What's new

Just a few weeks ago we heard a lot about a delicate compromise that would allow Congress to review any deal emerging from nuclear talks with Iran. It came from a bipartisan negotiation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — to wide acclaim.

But that deal still needs to survive a vote of the full Senate, a far more daunting challenge in these partisan times. Getting through a Senate committee is easy compared to winning on the Senate floor.

In mid-April, you might have gotten the impression that a bill allowing Congress to review any nuclear agreement with Iran was on a glide path to the president's desk. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the deal 19-to-0, with credit going to the committee's two leaders: Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee and Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland.

"I cannot thank you enough for your temperament, for your tone, for your seriousness," Corker said to Cardin when the committee met mid-April to draft the bill.

Cardin returned the compliment: "I think we both represent all the members of the Senate in bringing in as much unity as we can to foreign policy in this country."

Well, that "unity" soon came apart on the Senate floor. The bill is now snared in a thicket of amendments ... and the normally placid Cardin is starting to lose it.

"We're trying to work out a way to do this!" an exasperated Cardin said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "We've been on the floor — Sen. Corker and I — now for four days, five days, debating this issue."

As Corker and Cardin are finding out first-hand, the floor can be an infuriating place. Senate rules give any lone-wolf senator the power to stop a bill — and that's exactly what Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton did last week. He threatened to force a vote on what some called a "poison pill" amendment — a measure requiring Iran to recognize Israel as a state.

"I would say these are not poison pills — these are vitamin pills," Cotton said on the floor on Thursday. "They're designed to strengthen this legislation and strengthen the U.S. negotiating position. Who could object that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state?"

There's been talk lately about bipartisanship making a comeback in the Senate under its new Republican management, but so far most of that cooperative spirit has been in committee — not on the floor. Senators have negotiated revisions to the No Child Left Behind education law and fast-track trade negotiating authority for the president. But only in committee.

It's All Politics

Has The Senate Found It's More Fun To Be Functional?

It's All Politics

Helping Bridge Congress' Iran Divide, Sen. Ben Cardin Moves Into Spotlight

Sen. Corker Says Congress Didn't Yield On Compromise Iran Bill

4:54

Playlist

Download

Embed

Embed

"In theory, right, committees tend to be more collegial," said Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution. "They tend to foster bargains, bargaining and really to promote accommodation."

There are very basic reasons for this, Binder says. For starters, committees have fewer people.

"Granted, senators are kind of big people and big egos — but 19 is far easier to deal with, obviously, than 100," Binder said.

And getting to the floor means getting more media attention — which usually favors the bold. The Senate now has four announced candidates for President – including Florida Republican Marco Rubio, who also took to the floor last week to push for a vote on Israel.

"If you don't want to vote on things, don't run for office — be a columnist, get a talk show," said Rubio on the floor.

On the Iran review bill, senators have offered more than 60 amendments so far — taking advantage of an open invitation to do so from new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Journalist Michael Golden, author of Unlock Congress, says Senate rules are choking the chamber's ability to function.

"When one person, in a nation of 320 million people, can halt the country's business due to one single thread of displeasure, our system isn't working," said Golden.

Or at least, it isn't working for those trying to move difficult bills from the compromise-friendly world of committees to the combat arena of the Senate floor.

Sen. Ben Cardin

tom cotton

Sen. Bob Corker

bipartisanship

Iran arms deal

U.S. Senate

Iran

The end of the world sure is taking a long time. Ever since the breakout success of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road, America has been degraded, devastated, and decimated time and time again — at least, on the page. Granted, McCarthy didn't invent post-apocalyptic fiction. But he helped spark a literary trend that shows no signs of abating.

In the last year or so, an avalanche of books — including Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, Monica Byrne's The Girl in the Road, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star, Kenneth Calhoun's Black Moon, Laura van den Berg's Find Me, Benjamin Percy's The Dead Lands, Adam Sternbergh's Shovel Ready, Lev AC Rosen's Depth and Jeffrey Rotter's The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering — have probed what it means to be a survivor after some form of collapse or cataclysm has ravaged the world. It's like the movie Groundhog Day, only with the apocalypse happening over and over, often with slight variations. These books are being written by the truckload, and some of them are even being read — but with this level of saturation, does post-apocalyptic fiction have a future?

The End Is Nigh

by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Paperback, 351 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleThe End Is NighAuthorJohn Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

Independent Booksellers

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fiction

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey clearly think so, and for good reason. The series of e-book anthologies they co-edit, The Apocalypse Triptych, is the most ambitious, audacious undertaking of its kind. They have the credentials to back it up: Adams is the Hugo Award-winning editor of the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series, as well as of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare; Howey is the bestselling author of the apocalyptic Silo Series, which began with Wool, a self-publishing phenomenon. Howey is also featured in The Apocalypse Triptych: His short stories "In the Air," "In the Mountains," and "In the Woods" — which tie into the Silo Series — are spread across the Triptych's three volumes, The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come.

What makes the Triptych unique isn't its subject matter. These are stories of loss, love, betrayal, and survival pitted against a backdrop of earth-shattering cataclysm, superbly written by such lauded speculative-fiction authors as Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Charlie Jane Anders, Elizabeth Bear, and Carrie Vaughn. The Triptych sets itself apart from dozens of other similar anthologies by structuring its three volumes to take place before, during, and after the doomsday clock strikes midnight. Released serially — The End Has Come was published on May 1 — the Triptych has cannily amped up the tension and dread in incremental doses spread over months, feeding an appetite for sequential drama that self-contained anthologies are unable to satisfy.

Wasteland 1

The Apocalyptic Edition

by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten

Hardcover, 365 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleWasteland 1SubtitleThe Apocalyptic EditionAuthorAntony Johnston and Christopher Mitten

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

Independent Booksellers

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fiction

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

When it comes to the end of the world, suspense and mystery are key. Even the best cataclysmic movies are hampered by the fact the demise and aftermath of life as we know it must be squeezed into a two-hour experience. Anthony Johnston works on a far vaster scale. His comic-book series Wasteland — which wrapped up in April after 60 issues and a slew of graphic-novel collections — took 10 years to play out.

Unlike most post-apocalyptic stories, Wasteland sprawls. Set a century in the future, after a catastrophe called The Big Wet has, oddly enough, rendered America a desert, Johnston's masterful epic features an erosion of civilization, battles between opposing tribes, and a sumptuous, science-fantasy backdrop that pits swordplay against the remnants of technology. But it's far more grounded than many so-called literary prose novels that dabble in the post-apocalyptic genre.

Johnson and his team of illustrators — most notable Christopher Mitten, whose bold, angular artwork captures both the grit and grandeur of Wasteland — tell human stories about those who have had humanity stripped away from them. And the slow unfolding of the story allows the reader to steep themselves in the alluring mystery behind The Big Wet, not to mention the mythic place called A-Ree-Yass-I that promises, and threatens, to hold all the world's secrets.

Releasing stories serially and using formats other than prose are two approaches that have helped boost the potency of the post-apocalyptic tale in recent years. But there's another option when it comes to sustaining the long-term viability of post-apocalyptic novels: Write really, really good post-apocalyptic novels.

The Only Ones

by Carola Dibbell

Paperback, 354 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleThe Only OnesAuthorCarola Dibbell

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

iBooks

Independent Booksellers

Literary Fiction

Fiction

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

Read an excerpt

Carola Dibbell's debut novel, The Only Ones, came out in March, and it's not written from an academic, self-consciously literary perspective or from a place of tired genre formulism, like far too many novels of its kind on the shelves. It's told in the language of the street, from the point of view of a mother in a post-pandemic New York who would do anything to keep her daughter alive — even though her daughter is not exactly that, but something even more astonishing. The Only Ones subtly addresses class, race, and gender issues, but it's also probes the subject of bioethics with a keen sense of relevance to the here and now.

The post-apocalyptic flood in literature doesn't seem to be receding anytime, nor should it. It may feel as though we've hit peak doomsday, books-wise, but there's still plenty of potential left in the field. The Only Ones — like The Apocalypse Triptych and Wasteland — succeed by refusing to follow the path of least resistance. These are stories that thoughtfully stretch how and why these stories are written.

Post-apocalyptic books are thriving for a simple reason: The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it. These stories are cathartic as well as cautionary. But they also reaffirm why we struggle to keep our world together in the first place. By imagining what it's like to lose everything, we can value what we have.

Read an excerpt of The Only Ones

Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club and author of the novel Taft 2012.

In hopes of quelling an HIV outbreak in rural Indiana, the state's legislature this week voted to let any county that can prove it is experiencing a drug-linked outbreak of HIV or Hepatitis C to set up a needle exchange program. Indiana's governor, Mike Pence, says he is "looking forward to signing it into law."

But critics say the measure that passed Wednesday is watered down, and too limited. It also includes so much red tape that counties may have a tough time complying.

"It costs a lot of money to set up a clinic and provide services to that population. Getting messages out to the right people is always the challenge."

- Lin Montgomery, public health coordinator, Jackson County, Ind.

Any county or city in the state that wants to set up a needle exchange will have to meet these standards:

Have an epidemic of hepatitis C or HIV.

Show that the primary mode of transmission of the diseases in their area is through injected drug use.

Show that a syringe exchange is "medically appropriate" as part of a comprehensive public health response.

A municipality that meets those requirements must then do this:

Conduct a public hearing.

Ask the state health commissioner to declare a public health emergency.

If the state health commissioner grants that request, the municipality must annually register the program with the state and have a licensed professional, such as a physician, oversee the program.

Shots - Health News

Needle Exchanges Often Overlooked In AIDS Fight

In effect, critics of the legislation say, only a handful of communities in Indiana are likely to be able to cut through the red tape to launch the sort of programs that federal health officials say are important to stopping the outbreak's spread.

