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Sports July 25, 2019

The Future Of Baseball May Be Happening Already As Independent League Tests New Rules

The Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, in partnership with the major league is implementing new rules this season. It’s unclear though if these will impact the game at the highest levels.



MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

You wouldn’t know it at first glance, but the future of baseball may be happening at a cozy little ballpark in New Britain, Conn. That is where Major League Baseball, in partnership with an independent league, is experimenting with some unique innovations this season. Esteban Bustillos from member station WGBH in Boston reports.

(SOUNDBITE OF BASEBALL GAME AMBIANCE)

ESTEBAN BUSTILLOS, BYLINE: Just southwest of Hartford, the New Britain Bees of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball are hosting the York Revolution on a scorcher of a midsummer evening. There’s everything you’d expect at a ballpark like this – hot dogs, cold beer and tickets you can get for eight bucks a pop.

(SOUNDBITE OF BASEBALL GAME AMBIANCE)

BUSTILLOS: But behind the scenes, the league is in the middle of an experiment that could change the way the game is played at the highest level. As part of a three-year agreement with Major League Baseball, the Atlantic League is testing out a series of rule changes to speed up the game, make it safer for players and give it more action. Some changes, like decreasing the amount of time between innings, are small, while others, like letting batters steal first on any wild pitch and having a radar-tracked strike zone are revolutionary. And they come as baseball is in a demographic crisis, with 9% of Americans listing it as their favorite sport to watch according to a Gallup poll released in 2018.

RICK WHITE: Baseball has tended to skew older in terms of its following, and this group of owners and the commissioner would like to see it start to skew younger.

BUSTILLOS: That’s Rick White, president of the Atlantic League. Of all the changes, the radar-tracked strike zone is probably the most eye-catching. It uses what’s called the Automated Ball-Strike System to determine each hitter’s strike zone and communicate whether a ball is inside or outside via an earpiece to the home plate umpire. It all stems from what White says is a constant pressure for accuracy in equity.

WHITE: Everyone in professional sports, but especially Major League Baseball, wants to create fairness and objectivity as opposed to a disparity between one player or another or their performance.

BUSTILLOS: Bees manager Mauro Gozzo is against some of the rule changes, but he likes the radar-tracked strike zones. Dealing with the grab bag of different strike zones is an everyday struggle for him as a manager.

MAURO GOZZO: As far as, you know, what you see from the umpires, it could change from the beginning of the game to the end of the game just on the intensity of the game.

BUSTILLOS: Bees pitcher Cory Riordan knows there are baseball purists who cling to tradition, but he says there’s also an evolution to the game.

GOZZO: I think if we’re more accepting of change and embrace the change, then I think, you know, there’s a future. But if you’re going to be constantly arguing against what the game has become and – it’s wasted to me. It’s wasted energy.

BUSTILLOS: On the other hand, Revolution shortstop Ryan Dent says the new rules have taken some getting used to.

RYAN DENT: It’s really you’re just accustomed to playing a certain brand of baseball for, you know, 10, 12 years of pro ball. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’re not going to be comfortable with it within a month or two, you know. So you got to give it time.

BUSTILLOS: Joe Trombetta was sitting in the first few rows behind home plate. He’s been coming to Bees games since the team started playing in 2016. He wasn’t aware of all the rule changes, but he was in favor of having a standardized strike zone.

JOE TROMBETTA: Well, I think it helps make things more accurate, you know. There’s no doubts, and there’s no arguing.

BUSTILLOS: As the game wore on, there weren’t any of the flashy changes immediately visible. No one stole first, and the new strike zone system wasn’t in use. But starting today, it will be implemented at every Atlantic League game. Major League Baseball will evaluate all the changes at the end of the season.

For NPR News, I’m Esteban Bustillos in Connecticut.

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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Business July 25, 2019

Economists Say Trump Administration Is Overpaying Farmers For Trade Losses

A worker at the port in Nantong, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, displays soybeans imported from Ukraine. Imports of soybeans from the U.S., once China’s biggest supplier, have dropped massively since a trade war between the U.S. and China began in 2018.

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If you’re caught in a trade war, it’s good to be a farmer.

Lots of American companies have lost sales since the Trump administration and China embarked on the current cycle of tariff-raising and retaliation. Few, if any, have been compensated as handsomely as farmers.

This week, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue unveiled details of the latest aid package for farmers who’ve lost export sales. It includes $14.5 billion in direct payments to farmers, another $1.4 billion in government purchases of agricultural commodities that will be distributed to food banks, and $100 million in loose change to promote exports to new countries. This is on top of $12 billion in aid that the Trump administration distributed last year.

