Obama speech to address military drones, closing Guantanamo; Young adults a key to Affordable Care Act in California; Fashion models among skilled workers eligible for H1B visas; How effective are police helicopters at fighting crime?; El Salvador gangs say Supreme Court ruling could threaten truce; Why conservatives from Southern California are flocking to Northern Idaho; Could 'Star Trek' technology ever become reality?
Obama speech to address military drones, closing Guantanamo
Later this morning, President Obama will deliver a long-awaited policy address in which he's expected to explain new guidelines on the use of unmanned military drones. In addition, he may call, once again, for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
All this comes after the administration admitted for the first time that four Americans had been killed in drone strikes that took place in Yemen and Pakistan.
Michael Hirsh, chief correspondent at National Journal, joins the show for a preview of the President's speech and a look at the debate over the use of drones.
How could use of drones create jobs, benefit economy?
Regardless of how the government revises their framework for using unmanned drones in military strikes, there's broad agreement that they will have a wide variety of civilian uses. One recent study estimated drones could create tens of thousands of new jobs, and as much $80 billion in new economic activity over the coming decade.
Joining us with more on what a drone-enabled future might look like is Jason Koebler, a reporter with US New and World Report who has written extensively about non-military drones.
Fashion models among skilled workers eligible for H1B visas
There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the H1B visas, the work visas reserved for those with special skills. Tech moguls like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have been lobbying Congress to increase the number of H1B visas doled out each year.
But these visas aren't just for coders and programmers; fashion models can also apply for them. Modeling is the only profession eligible for H1B visa status which doesn't require a bachelor's degree.
For more on this curious situation, we're joined now by Neil Ruiz, a senior analyst for the Brookings Institution.
El Salvador gangs say Supreme Court ruling could threaten truce
The truce between the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs in El Salvador has held since March 2012. The truce has significantly reduced violence in the country, but a recent decision by the Supreme Court could undermine the agreement.
The Constitutional Chamber of the Salvadorean Supreme Court ruled that the appointment of Security Minister David Mungia Payes was illegal. Payes is one of the main architects of the truce.
Tom Wainwright of The Economist joins the show with the latest events and what effect they might have.
Money even tighter as Indian Country schools face sequestration
Schools in Indian Country are starting to feel the effects of sequestration. For the Navajo Nation, across the board federal budget cuts mean larger class sizes, putting off building repairs and fewer buses. If you're a child that has to travel more than 70 miles to get to school, this can have a dramatic effect. Laurel Morales from the Fronteras Desk reports.
Orson Bigman, the director of transportation for Tuba City schools, sits behind the wheel of a small school bus. He drives over what looks like an off-road trail for weekend warriors.
"Usually I tell my drivers take a little bit of a run at it," Bigman said as he slammed on the gas. "You can go over the sand dune."
Bigman said he drives six miles over sand dunes and rocks to get to two students’ bus stop. And on rainy days he may not get to them at all, because the road is washed out.
All of his drivers complain of back problems.
"As you can see I try to keep my body as stiff as I can kind of move along with the bumps," Bigman said.
And you can imagine what those bumps do to the buses, literally shaking the screws loose. Bigman said a bus that should last the district 10 years lasts five. And they don’t know if they will have the money to buy a new one next year.
School Superintendent Harold Begay would like to take a few members of Congress on this bus ride.
"The powers that be, lawmakers and so on, they don’t see this," Begay said. "They’ve never been out here."
Sequestration has already meant the loss of $60 million in federal Impact Aid for schools that serve American Indian children across the country. And administrators like Begay are anticipating more cuts next year.
Begay walked past the Tuba City High School gym where sun shines through the holes in the ceiling. At the nearby primary school one wing and a cafeteria have already been condemned. That building is in desperate need of new bathrooms and safe playground equipment. But those upgrades will have to wait.
On the playground Principal Sharlene Navaho watched the students enjoy their field day. A teacher yelled instructions through a bullhorn as students try to pass eggs to each other on paper plates. Navaho said the school has seven open positions due to attrition. But sequestration means she will have to leave those vacant.
"There’s going to be more responsibility placed on our teachers," Navaho said. "But I can see that I have a staff that’s going to not let that be the determining factor for our students."
