitors!"

Some of Zelaya's Cabinet members were detained by soldiers or police following his ouster, according to former government official Armando Sarmiento. And the rights group Freedom of Expression said leftist legislator Cesar Ham had died in a shootout with soldiers trying to detain him, though a Honduran Security Department spokesman said he had no information on Ham.

Armored military vehicles with machine guns rolled through the streets of the Honduran capital and soldiers seized the national palace, but no other incidents of violence were reported.

Sunday afternoon, Congress voted to accept what it said was Zelaya's letter of resignation, with even the president's former allies turning against him. Micheletti, who as leader of Congress is in line to fill any vacancy in the presidency, was sworn in to serve until Zelaya's term ends.

Micheletti belongs to Zelaya's Liberal Party, but opposed the president in the referendum.

Micheletti acknowledged that he had not spoken to any Latin American heads of state, but said, "I'm sure that 80 to 90 percent of the Honduran population is happy with what happened today."

The Organization of American States approved a resolution Sunday demanding "the immediate, safe and unconditional return of the constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the coup and "urges the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country," said his spokeswoman, Michele Montas.

The Rio Group, which comprises 23 nations from the hemisphere, issued a statement condemning "the coup d'etat" and calling for Zelaya's "immediate and unconditional restoration to his duties."

And Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou canceled a planned visit to Honduras, one of just 23 countries that still recognize the self-governing island.

Coups were common in Central America for four decades reaching back to the 1950s, but Sunday's ouster was the first military power grab in Latin America since a brief, failed 2002 coup against Chavez. It was the first in Central America since military officials forced President Jorge Serrano of Guatemala to step down in 1993 after he tried to dissolve the congress and suspend the constitution.

-excerpt from npr

Remembering Michael Jackson, 'King Of Pop'

2009-06-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

We watched Michael Jackson grow up: He was a baby-faced boy with a captivating smile and an amazing voice who stole the show right out from under his big brothers.

We saw him morph into a modern-day song-and-dance man, so light on his feet he seemed to be moving on air.

We danced to his beat until he began to change and we weren't sure what to make of it. Then we witnessed his long, strange fall from grace.

"He's like Elvis," said Ann Powers, music critic at the Los Angeles Times. "He's that big."

For her, the death of Jackson has a special poignancy.

"The first album I bought was Jackson 5's Maybe Tomorrow. I grew up with him as an icon," she said. "The thing in my head right now is "I'll Be There" — that tender, delicate yet strong voice of Michael Jackson's."

Early Hits Culminate In 'Thriller'

Jackson was not even 6 years old when his father set out to make his sons famous singers. By 1968, the Jackson 5 had been signed on to the Motown label and had a string of hits. But Michael was clearly the star, and eventually he set out for a solo career.

While making the film version of The Wiz in 1978, Jackson met music producer Quincy Jones, who recalled the experience in an interview with NPR.

"I saw another side of him and so I said, 'I'd like to take a shot at your album,' " Jones said.

The collaboration with Jones unleashed Jackson's creativity as both a singer and a dancer, culminating with the 1982 release of the hugely popular album Thriller.

It stayed atop the Billboard charts for 37 weeks, and Jackson's performances of the songs on video and television were — well, thrilling.

"I think the word you've got to use is 'electrifying.' It was absolutely electrifying," said Jason King, music professor at New York University. "He wasn't just singing about 'Thriller' — he actually was a thriller in every sense of that term."

"I think it's the voice in conjunction with that incredible sense of rhythm and timing and innovation that made him the icon that he will always be," said King. Thriller provided the dance beat of the '80s with hit singles like "Beat It" and "Billie Jean."

Scandal Distracts From Talent

Jackson's next album, Bad, sold 22 million copies around the world, but — despite his fame and wealth — Jackson was never able to duplicate the success of Thriller. In the 1990s, his strange behavior began to draw as much attention as his talent. Finally in 2005 he was tried on charges of child molestation.

Though acquitted, Jackson's reputation and finances never fully recovered.

"He didn't seem able to live in the world," Powers said. "That does not exempt him from anything he did that was a horrible thing. But at the same time, I think we feel uncomfortable even thinking about that aspect of Michael Jackson because there is a sense of like, 'Did we do this to him? Did we damn him to this fate?' "

-excerpt from NPR

Parking Rates Hold Steady During Recession

2009-06-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

A new survey shows the average cost of a parking garage space is $16 a day. The rates at garages are holding steady. On a monthly basis, Manhattan tops the list. It's about $700 to park your car in a Midtown parking garage. In Memphis, that same space costs $20 a month.

-excerpt from NPR

Pet Names Reflect Trend To Humanize Furry Pals

2009-06-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

So much for Rover and Fido.

Almost half of American pet owners gave an animal a humanlike name, such as Jack or Sophie, according to an Associated Press-Petside.com poll of more than 1,000 pet owners released Tuesday.

Some of the more unusual names: Hollywood and Chichi Mittens, both cats; Vegas the Labrador retriever; Jibber Jack the dog; the beagle named Talulublue, and Louis XIV, the Yorkie.

In all, 49 percent of respondents, including 51 percent of dog owners and 50 percent of cat owners, had given at least one of their pets a humanlike name.

The most popular? Max got more mentions than other names in the AP Poll, but not enough to give it any broad claim of popularity (fewer than 2 percent of all mentions). One database of pet names, maintained by Veterinary Pet Insurance, also finds that Max pops up more frequently than any other name.

There has been a move away from classic dog names such as Spot and Lassie, according to VPI spokesman Curtis Steinhoff. There were 13 Fidos in VPI's database in 2008, placing the name at No. 2,866.

Rover was No. 2,534, behind names like Grendel, Ginger Snap and Munchie.

Steinhoff said the trend reflects a stronger bond between people and their pets.

Pet owners who give their pets human names are more likely to see them as full members of the family, said Wayne Eldridge, veterinarian and author of The Best Pet Name Book Ever!

But he cautions against reading too much into pet names. Many people choose names based on the animal's appearance, he said. One of the most unusual names in the VPI database was Snag L. Tooth for a cat with a snaggletooth that protrudes.

And some people don't know why they chose a certain name for their pet.

Like Beth Hart, 63, of Houston, who started naming her dogs Sassoon for the hair salon Vidal Sassoon. Her current Shih Tzu is Sassoon the Third. Her husband named their Lhasa apso "Dawg," their second dog with that name.

Daniel Rivera, 23, of Lansing, Mich., said his 4-year-old daughter named their pit bull Lab mix Little Fella. He said he guesses the name fits since the dog has very short legs.

For some it's all about being creative. Susan Jacobs, 45, of Long Beach, Calif., named her black poodle Kingston for her best vacation ever.

"It was beautiful, the people, the music, the warm weather," she said of her trip to Jamaica a decade ago. "Now whenever I say his name, I think of that time of in my life."

-excerpt from NPR

Bubble Bandits Defy Dishwashing Soap Ban

2009-06-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

Spokane County, Washington, became the first place in the country to ban the sale of high-phosphate dishwasher soap — which includes most popular brands. And that's meant a boom in trafficking of "illegal" diswasher soap from nearby Idaho.

Listen here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105741990

-excerpt from NPR

Iran's Supreme Leader Affirms Election Results

2009-06-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

Iran's supreme leader said Friday that the country's disputed presidential vote had not been rigged, sternly warning protesters of a crackdown if they continue massive demonstrations demanding a new election.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sided with hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and offered no concessions to the opposition. He effectively closed any chance for a new vote by calling the June 12 election an "absolute victory."

The speech created a stark choice for candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters: Drop their demands for a new vote or take to the streets again in blatant defiance of the man endowed with virtually limitless powers under Iran's constitution.

Khamenei accused foreign media and Western countries of trying to create a political rift and stir up chaos in Iran.

"Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory," he said. "It is your victory. They cannot manipulate it."

Khamenei said the 11 million votes that separated Ahmadinejad from his top opponent, Mousavi, were proof that fraud did not occur. Ahmadinejad watched the sermon from the front row. State television did not show Mousavi in attendance.

"If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?" Khamenei asked during Friday prayers at Tehran University.

Mousavi and his supporters have staged massive street rallies in recent days that have posed the greatest challenge to the Iran's Islamic ruling system since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought it to power.

So far, the government has not stopped the protests with force despite an official ban on them. But Khamenei opened the door for harsher measures.

"It must be determined at the ballot box what the people want and what they don't want, not in the streets," he said. "I call on all to put an end to this method. ... If they don't, they will be held responsible for the chaos and the consequences."

Khamenei blamed the U.S., Great Britain and what he called Iran's other enemies for fomenting unrest. He said Iran would not see a second revolution like those that transformed the countries of the former Soviet Union.

He remained staunch in his defense of Ahmadinejad, saying his views were closer to the president's than to those of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful patron of Mousavi.

Khamenei's address was his first since hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters flooded the streets in Tehran and elsewhere in the country in rallies evoking the revolution that ended Iran's U.S.-backed monarchy. On Thursday, supporters dressed in black and green flooded downtown Tehran in a somber, candlelit show of mourning for those who have been killed in clashes since Friday's vote.

Khamenei said the street protests would not have any impact.

"Some may imagine that street action will create political leverage against the system and force the authorities to give in to threats. No, this is wrong," he said.

The supreme leader left open a small window for a legal challenge to the vote. He reiterated that he has ordered the Guardian Council, an unelected body of 12 clerics and Islamic law experts close to the supreme leader, to investigate voter fraud claims. The Council has said it was prepared to conduct a limited recount of ballots at sites where candidates claim irregularities.

He also stressed that the four candidates were part of the country's Islamic system and reminded listeners that Mousavi was prime minister of Iran when Khamenei was president in the 1980s.

"All of them belong to the system. It was a competition within the ruling system," he said.

So far, protesters have focused on the results of the balloting rather than challenging the Islamic system of government. But a shift in anger toward Iran's non-elected theocracy could result in a showdown over the foundation of Iran's system of rule.

Ahmadinejad has appeared to take the growing opposition more seriously in recent days, backtracking Thursday on his dismissal of the protesters as "dust" and sore losers.

The crowds in Tehran and elsewhere have been able to organize despite a government clampdown on the Internet and cell phones. The government has blocked certain Web sites, such as BBC Farsi, Facebook, Twitter and several pro-Mousavi sites that are vital conduits for Iranians to tell the world about protests and violence.

Text messaging, which is a primary source of spreading information in Tehran, has not been working since last week, and cell phone service in Tehran is frequently down. The government also has barred foreign news organizations from reporting on Tehran's streets.

-excerpt from NPR

Job Seekers Find New Rules Of Recruitment

2009-06-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent and ticking up, millions of Americans are in the job market for the first time in several years.

But the job market has changed in that short time. The paper resume is laughably passe, at least in some circles. Not having a profile on the social networking site LinkedIn is, for some employers, not only a major liability but a sign that the candidate is horribly out of touch.

"If someone sends us a paper resume folded in thirds, stuffed in an envelope, it's hard to take it seriously," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.

Kelman says he has friends in their 30s and 40s who just missed the social networking boat and now need coaching in how things have changed.

For example, he says blogs and Facebook pages have gone from mere kids' play to essential for communicating with employers online. Someone applying for a job in marketing, for example, will do much better in an interview if he or she already commands an audience through a blog. People in sales look better if they can prove they have a broad network of contacts in their field.

These new rules especially hold true in the high-tech fields, where being up to the minute is considered essential. But even other industries are following suit.

Job applicants are required to submit their resumes digitally at UMB Financial, a bank based in Kansas City, Mo.

"We get very few paper resumes," says Pat Cassady, the director of recruitment at UMB. Cassady says 10 to 12 percent of UMB hires come through LinkedIn, and she searches niche networking sites for active users who might be promising business leaders. She is even planning to use Twitter to reach out to new recruits.

-excerpt from NPR

Obama Tries To Sell Health Plan To Doctors

2009-06-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

President Obama warned on Monday that the escalating cost of health care is a threat to the U.S. economy, telling the American Medical Association that the whopping cost of health care helped drag down General Motors and Chrysler, and urging support for his new public insurance system to whittle the medical price tag.

In a speech at the AMA's annual meeting in Chicago, the president noted that the U.S. is spending more than $2 trillion a year on health care — 50 percent more per person than the next highest-spending nation. Despite the huge expenditure, Americans' life spans are shorter than people in some countries that spend less.

"The cost of our health care is a threat to our economy," Obama said. "It is an escalating burden on our families and businesses. It is a ticking time bomb for the federal budget, and it is unsustainable for the United States of America."

Citing health horror stories from across the country, the president said Americans are forgoing checkups and prescriptions, small businesses are dropping or reducing coverage, and big companies are less profitable and less competitive because of the exorbitant cost of providing health care for workers.

"If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less and going broke," he said. Obama noted that without health care reform, "1 out of every 5 dollars we earn will be spent on health care within a decade. In 30 years, it will be about 1 out of every 3."

More than 46 million Americans are uninsured. Obama asked doctors to support his effort to provide affordable health insurance to every American, adding that his plan would enable those already insured to keep the coverage they have if they prefer. Under Obama's proposal, every American would be able to shop for a health care plan under a Health Insurance Exchange that would allow families and individuals to choose a basic health care package. The plan includes a public option that would allow Americans a broader range of choices that is designed to keep the plans competitive.

