Today, we begin with a discussion about the Malaysia flight shot down in Ukraine. Then, a look at the prominent AIDS researchers killed in the crash. Plus, 'The Book of Unknown Americans': A novel about the immigrant story, how hackers infiltrated the NASDAQ stock market, one senior's take on how her generation differs from Latino youths, Michael Pitt channels Richard Dawkins in the film 'I Origins' and much more.
Obama speaks at White House press conference about downed Malaysian jet
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down yesterday over eastern Ukraine. This morning, President Obama spoke about the crash and said at least one U.S. citizen was among the 298 who died in the crash.
Leigh Munsel, a defense reporter for Politico, joined Take Two to discuss this morning's events.
Angeleno with family in Ukraine reacts to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17
As emergency workers in the sunflower fields and villages of Eastern Ukraine search the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 today, there is still no official confirmation yet on who shot the surface-to-air missile that brought the plane down. But one thing is certain, it's making the situation in the region even more tense.
As events unfold, it is a nervous time for those with family in the region living thousands of miles away here in Southern California.
Nick Kolesnikow is a Russian living in Los Angeles whose family is living in Slavyansk, the heart of the separatist movement. He joins Take Two to talk about what he's heard from his loved ones in Russia.
Friday Flashback: Obama's sanctions against Russia, Hillary's presidential bid and more
It's Friday, and we're taking a look back at this week's biggest news stories: President Obama's sanctions against Russia, why Hillary Clinton needs to focus on African-American voters if she's running for president, and how a sex trafficking law is creating a backlog at the U.S. border.
Take Two is joined this week by Robin Abcarian, political reporter with the L.A. Times, and Jamelle Bouie, a staff writer with Slate.
First up: Obama's decision to increase sanctions against Russia over its actions in the Ukraine conflict. Chief among those targeted by the White House are energy firms, financial institutions and arms suppliers. How do Obama's actions differ from sanctions made by European leaders?
Just today, Vladimir Putin asked for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Could this mark the beginning of a resolution?
Moving to national issues, there's the matter of Hillary Clinton currying favor with voters. Even though she has yet to formally announce her bid for president, she may want to focus her attention on black voters, who will prove crucial in winning the Democratic primary.
Does Clinton have reason to worry about Senator Elizabeth Warren, another likely presidential hopeful? And how remarkable is it that these two women are getting so much presidential buzz?
Finally, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law that aims to stop sex trafficking, is causing a backlog of Central American immigrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexican border.
Why? The law requires all underage immigrants from countries aside from Mexico and Canada to stand before an immigration judge prior to deportation. A bill by Texas congress representatives attempts to solve the problem by simply sending those children back to their home country without visiting a judge.
Top AIDS researchers perish in Malaysia MH17 flight downed in Ukraine
Passengers on the downed Malaysia Flight MH17 are still being identified, but organizers of a major AIDS conference have already told attendees the news that about 100 of the people on board were bound for the summit in Melbourne, Australia that starts this Sunday.
Among those was Joep Lange, a top HIV/AIDS researcher and former president of the International AIDS Society, and Glenn Thomas, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization. Their deaths have dealt a blow to the AIDS research community.
Thomas Coates, associate director of the Health Services and Policy Program at UCLA's AIDS Institute, joins Take Two to talk about the impact this crash will have on the AIDS research community.
One senior's take on how her generation differs from Latino youths
There's a growing generational and cultural divide in America: according to a census report, more elderly people are white, while an increasing number of children are Latino.
But what does that next generation look like to our nation's seniors?
Sara Hanan has first-hand experience with that difference. This 73- year-old Mount Washington resident is part of a program at the L.A. Public Library called STAR, which organizes older volunteers to read to young children.
While Hanan is white, she says most of the children at her local branch in Cypress Park are Latino. "They're not different," Hanan tells A Martinez. "I think they're more accustomed to diversity than I was growing up, and they accept other people more readily, I think, than a lot of adults do." She adds, "As long as I'm willing to accept them, they're willing to accept me."
Hanan is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles who grew up in South Central while the 110 was being built just a block from her home. Hanan has noticed that the children she works with live in a very different world — and a more dangerous one.
"We played outside in the summer when I was a child," she says. "I think there's more fear with this generation. Children are not allowed to play in the front; there's a gang problem."
