Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MICHEL MARTIN, host: I’m Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

The guys are heading into the Barbershop. They’ve got a lot on their minds, including that dustup between popular radio personality Tom Joyner and his old friends, talk show host Tavis Smiley and scholar Cornel West. We’ll talk about why Joyner thinks that Smiley and West are actually to blame for some of the rude remarks directed at the president.

But first, we are going to talk about some bad news about the economy. Today’s report from the Labor Department showed only 18,000 new jobs were added in June. That edged the unemployment rate up to 9.2 percent. And this month marks two years from what we were told was the end of the recession. President Obama talked about this in brief remarks today.

President BARACK OBAMA: There are bills and trade agreements before Congress right now that could get all these ideas moving. All of them have bipartisan support. All of them could pass immediately and I urge Congress not to wait. The American people need us to do everything we can to help strengthen this economy and make sure that we are producing more jobs.

MARTIN: Here to give us the big picture on these low jobs numbers, Marilyn Geewax, NPR’s senior business editor. She’s with us once again in our studios in Washington. Marilyn, thanks so much for joining us once again.

MARILYN GEEWAX: Hi, nice to be here.

MARTIN: Now, you know, on the face of it, the unemployment rate edging up a tenth of a percent from 9.1 percent to 9.2 percent, bad doesn’t sound that bad, but you’re saying it’s actually more significant than the numbers would appear. Tell us why.

GEEWAX: When you duke around in these numbers, everything is bad – wages were down, temporary workers got hurt, jobs creation was really sluggish. It was just so far below what you’d want to see this far into the recovery. Remember, Michel, that we are now exactly two years into what is supposed to be this recovery. Starting in June of 2009, the economy began growing. So if the economy is growing, we should be adding jobs. We should be pretty far along now.

Well, in June of 2009 the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent and now we’re at 9.2 percent. Wow, you know, two years of expansion and all you’ve gotten is to drop the unemployment rate from 9.5 to 9.2? That’s awful.

MARTIN: And you were also saying that it’s also – the psychological effect of this also is that people were expecting a lot more in part because of certain events that you would’ve thought would’ve led to job creation.

GEEWAX: You know, there was a sense out there that jobs were going to be picking up again in June because we had had some sort of big shocks that happened in the spring. Remember, obviously, gas prices shot up. We went really quickly up in gas prices to almost $4 a gallon in early May. So that set people back. But we also had other setbacks in the spring. Fukushima, the terrible events in Japan, where we had a tsunami, an earthquake and all those supply disruptions. That was bound to ripple out into some of our manufacturing in this country. So that was a bad event in March.

But April was a terrible weather month. You know, we had a lot of those tornados, flooding, it was still tough in early May. So here we get to June and it’s pretty balmy. Gas prices have eased back. We’re down to about $3.60 a gallon. Now, that’s not cheap, admittedly, that’s a lot more than last summer. But still, it’s down from the peaks and psychologically that should’ve helped.

The Fukushima thing is starting to work itself out. And all of that bad weather, the tornados, you would think that by now there would be a bump up, a stimulus effect from that because you have to rebuild those homes. You have to clean up from all of that debris. So where is it? You know, there’s kind of almost a mystery to this economy that you keep thinking that the jobs reports should be getting better. And I think we can turn to any one of the 14.1 million Americans who don’t have jobs right now and they can assure you that it’s just not happening. We’re not getting the job growth.

MARTIN: Now, we mentioned earlier that the president is going to meet again this Sunday with the congressional leadership to talk about, you know, how they can come to agreement on the federal budget. As we mentioned earlier, the congressional Republicans have said that they won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling unless there’s a broader agreement over the federal budget and reducing the deficit.

Do you think that the lack of a deal on this bigger issue is somehow affecting job creation?

GEEWAX: Yes. You almost have to think that there’s something out there that is eroding confidence because it shouldn’t be this bad. We should be adding jobs. You look at a lot of statistics and you would think, well, geez, we should be moving forward. But we’re not. And what is that problem? And I think that one could make a pretty reasonable argument that businesses are not hiring because there’s a lack of confidence out there. They don’t know quite what’s going to happen.

I mean, what if we really did have a government default? I mean, that would be – many economists believe it would be catastrophic, the impact on interest rates would be huge. So people are pretty worried about that.

MARTIN: And we’re also getting mixed signals about whether the two sides are in fact closer to an agreement or not. I’ll just play a short clip from a news conference at the Capitol today that included House Speaker John Boehner. Here he is.

Representative JOHN BOEHNER: There is no agreement in private or in public. And as the president said yesterday, we are this far apart. It’s not like there’s some imminent – a deal about to happen. There are serious disagreements about how to deal with this very serious problem.

MARTIN: As I mentioned, we’re speaking with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax and we’re talking about the unemployment numbers that came out today. Not good numbers. So how do you think this would factor into it? I mean, obviously I think the Republicans would say – not that I speak for them – but I think that they would say that if there is an agreement to bring down the deficit, that would be a stimulus to the economy because it would give business confidence.

GEEWAX: Right. You know, I think that the thing about businesses is generally speaking, they can cope with almost anything, as long as they know what anything is. They just need some sense of confidence about where are we going with this? Let’s get it done so that they can make their plans. For example, some of the things that President Obama has talked about that would be part of a deal here, corporate jet tax breaks, and he wants to change the way corporate jets are depreciated, and that would potentially harm that industry.

Well, if you’re in Kansas and you have a plant where you’re making corporate jets, you could probably cope with the news one way or the other, but not knowing if those interest – if those deductions were going to change the depreciation scheduled, it puts you in a very awkward position. You don’t know what’s going to happen.

MARTIN: And finally, Marilyn, the president referred to some ideas that he says are ready to go. What are some of those ideas?

GEEWAX: Well, he wants some things like these trade agreements they’ve been kicking around for a while. He’d like to get that done. Again, back to this uncertainty thing. One way or the other, do the trade deals or don’t do them. There’s payroll tax cuts. He wants them extended. Are we going to do that or aren’t we? So there are many questions out here where Congress just – if they would give people certainty, I think employers could move ahead.

MARTIN: Marilyn Geewax is our senior business editor and one of our frequent contributors on jobs and the economy. Marilyn, thanks so much for joining us.

GEEWAX: Always nice to be here.

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U.S.

States Take Steps To Curtail Illegal Immigration

Civil rights groups sued Friday in federal court to block Alabama’s new law cracking down on illegal immigration, which supporters and opponents have called the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.

The lawsuit, filed in Huntsville, said the law is of “unprecedented reach” and goes beyond similar laws passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. Federal judges already have blocked all or parts of the laws in those states. It asks a judge to declare Alabama’s law unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

Alabama’s law, which takes effect Sept. 1, allows police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant if the person is stopped for some other reason. It also requires businesses to check the legal status of new workers and requires schools to report the immigration status of students.

The lawsuit said the new law will subject Alabama residents, including U.S. citizens and non-citizens who are in the country legally, to racial profiling. The law also recalls memories of Alabama’s troubled segregationist past by making life more difficult for a targeted class of people, according to the lawsuit.

“Individuals who may be perceived as ‘foreign’ by state or local law enforcement agents will be in constant jeopardy of harassment and unlawfully prolonged detention by state law enforcement officers,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed by various organizations across northern Alabama that represent immigrant groups as well as individual immigrants who are listed under the pseudonyms John Doe and Jane Doe. The lawsuit names as defendants various state and local officials, including Republican Gov. Robert Bentley, Attorney General Luther Strange and state schools Superintendent Joe Morton.

Supporters of the new law, including Bentley, have predicted it would withstand any legal challenges.

The law was written so that if any provisions are found to be unconstitutional, other parts of the law can remain in effect.

Friday morning was absolutely your last chance to watch a 20-story-tall space shuttle rise, pivot and speed away over the Atlantic Ocean with a crew of NASA astronauts aboard.

Hundreds of thousands of onlookers claimed their spots on the Florida coast to watch the liftoff of Atlantis. And of the shuttle program’s 135 launches, Friday’s was a suspenseful one.

Shuttle Through The Decades

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A montage of shuttle launches.

Credit: Andrew Prince, Maggie Starbard, Marina Dominguez/NPR

Weather concerns threatened to keep the shuttle on the pad up until almost the final moments. And a brief, unexpected delay 31 seconds before liftoff held up the launch for two minutes as NASA technicians quickly confirmed that a venting arm had been properly retracted.

Now the suspense is all about NASA’s future direction without a spaceship of its own.

Of Prowess And Prestige

Atlantis’ return from its planned 12-day mission will mark both the end of the 30-year-old shuttle program and the start of what’s likely to be at least a four-year gap before another U.S. rocket again rumbles off a launchpad carrying passengers.

NASA has endured such extended gaps in the past — including a nearly six-year period between the end of the Apollo program and the first shuttle launch in 1981.

Indeed, over the first half-century of spaceflight, deadly accidents and transitions between space vehicle designs frequently grounded both the U.S. and Russian space programs for months — or even years — at a time.

Earthbound

The end of the shuttle program won’t be the first time NASA astronauts have been without a spacecraft of their own. Program delays and deadly disasters have led to frequent gaps in U.S. spacefaring.

May 16, 1963-March 23, 1965: Tight budgets, technical challenges and hurricanes slow the transition from the one-person capsules of NASA’s Mercury program to a more versatile two-person Gemini spacecraft.

Nov. 15, 1966-Oct. 11, 1968: A January 1967 fire kills three Apollo astronauts on the launchpad during a practice countdown, leading to extensive redesigns. A scheduled three-month pause between Gemini and the Apollo program — which would eventually take Americans to the moon — lasts nearly two years.

Feb. 8, 1974-July 15, 1975: A quick trio of extended visits to the Skylab space station precedes the final Apollo mission — a symbolic orbital linkup with a Soviet space crew. But the complexity of synchronizing systems and procedures between the two Cold War rivals means the “handshake in space” does not occur until 17 months after the last Skylab flight.

July 24, 1975-April 12, 1981: After Apollo, U.S. astronauts wait until space shuttle Columbia is ready for its much-delayed maiden flight. Technical delays stretch the wait for more than 5 1/2 years.

Jan. 28, 1986-Sept. 29, 1988: Seven crew members — including teacher Christa McAuliffe — are killed when the Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff. Redesigning the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters and implementing other safety and management changes take more than 2 1/2 years.

Feb. 1, 2003-July 26, 2005: Wing damage caused by dislodged insulating foam destroys Columbia during re-entry, killing the seven-person crew. NASA’s remaining three shuttles are grounded, leaving U.S. astronauts dependent on Russian spacecraft for nearly 2 1/2 years.

— Mark Stencel

But those who rode into space aboard the shuttle have mixed feelings about the implications of the shuttle’s retirement for the country’s technological prowess and prestige.

“After this mission, we will no longer have the ability to send American astronauts into space ourselves,” former astronaut Leroy Chiao lamented Thursday on All Things Considered. “And, arguably, we will no longer be the leaders in human spaceflight until we get that capability back.”

Astronaut Cady Coleman, just back from an extended stay abroad the space station, was wistful, too. But she told host Melissa Block that NASA needs to refocus its staff and budget on new technology and new vehicles.

“Going further is what we’re all about,” Coleman said. “So it’s a hard change. It’s necessary. And in some ways, I think, it’s OK just to take some time to grieve.”

A Brittle Icon

For three decades, Atlantis and its four sister ships were powerful national symbols — “a true American icon,” as shuttle launch director Michael Leinbach told the crew before liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center.

But the shuttle was a gawky and fragile symbol, too. Two shuttles — Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 — were destroyed in accidents, killing 14 astronauts.

The reusable space planes also proved too expensive, complicated and dangerous to become the routine “transportation system” they were originally designed to be.

The board appointed to investigate the Columbia accident underscored that in its findings — providing the basis for the Bush administration’s 2004 decision to retire the shuttle fleet after the completion of the International Space Station. The shuttle “is not inherently unsafe,” the investigators said, but hobbled by design and budgetary compromises, and NASA’s promise to make spaceflight cheap and routine was unfulfilled:

“Columbiaʼs failure to return home is a harsh reminder that the Space Shuttle is a developmental vehicle that operates not in routine flight but in the realm of dangerous exploration.”

Grounded?

Retiring the shuttle program does not mean the U.S. space agency and its astronauts are actually grounded. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, himself a four-time astronaut, made that point during a July 1 appearance at the National Press Club in Washington.

“When I hear people say, or listen to the media reports that the final shuttle flights marks the end of U.S. human spaceflight, I have to tell you, you all must be living on another planet,” Bolden said.

But Bolden said the end of the shuttle program does mean the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets for access to space is likely to last until at least 2015, when a commercially developed U.S. space capsule might be ready to ferry crews to and from orbit.

The Obama administration and Congress canceled the shuttle’s originally planned successor largely because it was over budget and behind schedule. But recently NASA announced that the work would still provide the foundation for a longer-term program of human exploration beyond the Earth’s immediate orbit, including nearby asteroids and eventually Mars.

Those plans matter a great deal to Abby Harrison, a 14-year-old high school freshman and space blogger who plans to be the first person to set foot on Mars.

The aspiring astronaut from Minneapolis flew with her mother to Florida two months ago to see the shuttle program’s penultimate liftoff in person. And she was among a crowd watching Friday’s launch from a “tweetup” hosted by the Canadian Space Agency’s headquarters near Montreal.

Abby noted that NASA’s timeline squares perfectly with her plans for joining the astronaut corp — after she graduates from the Air Force Academy and completes advanced degrees in geology and biology.

“I’m fine with ending the program,” she said, “as long as that money goes to something new.”

The former director of a historic Chicago-area cemetery has been convicted in a money-making scheme that involved digging up bodies and reselling plots.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office says 51-year-old Carolyn Towns pleaded guilty Friday and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Towns was director of Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip when prosecutors say she and three workers desecrated hundreds of graves.

Prosecutors say Towns stole more than $100,000 from the corporation that owned Burr Oak by keeping the payments for graves and having workers stack bodies or dump remains in unmarked mass graves.

Three other former Burr Oak workers have been charged and are scheduled to appear in court next week.

Many famous African-Americans are buried at Burr Oak, including lynching victim Emmett Till.

The overwhelming majority of babies in the U.S. are born healthy, and their growth brings joy and comfort to their parents.

But across the country, there is a whopping disparity in birth outcomes based on race. Black women fare worse than white women in almost every aspect of reproductive health.

“Any state you look at, you see the same disparities, and race is the strongest predictor of disparities,” says Dr. Deborah Ehrenthal, of Christiana Care Health System in Delaware. “So we see higher rates of infant mortality, higher rates of preterm delivery.” Black women are about 60 percent more likely than white women to deliver babies early, and black infants are about 230 percent more likely than white infants to die before their first birthdays.

Racial Disparities In Birth Outcomes

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR

In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Christiana Hospital, a corridor is filled with the hum of incubators, which serve as a lifeline for fragile newborns.

Along with the large staff — including more than 100 nurses — you can’t help but notice the parents in the NICU, hovering over incubators, rocking quietly in chairs.

Tiera Carter was visiting the NICU for the first time since giving birth to her 1-day-old son. His name is David, and he weighs less than 2 pounds.

“His chances are pretty good of him gaining weight and getting better, right?” she asks Dr. David Paul, a neonatologist.

“It’s going to take him a while,” he says. “It’s going to be two to three weeks until we see him gain weight.”

Fragile lives. Fingers crossed.

‘Enormous Stressors’ Take A Toll On Black Women

The emotional toll is quite evident here, and so too is the cost of preterm birth.

In addition to seeing patients, Paul also heads up the Delaware Healthy Mother and Infant Consortium, which brings together public health officials, physicians and others in an effort to address health disparities.

Women in particular, especially in low-income communities, have enormous stressors they’re coping with. They’re usually centrally responsible for raising children, taking care of ailing elders, working, earning money, dealing with material hardship.

- Arline Geronimus, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health

Paul says the overall tab for premature births in Delaware runs as high as $80 million a year. More than half of that is paid for by Medicaid. And he says many of those premature births are due to pre-existing factors in the mothers’ lives — factors he encounters every day in the NICU.

“We see so many of the same risk factors over and over again,” he says. “Hypertension, obesity, smoking, diabetes, lack of antenatal care, drug use, alcohol use, poor maternal health.”

And in Delaware, as in other states, there is something counterintuitive going on with the race gap in birth outcomes. The gap does not narrow with age and educational attainment. In other words, white women’s health outcomes improve as they climb the socioeconomic ladder and give birth in their 20s and early 30s, rather than in their teen years. Not so for black women, whose health problems seem to compound with age.

So what explains that? Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, calls this phenomenon “weathering.” She theorizes that the cumulative impact of constantly dealing with disadvantages causes birth outcomes for black women to deteriorate with maternal age.

“Women in particular, especially in low-income communities, have enormous stressors they’re coping with,” she says. “They’re usually centrally responsible for raising children, taking care of ailing elders, working, earning money, dealing with material hardship.”

And it’s not just hardships associated with poverty. Geronimus says that for middle- and upper-class blacks, the pressure to be model minorities — or sometimes being the only minority — can also take a toll.

When Geronimus began talking about her weathering theory more than 20 years ago, she was widely pilloried. Some called her racist; others wanted her fired.

But in the years since, there’s been growing acceptance of her view that constant stress does lead to the deterioration of bodily systems: the cardiovascular system, the metabolic system and the immune system.

“This weathering process that eats at your health begins quite young. Its impact is seen as early as the 20s,” she says.

In fact, studies have found that African-American women of childbearing age in particular, in their 20s and early 30s, already suffer from chronic disease.

“In those ages, they’re suffering from hypertension at two or three times the rate of whites their own age,” she says. “African-Americans at age 35 have the rates of disability of white Americans who are 55, and we haven’t seen much traction over 20 to 30 years of trying to reduce and eliminate these disparities.”

“We’re not understanding what a broader social problem it is,” she adds, “and how much social policies, housing policies, economic policies, urban planning policies all impact health through these various roots and mechanisms.”

Doing Their Best, With Limited Funds

Back in Delaware, neonatologist David Paul agrees that addressing broader social issues would solve problems before patients land in the NICU. But he says that at the moment, there’s not enough research to convince those holding the purse strings that such a strategy would work.

How Delaware Compares

In 2000, Delaware had the third-highest infant mortality rate in the country, with 9.59 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 2007, the rate had fallen to 7.64.

Here, the 20 highest infant mortality rates across the U.S. in 2007, per 1,000 live births:

Washington, D.C.: 12.97
Mississippi: 9.98
Alabama: 9.94
Louisiana: 9.17
North Carolina: 8.52
South Carolina: 8.51
Oklahoma: 8.41
Tennessee: 8.30
Maryland: 8.02
Georgia: 8.01
Kansas: 8.00
Michigan: 7.94
Arkansas: 7.81
Ohio: 7.77
Virginia: 7.73
Delaware: 7.64
Indiana: 7.58
North Dakota: 7.58
Pennsylvania: 7.53
Missouri: 7.42

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

“I think if we had data to show that, yeah, if we build more sidewalks, if we build more soccer fields, if we put more money into physical education at school, we’ll improve those outcomes later on, we’d be able to go to the legislators and have a lot more power to say, let’s put money upfront.”

For now, they are doing what they can, with limited funds.

One floor down from the NICU, Dr. Vanita Jain puts a fetal heart rate monitor to Dana Thurn’s big belly. Ideally, the public health system would have reached Thurn much earlier — long before she became obese, long before her gastric bypass surgery, long before she began suffering from depression.

But in Delaware, the thinking is, nine months of pregnancy is an ideal time to reach women they may not otherwise reach.

Thurn is one of more than 10,000 women enrolled in the state’s Healthy Women, Healthy Babies program, which provides women with extra resources beyond standard medical care. So, when she comes in for a traditional OB-GYN visit, she also meets with dietitian Maureen O’Brien, who goes over which foods to eat and which to avoid.

Thurn will also hear from breast-feeding counselors and social worker Karen Spring, who screens for depression and also helps families find resources, such as food pantries or job placement agencies. She’ll also help women enroll in WIC — the government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

In Delaware, the good news is that preterm births are down. The state’s infant mortality rate has also dropped — by about 10 percent since the early 2000s. However, it’s still higher than the national average.

Since 2006, the state has spent about $4 million a year on an assortment of programs aimed at eliminating stress, promoting healthier living and improving birth outcomes.

Is $4 million is adequate? “It’s been enough to make a difference in Delaware,” says Paul. “It’s not enough to eliminate the problem.”

And so for the foreseeable future, Paul will have additional duties — doing rounds with his patients at the NICU, and also convincing those in power that spending money upfront is an investment that could save millions in the long run.

An unexpected drop in hiring put an end to the excitement that had been bubbling up on Wall Street over the past two weeks.

Stock indexes fell sharply Friday, erasing most of the week’s gains, after the government reported that U.S. employers created the fewest number of jobs in nine months. The 18,000 net jobs in created in June were a fraction of what many economists expected and dampened hopes that the economy was improving. Private companies added jobs at the slowest pace in more than a year. The unemployment rate edged up to 9.2 percent, its highest level this year.

A broader measure of weakness in the labor market was even worse. Among Americans who want to work, 16.2 percent are either unemployed or unable to find full-time jobs. That was up from 15.8 percent in May.

“There’s just a lot more evidence than before that we’re in an extended weak patch,” said Brian Gendreau, market strategist for Cetera Financial Group. He said private economists will likely reduce their projections for overall economic growth this year.

The Standard and Poor’s 500 index fell 9.42 points, or 0.7 percent, to 1,343.80. That eliminated the index’s gains from Thursday and left it with a 0.3 percent gain for the week.

