Cairo protests hit home for many Egyptian-Americans; Class-action lawsuit filed over Time Warner's CBS blackout; Oldest rock carvings in North America discovered in Nevada; Board to begin approving projects for California's cap-and-trade system, plus much more.
Cairo protests hit home for many Egyptian-Americans
The death toll in Egypt there continues to rise. Egyptian authorities are now saying more than 500 people died in yesterday's violent clashes between police and supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi. More than 3, 700 people have been injured.
President Obama announced this morning that the U.S. would not go forward with a previously planned joint military exercise, citing yesterday's violence.
To get the latest news we turn to Amira Ahmed Deputy Editor of the online news site MadaMasr.
Then, it's a tense situation for many Egyptians here in the U.S., as they watch the violent struggles for the future of their country from afar. We're joined by Mohamed Kolkela, a realtor in Long Beach who immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt in 2001.
Also on the line is Nile el Wardan, a professor of public policy with dual national citizenship who teaches at American University in Cairo. She grew up in La Jolla, California and is currently there during her summer vacation.
Immigration protesters descend on office of key GOP lawmaker
More than a thousand immigrants and their supporters from across California descended on the Congressional office of Kevin McCarthy in Bakersfield on Wednesday.
They called on the high-ranking Republican to pass immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people. The California Report's LA bureau chief Steven Cuevas has more.
Ask Emily on Take Two: How Obamacare will affect young people
Now to a new regular feature we're kicking off to answer you're pesky questions about the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
Chances are you haven't read the 2,000-page-long law, but even if you have, you're probably still pretty confused. So we're going to "Ask Emily," with Emily Bazar, senior writer for the California Healthcare Foundation Center for Health Reporting.
She publishes a regular column by the same name, Ask Emily, at our website.
Oldest rock carvings in North America discovered in Nevada
Researchers have discovered what they say are the nation's most ancient rock carvings — known as petroglyphs —located in Western Nevada
The carvings may date back more than 10,000 years ago.
Larry Benson of the US Geological survey and the University of Colorado Boulder led the research on the rocks. He joins the show with more.
Class-action lawsuit filed over Time Warner's CBS blackout
If you've been pining away for CBS shows like "NCIS" and the "Big Bang Theory", you may just be a Time Warner Cable subscriber.
Time Warner has blacked out CBS shows for the last two weeks as it fights over how much it should pay in fees for the right to carry CBS-owned channels. Several southern California residents have gotten fed up enough to file a class-action suit yesterday.
With more on this media saga is Alex Ben Block, senior editor for The Hollywood Reporter.
Study: Twitter can predict outcome of an election
Researchers at Indiana University have found a new use for Twitter, and it has nothing to do with pictures of your cat or what you had for lunch. Their study shows that Twitter might be the best way to predict who will win an election.
Basically, the more times a candidate's name appeared in a tweet compared to their rival, the more likely they were to win. It might not sound like the most shocking conclusion, but the results were nearly perfect.
In 2010, analyzing tweets predicted 404 out of 406 competitive races for seats in the House of Representatives in 2010.
For more on Twitter and elections we're joined by Fabio Rojas, assistant sociology professor at Indiana University.
Meeting Dread Pirate Roberts, the head of the Silk Road illicit drug website
An underground website, Silk Road, reportedly traffics between $30-45 million in drugs from pot to LSD each year. Given the nature of the business, the guy in charge is pretty hard to pin down.
He goes by Dread Pirate Roberts, a pseudonym that may ring a bell to "Princess Bride" fans. His two-and-a-half-year-old site has managed to operate under the noses of the DEA and FBI.
One reason it's been hard to shut down is because it's run on Tor, a type of open source software that protects the user against surveillance. To access Silk Road, users have to write a piece of Tor software and they can only buy drugs using the crypto currency called Bitcoin, a digital currency that's not controlled by any banks or any governments.
"That means that it doesn't have to necessarily tie to your identity, as a result it can be very difficult to trace the transactions," said Andy Greenberg, a technology writer for Forbes magazine, who recently scored a rare interview with Roberts. "You can privately and securely make these purchases of even very large amounts of highly illegal drugs."
But how is this possible, and why haven't authorities been able to shut the website down yet? Greenberg says its because of the effectiveness of the Tor anonymity software and the triple-encrypted communication that it uses.
