What's new: 2015-06-07

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The Violence Subsides, And Revelers Return To Juarez

In downtown Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, Nelson Armeto and his brothers run a seafood restaurant called Pisces. Like other businesses owners in Juarez, they met with trouble beginning in 2008, when the drug cartels began demanding a monthly extortion fee.

"We received calls telling us we had to pay a quota, otherwise we'd get the business burned down, or a car passing by would be shooting up the place," he says. "They even threatened kidnapping us and even sometimes killing the employees."

With narcotraficante threats day and night, most people just stopped going out in Juarez.

"The fear, the terror, not a soul on the streets," recalls longtime Pisces patron Velia Contreras.

The city has suffered decades of violence, as hundreds of women working in factories there were murdered in the 1990s. Then came violent turf wars between drug cartels.

At the height of the violence in 2010, the official toll in Juarez was more than 3,000 killings. Many restaurants and clubs closed down or moved across the border to El Paso. The once-thriving nightlife ground to a halt.

But now, people are once again partying in Juarez.

The Mariachi Imperial serenades the crowd at the renowned Kentucky Club in Juarez. Frequented in the past by Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and a pantheon of Mexican movie stars and boxers, the club managed to stay open during the recent years of violence. Mandalit Del Barco/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Mandalit Del Barco/NPR

Mandalit Del Barco/NPR

After a few years of fear, Armeto says, he and his friends became numb to the violence. They decided to start going out on the town like they used to.

"YOLO," he says. "You only live once. It's kind of a religion where you go out and each day you live most you can, so if you don't have a memory that day, it's a wasted day."

"So let's go," I tell him.

This is something I definitely wouldn't have done a few years ago. But with the official death toll down to 434 last year, it seems safer.

With Armeto and his party posse, we head out to Avenida Juarez, just blocks from the border crossing. It's now dotted with bars and clubs — some new, others newly reopened. The oldest and most famous, the Kentucky Club, lost business but managed to stay open.

Mystery Loves Company, And TCM's Noir Movie Marathon Has Plenty Of Both

Who says summer has to be light and bright? Turner Classic Movies has kicked off its "Summer of Darkness" — 24 hours of noir films every Friday in June and July with an accompanying free, online class.

Writer Eddie Muller, the self-proclaimed "czar of noir," describes the genre as the flip side of the all-American success story. Noir is the dark underbelly of the American dream populated by femme fatales and the tough-talking guys who fall hard for them. And it depicts a world that's merciless and unforgiving.

Eddie Muller says Woman On The Run didn't make much of a mark when it was released in 1950, but decades later became recognized as a "minor gem" of the genre. Courtesy Turner Classic Movies hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Turner Classic Movies

Eddie Muller says Woman On The Run didn't make much of a mark when it was released in 1950, but decades later became recognized as a "minor gem" of the genre.

Courtesy Turner Classic Movies

Muller, who will be introducing many of the films in the "Summer of Darkness," says that he hopes younger viewers will understand the films in context.

"It's very, very important that younger people ... understand not just the value as entertainment, but its value as American history," Muller says. "I think it's very helpful and useful for people to understand all that because it will affect their appreciation for the film."

Muller will be working in tandem with Professor Richard Edwards of Ball State University. Edwards is teaching the free online course in conjunction with the "Summer of Darkness." He says noir is fueled by something that never gets dated.

"There is a kind of dread in these films," says Edwards. "These are not films that have particularly happy endings, and yet they are compulsively easy to watch."

Edwards sees the class as an opportunity to provide viewers with an informed experience. "There is so much more you can get out of watching a film with even just a little bit of a background knowledge of how these films work [and] how these films were made," he says.

The 1948 thriller The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland (left) and Charles Laughton, will be broadcast on Friday, July 3. Paramount Pictures/The Everett Collection, Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies hide caption

itoggle caption Paramount Pictures/The Everett Collection, Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies

The 1948 thriller The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland (left) and Charles Laughton, will be broadcast on Friday, July 3.

Paramount Pictures/The Everett Collection, Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies

To help achieve this, Edwards offers "A Daily Dose of Darkness" — a short film clip delivered by email to the online class each weekday morning. He recently sent out the shocker opening from The Letter where Bette Davis shoots a man to death. That clip spurred plenty of online discussion. Twitter comments ran the gamut from praise for the lighting to quips about Davis' ruthlessness. Joel Williams pointed out that to her credit, "she stopped pulling the trigger once she realized the gun was empty."

Blogger Angela Englert calls herself a noir neophyte and was was excited to tweet with fellow classmates about Dark Passage last Friday.

"It's always fun to live tweet these things," she says. "It makes it dynamic. There's always a lot of great information along with snarky barbs and things here and there."

The 1949 film Gun Crazy starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins airs Friday, June 12. Fans can follow along on Twitter using the #TCMParty hashtag. United Artists/Photofest hide caption

itoggle caption United Artists/Photofest

The 1949 film Gun Crazy starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins airs Friday, June 12. Fans can follow along on Twitter using the #TCMParty hashtag.

United Artists/Photofest

Friday night, #TCMParty, an online community of classic movie fans, will be live tweeting the film Gun Crazy. Blogger and journalist Will McKinley is one of @TCM_Party's 9,000 followers.

"Years ago, if you liked something that was unique it could be a lonely experience," McKinley says. "Nowadays, thanks to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, lots of people who like the same weird, crazy things that you like are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it fundamentally makes the experience of liking unusual things less lonely and more fun."

And when you are traveling down those dark noir streets, it's good to have a little company.

Mighty Farming Microbes: Companies Harness Bacteria To Give Crops A Boost

What if farmers, instead of picking up some agricultural chemicals at their local dealer, picked up a load of agricultural microbes instead?

It's something to contemplate, because some big names in the pesticide business — like Bayer and Monsanto — are putting money behind attempts to turn soil microbes into tools that farmers can use to give their crops a boost.

It's a symptom of the soaring interest in the ways microbes affect all of life. In our bodies, they help fight off disease. In the soil, they help deliver nutrients to plants, and perhaps much more.

The most direct way to take advantage of microbes in farming — an approach that's been around for decades, in fact — is to deploy them as weapons against insects or weeds.

Pam Marrone, founder of Marrone Bio Innovations, in Davis, Calif., has been spent most of her professional life looking for such microbial pesticides and bringing them to market.

She shows me a few of her newest candidates: colonies of microorganisms growing in little round petri dishes. Some are fuzzy; some are slimy. Marrone thinks they're beautiful. "They're all different colors," she points out. "You've got orange, blue, purple, black, boring tan and magenta."

Petri dishes filled with colonies of microorganisms at Marrone Bio Innovations, in Davis, Calif. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Charles/NPR

Petri dishes filled with colonies of microorganisms at Marrone Bio Innovations, in Davis, Calif.

Dan Charles/NPR

The real test of their value, though, will be seeing whether they can kill a few other living creatures in this laboratory: crop-eating insects. The company maintains a collection of cabbage loopers, beet army worms, corn rootworms, green peach aphids, spider mites and a few others.

Marrone is also looking for microbes that kill weeds — and she thinks she may have found one. The company's scientists discovered it in soil collected from the garden of a Buddhist temple in Japan. It doesn't harm insects, but it kills many plants. Marrone thinks that it might eventually be a weedkiller that organic farmers can use. She says there's huge demand for such a thing.

"I can go into a chemical distributor in the Central Valley of California and say, 'What's your greatest unmet need?' and honest to God, this chemical dealer will tell me it's organic weed control," she says. "It's remarkable."

The Salt

Who Made That Flavor? Maybe A Genetically Altered Microbe

Marrone is hoping to submit a pile of data to the Environmental Protection Agency later this year, asking for approval to sell this microbe-produced herbicide to farmers.

Biopesticides have long been popular in small corners of agriculture, like organic farming.

Now big chemical companies are jumping in. That's partly because organic farming is growing. But even conventional farmers are under pressure to use fewer toxic chemicals.

And the search for useful microbes has now expanded to include a whole new way to use microbes on the farm. Some call it "probiotics for crops." There are microbes that somehow seem to give crops a boost.

"We don't know how they work, necessarily," says Matthew Ashby, the founder and chief scientist of a tiny startup company called Taxon Biosciences, in Tiburon, Calif.

On the wall at Taxon there's a computer printout that reaches from ceiling to floor. It's a list of all the microbes Taxon found in about a hundred different soil samples. Each microbe was identified through its DNA sequence. The sheer number of microbes on the list is astounding.

Matthew Ashby, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Taxon Biosciences. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Charles/NPR

Matthew Ashby, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Taxon Biosciences.

Dan Charles/NPR

"I asked our sequencing manager to print out eight feet of this, so it would fit on the wall," Ashby says. "If we printed out the entire data set, it would be over a mile long."

Ashby says if you take a close look at this overwhelming list, you find clues about what the microbes are doing. For instance, some microbes show up consistently in soil samples from fields that produce bumper harvests of corn.

"When you always find a microbe there when a plant is doing well, there might be something to that," he says.

Maybe those microbes are making corn more productive. Maybe farmers could add those beneficial microbes to their fields, and see an effect.