The Dow Jones industrial average lost 62.29, or 0.5 percent, to 12,657.20. The Dow, which had been down by as much as 150 points Friday, had only its second down day over the past nine. The Nasdaq composite dropped 12.85, or 0.4 percent, to 2,859.81. It was its first loss in two weeks.

NPR

GRAPHICS: U.S. Payrolls And Unemployment

Companies whose business would be most affected by a weakening economy were hit hardest. Bank of America Corp., General Electric Co. and Boeing Co. were among the biggest decliners in the Dow average.

“The chance of a July bounce back in the economy looks pretty slim now,” said Jay Tyner, president of Semmax Financial Group in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Expectations for Friday’s jobs report were raised Thursday after payroll processor ADP said that private companies added more than 150,000 jobs in June. While the ADP report does not always accurately predict the broader Labor Department report, some investors said that the apparent clashing pictures of the job market were due to a jobs pickup in the last weeks of June.

Phil Orlando, chief market strategist at Federated Investors, said he believes manufacturers began rehiring workers in late June following signs that Japan’s economy was improving. Hiring slumped in May due partly to high fuel prices and disruptions of industrial supplies because of the earthquake and tsunami disasters in Japan.

Traders rushed to the relative safety of government bonds. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.01 percent from 3.19 percent just before the jobs report came out. Bond yields fall when demand for them increases.

Oil prices fell 2.5 percent. The slowdown in hiring suggested that demand for fuel will increase less than traders had expected. Lower fuel prices could eventually help the economy by leaving consumers with more money to spend on things other than gas.

Weak economic data this spring pushed stocks near their lowest levels of the year two weeks ago. Markets recovered last week, giving the Dow its best week in two years, on signals that the economy was rebounding. Stock indexes closed near their 2011 highs on Thursday.

Despite the weak job market, analysts still expect earnings at big U.S. companies to be strong. Companies are benefiting from export growth as the weak dollar makes American goods cheaper, and therefore more competitive, in overseas markets. Aluminum maker Alcoa Inc., one of the 30 companies in the Dow average, will be the first major corporation to report second-quarter financial results on Monday.

Orlando, the market strategist, said investors will be looking to see how companies have responded to higher commodity costs and a shortage of parts from Japan. “It’s not going to be an earnings season where you can have a blanket proclamation regarding how companies are doing this time around,” he said.

In other company news, Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corp. fell nearly 4 percent as a phone-hacking scandal at its News of the World tabloid deepened. A former editor of the paper who later served as spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron was arrested Friday. News Corp. shuttered the 168-year old paper on Thursday in hopes of saving its deal to take over the lucrative British satellite TV company British Sky Broadcasting. Government approval of that deal will now be delayed because of the crisis, which has shocked Britain.

The Dow rose 0.6 for the week, the Nasdaq 1.6 percent.

Two stocks fell for every one that rose on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was lighter than average at 3.1 billion shares.

Three suspected Somali pirates were charged with murder Friday in the slayings of four Americans aboard a hijacked yacht off the coast of Africa in February.

Ahmed Muse Salad, Abukar Osman Beyle and Shani Nurani Shiekh Abrar could face the death penalty if they are convicted. Attorneys for the men could not immediately be reached for comment after business hours Friday.

The Somalis are among 14 men who were charged with piracy, kidnapping and weapons violations in the hijacking of the yacht Quest. Eleven of those men have already pleaded guilty to piracy for their roles in the case, although prosecutors have said none of those men shot the Americans or ordered anyone else to. As part of a plea deal, the pirates agreed to cooperate with authorities in this case and possibly others in exchange for the possibility of having their mandatory life sentences reduced.

The murder charges were among several new charges handed down by a grand jury that carry the possibility of the death penalty. They include hostage taking resulting in death, violence against maritime navigation resulting in death and kidnapping resulting in death. In total, 22 of the 26 counts are death-eligible offenses.

“The charges announced in today’s superseding indictment send a strong message to those who seek to harm Americans on the high seas: you will be subject to American justice,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Janice Fedarcyk said in a statement. “Modern-day pirates remain a very real danger; the FBI joins our international law enforcement partners in our mutual goal of maintaining the rule of law on the high seas.”

The owners of the Quest, Jean and Scott Adam of California and friends Bob Riggle and Phyllis Macay of Washington state were shot to death several days after being taken hostage several hundred miles south of Oman.

The Adams had been sailing full-time on their 58-foot (17-meter) yacht since December 2004 after retiring.

They were the first U.S. citizens killed in a wave of pirate attacks that have plagued the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean in recent years, despite an international flotilla of warships that patrol the area. One of the men who has pleaded guilty was once a pirate victim himself. Others charged in the case have said they boarded the yacht while it sat still in the water and the Americans were sleeping.

The pirates said they intended to bring the Americans back to Somalia where they could be held for ransom. But that plan fell apart when four U.S. warships began shadowing the Quest.

The Navy had told the pirates that they could keep the yacht in exchange for the hostages, but they refused to take the deal because they didn’t believe they would get enough money. Ransoms are typically made for millions of dollars.

After several days, court records say Abrar, 29, fired a shot above Scott Adam’s head and told him to tell the Navy that if they came any closer that the Americans would be killed. Soon after, a rocket propelled grenade was fired by one of the convicted pirates at the USS Sterett, where two other convicted pirates were on board conducting the negotiations.

Court documents say the Americans were being held in the yacht’s steering wheel house by seven men when gunfire directed at the Americans erupted. Other pirates have said they tried to stop the shooting once it started.

A 15th man also faces piracy charges for serving as the pirates’ land-based negotiator and is considered the highest-ranking pirate the U.S. has ever captured.

In all, 19 men boarded the American boat. Four of them died on board including two who have also been identified in court records as those who shot at the Americans. One person was released by authorities because he is a juvenile.

The three men charged with murder are scheduled to be arraigned on July 20.

Enlarge David J. Phillip/AP

Jamie Leigh Jones, right, listens to a question along with her attorney Todd Kelly, left, outside the federal courthouse on June 14, 2011, in Houston.

David J. Phillip/AP

Jamie Leigh Jones, right, listens to a question along with her attorney Todd Kelly, left, outside the federal courthouse on June 14, 2011, in Houston.

A former KBR Inc. employee who said she was drugged and raped while working in Iraq lost her lawsuit against the military contractor Friday.

The jury of eight men and three women rejected Jamie Leigh Jones’ claims a day after starting deliberations in a Houston federal courthouse. Jones, 26, said she was raped in 2005 while working for KBR at Camp Hope, Baghdad.

Jones sued KBR, its former parent Halliburton Co., and a former KBR firefighter, Charles Bortz, whom she identified as one of her rapists. The Houston-based companies and Bortz denied her allegations.

The alleged sexual assault was investigated by authorities but no criminal charges were filed.

“I was going up against a monster,” Jones, sobbing loudly, told The Associated Press. “I’m devastated. I believe I did the right thing coming forward.”

KBR applauded the jury’s verdict, which in addition to rejecting Jones’ claims that she was raped also denied her fraud claim against the company.

“Since 2005, KBR has been subjected to a continuing series of lies perpetuated by the plaintiff in front of Congress, in the media, and to any audience wishing to lend an ear to this story,” spokeswoman Sharon Bolen said in a statement.

When the jury decided that Jones hadn’t been raped, a number of the questions before them were rendered moot, including accusations against Halliburton, said KBR attorney Daniel Hedges.

Jones said the civil trial wasn’t a fair fight. She said she felt she lost because the jury wasn’t allowed to hear details of her attacker’s past but were allowed to hear hers. Bortz said the sex was consensual.

Jones said she believed her bruises and the description of the rape would have swayed jurors.

“I just thought that the physical evidence would help. I guess the fact that my entire life was on display and (his) wasn’t” made a difference, Jones said.

Her attorney had asked jurors to award her as much as 5 percent of KBR’s net worth in actual or punitive damages. That would be more than $114 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Attorney Ron Estefan, in his closing arguments, accused KBR of neglecting to enforce its policies against sexual harassment for years by its contract workers in Iraq. The neglect facilitated Jones’ rape, he said.

Lawyers for Bortz and the companies argued that Jones concocted her story out of fear of gossip among coworkers at the camp.

Jones’ mother, Breanna Morgan, said she worried that the outcome might discourage future rape victims from coming forward, saying her daughter, “had to go through so much and she did it to help others.”

“I feel like, because she did that and then there was this verdict, others won’t want to,” Morgan said. “I feel it sends a clear message.”

Bolen, the KBR spokeswoman, said the “outcome of this jury trial as judged by her peers is the same result that the State Department got in 2005; that the Justice Department found in 2008. We are deeply gratified that the justice system has worked.”

Jones, who had been a clerical worker in Baghdad’s Green Zone, testified that she was drugged and then raped by a group of KBR firefighters. She said Bortz was in her room the next morning. During four days on the stand, she told jurors she has no memory of what happened because she believed she was drugged with Rohypnol, known as the “date rape drug,” just before she was sexually assaulted.

The Associated Press usually doesn’t identify people alleging sexual assault, but Jones’ face and name have been in media reports and she has promoted her case on her own website.

Bortz’s attorney tried to show that after the alleged rape, Jones did not appear to act like she had been attacked but instead went to work as normal, joked around and talked about camp gossip. Bortz no longer works for KBR.

Joanne Vorpahl, one of KBR’s attorneys, tried to portray Jones to jurors as someone with a history of being dishonest on resumes and job applications, including not disclosing in a medical questionnaire she filled out before leaving for Iraq that she had been treated in prior years for various things, including depression, dizziness and kidney and bladder problems. Jones said those were simply mistakes and she never intended to be dishonest.

Jones also accused KBR officials of locking her in a trailer after she told them about the rape and not letting her call her family. She testified she’s been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, takes medications for anxiety and had to have reconstructive surgery for her breasts, which were disfigured in her attack.

KBR and Halliburton, which split in 2007, were unsuccessful in having Jones’ case settled through arbitration as stipulated in her contract.

Due in part to Jones’ case, federal lawmakers in 2009 approved a measure prohibiting contractors and subcontractors that receive $1 million in funds from the Department of Defense from requiring employees to resolve sexual assault allegations and other claims through arbitration.

Enlarge StoryCorps

Betsy Brooks remembered her father, Charles Brooks, during a recent visit to StoryCorps in New York with her boyfriend, John Grecsek.

StoryCorps

Betsy Brooks remembered her father, Charles Brooks, during a recent visit to StoryCorps in New York with her boyfriend, John Grecsek.

Betsy Brooks remembers her father, Charles, as a “razor-sharp” former Marine. The two had their share of arguments, she says. But that all changed late in her father’s life, as Betsy recently told her boyfriend, John Grecsek.

Charles was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease when he was 78. Betsy tells John about her relationship with her dad before, and after, the diagnosis.

“We butted heads from the moment we could,” Betsy says.

Her father was a Marine — and very proud of it.

“I always say that we learned the Marine Corps Hymn before we knew our ABCs,” says Betsy, 54. “He was a meticulous man. He was meticulous about the house and the yard. And he was a perfectionist. His favorite tool was his level.”

Betsy grew up on Staten Island, N.Y. Her father had served as a Marine in the 1940s.

“I was just cut from a different cloth,” she says. “My mother, she would make these lists of, you know, all my day’s crimes. She would save them for my father when he came home from work. And he would turn positively livid. So, the day I turned 18, I got myself my own apartment.”

“When did the Alzheimer’s start?” John asks.

“It started to become obvious that he wasn’t himself. He was a razor-sharp person, but he started not to be able to do simple things,” Betsy says. “I remember one time I asked him to make some picture frames for me. He loved to do that sort of stuff.”

But her father was no longer the handyman he once was. As Betsy recalls, “My mother called me up and she said, ‘Please, do me a favor and don’t ask him to make any more. He had such a hard time.’ You know, he was so confused.”

Enlarge Brooks Family Photo

Charles Brooks poses for a photograph in 1995, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Brooks Family Photo

Charles Brooks poses for a photograph in 1995, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Charles Brooks was 78 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And his condition brought a change to his relationship with his daughter.

“All of a sudden, he turned to me — because he knew that if he had every single drawer out from the dresser on the floor, I really couldn’t care less,” Betsy says. “So he didn’t really hide from me.”

In fact, the pair spent more time together, Betsy recalls.

“We would sit on the back porch and eat pistachio nuts and share a beer,” she says. And I could tell him my secrets. And I got to enjoy all the good that was in him.”

Betsy and John spoke about her father shortly after Charles died.

“I love my father tremendously,” Betsy says. “And believe me when I tell you, despite the head-butting, all I ever wanted to do was to please him. The past 12 years since he got sick — I wouldn’t trade those 12 years for anything. Except, I wish the price to pay for them wasn’t so high.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Nadia Reiman.

Enlarge NASA

While orbiting the moon, Apollo 8 astronauts were greeted by this view of the rising earth.

NASA

While orbiting the moon, Apollo 8 astronauts were greeted by this view of the rising earth.

In April 1981, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a space shuttle program meant to take astronauts, cargo, research experiments and military equipment into low Earth orbit. The shuttle mission, called STS-1 for the first “Space Transportation System” effort, lasted 2 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes and 53 seconds.

NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program will end when shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to launch on Friday, returns from its 12-day mission. The last flight of the shuttle program is STS-135.

Enlarge Norton Books/AP

Astrophysicist, television host and author Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Norton Books/AP

Astrophysicist, television host and author Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Neil deGrasse Tyson joins NPR’s host Michel Martin to talk more about the conclusion of the space shuttle program and that program’s impact. He is an astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and host of the PBS television series “NOVA scienceNow.”

DeGrasse Tyson points out a geopolitical gain of the shuttle program — it brought together disparate countries to build the International Space Station. He calls it the largest global collaboration outside of the waging of war. “It’s a remarkable achievement not only geopolitically but also as an engineering marvel. The thing in all of its splayed form is about the area of a football field,” he says.

DeGrasse Tyson recalls that telescopes shot into orbit used to quickly break down and be de-orbited within three years. Then came Hubble. The Hubble Space Telescope was serviced frequently. Its worn-out parts could be replaced, and its software could be upgraded. “It was a remarkable marriage of the man-in-space program and science,” he says.

NASA’s shuttle program not only expanded America’s knowledge base but, deGrasse Tyson says, also affected the nation’s mood. He recalls that in the 1960s, “every next space mission was more ambitious than the previous one. When you do that, it brings an entire nation with it. It influenced our culture, architecture, food, the ambitions of students in schools, clothing, storytelling on television and movies.”

NASA’s program also changed American perceptions of the Earth. DeGrasse Tyson explains that in 1968, when the astronauts of Apollo 8 photographed the Earth rising over the moon, it marked the beginning of the modern conservation movement. He says Americans suddenly looked at the Earth as an entity unto itself, rather than a sphere divided by political boundaries; as something to protect.

However, many people will remember the disasters of NASA’s shuttle program.

In 1986, Challenger’s launch into space ended tragically after an explosion. All seven crew members died.

In 2003, seven more died when Columbia all but disintegrated just minutes before it was supposed to land at the end of its mission.

When asked whether we learned something from these two moments, deGrasse Tyson says that failure is fundamental for advancement, and that being on the frontier comes with expectations that not everything will go perfectly.

He notes that the Challenger disaster spread concern across NASA about the safety of shuttle designs. DeGrasse Tyson points out that if any crew is sitting adjacent to fuel tanks on a shuttle, their lives will be taken if those tanks explode. He says that if a crew is sitting on top of the fuel tank and it explodes, the crew can use a “rocket nozzle” to propel the shuttle away from harm. “Henceforth, any newly designed spacecraft will not have astronauts adjacent to the fuel tanks,” he says.

Regardless, many may question the value of spending money on space exploration. Why not spend that money down here? DeGrasse Tyson reasons that America actually spends four-tenths of a penny per tax dollar on NASA. “If you take a paper dollar and cut off four-tenths of one percent of it, you don’t even get into the ink of that dollar,” he says to illustrate.

Looking to the future, deGrasse Tyson says he would double NASA’s budget if he had the power to do so, and that would allow the U.S. to explore further regions of space. He notes that Venus, with a temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit, has a runaway greenhouse effect; and Mars once had running water but now is bone dry. “Bad stuff is happening on those planets. I want to know what that is,” he says.

“If you’re going to say, ‘Only spend money to study Earth’ and you’re not going to study anything else … you can’t build a science on a study of one. And the universe provides the repository for comparative places so you can say, ‘Oh that’s how that works there! Let me bring that back to Earth.’ So the value for it, especially for this minute cost, is incalculable,” DeGrasse Tyson says.

In the coming days, Tell Me More will feature several conversations with pioneers in space exploration, including the first African-American to walk in space and the first Arab Muslim in space. Please check back for those stories.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

NEAL CONAN, host: The drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan begins this month, and Afghan forces are supposed to take over all combat operations by 2014. Whether they and the Kabul government will be ready is anybody’s guess. But after almost 10 years, the American public is weary of the casualties and the cost. Last month, NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman spoke with Sergeant Jon Moulder on his fourth combat deployment – two in Iraq and two now in Afghanistan. He says he’s slipping away.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED INTERVIEW)

Sergeant JON MOULDER: Every time you come over here on a deployment like this, it’s like you lose a little bit of piece of yourself. Every time you come over here, a little bit of piece of humanity every time. And I don’t want to hit that breaking point to where I have no respect for humanity left.

CONAN: If you’ve served in the military in Afghanistan, did you make a difference? Give us a call. 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Tom Bowman just returned from a month-long trip to Afghanistan. He’s here with us in Studio 3A. Welcome home, Tom.

TOM BOWMAN: Neal, good to be with you.

CONAN: And did the soldiers and Marines you spent time with think they made a difference?

BOWMAN: I think some of them have believed they’ve made a difference. We were with the Marines in Helmand Province in the southwestern part of the country, and also with soldiers in the eastern part of the country right next to the Pakistan border. And we were around an area called Marja, which is kind of a district in Helmand Province that a little over a year ago was sort of a no-go zone. It was full of Taliban and drug traffickers, and the Marines needed a lot more troops before they could go in and clear it out.

They have cleared it out, and the Taliban – you know, those who were not killed or captured – kind of scooted off to the outskirts of Marja. We were out there at some combat outposts trying to wrap them up. But there’s still a fight over there. But I think the Marines clearly think they’re making a difference. And the soldiers, it was the same. There are more soldiers now in the east. They think they’ve pushed out the Taliban, but they’re still a pretty, you know, determined enemy.

CONAN: And Marja was an area that, well, it was thought that was going to be a strong push early on in the surge, and it turned out to be a tougher battle than people thought.

BOWMAN: It did. There were a lot of IEDs there, those roadside bombs that are the biggest killer of American soldiers and Marines. And also there was a lack of government there for a long time. They promised – they called it government in a box. And one general told me, be wary if someone offers you a government in a box. A lot of times that box is empty.

CONAN: Or a coffin.

BOWMAN: Exactly, right. So they had some problems with governance. They still have problems with Afghan forces. The police are getting a little better. The Army is doing much better. But it’s a mixed bag. I mean, some Afghan forces really did a pretty good job. They could do their own patrols. But others were just sort of young and inexperienced and just kind of wandering around, I mean, and letting the Americans do all the work.

CONAN: And that raises the question, after the Marines leave Marja, is it going to be a government that springs up and local troops that are going to be able to maintain the kind of security gains that the Marines won at such a difficult and terrible price, or is this going to go back to Taliban control?

BOWMAN: Nobody knows, and that’s the key question. Will the Afghans step up like they have to to take control of their own country, both the governance and security part of it? We ran around with General Dave Rodriguez, the number two general who’s going to be leaving soon. And he basically told the Marines, the real important thing is you have to make sure the Afghans do a lot more for their own security.

CONAN: And we seem to hear a disconnect sometimes between senior officers who come back and say, there are important gains that have been made, and troops in the field, the guys you spent time with who say, wait a minute, you know, it’s a little less clear.

BOWMAN: Right. I mean, some of these guys who are in their fourth combat tour, for example, they see a little difference sometimes. Sometimes they don’t see really much of a difference at all. So some of them are kind of frustrated, and they basically say, why am I here? What am I doing? I’m not achieving as much as I thought I would. So it’s clearly a problem with some troops.

CONAN: You profiled a teacher, Darryl Richard St. George. He enlisted when he saw former students headed to Iraq. He became a Navy corpsman – a squid, as they’re known among the Marines. And he said that people in the states were really coming to ignore Afghanistan.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED INTERVIEW)

DARRYL RICHARD ST. GEORGE: That didn’t sit very well with me. And I had known a number of people who had served, and some students as well, one student who was a Marine and died on Iraq. All of those things kind of rolling around in my head, I wanted to – how can I put this? I wanted to directly contribute in some way.

CONAN: Directly contribute in some way. So many of the men you’ve profiled have lost good friends…

GEORGE: Mm-hmm. That’s right.

CONAN: …sometimes best friends. I remember you talking about somebody who wore a wristband with his friend’s name on it.

BOWMAN: And also had two tattoos, the letter A on his chest…

CONAN: For Alabama…

BOWMAN: …for Alabama, right.

CONAN: …the state that his friend came from. And those kinds of sacrifices, you really want to think your contribution made a difference.

BOWMAN: Absolutely. I mean, if you’re seeing your friends die or get wounded or have, you know, PTSD, post-traumatic stress, you’d like to say: Was it worth it? Did we achieve anything? And I think that question is still very much an open one.