So far, more than 140 people in southeast Indiana's Scott County and neighboring Jackson County have tested positive for HIV. Clyde Polly's son Kevin, in the town of Austin, is one of those people.

Here's what happened, as Clyde Polly sees it: Austin, he explains, "is a town where there's always a lot of drug activity, unfortunately. A lot of people have problems. A lot of people struggle to make ends meet."

Clyde says Kevin had an addiction problem for a long time. He's now in rehab because he got hooked on the prescription painkiller Opana. When taken orally, these opioid pills provide pain relief. But, when ground up and injected, Opana can provide an almost instant feeling of euphoria, say people who use it that way.

"They do it three and four and five times a day," Clyde Polly says. "They can't do it just one time a day. They do the thing one time, and then a little bit later, they'll be looking for another dose."

A few weeks ago, Kevin Polly learned he has HIV, which he likely picked up from sharing a needle with someone already infected.

The outbreak has brought so much unwelcome attention to this town of about 5,000 residents, that Austin officials now tend to answer questions only during a weekly news conference.

Austin's police chief, Donald Spicer, says opioid drug abuse has long been a problem in the community, and his department is overwhelmed.

"According to federal statistics, we have about half the personnel we should have," Spicer says, "and of course that makes your job twice as hard."

Dr. Jonathan Mermin, who heads the CDC's center for HIV/AIDS prevention, says this outbreak is unusual because it's primarily spreading through the sharing of dirty needles.

"This is the first outbreak of HIV among injection drug users injecting an oral opioid in a rural community in recent years," Mermin says.

Shots - Health News

Indiana's HIV Spike Prompts New Calls For Needle Exchanges Statewide

In March, the governor's office declared a public health emergency in Scott County, allowing for a temporary exchange to be set up there that would allow addicts to get enough clean needles for a week, and then trade them in for new ones. Legislators considered drafting a bill that would expand the needle exchange statewide, mirroring programs that exist in Indiana's neighboring states.

But the bill was controversial; after the final version passed late Wednesday night — 80 to 19 in the Indiana House and 38 to 11 in the state Senate — some people on both sides questioned whether it would be enough to stop the spread of disease.

Drive just three miles northwest of Austin, and you'll cross into Jackson County, where HIV cases were recently confirmed.

Lin Montgomery, public health coordinator for Jackson County, says that right now she doesn't even have the funding or staff to test people for HIV.

Health

Needle Exchange Program Creates Black Market In Clean Syringes

"It costs a lot of money to set up a clinic and provide services to that population," Montgomery says. "Getting messages out to the right people is always the challenge."

Even as the state expands testing services and needle exchange programs, that alone won't get at the drug problem, says Beth Meyerson, with the Rural Center for HIV/STD Prevention. She wants legislators to go further.

"When the house burns down," Meyerson says, "it's not just time to go out and buy smoke alarms. It's time to ask ourselves, how did this happen? How did we let this happen? What do we need to be and, by the way, how's the rest of the neighborhood?"

But those in charge in Indiana are still at odds over just what that long-term response will look like in small towns like Austin — where there's often only one doctor, and little access to mental health care or substance abuse treatment.

That will have to change, state health officials say. Residents are wondering if it will.

drug abuse

needle exchange

hepatitis C

Indiana

HIV/AIDS

It's really hard to catch up with Nick Mosby.

The young Baltimore Democrat walks fast, which I discovered when I finally managed to catch up with him. It was early Wednesday afternoon, and Mosby was in the lunchroom of Carver Vocational-Technical High School in West Baltimore, fresh from a TV hit on CNN.

Along with some of Carver's teachers and administrators, Mosby was joking and handing out slices of donated pizza to a stream of students. The pizza was a lure to keep the teenagers away from the uneasiness nearby. Carver was open again on Wednesday, after being closed for a day like all the city's schools, because of concerns about unrest. Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man whose death after an arrest set off waves of protests and unrest this week, had played for Carver's football team back in his school days.

Mosby burst into the national spotlight this week after a tense, on-camera exchange with a Fox News reporter. With unrest at its worst, Fox's Leland Vittert pressed Mosby: Was it right that looters had robbed and set fire to several stores in the neighborhood? Mosby kept responding that he thought looting was wrong, but that broader, historical realities — like a paucity of investment and counterproductive policies imposed on struggling inner cities just like his — were like kindling. They went back and forth like this for a few minutes until an exasperated Mosby finally had enough. "At this point, this is not productive," he said. "All you want to do is talk about this" — pointing over his shoulder to the liquor store that had been looted, and walking away from the conversation.

Just like that, Nick Mosby, a first-term City Council member representing Baltimore's 7th District, became something of a folk hero. He said what a segment of the Internet was feeling about coverage of the burning city. Video of the exchange, which documentarian Ricky Kelly posted to his Facebook page, has drawn more than 4 million views.

Back at Carver High on Wednesday, with two aides in tow, Mosby headed across the street to deliver the remaining pizza slices to the school baseball team, all suited up in blue uniforms even though they had nobody to play against; Northwestern High School, the scheduled opponent, decided to suddenly scrap its baseball team altogether. Coach Michael Rosenband said it was the second non-game his team had suffered this week; a game on Monday was suspended when one opposing player's mother, concerned about the violence bubbling up not far from the field, plucked her kid from the game, leaving that team without enough players.

Met with @Carverbaseball team today delivering donated @PizzaBolis & a quick pep talk. #CarverBears pic.twitter.com/yNWYKVrWir

— Nick J. Mosby (@councilmanmosby) April 29, 2015

Mosby had heard the story, and razzed the players when they huddled around him. "I heard y'all got saved, because Northwestern was gonna come in here and destroy you," he said. The players laughed.

Then he got serious. "I know you guys aren't part of the trouble," Mosby said. "When I look into your eyes, I see myself."

Mosby left them with an admonishment: Stay out of trouble, play the game, finish the pizza.

He walked with the last of the pizza to a busy neighborhood recreation center right by the field. Mosby introduced me to Zanes Cypress, the center's voluble director, who happened to be one of his college fraternity brothers. Cypress and I chatted for a moment, and when I looked up, Mosby was in the wind, off to the next thing.

* * *

The spotlight being shone on the police-involved killings of black men has made many of the victims in those incidents household names. But this meta-story has also given national profile to young community organizers and politicos — folks like Mosby — who were working the streets long before the incidents. They know who everyone is and where everything is, so they're indispensable to outsiders, like reporters who must catch up quickly. That was the case of Antonio French, a young, quotable St. Louis alderman. Before the Ferguson upheaval, he had about 5,000 Twitter followers. Today his list numbers more than 120,000. But French's higher profile has not come without critics. Other local officials suggested that French, who didn't live in the city of Ferguson, was an opportunist.

But in Baltimore, Mosby hasn't shirked media attention during his three years in office.

"If being a good politician means nurturing your personal brand, keeping your name out there, and promoting yourself as you propose solutions for your constituents' problems (and it does), then Nick Mosby is the exemplar," the Baltimore City Paper declared in 2012, when it dubbed him the city's best politician for his zeal for pressing the flesh and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Back at the rec center, I chatted with Demaune Millard of the Family League of Baltimore; he, like Cypress, had known Mosby for years before he ran for office. When I asked them if they were surprised by Mosby's political career, they shared a glance and a chuckle.

"I was," Millard said.

Mosby ran for office in 2007 and lost; Millard said Mosby's second, successful bid, was helped a bit by an adjustment of the borders of a neighboring district that happened to give Mosby a more favorable electorate in his own. Millard said Mosby was good on some of the issues, like pushing a bill that removed questions about a job-seeker's criminal history from job applications. But Millard said that politics in Baltimore is tough business, full of quagmires.

"As the issues become all the more complicated, like education issues, that will be where his bones are made," Millard said. "All the tough issues that are the third rail of Baltimore city politics are what will be the test."

Mosby ran, in part, on a vow for more police accountability — the city's police force has a well-earned reputation for excessive force. He tried to improve the relationship between the department and the folks they police.

The Freddie Gray case falls right at the nexus of those issues.

But Mosby has another important connection to the Gray case. His wife, Marilyn, was sworn in as the city's chief prosecutor in January. When police completed their investigation into the confusing particulars of Gray's death on Thursday, they handed their findings over to her. Marilyn Mosby will decide what happens next: whether to call for a grand jury to seek an indictment for a criminal trial. The Freddie Gray case has thrust the Mosbys into national spotlights.

* * *

There was little media presence on Tuesday at Matthew Henson Elementary School, where Mosby presided over a community meeting on the unrest. Indeed, Mosby's press aide expressed some wariness about the media to me and my Code Switch colleague Shereen Marisol Meraji, when we arrived. ("There was this guy from Fox News and ...")

About 50 people attended this meeting. Mosby dressed casually: sneakers, jeans, a zip-up pullover. As he moderated, he seemed to already know many names of folks in the audience.

A few people from the neighborhood lamented the destroyed or looted stores — and the many other stores that had temporarily closed to avoid the violence. This made it harder for residents to take care of basic household needs.

"Right now we have no place to buy food," one man said to knowing head-nods in the audience. "You can't even buy toilet paper in a 50-block radius."

The neighborhood was underserved by retailers even in times of relative calm, and when the CVS store burned down Monday, it left old folks without access to medication. There was real worry about whether the pharmacy might ever return. "This takes me back to the riots of 1968," Jack Young, the City Council president said. "We still have scars from '68."

(Martin O'Malley, the city's former mayor and Maryland's former governor who is thought to be mulling a run for the White House, dropped in briefly and met folks in the auditorium. O'Malley said he'd been overseas but came home after seeing what was happening.)