Farmers will receive payments simply based on how much land they’ve planted with crops that are affected by tariffs, how much milk they produce or how many hogs they own. “We want sign-up to be easy for producers [and] straightforward,” said Bill Northey, undersecretary for farm production and conservation, “[so] that we can get these payments to them to address the challenges that they have due to these tariffs.”

In his remarks, Perdue portrayed the payments as a modest contribution toward the enormous losses that farmers have endured.

Agricultural economists, however, disagreed. “This is going to be a lot of money pumped into the Corn Belt,” said Scott Irwin at the University of Illinois.

Even last year’s smaller aid package probably overpaid farmers for their trade-related losses, according to a new analysis from the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. The study, as first reported by the The Food and Environment Reporting Network’s Ag Insider, looked specifically at soybeans, because soybeans were hit hardest by the trade dispute, and most of the aid package went to soybean farmers.

According to the new study, Chinese tariffs caused the price of soybeans grown in the U.S. to drop by $.78 per bushel. Last year’s aid package, however, paid farmers more than twice that much — $1.65 per bushel of soybeans that each farmer produced.

Pat Westhoff, the main author of the new study, wrote in an email to NPR that the USDA calculated farmers’ losses by estimating their lost sales due to foreign tariffs. The reality, he says, is more complex: As China bought soybeans in Brazil, rather than the United States, other buyers stepped in to purchase more soybeans in the United States, rather than Brazil. After all the reshuffling, American soybean farmers saw a rather modest decline in the prices they received for their soybeans.

Irwin agrees. “Most agricultural economists would probably put the damage at $.80 to $1 per bushel” of soybeans, he says. That’s about half what the USDA paid soybean farmers last year.

Secretary Perdue, in rolling out the new aid program, dismissed that analysis. “If you go out and survey farmers, you won’t find any that think they are being made whole by this [aid],” he said. “I guess some academicians can do whatever they want to with numbers, but they aren’t here on the ground producing and struggling to pay the bills.”

This year, the USDA calculated its aid differently in order to keep farmers from simply pursuing more government aid money by planting more soybeans. Instead, farmers will get paid a set amount per acre, as long as they’ve planted a crop that’s eligible for aid. The USDA set different payment rates for each county in the country, apparently based on which crops typically are grown in each area, and whether those crops have been affected by tariffs.

Irwin says that, at first glance, the payouts look “generous.” Farmers in many counties in Illinois will be paid more than $80 per acre. “That’s a lot of money!” Irwin says.

Two days ago, the USDA was in a distinctly less generous mood when it came to another group of people who get government aid. The agency proposed new rules for the SNAP program — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps — that could prevent about 3 million people from continuing to receive benefits. That change would reduce spending on SNAP by about $2.5 billion a year.

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Health July 24, 2019

Allergan Recalls Textured Breast Implants Linked To Rare Type Of Cancer

Allergan said Wednesday that its "Biocell saline-filled and silicone-filled textured breast implants and tissue expanders will no longer be distributed or sold in any market where they are currently available."

Courtesy of Jeff Weiner/Allergan

Allergen has announced a global recall of textured breast implants that are linked to a rare type of cancer, at the request of the Food and Drug Administration.

“Biocell saline-filled and silicone-filled textured breast implants and tissue expanders will no longer be distributed or sold in any market where they are currently available,” according to a company statement Wednesday.

The FDA said in a statement that while the overall incidence of the cancer appears to be low, it asked Allergan to initiate the Biocell implant recall “once the evidence indicated that a specific manufacturer’s product appeared to be directly linked to significant patient harm, including death.”

The agency does not recommend that people who already have the textured implants get them removed unless there are symptoms or problems, but it is providing information for patients and providers to consider.

The FDA said it requested the recall after a “significant increase” in cases of breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL), a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Since its previous report in February, there have been 116 new cases and 24 deaths.

“Based on new data, our team concluded that action is necessary at this time to protect the public health,” said FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy.

Overall, according to the FDA, there have been 573 cases of breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL) and 33 patient deaths worldwide. The agency said 481 of the cases are attributed to the Allergan implants, and that among the deaths “12 of the 13 patients for which the manufacturer of the implant is known, are confirmed to have an Allergan breast implant at the time of their BIA-ALCL diagnosis.”

Based on the latest data, the FDA said, “our analysis demonstrates that the risk of BIA-ALCL with Allergan BIOCELL textured implants is approximately six times the risk of BIA-ALCL with textured implants from other manufacturers marketing in the U.S.”