CONAN: We’re talking with Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, back after a month in Afghanistan. We want to hear from those of you who’ve been there, as well. Did you make a difference? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. Todd’s on the line, calling from Fort Campbell in Kentucky.

TODD: Yes. Hello, Neal.

CONAN: Hi.

TODD: Yes. Hi. Yes. I’m in the military, in the Army, and I’ve served two tours in Afghanistan as an aviator. I’ve flown probably, like, over 1,000 combat hours. So I’ve gotten the chance to see what things are like from the air and from the ground and talked to a lot of people. But I will say that, definitely, the troops over there are definitely making an impact helping the local populace. Whether to say that if, you know, how things are going to be after our eventual pullout, I can’t speculate on that.

But I will say that, yes, we’re doing a lot to help them. I’ve been in the Helmand Province. I’ve done, like, rotations out there doing Medevac missions, chasing Medevac aircraft. And we’ve picked up, you know, just numerous local nationals, people been injured, just helping them for whatever – yeah, just doing whatever we can do to help them, so…

CONAN: I wonder, Todd, when you come back and then read stories of dysfunction in the government in Kabul, people throwing shoes at each other on the floor of parliament, does that make you frustrated?

TODD: I would say – I’m not really – I don’t get too frustrated by, you know, ups and downs, what happens. But, you know, it’s – things are gonna happen, things I can’t control or, you know, just have to go with the flow sometimes. But I’ll say that it’s – yeah, it’s questionable what’s gonna happen there, but I definitely have some positive feeling anyhow, so…

CONAN: Tom?

BOWMAN: Yeah. You know, it’s funny you mentioned that because we had lunch with Admiral Mike Mullen today, the chairman of the Joints Chiefs. And he actually offered the fact that he’s concerned about the lack of governance in the country, the corruption that is still a problem and also the safe havens in Afghanistan. He said, listen, you know, the United States military can do so much to provide security, but it really is up to the Afghans to deal with those issues as well.

CONAN: Giving them a breathing space but they need to step into it.

BOWMAN: Exactly.

CONAN: Todd, thanks very much for the call.

TODD: You’re welcome.

CONAN: Let’s go next to – this is Eric. Eric’s with us from Fort Walton Beach in Florida.

ERIC: Hi, guys.

CONAN: Hi.

ERIC: Hi, Neal, thanks for putting this on. I was an adviser to the Afghan air force in 2010. And you know, it’s a long year to spend with them, and you build a lot of those friendships. And I think, you know, Admiral Mullen probably has it right. There’s only so much we can do. I saw a lot of progress on the security side. I spent time in Kabul as well as Kandahar. And the security piece is coming together. They’re capable. They can do it.

But it’s all that political stuff, all that upper level of governance kind of stuff that really the Afghans are just going to have to figure it out for themselves. I think it was a good investment. I’m glad I spent the year there. But at some point we’ve got to give it to the Afghans.

CONAN: You’re talking about training the Afghan air force. Obviously, command of the air is one the great advantages, militarily, that the NATO forces and the United States and its Afghan allies enjoy. Do you think that the Afghan air force is going to be able to take over in any meaningful way by 2014?

ERIC: It really just depends on what tasks we’re going to ask of them. You know, it’s doing basic Medevac, moving troops around the country, they’re going to get that. They’ve got it. But, you know what, I think what frustrated a lot of us in that mission was sometimes there’s a little political interference that made that particular part a little less effective. I mean, they’re not going to be doing all the things that we can do, and I certainly think that we’re going to, like we always have is to provide a little more air cover even after the ground troops are gone.

We’re gonna be providing air cover in(ph) intel collection kind of stuff. But, you know, basic things that extend the reach of the government out from Kabul and get the troops where they need to be and get them out if they need to be, the Afghans can do that for themselves. They’ve got that.

CONAN: When you say political interference, what do you mean?

ERIC: You know, a phone call from somebody who’s got connections in the government who sets a higher priority for what helicopter’s going to go that day or where one of the transports was going to go that day. You know, just little things like that that we would never stand for, but the Afghans, just because of the positions that they’re in, owing a little bit of loyalty to political forces. The military guys go in there – a little bit of loyalty to the political forces. You know, they – it’s an unenviable position for them.

CONAN: Eric, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it. Welcome home.

ERIC: Thank you. Thanks.

CONAN: We’re talking about Afghanistan. Did you make a difference while you were serving over there? We’re talking with Tom Bowman, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent. You’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let’s go next to Jessie. Jessie with us from Gainesville.

JESSIE: Hi there.

CONAN: Hi.

JESSIE: Yeah. I was in Afghanistan in 2002, was at the, actually, at the intel school when 9/11 happened. And I’m very disappointed with the way things turned out in Afghanistan, the whole operation, how we handled it. In the very beginning we should have flooded those mountains up in – close to the border of Pakistan with troops, and it should have been all about beans and bullets and having boots on the ground. And unfortunately, what ended up happening is we’re staying in places like Kabul and we’re getting – we’re going out into small towns and getting shot at, and it’s not accomplishing anything.

Now, we would have taken heavy casualties early on, but we would have been successful if we would have put guys out there, regular patrols, have them back in, check in a week, send them back out.

CONAN: Tom Bowman…

JESSIE: Unfortunately…

CONAN: …Jessie is not alone. A lot of people thought if we put troops on the ground – the overthrow the Taliban was achieved through, well, remarkably, economy of forces. But at that point the investment was skimped upon.

BOWMAN: Exactly. Because, of course, a lot of the troops went to Iraq at that time. We were just starting the Iraq war. And a lot of people argue to this day, not enough resources were put into Afghanistan, not only soldiers, but economic aid, and as he said, spreading out into the countryside, protecting the population, working to build up the local elders and the tribal leaders and maybe missed four or five or six years because the focus was Iraq.

CONAN: And now because of a, well, among other problems, a war-weary U.S. population concerned about the costs in blood and treasure, there is little time left.

BOWMAN: Exactly. You know, you have two years, you’re going to transition to the Afghan government in two years. But I think one of the callers is right that you clearly have to provide some air cover, some other intelligence information to the Afghans even after that time. Now, just like we’re talking in Iraq, that maybe, you know, 10,000 more troops might be needed after the end of this year when all U.S. troops is supposed to be out of Iraq.

CONAN: Jessie, thanks very much for the call.

JESSIE: Thank you.

CONAN: Let’s go next to – this is Jeremy. Jeremy with us from Linden in Michigan.

JEREMY: Hi. How are you?

CONAN: Good. Thanks.

JEREMY: Good. I just wanted to call and say I appreciate some of the comments some of the callers made. I think I’m going to come from another perspective. I was a junior officer with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan during (unintelligible) eight. So that would have been around the end 2007 timeframe. And maybe that was about the endpoint when Afghanistan was still in the shadow of Iraq and then transitioned more towards focusing on Afghanistan as we started to draw down and the surge was successful in Iraq.

But I just wanted to say that from a junior officer perspective, someone that was at the lower level, I don’t necessarily feel, long term, that our efforts there really did a lot of good. We did good things. And we always try to do good things every day. But things like building bazaars and adding solar lights, but – and with the loss of security as we leave, it’s all going to go away.

CONAN: And Tom, a lot of people think that advances – Jeremy, thanks very much for the call – advances, for example, in the issues involving women, those could regress quickly after U.S. and NATO forces leave.

BOWMAN: Right. And there’s also a concern about maybe a civil war between the Northern Alliance types, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks, against the Pashtuns in the country, the majority. And there’s a lot of worry about, you know, first of all, can the Afghans provide for their own security, and will there be some type of civil war once most of the U.S. and British troops leave.

CONAN: And there’s also the argument, yes, solar panels were put in schools. We built – a lot of projects were completed started. An awful lot of Afghan civilians were killed too.

ERIC: Absolutely. In some of the, you know, the raids from the NATO aircraft and, you know, some civilians have been killed. But clearly, most of the civilian deaths in the – according to the U.N. report, come from the hands of the Taliban.

CONAN: And finally, Tom, what do you get – what information do you have about the pace of the withdrawal? We know it’s supposed to start this month. And 10,000 the first year, is that going to be earlier or later?

BOWMAN: Well, they’re saying that maybe some National Guard troops will come out during the summer months. A Marine battalion, roughly 800 or so Marines, will probably come out toward the end of the fall in Helmand Province, where we were. But they hope that the bulk of the 10,000 are going to be support troops, construction battalions, military police, combat engineers, for example, not what they would call trigger-pullers, so they can provide security well into this year. And hopefully, again, it’s a big hope, can the Afghans take over?

CONAN: Tom Bowman, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent. There’s a link to his series, Who Serves, at our website. Tom, thanks very much.

BOWMAN: You’re welcome, Neal.

CONAN: Tomorrow, TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY is in San Antonio. Ira Flatow is looking at rock art along the Rio Grande. We’ll be back on Monday. Enjoy your weekends, everybody. I’m Neal Conan. It’s the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington. School’s out, and many children have traded schoolbooks for swimsuits. When these students return to school come the fall, many will have lost some of their reading and math skills.

Some argue that’s no big deal. Kids need time to recharge and just be kids. Still, studies show that those losses can add up and have lasting effects, especially for students in low-income families, who may not have access to libraries, museums or Internet over the summer vacation.

We want to hear from teachers today. If you have a traditional school year, how bad is it when kids come back in the fall? And parents, what do you do to keep minds engaged over the summer? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That’s at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Later in the program, as the drawdown begins, did we make a difference in Afghanistan? NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman joins us. But first, the summer slide. We begin with Ron Fairchild, a founder of the Smarter Learning Group and former CEO of the National Summer Learning Association. He’s with us today from member station WKNO in Memphis. Nice to have you with us today.

RON FAIRCHILD: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

CONAN: And how bad is it? How much do kids lose on average?

FAIRCHILD: Well, research really provides the footnotes for our common sense in this case, Neal. Basically everyone would expect performance to suffer without regular practice, and what research shows is that all kids, regardless of their income level of their family, experience over two months of setback in math computation skills during the elementary school grades, and low-income kids lose over two months of reading performance each and every summer of their elementary school years, while middle-income kids typically stagnate or experience a slight gain in reading performance.

So what the impact of that is, significant growth in the achievement gap in reading for kids based on income, so that by the time they reach fifth grade, the summer losses accumulate to a point where kids are close to two years behind in reading performance based on the impact of summer.

CONAN: Just based on the impact of summer. And arguments that kids need time to recharge and, you know, be kids over the summer, that seems insignificant, given that.

FAIRCHILD: Well, we like to draw – start dichotomies and pit learning against fun, and you know, even in the introduction, you know, you mentioned that we would sort of contrast popsicles and baseball versus diagramming sentences and more serious academic work.

And I think it’s possible with creativity to really ensure that kids have a break from the typical routine but also experience quality learning opportunities that really can change, fundamentally change, their long-term success and trajectory in school.

But more importantly than that, in life in general, we know that quality programs can make a difference for kids, and there are also things that parents can really do to make sure that kids have a memorable, enriching summer, but also get the skills and an opportunity to catch up, keep up and work ahead that many kids frankly deserve but don’t have the opportunity to experience.

CONAN: And given the budgets at many school programs across the country, summer school and summer sessions, those are things that seem to be going by the board. So it’s going to be more and more up to parents, don’t you think?

FAIRCHILD: They are. School systems across the country are cutting back on summer school. There are many school systems even that have been forced to cut time out of the regular school year, cut back on the number of days or number of hours. But what we’re also seeing is districts that are increasingly being much more creative.

So I’m actually in Memphis, Tennessee today and heading down to Holly Springs, Mississippi tomorrow to hear about an innovative partnership between a local Head Start center and Russ College University that are involving a RIF program, Reading is Fundamental, that distributes books to kids during the summer, a very low-cost strategy to make sure that low-income preschool kids are reading all summer.

And actually, Senator Wicker is joining us from Washington, D.C., because he’s such a supporter of programs like this that are low-cost solutions to helping prevent summer learning loss.

CONAN: When you talk about summer learning loss, there is also – all right, I did make fun and contrast summer learning with, you know, popsicles and running through sprinklers and that sort of thing, but there’s also what some people say is academic burnout, that kids if they’re not given a break can also suffer academically.

FAIRCHILD: Sure, but I think in general the hype about academic burnout and over-programming is a myth for millions of children in this country and especially in places like Holly Springs, Mississippi and other places that really suffer from a dearth in quality opportunities and programs.

And there are too few parents that have choices about what their kids can do during the summer. So I’d almost rather err on the side of extending opportunities, extending choices. I mean, nobody’s forcing kids into programs against their will, necessarily. It’s giving families…

CONAN: Sometimes their parents do, but yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FAIRCHILD: But you know, in some cases, you know, there are things that kids really do need extra help and support on during the summer. And I would just encourage parents to think about, you know, as they’re preparing kids for college that summers can really be a game-changer.

I talk to so many adults who are successful in life and who managed to have great summers as kids but also got exposure to a skill, a talent, a hobby, a job experience, an internship that was transformative. I mean, there are scientists and engineers who got a chance to do a one-week electricity camp at their local science center, and that’s what turned them on to science.

So I think we just need to think very expansively about the way we expose kids to learning experiences during the summer, take advantage of the fact that summers are, generally speaking, a pretty nice time of year from a weather standpoint. You can get outside. You can engage in service activities. You can take free educational trips.

I think what our job is as a parent of two boys myself is you try to expose kids to things that might interest them, that might excite them, that might motivate them so that they see the larger meaning and purpose for why they’re in school to begin with and why they need to learn to diagram sentences and do math activities, that these kinds of things are very important for – ultimately for what they’re going to do in life.

CONAN: We’re talking with Ron Fairchild, director, founder of the Smarter Learning Group, and we want to hear from teachers. How bad is it when kids come back to school in the fall? We want to hear from parents. What do you do to keep your kid’s mind engaged over the long summer months so that maybe they don’t suffer so much of the summer slide syndrome? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. And Chance(ph) is on the line with us, calling from Tulsa.

CHANCE: Hi, this is Chance.

CONAN: Go ahead, you’re on the air.

CHANCE: Oh, hey. I was just calling to say that one of the things that I do for my son to keep him sharp during the summertime is I found a Head Start, or a Jump Start, computer program that they have one for each grade, and it’s something – it’s like a computer game that they can use to get ahead for the next year, but it’s also fun and entertaining for the children.

CONAN: And something they’re accustomed to doing is, well, working on the computer.

CHANCE: Yes, you know, I mean they like to play games on the Internet, and so it’s a software game that they can play, and it helps prepare them with skills that they’re going to need for the next school year. So instead of just recovering what they had already learned, they are also gaining new skills.

CONAN: And are you monitoring to make sure that they’re playing that particular game and not playing another game on the Internet?

CHANCE: Yes, they play the computer that is my bedroom, so…

CONAN: I see.

CHANCE: I actually enjoy watching it also. It’s really fun to see them learn, and they actually enjoy doing it.

CONAN: All right. Well, thanks, Chance, very much. And I guess, Ron Fairchild, that’s one thing that parents can do.

FAIRCHILD: They absolutely can, and, you know, make this personal. Our two boys, who are 10 and 11, are doing a program that’s similar to what the caller just described, that’s computer-based. It’s called Ten Marks(ph), and it’s basically an opportunity for them to practice math skills that are assessed right at their level so that there are sort of problem sets that are just right, and they’re fun, and they’re challenging.

And then there are other sites that offer material on reading, and since, you know, we’re on public radio, I thought, you know, keep it in the family. The PBS Kids has a wonderful new partnership with JetBlue Airlines, and they’re doing this big Soar with Reading campaign over the course of the summer. And their website is full of activities that connect to – in particular to television programs on public television that are popular with the preschool audience to get kids – and there’s activities and get them reading and excited about reading in connection with some of their favorite TV shows.

So those things strike me as very sensible and reasonable things for parents to do, to make sure that their kids are doing something that’s productive and that involves learning over the summer.

CONAN: Let’s go next to Zach(ph), and Zach’s with us from Denver.

ZACH: Hi.

CONAN: Go ahead, you’re on the air.

ZACH: Thank you. Three quick things. I’m a teacher in Colorado. My first is that I applaud that previous caller’s help with his kids over the summer, but I’m – I teach at a Title I school, which means that most of our parents are on (unintelligible) of some kind.

And realistically, that’s just not an options for parents who work two, three jobs sometimes. But I love the idea of taking your kids to a museum over the summer, but realistically, for a lot of these kids, that just doesn’t happen. They go home, they take care of their little brother and sister, and that’s their summer.

And so for me, I see huge drops every year, and we spend so much time doing remedial education, which is my second point. I spend half my year doing remedial education just to get them back to or slightly above where they were when they left at the end of the year.

CONAN: So do you sometimes feel as if you’re spinning your wheels, just teaching the same thing over and over again?

ZACH: Oh my God, incredibly so. I mean, it’s – and granted, we try to make it as specific a learning environment as possible, but realistically, when I have to put a bunch – spend an entire class period every day with the kids who knew this stuff last year, they could do it on the test last year, but when they come to me in August, they can’t do it anymore, and they’ve lost all motivation because they’ve spent three months doing nothing stimulating, it’s really frustrating.

I even had my kids today, I’m teaching summer school, writing an essay on, you know, a long summer break versus short breaks, and a lot of them instantly said oh long summer breaks, best thing ever. Except they couldn’t come up with any reason why it was really better than taking like year-round school sort of style solutions and doing short breaks. So that would be my last point, is advocating for something like that.

CONAN: Zach, thanks very much for the call, and we’re going to be talking about that when we get back from a short break. We’ll be talking with the founder of the KIPP DC WILL Academy, a charter middle school that has, well, just about year-round classes. So stay with us for a talk about that approach.

Parents, how do you keep your kids’ minds engaged over the summer? Teachers, if you teach a traditional school-year system, how bad is it when kids come back in the fall? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I’m Neal Conan. It’s the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I’m Neal Conan in Washington. One proposed antidote to summer learning loss is an extended school year. KIPP is a national network of college preparatory charter schools in 20 states across the country. The schools have an extended school day.

Students attend classes from 7:30 to 5:00 and have a mandatory summer school, not a punishment program, a program that strives to turn learning loss into learning gain.

We want to hear from teachers today. If you have a traditional school year, how bad is it when kids come back in the fall? Parents, what do you do to keep minds engaged during the summer? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Send us an email, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Our guest is Ron Fairchild, founder of the Smarter Learning Group. Also with us here in Studio 3A is Jessica Cunningham, chief academic officer for KIPP DC Schools and founder of the KIPP DC WILL Academy, a charter middle school here in Washington. Nice to have you with us on the program today.

JESSICA CUNNINGHAM: So happy to be here, thank you.

CONAN: So teachers lose their coveted summer break. Does it pay off?

CUNNINGHAM: It absolutely pays off. I mean, I’m a former public school teacher myself, and so I can definitely relate to what I think Chance was talking about in terms of having to spend a lot of time just helping kids recover those old skills.

And so it really gives teachers an opportunity to get a head start on the school year and make sure that the kids really master the skills that they should have learned the previous school year. And so it’s really more of an opportunity than anything.

CONAN: And describe the school year for us. What do you do over the summer?

CUNNINGHAM: Well, at KIPP, our school year really starts in the summer. So we do a three-week summer school in July. It’s a shorter day because we actually understand that they need more time with their families, more time to eat those popsicles and jump into those swimsuits you mentioned.

But we also want to make sure that they’re getting a head start on that upcoming thick curriculum for us, for fifth graders, for middle school. And so it’s kind of a nice balance of the rigorous academics and the fun stuff, the playing on the monkey bars at recess and all that. That’s still there.

CONAN: It’s still there because obviously physical education and arts, all that’s very important too.

CUNNINGHAM: Right, which is why they don’t just start our year at KIPP with reading and math classes, but they also get to meet that new music teacher and get started playing that violin or get started in PE and figuring out, oh, I think I want to try out for the soccer team this year, or oh, you know, I think I’m actually more interested in lacrosse.

CONAN: And I wonder, kids, I’m sure the first minute they see that schedule will go, ohhh…

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

CUNNINGHAM: Well, you’re taking me back to our first year, where yes, I definitely remember seeing some faces that were a little less than happy that morning. But I’ll tell you, you know, within 30 minutes of that first morning meeting with the principal and their teachers, they’re really excited because they get there and they realize: Oh, so I’m going to learn my times tables, but I’m going to learn them in a fun way, in a way that allows me to really feel successful and confident but also allows me to laugh and wiggle with my peers.

CONAN: And do you do tests to find out how much kids lose over the summer or gain?

CUNNINGHAM: Well, we can definitely – we definitely can say that they gain. You know, I mean, in D.C., at KIPP DC Schools, our kids perform with – just right along with the top kids in the city, many of them are also coming from some of the more affluent households.

So we know it works. We also know it works just from the feedback that we get from parents, who are just ecstatic about being able to A) send their kids to a really safe place but a safe place where their kids are having fun and learning at the same time.

CONAN: Ron Fairchild, I wanted to bring you back in. I read a piece that you wrote, which corrected my fallacious assumption that the September-through-beginning-of-June school year was the product of our old agrarian economy.

FAIRCHILD: Well, most people think that it’s strictly a function of the fact that kids needed to be off all summer for agricultural work. What’s interesting is if you look back at the history of this, big cities had as much to do with our current calendar as rural communities, and in fact many rural communities typically had breaks in the spring and fall for planting and harvesting, but actually there’s a rich tradition of a summer term in rural communities, where kids actually came back for a short period of time during the summer.