"I am sure the drug enforcement agency would love to locate the servers who run the Silk Road, or better yet the people who are behind it," said Greenberg. "Tor is a complex tool that triple encrypts web traffic and then bounces it around to different computers around the world. It can be very difficult to trace those communications and to find the source…It's possible that the NSA could, but it doesn't seem that the FBI or DEA has been able to."
Roberts's motivation is monetary, but he is also motivated by a political stance. According to Greenberg, Roberts considers himself a radical free market libertarian and he hosts a forum site where he posts political manifestos. Users see him as a sort of Che Guevara figure and a hero.
"It is largely this idea of creating a free market that is not even the most powerful government in the world can regulate or enforce its laws upon," said Greenberg.
Another reason the site has been so successful is Roberts's diligence when it comes to clouding his true identity. Greenberg spent eight months communicating with Roberts via the website trying to convince him to open up to an interview. Even though he eventually broke through, Roberts still withheld even the simplest facts, like his nationality, age, and whether or not he was in the U.S.
Greenberg says he thinks the recent appearance of competitor sites, such as Atlantis, have pushed Roberts to dip his toe into the spotlight.
"They have a marketing team that created a YouTube video ad, that's the kind of thing that Silk Road has never dared to do until now," said Greenberg. "I think that the Dread Pirate Roberts is realizing that he needs to have a public persona as well to compete with these newcomers."
State of Affairs: City council woes, Garcetti and more
It's Thursday, which means it's time for State of Affair, our weekly look at politics throughout California. To help us with that, we're joined in-studio by KPCC political reporter Alice Walton and politics editor Oscar Garza.
It seems like it hasn't been a great week for L.A.'s city councilmen — and yes it's all men in this case. This week it came to light that City Councilman Jose Huizar's former deputy chief of staff filed a sexual harassment claim against him.
In addition, Moreno Valley City Councilman Marcelo Co was arrested for fraud and then resigned from office. Was this the worst week ever for Co?
There's a West Covina councilman who was robbed of his wallet and city ID. Is there a happy ending for Andrew McIntyre?
Finally, Hollywood residents are raising red flags over concerns that the brand new Millennium Project could be building dangerously close to the Hollywood fault. What's going on there? And isn't that Mayor Eric Garcetti's former city council district?
On Friday there's a major public hearing at L.A.'s City Hall. Members of the city's Budget Committee and Energy and Environment Committee will vet a proposed contract between the Department of Water and Power and its powerful union. Now, that's the city council, where is Mayor Eric Garcetti in this?
Garcetti also made headlines for appointing former mayoral challenger Emanuel Pleitez to serve on the panel that oversees retirement benefits and pensions for the city's police officers and firefighters. Now Garcetti campaigned on being hard on unions, but he and Pleitez had some pretty different views on pensions.
On Wednesday, Garcetti announced plans to shake up the panel that oversees the LAPD. What does he want to do there?
Let's move to county-wide politics. Right now the former L.A. County undersheriff Paul Tanaka is holding a press conference in Griffith Park and he's expected to announce that he's going to challenge his old boss, Sheriff Lee Baca in next year's election.
Earlier this week, Los Angeles decided it would not penalize Angelenos who plant curbside gardens. Lots of urban farmers turned up at City Hall to support that policy, and it sounds like they brought some props.
California's fight over fracking heats up
This morning, the California Coastal Commission meets in Santa Cruz.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club plan to show up in force to protest hydraulic fracturing in the Santa Barbara Channel, the site of a massive oil spill in 1969 many credit with launching the environmental movement know today.
The use of fracking in California is expanding, along with calls to regulate it more tightly. Earlier this year, state lawmakers sponsored multiple bills on fracking. Now there is just one, and as the legislative session draws to a close, everyone wants a say as to what's in it.
The California Report's Sacramento Bureau Chief Scott Detrow reports.
Board to begin approving projects for California's cap-and-trade system
California is now more than half way through the first year of its ambitious program to cut greenhouse gases under the landmark law: AB 32.
An important part of that effort is a cap-and-trade system, that requires polluters to reduce their carbon footprint through a combination of cutting emissions and trading carbon credits.
Carbon credits basically allow companies to get away with a certain amount of pollution by offsetting it with investment in projects that are reducing carbon in the environment. Think things like planting trees or sustainable farming.
Over the next few weeks, the California Air Resources Board is set to start approving offset projects to get the cap-and-trade system in full swing. KPCC's environmental reporter Molly Peterson joins the show to explain.
