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We sent out the alert to travelers headed for the Netherlands last month that an eagle owl was targeting runners and other unsuspecting pedestrians in the town of Purmerend.

The bird would take aim at human heads, inflicting wounds that required stitches, and prompting people to wear helmets and other protective gear.

Now, the Guardian reports the skies are safe and the terror alert is cancelled:

"'The animal was trapped by a falconer today,' the Purmerend city council said on Friday evening.

"'It's in good health and is currently being kept in a temporary facility awaiting a transfer once a proper permanent home has been found,' it added."

The Two-Way

An Owl Is Attacking And Injuring Residents Of A Netherlands Town

It's not that the Dutch town didn't like the owl. AP quotes Alderman Mario Hegger as saying said the municipality would have preferred to leave the "magnificent bird of prey" alone but "it became too risky."

The Dutch owl isn't the only one peeved with humans: Another one was keeping folks in Salem, Oregon, watching the skies and designing warning road signs, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports.

wildlife

This week we got a rude reminder that Ebola is clearly not over in West Africa.

Another American aid worker contracted the disease in Sierra Leone, health officials reported Thursday. The infected worker was flown back to the U.S. in a private jet and is being treated at the National Institutes of Health Clinic Center in Maryland.

Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says several other Americans in Sierra Leone were potentially exposed to the virus when they came into contact with the infected worker.

The Two-Way

Patient With Ebola Is Admitted To NIH Hospital In Maryland

None of these people have tested positive for Ebola, the CDC reported Friday. They are all being monitored in Sierra Leone, except for one person, who is being flown to Atlanta. That person is not showing any symptoms but will self-quarantine near Emory University Hospital, in case symptoms appear.

The world has recorded more than 24,000 Ebola cases so far, with nearly 10,000 reported deaths, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

The epidemic has drastically slowed in Liberia. The country hasn't recorded a case in more than two weeks.

But nearly a year after the first Ebola case was reported, the epidemic is still out of control in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Both countries continue to record more than 50 new cases each week.

The CDC director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, was recently in Guinea, where he assessed the situation. He says the country is still a long way from ending the epidemic.

In many parts of Guinea, people still don't believe Ebola is real or a serious threat, Frieden says. People are still suspicious of aid workers and treatment centers.

"I went to one Ebola treatment unit where some patients were not eating the food because they thought it would poison them," Frieden says.

Right now, the CDC isn't even sure where all the outbreaks are in Guinea, he says. The CDC is training and sending more epidemiologists to the country to track down and quarantine potential cases.

"There's a still a risk that Ebola could be become endemic [in West Africa]," Frieden says. "But we're going to do everything in our power note to let that happen. I believe we still can get to zero."

aid workers

ebola

Global Health

Hillary Clinton is, at least for now, not officially running for president. That's what she's said all along, and now all six members of the Federal Election Commission are on record agreeing with her.

The commissioners – three Republicans and three Democrats – unanimously voted they found "no reason to believe" that the former secretary of state crossed the legal line between non-candidate and candidate, and that the Super PAC Ready For Hillary is acting as her campaign committee.

Stop Hillary PAC filed the complaint in December. The complaint raises several other questions beyond Clinton's alleged candidacy, and on a few, the commission deadlocked. Democrats wanted to press the case; Republicans wanted to close it. The tie goes to the Republicans. The commission voted last month.

Why is this news? Well, Clinton has been laying the foundation for a White House run for a few years now. She and a platoon of Republican hopefuls are all busy with campaign-like activities – while insisting that they are not candidates.

And why does it matter? It's easier and more lucrative to be an un-candidate. Under federal law, candidates can't do things these un-candidates are doing right now — notably, traveling on donors' private planes and soliciting six- and seven-figure contributions for the treasuries of friendly Super PACs.

Federal election law – what's left of it – is intended to keep candidates away from the blandishments of lavish gifts and millionaires' money.

But as long as Clinton and the others hold on to their non-candidacy, the rules don't apply.

2016 Presidential Race

campaign finance

Hillary Clinton

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper has directed his Department of Consumer Affairs to look into reports that some African-American customers at the Ritz-Carlton in Charlotte were recently subjected to unwarranted fees.

We reported last week that the Ritz-Carlton had imposed a 15 percent surcharge for patrons in its Lobby Bar during the CIAA — Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association — tournament. The event involves basketball teams from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) from around the region, and brings tens of thousands of people each year to Charlotte.

They come to cheer for their teams, party, dine out and enjoy mini-reunions with friends from their own and rival colleges. The Charlotte Regional Visitor's Authority says CIAA week has infused almost $50 million dollars into the local economy in recent years.

So some Ritz patrons were surprised to discover the hotel was adding a CIAA service charge to the bill in the Lobby Bar.

Local media and NPR called the Ritz for an explanation, and eventually received this statement:

"We would like to apologize to any guests we may have offended by the addition of a service charge we implemented at a recent event in our lobby lounge. The service charge was not intended to single out any particular group or organization and we deeply regret any misunderstanding this may have caused. It is important for all guests to feel welcomed at our hotel and for them to receive the highest level of service, respect and hospitality we strive for every day."

The response didn't satisfy local authorities or media. On Tuesday Special Deputy Attorney General Harriet Worley sent an inquiry to the Ritz-Carlton that her office shared with us.

"We've received a couple of complaints from consumers about this today." Public Information Officer Noelle Talley told NPR via email. Attorney General Cooper's office is encouraging consumers who may have paid the 15 percent fee to contact their office and fill out a complaint.

On Thursday, Charlotte City Council Chairman Michael Barnes expressed his disappointment with the surcharge, and the editorial page of the Charlotte Observer weighed in, calling for the Ritz-Carlton to take steps to "repair the service charge damage."

Patrice Wright, whose Ritz-Carlton receipt went viral, says she finally had a brief conversation with the hotel's manager this week. It felt, she says, more like an effort at damage control than a sincere apology. And Wright says it's up in the air whether she and her friends who used to make the Ritz-Carlton a regular stop will return.

We'll keep you posted.

Black Tax

CIAA

As the Obama administration opens the door to offshore drilling, the oil industry is promising more jobs and less reliance on foreign oil. Some people who live along the Eastern Seaboard are saying, "no thanks."

Coastal towns and cities in several states are formally opposing offshore drilling and oil exploration.

Tybee Island, Ga., is a short drive across the marsh from the historic city of Savannah. The island is dotted with hotels and tiny vacation cottages for tourists — and for about 3,000 people, it's home.

"This is one of the most unique places I've ever seen," Tybee City Councilman Paul Wolff says. Walking along the beach on an overcast day, he says a height limit for buildings helps preserve the ocean view.

"It's a coastal community that hasn't been overdeveloped," he says.

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Northwest Oil Terminal Plan Would Mean Jobs — And More Oil Trains

Obama Administration Proposes Opening Up Atlantic To Drilling

Obama Administration To Allow Drilling Off Southeastern Atlantic Coast

Wolff worries about a federal proposal to open up areas at least 50 miles off the coast of Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia to oil and gas development. Federal regulators say drilling wouldn't happen for several years at least, but many companies want to start surveying for oil now.

Wolff says an offshore oil boom could threaten marine animals — and the island's thriving tourism industry.

"We make a lot of money and a lot of folks on Tybee support their families by doing dolphin tours; I don't want to take a chance on hurting that for anybody," he says.

Earlier this year, Wolff sponsored a resolution opposing both offshore drilling and seismic air guns. That's a technique that blasts sound waves into the ocean every 15 seconds or so, to search for oil and gas deposits.

Tybee's city council passed the resolution unanimously, joining more than 30 others since last year on the Eastern Seaboard.

Another is Beaufort, S.C., where a small group of residents recently met in the mayor's waterfront cottage to talk about how to oppose the oil industry.

Megan Feight, 28, grew up surfing and now owns a business in Beaufort. She recalls seeing the aftermath of the 2010 BP oil spill while flying over the Gulf of Mexico in an airplane.

"Seeing something like that in person gives you sort of the same feelings that you see when you see photographs or videos of it — it's horrifying and real," she says.

Even without an oil spill, some researchers worry that noise from seismic air guns may confuse marine animals that depend on sound for navigation.

i

Mayor Billy Keyserling of Beaufort, S.C., speaks out against drilling for oil offshore, Jan. 14. He says local votes expressing opposition to oil drilling plans are important even if they don't hold the force of law. Bruce Smith/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Bruce Smith/AP

Mayor Billy Keyserling of Beaufort, S.C., speaks out against drilling for oil offshore, Jan. 14. He says local votes expressing opposition to oil drilling plans are important even if they don't hold the force of law.

