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Brian Williams — the NBC Nightly News anchor who apologized earlier this week for misremembering that a military helicopter he was in during the 2003 invasion of Iraq had been fired upon — says he has temporarily taken himself off the air over the controversy.

In a statement released today, Williams said that "it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions.

"I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days," Williams wrote, adding that colleague Lester Holt would be taking over his nightly anchoring duties during his absence.

"Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us," he said.

The move by Williams comes a day after news organizations reported that NBC had launched an internal investigation of the anchor's claim, which he backed away from when challenged by veterans. Despite having publicly recounted the false story several times over the years, Williams now acknowledges that he was in fact aboard a helicopter that came in behind the one that was hit by enemy fire.

As NPR's Krishnadev Calamur reported on Friday:

"Williams and his network, until this week, had said the helicopter had been hit by an RPG and forced down during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Following pushback from soldiers who were there, Williams apologized Wednesday."

"The story is the latest twist to the scandal that has tarnished the reputation of the NBC news anchor, and it comes the same day The New Orleans Advocate raised doubts about Williams' claim during his reporting of Hurricane Katrina. Williams had said he saw a body float by in the French Quarter, a part of the city that had remained largely dry during the 2005 storm that devastated the city."

Brian Williams

NBC

Iraq

A work by French painter Paul Gauguin, who died penniless in 1903, has reportedly smashed the record books as the most expensive ever sold. The piece, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), is believed to have fetched $300 million.

The oil-on-canvas was produced in 1892 during Gauguin's first visit to French Polynesia. It features a pair of Tahitian girls seated next to a tree.

The painting was sold by Swiss collector Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby's executive. Although Staechelin has declined to name the buyer or the price, The Telegraph reports that is believed to have been purchased by the state-financed Qatar Museums and to have topped the previous record, also set by Qatar, which reportedly bought Cezanne's The Card Players in 2011 for $259 million.

"The market is very high and who knows what it will be in 10 years. I always tried to keep as much together as I could. Over 90% of our assets are paintings hanging for free in the museum." Staechelin told The New York Times.

The Times reports: "In recent years the Qatar royal family and the museums authority have been reported to be expansive buyers of trophy quality Western modern and contemporary art by Mark Rothko, Damien Hirst and Czanne."

Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist, visited Tahiti twice.

According to The Guardian:

"His first trip was in 1891 after becoming estranged from his wife and was facing financial difficulties given the unpopularity of his art.

"He came up with the idea of making the voyage to paint illustrations for the most popular novel at the time, Pierre Loti's The Marriage of Loti."

"He portrayed the natives as living only to sing and to make love," Nancy Mowll Mathews, the author of Paul Gauguin, An Erotic Life, told the Guardian in a 2001 interview. "That's how he got the money from his friends and raised the public's interest in his adventure. But, of course, he knew the truth, which was that Tahiti was an unremarkable island with an international, Westernized community."

Gauguin's efforts failed and on his return to France two years later, "what should have been a triumphant return turned into a morass of misunderstanding and disappointment as his paintings remained unsold," the newspaper says.

Within a few years, Gauguin returned to French Polynesia, where he eventually died of a morphine overdose.

"Gauguin seems to have fallen for the myth of Tahiti he created," Mathews told the Guardian in 2001.

"He returned expecting the erotic idyll that was only ever a figment of his imagination. Of course, he didn't find it and the disappointment was profound: he died a twisted and bitter man, having alienated everyone both at home and in Tahiti. It's a sad story of a man who believed his own fiction," the author said.

Paul Gauguin

painting

South Pacific

France

The issue is this: Should the West arm Kiev against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says no, and she is joined by French President Francois Hollande. They have the outline of a plan that Hollande says includes "rather strong" autonomy for Ukraine's east. And they are taking it to President Obama.

As for the U.S., White House press secretary Josh Earnest says this: "The president is going to make a decision that he believes is in the broader national security interests of the United States," adding, "and part of that is understanding what sort of impact the decisions that we make have on our allies."

NATO's top military commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove has made it clear that Washington has not ruled-out the option to arm Kiev.

"I don't think we should preclude out of hand the possibility of the military option," Breedlove told reporters, according to Reuters. He clarified that he was talking about weapons and capabilities, not "boots on the ground."

Reuters says it's part of an "emerging rift between America and Europe on over how to confront [Russian President Vladimir] Putin as the Moscow-backed rebels gain territory."

Obama has been under increasing pressure at home to provide weapons to Kiev to bolster its ability to defeat the rebels.

The Franco-German peace plan is being described as a last-ditch effort to forestall a broader conflict. Merkel and Hollande are hoping the U.S. will sign on.

To that end, Merkel, who met today in Munich with Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, will be in Washington on Sunday to make her case at the White House.

Even so, the German chancellor has expressed caution over the peace plan's chances of success and Hollande sounded a note of desperation, telling reporters in France: "If we don't manage to find not just a compromise but a lasting peace agreement, we know perfectly well what the scenario will be. It has a name, it's called war."

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is sounding a more optimistic note even as he issued a strong warning against arming Kiev, according to Reuters.

"We believe that there are good grounds for optimism, to issue recommendations for conflict resolution," Lavrov said after talks on Friday.

However, speaking at a debate in Munich today, Lavrov pointed to growing calls in the West to "pump Ukraine full of lethal weapons," Reuters says.

"This position will only exacerbate the tragedy of Ukraine," he said.

crisis in Ukraine

Francois Hollande

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Russia

President Obama

The family of the Arizona woman who Islamic militants claim was killed in a Jordanian airstrike is hoping she is still alive.

Kayla Jean Mueller's parents are not speaking to reporters, but issued a statement through a family representative late Friday asking for privacy and requesting that the so-called Islamic State, which has held the aid worker since 2013, contact them privately.

Jordan called ISIS's claim "criminal propaganda," and U.S. officials say they can't confirm her death, says Martin Kaste of our Newcast desk.

"ISIS is claiming she was killed in this Jordanian airstrike, but that's a very convenient thing for ISIS to say right now, and it's not known for sure how she died, or whether she died," Kaste reports.

Jordan launched strikes against ISIS after the extremists released a video this week showing a Jordanian hostage, pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, being burned to death.

Carl and Marsha Mueller's statement addressed "those in positions of responsibility for holding" their daughter.

The Two-Way

ISIS Claims U.S. Hostage Was Killed Friday In Jordanian Attack

"This news leaves us concerned, yet, we are still hopeful that Kayla is alive. We have sent you a private message and ask that you respond to us privately. We know that you have read our previous communications, [kidnapped British journalist] John Cantlie made references to them in October.

"You told us that you treated Kayla as your guest, as your guest her safety and wellbeing remains your responsibility.

"Kayla's mother and I have been doing everything we can to get her released safely."

Meuller is the last known American to be held prisoner by ISIS. The militant group has beheaded three Americans, two Japanese and three British hostages.

And similarly, we can make sounds in different ways. I mean, you take the Romans. They managed to do without the letter "V," the letter "W," and the letter "J." They may have sometimes made a sound. So, if you take a Latin word for horse was "equus" ... they made the [first] "U" signify the "W" sound and ... the [second] "U" sound made the "U" sound there. So they used the same letter to make different sounds.

On how the alphabet might evolve

I'm pretty sure most of the letters will be there, and probably just by convention they'll be in that order for 100 years or more. Should by chance our pronunciations change very much, and over 1,000 years they may well do so, then certain combinations of letters or even the letters themselves may fall into disuse.

So for example, we might imagine that people will get tired of writing "QU" every time and think, "Well, I'll drop the 'U."' So that would be a very easy evolution that one might imagine.

The Phoenician Alphabet

Counterpoint Press

More On Language

Author Interviews

From 'App' To 'Tea': English Examined In '100 Words'

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

From Salt To Salary: Linguists Take A Page From Science

Technology

On Language, The Web Is At War With Itself

For West Coast commercial fishermen and seafood lovers, there is reason to cheer. Rockfish, a genus of more than 100 tasty species depleted decades ago by excessive fishing, have rebounded from extreme low numbers in the 1990s.

It's a conservation and fishery management success story that chefs, distributors and sustainable seafood advocates want the world to hear.

The rub? It's hard to communicate this success if purveyors continue to misidentify the fish, as many do.

Now, this isn't necessarily a case of retailers and chefs being shady. A big problem, says chef Rick Moonen, owner of RM Seafood in Las Vegas, is that fish go by different names in different places. Take rockfish, for example.

"On the East Coast, they call striped bass 'rockfish.' You offer them a chilipepper," Moonen says, citing the name of one rockfish species, "and call it a 'rockfish' and they'll think they're getting a striped bass."

Moonen is well known as a sustainable seafood advocate. And he's eager to tell the story of rockfish's comeback, a result of tightened fishing restrictions and a reduction in the number of commercial trawlers raking the ocean bottom in pursuit of the buggy-eyed, spiny-backed fish.

But he says many diners are only familiar with a handful of fish species, and rockfish can sound "like an animal from the Flintstones cartoon."

If the goal is to get consumers to develop a taste for these fish, Moonen suggests, you've got to market it to them in an appealing way. So for now, on his menu, rockfish are still being sold as "Pacific bass."