However, she says that the children's appetite to learn, and for their parents to have them learn English, gives her great hope for what America will become.
A Honduran family in Phoenix explains the violence at home
In recent months, 57,000 kids have turned up at the Southwest border. According to government data, the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula is sending the greatest number of these child migrants to the United States. It also has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Fronteras Desk reporter Jude Joffe-Block met up with one family from that city that's just reunited here in Phoenix.
On Veronica’s dining room table in West Phoenix a Honduran newspaper announces story after story of gang-related killings.
Veronica points to one particularly shocking article: A woman murdered while praying in church.
Tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied children have left Honduras for the United States in recent months.
In fact, Veronica’s hometown of San Pedro Sula is sending the greatest number of child migrants to the United States, according to government data analyzed by the Pew Research Center.
Veronica left San Pedro Sula, alone, 18 years ago. She came to the U.S. to earn money to send back to her seven children who stayed behind.
She is now 49. Here in Phoenix she sells herbal supplements and tamales. She phones her kids in Honduras every day.
Since Veronica is undocumented, she is going by her middle name for this story.
“President Barack Obama and his cabinet should be able to do something so that these children don’t have to return to Honduras,” Veronica said in Spanish.
“Deporting them would be like sending them back into a fire,” she said.
Meanwhile, though, many of the proposals out of Washington for dealing with the migrant crisis involve reforms to send Central American children back quickly to discourage more from coming.
Earlier this week, the U.S. deported the first airplane full of only women and children migrants back to San Pedro Sula.
This spring the issue became personal for Veronica, even though her own kids are all young adults by now.
In April, Veronica got a frantic call from one of her daughters in San Pedro Sula. She learned her 22-year-old son was attacked by gang members and had to flee for his life.
“I told my daughter to get him out of there, and to send him to me,” Veronica said.
Her son came to the Texas border where he was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol. He told them he was afraid to return to his country and asked to apply for asylum.
Last month, he was released from an immigration detention facility on a bond. He still must appear for his future immigration court hearings, but was allowed to take a bus to Phoenix.
When Veronica picked him up at the Greyhound station, it was the first time the two had seen each other in person in 15 years.
Veronica said his face had not changed despite the years.
“He looked sad and happy at the same time,” Veronica remembers. “We hugged and cried.”
Veronica’s son wasn’t sure at first if he wanted to be interviewed for this story. In Honduras he learned to keep his mouth shut.
But after considering the idea for a few minutes, he ultimately sat down at the dining room table and agreed to tell his story. He was scared to use his name, so we are calling him Juan.
“You can’t say anything at all, because if you talk, you can be killed right away,” Juan said in Spanish.
He is referring to the gangs that he said basically run San Pedro Sula. Juan said his fear of talking extended here in the U.S.
“You can’t trust anyone, because you never know. The world is very small,” he said.
In his young life, Juan has already seen friends, relatives and neighbors killed.
Growing up in San Pedro Sula, he and his friends tried to stay away from gangs. They preferred soccer. Up until he left, Juan had a good factory job that he liked.
But he said gangsters still tried to force him and his friends to join them. Juan said gang recruitment could extend to boys as young as 9 and 10.
In Juan's old neighborhood, the gang MS-13 has in place a well-organized extortion policy for those who work or have a business. It’s known there as a “war tax.”
“Every week you have to pay it,” Juan said, explaining there was a book that kept track of who had paid. “And if you don’t, they keep charging you. And eventually if you don’t pay they could kill you.”
Juan’s factory job meant he had to pay about 200 lempiras, or about $10, a week. That’s almost a day of work at the minimum wage.
Still, Juan says he never planned to leave Honduras until it was clear he had to.
“If I didn’t move away I was basically sure to be tortured and killed,” Juan said. "I didn’t have any choice but to leave my country."
In addition to the gangs, Juan blames the police and government for forcing him into exile.
When Fronteras Desk asked Juan what he thinks will happen to young people who tried to escape gangs by going to the U.S. but then get deported back to San Pedro Sula, he sighed deeply.
“If the U.S. doesn’t want these kids here, then they should send them somewhere else,” Juan said. “But they can’t send them home because that basically ensures their death. I plead that they send them somewhere, anywhere except Honduras.”