The FDA first reported on a possible connection between implants and the rare cancer back in 2011, and Abernathy said the agency has continued to monitor reports in databases and patient registries and scientific studies pointing to risks.

Nearly 314,000 people received breast implants in the U.S. in 2018, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The group’s report does not distinguish between textured implants and other kinds.

“In the United States, the use of textured implants is much less common than the use of textured implants in Europe and Asia,” said plastic surgeon Daniel Maman, who is in private practice in New York and an assistant professor at Mount Sinai.

It’s not clear whether the texturing is actually responsible for the cancer or is just associated with a higher incidence of the disease. But Maman and others say the surface can interact with the surrounding scar tissue that the body forms as an immune response to the implant.

“It’s that response that is believed to cause the formation of the lymphoma,” Maman said, noting that he only uses smooth, round implants. Given the risks linked to textured implants, he said, “taking them off the market is very prudent and the right approach.”

The FDA’s action Wednesday is a change in course from a few months ago when advisers concluded there was a lack of scientific certainty about the health risks that breast implants pose to the millions of women who have them.

At the time, as NPR’s Patti Neighmond reported, “most members of the panel said there’s not enough evidence yet to rush textured implants off the market and that larger, longer-term studies are needed.”

Allergan said Wednesday that healthcare providers should no longer implant the Biocell implants and tissue expanders and that unused products should be sent back to the company. It said it would also work with customers about how to return unused products.

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Entertainment July 24, 2019

The Thistle & Shamrock: Chansons

Christ Norman plays the flute.

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From the “chant de marin,” or sea shanties, of Brittany to the songs of the voyageurs of the Canadian fur trade, enjoy the French songs that extend branches of the Celtic music tree from the old world to the new, with artists Le Vent du Nord, Hilary James and Chris Norman.

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Business July 24, 2019

FTC: Facebook’s Zuckerberg Must Give Progress Reports To Regulators

The FTC and Facebook entered a new settlement over privacy violations. CEO Mark Zuckerberg must give quarterly progress reports directly to regulators. Facebook must also pay a $5 billion fine.



STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Mark Zuckerberg has a stunning new responsibility. The founder of Facebook is now required personally to give regular progress reports directly to federal regulators. He needs to show Facebook’s progress in protecting the privacy of users. This is part of a newly announced settlement between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission, a settlement that also includes a $5 billion fine for past violations. NPR’s Aarti Shahani is on this story. Hi there, Aarti.

AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Hi.

INSKEEP: What does Zuckerberg himself have to do exactly?

SHAHANI: So Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard, has homework to do. Under the government’s order being filed today, he’ll have to sign the dotted line on a brand-new compliance document. He’s in charge of submitting it every quarter – four times a year – to the FTC and to the Facebook board. This has been a long road, OK? Back in 2011, Facebook entered a settlement with the FTC for violating user privacy. And then it looks like they violated again and also engaged in brand-new deception.

INSKEEP: Which was what?

SHAHANI: So basically, according to regulators, Facebook lied to users in two new ways. Facebook asks for phone numbers. Give us your cell, so if we need to reset your password, we can verify it to you with a text.

INSKEEP: Sure.

SHAHANI: Millions of people trusted the company. Maybe you did, too. And then Facebook took those phone numbers and used them not just for security but for advertising purposes. OK, lie number two – Facebook wrote up some terms on facial recognition and then switched them up and tracked people who never consented. So we can expect to see about 60 million users get notices asking if they’d like Facebook to delete all the facial recognition tracking it’s been doing unlawfully.

INSKEEP: OK, 60 million people.

SHAHANI: That’s right, according to FTC.

INSKEEP: That suggests the scale of this company because that’s just a tiny fraction of their users. Weren’t they already under scrutiny for the sheer extent of their power and how they’d been using it?

SHAHANI: That’s right. The Justice Department announced it’s starting an antitrust review of a handful of Internet giants who’ve gotten very big and powerful. And I would point out, Steve, about the FTC action that’s focused on consumer privacy, it’s holding the CEO accountable. Facebook is agreeing to abide by federal privacy rules. And if Facebook fails, if its compliance reports are inaccurate, Zuckerberg himself could face civil and criminal penalty.

INSKEEP: Wow.

SHAHANI: So that’s significant.

INSKEEP: That’s quite a threat over his head. Now, the $5 billion fine – is that a lot for a company as big as Facebook?