In this crowd, people were ready to help. A few wondered whether anything could be done to fix the big, underlying problems fueling the unrest — the same conditions Mosby had alluded to in his truncated Fox News exchange. Mosby tried to put the conversation on a more practical footing; he agreed that those issues were at the root of all this, but since violence just the night before had been the worst, the immediate focus had to be on reaching out to people in the streets and quelling the tension. He asked volunteers to go out that night and help keep things calm. He shouted out the elementary school's principal, Dave Guzman, for opening the auditorium for the meeting and handing out water in the neighborhood during the day. He told folks who were hungry that Whole Foods had donated meals.

Then he stepped outside to talk to some of the people who were still milling about. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, unremarkable except for the whir of three hovering police helicopters overhead and a line of police vehicles, including an armored truck, that had formed on the corner.

Mosby hung around for a few minutes — he gathered with a few of the folks who came to the meeting, put on a big, goofy grin, and snapped a selfie. Then he hopped in a car with his aides and headed out to the next appointment. It looked like it was going to be another long night of fast walking.

It's been a tough week for a couple of candidates looking to break through on the presidential stage, namely Chris Christie and Martin O'Malley.

First, in New Jersey, David Wildstein, a former Christie ally and former Port Authority official, pleaded guity Friday to charges related to the "Bridgegate" scandal that closed several lanes of traffic to the George Washington Bridge over four days in 2013, ensnaring cars in massive backups.

The New Jersey governor continues to deny any role in the incident. "I know what the truth is, so I'm not the least bit concerned about it," Christie said Wednesday in typical defiant Christie fashion.

i

While Christie addressed the Virginia Consumer Electronics Association Friday, his ally was due in court over charges related to the "Bridgegate" scandal. Olivier Douliery/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Olivier Douliery/Getty Images

While Christie addressed the Virginia Consumer Electronics Association Friday, his ally was due in court over charges related to the "Bridgegate" scandal.

Olivier Douliery/Getty Images

In Maryland, O'Malley, the former governor, was in the news for all the wrong reasons relating to the outbreak of violence in Baltimore following the death of a man after his arrest. O'Malley was scheduled to be in Europe, looking to burnish foreign-policy credentials ahead of a likely 2016 presidential bid. But, as the former mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, he canceled the trip and headed to the Charm City to try to be part of the solution.

That got sidetracked when reporters picked up on an exchange between O'Malley and a couple of men who heckled him about his "tough on crime" policing policies as mayor.

"You made a lot of promises," one man shouted.

"And I did the best that I could," O'Malley responded.

"In what community? Not in the black community!"

A couple of men on motorcycles rode by using an expletive and saying, "This is his fault," and they questioned why any residents or community leaders would shake his hand.

After a CNN interview Thursday, this was the headline: "Martin O'Malley: 'We're all responsible' for Gray's death."

These aren't good headlines and storylines for candidates looking to break through. For Christie, his fall has been remarkable. As recently as January 2014, right in the middle of the bridge controversy, he led in hypothetical 2016 GOP primary polls. Today, he barely registers, polling below Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio.

In February, Christie dismissed the polls. "Is the election next week?" Christie asked rhetorically at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I'm not worried about what the polls say 21 months before we elect the president."

But the months keep ticking away.

O'Malley was positioning himself as a viable, more liberal alternative to Hillary Clinton. But the incident in Baltimore is shedding light on some of his policing policies as Baltimore mayor that cut against the message he wants to deliver to the very people who could give him a lane against Clinton.

O'Malley says he will decide by the end of May whether he will officially get in, but the timing of Baltimore couldn't be worse for him.

The complexities of Baltimore seem largely out of the reach of the media that descends, as usual, only when certain neighborhoods burn.

Birthday parties and backyard barbecues – rituals of daily life and love – seem to never make the headlines. Yet images of overturned cars claim the top spot on the evening news every time.

In West Baltimore, at Pennsylvania and North avenues, media featured a drug store on fire.

But that intersection is also the location of the Enoch Pratt Free Library branch, where, as a 3-year-old, I accompanied my mother to get my first library card. I spent countless hours there, reading and dreaming about the world beyond our modest row house on Dolphin Street.

Though the library's website says it offers services that were not around when I used to haunt the place – computers and Internet access, for example – the children's reading area probably has not changed very much. And its meeting room for community groups might be needed now more than ever.

I left the neighborhood. But memories of life there – the many lessons, good and bad, learned while growing-up – never went away. That's why it broke my heart to see the fires on television.

On the day of his funeral, Freddie Gray's family was also heartbroken to see their day of mourning tarnished by unrest.

Yes, there is no excuse. But let's break this down for a bit:

Every story about misbehaving police officers – from Cleveland to New York City, and now to my own hometown – is required to contain some form of the following disclaimer: Most police are, of course, good, righteous and law-abiding. It's just a few bad apples.

Yet the opposite sentiment is seldom expressed when criminals disrupt the peaceful protest of thousands. It takes just one or two of these bad apples to change the narrative for everyone. Demonstrators are often swept into the same labels as violent thugs and opportunistic looters. Generally overlooked this week were the many Baltimore protesters who placed themselves in the middle as peacemakers. This is after Gray's twin sister pleaded, "Please stop the violence."

"Violence and justice never go together in the same sentence," the Rev. Jamal Bryant, who delivered Gray's eulogy, said on NBC's Today show. During the worst of the unrest, ministers linked arms and walked through the streets, singing. Residents showed up first thing Tuesday, armed with brooms and trash cans. And, when schools closed, community centers opened their doors.

Is every person – protester or police officer – an individual, or subject to definition by group identity? It depends on who is judging. And, in the game of who gets the benefit of the doubt, police officers, the ones with badges and guns, are overwhelmingly on the winning side.

This despite what appears now as almost routine and contradictory video evidence, as in the Walter Scott killing in North Charleston, S.C.

This, even after a Baltimore Sun report last September revealed that the city paid $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming brutality against a roster of people, including an 87-year-old grandmother and a 26-year-old pregnant woman.

And everyone condemns a "don't snitch" mentality for inner city witnesses of crime. But isn't that twisted mindset the same as the "good cops" who dare not cross the thin blue line when they see colleagues break the law?

I see and hear comments from people once sympathetic to the Freddie Grays and Walter Scotts that they are now weary of the news. They are comfortable giving police officers permission to act with impunity and without accountability – as long as it isn't in their own neighborhoods, I presume.

So, all black people are responsible for the misdeeds of any and every black person and must suffer the consequences. Yet bad police officers act on their own.

The West Baltimore of my childhood changed after the 1960s and '70s. Many folks who could move out, did so. I am far from nostalgic about the neighborhood's past. It wasn't considered a particularly great place back then. It was black and working-class with projects around the corner from my block. Our family did OK, but some neighbors were truly poor. The oldest son in a large family two doors down escaped by joining the military. He returned to West Baltimore from Vietnam in a casket months later; I've run my fingers over his name on the memorial wall in Washington.

Baltimore was once a cruelly segregated city: A local dance show did not allow "race mixing" (see Hairspray for a fanciful re-creation). Protesters once ringed a downtown department store that welcomed black shoppers' money but refused to hire any to work behind its glass counters. And, my brother was arrested twice by the police – not for stealing or drugs, but for sit-ins, taking a seat at diners and asking to be served. African Americans could only live certain places, and though that time is over, vestiges remain. You can see that in boarded up houses. The neglect is clear in the neighborhoods that reinvestment and job opportunity forgot.

Then and now – and I do visit relatives on occasion – West Baltimore had more than its share of hard-working folks with the same hopes and dreams for their children and loved ones as the top tenth of the 1 percent. Most people without fat bank accounts work hard. Sometimes, like my dad, they work hard in a lot of jobs.

My parents lived there all their lives. My father worked at Carver Vocational-Technical, the same high school Gray attended. My mother was a teacher. Her warm kitchen was respite for her five children and their friends – of every color. Today, my niece and her husband are Baltimore City teachers.

When I moved into neighborhoods considered "good" and with a higher income index, it didn't mean the end of trouble behind the lovely doors. There was domestic violence, and kids in rehab. Of course, most of the children living in those houses weren't detained for being where police imagined they didn't belong. They didn't attract attention for making "eye contact," as Freddie Gray did. He was deemed suspicious for looking like he belonged in a bad neighborhood, just as he might be stopped for looking like he didn't belong in a nice one.

Protesters everywhere own a right to denounce violence against the police – as they have in Baltimore – and to rail against the violence directed at those deemed suspicious without cause. Peaceful protesters in Baltimore insisted they were not anti-police, but pro-good policing. They support anyone who is pledged to serve and protect. But that doesn't mean they should tolerate routinely being treated as perps.

Mary C. Curtis is a journalist in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Charlotte Observer, as a national correspondent for Politics Daily and was a contributor to The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter.

Both of Barbara Hendricks's children were born with Cystic Fibrosis — a genetic disorder which causes a thick mucus to clog the lungs. Her daughter, Tiffany, died of the disease 13 years ago, when she was 15.

"Having CF is like being in a boat with a hole in it," says Brent Hendricks, Barbara's 22-year-old son. "You can keep bailing the water out, and you're fine, but the second you stop, the boat's gonna sink. And, gotta make sure I don't sink."

For Brent, watching his sister die was like watching his own funeral.

"Yeah, I guess it finally did set in, that you know that could be me," he tells his mom during a visit to StoryCorps in Atlanta. "I'm gonna be the cystic in the bed, instead of her. One time, I remember I was laying in bed, and I coughed, and there was the warm sensation in the back of my throat, tasted like coughing up pennies. It was just pure blood. So, we went to the hospital."

The same thing happened to his sister Tiffany at the end.

Brent and his sister Tiffany about a year before she passed away. Courtesy of Hendricks Family hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Hendricks Family

"Yeah, that's how Tiffany died," he says. "Her lungs wouldn't stop bleeding. And I remember you — I could just tell how worried you were."

But Barbara tried to put on a happy face for her son.

