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NPR's Scott Simon speaks with author Pam Jenoff about her new novel, The Lost Girls of Paris. It's the story of a group of British female spies sent to France during World War II.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Grace Healey is trying to cut through Grand Central Station, late again, on her way to work in 1946 when she stumbles over an abandoned suitcase. She looks inside. She cuts her finger and finds a packet with a dozen photos, each of a different woman, and becomes intrigued. What she discovers about those women and the woman whose name, Trigg, is engraved on the case is told in Pam Jenoff's new novel "The Lost Girls Of Paris." And Pam Jenoff, a former U.S. foreign service officer, now teaches law at Rutgers, and who's author of the previous bestseller "The Orphan's Tale," joins us from the studios of WHYY in Philadelphia. Thanks so much for being with us.

PAM JENOFF: Thanks for having me.

SIMON: So why doesn't she just leave the suitcase?

JENOFF: Well, Grace is at an interesting crossroads in her life. She is what I call not quite a war widow. She lost her husband during World War II but not to combat. And she's living in New York, trying to figure out what's next when she finds the suitcase. So I believe she's intrigued both with the photos for themselves but also with this journey that is a bit of an escape from her own problems.

SIMON: The stories of these women were inspired by the stories of real people, weren't they?

JENOFF: They were. I was researching for my next book idea, and I discovered the incredible tale of the British women who had served in Special Operations Executive, deployed behind enemy lines to engage in sabotage and subversion. And so this book is very much inspired by the real-life heroism of those women.

SIMON: They had discovered - maybe we should explain - that for a number of reasons, men were more vulnerable to being discovered.

JENOFF: Yes. It was the darkest days of the war for Britain when they started sending people over - first, men to engage in these activities. And the men were easily discovered because on the streets of France in the early 1940s, there simply weren't many young men. They had all been conscripted or imprisoned. And so British men trying to fit in were tagged quite easily. So someone said, there's lots of women, why don't we send some of those?

SIMON: You introduce us to a character named Eleanor Trigg, directly inspired by a real-life British character named Vera Atkins. Tell us about them both.

JENOFF: So in real life, Vera Atkins - an interesting woman. She was not British. She was of East European descent, from a Jewish family. And she had worked her way up through Special Operations Executive and, among other things, became in charge of the women's unit - the women who were to serve in SOE. So she was in charge of their recruitment and their deployment. And ultimately, when many of these women were captured and killed, she felt a great deal of guilt and went to find out what had happened to them.

SIMON: You worked at the Pentagon and State Department, including a stint in Poland, I gather. Do we see any of that in your novels?

JENOFF: All of my books are very much inspired by those experiences. I was first at the Pentagon. And that is a time that I refer to as seeing the world from the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton. I traveled all over the world with my boss, including to the 50th anniversary commemorations of World War II.

I then moved over to the State Department. And, myself, I was - I'm Jewish, and I was on the ground in Poland, became very close to the survivors. And the U.S. government gave me responsibility for the Holocaust issues. And so I emerged from both of those experiences really changed and moved. And I've been writing what I refer to as love songs to that period ever since.

SIMON: So much of this novel is taken up with the stories of people who are trying to do the right thing when it's the stealthy thing (laughter). Well, how do we get ahold of that in this time and place?

JENOFF: One of the themes that really emerged for me in writing this book is the trust that we place in our governments and whether or not such trust is warranted, which, you know, may or may not be a timely theme, as well.

But in this case, in the book, you know, these women just up and left their lives, and sometimes children, and were dropped into occupied Europe - you know, just dropped by a plane - and had to sort of fend for themselves. And they were very much doing what they believe was the right thing. But they were only one piece of a much larger puzzle. And often, you know, it's a question of whether sort of the ends justify the means, I think.

SIMON: Yeah. Do you hope that people who might read your novel might feel some debt to the real people after whom it's modeled?

JENOFF: Absolutely. One of the most striking things is that - not just the scope of the heroism of these women and their exploits, but, you know, after the war, they really received very little recognition for a long time. And so there's a great joy in bringing these stories to life. And someone remarked that this is almost an appropriate story for this #MeToo moment that we're having because it really is a story about women finding their power and their voice.

SIMON: Pam Jenoff, her new novel, "The Lost Girls Of Paris" - thanks so much for being with us.

JENOFF: Thank you for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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'The Lost Girls of Paris' Fictionalizes True Tale Of Female Spies During World War II

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NPR's Scott Simon speaks with author Pam Jenoff about her new novel, The Lost Girls of Paris. It's the story of a group of British female spies sent to France during World War II. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Grace Healey is trying to cut through Grand Central Station, late again, on her way to work in 1946 when she stumbles over an abandoned suitcase.

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Until 1:41 « in North America »

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Thanks to Nat King Cole, it's hard to think of chestnuts without conjuring an image of them "roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose." These days, tough, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone roasting American chestnuts over an open fire. The trees and the nuts have all but disappeared.

But now, scientists are excited about the discovery of an American chestnut tree in the woods of western Maine, a record-breaking tree that's giving them hope for the future.

Growing straight and tall, chestnut trees were once prized for timber. Vendors still roast and sell European chestnuts on the streets of Manhattan, fragrant aroma and all. But the American chestnut that once dominated the Eastern woodlands, from Maine to Georgia, was virtually wiped out by a blight that was accidentally introduced from Asia.

That's why on a recent, rainy December day, a gaggle of reporters, photographers and members of the American Chestnut Foundation trudged into the woods of Lovell, Maine, to confirm some crucial measurements of a chestnut tree growing in the wild.

As girth goes, this chestnut tree is not impressive: At 16.1 inches, it's on the skinny side. Except for its long, slender leaves, and spiny, urchin-like burs, it wouldn't stand out as distinctive in a forest lineup, especially this time of year, when both the leaves and the burs are littering the ground.

But Brian Roth, a forest scientist with the University of Maine, says when it comes to height, this American chestnut reigns supreme.

"We think it's around 100 years old," Roth says. "It's over 100 feet tall, which makes it the tallest tree that we know of in North America."

That's 115 feet tall, to be precise. But beyond its exceptional height, this chestnut is interesting to Roth and members of the American Chestnut Foundation because of its ability to survive. Surrounded by a cluster of equally tall pine trees, it was discovered in July from the air, distinguished by the large white flowers in its crown.

"Old-timers talk about the hillsides in the Appalachian Mountains being covered in flowers as if it was snow, and so we were able to key in on the particular week that these were blooming and ... find this tree," Roth says.

He says DNA from the tree will be preserved in a living gene bank. It's all part of a larger effort by the North Carolina-based American Chestnut Foundation to restore the chestnut to its historic range.

With the help of 6,000 devoted volunteers, the foundation has developed a complex breeding program to raise a hearty American chestnut that is resistant to the fungus and that can someday be reintroduced to the wild. (As The Salt has reported, separate efforts are also underway to create a genetically engineered American chestnu t that's resistant to blight.)

Foundation president Lisa Thomson says the American chestnut is "an underdog. You know, everybody loves an underdog. And they see hope in the future, real promise of the future to bring this species back."

Thomson says she and her volunteers won't see a cathedral of chestnuts in the forest in their lifetimes, but their grandchildren will. And that's enough of a vision to keep them singing the chestnut's song.

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In The Maine Woods, A Towering Giant Could Help Save Chestnuts

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Thanks to Nat King Cole, it's hard to think of chestnuts without conjuring an image of them "roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose." These days, tough, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone roasting American chestnuts over an open fire. The trees and the nuts have all but disappeared.

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Until 1:32 « observational data »

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Several members of a powerful science panel for the Environmental Protection Agency expressed doubt at a hearing Thursday about the long-established scientific consensus that air pollution can cause premature death.

The panel was meeting to consider recommendations that would fundamentally change how the agency analyzes the public health dangers posed by air pollution and could lead to weaker regulation of soot.

