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The ball has so much force that when it landed in her purse, she fell backwards. After she caught the ball, her husband caught her.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I’m David Greene. So when I went to baseball games as a kid, I would bring my mitt. The dream was to catch a foul ball. Last night, slight variation – a St. Louis Cardinals fan did not have a mitt. She did have leather, though. She lifted her purse up in the air, opened it and a foul ball went right in with so much force, she fell backwards. Other fans gave her an ovation, as did the ESPN announcers.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: That was a great grab – sorry.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: It hurt her back.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And then it looked like her husband caught her.
GREENE: It’s MORNING EDITION.
Copyright © 2017 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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Takata Corp. CEO Shigehisa Takada speaks during a press conference in Tokyo, Monday, as the Japanese air bag maker announces filing for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo and the U.S., The company has been under financial pressure from lawsuits and recall costs related to its of defective air bag inflators.
Shizuo Kambayashi/AP
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Long crippled by lawsuits and recall costs over its faulty air bags, Takata, the Japanese auto parts maker, filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan and the U.S. on Sunday.
Takata is on the hook for billions of dollars to banks and automakers, which have been covering the replacement costs of tens of millions of the recalled air bag inflators.
The company plans to sell what’s rest of its operations to the rival U.S. auto parts supplier, Key Safety Systems, for $1.588 billion.
Automakers will be able to recover some costs from Takata’s remaining assets, but “experts say the companies still must fund a significant portion of the recalls themselves,” reports The Associated Press.
It’s the largest safety recall in automotive history. Worldwide, 100 million inflators have been recalled, 69 million of them in the U.S., affecting 42 million vehicles by 19 different automakers, according to the wire service.
Takata’s air bag inflators are blamed for rupturing and spewing dangerous debris into a vehicle’s cabin, as NPR’s Sonari Glinton reported.
In January, the auto parts maker pleaded guilty to concealing the defect in millions of its air bags as the Two-Way reported earlier this year.
In that settlement, as NPR’s Bill Chappell noted,
“Takata agreed to pay $1 billion over air bag fraud; three of the company’s executives were also criminally charged. That total included $125 million that’s earmarked as restitution to people who are physically injured by defective air bag systems.”
At the time, the defective air bags were linked to at least 16 deaths, including 11 in the U.S.
And U.S. lawmakers have criticized Takata’s slow pace of addressing the recalls. As Bill reported last month, “As of late April, they say, all of the auto makers in today’s settlement had completed less than a third of their air-bag related recalls.”
“There are not very many airbag makers,” Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs tells NPR. “So a lot of these recalled vehicles have not been fixed, the airbags don’t exist for them to be fixed yet.”
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NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas about how to balance the need for health care with the need to reduce the federal budget deficit.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We’re going to turn back to the health care bill presented by Senate Republicans last week. They say the plan will cut costs and stabilize insurance markets. Yesterday, we heard from Lynn Cooper of Pennsylvania’s Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, which represents facilities that treat substance abuse. She was particularly concerned about the proposed caps on Medicaid, the national program that pays for health care for people with low incomes. She said it would be devastating at a time when the nation is struggling to contain a crisis of opioid abuse.
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LYNN COOPER: The loss of Medicaid expansion will be like the bottom dropping out for thousands of Pennsylvania citizens and their families.
MARTIN: Today, we wanted to get perspective from a different vantage point from someone who’s primarily concerned about the size of the federal budget and the federal deficit. Maya MacGuineas is president of the committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. It says it’s a nonpartisan organization focused on fiscal responsibility in government. She also chairs a group called The Campaign to Fix the Debt. And she’s with us now. Maya, thanks so much for joining us.
MAYA MACGUINEAS: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: So let’s talk about why you and others who share your perspective believe that restraining the cost of entitlement programs, of which Medicaid is one, is so important. Why does that matter?
MACGUINEAS: So right now, we have a federal debt that’s the highest it’s ever been since World War II. That affects our economy. It affects wages. It lowers our standard of living. So we need to get control of the national debt. The fastest drivers of the debt come from the aging of the population and growing health care costs. So focusing on cost control of health care and our Medicare and Medicaid programs will give us more freedom in the budget so that we’re not borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
MARTIN: As I mentioned earlier, yesterday, we spoke with a woman who represents Pennsylvania’s drug rehabilitation programs. And she was telling us in fairly graphic terms how, you know, capping Medicaid in her view could harm tens of thousands of people in her state alone. And this at a time when the opioid problem is being called a national crisis. So how do you make the argument that their needs right now are less important, if I could use that term, than the long-term need to control costs?
MACGUINEAS: So I wouldn’t make the argument that any particular group or person’s needs are less important. I would make the argument that we need to look at a budget as what budgets are actually supposed to be, which is trade-offs. So what we need to do is figure out what our national priorities are. And then we need to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. I would argue that the most important thing is that we ensure everybody is able to afford a reasonable amount of health care.