"That's ... the Trojan horse we use to get this fish into people's mouths," he says. That said, Moonen says he plans to transition to using real names for rockfish.

Indeed, rebranding fish species with more appealing market names is a common and accepted practice in the seafood industry. Toothfish are sold as Chilean sea bass, sablefish as black cod and slimehead as orange roughy.

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Name that fish: A wild U.S. fish being sold as "Pacific snapper." Snapper rarely occur north of Mexico, and some rockfish species are often sold as "snapper." Alastair Bland for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Alastair Bland for NPR

Name that fish: A wild U.S. fish being sold as "Pacific snapper." Snapper rarely occur north of Mexico, and some rockfish species are often sold as "snapper."

Alastair Bland for NPR

In these cases, it's not quite fraud, because consumers understand what each market name means. As Derek Figueroa, chief operating officer with Seattle Fish, a distributor in Denver, observes, "It's like asking for a Kleenex and getting some other tissue. It might not be what you asked for, but it's what you had in mind."

Not always, says Kim Warner, a senior scientist with the environmental group Oceana. She notes that rockfish is sometimes sold as snapper — but "snapper" is the name of another group of fish, which live in warm waters and are exceptionally tasty.

"What if someone who is familiar with real snapper comes to California?" asks Warner. "They'll think they're getting snapper. This absolutely confuses people."

The debate over what to call rockfish comes as American consumers are increasingly demanding accurate information about their food and where it came from. And even if they don't, correctly identifying fish on menus and in markets is the first step toward creating traceability in the often deceptive and murky fishing industry, says Sheila Bowman of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program.

"The only way to recognize and appreciate these fish is to start calling them by their proper names," says Bowman.

Bowman says telling the story of West Coast rockfish is important, because it could inspire fishery managers elsewhere to use similar strategies to rebuild other depleted fisheries—such as the beleaguered Atlantic cod.

Oceana's Warner notes that some instances of seafood mislabeling — such as calling farmed fish "wild," or serving up a fish containing high mercury levels under an ambiguous label — are deceitful attempts to hide traits that might be seen as undesirable.

But the case of the West Coast rockfish fishery offers much to be proud of, she says — so chefs and vendors who pass rockfish off as something else are shooting themselves in the foot.

"If they're celebrating that rockfish are doing well, why call them snapper?" Warner says. "You lose the story you're trying to tell."

Bowman says that on regular strolls through the seafood markets of Cannery Row, in downtown Monterey, Calif., she sees rockfish of all colors labeled as "snapper" and "rock cod." Sometimes, chefs and vendors avoid the fishes' real names because they are a mouthful for diners — like vermillion rockfish, bocaccio rockfish, chilipepper rockfish and shortbelly rockfish. But Figueroa at Seattle Fish says he's excited to start using these exotic — and accurate — names.

And a little tableside education could quickly help consumers get over the unfamiliarity factor, adds John Rorapaugh, owner of a seafood wholesaler and distributor in Washington, D.C., called ProFish.

"I think it's more interesting to use the real names," Rorapaugh says. "If you have thornyhead rockfish on the menu, it will start a conversation."

And if consumers start asking for these mild, white fish species by name, says Bowman, it could help boost demand – and prices — for rockfish. She says that could be good for both fish and fishermen.

"If rockfish fishermen are happy and making money, other fishermen will see that [the recovery efforts used for West Coast rockfish] could work in other places," Bowman says. "But if fishermen are just getting a couple of bucks a pound for these fish, then the effort we made to bring this fishery back won't be worth it."

sustainability

fishing

It took just one newspaper article to change James Robertson's life.

Last Sunday, the Detroit Free Press ran a front page story about the 56-year-old factory worker. It said every weekday for a decade, Robertson has left his house and walked more than 20 miles to and from his job in suburban Detroit. Robertson's car had broken down years before and so he made a long and lonely commute on foot in every kind of weather.

Those tough days appear to be over. The newspaper article on Robertson's plight generated a huge outpouring of help and donations from people across the country. An online GoFundMe account, set up by a Wayne State university student, has brought in more than $300,000. Today, Roberston is due to pick up a new Ford Taurus, a gift from a local car dealership.

But all this kindness and generosity worries Blake Pollack, a vice president of wealth management with UBS in the Detroit area. Pollack tells NPR he wants to make sure people don't take advantage of Robertson and his new found wealth.

Pollack was instrumental in bringing Robertson's situation to the newspaper's attention. He says he began offering the factory worker a lift about a year and a half ago - just every once in awhile when he happened to see him walking to work. The two men talked a lot, and Pollack learned more about him. He says what struck him about Robertson was he always "100% positive", he didn't think walking for hours to and from work was a big deal.

Pollack says he's excited that Robertson is getting what he calls well deserved recognition, but he's also very concerned about his safety. He says he lives in "a horrible area" of town. He fears "there is a stupid person who will see James and think he has the $300,000 in his pocket."

Robertson's story has sparked much discussion on the internet. Most people find his story inspirational, and admire his discipline and will power to walk every day to and from a job that pays $10.55 an hour. Others have responded negatively, and question the veracity of Robertson's story.

Pollack has talked with the local police and the Mayor's office about providing Robertson with security. Pollack says Robertson's employer - Schain Mold & Engineering in Rochester Hills - is also concerned about his safety. He's also organizing a team of community leaders, lawyers, accountants and investment specialists, to help advise Robertson on how to handle his money.

One of Robertson's new costs will be car insurance. Detroit has some of the highest insurance costs in the country. Pollack says they quotes from insurance companies for a 2015 Ford Taurus. They come in at $933 a month.

Economy

Detroit

The American-born actress, now known for her roles in Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was 14-years-old when her parents and older brother were deported to Colombia. She remembers coming home from school to find her dad's car in the driveway, dinner on the stove, but the house empty. "At first, I did break down and cry," she says. She went to visit her parents in jail, and they gave her the option to travel to Colombia with them. Guerrero felt that she had to stay here in the U.S. "I have to finish my studies, and I have to work really hard, and try to get my family back together," she thought.

Guerrero admits that she lived "in the shadows" for years. "I could have disappeared and nobody would've known anything," she as. But as her career picked up, she felt she had to speak out. In November, she wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. "I was so scared," she remembers. "I want to be viewed like a serious actress, and I'm afraid that people are just going to see me as the poor little girl whose parents were deported when she was 14." The piece sparked some criticism, but also earned strong support from families who had been through the same thing. "That made it all worth it," she says.

Interview Highlights

On why Guerrero decided to share her story

Once I started advancing in my career, I stopped wanting to hide from my reality. And it was really difficult when people would ask me where I've come from, what my roots were, and what my childhood was like without avoiding the question, or being vague, or even lying. That's how embarrassed I felt, or afraid to share my story. I didn't think that people would understand. But as I'm coming into my own, I'm feeling I don't want to hide anymore.

On why she didn't go to Colombia with her parents

That was a lot of the response from the letter — angry people — "why didn't she just go back with her parents?" Well, it wasn't that easy. Our financial situation wasn't stable. Anybody who lives in Colombia knows that if you don't have any money — I tell you what — you don't have many options.

Her response to people who say 'But your parents broke the law'

The fact of the matter is that my parents were here and stayed, and tried to amend their situation. And because there wasn't really a way to do things — I suppose — clearly, this is what happened.

Has Guerrero's family situation informed her work as an artist?

Absolutely. I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist, and empathize with the human experience unless you know your truth, and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

And Diane and I will head to Miami later this month to hear more about how immigration is shaping the American story. I'll be hosting an event there, in partnership with member station WLRN.

Share your immigrant story with us by sending an email to nprcrowdsource@npr.org.

jane the virgin

orange is the new black

Immigration

"Kids are inundated with so many advertisements of things that they 'should' have," de la Pea says. "And they develop this idea of like I want, I want, I want. ... I felt like the grandmother was such a great vehicle for: But you have, you have, you have."

Robinson identified with that sentiment, but says his grandmother was a little less "polite and gentle" in her efforts to help him recognize the blessings in front of him. "It was like a sandwich," he says. "The bread was sort of like the discipline, and the meat and the vegetables were kind of like the love, so it was balanced."

De le Pea grew up in a working class neighborhood, just outside of San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border. "My big takeaway from my childhood was: I saw my dad get up every day 5:00 o'clock in the morning. ... I saw my mom hustle, do every different job she could to provide for us. We never had quite enough, but we made it work. And I think my goal with everything I write ... is to kind of show the grace and dignity on the 'wrong side of the tracks.' "

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Nana gave everyone a great big smile and a "good afternoon." She made sure CJ did the same. Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing hide caption

itoggle caption Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing

Nana gave everyone a great big smile and a "good afternoon." She made sure CJ did the same.

Christian Robinson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House Publishing

De le Pea says this book features characters from diverse backgrounds but it isn't a book about diversity. "That's very important to me," he says. "I don't think every book has to be about the Underground Railroad for it to be an African-American title."

Robinson says that, coming from the perspective of an illustrator, the essential element is fun. He's found that in books that focus explicitly on diversity, "there tends to be an element of heaviness — maybe because the history is heavy and serious."

