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ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Homelessness in this country keeps going up. Los Angeles and New York City declared a record number of people without housing this past week, part of a steady rise since 2017. NPR's Jennifer Ludden is here to help us understand what's going on. Good morning, Jennifer.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Good morning.
SCHMITZ: So cities have put a lot of money and effort into reducing homelessness. LA Mayor Karen Bass even ran on this issue. Why is this problem seems - why does it seem so intractable?
LUDDEN: Well, you know, for sure we do see cities really struggling with homeless encampments. This is hard. But experts tell me it's not like programs to move people into housing don't work. Los Angeles helps thousands find housing every year. The problem, they say, is that even more people keep losing housing because it is increasingly unaffordable. So nationwide, the places with the most homelessness are those where you have poverty and high housing costs.
SCHMITZ: So tell us more about the people who are losing their housing. How do they describe what's happening to them?
LUDDEN: So there's a landmark study just out that surveyed thousands of people without homes in California, and researchers interviewed hundreds of them. Margot Kushel at the University of California, San Francisco, says many describe this slow slide as they struggled to keep paying rent. They may have lost income, had their hours cut at work. Or some lost a job because of a health crisis, or the rent just went up. Kushel says a lot of people crowded in with relatives or friends.
MARGOT KUSHEL: And we found that those relationships, when they fell apart, fell apart quickly. People only had one day's warning. You know, when you're the 10th person in a one-bedroom apartment, not that surprising that there would be conflict there. Or sometimes people just felt like they could no longer impose.
LUDDEN: And to put numbers on the financial disconnect here - for the people who became homeless in that survey, their median monthly household income was $960. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in California is 1,700.
SCHMITZ: That is a huge disconnect. I mean, you've reported on how the U.S. needs more affordable housing. And cities are spending more to build this. What's not working?
LUDDEN: You know, even with more building, the housing shortage is in the millions. Steve Berg with the National Alliance to End Homelessness also says zoning laws, some of which date back to segregation, by the way, make it really hard to build apartments in residential neighborhoods.
STEVE BERG: You hear of places that - where they're trying to build new, affordable apartment buildings. And the powers that be in the city don't want to have it. You know, neighbors will say, we don't want low-income people living here. And they'll stop the housing from being built.
LUDDEN: Berg also says housing that's billed as affordable and does get built, it's not always cheap enough for the lowest-income families, and he says more of it needs to be.
SCHMITZ: Well, to wrap this up, I mean, building new housing also takes a lot of time. What can be done to prevent people from losing housing in the first place?
LUDDEN: You know, at the top of that list would be expanding federal housing subsidies. Right now, only 1 in 4 people who qualify actually get them, and they're really hard to use. In fact, many landlords refuse to accept housing vouchers, so there could be more programs to help people find places that do. Also, Margot Kushel of UCSF would like to see more ways to catch people at risk of becoming homeless. You know, you could target health care clinics or social service agencies. In her survey, she was just shocked by how many people did not reach out anywhere for help as things were falling apart.
SCHMITZ: That's NPR's Jennifer Ludden.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A nationwide shortage of ammunition means some Alaska Natives are having trouble putting food on the table. The cost of every shell and bullet is much higher than it was before the pandemic, raising concerns about food security in rural Alaska. Here's Emily Schwing.
EMILY SCHWING, BYLINE: Sam Berlin (ph) grew up eating ducks, geese and other waterfowl in a remote roadless village in western Alaska.
SAM BERLIN: My mom would boil them, make soup out of them with other ingredients like onions, potatoes, corn.
SCHWING: Berlin, an Alaska Native elder who lives in Bethel, is an avid bird hunter. But he's had a hard time finding shells for his shotgun over the last few years.
BERLIN: The Bethel stores can't find any. I called to a couple of the villages and they're rationing also. So when I called up my brother in Anchorage, he told me I was lucky if I found one box.
SCHWING: There are hundreds of roadless communities in Alaska where store-bought food selection is both limited and very expensive. So many people rely heavily on subsistence. It's a lifestyle. It means putting food away in freezers all spring, summer and fall for the long winter ahead. Kenneth Eric (ph) hunts for birds out of Chefornak, 200 miles southwest of Bethel.
Do you enjoy going hunting for birds?
KENNETH ERIC: Oh, yeah. A lot, yeah.
SCHWING: What do you like about it?
ERIC: Kind of therapy. It really helps with the mind and the body. Like, take out stress out there somewhere.
KENT HARRINGTON: There just is not the supply. There's the demand.
SCHWING: Kent Harrington manages VF Grace company based in Anchorage. It's a wholesale distributor of a wide range of goods, including ammunition.
HARRINGTON: Shotgun shells, centerfire cartridges, rifle cartridges, rimfire, .22s, et cetera.
SCHWING: After decades in the wholesale business, Harrington says, he's only had a hard time stocking shelves one other time. Manufacturers point to a raw materials shortage and supply chain issues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. A recent surge in gun ownership has also contributed to the lack of ammunition. The years 2020 and 2021 saw more gun sales than any other years in the last two decades. And Harrington says everything's just more expensive.
Like, if I were going to, you know, order a case wholesale of shotgun shells today, what price would I pay compared to three or four years ago?
HARRINGTON: November 1 of 2019, a box wholesaled for $10.33. Today, it's $16.33.
SCHWING: Add to that a freight charge to ship the shells by air to one of Alaska's remote communities and a hazardous materials charge from the carrier and that price climbs beyond what some hunters, who rely on birds as a main food staple, can afford. Sam Berlin isn't too worried because he was able to stockpile four boxes of shells from last year.
BERLIN: When we grew up, me and my brother, my brother was mostly a driver. And I was the shooter. So I had a lot of practice.
SCHWING: Practice hunting for his large extended family, which includes three sisters, four brothers, their kids and eight children of his own.
For NPR News, I'm Emily Schwing in Bethel, Alaska.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARLOS NINO AND FRIENDS' "CALIMAYAN")
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It is officially the holiday shopping season. It's Black Friday. And this year, it has a bit of a shadow hanging over it because inflation is near record highs. So how does this bode for holiday gifts? Well, we have NPR's Alina Selyukh here for an update. All right. Let's talk inflation. How is it changing up the way people shop?
ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: It is by far the No. 1 issue people bring up. Retailers themselves, actually, like Target and Kohl's, have said that they are seeing people pull back from discretionary shopping because they're spending so much on necessities like food and gas. And that means this year, people are hunting for discounts more than even before, intensely chasing sales and deals. I talked to Krish Thyagarajan at the analytics firm DataWeave. It tracks prices. And he says, basically, stores and shoppers are kind of in this standoff where stores are lowering prices, trying to keep people shopping, while many shoppers are kind of waiting for even bigger discounts.
KRISH THYAGARAJAN: Consumers want better price, so they are sitting on the side. So it's going to really boil down to, do consumers blink first, or do the retailers blink first?
SELYUKH: So if retailers blink first, the discounts in December might bring some inflation relief because this year, some people seem to only shop if they find something on sale.
MARTÍNEZ: So glad you mentioned that because I've had my eye on these sneakers, Alina, that I've held off...
SELYUKH: OK.
MARTÍNEZ: I've held off on buying, but my resolve is weakening. So are these big sales happening any time soon?
SELYUKH: You know, it always depends on the store. But here's what I learned from Vivek Pandya, who tracks online shopping at Adobe.
VIVEK PANDYA: Computers and electronics - they're going to have some of the strongest discounts on record. We're expecting down to around 32%. Other categories, like toys, apparel, home furniture, are seeing very good discounts.
SELYUKH: Not sure on the footwear front. But I just want to explain that for some of these things, like clothes and home goods, for example, there's been a big story of inventory glut. We had shoppers buying like crazy last year. That meant stores ordered more and more and then shoppers decided they were over it just as many of these shipments were still arriving because of supply chain issues. So now if stores have too much of the wrong stuff, a lot of it is likely to be on sale. Pandya says the big question is whether people will actually decide to spend their money on all these extra things.
MARTÍNEZ: So do we have an answer to that question?
SELYUKH: Well, people are definitely still shopping. Holiday spending is expected to increase. The National Retail Federation predicts about 6 to 8%. That's actually more than your average year, although if you account for inflation, it does mean we are buying less stuff while spending more money. And it really depends on who we're talking about when we talk about shoppers because there's this growing divergence between shoppers who are wealthier and those who are less so. Many people are entering this holiday season with the lowest savings they've had in a while. They're shopping with credit cards. A government report this month found credit card balances have recently jumped the most in 20 years. Meanwhile, luxury goods, for example, have actually seen little change from inflation. Even Best Buy said that while shoppers with lower incomes are buying cheaper TVs, shoppers with higher incomes are upgrading electronics, getting fancier versions.
MARTÍNEZ: While you were talking, I was checking on the sneakers. They're still the same price. I'm not buying them.
SELYUKH: Still the same price.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR's Alina Selyukh. Thanks a lot.
SELYUKH: Thank you.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
In her latest look at folks living in multigenerational households, NPR's Claire Murashima brings us the story of a woman in Healdsburg, Calif., who has questioned what it means to be living with her mom as a 34-year-old.
CLAIRE MURASHIMA, BYLINE: Lauren Ahlgren is a swim instructor. She's also a writer and a full-time caregiver to her mom.
LAUREN AHLGREN: My mom used to semi-joke when we were younger that once she got older, she's like, just take my license away. And I thought of that when we did have to, like, take her car away from her.
MURASHIMA: She grappled with societal expectations around living at home when her mom developed early onset Alzheimer's.
AHLGREN: At first it was - there was kind of, like, a little bit of shame. Or, like, I guess I kind of felt weird about being in my 30s and living back at home. It's not what I had envisioned for myself. And I definitely didn't expect my mom to get ill so early on in her later years. So that really didn't, like, sit well with me.
MURASHIMA: Before becoming a caregiver, Lauren used to go on weekly hikes and travel. One day, she wants kids, but she doesn't have a partner, nor does she have time to date.
AHLGREN: I just feel like a single mom, and I really miss all the other aspects of my life.
MURASHIMA: She's dealing with something else, as well.
AHLGREN: It's also really hard to grieve someone when they are alive. It's such a drawn-out process with Alzheimer's.
MURASHIMA: She's asked her two siblings for help. But...
AHLGREN: At this point, even though I've asked for help many times, it just kind of, like, always ends up being on my plate anyway. So I just take charge.
MURASHIMA: For the last couple of years, she's had to evacuate because of the Northern California wildfires. She also lives with the uncertainty of whether or not she'll be able to even afford more advanced care for her mom one day. But Lauren says one of the toughest things is the isolation. She's been vocal with family and friends, but it's all a growing burden.
AHLGREN: This has been ongoing for five years now, and I'm tired of talking about the same thing.
MURASHIMA: Lauren says the one silver lining of the pandemic is that she was able to save money. For the most part, she could still work but wasn't spending very much. Before the pandemic, though, she says, they were living paycheck to paycheck.
AHLGREN: My mom is low income, and her Social Security doesn't even cover half her mortgage. So I have to cover everything else.
MURASHIMA: She's in the process of selling the house they live in. And once they sell it, Lauren hopes there will be enough money to move her mom into a memory care facility. As it is, she spends a lot of money on making sure someone is always looking after her.