The recommendations concern how the EPA regulates microscopic soot known as particulate matter, which causes and exacerbates respiratory diseases such as asthma. Determining exactly how much particulate matter is safe to breathe requires complex analysis of an enormous - and growing - body of scientific literature.

Before the EPA disbanded it last year, a 20-person subcommittee called the Particulate Matter Review Panel was responsible for helping the agency decide how much air pollution is safe for Americans to breathe. With that group gone, only the seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee is left to make recommendations.

At a public meeting Thursday that ran nearly two hours long, multiple members of that committee, including Chair Tony Cox and Steven Packham of the Utah Division of Air Quality, said they do not agree that breathing air polluted with soot can lead to an early death.

"[Committee] members have varying opinions on the adequacy of the evidence supporting the EPA's conclusion that there is a causal relationship between [particulate matter] exposure and mortality," said Cox, reading from the committee's draft recommendations before explaining that he is "actually appalled" at the lack of scientific evidence connecting particulate pollution to premature death.

"This is waving a red flag in front of a bull, so I acknowledge that," Cox continued.

The draft recommendations would dramatically limit the breadth and depth of the science used to determine safe air pollution limits in the U.S. by pushing the EPA to limit the types of studies considered during the regulatory process.

The EPA currently bases its air pollution regulations on a wide range of scientific studies about the relationship between health outcomes, such as asthma or premature death, and different types of air pollution, such as soot of different microscopic sizes.

"The EPA has a very well-vetted process that has been going on over the years called the weight of the evidence," says Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who recently wrote about the draft recommendations in the journal Science. "This is a process that has been endorsed not only by the EPA, but by the National Academy of Sciences, [and] is pretty well accepted by the scientific community."

"Every time you try to assess the link between exposure to a contaminant and health," Dominici says, "you have to make sure there is consistency in the evidence across many, many studies, across many disciplines," including atmospheric chemistry, toxicology, epidemiology and exposure, and data science. That's important, she explains, because no one study captures everything about a given pollutant.

"You can't randomize millions of [people] around the world to breathe higher pollution or lower pollution, so we have to rely on observational data," Dominici says.

Decades of broad analysis have enabled scientists to make clear recommendations to the EPA about how to protect Americans from air pollution. "They're providing a very robust message that air pollution is harmful to human health," Dominici says.

But at Thursday's hearing, Cox and others expressed concern that the current system overstates the scientific certainty around air pollution.

"If we don't know that X causes Y, then we should say we don't know," said Cox, who consults and lectures about various risk-related topics. He expressed concern that the EPA would move to reduce air pollution under the erroneous assumption that it would result in fewer premature deaths.

To avoid that, Cox has shepherded through recommendation language that emphasizes uncertainty about the relationships between air pollution and respiratory disease.

If the EPA adopts those recommendations, many scientists warn it will lead the agency to underestimate the effects of air pollution on public health.

"I just want to emphasize the fringe nature of these proposals," says H. Christopher Frey, a former chair of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and member of the now-disbanded particulate matter review board.

"It's kind of like the same issues that came up with tobacco denial of health effects or denial of climate change health effects," Frey says. "There's a very small community that have scientific credentials but are moving outside their area of expertise to try to raise doubt after doubt after doubt on issues where they really don't have the strongest competence."

"There are other experts who are much stronger, much better informed, much more aware of the leading edge," he argues.

In a surprise development, the full panel appeared to agree that other experts should be brought in to review the current recommendations. Members are calling on the EPA either to reinstate the disbanded 20-person panel of particulate matter experts or to create a new expanded panel with even broader expertise to review the recommendations of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee before they become final.

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EPA Science Panel Considering Guidelines That Upend Basic Air Pollution Science

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Several members of a powerful science panel for the Environmental Protection Agency expressed doubt at a hearing Thursday about the long-established scientific consensus that air pollution can cause premature death. The panel was meeting to consider recommendations that would fundamentally change how the agency analyzes the public health dangers posed by air pollution and could lead to weaker regulation of soot.

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Until 1:45 (when he gives the musical notes)

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Finding the Higgs boson was an important discovery. But for all of the publicity the particle has received, how many could explain what it does? Host Scott Simon talks with the researchers who have turned the recently discovered Higgs boson into music.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

It's been over a week since scientists announced that they've found the Higgs boson particle. It's an important discovery. They say that although the Higgs boson particle is small - or, come to think of it, perhaps because of it - it holds the universe together. But for all the publicity the particle's received, how many of us could explain what it actually does? Well, here's the announcement from scientists in Switzerland.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 + or - .6 GeV at 4.9 standard deviations. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

SIMON: Which didn't quite clear it up for all of us, but there is one man...

DOMENICO VICINAZA: Yeah, so my name is Domenico Vicinaza.

SIMON: ...who heard those words and immediately thought of music.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: It's the soundtrack, if you please, of the Higgs boson. Domenico Vicinaza is a particle physicist and a musician. He works at DANTE, a non-profit research organization in the United Kingdom, and his job is to try to see music in science. At the conference in Switzerland, a huge graph displayed the evidence for the Higgs.

VICINAZA: I looked at the graph and I say, oh, I really want to make it something.

SIMON: He saw the line on the graph going from left to right and thought it could translate into musical notes, moving through a song. Points along the line became notes on sheet music. And as you listen, for the most part, they form a playful baseline melody. Now, scientifically, this is just background noise. But then there's a big bump in the line. The song does the same thing.

VICINAZA: You can hear really high pitched notes, an F and C and E.

SIMON: Here it is again.

(SOUNDBITE OF TAPE BEING REWOUND)

SIMON: Listen for the part where the notes jump noticeably higher.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: The high notes are the bump, and that bump is the Higgs boson. If you still can't quite hear the particle, Domenico Vicinaza and his team have added a few more musical instruments, including maracas.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: Maracas - the sound of the universe. Mr. Vicinaza says he hopes this music will help people realize some of the same kind of elemental loveliness that a scientist discerns in the Higgs boson.

VICINAZA: That graph for a particle physicist contains a kind of inner beauty or special beauty that can be translated into other fields.

SIMON: And the next one, he says, will be a Higgs boson ringtone for cell phones. Oh, excuse me, the universe is calling.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: This is NPR News.

Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Found In Musical Translation: Higgs Boson Explained

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Finding the Higgs boson was an important discovery. But for all of the publicity the particle has received, how many could explain what it does? Host Scott Simon talks with the researchers who have turned the recently discovered Higgs boson into music.

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In 1978, Ron Stallworth was working as a detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department when he came across a classified ad to find out more about the Ku Klux Klan - and answered it. Two weeks later, he got a call on the police department's undercover operations line. It was the local KKK organizer. He asked why Stallworth wanted to join the Klan.

"I said I wanted to join because I was a pure, Aryan, white man who was tired of the abuse of the white race by blacks and other minorities," Stallworth recalls.

But Stallworth - a highly decorated law enforcement veteran - is actually black. In his new memoir, Black Klansman, he tells the story of how he hoodwinked the Ku Klux Klan into thinking he was one of them. (As you might imagine, this conversation includes some racist language.)

Interview Highlights
On why the Colorado Springs Police Department was investigating the Klan
My job as an intelligence officer, detective, was to monitor any subversive activity which could negatively impact the city of Colorado Springs. And, let's face it, the Ku Klux Klan historically is a subversive group. ... And when I saw the ad in the newspaper, obviously I perked up to this fact and set about trying to address it, to understand it.
On how he infiltrated the Klan

When you've grown up and you've been called "nigger" many times in the course of your lifetime, and you've been treated negatively because of your race, it's not too hard to put on that front. ...