"Yeah, you've always been good about that, but it was that voice that, like when things would really go wrong with Tiffany, you sounded vulnerable. You know, there was no hiding it. It was getting to that scary point," he says.

"My mother used to say when I was a child, that if anything ever happened to one of her children, they would have to dig two holes," Barbara says. "And I never understood what she meant. I can clearly remember standing at Tiffany's grave, looking down at that hole, and thinking, I know now, why Nana said that. And it's even worse, thinking, that you have the same disease.

"My biggest hope for you is that you just live a long, happy life. Just sucking every bit of juice out of every single day," she tells him.

Brent tells his mom that, "people are so scared of death because it's so unknown. There's a really strong possibility that [cystic fibrosis] is gonna be the way I die. And I guess maybe that's like, comforting to me. That there's not as much uncertainty as some people.

"Death is like a deadline," he says. "You have to finish everything you wanna do before then. So don't waste your time."

Produced for Morning Edition by Allison Davis.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.

cystic fibrosis

Prospects for low-wage workers at some large companies have improved recently as both Walmart and McDonald's announced pay hikes, but one of the most significant announcements came at Aetna.

The large insurance company raised the pay of its low-wage workers to $16 an hour this month. Aetna's CEO Mark Bertolini says he believes the raise could largely pay for itself by making workers more productive.

The pay raise will affect 5,700 of Aetna's lowest-paid workers, including those like Kally Dunn at its call center in Fresno, Calif. The veteran employee teaches newcomers how to handle calls, sometimes from irate customers who can't make sense of what's covered and what's not.

"When they call, they're just ... they're angry," Dunn says. "And so it's just a lot of de-escalating, calming them down, um, you know — reassuring them."

It can be stressful work, and many low-wage workers already live stressful lives trying to make ends meet. So when all these workers got their pay raise last Friday, it was a big deal, says Dunn's co-worker, 33-year-old Fabian Arredondo.

i

Kally Dunn is a call center veteran at Aetna. John Ydstie/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption John Ydstie/NPR

Kally Dunn is a call center veteran at Aetna.

John Ydstie/NPR

"Couldn't have come at a better time — 'cause as I mentioned I'm getting married, and we're going on the honeymoon and everything, so it's gonna be helping out a lot," he says.

Arredondo's fiance, with whom he already has a child, wants to add to the family and start saving for a house — all of which adds up to a lot of money.

"Finance can be one of the main stresses in people's lives," he says. "And when you can pull some relief away from that stress, I definitely think it makes for — you know, a happy employee is a productive employee."

Bertolini in convinced that's true.

"We wanted people at the front lines who took care of our customers to not have the kind of stress associated with being able to provide health coverage for their families and food for their families, worrying while they were on the job." he says. "To make sure that they were bringing their best selves to work everyday."

As Bertolini and his executive team worked to understand what challenges their low-wage workers face, they discovered that to make ends meet many were on public assistance, such as food stamps, or Medicaid for their children.

Bertolini says he was taken aback shocked "that we as a thriving organization, as a successful company, a Fortune 100 company, should have people that were living like that among the ranks of our employees."

Bertolini was committed to changing that, but he discovered the cost of boosting compensation for his low-paid workers would be significant — about $27 million a year.

But he also found that research shows there are costs associated with paying low wages. Low-paid workers quit more often, and the turnover is expensive. There's also evidence higher-paid employees provide better customer service. Bertolini thought the potential benefits could offset the $27 million cost and improve his company's profits in the long run.

Related NPR Stories

Business

While Pay Holds Steady For Most, Low-Wage Workers Get A Boost

Economy

More Jobs, Less Inflation Drive Down 'Misery' — So Where's The Joy?

Business

New York Investigates Retailers For Unpredictable Work Schedules

Economy

Does A Higher Minimum Wage Kill Jobs?

"I think it's a pretty good bet that we're going to find a way to cover those costs in the long run," Bertolini says. "We don't see it suffering at all."

But economist Alex Tabarrok is skeptical.

"Wouldn't it be a great world if we could raise wages, increase profits and increase productivity all at the same time?" says Tabarrok with a laugh. "But I don't think that is actually the world that we live in."

Tabarrok, a professor at George Mason University, argues that most firms already are very engaged in calculating what wages are optimal for getting the highest productivity.

"They've already explored ways to increase profits as much as possible," he says. "There's no easy solution to raise wages and increase profits at the same time — it's just not going to happen."

Bertolini says even if it doesn't boost profits — and maybe even if it costs the company something — raising wages is still the right thing to do.

"There definitely is a moral component and, you know, I had plenty of arguments that the spreadsheet wouldn't pencil out," he says. "And my view was, in the end analysis, this is just not fair."

The Aetna plan also makes sure to boost employee earnings enough that, even if they are no longer eligible for public aid they were relying on, they still come out with more disposable income.

Bertolini says Aetna's shareholders have gotten behind the idea.

"We positioned it with them on the economics first, but went to this very notion of 'this isn't fair,' " he says. "We need to invest in our employees. We need to help restore the middle class, and that should be good for the economy as a whole. And so for us it is as much — probably, for me personally, more — a moral argument than it is a financial one."

Bertolini has become an evangelist on this subject, handing out a how-to packet to other CEOs to encourage them to look closely at boosting their low-income workers' compensation. He says he's getting positive feedback from many.

labor force

health insurers

aetna

Wages

CAlifornia

minimum wage

It's no surprise that people can't agree on a label for what's happening in Baltimore. There was little agreement about what to call Ferguson, too: The action in both have been described as "riots," "uprisings" and "civil unrest." People use different terms in different contexts for different reasons.

In Los Angeles, in 1992, fires blossomed after four LAPD officers were acquitted of the assault on Rodney King—even though half the world had seen what's now known as the Rodney King Video, captured by an appalled onlooker.

The verdict that sparked the LA riots in April 1992.

Two years ago, University of Southern California sociologist Karen Sternheimer wrote "Civil Unrest, Riots and Rebellions: What's the Difference?" for the Everyday Sociology Blog.

While the 1992 crisis was often called a riot, Sternheimer wrote that it had elements of all three terms. "Civil unrest often occurs when a group strives to gain attention for something they feel is unjust." When the jury declared "not guilty" for the officers on trial, there was disbelief.

"People felt angry enough to disrupt the social order," Steinheimer continued, "because many felt like the justice system had severely let them down."

Black communities in LA and Ferguson, over time, had come to believe they were occupied by hostile police departments that didn't resemble their civilian populations, and focused their policing on containment and suppression, rather than protecting and serving. In LA, the last straw was the exoneration of the officers despite clear video evidence of the abuse: Parts of the city burned in a matter of hours. Fifty-five people died and property damage reached a billion dollars.

"Riots are characterized by unruly mobs, often engaging in violence and mayhem," Sternheimer wrote in her blog.

Jack Schneider, an assistant professor in the education department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, wrote a blog last year: Ferguson: Riot or Rebellion? Schneider noted that throughout American history, white citizens were lauded when they rose up against perceived tyranny. Actions that came to be known as Shay's Rebellion and Bacon's Rebellion were called rebellions; participants were considered patriots. "When blacks become involved, however," Schneider wrote, an uprising isn't a rebellion. It's a riot. Harlem, Watts, Chicago, or more recently, Ferguson."

These have been characterized as "resistance to authority or control," Schneider added. The assumption by those in power is those instances of civil unrest were hooliganism, not "simmering resentment and honest anger" to oppressive conditions.

Need a clear example of how perspective can cloud the media mirror? Here's this, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, after a student riot that left windows smashed and cars flipped, in 2011:

"More than 10,000 students rallied Wednesday night in anger after Penn State University trustees announced that longtime football coach Joe Paterno had been fired."

What was a riot became a rally.

Riots can also start out as one thing and morph into something else. Ferguson protests were largely peaceful until an aggressive police response infuriated many marchers. What started as a demonstration against police brutality and racism became, some said, a demonstration of police brutality.

"There can be resistance to oppression," said Marc Lamont Hill, "a political commentator and Morehouse College professor, in a conversation with CNN anchor Don Lemon. Resistance, Hill said, "looks different ways to different people." And, he added, it's not something that can be neatly contained or scheduled. "You can't tell people where to die-in, where to resist, how to protest." While many in and on the media were referring to the Baltimore demonstrators as rioters, Hill refused. "I'm calling these uprisings," he insisted, "and I think it's an important distinction to make."

Baltimore, Hill said, is one in a series of cities where people pushed back against "the state violence that's been waged against black female and male bodies forever." Just as the media is covering the flames when cities are burning, Hill told Lemon, it should also be looking at root causes behind the fires. Riot, unrest, rebellion, uprising—what we call them is not a to-may-to, to-mah-to argument. The words may describe the same event, but they mean very different things.

Tell us what you call what's going on in Baltimore—and why you believe your word or term is the right one. Do it below or on Twitter, at #whatdoyoucallbaltimore.

As you're wheeled down to surgery nervously waving goodbye to loved ones, it's unlikely that one of your fears is whether your surgeon will have to double up as your anesthesiologist.

But at a hospital in Nigeria, Dr. David Barash remembers watching an obstetrician perform a cesarean section while at the same time instructing a nurse on how to deliver anesthesia.

Then at another hospital in Nigeria, Baresh saw women left unattended, laying on beds in the hallway, to recover on their own after C-sections.

Shots - Health News

The Gentle Cesarean: More Like A Birth Than An Operation

For billions of people around the world, situations like these are the norm, not the exception. Going under the knife is extremely risky.

In 2010, a third of all global deaths were from common conditions, such as obstructed labor, appendicitis and fractures, because people didn't have access to safe surgery, Baresh and an international team of doctors report Monday in The Lancet journal.

Most of the deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries, where 9 out of 10 people struggle to find basic surgical treatment, the study finds.

