…..Reserve should likewise act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies. This makes it very hard for our manufactures & farmers to fairly export their goods. Lower Rates & Loosen – Fed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2019

NPR’s Don Gonyea speaks with the co-owners of Immigrant Food, Chef Enrique Limardo and Peter Schechter, about their new restaurant, which is located one block from the White House in Washington, D.C.

DON GONYEA, HOST:

Just before Thanksgiving, I broke away from my desk at NPR headquarters and headed to a new restaurant here in Washington that’s been getting some attention lately, mainly for its name and location.

We are one block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s right over there. The restaurant behind me is called Immigrant Food. It’s a place that celebrates the thousands of immigrants who have helped make D.C. the city it is, with flavors from Ethiopia, El Salvador, China, Iran, India. That’s just to name a few. So we wanted to find out more about this restaurant that refers to itself as cause casual, so we’ve come to chat with two of the co-owners. Let’s go in.

PETER SCHECHTER: We wanted to create a restaurant that wore pride of immigration and immigrants right on its sleeve, right on its name – you know, a celebration of the food and the gastronomies that immigrants brought to America throughout the centuries.

ENRIQUE LIMARDO: It’s like combining 20 restaurants in just one place.

GONYEA: That’s award-winning chef Enrique Limardo. He’s created the menu at Immigrant Food. We heard first from another co-owner, Peter Schechter. He’s a longtime political adviser and global policy expert. There’s a third co-owner as well, Ezequiel Vazquez-Ger. All three owners come from immigrant backgrounds. They opened the restaurant in part because of the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

SCHECHTER: We now live in a country where at least a portion of the country feels that sort of we’ve got to be closed to immigrants. And so we thought that it would be a wonderful thing to create a restaurant, in part because people unite around food. Our hashtag is #unitedatthetable.

GONYEA: The name is so simple it is almost generic. It is generic – Immigrant Food.

LIMARDO: Yeah. It’s Immigrant Food. It’s nothing more to say. That is exactly what we are doing here. So when Peter brought the idea, I just fall in love because as an immigrant from Venezuela, I just left my country because of the situations, political and economics. And I came to America because it’s the land of opportunities and pursuing the – you know, the American dream and all of that. So I just fall in love with the idea.

GONYEA: But we’re sitting here – as we said, the White House is only a block away. Immigration has become one of those issues that people argue about, and it seems the volume is so high. Do you try to stay clear of the politics? Are you embracing it? Are you taking another path?

SCHECHTER: We want very much that this restaurant be all about values. We’re trying to espouse a fundamental value because we believe that America’s story is the story of immigrants. And so we want to push those values forward because we believe that immigrants are fundamental not only to the past, to the law of what America is, but to the future of what America will be.

Americans continue to be the lifeblood, you know, of energy, the innovation. If you look at the Nobel science prizes that America has received, 40% of them have gone to people who were not born in America and immigrated to America. If you look at the CEOs of some of the companies that we love, whether it’s Tesla or Amazon, these are people who are either immigrants or whose parents were immigrants.

GONYEA: The restaurant is described as cause casual, in part because it also acts as an educational space. The owners donate meeting space within the restaurant to nonprofits dedicated to immigrant services.

SCHECHTER: The space we’re sitting in right now, the upstairs of the restaurant, is something that we will donate to the organizations for English classes or citizenship classes or board of director meetings – whatever they need.

GONYEA: Customers are also given the option to donate to these groups. At the end of the day, though, this is a restaurant with an award-winning chef running the kitchen. And he makes sure the food is also part of the conversation.

So in describing this place to people, I’ve been saying you can get Ethiopian, and you can get Salvadoran, you can get Iranian food. But I’m not correct in saying that. You can get those things, but they may not be in the form that you – yeah.

LIMARDO: One other thing that I always said – that we don’t want people just to attach the idea that it’s very traditional from Ethiopia, for example. Or this is what’s prepared by the nonna (ph), my nonna in Italy. No. We want that people just remind those flavors and reminds the idea from Italy or from Greece or from China or from Vietnam. And they are going to expect something very powerful because it’s the mixture of those cultures is very strong. And it’s a celebration in the palate. You know, it’s explosion in the palate.

GONYEA: And Limardo says this fusion of flavors works.

LIMARDO: It’s like chemistry. I just – with this challenge and this concept, I just realize in this point of my career that you can fusion almost everything if you use the right amount, and it’s going to be delicious.

GONYEA: Chef Enrique Limardo and Peter Schechter of Immigrant Food, a new restaurant just steps from the White House here in Washington, D.C.