Robinson hopes that playful, fun stories featuring a diverse cast of characters will reach wider audiences. He and de la Pea designed Last Stop on Market Street to be a book that would speak to all kids. "This is a book that features an African-American boy and his African-American grandmother," de la Pea says. "I think sometimes in the past those books were set aside for kids of color. I really, really hope that everybody reads this. I hope suburban white children are read this book as well."

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Hard times have hit the oil fields. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude has dropped from a high of over $100 to less than $50. But Tracy Perryman, a small oilman in Luling, Texas, has learned how to survive the lean times.

Oil companies that take on a lot of debt sometimes don't survive the downturns. But veterans of oil busts have learned how to plan for the inevitable price plunges.

Perryman's family has been in the oil business in Luling since the 1920s, when a wildcatter drilled down a half-mile through ancient limestone and struck a small but productive field measuring 2-by-12 miles. Nearly a century later, the Luling field, located about an hour south of Austin, is still active — there are about 9,000 producing wells in Caldwell County.

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down. ... We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does ... we can ride through the hard times..."

- Tracy Perryman, production manager, B.J.P. Inc.

They have made a good living for Perryman, production manager of B.J.P. Inc. Unlike the stereotype of the flamboyant, boorish Texas oilman, Perryman wears work clothes and speaks softly.

Digging into a slice of smoky brisket in the dining room of Luling City Market, he looks out the window and considers what the price drop has meant for traffic rumbling through his hometown.

"Gravel trucks, oil field trucks, oil haulers, rigs ... going right through Luling — it's maybe half as much or less in activity than it was when oil was $100 a barrel," he says.

As it happens, the Luling field lies just north of the monster-sized Eagle Ford Shale formation, which has become one of the world's most prolific fields thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling.

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Where Is All That Excess Oil Going?

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Drop In Oil Prices Is Being Felt By U.S. Drillers, Oil Field Firms

The old Luling wells are what are called stripper wells — they produce less than 15 barrels a day.

After lunch, Perryman sits on the tailgate of his pickup next to one of his bobbing pumpjacks. The dirt is stained black and the air smells of rotten eggs.

"This well that we're currently sitting by produces about a barrel-and-a-half of oil a day and about 20 barrels of saltwater," he says. "It was drilled in the early '60s. We anticipate that it will continue to produce for many, many years."

Staying Afloat When Prices Are Falling

So how does a small oilman stay above water when prices drop in half?

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down," Perryman says. "We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does go down, we have no debt, we have good equipment and we can ride through the hard times and get ready for the next boom."

In better times, his company bought new pumpjacks, pipes, tanks, vehicles, forklifts and machine tools. They fixed roads and fences. And they paid cash.

Today, everything has changed. They'll defer downhole maintenance on wells, they'll ignore potholes in their roads rather than call the gravel truck, and they'll try to repair broken equipment instead of replace it.

"I don't believe that hard times are here yet," Perryman says. "In April of '98, we'd seen oil go down to $9 a barrel. And that was tough, because it was costing us $18, $19 a barrel ... just to get it out of the ground."

Most small independents like Perryman cannot afford to explore for oil. They buy up properties from the majors, who decide to sell off marginal wells when they become less profitable. The Perryman family purchased its wells years ago from Humble Oil, which became Exxon.

"Smaller, independent oil and gas producers like Tracy Perryman are of critical importance, obviously, to our state and our national economy," says Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

He says in Texas — the nation's biggest crude oil producer — 41 percent of all wells are stripper wells like the ones in Luling. "The reason smaller independents can survive is because they are not drilling $5-, $10-, $15-million horizontal wells in the sweet spots ... of some of these shale formations."

Perryman's company owns 116 wells — all of them shallow and vertical. Together, they produce about 100 barrels a day. Last summer when prices were high, they paid $10,000 a day. Today, it's half that.

But year after year, the moaning pumpjacks keep Perryman's company afloat. The one he's sitting next to brings up 1 to 2 quarts of oil and saltwater with every stroke.

"You get enough of these wells," Perryman says, grinning, "you can make a living, even at $45 a barrel, in Luling."

energy

oil prices

oil

My mother, as far as I can remember, has been a feminist and that was another thing that I didn't realize was slightly unusual in a household like mine. But also, I think a lot of working-class black women and educated black women — my mother is educated, both my parents went to college — are feminists, but wouldn't articulate as such whereas my mother would. ...

She would always say things like, when people talk about "When we get married," she'd say, "If you get married," and talk about a lot of things as a choice. Or she would always tell this story of a friend of hers who was raising a child on her own and somebody would say, "Oh, you need a husband," and the friend would say, "No, I need a wife." So she was very conscious of the hierarchy of gender and these kinds of things.

On a real-life incident that inspired her to write one scene in the book

One time my mom ... sat me down, we were sitting there, and she said, "You know your father and I aren't married." And I was like, "Really?" And she was like, "Yeah." And I'm struggling because I'm thinking like, my mom is the one who told me not to say "illegitimate." It doesn't matter, but at the same time it kind of does matter.

She was lying. This was some kind of weird prank just to see what [I] would say.

And so I think what I'm doing in the book is thinking about [how] in that moment I felt so like something dropped away, even though I had been taught not to feel that way. I had been taught not to be invested in this foolishness. But that's part of why it's there, because it was a part of this learning process that Kenya undergoes about her parents and about the mythologies of her childhood that fall away. And I could draw on that one bizarre moment of my mom's sense of humor.

On Solomon's experience attending an affluent private school

It was alienating in a lot of ways, but I certainly got an excellent education. I guess it took me a long time to understand the mix of feelings I have about that. It's something I've written about a lot and thought about a lot because [Bryn Mawr's Baldwin School] was a great school, aesthetically it was beautiful, I got to do so many things, but I always felt just kind of cold and out of it there.

I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black.

- Asali Solomon

There were things that could clearly explain this, like people really would ask me questions about the city, like, "Were there pools of blood on the ground?" and people would say things that were subtly or not-so-subtly racist. And class was a big issue. A lot of the kids were wealthy.

We weren't poor, but we weren't wealthy. We didn't have a lot of money — and that was something that was always there. I was very nervous about people coming to my house, which, in a lot of cases, they were not even allowed to do, because they weren't allowed to come to West Philadelphia.

But I think that recently I was thinking about how to articulate it. And I would say that in that situation I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black. ... I didn't go to high school there, but I imagine that would've only increased as people got into dating, because [we] weren't going to be dating out there.

On the trade-off of attending a school where you feel marginalized

The thing that's difficult about "good schools" where you feel alienated or socially marginal, is that depending on who you are as a person, you can make it out of that and write fiction about it — about the pain that you experience. But a different kind of person won't necessarily get the benefit of the education because they're so broken as a person by that experience. So that's a kind of risk there. For me, I was definitely affected in ways that were negative and positive. But I think partially my ability to communicate about it in this way really means that it was a positive.

Read an excerpt of Disgruntled

President Obama, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast today, condemned the twisting of religion to justify killing innocent people, saying that it always goes against the will of God. He also praised the Dalai Lama, who was in attendance, calling him a good friend.

The audience of 3,600 people gathered for the annual event in Washington included for the first time the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has lived in exile since 1959, when he fled Tibet amid a Chinese takeover. Beijing objects to any official recognition of the Dalai Lama by foreign governments.

Even so, Obama has met privately with the Dalai Lama on several occasions and today referred to him in remarks as "a good friend."

But the main focus of the speech was on concerns about religiously inspired acts of terror, echoing a theme he has touched on in past prayer breakfasts.

"From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence from those who profess to stand up for faith and in the name of religion," the president said.

He pointed out the "horrific acts of barbarism in the name of religion" and the "rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe" which, he said, was often justified by faith.

"No god condones terror," the president said. "We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends," he said, describing militants of the self-declared Islamic State as a "death cult."

The Associated Press says it was the first time Obama and the Dalai Lama attended the same public event.

The president, who the AP says clashed his hands in prayer, smiled and nodded the Tibetan leader called him "a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion."

He "inspires us to speak up for the freedom and dignity of all human beings," Obama said.

National Prayer Breakfast

China

Dalai Lama

President Obama

Taipei's mayor and others are hailing the pilot of TransAsia Flight 235, which crashed Wednesday shortly after takeoff, for steering the aircraft into a river and avoiding buildings and likely more casualties.

"We really have to thank that pilot," a tearful Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je said of Liao Chien-tsung, the 42-year-old pilot who died in the crash. "He really tried his hardest."

The comments were reported by The Associated Press.

Dramatic video of the crash showed the ATR 72-600 propjet barely clearing buildings near Taipei's Songshan airport, clipping an elevated roadway with its left wingtip before falling into the shallow Keelung River. The plane was carrying 58 people; at least 31 of them were killed. Fifteen passengers survived the crash; 12 are still missing.

"The pilot's immediate reaction saved many people," said Chris Lin, brother of one of the survivors, told Reuters. "I was a pilot myself and I'm quite knowledgeable about the immediate reaction needed in this kind of situation."

Experts said it's too soon to tell whether Liao's actions prevented a higher toll. Investigators are piecing together what happened to the aircraft, which crashed shortly after takeoff. The plane's black boxes were recovered Wednesday.

