Today we begin with an update on the Nairobi mall terrorist attack. Then, we'll take a look at the safety of public places in the wake of recent mass shootings. Also, a new Pew study tracks the ebb and flow of undocumented immigrants in US; Rep. Becerra joins the show to talk about the status of immigration reform in the House; Wrapping up the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards, and more.
An update on the Nairobi mall terrorist attack
In Nairobi, officials are still trying to get a handle on a terrorist attack in a local mall there. Masked gunmen stormed into the upscale Westgate mall on Saturday, firing shots at civilians.
At last count 62 people have died, and the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Shabab group in Somalia has claimed responsibility for the attack.
For the latest we are joined by Heidi Vogt of the Wall Street Journal.
How can we keep public places safe from attacks?
The standoff between attackers and security forces in Nairobi has us also thinking about the security in open spaces here as well.
In the past few years there have been a number of mass shootings in several open spaces: The Aurora Colorado Mall Shooting, the Gabriel Giffords rally, the mall shooting in Oregon. It seems like open spaces that are unprotected gathering places for large groups of people would be the perfect places for an attack.
Is there a way to protect people in open spaces?
Joining us now to talk about how best to protect public spaces is Jonah Blank, counter terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation.
Rep. Becerra on the status of immigration reform in the House
On Friday, the bipartisan Group of Seven in the House has lost two more members.
Republican representatives Sam Johnson and John Carter — both of Texas — announced they were resigning from the group. Another Republican, Raul Labrador of Idaho, left the group in June.
This comes after four years of trying to hammer out an agreement in the House. For how this will affect immigration legislation moving forward, we're joined by one of the remaining five, Congressman Xavier Becerra.
Showdown in Congress on Obamacare and automatic budget cuts
State lawmakers have complained for years about dysfunction in California's capitol. Now a couple of those lawmakers have been elected to Congress, and they've found a whole new level of dysfunction there. KPCC's Washington Correspondent Kitty Felde reports.
Wrapping up the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards
The 2013 Primetime Emmy Awards are always full of glamor and glitz, but what do people really want to know? Who brought home the most gold statues!
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We’ll get a complete wrap-up of the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards with the Hollywood Reporter's Alex Ben Block.
The problem with binge-watching TV shows
In the early days of television, families would gather around the set at a specific time to watch the "Lone Ranger" or the nightly news. Now, with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, we can what whatever we want, whenever we want.
Nielsen ratings report that almost 90-percent of Netflix viewers watch three or more episodes of the same show in one day. TV binging is now the norm, and that's not always such a good thing, says blogger and TV comedy writer, Ken Levine.
On The Lot: Bruckheimer leaves Disney, China goes Hollywood and more
A big hit maker parts ways with Disney, and the pipeline runs dry at its animation arm, Pixar. Plus, an historic house goes on the market in Toluca Lake. It's time for On the Lot, our weekly look at the movie business with Rebecca Keegan of the LA Times.
China already makes a lot of our clothes, they build our iPhones, and now they want to make our movies, or at least some of them. We discuss the latest on the Chinese attempt to go Hollywood.
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The company that made the announcement about investing $8 billion in film production is already enormous in China, and the head of the firm is predicting that China will have the biggest film business in the world by 2018. Are we going to see an exodus from Hollywood to China?
This firm is closely tied to the Chinese government, which controls every aspect of the movie business there. Doesn't it seem like there's a real danger of some major conflict, especially since Hollywood types aren't known for their small egos?
Everything is not all sweetness and light in the Magic Kingdom. The super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer announced he's leaving Disney, his home for more than two decades. He's indicated it's because the studio doesn't want to make the kind of films he wants to produce. But he's also coming off a box office disaster, "The Lone Ranger." That was a rare miss for Bruckheimer, who has an amazing record of producing box office hits.
That's a lot of movies and a lot of tickets sold. "Flashdance", "Beverly Hills Cop", "Top Gun", "Crimson Tide", "Black Hawk Down", "Pirates of the Caribbean". And that's just a handful of his movies. So, why is Jerry Bruckheimer leaving Disney, and who dumped who?
Is the era of studios making big deals with producers to lock up talent over?
So no Bruckheimer movies for Disney, and apparently no Pixar film anytime soon, either.
After Disney fired the director, a number of other people began supervising parts of "The Good Dinosaur", including Pixar's John Lassiter, the real creative force there. It has to raise some eyebrows when you have an animated film that appears to be directed by committee, right?
Bob Hope's house in Toluca Lake is on the market.
An ethanol-fueled comeback for sugar beets
California once grew a lot of sugar beets to supply the state's sugar mills. Most of those the mills are closed now, and farmers have turned to other row crops. But in the Central Valley, growers are on a quest to bring back the gnarly looking vegetable -- this time to turn it into ethanol.
For The California Report, Alice Daniel has more.
The story starts in the town of Mendota, a poor, farming community on the Valley’s west side, where jobs are scarce and rarely steady.
“In Mendota, the majority of work is seasonal so you have a high rate of unemployment in the wintertime,” said Mayor Robert Silva, sitting at a local Mexican restaurant in town. “We’ve gone through the worst of times.”
