July 12, 2019

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Business July 12, 2019

Data Shows U.S. Trade Gap With China Widened During Month Of June

President Trump promoted his trade agenda in Wisconsin on Friday, as new data shows a widening trade deficit with China.



AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

President Trump’s trade war is having an impact on the nation’s trade deficit, but it’s not the one the president advertised. The U.S. trade gap with China actually widened last month. The trade war depressed both imports and exports, but U.S. exports to China took the bigger hit. The administration is urging Americans to be patient during what could be a drawn-out tariff battle. NPR’s Scott Horsley reports.

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Trump promoted his trade agenda in Wisconsin today while also raising money for his reelection campaign. Speaking at an aerospace company in Milwaukee, Trump said the 25% tariffs he slapped on hundreds of billions of dollars in imports from China are paying off.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A lot of companies are leaving China now because they want to go to a non-tariffed country. And some of those companies are coming here. It’s been incredible. We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars.

HORSLEY: Customs data from the Chinese government confirms Americans bought 8% less stuff from China last month than they did a year ago. But U.S. sales to China plunged more than 30%. Economist Mary Lovely of Syracuse University says U.S. exporters are paying a heavy price for the president’s trade war.

MARY LOVELY: I think whatever jobs are created by President Trump’s war on global supply chains are going to be dwarfed by losses in the U.S. export sectors.

HORSLEY: Trump boasted on Twitter this morning that tariffs are a great negotiating tool and a powerful way to get companies to build products in the United States. Lovely acknowledges some companies are shifting production away from China to avoid Trump’s tariffs, but she says they’re generally not opening factories in the U.S. Instead, they’re building plants in places like Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong.

LOVELY: We see increasing evidence of the supply chain moving but clearly not to the U.S. And unfortunately, the evidence is mounting that this is not good for the U.S., that we need to take a different approach, work this out. But these guys have dug in.

HORSLEY: Two weeks ago, Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jingping, and the leaders agreed to restart trade talks. But Trump complained on Twitter this week China has not followed through with additional purchases of U.S. farm goods. Hopefully they will start soon, the president said. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told CNBC this morning the U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, will soon be traveling to Beijing for talks. Navarro cautioned it could be a lengthy discussion.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PETER NAVARRO: My advice for investors is to be patient with this process. Don’t believe anything you read in either the Chinese or the U.S. press about these negotiations unless it comes from the mouths of either the president or Ambassador Lighthizer.

HORSLEY: Professor Lovely says patience just means more pain as tariffs mount. The advocacy group Tariffs Hurt the Heartland has been keeping a running tally of tariffs that Americans are paying. Those totaled $5 1/2 billion in May – 2.4 billion of that was on goods from China. Lovely says U.S. producers might absorb the cost of those tariffs for a little while, but eventually, they’ll pass it on in their prices.

LOVELY: I think U.S. producers have been reluctant to do that, especially if they feel that these tariffs are short-lived. But if they believe that these tariffs are here to stay, they’ll be forced to pass those along to consumers.

HORSLEY: China and other countries are fighting back with their own tariffs on U.S. exports. Those tariffs jump to $1.3 billion in May, even as the value of American exports fell. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Sports July 12, 2019

Remembering Major League Pitcher Jim Bouton, Author Of ‘Ball Four’

Bouton, who died Wednesday, spoke to Fresh Air in 1986 about his 1970 tell-all memoir, in which he drew on his seven years with the New York Yankees to offer an insider’s guide to baseball.



DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Jim Bouton, the former big-league pitcher better known for his prose than his fastball, died Wednesday at his home in Massachusetts. He was 80.

In 1970, Bouton wrote the book “Ball Four,” a raunchy insider’s look at the game that drew heavily on Bouton’s seven seasons with the New York Yankees. He wrote about players getting drunk, peeping through keyholes at women and popping amphetamines like candy. The book enraged players and some sportswriters and drew a rebuke from commissioner Bowie Kuhn, but it was a bestseller.