A year and a half ago, DuPont, the giant multinational that sells pesticides and seeds, among many other things, paid a visit to Taxon. Frank DeGennaro, director of DuPont Biologicals, was on that trip. He says the delegation was really impressed; the car ride home was filled with excited chatter about possibilities, "and I said, 'I think there's something here. I think we should have another discussion.' "

In April, Dupont announced it was buying Taxon. This summer, at thousands of small plots across the Midwest, it's carrying out trials to see whether Taxon's microbes really do boost corn yields.

Other big companies that sell pesticides and seeds — like Monsanto, Bayer Cropscience , Syngenta — have made similar deals to boost their microbe-discovery capacity. Some, in fact, are much bigger than the Taxon deal. All of these companies are betting that the next great tool that farmers use to grow more food may be found in the soil under our feet.

microbes

farming

organic farming

pesticides

Diane Rehm And A Bungled Interview With Senator Bernie Sanders

Another week, another Bernie Sanders column. And this time the issue is far more serious than repeatedly being called a "long shot."

Listeners are mad, and rightly so, about Diane Rehm's Wednesday interview with the Vermont senator, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president. (For the record, Rehm is employed by WAMU-FM, which produces her show; NPR distributes the show to stations across the country and it is clear from the mail I have received that listeners consider the program to be an NPR show.)

And Rehm? She told me this episode "has been the most difficult two days of my professional life."

To recap briefly what happened: During the interview Rehm said to Sanders: "Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel." Even when Sanders immediately corrected her, Rehm pressed on, telling him his name was on a list of lawmakers with dual citizenship.

Charges immediately flew that Rehm was engaging in anti-Semitism; Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Rehm's statements "play into classic anti-Semitic charges of dual loyalty." As Politifact documented, the lists have circulated for nearly a decade.

Rehm's apology later in the day contained the jaw-dropping admission that she got the erroneous information from "a comment on Facebook."

Thursday, halfway through her show, she made a fuller apology:

I want to make a correction. On yesterday's show I raised the issue of dual citizenship with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. This is an issue that has come up over the years in American politics.

One of our listeners suggested by Facebook that I ask Senator Sanders about Internet speculation that he has dual citizenship with Israel. But instead of asking it as a question I stated it as fact and that was wrong. He does not have dual citizenship.

Senator Sanders immediately corrected me. I should have explained to him and to you why I thought this was a relevant question and something he might like to address. I do apologize to Senator Sanders and to you for having made an erroneous statement.

However I am glad to play a role in putting this rumor to rest.

I don't agree with her about what she "should" have done but before I get to that it's worth explaining in more detail the backstory. The question was posted on the show's Facebook page, in response to a call-out to listeners asking them what they wanted to hear from Sanders.

Senior producer Denise Couture researched the issue quickly that morning, before the show aired. She told me she didn't find any references to the dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship list in the mainstream press, but she did find articles that explored issues of dual citizenship (Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, for one, renounced his dual Canadian citizenship in 2013.) The web sites she found that dealt specifically with the list did not contain anti-Israel language (as some of the sites do).

Nonetheless, I was surprised that Rehm, who has covered politics on her show for nearly 36 years, didn't herself flag the topic when looking through her briefing papers.

Rehm told me that when she saw the Facebook question "I thought to myself, 'is this really true? Are there people who have dual citizenship?'" But she added, Couture "is a trusted producer." She said, "I made a terrible mistake by not following my instinct and looking into this on my own."

She added, "This is the first time in nearly 36 years that this show has ever been called out on an error, a terrible, terrible error, like this. I am so sad and so embarrassed that this has happened, but it was a mistake and I take full responsibility for it. I should have probed further. I should have looked into it myself when the doubts came into my own mind."

[These have] been the most difficult two days of my professional life.

Diane Rehm

Rehm said the idea of dual citizenship, "did not seem to me to be such an outrageous question because people have it." But, she added, "The terrible mistake was not realizing that these lists had been put up by anti-Semitic groups." None of her producers, she said, were aware of the lists or their source.

But pulling unsubstantiated information from the Internet is just part of the problem. (An important part, to be sure: Mark Memmott, NPR's standards editor, has weighed in on that aspect with a reminder that "The old newsroom adage 'if your mother says she loves you, check it out,' applies to information on the Internet as well.") Jeff Brodin, a listener in Phoenix, Ariz., objected to a part of her apology that troubled me, as well: "She says she is glad to help quell the rumor. What? She is the one who published the rumor on the air as fact!"

I agree. Far from putting anything to rest, Rehm has now taken a falsehood from the fringes of the Internet and moved it into the mainstream conversation. In a harsh commentary, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote yesterday that to ask an incendiary question just so it can be knocked down is essentially "dignifying, laundering hate speech."

Rehm called that accusation unfair. "It is attributing motive to me that was not there. And that's what many of these websites and tweets are now doing." She added that she is "really very upset that I'm being called an anti-Semite. Had I known that the site and the name and the sources were false it would never have been part of the interview."

Point taken. But more broadly. I see little value in offering interview subjects the opportunity to address Web rumors, "hate speech" or other. In general such questions just distract from what should be the more relevant conversation that listeners tell me they are craving in what is going to be a long campaign season: substantive information about the candidates' political platforms and plans. Sideline questions like these should largely be avoided, and Rehm, as a seasoned journalist, should know better.

As Fish Stocks Dwindle, So Do The Livelihoods Of Greek Fishermen

It's a sunny afternoon on the port of Laki, a fishing village on the Aegean island of Leros. The seaside tavernas are filled with happy tourists and local families listening to traditional violin music and eating fresh grilled fish.

But fisherman Parisi Tsakirios is not celebrating. He's on his wooden fishing boat, cleaning a bright yellow net. Two days at sea, he says, and barely a catch.

"We caught just 20 pounds of fish," says Tsakirios, who, at 29, has been fishing for 15 years. "We can sell that for 200 euros (about $225). But fuel costs almost as much, so we'll be lucky if we make 20 euros (about $22)."

He will split those earnings with his 58-year-old father, Yannis, who fishes with him. Yannis Tsakirios made enough to raise four children as a fisherman. Three followed him into the trade.

"It's so hard to make a living these days," he says. "I work much longer hours now than I did as a young man."

The traditional Greek fisherman casting a net from his small wooden caique is a postcard image of the Mediterranean. In the past, these fishermen supplied tavernas and fish markets. But fish stocks are so low now that many say they can't make a living.

Michalis Kastis, another Leros fisherman, docks his caique after three days at sea with his Dutch wife, Tinika. They caught just one red mullet. "The catch is not enough to pay a crew," he says, laughing. "That's why I go with my wife."

Kastis blames large commercial trawlers for scooping most of the fish out of the sea. He calls them the "bulldozers of the sea."

"They destroyed everything," he says. "Soon, after five years, [the] Mediterranean Sea is gonna be a desert — empty."

Yiannis Tsakirios, 58, cleans a fishing net on the wooden caique he owns with his son, Parisi, docked at the village of Laki on the Aegean island of Leros. "I work much longer hours now than I did as a young man," he says. Joanna Kakissis/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Joanna Kakissis/NPR

Joanna Kakissis/NPR

Maybe not empty, marine researchers say, but certainly fragile.

"In the Med, most stocks, actually the vast majority of stocks, are below safe biological limits," says Paraskevas Vasilakopoulos of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Athens. He's the lead author of a 2014 study of declining fish stocks in the Mediterranean Sea.

"It has to do with over-exploitation," he says. "So we catch more fish than we should if we want to sustain viable populations. At the same time, in the Mediterranean, there's an additional problem of catching fish when they are too young, too small. So we catch too many fish before they get the chance to reproduce, to spawn at least once."

Sure, trawlers cause much of the damage, he says, because "they fish over the sea bottom and just take everything." That method of fishing has especially hurt demersal, or bottom-dwelling fish, like hake and red mullet in the Mediterranean.

"Those fish tend to be particularly in trouble, because they tend to grow slower and reproduce later than, say, anchovies and sardines," Vasilakopoulos says. "And they are also caught by trawlers and small-scale fishermen."

Greece has a large shipping fleet — more than 20,000 vessels — but most of them are small, family-owned boats.

Fishing regulations are not as well-enforced in the Mediterranean as they are in the North Sea, where cod has made a comeback. And while large trawlers are a big part of the problem, small fishermen shoulder some of the blame, too, says Vasilakopoulos. He only has to look at the seaside outside his office window for proof.

"For example, you see a small fishing boat going out," he says. "You'll never know what he caught, if what he caught was more than what he caught yesterday." He points to a man near a red buoy. "There's also a spear-gun fisherman over there," he says. "Can you see that?"

Spear-gun fishermen are a common sight along Greek shores, but they don't have to register their haul — one more reason why it's hard to track how much is really being caught.

Greece is now heavily investing in open-ocean fish farming to meet demand. Vasilakopoulos and Eleni Fountoulaki, a fish nutrition scientist with the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, show me tanks full of farmed sea bream — a popular fish in tavernas. "You can't find them wild so easily any more," Fountoulaki says.

It's a catch rarely seen by the fishermen of Leros these days. After selling their 20 pounds of fish, Parisi and Yannis Tsakirios are preparing to set off on another trip. Parisi's 4-year-old son, Yannis, named after his grandfather, hops on the boat to kiss his father goodbye.

"Is there anything to fish?" the boy asks.

"I'll find something," his dad says, laughing.

But next year, he says, he has to find another job. His wife is expecting their second child. Fishing just can't pay the bills.

fishing industry

Aquaculture

Fish

How Would Hillary Clinton 'Reshuffle' Economic Inequality?

