National Public Radio: California City

 Deep in the Mojave Desert, there is a little town with a big name and a bizarre history: California City. For decades, real estate developers have sold a dream here: if you buy land now, you'll be rich one day. Thousands of people bought this dream. Many were young couples and hard-working immigrants looking to build a better future. But much of the land they bought is nearly worthless. In this new podcast from LAist Studios, host Emily Guerin tells a story of money, power and deception.

listen to the podcast

National Public Radio: It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system.

Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources. [...]

That means that until arriving here, people who were Irish, people who were Hungarian, people who were Polish would not have identified themselves back in the 19th century as being white, but only in connection to the gradations and ranking that occurred and was created in the United States — that is where the designation of white, the designation of Black and those in between came to have meaning. [...]

One of the examples, a Japanese immigrant petitioned to qualify for being Caucasian because he said, "My skin is actually whiter than many people that I identified as white in America. I should qualify to be considered Caucasian." And his petition was rejected by the Supreme Court. But these are all examples of the long-standing uncertainties about who fits where when you have a caste system that is bipolar [Black and white], such as the one that was created here. [...]

It turned out that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. And then, of course, the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. But what they did was they sent researchers to study America's Jim Crow laws. They actually sent researchers to America to study how Americans had subjugated African Americans, what would be considered the subordinated caste. And they actually debated and consulted American law as they were devising the Nuremberg Laws and as they were looking at those laws in the United States.

read the article

National Public Radio: Warnings, Wariness Mingle With Joy After Hong Kong's Pro-Democracy Landslide

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, adopted a conciliatory tone. She pledged to respect the election's results, which represented a veritable drubbing of her preferred slate of candidates. After months of massive protests, voters turned out in record numbers and give pan-democratic, or pro-democracy, candidates more than three-quarters of the total 452 district council seats. [...]

Chinese officials, for their part, reacted more tersely than their ally in the chief executive's office. At a briefing Monday, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not mention the results, instead choosing to reassert Beijing's sway over Hong Kong's governance. [...]

Still, the newly elected councilors aren't entirely bereft of ways to make their weight felt. District councilors represent a sizable chunk of the Election Committee, the roughly 1,200-member body of politicians and business figures responsible for deciding the chief executive.

read the article

National Public Radio: Indonesia Plans To Move Its Capital Out Of Jakarta, A City That's Sinking

Jakarta is plagued by massive challenges. As the BBC has reported, it's the fastest-sinking city in the world, with almost half of its area below sea level.

"If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95% of North Jakarta will be submerged," Heri Andreas, an expert in Jakarta's land subsidence at the Bandung Institute of Technology, told the broadcaster. [...]

Brodjonegoro told reporters Monday that neither of these options would mitigate the crowding in Java, where more than 140 million people live, according to the Post. They ultimately decided on the third option — to locate the new capital outside of Java. [...]

The city's massive amount of traffic is also costly. According to the BBC, the planning minister has estimated traffic jams in Jakarta cost the economy some $6.8 billion annually.

read the article

National Public Radio: 'You Are Safe Now': Matthew Shepard Laid To Rest At National Cathedral

The public remembrance at the filled 4,000-seat cathedral was led by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. After, his ashes were interred at the cathedral's crypt in a private family ceremony.[...]

Shepard's parents' requested that their sons ashes be interred at the cathedral after 20 years of reluctance. They feared his gravesite would be desecrated.[...]

In the years since, the circumstances surrounding the case have been disputed, but Shepard's murder has nevertheless come to be seen as a classic hate crime, highlighting anti-gay bigotry. Four months before Shepard was killed, white supremacists in Texas had tied an African-American man, James Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck and dragged him to his death. Outrage over the two brutal murders ultimately led to the passage of the Shepard/Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

The act expanded an existing federal hate-crimes law to include crimes based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. Shepard's killing became the basis for a play, The Laramie Project, which brought widespread attention to the problem of homophobia. Shepard's parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, established the Matthew Shepard Foundation and became activists for gay rights and more vigorous prosecution of hate crimes.

Shepard's funeral in 1998 was met with noisy protests by anti-gay militants. The decision to seek his interment at Washington National Cathedral came as a result of the Shepards' friendship with Bishop Robinson. Robinson contacted the cathedral dean, the Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, and Washington's Episcopal bishop, Budde, both of whom readily agreed to the placement of Shepard's ashes in the cathedral crypt.

read the article

National Public Radio: Catholic Church Now Formally Opposes Death Penalty In All Cases

The Catholic Church now formally considers the death penalty "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person" and is pledging to work for its abolition worldwide. 

It's a shift for the church, which used to consider the death penalty a "means of safeguarding the common good" in response to "certain crimes." The update to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the book of official teachings of the church, was announced Thursday. [...]

