Today on the show, we'll check in with a journalist covering the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Then, CVS will stop selling tobacco products in October and how the threat of relapse is ever present for recovering addicts, plus much more.
Much ado about Sochi's Winter Olympics accommodations
We are a day away from the opening ceremony at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Whether it's terrorist threats, construction issues or political unrest, the Games have been constantly surrounded by controversy and concerns.
Now, leading up to the eve of the Olympiad, there have been recent reports that even the hotels aren't ready to host such a global event. According to journalists in Sochi, if the only thing you're missing in your room is WiFi or a shower curtain, consider yourself lucky. If you're not, well, you might be better off sleeping in the media area. That is if you don't mind double toilet stalls.
But BBC World's sports reporter Alex Capstick says his temporary pad in Sochi isn't that bad.
"My place is fine. It was there for me — quite small, quite basic. But it's OK. I've got no complaints whatsoever," he told Take Two Wednesday. "The food takes a little bit too long to get to you in the restaurant so that's one thing — although they do try hard."
Capstick says 700 journalists who turned up at beginning of week found that their rooms weren't ready. But organizers are confident that everyone will have a place to stay by end of week.
Overall, Capstick says the build-up to Sochi has been one of the the most politicized of any Olympic Games. And yes, organizers are afraid that all of this negative publicity will overshadow what, he thinks, will be a fantastic sporting event.
"The venues are going to be really, really impressive and the athletes have been full of praise about them both in the mountains and down here on the coast," he said. "I think the organizers want to get the sport underway as soon as possible and then perhaps some of the difficulties that have been talked about almost constantly ... might just fade away a little."
Here's what journalists in Sochi had to say about their accommodations on Twitter:
Watch your step
-- I've noticed on walkway and on sidewalks that not all man holes are always covered. pic.twitter.com/a5Nv4wu5iA
— Jo-Ann Barnas (@JoAnnBarnas)
Watch your step @Sochi2014 -- I've noticed on walkway and on sidewalks that not all man holes are always covered. pic.twitter.com/a5Nv4wu5iA
— Jo-Ann Barnas (@JoAnnBarnas) February 1, 2014
My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, "do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous."
— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair)
My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, "do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous." #Sochi2014
— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair) February 4, 2014
Water restored, sorta. On the bright side, I now know what very dangerous face water looks like.
— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair)
Water restored, sorta. On the bright side, I now know what very dangerous face water looks like. #Sochi #unfiltered pic.twitter.com/sQWM0vYtyz
— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair) February 4, 2014
Went to buy water, realised at last minute was big plastic bottle of gin. Then got accosted by 3-legged dog.
— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7)
Went to buy water, realised at last minute was big plastic bottle of gin. Then got accosted by 3-legged dog. #Sochi pic.twitter.com/RbP2GqnXUK
— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) February 4, 2014
Just to make clear, this is not photoshopped. You can see my reflection in the flusher.
loo pic.twitter.com/LONZhbt6pZ
— Steve Rosenberg (@BBCSteveR)
Just to make clear, this is not photoshopped. You can see my reflection in the flusher. #Sochi #Olympic loo pic.twitter.com/LONZhbt6pZ
— Steve Rosenberg (@BBCSteveR) January 21, 2014
CVS to stop selling tobacco products in October 2014
Convenience. Value. Service: That's what CVS stands for.
But perhaps they need an "H" in there too. The company says they are trying to become more of a health care provider. To that end, today CVS announced they would stop selling all cigarettes and tobacco products nationwide by October.
RELATED: CVS Caremark plans to stop tobacco products sales
For more on what's behind this move we're joined by Timothy Martin of the Wall Street Journal.
For recovering addicts, the ever-present threat of relapse looms
The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman of an apparent drug overdose was a shock to almost everyone who heard the news. Hoffman, it's been widely reported, had over two decades of sobriety under his belt before relapsing into addiction last year.
We're joined now by journalist Seth Mnookin, the co-director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, and also a recovering drug addict. He wrote about his experience in a piece for Slate.com.
Mexican government pledges $3.4 billion to stem violence in Michoacán
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto says his government will spend nearly $3.5 billion in the state of Michoacán.