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.

Toys R Us has reopened just two stores after a painful bankruptcy. This Black Friday will be its first under new ownership.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Could Geoffrey the giraffe be back in business? For decades, a visit to Toys R Us was an indispensable part of holiday shopping for kids. That is, until last year, when the company announced it would be closing its doors for good.

NPR’s Darius Rafieyan paid a visit to its new flagship store.

DARIUS RAFIEYAN, BYLINE: Like many people, Jennifer Bain has fond memories of running around a Toys R Us store.

JENNIFER BAIN: I was a Toys R Us kid when I was younger. I definitely wanted to make sure that that was part of my daughter’s life, and I was really sad to see it go.

RAFIEYAN: I met Bain here at the new Toys R Us flagship store in Paramus, N.J. It’s part of a plan to open 10 new stores over the next year.

(SOUNDBITE OF NERF GUN FIRING, LAUGHTER)

RAFIEYAN: Her 5-year-old daughter Charlotte is standing inside a plexiglass enclosure trying out the latest Nerf blaster.

How do you like it?

CHARLOTTE: I loved it. Can I do it again, mommy?

BAIN: Absolutely.

RAFIEYAN: This Nerf target range is part of what Toys R Us is calling experience-driven retail. The idea is to encourage kids to actually pick up the toys and play with them. The company doesn’t have hundreds of stores like Walmart or same-day delivery like Amazon, so it’s trying to compete on fun. That strategy is the brainchild of Richard Barry, a former Toys R Us executive and the current CEO of Tru Kids Brands, which now owns the Toys R Us name.

RICHARD BARRY: I’m a 34-year Toys R Us employee, so hearing that the company was going through the troubles was extremely distressing.

RAFIEYAN: The original Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy back in 2017 and was ultimately forced to close all of its stores, some 700 of them. That company had been slow to adapt to online shopping, and it struggled to manage a sprawling real estate portfolio of hundreds of underperforming stores. And all of that was made worse by a disastrous private equity buyout that left the company billions of dollars in debt.

Barry is hoping that this smaller, more immersive retail concept will help the new company avoid some of those pitfalls.

BARRY: This is a very different store from those of the past. It’s extremely experiential. We’ve got a treehouse. We have a theater in the store. Every different spot in the store has a place where you can engage with toys and products.

RAFIEYAN: But Liz Dunn, a retail analyst at Pro4ma, is skeptical. She says many brick-and-mortar retailers are trying to reinvent the shopping experience. Delivering something that actually gets people to put down their phones and come into a store can be easier said than done.

LIZ DUNN: Just calling it experiential is not enough. You have to really, really wow consumers.

RAFIEYAN: The new store has its fans, though. For Stacey Wilkins, who spoke to me as her 7-year-old ran around the treehouse, this new Toys R Us is a godsend.

STACEY WILKINS: We needed a toy store like this, especially – my son is autistic. So being able to play and build and make things and let them be able to use their creativity is a wonderful thing.

RAFIEYAN: But if the company wants to avoid the fate of its predecessor, it still needs to show it can turn all that fun into actual sales.

Darius Rafieyan, NPR News, Paramus.

(SOUNDBITE OF PHOENIX’S “DEFINITIVE BREAKS”)

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.

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case that involved both a 300-year-old pirate ship — and a contemporary fight between two powerful forces: states’ rights and property rights.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case that involved both a 300-year-old pirate ship and a contemporary fight between two powerful forces in American law. Jacob Goldstein from our Planet Money podcast explains.

JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: The ship belonged to the pirate Blackbeard. It sunk off the coast of North Carolina in the early 18th century. The person who brought the case to the Supreme Court is an underwater videographer named Rick Allen. Allen started filming the excavation of Blackbeard’s ship in the late 1990s.

RICK ALLEN: The first time I went down, it was like climbing into a washing machine, filling it with tea or coffee and then turning it on. There’s a lot of current. The visibility’s terrible. So I didn’t see a lot of the wreck. I just pretty much hung on for dear life.

GOLDSTEIN: But year after year for more than a decade, Allen kept diving and filming there.

ALLEN: We’re probably talking about 1,000, 2,000 hours on the wreck site.

GOLDSTEIN: The rights to the ship were owned by the state of North Carolina. Rick Allen had signed a deal where he would pay for the filming out of his own pocket, and he would own the copyright to the footage so he could license it to museums and for documentaries. The legal trouble started in 2013 when, Allen says, the state started posting his pictures and videos without his permission. The fight wound up in the Supreme Court this fall.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN ROBERTS: We’ll hear argument next in Case 18-877, Allen v. Cooper.

