Recognize the difference between responsible citizenship and profiling, what is the economic cost of not paying attention to climate change?
Vigilant or paranoid? Reexamining ‘See Something, Say Something’
America’s relationship with the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign can best be summed up in two words: it’s complicated.
The operation, which has been adopted by the Department of Homeland Security, is supposed to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense in the fight against extremism. But the San Bernardino attacks have led some to question the effectiveness of the approach -- especially since it could be seen as a way to encourage racial profiling.
Case in point, before the massacre that left 14 dead, the suspected shooters practiced at a gun range in Riverside. Range instructor, John Galletta, was asked by the Associated Press why he didn't report the couple’s activities. He replied, "Americans look different. They vary in size, shape, color, ethnicity, and you can't tell what someone is planning or preparing to do."
How can "If You See Something, Say Something" be used effectively, and where's the line between being a good citizen and profiling?
Take Two put that question to David Schanzer, professor of public policy at Duke University’s Triangle Center of Terrorism and Homeland Security.
Press the blue play button above to hear more.
Effectiveness of U.S. monitoring of Muslims ranges
Let's say you're a practicing Muslim in America, but one of the people attending your mosque is saying some incendiary thing, maybe even radical.
How do you see something and say something to authorities?
In the past, the FBI tried to infiltrate mosques with informants to keep tabs on people, but that program ended in embarrassment and several lawsuits.
But for a look at how law enforcement is trying to collaborate with Muslim communities in the US, UCLA law professor Jon Michaels joins Take Two.
For SoCal immigrants, climate change hits close to home
Leah Tejada was at work when she got the news: a massive hurricane had just hit near her family's hometown on the island of Leyte in the Philippines and the emerging reports were grim.
"I was scared," she said. "They said there's no food, so I sent money to Manila and looked for somebody who will go by land to bring food, [like] dried fish."
Like many Filipinos in L.A., Tejada scrambled to reach her family and send aid after Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November 2013. When she finally got word from her three brothers – more than a week after the storm first hit – the news was mixed: they had survived, but their home was demolished. And all of them had to flee to the capital, Manila.
Haiyan turned out to be the strongest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall, with winds of nearly 200 mph. It left a path of destruction in the Philippines: over 6,000 dead, tens of thousands more missing.
In the end, more than four million people were driven from their homes, including Tejada's family.
Climate migrants or refugees?
"We're going to have this flood of people moving as a consequence of climate change," said Megan Herzog, a fellow at UCLA's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. "Perhaps tens or hundreds of millions of people by the middle of this century, but we really don't have a clear framework in place for those folks."
There's debate over how many could be displaced and how much of it will be permanent. The UN has projected anywhere from 20 to 250 million by 2050, and those figures have been much discussed and examined. But one thing is clear, say experts: climate change poses a bigger risk to poorer countries, places already vulnerable to social upheaval.
"Climate change can act as that threat multiplier or that tipping point, increasing a community's risk and vulnerability to situations that they're already experiencing," said Julie Maldonado, an anthropologist and a lead author with the U.S. National Climate Assessment.
And it's not just the big headline-grabbing storms that could drive people from their homes. It's ongoing, sustained changes like sea-level rise, flooding and drought.
"All of these types of events and disorder and the risk and the loss of economic opportunities can contribute to people's decision to leave their homes," said Herzog.
The complexity of that decision, though, makes it hard to clearly define what a climate migrant is. There aren't clear global rules on what to do with a family that is forced to flee national borders by a hurricane or prolonged drought. Nations put together a set of guidelines, known as the Nansen Principles, as early as 2011, but they aren't legally-binding.
"The system of laws that we have for refugees was built after World War II and we were thinking of really different problems," said Herzog.
'Where will they go?"
Omar Huda, 65, describes his family's ancestral home in the Bay of Bengal in fond terms: a lush delta that's home to the famed Bengal tiger, large pythons and rich seafood.
The abundance of crab, shrimp and frog prompted his cousins to build up a fishing business. Huda, who as a Banglaedshi is part of the fastest-growing Asian group in L.A., returned to visit his cousins over the years. He watched as the business thrived, allowing his family to buy nice homes and boats and creating jobs for other villagers, he said.
But that all changed in 2007. A strong cyclone destroyed the fishery and forced more than a million people on the coast to evacuate. Storms along the coast were nothing new, but there was an added risk this time: a strong tidal surge crashed into villages and fields.
"After the cyclone, what should happen is [the tide] should recede, but this time it didn't recede," he said. "And so that area simply became Bay of Bengal. And all of the shrimp just flew to their freedom, if you will, into the ocean."
That meant the end of the family business.
His cousins moved to the capital, Dhaka. They found apartments and started working in the garment industry. City planners there say such events are already shaping the city of over 17 million, where more than one in five people living in slums moved from villages near the Bay of Bengal.
What is happening in Bangladesh is alarming, experts say. High tides are rising as much as ten times faster than the global average. And with a low-lying delta that's home to millions, families like Huda's face big risks. Recently, the country's ambassador said as many as 50 million Bangladeshis could flee the country by 2050 if sea levels rise as expected.
"Where are these people going to go?" asked Huda, of the country that's surrounded by ocean or a land border with India. "There is no sea to go to. Where are they going to go?"
Whether nations currently meeting at the UN climate summit in Paris seriously address that question remains to be seen. A draft agreement released after the first week of talks called for a new "coordination facility" to oversee migration and relocation due to climate change. But many details – including how that facility will operate on the ground and who will fund its operations – weren't spelled out.
Rebuilding after the storm
The year after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the International Organization of Migration tried to find out how many people were still displaced from their homes. Out of the 4 million, they said about half still could not go home. Either the area was too unsafe or houses were still destroyed. But that number came with a big caveat: those who were able to find temporary shelter with friends or family in the big cities weren't counted.