Juan said returning deportees are like marked men — in even more danger — because the gangs now see them as disloyal. United Nations workers and NGOs in the region have stated similar concerns.
Juan is awaiting his immigration court case here in Phoenix and is hoping he won’t be sent back.
The statistics for asylum claims from Honduras adjudicated in immigration court reveal it won't be easy.
Last year, immigration judges granted 92 Hondurans asylum and rejected 525, according to statistics from the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
Meanwhile, Juan is getting to know Phoenix, and the mother he only knew by phone before.
Veronica sat down beside Juan at the table. Her voice quiet, she asked Juan for his forgiveness for being separated for so long.
“There’s always forgiveness for a mother,” Juan told Veronica.
But this family reunion is bittersweet.
When Juan came here, he had to leave behind his own 2-year-old daughter in San Pedro Sula.
So this family’s pattern of separation continues, as does the violence swallowing up their hometown.
Examining the roots of the latest Gaza conflict
The Israeli ground offensive in Gaza began yesterday and continues today. So far, more than 260 Palestinians and two Israelis have died in the fighting, which began ten days ago.
To help explain what has caused this conflict, and how many years back it goes, Take Two was joined by Professor Thomas Hill, who teaches Middle Eastern studies at UC Berkeley.
UC appoints pro-Israel student regent, amid controversy
There are ripple effects of the conflict in the middle East here in California, perhaps one of the strongest of of which was felt this week at the University of California.
Earlier this week, the UC Board of Regents voted to confirm a Jewish student from UCLA as its newest student representative. This, despite opposition from fellow students who had serious concerns about his connection to pro-Israeli causes.
Nanette Asimov, an education reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, joins Take Two for more on the story.
Jerusalem film festival continues despite Israeli-Palestinian conflict
As rockets rain down in the midst of an escalating conflict between Israel and Palestine, the Jerusalem Film Festival continues even as sirens wail between screenings.
Annette Insdorf is the director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University. She joins Take Two from Jerusalem, where she's attended screenings at the festival.
You can read her posts from the Jerusalem Film festival here.
Glendora couple could be fined for having brown lawn — and trying to water it
California is in the middle of an extreme drought, and most of us are doing whatever we can to conserve water.
You kind of have to now: the state will fine water-wasters up to $500 a day.
Michael Korte and Laura Whitney-Korte of Glendora did a number of things to cut back, including watering their lawn less, which made it brown and patchy.
It turns out that effort got them into trouble, because they got a letter in the mail from the city's police department.
"At the bottom, there are photos," said Whitney-Korte on Take Two. "There's an X through a picture of a house with a lawn that looks a lot like ours. And in the middle is a 'Do' picture, which has the lushest, thickest grass I think I've ever seen with a bright yellow sprinkler going full blast in the middle of the day."
Laura and her husband were told to make their lawn look like the latter picture in 60 days — or face fines up $500.
"I was flabbergasted," said Whitney-Korte.
Then, on Thursday night, the mayor of Glendora called to say their home was anonymously reported as abandoned, and that investigators determined it was a blight.
"It's just very difficult to live in a community where you feel like they're all against you for something that you felt you were [doing to be] a good neighbor, a good citizen by reducing your water use," said Whitney-Korte.
At the time this interviewed aired, the city of Glendora hadn't responded to KPCC's request for comment.
In the meantime, Whitney-Korte said she is still uncertain about what she and her husband will do, because even tearing out the lawn to install drought tolerant plants wouldn't adhere to the 60 day deadline to have a green landscape.
"We're still kind of not sure what the expectation is or what would be acceptable," she said.
Water School: Santa Cruz offers classes to waive fines for water wasters
As California looks to use water restrictions and fines to conserve more water during the drought, one city has already adopted a strict water policy with penalties that hurt residents in the pocket.
Amanda Bunte, water conservation representative for the City of Santa Cruz, joined Take Two to talk about how her city is giving residents an alternative course to cancel out their hefty water usage fines.
Residences throughout the city are assigned a maximum per-cycle amount of water that they can use without incurring a fine. Should a household use 10 percent more than its allotment, it would get a $25 fine. Should it exceed even that, the fine goes up to $50.