AHLGREN: So in order to go to work, I have to hire a caregiver to hang out with her, which is great. She loves it. But it's definitely expensive.
MURASHIMA: Lauren has developed strategies to make it work, like starting each day with the same ritual.
AHLGREN: Hi. Good morning.
I make a point of spending every morning waking up and then going into her room to cuddle her and the dog just so we can start the morning off on, like, a good note.
How come you're hanging off the bed here? Oh, the dogs took your spot. Here.
MURASHIMA: She's making the most of their time together before someone else becomes her mom's primary caregiver. And maybe then she'll find the time to go on those hikes and start thinking about building a family of her own, the life she thought she'd be living at 34.
Claire Murashima, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now this is the sound of mourning on the streets of Seoul, South Korea.
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UNIDENTIFIED MONKS: (Chanting in non-English language).
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Buddhist monks chanted as people laid flowers for the 154 people who were killed in a Halloween stampede. It's the nation's most deadly crowd accident.
INSKEEP: NPR's Anthony Kuhn is covering this story from Seoul. Hi, Anthony.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What was the scene like at the place where people were marking these deaths?
KUHN: We were just listening to sounds from an informal altar, which was outside the Itaewon subway stop near the site of the accident. Itaewon is a kind of funky, multicultural neighborhood of bars and restaurants, embassies and international schools in Seoul. People stopped by this place to put flowers, candles, bottles of liquor and other offerings on the ground. And in addition to this unofficial altar, there were also two official ones in Itaewon and another by city hall. President Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife paid tribute to the victims there today. And this is the second day of a weeklong period of mourning with flags at half-staff across the nation and many events canceled.
INSKEEP: And I'm sure that many people with a little extra time on their hands are asking the question, how did this happen?
KUHN: Yes. Well, just steps away from this unofficial altar was the site of the crowd surge. The center of it was an alleyway which is only 11 1/2 foot across. It runs downhill to Itaewon's main street. Eyewitnesses say this place was just packed with around 100,000 people in Itaewon. And at the uphill end of this alley, people started pushing, and then people started falling down in front of them. And they were buried by others falling on top of them. Medics and bystanders tried to resuscitate people who were lying on the sidewalk. The largest group of these people were in their 20s, there to party and celebrate Halloween. All of the dead, including 26 foreigners - of whom two were Americans - have now been identified. Police and forensic investigators combed the alleyway for clues today. But the precise cause of the crowd surge is still not clear.
INSKEEP: I'm sure that some people are asking why the police would not have controlled the crowd a little differently.
KUHN: That's right. The interior minister of South Korea said yesterday that police were busy dealing with political protests. But even if they had deployed large numbers of police, it wouldn't have prevented the tragedy. Today, though, the National Police Agency admitted they failed to predict that the crowd could become deadly. They admitted that the police weren't doing any crowd control in that alley. There were 137 police there in Itaewon, but they were directing traffic and looking out for street crime. They also admitted they don't have any standard procedures for a spontaneous event where there's no organizer that authorities can work with.
INSKEEP: And what insights did you gain, Anthony, when moving around the area where this happened?
KUHN: Well, there were a lot of people at this informal alter. It was the first weekday since the accident happened. There was a lot of raw energy. This is a national tragedy, and such events always seem to be followed by introspection about how this was allowed to happen and how to prevent it. So far, nobody has taken responsibility or held - been held accountable for the tragedy. But that may happen later as the investigation goes on and makes clearer the causes of this tragedy.
INSKEEP: Anthony, thanks so much.
KUHN: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Anthony Kuhn.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced today that Russia's taking part of Ukraine as its own, four provinces to be exact. The move came amid a ceremony at the Kremlin today and follows a series of staged referendums in the mostly Russian-occupied territories, despite Western condemnation of those referendums as a violation of international law. Joining us to talk about all this, NPR's Charles Maynes in Moscow. Hi, Charles.
CHARLES MAYNES, BYLINE: Hi there.
MARTIN: So staged celebrations to mark staged referendums. What was the event like today?
MAYNES: Well, it was staged a lot, but of course, we had to wait. First of all, Putin was about 20 minutes late before he entered the Kremlin's grand St. George Hall. Lawmakers and dignitaries were there to look on. But once he started, you know, Putin cut right to the chase. He said that the people in these Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine had made their choice, and that choice would not be betrayed, no matter what the West thought of it. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: (Speaking Russian).
MAYNES: So here, the Russian leader says he called on Ukraine - he said that Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson were becoming citizens forever. You heard a little bit of applause there at the end. The Russian leader called on Ukraine to end hostilities and hold negotiations with Moscow but insisted that would be on Russia's terms. These annexed territories were no longer up for discussion. So, in effect, we have Putin essentially insisting that these people had a right to self-determination, and Russia was, therefore, legally redrawing the map of Europe for the second time in less than a decade.
MARTIN: Although, of course, there are all kinds of reports of voters being coerced, forced to vote yes. I mean, as you know, Charles, the war in Ukraine is not a one-off, right? Putin's been trying to reintegrate parts of the old Soviet Union for a long time. In this speech, did he place this moment in a larger context?
MAYNES: Absolutely. You know, Putin framed what's happening as part of this larger conflict with the West, almost a clash of civilizations, with Russia rising up to defend its own sovereignty. The way Putin describes it, we're really at a key kind of inflection point in history. So for Putin, this is not only about rewriting the rules of the post - you know, post-Cold War era, in which he clearly feels the West dictated the terms both politically, economically and culturally, but it's about building a new world - a multipolar one, as he calls it - where Russia's a key player who defends traditional values and a right to self-determination from Western colonization, as he likes to say.
So we heard him take a lot of broadsides at the U.S. today. He certainly also argued that there were echoes of all this colonialization in the food crisis, for example, that we see across the world right now, or the fight for natural resources. You know, really, all the things that the West accuses Russia of doing, he's throwing it back the other way.
MARTIN: So there's not exactly a long list of countries rushing to proclaim these provinces as Putin's territory, right? I mean, the U.N. has said this is illegal. The U.S. isn't going to recognize this. Neither is any other country, it seems, at this point. So what happens now?
MAYNES: Yeah. Yeah, I think that, you know, the Kremlin understands that, and it's - really, the issue is trying to scare the West and Kyiv into de facto accepting these changed borders. You know, these annexations are taking place in this active war zone. Much of the lands aren't even completely held by Russian forces. And Putin has been resorting to veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to defend the new boundaries.
MARTIN: NPR's Charles Maynes in Moscow. Charles, thank you.
MAYNES: Thank you.
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Between 1976 and 1999, hundreds of federal judges traveled to an exclusive, private retreat where they learn from famous economists. Ruth Bader Ginsburg went, so did Clarence Thomas. Jeff Guo from our PLANET MONEY podcast tells us how these retreats may have had a surprising effect on federal courts.
JEFF GUO, BYLINE: Picture this - it's 1982, and we're on an island resort near Miami. RBG has just arrived, along with 18 other federal judges. And they're about to spend two weeks hanging out and learning economics. The guy who arranged all of this, his name was Henry Manne. He was an influential professor of law and economics. And in 1976, he started a program to teach federal judges economics. Manne died in 2015. But here's him talking about it in 2005.
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HENRY MANNE: All these years later, I still think it was the nerviest thing imaginable. No one had ever conceived of any idea of a private program to educate federal judges.
GUO: Manne brought the judges to swanky locations, where they would take classes on supply and demand, monopolies, taxation. And he got Nobel laureates, people like Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, to give lectures. By all accounts, these retreats were a lot of fun. And they became really popular. By the 1990, some 40% of federal judges had done the program. But the retreats were also controversial. Critics pointed out that the funding was coming from corporations and conservative foundations. And the professors mostly seemed to be teaching a conservative, free market version of economics, which was popular at the time. And according to Suresh Naidu, an economist at Columbia University, these two-week seminars had a surprisingly influential legacy. Naidu and his colleagues, Elliott Ash and Daniel Chen, recently analyzed the decisions of all the judges who attended this program before and after. And their preliminary results show that these econ bootcamps had a big impact on the courts.
SURESH NAIDU: I think we find the effects are strongest for the Democrat appointees. So it's a program that has, I think, effects on liberal judges and makes them somewhat more conservative.
GUO: For instance, they found that the program made judges more likely to rule against the agencies in charge of our environmental and labor regulations. And it may have also made the judges more friendly to corporate monopolies. Vaughn Walker, a judge who attended one of these retreats in the 90s, says people who accuse the camps of being this kind of brainwashing thing, they have it all wrong. Judges know how to be impartial. That's the job.
VAUGHN WALKER: People are trying to brainwash judges all the time with this argument or that argument. And if there's any group in society that has developed some instincts of skepticism, it should be judges.
GUO: But Naidu says, there's a kind of power in economics, even though economists aren't always right. In fact, a lot of what the judges were learning at these camps is now outdated. We kind of see it as being too reductive. But economists use math and logic in a way that can be really hard to argue with.
NAIDU: It's like, these judges that are super smart and, like, super skeptical, it takes something that's as powerful as economics to convince them.
GUO: Jeff Guo, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOKHOV'S "AUSPICIOUS PATH")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates by three quarters of a percentage point yesterday.
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The latest hike is aimed to bring down inflation. But by raising the cost of borrowing, the Fed also slows down the economy. Home prices are falling. Stocks and bonds are both down a lot this year.
INSKEEP: NPR's Chris Arnold joins us next. Good morning.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: How did Powell explain his, I guess, fifth rate hike in about six months?
ARNOLD: Yeah. He talked about how higher prices, inflation, is hurting a lot of Americans. He spent some time talking about that. The annual inflation rate in August was about 8%. That's just a bit lower than the month before, so not a lot of improvement. And Powell's job here is to really convince the world, basically, that the Fed is serious about doing what it takes to fight that inflation. Here's what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JEROME POWELL: We have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that - there isn't. We have to get supply and demand back into alignment. And the way we do that is by slowing the economy.
INSKEEP: Which they do with interest rates, with other tools, I guess, and also just signaling that it's what they intend to do.
ARNOLD: Right. And it might sound bad to be slowing the economy, but the hope is that will cool off higher prices. And Powell's messaging here is really important, too, because people's expectations matter a lot. So if workers think that, oh, inflation is going to go up - I need higher wages - they're going to push for higher wages. And businesses will feel more pressure for that. And they'll think, well, look; I can just raise prices to pay the higher wages. And we get into a cycle. The Fed doesn't want that wage price spiral to get embedded. So Powell is saying, we are going to slow the economy even if it means job losses, even if it means a recession. That's the pain that he's talking about.
INSKEEP: What does all of this mean specifically for the housing market?
ARNOLD: Well, rising rates, that's pushed mortgage rates up a lot this year, too. And that's making it much harder to buy a house. So we got some new numbers yesterday. Home prices fell 6% since June. That's the biggest two-month drop in nearly a decade. And Powell talked about housing, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
POWELL: We've had a time of a red-hot housing market all over the country, where, you know, famously, houses were selling at 10% above the ask before even seeing the house, that kind of thing. Housing prices were going up at an unsustainably fast level. So we probably, in the housing market, have to go through a correction.
ARNOLD: Now, correction might sound scary. They could just flatten off prices. They could come down a bit more. We'll find out.