The gambit was: I obviously, as a black man of African descent, could not meet a white supremacist posing as a KKK member. So I had to have a white officer introduced into the mix posing as Ron Stallworth. So I got an undercover narcotics detective friend of mine - in the book, he's identified as Chuck, that's not his real name - but I had Chuck pose as me. And for the initial meeting, I gave him any identification that I had minus a photograph, so that if they should question him about being me he could pull those out and, you know, convince them. And it worked. We did this for seven and a half months.
On the Klan organizer he and his partner interacted with
Ken O'dell, the local organizer that I answered the initial phone call with, he was a soldier at Fort Carson, Colo., about 5' 9", stocky. He was not - none of these guys were, as I say in my book, the brightest light bulbs in the socket. Because if they were, they would have known that they were talking to two different people - one on the phone and one in person - because my voice and Chuck's voice sound nothing alike. But they never picked up on it in seven and a half months of phone conversations and periodic face-to-face meetings with Chuck.
On meeting then-KKK leader David Duke and receiving the Klan handshake from him
David Duke came into town in January for a publicity blitz. He was going to appear at a couple of radio stations, a TV station doing a debate with a black history professor. ... And he was getting death threats. My chief called me in the morning of his appearance in Colorado Springs, and my chief told me he was assigning me to be David Duke's bodyguard because of the death threats.

I met David Duke and introduced myself without giving him my name. I simply said, "I am a detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department." And then I told him, "I don't believe in your philosophy or your political ideology, but I am a professional and I will do everything within my means to ensure your safety while you're in my city."

He was very cordial. He shook my hand. He gave me the Klan handshake - he didn't know that I knew it was the Klan handshake, but he did give it to me. If you shake a person's hand and you extend your index and middle finger along their wrist and as you're pumping their hand you start pressing your fingers in their wrist area, it's the Klan handshake. ...

When he was not talking about race, David Duke was a very pleasant guy to talk to. He was a very nice conversationalist. He seemed like a regular guy on the phone when the subject wasn't on race and on Jews and ethnicity. When that subject came around, the Dr. Jekyll in him left and Mr. Hyde appeared - the monster appeared.
On what he learned about the KKK
Well one thing I learned is that they're very serious about their objective, their agenda. They truly believe that they, as white people, are inherently superior to blacks, Jews and other minorities. That was part of David Duke's agenda, is to turn the Klan from a racist organization in the eyes of the public into something that is respectable and acceptable. And sadly to say, with the gentleman we have in the White House, part of that has been accomplished.

There is a historical thread from the David Duke that I dealt with and what he was saying - his approach to immigration and other issues impacting the country - a connection between him and what Donald Trump campaigned on and what Donald Trump is a governing by. That historical thread is quite obvious if you sit back and connect the dots. I connect them a little bit in my book. It is addressed in the movie. But in many respects, David Duke was the playbook. He established the playbook by which Donald Trump ran and ultimately became - I won't even use the term - let's just say he became the occupant of the White House.
Hiba Ahmad and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Nicole Cohen adapted it for the Web.

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How A Black Detective Infiltrated The KKK

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In Black Klansman, Ron Stallworth writes about an undercover investigation in which he - an African-American police detective - convinced the Ku Klux Klan that he was one of them.

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

When Antonio Reliford was a child in New Jersey, he and his family did what a lot of African-American families did when it came to vacations: They hit the road to visit relatives in the South.

But this was back before the nation had a network of high-speed highways. Before major routes like the New Jersey Turnpike or Interstate 85, which goes through the Southeast.

And so the Reliford family had to use what everyone else did: two-lane roads that often went through picturesque rural areas.

Picturesque. And for African-American families, dangerous. Which meant black travelers had to choose carefully how they would go, and when, and where they would stop.

"Everything was planned," Reliford, now 62, remembers. Two or three families would travel in their cars together, as a caravan, "for safety."

He remembers leaving in the dark, "usually at daybreak or just before" so the families could travel as far as possible while it was light, in case some of the towns they passed through had Sundown Laws. (Those laws dictated that black people had to leave those towns by sunset, or face dire consequences.)

They'd drive continuously, he remembers, with food packed in coolers so they wouldn't have to search for - and perhaps be rejected by - an establishment that chose not to serve them, even from a back window.

Bathroom breaks? "Usually you had to pee at the side of the road because we had problems finding facilities that would allow us." And those that did? "You had to pay a token to get in."

Even fuel was problematic. "There were long lines where we knew the gas was," Reliford recalls. They knew which pumps to use because "it would actually say COLORED GAS." And in case that didn't sink in, the segregated service stations often had a separate attendant for black motorists. "Usually it was an elderly black man."
Safe passage along sometimes-perilous routes
This was the world The Negro Motorist Green Book was created to navigate. Listed in the slim little book were motels, diners, even gas stations that were black-owned or black-friendly. Postal worker Victor H. Green wrote and published the guide. He initially focused on his town- Harlem - but eventually the books expanded to cover almost every state.

These word-of-mouth suggestions for safe passage through a sometimes-hostile America were, "sort of a 20 th Century version of the Underground Railroad, and this annual travel guide was the Bible of black travel," says Brent Leggs, the director of t he African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

The fund seeks to help African-American communities to preserve and support sites with cultural significance. It's administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and seeks to, in its words "tell the full story" of America.

As the movie Green Book notes, Jim Crow was not impressed with an individual's wealth or talent. Whether you were a family, like the Relifords, or an icon, like Duke Ellington, there were many white-owned places - below and above the Mason-Dixon Line - that would not accept you. No hotels. No restaurants. No hospitals or auto repair shops.

The Green Books were one valuable way to get around that.
A way for future generations to remember
There was less of a need for the books after passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which legally mandated that public businesses should be open to all, regardless of race. In theory, segregation ended, although it would take years for some places to actually honor the law.

As segregation eroded, the need for separate accommodations faded, and with it, many of the businesses in the Green Book. It officially ceased publication in the late '60s.

Brent Leggs says the National Trust has a campaign to celebrate Route 66 as "the Main Street of America." The iconic highway goes from Chicago to Los Angeles, and while there weren't many Green Book motels along the way, there were a few.

The new movie will doubtless increase interest in the Green Book and its history. Brent Leggs welcomes that. "As a preservationist, it's exciting, because we can leverage the attention to celebrate the actual physical sites related to the Green Book."

He wants to make sure "that current and future generations never forget about this critical social movement and this story of black entrepreneurism, activism and achievement during the period of Jim Crow."

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The Green Book: Celebrating 'The Bible of Black Travel'

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast When Antonio Reliford was a child in New Jersey, he and his family did what a lot of African-American families did when it came to vacations: They hit the road to visit relatives in the South. But this was back before the nation had a network of high-speed highways.

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Until 1:40 “for this story”

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In recent days, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel and some of its corporate siblings have faced renewed and withering criticism for the way they depict Muslims and immigrants. Calls for boycotts of shows and pressure campaigns on advertisers ensued.

Last weekend, a Muslim news producer said she quit Fox's corporate cousin, Sky News Australia, over its coverage of Muslims following the massacre at two New Zealand mosques. Her post went viral.

Now, add the voice of one of Murdoch's former senior executives, who says he left his job in late 2017 over the coverage of Muslims, immigrants and race by Fox News and other Murdoch news outlets.

"Scaring people. Demonizing immigrants. Creating, like, a fervor - or an anxiety about what was happening in our country," former News Corp. Senior Vice President Joseph Azam tells NPR in his first public comments on his former employer.

"It fundamentally bothered me on a lot of days and I think I probably wasn't the only one," he says.

Azam was also group chief compliance officer for News Corp.'s corporate headquarters, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the HarperCollins book publishing house, among other properties. He worked for News Corp. from 2015 until late 2017, leaving, he says, without any nondisclosure agreement. While News Corp. is technically separate from the corporate parent of Fox News, they are both controlled by Murdoch and his family.

In separate interviews, a longtime friend of Azam's and Azam's wife said he relayed his concerns to them about News Corp. and Fox News at the time. Both women said that was his reason for deciding to leave the company.

For Azam, his decision to leave News Corp. was a matter of personal pride as well as principle: Born in Kabul, Azam came to the United States as a toddler, part of a family of immigrants and war refugees seeking haven from the conflict caused by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan nearly four decades ago.