Bruce Smith/AP

Industry leaders like Richie Miller say they follow federal rules meant to protect wildlife. He's the president of Spectrum Geo, an oil and gas survey firm based in Houston that's applying to conduct some of the seismic tests.

"There are what we call PSOs, protected species observers, on the vessels, and they're there solely to look for marine mammals. And if they get within a certain safety zone, then the vessels shut down," he says.

As regulators consider requests from companies like Miller's, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is hosting public meetings up and down the coast to discuss both offshore drilling and seismic testing.

"This has been piquing a lot of interest," says John Filostrat, a spokesman for the agency.

"Seismic acquisition hasn't been conducted on the Atlantic for three decades, and so we really don't have up-to-date information on what's out there," he says.

What happens next is up to state and federal regulators. Coastal cities can only pass resolutions expressing opposition, without any force of law.

But Beaufort's mayor, Billy Keyserling, says these local efforts are important.

"I think that the more towns which do represent bundles of people that are involved in sending the message and educating the public, the more difficult it's gonna be," he says.

If the plans move ahead, ships carrying seismic air guns could start their search for oil as early as this year.

offshore drilling

oil drilling

Georgia

South Carolina

Some startup entrepreneurs are leaving the high tech hot spots of San Francisco, New York and the Silicon Valley for greener pastures in a place that actually has greener pastures: Lincoln, Neb.

In fact, one of the secrets to the economic success of Lincoln, a city with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, is a surprisingly strong tech startup community that is part of what some in the region are calling the Silicon Prairie.

i

Paul and Stephanie Jarrett are co-founders of the e-commerce platform Bulu Box, in Lincoln, Neb. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Paul and Stephanie Jarrett are co-founders of the e-commerce platform Bulu Box, in Lincoln, Neb.

David Schaper/NPR

One of the, shall we say, middle-aged startups is an e-commerce platform called Bulu Box, started almost three years ago by Paul and Stephanie Jarrett.

It's a small company with nine full-time employees including the Jarretts, and a few interns.

"We are all about the open air office," says Paul Jarrett, as he shows off the cozy space on the second floor of an older downtown building.

And if the bright and vibrant office has a homey feel, there's a reason for that. "This is actually an apartment converted into an office space," he says.

There's a kitchen, laundry, showers, lockers, and a hangout room with couches, video games, board games, and adult beverages for those of legal drinking age.

But for Paul Jarrett, there's another reason his workspace feels like home.

"I actually grew up in a trailer park about four blocks from here," in downtown Lincoln, he says.

U.S.

A Nearly Recession-Proof City Is Not Slowing Down

Looking Up: Pockets Of Economic Strength

On Utah's 'Silicon Slopes,' Tech Jobs Get A Lift

While he dreamed of playing in the Nebraska Cornhuskers' football stadium, which is also just a few blocks from here, Jarrett earned a football scholarship to Iowa State and played there instead, starting at defensive nose guard.

He returned to Lincoln and then he and Stephanie moved away to New York for jobs in advertising and marketing, before going to work at tech startups in San Francisco.

"It's insane there," Jarrett says. "I couldn't get a cup of coffee without somebody telling me about their startup."

Nonetheless, Jarrett and his wife figured they'd need to stay in the Bay Area when they wanted to launch their own startup. But a friend told him about a network of technology investors back home, called Nebraska Angels.

He and Stephanie pulled all-nighters to put their plan together and made the long drive to Lincoln to make their pitch.

"Before we left town, we raised half a million dollars on our idea," he says.

So they loaded up a U-Haul and it was back to Lincoln they went, this time for good. And he immediately noticed a difference in the high tech business culture.

"In San Francisco and in big cities, people come up to you and they say, 'What do you do?' And they immediately start competing with you and they start sizing you up, and it's almost like they're saying, 'What can you do for me?' And in the Midwest, it is completely opposite. People say, 'How can I help you? What can I do for you?' "

For example, when Jarrett was setting up his office and needed Internet service, local providers told him it would be at least a couple of weeks. Then he ran into a friend on the street.

"And he's like, 'Oh, I know a guy.' He literally said, 'Follow me,' and he introduced me to these local guys that did Internet downtown and they're like, yeah, we could wire you up right now and they actually temporarily ran across the alley a cord just right into our office and within one hour we had Internet."

i

Bulu Box is a small startup based in Lincoln, Neb. The e-commerce company provides boxes of healthy snacks, drinks, vitamins, supplements and other premium health care products. It then compiles data on what consumers like and don't like about those products for the companies that make them. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Bulu Box is a small startup based in Lincoln, Neb. The e-commerce company provides boxes of healthy snacks, drinks, vitamins, supplements and other premium health care products. It then compiles data on what consumers like and don't like about those products for the companies that make them.

David Schaper/NPR

In the growing community of high tech entrepreneurs in Lincoln, as well as in nearby Omaha, people pull for one another. They collaborate, commiserate, advise and mentor. Even though they may compete for investors, talent and ideas, Jarrett says, there's a belief that any one startup's success is good for everyone else, especially in the same building.

In the office next door are 25-year-old startup "veterans" Blake Lawrence and Adi Kunalic and their newest company, Opendorse.

"Adi and I started our first company when we were 20 years old, five years ago, and there's been a ton of support ever since," Lawrence says.

Lawrence and Kunalic came to the University of Nebraska to play football, and the ties between college athletics and many tech startups in Lincoln are tight. An early connection was a company called Hudl, which was started almost a decade ago by three students in at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Raikes School of Computer Science and Management. They worked with Nebraska's football coach at the time to develop digital tools for coaches and players to share and store video and data, so they can review game and practice footage on laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Hudl has been named the fastest growing company in Nebraska for two consecutive years and now employs more than 225 people around the country, with most in offices in Lincoln and Omaha.

CEO and co-founder David Graff says the company could have moved anywhere, and had offers to relocate, but it stayed in Lincoln because "we really like the access to the University." Hudl has 35 interns and most are from the Raikes School (named for Nebraska alum and former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes).

"We've had great support from the city," Graff adds. "A number of our investors come from the Lincoln area ... and we really like what's being built in Lincoln."

Graff points to the city's redevelopment of the Haymarket area, which is where Hudl is headquartered. Less than a decade ago, the area adjacent to downtown mostly consisted of neglected warehouses, dirty railroad tracks and the city's old rail depot.

The city and the university are also turning the old state fairgrounds into an innovation campus for high tech firms.

After starting and selling a social media company, Lawrence and Kunalic founded Opendorse, which uses data to help link athletes to marketers and the right endorsement opportunities.

Kunalic agrees the university provides access to "a lot of talent" and the small Midwestern locale helps keep a startup's costs down.

"I feel like [in] Lincoln, you can take a lot of risk and you can grow your team very fast and not have to pay ridiculous prices just to get your concept out the door," Kunalic says.

Lawrence, Kunalic, Jarrett and other entrepreneurs here admit lower salaries and Nebraska's sleepy reputation can make Lincoln a tough sell when going after top talent in places like Boston, New York, Seattle or San Francisco.

But Lincoln boosters say the low cost of living and high quality of life can be a draw. And a redevelopment of Lincoln's warehouse district downtown has dramatically increased the number of bars, restaurants and music venues, sparking a vibrant night life in this college town of nearly 300,000.

One of the latest to make the move is 30-year-old Matt Boyd, who arrived a few weeks ago from the Bay Area.

"I think there's a lot of people who in their mind, they think that innovation lives in San Francisco and hard work lives in San Francisco, especially for the startup scene and that's just not true," Boyd says. He says he's seeing "so many positive indicators of people who are super-duper innovators and are just churning and burning the midnight oil and almost a harder work ethic than I have seen anywhere."

Boyd and the other entrepreneurs note that access to capital can be a problem. There is some money available in the Midwest through Nebraska Angels and other similar investment groups, but Midwest investors tend to be a bit more conservative.

"That's why I keep my New York cell number," Bulu Box's Paul Jarrett quietly admits.

That way his calls are returned more often and more quickly. And after potential investors hear his business plan, they don't really care that he's not in the Silicon Valley, but on the Silicon Prairie in Lincoln, Neb.

silicon prairie

tech startup

tech entrepreneurs

lincoln, nebraska

startups

Silicon Valley

Nebraska

entrepreneurship

Some startup entrepreneurs are leaving the high tech hot spots of San Francisco, New York and the Silicon Valley for greener pastures in a place that actually has greener pastures: Lincoln, Neb.

In fact, one of the secrets to the economic success of Lincoln, a city with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, is a surprisingly strong tech startup community that is part of what some in the region are calling the Silicon Prairie.

i

Paul and Stephanie Jarrett are co-founders of the e-commerce platform Bulu Box, in Lincoln, Neb. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Paul and Stephanie Jarrett are co-founders of the e-commerce platform Bulu Box, in Lincoln, Neb.