Many of the early drivers for the current calendar in urban communities are really the relatively wealthy or affluent who wanted to flee the cities. And you think about the turn of the last century, what was going on in our large urban communities, many people wanted to leave the city for the summer, and hence the grand compromise and how we settled on the current 180-day calendar is really a political compromise as much as anything else between our rural and our urban communities.

CONAN: Here’s an email we have from Allen(ph) in Victor, Idaho: I grew up when everybody went to school from September through May, before there were any alternative school schedules. We all went to school six hours a day, five days a week.

Today, as I understand, the problem with all these alternative schedules and classes, students are not performing as well on standardized tests as we did 30 years ago. So how can you blame summer vacation? The difference is performance was demanded of us, or we were failed and held back. Today, it seems we just make excuses for poor performance and allow the students to advance while not performing.

Jessica Cunningham, I was wondering if we could get your response to that.

CUNNINGHAM: Sure, I think lots of things have changed in those 30 years, and I don’t think it’s just about making excuses for the kids. I think that there are – unfortunately, there are more homes now, where, you know, like the caller said, kids don’t have opportunities to do really positive, engaging things during the summer.

And so, you know, maybe when that particular person was a kid, he wasn’t just sitting around all summer watching his little brothers and sisters. Maybe he was going to the library and reading. Some of our kids don’t necessarily have access to good public libraries or access to great museums or even the knowledge that those museums are there and that it’s another learning opportunity.

CONAN: Let’s see if we can get a caller in. This is Jason, Jason calling from Casper, Wyoming. Jason, are you there? And Jason seems to have found better things to do in Casper. Let’s go instead to Sherry(ph), Sherry’s with us from Napa in California.

SHERRY: Yes, I am.

CONAN: Go ahead, you’re on the air.

SHERRY: So I’m not entirely sure, after hearing the conversation, that I really disagree. I would just like to offer a few observations of my own. My youngest daughter is now 31, but when she was in junior high school, just as she was about to enter junior high school, we pulled her out of school and moved to Indonesia for two years.

She did no schooling, but she learned another language, she studied a culture, and she’s an aerospace engineer. Now, we are in a very fortunate position to have been able to do that, but we also took in foster children for 25 years. None of those children were as fortunate as my children, certainly did not have the opportunities that they had.

However, we regularly took those children, who came from very diverse and very troubled backgrounds, we regularly took them out of school, on a regular basis, all throughout the year. Sometimes the schools would object, but we did it anyway, and we would simply do things with them.

Now, this is why I’m not sure I disagree. I think all of your speakers have talked about quality and exposure. So I’m not sure that I entirely disagree. My disagreement would be that if you’re talking about school programs, in other words programs that have them doing reading and math and history or whatever, during the summer as well as during the year, then I vehemently disagree because I think part of what has happened is that as the world has changed and as schools are trying to keep up – you know, our schools are trying to compete with other countries, et cetera, et cetera, and at the same time our teachers are being asked to be both parents and teachers.

And to give an inordinate amount of tests so that we can measure, none of which I think works very well – they aren’t really able to teach as much. And so the children are more stressed, and the children are not learning as well. That’s all true. But I don’t think that’s because they need summer programs. I think that’s because we need to change the way the school day works throughout the school year.

CONAN: Ron Fairchild, the idea of pulling your kid out of school, even for a couple of days, much less a couple of years, boy, you’d run into a lot of problems with that today, wouldn’t you?

FAIRCHILD: You know, I think Sherry makes a really good point about the fact that schools can’t do this alone. And certainly we expect our schools to provide a solid foundation of knowledge and skills for all of our kids. And we know some schools are providing a much stronger, a more solid foundation for kids than others.

But I think this also goes back to, you know, the – I believe it was Zach’s point earlier that he teaches in a Title I school, and you know, to have those hard-fought gains that teachers and principals and parents work on during the school year, to see those erode year after year, there have to be – there have to be ways that community organizations, nonprofits, other groups can partner with schools to make sure that kids get the kind of experiences that Sherry’s talking about, certainly not a trip to Indonesia but opportunities that expand their horizons and give them windows into worlds that aren’t currently there.

And I would just like to mention there are a number of national organizations that do exactly that, and KIPP is a great model of an organization that actually runs schools from start to finish. And there are other models of programs that specialize in exactly what we’re talking about, just summer programs.

So organizations like Summer Advantage or Bell or a group called Horizons that partner with public schools, deliver services to public schools, but those services are qualitatively different from what kids get during the school year so they get a chance to have exposure to libraries and aquariums and museums and art and music and soccer and robotics and all kinds of great activities during the summer, but they’re brought in in a way that makes sense and that parents can access much more easily and free.

CONAN: Sherry, thanks very much for the call.

SHERRY: Thank you. I really agree with what he just said. That’s (technical difficulty).

CONAN: OK.

SHERRY: They just need to be exposed to lots of things (technical difficulty). Thank you very much.

CONAN: Thank you. Here’s an email from Catherine: I’m a director of an old-fashioned summer camp. We work on language, physics, math and science by cooking, playing games, climbing trees and damming creeks. We keep them sharp by applying what they learned during the school year in fun and practical ways. We have scholarships and work with kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds and home lives.

And let’s see if we can get another caller in. Let’s go next to Paul. And Paul with us from Avon in Ohio.

PAUL: Hi.

CONAN: Hi.

PAUL: I am a high school teacher as well as a parent. I have three young daughters. And my thoughts on summer retention and summer work is that from – when I was, you know, not just as a teacher, when I was a child, when I was young, my parents always took me to the library and that, you know, there was always incentives and summer reading programs. I was always a reader, so it was a little bit easier for me that they were available there.

But even for students who don’t have access necessarily to libraries or those types of resources, I find it hard to believe that any school would not be supportive of any work that the students or the parents want to get from the school for their children over the summertime.

So I am in support of the idea of a break. I don’t know if it necessarily needs to be three months, but I think it’s really not that difficult to supplement the students’ education over the summer. As an English teacher, obviously I can only speak to reading, doesn’t necessarily help with math. I don’t know many students who are going to do drill and grill with mathematics and times tables. But even when as an English teacher, I can say it doesn’t matter what you read as long as the content is appropriate, your attention is going to stay high and your reading comprehension is going to be good.

CONAN: Jessica Cunningham, the program you were describing, a three-week course in July, it’s not as if you’re using up the whole summer vacation.

CUNNINGHAM: Right. Kids don’t have at least four weeks off in a summer. In some regions, they have even more than that. So we absolutely give them opportunities to do other things, which we think are really important.

CONAN: And I’m sure you would endorse the idea that in those times off, maybe they should go to the library?

CUNNINGHAM: Absolutely. And, I mean, they also, you know, to this point, we actually give them assignments when they leave us in June to complete, you know, while they’re on their own. It won’t take up the entire time, but, you know, you have your KIPP work to do, and then you also can go to the pool.

CONAN: All right. As long as you don’t have to read those books I was assigned in the summer.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

CONAN: Anyway, Paul, thanks very much for the call. Here’s an email from Annie in Galveston: I’m a fifth grade reading teacher. I have some advice I offer for parents. Kids should only earn as much screen time as they read, i.e. two hours of reading will equal two hours of video games, TV or computer. A simple rule that works. We’re talking about how to keep kids’ minds engaged to not go off on that summer slide, where they lose proficiency in math and reading. You’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And let me reintroduce our guests: Ron Fairchild, founder of the Smarter Learning Group, and Jessica Cunningham, founder of KIPP DC WILL Academy, a charter middle school. And let’s see if we can get another caller on the line. Let’s go to Heather. Heather with us from Minneapolis.

HEATHER: Hi. OK. So I guess, first, technically I’m a soon-to-be parent. And my father actually taught us about three weeks – three times a week – math and sciences. And we were grilled. And so when we got back to school, we were ahead of the rest of the whole class. I mean, school became boring. So I guess my question mainly is, since I’m now pregnant, I still like my father’s method. I did great in school. It was just, like I said, I really hated it because I was so far ahead. We were also going to school during the No Child Left Behind Act. So we were super far ahead in a lot of cases. What’s the best way I can teach my child like my father did, but yet not have them bored with school?

CONAN: Ron Fairchild, is it time to think about skipping a year?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

FAIRCHILD: Well, you know, certainly, you don’t want to – you want to challenge your children wherever they are. And so obviously, I think if you can do that at home and make sure that kids are being challenged, then I think having a conversation with the teachers back in the fall and during the regular school year to make sure that your child is appropriately placed, that they’re involved in material that really challenges them.

And to go back to Paul’s point, I think the single most important thing if I – you could have one recommendation to parents is just to get and keep their kids reading over the summer. And even kids who are reluctant readers, make sure that they have material that interests them, and keep them reading. It’s the single most important thing that they can do to prevent those learning losses.

So do reading lists, do special interest reading, read to and with them, share books with them, talk about magazines and newspapers that you have in the house. Make sure that kids are exposed to words. And keep some of those routines over the summer.

I think the other point about screen time, set some limits on things and make sure that just because it’s summer it doesn’t mean that anything goes in terms of how much time they’re spending in front of screens and snacking, because one topic we haven’t really talked about are setbacks that kids experience in health and nutrition over the summer. And far too many kids spend too much time snacking and sitting in front of screens, where the only activity they’re getting is with their thumbs on a video game controller. So I think that, you know, more and more families and kids need to figure out ways to make sure that kids are physically active too.

CONAN: That’s incredibly important because we talked about all the baseball and running through sprinklers. But as Ron Fairchild has said, Jessica Cunningham, a lot of the time – well, kids don’t go outside some places because it’s not safe to go outside.

CUNNINGHAM: Absolutely. And it’s definitely one of the concerns that our parents have in many of the communities that our kids come from at KIPP.

CONAN: And as you look ahead to the school year, when does your summer school start?

CUNNINGHAM: It starts on Monday. We’re really excited. I just came from one of our schools and teachers are getting ready, getting those bulletin boards up. So we’re very excited to see them bright and early on Monday morning.

CONAN: So Fourth of July, you get a week off and then back to school.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

CUNNINGHAM: That’s right.

CONAN: All right. Thanks. Good luck with the summer session. We appreciate your time today.

CUNNINGHAM: Thanks so much.

CONAN: Jessica Cunningham, founder of KIPP D.C.: WILL Academy and chief academic officer for KIPP D.C. schools, joined us here in Studio 3A. Ron Fairchild, good luck on your visit to Mississippi.

FAIRCHILD: Thank you.

CONAN: Ron Fairchild, founder of Smarter Learning Group and joined us today from member station WKNO in Memphis, Tennessee.

Up next, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman will join us, just back from a month in Afghanistan. He’s brought back with him the stories of soldiers serving there. As the drawdown begins, did we make a difference in Afghanistan? If you served, give us a call. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I’m Neal Conan. It’s the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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A court order for the Pentagon to stop enforcing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is likely the last gasp of the 17-year policy that was repealed by Congress in December but remained temporarily in effect, experts and activists said Thursday.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that because Congress repealed the ban on gays serving openly in the military last year, it doesn’t make sense to continue enforcing it — although the Pentagon is still awaiting certification from the president, secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the new “open service” policy won’t adversely affect the military.

“I think it’s safe to say this is the final nail in the coffin,” R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, a group for gay Republican Party members, said of the court’s ruling.

An ‘Insurance Policy’

Cooper, a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, told NPR he would be “very surprised” if the Justice Department tried to pursue the case any further.

Last year, before the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell, Log Cabin Republicans persuaded a lower court to declare the policy unconstitutional. A higher court overturned that ruling, which was effectively reinstated by the 9th Circuit on Wednesday.

Cooper said despite the repeal of the 1993 policy — which resulted in the discharge of more than 14,000 service members over the years — Log Cabin Republicans wanted to press ahead with the case as an “insurance policy.”

Even after Congress approved open service, don’t ask, don’t tell has remained in force awaiting final certification that the new policy is “consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the armed forces.”

Certification Could Be Months Away

In the interim, dozens of cases of service members who were set to be discharged have gone ahead, said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Sarvis said those cases will now be suspended.

“This sad chapter is almost over, but it needs to be brought to finality,” he said of certification, which could still be weeks or months away.

On Wednesday, a spokesman said the Pentagon is taking immediate steps to inform commanders in the field that don’t ask, don’t tell will no longer be enforced in accordance with the 9th Circuit’s decision.

“From what I’m seeing, it appears the Department of Defense is resolved and resigned that this is the new policy and there’s no going back,” said Philip Cave, an attorney who deals exclusively with military law.

But Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said although don’t ask, don’t tell was already in its death throes, the Department of Justice had an ethical obligation to defend it vigorously before the 9th Circuit.

“They didn’t call a single witness. They should have gotten out of it earlier if they didn’t want to defend it,” Spakovsky said.

Although the stay was lifted, the 9th Circuit scheduled an Aug. 29 hearing to consider whether the government’s appeal of the original lower court’s decision is valid. Even so, any further movement in the case appeared unlikely, Cooper said.

In the meantime, Cooper and others have observed that the military has gone forward with training to prepare its officers and enlisted personnel for the official end of don’t ask, don’t tell.

“They are proceeding with that in a very professional, very methodical way, and they should be commended for that,” he said.

Courtesy of Dig This

A Caterpillar Excavator at Dig This, a playground for adults that allows them to drive and operate construction equipment.

Las Vegas just opened up a new playground, but it’s not for children.

It’s called Dig This, and it claims to be the first heavy-equipment playground — as in construction equipment.

Before riding, participants attend a safety and equipment orientation. The park is also staffed with instructors like Phil Chavez, a former construction worker. Chavez can communicate with riders over a wireless headset, and just to be extra safe, he has a kill switch in case a machine gets out of control.

Employees take no chances at Dig This, which is a good thing — owner Ed Mumm says he has more than $1 million invested here.

“Y’know, my original business model was to go with just smaller equipment,” Mumm says.”And that certainly would’ve reduced the cost for the experience, but man, Americans love big stuff.”

Mumm, who is originally from New Zealand, got the idea when a friend taught him how to operate an excavator he had leased for work at his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

“After being on that machine, I thought, ‘Wow, this is so much fun,’ and then it occurred to me, ‘Well, if I’m having so much fun, imagine the amount of people that don’t get the opportunity to do this sort of thing.’ And from there, Dig This was born,” he says.

After a couple of years in Steamboat Springs, he moved to Las Vegas, where he said there were more potential customers.

He hasn’t turned a profit yet, but his timing is good. A decade ago, leasing 5 acres so close to the Strip would’ve cost a fortune. But things now are so bad in the construction and real estate business, Mumm says, that the landowners are delighted anyone will pay to use it.

“People are looking for anything,” he says.

Dig This charges between $200 and $750. This may seem pricey, but many people in Vegas spend that for dinner, gambling or to fly over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter.

Mumm says a good majority of customers are guys who have “operate heavy equipment” on their bucket lists.

But he says he has been surprised at how many women are also interested, which is the reason Dig This offers a package called “Excavate and Exfoliate,” a half-day at the park followed by a spa treatment at the Trump Las Vegas Hotel.

While I was at the park I got to dig a trench, use the bucket to pick up basketballs, and build a pyramid with tires — those last two are obviously not standard construction tasks.

As with video games, the key is to not overthink.

Given all the people out there who have wanted to do this since they were kids, it’s easy to wonder why no one thought of it before.

Enlarge AP

Sunflower Electric Cooperative’s coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kan., churns out electricity. Kansas is one of the states included in the new pollution rule.

AP

Sunflower Electric Cooperative’s coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kan., churns out electricity. Kansas is one of the states included in the new pollution rule.

The Environmental Protection Agency sent a strong message Thursday to power plants that burn coal. It’s time to clean up dirty exhausts that travel long distances, and 75 percent of Americans will breathe healthier air as a result.

The new EPA transport rule is designed to clean up the pollution that blows from power plants into other states. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says it’s about fairness.

“This is EPA, the federal government, doing what the federal government should and has a responsibility to all Americans to do. And that’s leveling the playing field, ensuring that one community doesn’t put out smog and soot at the expense of the residents downwind,” she says.

The new rule replaces a similar Bush administration regulation that was struck down by a court that deemed it too lenient. The new rule will cut almost 2 million more tons of pollution per year than the Bush administration program.

States from Texas to New York will have to slash 70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions and 50 percent of nitrogen oxides from power plants, compared with 2005 pollution levels.

Scientists say the fine particles and ozone from these plants contribute to deadly heart and lung failures.

The agency estimates the rule will be so potent that within three years, it will prevent as many as 34,000 premature deaths each year.

It’s also expected to reduce hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks per year. That really resonates with Jackson, whose sons both had asthma when they were small. Her younger son still carries a rescue inhaler.

Jackson says she wants every parent with an asthmatic child to have “as close to a normal experience in childhood as possible.”

She says less power plant pollution will mean fewer days when parents have to tell their kids they can’t play outside because the air is bad.

“When you talk about asthma attacks, every single one can mean hours — if not days — of caring for a sick child or family member. It can mean hospitalization,” she says.

That adds up to lots of costs for families and society. Jackson says that’s part of why the new rule is projected to provide billions of dollars in public health benefits.

Some power companies complain the deadlines are too tough to allow them time to install pollution control equipment. So, they will have no choice but to shut down some older coal-fired power plants.

Pat Hemlepp represents American Electric Power, which is one of the country’s biggest power companies, with plants in 11 states from Texas to Michigan.

“Taking power plants out of service like this pulls tax dollars out of the communities, pulls jobs out of communities, in addition to increasing electricity costs,” Hemlepp says. “This is a region of the country that’s struggling to recover from the economic downturn, and doing this on such a short timeline is an economic hit that could be avoided.”

But overall, Harvard Economist Robert Stavins says, the new regulation is a real winner for the economy.

“It doesn’t mean that there are no costs, but the benefits of the transport rule in terms of human health protection tremendously outweigh the costs of this,” he says.

Stavins says even in parts of the country where electricity costs will increase a little bit, health care savings in those same communities will more than compensate.

Michele Norris talks with David Krajicek about the history of the so-called perp walk — and why law enforcement uses it, particularly in New York City. They discuss why the media is drawn to these and talk about some famous perp walks in the U.S.

Life in advertising is multicultural — how does it compare to real life, and how is advertising selling the “All-American” dream? Michele Norris talks to Jimmy Smith, creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day, and Roberto Orci , president of Acento ad agency, for more.

Thunderstorms threatened to delay the final space shuttle launch, set for Friday, and a lightning strike near the pad prompted NASA to convene an engineering panel to discuss any possible damage.

The lightning struck within a third of a mile from the spacecraft around midday Thursday. Technicians hurried out to check for any signs of electrical problems. No immediate damage was reported. But a review board was quickly assembled.

Over the years, lightning has struck on or near the launch pad occasionally, but no recent launches have been delayed by damage.

At the same time, the weather outlook for Friday looked dismal, with a 70 percent “no-go” forecast.

NASA test director Jeff Spaulding pointed out that space shuttles have managed to launch with worse forecasts.

“There’s some opportunity there,” he said Thursday as the rain set in. “It’s a really tough day if you make a decision not to go and it turns out to be good weather.”

Launch time is 11:26 a.m.

NASA is closing out its 30-year space shuttle program to take aim at asteroids and Mars, destinations favored by the White House. Private companies will take over the job of hauling cargo and crews to the International Space Station, freeing NASA up to focus on points beyond.

“We believe that on behalf of the American people, it is time for NASA to do the hard things to go beyond low-Earth orbit,” NASA’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver, told reporters gathering for the launch.

The odds of good flying weather improve with each passing day, said shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters. The launch time moves slightly earlier every day, and that helps, she said.

NASA has until Sunday, possibly Monday, to get Atlantis and its four astronauts in orbit. Otherwise, the spacecraft will remain grounded until the following weekend because of an Air Force rocket launch that takes priority.

Rain or shine, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to jam the area for the launch. Some estimates put the crowd at close to 1 million. Dozens of astronauts already are in town, including the very first shuttle pilot Robert Crippen, who opened the era aboard Columbia in 1981.

“It’s a sad time for me obviously. But it’s also a time when I feel pride. I’m proud of what the shuttle has done,” Crippen told The Associated Press. “You’ve got to get it back down on the ground safely. So when we finally get `wheels stop,’ it will be an emotional moment for me.”

The commander of that original shuttle shot, moonwalker John Young, opted to stay home in Houston. He didn’t want to deal with all the fuss, Crippen explained. “It’s not his kind of thing,” he said. “He’ll watch it on TV,” he said.

Along one of the main roads leading into Kennedy Space Center, businesses and even churches joined in the celebration with billboards pronouncing “God Bless Atlantis July 8″ and “Godspeed Atlantis and Crew.”

The countdown, at least, was going well, with only a few minor technical problems at the pad reported.

Atlantis is bound for the International Space Station with a year’s worth of provisions. NASA wants the orbiting outpost well-stocked in case there are delays in getting commercial cargo hauls started. The first privately operated supply run — by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — is tentatively scheduled for late this year.

NASA payload manager Joe Delai got emotional as he showed pictures of the 21-foot-long, shiny metal cargo carrier in Atlantis’ payload bay. That massive bay is the one thing that none of the smaller follow-on craft will have.

“This is just beautiful … It’s not a piece of metal. It’s a way of life,” he said. “We’re just inches into what we know, and everything we do now is what I consider the foundation for human spaceflight.

“Yeah, it’s emotional, but it’s also part of history. I think that’s what you’re seeing from a lot of folks down here.”

Also aboard Atlantis: multiple sets of patches and pins representing all 135 shuttle missions, as well as thousands of shuttle bookmarks for children. The patches and pins will be presented to schools following the flight, Delai said.