INSKEEP: I would imagine that this is one of those periods where if you're lucky enough to have money socked away for retirement in some fund, you shouldn't be looking at that because you'll be horrified by how much it's gone down.
ARNOLD: Yeah. Yeah, particularly now because it's not just stocks going down, bonds are going down, too. And, you know, it's sort of a 101 investing thing, right? Like, I want to own some stocks. You want to own some bonds. And one of the reasons for that is that it diversifies your risk. And they don't usually fall at the same time. But a side effect, really, of what the Fed's fight against inflation is doing is that it's pushing both down at the same time, stocks and bonds. And that's hurting people, you know, with retirement accounts and 529 plans. I talked to retiree Deborah McDaniel. She lives in Bremerton, Wash. And her 401(k) has fallen down from around $500,000 to 400,000.
DEBORAH MCDANIEL: It is concerning to me that this not go on for too much longer because
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Now that California has banned the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, other states may follow and adopt those stricter standards. It's actually happened plenty before. Adrian Ma and Darian Woods from our daily economics podcast The Indicator explain the California effect.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: So the California effect is this idea that when the Golden State adopts strict regulations, those standards often end up spreading to other jurisdictions. It was a term coined by David Vogel, who's now a retired professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And David says you can especially see this effect with environmental standards.
DAVID VOGEL: Regulating appliances so they use less energy, extensive labeling of hazardous materials in California, building codes which attempt to make buildings more energy-efficient.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: David says that the prime example of the California effect is the state's regulation of car emissions. So think back to the 1970s, and air pollution in Los Angeles was really, really bad. And when Congress was passing the Clean Air Act, California wanted a special carve-out to pass emission standards that were even stricter than what the federal government would require of other states. And Congress said, OK.
MA: And then California turned around and said to carmakers, you want to sell here, you got to sell cleaner cars. And the carmakers said, fine. So how did this one state bend these multinational corporations to its regulatory will? Well, there are a couple of reasons - economic, of course. First, California is what economists call ginormous. With a population of 39 million, it is by far the biggest state.
WOODS: And check out California's spending power. In 2020, roughly 1 out of every 8 consumer dollars in the U.S. was spent by a Californian.
VOGEL: It's such a large market so that anything which California acquires for its own product sold in its state is going to resonate among national and global companies. If you don't want to have to make separate products for California and the rest of the country, you might as well just make them according to California's standards.
WOODS: And this business logic of regulations can even extend overseas. So, for example, David says that in the 1970s, the European Commission was debating how to regulate auto emissions. And German carmakers raised their hands and were like, we want stricter regulation.
WOODS: Why? - because a major portion of the market for German cars is in California, and the German manufacturers realized that they needed to meet California's standards to retain their impact on the American market. And they pressured the European Union to adopt environmental standards which were as close as possible to those of California.
MA: Now, it's important to say, a lot of people do not see California's power to move markets as a good thing. Earlier this year, attorneys general from 17 states actually complained to the Environmental Protection Agency, saying that California, with its special emissions carve-out - it has too much power. And Missouri's AG actually called California's rules oppressive.
WOODS: In any case, none of this is stopping California lawmakers from promulgating away. Last week, lawmakers passed a whole raft of climate legislation, from new restrictions on oil and gas drilling to an ambitious goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2045.
Darian Woods.
MA: Adrian Ma, NPR News.
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Rains are flooding parts of this country. Drought is parching others. Farmers in particular are worried. But as summer turns to fall, a century-old silo is bringing pleasure to one Texas town. An Australian street artist covered the silo with a mural that reflects the town and its residents. NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg tells the story.
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: I've always liked silos, exotic to this Manhattanite. But Guido van Helten is obsessed with them. He's made them canvases for his art in Iowa, India, Iceland, Britain, all abandoned silos in small towns. The latest in McKinney, Texas, stored grain once. Now the silo's big canisters introduce passers-by and locals to the spirit and people of the town. Guido starts by interviewing and photographing residents.
GUIDO VAN HELTEN: I meet people, try and get a bit of character of the place.
STAMBERG: He sorts through his hundreds of black-and-white photos.
VAN HELTEN: Seeing which ones will fit the space.
STAMBERG: And then he picks maybe 19 pictures and combines parts of them to paint on the 90-foot-tall silo. Painted or plain, silos are landmarks, stand for safe-keeping, sustenance, security. They're storing the future. And by painting some with strong, evocative images, they literally become signs of home. Guido's mural shows several McKinneyans at a town celebration of Juneteenth.
VAN HELTEN: People interacting and moving and walking. And it shows layers.
STAMBERG: A major figure is a pretty, young African American woman, an arm behind her back, looking over her shoulder at viewers. It's an unselfconscious look. She's comfortable where she stands. Guido has themes for his silo art - public housing, education, desegregation. For McKinney, the theme is community. The town is changing. It went from 35,000 to 210,000 in just a few years - Republican, with lots of civic pride, some 30 miles from Dallas off Highway 5, once the main way to go north or south. Mayor George Fuller and other town leaders think Guido's silos could bring together the white, Black and Hispanic population and attract tourists.
GEORGE FULLER: We saw this as a tremendous opportunity.
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FULLER: I want to welcome everybody that has come out here to celebrate this incredible work of art.
STAMBERG: The mayor opened a silo ribbon-cutting ceremony the other day.
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FULLER: This is a day to celebrate.
STAMBERG: McKinney's economy is diverse - Raytheon, a big copper wire company, hospitals, tech, plus a proud history of production.
FULLER: We were the lollipop capital.
STAMBERG: There once was a flour mill, a cotton mill.
FULLER: We were the blue jean capital of the world at one point. We've done it all here in McKinney, Texas.
STAMBERG: The historic downtown has lots of owner-run businesses and restaurants, plus a concentration on the arts - galleries, musicians - and now Guido van Helten's really stunning painted silos, a salute to the place's past and a new and powerful act of artistic preservation.
Do you make a nice bourbon?
FULLER: Yes, we do. We make some great beer, too.
STAMBERG: I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News, Washington.
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act has a lot of provisions for things such as tackling climate change and health care costs. But whether it really fights inflation is a little less clear. Mary Childs of our Planet Money team wanted to take the act at its word and find out what effect will all of these new provisions have on rising costs. Mary, all right, so first off, how does one go about reducing inflation?
MARY CHILDS, BYLINE: So this is one area where economists basically agree. Inflation is a mismatch between supply and demand for all the goods and services in the economy - too much demand, not enough supply. So the main way for the government to fight inflation is to slow down demand, to get everyone to stop spending so much money, even removing money from the economy.
MARTINEZ: And does this law do that?
CHILDS: Well, yes and no. It takes money out of the economy in a few ways, most notably through new taxes on big companies. It also ramps up tax enforcement, enabling the IRS to, for example, investigate people who haven't been paying their taxes. The government itself is also spending less, namely in health care through Medicare. This law lets Medicare haggle with pharma companies to get lower drug prices and gives other new mechanisms to keep drug prices down. But the new law also spends a lot in health care, too, by providing new subsidies and caps on prescription costs for people covered by Medicare. And so all this so far does save more than it spends in the end for a grand total of $660-ish billion out of the economy over the next 10 years, which is good to fight inflation.
MARTINEZ: All right. Now, there's another part of this law, so tell us about the climate stuff.
CHILDS: Yes, so it's a lot of spending. It's more than $350 billion on clean energy alternatives and technologies and other things. And it's great if you're worried about climate change, but if you are thinking narrowly about inflation, it's a lot of credits and subsidies to encourage people to go buy things, which means more demand, more money into the economy right now, which is what we don't want when it comes to inflation. So the net savings in the law are too small to make much of a difference in fighting inflation. All the economists we talked to and also researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business say that this law's overall effect from an inflation standpoint is basically zero.
MARTINEZ: So, Mary, I am not a Wharton School graduate...
CHILDS: (Laughter) Yet.
MARTINEZ: ...But it definitely sounds like the climate section is a tough sell as inflation-reducing.
CHILDS: That's right, yeah, at least in the short term. But there is this kind of other element to it that's harder to price, and indeed, a lot of the analysis that you'll see doesn't take this into account because, yes, those subsidies mean spending now and soon, but they can also help create a larger market for the things being subsidized. They can spur innovation, create greater supply, all of which should help bring costs down, which is good to fight inflation. But also, everyone having more energy-efficient things will mean less spending on energy in the long term.
So as an example, say you use the tax credit in the law to go spend money on new energy-efficient windows. So that's bad for curbing inflation now. You're spending money now. But your house will retain heat better for years, so your energy bills will be lower. And that's going to be disinflationary, just not right away.
MARTINEZ: All right, that's Mary Childs from Planet Money. Mary, thanks.
CHILDS: Thank you.
A judge in Florida is signaling that he's inclined to make more information public about the FBI search of former President Trump's home. Yeah, the judge is giving the Justice Department one week, one week to propose redactions to the affidavit that was used to justify the search.
FADEL: We've got NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson with us. She's been following this story closely. Good morning, Carrie. ... So, Carrie, if the judge unseals the affidavit, that would be highly unusual. Usually the public doesn't get to see this while an investigation is underway. What's different about this case?
JOHNSON: This case involves the search of a home of a former president. That's apparently never happened before. And yesterday, one lawyer representing media groups says the public interest could not be greater in this case. The magistrate judge really seemed to agree. Judge Bruce Reinhart says he's inclined to release more information about the search, but he's giving the Justice Department until next Thursday to think about what details can be made public.
FADEL: Now, the Justice Department has objected to releasing this affidavit. What's the DOJ say it's worried about?
J: It's worried about the safety of witnesses in this case and in other investigations. There have already been threats to FBI agents listed on some of the search warrant papers and threats to this judge. DOJ national security lawyer Jay Bratt told the judge in Florida, this investigation is in its early stages. He doesn't want to give anyone a roadmap into the prosecution strategy. And this case also involves government secrets, some highly classified material. We know the FBI collected about 11 sets of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in the search last week. Some were labeled at that top-secret level and higher.
F: OK, so how will the Justice Department go about making changes to this affidavit?
J: Yeah, DOJ is going to get back to the drawing board in a room full of black pens to make some redactions to this search warrant affidavit. We might not see anything for a while, especially if the judge and the Justice Department disagree about the scope of those redactions. Even if we do get the document eventually, former prosecutors say it's probably going to offer minimal new information of the sort the public would be interested in. And, of course, meanwhile, the FBI is still sifting through all the boxes it took from Mar-a-Lago last week. That can take time as they figure out what's in those papers and try to confirm the classification levels of some of that material. At this stage, of course, it's not clear whether former President Trump or anyone else will be charged with a crime. Trump's posted on social media that he wants this affidavit to be released, but he's taken no action in court, only speaking online.
F: So we'll wait at least a week, if not longer, for any word on the affidavit, which, based on what you're saying, might be a lot of blacked-out words versus words we can read. But some other documents related to the Mar-a-Lago search did emerge last night, right?
J: Yeah. We got a few more minor documents. In one of them, prosecutors say they're looking at possible willful retention of defense information, concealment or removal of government documents and obstruction of a federal investigation. So those are the three laws the FBI thinks may have been violated. And in another new document, we can see that prosecutors initially asked to seal all these materials because the integrity of the ongoing investigation might be compromised or that evidence might be destroyed at Mar-a-Lago.