Baresh is the chief medical officer for the GE Foundation, which gives communities medical equipment and helps train health workers. He spent several years inspecting surgery rooms in developing countries.

Goats and Soda

India's Philanthropist-Surgeon Delivers Cardiac Care Henry Ford-Style

The sparkling surgery rooms of Western hospitals are a far cry from the dingy operating tables he saw. "They don't have sterilizers or clean water. And they definitely don't have power on a consistent basis," Barash says.

"Having practiced as a physician in a developed country, and then to go to a developing country and see that there is a whole other world out there that is not as lucky as I am or my patients are, it was eye-opening," he explains.

Up to 90 percent of maternal deaths can be avoidable if surgical provisions are improved, Baresh and his colleagues report. "We are talking about hundreds of thousands of mothers and infants per year. A lot of lives are at risk," he says.

Two other procedures are singled out as problem areas: the treatment of fractures in which the bone breaks through the skin and laparotomies, when doctors open up the abdominal cavity to remove tumors or repair injuries. "If we can put enough of the surgical ecosystem together to do these procedures safely, it will have an extraordinary impact on saving lives," Barash says.

But training doctors and setting them up with the right equipment is expensive. It would take about $420 billion over the next 15 years to bring surgical resources up to scratch in the weakest countries, the report estimates.

On the other hand, that cost is "far outweighed" by economic losses to communities resulting from the global shortfall in access to surgery, the researchers write.

surgery

Doctors

Global Health

Poetry is the secret story, the story behind the story — or, as Wordsworth puts it, what is "felt in the blood and felt along the heart." Poetry is language broken down, chiseled, and refined, made to say what is unsayable through any other means. And while it is singular and limitless in its power to affect, poetry is bound to the senses, to memory and to place.

There's a reason I can call poetry the highest form of artistic expression without thinking twice about it. And even though most Americans today don't acknowledge the art form all that much, you'd be hard-pressed to find a sensible person who doesn't respect or — if only from a distance — admire the magic in it.

Around this time of year, I always think of William Faulkner. Here's why: For all of his achievements, his Nobel Prize for Literature, his Pulitzers and National Book Awards, his mug on a 22-cent postage stamp — the man still fell short. And it wasn't that he dropped out of high school and did only a few semesters of college, or that he was once fired by an employer for reading on the job. These were small missteps and shortcomings that were basically inconsequential in the long run. The larger issue is that, in his own view, William Faulkner was a failed poet. Failed.

"Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first," he told The Paris Review in 1956, "finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

What you may not know is that before his first novel, Soldier's Pay, Faulkner had written two books of poetry, Vision in Spring in 1921 and The Marble Faun in 1924. While he'd long dreamed of being taken seriously as a poet, the verse was always second-rate and not particularly significant. Eventually he abandoned his efforts as a poet to focus solely on his fiction.

"Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

- William Faulkner

1956

According to Faulkner, novelists are an inferior breed of writer. It's the poet who holds the top job, the most prominent calling in the business of words. Thing is, few are fit for its demands. Ernest Hemingway, who never sought to be known as a poet, naturally tried his hand at verse. He wrote war poems and love poems and a ridiculous one called "I Like Canadians." And much like Faulkner, the results were forgettable at best.

The world of letters is fraught with writers who started out as poets and went a different direction later on in their careers. Hans Christian Andersen, immortal for stories like "The Little Mermaid" and "The Ugly Duckling," only turned to fairy tales after failing as a poet and playwright.

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolao too began as a poet. The difference between Bolao and Faulkner, however, is that Bolao was actually pretty good at it. In fact, the poems collected in The Unknown University and The Romantic Dogs reveal a sly and engaged craftsman who was more than worthy to retain the title of poet. His reasons for taking up fiction were monetary: With a family to support, Bolao believed he could earn more by writing novels and short stories, a decision that proved to be wise and true. But he always saw poetry as superior. Once, when asked, "What makes you believe you're a better poet than a novelist?" Bolao answered, "The poetry makes me blush less."

In honor of National Poetry Month, we invite our readers to join in on the discussion. What is it about poetry that causes so many readers and writers to view it as a superior art form? And, in light of Faulkner's assertion, what makes someone, especially one with such towering skill as a wordsmith, a "failed" poet?

Juan Vidal is a writer and critic for NPR Books. He's on Twitter: @itsjuanlove.

Web Resources

Read Some Of William Faulkner's Poetry

Poetry

It's just Wednesday, but maybe you're already crashing. You've got three deadlines to juggle, your boss is breathing down your neck and Lillith from Finance is being a total pain.

Here's a bit of research that might reassure you it's all worth it.

Challenging work that involves lots of analytical thinking, planning and other managerial skills might help your brain stay sharp as you age, a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology suggests.

Researchers from the University of Leipzig in Germany gathered more than a thousand retired workers who were over age 75, and assessed the volunteers' memory and thinking skills through a battery of tests. Then, for eight years, the scientists asked the same group to come back to the lab every 18 months to take the same sorts of tests.

Those who had held mentally stimulating, demanding jobs before retirement tended to do the best on the tests throughout testing period. The research team estimated how mentally engaging each job was by checking job descriptions in a huge online database developed by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Study participants who had held the most mentally demanding jobs tended to lose cognitive function at a much slower rate over the course of the study than those with the least intellectually challenging jobs.

"This works just like physical exercise," says Francisca Then, the cognitive psychologist and epidemiologist who led the study. "After a long run, you may feel like you're in pain, you may feel exhausted. But it makes you fit. After a long day at work — sure, you will feel exhausted, but it can help your brain stay healthy."

The results held true even after the scientists accounted for the participants' overall health and socioeconomic status.

It's not just corporate jobs, or even paid work that can help keep your brain fit, Then points out. A barista job, for example, that involves multitasking, teamwork, and decision-making could be just as stimulating as any high-level office work. And "running a family household requires high-level planning and coordinating," she says. "You have to organize the activities of the children and take care of the bills and groceries."

Of course, our brains can decline as we grow older for lots of reasons — including other environmental influences or genetic factors. Intellectuals develop dementia, too. Still, continuing to challenge yourself mentally, and keeping your mind engaged can only help.

"There's a wealth of evidence dating back several decades showing that people who are better educated and who have enriching jobs tend to stay sharp for longer," says Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a psychiatrist at Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences, who wasn't involved in the recent study. And research shows that people with less-engaging careers, or whose jobs involve primarily physical work, tend to have higher rates of dementia in old age.

"We're still figuring out why that is," Doraiswamy says. People with higher-paying jobs likely have better access to medical treatment, he points out, which may partly explain why they have lower rates of dementia.

But a growing body of research does suggest that intellectual stimulation may directly help maintain a healthy brain. One theory holds that by challenging yourself mentally and learning new information, you're building up your cognitive reserve. The more you have in your reserve, the more thinking power you have to fall back on, if the brain starts to fade.

"Research even shows that people who worked for longer had lower rates of dementia," Doraiswamy says. "My advice is, if you have a fulfilling job, avoid early retirement."

And if you're totally bored at work, he says, there are other ways to keep your mind fit. "Read a book, learn to play chess, try something new." Lying on your couch and watching sports may be relaxing, and that's important for a healthy life, too. Just don't count on it to grow your brain.

memory

dementia

workplace

Jobs

Alzheimer's disease

i

Now this is an international baby: Born to a surrogate mom in Nepal (who was implanted with an egg from a South African donor) and now living in Israel with his parents, Amir Vogel Greengold (left) and Gilad Greengold. Emily Harris/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Emily Harris/NPR

Now this is an international baby: Born to a surrogate mom in Nepal (who was implanted with an egg from a South African donor) and now living in Israel with his parents, Amir Vogel Greengold (left) and Gilad Greengold.

Emily Harris/NPR

i

Roy Youldous is a manager at Tammouz, the Israeli agency that set up the surrogate mother for the Greengolds. He's holding a photo of his twin daughters, who were carried by a surrogate. Emily Harris/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Emily Harris/NPR

Roy Youldous is a manager at Tammouz, the Israeli agency that set up the surrogate mother for the Greengolds. He's holding a photo of his twin daughters, who were carried by a surrogate.

Emily Harris/NPR

The sperm came from Israel. It was frozen and flown to Thailand, where a South African egg donor awaited. After the egg was fertilized, the embryo traveled to Nepal and was implanted in the Indian woman who agreed to serve as the surrogate mother.

And roughly nine months later, there was a big, bouncing earthquake.

The world of international surrogacy is ... pretty complicated.

The parents of the earthquake baby are Gilad Greengold and his huband, Amir Vogel Greengold. They flew from their home in Tel Aviv to Nepal when they learned that the surrogate mother carrying their son had given birth prematurely.

They arrived on April 25 and were in a cab headed to the Kathmandu hospital when they felt tremors.

"It was superstrong, superscary," Gilad Greengold says. "We're afraid, we're shocked and then we started to walk to the hospital because the driver wouldn't drive us anymore."

They found chaos. Hospital staff had moved everything they could to the open parking lot. People were injured, afraid, uncertain. Then a nurse holding their son spotted the Israeli couple.

"You couldn't understand who's against who, who's alive, who's not alive, what's going on, nothing," Greengold says. "And all of a sudden you see this miracle. And from that moment we didn't leave him, we stayed in the parking lot for four days."

The director of the hospital lent them a car and told them to turn on the heat. There were three other Israeli parents who'd arrived to pick up babies born to surrogates. For four days, the new families huddled together in the car, trying with the hospital staff to provide what the newborns needed.

At one point Gilad found the woman who had carried his new son Yaari. He gave her chocolates and met her husband and their child. He was touched to meet the couple, but the language barrier made it impossible to communicate with the Indian mother.