Liao has nearly 5,000 flying hours under his belt, Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration said; his copilot, who also was killed, had nearly 7,000 hours.

Reuters adds: "Taiwanese media reported that Liao, the son of street vendors, passed exams to join the air force. He later flew for China Airlines, Taiwan's main carrier, before joining TransAsia."

The AP reported today that moments before the plane crashed one of the pilots told the control tower: "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout."

The aircraft itself was less than a year old; one of its engines had been replaced in April 2014 because of a fault with the original engine.

Aviation experts say the ATR 72-600, the most modern version of the plane made by ATR, is among the most popular turboprop planes worldwide. It is known to be safe and reliable, as well as cheap and efficient to operate.

taiwan

plane crash

Megan Rice celebrated her 85th birthday last week — in a high-rise detention center in Brooklyn.

The Catholic nun is serving nearly three years in prison for evading security and painting peace slogans on the walls of a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Rice is far from the only religious figure to run into legal trouble. There's a long tradition of Catholic clergy protesting nuclear weapons, from the Berrigan brothers in the 1980s to the fictional nun Jane Ingalls, featured in the series Orange is the New Black.

Rice, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, spent decades working and teaching in Africa. She too has a long history of protest, even before she allegedly joined two men to throw human blood and write slogans on a building that houses enriched uranium in 2012.

Now, from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Rice is continuing her own brand of activism. With the help of friends and advocates including the National Association of Women Judges, Rice is drawing attention to conditions inside U.S. corrections facilities.

She and a few hundred others had been set to live in a women's prison in Danbury, Conn., the same one that served as a model for Orange is the New Black.

After authorities decided to overhaul that facility, the Catholic nun was sent to what was supposed to be a temporary holding center.

Brenda Murray, a federal administrative law judge, has been closely following Sister Rice's case because one of her friends entered the convent at the same time.

"It seems ridiculous to put somebody like that long term on the ninth floor of a high-rise building," Murray says. "I mean, that was supposed to be a temporary situation 'til we resolved Danbury, and it isn't been temporary. And it just is unfair."

A high rise might sound luxurious. But in this case, friends say, more than 100 women share six bathrooms.

A study by the Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School says the detention center in Brooklyn has much less to offer than the one in Connecticut.

Pat McSweeney, a retired ninth-grade English teacher, knows that firsthand. McSweeney befriended Sister Rice years ago at a protest. She describes the Brooklyn holding center as "like a big cement box, huge."

McSweeney visits when she can, and keeps in touch by phone or e-mail.

"When I've asked her a couple of times if she can go outside, no she can't," McSweeney says.

Rice insists she's fine, but friends say conditions in the Brooklyn facility are taking a toll on her. For one thing, the cap came off her front tooth months ago.

"There was a long time when she was carrying the cap around in her pocket," McSweeney says, "and then I think she did see someone and it was on, when her niece from Boston visited her, but it must have come off again."

Things are even more complicated when it comes to women's health care behind bars. That's because advocates say every facet of the Bureau of Prisons system was designed for men, even though women are very different.

"The majority, the vast majority of women in federal prisons are not violent offenders," says retired federal appeals court judge Pat Wald.

Wald says research demonstrates that incarcerated women need time with family members and friends, and special programs to help them get ready to leave prison. She says those are programs that seem to be unavailable for Sister Rice and others locked up in the Brooklyn facility.

Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik has been studying prisons for more than 30 years. She says the best solution is for authorities to look, case by case, at the inmates holed up in Brooklyn.

"A national review of those incarcerated with the end state of asking who need not be here or who could be in a less secure facility would be the desired end state," Resnik says.

For Megan Rice, that question could be moot by November. That's when the Bureau of Prisons web site says she's scheduled for release.

Moving from crisis to crisis — for too long that's been America's strategy for dealing with the challenges of an aging transit infrastructure, from roads, to bridges to ports. The result is a system that's crumbling and in desperate need of attention, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The massive study looks both at the current state of the country's transportation systems and forecasts what challenges lie ahead.

"Over the next 30 years, we're going to have 70 million more people in this country, and all those people are going be trying to get someplace on top of the number of people we have," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told NPR's Morning Edition. "So the congestion we have today is expected to get worse, unless we do something radical now." He says that, along with the president, he feels it's important to make a "substantial pivot" toward investing more in the country's transportation system.

Interview Highlights

i

"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

On the 5.5 billion hours we're spending in traffic

One of the statistics that comes out of this report is on the average year, people are spending about 5.5 billion hours in traffic, to the tune of $120 billion of lost time and cost — gasoline and other things. That's because the congestion is continuing to grow in some of our fastest-growing areas.

That doesn't have to be the reality going forward. Clearly, we need to make investments at the federal level, not only to maintain the system we have but to improve and build new capacity where we need it. We also need to make sure we're making smart choices about how that infrastructure gets built so we get the most throughput out of that infrastructure.

On how manufacturing will affect traffic

We have more manufacturing activity now than we've had over the last 15 years and we expect that to grow. We're expecting over the next 30 years, a 60 percent increase in truck traffic on our freeways. The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level before it gets worse.

On his proposal to improve highways and rails

The president and I have a proposal for surface transportation – highways, and transit, and rail – that would use pro-growth, business tax reform. Taxing untaxed corporate earnings that are overseas, and having those earnings come back home and being put to work for infrastructure.

It's a one-time fix, but it's also a fix that doesn't increase deficits and doesn't require tax increases, and allows us to basically double what the gas tax is putting into the system today. So we think it's important to make a very substantial pivot toward much greater investment.

Megan Rice celebrated her 85th birthday last week — in a high-rise detention center in Brooklyn.

The Catholic nun is serving nearly three years in prison for evading security and painting peace slogans on the walls of a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Rice is far from the only religious figure to run into legal trouble. There's a long tradition of Catholic clergy protesting nuclear weapons, from the Berrigan brothers in the 1980s to the fictional nun Jane Ingalls, featured in the series Orange is the New Black.

Rice, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, spent decades working and teaching in Africa. She too has a long history of protest, even before she allegedly joined two men to throw human blood and write slogans on a building that houses enriched uranium in 2012.

Now, from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Rice is continuing her own brand of activism. With the help of friends and advocates including the National Association of Women Judges, Rice is drawing attention to conditions inside U.S. corrections facilities.

She and a few hundred others had been set to live in a women's prison in Danbury, Conn., the same one that served as a model for Orange is the New Black.

After authorities decided to overhaul that facility, the Catholic nun was sent to what was supposed to be a temporary holding center.

Brenda Murray, a federal administrative law judge, has been closely following Sister Rice's case because one of her friends entered the convent at the same time.

"It seems ridiculous to put somebody like that long term on the ninth floor of a high-rise building," Murray says. "I mean, that was supposed to be a temporary situation 'til we resolved Danbury, and it isn't been temporary. And it just is unfair."

A high rise might sound luxurious. But in this case, friends say, more than 100 women share six bathrooms.

A study by the Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School says the detention center in Brooklyn has much less to offer than the one in Connecticut.

Pat McSweeney, a retired ninth-grade English teacher, knows that firsthand. McSweeney befriended Sister Rice years ago at a protest. She describes the Brooklyn holding center as "like a big cement box, huge."

McSweeney visits when she can, and keeps in touch by phone or e-mail.

"When I've asked her a couple of times if she can go outside, no she can't," McSweeney says.

Rice insists she's fine, but friends say conditions in the Brooklyn facility are taking a toll on her. For one thing, the cap came off her front tooth months ago.

"There was a long time when she was carrying the cap around in her pocket," McSweeney says, "and then I think she did see someone and it was on, when her niece from Boston visited her, but it must have come off again."

Things are even more complicated when it comes to women's health care behind bars. That's because advocates say every facet of the Bureau of Prisons system was designed for men, even though women are very different.

"The majority, the vast majority of women in federal prisons are not violent offenders," says retired federal appeals court judge Pat Wald.

Wald says research demonstrates that incarcerated women need time with family members and friends, and special programs to help them get ready to leave prison. She says those are programs that seem to be unavailable for Sister Rice and others locked up in the Brooklyn facility.

Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik has been studying prisons for more than 30 years. She says the best solution is for authorities to look, case by case, at the inmates holed up in Brooklyn.

"A national review of those incarcerated with the end state of asking who need not be here or who could be in a less secure facility would be the desired end state," Resnik says.

For Megan Rice, that question could be moot by November. That's when the Bureau of Prisons web site says she's scheduled for release.

Moving from crisis to crisis — for too long that's been America's strategy for dealing with the challenges of an aging transit infrastructure, from roads, to bridges to ports. The result is a system that's crumbling and in desperate need of attention, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The massive study looks both at the current state of the country's transportation systems and forecasts what challenges lie ahead.

"Over the next 30 years, we're going to have 70 million more people in this country, and all those people are going be trying to get someplace on top of the number of people we have," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told NPR's Morning Edition. "So the congestion we have today is expected to get worse, unless we do something radical now." He says that, along with the president, he feels it's important to make a "substantial pivot" toward investing more in the country's transportation system.