Hillary Clinton To Address Economic Issues In Campaign Speech

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Hillary Clinton's campaign for president is about to enter a new phase. At her first big rally this Saturday in New York City, she will make an unusually personal speech about how her upbringing forged her commitment to helping others.

It's All Politics

Dreams From My Mother: Clinton To Look To Mom In Campaign Kickoff

Soon after, Clinton will begin laying out her positions on a broad range of economic policy questions. In the past few months, we've learned her positions on immigration, campaign finance reform, voting rights, and gay marriage. But we don't know yet what she wants to do about the number one economic issue of the 2016 campaign — stagnating middle class incomes.

Clinton does talk about the economy a lot on the campaign trail, but so far only in broad strokes. She says she wants everyone to have the same chances she had — and that, as she said visiting a brewery in May, "here in Washington we know that unfortunately the deck is still being stacked for those at the top."

She says that her job is to take that deck and "reshuffle the cards" but what does that mean?

"Paramount is how we're going to have an economy that grows for everyone, that's inclusive, in which middle class families and people struggling to get into the middle class can get ahead as the economy grows," said Neera Tanden, an informal advisor to Clinton and president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

So would she address economic inequality the way Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders propose by breaking up the big banks,or increasing Social Security Benefits?

Right now, said former Clinton White House aide Bill Galston, it's really not clear.

"Clinton has very deliberately appropriated progressive populist phrases from the Warren wing of the Democratic party. That leaves entirely unanswered the question of what the full economic narrative would be when she spells it out," he said.

She'll start spelling it all out Saturday in her big kick off speech. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said that's when Clinton will talk about the conditions of the country and "why people haven't seen their wages rise even as we've seen private sector job growth come back in this country."

He says she'll also talk about "what she wants to do to make sure that people get ahead and stay ahead. She'll lay out a template for that, and then through the course of the Summer and into the Fall she'll get specific about what policies she thinks she' can achieve to help people succeed in life," he said.

In those Summer and Fall speeches, Clinton will lay out her plans for college affordability, early childhood education, Wall Street reform and paid family leave. At some point she will say exactly how high she wants the minimum wage to be, and how she'd finance big investments in infrastructure. And, her aides say, she'll also eventually explain how she plans to solve one part of the income inequality puzzle — that even when profits and productivity go up, wages do not follow.

"The hard work, the productivity that you contribute to the the profitability and the success of the businesses that you work for should be reflected in those paychecks so that people feel that the work ethic is really paying off for them," she said last month.

Exactly how Clinton proposes to get productivity and wage growth back in sync will depend on why she thinks the middle class is struggling. Theres a big debate about this going on inside the Democratic Party. The Elizabeth Warren wing thinks the middle class is suffering because the top 1 percent grabbed more than their share. On the other side are Democrats who believes the deck is not just stacked, its been transformed — by the big forces of global competition and technology.

Clinton doesn't believe those dueling narratives are mutually exclusive, according to Podesta, and he said she will make that very clear.

"By the time people are going to the polls and voting, people will know exactly what she wants to do. And I think offer a vision that will be appealing to a broad section of Americans," he said.

Many of her supporters say the sooner she lays out that vision the better. Her unfavorable ratings have been growing, and majorities of voters tell pollsters that she is not honest and trustworthy. Neera Tanden thinks the best way to address those political problems is with a robust policy agenda. And it has the added benefit of playing to Clinton's authentic political strengths. As Tanden points out, Clinton is first and foremost a workhorse and a policy wonk.

"That's always been an asset for her," she said. "In a campaign in which you are continually discussing the way you want to solve people's problems is another way to communicate how you're on their side and care about their concerns."

So the question the Clinton campaign would like to ask is not whether she is honest and trustworthy but whether voters can trust her to fight for them and their families.

Crossing The Line: Political Operative Gets 2 Years In Prison

The first political operative to ever be found guilty of illegally coordinating between a superPAC and campaign was sentenced Friday to two years in prison and two additional years of probation.

"I did it, it was wrong when I did it, and I knew it was wrong when I did it," Tyler Harber admitted in federal court Friday.

Harber controlled both the campaign and superPAC that ran ads supporting Chris Perkins, a Virginia Republican challenging Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly. Harber took a big commission on those ads. A local Republican official raised questions about Harber's activities. The Justice Department got involved, and last February Harber pleaded guilty to illegal coordination and to lying to the FBI. The two felonies could have brought a combined total of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors asked the judge to give Harber nearly four years.

In 2012, Tyler Harber was hired by Chris Perkins, a first-time Republican candidate challenging long-time Democratic congressman Gerry Connolly in Northern Virginia. He also controlled a superPAC that ran ads supporting Perkins and took a big commission on those ads. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

In court, Harber noted, "It was not just a mistake," that "it was a deliberate decision to do this." But, Harber, who while on probation will not be allowed to do any campaign work without permission of his probation officer, added, "It was something I had seen other people do. ... These folks didn't get caught."

Millions of dollars will be spent in this presidential election by superPACs supporting candidates. These outside groups are not supposed to coordinate strategies or messaging with the campaigns. But that the legal line is getting faint, largely because the Federal Election Commission has rarely enforced the law.

The Harber case, though, is a warning shot sent by the Department of Justice. It's signaling — ahead of a 2016 presidential election when money will flow to a greater degree than in any election in American history — that it will be willing to go after people who cross the line.

"The significant prison sentence imposed on Tyler Harber should cause other political operatives to think twice about circumventing laws that promote transparency in federal elections," Leslie R. Caldwell, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said in a statement. "As the first conviction for illegal campaign coordination, this case stands as an important step forward in the criminal enforcement of federal campaign finance laws. Illegal campaign coordination can be difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders to come forward and blow the whistle."

The FBI's Jennifer Leonard went further.

"As the 2016 election gears up, there may be others, similar to Mr. Harber, who may view campaigns as a venue to misappropriate funds," Leonard said. "With millions of dollars in play, donors should be aware of how their money will be spent prior to making a donation to a superPAC to ensure that their contributions are being legally expended."

Campaign-finance lawyer Robert Kelner has been closely watching the case.

"The Department of Justice is not, I don't think, actively looking for these cases," he said in an interview. "But when they are put on the department's doorstep, we now know they are very willing to pursue them."

An outlier or emblematic? The rise of superPACs and the danger of corruption

SuperPACs, which are supposed to be independent entities from campaigns, are not bound by the usual contribution limits. This year, virtually every presidential candidate has at least one superPAC, run by friends and financed by billionaires.

But with the proliferation of money in politics since the 2010 Citizens United decision, the close ties between those who run superPACs and candidates, and those likely candidates raising money for the superPACs before they get in, campaign-finance watchdogs warn of more potential problems to come.

"You know, some of those campaign-finance lawyers just may be wishing this will go away," said Fred Wertheimer, a long-time leader of efforts to restrain political money. "We just cannot have the president of the United States chosen on a flood of illegal campaign money."

But not all campaign-finance lawyers are convinced the case will change the behavior of consultants or politicians. Harber, they argue, is an outlier not emblematic of the norm.

"For most political actors, in this situation, they likely would've talked to a lawyer first," conservative lawyer Dan Backer told NPR.

Whatever the perceived impact, Kelner said the Justice Department has made clear that it's eager to see more coordination cases.

"There are lots of people involved in campaigns who end up with a grudge," he warned. "And each and every one of those people is a potential whistle blower who can run to the Department of Justice."

2016 Presidential Race

Politics

campaign finance

Justice Department

Republicans

Germany Closes Probe Into Alleged U.S. Hacking Of Merkel's Phone

Germany's top prosecutor Harald Range has decided to close an investigation into whether the United States' National Security Agency eavesdropped on Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls due to lack of evidence.

The allegations were some of the most stunning to emerge from the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The White House never outright denied spying on Merkel, but it did say that it was not currently spying on her phone calls and would not do so in the future.

The allegations and the probe strained the relationship between the two allies. The BBC reports:

"On 4 June last year Mr Range said "sufficient factual evidence exists that unknown members of the US intelligence services spied on the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel".

"But in December he revealed that the investigation was not going well and he had not obtained enough evidence to succeed in court. A statement from Mr Range's office on Friday said 'the accusation cannot be proven in a legally sound way under criminal law.'

"It said 'the vague statements by US officials about possible surveillance of the chancellor's mobile telecommunication by a US intelligence service — "not any more" — are not enough to describe what happened."

The Associated Press adds:

"Prosecutors said they see no prospect of success in continuing to investigate. They noted that journalists involved in publishing Snowden's documents are entitled to refuse testimony, and argued that public statements by Snowden give no indication that he has personal knowledge of the surveillance of Merkel's phone."

National Security Agency

Germany

French Court Clears Dominique Strauss-Kahn In Pimping Case

A French court has found Dominique Strauss-Kahn not guilty on a charge of "aggravated pimping."

The court said the former head of the International Monetary Fund and one time French presidential candidate did not promote or profit from the prostitution of seven women.

The Guardian reports:

"The judges said there was no proof he knew that some of the women he had sex with at orgies were prostitutes. Throughout his trial, he maintained that he had not known that some of the partners brought to him by business friends at group-sex sessions had been paid, saying he thought they were merely 'swingers' like himself. The businessmen told the women who had sex with Strauss-Kahn not to say they had been paid.