David Schaper/NPR

One of the, shall we say, middle-aged startups is an e-commerce platform called Bulu Box, started almost three years ago by Paul and Stephanie Jarrett.

It's a small company with nine full-time employees including the Jarretts, and a few interns.

"We are all about the open air office," says Paul Jarrett, as he shows off the cozy space on the second floor of an older downtown building.

And if the bright and vibrant office has a homey feel, there's a reason for that. "This is actually an apartment converted into an office space," he says.

There's a kitchen, laundry, showers, lockers, and a hangout room with couches, video games, board games, and adult beverages for those of legal drinking age.

But for Paul Jarrett, there's another reason his workspace feels like home.

"I actually grew up in a trailer park about four blocks from here," in downtown Lincoln, he says.

U.S.

A Nearly Recession-Proof City Is Not Slowing Down

Looking Up: Pockets Of Economic Strength

On Utah's 'Silicon Slopes,' Tech Jobs Get A Lift

While he dreamed of playing in the Nebraska Cornhuskers' football stadium, which is also just a few blocks from here, Jarrett earned a football scholarship to Iowa State and played there instead, starting at defensive nose guard.

He returned to Lincoln and then he and Stephanie moved away to New York for jobs in advertising and marketing, before going to work at tech startups in San Francisco.

"It's insane there," Jarrett says. "I couldn't get a cup of coffee without somebody telling me about their startup."

Nonetheless, Jarrett and his wife figured they'd need to stay in the Bay Area when they wanted to launch their own startup. But a friend told him about a network of technology investors back home, called Nebraska Angels.

He and Stephanie pulled all-nighters to put their plan together and made the long drive to Lincoln to make their pitch.

"Before we left town, we raised half a million dollars on our idea," he says.

So they loaded up a U-Haul and it was back to Lincoln they went, this time for good. And he immediately noticed a difference in the high tech business culture.

"In San Francisco and in big cities, people come up to you and they say, 'What do you do?' And they immediately start competing with you and they start sizing you up, and it's almost like they're saying, 'What can you do for me?' And in the Midwest, it is completely opposite. People say, 'How can I help you? What can I do for you?' "

For example, when Jarrett was setting up his office and needed Internet service, local providers told him it would be at least a couple of weeks. Then he ran into a friend on the street.

"And he's like, 'Oh, I know a guy.' He literally said, 'Follow me,' and he introduced me to these local guys that did Internet downtown and they're like, yeah, we could wire you up right now and they actually temporarily ran across the alley a cord just right into our office and within one hour we had Internet."

i

Bulu Box is a small startup based in Lincoln, Neb. The e-commerce company provides boxes of healthy snacks, drinks, vitamins, supplements and other premium health care products. It then compiles data on what consumers like and don't like about those products for the companies that make them. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Bulu Box is a small startup based in Lincoln, Neb. The e-commerce company provides boxes of healthy snacks, drinks, vitamins, supplements and other premium health care products. It then compiles data on what consumers like and don't like about those products for the companies that make them.

David Schaper/NPR

In the growing community of high tech entrepreneurs in Lincoln, as well as in nearby Omaha, people pull for one another. They collaborate, commiserate, advise and mentor. Even though they may compete for investors, talent and ideas, Jarrett says, there's a belief that any one startup's success is good for everyone else, especially in the same building.

In the office next door are 25-year-old startup "veterans" Blake Lawrence and Adi Kunalic and their newest company, Opendorse.

"Adi and I started our first company when we were 20 years old, five years ago, and there's been a ton of support ever since," Lawrence says.

Lawrence and Kunalic came to the University of Nebraska to play football, and the ties between college athletics and many tech startups in Lincoln are tight. An early connection was a company called Hudl, which was started almost a decade ago by three students in at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Raikes School of Computer Science and Management. They worked with Nebraska's football coach at the time to develop digital tools for coaches and players to share and store video and data, so they can review game and practice footage on laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Hudl has been named the fastest growing company in Nebraska for two consecutive years and now employs more than 225 people around the country, with most in offices in Lincoln and Omaha.

CEO and co-founder David Graff says the company could have moved anywhere, and had offers to relocate, but it stayed in Lincoln because "we really like the access to the University." Hudl has 35 interns and most are from the Raikes School (named for Nebraska alum and former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes).

"We've had great support from the city," Graff adds. "A number of our investors come from the Lincoln area ... and we really like what's being built in Lincoln."

Graff points to the city's redevelopment of the Haymarket area, which is where Hudl is headquartered. Less than a decade ago, the area adjacent to downtown mostly consisted of neglected warehouses, dirty railroad tracks and the city's old rail depot.

The city and the university are also turning the old state fairgrounds into an innovation campus for high tech firms.

After starting and selling a social media company, Lawrence and Kunalic founded Opendorse, which uses data to help link athletes to marketers and the right endorsement opportunities.

Kunalic agrees the university provides access to "a lot of talent" and the small Midwestern locale helps keep a startup's costs down.

"I feel like [in] Lincoln, you can take a lot of risk and you can grow your team very fast and not have to pay ridiculous prices just to get your concept out the door," Kunalic says.

Lawrence, Kunalic, Jarrett and other entrepreneurs here admit lower salaries and Nebraska's sleepy reputation can make Lincoln a tough sell when going after top talent in places like Boston, New York, Seattle or San Francisco.

But Lincoln boosters say the low cost of living and high quality of life can be a draw. And a redevelopment of Lincoln's warehouse district downtown has dramatically increased the number of bars, restaurants and music venues, sparking a vibrant night life in this college town of nearly 300,000.

One of the latest to make the move is 30-year-old Matt Boyd, who arrived a few weeks ago from the Bay Area.

"I think there's a lot of people who in their mind, they think that innovation lives in San Francisco and hard work lives in San Francisco, especially for the startup scene and that's just not true," Boyd says. He says he's seeing "so many positive indicators of people who are super-duper innovators and are just churning and burning the midnight oil and almost a harder work ethic than I have seen anywhere."

Boyd and the other entrepreneurs note that access to capital can be a problem. There is some money available in the Midwest through Nebraska Angels and other similar investment groups, but Midwest investors tend to be a bit more conservative.

"That's why I keep my New York cell number," Bulu Box's Paul Jarrett quietly admits.

That way his calls are returned more often and more quickly. And after potential investors hear his business plan, they don't really care that he's not in the Silicon Valley, but on the Silicon Prairie in Lincoln, Neb.

silicon prairie

tech startup

tech entrepreneurs

lincoln, nebraska

startups

Silicon Valley

Nebraska

entrepreneurship

In the 19th century, London was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever known — and it was infamously filthy. It had choking sooty fogs; the Thames River was thick with human sewage; and the streets were covered with mud.

But according to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, mud was actually a euphemism. "It was essentially composed of horse dung," he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. "There were tens of thousands of working horses in London [with] inevitable consequences for the streets. And the Victorians never really found an effective way of removing that, unfortunately."

In fact, by the 1890s, there were approximately 300,000 horses and 1,000 pounds of dung a day in London. What the Victorians did, Lee says, was employ boys ages 12 to 14 to dodge between the traffic and try to scoop up the excrement as soon as it hit the streets.

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"It was an immense and impossible challenge," Lee says.

To the public health-minded Victorian, London presented an overwhelming reform challenge. But there wasn't change until the city took over.

"It takes decades for people to accept that the state perhaps has a role in how they manage their household, how they manage their rubbish, their toilet facilities even," Lee says. "The state basically does intervene and it is that idea of a central authority that is actively concerned — what the Victorians would've called 'municipal socialism.' ... That mission to improve people's lives on a very day-to-day basis was carried on throughout the 20th century."

Interview Highlights

On what it was like to walk around Victorian London

The first thing you'd notice if you stepped out onto the streets would be the mud that lined the carriageways, but of course it wasn't really mud.

The air itself was generally filled with soot and smoke. It was famously said of the sheep in Regent's Park — there were still grazing sheep in Regent's Park in the mid-Victorian period — that you could tell how long they'd been in the capital by how dirty their coats were. They [went] increasingly from white to black over a period of days.

If you were a respectable person, you had to wash your face and hands several times during the day to make sure that you looked half decent. ... You had the stench from blocked drains and cesspools below houses. It wasn't really a pleasant experience.

On the horse dung and urine on the streets

i

Lee Jackson's other books include A Metropolitan Murder and London Dust. Courtesy of Yale University Press hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Yale University Press

Lee Jackson's other books include A Metropolitan Murder and London Dust.

Courtesy of Yale University Press

Urine, of course ... soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury and it was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia that was coming from the pavement was just impossible. Also the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was actually discoloring their shop fronts as well.