Interview Highlights

i

"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

"The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level," says Foxx.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

On the 5.5 billion hours we're spending in traffic

One of the statistics that comes out of this report is on the average year, people are spending about 5.5 billion hours in traffic, to the tune of $120 billion of lost time and cost — gasoline and other things. That's because the congestion is continuing to grow in some of our fastest-growing areas.

That doesn't have to be the reality going forward. Clearly, we need to make investments at the federal level, not only to maintain the system we have but to improve and build new capacity where we need it. We also need to make sure we're making smart choices about how that infrastructure gets built so we get the most throughput out of that infrastructure.

On how manufacturing will affect traffic

We have more manufacturing activity now than we've had over the last 15 years and we expect that to grow. We're expecting over the next 30 years, a 60 percent increase in truck traffic on our freeways. The bottom line is, if you're stuck in traffic today and your travel time's longer than it was 10 years ago, it's likely to get worse unless we take some very important steps at the federal, state and local level before it gets worse.

On his proposal to improve highways and rails

The president and I have a proposal for surface transportation – highways, and transit, and rail – that would use pro-growth, business tax reform. Taxing untaxed corporate earnings that are overseas, and having those earnings come back home and being put to work for infrastructure.

It's a one-time fix, but it's also a fix that doesn't increase deficits and doesn't require tax increases, and allows us to basically double what the gas tax is putting into the system today. So we think it's important to make a very substantial pivot toward much greater investment.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush isn't officially a presidential candidate, but by delivering a speech to the Detroit Economic Club Wednesday he sure acted like one.

The elite, nonpartisan organization is a must-stop for serious candidates — it's hosted every eventual president since Richard Nixon. The list of presidential contenders who've taken to the podium there in recent decades is long. Last year, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was among the speakers.

The club was founded in 1934 during the Great Depression, by prominent Detroit businessman Alan Crow to hold Michigan gubernatorial and senatorial debates and talks by congressional and business leaders.

Its nearly 3,300 members include movers and shakers from Michigan's political and corporate worlds.

Historically, candidates like Jeb Bush have used the forum to outline their economic policies. It was during his 2012 DEC speech that Michigan native Mitt Romney famously listed all the cars he owned, including "a couple of Cadillacs." Romney's father, automaker and former Michigan Gov. George Romney, spoke at the DEC with Nixon in the 1960s.

In 1992, Bill Clinton used the DEC platform for "a major economic address," that criticized President George H.W. Bush. A month later, Bush delivered his own address at the DEC to announce his economic agenda for his second term.

More recently, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2007 reprimanded Detroit auto giants from the DEC podium.

"We know that our oil addiction is jeopardizing our national security," he said. "Here in Detroit, three giants of American industry are hemorrhaging jobs and profits as foreign competitors answer the rising global demand for fuel-efficient cars."

"We politicians are afraid to ask the oil and auto industries to do their part and those industries hire armies of lobbyists to make sure that the status quo remains," he said.

2016 Republican presidential nomination

Detroit

Fresh Off The Boat, a comedy premiering Wednesday night on ABC, is the rare series that features Asian-American actors in a show about an Asian-American family. It closely resembles ABC's Black-ish not primarily because both shows feature casts of color, but because both shows share a sort of emerging ABC house style, in which slightly hapless but deeply lovable narrators have family adventures while constantly teetering at the edge of a very much heightened reality.

The show is based on — but liberally adapted from — the story of Eddie Huang, whose parents were from Taiwan, and who are played in the show by Randall Park and Constance Wu. Their American dream involves running a steakhouse, perhaps the most cowboy-tinged, Americana-themed kind of restaurant they could have chosen. For young Eddie, played by Hudson Yang, being an American kid means hip-hop.

It's well worth reading this New York Times piece by Wesley Yang, which interrogates the "tortured ambivalence" the real Eddie Huang has about the show, as well as the long piece he wrote for New York Magazine about finding most of the pilot silly and frustrating but a sliver of it energizing. (Make sure you get to the end, though; there's a turn.)

But it's also worth at least considering the show simply as a self-contained half-hour of broadcast comedy, separate from any obligation to break ground, and asking: is it any good?

In the first three episodes that the network made available, you get a pretty basic set of family stories: kids trying to make friends, kids getting goofy and ill-advised ideas, mom trying to navigate the crazy neighborhood ladies, dad dealing with the problems at his restaurant, mom trying to lower the boom about school. As already mentioned, it feels, in structure and style and mood, a lot like Black-ish, with young Eddie Huang taking the sardonic narration over in the place of Anthony Anderson as Andre Johnson. That's not necessarily surprising — CBS procedurals have a style, as do ABC dramas and as did many of the successful NBC comedies of the '80s and '90s. It's a slightly detached retelling by the central character, almost adopting a little bit of the ability mockumentary shows like Modern Family have to let characters reflect on their own folly.

For the early stages of the show, it's really all about the execution of the material. They're still settling into the rhythms of this family, but Constance Wu as mom Jessica and Randall Park as dad Louis are both very good at making rather sitcommy lines sound better than they would in less careful hands. Wu has a tough task here, because her hard-driving mom could easily drift into stereotype, but they're smart to give her a personal story early on in which she's called upon to decide whether to stand up to bullies, much like Eddie has to do at school.

It's certainly not a great show; Eddie Huang is right that they're taking a pretty safe, not very provocative approach to putting this family in front of the viewers of ABC. He's right that a lot of the feel-good lessons aren't exactly daring in the face of what television has been saying for decades about everything being ultimately universal.

But he's also right that there are bracing moments in which this show is pushing on dynamics that don't come up all that often, as when Eddie finds himself tussling with the black kid at his school over who's "on the bottom" of the pecking order. Every episode has a couple of moments like that, where a new facet is added to a pretty ordinary sitcom plot and even a jaded eyebrow may go up in interest.

There's a warmth to the show, though, that feels earned. It has promise. It's a family with a lot of rootable, likable people in it. And it has a really funny line about Burt Reynolds and Cop And A Half in the second episode, though you won't necessarily want to explain it to your littlest ones. Fortunately, they won't get it.

There's a PSA that greets you on the radio when you're driving the flat stretch of Colorado State Highway 113 near the Nebraska state line.

"With marijuana legal under Colorado law, we've all got a few things to know ... Once you get here, it can't leave our state. Stick around, this place is pretty great."

"I'm concerned what [Colorado's legalization] will lead to in terms of a change in culture, a change in the way that we enjoy a certain quality, a certain type of life, in small-town America."

- B.J. Wilkinson, police chief of Sidney, Neb.

B.J. Wilkinson, police chief of nearby Sidney, Neb., rolls his eyes whenever he hears that spot, made by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Sidney is the first place you come to after crossing the border, and Wilkinson knows firsthand that not everyone's listening to those ads.

"Do you really think that somebody listening to that is going to say, 'Oh, they said on the radio I shouldn't take my marijuana back into Nebraska. So because they said it on the radio and I got a warning, I'm gonna listen to it'? Nah."

It's been more than a year since Colorado formally legalized recreational marijuana, and the police in the rural counties that border the state are reporting big increases in illegal marijuana trafficking.

Wilkinson says marijuana-related offenses in Sidney have increased 50 percent in that time, jumping from 100 to 150 cases.

Police in border towns like Sidney say they didn't vote to legalize the drug — and yet their communities are dealing with burdensome consequences. Two states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, are now asking the Supreme Court to throw out Colorado's law altogether.

Concerns About Changes 'In Small-Town America'

i

In the evidence room at the courthouse in Deuel County, Neb., Sheriff Adam Hayward holds up a 1-pound bag of marijuana confiscated during a recent traffic stop. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR

In the evidence room at the courthouse in Deuel County, Neb., Sheriff Adam Hayward holds up a 1-pound bag of marijuana confiscated during a recent traffic stop.

Kirk Siegler/NPR

"I'm concerned what [Colorado's legalization] will lead to in terms of a change in culture, a change in the way that we enjoy a certain quality, a certain type of life, in small-town America," Wilkinson says.

Wilkinson likes that small town life. He's spent his whole law enforcement career working in small towns. He's proud of Sidney, and it shows.

Sidney, population 7,000, is the headquarters of the hunting and camping retailer Cabela's. It's expanding, and so is the local hospital. There are a lot of jobs to be had here. Wilkinson says Sidney is thriving — and he doesn't want Colorado's experiment with marijuana to get in the way.

"I'm not disputing the fact that the people of Colorado voted to make this opportunity exist. I get all that," he says. "My problem is that the fallout from it is impacting our way of life and our quality of life here."

Much of what you hear about pot in this community is still pretty anecdotal. The cops say they're seeing an increase in distribution cases involving high school kids, but the high school principal says school officials haven't yet noticed more of the drug around, and the health department said it's an issue they're tracking.

Spend a couple of days in Sidney, and you won't find that marijuana is the number-one topic of conversation in town.

Bring it up to older folks — the ranchers who've been here 60 years — and sure, they'll bash Colorado's hippie culture. One man in a cafe told me that Colorado's dope shouldn't be Nebraska's problem.

But bump into someone who's younger, and there's a good chance they might tell you pot isn't as big a deal as it's being made out to be.