SHAHANI: Well, it depends. Facebook’s revenue in just the first quarter of this year was 15 billion. After the company announced in its last earnings call that it expected to pay a multibillion-dollar fine, its stock price jumped. That means investors believe the future of a company is solid. That said, the FTC’s James Kohm. He really disagrees with critics who say who say the fine was not big enough.

JAMES KOHM: The idea that $5 billion is a slap on the wrist just doesn’t pass the laugh test. It is an enormous amount of profits. They didn’t give it up easily. It is way higher than any case in U.S. history other than Deepwater Horizon, where there was massive amounts of harm.

SHAHANI: So data privacy harm is less tangible than oil spill harm. But the FTC says the 5 billion is for deterrence, to send a message to other tech companies and that Facebook fought tooth and nail against it. Facebook, which is an NPR sponsor, declined to comment.

INSKEEP: OK. Aarti, thanks for the update. Really appreciate it.

SHAHANI: Thank you.

INSKEEP: NPR’s Aarti Shahani covers tech.

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 24, 2019

Cornhole And Other Less Traditional Sports Gather More Attention

Niche sports, such as cornhole, axe throwing and even professional arm wrestling, are beginning to attract interest and money. These less traditional sports are gaining sponsors.



STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Basketball, football and baseball may draw big crowds and score prime-time television spots, but niche sports are attracting some interest and money – sports like cornhole and ax-throwing and even professional arm-wrestling. So get ready, elbow on the table, get a good grip – here are Stacey Vanek Smith and Sally Herships from NPR’s daily economics podcast The Indicator From Planet Money.

SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: What is it about these less traditional sports that’s attractive to sponsors, like Johnsonville sausages? And, I mean, nothing against cornhole or ax-throwing – what about, you know, basketball…

STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Right?

HERSHIPS: …Or hockey? Yeah.

VANEK SMITH: Like, sports people know about…

HERSHIPS: Yeah.

VANEK SMITH: …And that don’t – you don’t play at, like, 8-year-old birthday parties.

HERSHIPS: Or risk cutting off a limb. And finally, how do these sports get on TV – in this case, ESPN?

SCOTT ROSNER: You know, I think you have to remember that the E in ESPN stands for entertainment.

HERSHIPS: Scott Rosner is academic director of the Sports Management Program at Columbia.

ROSNER: So just because it’s on ESPN doesn’t make it a sport. To wit, poker has been a fixture of their efforts for a very long time.

VANEK SMITH: But that lack of popularity can actually represent an unusual perk for a broadcaster. Just over 3.5 billion viewers watched the World Cup in 2018. For comparison, the World Axe Throwing League says its world championship got hundreds of thousands of viewers last year on TV. That makes ax-throwing what they call an evergreen property, meaning that you can put it on the air anytime you have a gap in your scheduling. But there’s also another possibly more important reason that these sports are getting on ESPN.

ROSNER: You’re not paying them if you’re ESPN. They’re paying you.

HERSHIPS: That is true. Many new sports buy time on the airwaves because there are profits to be made. The American Cornhole Organization had been streaming its videos on Facebook, but it hit almost 2 million views, and it decided the time was ripe, and it launched its own digital streaming network last year, which brings us to another question – what is it about these sports that’s attractive to sponsors?

ROSNER: The companies that are sponsoring are looking for a really, highly targeted audience.

VANEK SMITH: This is also an opportunity for smaller companies, the kinds who can’t afford to advertise during an NBA game or during the Super Bowl. But in order for a starter sport to get big enough to cut a deal to get on TV, that sport needs financial backing to begin with. And the question – why would you want to buy a team who played cornhole or threw axes? Scott says buying a team, even a small one in a more obscure sport, can have some perks as well, including just being, you know – straight up – a really good financial investment.

ROSNER: They all have a dream. They all have the dream that they can be the next – so NBA or Major League Baseball or National Football League, Major League Soccer – that they can all be the next one.

VANEK SMITH: Stacey Vanek Smith.

HERSHIPS: Sally Herships.

VANEK SMITH: NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “FOREST FAIRIES”)

INSKEEP: They report for NPR’s daily podcast about money, work and human behavior, The Indicator From Planet Money.

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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Business July 23, 2019

Offers Pour In To Cover Pa. Students’ Meal Debt, But School Officials Not Interested

Wyoming Valley West High School in Plymouth, Pa. Officials with the school district are not responding to several offers to settle debt students accrued from not paying for cafeteria meals.