F: The former president made a bunch of claims about why he had classified government records at Mar-a-Lago. How has he been defending himself?
J: Yeah. Some of Trump's allies say the former president already declassified these materials, but there's no evidence of any paperwork backing up that claim.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
What's it like to live near a nuclear power plant that's threatened by war? The southern Ukrainian city of Nikopol is located about a dozen miles across the river from Europe's largest nuclear plant, now occupied by Russian forces. As NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports, the city is a daily target for Russian missiles and a danger zone for a nuclear accident.
TAMARA KOROLKOVA: (Speaking Ukrainian).
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Tamara Korolkova can see the Zaporizhzhia power plant outside the apartment building where she has lived for decades. She used to look at this panorama across the river with admiration. Now she has nightmares about the plant blowing up.
KOROLKOVA: (Through interpreter) All of us are just scared all the time. I'm old. I have diabetes. If anything happens, I'll only have time to lie on the floor and close my eyes.
KAKISSIS: Russia occupied this nuclear power plant back in March. But in the last week, Russian forces have used the area around the plant as a staging ground for attacks on Ukraine. This has left many in the friendly, blue-collar city of Nikopol terrified about a nuclear accident. They're stocking up on potassium iodide pills to protect themselves from radiation poisoning.
NATALIA HORBOLIS: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: City council official Natalia Horbolis hears from frightened residents every day.
HORBOLIS: (Through interpreter) The plant used to be run by professionals, people we knew. Now outsiders have taken it over, and we don't know what they are doing and what it will lead to.
KAKISSIS: Horbolis is showing us around Nikopol. Air raid sirens go off all the time with Russian missiles destroying homes every day. Eighteen-year-old Dima Malichenko was sleeping when a missile tore through his house.
Oh, that right there. Oh, you've got a - you've got cut on your leg.
DIMA MALICHENKO: (Speaking Russian).
KAKISSIS: He says falling rubble blocked his basement bomb shelter, so he ran outside and huddled under a tree.
MALICHENKO: (Speaking Russian).
KAKISSIS: His grandfather, Oleksandr Pylypenko, says about a dozen neighbors are now helping the teenager's family rebuild the house.
OLEKSANDR PYLYPENKO: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: "I didn't expect that," he says, choking up. "But these days, such acts feel very Ukrainian."
OLEKSANDOR SAYUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
KAKISSIS: At Nikopol's sandbagged city hall, Mayor Oleksandor Sayuk explains that there have been very few fatalities. Residents heed air alarms, he says, but stress over a nuclear accident has been much harder to manage.
SAYUK: (Through interpreter) Our biggest challenge is that we can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow or even if there is going to be a tomorrow.
KAKISSIS: He's hoping the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency can intervene. Meanwhile, we stop at a partly collapsed apartment building that's being demolished and another apartment block where residents repair windows and doors. A missile hit the road outside, leaving a large crater. An elderly woman sweeps broken glass around it. Thirty-five-year-old Anna Yaroshek arrives to check her own apartment.
ANNA YAROSHEK: (Speaking Russian).
KAKISSIS: She says her own father helped clean up nuclear waste after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. He died after years of suffering from cancer.
YAROSHEK: (Speaking Russian).
KAKISSIS: "This radiation has no mercy," she says, "and no pills can really protect us." Joanna Kakissis, NPR News, Nikopol, Ukraine.
A MARTINEZ, HOST:
Waiters, lifeguards, airline pilots, all professions hurting for workers - also, certified public accountants. CPAs earn a special license that gives them a kind of accounting superpower, like being able to audit publicly traded companies. Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma from our daily economics podcast The Indicator look at the CPA crunch and what the industry is doing about it.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Believe it or not, there's actually a news site for millennial and Gen Z public accountants. It's called Going Concern. And for years, it has been banging the drum on the CPA labor shortage. Adrian Gonzalez is managing editor there.
ADRIENNE GONZALEZ: It's almost like there was a accounting rapture, and accountants just kind of disappeared overnight.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Adrienne says at first it seemed like that misery was limited to what's known as the Big Four accounting firms - Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG and PwC. But now all kinds of businesses are feeling the pain.
MA: Adrienne has been hearing from smaller accounting firms, too, that they have had to turn away clients or raise prices. And all this has had an impact on small and medium businesses that rely on those accountants to, you know, help them with tax filings and advising them on accounting rules.
WONG: And when it comes to the Big Four firms, the ones that do the audits for a lot of big public corporations - you know, making sure all their financial reporting is on the up and up - the CPA shortage could compromise the quality of these complex audits.
MA: And you know who really cares about the integrity of these audits? The Securities and Exchange Commission. They regulate public companies, so they take the work of CPAs very seriously. In fact, a few weeks ago, the SEC hit Ernst and Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, with a $100 million fine. And that's because the SEC said accountants at the firm cheated on the exams they needed to maintain their licenses.
WONG: Now, maintaining those licenses, along with, you know, grueling hours, it gets at some of the reasons why college students may be shying away from accounting careers.
KRISTIN GAYOSO: There were days where I would start at 7, 8 a.m. And I would work until 3 a.m.
WONG: Kristin Gayoso is a CPA who started her career at a Big Four firm.
GAYOSO: The scary thing is, when you work in public accounting, if you take your salary and divide it by the hours that you're working, a lot of times you're making below minimum wage.
MA: Of course, there are a lot of jobs in the finance industry that demand long hours from junior employees. But people who work in accounting, they say that their starting salaries are often lower than those other jobs. And the salaries have been kind of stagnant for years.
WONG: The Big Four firms are responding to the conversation around compensation and burnout. KPMG, for example, announced a $160 million investment in salary increases. PwC, it gave its entire firm 5% raises this year and expanded parental leave and access to mental health services.
MA: The companies are also trying to, like, poach future accountants from other majors like computer science and data analytics. Adrienne Gonzalez of Going Concern, she says that could help modernize the profession in some exciting ways.
GONZALEZ: Where the talent shortage will not be as critical because the technology is starting to kind of pick up the slack and all that.
WONG: And that technology she's talking about, it's automating the most tedious parts of the job. All that administrative paper pushing, that can now be done with software, which means CPAs could be freed up for more creative problem-solving work, you know, the fun stuff.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
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Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza appears to be holding. The agreement followed three days of Israeli airstrikes that killed 44 Palestinians, including children, in the blockaded Gaza Strip, according to officials there. There are no reported deaths on the Israeli side, but Israel says several Palestinian deaths were actually caused by militant rockets that fell short of their Israeli targets. Israel launched the airstrikes after it said at least 580 rockets were fired from Gaza. We're joined now by The Washington Post's Jerusalem bureau chief, Steve Hendrix. He's in Gaza now. Hi, Steve.
STEVE HENDRIX: Hi, Leila.
FADEL: So I know you just arrived in Gaza, but would you tell us what you're seeing so far?
HENDRIX: Yeah, I've just gotten in. I haven't been all over the enclave yet, but clearly there's been a lot of fighting here. There's evidence of fires in several places. There's damaged buildings. I know that something like 16 buildings were destroyed utterly. It's maybe the tragedy of Gaza that people have had - seen so many of these escalations here that they sort of rank them. And this isn't as bad as it was last year, when - 11-day war - but this has been a very brutal weekend for people living here.
FADEL: What triggered this latest violence?
HENDRIX: The immediate cause was the arrest early last week of a senior Islamic Jihad leader, not in Gaza, but in the West Bank, in the city of Jenin. There's been a series all summer long of Israeli troops raiding and arresting suspected terrorist cells across the West Bank. This was a senior leader, and, immediately, the Islamic Jihad group in Gaza threatened retaliation. So tensions have really ramped up very quickly. Israel sealed off access to Gaza. They closed a lot of roads in the surrounding areas. And then, by Friday - Friday afternoon - they launched what they called a preemptive strike because they had evidence, they said, that a major attack from Islamic Jihad was about to be launched.
FADEL: Now, Hamas - the group that runs Gaza - seems to have distanced itself from these rocket attacks. Why?
HENDRIX: Well, that definitely shows the factionalism within Gaza. Islamic Jihad is a rival to Hamas and a much smaller organization, and the two don't always get along. In this case, Hamas had a decision to make. It would have been a much larger escalation had they taken hand and begun launching their own rockets into Israel. They decided not to do that. It's easy to imagine that they're not sorry to see the leadership of this group be decimated.
FADEL: Now, in the past, as you mentioned, Israel has responded after the rocket fire from Gaza with what critics say is overwhelming, disproportionate strength. Does this signal a different approach by Israel - this latest round?
HENDRIX: It's hard to say. We're talking about different enemies, as it were. Last year, during the 11-day war, they were targeting Hamas assets, and those are distributed all over the enclave. Islamic Jihad is a smaller group, with a smaller number of facilities, training grounds, manufacturing plants. And yes, it was very, very targeted. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of destruction here, but nothing like sort of the carpet bombing that you could almost say that we saw a year ago.
FADEL: The Washington Post's Jerusalem bureau chief, Steve Hendrix. Thank you so much for your time.
HENDRIX: Thank you, Leila.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. Today we hear from Ashley Cosme, who grew up with two sisters in northern Indiana. Her dad, Al Plumley, taught his daughters about one of his greatest passions - fixing up old cars. Al died in October of last year, and Ashley came to StoryCorps with her husband, Nicolas, to talk about how they are keeping his memory alive.
ASHLEY COSME: He knew absolutely everything about cars. He knew what they were worth. If we were buying a used car, he knew every little thing to look for. You know, his first car was a blue Mustang. He was able to, even back then as a 16-year-old, figure out what was wrong with the car and actually carried the entire engine up to his bedroom, and he fixed it himself. When we were growing up, he would find cars on the internet. My mom would just jump right in the truck, and they would go look at them and haul them back if it was something he wanted to fix up. And he, you know, had been working on this Mustang for a while.
NICOLAS COSME: He didn't say a lot, but he lit up to talk about the car.
A COSME: Right before he passed, I remember he was sitting in his chair with his oxygen, and he had this folder that said old Mustang. And there's just a list, all in his handwriting, with all the parts that we need to get. And he said once it's done, he wants it to be painted the 1966 Oldsmobile blue metallic.
N COSME: After he passed, we were entrusted with the task of completing the Mustang, essentially this baby that he was working on and putting all this time and effort. I was honored and then terrified.
A COSME: I know. But I was also really excited that he chose us.
N COSME: I remember staring at the front end and just looking at where the engine should be. And I'm like, I have zero idea, but we're going to make it happen. So what are you looking forward most to when it is finished?
A COSME: My mom driving it. Can you imagine the feeling? This is something we're going to do together in his memory. My dad did everything for us. I mean, he was my go-to guy for absolutely everything. So just being able to see this was one of dad's dreams, I think that will be really special.
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FADEL: That was Ashley and Nicolas Cosme remembering Al Plumley for StoryCorps in Chicago. They've recently finished gathering all the parts on Al's checklist and are looking forward to getting under the hood. Their conversation will be archived at the Library of Congress.
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At least 37 people have died following heavy rains in eastern Kentucky. Climate change is blamed nationwide for higher inland flooding risks, and coastal residents also face a greater risk of disaster. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports.