And Azam says the rhetoric coming from some of his corporate colleagues sickened him: Muslims derided as threats or less than human; immigrants depicted as invaders, dirty or criminal; African-Americans presented as menacing; Jewish figures characterized as playing roles in insidious conspiracies.

Azam says he saw it throughout the Murdoch media empire - especially on the popular opinion shows of Fox News, including Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, and Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs.

Azam's public remarks to NPR arrive after a slew of controversies for Fox News.

In recent days, the network has found itself forced to condemn recent anti-Muslim commentary by Pirro, an opinion host with close ties to President Trump. Fox News said her views "do not reflect those of the network and we have addressed the matter with her directly."

Prime-time Fox News star Tucker Carlson has been on the defensive over seemingly racist anti-Iraqi remarks he made years ago uncovered by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters (in 2008, Carlson called Iraqis "semi-literate primitive monkeys" on a shock-jock radio show). Carlson's critics say those remarks dovetail with his more recent anti-immigrant commentaries on Fox. (Carlson was not made available by Fox to talk for this story.)

Indeed Azam himself brings up an interaction with Carlson from two years ago. In June 2017, Carlson sent out this tweet from his personal account: "#Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?"

Azam shot back: "If you come upstairs to where all the executives who run your company sit and find me I can tell you, Tucker. #Afghanistan."

Azam's boss, News Corp. General Counsel and Executive Vice President David Pitofsky, took him aside and counseled him not to attack other figures in the larger Murdoch empire, as Azam recalls it, and he took down the tweet. (Pitofsky declined to comment through a corporate spokesman.)

Carlson is the focus of intense scrutiny from Media Matters as well as Muslim advocacy organizations. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, for example, has called for advertisers to boycott Fox News unless Carlson and Pirro are both dropped.

Azam, now 37, in many ways is an embodiment of the American dream, an example of the drive and thrift that is often praised, at least in the abstract, by Fox hosts and commentators.

After coming to the U.S., Azam grew up largely in Queens, N.Y., and then Southern California, at one point selling shoes at his father's small store in Manhattan.

He went to New York University and got his law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

"My office at News Corp. looked over a corner near Rockefeller Center where my dad used to sell newspapers," Azam says.

He says he loved working with his legal colleagues and many of the journalists. Yet at times he seethed in navigating News Corp., which is in the same building as Fox News in Midtown Manhattan. During an elevator ride shared with Pirro, Azam says, the host watched a monitor tuned to a Fox News report on a terrorist strike by Islamic extremists. Good fodder for the show, Pirro remarked, according to Azam. (Pirro was not made available for comment by Fox News for this story.)

"My issue with this isn't as an American Muslim. It's not as a refugee. It's not as an immigrant. It's as an American," Azam tells NPR. "I live here. I have kids here. And it worries me that, you know, what's being put out into the universe could actually create a lot of risk for them."

Azam wrote about his experience as a refugee and an immigrant in a recent collection of essays edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Nguyen. Azam says he was inspired to speak more directly now regarding his qualms about Fox and its corporate siblings by two incidents: the mass shootings of Muslims in New Zealand and the murder of an Afghan-American in Indiana last month. Authorities accuse a man of shooting Mustafa Ayoubi after yelling anti-Muslim slurs.

The former Sky News Australia producer, Rashna Farrukh, also cited the New Zealand killings this week in quitting the cable network, which is owned by News Corp.

"As a young Muslim woman, I had many crises of conscience working here, but the events of Friday snapped me out of the endless cycle of justifying my job to myself," Farrukh wrote on the website of the ABC, Australia's public broadcasting network. "I compromised my values and beliefs to stand idly by as I watched commentators and pundits instil[l] more and more fear into their viewers. I stood on the other side of the studio doors while they slammed every minority group in the country - mine included - increasing polarisation and paranoia among their viewers."

Since the departure of the late Roger Ailes as the network's chairman, Fox News executives have at times sought to rein in more extreme commentary, barring a guest, for example, who spun a conspiracy theory around the Jewish philanthropist and investor George Soros.

However, Azam says if anything, the rhetoric has gotten harsher since Trump came to power. Told of the nature of Azam's critique, executives at Fox News and News Corp. declined to comment.

The opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, Azam argues, often sounded similar themes surfaced against immigration in a more high-brow fashion.

"It was very eloquent, mostly. ... It was policy-backed, at a certain level," Azam says. "In a very subtle and eloquent way, it was kind of like the stuff that would happen in the [New York Post], dressed up in a tuxedo."

As an example, Azam pointed to an opinion piece in the Journal by two leaders of a right-wing, populist Swedish political party claiming violence rose along with greater immigration in Sweden - though subsequent news coverage elsewhere seemingly debunked it. Under former Journal Editor Gerard Baker, Azam says, even the news coverage of the Trump administration's initial Muslim ban "seemed to be aimed at shaping the narrative for the White House, to move away from talking about the fact that religion was being targeted." Some journalists agreed, as NPR and other outlets reported at the time.

Fox just publicly distanced itself from Pirro for questioning a Muslim congresswoman's loyalty to the U.S. because the lawmaker wears hijab. Pirro was off the air last weekend. And the network won't explicitly say whether it has suspended her. Trump has tweeted in support of both Pirro and Carlson. Azam says the network's silence is telling, arguing that Fox is seeking to retain Pirro's fans - and the president's support.

"I think that the wink-and-a-nod thing is very problematic because that is exactly how racists operate at the highest level, right? That is exactly how anti-Semites operate. That is exactly how Islamophobia operates at the highest level."

News Corp. is technically separate from the Murdoch family's television and entertainment holdings, newly called Fox Corp. after a massive sale of assets to the Walt Disney Co. Yet Azam lays the responsibility at Rupert Murdoch's feet, saying the punditry echoes what the media mogul himself appears to believe and promote. Azam notes, for example, a 2015 tweet in which the media chief wrote that most Muslims may be peaceful but until they destroy this "jihadist cancer" they must all be held responsible.

Murdoch no longer tweets. But the controversies continue.

"I grew up in New York City. I don't think I'm very sensitive," Azam says. "I've had guns pointed at me at my work. I've investigated corruption throughout Africa and the Middle East and in places where, you know, my life was in danger doing that. So I think I'm pretty thick-skinned when it comes to pretty much anything.

"This stuff went beyond sort of being thick-skinned," he says.

Read more stories from NPR Business.

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Former Murdoch Executive Says He Quit Over Fox's Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

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In recent days, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel and some of its corporate siblings have faced renewed and withering criticism for the way they depict Muslims and immigrants. Calls for boycotts of shows and pressure campaigns on advertisers ensued.

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Until Medecine Fellowship at 1:41

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The U.S. surgeon general's office estimates that more than 20 million people have a substance-use disorder. Meanwhile, the nation's drug overdose crisis shows no sign of slowing.

Yet, by all accounts, there aren't nearly enough physicians who specialize in treating addiction - doctors with extensive clinical training who are board certified in addiction medicine.

The opioid epidemic has made this doctor deficit painfully apparent. And it's spurring medical institutions across the United States to create fellowships for aspiring doctors who want to treat substance-use disorders with the same precision and science as other diseases.

Now numbering more than 60, these fellowship programs offer physicians a year or two of postgraduate training in clinics and hospitals where they learn evidence-based approaches for treating addiction.

Such programs are drawing a new talented generation of idealistic doctors - idealists like Dr. Hillary Tamar.
A drive to connect with patients in need
Tamar, now in the second year of a family medicine residency in Phoenix, wasn't thinking about addiction medicine when she started medical school in Chicago.

"As a medical student, honestly, you do your ER rotation, people label a patient as 'pain-seeking' and it's bad," Tamar says. "And that's all you do about it."

But in her fourth year of med school, she happened to be assigned to a rotation at a rehab facility in southern Arizona.

"I was able to connect with people in a way that I haven't been able to connect with them in another specialty," the 28-year-old recalls.