Courtesy of Luzerne County /Courtesy of Luzerne County


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A public school district in Pennsylvania that faced a national outcry after threatening to place children in foster care over unpaid cafeteria debt has received several offers to pay off the entire delinquent meal tab, but school officials do not seem interested.

In a letter sent on July 9 to about 40 parents in the Wyoming Valley West School District in an effort to collect the debt, officials warned that if it went unpaid, “The result may be your child being taken from your home and placed in foster care.”

According to Luzerne County Manager David Pedri, at least five donors have stepped forward willing to satisfy the $22,000 in debt accrued by dozens of students whose parents did not give them money to pay for the meals.

A prominent media figure is among those who has tried to settle the students’ debt. An assistant to this person, who requested anonymity, told NPR that attempts to reach school officials were unsuccessful.

“These are gracious and kindhearted people, and I have forwarded their information over to the Wyoming Valley West School District for their review,” Pedri said.

Another one of the potential donors is Todd Carmichael, the Philadelphia-based chief executive of coffee-roasting company La Colombe.

In an interview with NPR, Carmichael said he grew up poor, one of four kids raised by a single mom outside Spokane, Wash. Hearing about a school in rural Pennsylvania threatening to remove children from a household for not being able to pay a lunch bill struck a nerve with him.

“I know what it’s like to be shamed at school. I know what these things are. And I know how my mother would react if someone threatened to take her children away,” Carmichael said.

So, Carmichael’s team contacted the district’s school board.

“And,” he said. “We were rejected.”

Carmichael said his assistant called the school district’s president, Joseph Mazur, and the conversation quickly became combative before Mazur abruptly hung up the phone.

Mazur and members of the Wyoming Valley West administration did not respond to NPR’s numerous requests for comment on Tuesday.

The situation has left Carmichael, who has done a fair amount of philanthropy, searching for answers.

“I’m just completely mystified by it,” he said. “I’m still picking through the pieces and saying, ‘What is this?'”

State records show that the school district is one of the poorest in Pennsylvania, and it is situated in a blue-collar community outside of Wilkes-Barre, which is a former coal mining town.

When Mazur talked to NPR earlier in the week, he defended the letter by saying the school district is strapped for cash and desperate for ways to save money.

That has left Carmichael wondering why the district would turn down donations.

“This really isn’t about the money,” he concludes. “I think it’s about teaching people who are struggling some sort of moral lesson they need to learn, no matter what the consequences are.”

Pedri, who oversees the foster care program in Luzerne County, recently sent the district a letter admonishing school officials for the letter and asking them never to do it again.

“Foster care is something we utilize as a shield to assist kids. It’s not a sword. We don’t like foster care being utilized to try to terrorize individuals,” Pedri told NPR.

In an a recent editorial, The Times-Tribune of Scranton called the threats “shameful” and “an act of hubris.”

“The state Department of Education and the Legislature had no way of knowing that some school district officials would play the schoolyard bully, issuing threats to separate children from their parents in pursuit of lunch money,” the editorial board wrote, urging state lawmakers to “outlaw such outlandish conduct by law and regulation covering lunch debt collection.”

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Entertainment July 23, 2019

Mali’s ‘Guitar Gods’ Tinariwen Receive Racist Threats Ahead Of U.S. Tour

Ahead of a September tour date in Winston-Salem, N.C., social media commenters are leveling violent, racist attacks against the Tuareg musicians known as Tinariwen.

Marie Planeille/Courtesy of the artist


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A guitar band from Mali called Tinariwen is famous worldwide. The group’s fans and collaborators have included Robert Plant, Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Bono of U2 and Nels Cline of Wilco. The band has fought extremism in their home country of Mali, and been victims themselves. But ahead of a September show in Winston-Salem, N.C., social media commenters are leveling violent, racist attacks against the musicians.

A refresher on Tinariwen: This a group of Tuareg musicians from the north of Mali. The members have been hailed as guitar gods, playing rolling melodic lines and loping rhythms that evoke the desert sands of the Sahara — the band’s native home. The band’s name literally means “deserts” in their language, Tamasheq.

The first time I saw them play was in Mali, back when it was a safer country than it is today — it was a life-transforming experience. In January 2003, I was lucky enough to travel to see them play at the Festival in the Desert, at a Saharan oasis called Essakane — that’s about 40 miles outside of Timbuktu, to give you a sense of its remoteness. To get there, we drove, off-road, in ramshackle Toyota Land Cruisers over constantly shifting sands.