The president said the plan would make sure doctors are reimbursed in a way that is tied to patient outcomes, rather than the annual negotiations that drive Medicare rates. He also appealed to the nation's doctors to help explore ways to ensure patients' welfare without unnecessary medical tests or procedures that are often done as a hedge against lawsuits.

"I need your help, doctors," he told the group, "because to most Americans, you are the health care system."

The plan won't be cheap, and the money to pay for it will come from a number of sources, Obama said. He noted that the federal budget calls for putting aside $635 billion over 10 years in a health reserve fund. More than half of that will come from revenue generated by limiting tax deductions to the wealthiest Americans.

Obama also said savings would come from cutting inefficiencies in the Medicare program. Although he predicted debate regarding where the cuts should be made, he said $177 billion could be saved over the next decade by ending overpayment for Medicare services by introducing competitive bidding into the Medicare Advantage program, which allows private insurance companies to offer Medicare coverage.

In addition, the president said using Medicare reimbursements to reduce preventable hospital readmissions would save $25 billion over the next 10 years, and that introducing more generic versions of biologic drugs also could save billions.

-excerpt from NPR

Ad Agency Finds 2-for-1 Deal In Downturn

2009-06-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

The lack of income isn't the only hard thing about being unemployed: There's also isolation and a loss of purpose.

Ariel Horn, who runs The Horn Corp., a Manhattan ad agency, has found both a way to help the numerous unemployed ad workers in New York, and a new business model.

"Typically, when times are tough, when you hit a recession, there's the natural tendency to want to shutter up and kind of close down until things wake back up," Horn says. "But we took a very different approach."

What Horn did was send out word that anyone in the advertising business who needed a job could use his office to look for work. They could bring their laptops, sit at one of his empty desks and spend the whole day sending out resumes.

On any given day, there's a small, shifting crowd here, like a pickup basketball game. It's a community of job-seekers.

And they're assets for Horn.

Take 36-year-old Gary Wapnitsky. He's worked at some of New York's biggest agencies. Now he's out of a job.

"It's very unusual to just be able to come into an office and plop yourself down with your computer and work on your own things. We're all trying to find full-time jobs while we're doing this, and we're all trying to help each other out," Wapnitsky says.

And while these job-seekers are here, Horn encourages them to brainstorm with him as much as possible. He wants them to talk about projects they'd like to take on — and they have a real company behind them if they want to pursue them.

Dustin D'Addato, head of production at Horn Corp., used to work in TV production at one of the big networks, but he became bored. He likes the loose, free-wheeling atmosphere here.

"When you're in a more corporate environment, anything that's out of the norm was beaten down right away," D'Addato says. "Here — I don't want to sound hokey — but we dream and give it a shot. We have enough connections where if somebody says, 'Hey, I think this would be a great idea for this company' — OK, well, let's ask them about it. Worst they could do is say no."

If one of the ideas takes, it could lead to a job for Horn and his agency. It's happened before, and when it does, Horn hires the person who came up with the idea. He pays them by the project, with no benefits. For Horn, this kind of business model has a big advantage. The people who come here have all kinds of backgrounds — digital marketing, social networking, music videos. It means Horn's agency can function like a much bigger company than it really is.

"[We] use the power of the people we have here," Horn says. "While we are a group that's been constructed primarily by our open-door policy, we do like to keep the structure of a real corporation."

Horn acknowledges that he's essentially getting free labor out of people. But he says he's also giving something back in a business where personal contacts are essential. Unlike most unemployed people, they have a real company to work at each day — and it might lead to real work.

It's an unorthodox strategy. But the advertising industry is undergoing seismic changes, and Horn says a fresh approach is the only way for a small agency like his to survive.

-excerpt from NPR

Amid Recession, One Automaker Is Prospering

2009-06-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

Across the Midwest, auto plants are on extended summer breaks or, worse, shuttered for good as turmoil in the industry continues. But there's one factory in Ohio that can barely keep up with demand for its hot car.

It has two doors and an iconic, compact design.

"This car really has done a great job of reading what the consumers want these days," says auto expert Paul Eisenstein. He publishes TheDetroitBureau.com.

"Whether you're talking about its performance, which is pretty good, depending on who's behind the wheel. It has a lot of really nice features," says Eisenstein. "You don't have to worry about these vehicles breaking down. In this case, the driver might break down a little bit. Get a little tired and have to count on Mom and Dad."

Wait. Mom and Dad? Yes, the nation's best-selling car is the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe: that molded plastic yellow and red sub-subcompact with countless fans like 3-year-old Audrey Kuntz of North Royalton, Ohio. She makes car sounds as she rides around in her Cozy Coupe.

The Cozy Coupe is delightfully low-tech and environmentally friendly. No gas or batteries are needed. It's powered by a toddler's legs or a parent's push.

The Little Tikes factory in Hudson, Ohio, runs 24 hours a day, cranking out a Cozy Coupe every minute. Sales have remained strong, moving more than 450,000 of these cute plastic cars every year in the U.S. That's more than the runners-up in the sales race: the Toyota Camry or Honda Accord.

Bill Holcomb, the plant manager, says it feels nice to be in an auto factory in Ohio that is doing pretty well. "The Cozy Coupe isn't subject to the same woes that Chrysler and GM are subject to today," he says.

The little car has gone through only a few minor face-lifts in its life span. Little Tikes executive Tom Richmond says the biggest change actually came this year with a new front end that looks like a happy face, with big cartoonish eyes.

"We've given Cozy a personality," he says. "He has a full-length video. He has eyes, he has a mouth; we've humanized him."

The Cozy Coupe also now has cupholders.

"Of course those are primarily for Mom and Dad, but [they're] also a great place for sippy cups and so on," he explains.

As the Cozy Coupe celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, it entered automotive history.

Last weekend, the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland inducted the Cozy Coupe into its permanent collection. Museum Director Allan Unrein says it deserves to be among the historic Model T's and Packards.

"This, of all the cars I've ever seen in my life, that's the only one everybody aspires to. That's the Cozy Coupe," he says.

Unrein says that when the kids came for the induction, he realized the beleaguered automakers could learn a thing or two from the Cozy Coupe when designing their new models.

"Sometimes they become too appliancelike," he says. "They just lost that emotional appeal where there is emotional appeal. Those kids who were riding around, I can take it from them and they're all sad and crying, you know. I can take your Honda away from you and you're not going to be sad and crying. I'll find something else or whatever."

No wonder Honda and Toyota can't compete. Oh, and maybe the fact that the Cozy Coupe sells for the low-low price of $49.

-excerpt from NPR

Venezuela Threatens To Close Opposition TV Station

2009-06-11T10:57:00.001-07:00

Venezuela's last remaining anti-government television station has infuriated President Hugo Chavez. He has appointed his lieutenants to investigate the station, and international press freedom groups say it is on the verge of being closed down.

-excerpt from NPR

French Pawn Shops Thrive During Recession

2009-06-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

In France, banks are increasingly hesitant to lend during the economic downturn. That has made one venerable Paris lending institution more popular than ever: the pawn shop.

here story here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105188957

-excerpt from NPR

Debate May Be Turning Point In Iranian Election

2009-06-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

During a TV debate, Iranians witnessed an aggressive debate between the two main candidates. Journalist Hooman Majd is covering Iran's presidential elections. He talks with Steve Inskeep about how Iranians view this Friday's presidential contest. Majd is the author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

Listen here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105143819

excerpt from NPR

Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships

2009-06-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

The hookup — that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.

It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.

Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

"The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening," Bogle says. "In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating."

Young people from high school on are so preoccupied with friends, getting an education and establishing themselves, they don't make time for relationships.

New Goal: Fun, Not Marriage

"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche — isn't that funny?"

It seems it's far easier to have casual sexual encounters or hookups, though several national surveys of college students found a stalwart 28 percent who remain virgins. The term "hookup" is so vague, however, it might well encompass someone's idea of virginity — it involves anything from kissing to fooling around, oral sex and sexual intercourse.

"For me, it's been anytime that I was attracted to a guy and we spent the night together," Welsh says. "It has been sex; it has just been some sort of light making out. That's the beautiful thing about the phrase. Whatever happened is hooking up."

Bogle interviewed college students on a small and a large campus, as well as recent college graduates, to find out what was going on. The hooking-up phenomena has been traced back to the 1960s and the 1970s, when male and female students were thrown together in apartment-style dormitories, and there was a revolt against strict rules on having a member of the opposite sex in your dorm, lights out and curfews.

"What you see on college campuses now, even in some cases Catholic campuses, is that young men and women have unrestricted access to each other," Bogle says. Throw in the heavy drinking that occurs on most campuses, and there are no inhibitions to stand in the way of a hookup.

The alumni Bogle spoke with were less into hooking up after leaving college, but she says that's changing. It is catching on among young working adults, mainly because of the Internet and social networks.

The Evolution Of Dating

Dating itself represented a historical change. It evolved out of a courtship ritual where young women entertained gentleman callers, usually in the home, under the watchful eye of a chaperone. At the turn of the 20th century, dating caught on among the poor whose homes were not suitable for entertaining, according to Beth Bailey's history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America.

Young couples would go out for a movie or dinner. The expectation was that dating, as with courtship, would ultimately lead to a relationship, the capstone of which was marriage. Precious few of these young women attended college.

According to experts, the main reason hooking up is so popular among young people is that in the United States and other Western countries, the age at which people marry for the first time has been steadily creeping up. As of 2005, in the United States, men married for the first time around the age of 27, and women at about 25 years of age.

Bogle says the hookup is what happens when high school seniors and college freshmen suddenly begin to realize they won't be marrying for five, 10 or 15 years.

Prioritizing Career And Social Life

Marriage is often the last thing on the minds of young people leaving college today.

"My first few years out of college was about trying to get on my feet and having a good time," Welsh says. Dating and a relationship interfered with that.

Avery Leake, 25, knows what this is like from the other side. He's in a relationship now, but he says that, in general, most of the young women he used to meet "just wanted sex. They're independent." Being in a relationship was not important to them, especially if it interfered with their careers or their pursuit of advanced degrees, he says.

Leake found that he was also up against women who had as much money as he had, if not more, and he says dating had just become too expensive. "You used to be able to get away with paying $30 for a dinner and a movie," Leake says. "Not anymore."

Empowerment Or Loss Of Intimacy?

A number of experts accept this relaxed attitude toward sex outside of relationships as a natural consequence of the sexual revolution, women's growing independence and the availability of modern contraceptives. But Deborah Roffman, who conducts human sexuality workshops for middle- and high-school-age students and their parents, sees that as a distorted view of liberation.

"It's not a new model. I think most people would probably look back and agree that this has been a more traditionally, or at least stereotypically, male model," says Roffman. "What I've seen over the last few years is girls adopting a more compartmentalized view, and feeling good and empowered by it."

She's not convinced that this is a good thing for women, and says that being able to say yes is only one way of looking at freedom. She would feel much better if young men also were developing a greater capacity for intimacy.

Being able to engage in intimate relationships where men and women bring all of themselves to the relationship is the cornerstone of family, Roffman says.

But young people like Elizabeth Welsh don't see the hookup as an obstacle to future relationships:

"It is a common and easy mistake," Welsh says, "to assume that the value of friendship and those relationship building blocks have no place in longer term relationships."

If you're honest and open about what you're doing, and willing to commit to a relationship, she says, a hookup and friendship can be fused into a lifetime partnership.

Partnership Still The Ultimate Goal

At 25, May Wilkerson would like a relationship, but not a family — not quite yet. She's lived a lot of places: Argentina, Canada and Paris. Wilkerson says she hasn't found much intimacy with the men she's encountered.

In New York City, where she moved two years ago, people seem even more emotionally detached, and she thinks it is because so many of the people who come to the big city are focused on success.

"For many of us, the requisite vulnerability and exposure that comes from being really intimate with someone in a committed sense is kind of threatening."

And the thought of being in love with someone, Wilkerson says, "is the most terrifying thing."

Yes, she has been in love, but the guy wasn't quite into it. There was one older guy who was serious; he used to bring her cupcakes. She couldn't work up an interest in him.

Today, Wilkerson says people hook up via the Internet and text messaging.

"What that means is that you have contact with many, many more people, but each of those relationships takes up a little bit less of your life. That fragmentation of the social world creates a lot of loneliness."

Hooking up started before the Internet and social networks, but the technology is extending the lifestyle way beyond the campus. Deborah Roffman says no one is offering this generation guidance on how to manage what is essentially a new stage in life.

The dilemma for this generation is how to learn about intimacy, she says: "How am I going to have a series of relationships that are going to be healthy for me and others, and going to prepare me" for settling down with one person?

Wilkerson doesn't really focus on the concerns of people like Roffman, who fear that hooking up doesn't bode well for the future of young people. She thinks young people will be able to sort it out for themselves.

"We all attended health class in middle school and high school. We know about condoms and sexually transmitted disease. Sex is fun, and a lot of people would argue that it is a physical need. It's a healthy activity."