One of those times was in 2008, when the Spreckels sugar plant closed and about 250 people lost their job. The recession hit the town of 11,000 hard and unemployment was at 40 percent.
Growers, who had sold sugar beets to Spreckels for decades, formed a cooperative and unsuccessfully tried to buy the refinery. Their next step was more of a giant leap.
“The company came to us that grew the seed for the sugar beets and said, ‘Think about making ethanol from the sugar beets,’” rancher John Diener said.
Most ethanol in the United States comes from corn, but in Europe, about a dozen former sugar mills have been retrofitted to produce ethanol instead. That hasn’t happened in the U.S., but Diener and other co-op members decided to form a company, Mendota Bioenergy, and investigate building their own biorefinery. Diener stands in a building on his ranch that will soon be part of the test site.
“Our tagline is we’re taking sunshine and making it into moonshine,” said Diener. “That’s quite honestly what we’re doing.”
Mendota Bioenergy has a $5 million grant from the California Energy Commission – and the partnership of university experts from UC Davis and Fresno State – to complete the test site. It should be up and running this winter and if all goes as planned. The company will then build the nation’s first commercial sugar beet biorefinery in Mendota by 2017.
The project is also unique because of its focus on sustainability.
“You’re looking at what you consider the energy balance of the farm,” Diener said. “The old cliché is we get everything out of the hog except the squeal.”
And everything out of the beet. Byproducts from the ethanol process will be turned into fertilizer and biomethane gas. Some of that gas will be used to power the trucks hauling beets in from nearby farms. Even prunings from other parts of the farm will be used in the biorefinery.
Outside the building, Diener points to a compact machine that will produce electricity and hot water for the test site by burning wood prunings. The carbon char is captured and is used on the farm to enrich the soil.
Sustainability is vital on the Valley’s west side, where farmers like Diener grapple with salty soil and reduced water allocations. But beets do fine in poorer soil – and they’re 80 percent water, which will also be recycled in the plant.
“Not only will very little fresh water be needed,” Project Manager Jim Tischer said, “but it should generate on the order of 400 acre feet a year of additional water to be used in landscape purposes or for irrigation.”
That’s about 130 million gallons of water. Because the plant will be green, the sugar beet ethanol will have a much lower carbon index than corn ethanol, says Tischer. Sugar beets also produce more than twice as much ethanol as corn and surpass sugar cane yields.
But don’t expect sugar beets to take over corn, Tischer says. There’s 92 million acres of corn in the US and about 1.5 million acres of sugar beets.
Ellen Des Jardins is one of the members of Mendota Bioenergy. She says she’s looking forward to growing beets on her farm again.
“It was one of the profitable things in our farming operation and I think it still will be,” she said. “Ethanol will prove to be maybe even more profitable.”
The first phase of the commercial refinery expects to use enough local sugar beets to make 10 to 15 million gallons of ethanol a year. And because California is focused on reducing its carbon index, the farmers say they will have no trouble selling their ethanol to state oil refineries and other users of petroleum products.
Back in Mendota, Mayor Robert Silva says the city jumped at the chance to host the commercial plant. It will increase the tax base, provide a hundred full-time jobs and many more in agriculture, trucking and construction, he says – a kind of sweet deal for a town that lost its sugar mill.
- See more at: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201309200850/a#sthash.I8hdY5Ly.dpuf
Pew study tracks the ebb and flow of undocumented immigrants in US
Exactly how many unauthorized immigrants are living in the U.S.? It's a number that's difficult to pinpoint, but a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center seeks to give a more complete picture of the immigration flow in recent years.
Jeffrey Passel, lead author of the report, joins the show to explain.
The Texas GOP's battle against Obamacare
The Obama administration's health insurance exchanges go live online October 1st. Policies vary by state, but in Texas, state leaders are unabashed in doing all they can to hobble the Affordable Care Act.
Fronteras reporter David Martin Davies says that could have repercussions for Obamacare as a whole.
New device can measure concussion warning signs
Concussions are a constant hazard in football, soccer, and a variety of other sports. Coaches and trainers are taught to recognize some of the warning signs, but it's not always easy to diagnose a concussion on the sidelines.
Now, a professor at San Diego State has developed a device that could provide a more objective way to detect whether an athlete has suffered a concussion. For the California Report, Kenny Goldberg has more.
Is the apostrophe unnecessary?
Imagine writing an email to your family, friends or colleagues without using a single apostrophe. Sound painful?
The punctuation mark is so engrained in the English language that knowing how to use it properly is a badge of honor, and misusing it opens you up to a whole host of abuse (especially on the Internet). Heck, even our smartphones and tablets might autocorrect an apostrophe omission or two.
For many people — and devices – not using the apostrophe feels wrong and unnatural, but is it really necessary?
In a recent article for Slate, self-proclaimed "sentence sommelier" James Harbeck argues that the we could and should ditch the apostrophe.
"Apostrophes seems like they're useful...they're a thing that we use to distinguish the educated from the woeful, unwashed," said Harbeck. "Actually they do very little real good unless you think of it as a good to be able to condescend to other people."