The stage for the three-day event was set up amidst the desert dunes; we slept in simple tents as Tuareg nomads pitched their tents and camels nearby. (The festival, which was founded in 2001, was built upon a traditional Tuareg festival — a time for nomadic Tuareg to get together, make community decisions, race camels, make music, recite poetry and dance.) There were a few dozen foreigners — Brits, Europeans and Americans, like myself — among hundreds of Tuaregs and their camels.


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The hope for a larger Festival in the Desert was that it could serve as an economic engine and encourage cultural tourism to northern Mali, a region that has often struggled, and to show cultural unity among Mali’s richly diverse peoples, in the years after the country suffered terrible and bloody conflict in the 1990s. To that end, the organizers invited some incredible Malian musicians who weren’t Tuareg to perform — artists like Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangare — along with Robert Plant. The 2003 Festival in the Desert became legendary — and it spurred Tinariwen to worldwide success.


Tinariwen
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But the Festival in the Desert didn’t last. The political situation in Mali grew more precarious, and by 2012, Islamist extremists — many of them foreigners — fanned out across northern Mali, in hopes of gaining control. Musicians became a prime target. The Festival in the Desert went into exile, and transformed by necessity into an international touring collective.

One of Tinariwen’s own members, the vocalist Intidao (born Abdallah Ag Lamida), was kidnapped by one of those extremist groups, Ansar Dine, in early 2013. Fortunately, he was released. But like many musicians from Mali, Tinariwen has rebuked fundamentalism, and they persevered largely by recording and touring extensively abroad.

Fast-forward to this week. The band is touring the U.S. in September and October to support a new album. A club in Winston-Salem, called The Ramkat booked a show with them for Sept. 17. The venue’s owners put up an ad on Facebook for the show and in response, they started getting a number of racist, vitriolic comments and even violent threats against Tinariwen. (The situation was amplified by the local alternative newspaper, the Triad City Beat, which posted a report on July 19.)

Andy Neville, one of The Ramkat’s owners, told NPR on Tuesday that he found the comments “highly disturbing, hateful, and sad — very sad.”

He continued: “If any of these commenters had done any sort of homework on the band, the Tuareg people or their history, they’d find that the band and the Tuareg people have been marginalized their entire lives — and that Tinariwen themselves have stood up to some of these kind of hateful and and racist forces in North[western] Africa. It’s incredibly disappointing, and then probably the most disappointing thing of all is the fact that we’re talking about these misguided commenters, and what we’re not talking about is what an incredible band Tinariwen is.”

Neville says that he and the other owners have been heartened by positive comments and ticket purchases, however, in the aftermath of the waves of racist and xenophobic comments. Even so, they’re planning to increase security measures on the night of Tinariwen’s show.

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Health July 23, 2019

From Insomnia To Sexsomnia, Unlocking The ‘Secret World’ Of Sleep

Different parts of the brain aren’t always in the same stage of sleep at the same time, notes neurologist and author Guy Leschziner. When this happens, an individual might order a pizza or go out for a drive — while technically still being fast asleep.

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We tend to think of being asleep or awake as an either-or prospect: If you’re not asleep, then you must be awake. But sleep disorder specialist and neurologist Guy Leschziner says it’s not that simple.

“If one looks at the brain during sleep, we now know that actually sleep is not a static state,” Leschziner says. “There are a number of different brain states that occur while we sleep.”

As head of the sleep disorders center at Guy’s Hospital in London, Leschziner has treated patients with a host of nocturnal problems, including insomnia, night terrors, narcolepsy, sleep walking, sleep eating and sexsomnia, a condition in which a person pursues sexual acts while asleep. He writes about his experiences in his book The Nocturnal Brain.

Leschziner notes that the different parts of the brain aren’t always in the same stage of sleep at the same time. When this happens, an individual might order a pizza or go out for a drive — while technically still being fast asleep.

“Sometimes these conditions sound very funny,” Leschziner says. “But on other occasions they can be really life changing, resulting in major injury or, as one of the cases that I described in the book, in a criminal conviction.”

Interview highlights

On what we know about recall after a sleepwalking episode

We used to think that people don’t really remember anything that occurs in this stage. That seems to relate to the fact that the brain in parts is in very deep sleep whilst in other parts is awake. What we have learned over the last few years is that actually quite a lot of people have some sort of limited recall. They don’t necessarily remember the details of all the events or indeed the entirety of the event, but sometimes they do experience little snippets. … On one occasion, [a patient] dragged his girlfriend out of bed in the middle of the night because he thought that a tsunami was about to wash them away, and those kinds of events with strong emotional context are often better remembered.