Teachers said in addition to larger classes, they will have to buy scissors, crayons and other supplies themselves. Superintendent Begay said all this has a big effect on teachers’ attitudes.
"When you have an unreliable revenue flow, always being underfunded, to say that it hurts morale is putting it mildly," Begay said.
But Begay and a lot of people on the Navajo Nation said they’re used to doing more with less. It seems to be a reservation motto.
"You almost have to develop a pathological immunity to any kind of government funding, especially federal funding," he said.
Seventy percent of his students graduate, but Begay says many of them are not prepared to compete in the outside world. He has been working hard to change the low expectations of not just teachers but the whole community. But that’s especially hard to do with less federal funding.
Begay said one of the most important things they can teach children is resiliency — something people living in Indian Country have to learn the hard way.
Why conservatives from Southern California are flocking to Northern Idaho
It may come as no surprise that Idaho is one of the reddest states in the country, or that a county in northern Idaho has become perhaps the reddest county in the country. One of the reasons for that deep red hue is an influx of conservatives from Southern California.
Sierra Crane-Murdoch, who reported on this migratory pattern for the High Country News, joins the show with more.
Could 'Star Trek' technology ever become reality?
Space ... the final frontier. The voyages of the starship Enterprise have been a Hollywood staple for decades. It all started in 1966 with the original television series, which has since spawned five spinoffs and 12 feature films.
"Star Trek Into Darkness," which opened last Friday, has already reeled in more than $178 million.
It's the latest in a franchise that has captured audience attention with compelling storylines, cult catch phrases and futuristic technology. Of course, all the beaming up, phaser guns and otherworldly technology is fictional, but could some Treknology ever become a reality?
Adam Steltzner, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joins the show to give us insight into how close we are to reaching "Star Trek" tech.
Interview Highlights:
What is warp speed and how possible is it?
"Warp Speed is a cousin of physics that we think we understand. Nothing in our universe can move faster than the speed of light as long as it stays in the dimensions that we're aware of. Warp Speed is sort of our way of cheating through that. The idea in 'Star Trek' is that you surround a bubble around the spacecraft that keeps it in 'sub-warp space,' and then you move that bubble through space time by warping space time and allow yourself to move faster than the speed of light. That's something that we don't understand how to do now, but in some ways it's possible to imagine us learning physics that would teach us how to wrap space time and move through space time faster than the speed of light."
How about "beaming up," known as dematerialization and rematerialization?
"That's a pretty tough one. I was hanging out with some science fiction writers yesterday, and there's even debate amongst ourselves about what's actually happening. Are we taking an image of the exact state of the human being, destroying them, and just taking the information like a fax and sending it down somewhere else and somebody rebuilds the person with that information, or are we actually taking the energy that comes from taking their matter and turning it into energy, and beaming that down?
"It is way out there, ... transporter technology. We are getting to the place where we think we can build 3-D things with 3-D printers, but the idea of being able to capture someone's self, even their thoughts, and transport through space and then rematerialize, is probably never going to happen."
How about phasers?
"Lasers as weapons are absolutely there. The 'Star Trek' phaser takes it one step beyond, in that you can change it to 'Stun' or change it to 'Destroy.' The physics of that are not well defined or understood. In 'Star Trek' lore, they use something called a Nadion particle, which is not really a real particle, but energy weapons, beam weapons, lasers as weapons, are absolutely out there today. We use them to shoot down satellites.
"The ones that we have naturally don't have a 'Stun' setting. They have a 'really, really hot' setting, and so you just burn whatever you're shooting at, and if you burn it hot enough, then you burn right through it. Which is painful and usually very bad if you're a human being."
Would NASA adopt 'Star Trek''s Prime Directive "no-interference" policy in internal development of alien civilizations?
"It actually is today, the U.N. policy. It is not enumerated as 'Star Trek''s Prime Directive, but essentially it is called 'Planetary Protection.' And when we go to a planet, we try to make the spacecraft very, very clean so that we do not take bugs from Earth and essentially pollute the environment of that planet. Now, we do that primarily for science purposes, so other science expeditions can go to that same planet and not see stuff that is the result of Earth or stuff that's a result of mutations between Earth bugs and whatever the bugs that might be there or present. The essence of it is the same; we want to allow that life ecosystem to maintain its pristine state and not be interfered with by human interaction."
