Take Two looks at about the negative effects of restricting water in urban environments. We'll also discuss efforts to bring the 1984 Olympic Freeway murals back to life, how seals could have infected early humans with tuberculosis, and we remember the Northridge Earthquake through opera. All this and much more.
Hi-tech tools employed in the hunt for James Foley's killer
On Tuesday, a video surfaced on YouTube showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley by a member of an Islamic militant group. Foley's executioner was shrouded in black clothing, revealing nothing but his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Without a clear image of the killer, finding him will surely be a daunting task — but it's not an entirely impossible one.
Reporter Mike Riley wrote about the logistics of the hi-tech search for the killer for Bloomberg News. The good news is, Riley explains, is that after years of intelligence-gathering in the region, investigators are "actually really good at this now."
Low-income households hit hardest by water restrictions
Governor Jerry Brown has asked residents to reduce water consumption by 20 percent as the drought persists. The Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles has even started handing out fines through the newly implemented "water cops."
But as state and city officials impose restrictions, a new report from UCLA has recommendations for easing people off water while not harming the health of the community. Brian Cole, adjunct assistant professor of environmental sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, believes instituting a tiered pricing system could help ease the effects for low income residents.
The Flashback: President Obama responds to terror related death, and the continuing unrest in Ferguson
and
join the show to discuss the week that was in our weekly series - the Flashback.
President Obama and terror
The killing of American journalist James Foley by Islamic militants was brutally caught on video and seen throughout the world. His death has sparked horror and outrage. And since Foley's death, there have been calls to take more action against the group of Islamic militants behind this.
Secretary of State John Kerry
ISIL must be destroyed/will be crushed.
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) August 20, 2014
that this Islamic militant group will be crushed, but is that possible to do without military action?
And its been well documented that most Americans are tired of military operations in Iraq, but could the starkness of the video influence how people feel about a military action?
Unrest in Ferguson
The big domestic story of the week which has been unfolding events in Ferguson Missouri - where Jamelle has been reporting from. In this article, he spoke to scores of people there and asked them what their experience with the police was.
President Obama has dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson to work with the local officials there … what can the Justice Department do if they choose to step in?
Writer Jon Ronson and the strange world of "Frank"
The new film "Frank," is about a musician by that name, who wears a giant papier-mâché head all the time. Into his band, comes a young man named Jon, modeled after writer Jon Ronson who wrote the screenplay based on some real life people and events.
Frank's real life counterpart was a musician named Chris Sievey, who wore a similar giant head and adopted the persona of Frank Sidebottom on stage. Ronson based the story of the film partly on his experience in Sievey's band.
The true story behind the film is told in Ronson's most recent book, "Frank:The true story that inspired the movie."
Don Obama? The surprising ways the President is like the Godfather
If you ever scratch your head about the President's foreign policy moves, Harvard professor Stephen Walt says look no further than the Corleones to understand the motivations.
It's well known that Obama loves the Godfather trilogy, a fact he told Katie Couric back in 2008.
Walt says it goes beyond "like": President Obama demonstrates a lot of similarities between himself and the Don.
"Michael Corleone says, 'It's not personal, it's strictly business.' If you look at the governing style of Don Corleone and Michael Corleone, they don't make a lot of threats, they don't raise their voices," Walt says. "But when it's time to deal with adversaries, they're rather remorseless in dispatching them, much in the way that Obama dispatched Osama bin Ladin."
It may seem unusual to compare the head of the U.S. to a gangster, but Walt points out that politics is a ruthless business.
"Ultimately, any president's responsibility is to make the United States safer and trying to making Americans better off and more prosperous," he says. "Having a president who's somewhat more detached and somewhat more cold-blooded about American interests might not be such a bad thing."
Being a female game developer in a male-dominated industry
The stereotype of the pimply-faced teenage boy gaming in his parents' basement has become all but obsolete in the current video game landscape. In fact, a new report by an industry group shows that almost half of all gamers in the U.S. are women, which means there's a newfound demand for games that appeal to this fast-growing segment.
But whether the video game industry understands how to do that is another question.
is a lifelong gamer and a video game developer, who recently made a game called Revolution 60 with a team made up entirely of women.