The Vatican catechism also cited "a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state." It also notes that "more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption."

read the article

National Public Radio: Hooking Up Gets Easier To Do In Saudi Arabia

She's wearing stylish high-heeled shoes and a black abaya, a traditional floor-length cloak. But her flowing hair is not covered. She asks NPR not to use her name for fear her family would find out about her dating past. Until recently, she says, it was "taboo to be seen with a man who was not your relative."

Nowadays, things are getting easier for many Saudis on the heterosexual dating front. The Gulf kingdom now allows things like movies, music and theater that it once forbade. More men and women are openly mixing in public than before. Though some in the deeply conservative country are bothered by it, a growing hookup culture is one of the latest signs of gradual social change. [...]

"I've seen girls who are pro-active and if they like a guy, they would go to him, and that's happening a lot right now," she says. "Girls are becoming more powerful — I love it."

Others are unsettled by it, like one young man who spoke to NPR in a different area of Riyadh. He also doesn't want to use his name, saying his family would be angry with him for talking to foreign media.

read the article or listen to the podcast

National Public Radio: 5 Truths About Trump Displayed In His Phoenix Rally

President Trump led an incendiary rally at which he ripped at cultural divides, played to white grievance, defended himself by stretching the truth or leaving out key facts, attacked members of his own party and the media, played the victim and threatened apocalyptic political consequences — all the while doing so by ignoring political norms and sensitivities. [...]

Played to white grievance. "They're trying to take away our culture," Trump said of activists calling for the removal of Confederate statues. "They're trying to take away our history. And our weak leaders, they do it overnight. These things have been there for 150 years, for 100 years. You go back to a university, and it's gone. Weak, weak people." [...]

Consider: There has been a usual pattern. Here's how it has gone — Trump says something attention-grabbing, outrageous or controversial. He gets lots of negative attention and criticism for it. Then, he adjusts and does something more on-script. The criticism dies down and people think maybe he is changing ("pivoting") and becoming more "presidential." And then he undercuts that with a tweet or rally soon after. [...]

Not loyal, except maybe to his family. Trump is all about Trump. Look at how he has dealt with his White House and administration. He nearly threw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus, for example, threatening his job on Twitter — and Sessions was one of Trump's earliest supporters and was behind Trump when no one else in the Senate would back him.

read the article

National Public Radio: Why Greece Has Been Slow To Embrace Clean Energy

"Tilos is a good example to acquaint people with the power of renewables," says Yiannis Tsipouridis, a wind-energy advocate and the former head of renewables for Greece's electricity company, the Public Power Corporation. "But it's a small island, small needs. It will just cover the local needs."

Tsipouridis says the Aegean should be a clean-energy production unit — that every island could be a Tilos, with a scaled solar-and-wind energy production unit that can also export power.

"The first wind park in Europe was installed in Greece in 1982," he says. "We started fantastically. But we have never had a long-term energy plan. We have had efforts by only a few leaders." [...]

Giorgos Adamidis is one of the people in the political system who has lobbied hard for lignite. He runs the union representing workers at the Public Power Corporation.

"I believe there is some human involvement in climate change but there's no way it's so high that it will destroy the planet," says Adamidis, who worked in coal plants. "I can't imagine that, and scientists haven't proved it, in my opinion."

The union applauded when President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords. Though Adamidis says he cringes at Trump's description of climate change as a "Chinese hoax," he believes the financial interests of renewable-energy companies are pushing climate-change fears.

read the article or listen to the podcast

National Public Radio: How America's Idea Of Illegal Immigration Doesn't Always Match Reality

The total number of people living in the country illegally — about 11 million — has made headlines recently, because immigration advocates suggest that under the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies, almost all of them could be targeted for deportation. (More than 700,000 "DREAMers" — immigrants who were brought into the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas as children — are still temporarily protected from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.)

A large majority of those people currently living in the U.S. illegally have been here for a decade or longer, which is a major shift from the situation at the turn of the millennium.[...]

Of people living in the U.S. illegally, more than half are from Mexico. The population from that one country far outnumbers the population from entire continents. But there are fewer people of Mexican origin living in the U.S. now than there were a decade ago.[...]

But there just aren't very many farming jobs in the U.S., overall. So farming is not a common industry for the 11 million — only 4 percent of people living here illegally work in agriculture.

read the article 

National Public Radio: The U.S. And China: Two Centuries Of Infatuation And Disappointment

In the 19th century, more Chinese workers started coming because the U.S. signed a treaty with China in 1868, and as Pomfret writes: "By the time the treaty was signed, Chinese had been coming to the United States for almost two decades." They soon represented 10 percent of California's population.

Americans welcomed them. Chinese workers drained swamps to produce millions of acres of the richest farmland in the world. The Chinese were miners, laundrymen, cooks, small merchants and railroad workers. They helped build the West. A Republican who owned mines and built railroads told the California State Senate that Chinese workers were "men of iron" and "hardy, industrious laborers."