-excerpt from NPR

Rural Layoffs: Losing A Grip On Retirement

2009-06-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

Randy Badman thought he was set for life. After all, he was born and raised in DeWitt, Neb., home of the plant making Vise-Grip locking pliers. Vise-Grips were invented in a blacksmith shop in DeWitt in the 1920s, and in past years the plant had more jobs than the rural town of more than 500 had people to fill them.

"It brings back a lot of memories here … I planned on retiring here," says Badman, 60, standing outside the cavernous and empty metal plant on DeWitt's Main Street. "A lot of us that got laid off did." The layoff came in January 2005, after Badman had been making Vise-Grips for 36 years. He started in the tool and die shop in his 20s and was the tool shop supervisor when he and other managers were let go. Close to five years later, in October 2008, the last 300 workers were given pink slips as the plant closed. Irwin Industrial Tools moved Vise-Grip manufacturing to China.

Since the Vise-Grip layoff, Badman has worked two other manufacturing jobs in the region, but both also ended in layoffs. At the same time, Badman's 401(k) retirement account lost 40 percent of its value. Having experienced three layoffs in four years, Badman says, "If you have any kind of savings you tend to use those up … and you get to the point where you don't have anything anymore. And that's kind of a scary feeling."

Badman illustrates a trend in rural America. Manufacturing has been a big part of the rural economy, bigger than agriculture, but plants began downsizing and shutting down long before the current economic recession. Now it's getting worse, says Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.

"Small manufacturers have really been hit hard by this economic downturn," Goss says. "They have done some outsourcing [and] moved to other countries. That's really affecting rural areas."

Hard To Find Other Jobs

Rural factory workers like Badman don't have many other options because the manufacturing slowdown is widespread and there are fewer employers in rural areas to begin with. That's been Badman's experience as he searches for work.

"Right now, the job market, especially in manufacturing, is extremely difficult to find another job," he says.

That has forced him and his wife, Marge, to rethink their retirement plans.

"It changed them, obviously," Badman says. "Some of the plans you have for retiring, you just have to set them aside because right now, everything is up in the air."

Badman had hoped to retire in from two to five years, but now he needs to work longer just to get to retirement — and to make sure his retirement funds last.

Worries About An Exodus From Rural Villages

The competition for jobs increases as economically stressed retirees return to the work force and older workers like Badman put off retirement.

Driving long distances to work is one option. Badman has already commuted 100 miles a day and is willing to do it again. Long commutes are common in rural places.

Moving to find work is another option. The Badmans resist that because they've spent their entire lives in DeWitt and are active in the community. Randy chairs the DeWitt Village Board. He's the equivalent of the mayor, and he and other officials are concerned about a tax and brain drain on the village if he and others close to retirement are forced to leave.

That's already a major problem in many small towns, notes economist Goss.

"The burden of the infrastructure costs is spread among fewer and fewer individuals and fewer and fewer families," Goss says. "If every one of those retirees could take a chunk of the infrastructure with them, [which] would not have to be paid for by those who remain, you'd be OK. But, you've got schools, the sheriffs' departments, the county court clerk. All these are affected by this. It's not a small thing."

Rural hospitals and other medical services could be affected by an exodus of the nearly retired, as they take their insurance and Medicare payments with them.

Frustrations Over Wooing Another Employer

Badman is part of an effort to find another company to move into the Vise-Grip plant. But he is competing with hundreds of other rural communities at a time when fewer companies are expanding or moving.

"Right now, it's a difficult time with the economy," Badman says. "All companies are cutting back."

Economist Goss says he expects that to improve, "but it's hard to tell a person who's over 50 years of age, 'Well, just hang on for another 5 to 10 years. It'll get better.' "

In the midst of the frustrating job hunt, and the frustrating efforts to find another big employer in DeWitt, Badman seeks solace on his back porch, where he is replacing a deck. Drilling screws into new planks helps relieve the stress of a life plan gone awry.

"Timing in life is everything, isn't it?" Badman asks.

"Sometimes you have good timing and sometimes you have my timing," he adds with a hearty, but wry laugh. "And, right now, my timing's not so good."

-excerpt from NPR

Medical Bills Blamed On More Personal Bankruptcies

2009-06-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

More and more Americans are going bankrupt because of medical bills. A study paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds that medical bills were involved in more than 60 percent of personal bankruptcies in 2007.

-excerpt from NPR

Chile Police Find Suitcases Made Of Cocaine

2009-06-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Police say two suitcases carried by a woman who was about to fly from Chile to Spain were made of cocaine. The Associated Press reports the suitcases were made of a substance combining cocaine with resin and glass fiber. A "chemical process" could be used to separate out the drug.

-excerpt from NPR

A Door Opens ... To Pie, Coffee And Possibility

2009-06-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

There's a new cafe in Ellsworth, Mich., that's helping the town hang on, if only by a thread — The Front Porch cafe. It's a nonprofit business, staffed only by volunteers, but it has brought some light to the darkening downtown.

The intersection of Main and Center streets constitutes downtown Ellsworth. In the past year, the 500 or so residents have lost the diner, grocery and deli, and bait shop, and that's where folks used to count on a cup of coffee.

With unemployment in the county around 16 percent, there's not a lot of extra cash to spend, but Bob Felton of the local Christian Reform Church recognized that neighbors needed a place to gather over coffee and a cheap meal.

"We have a joke at church — if you want to get people together, bring food," Felton recalls. "And early on as we presented the vision to the people, there were some who said, 'I would never start a restaurant anytime, let alone in this kind of an economic climate.' From our perspective that was the perfect time to do it."

It seems he was right. These days you can find half the town sitting down for a nonprofit, nondenominational meal. Some are there for the $5 breakfasts, and others for pie: coconut, peanut butter, chocolate cream and lemon meringue.

And it's not just The Front Porch that seems to benefit. Bob Vollmer volunteers at the cafe on Thursdays and owns the used car lot across the street. He says the cafe has attracted visitors from all over Michigan.

"Two people from Charlevoix came over and had breakfast here; none of them had intended to buy a car that day. Wasn't the reason to come to Ellsworth, but by the end of the day they had come back — each of them bought a car."

Slices of pie and two used car sales may not turn the economy of Ellsworth around, but they have brought hope and life to downtown.

As the undertaker John Hastings, who also volunteers at the cafe, points out, "When this place is closed, you could shoot a cannon down the street."

The church-sponsored cafe is open every day except Sundays.

-excerpt from NPR

Italy's Berlusconi Fights Smear Campaign

2009-06-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

Enveloped in a growing scandal over the nature of his relationship with a teenager, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi believes he is the target of a smear campaign by the leftist opposition. He has gone on the offensive against both opposition media and the foreign media.

Berlusconi's latest move was blocking publication of hundreds of photos taken of his guests at La Dolce Vita-style parties at his Sardinian villa. The photos allegedly include young topless women and a top-ranking European politician in the nude.

The scandal erupted a month ago when Berlusconi went to the 18th-birthday party of aspiring starlet Noemi Letizia in Naples, where he gave her a diamond and gold necklace worth many thousands of dollars. Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, then filed for divorce, saying she could "no longer remain with a man who frequents minors."

She spoke of her husband's fondness for young women, who, she said, "offer themselves like young virgins to the dragon to pursue fame and fortune."

Berlusconi first said he was an acquaintance of Letizia's parents — a claim contradicted by her former boyfriend Gino Flaminio. He told the left-leaning daily La Repubblica that Berlusconi first called his former girlfriend directly last November after chancing upon her modeling photos. Flaminio even listened in to some of the calls. He said Berlusconi invited the underage girl and her girlfriend to spend New Year's vacation at his villa together with dozens of other young women.

Berlusconi's wife also had criticized her husband for putting young starlets and showgirls on his party slate for Parliament — calling it political trash. Alexander Stille, author of a book on Berlusconi's political and media control, says the prime minister has concentrated power in his own hands, also thanks to a new electoral law that allows party leaders to pick candidates.

"What that meant is that the favorites of the king are the people who get into Parliament," Stille says. "So you see this profusion of beautiful girls, fashion models, TV stars and showgirls in Parliament."

Stille says they're just ornaments — meaning Parliament's function of checking the executive has been weakened.

Berlusconi also controls a large chunk of the Italian media — directly through ownership and indirectly through his large advertising agency and his political power.

With the exception of La Repubblica and a few other outlets, Italian journalists have treated the scandal with kid gloves.

Not so elsewhere. The European media have been relentless in their coverage. And an editorial in the Financial Times said Berlusconi is "no Fascist, but a danger, in the first place to Italy, and a malign example to all."

The prime minister retorted with a quip: "Mussolini had squadrons of black shirts. According to the foreign media — which are in the service of the Italian left — I have squadrons of showgirls. Thank god for that; they're much better."

But it's clear the prime minister is worried about his image abroad and has gone on the offensive. He charged that publications such as the Financial Times, The Economist and The Times of London are part of a plot orchestrated by the left.

Some of the prime minister's closest aides have gone even further — hinting at the alleged existence of a campaign hatched in Washington against an Italian leader who was very close to former President George W. Bush.

-excerpt from npr

After 50 Years, Space Monkeys Not Forgotten

2009-05-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

· In Huntsville, Ala., there is an unusual grave site where, instead of flowers, people sometimes leave bananas.

The gravestone reads: "Miss Baker, squirrel monkey, first U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive. May 28, 1959."

Fifty years ago, when Baker made her famous flight, she had some company in the nose cone of the Jupiter ballistic missile: a rhesus monkey named Able.

Able and Baker were shot about 360 miles up into space and experienced about nine minutes of weightlessness. Their safe return occurred two years before any humans flew into space, and it made them huge celebrities.

The monkeys appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and at a press conference, news correspondents "pushed each other and clambered over chairs to get closer," reported The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "the monkeys were far less excited than the humans. They munched peanuts and crackers."

Early Space Travelers

Able and Baker were not the first living creatures to return to Earth alive from space, although that myth seems to be out there, says Chris Dubbs, co-author of the book Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle.

In 1947, the United States sent up fruit flies, which were the first living things to travel into space, Dubbs says. "And then they started sending monkeys."

America's first attempt to send up a monkey was in 1948. For over a decade, all monkey flights failed for one reason or another, Dubbs says.

In one case, the rocket exploded. Another monkey died on impact when its parachute failed. After another parachute failure, a monkey plummeted into the sea and was never recovered. One monkey mission saw the animals return home safely, but their vehicle hadn't traveled high enough for them to actually reach space.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were sending up dogs and having success bringing them back alive from suborbital flights, Dubbs says. At least 30 of those animals returned alive.

The first animal who actually orbited the planet was a dog named Laika, though she did not survive the entire flight. She was launched in 1957 in Sputnik 2.

"Americans were aware of this," Dubbs says, "and the space race was clearly on by the time that Able and Baker came on the scene."

Two Tiny Astronauts

Able was a rhesus monkey, and Baker was a much smaller squirrel monkey.

Because the rhesus monkey is revered by some in India, U.S. officials stressed that Able had been born not in India, but in Independence, Kan.

The monkeys' missile blasted off in the early morning hours from Cape Canaveral and traveled 1,700 miles in 16 minutes, reaching an altitude of about 360 miles.

The bright missile lit up the dark sky, says Joseph Guion, who commanded the Navy vessel USS Kiowa that retrieved the monkeys.

"You could read a newspaper on the bridge of the ship, it was so bright," he says. "The nose cone arced down, almost like a shooting star, down toward the water. It just came down very rapidly and — boom — it was gone."

He and his crew at first thought it had sunk. But then a lookout spotted the nose cone bobbing in the water, and they struggled to get it on board.

Military personnel on the ship checked on the monkeys and then sent out a message: "Able Baker perfect. No injuries or other difficulties."

Guion says he was floored to see how tiny Baker's capsule was.

"It was about the size of a large thermos bottle," he says, recalling that Baker was "extremely easy to talk to and hold. She was like a little doll. Able was just the opposite. You could not get near her."

The two monkeys were taken to the officer's wardroom, where air conditioning had been installed for their comfort. Later, they were flown to Washington, D.C., under military escort, for the press conference.

A Hundred Letters A Day

Unfortunately, Able died just a few days later, during a medical procedure to remove an electrode. Her stuffed body is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

But Baker lived another 25 years, mostly at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"She would get 100 to 150 letters a day from schoolchildren," says Ed Buckbee, a former director of the center. Children read about her in textbooks and wanted to say hello. "She was very prominent in the story of our early spaceflight ventures."

The pioneering monkeys weren't forgotten, even after the first humans reached space in 1961.

More than 300 people attended Baker's funeral service when she died of kidney failure in 1984, Buckbee says.

And, he says, often at her grave at the entrance to the rocket center, "you'll see a banana or two laying there. You know, some youngster brought it or somebody heard the story and wanted to leave something in memory, kind of like leaving flowers over a person's grave."

-excerpt from NPR

Sotomayor: 'Always Looking Over My Shoulder'

2009-05-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a self-described "Newyorkrican," the daughter of parents who moved from Puerto Rico to the Bronx. In speeches to Latino groups, she has echoed some of the same themes as President Obama about growing up as a minority and feeling she never completely fit in anywhere.