The 12-day voyage by Atlantis should culminate with a touchdown back at Kennedy on July 20, the 42nd anniversary of man’s first steps on the moon.

“There’s an old saying that says it’s better to travel well than to arrive,” Spaulding said. “And I’d have to say after the last 30 years, certainly our program and these shuttles, throughout all of their missions, have traveled very well. And after 135′s landing, I think we can say at that point that we’ve arrived.”

Texas has executed a Mexican national for the kidnapping and rape of a 16-year-old San Antonio girl. Humberto Leal Garcia, 38, was put to death less than two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, rejected pleas from the Obama administration for a delay to avoid what it called serious international repercussions.

This was Texas’s seventh execution of the year and the second execution since 2008 of a Mexican national who was denied access to the Mexican consul before trial.

Related NPR Stories

Before Leal Garcia’s trial, Texas authorities failed to inform him of his right to speak with officers from the Mexican consulate and failed to inform the consulate that a Mexican national had been arrested. Both of those failures violated a 1963 treaty signed by the U.S. Indeed, the consular access provision was added to the treaty at the insistence of the United States.

The U.S. relies on the treaty to secure legal help and often to win release of Americans imprisoned abroad, some in countries such as Iran, Libya and Syria. Last year alone the U.S. invoked the treaty for 3,500 Americans imprisoned in other countries.

In Leal Garcia’s case, Mexico said that if it had known of his arrest, it could have provided sufficient legal help and information about his abusive childhood that the death penalty might well have been averted.

In 2008, in a similar case brought by the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the consular access treaty does not bind state courts unless Congress, in addition to its ratification of the treaty, enacts an enforcement law. The Obama administration last month endorsed such a law and last week asked the Supreme Court to stay the Leal Garcia execution to allow it time to win passage of the proposed statute.

We are doubtful that it is ever appropriate to stay a lower court judgment in light of unenacted legislation.

- Unsigned Supreme Court majority opinion

But the Supreme Court refused to grant the stay of execution. In an unsigned opinion, the five-member majority said, “We are doubtful that it is ever appropriate to stay a lower court judgment in light of unenacted legislation. Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be.”

Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Writing for the three, Breyer said, “It is difficult to see how the State’s interest in the immediate execution of an individual convicted of capital murder 16 years ago can outweigh the considerations” put forth by the executive branch for a delay lasting no longer than six months.

The proposed bill would give foreign nationals held in the U.S. the right to appeal a conviction when either the individual was not notified of the right to consult with officials from his home country’s embassy, or when the embassy was not notified of the arrest of its citizen. But to win such an appeal, the bill requires a showing that failure to abide by the treaty actually harmed the individual. Merely failing to provide notification alone would be insufficient.

In recent years, states have, at the insistence of the Clinton, Bush and Obama State Departments, become more compliant with the consular treaty. Compliance ramped up in particular after the International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the U.S. was in violation of international law because states failed to comply with the treaty, with no judicial review process for treaty violations.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder and an assortment of ambassadors all called upon Texas Gov. Rick Perry to grant a temporary stay of execution to allow time for Congress to vote on the bill.

In a letter to Perry, Clinton and Holder said an execution could compromise law enforcement cooperation between Mexico and the U.S., “strain” relations with Mexico, and call into question U.S. commitments to honor its treaties.

Enlarge Maggie Starbard/NPR

Dr. Ray Dorsey video chats with his patient, Victor Jarzombeck, from his office at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dorsey has been treating Jarzombeck, who lives nearly 350 miles away in New Hartford, New York, for three years.

Maggie Starbard/NPR

Dr. Ray Dorsey video chats with his patient, Victor Jarzombeck, from his office at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dorsey has been treating Jarzombeck, who lives nearly 350 miles away in New Hartford, New York, for three years.

People with chronic medical problems like Parkinson’s disease can have a hard time finding a specialist who can help them manage the disease. Some patients are turning to doctors hundreds of miles away to get the care they need. But they’re not driving to get to the doctor. They’re doing the medical version of telecommuting, despite the fact that many insurers won’t pay for it.

Deanna Ventura wasn’t happy with the neurologist who was treating her Parkinson’s. She was having trouble walking, bathing, and doing her housework. “I knew that I needed more than what he was doing for me,” she says.

But the closest specialist was in Rochester, two hours away from her home in upstate New York. And she doesn’t drive. Now, the specialist comes to her, on a video conference call.

Ray Dorsey is a movement disorders specialist at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, in Baltimore. That’s 343 miles from Ventura’s home in New Hartford, New York. But for the past four years he’s been her doctor, even though they’ve only met once in person.

The Tele-Checkup

“How about your Parkinson’s disease?” Dorsey asked her during a recent checkup. “Any complaints related to your Parkinson’s?”

“I find that I drop things a lot more,” says Ventura, a 68-year-old grandmother. “I find that my balance is worse, which isn’t too good anyways.”

She’s sitting in the conference room of a nursing home, just down the street from her apartment. She can see the doctor on a flat-screen TV. He can see her on his laptop.

The Canadian Connection

Telemedicine for specialty care may be a bit of a hard sell in the United States, but not so in Canada. “Canada has a very different health care reality,” says Mark Guttman, a movement disorders specialist in Markham, Ontario. “We have a shortage of physicians, and the specialists are in urban areas.”

The government has invested in telemedicine in a big way, building the world’s largest medical teleconferencing system, with more 1,000 videoconferencing suites at local hospitals across the country. Not only do doctors not have the problems getting paid for telemedicine that they have in the United States; they get a bonus, $15 to $25 per visit, for seeing patients remotely.

Guttman tried telemedicine visits so his Parkinson’s patients wouldn’t have to drive 14 hours one way for a 20-minute follow-up visit. He’s so sold on the benefits that he fund-raised to install two videoconferencing suites in his office, and sees 15 percent of his patients remotely. From 1 to 2:15 every day, the doctor is in, online. A nurse in the conference suite with the patient helps with the evaluation.

“Typically I see someone three times a year, for 2 to 15 years.” Guttman explains. “As their disease progresses they have more complex medical management issues.”

In patient surveys, 90 percent of patients say they like the Canadian approach to long-distance healthcare.

“It works. It’s green,” Guttman says. “The savings in gas and emissions are huge. It’s timesaving for patients. And I think we provide at least equivalent services. And they like it.”

—Nancy Shute

The sound is scratchy, but audible; familiar to anyone who Skypes with friends and relatives. “Do you know what today’s date is?” Dorsey asks Ventura, checking to see if the disease is affecting her memory or cognition.

“Yes,” she answers. “Today is May 20, and the year is 2011.”

“And who’s the secretary of state?”

“Hillary Clinton.”

“Pretty good!” Dorsey says. The doctor also tests her balance and motor skills, asking her to move her arms and hands, and walk across the room.

Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that most commonly affects people over age 50. At least 500,000 people in the United States have the disorder.

It happens when the cells in the brain that make the neurotransmitter chemical dopamine are destroyed, making it hard for nerve cells to communicate. As a result, people can have tremors, trouble talking, impaired balance, and loss of fine hand movements.

Parkinson’s can be tricky to treat; the medications have to be adjusted regularly, and have many side effects. And because Parkinson’s saps mobility, many patients can’t drive.

Remote access to medical care has been touted as the next great thing for almost 20 years. And telemedicine is now more widely used in some areas, such as linking radiologists and stroke specialists to hospitals. It’s been used to monitor patients’ vital signs remotely, and to provide long-distance psychiatric care.

More Time With The Physician

But it’s been much less successful in meeting one of the needs that seems most obvious: remote access to medical specialty care.

Technology is no longer the problem. The laptops, webcams, and Internet access needed are now cheap and common, available in most homes and offices.

Clinical trials of telemedicine have found that the quality of care is at least as good as with in-person visits. In a small study run by Dorsey with the patients in upstate New York, the telemedicine patients had improved motor skills and quality of life, while patients making in-office doctor visits with their regular doctors did worse. Patients also say they like the visits better than in-office visits, because they get more time with the physician.

Ventura says she’s seen a dramatic difference in her quality of life, and mobility. She can now get around with a cane instead of a walker, and even walks to church sometimes. “If it wasn’t for this program, I would not be getting what I need to get for my Parkinson’s.”

But Medicare doesn’t pay for Ventura’s doctor visit. It covers telemedicine only if a person lives in what the federal insurer considers a rural area. New Hartford, which is outside of Utica, New York, isn’t on the list, despite the fact that there are no Parkinson’s specialists within a 2-hour drive. Tony Joseph, the Presbyterian Home administrator, says: “Right now if I were going to bill a Blue Cross Blue Shield for a neurological consult like we’re going right now, they’re not going to cover it.”

So the Presbyterian Home, where Ventura goes for her telemedicine visits, holds fund-raisers to come up with the approximately $40,000 a year they pay Dorsey and another neurologist. The home also covers the cost of a nurse and IT support, although most of the 45 people using the service aren’t residents of the home.

“We do a Parkinson’s awareness walk, and we’ve been very successful with that,” Joseph says. Rashida Ali, the daughter of boxing great Muhammad Ali, was the grand marshall this year. The boxer has had Parkinson’s for almost 30 years.

Bound By State Lines

Payment to doctors is traditionally based on the physical presence of the doctor with the patient, according to Jay Sanders, president and CEO of the Global Telemedicine Group. And there’s one word for why: fraud. Medicare fraud costs the country at least $60 billion a year. But Sanders argues that telemedicine visits would be easy for insurers to monitor, because every visit is recorded.

There’s one other big stumbling block to remote visits: Doctors licensed in one state can’t treat patients in another. The only reason Dorsey, in Baltimore, can treat Ventura, in New York, is that he used to work at the University of Rochester, and is still licensed in that state.

Getting licensed in another state is expensive and time-consuming. “Why do we have this ridiculous state by state licensure situation?” Sanders asks. “That impedes telemedicine.”

Related NPR Stories

Telemedicine doesn’t cure all ills. Dorsey has to suggest that Ventura go see her internist when she complains of a pain in her neck. He can’t figure out the cause without touching her. But watching her on the small screen has been enough to keep up with the changes caused by Parkinson’s, and try to help control them.

“Believe me when I tell you that he doesn’t miss a thing,” Ventura says. “I never noticed that my lower chin was quivering. But Dr. Dorsey did.”

For his part, Dorsey hopes that his ongoing experiment in telemedicine will inspire other doctors and patients to try it, despite the legal and regulatory barriers.

“We’re at the point where we can remove geographical barriers to care,” he says, noting that 140 million Americans are living with some sort of chronic condition. “Our hope is that the vast majority of those people can receive the care that they need from the specialists that are most qualified to provide them care.”

Enlarge Scott Olson /Getty Images

Businesses are surrounded by floodwater as the Souris River crests as seen from the air on Sunday in Minot, North Dakota. The Souris River surpassed its 1881 record level of 1,558 feet above sea level and flooding estimated 4,000 homes in the city.

Scott Olson /Getty Images

Businesses are surrounded by floodwater as the Souris River crests as seen from the air on Sunday in Minot, North Dakota. The Souris River surpassed its 1881 record level of 1,558 feet above sea level and flooding estimated 4,000 homes in the city.

The Souris River is slowly retreating in Minot, N.D., where the river peaked early Sunday at levels not seen in more than a century. About 4,000 homes are flooded and a quarter of the town’s 40,000 residents are displaced.

There is a constant stream of dump trucks crossing the main bridge in downtown Minot. Construction crews continue to build, fill and shore up levees aimed at keeping what’s left of the town dry.

The city’s records date back to the late 1800s, and they show there’s never been this much water coming through town.

Michael Bart is in charge of the Army Corp of Engineers’ effort, and is trying to make sure the levees hold.

“The river is trying to erode the levee, the river is trying to go through the levee, the river is trying to go underneath the levee, and so we are battling that constantly,” Bart says.

The water level may be dropping but Bart won’t lower his guard.

We’re walking these things and watching them 24 hours a day, at some points we are watching these things every 30 minutes,” Bar says. “Someone is walking that stretch of the levee every 30 minutes. This is vigilance.”

Figuring out just how much water is still coming Minot’s way is Brent Hanson’s job. He’s a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and he measures the river every day.

About 25 miles north of the city, Hanson sits in a small flat bottom boat floating in flood waters. He’s got a computer on his lap and a small bright orange measuring device floating next to the boat.

The river is normally just 30 feet wide, now it stretches more than 2,000 feet from shore to shore.

“What’s that thing right there, that building,” I ask Hanson. “It looks like a chimney sticking out of the water.”

“That’s an outhouse,” Hanson answers.

The normally dry river banks make this stretch of the Souris a favorite spot for bird watchers. And the wildlife service installed the outhouse for them.

But the thick groves of ash and oak trees are almost completely submerged.

“Channel should be coming up in a couple of feet here,” Hanson tells me.

“We’re still aren’t into the river channel,” I ask.

“Nope,” Hanson replies.

A few minutes later Hanson reaches the other side and takes his readings. He’ll make three more trips back and forth then average the results. His numbers are used by everyone from the National Weather Service to the governor’s office.

North Dakota Governor Jack Dahlrymple says it’s not been that easy to get accurate river information north of the border. Record rainfall in Canada swelled the Souris which begins north of the border and flows into the U.S. All river data is shared over the phone.

“Had we been able to read their gauges directly, probably could have gained another day of preparation time,” Dahlrymple says.

Fighting the river back in Minot, the Army Corps’ Michael Bart says a section of the primary levee started leaking over the weekend and crews had to build another earthen wall. Four houses were left behind the new levee.

“Unfortunately, those four houses may get flooded in order to save the whole neighborhood,” Bart says.

But he said it wasn’t a hard decision to make.

“You do what you need to do and get on with it,” Bart adds.

He will be getting on with it for many more days to come. Bart says while this river has crested the fight to control it is far from over.

Enlarge Jason Reed/Pool/Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrives at Combat Outpost Andar in Ghazni province on June 6, as part of a two-day farewell trip to Afghanistan before he steps down from his post.

Jason Reed/Pool/Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrives at Combat Outpost Andar in Ghazni province on June 6, as part of a two-day farewell trip to Afghanistan before he steps down from his post.

On Thursday, Robert Gates will step down as defense secretary — a position he held for more than four years, overseeing two wars. He’s the only person to hold the job under two presidents from different parties.

For the past two years, he has attained a kind of “wise man” status within the Obama administration. While he makes weekly visits to the White House, he has also spent a great deal of time in khakis and a baseball cap out in the field with men and women in uniform.

Whenever Gates visits troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, he looks them in the eye and takes responsibility for sending them into combat. He told soldiers in Baghdad: “This is kind of personal for me. I’m the guy who signed the orders that sent you here.”

And in northern Iraq, he told them: “For the last four-and-a-half years, I’m the guy who has signed the paper that sent every single soldier, sailor, marine and airman in harm’s way.”

And in Afghanistan earlier this month, he said this: “More than anybody except the president, I’m responsible for you being here. And that weighs on me every day.”

There’s a heavy sense of accountability there. It’s almost paternal — a message that no matter the challenge you face, someone has your back. Gates has been that someone for the troops under his command and the president he serves.

Credibility For The President

President Obama came into office pushing to end the war in Iraq and double down on what he called “the right war” in Afghanistan. He was untested as a commander in chief and needed national security credibility; Gates helped give him that.

“I am confident Bob Gates will be remembered as one of the finest defense secretaries in American history, and I will always be grateful for his service,” the president said in a speech in April.

Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, has known Gates for close to 30 years — they met when Gates was the deputy director of the CIA and Armitage was at the Pentagon. He says this president flat-out needed Gates.

“There was a great deal of confidence in the foreign policy area as long as Bob Gates was involved, and this, I think, benefited the president a huge amount,” Armitage said. “The fact that we were in the middle of two wars, now almost three, and you had a steady hand at the helm is something that must have comforted our president, as it comforted the nation.”

Gates gave the president political cover when he needed it. He stood up for the president’s decision to wind down the war in Iraq, and to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell — the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

And on Afghanistan, when Obama was accused by Republicans of taking too long to figure out his war strategy — “dithering,” even — Secretary Gates was there to defend him.

“We need to understand that the decisions that the president faces on Afghanistan are some of the most important he may face in his presidency about how we go forward there,” Gates said at a Pentagon briefing in 2009. “And this is a situation in which I think this decision process should not be rushed.”

A Straight-Talker

Enlarge Dennis Brack/Pool/Getty Images

Secretary Gates listens as President Obama speaks at a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Gates began serving as defense secretary under the Bush administration, and was the first to continue under a different party.

Dennis Brack/Pool/Getty Images

Secretary Gates listens as President Obama speaks at a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Gates began serving as defense secretary under the Bush administration, and was the first to continue under a different party.

Gates served eight presidents, both Republicans and Democrats. He has been at the center of power for more than three decades.

“He is a kind of calmly self-assured person and probably isn’t swayed either by the emotions or the consensus of the moment,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the National Security adviser for President Jimmy Carter and hired Gates in 1977.

That may be why Gates is such a straight-talker. In 2006, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked him a direct question and got a direct answer.

“Mr. Gates, do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq?” Levin asked.

“No, Sir,” Gates answered.

This past February during a speech at West Point, Gates offered another straight shot: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army to Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

And in the run-up to the NATO attack on Libya this spring, he said, “There’s a lot of frankly loose talk about some of these military options, and let’s just call a spade a spade: A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya.”

Up until that point, the president and his secretary of defense had been on the same page on the big issues. The debate over Libya signaled a shift in the dynamic between the two. Gates came down on one side of the issue, and the president went in a different direction, going ahead with the Libya operation.

NPR Interview With Secretary Gates

It happened again in the run-up to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Officials close to Gates say he gave the president a different option: a missile attack that wouldn’t be nearly as risky for U.S. troops.

Obama listened to his defense secretary and in the end went his own way. Now, Gates is getting ready to go his.

Gates plans to move back to his lakeside home in Washington state, where he’ll write a book about his time leading the U.S. military — which is likely to include at least a few chapters on the war in Iraq.

Thanking Troops For Their Service

Gates has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan more than two-dozen times as secretary of defense, always on a specially equipped 747.

On the plane, there are sleeping quarters for the crew, a kitchen that churns out a lot of beef brisket (the secretary’s favorite) and a big operations center where the crew and Pentagon staff work.

The plane is designed to be a full-service command and control center. Some of the crew call it the doomsday plane, but most of the time, the souped-up aircraft is just a way to get Gates from point A to point B.

On one trip, Gates was headed to Baghdad to visit U.S. troops. It was a familiar scene: men and women in uniform gathered around him, some standing, others kneeling or cross-legged.

They came in close to hear the secretary tell them again that he’s got their back. When the talking was done, Gates made sure to shake everyone’s hand, thanking them for their service.

Enlarge Jason Reed/Pool/Getty Images

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaks to troops in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

Jason Reed/Pool/Getty Images

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates speaks to troops in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

Again, he made himself accountable to them, as he has with the presidents he has served. He’s the one who sent them to war, and he’s also among those who grieve if they don’t come home.

In 2007, Gates gave an emotional tribute to Doug Zembiec, a Marine major who was killed during combat operations in Baghdad. It is the kind of speech he would give many times over the next four years, and it spoke to how Gates measured his own success in the job: how well he took care of the troops he sent to war.

“Every evening, I write notes to the families of young Americans like Doug Zembiec,” Gates began. “For you and for me, they are not names on a press release or numbers updated on a website. They are our countries’ sons and daughters. They are in a tradition of service that includes you and your forebearers back to the earliest days of the republic. God bless you, the Marine Corps, the men and women of our armed forces and the country we have all sworn to defend.”

The Souris River began a slow retreat from Minot on Sunday with no further flood damage in the city, but officials warned danger would remain for several days until the highest water passed.

“We’re still at full alert until the water starts going down,” said Shannon Bauer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “It’s still a war.”

On Sunday, North Dakota National Guard soldiers were monitoring a submerged pedestrian bridge in Minot to make sure it didn’t break off in the river channel. The bridge has been trapping debris and could harm nearby levees. Guard commander David Sprynczynatyk said soldiers were ready to pull it out if it came loose.

The city’s levees were reinforced with plastic sheeting to help them withstand the sustained exposure to high water. Forecasts called for the Souris to fall nearly 2 feet by Wednesday.

More than 4,000 homes and hundreds of businesses flooded when the Souris flowed over levees Friday. Bauer said crews had dealt only with isolated problems since then, including a leaky dike that was reinforced Saturday night.

The Minot City Hall is still dry and up and running. With the help of pumps and a huge earthen levee along the side of the building, the river is being held back. But the street below the building, a school and several homes are all underwater.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and to see where I grew up underwater,” said Erik Hobbs, who came to check out the flooding. “I’m lucky enough to live on a hill and the blue house back there is someone I know and I don’t know how people are going to come back from that.”

Thousands of homes have been lost. Downtown is closed and the regional hospital is threatened. The city’s drinking water system may have been contaminated and residents have been warned to boil all water.

At a press conference, Mayor Curt Zimbelman said this has been the toughest flood fight he’s ever been in.

“Some points it’s overwhelming,” he said. “We are doing everything we possibly can do to survive this thing. I’m praying everything will be OK.”

The stress could be seen on Rep. Rick Berg’s face as he tried to tell a story about his family.

“I called my wife this afternoon and my 11-year-old son got on the phone,” he said before breaking down. He said his son told him to offer their house to displaced residents – “especially if there is someone elderly who doesn’t have a place to stay. We are five hours away so I don’t know if that will work, but that’s what we do in North Dakota, that’s what we do.”