She joins A Martinez to talk about the difference between creating video games for women and men, what it will take the industry to change and the abusive messages that she regularly receives from men about her involvement in video games.
Brianna Wu previously chronicled her experience in the gaming industry here.
Sexualized Spider-Woman makes the web sling some hate
Female superheroes can be great at kicking butt, but Spider-Woman has gotten a lot of negative attention for showing too much of her own.
In an alternate cover to an upcoming issue, the heroine is perched on top of a skyscraper. Some fans object to the way she's positioned: on all fours with a bodysuit that's designed to look painted on, and her butt is pushed up high into the air.
As one commenter on Twitter writes, "Shaking my head, Marvel turns Spiderwoman into a porn star and causes outrage."
Yet this isn't the only instance this week of a negative reaction to how woman are portrayed in pop culture. In the upcoming installment Super Smash Brothers, an alternate costume for the character Samus Aran is her in a skimpy sports bra and panty set.
While it draws on her design in a past game and the creator made a point to say that a female programmer designed the outfit, some gamers say the suggestive look goes too far.
Meanwhile, an upcoming straight-to-DVD Scooby-Doo movie has Daphne cursed to swell from a size 2 to a size 8. She's mortified (and looks more like a size 18), but the message it sends to young girls is that gaining weight of any kind is horrific.
Melody Severns, president and founder of Girls Drawin' Girls, says that even though it's 2014, it's still surprising to see that these kind of images persist in pop culture.
"Opera" about the 1994 Northridge earthquake debuts in SoCal
Twenty years ago, hours before sunrise one January morning, Southern California was rocked awake by a magnitude-6.7 quake that we'd later dub the Northridge earthquake.
Those of us who lived through it were left terrified amid the sounds of shaking and crashing, but this Saturday a new sound to Southern California commemorates that event.
The Long Beach Opera will perform "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky" at the Ford Ampitheatre.
It's a sort of-opera, kind of-musical about the quake, written by composer John Adams in 1995. However it's never been performed in the place it's set until now.
"We are not really experiencing an opera like we think about," says the Long Beach Opera's artistic director, Andreas Mitisek.
"You have rap songs, you have gospel songs," he says. "It's like L.A., you know? It's a melting pot of styles."
The staging tells the story of seven people whose lives are intertwined because of the earthquake, ranging from the minister of a black church, to a closeted white cop, to an undocumented immigrant mother from El Salvador.
"It has a bit of a troubled history maybe, because initially when opera critics went to it they may be expected an opera and that's not what they got," Mitisek says.
However, he says the work contains a lot of social and political themes that are still relevant today, such as racial discrimination.
"Each of these characters start a new journey after that quake," he says.
Seals likely responsible for spread of tuberculosis in Americas
European explorers have been blamed for introducing diseases across the Americas, but they might have been unfairly pegged with spreading tuberculosis. New research suggests that Native South Americans could have contracted tuberculosis from seals well before any outsiders showed up.
Co-author Anne Stone joins Take Two to talk more about how the disease could have been transmitted to humans and how they came to this conclusion.
Ferguson unrest triggers memories of Anaheim shootings
For residents in Anaheim, California, just South of Los Angeles, the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, is triggering some unpleasant memories. Two years ago, two Latino men were killed in back-to-back police shootings.
The events uncorked longstanding frustrations among minority residents who felt their city government wasn't representing them. Southern California Public Radio's Erika Aguilar says one mother took it upon herself to make a change.
Celebrating 30th anniversary of the Olympic freeway murals
After years of abuse from weather and graffiti, the 1984 Summer Olympics murals painted along the 101 and 110 freeways are coming back to life. On Sunday, the artists behind these murals will come together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their work and fundraise to keep mural history alive.
Joining us with more is Eric Bjorgum, a director of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, which has been working to restore the murals.
How does salmonella get into peanut butter?
The Food and Drug Administration announced this week that nSpired Natural Foods, a major supplier of nut butters, is voluntarily recalling some peanut and almond butters over concerns about possible salmonella contamination. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, explains how peanut butter becomes contaminated with salmonella and why it seems to happen so often.