Ïîïóëÿðíûå ñîîáùåíèÿ

суббота

Sarah and Yael Levintin raised their wine glasses to the sky and toasted the Iron Dome system that had just been deployed outside Israel's commercial center.

The two sisters decided to leave their apartment Friday evening after two rockets fired into the Tel Aviv area were successfully intercepted by the system.

"We had stayed home all day because we didn't want to take the chance that, you know, we'd be away from the bomb shelter," said Yael Levintin. "We aren't used to war. I guess we are kinda babies about it."

Enlarge Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Israeli civilians run for cover during a rocket attack launched from from Gaza on Saturday in Tel Aviv, Israel.

It's the sort of juxtaposition that often arises at this time of year: novel adaptations arriving in droves at movie theaters, hunting for Oscar nominations.

J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical The Hobbit and Yann Martel's lifeboat adventure Life of Pi are coming soon, and this week Leo Tolstoy's romantic tragedy Anna Karenina goes head to head with Matthew Quick's romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook.

Quick's novel centers on Pat, a bipolar guy sprung by his mom from a mental institution before he's quite ready, who has a theory that his life is a movie written and produced by God. In David O. Russell's film, God gets left out of the mix. But Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, still has plenty of theories.

"This is what I believe to be true," he says at one point. "You have to do everything you can, you have to work your hardest, and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

Silver linings, of course, come with clouds, and Pat has plenty scudding through his life: He is living with his folks because his wife, with whom he's determined to reconnect, got a restraining order against him. And he's a chip off the old block: His bookmaking dad (Robert De Niro) is obsessive-compulsive, especially when it comes to the Philadelphia Eagles.

And against the advice of his therapist (the stellar Anupam Kher), Pat is not taking his medication — a point that provides a conversation-starter when he meets Tiffany, a recent widow who's just as fragile (and formerly medicated) as he is.

Enlarge The Weinstein Company

Bradley Cooper stars as a bipolar high school teacher in Silver Linings Playbook.

David Petraeus' resignation from the CIA further complicated the debate over the September attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Petraeus, a key figure in the events, stepped down as director after admitting to an extramarital affair. But members of Congress were so anxious to hear from him that they brought Petraeus back to Capitol Hill Friday to get his version of the Benghazi story.

President Obama's critics say there's lots about Benghazi that reflect poorly on his administration, but this week they focused on comments by United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice on TV talk shows, five days after the attack.

While the closed hearings have answered some questions, the flurry of concerns is far from settled.

What Ambassador Rice Said

In interviews, Rice said the attack began as a "spontaneous" demonstration prompted by anger over an anti-Muslim video and that "extremists" only joined later. Four Americans were killed, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

Some Republicans are so outraged by Rice's failure to blame al-Qaida that they said this week they'll block her from becoming secretary of state, if Obama nominates her. That angered the president, who in a news conference Wednesday vigorously defended Rice's TV comments.

"She made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her," he said.

So the White House sent Rice out on those Sunday shows, and Rice was given talking points. But the explanation she gave has since changed.

Intelligence officials now say the Benghazi attack was not spontaneous, and they think an al-Qaida offshoot was behind it.

The discrepancy in the accounts raised a number of questions this week: Did Rice, at the behest of the White House, deliberately downplay the Benghazi attack?

Who approved the talking points that guided her comments? If it was Petraeus, was it only because he knew he was under an FBI investigation and was hoping to stay out of trouble with the White House?

Related NPR Stories

The Two-Way

Petraeus Supports White House On Post-Benghazi Accounts, Lawmakers Say

Fresh off his re-election, a politically fortified President Obama summoned the top four congressional leaders to the White House Friday for the first of what could be many rounds of talks for a deal to avert fiscal calamity.

The meeting was part of the opening moves to keep the nation from sailing over the so-called fiscal cliff — those across-the-board tax hikes and deep spending cuts set to kick in at year's end.

In welcoming the quartet of lawmakers, Obama struck a conciliatory note.

"Our challenge is to make sure that we are able to cooperate together, work together, find some common ground, make some tough compromises, build some consensus to do the people's business," he said.

But any deal reached to prevent the fiscal plunge may prove a hard sell on Capitol Hill.

Revenue's 'On The Table'

The president had already made clear at his news conference Wednesday that he has one bottom line as this high-stakes bargaining begins.

"What I have told leaders privately as well as publicly is that we cannot afford to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy," he said.

Obama took that same stance two years ago, but ultimately relented. This time, backed by a renewed mandate and polls that support his position, he says that won't happen.

And House Speaker John Boehner, who scotched a revenue-raising deal with the president last year, emerged from Friday's meeting on a very different note.

"To show our seriousness, we've put revenue on the table, as long as it's accompanied by significant spending cuts," he said.

Related NPR Stories

It's All Politics

Obama And Lawmakers' Confidence About Avoiding Cliff Isn't Universal

BP will pay nearly $1.3 billion for crimes associated with its 2010 drilling rig accident and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On top of that, the company will pay more than $3 billion to settle claims from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Steve Inskeep talks to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray about going over the fiscal cliff. As the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Murray helped the Democrats maintain their Senate majority. She has said that if Republicans do not agree to let tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 per year, the country should go over the fiscal cliff.

Whenever there's a disaster, people want to give, and Hurricane Sandy is no exception. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, U.S. charities collected more than $174 million in donations as of Nov. 9 to help respond to the storm.

But it's not only money that has been pouring in. Relief programs have also received mountains of clothes, food and other supplies, not all of which are needed.

Enlarge Pam Fessler/NPR

Volunteers sort through donated clothes in Sea Bright, N.J.

пятница

BP will pay nearly $1.3 billion for crimes associated with its 2010 drilling rig accident and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On top of that, the company will pay more than $3 billion to settle claims from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cross-border violence escalated between the Israeli military and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But there's also a messaging war taking place on Twitter, with both sides live-tweeting their military operations. Host Michel Martin discusses the implications with NPR's senior strategist Andy Carvin and Greg Myre, NPR digital editor for international news.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Splendid Table is a show for people who love to eat. Every week, on many public radio stations, Lynne and guests give recipes, history lessons and background on various edibles. And on Thanksgiving Day, she does a live two-hour call-in show, helping listeners with the Big Meal. Sometimes Lynne gets desperate callers — but she seems able to calm them down.

"We save just about anything," Kasper says. "I'm not saying it's always the greatest save, but we give it a shot"

Kasper is fearless! My favorite part of her weekly taped show is a feature she calls "Stump the Cook." (The Car Talk guys do "Stump the Chumps," but Lynne has better manners.) Here's how her "Stump the Cook" works:

Enlarge APM/NPR

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of The Splendid Table (left) wasn't fooled by Susan Stamberg's attempt to play "Stump the Cook" with the ingredients for her (in)famous cranberry relish recipe.

On Thursday, we heard the Israeli viewpoint on the current fighting. On Friday, Melissa Block talked with Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister for Hamas in Gaza.

It's no secret that, in many parts of the world, children don't experience what affluent Westerners would term "childhood." Still, even the most hardened documentary buffs may be dumbfounded by Buffalo Girls, a look at two 8-year-old Thai girls who support their respective families.

They do so by hitting each other in the head.