"I am always looking over my shoulder, wondering if I measure up," she has said.

Sotomayor, 54, was nominated by Obama Tuesday to replace retiring Justice David Souter. If confirmed, she will be the first Hispanic justice — and third woman — to serve on the nation's highest court. As a judge, Sotomayor has earned praise for being thoroughly prepared and for her penetrating questioning, though some have described her courtroom style as overly aggressive. In announcing his choice, Obama praised her "rigorous intellect" and called her an "inspiring" woman with a "depth of perspective."

A Childhood In The Bronx

Sotomayor was raised in the New York City borough of The Bronx. She was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age 8. Her father, a factory worker with a third-grade education who did not speak English, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse, raised her two children in a Bronx housing project near Yankee Stadium, working six days a week to send Sonia and her brother to Catholic school.

Sotomayor has recalled how her mother always kept a pot of rice and beans on the stove for friends, and how her family had the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood.

It was as a child that Sotomayor became intrigued by the law. She first wanted to be a police detective, inspired by Nancy Drew mysteries. But a doctor suggested that would be difficult with diabetes. So Sotomayor settled on being a judge instead, after watching an episode of the popular TV show Perry Mason.

"I realized that the judge was the most important player in that room," she said.

Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and then Yale Law School. She has described her time at Princeton as life-changing, like "a visitor landing in an alien country," and said she was too intimidated to ask any questions the first year. Sotomayor married while in college, then divorced a few years later.

Judicial Experience

Obama administration officials say Sotomayor would bring more judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice confirmed in the past 70 years. She has worked in Manhattan as a prosecutor and then an attorney and has spent the past 17 years as a judge.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Sotomayor as a judge on the U.S. District Court in New York, making her the youngest judge in that district. She won Senate confirmation without dissent. But that wasn't the case in 1998, when President Bill Clinton named her to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans delayed her confirmation for more than a year, in part because they believed that as a Hispanic she could well be chosen later for the Supreme Court. She was eventually confirmed, 67-29.

As Obama noted in his remarks Tuesday, one of Sotomayor's most famous rulings earned her gratitude from baseball fans, when she ended a Major League Baseball strike in 1995. "Some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball," Obama said to applause. A lifelong fan of the game, she described her decision as being like "when you see an outfielder backpedaling and jumping up to the wall and time stops for an instant as he jumps up and you finally figure out whether it's a home run, a double or a single off the wall or an out."

Sotomayor also sided last year with the city of New Haven, Conn., in a discrimination case brought by white firefighters. After too few minorities scored high enough on a promotion exam, the city threw out the results. Conservatives have criticized that ruling and the case is, ironically, now before the Supreme Court.

The conservative Judicial Confirmation Network calls Sotomayor a "liberal judicial activist of the first order." Many expect that, like Souter, she would routinely side with the court's four-member liberal minority.

But not all her rulings can be so neatly categorized. In 2002, Sotomayor ruled against an abortion rights group that had challenged a federal policy prohibiting the denial of U.S. funds to foreign groups that supported abortion. In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that the government was free to favor the anti-abortion position if it chose.

In other high-profile rulings, she ruled that The Wall Street Journal had the right to publish the suicide note of former Clinton White House aide Vincent Foster, and she ruled against a state prison regulation that prevented people from wearing beads to thwart evil spirits. She also allowed the display of a 9-foot-tall menorah in a suburban park.

A First For Hispanics

Until now, some Hispanics had been disappointed in Obama's failure to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet and other high offices. But the nomination of Sotomayor may go a long way to assuage that.

Hispanics turned out in huge numbers for Obama in last fall's election, and they are the nation's fastest-growing minority. Sotomayor has spoken publicly about her pride in being Latina and admitted that it no doubt affects how she views cases from the bench.

"I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging," she said in a speech in 2002, "but I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

-excerpt from npr

A California Town Squeezes Water From A Drought

2009-05-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

Tips From Bolinas-Stinson Elementary School

NPR.org, May 22, 2009 · 1. Put a bucket in the shower and use that to flush the toilet. — Orie Young

2. Don't leave faucets running while you're brushing your teeth. — Mara Kauffman-Puchall

3. I bring a water bottle to school because when you drink out of the drinking fountain, 25 percent of the water goes down the drain. — Ryder Wood

4. We fill up something in the sink with water and put soap in it and wash all the dishes in that. — Orie Young

5. Fill your dishwasher completely before starting it. — Eric Bell

6. If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down. — Ibarra Demmerle

7. At home, don't turn the faucet on full when you wash your hands. — Melea Emunah

8. My family puts coolers (or buckets) under the shower until the water gets warm and then we use that water to water the plants. — Zoe Zaleski

9. Clean your driveway with a broom instead of a hose. — Ariana Trubeyagnew

10. Wash your bikes less. — Eric Bell

11. This was a really hard thing for me to do, but I did it anyway. I took five minute showers instead of 11 minutes.

— Mariah Rose-Ives

12. Just shower when you need to. — Owen Bisson

13. A lot of people use way too much water when they're watering their garden. We got a new garden right around the time the drought started, so we couldn't use that much water to water our garden. Nothing really happened. The garden survived. — Ryder Wood

California is in the third year of a drought, and many cities and towns are calling for various forms of water rations. But the northern California coastal community of Bolinas had to learn water conservation the really hard way. That's because the town almost dried up earlier this year. The beginning of the rainy season turned into one of the driest winter periods on record for Bolinas. Every day, Bill Pierce, a 25-year veteran of the Bolinas Community Public Utility District, checked the town's main water source, the Arroyo Hondo Creek. But all he could do was pray for rain.

It's not easy finding the creek that slakes the village thirst. You drive up a narrow Jeep trail, then walk through dense stands of old growth Douglas fir until you stop in a clearing. It looks like an old swimming hole, 20 feet wide, about 28 feet long and 3 feet deep. It was created in the 1920s by a dam, only 15 feet wide. During those dry months, Pierce watched the creek flow dwindle to a trickle, when it should have been roaring. By the end of January, the town had completely drained one of its two emergency reservoirs. "We're in deep trouble here," Pierce finally realized. "Basically we were out of water, we just hadn't consumed it all yet."

Pierce figured, without any new rain, Bolinas would run out of water by the end of April. So he calculated the amount of water available, which needed to be spread out over 300 days until the next big rains were expected. And then he divided that number by the 600 households in town. He came up with 150 gallons per day per house. The average U.S. household of four uses about 400 gallons a day. Bolinas was already pretty good about water use, coming in below the national average. But now, residents had to be even more careful. Mandatory rationing went into effect immediately. It required that every household (or water hook up) use 150 gallons a day or less, regardless of how many people it supported. All businesses and the town's only school were told to cut usage by 25 percent, which is the more standard way of rationing.

Home meters were checked randomly every day. If you went over the limit, you got a written notice. You were allowed only two. The third time, your water could be shut off. That's pretty harsh. But Pierce says, "There's only so much water. We've never been here before. This is new ground for us. It's new ground for most water districts, everywhere." Before the rationing kicked in, a personal notification went out to every home that was already using more than the rationed amount, including the Zimmer-Demmerle family. "I was surprised because not everybody got the letter, hand delivered, to their house and we were one of them," says Maud Zimmer. Zimmer, her husband Bob Demmerle, and their two daughters, 9-year-old Ibarra and 5-year-old Zetana live in a house Demmerle built with water conservation in mind. They have low-flow toilets and a front-loader washing machine. But that wasn't enough. "I realized we were going to have to change," says Zimmer.

So the family started to watch every drop of water. Most of it was just common sense. Dirty dishes were soaked in a bucket of soapy water in the sink during the day. Water was turned off in the act of brushing teeth. Showers were shortened. Ibarra easily recites this saying, when asked about toilet flushing: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

For the garden (filled mostly with low-water plants) Demmerle bought old olive barrels and placed them at all the roof downspouts. When rain finally did come, he was able to catch rainwater to nurture the garden. He covers all the barrels with screw-on tops and then transfers the water to a 1,500-gallon water tank. But most importantly, the family began to read the water meter, something few Americans ever do. Demmerle and the family walk outside to the front yard to show off the meter. First, Demmerle takes off the cement lid and points to the dial. It's in cubic feet. Many Bolinas residents have learned to make the conversion. If they use 20 cubic feet a day, they know that's equivalent to 150 gallons.

"I came out for about 35 days in a row and read the meter every morning," Demmerle says. Before that, he knew his meter was there, but never looked at it. "It's embarrassing," he says. "Mostly our family was letting water run down the drain." During rationing the Zimmer Demmerles dropped below the minimum. But now Demmerle is worried.

"We stopped reading the meter," he admits, because the rationing was lifted after some late rains restored the reservoir. Now the town is in voluntary conservation mode. "And I'm wondering if we're getting a little sloppy with our water use," he says.
The Zimmer Demmerles needn't worry. The utility district tells us they're now using 100 gallons less a day from the same period last year. While the ration was in effect, the town was 98 percent compliant. And since restrictions were lifted in mid-March, residents on average are keeping just below the ration amount.

That's very encouraging. But Seth Klein, who works for the utility district, says the town only had a reprieve with some late winter rains. He worries that if there's a major water main break or fire, the storage tanks could drain. "We're really one emergency away from a major crisis." Bolinas' best investment in protecting its future water supply may be its children. During the rationing, the elementary school reduced its usage by more than 35 percent, and it's stayed that way. The students made graphs about water conservation and posters with reminders to turn off faucets and flush less, even at school. They took field trips to the town's water source and its two emergency reservoirs. They talked about things they can do to save water, too, and compiled a list of tips on how to save.

Principal Leo Kostelnik posted the school's water usage by the bathrooms every day. He says the students got a good lesson when a tour group of 11 people dropped by for a bathroom pit stop. "In about 15 minutes they used more water than we use in two days," he says. "We're a public school," Kostelnik continues. "We understand that we're raising a generation of future citizens who are going to be running the place for us. And we want to help the kids understand that water conservation isn't a reaction to an emergency, it's a way of life."

-excerpt from NPR

Senate Democrats Pull Funds To Close Guantanamo

2009-05-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Funding for closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba is being removed from the 2009 supplemental appropriations bill, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide has confirmed to NPR. The Senate Appropriations Committee had included $50 million in the supplemental bill last week for the Guantanamo shutdown, while stipulating that such funding would become available only once President Obama had submitted a detailed plan for closing the facility and relocating inmates.

Senate Republicans have made the lack of a plan for closing Guantanamo and the prospect of inmates being sent to the U.S. a major point of attack over the past month. Senate Democrats themselves are divided over whether any prisoners should be sent to the U.S. Their decision to pull the funding just as the Senate was set to begin debate on the supplemental bill reflects a desire to avoid a floor fight over an issue that Republicans have successfully used as a wedge among Democrats and between Congress and the Obama administration.

The House did not include any of the $80 million that Obama requested for closing down Guantanamo in the House-approved version of the supplemental bill. The decision to pull the funding leaves Obama with three choices. He can veto the supplemental bill to pressure Congress to reverse its position; he can try to move ahead with his goal of closing Guanatanamo by Jan. 22, 2010, using funds from other sources; or he can reverse his decision to close the facility.

-excerpt from NPR

New York Tackles Wage Theft Against Immigrants

2009-05-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

On a bustling sidewalk in the Dominican neighborhood of New York City's Washington Heights, Carmen Calderon reaches over a folding table to wave a pamphlet at a sandwich delivery man, shouting in Spanish, "You know your rights as a worker?" The man smiles and keeps biking. But in the course of an afternoon Calderon manages to lure others and deliver her message, part of a new effort by New York State's Labor Department to combat wage theft among this city's enormous immigrant workforce.

Calderon says it's amazing what immigrants don't know about: the minimum wage, overtime, lunch breaks or that labor laws apply to them even if they're in the U.S. illegally. Several people stop to confide about bad treatment at work, but want to know if they'll be deported if they complain. Even if they're legal, Calderon says, typically humble immigrants are unlikely to report abuse. "They don't want to ruffle any feathers," she says. "It's like, 'Wow, he's doing me a favor, he gave me a job.' But they don't realize they're being abused by the person supposedly doing them the favor."

With the foreign-born making up half of New York's work force, labor officials say wage and hour violations are stunningly widespread, from upscale restaurants where bathroom attendants are paid only in tips, to the city's car washes, where inspectors last year found three-quarters did not pay minimum wage or overtime.

Faced with such an overwhelming problem, the Labor Department has joined forces with immigrant advocacy groups for what they call "wage watch" — an approach taken straight from the concept of Neighborhood Watches.

On a cool evening, four teams of state investigators descend on the tony neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. They no longer wait to respond to complaints. Instead, clipboards in hand, they're paying surprise visits to 22 restaurants. They scope out any basement exits first and post a member outside; this is in case kitchen workers mistake them for immigration agents and try to flee. At a family-friendly chicken place, one team heads inside and investigator Aristoteles Rodriguez slides his department ID across the counter.