Working with patients there transformed Tamar's understanding of addiction, she says, and showed her the potential for doctors to change lives.

"They can go from spending all their time pursuing the acquisition of a substance to being brothers, sisters, daughters [and] fathers making breakfast for their kids again," she says. "It's really powerful."

When Tamar finishes her residency, she's planning to pursue a fellowship in addiction medicine. She sees addiction medicine, like primary care, as a way to build lasting relationships with patients - and a way to focus on more than a single diagnosis.

"I love when I see addiction patients on my schedule, even if they're pregnant and on meth," she says. "More room to do good - it's exciting."

Doctors with Tamar's enthusiasm are sorely needed, says Dr. Anna Lembke, medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and a longtime researcher in the field.

"Even 10 years ago," Lembke says, "I couldn't find a medical student or resident interested in learning about addiction medicine if I looked under a rock. They were just not out there."

But Lembke sees a change in the upcoming generation of doctors who are drawn to the field because they care about social justice.

"I now have medical students and residents knocking on my door, emailing me. They all want to learn more about addiction," Lembke says.

Historically, the path to addiction medicine was through psychiatry.

But that model started to change in 2015, when the American Board of Medical Specialties - considered the gold standard in physician certification in the U.S. - recognized addiction medicine as a bona fide subspecialty and opened up the training to physicians from many other medical fields.

Until then, Lembke says, there had been no way to get addiction fellowships approved through the nationally recognized Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. And that made recruiting young talent - and securing funding for their fellowships - difficult.

Last year, ACGME began accrediting its first batch of addiction medicine fellowship programs.

"We have got an enormous gap between the need and the doctors available to provide that treatment," Lembke says.

"At least the medical community has begun to wake up to consider not only their role in triggering this opioid epidemic but also the ways they need to step up to solve the problem," she says.
Build a program, and they will come
When Dr. Luke Peterson finished his residency in family medicine in Phoenix in 2016, there were no addiction medicine fellowships in Arizona.

So he moved to Seattle to complete a yearlong fellowship at Swedish Cherry Hill Family Medicine Residency. There he learned, among other things, how to treat pregnant women who are in recovery from drug use.

"I really needed to do a fellowship if I was going to make an impact and be able to teach others to make the same impact," says Peterson, who went on to help found an addiction medicine fellowship program in Arizona. His program is based in Phoenix at the University of Arizona's medical school, and its teaching hospital run by Banner Health, and the Phoenix VA Health Care System.

Arizona's two addiction medicine fellowship programs received ACGME accreditation last year - a stamp of approval that made the programs desirable choices for up-and-coming physicians, Peterson says.

Not every doctor who plans to treat substance-use disorders needs to do a fellowship, he says. In fact, his goal is to integrate addiction medicine into primary care settings.

But a specialist can serve as a referral center and resource hub for community doctors.

For example, physicians can learn from a specialist such as Peterson how to provide medication-assisted treatment like buprenorphine.

Public health leaders have been pushing to get more physicians trained in evidence-based treatments like buprenorphine, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death among people who have recovered from an opioid overdose.

"As we provide more education and more support to primary care physicians, they will feel more comfortable screening and treating for addiction," Peterson says.

Peterson's own journey into addiction medicine began during a rotation with a family doctor in rural Illinois.

"In moments that most doctors find uncomfortable - maybe a patient comes in to request pain medication and you're seeing the negative side effects - he did not shy away from that situation," Peterson says. "He addressed it head-on."

It was a formative experience for Peterson - one he wants other young doctors to have. And he recognizes the urgency.

"In 20 or 30 years from now," Peterson says, "those medical students are going to look back at my current generation of doctors, and we will be judged by how we responded to this epidemic," in the same way he and his peers now look back at how doctors handled the HIV epidemic.

One of the first steps in stopping the epidemic, he says, is making sure there are enough doctors on the ground who know how to respond.

Many of today's medical students, people like Michelle Peterson (no relation to Luke), say they feel the calling too.

She's in her first year at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix and became interested in addiction after working at an outpatient treatment center.

She says she's already learning about addiction in her classes, hearing from doctors in the field and seeing other classmates equally engaged.

"It's definitely not just me," she says. "There are quite a few people here really interested in addiction."

It's a trend she and her mentors hope will continue.
This story is part of NPR's reporting partnership with KJZZ and Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Aspiring Doctors Seek Advanced Training In Addiction Medicine

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The U.S. surgeon general's office estimates that more than 20 million people have a substance-use disorder. Meanwhile, the nation's drug overdose crisis shows no sign of slowing. Yet, by all accounts, there aren't nearly enough physicians who specialize in treating addiction - doctors with extensive clinical training who are board certified in addiction medicine.

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Until 1:38 “logistical hurdles”

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subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast

Most people in America want the Electoral College gone, and they want to select a president based on who gets the most votes nationally, polls say.

Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too.

"Every vote matters," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in Mississippi on Monday. "And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the electoral college."

That line garnered one of her largest roars of applause for the evening.

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke said there is a "lot of wisdom" in the idea and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., also said she's open to it.

The politicians are tapping into what's become a popular position with many voters, especially Democrats. In the U.S., 65 percent of adults think whoever wins the popular vote should hold the nation's highest office, according to an Atlantic/PRRI poll last year.

Under the current system, voters in each state cast their ballots for electors, of which 270 are necessary to win. So it's possible for a candidate to win more votes overall across the country than a rival but not be inaugurated because of insufficient support from the Electoral College: a scenario that has occurred twice in the past two decades.

But experts say reforming this practice isn't likely anytime soon for a number of reasons. First, there's the Constitutional problem.
The amendments
Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states.

Support of that magnitude has become rare for anything in a sharply divided United States. An amendment hasn't been adopted since the 27th, in 1992, and one hasn't been adopted relatively quickly since the 26th, which took 100 days from proposal to adoption in 1971.

President Trump once supported abolishing the Electoral College - he previously felt it was a "total disaster for democracy" - but since his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, in which Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but Trump received 304 electoral votes, he has changed his mind.

Now, Trump feels the Electoral College is "far better for the U.S.A." as he wrote Tuesday on Twitter.

That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be sufficient support for changing the system.

"There's no realistic chance of a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College," said Jacob Levy, a professor of political theory at McGill University.
The state way
There may, however, be another way.

A number of states have signed onto a pact that guarantees their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote, no matter the outcome in their individual states.

The compact would only go into effect once the number of states involved surpasses the 270 Electoral College vote threshold that is required to win the presidency.

Today the pact has the support of states - and Washington D.C. - that total 181 electoral votes, largely those that have gone for Democrats in recent years.

The pact raises questions of its own for democracy: It creates a situation in which voters in, for example, Colorado, may cast most of their votes for the Democrat in a presidential race - but the state might wind up giving its electors to the Republican depending on the national outcome.

That might invite legal challenges from candidates or voters' groups if it took place.
The cases for and against
Supporters of a national popular vote argue something must be done; the Electoral College disproportionately inflates the influence of rural areas while undervaluing the votes of cities. That, critics say, means devaluing the votes of many non-white voters too.

"It really does over-represent some sparsely populated states, and it provides some skew and bias to our system that I just don't think is healthy anymore," said Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College.

Gronke notes, however, that there would be major administrative challenges if the U.S. ever got to the point of switching to a national popular vote.

Would the federal government get into the business of administering the elections, or leave that up to state and local officials, as it does today? Could Washington administer a national recount in the event of a close result?

"How would that work?" Gronke asks. "You look at the Florida situation we had in 2000 - that already took a lot of time and effort, but imagine if that was done across the country. It's just not clear how you could do that."

Gary Gregg, who leads the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, says that if today's system over-privileges rural states, a national popular vote would be just as unfair in the opposite direction.

Trump made a similar argument earlier this week, warning that "smaller states & then entire Midwest would end up losing all power."