Stam and Pet compete in Muay Thai, a form of boxing in which kicking as well as punching is allowed. As depicted in fictional action movies, Muay Thai is both graceful and brutal. Practiced by 8-year-olds, it's neither.

Stam and Pet are not seriously injured in the bouts filmed here, although one adult observer acknowledges that broken arms and legs are fairly common among Thailand's 30,000 — yes, 30,000 — child boxers.

Enlarge 108 Media

Stam Sor Con Lek fights to support her family. Her winnings go toward completing their half-finished house.

Steve Inskeep has the Last Word in business.

The week after Election Day is full of surprises, with news of scandal enveloping top Gens. David Petraeus and John Allen. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney reflects on his loss and what he calls Obama's "gifts" to the electorate, while the president pledges not to overreach in his second term.

Join NPR's Ron Elving and guest host Liz Halloran for the latest political roundup.

 

It's the sort of juxtaposition that often arises at this time of year: novel adaptations arriving in droves at movie theaters, hunting for Oscar nominations.

J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical The Hobbit and Yann Martel's lifeboat adventure Life of Pi are coming soon, and this week Leo Tolstoy's romantic tragedy Anna Karenina goes head to head with Matthew Quick's romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook.

Quick's novel centers on Pat, a bipolar guy sprung by his mom from a mental institution before he's quite ready, who has a theory that his life is a movie written and produced by God. In David O. Russell's film, God gets left out of the mix. But Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, still has plenty of theories.

"This is what I believe to be true," he says at one point. "You have to do everything you can, you have to work your hardest, and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

Silver linings, of course, come with clouds, and Pat has plenty scudding through his life: He is living with his folks because his wife, with whom he's determined to reconnect, got a restraining order against him. And he's a chip off the old block: His bookmaking dad (Robert De Niro) is obsessive-compulsive, especially when it comes to the Philadelphia Eagles.

And against the advice of his therapist (the stellar Anupam Kher), Pat is not taking his medication — a point that provides a conversation-starter when he meets Tiffany, a recent widow who's just as fragile (and formerly medicated) as he is.

Enlarge The Weinstein Company

Bradley Cooper stars as a bipolar high school teacher in Silver Linings Playbook.

Czars.

It was fun to call American sports commissioners czars, but once players started to have unions, a commissioner really became more like a majority leader in a legislature, trying to keep his party — the owners — together in their financial battles against the minority opposition, the athletes.

Curiously, commissioners have all been in the news lately, if in different ways. David Stern announced that he'll retire in 2014 after 30 years running the NBA. Stern has been the most accomplished commissioner ever because he took the NBA from off-Broadway onto the Great White Way. Yes, it sure helped that Larry and Magic took off, then followed by Michael. You see, precisely: marquee first-name stars who just happened to have teams attached to them. But Stern knew how to milk that celebrity-first angle and, also, he knows when to leave the party.

Are you listening, Bud Selig? Stop being coy. Give us your sell-by date. So many sports bosses — czars, owners and coaches; Pete Rozelle, Al Davis, Bobby Bowden — have tarnished their achievements by overstaying their welcome; but in fact, Selig might have done his best work most recently.

Still, he's always been better at boardroom machinations than polishing the diamond. Buddy didn't see the steroids pumping up the pastime, and now he doesn't see that there are too many strikeouts sucking the action from the game. Excuse me, but a swing and a miss is just not appointment viewing.

Gary Bettman is front and center, locking out his skaters once again. The NHL commissioner, like his baseball and basketball counterparts, always has to deal with the big market/small market franchise divide, and hockey has the additional problem of its sport being indigenously beloved up north, but just an alien hard sell down south.

So Bettman has the hardest job. But he's got a good memory. The last time there was a lockout the NHL lost a whole season, but hockey fans are so famously loyal, they still came back like sheep. That's why there's no hockey now, because Bettman and the owners remembered that hockey fans are dependable suckers.

It's a good lesson for fans of all sports. If they take your game away, take your time coming back to the games.

Now, the NFL has no major financial concerns. Good grief, its dopiest small franchise, Jacksonville, sold for three-quarters of a billion dollars.

No, Roger Goodell's problem is simply that his sport has been revealed as a brain buster for his fungible gladiators. In 25 percent of Sunday's games, a quarterback was knocked out with a concussion. He talks about safety, but then Goodell ballyhoos Thursday night games for the walking wounded and he wants an extended 18-game schedule.

Ultimately, Goodell is a proprietor of a blood-and-guts show, so he has the trickiest act as commissioner. Because balance sheets are one thing, but balancing employee safety with box office is another.

 

The next victim of the foreclosure crisis could be the Federal Housing Administration. The agency is on the verge of burning through its cash reserves and will eventually ask for taxpayer assistance, according to Rep. Spencer Bachus, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. The FHA insures many of the nation's low-down-payment mortgages.

The next victim of the foreclosure crisis could be the Federal Housing Administration. The agency is on the verge of burning through its cash reserves and will eventually ask for taxpayer assistance, according to Rep. Spencer Bachus, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. The FHA insures many of the nation's low-down-payment mortgages.

четверг

The titular altar boys would probably enjoy Funeral Kings. The first feature from sibling filmmakers Kevin and Matthew McManus has most everything the average adolescent boy wants: swearing, smoking, swearing, gun violence, swearing and cute girls. And swearing.

They'd likely emerge from the cinema — provided they'd found a means of sneaking into the R-rated screening — quoting the most profane lines and complaining that none of the aforementioned cute girls took off their shirts. This is what teenage boys do — and that headlong hormonal rush toward what boys perceive as the benefits of adulthood is what the brothers McManus capture here with candor and occasional hilarity.

Set in a small Rhode Island town circa the early '00s — the few mobile phones are of the clamshell variety, and a still-operational video store plays an integral part in the plot — the film follows a trio of Catholic middle-schoolers and miscreants-in-the-making who have scored the prime church assignment of weekday funeral duty. This gets them out of classes from time to time, and once the services are done, they skip out for the rest of the day.

They've got a pretty standard routine established — of slacking and cheating the local Chinese buffet on its all-you-can-eat lunch special — until the oldest of the trio, Bobby (Brandon Waltz), shows up at Andy's (Dylan Hartigan) house late one night to drop off a padlocked footlocker for safekeeping before speeding off into the darkness.

Enlarge Freestyle Releasing

Andy (Dylan Hartigan) must convince a pious fellow altar boy not to give away the details of their afternoons playing hooky.

Republicans claim President Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy will cost the economy 700,000 jobs. Another study from the Congressional Budget Office puts the number of lost jobs as 200,000. But both studies also assume millions of new jobs will be created.

Audie Cornish talks with Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesars, which operates 52 casinos around the world in seven countries. They talk about what he would like to see from the Obama administration over the coming months, and thoughts on the looming "fiscal cliff." The White House hosted a roundtable of CEOs on Wednesday.

Oil giant BP is preparing to plead guilty to criminal misconduct related to the 2010 Gulf spill. The deal is set to be announced in New Orleans Thursday.

среда

In Mexico City's most prominent tree-lined park, you can find statues to such international heroes as Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King and now Heydar Aliyev. He's the Soviet-era autocrat of Azerbaijan. Its government paid for the park's latest statue and restoration of a nearby plaza. The gilded gift has upset many in the capital and is causing headaches for Mexico City's outgoing mayor.