That's where violence flared last month as armed vigilante groups rose up to challenge the hold of regional drug cartel forces. Peña Nieto unveiled the plan Tuesday on a visit to the state capital Morelia. The plan includes loans for small businesses, improvements to local ports and roads and funds for education and healthcare.
But it's uncertain if this will translate into meaningful reforms or stem the long-running violence. For more, we're joined by journalist Ioan Grillo, in Mexico City. He's the author of "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency."
Sports Roundup: Lakers lose again, Richie Incognito, and more
The Lakers are historically bad, will a little Magic save the Sparks? And Richard Sherman shows off some hand/eye interpretation. That means it's time for sports with Andy and Brian Kamenetzky, who have covered the sports scene for ESPN and the L.A. Times.
Tuesday night in Minnesota, the Purple and Gold nightmare continued as they lost their 7th straight game. On the night that the Lakers got Steve Nash and Steve Blake back, they lose Jodie Meeks and Jordan Hill with injuries and find out that Pau Gasol will miss even more time with injuries.
Why does this team have so many injuries?
The Lakers are on pace to have the worst record in their 54-year history in Los Angeles. They also could wind up in last place in the Western Conference. Considering how dismal things have been would there be any dignity left if they could avoid last place?
In a few minutes, Magic Johnson is expected to announce that he along with his Dodgers partners will buy the WNBA Los Angeles Sparks. We catch up on the Sparks recent struggles and will Magic make a difference?
As we all know, the Seahawks destroyed the Broncos in the Super Bowl 43-8. It looked like Seattle's defense knew exactly what Peyton Manning was going to do before he did it?
Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito's suspension was lifted yesterday. Brian remind us of what happened with him and teammate Jonathan Martin and where it'll all go from here? Which one of the two has a better chance of being with an NFL team next season?
The Winter Olympics opening ceremony isn't until Friday but tomorrow some events get started with qualifying runs like slopestyle. But that event just got a little less interesting.
Small businesses are sad to see 'The Tonight Show' leave Burbank
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno is preparing for its last broadcast tomorrow night. After 42 years, the show is heading back to New York City, where Jimmy Fallon will take over. More than 150 people at NBC will lose their jobs.
KPCC's Brian Watt reports some nearby businesses will also feel the pinch.
GOP lawmakers show support for preschool programs
Preschool has become one of the hottest topics in politics. While Republicans have been pushing for big cuts and spending almost everywhere else, many are pumping lots of cash into early education.
For more on why the red states are taking the charge on preschool, we're joined now by Matthew Melmed, executive director for Zero To Three, a national organization devoted to early education
How will California farmers fare under the $1-trillion farm bill?
After two years of Congressional infighting, the U.S. farm bill finally passed both the House and the Senate. It now goes to the President for his signature.
To find out a little more on how California farmers might fare with this legislation, we reached out to Carolyn Lochhead, Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Chef Jamie Oliver's mobile kitchen brings cooking to Sacramento Charter High School
With an estimated 3,000 gardens planted at California schools, and home ec labs extinct, how to get those peas into a pot? That's where British chef Jamie Oliver comes in. His Big Rig — a traveling teaching kitchen now touring the state — roared onto the campus of Sacramento Charter High School for a four-week stint of cooking.
Capital Public Radio's Elaine Corn got on board for a class that starts in the garden.
It's after school at Sacramento Charter High, but 16 students are staying late. They're picking food from the garden they planted, along with Edible Sac High's project manager, Erika Dimmler.
Edible Sac High is a collaboration between Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and Alice Waters, the food activist chef of Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant. This is Edible Sac High's first harvest. The broccoli is for a special cooking class, but not everyone's excited about this particular vegetable.
"I don't know, I think it's like the little things on top of it, you know how it has those little beads," said student Shania Hayes. "I don't know, yeah, the texture of it in my mouth, it's weird to me."
The kids load bok choy, lettuce, purple kale, spinach and the broccoli into a cardboard box. It's held by Tre'von Lyle, a tall Sac High alum with serious dreadlocks. He's home during a break from college at NYU where he studies drama and genetics. Tre'von broke ground on this garden 18 months ago.
"It's a place that laid my foundation to go to NYU to learn how to build relationships with people," said Lyle.