How feasible is cold fusion technology?
Are you a "Star Trek" fan? What technology would you like to see become reality? Holodecks? Replicators? Transporters? Let us know in the comments below or comment on our Facebook page.
Young adults a key to Affordable Care Act in California
Today, Covered California is expected to release a list of the health plans and rates they'll offer this fall. The success of the Affordable Care Act depends on people who are currently uninsured buying into the insurance marketplace.
However, many of those people are young adults, and those who've been watching the process worry they'll be put off by the premiums. For the California Report, Mina Kim explains.
How effective are police helicopters at fighting crime?
The LAPD has the country's largest fleet of helicopters with 17, with a total cost of nearly $20 million a year. KPCC's Erika Aguilar spent time learning how the fleet operates, and looked through LAPD statistics to find out how effective the helicopters are in fighting crime. Read more here.
RELATED: See part 1 of Erika Aguilar's series on police helicopters in Los Angeles
RELATED: See part 2 of Erika Aguilar's series on police helicopters in Los Angeles
RELATED: View a slideshow of the LAPD's helicopter fleet on AudioVision
Colonel Meow and the Internet's obsession with cats
UPDATE:
Colonel Meow's owner, Anne Marie Avey, announced his death via Facebook on January 30, 2013. We'll miss you, Colonel!
EARLIER:
Facebook loves to boast about how it has 1.11 billion monthly active users, but notice that they don't specify just how many of those users are human.
An estimated 100 million Facebook profiles are those belonging to brands, products and perhaps most beloved of all, people's pets. Social media has turned pets, especially cats, into some of the biggest sensations online.
One popular Internet cat personality is Colonel Meow, who currently boasts more than 166,000 Facebook fans and counting. He and his owner Anne Marie Avey live right here in Southern California.
Avey says she was strolling through her local Petco, waiting for her dog to be groomed, when she happened to catch a gray fur ball in the adoptable cats section. She was drawn to Colonel Meow (before he was named Colonel Meow) and after watching him clawing and meowing at her through the glass, she decided she had to have him.
"I adopted him as an impulse purchase," said Avey. "I saw him and immediately wanted to pick him up and squeeze him."
That was back in October 2011. By August 2012, Avey had created a Facebook page for him as a joke to share with her friends, never thinking it would end up as popular as it has:
Avey describes Meow's mixed-breed looks as a monkey mixed with an Ewok mixed with anything with a beard. His unique expressions, often depicting a kind of frown, have captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. Though Avey's captions help.
"I'm a writer, and I always just thought it'd be really fun to create this little voice where 'if pets could talk, what would they really say?'" said Avey. "His pictures give off such a mean look. I'll wake up in the morning, stretch and look around, and Colonel's staring at me crazily and I'm scared. I'm like 'Don't look at me like that!' And he doesn't mean anything by it, but it's terrifying when you first wake up in the morning and he's staring down at you. And I just thought he should be a drinker and someone who swears. He's the Don Draper of the cat world."
What's Behind The Internet's Obsession with Cats?
Yes they're cute and engage in hilarious antics, but why have cats — as opposed to dogs or other pets — become so popular on the Internet?
Avey thinks it's because dogs are more public animals who we see out on walks, at the park, and hanging out with people at our friends' houses. Cats can be less social and you never see them out with their owners in public.
"When you have a dog, people can go out and share their dog with the world. You have to take him out every day to use the restroom, they have dog parks where people as a community can get together and they swap stories, and there's not that for a cat," said Avey. "Even when people come over to your house, most cats…will run and hide and stay under the bed. With social media and with the Internet, people are able to post their cat's true personality when they're not scared. I think there's a lot of closeted cat lovers out there, and it's now become kind of hipster to like cats. It's cool to be cat."
Colonel Meow, along with other Internet cat sensations like Lil Bub, are featured in a recent documentary called "Lil Bub & Friends," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival:
Correction: An earlier version of this story had a caption misidentifying "Take Two" host Alex Cohen.