....just the large States - the Cities would end up running the Country. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we can't let that happen. I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote, but now realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2019

Gregg says that change would radicalize politics.

"The game will not be any longer to be a [politician who is] liberal but be able to appeal to a rural Ohioan," he said. "The game will be: Be a liberal - to the extent I can maximize votes in major urban centers."

Jacob Levy, of McGill University, disagreed with that argument.

"Precisely what it does is proportionately advantages where the people are," Levy said. "And places where there are more people become more important when you're counting votes."

Still, Levy said if he had to bet on whether the U.S. will still be using the Electoral College in 20 years - he thinks it will.

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Abolishing The Electoral College Would Be More Complicated Than It May Seem

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subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast Most people in America want the Electoral College gone, and they want to select a president based on who gets the most votes nationally, polls say. Democratic presidential candidates are weighing in too. "Every vote matters," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in Mississippi on Monday.

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Until 1:32 “bursting its banks”

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Cyclone Idai Has Displaced Thousands In Southern Africa

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Steve Inskeep talks to Gerald Bourke of the United Nation's World Food Programme about the aftermath of last week's cyclone that hit Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

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Until 1:30 “speed”

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Here's a puzzle: a giraffe has much longer legs than a cheetah, but it runs only about half as fast.

It seems long legs don't make you the fastest in the land. Yale University biologist Walter Jetz says theoretically, they should. Animals with longer limbs and lots of muscle should be able to cover ground - or water or air - the fastest.

"I mean it's really cool actually," Jetz says, "to think about these really large birds or mammals or even large dinosaurs, in principle they could have been super super fast." For example, based on muscle mass and body size, an elephant in theory could run 60 miles an hour.

But Jetz and his fellow researchers studied over 400 animals species and found that the biggest animals fall short of their potential. It's actually mid-sized animals that run almost as fast as their bodies theoretically can go: the cheetah, the marlin, or the falcon, for example.

It turns out that reaching your top speed potential depends on your fuel tank. Acceleration is all about burning the body's high-octane fuel to get those fast-twitch muscles going. This is where muscles are working hard and fast - anaerobically, or without much oxygen.

Animals only have so much of this kind of fuel: What happens is, the biggest animals take more time to accelerate, and they run out of it before they reach their top speed. "In practice, they run out of energy in their acceleration before they can even reach that theoretical speed," Jetz says. They switch over the aerobic running, which is lower intensity and much slower.

Mid-sized animals, however, have a mix of energy and limb size and muscle that puts them in a speed "sweet spot." They don't burn out as fast. "The leopard or the jaguar have enough acceleration energy to make it all the way to nearly your theoretically maximum speed," says Jetz.

Jetz reports his findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. Once his research team proved their calculations worked on living animals, they turned their analysis to dinosaurs. They found that the giant Tyrannosaurus rex topped out at a mere 17 miles an hour.

That reassures Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, who came to much the same conclusion from studying the T. rex skeleton. "You know, this is one of these things - I had a professor who said 'I don't know if this is true but it deserves to be true'."

Carrano says accurately deducing a dinosaur's movement from its size is a handy tool. It could provide clues to how dinosaurs traveled, like the horned triceratops. "How wide-ranging was a triceratops?" Carrano wonders. "Was it like a bison? Some people think these animals migrated across the continent."

Or it might shed light on how the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame actually hunted. According to the Jetz's research, the velociraptor would have been in that speedy sweet spot like mid-sized mammals, possibly running as fast as 33 miles an hour.

That's something to think about.

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New Research Suggests Why Mid-Sized Animals Are The Fastest

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Here's a puzzle: a giraffe has much longer legs than a cheetah, but it runs only about half as fast. It seems long legs don't make you the fastest in the land. Yale University biologist Walter Jetz says theoretically, they should.

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Until 1:29 “up”

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Japan Is Betting Big On The Future Of Hydrogen Cars

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Japan doesn’t think battery electric cars are the only future for transportation. It is investing millions to ramp up production of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, citing their convenience for consumers.

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From 1:10 or 1:11 (after the commercial) until 2:45 « fake test scores »

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It's no secret that wealth brings advantages when it comes to sending your kids to college. Rich and famous parents can donate large sums of money to schools or lean on their names and connections. Some ritzy colleges explicitly prefer the children and grandchildren of alumni - at Harvard University, an investigation found last year that these "legacy" admits were over five times more likely to get in than the average Joe.

Yet federal prosecutors say that for 33 wealthy parents, these advantages were not enough. A college consultant named William Singer, of Newport Beach, Calif., pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to a cheating scheme that included bribing SAT test proctors and college coaches on behalf of these families.

The indictment names prominent actresses and business leaders. It alleges crazy stunts - like having a stand-in take a college entrance exam, photo-doctoring to paste a student's head onto the body of an athlete, bribing college sports coaches and paying up to $75,000 for falsified exam results, all in the name of getting their kids admission through what Singer called "a side door" to schools like Yale University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California.

To better understand this story, here are a few things to know about the fraught history of college admissions.
Just a fraction of U.S. students attend schools like these.
The majority of the schools targeted in this scheme are selective: The University of Texas at Austin takes four in 10 applicants, and Yale just 7 percent. Yet the average U.S. college accepts two out of three applicants. That means this demolition derby of highly competitive admissions just doesn't apply to most Americans.

Universities are tax-exempt and taxpayer supported through federal aid and, in the case of public institutions, state funding. That status is granted because they profess a public mission. Selective institutions justify effectively barring the masses because, they say, they admit students based on merit.

When a high school junior in Spokane, Wash., or Sutherland Springs, Texas, goes to Yale's application website, she reads this: "As we carefully and respectfully review every application, two questions guide our admissions team: 'Who is likely to make the most of Yale's resources?' and 'Who will contribute most significantly to the Yale community?' "

The existence of legacy admissions and even athletic recruitment puts a dent in this shiny image. This bribery scandal could tarnish it for good. A detail that some critics have found especially galling: In some cases, payments that were effectively bribes to university officials were funneled through charitable foundations to the universities, meaning that the bribers also could claim tax exemptions.
This controversy comes amid a broader debate over affirmative action.
Last year, Harvard University's admissions process - and the very concept of merit at the most selective colleges - was put on trial. Asian-American students alleged discrimination because they are consistently admitted at lower rates than their SAT scores and grades might predict. Harvard denies the allegations.

At stake are the procedures that elite, highly selective colleges, which are generally overstacked with white and rich students, try to use to improve diversity without running afoul of the law.

Despite battles over affirmative action stretching back decades, research has shown that low-income students make up just 3 percent of America's most selective colleges and that racial diversity is lacking too.

These inequities in American education go back all the way to kindergarten. Access to college counselors and advanced courses is inequitable by class and race. According to a recent report from the nonprofit EdBuild, predominantly white school districts as a group receive $23 billion more than districts that serve mostly students of color, though both have the same number of students.
Highly selective colleges have dubious advantages.
With all the general cultural brouhaha over getting kids into a "good school," which now extends to charges of federal racketeering and wire fraud, you'd think that a fat admissions letter is a golden ticket to a great life. The answer is yes and no.

Low-income students who do manage to get into top colleges graduate at high rates and do nearly as well financially as their silver-spoon peers.

But the colleges that most excel in promoting social mobility, according to an analysis by economist Raj Chetty, aren't the Ivies - they are excellent, open-access public institutions and community colleges with large numbers of working-class students, like the City University of New York.

All else being equal, highly selective colleges do seem to confer an income premium over nonselective colleges. But an individual's choice of major, such as engineering, is a far more powerful factor in her eventual earnings than her choice of college.

If you have more specific dreams, the Ivy League holds a near monopoly over the Supreme Court.

CEOs, on the other hand, come from a broader mix of public and private institutions, with only 14 Ivy Leaguers among the top 100 companies in the U.S., according to a U.S. News & World Report analysis last year.

Meanwhile, many tech billionaires are better known as college dropouts.