After a respectable baseball career, Bouton wrote several other books, did some acting and sportscasting and was a George McGovern delegate to the 1972 Democratic convention. Bouton spoke with Terry in 1986 and began with a story from “Ball Four” about Mickey Mantle.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

JIM BOUTON: I think the most controversial story in the book was I told about the time Mickey Mantle hit a home run with a hangover. And it wasn’t really even so much as a put-down of Mickey Mantle as it was a story of what a great athlete he was. I told about the time we were in Minnesota. And we’d been out the night before a game, having a few drinks – about 2 o’clock in the morning, I guess it was. I don’t want to say Mickey was drunk, but he spent about a half an hour trying to make a telephone call from a grandfather’s clock.

So he comes into the ballpark the following morning, and he’s hungover. And the manager says, you know, sleep it off. Most managers were players themselves. They understand you come to the ballpark once in a while with a hangover.

So Mick is sleeping in the trainer’s room. We’re playing the Minnesota Twins. We get – stick somebody else in the outfield. And so the game’s going on, and it gets tie score after nine innings. And in about the 12th inning, the manager says, I hate to do it, but I need a pinch hitter in the 13th. Go in and wake up the Mick.

So we go in the trainer’s room, you know, wake up Mickey Mantle, dress him in his uniform, steer him through the tunnel up into the dugout. Thirteenth inning comes around – he put a bat in Mickey’s hands and point him in the direction of home plate. The Mick staggers up to the plate. Fortunately, he’s a switch hitter – doesn’t matter what side he gets on – steps into the batter’s box.

To show you what a great athlete this guy was – and Mickey was the best ballplayer I ever saw – he takes one practice swing and hits the first pitch into the center field bleachers, a tremendous blast 450 feet away. We win the game. The crowd is going nuts, and the players are going crazy in the dugout. We’re laughing and pointing and screaming and slapping each other on the back. And suddenly, it occurs to us he still has to round those bases.

TERRY GROSS: (Laughter).

BOUTON: There’s a rule in baseball that you must touch the bases in order. Fortunately, he heads off in the right direction. The minute he hits first base, the entire dugout goes, make a left – goes around, touches second, touches third, comes across, misses home plate – we have to send him back for that – comes over to the dugout.

And, of course, the fans are giving him a standing ovation. And as he’s waving to the crowd, he looks at us in the dugout, and he says, those people don’t know how tough that really was. I went over to his locker afterwards, and I said, how did you do that? You couldn’t even see up there. He said, it was very simple. I hit the middle ball.

GROSS: (Laughter).

BOUTON: So if this destroys America’s illusions about baseball or Mickey Mantle, then I don’t know what you do with all the literature that’s come out since then where each player tries to top the next in terms of what he can tell or how far he can go.

GROSS: Pitching careers are subject to more problems than other careers are, I think, because your arm is so vulnerable. And your career depends on your arm, and it’s what you’re abusing all the time.

BOUTON: Sure. And pitching is not a natural motion. Throwing a ball as hard as you can 120 times every four days is not natural.

GROSS: Did you have to change your pitching style because of injuries you were getting?

BOUTON: Well, I had to change my pitching style when I wasn’t able to throw hard anymore. See, what happened was I threw very hard when I first came up. I was a overhand fastball pitcher. And then when I hurt my arm, I wasn’t able to throw hard for a while. And then when I did, it – the ball didn’t have that zip on it anymore. It didn’t have that snap. Even though the ball was traveling as fast, it wasn’t moving.

So it’s like taking a rubber band and stretching it too far, and then it never gets its elasticity back again. And that’s what happened to my arm. So I had to change from being a fastball pitcher to a knuckleball pitcher.

Fortunately, when I was a kid, I threw a knuckleball, which is not a pitch that requires very much strength. It’s a skill pitch. You push it off with your fingertips. The idea is to get the ball to go through the air without any rotation, and then it jumps around all by itself. And so I became a knuckleball pitcher to compensate for the fact that I couldn’t throw hard anymore.

GROSS: How hard are knuckleballs to hit?

BOUTON: They’re almost impossible to hit when you throw a good one. The difficulty is throwing a good one. When you don’t throw a good one, anybody can hit them. That’s the problem with a knuckleball. Nobody can hit a well-thrown knuckleball, and almost anybody can hit a poorly thrown knuckleball.