On how sleepwalking demonstrates the brain can be in multiple sleep stages at once

Certain parts of the brain can remain in very deep sleep … [such as] the frontal lobes, which are the seats of our rational thinking or planning or restricting on normal behaviors, whereas other parts of the brain can exhibit electrical activity that is really akin to being wide awake. So, in particular, the parts of the brain that [can seem to remain awake] are [the ones] responsible for emotion, an area of the brain called the limbic system, obviously the parts of the brain that are responsible for movement. And it’s this dissociation, this disconnect between the different parts of the brain in terms of the sleep stages, that actually give rise to these sorts of behaviors.

On what causes sleepwalking

We know that sleepwalking and these related conditions seem to run very strongly in families. So there seems to be some sort of genetic predisposition to being able to enter into this disconnected brain state, and we know that anything that disrupts your sleep if you have that genetic predisposition can give rise to these behaviors. So, for example, I’ve seen people who have had non-REM parasomnia events [such as sleepwalking] triggered by the fact that they sleep in a creaky bed and their bed partner rolled over [or] sometimes a large truck [drove] past in the street outside the bedroom.

But there are also internal manifestations, internal processes that can give rise to these partial awakenings. So, for example, snoring or, more severe than snoring, sleep apnea, where people stop breathing in their sleep … anything that causes a change in the depth of sleep in people who are predisposed to this phenomenon of being in multiple sleep stages at the same time can give rise to these behaviors.

On sleep apnea

Sleep apnea describes the phenomenon of our airway collapsing down in sleep. … Our airway is essentially a floppy tube that has some rigidity, some structure to it as a result of multiple muscles. And as we drift off to sleep, those muscles lose some of their tension, and the airway becomes a little bit more floppy. Now when it’s a little bit floppy and it reverberates as we breathe in during sleep, that will result in snoring — the reverberation of the walls of the airway result in the noise.

But in certain individuals, the airway can become floppy enough or is narrow enough for it to collapse down and to block airflow as we’re sleeping. It’s normal for that to occur every once in a while for everybody, but if it occurs very frequently, then what happens is that sleep can be disrupted sometimes 10, sometimes 20, sometimes even 100 times an hour, because as we drift off to sleep, the airway collapses down, our oxygen levels drop, our heart rate increases, our brain wakes up again and our sleep is essentially being disrupted. …

We are now aware that obstructive sleep apnea has a range of long-term implications on our health in terms of high blood pressure, in terms of risk of cardiovascular disease, risk of stroke, impact on cognition and mental clarity. And there is now an emerging body of evidence to suggest that actually obstructive sleep apnea may be a factor in the development of conditions like dementia.

On the importance of having positive associations with your bed

If you’re a good sleeper, you tend to associate being in bed with being in that place of comfort, that place where you go and you … feel cozy and you drift off to sleep and you wake up in the morning feeling wide awake and refreshed. But for people with insomnia, they often associate bed with great difficulty getting off to sleep, with the dread of the night ahead, with the fact that they know that when they wake up in the morning they will feel horribly unrefreshed and unrested. And so the environment that we normally would associate with sleep becomes an instrument of torture for them. And so a lot of the advances that have been made in this area about treating insomnia are really directed towards breaking down those negative associations that people have with their sleeping environment if they have insomnia and rebuilding positive associations. So trying to utilize the brain’s own mechanisms for drifting off to sleep and trying to reduce the anxiety surrounding sleep in order to reestablish a normal sleep pattern.

On the problem with taking benzodiazepines and Ambien for insomnia

There has been a bit of a sea change in the last few years away from these drugs. We know that these drugs [are] sedatives. So the first thing to know is that they do not mimic normal sleep. They’re associated with some major problems. So some of these drugs are, for example, associated with an increased risk of road traffic accidents in the morning, because of a hangover effect. They’re associated with an increased risk of falls in the elderly, for example. And we know that people can develop a dependency on these drugs and can also habituate, by which I mean that they require ever-increasing doses to obtain the same effect.

In the long term, there are now some signals coming out of the work that is being done around the world that suggest that some of these drugs are actually associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. And whilst that story is not completely understood — and it may be that people who have insomnia in themselves are predisposed to dementia or actually that insomnia may be a really early warning sign of dementia — [it] certainly gives us cause for concern that perhaps we shouldn’t be using these drugs quite as liberally as we have done historically. And so therefore the switch to behavioral approaches, approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, has been really driven by some of these concerns.