Audie Cornish and Melissa Block read emails from listeners about celebrity chef Alton Brown's tips on cooking the perfect Thanksgiving turkey.

A second term means some new Cabinet appointments for President Obama, including at the Treasury. After four pretty grueling years, Secretary Timothy Geithner has made it clear he will be leaving Washington.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said last week that Geithner would be staying on through the inauguration. He's also expected to be a "key participant" in "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

The Treasury secretary was arguably the most important Cabinet post in the first Obama administration. Secretary Geithner had wobbly banks, auto bailouts and the Great Recession on his plate. The next secretary will face big challenges too, beginning with the "fiscal cliff" and working with Republicans to craft a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction.

It's not surprising that there's been a lot of talk about Erskine Bowles as a replacement for Geithner. Bowles chaired the president's deficit reduction panel, the Simpson-Bowles commission. Speaking on Charlie Rose's show last March, Bowles outlined the content of a good budget deal.

"Any of them that don't address defense, any of them that don't address Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and don't reform the tax code and aren't balanced in some way between that, aren't serious," he said.

Bowles was a chief of staff for President Clinton. He's also a former investment banker and is popular with Republicans and on Wall Street. But he's criticized President Obama's budget publicly while praising Paul Ryan's.

A more likely choice might be Jack Lew, the current White House chief of staff and formerly the president's budget director. In April 2011, he discussed overhauling Social Security:

"It's never really moved the debate forward for one side or another to put a plan out there. It's only really worked well when the parties come together; that's what happened in 1983," he said.

Lew worked on that 1983 Social Security fix as an aide to House Speaker Tip O'Neill. He has Capitol Hill experience and the budget expertise to tackle the big issues that are on the Treasury's plate. And he's got a good working relationship with the president.

 

President Obama held his first full dress press conference since his reelection last week and since March of this year on Wednesday.

With the election settled, Washington and Wall Street are focused on whether Congress and a re-elected president can avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff." Renee Montagne talks to David Wessel, economics editor of "The Wall Street Journal," about the automatic budget cuts and tax hikes that would happen if an agreement can't be reached by early in the new year.

It's a cold March night in New York, and journalist Susannah Cahalan is watching PBS with her boyfriend, trying to relax after a difficult day at work. He falls asleep, and wakes up moments later to find her having a seizure straight out of The Exorcist. "My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened," Cahalan writes. "I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth."

It's hard to imagine a scenario more nightmarish, but for Cahalan the worst was yet to come. In 2009, the New York Post reporter, then 24, was hospitalized after — there's really no other way to put it — losing her mind. In addition to the violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia and fierce paranoia. Cahalan spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family, before doctors diagnosed her with a rare autoimmune disorder. "Her brain is on fire," one doctor tells her family. "Her brain is under attack by her own body."

Cahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing about her monthlong hospitalization — it's a merciful kind of amnesia that most people, faced with the same illness, would embrace. But the best reporters never stop asking questions, and Cahalan is no exception. In Brain on Fire, the journalist reconstructs — through hospital security videotapes and interviews with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life — her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The result is a kind of anti-memoir, an out-of-body personal account of a young woman's fight to survive one of the cruelest diseases imaginable. And on every level, it's remarkable.

The best journalists prize distance and objectivity, so it's not surprising that the most difficult subject for a news writer is probably herself. And although she's young, Cahalan belongs firmly to the old school of reporters — she writes with an incredible sense of toughness and a dogged refusal to stop digging into her past, even when it profoundly hurts. One of the most moving moments in Brain on Fire comes when Cahalan, preparing a New York Post article about her illness, watches videos of herself in the hospital. She's horrified, but finds that she can't look away. "I was outrageously skinny. Crazed. Angry," she writes. "I had the intense urge to grab the videos and burn them or at least hide them away, safe from view."

Julie Stapen/Free Press

Susannah Cahalan is a reporter and book reviewer at the New York Post.

"PIGS" are a hot topic in Germany's capital.

Attend any press briefing about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is going to solve the European debt crisis and you're likely to hear that acronym, which stands for "Portugal, Ireland (or Italy), Greece and Spain."

But recently, pigs of an altogether different variety made headlines in Berlin.

Four people were injured — including a policeman — when a 265-pound wild boar attacked them in the Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg in late October. The police officer shot and killed the animal, which had been injured while crossing a busy highway.

Shocked residents said that they'd seen boars in the nearby park, but didn't know they were dangerous. Some residents squealed on neighbors, accusing them of throwing food from their balconies to the pigs. Feeding wild boars in Berlin is illegal and offenders face fines of up to $6,500.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR

Wild boar, shown here inside an enclosure in a Berlin city park, are considered smart and quickly learn how to avoid hunters.

Publishers, reporters and authors gathered Tuesday at the New School in New York City to celebrate this year's exceptional nominees for the National Book Awards. NPR recorded the 10 nominated authors for fiction and nonfiction reading from their works. These 10 books — which tell the stories of a young drug smuggler, lovable philanderers, holograms in the Saudi desert, and more — inspired, informed and entertained readers in 2012.

Fiction Nominees

Linda Wertheimer and Steve Inskeep have the Last Word in business.

Aatish Taseer is the author of Stranger to History.

Hindus from New Jersey to New Delhi are celebrating Diwali. The holiday has its own traditions, customs, and most importantly, food. Host Michel Martin speaks with writer and cookbook author Anupy Singla about the dishes she's bringing to the table for this year's Diwali celebration.

The dust hadn't settled on Tuesday's election when people started talking about the fiscal cliff, the expiration of tax cuts and automatic spending cuts set to hit at the start of the year. The fiscal cliff will dominate the political dialogue through the end of the year, at least.

вторник

Czars.

It was fun to call American sports commissioners czars, but once players started to have unions, a commissioner really became more like a majority leader in a legislature, trying to keep his party — the owners — together in their financial battles against the minority opposition, the athletes.

Curiously, commissioners have all been in the news lately, if in different ways. David Stern announced that he'll retire in 2014 after 30 years running the NBA. Stern has been the most accomplished commissioner ever because he took the NBA from off-Broadway onto the Great White Way. Yes, it sure helped that Larry and Magic took off, then followed by Michael. You see, precisely: marquee first-name stars who just happened to have teams attached to them. But Stern knew how to milk that celebrity-first angle and, also, he knows when to leave the party.

Are you listening, Bud Selig? Stop being coy. Give us your sell-by date. So many sports bosses — czars, owners and coaches; Pete Rozelle, Al Davis, Bobby Bowden — have tarnished their achievements by overstaying their welcome; but in fact, Selig might have done his best work most recently.

Still, he's always been better at boardroom machinations than polishing the diamond. Buddy didn't see the steroids pumping up the pastime, and now he doesn't see that there are too many strikeouts sucking the action from the game. Excuse me, but a swing and a miss is just not appointment viewing.

Gary Bettman is front and center, locking out his skaters once again. The NHL commissioner, like his baseball and basketball counterparts, always has to deal with the big market/small market franchise divide, and hockey has the additional problem of its sport being indigenously beloved up north, but just an alien hard sell down south.

So Bettman has the hardest job. But he's got a good memory. The last time there was a lockout the NHL lost a whole season, but hockey fans are so famously loyal, they still came back like sheep. That's why there's no hockey now, because Bettman and the owners remembered that hockey fans are dependable suckers.