"I work for the New York State Department of Labor," he tells the cashier. "We're basically conducting an investigation of your business, and we need to speak with some of your employees." The cashier looks wary and picks up the phone to call the manager. A few customers near the front window don't seem to notice anything. Rodriguez heads to the back bar to start interviewing waitstaff. "Sunday, what time do you come in?" he asks a nervous looking young man.

Rodriguez goes through each day of the week, asking about hours worked and then pay. The man says he gets $25 for an eight-hour shift, less than half of New York's minimum wage for waiters. He also works several 12-hour days, but says he gets no overtime.

Deputy Labor Commissioner Terri Gerstein has come along on this sweep, something she's been doing every couple of months as the department takes its more aggressive approach. On the sidewalk out front, an employee tells her he is paid in cash and describes a grueling workweek of more than 80 hours. "How many days off do you have?" Gerstein asks.

"I don't have time off," he says with a slight hint of indignation. "The only rest I get is three hours at most," once a week. The interview suddenly ends as the restaurant manager arrives, asking, "What's the problem?" Some workers scurry inside while others come out to watch. Gerstein explains they're investigating a number of restaurants in Brooklyn and after a tense exchange takes down his name and hands him her card. Then she adds, "I also just want to make sure you know it's against the law to retaliate against workers for talking to us."

The manager, Fernando Tisoc, says his accountant will call to clear up any problems. Later, he tells NPR his workers' tips make up for their low hourly pay. He insists the restaurant isn't breaking any laws, though says he isn't aware of any provision on overtime pay. After the sweep, labor officials will decide which restaurants to formally audit. They used to investigate individual employees' allegations, only to see some workers fired. Now, Labor Commissioner Patricia Smith says her department works hard to protect the identities of those who claim abuse.

"So we will go in and we will audit the whole establishment, so that the employer is much less likely to know who, if anyone, complained," she says. The department has also asked for higher penalties against businesses that retaliate.

Smith, who took over as New York's labor commissioner two years ago, says that for too long, labor enforcement both in New York and at the federal level was lax. Smith says the challenge isn't only that so many workers are vulnerable immigrants, but that many of their employers are also foreign born and may know little of U.S. labor laws.

"I talk to a lot of employers who are in violation of the law," she says. "And when you ask them what was the story they basically say, 'I bought the store from Joe X, and this is what Joe X did and so this is what I did."

Smith says education is key, and so as part of the Wage Watch program her department has teamed up with Make the Road New York and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Each week local activists in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn make their own workplace visits, handing out pamphlets on labor laws to both management and workers.

They're also on the lookout for possible violations to report to the Labor Department. Nieves Padilla of Make the Road New York says she can gather tips better than any labor department official. She knows this neighborhood, and everyone knows her.

"Even if I'm just in a store to buy something, all the managers think I'm investigating," says Padilla. "They say, 'Ah, here's the troublemaker!' They follow me around and try to keep me away from their employees. But the workers know me too, and actually, we have a way of communicating without even speaking."

Padilla demonstrates this knack in a health and beauty store, where one employee seems too nervous to talk with her manager nearby. As the woman watches, Padilla strolls into an aisle, slips a workers rights pamphlet between boxes of hair color and then leaves. The employee gives her a smiling glance as she moves to discreetly retrieve the pamphlet. The manager has seen nothing.

New York's Wage Watch is just a few months old, and officials say it's too soon to measure success. But the pilot program is set to expand across the state this summer.

-excerpt from NPR

Candy Bar From Mars Aims For Women From Venus

2009-05-18T05:17:00.000-07:00

The Snickers bar has a new sibling, and it's a girl.

She's sexual, uninhibited — and only 85 calories. The "Fling" is the first new chocolate bar Mars has introduced in more than 20 years. Wrapped in a shiny pink and sliver package, this delicate "chocolate finger" is intended for women. The word "finger" is an industry term for a long, slim confection, Mars spokesman Ryan Bowling says, but with ads that invite you to "Pleasure yourself" in pink lettering, consumers might come to other conclusions.

The tag line on the package is "Naughty, but not that naughty." A TV spot starts with what looks like strangers having sex in a store dressing room. Currently the candy bar can be bought only California and online, but if all goes well, Mars is hoping women will be having Flings all across the country. But is this hyper-feminine, hyper-sexualized marketing coming on too strong?

"The overall campaign feels weird," Lisa Johnson says. "It feels creepy." Johnson is the co-author of Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy — and How to Increase Your Share of This Crucial Market. She describes the marketing as a "full-frontal attack."

"The language of it has so much sexual innuendo, you could pack it into a trashy novel." Johnson says marketers are taking the connection women often make between chocolate and sensuality too literally. "There are other things you can do that can hit this note without banging on it."Bowling says the campaign has been received well so far. Whether the Fling will keep calling itself a "finger," however, remains to be seen.

-excerpt from NPR

"Will the Fling bar be successful? Probably, for a while, based on curiosity alone. But the shadiness of marketing a bar to women who clearly aren't comfortable with food and therefore need to view their candy as a "secret" or something to be incredibly sneaky about is just disappointing and gross, and even if the chocolate below the wrapper is delicious, there's a sense of bad taste that already overwhelms the product. And besides, why have a Fling with a novelty bar when you can have a lifelong relationship with a Snickers? I mean, really."

- excerpt from jezebel.com
http://jezebel.com/5153867/the-fling-candy-bar-a-pink-sparkly-marketing-mess

Olympic Medalist Michael Phelps Tests The Water

2009-05-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

Olympian Michael Phelps is jumping back into competition this weekend. Even non-sports fans were wowed as they watched the swimmer with the 6-foot-7 wingspan dive into the pool at last summer's Beijing Olympics and emerge with eight gold medals.

But after he returned home, the news turned to the photograph of him toking from a marijuana bong and his three-month suspension from the sport.

"He's kind of had a midlife crisis at the age of 23," USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "Since we last saw him, nine months ago when he got out of the pool in Beijing, he's made millions of dollars, he's been photographed ... with the bong and been suspended for three months. One sponsor, Kellogg's, dropped him…. I think there's a tentative feeling about what's next."

And yet, Brennan notes, Phelps said in March that "he wants to go and swim for four more years. It's a very different challenge for someone who is turning 24 next month to go till he's 27 versus what he was doing, of course, as a teenager or in his early 20s."

Phelps' fans should not be disappointed if he loses this weekend — a very real possibility. But Brennan says this weekend's competition is akin to "spring training or early season baseball." She adds that it may be hard for the swimming superstar to stay focused as he shifts from the Cube at the Beijing Olympics to the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center in Charlotte, N.C.

But sports fans shouldn't start the countdown yet — this weekend is merely a training race to get warmed up for the world championships trials in Indianapolis in July and the world championships in Rome later that month. Looming over the Olympian like Big Ben? The 2012 London Olympics.

-excerpt from NPR

Free Lipitor, Viagra, other drugs for jobless

2009-05-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

Pfizer Inc. says it will provide 70 of its most widely prescribed prescription drugs — including Lipitor and Viagra — for free to people who have lost their jobs and health insurance. The world's biggest drugmaker said Thursday it will give away the medicines for up to a year to Americans who lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been on the Pfizer drug for three months or more.

The announcement comes amid massive job losses caused by the recession and a campaign in Washington to rein in health care costs and extend coverage. The move could earn Pfizer some goodwill in that debate after long being a target of critics of drug industry prices and sales practices. The program also likely will help keep those patients loyal to Pfizer brands.

"Everybody knows now a neighbor, a relative who has lost their job and is losing their insurance. People are definitely hurting out there," Dr. Jorge Puente, Pfizer's head of pharmaceuticals outside the U.S. and Europe and a champion of the project, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Wednesday. "Our aim is to help people bridge this point."

The idea for the program came just five weeks ago, at a leadership training meeting, as the workers discussed how many patients are struggling, Puente said. He said he urged top management to approve the program, presenting a recent Associated Press article about how newly uninsured diabetics are suffering serious complications because they can no longer afford the medicines and testing supplies. Approval came quickly. "It was my idea," he said. "I floated it, and the reception it got was so dramatic that it very quickly became our idea."

Colleagues suggested employees could donate to a fund to help support the effort, Puente said. He said some employees had tears in their eyes when discussing how they could help people who had lost jobs. Officials for New York-based Pfizer said they don't know how much the program will cost and haven't put a cap on spending for it.

Applicants will have to sign a statement that they are suffering financial hardship and provide a "pink slip" or similar employer notice. Applications will be accepted through Dec. 31, with medication provided for up to 12 months after approval — or until the person becomes insured again. Starting Thursday, patients can call a toll-free number, 866-706-2400, to sign up, and those whose drugs are not included in the program will be referred to other company aid programs. Starting July 1, patients can also apply through the Web site, http://www.PfizerHelpfulAnswers.com, which has information about the other Pfizer aid programs.

Pfizer and the rest of the drug industry are trying to have a voice in the debate over how to overhaul the U.S. health care system, partly by joining in a pledge this week to help hold down inflation of health costs. "There's a long-term benefit there, beyond the goodwill and the publicity," said David Heupel, health care portfolio manager at Thrivent Large Cap Growth Fund. "Pfizer is trying to maintain their (market) share, if not grow their share" by keeping people from switching to generic versions of its drugs to save money. "If you're already taking medication that's working, typically doctors don't push to change it," Heupel said.

Pfizer's program comes at a time when many drugmakers, including Pfizer, have been raising prices on their drugs, partly to offset declines in revenue as the global recession reduces the number of prescriptions people can afford to fill. The 70-plus drugs covered in the program include several diabetes drugs and some of Pfizer's top money makers, from cholesterol fighter Lipitor and painkiller Celebrex to fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica and Viagra for impotence. Drugs from several other popular classes such as antibiotics, antidepressants, antifungal treatments, heart mediations, contraceptives and smoking cessation products also are included. Cheaper generic versions are available for quite a few of the drugs. Pfizer said that from 2004 through 2008, its patient assistance programs helped 5.1 million people get 51 million Pfizer prescriptions for free or at reduced cost, with a total value of $4.8 billion.

-excerpt from NPR

gone campin'.

2009-05-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

check back tomorrow!

Airline Going To The Dogs ... And Cats, Too

2009-05-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

Think your Fido or Boots deserves more respect when traveling? So do the founders of Pet Airways, who are launching their pets-only airline in July. All animals that fly will be called "pawsengers" and have a pet attendant to ease their travel, says airline co-founder Alysa Binder.

Pet Airways will start out in five cities — Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago and Denver. The animals will fly on Beechcraft planes, constructed for 19 human passengers, Binder tells Renee Montagne. All the people comforts have been torn out and reconfigured with pet carriers. There are sections for cats and dogs, but there's no first class. When asked how she plans to manage in this economy, Binder says, "Folks are still going on vacation and would like to take their pets — maybe they're going to Grandma's house."

And, she notes, "In this economy, there's a lot of pet parents that are being relocated … so they need to take their pet."

Fares start at $149 each way — water and food included.

-excerpt from NPR

Astronauts To Give Hubble One Last Hug

2009-05-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Hubble Space Telescope is about to get a long-awaited makeover, as NASA astronauts head out on a final mission to repair the aging but beloved observatory. Space Shuttle Atlantis blasted off Monday just after 2 p.m. ET. Atlantis is carrying with it 180 special tools — 116 of them designed just for this mission, which involves tricky repairs to two science instruments that were never intended to be fixed in space. The famous silver telescope hasn't been visited by an astronaut repair crew in more than seven years, and some of its instruments have started failing, diminishing the science it can do.

"I liken this to the situation of a champion athlete who is playing hurt, who has an injury, is playing through the pain, still doing very well, but now, by golly, it's time to go off, get our surgery, and get back to 100 percent," says David Leckrone, senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Actually, he says, after this mission, Hubble will be even better than 100 percent: The 19-year-old telescope will be more powerful than it has ever been before. Astronauts will go on five spacewalks to install new science instruments, repair old ones and replace key items like batteries and gyroscopes.

The Most Devastating Day

This mission to Hubble was originally supposed to have happened back in 2004. But in 2003, space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its return to Earth, killing the astronauts on board. "We were mourning, but then, beyond mourning, looking ahead, what did that mean for the future of Hubble and our servicing mission?" Leckrone says. "We figured, well, it would cause a two- to three-year postponement, probably." Instead of a delay, NASA's chief decided that astronauts were never going to Hubble again.

"To be told by Administrator [Sean] O'Keefe that he didn't think it was safe enough to do this mission, and he canceled it, was about the most devastating day I've ever had in my life," Leckrone says. Without routine maintenance, Hubble slowly breaks down in the harsh environment of space. Researchers didn't want to lose one of the most famous science instruments ever — one that has transformed their view of the universe. "I don't want to seem arrogant, but I truly believe that a hundred years from now, people will still remember Hubble and what it did," Leckrone says. The science community spent about a year thinking about a repair robot. That idea got the ax, too. But finally, the next NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, did a careful safety analysis and decided that astronauts could take the space shuttle on this last trip to Hubble. "The adrenalin is pumping far higher than it should be right now," Leckrone says. "We should be calmer."