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: When there's water in the streets but not a cloud in the sky, that's called a sunny day flood or a high tide flood, and it's getting more and more common in coastal cities and towns because of sea level rise. William Sweet is an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
WILLIAM SWEET: By 2050, the number of high tide flood days rise between 45 and 70 days per year on average.
HERSHER: Seventy days a year when the ocean is so high that there's a flood. That's what the future holds, according to the federal government's annual report on such things. And that's just the average. In some places, the number of flood days will be much, much higher, like on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, for example.
SWEET: This part of the country, land is sinking - in some areas, faster than the ocean itself is rising.
HERSHER: The land is sinking because humans are pumping drinking water, oil and gas out from underneath, like deflating a water balloon that's holding up the land. And the ocean is rising because humans are burning fossil fuels. Add it all up, and you get a whopping 170 days of high tide flooding on the Texas coast by 2050. Basically, every other day, there will be a flood, which is particularly scary for people who live in flood-prone homes on the coast.
Joel Scata studies flood policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
JOEL SCATA: A home that's flooded before is likely to flood again.
HERSHER: So if you're buying a house, you probably want to know, has this place flooded before? But in a lot of states, no one is required to tell you about a home's flood history, which Scata thinks is a problem because people are buying houses they think they can afford when, actually, they'll likely end up with expensive flood damage.
SCATA: It's really important for homebuyers to have a right to know the flood risk that they might face by buying a home because the damages can be so high, it can be financially ruinous.
HERSHER: A new report commissioned by Scata and his colleagues looks at just how financially ruinous. It finds that owners of flood-prone homes in three coastal states will face an average of 35,000 to $90,000 in flood damage in the next 30 years. And the costs will only get higher as the climate gets hotter.
Rebecca Hersher, NPR News.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We are all paying more for everything from toilet paper to cars, in part because of increased shipping costs.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Rising demand during the pandemic clogged the supply chain at sea, and the White House says that pushed up some ocean-going shipping costs from Asia to the U.S. by as much as 1,000%.
INSKEEP: Whoa. So Congress passed and President Biden signed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act. Zippy Duvall stood next to the president as he signed it. He heads the American Farm Bureau Federation.
ZIPPY DUVALL: There is price gouging, and that definitely put farmers at a disadvantage because once they got that product there, paying that kind of cost of moving it, then they couldn't be competitive on the market.
MARTIN: Duvall is a third-generation farmer who grows hay and raises cows and chickens in Georgia.
DUVALL: All the things that I have to buy to fertilize my grasses, to make them grow, to produce forage for my animals, equipment, tractors, labor - all that has increased many times. When you put your heart and soul into growing a crop or taking care of animals to be able to put it out to nourish the world, and then there is not enough opportunity to send that crop out to the mouths and people that need it - it's really deteriorating to the morale of our farmers.
INSKEEP: So the law takes aim at carriers or terminal operators who unreasonably refuse to open up available cargo space. Some ports have been clogged, as we've reported in the past. Market analyst Cathy Roberson says it requires the Federal Maritime Commission to investigate exorbitant late fees on importers and exporters.
CATHY ROBERSON: If a shipper can't pick up a container because there's not a truck driver available - something that's out of their hands - this law is to help protect them from these detention and demurrage fees.
MARTIN: Roberson says these fees are often passed on to the buyer. But she says this law may not do what the Biden administration hoped - cut prices for consumers.
ROBERSON: This is all fine and dandy, but there's a lot more involved in supply chains. There's a lot of folks in the federal government that really don't understand how supply chains operate from manufacturing all the way to our front door. This isn't going to help lower inflation whatsoever. The Consumer Price Index figures the majority of the increase has been attributed to energy cost.
MARTIN: The Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 is the first revision to maritime legislation in more than 20 years.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Japan is in shock following the assassination of one of the country's most powerful politicians, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan's longest serving prime minister, Abe has had a lasting impact on Japanese politics, including since he stepped down in 2020. And the attack is especially shocking in a place with such little gun violence. NPR's Anthony Kuhn joins us from Seoul to update us on what's going on.
Hi, Anthony.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Hi, Leila.
FADEL: So describe first exactly what happened.
KUHN: Well, Abe was giving a campaign speech ahead of parliamentary upper house elections on Sunday. And at about 11:30 local time, he was shot in the back. He was rushed to a hospital. Doctors tried to save him, but they were unable to stop the bleeding. And they declared his death just after about 5 p.m. local time. At the scene, security agents tackled a suspect. Police arrested him. Police have identified him as 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, a resident of the city of Nara, where Abe was speaking. And Yamagami formerly served in Japan's military. Media pictures show that he appeared to be carrying some sort of improvised firearm, which looks a bit like a two-barrelled shotgun. The man's motive is at the moment still unclear.
FADEL: Now, this is a place where gun violence is so rare, right?
KUHN: Yes. It feels very safe to most people. The country has very strict gun laws. There are very few gun deaths every year. Handguns are banned outright in this country. And political violence of this sort has not been seen since the 1960s, at which time there were street clashes between the political left and the right. And the head of a Japanese socialist party was assassinated in 1960 with a sword. Now, in Japanese politics, you can be sure there's always a lot of sparring, both among and within the political parties. But there's also a consensus to keep that sparring civil, keep it behind closed doors and keep up a sort of harmonious facade.
FADEL: So quite a shock in Japan - how is Japan and the world reacting?
KUHN: With real horror to this. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida flew back from the campaign trail. He said Sunday's election is going to go ahead, be free and fair - and looking very distraught. This is part of what he had to say to reporters.
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PRIME MINISTER FUMIO KISHIDA: (Speaking Japanese).
KUHN: "I'm not aware of the background of this act. But it took place during an election," he said, "which makes it an attack on the core of democracy. It is a contemptible act of barbarism and cannot be tolerated. I condemn it in the strongest words." U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel called Abe an outstanding leader of Japan and an unwavering ally of the U.S. The White House said it was shocked and saddened; and their thoughts are with his family and Japan's people.
FADEL: And Abe remains a really important figure in the Japanese political scene. Can you tell us about that?
KUHN: Yeah. Well, even after he stepped down as after two terms as prime minister, eight years in total, he remained the head of the largest faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for most of the past seven decades. And his successors, including the current Prime Minister Kishida, have largely stuck to his conservative policies - strengthening the military, tightening the alliance with the U.S. and trying to keep the economy growing despite its aging, shrinking population. Abe's message was that Japan is back, both from two decades of economic stagnation and the earlier stigma of its defeat in World War II. Abe had many critics, but I think many would admit that he articulated his own vision for the nation's future and engineered a real shift in Japan's security and foreign policies.
FADEL: That's NPR's Anthony Kuhn joining us from Seoul. Thank you.
KUHN: Thanks, Leila.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There are more classes at universities on African American and Latino studies than there ever have been, although few schools have been teaching Asian American culture and history. That is slowly changing. From NPR's member station in Nashville, Juliana Kim has the story.
JULIANA KIM, BYLINE: Jack Mok just graduated from Vanderbilt University. He grew up around a lot of Asian Americans back home. Still, he was no stranger to stereotypes, like when kids would poke fun of things made in China.
JACK MOK: I laughed along with the jokes. I even told a couple when I was growing up. But I never really understood the sort of stigma that was associated with that.
KIM: Earlier this school year, Mok took one of the few classes offered on Asian American history at Vanderbilt. And he says the course actually helped debunk his own misconceptions.
MOK: The reasoning that we came up with for Asian American studies at our campuses was that, you know, acts of violence are born out of ignorance.
KIM: For the past two years, Mok and other Vanderbilt students have been pushing for more Asian American faculty and classes in hopes of creating a major. And it's not just Vanderbilt. The field of study began popping up in universities during the 1960s. But today, only 26 schools offer a degree in Asian American studies, including Cornell and Northwestern University. But that's slowly changing.
STELLA LEE: When the hate crimes were first kind of rolling in, I knew a lot of people who weren't Asian who didn't really understand, like, these stereotypes that caused those hate crimes kind of have historically existed.
KIM: That's Stella Lee, a rising senior at Texas A&M University. She says the recent uptick of anti-Asian bigotry and violence across the country has reenergized interest among students for more Asian American classes. Growing up, Lee learned a lot of Texas history, but it rarely included Asian Americans.
LEE: How can you make a history for a whole state but not make a history for a whole demographic group?
KIM: At John Hopkins University (ph) in Baltimore, students are taking it one step further. A rising junior, Kobi Khong, originally wanted a major focusing on Asian Americans, but he saw a larger issue at hand. He and other students have been lobbying for a major that reflects the entire immigrant experience, not just focusing on people from Asia.
KOBI KHONG: I think it stems from just the objectification of the foreigner. You know, they're not Americans. They're FOBs. They're this other.
KIM: Khong and Vanderbilt's Jack Mok belong to a national coalition of Asian American college students working to make campuses more inclusive of their community. Mok says there's a long way to go, but adding more Asian American-related classes is a good first step.
MOK: What I hope for Asian Americans in, you know, a decade is that they feel like they belong from the moment they step on campus.
KIM: He says that's going to take group effort from the administration, faculty and both Asian and non-Asian American students. After all, these courses are for everyone to enjoy.
For NPR News, I'm Juliana Kim in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF ODDISEE'S "AFTER THOUGHTS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The market is down, especially for tech stocks. And that changes the calculations for the private equity investors known as venture capitalists. As Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma from the Indicator podcast explain, both investors and startups are facing hard choices.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Before we get to the doom and gloom, let's revisit some of the high-flying times for tech. Nicole DeTommaso is a senior associate at Harlem Capital. It's a firm that specializes in early-stage funding for startups run by women and people of color.
NICOLE DETOMMASO: Valuations were through the roof. You know, people were getting 30 million valuations off of an idea. And we still wanted to be in with those great founders. You couldn't sit out because, otherwise, you just wouldn't be deploying.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Deploying is, basically, spending money. It's what venture capitalists live to do because the sooner those funds go to work helping a company create the next bit of world-changing technology, the sooner they might see a return on that investment.
MA: And as it turns out, VCs have their own investors to answer to. Those investors are called limited partners - or LPs.
WONG: Limited partners are often wealthy individuals or institutions who spread their money around to lots of places, including VC funds. And one reason they're called limited partners is because they don't get involved in picking which startups to invest in.
MA: So to sum it up, startups get their money from venture capital firms, which get their money from limited partners. And so now it is time to follow that same flow of money that we talked about, and follow it in a down market. Nicole says the trouble started with that thing we're all living with now, high inflation.
DETOMMASO: Honestly, it probably started kicking off when inflation rose to 40-year highs. Interest rates hiked. Once those hiked, the equity markets dropped.
WONG: Stock markets tend to fall when interest rates go up. And publicly traded tech companies set the expectations for how much private tech companies should be worth. So as public valuations fall, so do private ones, which means a startup that was maybe once poised to be the next Uber or Shopify now just looks like too risky of a bet.
MA: So now you have startup valuations falling, meaning venture capital firms aren't getting the kind of returns on investment that they want.
WONG: And remember, venture capital firms are investing money they got from their limited partners - the people trusting them to make smart bets on startups. Now venture capital firms are returning less money to their LPs.
MA: Right. And when it comes time for venture capital firms to fundraise, their limited partners write smaller checks. And then the VC firms, they have less money to invest. And so they, in turn, write smaller checks to the startups.