"There's always been pot around," says Brandon Sean, who grew up here. He doesn't smoke pot, but he says this part of the Nebraska panhandle is more independent, more libertarian, like Colorado.

"What do you do? I mean, you're not gonna stop it from coming over. That's kinda like the border down south — you ain't gonna stop it," he says.

i

In Sidney, Neb., Police Chief B.J. Wilkinson says there's been a 50 percent increase in marijuana-related offenses in the year since neighboring Colorado legalized the drug. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR

In Sidney, Neb., Police Chief B.J. Wilkinson says there's been a 50 percent increase in marijuana-related offenses in the year since neighboring Colorado legalized the drug.

Kirk Siegler/NPR

'Tons Of People, All The Time'

It's hard to say how much marijuana is coming into Nebraska border towns like this, but one thing is clear: Plenty of people will tell you that if you want to buy pot, you don't have to go far.

The closest dispensary is about a 40-minute drive away in Sedgwick, Colo. The town is small — just a couple of streets. There's a bar and an old stage coach motel-turned-antique shop. And then, next door to the hair salon, there's Sedgwick Alternative Relief, which markets itself as the "First Dispensary in Colorado."

Cathy, who doesn't want her last name used because this is such a small town, is getting highlights in her hair. She lives off one of the back roads by the state line, and it's clear she wants nothing to do with the dispensary.

"I think it's increased our revenue, it's definitely increased our population — maybe not with the kindest people," she says.

"You just see more out-of-state plates than what we normally do. Like before the pot shop came into town, nobody drove those roads. And now you see tons of people, all the time," she laughs.

Today, a couple of cars with Colorado plates are parked in front of the dispensary. There's also Illinois, Kansas and two from Nebraska.

Nobody really wants to talk to a reporter with a microphone. The dispensary's assistant manager doesn't want to give an interview on tape, but tells me the business sees a lot of customers coming down from Nebraska. But they're mostly older, he says, buying for their own personal use. They're not dealers.

Related Stories

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Pediatricians Say Don't Lock Up Teenagers For Using Marijuana

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Voters Said Yes, But D.C. And Congress Continue To Spar Over Pot

'We Don't Want This Stuff Here'

This isn't a big secret. Top law enforcement officials in Colorado have said their state is becoming a major exporter of marijuana, even though it's against the law for pot to leave the state.

Visit to the evidence locker in the courthouse in Deuel County, Neb., and that becomes clear. Those back roads out of Sedgwick lead to Deuel County.

"These bags here, these totes, these buckets ... this is 75 pounds of marijuana," says Sheriff Adam Hayward, displaying what he seized in a single traffic stop.

Hayward says he's overwhelmed. "Every bit of marijuana we have in here came from Colorado," he says.

Deuel County is roughly the size of Los Angeles, but has a population of just 2,000. Hayward has only a handful of deputies. In 2011 there were only four felony marijuana convictions in the county, but in 2014, there were 32, costing the county $150,000 — money that didn't go to fixing roads or schools, Hayward says.

"We need to stand up and say, 'No, we don't want this stuff here,' " Hayward says. "It's dangerous. It's bad for people's health. You don't want your kids getting involved in this."

For cops in these small towns along the Colorado border, this fight is about people's health, which is why Nebraska and Oklahoma aren't asking the Supreme Court to force Colorado to pay court costs. They're asking for Colorado's entire experiment with legal, recreational marijuana to be shut down, full stop.

recreational marijuana

legalizing marijuana

legalization of marijuana

marijuana

Recent reports about the death of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro appear to be exaggerated. Cuban state media released images of the 88-year-old Castro who has not been seen in public for more than a year, an absence that has led to speculation he is ailing or worse.

The photographs are the first since August 2014 when Castro was shown talking to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. In the images released today, the former Cuban leader is seen talking to Randy Perdemo Garcia, the head of the country's main student union. An accompanying piece by Perdemo Garcia says the three-hour meeting to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Castro starting his studies at the University of Havana took place Jan. 23. The Associated Press has more:

"The student leader says Castro said that he is keeping abreast of the news and performing daily exercises, and he engaged Perdomo in a wide-ranging discussion of topics including international politics, agriculture, astronomy, and even Namibia's donation of animals to Cuba's National Zoo.

"Perdomo says the two men discussed the release of three Cuban intelligence agents as part of the Dec. 17 declaration by Cuba and the United States that they would move to re-establish full diplomatic relations. The photos show Castro examining a newspaper report on their release."

On Jan. 26, the Communist Party-run Granma newspaper released a letter that it attributed to Castro, in which, as NPR's Eyder Peralta reported, he insisted Cuba will defend its ideals in the face of a planned rapprochement between his country and the U.S.

"I don't trust the politics of the United States and I've not said a word to them," he wrote. "This doesn't mean, however, that I reject a peaceful outcome... We will always defend the cooperation and friendship with all of the world and our our political adversaries."

An ailing Castro stepped down as Cuba's president in 2006 and handed the country's reins to his brother, Raul Castro. Rumors of his death have surfaced periodically since then.

Cuba

Fidel Castro

After dozens of votes attacking Obamacare in recent years, House Republicans' latest attempt Tuesday finally gets real.

Not in the sense that the full repeal bill will become law — it's not likely to pass the Senate and, in any event, faces a certain presidential veto even if it somehow did. What makes today a milestone is that, for the first time, House Republicans plan to vote on whether to actually take health coverage away from millions of Americans who now have it.

More precisely: 19 million of them by the end of the year, according to a recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. And with a new study showing that 60 percent of Affordable Care Act beneficiaries receiving subsidies from the federal exchange are from the South and 60 percent of them non-Hispanic whites, House Republicans would be casting votes to eliminate a program that to a large extent benefits their own constituents.

How this new reality will affect the vote count is unclear. Republicans have been solid in their opposition to the health care law. The last time the House voted to repeal the law in entirety — rather than tweak one or more small provisions — was May 16, 2013. Not a single Republican voted against it. But that was when the first enrollment period was still months away, and the vote could still largely be framed as a matter of political philosophy.

That was also before Republicans picked up 13 Democratic seats in the 2014 midterm elections, some of which are in swing districts that could swing right back to Democrats.

One of those new Republicans, in fact, could serve as the poster-child for the party's potential problems with the vote. Rep. Carlos Curbelo represents the western suburbs of Miami, some of Florida's poorest communities. The majority-Latino district also happens to contain one zip code with one of the highest Obamacare enrollments in the country, and is blocks away from two others.

This could be one reason why Curbelo's Spanish response to President Obama's State of the Union address last month avoided the Affordable Care Act altogether. Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, in the English response, described Obamacare as an example of "failed policies." Curbelo, though, spoke instead about education and the income gap — and chided Washington for not working "toward a health economy that offers opportunities to everyone who lives in this country, not just the most privileged," according to a comparison done by the Miami Herald.

Other Republicans have recognized for some time that taking away access to health care for the working poor was not necessarily good politics, and have advocated a "repeal and replace" strategy to show that the GOP also cares about the issue.

No Republican alternative to the ACA has yet emerged since they took control of the House in 2011, and none is in today's bill, either. However, the proposal does instruct three House committees to recommend ideas to replace Obamacare, including such things as limiting medical malpractice lawsuits and giving states more flexibility in administering Medicaid.

This week figures to be a big one in the debate about how to regulate the Internet.

Yesterday the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission announced he'll try to overrule laws in two states that restrict community-owned broadband networks. Later this week, he's expected to propose exactly what President Obama asked for last year: reclassifying the Internet under regulations known in the parlance of telecom wonks as Title II.

"In plain English, I'm asking them to recognize that for most Americans, the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life," Obama said in November.

i

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, left, speaks Oct. 8 during new conference in Washington. Wheeler has spoken in favor of regulating Internet providers as public utilities, an issue the commission is expected to decide on this month. Jose Luis Magana/AP hide caption

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, left, speaks Oct. 8 during new conference in Washington. Wheeler has spoken in favor of regulating Internet providers as public utilities, an issue the commission is expected to decide on this month.

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Big cable and phone companies warn that would stifle investment and cost consumers more, but the truth may be more complicated.

This policy shift, which the FCC is expected to vote before the end of the month, is what many Internet companies and public interest groups say is what the commission needs to do to stop broadband companies from charging extra to get information to consumers faster. But phone and cable companies warn that Title II would be a disaster.

"These regulations that we're talking about are public-utility-style regulations, and this industry's moving fast," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told an industry conference in November. "And if you can't bring new products to service at your speed, not the government's speed, why would you ever make these investments?"

Broadband industry executives have told the same story on Capitol Hill. But Fran Shammo, the chief financial officer of Verizon, seemed to go off script when he was asked about Title II at an investor conference in December.

"To be real clear, I mean, this does not influence the way we invest," Shammo said. "We're gonna continue to invest in our networks and our platforms. Nothing will influence that."

The differing messages don't necessarily result from a difference of opinion, but a difference of audience, says Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

"When they're talking to Wall Street, they say different things than when they're talking to the press about what the FCC might like to do," she says. "They trot out these really simple and nonsensical platitudes, like 'regulation inevitably leads to lower investment.' That's just not true."