GROSS: Say it was a full count, and there were a couple of men on base. What would you throw? Would you throw a knuckleball, knowing that if you made one more – one wrong move, it might be a home run ’cause…

BOUTON: Yes.

GROSS: …It’s easier to hit?

BOUTON: I would throw a knuckleball. I would throw a knuckleball because my feeling is I would rather live and die with my best pitch than take a chance with something that wasn’t my best.

GROSS: Did you have any gestures that you had to do before you threw a pitch and, like, rub your hand on your side three times or (laughter)…

BOUTON: Nothing that was superstitious. Sure, I went through the same sort of little rituals before I threw the ball because it’s important to do that. And athletes need to do that and many performers need to do that because those are the little steps that are really part of the process.

Throwing a ball is not just throwing a ball. Part of it starts when you walk out to the mound – how you walk out to the mound, how you feel about yourself and the fans and the batter and the whole – I mean, all of that – the rosin bag in your hand, how the ball feels. And you want to start playing with that ball in your hand so you get that feeling, and you want to recreate the memory – the muscle memory that brings you back to the last time you were really throwing well. And that whole process starts long before you actually throw the ball.

GROSS: Why do pitchers like to chew when they’re on the mound?

BOUTON: Part of it is because of the nervousness and the tension. And it’s sort of – chewing relieves that. But the spitting part is different, OK? Spitting – and also all this crotch grabbing and spitting back and forth that you see in Major League Baseball – there’s a real reason for that. There’s a behavioral reason for that. And that is that what these are is macho displays, OK? It’s a man-to-man challenge out there, the pitcher versus the batter. And it’s very much like two cats squaring off where they both have to sort of urinate on the shrubbery, saying, OK, this is my yard. I own this space. And the other cat’s saying, yeah, but I own my space, and then they’re fighting.

You see, what the batter is is – he steps into the batter’s box and he spits all over the place. He’s saying he’s – that’s his turf. The pitcher is saying, oh, yeah? Well, (imitating spitting) this is my turf out here, and now we’ll see who’s the best. And so that’s why you have that. It’s that mano-a-mano challenge situation, you know? And that’s what they are. They’re animals marking their territory.

GROSS: Jim Bouton, I want to thank you very much.

BOUTON: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it.

DAVIES: Jim Bouton spoke with Terry Gross in 1986. Bouton died Wednesday at the age of 80. Coming up, we’ll remember actor Rip Torn, best known for his role as Artie on “The Larry Sanders Show.” This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF WES MONTGOMERY’S “FOUR ON SIX”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health July 12, 2019

A Call For More Research On Cancer’s Environmental Triggers

A stretch of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, La., that is crowded with chemical plants has been called “Cancer Alley” because of the health problems there.

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We already know how to stop many cancers before they start, scientists say. But there’s a lot more work to be done.

“Around half of cancers could be prevented,” said Christopher Wild in the opening session of an international scientific meeting on cancer’s environmental causes held in June. Wild is the former director of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

“Cancer biology and treatment is where most of the money goes,” he said, but prevention warrants greater attention. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work to improve treatment, but we haven’t balanced it properly.”

Perhaps no question about cancer is more contentious than its causes. People wonder, and scientists debate, if most malignancies stem from random DNA mutations and other chance events or from exposure to carcinogens, or from behaviors that might be avoided.

At the conference in Charlotte, N.C., scientists pressed for a reassessment of the role of environmental exposures by applying modern molecular techniques to toxicology. They called for more aggressive collection of examples of human pathology and environmental samples, including water and air, so that cellular responses to chemicals can be elucidated.

The hope is that by identifying specific traces of exposures in human cancer specimens, scientists can identify environmental causes of disease that might be prevented.

“Over 80,000 chemicals are used in the United States, but only a few have been tested for carcinogenic activity,” said Margaret Kripke, an immunologist and professor emeritus at MD Anderson Cancer Center, in an interview at the meeting.