Because the Greengolds are a gay couple, they are banned from using a surrogate mother in Israel. So are single parents of either sex. Greengold wishes it were different.

"It is what it is," he sighs. "It's frustrating that we have go all the way around the world to be able to be parents, which is a basic right."

His husband, Vogel Greengold, agrees. But right now he is more grateful than upset with the Israeli government.

"I don't think any other country in the world would do what they did for their citizens stuck in Nepal," Vogel Greengold says. "We are very thankful and it's very important to say that."

Israel did indeed do a lot. It sent a field hospital and search and rescue teams to help overall rescue efforts. The government also sent helicopters to remote spots in Nepal to rescue stranded Israeli hikers. It has brought scores of Israelis home, including some two dozen babies born to surrogates.

Now pressure is building to bring surrogates who are still pregnant to Israel, says Roy Youldous, marketing manager for the Israeli surrogacy company Tammouz.

"I know all parents want them here," says Youldous, although he adds that if things return to normal in Nepal, "I'm not sure what's the right thing for the surrogates."

Eighty percent of Tammouz clients are gay couples. Seventy-five percent are Israelis and the rest are from various places — the U.S., Europe, Australia, China. Through Tammouz, parent or parents can chose a Chinese, Indian, Nepali or white South African egg donor — countries where the laws allow egg donation and the economics make it attractive to women. Youldous says prices depend on choices parents-to-be make and how smoothly medical procedures go.

The Greengolds say they spend about $70,000 for Tammouz's services — roughly half the price for surrogacy in the U.S.

Goats and Soda

Surrogacy Storm In Thailand: A Rejected Baby, A Busy Babymaker

The company had previously operated in Thailand. That's why the fertilization for the Greengold baby took place there. But Tammous closed its business there after several high profile controversies around surrogacy in Thailand.

Back at the neonatal ward in a hospital just north of Tel Aviv, baby Yaari hiccups through his tiny feeding tube. Gilad Greengold says he and his husband hope to connect with the woman who carried him again. But his thoughts are turning to raising Yaari.

Yaari will go home as soon as he is able to eat on his own. His new room has curtains decorated with forest animals and owls painted on the walls. And some day, his Israeli parents will tell him the story of how his Indian surrogate mother brought him into the world in Nepal in the middle of a devastating earthquake.

surrogates

Nepal

Israel

President Obama's plan for creating a Pacific Rim trade zone has been hovering in the wings, waiting for the right moment to demand attention.

On Wednesday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed it out on to center stage during a dramatic joint meeting of the U.S. House and Senate. He urged Congress to approve the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

"We must take the lead to build a market that is fair, dynamic, sustainable," he said. "The TPP covers an area that accounts for 40 percent of the world economy and one-third of global trade. We must turn the area into a region for lasting peace and prosperity."

Whether Abe's words swayed many lawmakers is not yet clear. But his personal lobbying did turn up the political heat. Abe wants Congress to approve the proposed trading partnership among 12 nations, including the United States and Japan.

This year began with Obama talking up the benefits of such a trade deal. But to get TPP written, he first wants Congress to renew his expired power to negotiate trade deals on behalf of the country. Once negotiated, such pacts can then be presented to Congress on a "fast track" for simple approval, with no amendments.

It's All Politics

Obama Confident In Asia Trade Pact, But Track Record For Deals Is Spotty

It's All Politics

Union Head Presses Candidates, Clinton On Trade

Business

Obama, Unions On Opposite Sides Of The (Fast) Track For Trade Deals

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said Obama is right to push for this negotiating power, more formally known as Trade Promotion Authority. Speaking at a Politico-sponsored event Wednesday, Hatch said that without it, other countries would be leery about negotiating.

He said New Zealand officials told him they need assurance that a completed deal could not be changed at the last minute by congressional amendments. Offering a "fast-track" to passage would be "very critical" to getting all trading partners on board, Hatch said.

Last week, Hatch's committee approved bipartisan trade-promotion legislation on a 20-6 vote. The House Ways and Means Committee also voted last week, 25-13 in favor.

So now here's the White House's to-do list:

1) Get the full House and Senate to approve the trade-promotion bill in coming weeks.

2) Wrap up negotiations with Japan and the other TPP countries.

3) Persuade Congress to approve the trade partnership in coming months.

But how likely is Congress to follow those steps?

Rep. Sandy Levin, D-Mich., was at the same event as Hatch, and he said most Democratic lawmakers are still not on the same page with Obama. "We're not there," Levin said. "Trade has been one of the reasons for middle-income stagnation."

Unions have been working extremely hard to block both "fast-track" renewal and TPP, saying they are not in the best interests of workers, whose wages have stalled as global competition has risen.

This week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warned presidential candidates that unions will not support anyone who favors the White House trade agenda. "The labor movement opposes fast track," he said. "And we expect those who seek to lead our nation forward to oppose fast track, as well. There's no middle ground, and the time for deliberations is drawing to a close."

trade

trade agreement

The label had promised Bud Light was "the perfect beer for removing 'no' from your vocabulary for the night." But that's exactly the word that occurred to many people who say the message recalls alcohol's troublesome connection to sexual assaults.

Anheuser-Busch says the slogan is one of many messages it has printed on beer labels as part of its "UpForWhatever" ad campaign. But it acknowledges that it "missed the mark" with this one, saying that it has stopped making the label.

The move follows heavy criticism of the message via social media and on Reddit, where a photo of the label was placed beneath a not-safe-for-work title that expressed incredulousness at the message.

On Twitter, many said the slogan promotes rape culture.

.@budlight is trying to say they didn't know they were making references to raping someone. How else do I read this? pic.twitter.com/1k7rfjK3PQ

— Lyndsay Kirkham (@Lyndsay_Kirkham) April 28, 2015

Part of the Reddit discussion also turned on whether a drunk person would be able to say no to the question, "Are you OK to drive?" Poking fun at Bud Light, others on Twitter and elsewhere simply said that they say "no" to one of America's best-selling beers on a regular basis.

On Tuesday, the company issued a statement saying:

"The Bud Light Up for Whatever campaign, now in its second year, has inspired millions of consumers to engage with our brand in a positive and light-hearted way. In this spirit, we created more than 140 different scroll messages intended to encourage brand engagement. It's clear that this particular message missed the mark, and we regret it. We would never condone disrespectful or irresponsible behavior. As a result, we have immediately ceased production of this message on all bottles."

To put the discussion in a broader perspective, roughly half of all sexual assaults in America involve alcohol, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism:

"Conservative estimates of sexual assault prevalence suggest that 25 percent of American women have experienced sexual assault, including rape. Approximately one-half of those cases involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Alcohol contributes to sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating existing risk factors.

"Beliefs about alcohol's effects on sexual and aggressive behavior, stereotypes about drinking women, and alcohol's effects on cognitive and motor skills contribute to alcohol-involved sexual assault."

Budweiser

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in three death penalty cases testing what drug combinations constitute cruel and unusual punishment when used to execute a convicted murderer by lethal injection.

It is the second time in seven years that the justices have looked at the lethal injection question, and it comes after three botched executions over the last year.

Oklahoma was the first state to execute prisoners by lethal injection. The three-drug cocktail it developed and used for the first time in 1977 was soon adopted by every other capital punishment state. It was seen as the most humane way to impose the death penalty.

The first drug in the original cocktail was sodium thiopental. It was used to put the prisoner into a deep, coma-like state; the second was to paralyze him; and the third was to stop the heart.

In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld that protocol. The court plurality said that while the second and third drugs were painful, the first drug, rendering the prisoner deeply unconscious, would prevent any great risk of pain.

Since that opinion, though, the drug used to put the prisoner into an insensate state has become increasingly difficult to obtain.

Under pressure from groups opposed to the death penalty, manufacturers have refused to provide sodium thiopental or a similar drug called pentobarbital, for use in executions.

In addition, the American Pharmacists Association has joined the American Medical Association in discouraging members from participating in executions in any way.

So most death penalty states have turned to midazolam, a drug not approved by the FDA to put people into a deep, coma-like state.

"The evidence that we have about its effects shows that it is not capable of creating that kind of deep unconsciousness in the body," contends Mark Haddad, one of the lawyers representing the death row inmates.

Haddad argues that without that deep unconsciousness, there is a substantial risk that prisoners will feel severe pain before dying.

Oklahoma says it has increased the midazolam dosage to bring it up to par, but Haddad contends that the drug has what is called a "ceiling effect," meaning that no matter how much of it you give, the effects level off.

Exhibit A in Haddad's arsenal of arguments is Oklahoma's botched execution of Clayton Lockett, using high doses of midazolam. After the drugs were administered the reaction was anything but sedate.

Lockett "began to writhe on his gurney, began to buck his head, [and] began to speak out in pain," Haddad says.

The execution "went horribly wrong, notwithstanding a substantial amount of midazolam being administered," he adds.

Oklahoma doesn't deny that the execution was botched, but it contends that the problem was an intravenous tube that was improperly placed.

According to Haddad, however, the postmortem on Lockett showed he had more than enough midazolam in his system to render him fully unconscious, if the drug were capable of doing that.

Clayton Lockett's execution was halted on April 29, 2014 due to problems with Oklahoma's lethal injection. He later died of an apparent heart attack, according to the prison system. Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Reuters/Landov

Oklahoma and other states that use midazolam defend its use. Florida says it has executed 11 prisoners using midazolam, without incident.

"If you have the IV in the right place, and you give the right dosage, the executions go fine," says Alabama Solicitor General Andrew Brasher.

States are not changing their lethal injection protocols because they want to, he says. Rather, "they're changing them because the drugs that we've used previously, and the drugs the Supreme Court ha[s] already held to be constitutional, are no long available to us."

Indeed, Oklahoma and the other death penalty states contend that if the challengers don't like the midazolam protocol, they are required, under previous Supreme Court rulings, to come up with a workable alternative.