For a broader view, a 2014 survey of tens of thousands of graduates by Gallup found that college selectivity correlated not at all with later satisfaction in work or fulfillment in life. As NPR reported in 2014, "Those percentages did not vary based on whether the grads went to a fancy name-brand school or a regional state college, one of the top 100 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings or one of the bottom 100."

No word yet on what it means for long-term happiness to find out your parents lied to get you into college in the first place.
NPR wants to hear from anyone who has received advice from the man at the center of the college admissions scandal, William Rick Singer, and any of his companies - The Key, the Key Worldwide Foundation, Future Stars, the CollegeSource or others. Fill out the form below .

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Does It Matter Where You Go To College? Some Context For The Admissions Scandal

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It's no secret that wealth brings advantages when it comes to sending your kids to college. Rich and famous parents can donate large sums of money to schools or lean on their names and connections.

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Parcoursup Héloïse Thomassier

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Hi students, could you spread the word to everyone in our class : For Parcoursup, before Sunday,  I need to indicate what kind of English diplomas each one of you has received over the years (FCE, CAE, IELTS) & your level or score. Could you tell me? & the year / class you took the exam.   Either on the padlet or by mail at v.monnier@franklinparis.com
Thanks a lot! & have a restful weekend (I hope)

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From « order, order » at 2:08 until « they had not anticipated » at 3’48

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast

Britain's official deadline to leave the EU is on March 29. Tomorrow, there's another vote on Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to leave the EU. But if that doesn't pass, that puts the UK on a path for a "hard Brexit," where Britain leaves the EU with no special deal in place. In that case, Britain and the EU's trade would go back to the World Trade Organization's default rules governing all trade, without special agreements.

Leaving the EU is unprecedented, but leaving a large trading bloc is not. Today on The Indicator, we look at what Brexit and the former state of Czechoslovakia have (or had) in common.

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast Britain's official deadline to leave the EU is on March 29. Tomorrow, there's another vote on Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to leave the EU. But if that doesn't pass, that puts the UK on a path for a "hard Brexit," where Britain leaves the EU with no special deal in place.

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Until 1´42

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A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that resulted in dozens dead and many seriously injured, left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

We are following the news from New Zealand this morning. There has been an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, which is that country's second-biggest city. It appears that people who were worshipping in these mosques were gunned down. At least 49 people are dead. Many others have been injured. This is the voice of an eyewitness, Nour Travis, calling into Newstalk ZB.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NOUR TRAVIS: I was really lucky. People were just, like - they're falling down, like - I wasn't. I was lucky. I thought, I'm going, as well.

GREENE: That's a witness to these attacks, Nour Travis. Multiple suspects, we should say, are in custody at this hour. And, as we said, many families are waiting at hospitals, hoping that their loved ones are there. I want to turn now to NPR's national security correspondent Greg Myre, who has been following this unfolding from Washington, D.C., this morning.

And, Greg, what is the latest as we know it right now?

GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Well, as you mentioned, at least 49 dead in these two mosques. Most were killed in one mosque - at least 41 of them in one and seven or so in the other. One died in the hospital. The shootings took place during the Friday prayers - midday or early afternoon in New Zealand. Four people have been arrested - three men, one woman. One of them has been charged. Police also found two explosive devices in a vehicle. And so we're still learning more details. But those are the basics right now.

GREENE: Two explosives in a vehicle - but it sounds like much of this was carried out by someone using an assault rifle.

MYRE: Exactly. These - as far as we know, all of the people killed and injured - more than 20 people injured, as well - were all shot with a sort of military-style assault rifle, apparently. Another horrific fact - this - the shooter livestreamed this on Facebook. He clearly wanted maximum attention. He's also put out a lengthy manifesto describing why he did this.

GREENE: Yeah. The manifesto - obviously, something that, I suppose, investigators are going to be incredibly interested in. What exactly do we know about this man? And what do we know about this manifesto at this point?

MYRE: Well, the one - of the four people arrested, the one who's been charged is apparently a 28-year-old Australian. And he apparently wrote this lengthy manifesto. And he makes it very clear that he's - he believes that there's a white genocide taking place and that he's doing this to sort of spark a race war. And he - his own family came from Europe. And he talks in his manifesto about the Second Amendment in the United States and that the attempt to remove firearms, as he describes it, will ultimately result in civil war in the U.S. So he's clearly drawing on a far-right, white supremacist ideology that has - you know, we've seen increasing amounts of that in this country and in other places in Europe and in New Zealand, as well, now.

GREENE: He's Australian, you said, right? Not...

MYRE: He - yes, he's - he described himself as an ordinary, white man who was born in Australia. His parents were of Scottish, Irish and English descent. And then he says he had decided not to go to college. And he'd spent some amount of time in New Zealand. He also says - he has, like, a question-and-answer part of his manifesto, where he says he'd been planning this attack in New Zealand for two years and the mosque specifically for the past three months.

GREENE: No one wants anything like this to happen anywhere in the world. But I've been struck because as we've been talking to people, journalists in New Zealand, they've been saying, this just doesn't happen here. I mean, what is New Zealand's history with incidents like this?

MYRE: Well, it's a peaceful country - a very low murder rate, low violence rate. The last mass killing there was in 1990. Thirteen people were shot dead then. It does have a lot of weapons. A lot of people in New Zealand do have guns - but again, very low murder rate. And again, the manifesto talks about this Muslim invasion. New Zealand's a very small country - a little over 4 million people. Latest figures I've seen - only about 1 percent of New Zealand's population are Muslims, most of them immigrants in the past several decades - not a big part of the country. This is a country that just does not have a lot of major trauma. The last one you could point to was back in 2011. They had a huge earthquake - 185 people were killed. And it was in Christchurch, as well. And that city has still been rebuilding.

GREENE: Yeah. One journalist noted the city really is still coming back from that, even though it's been eight years. And now they're dealing with this. OK. We'll be following all of this news from New Zealand - just tragic events this morning at these two mosques. Speaking to NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre - we appreciate it, Greg.

MYRE: Thanks, David.

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In New Zealand, 2 Mosques Came Under A 'Terrorist Attack'

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A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that resulted in dozens dead and many seriously injured, left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto. DAVID GREENE, HOST: We are following the news from New Zealand this morning. There has been an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, which is that country's second-biggest city.

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Starvation
Civil war
A high insecurity level
Hard to tackle
Malnourished//Overnutrition
Stunting
Poverty level
to waste

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From beginning to 1:31

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subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast

President Trump was bombarded with negative news cycles last month, so he turned to Twitter, venting frustrations and dismissing an increasingly wide variety of things he doesn't like as "fake" or "phony." Presidential tweets about "fake news" aren't new, but August was unique in the sheer frequency of such presidential declarations on Twitter. There were more tweets in August about things Trump labels fake and phony than in any other month of his presidency.

This is part of a trend: as Trump's presidency has gone on, these kinds of tweets have increased over time, with peaks coming in months with particularly bad headlines for the president.

The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about "fake books," "the fake dossier," "fake CNN," and he added a new claim - that Google search results are "RIGGED" to mostly show only negative stories about him. He also accused NBC News' Lester Holt of "fudging" the tape of his May 2017 interview conducted shortly after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

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An NPR analysis found that in the month of August, Trump sent out 46 tweets containing the words "fake" or "phony," far surpassing his previous record. (Two of the tweets were later deleted to fix typos).

August was also a month in which former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman turned on the president with a tell-all book, Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight felony counts and Trump's long-time personal attorney Michael Cohen implicated the president in campaign finance violations when he entered into a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

In October 2017, Trump tweeted about things being "fake" or "phony" 30 times. It was a record for the year, with two events dominating Trump's tweets.

Trump visited hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico and declared the response a success all while fighting with local officials who begged for more assistance.

As that month closed out, Trump's attention turned to the Russia investigation, especially after Manafort was indicted and George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

In June 2018, a month with 31 "fake" or "phony" tweets, Trump took issue with coverage of the Singapore summit with North Korea, family separation along the U.S.-Mexico border and, as usual, the Russia investigation.