On cesspools and the first water closets

This is the thing that's often forgotten: that London at the start of the 19th century, it was basically filled with these cesspools. There'd be brick chambers ... they'd be maybe 6 feet deep, about 4 [feet] wide and every house would have them. They'd be ideally in the back garden away from the house, but equally in central London and more crowded areas it was more common to have a cesspool in the basement. ... And above the cesspool would be where your household privy would be. And that was basically your sanitary facilities, for want of a better term.

That actually worked quite well for a little while, but then people got very interested in this new invention — the water closet. And it's often ignored that the water closets were initially connected to these cesspools, not the sewer system that existed in the start of the century — that was just for rainwater. So you get water closets coming in and they're connected to cesspools and they don't really fit because of the extra large volume of flushing water. You get these surges of waste and dump and smell, and people start getting very concerned about what's in their cesspools because of the stink that's rising from them. ...

The idea that this sort of stench is coming into the house, seeping through the house and possibly bringing in diseases like cholera or typhoid ... is actually one of the great driving forces of sanitary reform in the 19th century.

"The idea that this sort of stench is coming into the house, seeping through the house and possibly bringing in diseases like cholera or typhoid ... is actually one of the great driving forces of sanitary reform in the 19th century."

- Lee Jackson

On how cesspools were built and emptied

Cesspools were built to be porous so the liquid part of the waste was meant to seep away into the ground. There was no knowledge of bacteriological contamination, although there was plenty of it happening. Nevertheless, you had this residue of solid matter left and it was removed by so-called "night soil men." This wasn't a full-time job for people; there were often dustmen or laborers or bricklayers who made a little extra money on the side and they would come in the middle of the night to your home. And it was by law in the night because the stench of venting a cesspool was considered too disturbing during the day. And they would unfortunately have to [climb] down into the pit, shovel out the muck and get it into a wicker basket, get it into a cart. And at the start of the century, that was actually reasonably productive labor because the cart could then be taken out to the countryside and the manure could be sold to farmers.

On the first public toilets

It's often said that the first public toilets were at the Great Exhibition, which was the first world expo held in Hyde Park [in 1851]. It had 6 million visitors in a matter of months and there were indeed public toilets set up in the exhibition. But there was a great debate after that closed as to whether London needed such facilities actually on the street.

Book Reviews

London Through The Eyes Of Dickens In 'The Victorian City'

It was tied up with notions of shame and respectability and it was particularly said that women would be just too embarrassed to enter a public toilet on the public street.

On personal hygiene for the lower class

There were a few parish pumps that you could freely use if you could get to them, but you have people cramped in tenement accommodations ... in London. And ... how many buckets of water, even if you had the buckets, could you carry up to, say, a fourth-floor tenement? ... If you were poor, your basic water supply — which would do for washing, for cooking, for cleaning, for laundry — often it was from a standpipe provided by your landlord. And that water supply would be turned on for something like two to three hours per week. There were literally crowds of people queuing and fighting at these standpipes in the slums of London. And if you wanted to wash, then you had virtually no options. So the poor working men would actually go anywhere where there was a river, a canal or a lake and strip off and try and bathe.

On how things improved

The Victorians did achieve something: They built the famous great sewer network of the mid-19th century. [It was] built by Joseph Bazalgette, a renowned civil engineer, and that did achieve a lot. It basically took away the possibility of wholesale cholera epidemics in the city, typhus and typhoid — they all were reduced. But basically it's only until the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century that you get a sort of an effective central authority for London that you actually start to see change.

Read an excerpt of Dirty Old London

Sir Terry Pratchett, the prolific author behind the Discworld series, has died at the age of 66. The British writer had struggled with a rare, early-onset form Alzheimer's disease for the better part of a decade.

His publisher, Transworld Books, confirmed news of the writer's death in a tweet Thursday morning.

The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds. Rest in peace, Sir Terry Pratchett.

— Transworld Books (@TransworldBooks) March 12, 2015

Over the course of a career that spanned more than four decades, Pratchett earned both plaudits and popularity. His books — brimming with witches and dwarves, magic and metamorphoses — went on to sell more than 75 million copies internationally. Remarkably, he seemed to publish nearly as many novels — most of which were set in his fantastical Discworld, a flat disc of a literary universe, borne on the backs of gigantic elephants that, in turn, ride a gigantic turtle.

Pratchett announced his "embuggerance" — as he called his posterior cortical atrophy — in 2007. Since then, he has continued to write.

In an essay published last year, author Neil Gaiman, who collaborated with Pratchett on the book Good Omens, commented on the loving fury that fuels the best of Pratchett's fantasies.

"I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly," wrote Gaiman. "But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise."

Pratchett died at home, the BBC reports. He is survived by his wife, Lyn, and his daughter, Rhianna, as well as a devoted readership unlikely to take his passing lightly.

Terry Pratchett

Neil Gaiman

I first encountered cumin in suburban New Jersey around 1988. Indian food was just starting to penetrate the suburbs, and a trip to the new Indian restaurant in the next town had, literally, the whiff of adventure about it.

As I took in the many new tastes and aromas from curries and kormas, one stood out: what I deemed the "the sweaty shirt spice," or cumin.

Cumin is essential not just to India cooking but to cooks everywhere from Cuba, where it features in a garlicky sauce called mojo, to the Middle East, to China, where it flavors the grilled meats of the country's Muslim minority.

Here in the U.S. you'll find cumin in an impressively diverse selection of products from chili powder and black bean soup to croutons and kale slaw, as a recent Food and Drug Administration recall of cumin products revealed. Some of our most popular restaurant chains rely on it heavily, too: Cumin is in nine of the 23 items on Chipotle's menu.

The Salt

Nutmeg Spice Has A Secret Story That Isn't So Nice

"Once it has been introduced into a new land and culture, cumin has a way of insinuating itself deeply into the local cuisine, which is why it has become one of the most commonly used spices in the world," writes Gary Nabhan, author and social science researcher at the University of Arizona Southwest Center, in his recent book, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans.

Nabhan's book is really a much broader look at the spice trade and its relationship to history and culture. But cumin earned a spot in the title "because it is so demonstrative of culinary globalization," Nabhan writes.

Cumin has also literally been popular since the dawn of written history.

In English, at least, cumin has a singular distinction – it is the only word that can be traced directly back to Sumerian, the first written language. So when we talk about cumin, we are harkening back to the Sumerian word gamun, first written in the cuneiform script more than 4,000 years ago.

Cumin's popularity in ancient Mesopotamia is also evident in the world's oldest recipe collection, the so-called Yale Culinary Tablets, which date to about 1750 BC. Written in what is now southern Iraq, the tablets attest to the Mesopotamians' taste for highly spiced food with lots of onions, garlic and kamnu, as cumin was called in Akkadian, the Semitic language the recipes were written in.

Almost a millennium later in the 9th century BC, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II threw a huge feast to celebrate the construction of his new capital, Nimrud, in what is now northern Iraq. Boasting about it in a royal inscription erected in his new palace, Ashurnasirpal lists the massive quantities of food he served to guests from all over his empire, including lots of cumin. It was probably used as a table condiment as it still is throughout the Middle East.

i

More Americans became familiar with the flavor of cumin in the 1960s as restaurants like Taco Bell gained popularity. Here, beef short ribs are seasoned with ground coriander, cumin garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper and brown sugar. Bob Rudis/Flickr hide caption

itoggle caption Bob Rudis/Flickr

More Americans became familiar with the flavor of cumin in the 1960s as restaurants like Taco Bell gained popularity. Here, beef short ribs are seasoned with ground coriander, cumin garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper and brown sugar.

Bob Rudis/Flickr

The cuisines of the classical world also made use of cumin both as a flavoring and a drug. The Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of Greek medical texts mostly dating to late 5th and early 4th centuries BC, lists cumin as one of the ingredients in a prescription said to stop a woman's uterus from moving around her abdomen and causing "hysteria." Its association with women's reproductive health is also noted by the 1st century CE Roman author Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. He writes that if a woman smells cumin during sex she is more likely to conceive.

Besides its supposed medicinal properties, the ubiquity of cumin on the Roman table can be seen in the novel Satyricon, from around the 1st century BC. In it, the pompous Trimalchio is throwing a lavish dinner party and is shocked to find that his cook has forgotten to prepare the pig. Trimalchio, in a rage, complains that the cook is not taking the situation seriously enough, saying that he is acting as if he has only forgotten to add a pinch of pepper and cumin to a dish. Cumin was so important that in a Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius, dating the late 4th or early 5th century AD, it's listed among the "pantry essentials" that every well stocked home must have.