It's a good lesson for fans of all sports. If they take your game away, take your time coming back to the games.

Now, the NFL has no major financial concerns. Good grief, its dopiest small franchise, Jacksonville, sold for three-quarters of a billion dollars.

No, Roger Goodell's problem is simply that his sport has been revealed as a brain buster for his fungible gladiators. In 25 percent of Sunday's games, a quarterback was knocked out with a concussion. He talks about safety, but then Goodell ballyhoos Thursday night games for the walking wounded and he wants an extended 18-game schedule.

Ultimately, Goodell is a proprietor of a blood-and-guts show, so he has the trickiest act as commissioner. Because balance sheets are one thing, but balancing employee safety with box office is another.

 

This Veterans Day, All Things Considered asks two veterans and writers to tell a story about their experiences in the military.

Benjamin Busch reflects on his grandfather's service during World War II, and David Abrams tells the story of a terrifying flight to Iraq.

Benjamin Busch

Benjamin Busch is the author of Dust to Dust.

My grandfather told only one story about his years in the Army. He served in the 10th Mountain Division fighting the Nazis in the Italian Alps. The only evidence of those years I knew of was a frayed backpack and skis he kept, but there was more.

Courtesy of Benjamin Busch

Since Gen. David Petraeus resigned as the head of the CIA after admitting to an extramarital affair, the scandal has become rich fodder for the opinion pages. NPR's Jacki Lyden reads from a variety of op-eds, and takes calls from listeners on why the story matters.

NPR's Jacki Lyden reads listener comments from past shows about why we run for office, part-time workers, and the open letter John Franklin Stevens wrote to Ann Coulter on using the word "retard" as an insult.

Robert Siegel and Melissa Block read suggestions from listeners on alternatives to the phrase, "fiscal cliff."

Hurricane Sandy left a long trail of destruction across the New Jersey shoreline. And it did a lot more than just flood houses.

Enlarge Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

What remains of the 1.2-mile boardwalk sits on the beach on Oct. 30 in Belmar, N.J.

In the wake of last Tuesday's elections, a lively debate has erupted into the open over whether conservatives and the Republican Party were well-served by their favorite media outlets.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney was reported to have been so certain of a victory on Tuesday night that he cast aside tradition and did not draft a concession speech. But conservatives now say his misplaced confidence — and theirs — were bolstered by the predictions of many like-minded pundits, which were broadcast and posted online around the clock by sympathetic news outlets.

"You had this kind of mutually reinforcing phenomenon going on between the Romney campaign [and] some influential commentators — and then a lot of that commentary gets repeated in the media at large," said Byron York, chief political correspondent for the conservative Washington Examiner.

York said that stunned Republicans at Romney's Boston headquarters told him they were influenced by the results of surveys conducted by the campaign's pollster, Neil Newhouse, and by what they heard on the air and saw in print.

Similarly, conservative columnist John Podhoretz of the New York Post had argued before the election that many pollsters were ignoring the high turnout by Republicans in the 2010 elections that swept the GOP into control of the U.S. House. The 2012 race would be the same, proving Obama's 2008 win to be an anomaly, Podhoretz argued — quite mistakenly, as he conceded afterward.

"Because I had a rooting interest in the other side, that view was strengthened and amplified by what I wanted to happen, which I freely confess," said Podhoretz, also the editor of the conservative Commentary magazine and a cultural critic for the conservative Weekly Standard. "People don't ordinarily cast a skeptical eye on data and information that supports their opinions. They're happy to take it."

The noted conservative political analyst Michael Barone and conservative columnist George Will were among those predicting a landslide in the electoral college for Romney. But they were far from alone. Viewers consumed a steady diet of such punditry on Fox News for weeks ahead of the election. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ambidextrous political consultant Dick Morris (a consultant to a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and a Republican Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott) additionally promised landslides in the popular vote for Romney. Former chief George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, who is now a top analyst for Fox and a top fundraiser for a political action committee that spent $300 million against President Obama and his fellow Democrats, predicted a comfortable but closer win for Romney.

Many conservatives argued the polls themselves were skewed — because they showed a Democratic edge nationally and a strong advantage in key battleground states. And indeed, Podhoretz and other conservatives contended that liberals and their sympathizers in the press corps clicked on Nate Silver's 538 blog in the New York Times hour after hour not because of their fascination with the mathematical probabilities but out of a desperate need for reassurance that President Obama would win re-election.

But in the days after Obama cruised to victory, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum accused right-of-center media outlets and partisan pundits of failing their audiences by cheerleading for the GOP rather than reflecting what was actually happening in the race or in the nation at large.

"The conservative followership has been fleeced, exploited and lied to by the conservative entertainment complex," Frum said on MSNBC's Morning Joe.

Pressed to name names, Frum demurred, though he has pointed to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh in the past. Frum argued the conservative media have failed their audiences by cheerleading rather reflecting what was actually happening in the race or in the nation at large.

"The activists are so mistaken about the nature of the problems the country faces," Frum said. "I went to Tea Party rallies, and I would ask this question: Have taxes gone up or down in the past four years? They could not answer that question correctly."

Host Joe Scarborough — a former Republican congressman — seconded Frum's critique and said he was reminded of what happened when the German army overtook France in 1940. "The French generals [were] reassuring [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill day after day, week after week that the French were putting up a brave defense, when they knew the war was already lost."

On election night, Rove was in constant contact with Romney's people and proved so flustered by the results that he vigorously disputed the conclusion of Fox News' decision desk that Obama had won Ohio — and thereby won the election. A nonplused Megyn Kelly responded: "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?"

The backlash has only strengthened in the days since the election. Younger political right-of-center operatives and pundits told Politico's Jonathan Martin that the reliance on clearly conservative media outlets and pundits — such as Newsmax, Rush Limbaugh's radio program, and the opinion shows on Fox News — had undermined their understanding of where the campaign stood.

"Unfortunately, for us Republicans who want to rebuild this party, the echo chamber [now] is louder and more difficult to overcome," former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who unsuccessfully ran against Rand Paul two years ago for the Republican nomination for Senate, told Martin.

Martin reported that Grayson's mentor, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, unsuccessfully pleaded with Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to give his candidate as much time on the air as Paul, a firebrand conservative libertarian popular among Tea Party fans and many Fox viewers. Sorry, Ailes is said to have responded: Paul is better TV.

 

NPR's Jacki Lyden reads listener comments from past shows about why we run for office, part-time workers, and the open letter John Franklin Stevens wrote to Ann Coulter on using the word "retard" as an insult.

Seriously, again?

Anyone who follows the adventures of the alternative minimum tax has to be getting sick of the many sequels. Again and again, this unpopular income tax threatens to hit middle-class families with large and unexpected tax increases.

And each time the threat reappears, Congress applies a "patch" to fix the problem temporarily. That makes the threat an annual event — along with the associated congressional hand-wringing and taxpayer confusion.

So here we are again, with the AMT looming over about 27 million more taxpayers this year. It's just one part of the so-called fiscal cliff — a big cluster of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes that will take effect at year's end unless Congress acts.

November 13, 2012

Howard Audsley has been driving through Missouri for the past 30 years to assess the value of farmland. Barreling down the flat roads of Saline County on a recent day, he stopped his truck at a 160-acre tract of newly tilled black land. The land sold in February for $10,700 per acre, double what it would have gone for five years ago.