"The wide-reaching trial in the northern French city of Lille revealed a saga of money, fame and women travelling to luxury locations for sex with powerful men against a backdrop of economic deprivation and social misery.

"Known as the Carlton affair, the case began in 2011 as an investigation into an alleged prostitution network at Lille's smart Hotel Carlton, where women — described by the men that ran them as 'livestock' or 'dossiers' — had been offered up as the "dessert course" at business lunches. Strauss-Kahn was never involved in any alleged activity at the hotel, but when his name was mentioned by sex-workers in interviews with investigators, the inquiry was widened."

Strauss-Kahn became a household name in 2011 after he was arrested in New York City over allegations that he sexually assaulted a hotel maid. U.S. authorities eventually dropped those charges later that year.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

A Good But Not Great New Season For Netflix's 'Orange Is The New Black'

The third season of Orange is the New Black begins with middle-class slacker-turned prison inmate Piper Chapman in a pretty dark place.

How can we tell? She's having a casual conversation about suicide with the prison's electrician. And when she suggests using pills instead of car exhaust in a garage, the electrician dismisses her for choosing a way out that's way too expensive.

"I didn't realize that my hypothetical suicide had a budget," Piper says, sarcastically. A moment later, she realizes, "this is not a healthy discussion."

Maybe not. But it's a discussion which also neatly sums up many of the themes that have made Orange is the New Black one of the most groundbreaking and compelling series on television.

There's the middle class' unthinking privilege. The tedium of prison life. The ways in which the guards are nearly as dysfunctional as the inmates.

OITNB has played these notes well in previous years and we get more such material in the third season, unveiled by Netflix today.

Author Interviews

Behind 'The New Black': The Real Piper's Prison Story

Especially welcome are wonderful new scenes with transgender inmate Sophia Burset – played by Emmy-nominated transgender actress Laverne Cox — who discusses plans for a Mother's Day visit from her son with another inmate whose hair she is styling.

"How does that work with you being a lady man and all?" the inmate asks. "Do you and his mother both celebrate the day?"

Sophia reacts immediately. "Do you really want to be calling me a lady man, when I got a fist full of your hair in my hand?"

But the visit with her son, who is clearly struggling to process her transition, is just as awkward – especially when Sophia offers to provide advice on dating.

"You want some real advice?" she asks him.

"From my second mom or my used to be dad?" Michael replies.

Television

New Faces Keep 'Orange Is The New Black' Humming In A New Season

Sophia is unfazed. "My dad told me, find a real insecure girl and practice on her. That way, you meet a girl you really like, you'll be good at it."

"You really want to be a lady in a world where men do that?" Michael asks.

Sophia doesn't hesitate. "God help me, I do."

This is when the show is at its best, exploring the characters who surround Piper Chapman. As the blonde, attractive middle class inmate, she may have once been a point of entry for fans who needed to be introduced to this world. But by now, she's surrounded by characters so much more compelling, you barely notice when she's not onscreen.

What works well this season are poignant flashback episodes for characters once relegated to the background, like overweight bully Carrie "Big Boo" Black. Seeing her pre-jail relationships with her family – and the early life of crime led by some other inmates – are always a welcome window into their current behavior.

It's not about seeing the specific acts which got them locked up, though that can be enlightening, too. It's about seeing what put them on the path that ended at Litchfield; whether it's a mother feeding her kids too much Mountain Dew to further a welfare scam or a Chinese woman who turned a marriage rejection into a job leading a gang.

But there are times when the show's message is a bit TOO on the nose. Like when one inmate talks about whether friendships in prison can survive on the outside.

"Here's what going to happen when you get out," she says, bitterly. "You'll call each other up, maybe meet for drinks, make more plans but then cancel them. You're avoiding each other because it only took that one drink to realize you don't have anything in common We're not a family, we're a band aid. And once you rip it off, all we are to each other is scars."

That seems a little more like a speech from the Shawshank Redemption, if you ask me.

There's more: Piper sees a person returns to the prison that she never expected, Blair Brown plays a Martha Stewart-like figure who lands in Litchfield prison and a change in how the place is run has implications for everyone.

But what Orange is the New Black really lacks – at least in the first six episodes provided to TV critics for an early look — is the kind of drama brought last season by Lorraine Toussaint's masterfully menacing character, Yvonne "Vee" Parjker.

Vee was a drug dealer who became a maternal figure for many of the black women in the prison and nearly ran the entire jail until she died during an escape attempt.

This year, the show's first six episodes lack the urgency and focus that Vee's jailhouse maneuvers often brought. The series may recapture that energy later in the season, but six episodes is a long time to wait.

What we get is still a really good third season for Orange is the New Black. But it somehow still feels a little less groundbreaking than the season which came before.

четверг

Cinephiles Rule In A High School Movie With Respect For Film History

Not many teen movies would devote an entire montage to a joke about Errol Morris' Interrotron. But for better and worse, most teen movies aren't Me And Earl And The Dying Girl.

The scene parodying the documentary filmmaker's signature interview technique may seem overly esoteric, but in context it makes perfect sense. It comes as a young film obsessive tries to make a movie for a friend dying of cancer, his loving attention to detail flying over the heads of the bemused classmates he's roped into being interviewed with the device. More than just a wink-wink to cinephiles, the scene is the perfect encapsulation of how much difficulty our hero has fitting into the real world, no matter how hard he tries to do right.

"Me" is Greg, a pale, awkward teenage boy (is there any other kind in the movies?) played with gawky charm by Thomas Mann. "Earl" is Greg's only friend (RJ Cyler), a ribald kid who literally wanders into his life from the other side of the tracks. The two exist in a high school symbiosis that prevents them from having to get too close to anyone else, instead living on the margins of every other social group. In between, they spend their free time making parodies of classic cinema, allowing Greg to show off his spot-on Werner Herzog impression. They also coast on the good graces of their demented history teacher (a scene-stealing Jon Bernthal), who has "Respect The Research" tattooed on his neck.

Greg's perfect plan to sneak through teendom unnoticed is foiled by Rachel, the "dying girl": a cute classmate who's been diagnosed with cancer. After Greg's mom (the always lovely Connie Britton) pushes him into socializing with this poor soul, he's shocked to discover he actually enjoys spending time with Rachel. Maybe it's because she only asks not to be pitied; because she finds his films cool; or because she's played with a wry smile and raw feelings by Olivia Cooke, who has no interest in becoming just another terminal teen. Whatever the case, Greg soon has a mission: to make a film for Rachel and improve her mood as her health spirals downward. When he agrees to sit with her at lunch, they enter the war zone of the cafeteria with grins so infectious they leap off the screen like the Cheshire Cat's.

Me And Earl won both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, which makes it the textbook definition of a crowd-pleaser. It's based on the novel by Jesse Andrews, who also collaborated on the screenplay. Perhaps to ward off unfavorable comparisons to John Green and The Fault In Our Stars, Andrews has deployed Greg's interior monologue with snarky, acerbic digressions to strike like landmines at any sign of sentiment. Do Greg and Rachel seem like their blooming hormones are about to kick in during one of their hangout sessions in Rachel's lush, cavernous attic bedroom? Slow down, shippers: "This isn't a touching, romantic story," Greg insists, suddenly restaging the image so the two remain on opposite ends of the room. It's like a self-loathing Funny Games.

Such insistence on chastity and dispassion may be novel for a high school saga, but it also tries our patience. Greg and Rachel don't have to make out, but couldn't they do something with the remaining time Rachel has on Earth other than just sit around watching movies? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Greg's perverse inaction is also at odds with Me And Earl's many technical virtues, which seem like they belong in a hipper, more fanciful story. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, no doubt drawing from his time as personal assistant to Martin Scorsese and Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, uses a series of long takes, often stretching them past the point of comfort. In those pauses, his actors make us feel the awkward disquiet of adolescent interactions that the script fails to deliver. Also, film school students would kill to craft even one of Greg and Earl's lo-fi masterworks, which precisely mimic the aesthetics of their originals while adding potty humor, puppets and stop-motion animation. Yet Greg refuses to acknowledge he has any passion for filmmaking. He snaps at his dad (Nick Offerman, who seems born to be a teen movie dad) for making an innocuous comment about his talent.

For Greg to keep insisting that none of this means anything forces the movie to lower itself to his level, so that the principle conflict revolves around his own self-worth (he gives up on schoolwork and applying to college). This is at the expense of Rachel, who surely has other things on her mind as her cancer progresses—and also Earl, who doesn't get to develop beyond a one-note joke machine.

Still, it would be unfair to the film's many virtues to only focus on what it gets wrong. If every teen movie were as buoyant, stylish and aware of history as Me And Earl, the cultural landscape would feel a lot smarter. The end-credit list of Greg and Earl's filmography is worth the price of admission alone. A remake of the 1960 British thriller Peeping Tom called "Pooping Tom"? Now that's respecting the research.

Bros Before What? Lindsey Graham Would Be Third Bachelor Elected President

Joe Biden couldn't help dropping an f-bomb when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Obama knew he would have "more flexibility" in his dealings with Russia after he was reelected. And back in 2010, Carly Fiorina didn't like Barbara Boxer's hairstyle.

Those are just a few things we've learned from hot mics over the years, and now we have a new one: Sen. Lindsey Graham is a "bro with no ho," in the words of Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk.