Now, people will disagree on what reasonable amount is, and that’s a big part of where the fight is. But we want to make sure that the subsidies are flowing to people who we should be subsidizing. And there’s different questions. Do we have the young subsidize the old, the healthy subsidize the sick, the rich subsidize the poor? There is no one right answer, but you have to make some choices. And budgets push us to make choices.
MARTIN: Does this argument become more difficult, speaking of trade-offs, when it appears that the agenda of this administration – and frankly, congressional Republicans at the moment – is to use these costs savings to provide tax cuts which disproportionately benefit the wealthy?
MACGUINEAS: Well, it makes it more difficult for those of us who care about reducing the deficit because if I were structuring something like this, I would keep that revenue because we need it. And I would worry about, how are you going to make sure that people who need health care get it as efficiently as possible? How do you control the cost of health care? And how do you help use these savings to bring our debt down before we go forward with cutting taxes?
Which it seems like at a time of record debt levels, tax cuts don’t make a lot of sense. And that does include making reforms to entitlements and thinking about things in Medicare and Medicaid. People never like those changes, but you actually can’t get control of these programs if they go uncapped with no control.
MARTIN: Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and The Campaign to Fix the Debt. Maya, thank you so much for speaking with us once again.
MACGUINEAS: Thanks so much for having me.
Copyright © 2017 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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John McEnroe reacts during a Men’s Legends match against Jim Courier at the Connecticut Open in August 2015.
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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, tennis great John McEnroe triumphed three times at Wimbledon and four times at the U.S. Open. But all his achievements on the court did not prepare him for life off of it. After his professional career ended, he dabbled as a talk show host and as an art collector and appeared in movies and TV shows.
Above all, McEnroe wanted to be a rock guitarist in his wife’s band, but, he admits: “That was not going to happen.”
His wife, singer Patty Smyth, told him, “I want to play mixed doubles with you at Wimbledon.” To which he replied, “Well, you don’t play tennis.”
And she said, “Exactly.”
During his tennis career, McEnroe became known for outbursts on the court when he thought umpires had missed a call. In one classic exchange, he yelled at an official, “You cannot be serious! That ball was on the line!”
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That line has followed him for decades. “If a day goes by where I don’t hear that at least a couple times, it’s a miracle,” McEnroe says. So he has decided to embrace it: His first memoir was called You Cannot Be Serious, and his new memoir is called But Seriously.
On reinventing himself after his pro career ended
I was actually going through what turned out to be a separation and divorce from my first wife, [actress Tatum O’Neal], so I was unable to really think about anything else. We had three kids together and my head was all over the place and I couldn’t even think about … the transition that I was anticipating I was going to be making. …
I was sort of lost, but was open enough to experiment … so that I can find myself again, which isn’t easy when you’ve peaked in your career at 26 years old.
On why there aren’t more great male American tennis players right now
There’s a lot of reasons, but the biggest one to me is the cost of it: the cost of play, the cost to train, the cost to get a court. All of this factors into the difficulty of getting a champion. The truth is … the game has become more athletic than ever, and quicker, you need to be more athletic, and our best athletes mainly are playing in basketball or football. …
If you take a court the size of a tennis court and you decide you want to use it for a soccer field, say, you could fit a lot more kids. … When you talk about schools, they say: Well, it’s better if we put a little soccer field in there and we get 20 kids running around kicking a ball. … Whereas tennis doesn’t come as easily.
On calling Serena Williams the best female tennis player in the world
Garcia-Navarro: We’re talking about male players but there is of course wonderful female players. Let’s talk about Serena Williams. You say she is the best female player in the world in the book.
McEnroe: Best female player ever — no question.
Garcia-Navarro: Some wouldn’t qualify it, some would say she’s the best player in the world. Why qualify it?
McEnroe: Oh! Uh, she’s not, you mean, the best player in the world, period?
Garcia-Navarro: Yeah, the best tennis player in the world. You know, why say female player?
McEnroe: Well because if she was in, if she played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world.
Garcia-Navarro: You think so?
McEnroe: Yeah. That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player. I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she’s so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke ’cause she’s been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit — the men’s circuit — that would be an entirely different story.
Garcia-Navarro: Many people over the years, including, we should mention Donald Trump, the President, wanted you to play her, and you seemed to have at least thought about it.
McEnroe: Well I’ve thought about it. I didn’t really want to do it, personally. I don’t know, people always seemed — I would say why don’t they go ask Roger Federer? Or someone, you know they added the old fart that’s you know 25 years over the hill. And I think I can still play and I think I could still — I mean my kids don’t think I can beat her anymore. Maybe I should get her now because she’s pregnant, but the truth is that I think that sometimes —I don’t know why in tennis, I get it’s that one battle of the sexes when Bobby Riggs played Billie Jean.