Heading out into the field, Audsley picked up a clod of the dirt that makes this pocket of land some of the priciest in the state.

"This is a very loamy, very productive, but loamy soil," Audsley said. "A high-clay soil will just be like a rock and that's the difference between the ... soils. And the farmers know this and the investors know this. That's why they pay for it what they do."

A Steep Surge In Prices

It's not just the value of Missouri cropland that's rising. Corn Belt farmland prices from Iowa to Illinois and Nebraska to Kansas have been sky-high lately, boosted by $8-a-bushel corn.

MAP: How Farmland Value Is Changing

Harvest Public Media

Click the map to see how the price of farmland has gone up. Produced by Harvest Public Media.

If the government goes over the "fiscal cliff," millions of households could see tax increases because of an obscure part of the tax code, known as the Alternative Minimum Tax. Host Michel Martin talks with NPR Business Editor Marilyn Geewax about exactly what could happen and who would be affected.

Police in the Central American nation of Belize said Monday that they are looking for the founder of the software company McAfee Inc. to question him about the slaying of another U.S. citizen, his neighbor in an island town on the Caribbean.

John McAfee lived next door to 52-year-old Gregory Viant Faull, who was found with a gunshot wound to his head inside his two-story home north of San Pedro, a town on the island of Ambergris Caye, said Raphael Martinez, spokesman for Belize's Ministry of National Security. The housekeeper discovered the body Sunday morning and called police.

Martinez said that no charges had been filed in the case, describing McAfee, 67, only as a "person of interest" for police.

"It's too early in the investigation. To say he is a suspect would be a bold statement," Martinez told The Associated Press.

Police officers went to McAfee's home on the island but he had not been there, the spokesman said.

One resident of the island told the AP that Faull had complained about McAfee's behavior, and others said the former software executive was hard to befriend.

The case was the latest twist in McAfee's recent life as an eccentric yoga lover. He sold his stake in the anti-virus software company in the early 1990s and moved to Belize about three years ago to lower his taxes.

He told The New York Times in 2009 that he had lost all but $4 million of his $100 million fortune in the U.S. financial crisis and that he was moving to Belize.

Last April, Belize police raided McAfee's home looking for drugs and guns. McAfee said officers found guns, which he said were legal, and he was released without charge after being detained for a few hours.

Faull's killing shocked the island community. Residents said Faull was a longtime home owner there who had recently retired as a builder and moved from Florida to live full-time in the island.

"He was starting to enjoy his retirement," said a real estate agent.

The agent, who insisted on speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, said she had heard Faull complain about McAfee's numerous dogs barking outside his property.

Other residents said McAfee seemed standoffish and not friendly.

"His physical appearance doesn't really inspire you to go over and make friends with him. He's a little scruffy looking," said another real estate agent, Bob Hamilton.

Martinez said police had questioned other neighbors of Faull but had been unable to locate McAfee.

The AP tried unsuccessfully to contact McAfee by email. McAfee said in May that he was disconnecting his phone because he felt he was being harassed by police.

Police said Faull's computer and phone were missing, but there were no signs of forced entry at his home. Police reported finding a single 9-mm shell casing and said it appeared Faull was killed between late Saturday and Sunday morning, which was a rainy night on the Caribbean island. Faull was last seen at 10 p.m. Saturday.

 

Harvey Hilbert enlisted in the Army in 1964. He was in the infantry, and in January 1966, he was sent to Vietnam to fight. Five months later, his unit was sent into the jungle. That was the last time he fought in Vietnam.

"It was coming on dusk, and we went into what's called a hot landing zone — means we were under fire," Hilbert told StoryCorps. "We jumped off the helicopters and took a position. And then the enemy stopped shooting."

The company commander sent three soldiers into the jungle to set up a listening post to look for enemy forces and report back. Usually, the three newest men in the unit were sent out for this kind of duty, Hilbert says. He had met one of the men who was sent out that night.

"He went about 100 meters or so out in front of the line," Hilbert says. "But the enemy hadn't gone anywhere. They were embedded in the jungle. And around midnight, they opened fire."

The three men had set up their listening post in the middle of a battalion of enemy soldiers. They grabbed their rifles and started running back to the helicopters.

"All I saw were soldiers with rifles, and machine-gun fire coming at me," Hilbert says. "And so I shot at 'em. And one of them fell about 10 or 15 feet from me and was screaming in pain, and it turned out it was this young man that I had met."

A few minutes later, Hilbert got shot in the head.

"I could hardly move, and I thought that if I fell asleep I would die. So I was trying to stay awake, listening to this young man scream.

"He died just before I was airlifted out. You know, I'm 65 years old, and I can remember clearly that young man — the color of his skin, his face, his cries.

"You know, there's a legacy of war that lasts forever," Hilbert says.

Hilbert was hospitalized at a field hospital in Vietnam, where he had to have bullet fragments removed from his brain. Hilbert was partially paralyzed on his left side, though he recovered the use of most of his leg and some of his arm.

He was decorated with a National Defense Service Medal and a Purple Heart, among other medals, for his service.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon.

 

There are nearly 400 art galleries in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Many of these galleries were flooded by the storm surge that accompanied Hurricane Sandy. One insurance company estimates it has $40 million in claims.

понедельник

Israel fired a missile into Syrian territory on the Golan Heights on Monday, responding to mortar shell that landed on Israeli-held territory The cross-border incident occurred as Syrian army troops battled rebels near the frontier.

The fragrance company Demeter has introduced a new sushi scent. The company's website says it offers a whiff of seaweed and rice with a lemon-ginger essence. But it isn't fishy.

Host Rachel Martin talks with director Nikolaj Arcel about his new film, A Royal Affair. The movie focuses on an affair between the 18th-century queen of Denmark and her German physician, which led to a revolution. Arcel also wrote the screenplay of the Danish film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Beginning next summer, federal rules will require pilots to have six times more flight time to get hired, and will then also require airlines to give pilots more rest between flights. This will increase the number of pilots airlines need, just as thousands of senior pilots reach the mandatory retirement age of 65.

The second act of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly opens with the aching aria "Un Bel Di," one of the most famous in the Italian repertoire. Onstage, an abandoned young woman sings longingly for "one fine day" when her lover might return to her and their young son in Nagasaki, Japan.

The story takes a tragic turn when the woman — Madame Butterfly — learns that her beloved American, Lt. Pinkerton, finally has returned, only to take their son away to America with his new wife. Before the curtain falls, Madame Butterfly blindfolds her young son and takes her own life. And that's where the story ends. It leaves opera fans like author David Rain wondering what happened to that little boy. "The question lodged in my mind, and here I am with my answer," he says.

Rain is the author of a new book, The Heat of the Sun, which imagines the lives of Madama Butterfly's characters years later. As the book begins, Trouble, the son of Butterfly and Pinkerton, is a boarding school student in America. Rain tells NPR's Rachel Martin what happened to Trouble after he left Japan with his father.