The incident, caught by Huffington Post's Sam Stein, occurred during a Thursday Appropriations Committee markup session. Kirk can be overheard, at around the 25-second mark, telling a fellow lawmaker that he had been joking recently, "He's going to have a rotating first lady. He's a bro with no ho."

Kirk was referring to Lindsey Graham's recent comments about who would serve as first lady if he were elected president. Graham, a lifelong bachelor, recently told the Daily Mail that he could have "a rotating first lady" as president, or that his sister could fill the role.

Graham is one of many running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, but he is the only who is a bachelor. In fact, if he were elected president, he would join a tiny club of bachelor presidents.

Graham would be only the third person to become president as a bachelor — James Buchanan, who assumed office in 1857, was the only president to remain a lifelong bachelor. Grover Cleveland, inaugurated in 1885, was also solo when he entered the White House — and he makes Graham's suggestion that his sister serve as first lady seem a little less odd. Cleveland's sister, Rose, served as hostess in the White House for a little over a year, until her brother married Frances Folsom (another fun fact: he was 49 at the time; she was only 21).

As HuffPo's Stein points out, Graham has shrugged off questions of whether an unmarried president might be unrelatable to many voters.

Really, an unmarried president might be more relatable than ever. A growing share of Americans are unmarried, and as the Pew Research Center found last year, a record number also, like Graham, have never been married.

Being single may not be a big worry for Graham, but the comment could be a problem for Kirk, who is facing a competitive reelection race next year. He may face former Rep. Joe Walsh in the primary, and Rep. Tammy Duckworth is running on the Democrat side.

When asked for comment, Kirk's office told NPR that the senator's comment was simply "a joke between friends."

A Satisfying Steampunk Saga Winds Up In 'Clockwork Crown'

Crown picks up the thread with Octavia and Alonzo on the run across the free nations south of imperial Caskentia, the homeland that now wants them dead. The strength of Cato's setting — unlike most steampunk, her books aren't set in an alternate version of Victorian England, but in a wholly invented fantasy realm — comes into sharper relief as new societies, governments, and systems of oppression form the backdrop of Octavia's quest to find the Lady's Tree, her mythic source of spiritual energy. Rather than slipping into new-age fluff, Crown draws just enough mysticism to keep its airship-and-industrialization level of technology superbly balanced. Not every aspect of this steampunk chemistry works as well as it should; in particular, Cato introduces a whole world of biomechanical wonder — including giant, bioengineered gremlins — that begs for more page-time.

Octavia herself carries the story with the same tender empathy that made Dagger so winning. With her power growing alarmingly stronger, not to mention a horrific transformation that's begun to take hold of her body, she struggles through revelations, reversals, betrayals, and sacrifices. But she's also sparring with her own feelings toward Alonzo, a romance that's fraught with heartache and trauma. Cato's touch remains light despite the story's encroaching darkness; this may be steampunk, but it's solidly rooted in the classic fantasy of Mercedes Lackey and David and Leigh Eddings. Crown, though, is every bit as subtly progressive as Dagger, with a diverse, socially conscious sensibility that's woven into the fabric of the story rather than dolloped on top.

Although Crown operates on a sprawling scale, it's impeccably paced and compact, making for a potent conclusion to Cato's rousing steampunk tale as well as a study in how less can be so much more. At a time when overstuffed science fiction and fantasy trilogies are standard issue, and when open-ended series can drag on for years, it's impressive that Dagger and Crown are a duology, self-contained and wholly satisfying. That said, there's still plenty of room left in Caskentia for more forward-thinking adventures — be they Octavia's or someone else's. Here's hoping Cato doesn't take too long to realize that potential.

Tell Us About Your Favorite Romances — It's The NPR Books Summer Of Love!

We're bringing back our famous summer reader poll this year, and as the days get longer (and the nights get hotter), we think it's the perfect time to celebrate romance.

Whether you love historicals, paranormals, inspirationals, young adult, Amish, romantic suspense, contemporaries (or, like some people around here, you'd be perfectly happy never leaving the Regency), we want to hear about it! And with your help, we'll spend this summer putting together a great big bonbon box of 100 delicious love stories.

To nominate your favorite books for consideration, click here to go to our submission form (or you can submit using the form below). Based on your recommendations, our expert panel — made up of romance authors and reviewers — will curate the final list of 100 books. Before you start nominating, here are a few guidelines:

Apple's Cook Takes Rivals To Task Over Data Privacy

Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines this week when he lashed out at rival tech companies for selling people's personal data. He didn't mention Google, Facebook or Twitter by name, but it's pretty clear those were the companies he meant. But is Apple faultless on privacy issues?

Cook's been beating the drum on the issue for a while. Last fall he told PBS's Charlie Rose, "When we (Apple) design a new service we try not to collect data," Cook said. "So we're not reading your email. We're not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessages we can't provide it."

At a cybersecurity summit this fall he made a similar point in front of an audience that included President Obama.

Some groups are applauding Cook for speaking out. The Electronic Privacy Information Center honored Cook at its annual "Champions of Freedom" event in Washington, D.C.

"It is a recognition that he has spoken out about the importance of protecting privacy for consumers," says EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg. "And he spoke out in support of protecting a value that many people today are justifiably concerned is at grave risk."

Recent events sure make it look that way. Once your data is out there, hackers don't seem to have much trouble getting their hands on it.

At the EPIC Awards ceremony, Cook told the audience that some of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies have "built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information."

But, it's easier for Apple to take this position. Most of its profits come from selling devices. Google, Twitter and Facebook sell ad-supported services. You get them largely for free because you're willing to watch ads.

Take Google's Gmail. "Google has made a decision to use a form of encryption that basically breaks the communication in the middle," says EPIC's Rotenberg, "and allows them to see what you've said and determine whether there's some advertising value in your text that they can then sell to an advertiser and profit from your email."

Neither Google nor Facebook would talk on the record. But Mike Zaneis, general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, says these companies don't sell your name to advertisers, just your profile of interests. And Apple products are expensive. Ads make products accessible to people of all incomes.

"They wouldn't be able to afford it if they had to pay out of pocket, but because it's all supported by advertising that's a wonderful tradeoff for them and one that they eagerly engage in," Zaneis says.

And it's not like Apple is 100 percent pure. "They do still ultimately collect lots and lots and lots of data," says Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Though Khatibloo says Apple does do more to protect the data even with ad driven products like iTunes Radio. But, it doesn't do much about companies, like Uber, that have apps on its mobile devices.

"Even if you're not running the app, they're collecting your location information. And even if you turn off location tracking services they can still sort of triangulate where you are based on IP address," Khatibloo says.

And on Monday, Apple is expected to reveal a streaming music service; chances are at least part of it will be ad supported.

Privacy

Behind The Story: What Made NPR Look Into Red Cross Efforts In Haiti?

Special Report: The American Red Cross

In Search Of The Red Cross' $500 Million In Haiti Relief

Where did the money go? An NPR and Propublica investigation has raised troubling questions about what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by the American Red Cross for earthquake relief in Haiti.

Goats and Soda posed a few questions to NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan about her work on this investigation.

What made you decide to look into the American Red Cross's earthquake recovery spending in Haiti?

I spent a lot of time last fall with Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger from ProPublica looking at some of the problems the American Red Cross ran into in their disaster response to Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac and found the charity had put this inordinate focus on public relations that really hurt their effort to provide disaster relief. We found in one case the Red Cross diverted 40 percent of its emergency vehicles to press conferences and in another case drove empty trucks around to make it appear as though services were being delivered. After those stories, we started to hear from people about things that went down in Haiti. At the same time we started noticing that the numbers they were giving the public about how they spent donors' money didn't make sense. Since then the Red Cross has changed the language it uses around those figures. So with that in mind, we really started looking at the spending the Red Cross did in Haiti.

While you were working on this investigation, if someone asked you over dinner "What's going on with all that money raised by the Red Cross to rebuild Haiti?" was there one anecdote that just immediately jumped to mind for you?

I found myself saying the same thing over and over again: The Red Cross spent five years and almost half a billion dollars in Haiti – and built six homes. That seemed to sum up the situation a bit. The Red Cross told us that they provided homes for more than 130,000 thousand people. So we thought, great, it shouldn't be hard to find tens of thousands of homes. Well, it turned out, after a lengthy series of email exchanges, that the vast majority of that number is made up of people who went to a seminar on how to fix their own homes, people who got temporary rental assistance and people who received temporary shelters that, according to the Red Cross, start to disintegrate after three to five years.

I think for me personally, though, it was really about meeting the people in the neighborhood of Campeche. Justin and I went there in February. They told us the Red Cross came three years earlier and told them they would build new homes and a new neighborhood. They didn't understand why that hadn't happened yet. We ended up showing them a Red Cross press release on the project which confirmed that they weren't getting new homes or a new neighborhood but some smaller projects. Their disappointment was hard to watch. This was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. And they saw on the press release the whole project was costing $24 million. They just couldn't figure out where the Red Cross was spending that money because they couldn't see it. Neither could we.

To give the Red Cross some credit, Haiti is an incredibly difficult place to work for a lot of reasons. How much of the trouble in delivering new homes to earthquake survivors was the result of the lack of clear title to land in Haiti and other endemic issues in that country?