Garcia-Navarro: Billie Jean one of the most famous, iconic and most watched, I think tennis matches at the time.
McEnroe: Yeah, it was no question. I think there was the most, the biggest attendance at the Houston Astrodome, and it was great that Billie Jean did that but…OK, but that doesn’t mean, talk about other sports. If you go look at the times, for example, of the world’s fastest females — and you know maybe it will change! You know my daughter, one the things she says is ‘You’re a feminist, Dad.’ OK. I started with two boys, I got four girls now and I’m all for it and I’m trying to just get with it and figure it out.
Garcia-Navarro: So, you’re a feminist.
McEnroe: Maybe at some point a women’s tennis player can be better than anybody. I just haven’t seen it in any other sport, and I haven’t seen it in tennis. I suppose anything’s possible at some stage.
Garcia-Navarro: You really think at 60, you could possibly beat Serena Williams? Maybe pregnant.
McEnroe: The way you put that makes me think that you have your doubts.
Garcia-Navarro: Far be it from me to question you Mr. McEnroe.
McEnroe: Well, you know, my kids do, so feel free to. But there’s people that because of course as you get older — I’m not sure how athletic you are and how often you get out in whatever sport it is, but I have kept at it regularly. I’ve done it sort of doing this playing some other guys close to my age even though they keep getting younger and younger. Obviously, if I was going to do something like that, I would train very seriously for that to make sure my body was at, like, the peak it could be. Absolutely — to try and be as ready as I possibly could, but I bring things to the table, certainly until recently. I may be way past it, but I can still bring a few things to the table and so that’s why I guess people still find it interesting to even talk about.
On where to go from here
I need to make sure that I enjoy the upcoming 10 — hopefully 20 — years of my life and just appreciate the ride that it’s been, and be able to continue to … find that inner peace, in a way, because that’s difficult for me. I grew up a perfectionist getting pushed, pushed, pushed a lot. … Especially when my dad passed away a few months ago, I said, Wait a second, you’ve got to just take a step back here and smell the roses a little bit more. That would be my Number One goal moving ahead.
Radio producer Peter Breslow, radio editor Stacey Samuel and Web producers Beth Novey and Wynne Davis contributed to this story.
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The cladding used in a 2016 refurbishing of Grenfell Tower in London helped last week’s fatal fire spread. The combustible material is permitted in some parts of the U.S.
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The type of siding or “cladding” used on the Grenfell Tower in London — and suspected of feeding the massive fire that killed dozens of residents — is not allowed on the exterior of tall buildings across most of the U.S.
But a few states and the District of Columbia have relaxed their building codes in recent years and have started to permit the material’s use.
The cladding installed on Grenfell Tower as part of a 2016 refurbishing project has become a focus for investigators. NPR’s Frank Langfitt has confirmed that the cladding had a combustible polyethylene core rather than a more fire-resistant mineral core.
At least 79 people died last week when the fire spread quickly through the 24-story public housing tower. Investigators say a refrigerator started the fire, which then spread to the cladding outside.
Prime Minister Theresa May told Parliament this week that similar cladding on other buildings has been found to be combustible. Reuters reports that at least 600 buildings in England use the same type of cladding and that authorities are testing the material to determine whether other buildings are at risk of fire.
In the United States, most jurisdictions don’t allow this type of cladding for buildings higher than 40 feet. That is because they’ve adopted the International Building Code, which requires cladding for tall buildings to pass a rigorous test developed by the National Fire Protection Association called “NFPA 285.” The purpose of the test is to ensure that installed cladding will be noncombustible.
In recent years, a few U.S. jurisdictions have eliminated this testing requirement. They now permit cladding similar to what was believed to be used on the Grenfell Tower, as long as the building has other fire safety measures in place, such as a working sprinkler system. (The Grenfell Tower reportedly did not have sprinklers.)
This softening of some U.S. building codes upsets Tulsa, Okla.-based fire protection engineer John Valiulis. He says D.C. and three states — Minnesota, Indiana and Massachusetts — have exempted cladding from NFPA 285 testing.
Valiulis wrote a report about the topic for the Fire Safe North America group. In it, he details a series of cladding fires around the world that were similar to the Grenfell Tower fire. None were in the U.S., and he says there is a good reason for that.
“The fire protection engineering profession in the U.S. is quite active and is often very proactive,” says Valiulis.
Thirty years ago, when it became clear builders would start using more of this type of cladding, he says, the NFPA test was developed to determine whether combustible materials used within cladding might pose a fire danger.