Cumin spread throughout Europe with the Roman Empire and its culinary and (alleged) medicinal qualities continued to be valued throughout the Middle Ages. In 13th-century England, rents were often paid in cumin, and the household of King Henry III would buy it in quantities of 20 pounds at a time. By the end of the 15th century, when Europeans began looking for new trade routes to obtain even more exotic spices, cumin was being widely cultivated in the warmer parts of the continent.

After 1492, the "Columbian Exchange" brought about a massive new trade in products between Europe and the Americas that would influence eating habits in ways large and small. While foods like chilies and chocolate were being introduced to Old World kitchens, the ancient culinary traditions of the Americas were being introduced to cumin.

When Spanish settlers first planted cumin in the Americas, one of the last legs of cumin's journey began. By about 1600, cumin was being grown in what is now New Mexico; quickly it became an integral part of the regional cuisine. Anglo-American settlers first tasted the heady mix of cumin and chilies, which we now think of as central to Mexican and Southwestern food, when they began moving west in the 19th century.

These settlers and their descendants began incorporating this style of cooking into their own culinary repertoires, which helped to spread cumin's popularity. This could even be seen in the White House where Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the first president from Texas, had her own recipe for "Pedernales River Chili," which called for a teaspoon of comino seed (the Spanish word for cumin).

To the east, cumin traveled down the Persian Gulf where it was spread to India by traders from the Arabian Peninsula and from there throughout South Asia. The overland route linking Europe to Asia, usually referred to as the Silk Road, also helped to spread cumin's popularity and it was in this way that cumin reached China. In the Middle East, where cumin's use was first recorded, the spiced has remained popular in cuisines throughout the region and is often found in small bowls on tables right next to the salt.

More Americans became familiar with the flavor of cumin in the 1960s as restaurants like Taco Bell gained popularity. The second half of the 20th century also saw significant immigration from South Asia bringing dishes that had been redolent of cumin for millennia to the U.S.

Whether it's foul for breakfast in Syria, chana masala for lunch in India or mole for dinner in Mexico, cumin is always on the table somewhere in the world. When we eat it we are part of a tradition going back to the very beginning of recorded history.

Adam Maskevich is an archaeologist who has worked extensively throughout the Middle East. He has also taught classes on the history of food and cooking in antiquity and the politics of archaeology.

spices

food history

Police say two armored trucks carrying jewels and other items worth some $9.5 million were seized by more than a dozen armed attackers Wednesday, in a midnight heist that took place on the A6 highway that runs between Paris and Lyon.

Police are hunting the thieves Wednesday, focusing on an area around the crime that took place about 140 miles southeast of Paris.

The heist was timed to coincide with the trucks' stop at a toll booth, where gunmen overcame the shipment's drivers, who were reportedly not armed. The drivers were left uninjured.

The thieves were armed with Kalashnikov-style rifles and drove away in the two trucks and "powerful cars," news site Lyonne reports. The trucks were later found in a field nearby, where they had been burned.

From Paris, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports:

"The case is reminiscent of heists by a group of jewel thieves from the Balkans known as the Pink Panther gang.

"The Pink Panther network has been linked to a series of jewel thefts that international police agency Interpol says have netted more than 350 million dollars since 1999.

"France has seen repeated jewelry thefts. Just last month, eight people were convicted in connection with a 2008 heist at a Harry Winston boutique in Paris, when three cross-dressing gunmen stole about $92 million in goods."

jewel thief

crime

France

In something of a companion piece to our earlier segment on nerd culture, Stephen and Glen sit down in this edition to chat about the social dynamics at work and at play on TBS's surprisingly charming competition show King Of The Nerds. Glen carefully distinguishes it from its predecessor Beauty And The Geek, then wonders whether when nerds act like reality show contestants, they're using the tactics of the enemy.

It's a fun little talk ahead of the show's wrap-up for the season this Friday night, March 13.

Six weeks before a landmark mine disaster trial, federal prosecutors in West Virginia have added a new allegation to the criminal conspiracy charges lodged against former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.

A superseding indictment filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Beckley, W. Va., accuses Blankenship of engaging in a conspiracy to falsify respirable dust samples and falsely representing the locations of sampling devices at Massey's Upper Big Branch coal mine before a massive explosion killed 29 miners in 2010.

The samples and the devices are supposed to measure miners' exposure to the mine dust that causes the deadly disease known as black lung. Excessive levels of dust can force a slowing or shutdown of the mining machines that dig coal and generate mine dust.

Autopsies showed that the Upper Big Branch victims suffered an extraordinarily high rate of black lung, even though some were relatively young and had spent relatively little time working underground. Of those with sufficient lung tissue for testing, 71 percent were afflicted with the disease — a rate ten times the average for southern West Virginia, where the mine is located.

As NPR has reported, black lung has killed more than 70,000 coal miners in the past 40 years, and falsification of dust samples had been a widespread problem.

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Mine disaster investigators also reported that fraudulent coal dust sampling had been a common practice at the Upper Big Branch mine.

The new allegation is included in existing criminal conspiracy charges, which accuse Blankenship of willfully violating federal mine safety law and putting coal production before safety in the two years before the mine disaster.

The amended indictment also combines two counts in the original indictment into a single conspiracy charge. As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette explains, prosecutors seem to be responding to a Blankenship motion to dismiss the case.

Blankenship is also charged with misleading Massey investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission about the company's safety practices.

The case is a rare prosecution of a mining company executive for alleged safety lapses that preceded a deadly mine accident. It is scheduled to go to trial in Beckley, W. Va., on April 20.

black lung

coal mining

West Virginia mine disaster

West Virginia

Kavita Krishnan has been a leading activist in the protests that took over the streets of Delhi after the rape and killing of a 23-year-old student in December 2012.

She appears in India's Daughter, the controversial documentary about the crime.

But Krishnan does not like the documentary, starting with its title. And she thinks it should not currently be shown in India — although not for the same reasons that the government has banned it. A court order halted its broadcast on an Indian news channel Sunday, International Women's Day; authorities claimed the documentary might make it difficult to maintain public law and order.

Related NPR Stories

India Threatens BBC Over Decision To Air Rape Documentary In U.K. March 5, 2015

India Bans Film About Infamous 2012 Gang Rape March 4, 2015

Krishnan, a leader in India's Communist Party and secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, spoke with Goats and Soda about her views on the film and about the women's movement in India, which gained support when thousands came out to protest the rape.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think the documentary should not be shown at this time?

I want to make it clear that I didn't seek a ban on this documentary. My concerns were more about the ethical and legal implications of showing the interview with one of the [convicted rapists] at a time when he and the others are appealing their sentences in the Supreme Court.

Does the film have its strengths?

Yes, one of the strengths of the film is that it shows how the parents have been coping with the loss of their daughter. She comes to us through their memories. That is moving and undoubtedly important. But the thing is that we are more than what we are seen as by our parents. There are aspects of our life that we don't talk about with our parents. And I think in seeing her only as a daughter, this film has made a mistake.

Does that mean you don't like the title of the film?

The title is not saying she is her parent's daughter but that she's the nation's daughter, and that is a very different problem. In India we are continuously told, "You are the nation's women. You are the nation's daughters. You are the nation's mothers. And therefore, behave yourself because Indian women behave themselves." So to see this reflected unthinkingly in the [film's title] is problematic to me.

Do you think the film treats the victim fairly?

In the film we are told she had permission from her parents to go out that night. I wonder why the filmmaker thought this was important. After all she was an adult woman. Why should she seek permission? Would she have been any less of a victim had she not taken permission, had she been unapologetic about having the right to go out?

In your opinion, does the film perpetuates the idea of blaming the victim?

It has an interview with Sheila Dixit, the former chief minister of Delhi, talking about discrimination against women in our society. Dixit is actually one of those who is known to have made victim-blaming remarks herself when she was the chief minister. When a journalist was killed late in the night in Delhi, she actually said, "Why was she out at 3 o'clock at night — that's too adventurous of her!"

What do you think of the way the film depicts men of India?

What this film does basically is show the mindset of the rapist and his lawyers. But it doesn't highlight those who are on the side of law and order and morality.

In the process, it ends up profiling Indian men from poor and deprived backgrounds as potential rapists. It doesn't show you that men from such backgrounds may not be rapists — many of them are not.

Some people have said that the film glorifies the rapist and could encourage others to emulate him. Do you believe that?

Showing rape culture or victim blaming or violent statements by [the convicted rapist] and his lawyers does not mean [the film] will result in similar incidents. But I think there is a way in which the interview has been presented and the way he has been framed that [may make people fascinated by] him as a man.