But if the court were to rule against the midazolam protocol, the states would face a dilemma. Some states, like Texas, at least so far have solved their problem by finding pharmacy compounders to make the drug needed from scratch.

Other states have managed until now to find ways to get a supply of pentobarbital to render prisoners totally unconscious. But more and more states, like Oklahoma, can't find a supply.

So, if the Supreme Court were to rule that midazolam will not suffice, would that threaten the states' ability to carry out the death penalty?

"I don't know honestly," replies Alabama's Brasher. "The other alternative would be to go to some different execution method that's not lethal injection."

Indeed, Utah has already passed a law making the firing squad its back-up; Tennessee's is electrocution, and Oklahoma is moving toward legalizing the use of nitrogen gas for a gas chamber.

NPR — along with seven public radio stations around the country — is chronicling the lives of America's troops where they live. We're calling the project "Back at Base." This is the third of four reports this week about the National Guard. A version of this story has appeared on KPBS.org.

It's been more than four decades since Elaine Zimmer Davis got the knock on her door that no Marine wife wants to hear.

"And I didn't want to open it because I knew, I knew what was coming," she says.

Her husband's F-4 Phantom plane had been shot down over a remote mountainside in Vietnam. It was August 29, 1969. Witnesses described a fiery crash. The 25 year-old Marine pilot was "killed in action, no body recovered," they told her.

i

Elaine Zimmer Davis and Jerry Zimmer were married in June, 1966. Courtesy of Elaine Zimmer Davis hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Elaine Zimmer Davis

Elaine Zimmer Davis and Jerry Zimmer were married in June, 1966.

Courtesy of Elaine Zimmer Davis

"Later, members of his squadron came to see me," she says. "They said, 'Elaine, we could have put him MIA. We didn't want you to be waiting years for him to come back.'"

Capt. Jerry Zimmer was later reclassified to MIA: missing in action.

"If they did not come home, they then became MIAs," Elaine explains.

She says she spent years wondering if he might still be alive.

"I thought, 'He's out there.' But inside I think there was sort of that push-pull, feeling that he couldn't have survived," she says.

Jerry Zimmer's unknown fate is shared with 1,600 other Vietnam service members who remain unaccounted for. The U.S. government set up a command after the war ended to investigate MIA cases. They've recovered the remains of 900 service members. Jerry's case was unsolved and stamped "no further pursuit."

Back in the states, life went on for Elaine and their 2-year-old son, Craig. They moved across the country from Rhode Island to Tustin, Calif. It's where she met Ron Davis, a Marine helicopter pilot just back from Vietnam.

"We met sort of accidentally. And within the next year we were married," she says.

Over the years she had another son. She also completed college and enjoyed being a wife and stay at home mom. The family eventually settled in San Diego.

But Elaine says a part of her remained unsettled. After accompanying her husband on a business trip to Vietnam in 2004, she began a quest to bring Jerry's remains home.

Susan Murphy of KPBS reports on Elaine Zimmer Davis' 11-year effort to locate and bring home Marine Capt. Jerry Zimmer's remains.

By Katie Schoolov/KPBS

Researching and writing about Jerry's case became her full-time job.

"Maybe if I can bring home his remains – no matter when – I can feel like I did something for him," she says.

The family took multiple trips to Vietnam to search for evidence. They interviewed locals and documented their findings to present to the U.S. government.

Ron Davis is a former FBI agent who is using his investigation skills to try to find Jerry's remains.

"I'm a Marine and he's a Marine and just from the pure brotherhood of Marines I'm very pleased to be assisting," he says.

The government has reopened the case. Elaine says another excavation of the crash site is planned. Results could come this year.

"Right now, there is a small portion that they have nailed down as where remains — perhaps with his body in portions of the aircraft – where they slid down the mountain," she says.

Mountaineers will be required to search the 80-degree cliff. If remains are found, they will be sent to the Air Force for review and analysis, she says.

Elaine Zimmer Davis and her son, Craig, await Marine Capt. Jerry Zimmer after he landed at Beaufort Air Station, South Carolina, in 1968. Courtesy of Elaine Zimmer Davis hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Elaine Zimmer Davis

"I think having his remains come back and he's here," says Jerry's son Craig, now 47. "I think that would do a lot for our family."

He says his mom's search for closure has been an opening for him to learn more about his father.

"My mom pulled out this chest of letters, of mementos of all kinds of things that were 40 years in the past and the thing that was the most awe-inspiring was she had these tapes," he says.

"So it's daddy telling you goodbye for now, Craigy. And just behave yourself and I'll be seeing you pretty soon, Craigy," Jerry says in one of those tapes.

Craig says his father is a hard person to live up to.

"He was a farmer, small town. He got into an Ivy League university, he became a naval aviator with the Marine Corps, he was a father, a husband, a son" Craig says. "he's somebody that I hold in a regard, and I think it's a big part of who I am and who I try to be with my children as well."

Forty years after the Vietnam War concluded on April 30, 1975, Elaine says it may finally end for her.

"Maybe now he'll come home," she says.

Jerry's remains, if found, will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The 1980 novel is the very antithesis of Nazi propaganda — it tells the story of Spiegelman's father, a Holocaust survivor, by depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice — but Spiegelman tells NPR's Robert Siegel that criticism of the book's cover is not new. He says the purge of the book from Russian bookstores is "rather well-intentioned stupidity on many levels."

Interview Highlights

On the ban of Maus from Russian bookstores

I'm afraid that this is a harbinger of the new arbitrariness of rules in Russia, and the result will be like what happened in the obscenity rulings that closed down a lot of theater plays. It's arbitrary rulings that make playwrights and theater owners afraid to put anything on that has an obscenity in it.

So this is now extended to include: "You know, you want to put a swastika on a book? You really shouldn't do that on the cover, ever, because you might get nailed." And well beyond that, "be very careful if you're writing about anything else we decide is the red line this week."

Maus: A Survivors Tale

My Father Bleeds History

by Art Spiegelman

Paperback, 159 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleMaus: A Survivors TaleSubtitleMy Father Bleeds HistoryAuthorArt Spiegelman

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

Independent Booksellers

Nonfiction

History & Society

Comics & Graphic Novels

Biography & Memoir

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

So this is a way in which I fear that Maus has been instrumentalized to ends I don't approve of.

On previous objections to the cover

The first time this reared its head was way back when Maus was not a known entity [and] the word "graphic novel" would never pass my, or your, or anyone's lips.

When Maus was offered to a German publisher, the head of Rowohlt publishing said "we have a problem — it's against the law to show swastikas on the covers of books in Germany."

I said "well, we've got a problem, what are we going to do?" He said "I'm not sure, I'll get back to you."

He then found a loophole that says for works of serious scholarly import, it's possible to do it — and convinced the government to make an exception for Maus.

The amazing thing is he then went on to become the minister of culture under Schroeder, left his publishing post — but he obviously had the diplomatic skills that the job might have called for.

On the importance of the cover art

The whole point of what we're calling "graphic novels" is the melding of visual and verbal information — to sound professorial for a second — and part of that information starts with the first thing you see. ... It's why when, when Pantheon didn't want to give me the right to do the cover — back in 1986 when the first volume was published by them, and there was no such thing as a graphic novel that anybody'd heard of — I was sputtering. Like, how could they do that, if the cover's part of the book, of course?

And then my friend up at Pantheon, Louise Fili — the superstar art director of Pantheon at the time — said "shut-up and don't worry about it, you'll do the cover, it goes through me."

So I did. I got a separate paycheck on top of the relatively small advance — and when the second book came out, they insisted that I do the cover, so I don't get any extra money.

Related NPR Stories

Author Interviews

'MetaMaus': The Story Behind Spiegelman's Classic

Author Interviews

Art Spiegelman Reflects On 60 Years Of Pen And Ink

Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler

World War II

All over the world, free tourist attractions draw crowds at certain times each day — think the changing of the guard in London or Yellowstone's Old Faithful. In Munich, it's the Glockenspiel.

Robert and Kathie Seedroff from Denver are among thousands of tourists who cram Munich's Marienplatz, pointing iPads and phones upward toward the clock tower on top of city hall.

"At 5 o'clock [the Glockenspiel's] gonna go around and those little people up there are going to dance and then there's gonna be music," Kathie says.

The whimsical spectacle before them involves reenactments of 16th century events, for example, a wedding, a joust and the plague. It's all accompanied by lots of bells.

The Seedroffs are having a great time on this trip because the dollar is a bargain in Europe, Kathie says.

"We were very excited when we found out that the U.S. was only 1.06 to the euro because we'd been planning for it to be about 1.50, 1.60 — the way it was several years ago when we traveled to Britain. So this makes it very affordable for us," she says.

Food, hotels and souvenirs are all at a rebate this year, but that's where the bargains stop. Don't expect airlines to give you a break on flights to Europe, even though oil, their biggest expense, is cheap now.

Flights from the East Coast to Europe's hotspots average about $1,200. Many analysts say that's because over the past decade, airlines have merged to a point where the industry has become an oligopoly.

"An oligopoly is a market structure where you have relatively few players in the market, and since there are so few participants they have quite a bit of pricing power," explains George Hoffer, a transportation economist at the University of Richmond.

Business

Dollar's Rise Is Good News For The U.S., For Now

Business

Analysts Watch For Impacts Of European Economic Weakness On U.S.

Business

How A Too-Strong Dollar Might Lead To A Too-Weak World

In this case, the players are Delta, US Airways, United and American Airlines. They are making money on international routes by filling up planes, and Hoffer says they have no reason to offer discounts this year.

"Demand is strong, and I think that's the most important factor," he says. "Second, while the falling euro should have lowered prices, for the domestic carriers virtually all their costs are in dollars."