But that test can be expensive — potentially costing $30,000 or more. And usually a new test must be conducted for each building because the cladding specifications change.
A panel of external cladding was removed from the Dorney tower block in north London. Tower blocks across England are being tested to check whether their outer coverings pose a serious fire risk following the Grenfell Tower disaster.
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Cost is a primary reason the D.C. Construction Codes Coordinating Board, which is under the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, removed the testing requirement. DCRA spokesman Matt Orlins says that during a 2012 code review process, building designers said they were concerned about the difficulty of finding cladding that passed the NFPA 285 test.
“The board agreed that the concerns were valid and that other portions of the codes did provide safeguards,” says Orlins. So the board eliminated the requirement.
Advocates for eliminating the NFPA 285 testing requirement have said it’s a prudent cost-saving change, given the lack of dramatic fires in the United States like the Grenfell Tower fire. And they point out that most fires start inside a building, where required sprinklers are likely to keep a fire from spreading to the cladding outside.
NPR contacted firms that have pushed for code changes in the District and Minnesota, but those businesses either did not respond or declined to comment.
Valiulis doesn’t accept their argument. Like most fire protection engineers, he wants multiple safety systems in place in case one fails.
“When a code is well-written and properly anticipates problems, people observe a lack of incidents, and often assume that the code must be asking for overkill,” says Valiulis. But he says that also can be a sign that “the code got it exactly right.”
Now, at least one of the jurisdictions that relaxed its building codes may reverse course.
As more cladding options that comply with NFPA 285 have come onto the market in recent years, Orlins with the DCRA says the agency plans to put the testing requirement back into the next revision of the District’s building code.
And Orlins says, “The District is also evaluating whether the change ought to be adopted as an amendment to the current code.”
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Soybean leaves showing evidence of damage from dicamba. Thousands of acres of soybean fields have shown this kind of damage this spring.
Courtesy of the University of Arkansas
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Courtesy of the University of Arkansas
Arkansas’s pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.
“It’s fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product,” says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.
The tension — which even led to a farmer’s murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.
Farmers, especially in the South, have been desperate for new weapons against a devastating weed called pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. And some farmers even jumped the gun and started spraying dicamba on their crops before they were legally allowed to do so. (Dicamba has long been used in other ways, such as for clearing vegetation from fields before planting.)
A map showing the number of complaints filed by county. According to the Arkansas Agriculture Department, the investigations into these complaints have yet to be completed.
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Courtesy of Arkansas Agriculture Department
The problem is, dicamba is a menace to other crops nearby. It drifts easily in the wind, and traditional soybeans are incredibly sensitive to it. “Nobody was quite prepared, despite extensive training, for just how sensitive beans were to dicamba,” says Bob Scott, a specialist on weeds with the University of Arkansas’s agricultural extension service.
As soon as spraying started this spring, the complaints began arriving. By June 23, state regulators had received 242 complaints from farmers who say their crops have been damaged. “This has far eclipsed any previous number of complaints that we’ve gotten, and unfortunately, this number seems to just keep growing,” says Scott. “Every day we get an update with eight or ten more complaints.”
In his area, Hundley says, “any soybean that’s not [resistant to dicamba] is exhibiting damage. I can name 15 farmers within three or four miles who have damage, and I can only name 3-4 farmers who have used the technology.”
On June 20, the Arkansas Plant Board met to consider an emergency ban on further spraying of dicamba, and farmers crowded into the meeting to argue both sides.
“The individuals who were damaged were quite passionate. The growers who had invested money in the technology also were quite passionate,” says Jason Norsworthy, a weed specialist at the University of Arkansas, who attended the meeting.
At that first meeting, a procedural mix-up prevented the board from holding a valid vote. On June 23, it reconvened and voted, 9-5, to ban any spraying of dicamba on any crops except for pasture land for 120 days. The ban will take effect immediately if the governor of Arkansas signs it.
The decision, assuming it goes into effect, is a hard blow for farmers who paid extra for dicamba-resistant seeds. They now won’t be able to spray dicamba, which they were counting on doing. “A lot of those growers will not have a good option for pigweed,” Scott says.
Even Hundley, who was in favor of banning dicamba, doesn’t feel that it’s an optimal solution. “It’s pitting Arkansas farmers against Arkansas farmers, and that’s never good,” he says.
Looking toward the future, Scott isn’t sure whether dicamba ever will be a good tool for farmers, because it appears to be so difficult to control. “I have walked a lot of fields that leave you scratching your head, how did this happen? Because it seemed like they did everything right,” he says.
He also doesn’t think the problem will be limited to Arkansas. His state just happened to hit this problem first, because Arkansas’s farmers adopted dicamba earlier than those in other states. “Arkansas may be ahead of the curve, but I anticipate other states also having this problem,” he says.
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