Despite what we might think, the apostrophe hasn't always been a part of the English language. In fact, it's a relic from a time when English speakers wanted to mimic the French.
Beginning in the 1500s, French speakers began using an apostrophe to indicate places where a letter had been dropped (for example, le hotel turns into l'hotel). English speakers followed suit, and by the 18th century they were also using it to indicate possessives.
"The apostrophe was actually an invasive species brought over from France," said Harbeck. "The English said 'Oh, look the French are doing this, seems like a good idea'. Then somebody had the idea that in the possessives in English, that was something that was being dropped...That's when all heck broke loose."
We've been using the apostrophe so long, wouldn't dropping the it make reading more difficult? Isn't there a possibility that the word "i'll" might be confused with "ill"?
"Only in places where you would use one or the other with equal probability," said Harbeck. "I would say that its rather difficult to come up with sentences where you're going to say shell or she'll equally likely. The one word that is the biggest weakness is "were". We could use we're or were in places where they could be confused."
Still, Harbeck says the apostrophe is misused by English speakers so often that it's time to think about whether it's actually doing us a disservice.
"Consider this. When you have a computer program that gives a lot of trouble to a large percentage of people who are its target users, you would say that that program has some errors in design," said Harbeck. "I am suggesting that we consider the apostrophe to be a bit of a bug in the design of English ethnography. It's not working out for everybody, so we should just stop and ask ourselves honestly, why?"
Web article by Michelle Lanz
How the dwindling status of handwriting is changing our brains
These days, we spend so much time communicating on computer keyboards and mobile phones, we may be missing out on neurological benefits of the good old fashioned notion of putting pen to paper.
Joining us to explain is Brandon Keim, who wrote a piece for the current issue of Scientific American Mind called, "The Science of Handwriting."
Picture This: 'Heavenly Bodies' captures Rome's bejeweled catacomb saints
In 1578, the remains of thousands of people thought to be Christian martyrs were discovered deep underground in Rome.
They came to be known as the catacomb saints, and their bones were dispatched to Catholic churches throughout Europe. Paul Koudounaris had the rare chance to spend time with these spectacular skeletons. The result of his travels is his new photo book, "Heavenly Bodies."
As part of our series, Picture This, Koudounaris joins us in studio to talk about his photographs of the catacomb saints.
Check out more of Koudounaris' catacomb pictures on KPCC's AudioVision
Interview Highlights
On the identities of these jewel-encrusted skeletons:
"We really don't know. When they rediscovered the Roman catacombs they thought these bodies must all date to old Roman times and they figured these must be early Christian martyrs, but in fact, Romans were buried down in those catacombs and Jews were as well…They could very well have been sending skeletons of shoe salesman to Christian churches and having people worship them."
On whether they were actually saints:
"They were never canonized in the traditional sense. Remember that they didn't know who these people were, I even found an account at one point in time where they sent a group of psychics down into the Roman catacombs to go into a trance and start pointing at skeletons. Oftentimes they would replicate saints that already existed and a lot of times they didn't have any identities for these bodies, so they would just make up names for them. They would re-baptize these bodies and name them after virtues. I found one in Switzerland named Saint Anonymous, because they just ran out of inspiration. "
On why they were sent to churches in other countries:
"They wanted to wow people with the resurgence of the Catholic Church. They sent them to churches in places like Germany, Switzerland and Austria, which had battleground states with the Protestants. A lot of these parishes had left the Catholic Church and now in the early 17th Century, they were drawing them back in.
"It was a chance to send something northward that would be of such incredible presence that people would walk into this church and be awed by this fully life-size skeleton covered in jewels. It just represented an earthly manifestation of divine glory. This is the glory that God has reserved for people who have sacrificed on behalf of the Catholic faith. It was a kind of visual propaganda to tell people that we are strong, and we are back and we are the true way for the faithful."
On what they represented:
"On a popular level, they became patrons of all kinds of bizarre things...One of these in Switzerland, he became the Patron Saint of Urinary Disorders, because when he was being translated into the church, a woman who had urinary incontinence prayed to him and she claims she had been cured. So people from then on who had urinary disorders would come to this town in Switzerland and stand in front of this jeweled skeleton and pray that he would remove their urinary disorders."
On the most ornate of the skeletons, St. Albertus:
"He's the one I open the book with, because he was one of the few where I was able to find some personal information, not about him, but the woman who decorated him, who was a known local nun. He is one of the most ornate I've ever found. You can't even see the ribs on his ribcage because they're so covered in jewels. You can see most of the skull is also covered in jewels and it goes all the way down to his legs.
"Albertus was proclaimed as this visual manifestation of God's glory to those who serve the faith. he was the embodiment of what they call the heavenly Jerusalem. This idea that those who serve the faith well would be invited into this gold and glittering castle that was represented by this skeleton among us."
Gallery Events:
Paul Koudounaris at Les Noces du Figaro (free event)
618 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA, 90014 on Sept. 29, noon
Paul Koudounaris at Glendale Public Library (free event)
222 E. Harvard, Glendale, 91205 on Oct. 30, 7 pm
Paul Koudounaris at La Luz de Jesus
4633 Hollywood Blvd. 90027 on Nov. 1, 8 pm