On his recommendation that you read before bed

Provided you are not reading on a tablet or a laptop, [and instead an] old-style analog book, I would highly recommend. It’s a good way of reducing your light exposure. Keeping your mind a little bit active so that you’re not concentrating on the prospect of having to drift off to sleep until you’re really tired. It’s a very good way of keeping your mind occupied.

Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.

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Business July 22, 2019

Equifax Reaches Up To $700 Million Settlement Over Massive Data Breach

The credit bureau Equifax will pay up to $700 million in fines and monetary relief to consumers over a massive data breach two years ago. The agreement settles claims by federal and state authorities.



ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Two years ago, hackers hit the credit bureau Equifax and exposed the data of nearly 150 million people. That’s more than half the adult population of the United States. Now some of the people affected by that breach stand to be compensated. Equifax will pay up to $700 million in fines and monetary relief to consumers. We’re joined by NPR’s Chris Arnold, who has been following today’s settlement with state and federal regulators.

Hi, Chris.

CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.

SHAPIRO: So is most of this money actually going to go to people who were affected in some way by the breach?

ARNOLD: Well, most of it will. It looks like upwards of $400 million will go to those people. We spoke to California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, who was involved in the settlement along with other state and federal regulators. And here’s what he said.

XAVIER BECERRA: We’re trying to make sure that anyone who was impacted by this data security breach has a chance to recover their costs. If you lost your privacy, if identity thieves have taken advantage of your private information, you deserve to be compensated by Equifax.

ARNOLD: Now, people can conceivably get up to as much as $20,000. They got to document the time and what all this cost them. For many people, it’ll probably be a lot less. Also, if you spent money and time just signing up for preventive stuff, like credit monitoring or whatever else you had to do, the goal is that you will be compensated for that too. And they’ll pay – I think it’s $25 an hour for up to 20 hours that you had to deal with that.

SHAPIRO: I’m sure many people are asking, how do I get the money?

(LAUGHTER)

SHAPIRO: What do they have to do?

ARNOLD: I’m sure, since there were that many people involved in the breach, yes. There is a website, as there often is – equifaxbreachsettlement.com. I’m going to say that again because it’s radio – equifaxbreachsettlement.com. Assuming the court approves the settlement, people can go there. And they’ll tell you what to do. But you have to do this within the next six months to get compensation.

SHAPIRO: Within six months of court approval of the settlement.

ARNOLD: Right.

SHAPIRO: It’s always hard to get a sense of the magnitude of these penalties with huge, huge companies. Is $700 million viewed as a meaningful deterrent for a company as big as Equifax?

ARNOLD: Well, it depends on who you talk to. But with consumer advocates – not so much. We talked to Ed Mierzwinski with the nonprofit consumer advocacy group U.S. PIRG. He says, look. I mean, it’s great that people are getting some money back. That’s fantastic. But as far as a real effective deterrent…

ED MIERZWINSKI: I don’t think it’s a lot of money. I think it’s more of, hey, go away money rather than a real penalty or a punishment. And I think that’s a calculated bet by Equifax. They went in there and negotiated a parking ticket rather than a punishment.

ARNOLD: And at least some of the people affected by the breach feel the same way. We spoke with Jessamyn West from Randolph, Vt. Her information was stolen, she says. And here’s her reaction that people will be getting some money back.

JESSAMYN WEST: I mean, it’s garbage, right? Like, money isn’t going to solve this problem. Like, what we need is an overhaul of the way bank corporations are allowed to handle our personal information.

SHAPIRO: It’s interesting, Chris, that, like, Equifax wasn’t the hackers here, right? Equifax got hacked, and yet everybody wants to punish Equifax. There were hearings in Congress when news broke. Lawmakers were outraged. Explain why there was so much anger at the company that, in all likelihood, sees itself as the victim.

ARNOLD: Sure. You know, first, 150 million people – but what Equifax has in its sort of vaults of information is your credit score, which allows you to get a mortgage or a loan. They got your credit card numbers, your Social Security number. You know, and this exposed that they were not doing a good job keeping that safe.

SHAPIRO: And has any policy changed to prevent this from happening in the future?

ARNOLD: Well, very quickly, there has not been a major overhaul for regulating credit bureaus that may be coming, though. There is some bipartisan support. We should also say Equifax, in a statement, called today’s settlement, quote, “a positive step for U.S. consumers.”

SHAPIRO: NPR’s Chris Arnold, thanks a lot.

ARNOLD: Thanks, Ari.

(SOUNDBITE OF J BOOGIE’S DUBTRONIC SCIENCE SONG, “TRY ME”)

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