And European airlines can't offer much price competition. Hoffer says that's because oil is sold in dollars. A weak euro means they're paying more for jet fuel.

But there are options for bargain travelers willing to start their trip on the edges of Europe.

Patrick Surry is a data scientist with Hopper, a website that finds bargains on travel. "Don't fly to Rome," he says. "Fly to Portugal or fly to Istanbul and take a stop-over, and then get a connecting flight." Once you are on the continent transportation gets cheaper, Surry says. "Europe is actually pretty small. When you're there, you can get around pretty effectively even without using planes."

And you can take in more sights.

Just ask Michael Lybass. The Boston University student had a 6-hour stop-over in Munich on his train odyssey. "We started in Paris. We went through Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, Brussels and we have a train tonight to Venice."

Tour operators throughout Europe are reporting an uptick in bookings from Americans ready to enjoy the great sale of Europe.

currencies

Euro

dollar

Don't expect labor support to get fired up for a candidate who hedges their bets. That was the message from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for 2016 presidential candidates. Translation: Hillary Clinton.

"Candidates can't hedge their bets any longer and expect workers to rush to the polls in excitement, to run out and door knock and phone bank and leaflet only to have their candidate of choice turn a back towards the policies," Trumka said in a speech at the labor federation's headquarters in Washington.

Trumka never named Clinton, but the Democratic frontrunner has done exactly what Trumka is warning against on trade — hedge.

As secretary of state, Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is being hotly debated now in Congress, the "gold standard" of trade agreements. But, now that she's running for president, she has backed away from that.

"Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security," Clinton said in Concord, N.H., last week while touring a community college that focuses on technical skills. "We have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive."

Clinton is the only announced Democratic presidential candidate to this point, and she is far ahead in the polls. Independent Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist is set to announce his candidacy Thursday, Vermont Public Radio reports. Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has indicated he is also likely to run and will announce his decision by the end of May.

O'Malley, who is trying to position himself to Clinton's left, didn't mince words during an event at Harvard earlier this month. He cut a web video off of what he said on trade.

"I'm for trade," he said. "And I'm for good trade deals, but I'm against bad trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership."

Trumka talked of the income inequality and noted that CEO pay has skyrocketed over the last four decades while the wages of average Americans have gone the other way.

"We want action," Trumka said. "We want big ideas, and we want structural change. We want 'Raising Wages.'"

And he said labor won't accept "half measures."

"Workers have swallowed the politics of hedged bets for almost two generations," said Trumka, who has seen labor membership decline in the past generation. "We've waited for the scraps that remain after the pollsters shape the politics. Those days are over. America doesn't need relentlessly cautious half-measures."

If you're thinking about making a donation to help Nepal in the wake of the devastating earthquake, now is the time to act.

Immediate aid is essential, says Center for Global Development fellow Vijaya Ramachandran, who has drawn her conclusions from looking at the earthquake in Haiti and other disasters. "The aid that comes in within the first weeks and even months is of a life-saving nature. That's the period when the local capacity is almost zero. So outside help is really important."

And while aid from the U.S. and around the world is coming in, that does not negate the need for additional help. Nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations can allocate their funds more flexibly, to react to immediate or unforeseen needs on the ground, says Julien Schopp, director of humanitarian practice at InterAction, a coalition of aid groups.

But the sheer number of organizations appealing for funds can be overwhelming. Here's a guide for the bewildered do-gooder.

Check out the charity. To begin with, look at the organization website and see if has a specific page for its Nepal efforts, says Schopp. If it does not, he says, "then the organization is not mandated to spend money there." Pursue further due diligence about an organization's track record at such websites as Charity Navigator and Guidestar. The Better Business Bureau has released a list of charities that are providing aid to Nepal and also meet the BBB's accountability standards.

Look at the organization's presence in Nepal. Make sure the organization has worked in Nepal and has people on the ground there, has relationships with the government and community — and has experience responding to natural disasters. "This isn't rookie camp," says Gary Shaye, senior director of humanitarian operations for Save the Children. "It's not a place to break people in." For an agency to set up shop in Nepal in the wake of the quake would almost certainly mean high overhead costs and a lack of familiarity with the country. So efforts by newbies, no matter how well-intentioned, could be less effective than promised in their pitch.

Follow the money. It goes without saying but it's still worth saying: Beware of appeals that ask you to send money directly to a personal bank account, which can happen not only in email solicitations but in social media campaigns. Don't by shy about asking questions. "Somebody writing a check should feel it is absolutely their right to know where this money is going and how it is going to be spent," says Ramachandran. If the website does not provide sufficient information, email or call. "Think of this as a considered purchase," says Shaye of Save the Children. And always ask for a receipt.

You can target funds for a particular purpose. Consider if you want your donation to go to a specific purpose in the immediate crisis — or in the rebuilding to come. The dropdown menu at InterAction's Nepal webpage will direct you to organizations in a number of areas: medical assistqance, food aid, supplies for shelter, to name a few.

Don't pack up gently used clothes or other donations. "That's the worst thing to do," says Schoop. What you want to send may not be needed. Transportation to Nepal is iffy and cargo space limited. And if relief agencies buy local goods rather than relying on handouts, that will help the economy gain strength.

Related NPR Stories

A 10-Year-Old's View Of The Nepal Earthquake April 28, 2015

Remote Villages In Nepal Wait For Aid April 28, 2015

How American Tech Giants Are Stepping In To Help Nepal April 28, 2015

Be patient. The situation in Nepal is chaotic. Aid efforts haven't yet reached remote areas. "It's easy to put a journalist in front of rubble saying no one's doing anything," says Schopp. But that doesn't mean donations aren't being put to use. In Nepal, as with natural disasters in the past, getting aid and supplies to the right places doesn't happen overnight: "It takes a few days to really kick into gear."

Nepal

charity

Earthquake

As we reported earlier this month, a fascinating project called Blue Zones is documenting and disseminating the lifestyle secrets of the communities with the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world.

The people in these five regions in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the U.S. that live to be 100 have a lot going for them. Genes probably play a small role, but these folks also have strong social ties, tightly-knit families and lots of opportunity to exercise.

i

Blue Zones' Dan Buettner smells turmeric grown in Okinawa. Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones hide caption

itoggle caption Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

Blue Zones' Dan Buettner smells turmeric grown in Okinawa.

Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

As we were parsing through the dietary secrets of the Blue Zones, as described in author Dan Buettner's latest book, The Blues Zones Solution, we were struck by how essential tea drinking is in these regions. In fact, Buettner's Blue Zones Beverage Rule — a kind of guideline distilled from his 15 or so years of studying these places — is: "Drink coffee for breakfast, tea in the afternoon, wine at 5 p.m."

In Okinawa, Japan, for example, Buettner watched one 104-year-old "make jasmine tea, squatting in the corner and pouring hot water over tea leaves as the room filled with a delicate, floral aroma." Indeed, Okinawans call their tea shan-pien, or "tea with a bit of scent," which combines green tea leaves, jasmine flowers and a bit of turmeric.

And, of course, science has plenty to say about the healthful virtues of green tea. Researchers are most smitten with catechins, antoxidants that show up in green tea, as well as foods like cocoa. Why might they help so many Okinawans break 100? Catechins and other compounds in green tea can lower the risk of stroke, heart disease and several cancers. One review study also found that drinking green tea slightly boosts metabolism.

i

Ginger's golden cousin, turmeric, figures prominently in the Okinawan diet in both food and tea. Studies suggest it is a powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones hide caption

itoggle caption Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

Ginger's golden cousin, turmeric, figures prominently in the Okinawan diet in both food and tea. Studies suggest it is a powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory.

Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

If you find yourself on the island of Ikaria, the Greek Blue Zone in the middle of the Aegean, you won't be offered any tea made with tea leaves. Instead, Ikarians typically brew their daily cup of tea with just one fresh herb that they have picked themselves that day — either rosemary, wild sage, oregano, marjoram, mint or dandelion, all plants that may have anti-inflammatory properties.

Buettner tells The Salt that he took samples of Ikarian herbs to pharmacologists in Athens to have them analyzed. "Turns out, they were anti-inflammatories and mild, or mildly strong diuretics," which help lower blood pressure, he says. This could explain Ikaria's very low dementia rate, he adds, since high blood pressure is a risk factor for the disease.

The Salt

Eating To Break 100: Longevity Diet Tips From The Blue Zones

The Salt

Health Benefits Of Tea: Milking It Or Not

According to Thea Parikos, an Ikarian who runs a guesthouse there, the people of the island use herbs and teas as medicine and will drink them for various ailments before going to see a doctor. (If the condition worsens, they will seek medical attention, she says.)

"We often drink a tea with friends or in the evenings," she tells us by email. "The teas we use are collected in the wild. We are not so enthusiastic on store-bought tea. We consider the wild plants to be of better quality."

Hear that? So rather than run to the store in search of Ikarian Longevity Tea (it doesn't exist), grow or buy fresh herbs and make your own tea with them.

In Sardinia, the preferred tea is milk thistle, a native wild plant that Buettner writes is said to "cleanse the liver." The plant's principal active ingredient, silymarin, is being analyzed by scientists as an antioxidant. One 2007 review paper noted that, "Promising results have been reported in the protective effect of milk thistle in certain types of cancer, and ongoing trials will provide more evidence about this effect." So those Sardinians, who've been drinking this tea for centuries, may have figured out one small hot fountain of youth.

If you want to get more tea into your routine, here's what Buettner recommends:

"Sip green tea all day; green tea usually contains about 25 percent as much caffeine as coffee and provides a steady stream of antioxidants.

Try a variety of herbal teas, such as rosemary, oregano or sage.

Sweeten teas lightly with honey, and keep them in a pitcher in the fridge for easy access in hot weather."

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

blue zones

Tea Tuesdays

green tea

herbs

tea