Without question, it is extremely difficult to build anything in Haiti. The land title system is archaic and almost nonexistent. And many people don't realize the government lost almost a third of its work force by some estimates the day of the earthquake. The government was in disarray. But still, in the years since, other charities have managed to do it. Other NGOs have built more than 9,000 permanent homes so far. We saw a project by Global Communities and PCI that's built over 300 homes so far and is now doing multifamily homes with running water.

What could the Red Cross have done differently to get more bang for their buck in Haiti?

All the internal documents we read suggested that a lot of the Red Cross's problems were of their own making. They had huge bureaucratic delays not just in Haiti but at headquarters in Washington. We saw problems with high turnover and indecision. But what many of the people who worked there — and some who still do — told us is that the Red Cross simply lacked the expertise and know-how to rebuild in a developing country. They have long been known for their work in disaster relief, and they certainly spent millions of dollars in Haiti providing immediate food and water. They also gave millions to hospitals and other projects. But building brand-new communities as the charity's CEO promised is just not something they have any experience in.

Also, they ended up outsourcing most of the hands-on work to other charities. That meant that a lot of administrative fees got paid. First the Red Cross took its admin fee, then the other charities that did the work took theirs, and then what we found in the documents is that the Red Cross then took an additional cut on top of those fees to pay for what it called the management costs of running these third party projects. In one case we looked at, all those fees meant a third of the money donors gave never made it to Haitians.

Red Cross

Haiti

Here's Why All These Political Cattle Calls Matter

Stop us if you've heard this one before — the vast field of GOP presidential hopefuls is gathering in a critical early state this weekend to give speeches, woo voters and court activists. That's what's been happening nearly every weekend since the beginning of the year, with Republican groups, influencers and politicians each hoping to attract top-tier candidates to their event.

With national Republicans trying to limit debates this year, the multifaceted events have become the new normal for both candidates and the media. On Saturday, both announced and likely GOP candidates will head to Iowa for the next one, where freshman GOP Sen. Joni Ernst will hold her inaugural "Roast and Ride."

So far, there have been at least a dozen different cattle calls since January. And if it feels like there's been a lot of cattle calls this year, maybe that's because there's a lot of cattle. For lesser-known candidates in such a crowded field, the different events offer a chance to try to and catch fire with often little investment or infrastructure needed.

"You have a megaphone from the inside out," said longtime Iowa GOP strategist Tim Albrecht. "There's no other place these candidates can go where they will see 200 media confined to one location. That's potentially 200 stories they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. With these kinds of events, it's a very low bar to participate and to even be invited."

And in Iowa – a state where GOP voters insist on meeting their candidates early and often – the guaranteed national attention has also been a boon for state and local Republicans.

National Republicans are limiting presidential debates this year, fearing too many too early in 2012 hurt their chances. And with a crowded primary race, they're networks are setting benchmarks to get on stage. Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press hide caption

itoggle caption Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

"Everybody is a beneficiary of these events, whether it's the local county party, the state party the campaigns and the voters," Albrecht said, "because this gives Iowans the opportunity to see these candidates and potential candidates on the same stage, back to back, to directly compare how each of them would handle a particular situation. These are a wonderful way for Iowans to gauge candidates on an Iowa stage who eventually want be on the world stage."

To national observers, the cattle calls have become the new debates and a way for hopefuls, who haven't been getting as much attention, to boost their profile, so they can ultimately make it onto the debate stage later this year.

"A lot of the folks in the field not named [former Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush, [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker, or [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio, they don't have very high name ID," national GOP strategist Ford O'Connell said. "That's why the cattle calls are taking on an added importance in the way we haven't seen before."

The field will naturally be winnowed down after the first few states vote early next year. But until then, if candidates aren't able to get momentum before the debates, "donors aren't going to open up their wallets," O'Connell said.

The burst of early events in 2015 helped some candidates jump to the head of the pack nationally. Albrecht pointed to Walker's breakout performance at the Iowa Freedom Summit this past January as one example. While he noted that Iowans had been wowed by his speeches already the previous year, the first major cattle call gave the Wisconsin governor the momentum he needed.

"There was serious buzz after that event," said Albrecht, a former top aide to Gov. Terry Branstad, R-Iowa. "Scott Walker has real star power."

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has performed well in early cattle call events, but is still lagging in the polls. Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press hide caption

itoggle caption Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has performed well in early cattle call events, but is still lagging in the polls.

Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

He also pointed to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — who performed well at last month's Iowa Lincoln Day Dinner and had a big crowd outside her room — and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who needs a comeback after not living up to the hype in the state four years ago — as candidates who have shone at the events.

Both will be at Ernst's event this weekend — only Perry and Walker will be riding motorcycles along the GOP senator, though. Seven candidates will be in attendance, including Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Fiorina and Perry have yet to see much evidence of what activists say have been good performances. Both are still mired in single digits in both early state polls and national surveys, the latter of which will determine whether they make it onto the debate state during the first faceoff in August.

That makes their continued performance in such cattle calls all the more important along with building their political operations.

"Everything's been turned on its head, because of the capping of the debates and the calendar," O'Connell warned. "You know if you're not on the first one or two debate stages, it's going to be hard to get past New Hampshire."

2 Dead, More Than 100 Trapped By Avalanche On Mountain In Borneo

At least two climbers are dead and more than 100 stranded by an earthquake-triggered avalanche on Borneo's highest peak.

The 137 climbers, including an unknown number of foreign tourists, were unable to descent Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo. However, Masidi Manjun, the tourism minister for Sabah state on the island's northeast side, tweeted:

It is with much regret that I have to inform that there have been fatalities at Mt Kinabalu. Details will be announced tomorrow. #tremor

— Masidi Manjun (@MasidiM) June 5, 2015

A photo taken by another guide showing Kinabalu Mountain guides carrying an injured climber down. #tremor pic.twitter.com/THUKzpsZlf

— Masidi Manjun (@MasidiM) June 5, 2015

The epicenter of the magnitude-5.9 earthquake was in Ranau district in Sabah state on Malaysian Borneo, according to the country's meteorological department. The tropical island, famed for its biodiversity, is split between Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Malaysian Star reports that most of the climbers were descending after reaching the 13,435-foot peak before sunrise when the quake struck at 7:17 a.m. local time "with boulders and rocks from the granite surface dislodging and rolling down rapidly."

The temblor was violent enough to snap off one of the mountain's distinctive "Donkey's Ear" peaks.

The BBC quotes Masidi as saying 32 guides were assisting the climbers who were moving down "cautiously" because the trail had been damaged. Initial attempts to rescue the climbers with a helicopter had to be abandoned due to bad weather.

"Other than ongoing rescue efforts, our priority is to send food, drinks and warm clothing to those still stranded on the mountain," Masidi said.

Malaysia

mountain climbing

Earthquake

GOP Suiters Woo Iowa With Bikes, Barbeque And Barnstorming

A herd of Republican presidential candidates spent some time in Iowa farm country this weekend. They were there for a fundraiser called Roast and Ride, a motorcycle ride and barbecue organized by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst.

It's All Politics

Here's Why All These Political Cattle Calls Matter

Ernst, a political newcomer, is making herself a force in presidential politics.

On Saturday morning, Ernst, decked out in a leather biker vest and drinking a Monster Energy drink, was greeting hundreds of bikers in the parking lot of a Harley Davidson dealer in Des Moines. She joked with the press about Florida senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio turning her down for a ride on the back of her motorcycle.

Only two of the GOP presidential hopefuls rode motorcycles. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry led his own motorcade, from Perry — yes, Perry — Iowa.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker rode with Ernst. He hasn't officially announced he's running for president, but has been spending a lot of time in Iowa.

"When Joni told me in January she was going to do this I thought, well heck, that's easy," Walker said. "I'll do that in a heartbeat, right?"

After finishing the 38-mile ride to the small town of Boone, it was time for the roast. Iowa resident Connie Rueter waited in line for Barbeque sandwiches, baked beans and potato salad.

Iowans listen to prospective and declared GOP presidential candidates in Boone, Iowa during Sen. Joni Ernst's Roast and Ride. Clay Masters/Iowa Public Radio hide caption

itoggle caption Clay Masters/Iowa Public Radio

"It was amazing to see that many consecutive bikes and people along the way with their flags waving," Reuter said. "It just gave me a good spirit of, you know, USA and freedom, and it was just really great."

Swap the pork for steak and Republicans for Democrats and you could be at Tom Harkin's Steak Fry. Ernst replaced Harkin in the Senate this year, but she's copying his playbook, with a fundraiser designed to draw presidential candidates.

Former state GOP chair Matt Strawn said Ernst is showing the candidates a slice of Iowa.

"We're not in a ballroom with $100/plate dinners," Strawn said. I'm in my boots and jeans as we're talking here. My kids are here. We're eating barbecue. We're having fun."

The event included a full buffet of Republican candidates to sample: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — and, of course, a lot of speeches.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham earned some groans with this one: "Hillary Clinton couldn't be here today — because there's a crowd that might ask her a question."

As the Roast and Ride drew to a close, Ernst appeared to relish her roles as host and a new political force from an important state.

"Travel safely as you're heading home this afternoon," she told the crowd. "And make sure, as these candidates are coming back through, you're giving them a very warm Iowa welcome."

You've Saved Money At The Pump. Why Aren't You Spending It?

Even though it's crept up in the past couple of months, the price of a gallon of gasoline is still about $1 less than it was a year ago. That's saving drivers $15 to $20 every time they fill up.