The Next Generation Telescopes

If all goes well, the upgrades and repairs should keep Hubble going until at least 2014. After that, if it breaks, there won't be another repair mission, says Edward Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate. He says NASA is getting ready to retire the space shuttle program, so NASA will have no way of getting to Hubble. And the agency isn't building any new spare parts. "Nothing is being built for further servicing, because to spend money on that would mean we wouldn't be able to build the next generation telescopes," Weiler says.

For example, NASA is currently building the James Webb Space Telescope, a large new observatory that is scheduled to launch in 2014 and will orbit about a million miles from Earth. "As hard as it is for somebody like me who's worked on Hubble for 31 years to say that, you know, 'You've got to let go,' it's time to let go," Weiler says. "Not now. Not three years from now, hopefully not five years from now, maybe seven or eight or nine years from now."

'Hubble Needs A Hug'

NASA has assembled a dream team of astronauts for the Hubble repair. Three of the seven astronauts who will ride on space shuttle Atlantis have come face-to-face with the telescope before. Astrophysicist John Grunsfeld has been to Hubble twice and is glad to be going again. "Hubble needs a hug, and we're ready to go," he says. He notes that every astronaut who goes to Hubble leaves a mark on the observatory. "Even just putting your hand on the telescope affects the surface coating juts a little bit," he says, "and so you can see handprints and things like that, and so it's clear that people have been working on this telescope."

Another astronaut who will do spacewalks and repair work on this mission, Mike Massimino, says he recently saw a good friend who has worked on the Hubble project for a long time. "He said, 'Make sure, your last time on that telescope, you give it a pat for me,' " Massimino says. So, he will give Hubble a special goodbye pat on behalf of all the people who have worked with it. "I hope that that's going to be in my mind as I'm letting go of the telescope for the last time, my one last handshake with it," Massimino says.

The astronauts will spend about a week with Hubble. One of their chores will be to attach a kind of ring that a future spacecraft can dock with, to pull the telescope out of orbit when its long and celebrated life finally comes to an end.

-excerpt from NPR

Economic Indicators: Clowns Want To Get Paid Too!

2009-05-09T07:25:00.001-07:00

Whatever numbers the marketplace and government reports have been cranking out, Mandy Dalton found one economic indicator that matters to her recently in a newspaper story about the bankruptcy of General Growth Properties.

The paper reported that General Growth, the second-largest mall owner in the country, had filed for bankruptcy. It owed billions of dollars to banks, and $200 to her. Dalton's not a bank. She's a clown, a professional clown.

"I make kids laugh, I fall on my butt for a living," she says. "It's great."

Dalton performed at a family fun day at a General Growth mall near Baltimore. Now, if she wants to get paid, she'll have to stand in line with all the other people who say General Growth owes them money.

She has to decide whether it's worth her time to travel to New York City for the creditors' meeting, "where other people are going to be there for, if not millions, certainly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, looking for payment. And I'm supposed to go to the judge and say I want my $200?"

For Dalton, that uncollected pay amounts to the cost of a single pair of clown shoes, Clown-so-port's Funky style. Then there are her other expenses, like liability insurance. What if she's juggling a ball, she says, and it ends up hitting someone in the head?

In Florida, Daniel Cross has an indicator of his own, too. His is five — as in five days. Cross designs electronic circuits, and in January his employer announced a round of unpaid time off. What exactly a furlough says about a company's financial state can be hard to interpret. Cross said he was glad he still had his job and he didn't necessarily mind the time off.

"I'm in the middle of a home renovation project," he said then. "We had a plumbing disaster, so this will give me an opportunity to finish that up."

But by April, the office had become a kind of Dilbert cartoon. "The rumor is that our site is going to be closed," Cross said. Management sent around an e-mail asking the staff to maintain good conduct despite the circumstances. Cross reads the e-mail message:

"All, there is no doubt that we are all living in an uncertain and difficult time, but we can not fall into nonprofessional behaviors, and there are things that cannot be tolerated on company property. For example, marker inscriptions in the boardroom about your career moving into smelly places, cardboard resumes in your cube saying will design circuits for food, sarcastic white board messages, etc."

Then Cross' indicator went from five furlough days to infinity. In April, the business closed up shop and he was out of a job.

-excerpt from NPR

2009-05-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

Inside The New Flu Virus

2009-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

A crash effort to analyze the genes of the swine flu virus has revealed that it first emerged in humans last year — most likely last fall. "The consistent range we're getting out is the second half of last year — between June and December," says Oliver Pybus of Oxford University. "The best estimate is the middle of that range, kind of September."

That means the newly recognized virus has been hiding in plain sight for the past eight months or so. Researchers say it probably had been circulating in Mexico and causing disease there, but its presence was masked by cases of regular flu and the absence of lab tests to identify the newcomer.

A Dizzyingly Complex Virus

Genetic analysis of the swine flu virus is proceeding at a furious pace, abetted by the Internet. The research is not only yielding early insights about the virus's lineage and age, but scientists say the work will also be crucial in tracking how the virus is evolving and what sort of threat it may represent over the coming months. Pybus is one of 11 scientists around the world who've been digging through genetic data on thousands of animal and human flu viruses and sharing it with each other on a new swine flu wiki. This is the fastest a new flu virus has ever been identified and placed on a family tree that's dizzyingly complex.

"This has got to be the way this happens from this point forward," says Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, another member of the spontaneous new collaboration, which includes groups from Hong Kong to Edinburgh and Tucson, Ariz., to Gainesville, Fla.

Where Did The Virus Come From?

The effort has already shed considerable light on where the new-found virus came from and over what period it evolved. Its great-grand-daddy was what flu scientists call a "triple reassortant" — a three-fer virus made up of genes from a seasonal human flu virus of the H3N2 family, a North American bird virus and a classic swine virus.

The three separate viruses got together in a pig somewhere. When all three ancestor viruses infected the same pig cell, that enabled them to swap genes, a trick flu viruses specialize in.

"Pigs are special because they are easily infected with swine viruses, avian viruses and human viruses," says Joan Nichols of the University of Texas in Galveston. "That makes pigs a mixing pot." The pot keeps boiling, genetically speaking, because flu viruses are notoriously mistake-prone as they replicate within a bird or mammalian "host."

"This virus doesn't have a proof-reading mechanism, so it makes a lot of sloppy little mistakes along the way," Nichols says. Some viruses with those "mistakes" survive and thrive because the mutations allow them to spread more efficiently or infect another species. Other mutations cause more severe disease in the virus's hosts.

A Flu Stew

Scientists say the swap meet that gave rise to the newly discovered swine flu virus happened 10 or 20 years ago. That "triple reassortant" spread among swine for years, but it wasn't yet able to spread among people. It acquired that ability only last year, when the old "triple reassortant" combined again with two other pig viruses that circulated in North American and Eurasian swine.

That created the virus that's currently bedeviling the world. The new collaborative group calls it A/California/04/2009 because it was first identified near San Diego in April 2009. It is, in fact, mostly a swine virus with human and bird elements.

Pybus says it really should be called the "gallimaufry" virus. That's a 16th century French word that means "stew" or "hodgepodge."

Finding Clues For Next Flu Season

Scientists will track genetic changes and correlate them with the kinds of disease it causes in the Southern Hemisphere, where the flu season begins this month. So far the swine flu virus has begun to turn up in Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala.

"We're going to be actively monitoring what it does as it moves through the population," says Joan Nichols. "As it turns around and comes back to us in the fall, we'll know much more about it."

If it starts causing severe and fatal disease at a high rate in the Southern Hemisphere, that will be obvious enough. Scientists will quickly analyze viruses from such cases to see if they can identify the genetic changes that correlate with increase virulence.

But unfortunately, the absence of such an obvious signal this summer may not mean the virus won't evolve into a pandemic killer in the fall. That's because researchers know relatively little about the genes that confer virulence.

Jeffrey Taubenberger of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases knows as much about virulence in flu viruses as anyone. He led an effort to reconstruct the killer virus of 1918, which has enabled scientists to probe what made it so dangerous.

Taubenberger says virulence doesn't appear to reside in a particular gene mutation. Instead it comes from the interaction of still-unknown genetic elements, which he calls "a constellation effect."

"Virulence and other behaviors are totally dependent on the overall makeup of the virus," Taubenberger says.

Nichols says the only solution is to watch the newly discovered virus obsessively in the coming months. "Remember," she says, "this virus hasn't stopped. It's just begun."

-excerpt from NPR

Obama, Biden Make A Burger Run

2009-05-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

It's like this: When you want a burger, you have to have a burger.

In this state of mind, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden took a short — but wholly noticeable — motorcade ride from the White House to the nearby Virginia suburb of Arlington and pulled into a small, independent burger joint called Ray's Hell Burger.

The two leaders went right up to the counter where the meat was being grilled and ordered. Each fetched cash from his pocket and paid, and then the pair stood like the rest and waited for their number to be called before going to a table.

The restaurant, which prides itself on premium aged 10-ounce burgers, sits in a small strip plaza. The burgers sell for $6.95.

-excerpt from NPR

Lucha VaVoom: A Singular Cinco De Mayo Sensation

2009-05-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

“There's wrestlers, and little people in chicken suits, and burlesque dancers changing, and everybody's in their underwear. ... It's as close to vaudeville as I think I'll be able to get, unless I find a time machine.”

Latin culture is big in Los Angeles — and on the eve of Cinco de Mayo, one way some Angelenos are planning to celebrate is with a whole lot of Lucha VaVoom. That's the hybrid name for a vaudeville-flavored variety show that's become something of a local sensation — and whose producers are staging one of the larger Cinco de Mayo celebrations in L.A. It's got two key ingredients. First, Lucha: That refers to lucha libre, the distinctly Mexican brand of freestyle wrestling in which masked contenders fly through the air, bounce off the mat and sometimes spill into the crowd. "We get a little bit hurt out there," says a wrestler who goes by the ring name Cassandro. "It's wrestling. It's not a beauty salon."

Lucha VaVoom's wrestling matches are shorter than traditional bouts in Mexico, largely to make way for the other part of the show, namely the VaVoom: American-style burlesque dancers, wearing tassels, peacock feathers and in one case, a giant cupcake. There's a lot of Old Hollywood and striptease in the burlesque part of the show. The wrestlers and dancers take turns on the stage for the two-hour show. Emcees take turns, too, pumping up the crowd in English and Spanish.

"I love being backstage at the theater," says Dana Gould, one of the English-language emcees. He's a comedian and former writer for TV's The Simpsons. "There's wrestlers and little people in chicken suits, and burlesque dancers changing, and everybody's in their underwear. It's really old-time show business. It's as close to vaudeville as I think I'll be able to get, unless I find a time machine."

What's The Appeal? 'Three Very Primal Things'

The show's co-producer, Liz Fairbairn, agrees. "It incorporates three very primal things," she says. "People get blood-lust, and they get lust-lust, and they laugh." Fairbairn, who works a Hollywood day job as a special-effects costume designer, got the idea for Lucha VaVoom when she dated a Mexican wrestler. She followed him around the lucha libre circuit for the better part of a decade, and she thought an American audience would enjoy the spectacle. Co-producer Rita D'Albert brought in what she called "neo-burlesque," and Lucha VaVoom was born. The American following for Lucha VaVoom does include fans of more traditional lucha libre, but there are a lot thrill-seeking hipsters, rockers and artists in their audiences. It's a mixed crowd, mostly Latino and Anglo, that enjoys cheering heartily and drinking heavily.

That diverse and enthusiastic fan base earned Lucha VaVoom a similarly diverse array of corporate sponsors for the Cinco de Mayo celebration. Banners for El Jimador tequila fly alongside historically Anglo-oriented sponsors such as the L.A. Weekly newspaper, KROQ radio and Miller beer. Porfirio Rodriguez, a Milwaukee-based brand manager for Miller Lite, says events like Lucha VaVoom attract an important slice of the Hispanic market that he calls "biculturals." "They're living in more than one world," Rodriguez explains. "We have to talk to them where they live. If we don't, we run the risk of irrelevance."

Lucha VaVoom fan Nicholas Sauceda, who turned up for a recent Ventura show to snag a seat close to the stage, isn't so worried about the larger cultural and marketing implications of the show. He just loves the wrestling and the dancers. "It takes you away from all the things you have to worry about in life," he explains. Indeed: Lucha VaVoom bills what it offers as sexo y violencia — a tried-and-true hybrid for hard times. The troupe has already taken its act to Amsterdam and San Francisco; now, producers are looking to secure the L.A.-based outfit a second home.

In — where else? — Las Vegas.

-excerpt from NPR

Home Alone: Is Your Tween Ready?

2009-05-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

Experts say there's no one-size-fits-all recommendation on the appropriate age to begin leaving adolescents home alone. "There's terrific variation in maturity among kids," says William L. Coleman, professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. If you look to the law for guidance, there are only a few states that set a minimum age for leaving children home alone. In Maryland, "a person has to be 8 years old or older to be left alone," says Lt. Paul Starks of the Montgomery County Police Department. Illinois has a similar law. Yet social norms suggest most parents are not comfortable leaving second- or third-graders home without an adult. In a University of Michigan survey, most parents said it was appropriate to leave children aged 11-12 home alone.