Leah Tejada's family did make it back to Leyte and rebuilt their home.
Then, the following year, 2014, another typhoon came. This one called Ruby. It wasn't as strong as Haiyan and didn't get as many international headlines, but the Tejada home was again destroyed. And again, they rebuilt.
"It's very hot over there, extreme," said Tejada. Frequent storms are part of life for Tejada's family, and places like the Philippines, but Tejada says her family has noticed a difference in recent years.
"If it rains, it's flooding and now it's almost every two months or monthly, there's a storm," she said.
After Haiyan, she watched as some of her friends in L.A. brought family members to the U.S. They're called the Yolanda survivors, after the Philippine name for the storm. But her family has stayed put in the Philippines – at least for now.
"That's the only land they have," she said. "If they go somewhere else, they will become squatters. That's the only land they have."
Climate change could drain billions from the world economy
Climate change will have a profound effect on sea levels and weather patterns, that much is known.
But new research from Stanford University also suggests a global rise temperature by a few degrees could drain the world's economy by billions.
The optimum average temperature for productivity, says assistant professor Marshall Burke, is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of the top economies in America fall into that range, New York City and San Francisco, for example.
But many things can happen when that increases by a few degrees.
Crop yields may shrink with slightly warmer temperatures. Workers everywhere may also be less efficient because they're sweating or uncomfortable in the office. Burke also suggests the temperatures could also impact sleep patterns, making people less on their game while on the job.
The net result of all that, he says, is a great loss of productivity in the economy.
Hear more of Burke's analysis by clicking the blue player above.
The Wheel Thing: Ford's Futurist on Autonomous Cars and 'Time Poverty'
She admits it's the coolest job ever.
Sheryl Connelly is the staff futurist for the Ford Motor Co. For more than a decade she's been analyzing trends and trying to understand where we are going and what it will be like when we get there. Her work is not at all confined to the automotive space, but she says she exists at Ford to "slow the conversation," and challenge assumptions.
In a conversation on a visit to Los Angeles, Connelly told our Wheel Thing guide, Susan Carpenter, about some of the trends and concepts she's following. Among them, 'time poverty,' which she says is the result of all our digital devices and interconnectivity robbing us of free time. She sees a society that moving away from trusting traditional leaders, such as politicians, in favor of regular, everyday people who are doing small things to make stuff better.
And she did have some thoughts about cars, when pressed. She seems to agree with others that the development of self-driving vehicles will happen faster than many expect. But she also believes it's more likely to take hold in China and India before it becomes common in the US. That's because, she says, in those locales, traffic is truly horrific, and the road infrastructure is poor, so drivers there are more likely to accept an autonomous solution that promises to ease their pain.
State of Affairs: The political fallout of the San Bernardino massacre
On this week's State of Affairs, the politics of the San Bernardino massacre, California's role in the U.N. climate change summit, and how the drought factors in to a possible federal government shutdown.
Guests:
- Carla Marinucci, POLITICO's California Playbook reporter
- Marisa Lagos, political reporter, KQED's California Government and Politics Desk
In defense of Millennials: How the 'coddled student' is a myth
Whether demanding free speech, or racial equality, there's a rich history in America of college students calling for change.
In the last few years though, university students have also had to fight another battle: The perception that they require exceptional levels of coddling.
Reacting to their demands for everything from safe spaces, to trigger warnings, to micro aggressions, people ranging from President Barack Obama to Bill Maher have publicly called students out for being oversensitive.
But
, USC's student body president, disagrees. Her Huffington Post piece, "The Myth of the Coddled College Student," attempts to shatter this reputation.
"I think it's a reaction to what has been going on across college campuses in America, and I think that the idea of a coddled college student is something that's distracting from the actual issues that are taking place," she said. "We should be paying attention to what is actually happening, and it's issues of discrimination that we need to be taking seriously."
Sampath faced such discrimination herself in September, when she had a racial insult spewed at her as she walked passed a fraternity house. She said seeing events unfold not only on USC's campus, but at other campuses around the nation, inspired her to get other generations to view Millennials in a different way.
"College students should be critical of the spaces that they inhabit," she said. "We should be thinking more about how we can make the places that we're around better."
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.
How much weight do the SAG and Golden Globe awards carry?
The excitement and general craziness that is the Hollywood awards season has now reached a fever pitch. Yesterday the influential Screen Actors Guild announced nominations for their awards. And early this morning the Hollywood Foreign Press Association unveiled their slate of candidates for the Golden Globe awards.
John Horn, host of The Frame, and co-host of the KPCC podcast The Awards Show... Show, joins A Martinez to talk about the nominees, the state of the film industry and why he doesn't like the Golden Globes.
What in the world is going on with Yahoo!?
For a few weeks now Yahoo!... you remember Yahoo!, right? Well, for a few weeks now, rumors have been flying around about how the company could possibly be broken up and maybe sold off.
Yesterday, the company announced a reorganization. It will split into two parts, but its not selling anything for, at least for the time being. This is only the latest turn in an effort to revive what was, not so many years ago, one of the biggest names on the internet.
So, where is Yahoo! headed, and maybe more importantly, does anyone still care?
Brian Womack is a reporter with Bloomberg and he joins A Martinez to explain what's really going on and who's still using Yahoo!.
Lab Notes: The All-Dinosaur Edition!
Get ready, this edition of Lab Notes is all about the dinos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYKupOsaJmk
- Scientists have identified three new dinosaurs species. (You can read about them here, here and here.)
- Along with discovering new dinos, scientists think they may have narrowed in on when these beasts first showed up on Earth.
- A new study offers insight to dinosaur extinction, particularly for those animals in the ocean.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.