That generosity was evident in the city’s two shelters opened up to take in evacuees. Residents, even those whose homes were damaged, had come to volunteer, donate food, toys and handcrafted quilts.

Fay Nelson was handing out small stuffed animals. She said she just wanted to do something, no matter how small the gesture.

“It’s good to help others if you can,” she said.

While 10,000 people have been evacuated from Minot, only about 250 are staying in the shelters. North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple says he’s not surprised there aren’t more people here.

“They’re very resourceful; they are very self-sufficient but they don’t think of themselves as dependent,” he said.

Clergymen Mike Johnson and Mike Pancoast were too busy helping people chased from their homes by rising waters to give much thought to their own predicament.

The Evangelical Lutheran pastors were bunking with friends in Minot after being evacuated from the Souris River flood zone last week. But on Saturday they hopped into a car and headed for Velva, about 20 miles downstream, to assist others who were being forced to move.

“It’s disheartening,” Johnson said. “But I’m grateful that I have a place to go and I feel for people who are worse off than I am.”

Johnson, associate pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, was uncertain about the fate of his own apartment building, although his belongings were safely in the hands of parishioners and friends in town. Fellow Lutherans from Stanley, an hour’s drive west, took charge of his office equipment and files.

“They just showed up on Tuesday and carted stuff off for us,” he said.

Similar stories of people helping each other, often without being asked and demanding nothing in return, were a heartwarming counterpoint to the destruction from unprecedented flooding along the Souris valley in north-central North Dakota. Brought together by word of mouth, church and civic networks, social media and random encounters, those with housing and supplies to spare gave willingly to those without.

A Facebook page called “Minot ND Flood Help” drew volunteer offers to haul furniture, care for pets, clean laundry and even give therapeutic massages — many from outside town.

Patrica Eide of Tioga, about 85 miles west, posted an offer to loan her 30-foot camper to a displaced family. It quickly drew a taker: a man with a wife and three children who were living in their van since being evacuated.

“We could probably rent that thing for $500 a month, but I told my husband there’s no way I’m going to be greedy,” Eide, 62, said by phone. “God just had better plans for our camper than renting it.”

She was preparing to haul it to Minot with a load of canned tomatoes and green beans, a grill, propane and other supplies. “I think we’ve got ‘em covered,” she said.

A common sight was garages packed with televisions, books, clothing and other items as residents turned their homes into temporary storage units for flood victims. Williamson was keeping things for students at Minot State.

Across the street, a trailer stuffed with household belongings stood in Derek Cumbie’s driveway. His garage was a veritable warehouse after several friends dropped off their things.

Two were staying with Cumbie, 26, a captain at Minot Air Force Base.

“I’ve been really impressed with how people in this community are helping each other, so I wanted to do my part,” he said.

Minot’s Broadway Street bridge over the Souris, which is its most important connection between the north and south sections of the city, is likely to remain closed until the crest recedes, the mayor said.

NPR’s Carrie Kahn contributed to this report, which includes material from The Associated Press

River levels have just peaked in the city of Minot, N.D. Levels are now more than 6 feet above major flood stage. As many as 4,000 homes are flooded and more than 10,000 people remain evacuated from the city’s center.

Enlarge Mark Lennihan/AP

The annual Gay Pride parade works its way along Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on Sunday. The parade became a victory celebration after New York’s historic decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

Mark Lennihan/AP

The annual Gay Pride parade works its way along Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on Sunday. The parade became a victory celebration after New York’s historic decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

Hundreds of thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue from Midtown all the way down to Greenwich Village on Sunday for the one of the world’s oldest and largest gay-pride parades. The parade took place less than two days after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s new marriage-equality law, making New York the sixth state, along with the District of Columbia, to grant full marriage rights to gay couples.

Minutes before the parade kicked off, Cuomo was cheered as he held a brief news conference. New York, he said, has always been a progressive beacon for the country.

“I believe New York has sent a message to this nation loud and clear: It is time for marriage equality all across this country,” he said.

The march was led off by a fleet of gay couples on motorcycles. There were columns of rainbow balloons, floats from corporations, a gospel choir from a largely gay church congregation and the New York Police Department’s band playing the obvious song, “New York, New York.”

Many of the signs held by the crowd, or those marching in the parade, were different this year: “Thank You, Governor Cuomo,” and “Promise Kept” were two signs that were everywhere, as were rainbow flags and flags with an equals sign. Few protesters were anywhere to be seen. Back in one section of the crowd, behind steel barricades, you could see a sign with the Ten Commandments and another saying, “Jesus Saves From Hell.”

Besides flag twirlers and a few drag queens, there were floats from schools and civil rights groups.

Corrections officer Monica Campo marched in the parade wearing a T-shirt that said, “Against Gay Marriage? Don’t Marry One.” She was with her wife Lorraine Campo. The couple had married in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal.

“We are just happy to be here this historic day,” she said.

Not everybody was about to tie the knot. Aaron Monteabaro and Russell Lamendola were marching with a sign for Baruch College where Monteabaro had just graduated.

Monteabaro said it was “too soon” to be married.

“I would marry him in a heartbeat,” Lamendola said.

Many in the parade were not simply celebrating.

Jack Rojas, who was marching with the Human Rights Campaign, said he had been at this parade perhaps 30 times. His eye was on the federal marriage law, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

“We need … federal recognition in all civil matters,” he said. “We pay taxes like everybody else. We are your brothers, your sisters, your sons, your daughters, your co-workers, and we need to be treated as we deserve, equally.”

Leah Modigliani was there with her two girls who are in elementary school. The girls had rainbows painted on their faces.

“We are so happy about gay marriage,” she said, cheering. She added that she had brought her girls since they were babies.

“I am already married to a man … and we are a more traditional family, but we really, strongly believe it is important for families of all kind to have the right to get married,” she said.

Her friend Pamela Morris was also there with her two girls. She has a female partner of 17 years.

“Now we can finally get married for real,” she said. “Absolutely going to do it officially.”

City hall is gearing up. There is already a question-and-answer section on its website. The first licenses should be ready in about 28 days.

Enlarge Amy Sancetta/AP

The Fireside Book Shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, makes a sale.

Amy Sancetta/AP

The Fireside Book Shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, makes a sale.

The latest surveys show that both business owners and consumers have been losing confidence in the U.S. economy. That pessimism is just the latest blow to hopes for a speedy recovery.

Last week, even Federal Reserve officials said they have grown more pessimistic about the economic outlook this year. The policy makers cut their forecast for 2011 to a growth rate of just 2.7 to 2.9 percent — down from their April estimate of 3.1 to 3.3 percent.

Economists say growing pessimism and a lack of confidence tends to depress spending. Chris Christopher, an economist with the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, says the large cash reserves corporations are holding are evidence that our budding optimism is fading.

Consumer Confidence Index

Consumers were gaining confidence heading into 2011, but have lately lost heart.

Source: The Conference Board

Credit: Allison Lenz/NPR

U.S. corporations have about $1.65 trillion in cash available to them, he noted. But managers are so wary about the near-term outlook that they are not spending that cash on hiring workers or expanding operations.

One major source of uncertainty for businesses is Congress. Even after months of talks, lawmakers have not been able to agree on how to cut spending and whether to raise the federal debt ceiling. If they can’t reach a deal soon, global investors may begin to fear a U.S. Treasury default, and those concerns could in turn trigger a financial crisis.

Europe also is facing a huge debt crisis. In the Middle East and Northern Africa, rioting and political instability have raised concerns about the reliability of oil supplies coming from the region.

Manufacturing Activity Nationwide

Manufacturing also seemed strong as 2011 began, but it, too, has fallen.

Source: Institute for Supply Management

Credit: Allison Lenz/NPR

Other concerns involve a spring slump in manufacturing activity and the ongoing problems in real estate. For example, last week, a report from the National Association of Realtors showed existing home sales fell again in May, down 3.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million units, the lowest rate in six months. Even worse, the median price was down 4.6 percent from a year earlier.

Consumers, whose spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of all U.S. economic activity, also lost confidence this spring as gasoline prices rose to nearly $4 a gallon in early May and unemployment ticked back up last month. The unemployment rate had gotten down to 8.8 percent in March, but was back up to 9.1 percent by May.

Confidence has been hurt by “disappointing growth and job creation, weakness in manufacturing and real estate, and … renewed turmoil in the Euro zone and its impact on financial markets,” Raymond Torto, chief economist at CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., said in a statement on falling confidence data.

On Tuesday, the Conference Board, a business organization, will release its closely watched Consumer Confidence Index. In surveys, most economists are predicting that index will not show a significant increase in confidence as Americans head into the summer. IHS Global Insight concludes in its own forecast that “the consumer mood has become more pessimistic due to poor payroll numbers, a further decline in home prices, increasing non-energy prices, and an unsettling stock market. Consumer confidence is at depressed levels and consumer spending is looking very weak.”

Clergymen Mike Johnson and Mike Pancoast have been too busy helping people chased from their homes by rising waters to give much thought to their own predicament.

The Evangelical Lutheran pastors are bunking with friends in Minot after being evacuated from the Souris River flood zone last week. But on Saturday they hopped into a car and headed for Velva, about 20 miles downstream, to assist others who were being forced to move.

“It’s disheartening,” Johnson said. “But I’m grateful that I have a place to go and I feel for people who are worse off than I am.”

The river was expected to reach its peak level early Sunday after swamping an estimated 4,000 homes. The National Weather Service predicted the river’s crest would be more than 2 feet lower than earlier projected, welcome news in the battered community.

Johnson, associate pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, was uncertain about the fate of his own apartment building, although his belongings were safely in the hands of parishioners and friends in town. Fellow Lutherans from Stanley, an hour’s drive west, took charge of his office equipment and files.

“They just showed up on Tuesday and carted stuff off for us,” he said.

Similar stories of people helping each other, often without being asked and demanding nothing in return, were a heartwarming counterpoint to the destruction from unprecedented flooding along the Souris valley in north-central North Dakota. Brought together by word of mouth, church and civic networks, social media and random encounters, those with housing and supplies to spare gave willingly to those without.

So many opened their doors that while some 11,000 people were evacuated from neighborhoods nearest the river, only a few hundred used shelters at Minot State University and the City Auditorium.

“For the rest of the country, that is kind of mind-boggling. But … that’s how we are in North Dakota,” Sen. John Hoeven said.

A Facebook page called “Minot ND Flood Help” drew volunteer offers to haul furniture, care for pets, clean laundry and even give therapeutic massages — many from outside town.

Patrica Eide of Tioga, about 85 miles west, posted an offer to loan her 30-foot camper to a displaced family. It quickly drew a taker: a man with a wife and three children who were living in their van since being evacuated.

“We could probably rent that thing for $500 a month, but I told my husband there’s no way I’m going to be greedy,” Eide, 62, said by phone. “God just had better plans for our camper than renting it.”

She was preparing to haul it to Minot with a load of canned tomatoes and green beans, a grill, propane and other supplies. “I think we’ve got ‘em covered,” she said.

Mike Pancoast and his wife Kari, both associate pastors at First Lutheran Church, were staying with Minot State campus pastor Kari Williamson after the rising river threatened their church and adjacent brick parsonage. Like Johnson, they didn’t know how high the waters would rise, but were confident enough to move most of their clothes and other belongings to higher floors instead of removing them. Their four children were staying with her parents in Minnesota.

“We’ve kept it together pretty well, although it’s not to say we’re a solid rock through this,” Mike Pancoast said, sipping coffee at the kitchen table of Williamson’s ranch-style house. “It’s one thing to go and visit somebody and stay in their house and enjoy their hospitality for a couple of days. It’s another thing to move in indefinitely and wonder have we overstayed our welcome?”

Johnson was staying with parishioners David and Laurie Weber. Their teenage sons, Preston and Dylan, accompanied him to Velva after spending Thursday on their bikes, going door-to-door to help evacuees move furniture.

A common sight was garages packed with televisions, books, clothing and other items as residents turned their homes into temporary storage units for flood victims. Williamson was keeping things for students at Minot State.

Across the street, a trailer stuffed with household belongings stood in Derek Cumbie’s driveway. His garage was a veritable warehouse after several friends dropped off their things.

Two were staying with Cumbie, 26, a captain at Minot Air Force Base.

“I’ve been really impressed with how people in this community are helping each other, so I wanted to do my part,” he said.

On Friday, the river had been expected to peak at about 9 feet above major flood stage, but it leveled off and was only rising by tiny amounts Saturday. The National Weather Service dropped the projection by just more than 2 feet as upstream flows weakened.

City officials applauded when Minot Mayor Curt Zimbelman announced the peak forecast at a news conference. He warned the sustained high water flows were likely to last for three to four days, enough to put significant strain on the city’s newly built earthen levees.

“You’ve got that deterioration on the dikes. If you see how fast that water is moving, it’s scary,” Zimbelman said. “We’re concerned that we can hold it, and it’s critical that we keep a vigilant eye on this.”

Minot’s Broadway Street bridge over the Souris, which is its most important connection between the north and south sections of the city, is likely to remain closed until the crest recedes, the mayor said.

Problems at Minot’s water treatment plant prompted the state Department of Health to issue a “boil order” on Saturday for users of city water. It also applies to the Minot Air Force Base, about 13 miles north of town, which gets its drinking water from Minot’s municipal system.

Zimbelman said city officials were “not completely sure at this point” that Minot’s water supply had been contaminated.

“It has not been fully tested … to show that it is contaminated,” Zimbelman said. “There is just a concern at this point, so we’re taking precautions.”

One of the world’s oldest and largest gay pride parades was expected to become a victory celebration Sunday after New York’s historic decision to legalize same-sex marriage.

Parade organizers were expecting half a million people to participate in the march, which comes two days after state lawmakers transformed the wedding dreams of gay couples into reality. Floats, music and dancing were expected to enliven the city streets with bright flourishes of carnival-like revelry.

State Sen. Tom Duane, a Manhattan Democrat who is gay, said he planned to join in the festivities.

“I always love the parade,” Duane said in an interview Saturday. “It’s like Christmas and New Year’s all wrapped into one, but I think it’ll be particularly joyous, so I’m really looking forward to that.”

Duane said he and his partner had first discussed marriage when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, but opted not to make any decisions until it became legal in New York. They have not made any plans yet.

“That will be next week’s project,” Duane said.

There may even be a few surprise engagements during the parade, which begins at noon at 36th Street and Fifth Avenue before heading downtown.

It ends at Greenwich and Christopher streets, near where gays rebelled against authorities and repressive laws outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969 — helping to trigger the gay rights movement.

A year later, several hundred people marched through the neighborhood to commemorate the riots in what is commonly considered the world’s first gay pride parade.

This year’s grand marshals include author and sex columnist Dan Savage and Terry Miller, who married in Canada; the Rev. Pat Bumgardner, the senior pastor of Metroplitan Community Church of New York and a proponent of gay rights; and the Imperial Court of New York, which raises money for gay health and social services.

The law signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday doesn’t take effect for 30 days. It was passed amid opposition from influential religious groups in the state.

———

Online:

http://www.nycpride.org/

———

AP Radio correspondent Julie Walker contributed to this report.

The Souris River neared a lower-than-expected crest Saturday in Minot, N.D., where city officials hoped to ride out the high water without losing more than the thousands of homes already damaged by flooding.

The river had been expected to peak Saturday evening at some 8 1/2 feet above major flood stage, but it leveled off hours earlier and the National Weather Service dropped the projection by nearly 2 feet as upstream flows weakened.

It was a brief boost for a city that has already taken a heavy blow. Mayor Curt Zimbelman said more than 4,000 homes had been flooded in an evacuation zone of neighborhoods nearest the river. About 11,000 people were ordered out earlier this week.

Sgt. 1st Class David Dodds, a spokesman for North Dakota’s National Guard, said the situation had “kind of stabilized” Saturday. The Souris’ channel wasn’t getting any wider.

“The fact that more homes aren’t being engulfed or being touched by the water, that’s the one silver lining if you can even say there is one,” Dodds said.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple said he was encouraged.

“It looks to me like, barring any rainfall … the (flood-fighting) plan looks like it’s holding up very well,” he said.

City spokesman Dean Lenertz said updated estimates of the flood’s toll were being prepared. The city’s water, sewer and electric power systems were still working. Workers labored to keep the Broadway Bridge, a major north-south thoroughfare, from being overwhelmed, a possibility that would divide the city in half.

Zimbelman and others had fretted about rain in the forecast, but the National Weather Service said the storms didn’t appear to be widespread or long-lasting.

Fed by heavy rains upstream and dam releases that have accelerated in recent days, the Souris surged past a 130-year-old record Friday and kept going.

Dalrymple spoke Saturday to flood evacuees at shelters at Minot State University’s Dome, an indoor track and basketball arena, and at the City Auditorium. Thirty-seven people stayed at Minot State’s shelter Friday night, and 237 people bedded down at the auditorium, the governor said.

The Minot State shelter was virtually deserted Saturday morning. One evacuee dozed among rows of cots lined up neatly on the dome’s indoor track.

Dalrymple and his wife, Betsy, listened to Les and Jacque Younger, 30-year Minot residents whose home had been dry just a few days ago.

“We have about a foot, I think, to a foot and a half before (the flood water) goes to the second floor, and that’s what I’m trying to save,” Jacque Younger said. The couple, who had lived in their home four years, said they also lost a van to the water.

Dalrymple noted that although thousands had been displaced, relatively few were staying in shelters.

“It just seems like people are so well grounded here with, like, friends and family,” Dalrymple said. “They’re used to asking people to support each other, and they find places to go.”

Minot State cancelled classes next week. President David Fuller, who was biking around campus to check on conditions, said classes wouldn’t resume until after July 4 and only if the Broadway Bridge was open.

“Even then, we’re going to have to reassess to see how that’s going to impact the students’ work in their classes,” Fuller said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency pledged assistance to flood victims in Burleigh and Ward counties, which include Minot and Bismarck, the state capital, which has been damaged by Missouri River flooding. Sens. Kent Conrad and John Hoeven and Rep. Rick Berg had pushed for the aid in a call to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and said they hoped it would be extended to other flood-ravaged counties.

Hoeven said a helicopter flight over the Souris valley showed damage to smaller cities around Minot.

In nearby Burlington, more than half of the town’s 1,000 residents left late this week to escape the Souris. In Velva, a small town about 20 miles downstream of Minot, emergency levees were being built in anticipation of an expected crest on Tuesday.

Sawyer, a town of about 350 people, was under a mandatory evacuation order Saturday after the Souris flowed over the main dike around daybreak. National Guard soldiers worked on a secondary levee. Mayor Cy Kotaska said about three homes had been flooded

The National Guard activated 870 members for the crisis. Minot is best known as home to an Air Force base responsible for 150 Minuteman III missiles in underground launch silos scattered over 8,500 square miles in northwest North Dakota.

Col. S.L. Davis, commander of the 91st Missile Wing, said there was some “localized flooding” at a handful of missiles sites because of the wet spring and summer. But he said the silos are designed to safely handle some water and protective measures were taken at a few sites similar to what’s done in preparation for spring runoff from snowmelt.

The Souris River neared a lower-than-expected crest Saturday in Minot, N.D., where city officials hoped to ride out the high water without losing more than the thousands of homes already damaged by flooding.

The river had been expected to peak Saturday evening at some 8 1/2 feet above major flood stage, but it leveled off hours earlier and the National Weather Service dropped the projection by nearly 2 feet as upstream flows weakened.

It was a brief boost for a city that has already taken a heavy blow. Mayor Curt Zimbelman said more than 4,000 homes had been flooded in an evacuation zone of neighborhoods nearest the river. About 11,000 people were ordered out earlier this week.

Sgt. 1st Class David Dodds, a spokesman for North Dakota’s National Guard, said the situation had “kind of stabilized” Saturday. The Souris’ channel wasn’t getting any wider.

“The fact that more homes aren’t being engulfed or being touched by the water, that’s the one silver lining if you can even say there is one,” Dodds said.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple said he was encouraged.

“It looks to me like, barring any rainfall … the (flood-fighting) plan looks like it’s holding up very well,” he said.

City spokesman Dean Lenertz said updated estimates of the flood’s toll were being prepared. The city’s water, sewer and electric power systems were still working. Workers labored to keep the Broadway Bridge, a major north-south thoroughfare, from being overwhelmed, a possibility that would divide the city in half.

Zimbelman and others had fretted about rain in the forecast, but the National Weather Service said the storms didn’t appear to be widespread or long-lasting.

Fed by heavy rains upstream and dam releases that have accelerated in recent days, the Souris surged past a 130-year-old record Friday and kept going.

Dalrymple spoke Saturday to flood evacuees at shelters at Minot State University’s Dome, an indoor track and basketball arena, and at the City Auditorium. Thirty-seven people stayed at Minot State’s shelter Friday night, and 237 people bedded down at the auditorium, the governor said.

The Minot State shelter was virtually deserted Saturday morning. One evacuee dozed among rows of cots lined up neatly on the dome’s indoor track.

Dalrymple and his wife, Betsy, listened to Les and Jacque Younger, 30-year Minot residents whose home had been dry just a few days ago.

“We have about a foot, I think, to a foot and a half before (the flood water) goes to the second floor, and that’s what I’m trying to save,” Jacque Younger said. The couple, who had lived in their home four years, said they also lost a van to the water.

Dalrymple noted that although thousands had been displaced, relatively few were staying in shelters.

“It just seems like people are so well grounded here with, like, friends and family,” Dalrymple said. “They’re used to asking people to support each other, and they find places to go.”

Minot State cancelled classes next week. President David Fuller, who was biking around campus to check on conditions, said classes wouldn’t resume until after July 4 and only if the Broadway Bridge was open.