Bunte explained that these fines can rack up quickly. And while only 6 percent of Santa Cruz households have been fined for using more than their fair share of water, some offenders gotten slapped with penalties as steep as $4,400,
The goal, however, isn’t punishing consumers but educating them, and Bunte said the city has found success in offering a single, two-hour water school class in lieu of paying those fines.
“Most customers walk away pleased with the knowledge they’ve obtained with the class,” she said. “Overall, it’s been a very positive experience.”
And while one could make superficial comparisons to traffic school, don’t fret about passing a test at the end. “We have a brief 10-question quiz that we ask attendees to take, but we do not grade them individually,” Bunte explained. “Instead, we go over answers together, to help [attendees] retain the most important facts we want them to walk away with.”
Among those? Toilets. According to Bunte, most attendees seem surprised by how costly a leaky toilet can be. “Toilets can be a silent and continuous leak that can quickly add up,” she said.
The Goodtime Washboard 3's 'Oakland'
Tony Bennett and Jeanette MacDonald made sure San Francisco was enshrined in popular music, but Oakland has always struggled in the shadow of its shinier, richer neighbor across the Bay.
Forty years ago, Bay Area DJ Jim Lange challenged listeners to give Oakland a song that paid tribute to its beauty and quirk. The winning entry by The Goodtime Washboard 3 became an uplifting, unofficial anthem that some locals still cherish.
The California Report's Kate Hunts spoke with the group's washtub bass player Bruce Bratton about their song, "Oakland."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwpFJONIpVw
How hackers infiltrated the NASDAQ stock market
Cyber-security experts assumed that the financial sector in the U.S. was prepared to take on hackers. It was believed that they were safe and could prevent someone from infiltrating a financial system and wreaking havoc.
Four years ago, however, the experts were shown just how vulnerable we actually are when the NASDAQ was hacked.
Michael Riley wrote the cover story about the hacking and the subsequent investigation for Bloomberg Businessweek and he joins A Martinez on the line from Washington, DC.
Here's an excerpt, courtesy of Bloomberg Businessweek.
In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq (NDAQ). It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.
As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis — and many less well known or understood players — all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm.
Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once — in Nasdaq.
Michael Pitt channels Richard Dawkins in the film 'I Origins'
The new film "I, Origins" from director Mike Cahill is a fascinating film that explores the relationship between science and spirituality.
Actor Michael Pitt stars as Dr. Ian Gray, a molecular biologist whose work revolves around the human eye. He falls in love with a mysterious woman who just happens to have a rare genetic mutation which creates irises of multiple colors.
Michael Pitt joins Take Two to talk about channeling British evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins for " I, Origins."
Interview Highlights:
On how he took inspiration from Dawkins as well as the thought of of making such an adamant atheist question his beliefs:
“He’s a fascinating. fascinating man. He can be very mischievous and provoking. And he’s doing that on purpose, but I was just totally blown away by all his lectures. … [He] was so data-driven and was just rejecting any kind of spiritual or organized religious groups, completely rejecting that. At one point I said to [director Michael Cahill], ‘If you could shake Dawkins … and crack just a little bit of his theory and have some light shine in on that, that would make him question his path. If we could do that, that would be a very interesting film.”
On how “I, Origins” portrays scientists in a different light than do most films:
“I feel like we’re portraying them well. There’s a stigma that these scientists are people that live in white lab coats. who have no sense of humor, who can’t talk to you about poetry or music, who never get laid, and who are very dry. It’s just completely the opposite. Everyone we met [in preparing for the film] was extremely passionate, extremely creative, had a great senses of humor. And they’re doing these amazing things, and [depicting this] has been very fulfilling for me.”
And what he feels the relationship between science and faith should be:
“One of the things I turned Mike onto was a book by the Dalai Lama. … He’s a scientist — an amateur scientist, a hobbyist, [but] he’s extremely interested in science and in the research of science. He wrote this book where he’s talking exactly about what we’re talking about in this film, which is science and spirituality. Where do they live? And can they live next to each other? What’s amazing about the Dalai Lama is that … whether you’re in this religion or not, it is a spiritual leader talking about this topic. He is never threatened by scientific discovers. When you’re threatened and you try to push science down, it actually discredits your belief. It actually makes you seem insecure about your belief.”