But one thing missing from this garden's possible teaching moments is a real kitchen. Sac High health coordinator Chrissy Knopp leads the school's cooking club. She does the best she can with portable burners in the science lab.
"If there is a home ec lab, it would be in that building, which is our shutdown auditorium," said Knopp.
Big Rig brings real world cooking experience
Today, a gleaming bright kitchen is filling in for any ghost home ec lab. The food from this lush third-acre of fertile rows of winter greens will end up on a stove. For the first time, students are going to cook the food they grew. They climb metal stairs into a vehicle called the Big Rig.
Chef Matt Harrison faces the 16 school gardeners. They easily fit into the Big Rig, the name of British chef Jamie Oliver's traveling kitchen. On the outside, the rig is a cross between a brightly-painted cargo container and an RV with slideouts. Inside, it's state-of-the-art.
Oliver designed the Big Rig for his foundation's Food Revolution USA. He paid for it with $100,000 in prize money from TEDtalks and other donations. The big rig is on a forty-week state wide tour of California, which is funded by the California Endowment. And no, Jamie Oliver isn't here. It's Chef Matt's job to engage the kids and administer Oliver's credo.
"Does everyone know who Jamie Oliver is? OK, if you don't know who he is, he's most well-known for his first cooking show called the Naked Chef," said Harrison. "Not because he cooked naked, but because he used a lot of naked ingredients. His whole philosophy in cooking is it should be fun, easy and simple."
Harrison instructs the students how to cook the broccoli they just harvested. The broccoli is boiled quickly in water so salty that Chef Matt tells the kids it should taste like the ocean. When it's done, the water's drained off. The Brilliant Broccoli is the color of emeralds.
Everyone grabs a fork to taste the finished product, but all eyes are on broccoli-hater Shania Hayes.
"That's pretty good!" she says.
Considering this broccoli is about an hour old, it's sweet with no bitterness. Plus, there's that pat of butter-delicious so kids will eat it, but without putting anyone's health in jeopardy. For student gardener Krystion Thomas, the vegetables he tended for months are now more than just plants.
"It's amazing, that, like, we grew it in the garden. It took a few months. And then, now, it went from the ground to our stomachs," said Thomas.
By the time the Big Rig ends its California tour in May in San Diego, nearly 6,000 students will have come aboard for cooking classes. Whether funds become available to build cooking labs at Edible Sac High is anyone's guess. But for the four weeks, Jamie Oliver's Big Rig is parked on campus, with its kitchen of anyone's dream, it will have finished the circle, showing kids how food makes the journey from garden to gut.
Recipe:
Brilliant Broccoli:
- 1 bunch of broccoli, about 2¼ pounds
- teaspoon sea salt, plus an additional ½ teaspoon for salting water
- ¼ freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
- 1 tablespoon butter
Method:
- Trim the florets off your broccoli, trying to keep them a fairly even size. Chop the tough end off of the stalk and discard, then halve lengthways and finely slice the rest of the stalk.
- Put a large pot of salted water on to boil. Once boiling, add the florets and sliced stalk and cook for 3 to 4 minutes or until just tender – you should be able to poke the tip of a knife into the stalk quite easily.
- Drain in a colander, then tip back into the hot pan, off the heat. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper, add the pat of butter and toss to coat. Tip into a serving dish or on the sides of your plates and serve.
Jamie's Tips:
- When buying broccoli look for firm, compact clusters of small flower buds. The bud clusters should be dark or sage green, or even green with a purplish tinge.
- Make sure your water is at a rolling boil before you add your vegetables to the pan.
- The key to delicious vegetables is to make sure you don’t overcook them and season them well. If I’m in a rush I like to use lemon juice and a tiny drizzle of oil, a splash of soy or even some freshly chopped chile for a bit of a kick.
Freezing temps in California destroy $441M worth of citrus crops
It's been a rough year for citrus crops in California. New estimates out this week show that a week of freezing temperatures in December wiped out nearly a quarter of the state's $2 billion citrus industry.
RELATED: Report: Freeze cost California citrus about $441M
For more on the state of citrus in California and throughout the country, we turn now to Chip Carter, an Editor with the Produce News, who has been following the story.