Interview Highlights

On Pinkerton's background, back in the U.S., a few years later

"Well, [Trouble's] father, for one thing, has become a rather important man back in America. He's now Sen. Pinkerton; his wife, Kate — in my version of the story — comes from a very important political family. Her own father was a Democrat senator for New York. And when she married the naval lieutenant, he was, as it were, taken into the family firm, and so he is now a senator himself. He's quite an important man — he's a rising man in the political world — and so, what his son is like and what his son does actually does matter. But, of course, this boy has not turned out to be quite the ideal son. He is constantly getting into trouble, as we said."

On Woodley Sharpless, the narrator of the story

"Well, Woodley Sharpless is the son of Sharpless, who was the American consul in Nagasaki in the original Madama Butterfly. And that character, the consul, really can only just stand by while the tragedy unfolds. He sees what's happening, he sees how terrible it is, but there's nothing he can really do about it. And my character, Woodley Sharpless, is similarly a kind of bystander character."

Enlarge Antony Heaven/Henry Holt and Company

David Rain teaches creative writing at Middlesex University in London.

Host Rachel Martin talks with Gregory Johnsen about his new book detailing the U.S. campaign against al-Qaida in Yemen. The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia covers the drone strikes and the moral dilemma posed by the U.S. war against al-Qaida.

This Veterans Day, NPR Books went into the archives to find stories of combat and coping. A mother describes the emotional minefield of having a child at war, a Marine writes a memoir of a mortuary, and a photojournalist pays tribute to two centuries of Native-Americans in the military.

Titan, the new supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has been crowned the fastest in the world. It can clock 17.59 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second). Audie Cornish talks to Steve Henn for more.

Robert Siegel talks with Yaser Tabbara, spokesman for a newly formed umbrella organization of Syrian opposition groups. The coalition, forged over the weekend in Doha, is much broader than its predecessor, the Syrian National Council, bringing together roughly 90 percent of Syria's opposition. Tabbara, an attorney typically based in Chicago, helped broker the coalition's agreement.

The 2012 election was the first since the Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United and the most expensive in U.S. history. But not much changed. Host Michel Martin discusses the impact of unlimited cash with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A second term means some new Cabinet appointments for President Obama, including at the Treasury. After four pretty grueling years, Secretary Timothy Geithner has made it clear he will be leaving Washington.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said last week that Geithner would be staying on through the inauguration. He's also expected to be a "key participant" in "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

The Treasury secretary was arguably the most important Cabinet post in the first Obama administration. Secretary Geithner had wobbly banks, auto bailouts and the Great Recession on his plate. The next secretary will face big challenges too, beginning with the "fiscal cliff" and working with Republicans to craft a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction.

It's not surprising that there's been a lot of talk about Erskine Bowles as a replacement for Geithner. Bowles chaired the president's deficit reduction panel, the Simpson-Bowles commission. Speaking on Charlie Rose's show last March, Bowles outlined the content of a good budget deal.

"Any of them that don't address defense, any of them that don't address Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and don't reform the tax code and aren't balanced in some way between that, aren't serious," he said.

Bowles was a chief of staff for President Clinton. He's also a former investment banker and is popular with Republicans and on Wall Street. But he's criticized President Obama's budget publicly while praising Paul Ryan's.

A more likely choice might be Jack Lew, the current White House chief of staff and formerly the president's budget director. In April 2011, he discussed overhauling Social Security:

"It's never really moved the debate forward for one side or another to put a plan out there. It's only really worked well when the parties come together; that's what happened in 1983," he said.

Lew worked on that 1983 Social Security fix as an aide to House Speaker Tip O'Neill. He has Capitol Hill experience and the budget expertise to tackle the big issues that are on the Treasury's plate. And he's got a good working relationship with the president.

 

One scene has become increasingly common amid Spain's economic crisis: Thousands of people, many of them immigrants, are searching trash dumpsters by night. Some scour the garbage for food, but many others are involved in a black-market trade for recycled materials.

The scavengers have slowly become a sad fixture in many barrios across Spain, like the well-dressed, middle-aged man on a Barcelona street corner on a recent night. He averts his eyes from onlookers as he reaches his arm down deep into a dumpster.

He's embarrassed, he says, that Spain's economy has left him searching through trash. He's afraid to give his name, but willing to tell his story: He's Pakistani, and came to Spain four years ago to work in construction — an industry that collapsed shortly after he arrived. Now, he's left scavenging.

"Here, take a look at this," he says, describing what he's found. "This is junk metal, but it's worth a bit of money."

Selling stuff like this, he says, is his only work now.

"Look, over here there's some food," he says, lifting a few unbroken eggs out of a crate from a separate dumpster for organic waste.

Scavenging For Cash

Although food can be useful, the man concentrates on looking for plastic cable or copper wire. He worked construction just long enough to make contacts with builders who, these days, are desperate for cheap materials.

"See this? This is expensive," he says, showing off a cable. "But this other stuff over here, not as much. It's cheaper."

Enlarge Richard van der AA/Demotix/Corbis

A man searches through trash bins in Girona, Spain. Across Spain, people are increasingly dumpster diving for scraps of food or metal.

Officials in Washington are still trying to make sense of the sudden resignation last week of CIA Director David Petraeus. More details are emerging about the extramarital affair that brought Petraeus down. It came to light following an FBI investigation, which was not focused originally on the CIA director but soon led to him.

In the new movie Lincoln, actor Daniel Day-Lewis is getting a lot of attention for his spot-on portrayal of the 16th president. But Ben Burtt, the sound designer, also deserves credit for the film's authenticity. You may not know his name, but you surely know his work.

Burtt is something of a legend in the movie sound world. He has won numerous Oscars, including for his work on Star Wars.

Burtt invented that iconic swoosh of the light saber, using the hum of an old projector and the buzz of a television set.

When it came to Lincoln, Burtt wasn't going to settle for recreating the sounds of Lincoln's life in some studio. He wanted to capture the real thing — sounds Lincoln actually heard.

So Burtt and his team set out, recording equipment in hand, to capture the sounds from actual objects that have survived the years since Lincoln knew them.

"I love American history and I've always been a student of it," Burtt tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

DreamWorks

Lincoln follows the president in the last few months of his life.

Host Rachel Martin talks with director Nikolaj Arcel about his new film, A Royal Affair. The movie focuses on an affair between the 18th-century queen of Denmark and her German physician, which led to a revolution. Arcel also wrote the screenplay of the Danish film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Renee Montagne has the Last Word in business.

In her second report on China's expected new leader, Xi Jinping, NPR's Louisa Lim looks at his foreign experience.

Among the difficult decisions facing President Obama is whether to give the go ahead for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada down to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists want it blocked. They are concerned about endangering the Nebraska sand hills, under which is the largest aquifer in the country. It provides drinking water and irrigation water for several states.

Oil companies and their supporters, meanwhile, say the pipeline is in the national interest because it will create thousands of jobs and make the country more energy independent.

In January, Obama refused to make a decision about the fate of the pipeline, citing a State Department recommendation for more time to review alternative pipeline routes.

But now that the presidential election is over, environmentalists and politicians are putting renewed pressure on Obama to make up his mind. Sarah Ladislaw from the Center for Strategic and International Studies spoke with NPR's Renee Montagne about the prospects for the project.