WONG: Nicole says the advice she's been hearing is that in this market, startups should have 18 to 24 months of cash on hand because they can't count on being able to fundraise like they used to. For companies that don't have this cushion, it's time to start cutting costs.
DETOMMASO: Unfortunately, sometimes that means you do have to lay off people. But, I think, something that you have to consider as a founder is if you don't lay off certain people, the whole business might go under, right? And then you're laying off everyone.
WONG: Nicole says her venture capital firm is still actively investing in startups. And as the pace of deal-making slows down, she expects valuations to be based less on hype and more on a founder's ability to navigate the leaner times ahead.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRITZ KALKBRENNER'S "RIDE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Thanks to inflation, the U.S. dollar's value is eroding at home. But when you trade your dollars against other currencies overseas, its value is growing. Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong, our colleagues over at NPR's The Indicator, explain who benefits and who doesn't.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: According to a couple of popular indicators that track the value of the dollar against a whole bunch of other currencies, the dollar has appreciated somewhere between 8 and 13% just in the past year. When we were looking around for a guest to help explain why the dollar is getting stronger, our producer found an economist from the Brookings Institution named David Dollar. And we thought, come on.
DAVID DOLLAR: Right. So there's a word for this, you know - an aptronym - someone whose name is appropriate for their employment. So like, a Baker who's a baker. So I have an aptronym. I'm an economist, focusing very much on the international economy, named Dollar.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: So he's a perfect person to explain why the dollar is stronger right now.
MA: Yeah. And David says a big reason for it is that, well, there's a lot of turmoil and uncertainty in the world right now.
DOLLAR: So whenever there's a big, unexpected event in the world, people tend to come into dollars. We call it a safe haven currency.
MA: And we're talking about money being moved from big institutional investors, like banks and retirement funds. They're looking for a relatively stable place to park that money.
WONG: On top of seeking safety, though, investors, as always, are looking to make money. And that's another reason the dollar is up.
DOLLAR: Right now. Our U.S. government 10-year bond is paying 2.8%. And that's a big increase just in the last few months.
MA: But in order for international investors to get that sweet, sweet U.S. government bond yield, they have to buy U.S. bonds. And to do that, they've got to get their hands on some U.S. dollars. And so that is where investors turn to the foreign exchange markets.
WONG: One thing worth emphasizing here - a stronger dollar is usually not great for consumers in other countries. It means American goods and services are more expensive.
MA: And here's one other group that is also hurt by a stronger dollar - multinational corporations like Apple and Tesla or Procter & Gamble. Because they get so much of their revenue from consumers in other countries, big shifts in the exchange rates could influence where and how they do business.
DOLLAR: If you're serving the world, what you do in the United States is now going to be more expensive, and what you do in other countries is going to be less expensive in a sense. So you might shift some activities out of the United States. You know, for example, if you have multiple plants and you have a little bit of excess capacity, you might idle a plant in the United States and rely more on plants in other countries.
WONG: Obviously not good for the American workers in those plants.
MA: Yeah. And that is a really good point. Also, a stronger dollar can be a drag on the economies of a lot of different countries. It could mean U.S. goods get more expensive for them or their debts in U.S. dollars get harder to pay off. And that is not great, especially for emerging market economies. And then, on top of that, through the push and pull of the global financial ecosystem, that can bounce back to the home of the dollar, the U.S.
WONG: Wailin Wong
MA: Adrian Ma, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOKHOV'S "GOLDEN WAVES")
JO CORONA, BYLINE: This week from StoryCorps, we're going to hear from someone who brings comfort to people in their final moments. Hajime Koyama, who goes by Issan, is a retired hospice worker. He came to StoryCorps to remember his grandmother, who shaped his understanding of grief.
HAJIME KOYAMA: When I was 5 years old, I was playing in her room, as I always did. By that time, she was bedridden. She says, Hajime, keep it down. And I say, yes. And then suddenly door swings open, and one of the people who used to work for us comes in. And I was basically pulled out from the room. And I was told my grandmother died while I was with her all alone, playing on the floor at the foot of her bed. But the memory stuck with me because it was a beautiful afternoon. The sun comes in through the window, and I felt so warm and protected.
And then when I was a teenager, my father was sick with a cancer. My mother came to me and says, we need a little break. Can you sit with your father? So I said, of course. And in Japan, parents don't really touch kids - particularly father-son, don't really touch or hug. But before he died, he started to move his hand toward me. So I held his hand. Eventually, I held him in my arms. He looked at me and took three separate exhale with a long pause in between - his final breath. It's a strange thing to say, but it was so beautiful. It feels really deep and almost dangerous, like the depth of this unknown at the bottom of the ocean.
And so by diving right into it, I really understood that incredible sense of intimacy. We are all together in this painful world. But because of that, this really organic, deep-seated sense of compassion arises that puts us together. And in the midst of the chaos and pain and the suffering, that is exactly where the very, very pure white flower of compassion arises and blossoms - nowhere else but in the muddy water.
CORONA: That's retired hospice worker Hajime "Issan" Koyama. He spoke with his husband, Paul Boos. To hear more from their conversation, you can find the StoryCorps podcast at npr.org.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
There is an economic indicator that can reveal the state of the trucking industry and sometimes the economy at large. It's called the spot market rate, and it hit historic highs early in the pandemic. But this year, it's fallen fast. Paddy Hirsch and Wailin Wong from our daily economics podcast The Indicator explain what that means.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: If you need to truck your goods across the U.S., there are two ways you can do it. You can use the contract market, where you make a contract with a haulage firm. That's where the cost of transportation is agreed to weeks or months in advance. Or you can use the spot market.
KENDRA TUCKER: So at any given moment or any given location, there's a market for drivers and riders.
PADDY HIRSCH, BYLINE: This is Kendra Tucker. She's the CEO of truckstop.com It's a service that links people who need to move their goods with drivers who can do the moving for them.
TUCKER: One everyday example of a spot market is a ride-sharing app, like Uber or Lyft.
HIRSCH: The spot market in trucking is super dynamic, with prices rising and falling all the time, as supply and demand fluctuates. But during the pandemic, of course, we saw a massive surge in demand for goods, and that led to a surge in demand for truckers to ship those goods, and, of course, that led to a surge in transportation prices. Since 2020, the cost per mile to ship something in a truck has gone pretty much only one way - upwards.
WONG: Close to a 60% increase in the spot rates, an increase that peaked in January this year and created an interesting wrinkle in the trucking market.
HIRSCH: As those spot prices began to rise, contract market truckers started to get jealous of their spot market peers, and they started to reject their contracts.
TUCKER: So just because the contract exists doesn't mean the contract is always honored, particularly when spot market rates start doing what they've been doing. Carriers then say, I've got to get out of this contract because I could make more in the spot market.
HIRSCH: But of course, now the spot price is falling - down 15% since January. And in the past, a slump in the spot market has been kind of like a red light flashing on the dash of the trucking industry and maybe even the economy at large, warning that a correction could be coming or maybe even a recession.
TUCKER: We generally avoid the R word, in that it's not actually recessionary. I guess it's recessionary in that demand is receding. But demand was incredibly high, right? So what we're headed back to now is a normal market based on the trends that we see.
WONG: A normal market - and this makes sense, right? We are now coming out of the pandemic - fingers crossed.
HIRSCH: Fingers crossed.
WONG: And so our demand for services is rising, and our demand for goods is falling. That ebbing demand for goods means less demand for trucks.
HIRSCH: Which is good for the consumer, right? Because it means our stuff costs less to ship and, therefore, should be marginally less expensive.
WONG: But what about all those new trucking entrepreneurs who entered the market while it was raging hot?
DEMETRIS WASHINGTON: My name is Demetris Washington (ph). I'm the owner of Nomadic Transx LLC.
HIRSCH: Demetris started his own small trucking business in Maryland.
WASHINGTON: The industry right now is tough. You know, gas prices are really high and...
HIRSCH: But all of these problems aside, Demetris doesn't think that the sky is falling. Like Kendra Tucker, he believes that the industry is merely in a correction, and he's doing OK. Last week, he says, he broke even. That felt great.
Paddy Hirsch.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Food and Drug Administration is proposing a ban on menthol cigarettes. NPR's Andrew Limbong reports these cigarettes grew popular among Black people after a marketing campaign.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: There's this classic sketch from Season 2 of "Chappelle's Show."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CHAPPELLE'S SHOW")
DAVE CHAPPELLE: Welcome to the show "I Know Black People."
LIMBONG: Dave Chappelle does his best game show host and asks people various questions about Black culture. And the very second question is...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CHAPPELLE'S SHOW")
CHAPPELLE: Why do Black people love menthols so much?
LIMBONG: One of the contestants hems and haws until she says...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CHAPPELLE'S SHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) I don't know. That's crazy.
CHAPPELLE: That is correct. No one knows.
KEITH WAILOO: Well, the fact is that a lot of people know why.
LIMBONG: Keith Wailoo, history professor at Princeton University.
WAILOO: And it's the product of an elaborate and complicated push that really began in the mid-1960s, around 1964, in fact.
LIMBONG: He's the author of the book "Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing And The Untold Story Of The Menthol Cigarette." And he says in 1964, federal regulators banned tobacco companies from advertising to youths - no more advertising on college campuses or handing out free loosies (ph) to young people. So instead, they just pivoted that energy towards Black people. And the type of advertising went beyond just knowing what kind of imagery to use.
WAILOO: It's the intimate understanding of Black social structure. Who are the people who are influence-makers in a community? The importance of finding those influence-makers - they could be a barber; they could be a bellhop; they could be a numbers runner - and giving them free samples.
LIMBONG: And then they'd hand out those cigs to other people. The companies also gave a bunch of money to Black periodicals.
WAILOO: A lot of Black periodicals like Ebony became so dependent on tobacco advertising that they were reluctant - and I would say more than reluctant, silent - about the devastating health impact of smoking in the Black community.
LIMBONG: Same with campaign donations to Black lawmakers. The FDA's proposal on banning menthol cigarettes said that the move could potentially prevent somewhere between 90- and 240,000 deaths among Black people over 40 years. And, says Wailoo, it will interrupt a process that has been creating new smokers for generations.
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
New Mexico is the latest state to offer free tuition for higher education. Thirty-three states offer it in some form, and New Mexico’s program is among the most generous. But there are limits, as Alice Fordham with member station KUNM in Albuquerque reports.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: The celebration when Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed free tuition into law included a mariachi band from Western New Mexico University.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICHELLE LUJAN GRISHAM: New Mexico is the first state in the nation to have this as part of their education platform.
FORDHAM: It's part of a slew of measures designed to increase enrollment at universities and revitalize New Mexico's workforce, which lacks skills. There's a severe shortage of professionals like teachers and nurses here. Lujan Grisham is part of a movement sometimes called College Promise. Eddy Conroy is an analyst at the New America Foundation who's advocated for free tuition.
EDDY CONROY: These guarantees come in a bunch of different forms. We're up to about 20 states that have some form of state-level program.
FORDHAM: In terms of the scope of who it covers and what it covers, New Mexico's initiative does go further than most.
CONROY: New Mexico's program is one of the most generous, if not the most generous, Promise program that we've seen instituted so far.