Someone told me that they heard a man who watched this film say, "Look at how cool he looks." So there's that aspect and the fascination for the gruesome details of the incident, which we kept telling journalists to stop focusing on. This is not helpful and shouldn't be done. The horror of rape doesn't just lie in graphic details of how the rape was committed.

Why do you think this particular rape mobilized such a huge response?

In retrospect it's always difficult to make sense of why this particular incident was the catalyst.

This young woman was like a lot of other young women in Delhi, who are struggling migrants. So a lot of people empathized with her situation. I think there was also a larger anger beyond this particular case [at] sexual violence in general and at the apathy of the police, authorities and politicians.

What was significant about the movement was that there were thousands who moved away from demanding the death penalty and castration of these men. They moved away from the temptation to be a lynch mob and moved toward introspecting about violence against women in other contexts and other places, such as marital rape or by the Indian army.

What has been the impact of the December 2012 demonstrations?

One of the most important things about the December 2012 anti-rape movement was that it questioned [attitudes that are tolerant of rape] and victim blaming and the denial of autonomy to women in a very wide spectrum.

It demanded freedom from caste constrictions, freedom from parents and brothers, and it also castigated politicians for their victim-blaming remarks.

The December 2012 movement showed us that far beyond the ranks [of activists] there's a wider general public which is willing to respond to these concerns and, not only willing to get angry about rape, but actually willing to come out on the streets and make themselves be heard, make themselves uncomfortable.

That is extremely significant.

India's Daughter

rape

Editor's Note: A version of this story originally ran in March 2010.

In the mid-19th century, Britain was an almost unchallenged empire. It controlled about a fifth of the world's surface, and yet its weakness had everything to do with tiny leaves soaked in hot water: tea. By 1800, it was easily the most popular drink among Britons.

i

Robert Fortune was a 19th-century Scottish botanist who helped the East India Trading Company swipe the secrets of tea production from China. Apic/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Apic/Getty Images

Robert Fortune was a 19th-century Scottish botanist who helped the East India Trading Company swipe the secrets of tea production from China.

Apic/Getty Images

The problem? All the tea in the world came from China, and Britain couldn't control the quality or the price. So around 1850, a group of British businessmen set out to create a tea industry in a place they did control: India.

For All the Tea In China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History is writer Sarah Rose's account of the effort to control the tea market, what she calls the "greatest single act of corporate espionage in history."

"The task required a plant hunter, a gardener, a thief, a spy. The man Britain needed was Robert Fortune," Rose writes. Fortune was the agent sent to sneak out of China the plants and secrets of tea production.

Before Fortune, England engaged in trade with China, sending opium in exchange for tea.

But "the Chinese emperor hated that opium was the medium of exchange, because a nation of drug addicts was being created. So the emperor confiscated all the opium [and] destroyed it all," Rose told NPR's Guy Raz in a 2010 interview. "England sent warships. And at the end of the day, they realized that if they were going to keep pace with the British tea consumption and not deal with the Chinese, they had to own it themselves."

Enter Robert Fortune, a botanist in an era when the natural sciences were on the ascent in Britain. At the time, many botanists had university degrees and were trained as doctors, but Fortune, who was Scottish, grew up poor.

"He kind of worked his way up through the ranks of professional botany, learning with hands-on training instead of book training," Rose said.

Around 1845, when the botanist was in his early 30s, he took a two-year trip to China in search of plants. Upon his return, he published a travelogue in which he described his adventures.

"He was attacked by pirates, he was attacked by bandits, he encountered all kinds of disease and storms, and he also goes in Chinese disguise, dressed up as if he were a wealthy Chinese merchant," Rose said.

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His memoir captured the imagination of Victorian society, and Fortune was approached by a representative of the East India Trading Company — at the time, one of the most important (if not the most important) multinational corporations in the world. The company recruited Fortune to return to China — this time, to smuggle tea out of the country.

"They wanted really good tea stock from the very best gardens in China, and they also needed experts. They needed the Chinese to go to India to teach the British planters, as well as the Indian gardeners," Rose explained.

Fortune succeeded. He managed to get seeds from China to India, and the impact on the tea trade was immense. Within his lifetime, India surpassed China as the world's largest tea grower.

"It astonishes me," Rose said. "China has pretty much never really come back from that, certainly not in the Western markets. Now that Asia has such a booming economy, the Chinese are again pretty fierce tea producers. But it took a hundred-plus years."

So was Fortune history's greatest corporate thief, or the man we can thank for the tea we drink?

"I think he thought of himself as a China expert and a gardener," Rose said. "He didn't see himself as stealing something that didn't belong to him. He thought plants belonged to everybody."

Tea Tuesdays is an occasional series exploring the science, history, culture and economics of this ancient brewed beverage.

Tea Tuesdays

tea

food history

In the U.K., national elections are less than two months away. In the U.S., the presidential election is more than a year away. But you could be forgiven for thinking it's the other way around.

America experiences a long, drawn-out election fever, while the U.K. hardly shows any symptoms at all. That is to say, almost none of the events most strongly associated with an American presidential campaign are part of a typical British national election.

Take political rallies, where the bleachers fill with thousands of flag-waving, screaming supporters.

"I remember being in Denver in 2008," says London-based political consultant Steve Morgan. "The stadium was full, and thousands and thousands of people were outside, and millions more watching on television."

Morgan, who has worked in political campaigns in both countries, recalls the landmark moment when Barack Obama formally accepted his party's nomination to be president of the United States.

"We don't have that," he says.

The last time a British political leader tried to do something similar, says Morgan, "Was Sheffield in 1992, and it was Neil Kinnock."

The speech, three days before the election, was a disaster.

"The British media crucified him for trying to run an American-style campaign," says Morgan.

Kinnock's party lost that year, and no British politician has held a big rally like that since.

Debates are another staple of American campaigns. There were four Presidential debates in 2012, including the Vice Presidential debate. Not so in the UK.

"Last election we had a leaders' debate for the first time," says political scientist Margaret Scammell of the London School of Economics. "We may or may not have another one this time."

This year, Prime Minister David Cameron is threatening not to show up for debates — which points to another big difference between American and British campaigns. In the U.S., voters choose the president. But in the U.K., voters don't cast their ballots for the prime minister. People vote for local members of parliament, who then choose the party leader.

"If you have one party that's just able to amass a load of money and shout louder than the others, that's not healthy for democracy. ... And we wouldn't interpret freedom of speech to mean an unlimited ability to spend, spend, spend."

- Katie Ghose

Without a primary system, there are no polarizing, surprising, wild-card candidates, and everything becomes far more predictable.

"So there isn't a lot of bunting and razzmatazz and hoopla around British elections," says Scammell. "They've become rather dull affairs, if you want my honest opinion."

The current party leaders have been around for years. The parties chose them to be middle-of-the-road consensus-builders. As a result, voters may feel not feel very intensely about them one way or the other.

Beyond rallies, debates, and primaries, political ads practically define election season in America. Especially in swing states, it can be impossible to turn on the television or the radio without being inundated.

But in the U.K., "We have very strict rules where you're not really allowed to advertise via television or radio as a political party," says Katie Ghose. She's chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, a nonpartisan group that focuses on improving the way campaigns operate.

The internet has allowed for a bit of American-style political advertising in the U.K., but British campaigns don't have money for the hyper-saturation that Americans are used to. And political spending by outside organizations is not allowed.

"We just think that there is really a grotesque amount of money spent in the U.S. on politics," says Ghose. That's a pretty widely-held view in Britain, which highlights a big cultural difference between the U.S. and the U.K.: In America, campaign laws value free speech above all else. The Supreme Court has ruled that limits on campaign spending may amount to limits on speech. In the U.K., people talk less about free speech and more about what Ghose calls "a level playing field."

"If you have one party that's just able to amass a load of money and shout louder than the others, that's not healthy for democracy," Ghose says. "And we wouldn't interpret freedom of speech to mean an unlimited ability to spend, spend, spend."

The result is a British political campaign that seems almost eerily quiet.

"If you don't watch the news," says political scientist Scammell, "You could ignore the election altogether."

Southern Turkey, near the Syrian border, is the crossroads for an extensive smuggling operation of ancient artifacts. Those transactions are held in secret, often in town towns along the border.

But high overheard, eyes are watching: satellites scanning heritage sites, sending alarming imagery to Washington, D.C.

From her office in the nation's capital, analyst Susan Wolfinbarger monitors the ransacking of these sites in Syria and Iraq on a large screen computer.

"The looting is extensive, people are digging pits in the ground, holes so close together that we couldn't tell one apart from the other," she says.

Wolfinbarger is the director of the geospatial technology project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has been poring over high-resolution satellite images for months.

"It's a new way to monitor a conflict, it's not just peeking in, but seeing images every couple of days," she says.