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The phone and cable industries also have warned that Title II could lead to billions of dollars in new taxes on consumer's broadband bills, but Open Internet advocates say those claims are wrong.

They also argue that Title II and robust investment can coexist, pointing to the success of the wireless phone industry, which is regulated in part under Title II. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said that cell companies have been "monumentally successful" under Title II regulations, noting they made billions in investment under that system.

In theory, reclassification would give the FCC broad powers — including the ability to cap the price your Internet provider can charge. Wheeler has hinted that the commission won't actually try to use that power, but the mere threat of price regulation is enough to scare Wall Street, says Paul Gallant, an industry analyst at Guggenheim Partners.

"The uncertainty that Wall Street has, though, right now about Title II is a little bit overdone," he says. "I don't think there's any real prospect that the FCC will end up regulating prices. I just don't think is a realistic fear."

Still, Gallant says phone and cable companies might find it harder to borrow money under Title II, which could in turn could be a drag on investment in their networks.

But Michael Powell, a former chairman of the FCC who now heads the cable industry's trade group, said the the question is one of degree.

"All hyperbole aside, the issue isn't whether people will invest — of course they will, they have businesses to run," Powell said. "The real question is, will it be at a diminished and dampened level compared to the velocity and ambitions that the country has?"

Amid the disputes about customer bills and pace of investing, however, one thing is viewed as an absolute certainty: Big phone and cable companies almost certainly will take the FCC to court if the commission moves toward Title II, as anticipated.

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The Academy Awards are coming this month and if you're still trying to see all the Oscar-nominated films, it may be easier to find them in China than the U.S.

A few weeks ago, the films flooded into the pirated DVD store down the street from my apartment in Shanghai. It happens like clockwork every year.

I asked T.J. Greene, an American executive who runs a small movie theater company here in China, to visit the store and explain what was happening.

There is nothing subtle about the store, which has a huge "DVD" sign on top and pipes music out onto the sidewalk. We strolled inside to find a dozen shelves worth of pirated DVDs. The front rack, visible from the street, was filled with all the Oscar hopefuls, including American Sniper, Selma and Birdman.

"Every single one of them is in perfect and nicely wrapped plastic and in great, great condition," Greene said, admiring the packaging. "You can even read the synopsis on the back."

"Before, if it was just a Hollywood cinema or a Warner Brothers cinema, there wasn't as much pressure to crack down, because it's foreign. But now it's having an effect on their own pocketbooks.

- T.J. Greene, executive of a movie theater company in China

A female clerk, who wore the store uniform, a bright yellow wind-breaker, assured Greene all the DVDs had high-quality pictures and audio.

"What happens if [there's] bad quality, can we bring it back?" Greene said to the clerk.

"OK, no problem," the clerk answered cheerily.

Greene is the CEO of Apex Entertainment, which has a cinema in the eastern city of Suzhou and is building nine more around China. He often checks out pirated DVD stores to gauge the competition.

After scanning the Oscar nominees, Greene asked about the latest Hunger Games film, which opened around the world in late November, but will only come to China this month.

"The copy not very well ... so you can wait," said the clerk. "Maybe after Chinese New Year, I have very good one."

As Greene chatted with the clerk, the store's enforcer, a Chinese man about six feet tall, continued to eye us from just a few feet away and frown. We decided to leave and head to my apartment to talk about what we'd seen.

All the Oscar-nominated movies in the store were copies of screeners, the DVDs sent to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as part of the nomination process. Greene says the copies could have come from factories that made the screeners or from the homes of members themselves.

Members are not supposed to show a screener to other people. "But, hey, this is the real world," Greene says. "It can easily get into the hands of others."

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Online piracy in China remains a big problem, but DVDs on the streets have actually improved. When Greene arrived here in 2004, vendors across the city were still operating carts containing hundreds of DVDs each. Since then, authorities have run most street vendors out of business.

Greene says a big reason is the explosion of movie theaters in China.

When he came here, there were about 2,000 screens. Most of the theaters were rundown and had lousy sound systems. Today, there are about 25,000 screens, most state-of-the-art. Nearly all are locally or state-owned, which means China's government has a big incentive to protect them.

"Before, if it was just a Hollywood cinema or a Warner Brothers cinema, there wasn't as much pressure to crack down, because it's foreign," Greene says. "But now it's having an effect on their own pocketbooks."

That's probably one reason why the DVD store in my neighborhood didn't have a clean copy of the new Hunger Games movie. A pirated DVD of the movie would have eaten into potential ticket sales here over the last two months.

To protect domestic filmmakers, China only allows 34 foreign movies into the country each year. Greene says that's an even bigger problem than piracy, because it severely limits what Hollywood can show here and what audiences can legally see.

"This weekend, I went to Hong Kong and I was able to watch American Sniper," Greene says. "That film will never see the light of day here because of the quota system."

China says it will increase the foreign quota in two to three years. Until then, Greene says film fans here will have to keep going to pirated websites, or stores like the one in my neighborhood, to see some of Hollywood's best movies.

China

This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.

As the economy continues to recover, economists are seeing stark differences between people with high school and college degrees. Four-year college graduates are nearly twice as likely to have a job compared to Americans who just graduated high school and stopped there.

But economists say that doesn't mean everybody needs a 4-year degree. In fact, millions of good-paying jobs are opening up in the trades. And some pay better than what the average college graduate makes.

Learning A Trade

When 18-year-old Haley Hughes graduated from high school this past summer, she had good grades; she was on the honor roll every year. So she applied to a bunch of 4-year colleges and got accepted to every one of them. But she says, "I wasn't excited about it really, I guess."

"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials."

- Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

So instead of going that route, Hughes is taking a different path: an apprenticeship through the big New England power utility company NSTAR. In one of her recent classes at an NSTAR facility outside Boston, the classroom work was actually quite exciting.

Lara Allison is one of the instructors teaching Hughes and the other utility worker apprentices how to protect themselves if they're down under a manhole cover, in an underground electrical substation and something bad happens.

"An arc flash, that's the thing we worry the most about," Allison says.

An arc flash is a highly energized bolt of electricity, an explosion of electricity in a sense, that jumps from an energy source to another spot that's grounded or that the energy can flow into. Allison tells the students that if they wear the wrong clothing and they get hit by an arc flash, their clothes can catch on fire and get seared into their skin. "It's really, really hot," she says.

On her apprenticeship Hughes already has been down working in those underground substations.

"I loved it, it was great," she says.

Hughes says another thing that's great is that taking this path into the high-skilled trades is a lot cheaper than a 4-year college would have been.

$40,000 Vs. $2,400 Per Year

"The student loans would be ridiculous," Hughes says during a break from class. "The schools I was looking at ... were like $40,000 a year." In the long run she thought that was just too much.

By comparison, NSTAR is partnering with nearby Bunker Hill Community College. The students end up with a 2-year associate degree. Hughes has some scholarships and NSTAR pays some of the cost. It works out to about $1,200 a semester. Hughes says she's been paying that herself and so she expects to graduate with no debt.

Hughes is also getting a lot of on-the-job training and taking a wide range of courses at the community college: English, math, a computer science course and even a psychology group dynamics class. Then there are the classes directly related to power utility work: DC theory, AC theory, physics, engineering and business etiquette. Not bad for $1,200 a semester.

'Averages Lie'

At the NSTAR apprenticeship program, 90 percent of the students get jobs with the power utility at graduation. Starting base pay is about $58,000 a year.

On average, it is certainly true that people with a 4-year college degree make more money than those with a 2-year degree or less. But there is plenty of nuance behind that truth.

"Averages lie," says Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

He says the problem with those averages is that people who work at Radio Shack or Target get lumped in with master carpenters and electricians.

"You can get a particular skill in a particular field and make more than a college graduate," he says. For example, he says the average electrician makes $5,000 a year more than the average 4-year college graduate. And the country is going to need a lot more skilled tradespeople.

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"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials," Carnevale says. He says there are 600,000 jobs for electricians in the country today, and about half of those will open up over the next decade. Carnevale says it is a big opportunity for that millennial generation born between 1980 and 2000.

With so many boomers retiring from the trades, the U.S. is going to need a lot more pipe-fitters, nuclear power plant operators, carpenters, welders, utility workers — the list is long. But the problem is not enough young people are getting that kind of training.

Not Enough Training

Utility apprentice Haley Hughes says she chose to work in the trades, in large part, because she went to a vocational high school. A lot of her friends are going into the trades. She got comfortable there with wiring light switches and doing basic electrical work and learning about the industry. But, there aren't nearly as many of these types of programs in high schools as there used to be.

"We made a mistake," Carnevale says. "Back in 1983, there was the 'Nation at Risk' report in which, quite rightly, we all were appalled at the quality of education in America."

After that, he says, most high schools focused on academics and getting students ready for college. For a lot of parents, they wanted their kids to have a 4-year degree. But Carnevale says, in the process "we basically obliterated the modernization of the old vocational education programs and they've been set aside."

Carnevale says we should bring those programs back and we need to be preparing a lot more young people for good, well-paying jobs in the trades. And he says that means we need better training programs at high schools and community colleges in partnership with businesses in scores of different industries around the country.