Interview Highlights:

On the importance of the Keystone Pipeline to the country's future and for energy security

"It's a really hard question to answer because there's a variety of perspectives involved. If you're an oil sands producer in Canada, then you obviously think it's fairly necessary to have this infrastructure to be able to get your product to market. If you're a refiner in the Gulf Coast of the United States, you probably think it's good to be able to get the right kind of crude into your refineries so you can sell it not only here but in global markets. If you're an environmentalist or someone who supports a transition to a lower carbon energy profile in the United States, you probably think it works contrary to what you think is actually in the ultimate best interest of the country."

On the dangers that environmentalists see in the pipeline

"The dangers, they see are twofold: one, that it basically makes it possible for larger amounts of Canadian oil sands, which emits more CO2 and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than conventional based energy sources. The second kind of environmental opposition they have is that it's a major pipeline that would be going through huge portions of the United States — some environmentally sensitive. But that larger question of whether or not it's sort of in our longer term national interest to be perpetuating the production of this relatively abundant and relatively close by oil resource, rather than promoting things like clean energy is really sort of at the heart of the controversy."

On how the Keystone is part of a larger change in the North American energy industry

"In the United States we've now found that it's economically feasible and profitable to produce unconventional oil resources in a number of parts of the country in addition to unconventional gas. So what we've done, essentially, is flipped this scarcity mindset in North America that we don't have enough energy resources to one where we're actually quite abundant in these energy resources."

On how much of the oil from the pipeline will end up in America

"If you want to just track a barrel from when it's produced to when it actually makes it in your car per se, or into your heating fuel in your home, you have to go through a number of processes. One of those is being transported through a pipeline, and the other is being refined in a refinery. And oil is made into a whole host of products. A lot of the gasoline that's made form this oil could stay in the United States and a lot of diesel could be shipped to Europe. That's been sort of the pattern of how we produce and sell the products here. The other issue is that there's currently sort of an oversupply of oil within the mid-continent of the United States. And so a lot of what this pipeline does is it balances out that market a little bit. It allows some of the heavier crude, which is the oil sands to come down to the Gulf Coast and a lot of the lighter crudes to go to the mid-continent. So whether or not an actual Canadian barrel that goes through the Keystone Pipeline in its entirety is consumed in the United States — no, it won't be."

On whether Obama will approve the pipeline

"I do think that he'll approve the pipeline for two reasons: one, because he would have to find a reason why it's against the national interest. And for a country that doesn't have an overarching climate policy, that's hard to say because we believe in reducing emissions we don't necessarily want to be importing a higher emission fuel. And the second being this has become sort of a political lightning rod to exemplify the debate between pro-oil and gas people and anti-oil and gas people in this country. And it's not the most effective way of debating those issues. So politically it would be good to get beyond it and get on to a lot of the other things that the president will have to debate within energy policy."

Courtesy the Keystone Mapping Project. ©Thomas Bachand 2012.

Thomas Bachand, who made this map of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, says that neither TransCanada nor the U.S. State Department would provide much geographical information, so he pieced the map together from other federal and state sources. MP indicates states where milepost data is available. Mileposts are markers of longitude and latitude on the pipeline's route. NA indicates that this information is not available.

воскресенье

One scene has become increasingly common amid Spain's economic crisis: Thousands of people, many of them immigrants, are searching trash dumpsters by night. Some scour the garbage for food, but many others are involved in a black-market trade for recycled materials.

The scavengers have slowly become a sad fixture in many barrios across Spain, like the well-dressed, middle-aged man on a Barcelona street corner on a recent night. He averts his eyes from onlookers as he reaches his arm down deep into a dumpster.

He's embarrassed, he says, that Spain's economy has left him searching through trash. He's afraid to give his name, but willing to tell his story: He's Pakistani, and came to Spain four years ago to work in construction — an industry that collapsed shortly after he arrived. Now, he's left scavenging.

"Here, take a look at this," he says, describing what he's found. "This is junk metal, but it's worth a bit of money."

Selling stuff like this, he says, is his only work now.

"Look, over here there's some food," he says, lifting a few unbroken eggs out of a crate from a separate dumpster for organic waste.

Scavenging For Cash

Although food can be useful, the man concentrates on looking for plastic cable or copper wire. He worked construction just long enough to make contacts with builders who, these days, are desperate for cheap materials.

"See this? This is expensive," he says, showing off a cable. "But this other stuff over here, not as much. It's cheaper."

Enlarge Richard van der AA/Demotix/Corbis

A man searches through trash bins in Girona, Spain. Across Spain, people are increasingly dumpster diving for scraps of food or metal.

Daily Show host Jon Stewart recently called writer Jon Ronson an investigative satirist. As Ronson himself puts it: "I go off and I have unfolding adventures with people in shadowy places. I guess I tell funny stories about serious things."

Ronson has collected many of these stories in his new book, Lost at Sea. He talks to Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, about the characters and places he has encountered along the way.

Interview Highlights

On meeting the rap duo Insane Clown Posse

"It turns out that after 20 years of these incredibly violent songs, they announced that all this time they had secretly been Evangelical Christians embedding messages about their love of God deeply into the lyrics of their songs — I'd say very deeply."

"I think they hate the fact that their expression of their souls is something that is just mocked and ridiculed by so many people who come into contact with them. It's like they're trapped being them. And they thought [their song] 'Miracles' would bring them out of it. [They] said to me at one point, 'If Alanis Morissette had written this song, everyone would have said it was genius.'"

More On Jon Ronson

Author Interviews

The Real Mr. Incredible: Self-Styled 'Superheroes'

This week, President Obama will meet with congressional leaders to begin working out a deal to avert a budget calamity commonly known as the fiscal cliff.

Economists are unanimous in saying that if the leaders fail to keep the country from going over the "cliff," both the stock and labor markets will fairly quickly go "splat."

To keep that from happening, Congress must pass legislation to stop or delay or phase in the coming budgetary changes collectively called the fiscal cliff. That phrase refers to a massive collection of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that kick in at year's end. If they are all allowed to take full effect, it would be like tying a $600 billion weight to the economy.

The problem is that Democrats want to fix some of the issues by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and Republicans oppose hikes in tax rates.

This week, President Obama will meet with congressional leaders to begin working out a deal to avert a budget calamity commonly known as the fiscal cliff.

Economists are unanimous in saying that if the leaders fail to keep the country from going over the "cliff," both the stock and labor markets will fairly quickly go "splat."

To keep that from happening, Congress must pass legislation to stop or delay or phase in the coming budgetary changes collectively called the fiscal cliff. That phrase refers to a massive collection of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that kick in at year's end. If they are all allowed to take full effect, it would be like tying a $600 billion weight to the economy.

The problem is that Democrats want to fix some of the issues by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and Republicans oppose hikes in tax rates.

The U.S. trade deficit shrank to the lowest level in nearly two years because exports rose to a record high. The gain may not last given the global economic slowdown.

The deficit narrowed to $41.5 billion in September, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That is 5.1 percent below the August deficit and the smallest imbalance since December 2010.

Exports climbed 3.1 percent to an all-time high of $187 billion. That followed two monthly declines and reflected stronger sales of commercial aircraft, heavy machinery and farm goods.

Imports rose 1.5 percent to $228.5 billion. An increase in consumer goods drove the gain, including shipments of the new Apple iPhone 5. Higher oil prices also contributed to the gain.

The narrower trade deficit could lead the government to revise its July-September economic growth estimate slightly higher than the 2 percent annual rate reported last month. That's because U.S. companies earned more from overseas sales while consumers and businesses spent less on foreign products.