She has analyzed hundreds of images, and what she sees is alarming: an aggressive looting campaign in areas controlled by militants of the so-called Islamic State.

"I knew that there was a lot of looting, this was just beyond the scale of anything we'd seen," she says, as she downloads images of a particular site in eastern Syria, on the Euphrates River near Iraq: Dura Europos, an ancient walled city.

The damage is staggering.

A web application created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has tracked the destruction of Dura Europos between 2011 and 2014 using satellite imagery. DigitalGlobe/U.S. Department of State, NextView/Courtesy of AAAS hide caption

Click to see the before and after satellite imagery of Dura Europos (use Firefox for best results).

itoggle caption DigitalGlobe/U.S. Department of State, NextView/Courtesy of AAAS

"There is a complete and massive change to this site," Wolfinbarger says, comparing the pre-war images to those collected in 2014 of the renowned archaeological treasure.

British soldiers discovered Dura Europus in the 1920s. They hit on the wall of the ancient city while digging a trench during World War I. Excavation revealed a provincial Roman town founded in 300 B.C.

Brian Daniels, director of research at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center in Philadelphia, describes Dura Europos as "a snapshot in time."

Humans built the first cities in this region, and human history is written on the stones and the artifacts. But now, much of that history is at risk. Looters have destroyed more than 70 percent of Dura Europus. It's a particular loss because there was still much more for archaeologists to learn about this intact, multicultural early Roman town.

"It has the oldest synagogue known in the world and it also has one of the oldest house church known in the world," Daniels says. "The level of looting and devastation that's happened to Dura Europus is heart-breaking."

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The looting of antiquities accelerated in 2014, as ISIS tightened its grip across northern and eastern Syria and Iraq. The militant group is now the major player in the illicit trade of antiquities, but not the only ones in the looting business. Syrian regime soldiers and opposition rebels started looking for profit almost as soon as the conflict began in Syria.

"ISIS came to a pre-existing situation," says Syrian archaeologist Amr al-Azm. He now teaches Middle East history at Shawnee University in Ohio and is part of an international consortium to save heritage sites, Safe Guarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project (SHOSI).

Azm says ISIS began to levy a tax on the revenue raised on the sale of antiquities, and even encouraged digging in their areas, but the militants have now expanded their role.

"They start to engage their own people in the digging; in the retrieval in these looted items and also in the sale," Azm says. "So, they start being involved in every level of the operation – and they started to do it for themselves."

That includes hiring their own workers and using their own earth-moving machinery.

Azm and others in the consortium are trying to fight back. For his part, Azm has organized a team of volunteers in Syria. They are archaeologists, engineers and artists. They risk their lives posing as antiquities buyers to collect photographs of stolen treasures.

ISIS has turned the illicit antiquities trade into a multi-million dollar transnational business, according to U.S. officials who track the trade and Syrians on the ground who can monitor some of the sales.

With much of the business carried out in secret and on encrypted cell phones and websites, an accounting of their earnings is in dispute.

But there is agreement that ISIS has changed the business of looting, streamlining the supply chain and dealing directly with wealthy international buyers.

Last month, ISIS shocked the world with a rampage in the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq, with militants using sledgehammers to break ancient Assyrian statues. ISIS claimed their radical interpretation of Islamic law propelled them to destroy the idols of ancient cultures. They made a video of the carnage to get their message out.

But is seems that these radical Islamists are more interested in income than ideology when it comes to the selling out the ancient heritage of Syria and Iraq.

antiquities

Islamic State

ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

archaeology

Syria

Iraq

looting

Forget the blue-and-white tiled cathedrals and port wine houses that have made Portugal's second city, Porto, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A new guided tour is taking visitors through the city's back alleys and boarded-up businesses to show them the effects of austerity in southern Europe's economic crisis.

The tourist information center in downtown Porto offers zoomed-in maps of the city's historic quarter. But a few blocks away, a different type of tour takes you off that map.

"Ninety percent of visitors stay stuck in this very small, sterilized area they've outlined on the tourist map," says Margarida "Gui" Castro Felga, 32. She's one of three unemployed architects who two years ago founded what they call the Worst Tours, which shows tourists the worst of Porto. "Without our tour, you could spend three or four days in Porto without realizing that there are a lot of problems and the city is in trouble."

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A poor neighborhood of Porto, Portugal's second-largest city. Unemployed architects are giving tours of the city's poorer areas to show visitors the long-term effects of austerity on their country. Lauren Frayer/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Lauren Frayer/NPR

A poor neighborhood of Porto, Portugal's second-largest city. Unemployed architects are giving tours of the city's poorer areas to show visitors the long-term effects of austerity on their country.

Lauren Frayer/NPR

NPR joined one of Castro's recent tours. The first stop was a vegetable patch tucked away behind dilapidated rowhouses off the city's Marques Square, where impoverished residents are using every last scrap of land to grow their own food.

"They've got spinach, some trees for fruit — all the cabbages you might imagine, broccoli," says Castro, leading the tour through a narrow alleyway between houses, and out into a hidden urban garden.

"Unimaginable from the outside, isn't it?" she says, as airliners zoom overhead, a reminder that we are still in the center of the city, with Porto's international airport nearby.

Tiny food gardens have sprung up across Porto, even in what used to be middle-class neighborhoods, as residents struggle under austerity measures tied to the country's European bailout, in May 2011.

Stalls inside Porto's 19th-century Bolho Market, where Worst Tours takes visitors to show them economic conditions in the city. Lauren Frayer/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Lauren Frayer/NPR

Average household incomes have plunged 20 percent to 30 percent in Porto over the last five years because of tax hikes and wage and pension cuts. The minimum wage in Portugal is less than $625 dollars a month, or about $7,500 dollars a year, and the neighborhoods where the Worst Tours go live on considerably less. Homegrown vegetables become essential.

"Even in the steep slopes around the highway, there are cabbages growing everywhere," Castro says. "That's what's called austerity."

Portugal's economy is finally growing again, and the country exited its bailout program last spring, though it still must repay some $86 billion dollars in loans. But austerity remains in place — exacerbating urban decay and poverty. Portugal was already western Europe's poorest country, even before the economic crisis.

Over the past five years, more than 300,000 young people have left Portugal in search of work. That's a lot for a country of only 10 million people.

"This area lost a lot of people to emigration — a lot — and most of the commerce is dead," Castro explains, gesturing toward abandoned homes and businesses in the Cedofeita neighborhood. "So in this context, 20 shops a day closing in the region and six to seven only in the city center — it's very visible."

The tour passes broken windows and boarded up shops. Women are doing their laundry in public fountains. A sparkling new shopping mall, abandoned before its grand opening, is now used as an impromptu rehearsal space for local bands.

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The Worst Tours attract a mix of foreign tourists and local residents curious to learn more about their own city. Castro and her colleagues are not licensed tour guides, and their tours are not promoted by Porto's official tourist board. Their publicity comes mostly from social media and word of mouth.

"I think they don't like us, but what can you say?" says Pedro Figueiredo, 39, another co-founder of the Worst Tours, referring to the chilly reception he received from Porto tourism officials. "There is space for the worst, and space for official tours — and I think there is space for people to think about the city. This is more like a discussion about the city."

On this particular day, about 20 German college students have booked the tour.

"I just have never seen anything like that garden," says 22-year-old Marian Burk, who is studying politics. "I knew a bit about the southern European countries — the [budget] cuts and everything. But you actually you see normal people in the streets here suffering. It's a big difference from Germany."

Figueiredo disputes the idea that the Worst Tours amount to poverty tourism — like favela tours in Brazil or township tours in South Africa.

"I don't go there and say 'Look at the poor people!' I'd be very ashamed of it," Figueiredo says. "I just talk about the spirit of the thing. Sometimes we must talk about ideas, not just objects."

Portugal

"I think there's only one interesting story ... and that's struggle," says writer Thomas McGuane. Loners, outcasts and malcontents fill the pages of McGuane's latest book — a collection of short stories titled Crow Fair. There's a divorced dad who takes his young son out for an ill-fated day of ice fishing; A restless cattle breeder who takes a gamble on a more lucrative and dangerous line of works; A guy who abandons his blind grandmother by the side of a river to go get drunk, and chase after a corpse he's spotted floating by.

These "so-called unsavory" characters are "voiceless," he tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I try to find out what their view of the world would be by imagination — to sort of see how they see things. ... It wouldn't interest me very much to write a lot about contented people, successful people. That's I think for some other job, maybe sociology, not mine."

The stories are set in Montana, where McGuane has lived for decades — he bought a small ranch there after he sold his first novel The Sporting Club in the late 1960s. Along with his writing — McGuane raises cattle and cutting horses. He lives in a house built by homesteaders, along a river, outside the tiny town of McLeod.