But once the Civil War ended in 1865, a huge pool of American men headed west to look for jobs. The economy slowed, and Americans turned on the Chinese. At that time, a higher percentage of Chinese were employed than white men, so state laws blocked Chinese entry to the U.S. and prevented those already here from working.

In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. for 10 years. It was the first time the U.S. specifically denied entry to a particular ethnic group. [...]

Pomfret describes the strange and complex situation as a "never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again."

read the article 

National Public Radio: How To Win The Presidency With 27 Percent Of The Popular Vote

We decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Assuming a candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and then didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win?

Based on 2012 data, the answer is: 27 percent.  [...]

We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for one thing. Moreover, we're assuming there are only two candidates in the race, which, of course, is not the case this year. [...]

Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For example, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — a sizable gap, but nothing like the Electoral College walloping: Reagan won 525 electoral votes, beating Mondale by 95 percentage points. [...]

Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that most closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, one could call it one of the "fairest" elections in modern politics.

read the article 

National Public Radio: Along Germany's Coast, A Nazi Resort Becomes An Upscale Destination

It's a legacy Germany has struggled to erase by re-purposing or razing Nazi-era structures. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, for example, was placed in an old SS barracks in Nuremburg, while the German Finance Ministry took over the Nazi aviation building in Berlin.

The Berlin bunker where Hitler spent his final days was reduced to a parking lot.

Usually there's little or no complaint about these refurbishments. But one government-sanctioned plan for a Third Reich landmark is sparking a public outcry — a commercial exploitation of the biggest Nazi relic on the Baltic Sea coast.

It's a resort Hitler built between 1936 and 1939 along sandy, white beaches for working-class Germans, one that was grandiose even by Nazi standards. Concrete dormitories that are six stories high and 550 yards wide were erected side by side over 2.8 miles of pristine coastline on the northern island of Ruegen.[...]

Awareness of the site's grim history is something museum director Lucke and other critics of the project believe will dissipate with the conversion. Many historians and some former residents of the site during East German times feel it glosses over a dangerous part of German history that shouldn't be forgotten.

read the article 

National Public Radio: Sept. 11 Marked Turning Point For Muslims In Increasingly Diverse America

"Before Sept. 11, Muslims – the majority of them – were living here physically, [but] mentally and spiritually they were living back home," says Zahid Bukhari, executive director of the Council for Social Justice at the Islamic Circle of North America.

Interfaith efforts in those days were scorned as un-Islamic, he says. Bukhari, who moved from Pakistan to the U.S. in the 1980s and now lives in Frederick, Md., urges his fellow immigrant Muslims, including the most devout, to turn their attention away from their native lands and focus on their adopted homeland. [...]

The struggle to improve the image of Muslim Americans has not been easy. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that of eight major religious groups in the country, people ranked Muslims at the very bottom. [...]

In the 2000 election, a survey by the Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS) project at Georgetown University and Zogby Analytics found that immigrant Muslims, especially those from Arab countries, preferred George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, over Democrat Al Gore. They appreciated Bush's criticism of the racial profiling of Arab-Americans, and many aligned with conservative positions on social issues and the Republican emphasis on personal responsibility over government welfare.

read the article 

National Public Radio: A New Opera Illuminates The 'Lavender Scare,' A Little-Explored Era In Queer History

In the 1950s, as members of Congress were rooting out suspected communists in government and Hollywood, they broadened their search to include homosexuals and lesbians, under the theory that closeted gays could be more easily blackmailed into revealing government secrets. That crusade, dubbed the "lavender scare," is at the center of Fellow Travelers, a new stage production that received its world premiere last night at Cincinnati Opera. [...]

During the McCarthy era, anything connected with homosexuality could lead to scandal. Mallon points to the example of Lester Hunt, a real-life senator from Wyoming who committed suicide in his office after the arrest of his son for allegedly soliciting gay sex in Lafayette Square. (Author Alan Drury took pieces of the Lester Hunt story and used them in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Advise and Consent.) [...]

The consequences of being found out were real. Thousands of people lost their jobs, and restrictions on hiring gays in government remained in place into the 1990s. Jamie Shoemaker, a linguist with the National Security Administration, says his record was spotless when, one day, he was called to a meeting.

read the article 

National Public Radio: Denmark's 'Martyr Museum' Places Socrates And Suicide Bombers Side-By-Side

"Since 9/11, the word 'martyr' has been popping up in our minds more and more. It would have been in many ways strange if we were not discussing our own time when we did this show," Grimbäck says.

The show does not endorse such actions, but seeks to explore the many definitions of the word "martyr," says fellow artist Ida Grarup.

"To see the world through these terrorist eyes for a couple of minutes is not the same as sympathizing or understanding them," Grarup says. [...]

"A lot of Danes feel like freedom of speech is a very big thing, and they like to talk about it. But when it's something that they don't necessarily agree with, then it's not freedom of speech, it's just wrong," says sociology student Tea Ingemann Olsen, who traveled two hours to see the Martyr Museum.

read the article