Economists were quite convinced late last year that would boost growth because consumers would go out and spend that extra money. But things have not unfolded exactly as forecast.

There's no doubt the plunge in oil prices and the lower costs for gasoline, heating oil and natural gas gave consumers a big windfall.

"They saved about $116 billion," says John Canally, chief economist at LPL Financial. He figures that means a savings of about $83 per month per household on average — or about $1,000 a year. Lots of economists predicted Americans would go out a spend most of that, but Canally says they didn't.

"Consumers, since oil prices peaked back in June, have done what they've been doing this entire recovery, which is essentially they've spent a little, they've saved a little and they've paid down some debt," he says.

Seasonally adjusted annual rates Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis hide caption

itoggle caption Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Seasonally adjusted annual rates

Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Canally says he thinks many Americans learned a lesson during the financial crisis and are now being more prudent with their money. But in the short run, that's meant less consumption and less economic growth. So the growth dividend from lower energy prices has been elusive.

"I don't think it's completely materialized," says Laura Rosner, U.S. economist at BNP Paribas. For one thing, she says, the negative effects of the energy bust came faster than expected, with quick cutbacks in exploration and drilling and big job losses. That was a drag on the economy. And wicked winter weather from Virginia to Maine kept the energy windfall cash in people's pockets.

"Actually, 20 percent of all U.S. households live in either the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast," Rosner says.

That meant tens of millions of shoppers stayed at home and contributed to a near stall-out of growth in the first quarter — far underperforming hopes that the oil price windfall would fuel faster growth.

Rosner says she thinks there's another reason the benefits of the windfall have been muted: Americans have been skeptical that the low energy prices will be lasting.

The Two-Way

Will Slower U.S. Economy Make Fed Wait To Raise Rates?

Economy

Higher Wages, Lower Prices Give Consumers A Break

Economy

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

Economy

Higher Wages, Lower Prices Give Consumers A Break

"We're seeing evidence that consumers actually expect gasoline prices to rebound ... almost back to their prior levels within a year or two," she says. "So that's an important reason why they may not be spending more of the windfall, today."

While Rosner believes consumers have reacted cautiously up to now, she's seeing signs that they are ready to start spending more of the windfall.

"You know, really the consumer sentiment data show that consumers are feeling better about the outlook," she says "They're feeling more secure in their jobs and they're relatively optimistic."

Their added spending will help lift the U.S. growth rate this year, she says. Canally agrees, and he believes with more prudent U.S. consumers the current expansion will be longer-lasting.

gasoline

consumer spending

The Morning After: Lawmakers Vote To Reduce Amtrak Funding

Transportation funding was going to get plenty of attention this week in Washington — even before an Amtrak train derailed about 140 miles to the north.

This is National Infrastructure Week, so lobbyists, labor leaders and activists started swarming Capitol Hill on Monday, seeking funds for roads, bridges and other projects related to transportation.

Then on Tuesday night, an Amtrak train crashed in Philadelphia, killing seven people and injuring scores of others.

On Wednesday morning, it looked as if the case for funding might have been strengthened by events in Philadelphia. They could argue that — no matter what investigators may find was the specific reason for the derailment — the tragedy offers a general warning that U.S. transportation systems have gotten outdated and dangerous.

Whether it involves trains, planes or automobiles, "our infrastructure is in terrible shape," National League of Cities President Ralph Becker told NPR. Becker, who is the mayor of Salt Lake City, was in town to plead for more transportation funding. "Our infrastructure is failing."

But Republican lawmakers holding the purse strings were not buying such arguments, at least about Amtrak.

The GOP-led House Appropriations Committee voted 30-21 in favor of legislation providing funds for transportation infrastructure and safety in fiscal 2016. But the measure contains a spending cut of $252 million for Amtrak — a decrease of about 15 percent from this fiscal year. The reduction would affect Amtrak's capital spending, not operations.

The committee's bill would have to be approved by the full House and Senate before it could take effect Oct. 1.

Committee Democrats unsuccessfully tried to amend the legislation to boost Amtrak funding by $1 billion, to $2.4 billion. "Starving rail of funding will not enable safer train travel," Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., told the committee hours after the deadly derailment.

But Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, admonished Democrats: "Don't use this tragedy in that way. It was beneath you."

Becker, speaking for the National League of Cities, says mayors are frustrated with such congressional squabbling over transportation-related funding. Their message to lawmakers: "Get to work and get something done," he said.

The city leaders are particularly concerned about the Highway Trust Fund, which collects and distributes money for federal highway and transit projects. The fund's authorization expires at the end of this month. And the fund will run out of cash later this summer.

Becker's group wants Congress to authorize at least six years of programs and funding so that mayors and governors can make long-term plans for improving mobility, he said.

Georgia's Giant Clay Pots Hold An 8,000-Year-Old Secret To Great Wine

When I ask Iago Batarshvili to climb into his qvevri, a Georgian clay wine barrel, he rolls his eyes before he drops a ladder into what looks like a hole in the ground and makes his way down. What is a novelty to an observer is, to Batarshvili, simply the way things are done.

"I don't make anything special," he says. "I only continue in the way started by my parents."

Georgia's winemaking heritage goes back 8,000 years and centers on the qvevri, a cavernous terra-cotta pot shaped like an egg, lined with beeswax and buried to the mouth underground. But these ancient vessels were sidelined by the industrial wine production dictated by seven decades of Soviet rule. Over the last 10 years, however, qvevri wine has slowly recovered. Today, it is a calling card for Georgian wine around the world.

Batarshvili says making white wine in qvevris imparts a unique flavor. He pours organic white Chinuri grapes, skins and stems into the qvevri in October each year, lets them ferment with natural yeast for two weeks, and then seals the qvevris and leaves them buried underground for six months before lifting the lids in April. Finally, Batarshvili transfers the wine to a smaller set of qvevris for a further half year of aging before bottling. There are no barrels, tanks or gauges — just the grapes and the qvevri.

In most commercial winemaking, only red wines are fermented with their skins. The extended skin contact gives Batarshvili's white qvevri wine an orange tint and a deep tannin flavor that is prized by customers in Japan, Europe and the United States. Red qvevri wine is made through the same process.

A man stands next to a giant qvevri pot in Kakheti, Georgia, in this photo from the late 1800s. The beeswax-lined vessels have been used to make wine for thousands of years. via Wikimedia hide caption

itoggle caption via Wikimedia

A man stands next to a giant qvevri pot in Kakheti, Georgia, in this photo from the late 1800s. The beeswax-lined vessels have been used to make wine for thousands of years.

via Wikimedia

Batarshvili uses the same methods and even the same primitive wooden tools his parents and grandparents used, but for his forebears, qvevri wine was only a home craft.

That home craft was uprooted — literally — when the Soviets invaded Georgia in 1921. The Bolsheviks ripped up the hundreds of grape varieties grown on Georgia's many family vineyards. Instead, the Communists planted just a handful of grapes varietals and nationalized viniculture, churning out some 200 million liters of mediocre, mass-produced wine a year.

Ironically, the Russians who dismissed qvevri wine were also instrumental in restoring it. In 2006, the Georgian wine industry, already contracted after the fall of the Soviet Union, faced a grave threat when Vladimir Putin banned exports to Russia. Putin claimed it was to avoid rampant health violations in the Georgian wine industry; Georgians saw the move as punishment for drawing too close to the West.

The Salt

Ancient Wine Bar? Giant Jugs Of Vino Unearthed In 3,700-Year-Old Cellar

Without the Russian market, the Georgian wine industry tanked – and then reinvented itself for a global clientele. At its nadir, Georgia produced 22 million liters in 2009. By 2014, that figure had quadrupled.

James Beard award-winning wine writer Alice Feiring, who is writing a book about skin contact in Georgian wine, says the qvevri has been a major engine for interest in Georgian viniculture. The first of two International Qvevri Wine Symposia was held in 2011 in the Alaverdi Monastery, a stone compound surrounded by vineyards at the foothills of the Caucuses Mountains, in Georgia's Kakheti wine-growing region. Feiring attended and was surprised to see that even the monastery, which has produced wine for 1,000 years, had used barrels for wine and was in the midst of switching back to qvevri.

"If you are a modern winemaker using barrels, you're racking the wine several times, moving it from one barrel to another," Feiring explains. "You're checking things, you're adding things to the fermentation, you're messing with the temperature. Qvevri winemaking allows the winemaker to be as uninvolved as possible. It's the way wine was made before any modern contraptions."

Grapes on the vine in Kakheti, Georgia's wine-growing region via Wikimedia hide caption

itoggle caption via Wikimedia

Grapes on the vine in Kakheti, Georgia's wine-growing region

via Wikimedia

Because qvevris are buried underground, the earth's temperature remains relatively constant, Feiring says. The qvevri's torpedo shape allows sediment to collect at the pointed bottom of the vessel, while the wine naturally moves around the middle.

Two years after the first symposium, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognized qvevris as an element of "Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity."

"There's a lot of wine in Georgia made in barrels or in stainless steel," Feiring says. "But it really is the qvevri that put Georgian wine on the map for quality wine."

Russia ended its ban in 2013; today, Russia once again is Georgia's best customer, buying 60 percent of all wine exports. Yet the ban pushed Georgia to forge ties with far more foreign markets.