“Even then, we’re going to have to reassess to see how that’s going to impact the students’ work in their classes,” Fuller said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency pledged assistance to flood victims in Burleigh and Ward counties, which include Minot and Bismarck, the state capital, which has been damaged by Missouri River flooding. Sens. Kent Conrad and John Hoeven and Rep. Rick Berg had pushed for the aid in a call to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and said they hoped it would be extended to other flood-ravaged counties.

Hoeven said a helicopter flight over the Souris valley showed damage to smaller cities around Minot.

In nearby Burlington, more than half of the town’s 1,000 residents left late this week to escape the Souris. In Velva, a small town about 20 miles downstream of Minot, emergency levees were being built in anticipation of an expected crest on Tuesday.

Sawyer, a town of about 350 people, was under a mandatory evacuation order Saturday after the Souris flowed over the main dike around daybreak. National Guard soldiers worked on a secondary levee. Mayor Cy Kotaska said about three homes had been flooded

The National Guard activated 870 members for the crisis. Minot is best known as home to an Air Force base responsible for 150 Minuteman III missiles in underground launch silos scattered over 8,500 square miles in northwest North Dakota.

Col. S.L. Davis, commander of the 91st Missile Wing, said there was some “localized flooding” at a handful of missiles sites because of the wet spring and summer. But he said the silos are designed to safely handle some water and protective measures were taken at a few sites similar to what’s done in preparation for spring runoff from snowmelt.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Some of President Obama’s military advisers called for a different course in Afghanistan. They wanted to keep more of the surge troops for a longer period of time.

NPR Pentagon correspondent, Tom Bowman, is in Afghanistan. For the past three weeks he’s been out in the field with those troops.

Tom, thanks so much for being with us.

TOM BOWMAN: Good to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: And first off, where have you been?

BOWMAN: Well, Scott, we’ve been here about a month now, and at first we were with the Marines in Helmand Province in the southwestern part of the country. It’s a very high desert area, very arid. And then in the last week or so we’ve been in the eastern part of the country, very mountainous terrain, not far from the Pakistan border, with elements of the First Infantry Division.

And in both cases, we’ve been in the areas of heaviest concentration of American Troops, and also the greatest amount of fighting over the past year or two.

SIMON: The president’s military advisors have actually been pretty forthright about the fact that the president essentially rejected their advice as to how many troops to pull out.

Here’s Admiral Mike Mullen testifying Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Admiral MIKE MULLEN (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff): What I can tell you is the president’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept. More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the president in the end can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take.

SIMON: And obviously, Admiral Mullen respecting that the president is the commander-in-chief, and it’s his right to make that decision. At the same time, is it as simple as every commander just wants more.

BOWMAN: You know, I don’t think it is. And I think most of the people we’ve talked with, everyone from Sergeant up to General, they’re worried about it, and they think it is too risky.

We’ve heard consistently that they’ve made a lot of gains against the Taliban, both in the southwest with the Marines, and the east with the American Army troops. And they’re worried that if you reduce troops too quickly, those gains will slide back, that the Taliban will move back into those areas.

And what both the Marines and the soldiers are doing now, it they’re moving out, setting up patrol bases, partnering with Afghan soldiers, and what General Petraeus has said is that the progress is fragile and reversible.

And what they’re particularly worried about is removing combat troops, what they call trigger pullers. They say that you maybe can reduce some support troops, and that could be anything from construction battalions to military police. But they’re very worried about reducing combat troops.

SIMON: Tom, you’ve been in the eastern part of Afghanistan, and I wonder if that’s one area of the country where a draw-down in troops could actually change what U.S. strategy is to operate in that area.

BOWMAN: You know, it’s possible that it could. The big fight in the east is different from where the Marines were in the southwest part of the country. And the fight in the south, and that’s Kandahar Province and Helmand Province, it’s more of a localized insurgency. Everyone who fights there kind of lives here.

But in the east there are safe havens in Pakistan, and the big fight in the east is with what’s called the Haqqani network. Now this network was set up by a Mujahideen fighter who fought against the soviets and later linked up with the Taliban and al-Qaida.

So there’s a concern if your draw down American combat troops too quickly, it’ll have a hard time fighting this Haqqani network.

SIMON: In addition to talk about the numbers, obviously there’s been some dispute over timing. And let’s listen to an exchange on Capitol Hill Thursday. General David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, was testifying, got some pretty sharp questions from Senator John McCain of Arizona.

Senator JOHN MCCAIN (Republican, Arizona): From a pure military standpoint, the troops coming out before the end of the fighting season next summer, in order to comply with a September pull out, does it make it more difficult for General Allen to carry out pure military aspects of his mission?

General DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, again, this is a more aggressive timeline. It means that there are, again, further challenges by not getting all the way through the fighting season.

SIMON: General Allen by the way is, of course, nominated to replace General Petraeus. Tom, the military must read the public opinion polls in the United States and all the news accounts. Do a lot of them have a perception that this withdrawal date is in response to those public opinion polls and political considerations?

BOWMAN: Oh, I think absolutely. They realize that the support for the war at home is decreasing and also the support in Congress is decreasing as well. But their concern is pulling these troops out too quickly before the fighting season ends. The fighting season generally lasts until the snows come, into October or November, so they’re really worried a bit about that. You look into next year, they want to remove the remaining 23,000 surge troops before September of 2012, and that would mean the large number of these troops would come out in the spring and summer right in the middle of the fighting season. So there is a great deal of concern about, again, slipping back on the progress theyve made by pulling these combat troops out in the middle of the fighting season.

SIMON: Another question that has to be asked; the logic of U.S. withdrawal is predicated on Afghan troops taking over the burden of fighting the Taliban and other forces. Youve been with the Afghan army. What’s your impression of the progress theyve made?

BOWMAN: Well, weve been, weve seen a quite a number of Afghan troops in the month or so weve been here, and some of them are pretty squared away. There was one occasion, we were off with the 1st Infantry Division up in the hills of Eastern Afghanistan and there was a small number of Afghan forces there and they happened to see some Afghans out in the woods, and they actually rolled up these guys to find out what they were doing out there, questioned them and then let them go. So these guys seem to be pretty much on the ball.

But there are other occasions where we’d be patrolling with American soldiers or Marines, and the Afghan soldiers are almost along for the ride. They were looking around. They weren’t asking questions of any of the villagers. They were wandering off, some were jumping into canals and swimming. It really is what you would call a mix bag. Some of them are clearly ready to take over; they could probably do it tomorrow, but quite a few others are going to need a lot more time.

SIMON: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. We reached him in Kabul. Thanks so much.

BOWMAN: Youre welcome, Scott.

(Soundbite of music)

SIMON: And youre listening to NPR News.

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Enlarge Courtesy Steven Anderson

Air conditioners keep tents cool on a U.S. military base in Iraq. The tents have been treated with polyurethane foam to increase energy efficiency.

Courtesy Steven Anderson

Air conditioners keep tents cool on a U.S. military base in Iraq. The tents have been treated with polyurethane foam to increase energy efficiency.

The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.

That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.

“When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,” Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. David Patreaus’ chief logistician in Iraq.

Why does it cost so much?

To power an air conditioner at a remote outpost in land-locked Afghanistan, a gallon of fuel has to be shipped into Karachi, Pakistan, then driven 800 miles over 18 days to Afghanistan on roads that are sometimes little more than “improved goat trails,” Anderson says. “And you’ve got risks that are associated with moving the fuel almost every mile of the way.”

Anderson calculates more than 1,000 troops have died in fuel convoys, which remain prime targets for attack. Free-standing tents equipped with air conditioners in 125 degree heat require a lot of fuel. Anderson says by making those structures more efficient, the military could save lives and dollars.

Still, his $20.2 billion figure raises stark questions about the ongoing war in Afghanistan. In the wake of President Obama’s announcement this week that about 30,000 American troops will soon return home, how much money does the U.S. stand to save?

When you have this many people in a country that doesn’t want you there — that has no economy, no infrastructure and a corrupt government — and you’re trying to stabilize it and build them into a viable nation? I’m not sure we have enough time, and I definitely know we don’t have enough money.

- Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)

Dollars And Cents

The 30,000 troops who will return home by the end of next year were sent to Afghanistan in 2009, at a cost of about $30 billion. That comes out to about $1 million a solider.

But the savings of withdrawing those troops won’t equal out, experts say.

“What history has told us is that you don’t see a proportional decrease in spending based on the number of troops when you draw them down,” Chris Hellman, a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project, tells Martin.

“In Afghanistan that’s going to be particularly true because it’s a very difficult and austere environment in which to operate,” he says.

That means most war expenditures lie not in the troops themselves but in the infrastructure that supports them — infrastructure that in some cases will remain in place long after troops are gone.

“We’re building big bases,” American University professor Gordon Adams tells Martin. The costs of those bases are, in economic terms, “sunk” costs, he says.

“We’re seeing this in Iraq. We’re turning over to the Iraqis — mostly either for a small penny or for free — the infrastructure that we built in Iraq. But we won’t see back any money from that infrastructure.”

Then there’s the costly task of training Afghan security forces. The Obama administration has requested almost $13 billion to train and equip Afghan security forces in the next fiscal year.

And more importantly, Hellman says, “[Afghan President Hamid] Karzai indicated a couple years back that [Afghanistan] wasn’t going to be a position to support their own military forces 15, 20 years out. I suspect we’re going to be called on to pay a substantial part of that bill going forward.”

Criticism From The President’s Own Party

The realm of war and peace exists separately apart — and justifiably so — from the economic realm.

- Lawrence Kaplan, a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College

For critics of the president, the idea that the troop drawdown won’t save much money is reason enough to suggest it should be bigger.

One outspoken critic is Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). He notes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost hundreds of billions of dollars so far, and he argues a larger troop drawdown isn’t a national security risk.

“We have the greatest special ops in the world. We have more technology than any other country on earth,” Manchin tells Martin. “Do we actually need to have 70,000 troops on the ground?”

“When you have this many people in a country that doesn’t want you there — that has no economy, no infrastructure and a corrupt government — and you’re trying to stabilize it and build them into a viable nation? I’m not sure we have enough time, and I definitely know we don’t have enough money,” Manchin says.

But others argue war should be waged independent of cost.

“The realm of war and peace exists separately apart — and justifiably so — from the economic realm,” says Lawrence Kaplan, a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College, who says critics like Manchin are looking for “economic answers to a non-economic question.

“And anyway, it’s not the war that’s broken Washington’s piggy bank,” he adds, noting that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security account for far more spending than the $107 billion the Pentagon says it will spend in Afghanistan next year.

Enlarge Courtesy Steven Anderson

A U.S. military tent after treatment with polyurethane foam. A 2006 test of the foam cut energy use by 92 percent, says retired Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson.

Courtesy Steven Anderson

A U.S. military tent after treatment with polyurethane foam. A 2006 test of the foam cut energy use by 92 percent, says retired Brig. Gen. Steven Anderson.

“Remember, we’re talking about 30,000 troops,” he says “I don’t think that hundred-billion-dollar price tag should be the determining one.”

Can Greener Mean Safer?

But for Anderson, the retired brigadier general, economics does have a role to play in modern warfare.

Anderson advocates for increased energy efficiency for military structures in order to cut down on the need for long, dangerous fuel-transport missions. A few months ago, Anderson heard from a company commander in Afghanistan.

“He literally has to stop his combat operations for two days every two weeks so he can go back and get his fuel. And when he’s gone, the enemy knows he’s gone, and they go right back to where they were before. He has to start his counter-insurgency operations right back at square one.”

Anderson says experiments with polyurethane foam insulation for tents in Iraq cut energy use by 92 percent and took 11,000 fuel trucks off the road. But he adds there’s a lack of enthusiasm for a greener military among top commanders.

“People look at it and say ‘It’s not my lane. We don’t need to tie the operational commanders’ hands’ — things like this,” he says.

“A simple policy signed by the secretary of defense — a one- or two-page memo, saying we will no longer build anything other than energy-efficient structures in Iraq and Afghanistan — would have a profound impact.”

Enlarge Pam Fessler

Robert Laws collects supplies from the Tennessee food bank’s mobile pantry.

Pam Fessler

Robert Laws collects supplies from the Tennessee food bank’s mobile pantry.

Food banks around the country are trying to keep their shelves stocked as more people in the U.S. struggle to get enough to eat. Increasingly, that means finding new ways to salvage food that would otherwise go to waste.

One innovation is being tested at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee. In a back room at the food bank’s warehouse in Gray, Tenn., dented and crushed cans containing everything from green beans to beets are piled high on a counter.

In the past, these cans all would have been thrown out, because no one knew whether bacteria had slipped through a crack, spoiling the contents.

But Scott Kinney, who’s in charge of finding food supplies for the food bank, says that might be about to change.

He puts several damaged cans into a box-shaped machine with a clear lid. It’s a vacuum packaging machine — the kind usually used to seal food in plastic.

“Right now it’s setting up the vacuum,” he says, as the machine motor starts to hum. “You can watch; the cans will move a little bit as the vacuum gets to its highest pressure point.”

The cans vibrate, then puff up like little balloons as the machine sucks out all the air in the chamber. They return to normal when the machine stops.

Follow The Food: See How The Donation Process Works

NPR

Follow The Food: See How The Donation Process Works

Kinney takes out one of the cans, running his hand along the outside. It’s dry, which is a good sign. He says if there had been a hole, the vacuum would have sucked out some of the food.

Kinney says this system is still part of a pilot program, but at this food bank alone, it could mean tons of additional food for needy people. Out of 300 cans run through the machine the day before, only one had to be thrown away because it showed signs of a leak.

“The good news is, it was cat food,” Kinney says.

Rhonda Chafin, the food bank’s executive director, says Second Harvest of Northeast Tennessee distributes about 8 million pounds of food a year, but it needs more because demand continues to grow.

She already gets lots of donations from local supermarkets and retailers, but she has her eyes on other potential donors.

“We still have hospitals, hotels, caterers, restaurants that could give prepared food that has not been utilized, that’s still in the kitchen, that was left over,” Chafin says.

The challenge is convincing potential donors that it’s a good thing to do, and then finding a way to store and transport the food safely.

Jonathan Bloom, author of a book called American Wasteland, says Americans squander about 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. — or 150 billion pounds a year. He says that’s far more than what’s needed to feed the hungry.

A Squash’s Journey: From The Shelf To The Hungry

NPR followed squash and corn from Walmart’s shelves to a food bank to those who need it the most.

“All throughout the food chain, there’s a winnowing process, where anything that doesn’t look quite right or isn’t the right size gets cast aside,” Bloom says. “And this squandering of perfectly edible food is happening from farm to fork. The main culprit here is wanting our food to look perfect.”

He says lots of retailers prefer to throw damaged or bruised food away, rather than donating it, for fear of being sued if something goes wrong — even though there are laws protecting donors against such suits.

Farms are another promising source of more food donations, says Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.

“We know that today, there is 6 billion pounds of produce that is grown, but never distributed,” she says. Much of it is plowed under when market demand falls short. Now, Feeding America is talking with farm groups about how to get a billion pounds of that food a year to the poor.

“The good news is it’s healthy food, which clients need,” Escarra says. “The challenging thing is a billion pounds is a lot of food and it is highly perishable.”

So, along with buying machines to check out damaged cans, food banks are likely to be in the market soon for more refrigerated trucks and mobile pantries, so they can get all this produce quickly and safely to those who need it.

Little-Known Facts About An Infamous List

In The Beginning
The “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” program was launched on March 14, 1950 — a joint effort between the FBI and national news media.

Nobody Is THE Most Wanted
The list doesn’t rank fugitives in any order; just being on the list makes them all equal priority — the highest.

Fugitives By The Hundreds
At present, 494 fugitives have landed on the list. All but 30 of them have been located with 152 captured though help from the public. Of those, 17 were apprehended through the long-running TV show, “America’s Most Wanted.”

Women Are Most Wanted, Too
Eight women have made the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list, the first being Ruth Eisemann-Schier, who made the list in 1968 for kidnapping, extortion and other charges.

The Price Of Justice
The minimum reward for the capture of a “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive is $100,000. Sometimes, as in the case of Osama bin Laden, the amount can be much larger.

A Dubious Honor
With 59 apprehensions, California leads the nation in the number of “Most Wanted” fugitives captured.

Doing Time On The List
At 27 years, Victor Manuel Gerena has been on the list longer than any other fugitive. Billie Austin Bryant, however, spent the least amount of time on the list – just two hours.

Source: The FBI

With a threat of still more rain looming, Minot was bracing Saturday for the Souris River to cascade past its already unprecedented level and widen a path of destruction that had severely damaged thousands of homes and threatened many others.

City officials were expecting the river to peak as early as Saturday evening at some 8 1/2 feet beyond major flood stage and remain there for several days, straining the city’s levees to the limit and overwhelming some of them. Forecasters said there was at least an even chance of additional storms in coming days.

“A rain event right now would change everything. That’s the scariest,” Mayor Curt Zimbelman said.

After a flyover Friday, officials estimated at least 2,500 homes had been swamped and predicted the number would rise to 4,500 by the time the river crests. At least two schools, a nursing home and hundreds of businesses also were endangered, Zimbelman said.

More than a quarter of Minot’s 40,000 residents evacuated earlier this week, packing any belongings they hoped to save into cars, trucks and trailers.

Fed by heavy rains upstream and dam releases that have accelerated in recent days, the Souris surged past a 130-year-old record Friday and kept going. The river was more than 5 feet above major flood stage Friday afternoon.

The predicted crest was lowered a foot based on new modeling by the National Weather Service, but it was little consolation in Minot, where Gov. Jack Dalrymple said frantic efforts to keep the floodwaters at bay soon would give way to a daunting recovery challenge.

“The stress of this incident is going to build up very quickly,” he said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency pledged assistance to flood victims in Burleigh and Ward counties, which include Minot and Bismarck, the state capital, which has been damaged by Missouri River flooding. Sens. Kent Conrad and John Hoeven and Rep. Rick Berg had pushed for the aid in a call to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and said they hoped it would be extended to other flood-ravaged counties.

As they had the past two days, emergency officials focused on protecting water and sewer systems to avoid the need for more evacuations. They were confident about the water system, but a little less so about the sewer treatment plant. It had been sandbagged as high as possible.

Zimbelman said water coming up through a storm sewer briefly began to erode one downtown levee before it was controlled.

Also of concern was the Broadway Bridge, a key north-south route. Levees protecting the northern approach were being raised, but Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Col. Kendall Bergmann said it was touch and go. The levee work also protected the campus of nearby Minot State University.

Hoeven said a helicopter flight over the Souris valley showed damage to smaller cities nearby. He estimated more than 5,000 homes in the valley would eventually have water damage, including those in Minot and Burlington, where officials gave up sandbagging Thursday. The Army Corps of Engineers was leading an effort to build emergency levees in Velva, a small town about 20 miles downstream of Minot, before the Souris crests there Tuesday.

In Burlington, deputy auditor Cindy Bader estimated Friday that more than half of the town’s 1,000 residents had left to escape the rising Souris River.

Burlington’s city hall, school and police and fire departments appeared safe, but some homes in the evacuation zone had water up to their first floors and higher.

In one neighborhood, the tops of two traffic signs barely peeked above the brown, brackish water, which reached just beneath the eaves of two nearby houses.

Wayne Walter, a Burlington city councilman and truck driver for a snack food company, said residents were stunned by the river’s rapid rise. Just a trickle of water had slipped over the dikes Thursday night, but by the next morning “everything was gone,” he said.

The National Guard had 870 members activated for the crisis. Minot is best known as home to an Air Force base, which oversees 150 Minuteman III missiles in underground launch silos scattered over 8,500 square miles in northwest North Dakota.

Col. S.L. Davis, commander of the 91st Missile Wing, said there was some “localized flooding” at a handful of missiles sites because of the wet spring and summer. But he said the silos are designed to safely handle some water and protective measures were taken at a few sites similar to what’s done in preparation for spring runoff from snowmelt.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched four boats to patrol flooded neighborhoods and respond to 911 calls. No injuries were reported. The evacuation zone was empty except for emergency officials and some geese, who paddled in about 5 feet of water washing down the streets.

George Moe, 63, whose house was about a block from the water’s edge, returned briefly Friday to pick up some keys. Moe said the only thing left in his house was the mounted head of an antelope shot by his wife, who died about three years ago.

Moe worried about the home he’s lived in for four decades and the shop where he works as a mechanic; it was taking on water and he wasn’t sure he’d have a job after the flood.

“I hate to see something go to hell after 40 years,” he said. “There ain’t much you can do.”

———

Associated Press writer Dale Wetzel in Burlington contributed to this report.

Michele Norris speaks with Rick Seaney, CEO of Farecompare.com, about the new boarding pass fee that Spirit Airlines is charging — and what other fees we might be seeing soon.

Irish mob boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger’s scheduled arraignment in a Boston courtroom Friday after 16 years on the lam will open yet another chapter in the violent crime-and-politics family saga that has consumed Beantown reporters since the 1980s.

Enlarge Boston Police

An early mug shot shows James “Whitey” Bulger in 1953.

Boston Police

An early mug shot shows James “Whitey” Bulger in 1953.

“I’ve spent half my career chasing Whitey Bulger around,” says Gerard O’Neill, retired head of the Boston Globe investigative team, which in 1988 outed Bulger as an FBI informant since the mid-1970s.

Suspected of 19 murders, Bulger disappeared in December 1994 after being tipped off by an FBI pal that federal racketeering charges against him and his top associate, Stephen Flemmi, were about to be filed.