“This has been a very neglected area of cancer research for the last several decades,” said Kripke, the driving force behind the conference, which was put on by the American Association for Cancer Research. “Environmental toxicology was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s,” she said, but genetics then began to overshadow studies of cancer’s environmental causes. “Toxicology fell by the wayside.”

While the incidence of tobacco-linked cancers has been falling, malignancies not associated with smoking are rising, Kripke said. Recent evidence suggests an escalating rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers. That trend implicates other environmental factors.

Around the globe, cancer’s overall incidence is climbing. This year, 18 million people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer and over 9 million will die from it.

Infections — many preventable, such as by human papillomavirus —account for 15% of new cases.

Another rising cause is obesity, along with urbanization. People generally get less physical activity and eat differently in cities, and pollution is heavier there, too. “As people move into cities, that will drive up cancer rates,” Wild said.

One of the biggest obstacles to preventing cancer is that many people just don’t think it’s feasible. Progress “requires long-term vision and commitment,” Wild said. “Funding is limited, and there’s little private sector investment.”

A change in the way benefits of cancer prevention are framed could help. “When I was at the IARC, one thing that struck me was the power of economic arguments over health arguments for preventing cancer,” Wild said.

Cancer treatment costs can be prohibitive. But productivity lost from premature deaths in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa alone runs $46.3 Abillion annually, he said. “Developing countries are not prepared to deal with the rising cancer burden.”

The precise proportion of cancers arising from environmental and occupational exposure to carcinogens is uncertain. In 2009, a report by the President’s Cancer Panel called prior approximations of around 6% “woefully out of date” and low. A 2015 paper by over a hundred concerned scientists cited “credible” estimates of 7% to 19%.

Scientist at the Charlotte meeting emphasized the complexity of cancer’s causes and the need for toxicologists to update methods to reflect that complexity, such as by studying interactions of environmental and genetic risks, and by examining cells after a mix of exposures. “Most toxic exposures do not occur singly,” said Rick Woychik, deputy director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Until recently, many toxicology tests were performed in rodents, because it would be unethical to deliberately evaluate possible carcinogens in people. But these animal experiments are labor-intensive and slow, he said.

New alternatives are now being tried. “We learned from pharma that with robotics and high-throughput technology you can interrogate a lot of biology quickly and at lower costs,” he said.

Epidemiological research of human exposures has been stymied by the difficulty of proving cause-and-effect — that a particular substance actually causes cancer — and by shortcomings of survey data from questionnaires.

At the conference, scientists offered glimpses of new technology that is helping fill informational gaps.

Bogdan Fedeles of MIT explained how DNA serves as a lifelong “recording device.” He and others use duplex sequencing to examine human samples for genetic “fingerprints of exposure.”

Allan Balmain, a geneticist at University of California, San Francisco, spoke about mutational signatures in malignancies. In liver cancer, for instance, these signatures can offer causal clues—such as smoking, alcohol or aflatoxin, a product of mold that grows on some foods.

Many chemicals that cause or stimulate cancer growth are produced inside our bodies. “It’s not all about the environment,” Balmain said.

Others highlighted a conceptual shift in how scientists define carcinogens. Key characteristics may include a substance’s capacity to stimulate growth of malignant cells, or to induce inflammation—without necessarily causing DNA damage, long seen as the necessary .

“The answer to ‘What is a carcinogen?’ is changing” said Ruthann Rudel, a toxicologist at the Silent Spring Institute who has published extensively on breast carcinogens. She detailed new techniques to screen breast cancer cells for changes in response to specific chemical exposures.

The public health stakes for the field are high.

Professor Polly Hoppin, of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, discussed cancer-causing industrial contamination of drinking water at Camp Lejune, N.C., air pollution in St. John the Baptist Parish, La., and potential exposures to carcinogens from fracking and planned plastics production in Pennsylvania.

Hoppin reflected on the U.S. experience with tobacco cessation. Scientists knew that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, she said. Implementing that knowledge required policy and incentives — like high cigarette taxes and public smoking bans — and took decades.

“The science wasn’t enough,” Hoppin said. “How many lives could have been saved if we’d acted sooner?”

Elaine Schattner is a physician in New York writing a book on cancer attitudes that will be published by Columbia University Press.

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