Wasps may help rid SoCal crops of Asian citrus psyllid infestation
Efforts in Riverside to rid citrus crops of the Asian citrus psyllid are well underway. After conducting several tests, researchers there found that wasps are a natural enemy of the psyllid, the tiny insects that spread the incurable citrus greening disease.
We're joined by Mark Hoddle, director of the Center for Invasive Species Research, to talk more about the results.
The Hummus takes a satirical look at Islamophobia
There's a new satirical website that's being hailed as The Onion for Muslims. The Hummus was founded by three Silicon Valley, practicing Muslims in their 20s.
Headlines include things like, "Conversion of Ryan Gosling To Islam Halts Arranged Marriages Nationwide" and "Muslim Man's Ego Fatally Wounded in Coffee Shop Argument." Its founders say the site is, "an outlet for expressing the frustrations that we had as Muslims in America experiencing Islamophobia, the conflation of culture with religion, and the funny results that we can all relate to."
But they've said they want to remain anonymous, so we spoke to Maz Jobrani about his take on comedy in the Muslim community and his experience taking his "Axis of Evil" Comedy Tour through the Middle East.
“It felt like there was this audience that had been waiting for us – that had been waiting for somebody to talk about all the stuff they’ve been going through,” he said of the group’s first tour through the Middle East.
The show is in English, so Jobrani didn’t expect the reception that the group received.
“There had never been a group of American comedians who went to the Middle East to perform for the people of the Middle East,” Jobrani said.
Jobrani, who has lived in the United States since he was six years old, said he didn’t know there was such a large English-speaking population in the Middle East. But, “nowadays, with the Internet, everyone knows what’s going on,” he said.
Will Forte on 'Nebraska' nerves and missing his 'SNL' days
For eight years, Will Forte made audiences laugh as a cast member on "Saturday Night Live". He was known for characters like MacGruber, the easily distracted parody of TV action hero MacGyver.
Greg Stink, the very literal sports commentator who played opposite Jason Sudeikis' Pete Twinkle.
Will Forte has lately been taking on much more serious roles. You can see him opposite Bruce Dern in the Oscar-nominated film "Nebraska," directed by Alexander Payne. He says he was nervous about taking on such a dramatic role in front of such an accomplished director.
"It was scary all over again. It was scary because I'm a huge fan of Alexander Payne's," said Forte on Take Two. "I'll always find something to get nervous about."
Forte is also appearing in another drama, "Run & Jump," directed by Steph Green, in which he plays an American doctor who travels to Ireland to observe a family there after the father suffers a stroke.
Forte joins the show to talk about his favorite memories from "SNL" and his foray into more serious dramatic acting.
Interview Highlights:
On his best memories from "SNL":
"Everything about it is just so much fun. It's such a creative place and there's such an energy there because of the race to put the show together every week. It's like a family out there because it's such a stressful environment that you all band together so it's tough when you leave it. You miss every part of it."
On why he decided to transition into drama:
"I just liked the script in general. I don't know why the director Steph Green thought of me for this part because it wasn't something that I went and tried out for and fought for. She just sent me the script and I loved the story so much I thought, 'God, why not? It's so different why not give it a try.' But it was still terrifying and she had to really talk me out of all of my nerves."
On tapping into his vulnerable side:
"It's really nerve-racking. I'm used to doing all kind of embarrassing things in comedy situations. There's something about that you can blame on the character or sometimes these really embarrassing things are so over the top that you know people know that you would never do that kind of thing in real life. Like in MacGruber I put a piece of celery in my bum and jump around naked and that seems like it would be a pretty embarrassing and hard thing to do."
On acting in front of Alexander Payne in "Nebraska":
"It was scary all over again. It was scary because I'm a huge fan of Alexander Payne. And with Steph Green, who did Run and Jump, this was her first feature so I felt like we were kind of going through this, we both had to live out these new experiences and with Alexander Payne it was like, 'Oh, he's got such a track record.' There was just a different type of stress and pressure because even though I had done it before, I'll always find something to get nervous about."
On his plans for the future:
"Porn. I don't know. I don't plan stuff out really and the lack of planning has been working so far. That's the good thing about writing is that I'll always know if there's nothing out there that I feel that I would be good at, I can just wait it out until I find something that I do like that will also have me. So I would love to try a little bit of everything."