Audit shows City of Bell on brink of financial collapse
The city of Bell just can't seem to catch a break. First came the scandal in 2010 where the LA Times discovered that public officials stole millions from the public.
Now, a new report from the state controller finds the city's finances are in ruins. The general fund has a negative balance of more than a million dollars.
For more on this, were joined now by LA Times reporter Ruben Vives, who helped break the original story of the Bell scandal.
Dinner Party Download: Spray-on clothing, first speeding ticket and more
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.
Fabri-Can: Spray-On Clothing
It's a spray made of very short fibers mixed with solvent and polymers which bind the material together, and it really works! Manel Torres is the Spanish fashion designer who created this, and he addresses that this does not tear off on your chest. You hear this story and you're like, "Obviously, I want to make a silly-string bikini joke, right?" But it's not a joke, that's where he got the idea. He was at a friend's wedding and saw everyone shooting each other with silly string, and he was studying fashion, and he was like "why can't there be clothes?"
The First Speeding Ticket
This week back in 1899, the first speeding citation was given out. Here's what happened: This is New York, so the first person to get a speeding citation... a 'cabbie'. He was driving around town, blowing by mostly horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians, and zooms past a bike cop and gets pulled over. Well, he was pulled over by a bike cop, so it wasn't too fast. He was going a whopping 12 miles an hour.
A Free Lighthouse in Lake Superior...With a Few Caveats
They (the Coast Guard) don't need lighthouses and they want to find them good homes. But, there are a couple of things. If you do live there or you do something with it, like turn it into a museum, you have to maintain the structure as it is because it's on the National Register of Historical Places. In addition, the Coast Guard reserves an unrestricted right to enter the structure, and that's where it gets dangerous.
Edible QR codes help San Diego sushi diners trace origin of fish
Take a second look at your next sushi order, you might find a strange garnish sitting upon the back of your salmon skin roll.
Harney Sushi in San Diego has started printing edible, water-base ink QR codes on rice paper wafers and placing these smart garnishes on their dishes. QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, are square barcodes that can be scanned by smartphones to access information.
The codes are printed using the same edible ink used by the pastry industry to print photos on birthday cakes.
In the case of the QR codes placed on the sushi served at Harney Sushi, once scanned you’ll be sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s FishWatch (NOAA) website, which will give you additional information about the sustainability and origin of the fish you’re about to eat.
Harney Sushi’s executive Chef Rob Ruiz, the driving force behind these edible QR codes was inspired while researching sustainable cuisine.
“I basically was desperately seeking information about sustainable seafood, sustainable sushi anything. I was getting sustainable sushi emails from all over the world, and I got one from a sushi bar in London called Moshi,” said Ruiz. "They had done an event with the Marine Stewardship Council where they created this edible rice paper QR code kind of as a one time thing.”
Ruiz took it one step further saying, “We're not just doing it as a one time thing with a rubber stamp. We're really using it strategically with different websites and in the near future, starting in July, we're gonna have species specific QR codes.”
Aside from informing diners about where their fish is from, Ruiz hopes that the information his QR codes provide will help combat fish fraud.
Fish fraud, the intentional mislabeling of fish, has been reported by the ocean conservation group Oceana to be a rampant problem in Los Angeles.
A 2011 study by Oceana found that:
- Fraud was detected in 11 out of 18 different types of fish purchased.
- Every single fish sold with the word “snapper” in the label (34 out of 34) was mislabeled, according to federal guidelines.
- Nearly nine out of every ten sushi samples was mislabeled.
- Eight out of nine sushi samples labeled as “white tuna” were actually escolar, a species that carries a health warning for it purgative effects.
“We're in the worst area of the most rampant fish fraud,” said Ruiz, echoing Oceana’s report. "So by people scanning the QR code they can go directly to fishwatch.gov and you can click on a species and it tells you everything about it.”
Ruiz aims for having at least one barcode going out to every table, saying he doesn’t want to tell people what to do, but rather give his diners the best information available to make their own decisions.
So far Ruiz says customers have been overwhelmingly positive about the additions to their orders,“The only time when people get upset is when it's been saturated with soy sauce and they can't get to scan it.”