Interpol issues guide to prevent carbon trading crime
Internationally, the carbon trading market has become one of the biggest commodities markets in the world. It's estimated to be worth about $175 billion dollars, which makes it a major target for crime.
So much so that Interpol, the international police force, has just issued a guide to carbon trading crime. Here to tell us more is Davyth Stewart, an intelligence officer in the Environmental Crime unit of Interpol.
Interpol's Guide to Carbon Trading Crime
Dinner Party Download: 'Hamlet' banned, escalators and NASA haikus
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party Download podcast and radio show.
On tap this week:
A British Library Bans Hamlet Due To Violence
A scholar named MH Forsythe was working at the British Library and he was Googling "Hamlet." A message came up from the library telling him that access to the site was blocked due to "violent content." This is England and this is the British Library and this is "Hamlet," meanwhile people are searching YouTube, Facebook, all these things without any problems. He put a blog post about this and it has garnered quite a bit of attention.
This week back in 1859, a patent was granted to a guy names Nathan Ames for what is now considered to be the first escalator. Although he did not call it the escalator, he called it the revolving stairwell. It was a hand cranked device and he designed it for people to get up stairs in their homes if they were disabled or elderly. Because it was hand cranked, nobody really thought that was the greatest idea. It was 33 years before another man, Jesse Reno, manufactured a similar device that helped people get up to the pier at Coney Island.
Selected Haikus That Will Accompany NASA Shuttle to Mars
Over 1,000 haikus are going to go to space this November. The Going To Mars competition back in May invited the public to submit poetry that would be included on Maven, a spacecraft that's going on a mission to study Mars's upper atmosphere. The most popular one is from a man named Benedict Smith from the U.K. and his haiku says: It's funny they named/Mars after the God of War/Have a look at Earth.
Banksy's 2008 mural 'Flower Girl' goes up for auction in LA
The British artist Banksy has made a name for himself as a graffiti artist who's stealthily created provocative pieces around the world.
Now the L.A.-based auction house Julien's has announced that it's auctioning off one of his works — a piece called "Flower Girl" — which once graced the wall of a gas station on the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Brea. Julien's estimates the piece will bring in a whole lot of cash.
"We have a conservative presale estimate of $150,000-300,000 on the piece, that's just a general starting point," said Michael Doyle, consignment director at Julien's. "There have been similar pieces that have sold for over a million dollars in recent history, so we by no means are setting a ceiling on that."
Banksy first contacted the gas station owner to ask permission to do the mural. The owner give him the green light, and overnight the "Flower Girl" appeared on the side of the building.
"He somehow managed to make the surveillance cameras go blank for the whole evening and to this day the gas station owner has no idea how he did it," said Doyle.
The painting was completed in 2008, before Banksy had become as internationally popular as he is today. Over time, the gas station owner became concerned that someone would vandalize the work, so he covered it with a board for protection.
Finally, he decided it was time to put the piece in a private owner's hands. But that was no easy feat.
"The gas station owner decided to cut out a 9-by-8-foot portion of the gas station wall and encase it in a metal casing, then used a high-power forklift to transport it to our location," said Doyle.
This will be the first time a Banksy piece will be sold at auction; A piece titled "Slave Labour" was sold privately back in June. Still, some critics argue that, as street art, Banksy's works are not meant to be sold and displayed like traditional pieces. Doyle disagrees.
"This piece was done in 2008, almost 5 years ago, and it remained open and viewable to the public for several years," said Doyle. "It's at the point where we feel like it's best to be transferred to someone's private hands and they can do as they please with it."
As for the money raised by the sale of the piece, Banksy won't see a dime. It will all go to the gas station owner.
"The piece was done on private property which the gas station owner owns, so he'll be the one that received the funds for it," said Doyle.
The piece will be up for auction on December 5 in Beverly Hills.
Gerhartsreiter sentenced to 27 years to life in prison
This morning, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison for the 1985 murder of a San Marino man, John Sohus.
Over the years the German man assumed many identities, such as an English nobleman, a Hollywood producer and a Wall Street mogul. But his most notorious persona was that of Clark Rockefeller, a member of the wealthy Rockefeller clan.
RELATED: Key moments from the fake Rockefeller murder trial
We're joined now by Mark Seal, contributing editor for Vanity Fair and author of "The Man in the Rockefeller Suit" on the life of Gerhartsreiter.