Ground Rules

Brian Ott, a 14-year-old ninth-grader who lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., commutes to high school by himself using public transportation. He's accustomed to the independence now, he says, but when he first began staying home alone in the afternoons two years ago, it was for short periods of time. "My mom came home by about 5:30 or so," he says. And he had clear ground rules:

— A mandatory phone call to his mom when he arrived home.
— No friends in the house when his parents were not there.
— No video games until his homework was finished.

His mother says that when he continued to make good grades, it gave her comfort that he could handle the freedom. "If his grades were going down," says Margie Ott, "I would have to take some of that away." She recalls lots of conversations with parents of Brian's peers, and many discussions with friends and neighbors on the topic. "My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was 13," Ott says. "And there were lots of other moms home. So the neighborhood homes were a little more tightknit back then." So, she says, she was a little more anxious when it came time to leave her kids home alone. There are also the threats within the home, such as access to the Internet. But passwords on the home computer helped limit her son's Internet access. "I did catch him changing the password," says Ott. "So I changed it back and limited access." Experts say devices to track screen time or set allowances can be useful, too. Child development experts say Ott is doing many of the right things. She's keeping lines of communication with her son open, clearly articulating her expectations, and also realizing that part of an adolescent's job is to push.

Risky Business

The conundrum for many parents is that they want to trust their kids to be home alone, yet many recall from their own teen years that inevitable tug toward the forbidden. "They're looking for trouble, and exploring and pushing boundaries" says pediatrician Coleman. "That's normal." It's important for parents to recognize that there's a lot of variability among kids.

Some will push the boundaries in reckless, dangerous ways, like experimenting with sex and drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System says that more than 75 percent of high school students have experimented with alcohol, 38 percent report that they've tried marijuana, and 48 percent have had sex. Coleman says the developing brain tends to get a little reward for risky business. "Getting that rush of adrenaline, and then talking about it to your friends," says Coleman, "that's huge." Coleman says one thing that's helpful for parents in trying to decide whether their kid is ready to be home alone is to figure out where on that scale of risk-taking and responsibility their child might fall.

30 Minutes To Start

Some experts recommend that parents start with some 30-minute trial runs. "Then come back and debrief," and talk about any safety concerns, says Matt Davis, a University of Michigan pediatrician. Simple steps such as knowing neighbors' phone numbers and reviewing emergency procedures are important. And experts say it's also a good idea for parents to establish logical consequences for good and bad behavior in their absence. Ninth-grader Brian Ott says the more he shows his mom he can handle being on his own, the more space she gives him. "When I first started staying home alone, I wasn't allowed to leave the house until my mom got home," says Brian. "Now I can, if I tell her." Margie Ott says she routinely finds herself saying to Brian, "I want to be part of your life. I don't want to control your life, but I want to know what's going on." And increasingly, as trust builds, she says she feels more confident about the freedom that comes with being home alone. It's hard to let go, says Ott. "But it's nice to see that maturity."

-excerpt from NPR

Rain Forest Residents, Texaco Face Off In Ecuador

2009-04-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

A judge is preparing to render a decision in a long-running, multibillion-dollar lawsuit filed by residents of Ecuador's Amazonian rain forest against Texaco for fouling their land. In the lawsuit, filed in 1993, the plaintiffs charge that, throughout the 1970s and '80s, the American oil company so polluted a swath of northern Ecuador that hundreds died of cancer. The defendant, Chevron Corp. — which bought Texaco in 2001 — denies the accusations.

But a court-appointed expert agrees with many of the plaintiffs' charges and has assessed damages at $27 billion. Now, a judge in the small town of Lago Agrio, says he hopes to have a decision before the end of the year. Plaintiffs: A Legacy Of Pollution

Donald Moncayo, an activist who works with the poor farmers and Indian plaintiffs in the case, takes visitors on what he calls "toxic tours."

After tramping through the jungle, Moncayo reaches a huge pool of oily sludge and sticks a long pole into the muck. He says this is a legacy of Texaco's quarter-century in Ecuador: pollution that affects tens of thousands of people who bathe and drink from rain forest waterways. He says mud and other waste produced by drilling and production were dumped in the pit, and the toxins here and in hundreds of similar unlined pits leaked into the ground. A court-appointed geologist, Richard Cabrera, and his 14-member scientific team found barium, lead and other heavy metals in those pits. Chevron disputes Cabrera's findings. The company wants his report thrown out, saying he is biased toward the plaintiffs. All this happened in what was once virgin Amazonian jungle, the world's greatest biosphere and an area that still contains huge oil reserves.

The plaintiffs say Texaco, in 18 years of full-scale production, also dumped wastewater into rivers and that pipeline breaks spilled 17 million gallons of oil. Pablo Fajardo, a 36-year-old lawyer, leads the plaintiffs' team. He grew up poor in the area; this is his first legal case. Fajardo says his side has proved there was damage, that Chevron was responsible and that the company should pay.

Defendants: Texaco Acted Legally

Locally, the case has been called the trial of the century, and some of the hearings have been held in the jungle. Chevron does not dispute that pollution exists. But Chevron lawyer Diego Larrea says it's Petroecuador — the state oil company, which still drills oil in the area — that is responsible for the pollution. Larrea says Texaco adhered to Ecuadorian law. He also says Ecuador's government released the company of legal responsibility after a three-year cleanup a decade ago. In the current trial, the plaintiffs charge that Texaco's cleanup was a fraud, and the current government of Ecuador agrees.

The original suit was filed against Texaco in 1993 in a New York court. But Chevron argued that the case be moved to Ecuador, saying Ecuadorian courts were impartial and professional. In 2003, the trial was moved to a ramshackle court in Lago Agrio, a nondescript, dusty town near Colombia's lawless frontier. The judge in the case, Juan Nunez, says he feels the pressure on his conscience. And he says he has to carefully consider the arguments both sides have offered — arguments laid out in 145,000 pages of evidence. Texaco came to Ecuador in 1964. When it left nearly 30 years later, it had extracted 1.5 billion barrels and built Ecuador's oil industry from scratch.

The infrastructure is everywhere. Pipelines run alongside major roads. Pumping stations are located in clearings, carved out of the jungle. And then there are pools of sludge. The government says Petroecuador is not blameless. It, too, dumped wastewater intro waterways. But the state oil company's past practices do not absolve Texaco, the government says. Texaco was the primary operator for years and the pollution left behind is close to where people live and where children go to school, the government claims.

Health Problems Abound Among Locals

Wilmo Moreta, a schoolteacher in the town of Shushufindi, says he suffered skin rashes and other ailments when Texaco operated in the area. He says he drank water from the Napo river, bathed in it and used its water for cooking. He now blames oil pollution for his problems.

Cabrera's team, though, goes further, linking 1,401 cancer deaths to oil production and laying most of the blame for the pollution on Texaco. Chevron has countered Cabrera, the court-appointed geologist, by releasing a battery of studies that show cancer rates in the area are no higher than in other regions of Ecuador.

Chevron Disputes Report Findings

James Craig, a Chevron spokesman, says that the Cabrera report is "flawed in many ways." "In our view, it's a fraudulent report that we've asked the court to toss out a number of times," he says. Craig also says the methods Texaco's subsidiary, TexPet, used in Ecuador were common in the United States — and still are. Craig says that includes the use of unlined pits to hold sludge. "To suggest that somehow TexPet was using obsolete technology or substandard methods at the time is a complete falsehood," he says. States such as Texas permit unlined pits, but only for temporary use. In such instances, the waste must be disposed of eventually, often by re-injection back into the ground.

Case Wends Its Way Toward Resolution

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa squarely sides with the plaintiffs. He says Texaco left behind a mess. His government is also prosecuting two Chevron attorneys and seven former government officials who signed off on the cleanup in 1998. Correa says that pools operated by Texaco remain open, with little having been cleaned up. Craig, the Chevron spokesman, says Correa's comments show the company can't get a fair hearing — even though it was Chevron that originally petitioned to have the case transferred from the U.S. to Ecuador.

"Unfortunately, the case has deteriorated into a judicial farce, with the media circus put on by the plaintiffs on a regular basis, with the political pressure brought to bear on the court, with the government and political interference in this case," he says. Indeed, Chevron is already talking about a possible appeal should it lose the case. Meanwhile, in the jungle, residents wonder who will clean up the mess — or compensate them for their health problems.

-excerpt from NPR

The Challenge: Constant Current From Fickle Winds

2009-04-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

Like lots of other farmers and ranchers in the northern Plains, Joel Keierleber has been flirting with wind power developers for years. He knows his grassy slopes near Winner, S.D., have world-class wind, but there's always the same hitch: There aren't enough transmission lines to carry the electricity from rural areas like his to the big cities where the electricity is needed. If the country is going to meet President Obama's ambitious green energy goals, the transmission system has to link up the places that offer the best chance of producing lots of clean energy, such as the sunny Southwest and the windy Plains.

Keierleber's property is considered Class 6, or "outstanding," for a wind farm, but it's bone-chilling for people. Even on an early spring day, it feels like it's in the low teens. In the winter, with the wind chill, it can be 80 degrees below zero. "Your face will be numb before you get 10 steps," Keierleber says. "And if it hits you just right, you won't be able to breathe for a little bit. It will take your breath away." Because of all the wind, Keierleber has to feed his cattle more, and his neighbor can't keep siding on his house.

"That's why you want to see wind towers. Then you'll at least see some good out of it," he adds. In Keierleber's large kitchen, he unfolds a map that shows lots of properties near Winner that have been optioned by one wind developer or another. He says one reason ranchers here are so eager is that this place has never been good for farming. He only makes a profit three years out of five.

The latest wind developer to come courting is Scott Conant, from a small Wisconsin company called Prelude Wind Farms. As recently as last fall, Conant had never heard of Winner, but after about 18 trips, he's learned the contour of the land, the speed and consistency of the wind, and the desire of local residents to host wind farms. "I think that there's no doubt this area could be a 1,000-tower project, and maybe more. The whole package is right here," Conant says.

The Wind's There, But The Power Lines Aren't

Well almost. The only thing it lacks, Conant adds, is transmission lines.

One evening last month, Conant and another wind developer joined a couple hundred farmers and ranchers at Winner Middle School to hear a pitch from a transmission company called ITC Holdings Corp.

For more than a decade, wind developers have been salivating over windy places like this, but balked at building turbines without transmission lines. And utilities wouldn't string the lines without the wind farms. ITC wants to break that impasse, with a $12 billion transmission project.

"Who comes first, the generation or the line? That's been the problem that's probably plagued the transmission industry for the last 30 years. And that's why no transmission has been built," says Joe Dudak, a vice president of ITC, which is based in Novi, Mich. "We think you build it first, and you're there the same time the wind energy is there."

ITC's project would carry 12,000 megawatts of electricity from the northern Plains to Chicago and points east. That's enough electricity to power about 4.5 million homes. Dudak says the current grid is not up to the job of bringing green power to millions of homes and businesses — it's a patchwork of transmission lines strung decades ago by utilities — mostly connecting big polluting power plants to local customers.

"There is no superhighway system, and there's not enough room right now. The system is terribly constrained right now," he says.

Dudak hopes that concerns about climate change and new laws that mandate clean power will translate into a green light. "It's possible we can be breaking ground in two years," he says.

Jumping Hurdles To Wind Development

ITC already passed its first hurdle with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but it still needs lots of money and federal and state approvals to build its piece of a transmission superhighway, which it calls the green power express.

ITC is also awaiting an analysis from the Midwestern Independent Transmission System Operator, which is like an air traffic control tower for the electric grid in 13 states.

At the Midwest ISO's control room in Carmel, Ind., talk of a major increase in wind power sends chills down the spine of Rob Benbow, a grid manager. Before dawn on a spring morning, Benbow and a few dozen grid operators are shouting electricity jargon at each other in front of a massive curved screen that's 20 feet high and 150 feet long.

As people in the Midwest wake up and turn on coffee makers and hair dryers, the operators make sure enough power is being generated to match the surge in demand. A warning signal alerts them that a power plant has unexpectedly turned off. This time, it is someone else's problem. But Benbow worries that when wind power makes up a significant portion of his grid's electricity, managing it will cause him frequent problems.

Unpredictable Wind Makes Power Management Tough

"My biggest fear is if you see 20 percent wind on your system, and then it comes off at a time period where you don't have resources to replace it — that's going to, could, result in a blackout situation," he says.

Wind power is not predictable. That morning, the wind is steadily producing about 3,000 megawatts — about 5 percent of the total power being used in the region. But Benbow says he's seen wind power become increasingly variable as more wind farms come on line. And grid operators can't order wind plants to produce like they can other power plants.

"If the wind is not blowing, you just don't have that resource available," he says. And when the wind is blowing, it can be hard to make wind turbines shut down. "A lot of these plants are not manned — if we need to turn them off, we have to send a person out to actually do that," he says.

Lots of other things about wind frustrate the Benbows of the world — wind blows hardest at night when electricity demand is lowest, there currently aren't ways to store wind for later use, and you can't count on it on hot summer days when you need it most. "You can put all that wind in, but I still need to have all this other generation that I need to have available — all my coal, nuclear, all the gas — for my peak load day," Benbow adds. So when Benbow thinks about the new wind turbines and new transmission lines carrying their energy toward his control room, he sees more than clean energy. He also sees a lot of headaches coming his way.