"Donald Trump more and more is calling into question every other source of information besides himself," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies misinformation and trust in the media.

While some of Trump's core supporters believe him unflinchingly, for others the tweets and similar statements raise doubts and sow confusion about what the truth really is, said Nyhan.

"I think Americans are often very concerned when they see leaders with authoritarian tendencies telling their supporters things that are false over and over again and attacking other sources of information," said Nyhan. "And if that worries you when you see it abroad, it should worry you when you see it here too."

Trump is far from the first president to grouse about the way the press covers him, presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. What's different, Beschloss argued, is that Trump doesn't seem to share his predecessors' appreciation of the necessity of a free press as contemplated by the country's founders.

Trump also has a unique ability to deliver his complaints directly to the public via friendly hosts on Fox News and through his social media streams. "He's got social media that reaches perhaps 100 million people," said Beschloss. "We've never seen a president before with that kind of weapon."

Often when Trump says something is fake, it isn't false. Rather, he just doesn't like it. On May 9th, he posted a tweet that pulled back the curtain on this idea; "91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake)," he wrote.

"They don't cover stories the way they're supposed to be. They don't even report them in many cases, if they're positive," Trump said at a press conference in June. "I came up with a term. Fake news. It's a lot of Fake News."

Trump used to say the monthly unemployment figures were fake too. "Because the number is a phony number, five percent," then-candidate Trump said in August 2016 during a speech in Florida. "It's not down to five percent. It's probably 20 or 21 percent. Some people think it's higher."

But that was before the election. Now that Trump is president, he no longer calls the unemployment rate phony. In fact, he touts low unemployment as one of his great achievements and complains the "fake news" media doesn't cover it enough.

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President Trump's Description of What's 'Fake' Is Expanding

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
subscribe to NPR Politics Podcast podcast President Trump was bombarded with negative news cycles last month, so he turned to Twitter, venting frustrations and dismissing an increasingly wide variety of things he doesn't like as "fake" or "phony." Presidential tweets about "fake news" aren't new, but August was unique in the sheer frequency of such presidential declarations on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.headline
Alexandre Richter                 The wall, Brexit and comparison

# data[].attributes.subject
Alexandre Richter                 The wall, Brexit and comparison

# data[].attributes.body
- La montée du populisme: la montée du populisme
- Le système du vainqueur (celui utilisé lors de l'élection présidentielle aux États-Unis) est différent du système proportionnel.
-Pour fâcher: fustiger
-Mécontentement public: mécontentement public
-un embouteillage: une impasse

# data[].attributes.headline
Sixtine Voituriez (Israël left the UNESCO)

# data[].attributes.subject
Sixtine Voituriez (Israël left the UNESCO)

# data[].attributes.body
To pull out from an institution : se retirer d'une institution
A withdrawal : un retrait
To complain about how it is run : se plaindre de comment cela est géré
To become effective : commencer à être appliqué
To tear apart societies : séparer les pays
To revive its fortune : redonner vie à sa force
To underscore : souligner

# data[].attributes.headline
Héloïse Thomassier: government shutdown and trump’s wall

# data[].attributes.subject
Héloïse Thomassier: government shutdown and trump’s wall

# data[].attributes.body
Aiding and abetting (expression): aider et encourager (complicité criminelle)
Factual subtext: faits sous-jacents
Stymie: contrecarrer
Petulant: irritable
To mount: organiser
Power grab: coup de force, prise de
Hardline: dur, radical

Sources: cnn, Fox News

# data[].attributes.body
Topic : Trump’s wall

Vocab : Timetable : calendrier
To hold out : tenir bon
To deter : dissuader
To run for president : se présenter à la présidence
Standoff : impasse
To line up : s’aligner
Contractor : entrepreneur
Tethered : attaché
Livelihoods: moyens de subsistance
According to new polling
As a result of the shutdown

Sources : The Fox News and th Washington Post

# data[].attributes.body
Shutdown

- "it has already hit another historic milestone"
- reportedly
- cornered
- is pinned
- was essentially goaded
- consistently
- have engaged in such brinkmanship
- have made both parties leery of delving into

Sources :
- Fox News
- The New-York Times

# data[].attributes.body
Global compact for migration
- A firm stance
- The purpose of the article was to discredit the criticism

# data[].attributes.body
Sources:
The guardian 29/01/2019
The daily express 29/01/2019

Vocab
Resounding
Withdrawal
Thorny
Untamed
Spokesman
Turnaroud
Left-wing

# data[].attributes.body
The american shutdown

-to loom: menacer
-to strike a deal: conclure un marché
(A deal is struck)
->As a government shutdown looms and a deal has yet to be struck between president Donald Trump and the Democrats.....

-to reconverse: reconvoquer
-to be dazzled : être ébloui
-to face the prospect of: affronter l'éventualité
to offer a route off: offrir une voie de sortie

# data[].attributes.body
To tweak: peaufiner
To be ousted from:être éjecté de
To deem: considerer
A withdrawal deal
To strike a deal

Sources: France’s Le Monde
The daily express
The Guardian

# data[].attributes.body
The article 13
Voc: - To right a wrong
- value gap
- High-profile (adj)
- skeleton argument
- a snippet
- to plunder
- to water down sth
- "The devil is in the detail"
- a denizen
Sources: The Guardian, BBC News, Save your internet (website)

# data[].attributes.body
to stick to the plan/schedule
a dark horse
coattails
a pundit
a witch hunt
a bipartisan
the ticket

# data[].attributes.body
Trump Vs Pelosi
Sources: fox news CNN Le Figaro

A compromise was struck
To run roughshod on the political process
To stuck to sthg
To stand firm

# data[].attributes.body
The Benalla affair

to dowmplay the case importance
Sometimes dubbed "president of the rich"
His Twitter feed had gone silent
It's a court phenomenon

Sources :
- The  Guardian  : Macron thinks he's untouchable, but the Benalla scandal could undo him

# data[].attributes.body
A Chinese rover landed on the far side of the moon

-after its groundbreaking touchdown : Après son atterrissage révolutionnaire
-It undergoes :  it suffers/it endures (il subit/il fait l'objet)
-the government does not disclose : le gouvernement ne révèle pas
-pictures taken by Chang'e 4 lander and rover beamed back to Earth : des photos prises pas le lanceur Chang'e 4 et le rover ramenés/envoyés sur Terre

Sources :
-The guardian website
-The New York Times website

# data[].attributes.body
The American "shutdown":

To fullfil campaign promises
Federal Administration paralysis
To deprive of smth
"He can't walk away without a deal"
To back away from doing smth
To deliver excuses
"A new low for Washington's dysfunction" / "a new notch on his belt"
On one hand ... On the other hand ...

Sources :
The Huffington Post
Fox news Post
CNN

# data[].attributes.body
Topic : Brexit
Broadsheet
Tabloïd
General election
Crushing defeat
Motion of no-confidence

# data[].attributes.body
Topic : The Yellow vests in Paris.

Vocabulary :
- feature
- a riot
- to advocate
- demonstrations
- to deny
- skirmishes
- tear gas
- broadcasts
- the protests have become a weekly occurrence
- the yellow vest movement has divided France
- throwing punches in footage that was widely shared on social media
- the yellow vests have drawn strength from their diversity and breadth of appeal

Sources :
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Irish News
Le Monde
Libération

# data[].attributes.body
Fox news : January 13
Trump rejects report he hid key details of conversations with Putin: 'I don't care'
Washington Post : January 13 Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration

then-Secretary of State : le secrétaire d'État de l'époque
key détails
had taken unusual steps to hide
is subjected to the lobbyism : subit le lobbyisme

# data[].attributes.body
The Backstop
The deal was struck and then undone
Area of contention
To sow the seeds for an insoluble problem
Keep T. May on the dancefloor