FORDHAM: But state lawmaker Larry R. Scott points out one big catch. The free tuition is only fully funded for one year.
LARRY R SCOTT: If we were looking for an effective program, that one-year commitment to the project was not really the appropriate course of action.
FORDHAM: The law Governor Lujan Grisham signed means most of the $75 million funding free tuition comes from federal pandemic relief.
SCOTT: If we're going to do this, we probably should have committed at least a few years of resources to it to see how efficient the program was and whether it was going to be effective.
FORDHAM: The expectation is that the scholarship will be renewed next year. An oil and gas boom here means the state will end this year with a projected $2.5 billion surplus. But Scott says oil and gas busts happen, too.
SCOTT: We've gone from being flush with money to not having enough to fund K-12 education.
FORDHAM: Just five years ago, New Mexico had to dip into education funding to balance the state budget. But even a year's free tuition means a lot to someone like Itzayana Banda. She couldn't afford to stay in school even when her favorite teacher tried to encourage her.
ITZAYANA BANDA: But no, it got to the point where I was like, no, I need to stop. It's either, like, I have money for rent, for gas, for other things, or it's I finish my education.
FORDHAM: Banda now has another option and clearly misses studying to be a teacher at Central New Mexico Community College.
BANDA: My favorite class - it was math for teachers. And they would show us there how we could show the students how to count, how to capture their attention.
FORDHAM: New Mexico residents can apply the tuition assistance to the cost of bachelor's degrees, vocational certificates and other qualifications. Emily Wildau, an analyst for New Mexico Voices for Children, says publicly funded tuition pays dividends long-term.
EMILY WILDAU: Because as it trains more and more people, that's an investment in our economy so we have a better-educated workforce. And that will help us attract new industries and create better-paying jobs.
FORDHAM: If oil and gas do end up funding free tuition longer-term in New Mexico, Wildau hopes the result will be a workforce that's less dependent on a single industry for prosperity.
For NPR News, I'm Alice Fordham in Santa Fe.
Russia's president is answering Western sanctions by saying they failed. Vladimir Putin made that case in numerous speeches. He spoke after the U.S., the European Union, the U.K., Japan and some other nations, which represent a giant share of the world economy, closed off much business with Russia. So what's Putin's case? NPR's Charles Maynes is in Moscow. Hey there, Charles.
CHARLES: Hi there.
INSKEEP: What do the sanctions feel like where you are?
MAYNES: You know, it's been quite a ride. When sanctions kicked in, the currency, the ruble, cratered. That sent people scrambling for dollars and euros. Then we saw a run on goods, mainly out of a fear of inflation or that items might disappear. You know, and some of them you might expect, like iPhones. Others were more surprising, like sugar. But these days, most items are back on the shelves. Only prices are way up. And, of course, there's also been this exodus of foreign companies from Russia. So that's meant a lot of shuttered storefronts.
But all that said, the ruble - it's back, you know, almost to where it was before the conflict began. And now, that's thanks to government efforts to prop it up artificially and, of course, money pouring in from Russian energy exports, which are huge. But all this has created this kind of weird sense of normalcy here, although I really hesitate to use that word, given the conflict.
INSKEEP: Has Putin played up that sense that there's nothing to see here?
MAYNES: Yeah. You know, in this week in multiple settings, he was defiant and made the case that what he called the blitzkrieg of sanctions had failed. You know, Putin's basic message was they present Russia with opportunities to become more self-reliant and to build new partnerships.
Let's listen in.
(SOUNDBITE )
MAYNES: So Putin here is saying that economies always adapt. And if you can find something in one country, well, you go to another, and it's unavoidable. And so Putin's idea is that what Russia can no longer get from the West, it can now get from China or India and that what Russia currently sells to the West, you know, mainly gas and oil, it can provide to new, friendlier markets, if it comes to that.
INSKEEP: Well, can Russia pivot its whole economy to places like China and India then?
MAYNES: Well, experts aren't as optimistic. They say these sanctions will be devastating, and it's just too early to see. At least that's the view of Natalya Zubarevich. She's a specialist on Russia's regional development with Moscow State University.
NATALIA ZUBAREVICH: (Russian).
MAYNES: So Zubarevich calls these sanctions a genuine shock to the Russian economy. But she says, "we'll only feel the real impact starting in May or June, when," she says, "production lines will break down." Now, she argues the reason for that is imported parts. Most of what's made in Russia comes from at least some component made in the West, often specialized and high-tech, which China can't provide, at least not right away. "And so without these parts, work will just stop," she says, "in car factories, in offshore drilling for gas and airplane manufacturing and so on." And, of course, all this impacts people's lives.
INSKEEP: Well, let's talk about the people. To the extent that you can tell, what are ordinary Russians thinking about sanctions?
MAYNES: Well, we sort of know. Polls will tell you that a vast majority of Russians, over 80%, support Putin's policies in Ukraine, although most only have access to state media. That's important 'cause that media presents the view that these sanctions are the West trying to keep Russia down. You know, in conversations I have, at least, I also hear another view. People say this will all be over soon. You know, give it a few months, and everything will go back to normal. How realistic that is is questionable. But it's a view the Kremlin can certainly live with, at least for now.
The maverick billionaire Elon Musk says he wants to buy Twitter - the whole thing. It's a blockbuster move by Musk, who is one of Twitter's most dedicated users and also one of its most persistent critics. We're joined now by NPR's David Gura, who's been following this morning's developments. Hi, David.
DAVID: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: So, David, what exactly is Musk proposing here?
GURA: Well, Elon Musk lays out his proposal in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He announced it with a tweet. I made an offer, he wrote, with a link to the filing. Musk is Twitter's largest shareholder, and he wants to buy the rest of Twitter's stock. He says he's willing to pay $43 billion, which is a premium for the company - about 15% more than it's trading at right now. You know, appended to this filing is a letter. Musk wrote the chairman of Twitter's board. And in that letter, he says Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. And Musk goes on to argue in that letter that the company has, as he puts it, extraordinary potential, and he will unlock it.
FADEL: Wow, a $43 billion offer. Does Twitter have potential that can be unlocked?
GURA: Well, Twitter has not been as wildly successful as some of the other big social media companies. I mean, just compare it to Facebook, for instance. Twitter has just over 200 million users, which is significantly less than what Facebook has - more than 2 billion. But many of Twitter's users are dedicated. They use it fanatically, like Musk does himself. On Twitter, he has more than 81 million followers. But he's made a point that there are a lot of users who could be using the site even more. Just a few days ago, Musk posted a list of the 10 most-followed accounts on Twitter, including former President Obama, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry. And Musk suggested they tweet rarely and post very little content. And he ended that tweet by asking, quite provocatively, is Twitter dying?
FADEL: So what are Musk's other criticisms of Twitter?
GURA: It continues to be this roiling debate about free speech and social media and the role companies could play or should play in policing these platforms. Elon Musk has called himself a free speech absolutist, and this is something he also addressed in that letter to the chairman of Twitter's board. Musk wrote, I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. Right now, Musk argues, Twitter is not living up to that potential.
FADEL: So Musk is known for his antics and provocative comments and tweets. Should this offer be taken seriously?
GURA: Well, we'll see. I mean, it's been less than two weeks since Elon Musk became Twitter's largest shareholder. He bought just over 9% of the company. And then Twitter invited him on to its board. After that, there was a lot of speculation about what that would mean for how the company is run. And then there was a surprise announcement, just a few days later, from Twitter's still fairly new CEO that Musk had changed his mind. He wasn't going to join the board. So there's a lot of theater here. This is a takeover attempt, and Twitter has to take this bid seriously. Forty-three billion dollars is well over what Twitter is valued at currently. Musk's offering to buy it at a premium, as I said.
And there's some history here worth revisiting. Elon Musk, who is, of course, the founder and the CEO of Tesla, once said on Twitter, back in 2018, am considering taking Tesla private at $420 - funding secured. That tweet got him into a lot of trouble. And Tesla, of course, is still a public company. The last thing I'm going to say is we got to keep in mind Musk is the richest person in the world. He is worth north of $250 billion. So there is no question $43 billion for Twitter is something that Elon Musk could afford.
A fourth-quarter touchdown with less than two minutes left on the clock clinched a Super Bowl win for the LA Rams over the Cincinnati Bengals. Sunday's big game also featured an epic hip-hop performance. NPR TV critic Eric Deggans says it was an odd situation where the game and the halftime show actually overshadowed a largely uninspiring collection of commercials.
ERIC: The Super Bowl's halftime performance, which featured powerhouse appearances from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar, was a coming out party that was long overdue. Hip-hop's been at the center of pop culture for decades but hadn't fully occupied center stage at the Super Bowl halftime until this moment.
One commenter I saw on social media called it the Blackest Super Bowl halftime in history, and it certainly felt that way as the group performed hallowed hits like 50 Cent's "In Da Club," Eminem's "Lose Yourself" and Mary J. Blige singing her heart out on signature cuts like "No More Drama." And despite rumors before the game that the NFL had asked him not to do it, Eminem did kneel during the halftime show, a tribute to former NFL star Colin Kaepernick and other players who've taken criticism for kneeling to protest police brutality. All of this added up to a powerful artistic statement that seemed much more impressive than the commercials which surrounded the game action.
J: If it was delivered with Uber Eats, does that mean I can eats it?
D: That's from one of the odder commercials Sunday, featuring Jennifer Coolidge and other stars trying to eat pencils, paper towels and other nonedible stuff that Uber Eats has now also started to deliver.
A little more fun was BMW's ad featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Greek god Zeus, frustrated in his retirement by people always asking him to charge their golf carts.
ACTOR: Yo, Zeus, a little juice.
A: (As Zeus) That's it. I'm done with this place. .. / SALMA: (As Hera) We'll see about that. ... / D: Salma Hayek, playing Zeus' wife Hera, gets him an electric BMW car to ease his blues.
Google's ad featured Black people who have often grappled with cameras and photography aligned to work better with white faces.
P1: People with darker complexions have always struggled with having good lighting. .. / P2: Every single yearbook photo of mine has been terribly shot since I was a kid. / ... P3: I always show up as too dark or shiny.
LIZZO: (Singing) 'Cause if you love me, you love all of me.
DEGGANS: As Lizzo sings an unreleased song, the ad suggests that the new Real Tone software on Google's Pixel 6 smartphones will better capture darker skin tones, offering concrete achievement on a persistent problem.
There were also a few ads that offered a little low-key shade. Salesforce presented a commercial narrated by Matthew McConaughey encouraging the audience to focus on the Earth's problems while taking a subtle swipe at folks like SpaceX's Elon Musk and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
MATTHEW: So while the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let's stay here and restore ours. Yeah, it's time to blaze our trail. Because the new frontier - it ain't rocket science. It's right here.
D: But one of the more interesting ads featured a showbiz power couple, superstar actress Scarlett Johansson and her husband, "Saturday Night Live" star Colin Jost, for Amazon's Alexa. While displaying how Alexa might work if it could read their minds, the ad featured the digital assistant playing an interesting song while the couple was talking.
COLIN: When you have to do those love scenes with hot guys, is that fun, or is that, like, the worst?
SCARLETT: It's the worst. .... / MAC: (Singing) Tell me lies. Tell me sweet, little lies.