Tips For Preventing Swine Flu

2009-04-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

As it investigates recent incidents of swine influenza in humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stressing prevention.

The agency has posted several Web pages dealing with swine flu, including a list of what you can do to forestall this — or any — infectious disease.

The CDC recommends taking these everyday precautions:

• Avoid contact with people if you, or they, are sick.

• Stay at home — from work, school or other public activities — when you are ill.

• Shield others from your coughs and sneezes by using a tissue.

• Wash your hands often.

• Keep your hands away from your eyes, nose or mouth.

• Maintain healthful habits — get ample sleep and exercise, drink fluids, eat well.

Currently, there's no vaccine for humans that prevents swine flu, though scientists are working on one. But there is a vaccine for some forms of swine flu in pigs.

Which suggests one more precaution particular to this outbreak: Avoid unnecessary contact with live pigs. (It's safe to eat pork, but not pet a pig.) But that alone may not roadblock the spread of swine flu this time around. In pigs, this virus causes a respiratory illness that's highly contagious, but usually not fatal.

As seen with bird flu, people coming into contact with infected animals occasionally become sick themselves — but the virus usually stops there. Rarely have humans infected other humans with bird flu — or swine flu. With the current swine flu outbreak, the swine flu virus has transformed, appearing to increase its ability to spread between humans.

"We've seen swine influenza in humans over the past several years, and in most cases, it's come from direct pig contact. This seems to be different," Arnold Monto, a flu researcher with the University of Michigan, told the Associated Press. "I think we need to be careful and not apprehensive, but certainly paying attention to new developments as they proceed."

At this point, the CDC and other government organizations are focusing on getting the message out to individuals about how to respond to the threat of influenza. Public health officials are monitoring the various cases and conducting epidemiological research on the virus.

"If the outbreak turns into a full blown epidemic," says Andrew Pekosz, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Health at Johns Hopkins University, "the government will have the right to place limitations on travel and gatherings of groups of individuals." Schools may be closed or sporting events canceled, Pekosz says, and officials will implement quarantine procedures for hotspots of cases and begin distribution of antiviral drugs.

All these steps, Pekosz says, are necessary "to limit the epidemic and slow virus spread."

Jeanne Matthews, an assistant professor at the Georgetown University School of Nursing and Health Studies, says health officials are "so dependent on whether it appears that community containment might halt person to person contact. This is a new strain. I don't think we know enough about this flu to have a sense of when that should be."

-excerpt for NPR

GM To Cut 21,000 Jobs, Scrap Pontiac

2009-04-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

General Motors Corp. said it will cut 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year, phase out its storied Pontiac brand and ask the government to take stock in exchange for half GM's government debt as part of a major restructuring effort that would leave current shareholders holding just 1 percent of the company. The struggling automaker said it will offer 225 shares of common stock for every $1,000 in notes held by bondholders as part of a debt-for-equity swap that aims to retire most of GM's $27 billion in unsecured debt.

The announcements came in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. GM is living on $15.4 billion in government loans and faces a June 1 deadline to restructure and get more government money. If the restructuring doesn't satisfy the government, the company could go into bankruptcy protection. GM said in a news release that it will ask the government to take 50 percent of its common stock in exchange for canceling half the government loans to the company as of June 1. In addition, GM is offering the United Auto Workers stock for at least 50 percent of the $20 billion the company must pay into a union run trust that will take over retiree health care expenses starting next year.

Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson said the objective of the bond exchange is to reduce GM's $27 billion of outstanding debt by about $24 billion. The company estimates that after the exchange, bondholders would own 10 percent of the company. All the stock offerings mean that current common stockholders would own only 1 percent of the company under the deals, GM said. In a statement, the president's auto industry task force called the announcement "an important step in GM's effort to restructure its company.

"We will continue to work with GM's management as it refines and finalizes this plan and with all of GM's stakeholders to help GM restructure consistent with the President's commitment to a strong, vibrant American auto industry. "The Administration has made no final decision regarding the treatment of its current loan to GM or with respect to any future investments in the company," the task force said. GM said it would speed up six additional factory closings that were announced in February, although it did not identify them in its news release. Additional salaried jobs cuts also are coming, beyond the 3,400 in the U.S. completed last week. Including previously announced plant closures, the restructuring will leave GM with 34 factories at the end of next year, down from 47 at the end of 2008.

The company also said it plans to thin its dealership ranks by 42 percent from 2008 to 2010, cutting them from 6,246 to 3,605. "The Viability Plan reflects the direction of President Obama and the U.S. Treasury that GM should go further and faster on our restructuring," Henderson said in a statement. "This stronger, leaner business model will enable GM to keep doing what it does best — provide great new cars, trucks and crossovers to our customers, and continue to develop new advanced propulsion technologies that are vital for our country's economy and environment."

The new plan lowers GM's break-even point in North America to an annual U.S. sales volume of 10 million vehicles, the company said. That's slightly more than the current sales rate, and most economists expect an uptick in the second half of the year. "This lower break-even point better positions GM to generate positive cash flow and earn an adequate return on capital over the course of a normal business cycle, a requirement set forth by the U.S. Treasury," the statement said.

The company said it would phase out its storied Pontiac brand no later than next year, and the futures of its Hummer, Saturn and Saab brands will be resolved by the end of this year by either selling them or phasing them out. Henderson said in a news conference that the company was spread too thin to make Pontiac work. "We didn't think we had the resources to get this done from a product perspective," or marketing, he said Monday at a news conference. He said the decision was very tough for many at GM because of the brand's heritage.

Henderson said GM wants to develop a plan that doesn't have to be repeated. "We only want to do this once," he told reporters.

-excerpt from NPR

Few Uninsured Willing To Pay Full Cost For Coverage

2009-04-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

Some people can't buy health insurance because they have a pre-existing medical condition. But for most of the nation's 47 million uninsured, cost is the big obstacle — especially if they don't work for a company that pays part of the premium. And even if they could find an affordable health plan, many are not used to building that cost into their monthly budget. Potential sticker shock is emerging as a key issue in the nation's debate over whether everybody should be covered.

A new national poll, conducted by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, shows that what most uninsured people are willing to pay is a long way from what insurance really costs. Two out of three uninsured Americans say they'd be willing to pay no more than $100 a month for coverage. But, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average individual health plan costs about $400 a month, and a family policy costs more than $1,000.

Ann Notzelman, 48, of Flemington, N.J., knows she can't get health insurance for $100 a month. But she says that's all she can afford on an annual income of less than $20,000. "Right now, I'm in between jobs," Notzelman says. "And that's mainly why I can't afford to dish out the money that they'd want, you know? Because the cheapest plan I think I've seen was somewhere like in the $300 range." Notzelman worries about her lack of coverage every day.

"Actually, I'm a little concerned with a lump that I have," she says. "I know, it's not good — because my mother had breast cancer — so that's why I'm a little concerned, you know?" Notzelman represents a big part of the problem Washington policymakers are grappling with when it comes to the uninsured. There's little doubt low-income people like her would need substantial subsidies under any plan for universal coverage.

But a more difficult issue is whether middle-class Americans will need subsidies to buy coverage if their companies don't pay a chunk of the premium. Massachusetts has experience with that problem. It's the first state to require nearly everybody to have health insurance. Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, says Massachusetts is the first real-world test of how Americans respond when they are told they must buy health insurance. "Literally, we didn't know whether people in Massachusetts would say 'Hell no, I won't go' or go to New Hampshire or Rhode Island, or they would participate in the program," Altman says.

So far it seems to be working. If you make up to $33,000 a year, Massachusetts subsidizes your coverage. People who make more than that have to pay out of their own pockets. Only about 15 percent of the uninsured — about 75,000 people — have asked to be exempted. "What we've seen over the years is that people really want health insurance," Altman says. "They will struggle and stretch the family budget to get it and hang onto it." But the new poll finds some uninsured people who make good money say they can't afford health insurance on their own. James Brancatelli is one of the 29 percent of uninsured people who told pollsters he would be willing to pay more — but only $200 a month, tops.

"I haven't had insurance for the past four years," Brancatelli said as he made his rounds in Tucson, Ariz., delivering pharmaceuticals. He's self-employed. "Unfortunately, if I want health care, I have to purchase it myself," he says. "And unfortunately, for me and my wife, it is about $400 a month." He and his wife, Kimberly, have put off having a baby because of the cost. "We've looked into that," he says. "And to have a child, it'll roughly cost us about $30,000 without having insurance. So it's crazy." He says a hospital told them the charge for the labor and delivery room alone would be $7,000.

Massachusetts has tried to come up with affordable plans for people with middle-class incomes. When Brancatelli's information was entered into a government Web site to see what he could buy if he lived there, there were 19 plans in the Boston area for people like him. The cheapest one, which has deductibles and co-payments but prescription drug coverage, would cost the Brancatellis $615 a month. "That still would probably be out of my price range," he says.

The Brancatellis make $80,000 a year. Their fixed expenses total $3,500 a month. After gas, food and other expenses, he says, there's not much left. Under Massachusetts' rules, the Brancatellis would be expected to pay 10 percent of their income for health insurance. That's about $670 a month. "If there were some subsidy for that, we would have no problem with that, you know?" he says. "But since we don't have that, we just can't afford to put out $8,000 to $10,000 a year for health coverage." MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber, who sits on the board of the new Massachusetts health insurance agency, says if everybody's going to be covered, some people will have to get used to the idea of paying more than they think they can.

"To my mind, the biggest gain from national health insurance is not necessarily in terms of improving health," Gruber says. "There's just a huge benefit in not having to go to bed at night worried about whether you're going to wake up with cancer and therefore go bankrupt." Gruber says the nation needs to create a "culture of health insurance," as Massachusetts has begun to do, where people think it's as much a part of the budget as car payments and utility bills.

-excerot from NPR

Carved Success: Sam Maloof's Handmade Life

2009-04-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Sam Maloof was born in Chino, Calif., to immigrants from Douma, a lovely Mediterranean village in the mountains of what was then Syria and is now Lebanon. To woodworkers, 93-year-old Maloof is an icon. He has won a MacArthur "genius grant," and he's credited with helping to launch the California modern arts movement. His elegantly minimalist furniture has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Right now, though, Maloof is shuffling around his shop, frustrated. Just released from of the hospital, he's under strict doctors' orders to not pick up a tool.

Maloof taught himself how to woodwork after serving in World War II and marrying his wife, Alfreda. "She bought a little tract house for $4,200, which now is probably worth about $400,000," Maloof chuckles. "It didn't have a lot of furniture in it. Plywood floors, no carpeting or anything. And so I put rugs down, and then I found a lot of scrap wood, and I made furniture out of it for the house." Back then, no one designed furniture specifically for tract houses. Maloof was onto something new that fit California's evolving design aesthetic. At a moment when most Americans were enthralled with mass market, factory-manufactured goods, Maloof was turning away, toward the handmade. He became friends with potters and people who made stained glass. They were a community, then a movement. Maloof says making things by hand is part of his family legacy.

"My mother did beautiful lacework, just beautiful lacework — and they peddled it," he reminisced. "That's how they started. They were peddlers." Eventually, Maloof's parents opened a department store in Chino. They were the town's only Arab family. He says their ethnicity was never a problem, partly because of his mother's warmth and charisma — he remembers her giving away vegetables from the family garden during the Depression — but also because no one knew how to class them racially or ethnically. As he remembers it, they got along with everyone.

Today, Maloof's home is a state-designated historic landmark, nestled in the green-gray foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. The hand-built redwood building is open Thursdays and Saturdays for public tours. Maloof built his house room by room as he earned money for materials. It glows like an ember — its pink and orange walls lit through golden glass. And it's warm with wood, from the buttery swirl of bird's-eye maple to the dark chocolate of burnished walnut. The house boasts a world-class collection of Pueblo pottery, tribal masks, antique carousel horses, wood prints, oil paintings, kachina dolls — all jostling for space with Maloof's spare, sculptural furniture. "That would look great in my house," says visitor Janet Jensen, eying a handsome Tasmanian eucalyptus burl table. Maloof carved it, as he does all his furniture, freehand with a band saw. It can be terrifying to watch.

Jeremy Adamson curated a Maloof retrospective at the Smithsonian, and he's written a book about the artist. He says Maloof's instincts come from decades of experience, but also from a deep, almost spiritual connection between material and man. "All the parts come together in a very rational way, but they meet each other in such joyful connection," he says. "There seems to be a pleasure that the leg fits the chair. They're happy to be together. It's as if they really have grown together." When Maloof was still struggling to support his family, he turned down several lucrative offers to mass-produce his furniture — on principle. The black sheep of the family who never went to college now has three honorary degrees.

Maloof has said that when making furniture, start with the legs: They're like values, principles, beliefs. Choosing the arms is like choosing friends. And the seat keeps you upright, steady and looking ahead to your goals and your future. Those sound like ideas a woodworker could have learned from two young immigrants who came from Douma more than a hundred years ago.

-excerpt from NPR