"You know people so thoroughly," he says. "Where I live, for example, they know what time of the morning we usually turn the lights on. And it's a little socially claustrophobic that way — we all know a lot about each other. But for a writer, it's kind of a good thing."

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Read an excerpt

On the west he writes about vs. the "chamber of commerce west"

I love the west and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but I've long been preoccupied that the west that I see every day has never emerged into the sort of chamber of commerce west. We have a kind of "official" west — that west of the big sky and cowboy movies and all sorts of things, but really mostly the people you see where I live are the same people you see where you live but for some reason they're considered to be beneath the attention of local artists. In fact, I'm kind of considered someone who's betraying the local view of things. They think I should write more like A.B. Guthrie [Jr., author of The Way West.]

On whether he is "puncturing" the idyllic myth of the west

It's not a matter of wanting to puncture something. It's really a matter of writing about the world that I actually know — and I've been there for nearly a half century so I have a pretty good database on what goes on around me. But when people talk about Montana, they're talking about a very small portion of it. They're not talking about the eastern two-thirds of the state where life is very tough. They're usually talking about the ski areas and the universities and things like that.

On how his writing has changed since his early works in the late 1960s

I think when I first started out I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that ... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now. I look things over a little bit more carefully before leaping into them. ... I like writing that's a bit more direct because I hope the subjects are difficult enough that they supply all the indirection that I could possibly manage.

And I think living where I do among non-literary people I probably want to be able to write things that they could understand. I've always given the people who work down on the ranch, I've always given them books to read, and I've learned what they can't read and what they can read. And why they may be right about that. And maybe that's simplified my style a little better — not simplified it, but made it plainer.

"I'm a really a fanatical reviser and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text or I'll keep fooling with it forever. ... If I went back and read my earlier books, I'd feel so frustrated that I couldn't rewrite them that I know not to look."

- Thomas McGuane

On whether he goes back to read his earlier books

No ... I never have, I've never looked at a page ... seriously. I'm a really a fanatical reviser and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text or I'll keep fooling with it forever. And I think most of the stories in this book have been drafted at least eight or nine or 10 times. And if I went back and read my earlier books, I'd feel so frustrated that I couldn't rewrite them that I know not to look.

On how his sense of humor has shifted over the course of his career

Book Reviews

Montana's Almost Crowded Now, Thanks To The Colorful Characters Of 'Crow Fair'

I think probably the most over-the-top book language-wise was 92 in the Shade and I think I've looked at that. I think by my current standards I found it a little flamboyant. But it was kind of in fun, too. I think my comic sense was more lit up in those days than it is now. ... It was the '70s and all the people I knew were all still alive. My parents and my sister died ... very close together and after that I lost quite a bit of my sense of humor. Most of it I think has kind of come back, but I know there was a time when I didn't think things were funny anymore. I kind of think they're funny again.

Read an excerpt of Crow Fair

That's a story that was fun to write but also a challenge. I wanted the reader to realize some of that claustrophobic sense of being stuck at an apartment in this place that you don't know. ... One of the novels that I really admire is Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman [written mostly as dialogue between two prisoners] ... that was my little attempt to an homage to Manuel Puig.

In a way they are stuck. I mean, they are free to go outside, but they are alone, they are on their own, their parents are back in Mexico City. Even though they are privileged, spoiled kids in a Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan, they have lost everything they had. And I wanted to reflect that sense of loss and that sense of frailty.

On how his journalism career informed his writing

I've worked as a journalist for almost 19 years, many of those covering immigration issues both here in the States and back in Mexico. So I had the opportunity to see first-hand what immigrants of all backgrounds experience on a day-to-day basis. One of the things that has always struck me about them is their ability to reinvent themselves in these new places. How they can cope with so much without even knowing what's at stake for them. I think those experiences are present in the book.

On reactions he's gotten to the book from readers in Mexico

It's been interesting because I was a bit concerned about what friends in Mexico or people in Mexico would think about the book. Especially because, yeah, this is a big crisis going on in Mexico, but I left Mexico almost 15 years ago so I was not sure if they would think that I was allowed to be part of this conversation.

But the book has been sold to be published in Mexico in the fall and I am in charge of the translation. So to me that was like a sanction — like, "OK, I did things right here." I think more Mexicans relate to the book, and not just me.

The last time Dame Helen Mirren and author Peter Morgan collaborated, it was for the movie The Queen, and she took home an Oscar. Now the two are working together again, this time on a play called The Audience. It's about the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and her prime ministers. A hit in London, the play is opening Sunday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway.

The Audience begins with a Buckingham Palace officer named "The Equerry," who tells the theater audience what it's about to see.

"Every Tuesday," the Equerry begins, "at approximately 6:30 p.m., the queen of the United Kingdom has a private audience with her prime minister. It is not an obligation, nor is it written into the constitution. It is a courtesy extended by the prime minister to bring her majesty up to speed."

Once the audience is up to speed, the play lets them eavesdrop on the private conversations between nine of the 12 prime ministers who have served at the queen's pleasure in a reign that has stretched more than 60 years.

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Playwright Morgan did his research, but his dialogue is entirely speculative, since no minutes are ever taken at these audiences.

"That covenant of trust and silence between prime minister and sovereign is really, really guarded," Morgan says. "I mean, famously, most of them don't even talk to their wives about it."

Mirren, who has met the queen on several formal occasions, says she tries to imagine the human being who must interact with those prime ministers.

"When I was originally studying her," Mirren says, "I stopped looking at any film of her after she became queen. And I only looked at the film of her before she became queen to see who the person was before that mantle fell upon her."

Like Mirren, the play's director, Stephen Daldry, has also met the queen several times. "And she's always been the model of decorum and decency — but on reserve," Daldry says. "You know, she is the most invisible visible public woman in the world."

That reserve is also a matter of law, adds Daldry. The queen is constitutionally prohibited from even suggesting policy to her prime ministers. That included Margaret Thatcher, who refused to impose sanctions on South Africa's apartheid government and who by some accounts was not one of Elizabeth's favorites.

In the play, the queen tells Thatcher, "As sovereign, I am obliged to support you as prime minister on any position you take, including sanctions, including South Africa. ... I do have just one question for you, however. Considering what little impact it has on your day-to-day political fortunes, and yet how very important it is to me, could you not have supported me just once?"

According to Morgan, the queen did like Harold Wilson, who served her twice.

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In a scene between the queen (Mirren, right) and Margaret Thatcher (Judith Ivey), the two disagree over Thatcher's decision not to impose sanctions on South Africa's apartheid government. Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown hide caption

itoggle caption Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown

In a scene between the queen (Mirren, right) and Margaret Thatcher (Judith Ivey), the two disagree over Thatcher's decision not to impose sanctions on South Africa's apartheid government.

Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown

"The queen is somebody who naturally prefers less confident people and more humble people," he says. "And indeed, her favorite prime ministers were Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, John Major. They're all quieter men, and men you would overlook in a crowd, perhaps, initially; gray men, to some degree."

Wilson, Queen Elizabeth's first Labour prime minister, is played by Richard McCabe.

"I don't know where Peter [Morgan] has got this from, the idea that he was a favorite of the queen," McCabe says. "So our relationship is perhaps more personal and develops over three scenes during the course of the play."

Consider this chummy exchange between them: "You know," Wilson muses to the queen, "there's a terrible moment in every prime ministerial career when you realize that you haven't won the election that's brought you to power at all — it's just the previous government that's lost it; and that your first day in office is also the first day in the process of losing the next one."

"Would you like me to cheer you up?" the queen asks.

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According to playwright Peter Morgan, Harold Wilson (Richard McCabe, right)) was one of the queen's favorite prime ministers. Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown hide caption

itoggle caption Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown

According to playwright Peter Morgan, Harold Wilson (Richard McCabe, right)) was one of the queen's favorite prime ministers.

Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown

"Please, mum."

"Your nemesis ... has no idea of that fact," the queen says. "He still thinks he's actually going to win against you."

Unlike Wilson, most of the prime ministers show up for only one scene. The play is told not chronologically, but emotionally, as the queen and her prime ministers cope with political and personal crises.

While the real Queen Elizabeth II has not yet seen the play, according to Mirren, a number of her inner circle has. "Almost all of the royal household came to see it," she says. "All her ladies-in-waiting came and they all loved it. We got big thumbs up; they all said 'Yes, that's what it's like.' "

The Audience will play on Broadway through June. Just a few months later, Queen Elizabeth II will become the longest reigning monarch in British history (surpassing Queen Victoria, who served 63 years and 216 days).

And in May, a new prime minister may be written into the play, if Ed Miliband defeats David Cameron in general elections.