Most Recent Posts

There are more than 4 million American families living under the poverty line today that are led by a single mother. Katrina Gilbert is one of those moms.

Gilbert is a certified nursing assistant in Tennessee. To support her three children, she sometimes works seven days a week at a nursing home. But at $10 an hour, her paycheck doesn't go very far.

HBO followed her for a year for its upcoming documentary, Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert. The film airs Monday and will also be available online.

For Tell Me More's year-long series marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, Gilbert spoke to host Michel Martin about the film and the challenges she faces in her day-to-day life.

It's hard to see crippling sanctions at a modern shopping mall in north Tehran — the shops are stocked, the cafes are full. The latest western electronics – even iPhones and iPads, are available for those who can afford it.

But talk to middle class Iranians and you hear dire stories. The say they suffered as prices on almost everything rose dramatically for two years. International sanctions fueled skyrocketing inflation, estimated at 45 percent. Practically, that means that necessities – bread, rice, soap – got more expensive every month.

In a small neighborhood shop, a baker fills a machine with dough that pops out loaves of hot bread. Sanctions changed the way Iranians shop, says a customer, who doesn't give her name. Whatever the price, she says, you still have to buy the basics.

"Some things are expensive, but they are necessary and needed," she says. "The unnecessary things we ignore."

Iran's economy has been badly damaged over the past two years. International sanctions froze oil assets and isolated Iranian banks, which shut off most official international trade. Iran's currency lost 80 percent of its value, says economist Saeed Laylaz.

"We are in a catastrophe, disaster situation at the moment," Laylaz says.

Since January, when a six-month nuclear deal took effect with the easing of some sanctions, there's a slight economic revival, he says.

"Inflation, from 45 percent to 27 percent almost," Laylaz says.

Parallels

'Waiting For Godot' Strikes A Chord In Tehran

The United States announced its intention on Friday of relinquishing its remaining control of the Internet.

In a statement, the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration said it wants to relinquish its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICAAN is a kind of cooperative that includes a wide array of companies and people, as well as more than 100 governments. One of the key functions overseen by the U.S. is the assignment of domain names. (Think of .com or .org.)

"The timing is right to start the transition process," Lawrence E. Strickling, the assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, said in a statement. "We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan."

NPR's Steve Henn tells our Newscast unit that the world community has been calling for this handover for a while. But the current revelations over spying by the National Security Agency has led to louder calls.

"The announcement by the Commerce Department Friday that it would relinquish its oversight role of ICANN was widely viewed as a response to that criticism," Steve reports. "Administration officials have said any new governance structure for ICANN should be transparent and free from any hint of government interference."

The Commerce Department adds that it was always the intention of the United States to hand over these responsibilities to the global community.

The Wall Street Journal adds:

"The impact of the change remains unclear, because the Commerce Department's day-to-day role in overseeing the contract with Icann is largely clerical. However, other nations have suggested the U.S. can still use its current authority to block certain websites for reasons like copyright infringement or having links to known terrorists. One goal of transitioning Icann to nongovernmental oversight would be to provide more transparency to all nations into how the Internet's root structure operates.

"Until 1998, the functions were managed by Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, one of the early pioneers of the World Wide Web. Upon Postel's death in 1998, the Commerce Department issued a contract to Icann to take over those functions, making Icann the primary body in charge of setting policy for Internet domains and addresses."

Commercial aviation pilots tell NPR that they would have "no idea" how to disable all the systems designed to automatically communicate with ground stations, though they could probably figure it out from checklists and other documentation available aboard the aircraft.

Aircraft such as the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand a week ago are equipped with transponders, which give their position to air traffic control. The transponders can be switched off with a flick of a switch. But modern planes like the 777 have two other systems as well: Cockpit radios and a text-based system known as Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, which can be used to send messages or information about the plane.

But the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and the ACARS may have been shut down as well.

Turning off the radios and ACARS would be more difficult. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel spoke with commercial pilots, including two who have flown Boeing 777s similar to Flight MH370, which vanished 239 people aboard. He says the pilots tell him that those systems are "pretty hard-wired into a modern aircraft.

"They said you'd have to go through big checklists, you'd have to possibly pull circuit breakers if you wanted to deactivate [all the communications equipment]," Brumfiel tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block.

"So, to do this, you'd have to have some degree of premeditation and a lot of knowledge of the aircraft," he says.

Even without those systems, the plane's satellite antenna appears to have kept communicating for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to providers, there was apparently no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

Meanwhile, a U.S. government official who is being updated on progress of the investigation into the plane's disappearance says the working theory remains "air piracy," an umbrella term which could mean that either the pilot or someone else commandeered the aircraft.

NPR's Tom Bowman reports that a U.S. official says familiar with the investigation say that U.S. government agencies are working with their Indian counterparts to take a close look at radar data to see if the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, as one theory suggests.

Bowman says Malaysia has asked the U.S. Navy to send the destroyer USS Kidd to the Andaman Sea to patrol and a P-3 Orion anti-submarine plane has searched west of the Malaysian peninsula to roughly the island of Sri Lanka, a distance of about 1,000 linear miles. The Navy is now sending a more another aircraft, a P-8, that has more surface search radar, to the Bay of Bengal, after Malaysia requested a search in that area.

Two pieces of information are troubling: the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and ACARS may have been shut down as well.

Even without those systems, the plane's satellite antenna appears to have kept communicating for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to providers, there was apparently no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

Meanwhile, a U.S. government official who is being updated on progress of the investigation into the sudden disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 over the Gulf of Thailand says the "working theory" remains "air piracy," an umbrella term which could mean that either the pilot or someone else commandeered the aircraft.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel spoke with commercial pilots, including two who have flown Boeing 777s similar to MH370, who say those systems are "pretty hard-wired into a modern aircraft."

"They said you'd have to go through big checklists, you'd have to possibly pull circuit breakers if you wanted to deactivate [transponders]," Brumfiel tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block.

"So, to do this, you'd have to have some degree of premeditation and a lot of knowledge of the aircraft," he says.

As the Two-Way reports, a week after a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the mystery has bred more theories that hard data.

But two pieces of information are troubling: the plane's transponder appears to have been intentionally shut off and a system called ACARS, which can communicate text and basic information about the plane's performance in flight, kept communicating with satellites for at least 5.5 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

"That's caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish," Brumfiel says.

"Every hour, [a] satellite would send a signal going 'are you still there?' and the plane would send a signal back saying 'yep, I'm here,'" he says of the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, adding that for whatever reason – possibly because Malaysia Airlines wasn't pay a nominal fee to satellite provider Inmarsat, there was no avionics data being relayed from the aircraft.

Even so, he says, "it may be possible that the company that owns the satellite, Inmarsat, might be able to get a sense of where the plane was, where it was moving and what it was doing."

NPR's Tom Bowman reports that a U.S. official says familiar with the investigation say that U.S. government agencies are working with their Indian counterparts to take a close look at radar data to see if the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, as one theory suggests.

Bowman says Malaysia has asked the U.S. Navy to send the destroyer USS Kidd to the Andaman Sea to patrol and a P-3 Orion anti-submarine plane has searched west of the Malaysian peninsula to roughly the island of Sri Lanka, a distance of about 1,000 linear miles. The Navy is now sending a more another aircraft, a P-8, that has more surface search radar, to the Bay of Bengal, after Malaysia requested a search in that area.