During his absence, his politically powerful brother, William “Billy” Bulger, who had served 17 years as state Senate president, stepped down from the presidency of the University of Massachusetts and into a quiet retirement.

His FBI pal, John Connolly, the agent and childhood friend of the Bulgers, is in prison, convicted of racketeering for tipping Whitey Bulger off about the impending indictment.

John Martorano, a Whitey Bulger associate who admitted to 20 murders before cutting a deal to turn evidence on Connolly, is a free man and has been featured on 60 Minutes.

Flemmi, sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2001 for extortion and money laundering, still faces 10 federal and state murder charges. Kevin Weeks, a close Whitey Bulger associate, was facing federal racketeering charges in 1999 when he decided to cut a deal with investigators, leading them to the bodies of some of Bulger’s alleged victims. After five years in prison, he wrote a memoir.

And now, the final puzzle piece has fallen into place: the capture of Whitey Bulger, one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, and a man many never thought would be brought to justice.

It was — and continues to be — the story of a lifetime for many journalists, some of whom shared their Whitey Bulger tales with us.

Gerard O’Neill

Retired head of the Boston Globe‘s investigative team, which first reported in 1988 suspicions that Whitey Bulger was an FBI informant, and co-author of Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob.

Even after he fled, he was being romanticized. Anyone who turned up to accuse him of something was set upon.

- Jonathan Wells, producer at WBZ

Before he disappeared, the DEA was after him for a while. They put a bug in his car. It became clear that Bulger discovered it. It was a badge of honor to go back and reclaim the bug so you won’t have someone taunting you. So the DEA guys roust Bulger, put him up against the side of the car and Bulger says: “Hey, hey, we’re all good guys here. You’re the ‘good good’ guys, we’re the ‘bad good’ guys.” They had a laugh. Give us the bug and we’ll be on our way. Thank you very much. …

There was a reporter for the Boston Herald American, Paul Corsetti, who had written some critical things about [Whitey's brother] Billy Bulger. Corsetti used to drink at this kind of high-end bar at Quincy Market. While he was there, he finds that someone had slid in beside him on a bar stool. “My name is James Bulger,” the man said. “I kill people for a living. What you’re saying about my brother has to stop.”

[An account of this incident was included in a book by Howie Carr, a longtime Boston Herald columnist and Boston radio personality. It says that Bulger also made clear he had information on the cars Corsetti and his wife drove and the schedule of their young daughter's day-care routine.]

… When we did our first investigation series on the Bulgers in 1988, the FBI called up Kevin Cullen [then a Globe investigative reporter, now a columnist]. They had doped out that we were going to write a story that Bulger was an FBI informant. The agent said, “If you guys are thinking of doing that, he’ll think nothing of clipping the bunch of you.” I thought it was the FBI trying to intimidate us. Clearly, in retrospect, that was the case. We were very concerned about Kevin Cullen. He was living in South Boston. I thought he was in genuine danger. We moved him out for a couple weeks. They later tried to say it was a friendly warning to go slow, and be careful. I thought it was true colors all around. …

When Bulger’s mother died in 1980, and Billy was president of the state Senate, Whitey was concerned about leaving the church and being photographed with his brother. He feared the bad publicity for his brother. So he hid out in the belfry of the church. The family and the casket passed directly under him when they left the church. The price of infamy — you can’t even lay your mother to rest. But whatever he gets coming to him, he more than deserves. He’s a psychopath. Pure evil.

Jonathan Wells

Producer at CBS station WBZ in Boston and former Boston Herald investigative reporter and editor

For years, there were friends and apologists of Whitey in the media and in law enforcement. They tried to describe him as a Robin Hood — giving turkeys to widows, describing him as a crime boss who kept drugs out of the neighborhood, kept order. Even at the time, it rang hollow. He was not only letting drugs into the neighborhood but extorting big payments from the drug dealers to do business in the city, not just Southie. It came out later that under the guard of the FBI, he was murdering people serially. Even after he fled, he was being romanticized. Anyone who turned up to accuse him of something was set upon. When [John] Martorano became a government witness, Mike Barnicle had a column for Boston Globe, before he was booted for plagiarism, carrying water for the Bulger family. He said that Martorano used to shoot black people for fun, and how disgraceful that they’d use them as a government witness. Right to the end, people like Barnicle were doing their work for the Bulger family. His life was so toxic for the city: It reached into politics, the media and law enforcement. Martorano got a sweetheart deal, but he also delivered John Connolly to the government, which was a major breakthrough.

Phyllis Karas

Author, with Kevin Weeks, Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob and Where’s Whitey?

It was 1990. A young woman came into the convenience store that Jimmy (Whitey) ran. Said her daughter couldn’t play in the back of the triple-decker where they lived in Southie because there were all these needles in the yard. When they’d call the police, the family on the first floor, ex-boxers, brothers Al and Pat, would clean everything up before police got there and then be back in business dealing drugs the next day. Jimmy and Kevin went to the house, and when people started pulling up to get drugs, they told them to get out, and beat up a couple of them. But the dealing continued. One night, Jimmy and Kevin drove over to Curley’s lumber yard, picked up some plywood, nailed it over all the dealers’ windows, and spray painted “no drugs” on the wood. They told the brothers they had 24 hours to get out of the neighborhood. They were gone. There was a part of Whitey that was protecting his neighborhood.

Joe Bergantino

Former investigative reporter for WBZ-TV in Boston, now director of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University.

This goes back almost 30 years. In the early 1980s, we got a phone call from an informant who tipped us off that Whitey Bulger was running arms to Ireland — for the IRA, of course. We had a long phone conversation in which he explained that he was aboard the trawler that delivered the guns. The informant — John McIntyre — disappeared within a few days after the phone call. His body was unearthed several years later. If I remember correctly, Whitey and his gang tortured him — pulling out his teeth, one by one. We did several stories in the early ’80s about the trawler and its connection to Whitey. [Note: McIntyre's family has claimed in court that the FBI was responsible for his death because Connolly allegedly tipped off Bulger that McIntyre was cooperating with authorities investigating Bulger and Flemmi.]

I look at this as not a story of a traditional mob boss, but more about the corruption of the entire city culture for over a quarter century.

- Andrew Gully, former reporter and editor, Boston Herald

Andrew Gully

A former longtime reporter and editor at the Boston Herald

There are so many gruesome stories about Whitey. I look at this as not a story of a traditional mob boss, but more about the corruption of the entire city culture for over a quarter-century. The reach of Whitey Bulger went into the criminal justice system, and into the political system because of his brother, Billy. When Whitey had a no-show job in a courthouse in Suffolk County, the housing judge there was going to let him go. So the state froze the courthouse budget. You couldn’t mess with Whitey without getting the repercussions of Billy. And the other way around. That was the early chilling effect. That story was known for years and years. And you had the horrifying story of how Whitey strangled Flemmi’s girlfriends, cut off fingers, pulled out teeth. From stark brutality to political influence. You think of the fallout for people like the Wheeler family, the Donahue family. They lost their fathers because of Whitey. All the honest FBI agents will have to live with this legacy for a long time — suspicion, innuendo. The harm done is significant. [Jai Alai business owner Roger Wheeler was murdered after learning Bulger was skimming money from Wheeler's Florida operation. Michael Donahue was murdered when he gave a ride home to a neighbor who, unknown to Donahue, had offered information on Bulger to the FBI.]

Ralph Ranalli

Author of Deadly Alliance: The FBI’s Secret Partnership with the Mob, and former Boston Herald and Boston Globe reporter

When I first started covering Whitey Bulger in federal courts in Boston back in the early 1990s, I began hearing about an informant program called “Top Echelon.” I ran across documents that described the program and called the FBI’s national press office. I said, “Hey, I want to talk about this Top Echelon program.” They said, sorry we don’t talk about informants. I told them I wasn’t asking about a specific informant, I just wanted to know about a program. The press officer said never talk about informant programs, ever, and when I asked for his name to quote him, he said, “We’re off the record.” He said the conversation was over, and hung up on me. This wasn’t Cold War with Russia intrigue; this was just how a domestic law enforcement agency was going after a bunch of bookmakers and wise guys, and they won’t acknowledge the program exists? It just set off alarm bells, that there must be something really, really wrong here. And it turned out to be the case. They made deals with these high-ranking organized crime figures to bring down other high-ranking organized crime figures, with tons of collateral damage. People murdered, lives ruined because the FBI let these informants run amok and protected them. It’s just this stain on Boston and on the FBI that this sociopath was allowed to run loose and terrorize people, commit or order a bunch of murders because he was helping a small group of very ambitious law enforcement people make cases. He was this looming, terrifying presence. It shook the faith of a lot of people in law enforcement and also damaged relations between the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in Boston for a whole generation.

Jay Atkinson

Author of Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

There was a small-time drug dealer, Danny Jacie, a handsome, 21-year-old kid who was having a love affair with Flemmi’s girlfriend, Debbie Davis. One night at dusk, police patrolling a road on the Milton-Quincy border see a car passing them at high speed going in the opposite direction. It was a flashy car, the kind Flemmi drove, so they did a U-turn to follow it. They lost him. But then they came upon a body in the clearing — it was Danny Jacie. I’ve seen the autopsy photos. He was killed, execution style, in the back of the head. The murder was never solved. There are many other Danny Jacies. Murders that have gone unremarked because the families had no juice or because they’re low-level dealers like Danny Jacie. In addition to the bodies already discovered and the murder charges already made, there are more. They had some agreement with a crematorium in West Roxbury, where two bodies would be delivered in one coffin. The debriefing and — maybe — cooperation of Whitey Bulger may bring to light what really happened to the Danny Jacies of that time. [Debbie Davis disappeared in 1981; Flemmi claimed she had run off with a rich Mexican chicken farmer, Atkinson says. Flemmi in 2009 testified that he watched Bulger strangle Davis, they both pulled out her teeth, and they buried her along the Neponset River.]

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

People looking for jobs wait in line to speak with potential employers at the Brooklyn Job Fair on April 13 in New York City.

President Obama spent Friday pushing job creation in manufacturing, but he’s getting increasing pressure for job results from a key part of his base: African-Americans.

The unemployment rate for black men is about double the national average — and economists don’t expect that number to fall to the single digits anywhere in the near future.

So while those dealing with unemployment wait for the government to create jobs, they turn to groups like Michigan Works, a public-private collaboration in Ypsilanti, Mich., that helps get the unemployed retrained and back into the job world.

George Toles with Michigan Works says those who come in for help can get Internet access for job searches, interview and resume training, as well as other help looking for work.

“They can make use of our fax and copy machines, our interview rooms where they can go in and talk to employers,” he says.

On any given day Toles says he sees about 150 to 200 clients.

Ypsilanti is about 30 percent black, but Toles says the majority of the clients he sees in a day are African-American.

One of those clients is Fernando Payne, a carpenter who hasn’t had full-time work in 3 1/2 years since the housing market collapsed.

Unemployment Rates

A chart showing the unemployment rates for the total population, Hispanics or Latinos, and African-Americans from 2006 to 2011.

Credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics

“When the bottom fell out, I was probably the first one that felt it,” he says.

Payne says he is luckier than others: His wife has solid work as a nurse, so he has been taking care of their four children and is going back to college to get a degree in business administration. Payne says even with extra training, he’s still finding it very hard to find a job.

“They tell you to get a trade — you’ll be fine with a trade. Been there, done that for 20 years,” he says. “They say you need a better education, so when the bottom fell out I went and got a better education, and I’m still in the same boat.”

The national unemployment rate has been hovering in the 9 percent range, but for African-Americans — and African-American men in particular — it’s much higher.

A ‘Man-Cession’

“One of the unique things or features this recession was that it was called a ‘man-cession,’ ” says Bill Rodgers, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“White men and African-American men and Latino men really bore the brunt of it because of the dramatic loss or contraction in construction and manufacturing,” he adds.

Rodgers says for the unemployment rate for minorities to fall back down into the single digits the U.S. economy would have to have the kind of growth it had in the 1990s.

They tell you to get a trade — you’ll be fine with a trade. Been there, done that for 20 years. They say you need a better education, so when the bottom fell out I went and got a better education, and I’m still in the same boat.

- Fernando Payne, Ypsilanti, Mich., resident

“What distresses me more than anything is that it has gotten worse,” says Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League. “Here we are 50 years after the glorious 1960s, and the problem of unemployment in the black community is as bad as it’s ever been.”

Earlier this week the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report showing that cities with large black populations — like Detroit and Cleveland — won’t see single-digit unemployment this decade.

“To some extent [the report] should be a wake-up call,” Morial says. “I think what it says is that if we do nothing, we are in for a period of a decade or longer of very high unemployment. And the social cost and the human cost of that are something we haven’t even calculated as a nation.”

Morial says he wants Republicans and Democrats to focus on job creation, but he’s especially looking toward the president for leadership.

Enlarge David J. Phillip/AP

This foreclosure property in Houston was for sale in 2009. But many houses are still in the foreclosure pipeline and haven’t even come on the market.

David J. Phillip/AP

This foreclosure property in Houston was for sale in 2009. But many houses are still in the foreclosure pipeline and haven’t even come on the market.

The housing market is still languishing this summer, leading some economists to believe prices won’t begin to recover until 2014. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake says the market may be worse than most people thought.

This is due in large part to something economists call the shadow inventory — or the number of houses that will soon be up for sale.

On any given day in just about every city in the country, auctioneers are standing on the front steps of homes selling off foreclosed properties. Often no buyers even show up, and the bank takes the house.

Five years after the housing bubble burst, the numbers are still staggering. Additionally, many houses are still in the foreclosure pipeline and haven’t even come up for sale.

“In a worst-case scenario you’re looking at potentially 6 million of these properties,” says Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac, a company that follows shadow inventory.

He says there are more than 1 million houses in foreclosure that haven’t been sold. On top of that, he says there are 4 million seriously delinquent home loans.

“The majority of those will ultimately hit the market as distressed properties, another part of that shadow inventory,” he says.

One way to think about it is, the longer household formation stays down the greater the pent-up demand. And it’s like a rubber band — you keep pulling back on it. At some point, when you let it go, it’s going to snap back in a very big way.

- Nariman Behravesh, the Chief Economist of IHS

Sharga says at the current pace of foreclosure sales it would take more than nine years to sell all of these houses. Until then, they could keep glutting the market and putting downward pressure on prices.

“The numbers frankly aren’t terribly encouraging,” he says.

Moving Out

Still, most analysts don’t think the housing market is going to stay in the dumps that long. One reason they seem a little more hopeful is “household formation” — or when people finish school or get married and move out of their parents’ house for the first time, which creates a demand for housing.

“If you look at the number of households in the country … that’s been growing at a rate of a million to a million and a half a year quite steadily,” says Karl Case, an economist at Harvard University.

However, Case says that during this economic downturn the process of generating new households has slowed down substantially and economists are unsure why.

Household formation is about one-third of what it normally is. And Case says this is part of the story about why the housing market is so weak.

“People are doubling up,” he says. “They’re staying with Mom and Dad,” and immigration is down.

‘Pent-Up Demand’

Case says problems in the housing market can even affect marriage and divorce rates.

“There’s actually a new paper in the American Economic Review this month that finds the marriage rate sensitive to changes in house prices,” Case says. “So this decision to form a household is a major component of demand.”

Economists hope the slowdown in household formation is creating some pent-up demand for housing.

People want to move out of their parents’ basement, or their parents want them out. Young couples want to settle down, get married and get rid of their roommates.

“One way to think about it is, the longer a household formation stays down the greater the pent-up demand is,” says Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of IHS, a forecasting firm. “And it’s like a rubber band — you keep pulling back on it. At some point, when you let it go, it’s going to snap back in a very big way. So that’s very likely to happen in the housing market. We can debate exactly when it happens, but happen it will.”

Behravesh thinks next summer the housing market could start to pick up quite a bit, but other economists say it won’t happen that soon.

In the meantime, though, the housing market remains a pretty big mess, and there are a lot of people who, for better or worse, can’t sell.

Enlarge StoryCorps

Teacher John Byrne talked about coming out to his 10th-grade English class with a former student, Samantha Liebman, in New York City.

StoryCorps

Teacher John Byrne talked about coming out to his 10th-grade English class with a former student, Samantha Liebman, in New York City.

As a high school teacher at Friends Seminary in New York, John Byrne has taught hundreds of students. Recently, he spoke with a former student, Samantha Liebman, about the years before he became the teacher he is today. For one thing, his classrooms were very regimented.

“I would make the kids line up before they came into class,” he says, “and then they would stand by their desks and I would say, ‘You may sit down when I sit down.’ They said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Byrne.’

“I was very strict, because I was afraid the kids would discover I was gay,” he says.

Byrne, 56, taught English, a subject that proved to be minefield for a teacher who was trying desperately to keep a secret from his students. As he recalls, “some gay scene or character would come up, and I would start to blush.”

He was always frightened, Byrne says. But then, in 1991, “I decided to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade,” he says. “Because they refused to let the gays march, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to take a stand.’ I just wanted to be myself. So I went and marched with them.”

Back in class the day after the parade, Byrne’s 10th-grade students wanted to know how he had spent the day. Teasing their teacher, they accused him of going out and getting drunk.

“I said, ‘I was not!’” he recalls. He told them, “I was marching in the parade.”

That led to the next question: Who had Mr. Byrne marched with?

“And I said, ‘With the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization.’ And they said, ‘Well, why were you marching with them?’ and I said, ‘Because I’m gay!’

“

And they were so kind. They saw that I was nervous, and they helped me along,” he says.

That day changed Byrne’s life, and his career. He says it made him a better teacher.

“You know, it had hurt me to live in the shadows,” he says. “And then when I came out, it freed me to teach. It made me better at helping kids who had their own particular secrets.”

And the students repaid him for his trust, as well.

“Two years later, that class that I came out to, they asked me to be their graduation speaker,” Byrne says. “And I talked to the parents about how proud they should be of their children, for having taught me and helped me through a really difficult time in my life. It was a wonderful turning point.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher. Recorded in partnership with Friends Seminary.

Watching the Souris River creep over roads and into neighborhoods has amounted to slow torture for North Dakota’s fourth-largest city. In the next two days, Minot officials expect the waterway to roar.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Thursday again accelerated water releases from the upstream Lake Darling dam. Officials said the move could raise the river up to 3 feet higher than earlier projections — or a whopping 6 1/2 feet above the record set more than a century ago — in a community where floodwaters already have reached several homes’ first floors.

“The water is coming in deeper and faster than was expected,” North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple said.

Indeed, in just four days, the predicted release of water from the dam more than doubled — from 11,000 cubic feet per second to 29,000. National Weather Service hydrologist Steve Buan laid the blame on 4 to 6 inches of rain that fell last week in largely rural — and saturated — areas to the north.

“The short answer is, yes, it was from rain,” Buan said.

Some of the city’s primary dikes have been topped or breeched, sending water into neighborhoods and flooding homes. Minot Mayor Curt Zimbelman says the city is now working on secondary dikes to protect such things as water and sewer treatment facilities, and at least one critical north-south roadway.

“However, with the increased predicted levels, and with the crest expected sooner, completion of the secondary dikes is not guaranteed. Work will continue until we can no longer hold back the water,” Zimbelman said.

Failures there would worsen a desperate situation in Minot, where as many as 10,000 people — about a fourth of the city’s population — were ordered to evacuate Wednesday.

The city slightly expanded the evacuation zone on Thursday to add about 400 people in the river valley, but that notice was voluntary. Several hours after the expanded zone was announced, officials said damage to those homes might be no more than water in basements.

In Burlington, a town of about 1,000 people a few miles upstream on the confluence of the Souris and Des Lacs rivers, city officials abandoned sandbagging as hopeless. About a third of 320 houses are expected to be lost in the town that was founded in 1883 and is the oldest in Ward County.

“We’re no longer able to save the city,” Burlington Mayor Jerome Gruenberg said Thursday.

Burlington officials instead sent people to help with a frenzied labor around Minot, a town best known for its Air Force base but also an important agricultural center and home to many laborers drawn to the oil boom in western North Dakota.

Heavy equipment hauled dirt and clay to raise dikes wherever possible — an effort Zimbelman said would continue until rising water made it impossible. Workers and National Guard members were the only people to be seen in evacuated areas.

Fast-flowing water had overtopped dikes in some places and risen to the first level on several homes. A trailer park was under water. In one area, an old Chevy was half-submerged.

Near the water treatment plant, water had risen above a bridge deck; orange barricades blocked any traffic at either end. Loose clothes, beer cans, dark trash bags, a tire and other assorted trash could be seen floating in the Souris, cast off by departing residents.

Broadway Bridge, on a major north-south artery, was closed around midday and officials fretted over the possible closure of other bridges that would effectively cut the city in two. Two bridges remained open.

Kathy Sivertson, 52, who lives a block outside the initial evacuation zone, was opting to ignore the recommendation for expanded evacuations. She spent part of Thursday moving her belongings out of her basement but said she’d stay in her house until “they kick me out.”

Meanwhile, Leon Delker, 55, who lives nine blocks from the river, brought in a survey crew that estimated the water would go 3 feet up on his front door. He planned to clear out everything but the American flag in front of his home and “stay out until this thing is over.”

Some residents took refuge on the Souris River Golf Course, where longtime pro Steve Kottsick, 59, pieced together a makeshift 8-hole layout on the flooded course. More than 30 people took their swings on Thursday.

“People are a little down and out,” Kottsick said. “Hopefully it helps them maintain some sense of normality.”

The city’s other 18-hole golf course, the Minot Country Club, lost its clubhouse Thursday.