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Parents on the hunt for great kids' books get some help each year when the American Library Association gives out its youth media awards. On Monday, the association announced a long list of winners in a variety of categories. The two that get the most attention are the John Newbery Medal for most outstanding contribution to children's literature and the Randolph Caldecott Medal for picture book artistry. This year's Newbery went to Kwame Alexander's The Crossover, and the Caldecott went to Dan Santat's The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend.

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Alexander says he couldn't sleep Sunday night knowing that he had a chance of winning the Newbery. "I know we hear that it is all about the journey, and it was," he says. "But I so wanted the journey to end in a really cool place."

His winning novel is a story about twin brothers who love each other and basketball in equal measure. Alexander knew a story about sports would attract reluctant readers, especially boys. And he wrote the novel in verse because he started out as a poet.

He says, "When I set about the task of trying to write a novel, of course I went with what I knew. And I said, 'Oh, well I know how to write poetry so I'm going to be able write a novel in poems pretty easily.'"

But it was a lot harder than he expected. He says he wanted to embrace a variety of forms so that kids would be introduced to different kinds of poetry, though he's surprised when he hears people describe some of the verse as rap.

"That's so funny," he says. "You know, I hear people say ... that there's rap in the book and of course, when I was writing it, there was no rap in my mind."

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The Adventures of Beekle is the story of an imaginary friend who goes in search of a child who needs him. Author and illustrator Dan Santat says, "I found it interesting that no one had ever taken the approach from the imaginary friend's point of view."

He remembers when his own son first went to school and worried about making friends. He says the book is really a gift to his son, and winning the Caldecott just makes the whole experience sweeter.

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"I would have been perfectly fine knowing that my son would have been content growing up and maybe possibly having his own children and sharing the book and saying, you know, 'This book is a love letter from your grandfather to me.' But now it's going to have a sticker on [it] and now it can be shared, you know, with the world," he says. "It's beyond words. I'm thrilled."

Other winners announced on Monday include:

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Coretta Scott King Author Book Award)

Firebird by Misty Copeland and illustrated by Christopher Myers (Coretta Scott King Illustrator Book Award)

Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales (Pura Belpr Illustrator Award)

I Lived on Butterfly Hill by Marjorie Agosn and illustrated by Lee White (Pura Belpr Author Award)

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (Michael L. Printz Award)

The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet (Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award)

Read an excerpt of The Crossover

Peter Fredell carries an unusual wallet. It feels a bit like leather, but the material is pale and thin. He pulls it out on a street corner in Stockholm, Sweden.

"I actually made it myself," he says. "It's an eel that I fished up. And I used the skin and stitched it together."

This eelskin wallet carries personal significance — but it does not carry cash.

Around the world, cash is fading. Electronic transactions are becoming a bigger part of the economy every year. And one of the leaders in this trend is Sweden, where more than 95 percent of transactions are digital.

Fredell is the CEO of a company called Seamless that designs payment systems for cell phones.

Back in his office, I asked him to recall the last time he needed cash.

He thought for a bit.

"My son plays ice hockey, and I had to give something to the ice hockey team, and so I gave them some cash," Fredell says eventually. "But as a matter of fact, that will disappear too."

He says the ice hockey team has just started taking cell phone payments.

I decided to see just how far this goes.

So, we stuck our heads out of Fredell's office to the open-plan workspace. I ask if anyone has cash on them. Person after person shakes their head no.

Finally we found one employee with cash — an engineer named Wilhelm Svenselius.

He says he needed it for a party the previous weekend. It was held at a bar that doesn't take cards, and Svenselius had to get cash especially for the occasion. He says that happens once a month or so.

i

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically. Camilla Lindskog/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Camilla Lindskog/AP

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically.

Camilla Lindskog/AP

Of course, these people work for a digital payment company.

But national data show that in Sweden, they are not unusual. There are churches that pass a digital payment system with the collection plate. Some homeless people who sell newspapers on the street take digital payments.

Ruth Goodwin-Groen runs the Better than Cash Alliance, which the U.N. and major global foundations are funding as part of an effort to move the global economy away from cash toward digital transactions.

"This is a means of helping achieve many different goals," Goodwin-Groen says.

Electronic transactions are more transparent and more accountable, she says. They cost less, and they're more secure. It's a global trend, from the developing world to the biggest, most advanced economies.

But there are holdouts.

Ron Shevlin is a senior analyst at the Aite Group, a financial services firm in Boston.

"For some consumers, and especially older consumers, they prefer cash and don't prefer to use cards or mobile payments," he says.

And people making illegal purchases on the black market will always prefer cash.

Plus, he says, digital transactions do raise security concerns.

"In some respects, the economic impact is negative because of the propensity for data breaches and fraudulent transaction," Shevlin says.

Back in Stockholm, Fredell is already imagining ways to make cashless transactions completely secure.

"My favorite payment actually is DNA payment. You spit in a cup next to the cashier," he says.

That spit-system doesn't exist anywhere yet.

"But it's the absolutely safest way, right?" Fredell says. "Someone would have to copy your DNA."

It's a dream — but not one that he sees happening any time soon.

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In a move aimed at breathing life into Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, thousands gathered at the city's Victoria Park today in open defiance of Beijing's insistence that it have final say on candidates for the territory's next leader.

Organizers said 13,000 attended the rally, but police claimed the figure was 8,800. Regardless, the number is far fewer than the tens of thousands that came out for past protests calling for free and open elections in 2017 to choose a new "chief executive" for the former British colony.

In any case, The South China Morning Post says it's "the first major post-Occupy Movement mass rally."

According to the SCMP:

"[Placards] and balloons all paying homage to the "Umbrella Movement" abounded. At 2.20pm, the march began with the head of the rally leaving Victoria Park's eastern entrance through Tin Hau.

"Leading the charge were key figures of the Occupy Central movement including Benny Tai Yiu-ting, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Others at the front included Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-Ming as well as Daisy Chan Sin-Ying."

Reuters reports that some 2,000 police flanked the protesters as they marched through the city's glitzy shopping and financial districts, "seeking to avoid a repeat of the so-called Occupy Central campaign that saw demonstrations shut down key roads for 2-1/2 months."

Beginning in August, the mass protests attracted international attention amid fears of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown that never came. However, Hong Kong police did move aggressively on several occasions to try to break up the mass protests that paralyzed parts of the city.

In September, at the height of the mass protests, we published this primer on the history of Hong Kong and what's at stake for the pro-democracy movement.

Hong Kong protests

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As our plane touches down in Sundsvall, Sweden, the horizon is all snow and ice. A small air traffic control tower sticks out above the white horizon.

But this airport actually has two air traffic control centers. The second one is just a short walk from the airport runway.

Inside a ground-floor, windowless room, there's a display that looks exactly like what you'd see out of an air traffic control tower. You can see the snowy runway, you can see the trees, you can even see a car pulling into the airport parking lot.

But instead of windows, these are actually screens. And the airport you're looking at isn't the one in Sundsvall. It's the one in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden — about 105 miles away.

Ornskoldsvik is the first airport in the world to land passenger planes remotely. This summer, an airport in Leesburg, Va., will become the first American airport to use the new technology.

Erik Backman runs the remote airplane landing center in the town of Sundsvall. He explains that the town of Ornskoldsvik has a tiny airport, and it's expensive to keep air traffic controllers there who spend hours with no planes to land.

So they decided to have one team in Sundsvall that could handle both cities.

"The day you have one air traffic controller who can control two airports, then you have some good benefits according to costs," Backman says.

A 'Paradigm Shift' For The Industry

In Ornskoldsvik, a set of cameras and microphones delivers a real-time image to Sundsvall. Of course, new technology is notoriously glitchy.

And a problem landing an airplane is far more consequential than a laptop freezing up.

Backman says when he saw the first mockup of this technology in 2004, he was dubious. The room had to be dark, the pictures were jumpy.

But a decade later, they've been landing planes remotely for months without any major problems.

Mikael Henriksson, the project manager, has been an air traffic controller for 40 years. He says in all his time looking out tower windows, there were only three big innovations: blinds to block out the sun, thicker glass to block out the noise, and bug zappers to get rid of the flies.

Now, he's had a chance to play with this new technology, and he can't believe it only arrived near the end of his career.

"For the air traffic controller, this is like airline pilots going from propeller to jet," Henriksson says. "It's a paradigm shift."

Many Uses, Including Potentially For The Military

Because once the windows are replaced with screens, you can overlay all kinds of information on the display: airplane numbers, runway incursion warnings. You can zoom in, or switch to an infrared view to see through thick fog or darkness.

And that might make this technology useful even for big, crowded airports.

Anders Carp is head of traffic management at Saab, the Swedish defense and security company that created this technology. He thinks there are worldwide — even military — applications.

Airports in dangerous places could have a camera house instead of a control tower, he says. The air traffic controllers could be a few — or a few thousand — miles away in a safe environment, because it doesn't matter whether the remote tower is across town or on the other side of the earth.

Back in the Sundsvall control center, a plane descends toward the Ornskoldsvik runway. We watch it move across the screen. The sound shifts in stereo as the plane rolls along.

The passengers — and even the pilot — have no idea whether they've been brought in for a landing from the tower they can see out their window, or from this hidden, remote center more than a 100 miles away.

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