But economists cautioned that the increase in exports may only be temporary. One reason is soybean exports rose 32 percent in September from August, in part because of a jump in prices linked to the summer drought.

"More generally, export growth has slowed by more than import growth as the weak global backdrop has taken its toll," said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "So while these data may boost third-quarter ... growth by a couple of tenths of a percent, further ahead net exports may not add anything to growth."

Europe's debt crisis and slower global growth in emerging markets had weakened demand for U.S. goods overseas in the previous months. That subtracted from economic growth in the third quarter.

Exports to the 27-nation European Union were unchanged in September from August. Exports to Latin America grew 4.2 percent, although exports to Brazil declined. Brazil is South America's biggest economy.

So far this year, the U.S. deficit is running at an annual rate of $554 billion, slightly below last year's $559.9 billion imbalance.

The U.S. deficit with China increased to $29.1 billion in September. It is running 6.8 percent ahead of last year's record pace. America's deficit with China last year was the highest imbalance ever recorded with a single country.

The widening trade gap with China has heightened trade tensions between the two countries. Many have complained that China's trade practices are unfair. American manufacturers say China has kept the yuan undervalued against the U.S. dollar. A lower valued yuan makes Chinese goods cheaper for U.S. consumers and American products more expensive in China.

The Obama administration has lobbied China to move more quickly to allow the yuan to rise in value. But it has refused to cite China as a currency manipulator. That designation would require negotiations between the two nations and could lead to the United States filing a trade case against China before the World Trade Organization.

 

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says Hurricane Sandy will have a big impact on state budgets. He predicts New York will lose $1 billion in tax revenue.

A new James Bond movie opens this week, 50 years after the first film, Dr. No.

The latest installment, Skyfall, finds Daniel Craig once again in 007's perfectly tailored suit. And this time, Bond is battling both the bad guys and his own mortality.

Skyfall is directed by an English theater veteran, albeit a young one. Sam Mendes was a boy wonder of that scene in the late '80s, directing Judi Dench in The Cherry Orchard when he was just 24. He staged a much-acclaimed revival of Cabaret, first in London and then on Broadway. And his first feature film, American Beauty, won him a Best Director Oscar.

It was on his second movie, Road to Perdition, that Mendes met Craig. They'd meet up again just a few years later at a party and start discussing James Bond. The director explains to NPR's Renee Montagne how that conversation would lead him to the world of the MI6 agent — and how he made the experience his own.

Interview Highlights

On how he came to direct the film

"[Daniel Craig and I] both had a couple of drinks, and I asked him ... when he was doing the new Bond movie. And he said, 'I don't know.' And I said, 'And who's going to direct it?' And he said, 'I don't know. Why don't you do it?' And I can honestly say that I hadn't any strategy. I hadn't any particular agenda in asking him. I was just making small talk, literally. But it never occurred to me until he said it. I think Daniel sobered up the next day, realized that he'd offered me the job, and it wasn't really his position to do that. So he called the producers, and two weeks later I met them. And they were very, very collaborative and very open. It was very clear from the beginning what they wanted was not a Bond movie, but my Bond movie. And so I felt very comfortable from that moment on, really."

Watch Clips From 'Skyfall'

The U.S. trade deficit shrank to the lowest level in nearly two years because exports rose to a record high. The gain may not last given the global economic slowdown.

The deficit narrowed to $41.5 billion in September, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That is 5.1 percent below the August deficit and the smallest imbalance since December 2010.

Exports climbed 3.1 percent to an all-time high of $187 billion. That followed two monthly declines and reflected stronger sales of commercial aircraft, heavy machinery and farm goods.

Imports rose 1.5 percent to $228.5 billion. An increase in consumer goods drove the gain, including shipments of the new Apple iPhone 5. Higher oil prices also contributed to the gain.

The narrower trade deficit could lead the government to revise its July-September economic growth estimate slightly higher than the 2 percent annual rate reported last month. That's because U.S. companies earned more from overseas sales while consumers and businesses spent less on foreign products.

But economists cautioned that the increase in exports may only be temporary. One reason is soybean exports rose 32 percent in September from August, in part because of a jump in prices linked to the summer drought.

"More generally, export growth has slowed by more than import growth as the weak global backdrop has taken its toll," said Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. "So while these data may boost third-quarter ... growth by a couple of tenths of a percent, further ahead net exports may not add anything to growth."

Europe's debt crisis and slower global growth in emerging markets had weakened demand for U.S. goods overseas in the previous months. That subtracted from economic growth in the third quarter.

Exports to the 27-nation European Union were unchanged in September from August. Exports to Latin America grew 4.2 percent, although exports to Brazil declined. Brazil is South America's biggest economy.

So far this year, the U.S. deficit is running at an annual rate of $554 billion, slightly below last year's $559.9 billion imbalance.

The U.S. deficit with China increased to $29.1 billion in September. It is running 6.8 percent ahead of last year's record pace. America's deficit with China last year was the highest imbalance ever recorded with a single country.

The widening trade gap with China has heightened trade tensions between the two countries. Many have complained that China's trade practices are unfair. American manufacturers say China has kept the yuan undervalued against the U.S. dollar. A lower valued yuan makes Chinese goods cheaper for U.S. consumers and American products more expensive in China.

The Obama administration has lobbied China to move more quickly to allow the yuan to rise in value. But it has refused to cite China as a currency manipulator. That designation would require negotiations between the two nations and could lead to the United States filing a trade case against China before the World Trade Organization.

 

If you read Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain as a manual on how to take over a state and turn it totalitarian, the first lesson, she says, would be on targeted violence. Applebaum's book, which was recently nominated for a National Book Award, describes how after World War II, the Soviet Union found potential dissidents everywhere.

"It really meant anybody who had a leadership role in society," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "This included priests, people who had been politicians, people who had been merchants before the war, and people who ran youth groups."

The Soviets tried to control as many aspects of life as possible in the Eastern European countries they took over, Applebaum says. Everything was a potential source of dissent. "If you say, 'All painters have to paint like this because the state says so,' and then when one painter says, 'I don't want to do it that way; I want to paint an abstract painting,' then you've made him into a political dissident, even if in another society, he would have been apolitical," she says.

There were also efforts to control mass media, and radio in particular. "The radio was definitely the one institution that all of the communist parties cared about controlling right away," says Applebaum. "They believed very deeply in the power of radio, and they believed in the power of propaganda, and of their own ability to convince people."

Some of the radio shows were question-and-answer programs filled with praise for Soviet activities. Other call-in programs invited callers to share their problems; the solution always involved the Communist Party. As the shows became cruder and more propagandistic, they'd simply broadcast leaders' speeches, Applebaum says. "Or they would broadcast interviews with happy workers and happy peasants who agreed with everything the party was doing."

Interview Highlights:

On show trials

"They began in the Soviet Union. ... They were trials of communist leaders and officials who were accused of spying, or they were accused of being traitors ... and they were scripted in advance, so the suspect would be beaten or tortured or bribed or otherwise convinced to go along with the process. He would then be examined on the witness stand according to a predetermined text; This would all be put on the radio, it'd be recorded in the newspapers, and he would confess to a series of crimes. ...

Enlarge James Kegley/Doubleday

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her 2003 book, Gulag: A History, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Blog Archive