GOLDSTEIN: Allen’s argument relied heavily on a law Congress passed in 1990. It was called the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act. And the law said that federal copyright law applies to state governments just the same way it applies to everybody else. In other words, if a state posts your videos without permission, you can sue the state for damages just like you can sue anybody else.

North Carolina’s counterargument came down to this. That federal law Allen is relying on – it is unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court should strike it down. The state’s lawyer, Ryan Park, articulated the basis for North Carolina’s case in the first three words of his argument.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RYAN PARK: State sovereign immunity is a fundamental feature of our Constitution’s structure.

GOLDSTEIN: State sovereign immunity – that’s it. That is North Carolina’s whole case, and it is a pretty strong case – strong enough to make it all the way to the Supreme Court. So here is what state sovereign immunity means. State just means any state in the union. Sovereign immunity means in most circumstances, you are not allowed to sue the federal government or state governments for money damages.

Ryan Park, North Carolina’s lawyer, suggested that sovereign immunity really does come down to money.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PARK: I think the important understanding that the founders had is that when you sue a sovereign, on the opposite side of the judgment are the people and the people’s money.

GOLDSTEIN: When you’re suing the state, you are suing the people. You’re suing for taxpayer dollars. And Park is saying we, the people of North Carolina – not the federal government – should be allowed to decide when and whether we are on the hook for damages in court.

In the end, this case comes down to a fight between states’ rights – North Carolina’s sovereign immunity – and property rights – Rick Allen’s copyrights on the videos of Blackbeard’s ship. A decision in the case is expected sometime before the end of the court’s term next June.

Jacob Goldstein, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAWN AVERY’S “ZUSESKA (SNAKE) BATTLE”)

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.

Uber is fighting for survival in London after the city’s transportation agency said it would not renew the company’s operating license, citing safety concerns. This adds to a difficult year for Uber.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Uber has been stripped of its license to operate in one of its most important cities, London. The city’s transportation agency says Uber put passengers at risk through a pattern of failures. The decision is another big blow for the company in what has already been a difficult year. NPR’s tech correspondent Shannon Bond reports.

SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: London is one of Uber’s biggest markets. It’s one of five cities around the world where the ride-hailing company takes in a quarter of its fares from customers.

DANIEL IVES: London’s the heart and lungs of its European operations, biggest city in Europe.

BOND: Daniel Ives is an analyst at Wedbush Securities. By his estimate, the British capital accounts for 3- to 5% of Uber’s total ride-hailing sales. But that’s now at risk of vanishing.

Transport for London, the city’s transit agency, says it won’t renew the license Uber needs to run its car service there. The British agency says Uber doesn’t meet its standard of being a, quote, “fit and proper” company. The agency says unauthorized drivers manipulated Uber systems to upload their own photos to other drivers’ accounts. That resulted in 14,000 uninsured trips where passengers had no idea their driver had not been vetted by Uber. In at least one case, a driver whose license had been revoked was still able to drive for Uber.

Uber says it has fixed the flaw that allowed this to happen. It says it’s introducing facial matching in London to confirm drivers’ identities. But Uber has had safety issues for years as it has raced to grow quickly.

Ives, the analyst, says the British agency’s action against Uber reflects a big problem.

IVES: Safety is the lifeblood of Uber. If consumers don’t feel safe within the platform, there’s much broader issues.

BOND: For Uber, what’s at risk is not just the money it makes in London. It’s the precedent that could be followed by other big cities.

Bradley Tusk is a former adviser to Uber who helped the company fight regulations in New York in its early days. He still owns Uber shares.

BRADLEY TUSK: For a company that’s already struggling financially, this is yet another difficult blow. But beyond that, London is one of the most widely seen cities in the world, and what happens in London is noticed everywhere.

BOND: The London license denial is just the latest black eye for Uber this year. For example, the company has had to limit how many drivers it has in New York after losing a legal battle with the city. Uber is already losing billions of dollars a year, and its stock price has fallen sharply from when the company started trading publicly in May.

Ives, the analyst, says it’s tough to be an Uber shareholder.

IVES: Since the IPO, it’s really been a horror movie. And I think this is something that investors are starting to get more and more frustrated with the company, and this latest London issue is another overhang now over the Uber stock.

BOND: Uber says it will appeal the decision. In the meantime, its 45,000 London drivers will still be picking up passengers while the company fights to stay in the city.

Shannon Bond, NPR News.

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.