DEGGANS: In the end, these were the ads which worked best in the Super Bowl's elevated showcase - personal and cheeky with a little bit of painful honesty.
I'm Eric Deggans.
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DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. In 1941, Rabbi Philip Lazowski and his family were among the Jews banished from their village in Poland by the Nazis and forced to live in a ghetto. Philip got separated from his family. He was just 11 years old. Philip saw the Nazis sending children and the elderly to their deaths, but he noticed they were sparing families with adults who worked, like doctors, tailors and cobblers. Philip, who's now 91, came to StoryCorps with his wife, Ruth, to remember a quick decision that saved his life.
PHILIP LAZOWSKI: I saw a woman standing with two girls and she was a nurse, so I went over to her and I asked her, would you be kind enough to take me as your son? She said, if they let me live with two children, maybe they'll let me live with three. Hold on to my dress. We survived, and even though I saw her only for 15, 20 minutes, I never forgot her face. I was able to come to United States in 1947. I was 17 years old.
RUTH LAZOWSKI: Can you describe life after that?
P LAZOWSKI: Years later, a fellow got married, and I didn't want to go to the wedding. I didn't have fancy clothes. Also I don't dance, but I went. And sitting at the table, I said, I come from the town of Belzyce (ph). A lady was sitting next to me. She says, you know, a girlfriend told me a story. They saved the boy from Belzyce. and we don't know if he's alive. When she finished telling me the story, I realized that I am the boy. I says, where do they live? And I called the lady that saved me. She picked up and I promised to come to visit her. While there, I noticed the two girls. They were 18, 19 years old and grown up.
R LAZOWSKI: (Laughter) That was me. I was the other girl.
P LAZOWSKI: (Laughter) Yes. Your mother saved my life. I then married you, and that's how our family began. We have been together as husband and wife for 66 years. We had three children, seven grandchildren. So all in all, I am very thankful to be alive. God was good to us.
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ELLIOTT: That was 91 year old Rabbi Philip Lazowski and his wife, 86-year-old Ruth Lazowski, in West Hartford, Conn. This interview will be archived at the Library of Congress.
Do you remember when sea shanties briefly took over the internet?
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) Soon may the Wellerman come to bring us sugar and tea and rum.
ELLIOTT: Exactly a year ago, social media was obsessed with these kinds of videos of people performing old maritime folk songs. It took about a week for the trend to burn out. NPR's Neda Ulaby tells us what such so-called garbage trends have to do with you.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: You know something's reached a kind of cultural tipping point when it gets on NPR.
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SCOTT SIMON: Argh. The latest trend in pandemic distraction may be - shiver me timbers - sea shanties.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) There once was a ship that put to sea, and the name...
REBECCA JENNINGS: It was, like, a whole craze for, like, a week, and then no one remembered it ever again.
ULABY: Rebecca Jennings covers internet culture for Vox. She's seen so many short-lived trends come and go, she's come up with an expression for them.
JENNINGS: Garbage trends. They kind of are like fast fashion. They sort of come out of nowhere, and then the next week, they're in a landfill - like, the figurative landfill of ideas.
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HALLIE CAIN: OK, TikTok, I have a new word for you.
ULABY: Take, for example, this internet slang.
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CAIN: The word, my friends is cheugy (ph), OK? It's the opposite of trendy.
ULABY: The word cheugy or a recipe for baked pasta that captivated hungry TikTokers last year.
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MACKENZIE SMITH: Add cherry tomatoes, olive oil and salt to a baking dish and toss. Put a block of feta in the middle.
ULABY: Look, fads and trends are nothing new - tulip mania in the 1600s, the Charleston dance craze of the 1920s. When you look at clips of Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston back then, they could almost be TikTok videos today. But there's one huge difference, says Rebecca Jennings.
JENNINGS: The speed of these trends that come and go is so much faster, and I think TikTok and other algorithm-based platforms are a huge part of it.
ULABY: The way these algorithms work - how they direct our attention, goose it along and monetize it - is also what drives the spin cycle of content showing up in your personalized feeds on Netflix, Spotify or your news app of choice.
JENNINGS: They test something. And then if it doesn't blow up, they'll just get rid of it.
ULABY: Garbage trends, says Jennings, are arguably part of a bigger cultural continuum that includes NFTs, crypto and Web3 in that they can seem terribly urgent and important in the moment.
JENNINGS: But you don't really know what actually is meaningful or valuable about them.
ULABY: There's something, she says, about the rise of garbage trends that reflects how we've all been dealing with the pandemic over the past two years.
JENNINGS: Things have just felt so frenzied. You know, the vaccine and everything's fine, or it's like, oh, wait, no delta's here. No, everything's not fine. And, oh, omicron - and, like, oh, what are we supposed to do?
ULABY: The garbage trend, as trivial as it may be, can root you in the moment when the future feels uncertain. The garbage trend is not a trend, Jennings says. For as long as we're being led by algorithms designed to hook us in, the garbage-trend trend is here to stay.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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Inflation is on the rise here in the U.S., but in some countries like Turkey, the situation is extreme. The new year brought a steep spike in food prices there and a currency crisis that's been going on for months. The Turkish president is taking an unorthodox approach. NPR's Peter Kenyon has been talking with people in Istanbul struggling to cope.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Nejdet Sik, who works in a kebab restaurant, says people are under a huge strain. He can feel it every time he rides the bus or the tram.
NEJDET SIK: What can I say anymore? Economics - everyone upset. If you touch someone, they are really like the dog - want to bite you because stress, too much stress, brother, so I hope change.
KENYON: He says he completely understands how they're feeling, watching their standard of living decline before their eyes.
SIK: What they're going to do? They can't buy stuff, they can't give to electric, they can't give to the gas, look after the kids or give the rent. What they are going to do?
KENYON: Many economists will tell you that a big reason for Turkey's inflation problem is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's unorthodox theory that cutting interest rates will bring prices down, rather than force them even higher, as most economists believe. In a speech to his ruling party members late last year, Erdogan appeared to acknowledge the risk involved in cutting rates. But he declared that in the end, it would pay off for the Turkish lira and the country. Analyst Can Selcuki at Istanbul Economic Research says while he doesn't support Erdogan's policy, he can explain what the Turkish president is trying to do.
CAN SELCUKI: So the two fundamentals of the new model is low interest rates and a depreciated lira, with the aim of boosting exports, construction and tourism, which in return will provide a surplus, which will be used for investments, thereby valuing the Turkish lira and bringing down interest rates.
KENYON: The problem, says Selcuki, is that no economist he knows believes the currency markets will respond the way Erdogan says they will.
SELCUKI: The belief in Erdogan's administration is that interest rates causes inflation, which is against any common wisdom or knowledge of economy that we have.
KENYON: But rather than reverse course, Erdogan has dug in his heels and vowed to continue. At an outdoor tea shop, I meet Bojana, who didn't want to give her last name when being critical of Turkey. She's a 42-year-old freelance filmmaker who moved to Turkey two years ago from Macedonia. She says obviously, this crisis in the Turkish lira works out well for foreigners who get paid in euros or other relatively strong currencies. But she's painfully aware of what it's doing to her Turkish friends.
BOJANA: You can see it everywhere. You can see it in the neighborhoods. You can see that shops are closing. You can see, of course, in the supermarket bills that they are now double, if not triple, what they were. But it is palpable. You can see it.
KENYON: By now, many in Turkey are aware that the lira lost nearly 40% of its value against the dollar last year, and they're wondering what the new year will bring. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
We're entering a tense weekend for a lot of families across this country. Many are supposed to have kids return to school as soon as Monday or a few days after that. The first question is, will school really open? The second question is, can kids get a coronavirus test, as many schools do require? Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman reports from KQED in San Francisco.
AZUL DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN, BYLINE: When Cari Cymanski took her first grader to get tested earlier this week, she found the site closed. She checked her phone.
CARI CYMANSKI: Drop-in had exceeded capacity for the day, and there were no longer any drop-in tests available.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: The following day, she found another site had closed early. The next day, when she found an open site, there was a long line, and it was raining.
CYMANSKI: I was without an umbrella or a rain jacket for my kids, and I was unwilling to wait in a God-knows-how-long a line in the freezing rain.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: Parents and teachers have been increasingly frustrated about what they say is an inadequate plan to test schoolchildren before the start of the new term. During the break, on December 22, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced test kits would be provided to every student in the state before classes resume. But those test kits still haven't arrived.
Laura Dudnick is the spokesperson for the San Francisco Unified School District. She says they're expected to show up sometime next week at the earliest, after classes are set to begin.
LAURA DUDNICK: So right now, we're mobilizing quickly to coordinate how we're going to distribute those kits with the limited staffing resources that we have.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: The only district-specific testing offered before classes start is this Sunday. But across the bay in neighboring Oakland, the school district sent students home with test kits to use over the break. That's something that San Francisco could've done, too, says Cassondra Curiel, president of the United Educators of San Francisco, a union that represents school workers.
CASSONDRA CURIEL: Oakland had a plan. They already had the test kits. And they implemented their plan.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: Curiel is worried that without adequate testing, this coming Monday could become a mass exposure event in San Francisco schools. But the test kits in Oakland are not among those promised by Governor Newsom. Michelle Smith McDonald with Alameda's Office of Education says those tests are part of an earlier effort by the state to expand testing.
MICHELLE SMITH MCDONALD: Oakland got their tests before the break because they were part of the pilot.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: The San Francisco Department of Public Health said in a statement that in-person learning is safe and that schools have remained low-risk settings by following proper safety protocols, such as social distancing and masking.
For NPR News, I'm Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman in San Francisco.
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A MARTINEZ, HOST:
If you've ever cooked a lobster, the traditional method is dropping it into boiling water alive.
NOEL KING, HOST:
Yeah. Conventional wisdom is that that's the most hygienic way to cook them and also that lobsters don't feel any pain. A new study from the U.K. says otherwise.
JONATHAN BIRCH: There's evidence that a lobster will carry on living for two to three minutes when it's dropped into a pan of boiling water and that the nervous system response carries on very intensely during that time, just as it would with you or me or a cat or a dog or any animal dropped into a pan of boiling water.
MARTINEZ: That's Dr. Jonathan Birch, associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He led the study and looked at a whole range of mollusks and crustacea to see if they were sentient - in other words, if they were animals that could feel sensation.
KING: And it wasn't just lobsters. They looked at octopi, squid, crabs, even shrimp. And it turns out all of them can feel.
BIRCH: We drew on over 300 scientific studies looking at various different types of evidence with a particular focus on evidence for pain, you know, not because pain is all that matters. In fact, all feelings matter, including feelings of pleasure and joy and so on. But pain has been the most studied because it does have this special significance for animal welfare.
MARTINEZ: Birch and his team recommended more humane ways of dealing with these creatures, from the catching to the cooking, things like specialized knife techniques.
KING: And this whole thing has prompted the British government to include them in an animal welfare bill that could mean changes to the laws in the future.
BIRCH: I don't expect anything to happen quickly in this area, but I think if we start a conversation now, if we draw this line in the sand that says from now on, we're going to think of these animals as sentient beings, that then starts a conversation about what that means and what it is to treat these animals humanely. And that's the conversation we wanted the report to start.
MARTINEZ: Birch hopes this move alters the way we regard all invertebrate animals in the future.
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