Irakli Cholobargia, marketing director of the state-run National Wine Agency, says qvevri wine is still a tiny portion – less than 1 percent — of the total Georgian output. Yet the number of qvevri winemakers is growing: Today at least 30 artisanal winemakers use the ancient vessels exclusively, and larger wineries are adding qvevri series to their lineups.

"To stand out from the crowd, it's good to have the qvevri wine. It's a different thing," Cholobargia says. But, he adds, increasingly, qvevris are not enough to differentiate a winery. "You have to have new grape varieties in your range, a new one even for the Georgians."

As for Batarshvili, growing global interest has helped him expand his wine operation five-fold since 2006. Now he does not have enough wine to fill his orders.

"We'll produce maybe 8,000, maximum 10,000 bottles and that will be all," he says, while drumming his hands on five new qvevri lying on their sides like dinosaur eggs on his front lawn. "After 10,000 bottles, we would need to use some factory mechanics."

Georgian food

winemaking

wine

This Year, Women (And Girls) Rule The Big Screen

With Spy topping Hollywood's box office charts this weekend, Melissa McCarthy becomes the latest woman to head a major box office hit in 2015, and while that merely puts her in good company this year, it's hardly been common in the past.

I fielded a bunch of distressed tweets a couple of weeks ago after noting that Charlize Theron's Furiosa so dominated Mad Max: Fury Road that it could reasonably be regarded as a feminist film. That weekend's openings were already a battle of the sexes — the nominally masculine Mad Max versus the girl-power musical Pitch Perfect 2.

And indeed, Pitch Perfect 2 came out ahead at the box office. So pointing out that Tom Hardy's Max was taking a lot of his cues from Charlize Theron's Furiosa inspired furiosity, as it were, from some fringe-y men's rights groups.

They were fighting a rear-guard action, though. Having a feminist focus this year is nothing special, though in most years, it would be a crazy anomaly. It's a truism that male stars dominate Hollywood — in salary, in number of movies, in box-office clout. But look back through three decades of box-office grosses, and how much men dominate becomes clear when you focus on the very top of the charts — just the top ten movies each year.

In 13 of the last 30 years, not a single top ten box-office hit was centered on a female character. And in the other years, there were never many — just one per year for eight years, and two or three in the others, and that, largely thanks to the Twilight and Hunger Games franchises.

In total, I count only 31 female-centered pictures at the top of the charts in 30 years. And I was pretty generous in what I labeled woman-centric. I included Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, for instance, though both are arguably more about Michael Douglas than about the women who torment him. I also included a bunch of Disney princesses. (I did not, just for the record, automatically include romantic comedies — unless the female star dominated; What Women Want, for instance, did not qualify as a femme-centric film, since it's really a Mel Gibson vehicle).

This year, though, is different: We are almost at the midpoint of 2015, and as of right now, more than half of the top ten box-office hits — six of them — center their stories on female characters. Besides Mad Max, there's its arch-rival Pitch Perfect 2, as well as Insurgent with its combative heroine Tris, Fifty Shades of Grey, the animated kid-flick Home, in which a little girl saves the planet from invading aliens, and Disney's live-action Cinderella.

Not all of these feminine characters are "empowered" exactly — don't even get me started on the Bechdel Test — but they are feminine, which is no small thing. Remember it's just three years ago that Pixar's Brave was called "brave" simply for being about an action heroine.

Nor are these gals going to be alone at the top for long. They'll soon be joined by Riley, the 11-year-old heroine of Pixar's Inside Out, and by Katniss Everdeen in her Hunger Games victory lap, Mockingjay 2. The ladies are going to have a very good year at the box office.

Now a couple of caveats: Only two of these pictures — Pitch Perfect 2 and Fifty Shades of Grey — were written or directed by women, but hey ... baby steps, right? And while all of them have muscled their way past the hundred million dollar mark, some will likely slide out of the year's top ten as they're passed by the dinosaurs, minions and storm troopers that'll soon be rampaging through multiplexes.

So this gals-ascendent moment at the top of the charts may prove fleeting. Still, that won't make it any less remarkable — unprecedented for at least three decades in Hollywood.

Didn't want that to go unremarked.

среда

Online Health Searches Aren't Always Confidential

In the privacy of a doctor's office, a patient can ask any question and have it be covered under doctor-patient confidentiality. But what happens when patients want to search possible symptoms of a disease or ailment online?

It's common to search for treatments for a migraine or stomach pain on WebMD, or a flu strain on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. But there's no way to know who else may be privy to that search information. So where does that data go when a patient presses enter?

That's what Tim Libert, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to know. He's been researching what happens with information people search online and spoke with NPR's Robert Siegel about the privacy implications.

Interview Highlights

On what happens when someone searches a health issue

I took a list of 2,000 common disease names — I mean everything from migraines to breast cancer. I ran those through a search engine and I found about 80,000 pages that were related to those terms. I looked at those pages and I found about 90 percent of those, when you load the page on your computer it tells hidden parties the address of the page you're looking at. In cases where that address has the name of the disease or something, these hidden parties get to find out what it is you're interested in.

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Shots - Health News

Who's Watching When You Look For Health Information Online?

All Tech Considered

As Health Apps Hop On The Apple Watch, Privacy Will Be Key

On who these hidden parties are, and why they're interested

Most of the times it's advertisers — so these are your marquee names, your Googles and Facebooks. But I also found kind of further down there a fair amount of tracking going on by data brokers. So these are companies like Experian and Acxiom. And their core business model is not advertising per se, but selling information about you to whoever wants to buy it.

On what they would do with this search information

There's actually companies that sell lists of people who have different diseases or symptoms. There's been some kind of chilling cases: [There were] companies selling lists of people who had been raped or people who had AIDS. So there's a market for this stuff.

On the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 [HIPPA] and its relation to online data privacy

HIPAA's a pretty good law, but HIPAA was made long before the Web was really in everybody's home and very well before smartphones existed.

Anything that is happening on the Web today is pretty much completely unregulated. There's really no oversight and there's no real standards either. Companies aren't required to encrypt the information to keep it in a secure place. And we've also been seeing a lot lately that this is of interest to criminals, so there is additional kind of worry that not only is it not protected by HIPAA, it's not really protected at all.

The CDC pointed us to its online privacy policy, which says the data its sends to Google Analytics, for instance, is anonymized. But Tim Libert says that's "not nearly sufficient." He says that doesn't provide the kind of protection that federal law requires for doctors' visits.

In a statement, WebMD says that it "may collect data about our users' online browsing and use that data to deliver advertisements to our users. WebMD's collection and use of data is described in greater detail in our Privacy Policy. The policy also describes how we protect user information and the choices we offer users for opting out of behavioral advertising by WebMD."

health privacy

health data

online privacy

In Atlantic City, A Silver Lining For Casinos Left Standing

New casinos are popping up all along the East Coast, giving Atlantic City a run for its money. Four casinos out of 12 in Atlantic City closed last year. But those closures have, in turn, helped the remaining gambling houses there.

Casino customers tend to be pretty loyal to one or two houses — to accrue rewards, or sometimes for other reasons.

"We like to bring the dog down once in a while because he likes to walk the boardwalk, go in the ocean," says Patty Davis. She and her husband travel more than six hours to gamble in Atlantic City.

The Davises used to go to the Showboat casino because its hotel allowed dogs. When it closed in September, the couple and their Pomeranian started going to Harrah's, because it allows dogs.

Many people have been taking their business to other casinos in the city since their usual haunts closed, which has meant better business for the places left standing.

Resorts, Atlantic City's oldest casino, still lost money in the first quarter of this year but a lot less than it did last year.

"We're certainly seeing the benefit of a smaller competitor base so our revenues and our profitability continue to improve steadily," says Mark Giannantonio, president and CEO of Resorts.

Business

As Casinos Fold, Stakes Are High For Atlantic City Transformation

Atlantic City Residents Await Word On Potential Bankruptcy

In other words, Atlantic City went from having 25,000 slot machines at the start of last year to 17,000 now. It went from 12 underperforming casinos to eight fuller gambling houses. And that's helped the remaining casinos grow their profits by 26 percent.

It certainly looked like the first good news for Atlantic City in a long time. But Moody's Investors Service analyst Keith Foley says it doesn't mean the rest of the casinos are in the clear.

"In addition to the fact that you've got larger and more competitors within that region, you've got a couple of trends going on in regional gaming that will affect Atlantic City and probably not positively," Foley says.

Casinos need to replace their aging customers. But, Foley says, younger people not only have less disposable income, they're also just less interested in playing the slot machines.

Joe Lupo is senior vice president at the Borgata, where profits were up 82 percent for the first quarter of this year. He says the most important thing for Atlantic City's remaining casinos is to take their new profits and reinvest them in their properties.

"Product's extremely important especially when you have a similar gaming product in your backyard in Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland, what's the differentiator?" Lupo says.

While Lupo says the casino industry in Atlantic City has stabilized, the region is still reeling from the closures. The county has an unemployment rate that is twice the national average and leads the state in foreclosures.

Back at Resorts, a lounge beside the blackjack tables shows off one of the casinos' biggest hopes for growth: its website for online gambling. However customers who log in from home will be able to pour their own gin and tonics. So even great success on the Internet won't bring back many of the lost jobs.

gambling

Atlantic City

casinos

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Online Health Searches Aren't Always Confidential

In Atlantic City, A Silver Lining For Casinos Left Standing

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