Starbucks has come full circle.

More than three decades ago, during a trip to Milan, Howard Schultz was inspired to turn the coffeehouse chain into a space that served as a community gathering place. Now Schultz, the company’s CEO, has announced Starbucks is opening its first location in Italy, in the heart of Milan’s city center.

One might think Italian coffeehouses would be shaken by the looming arrival of this global java giant. But many are saying, bring it on.

Set to open in late 2018, Starbucks’ first outpost in the espresso motherland will be a Roastery, one of its higher-end, sprawling locations where beans are roasted in-house and visitors can witness the entire coffee-making process, from green beans to finished cup. Roastery locations also feature drinks not found at regular Starbucks, like the Shakerato, an espresso shaken with ice and a dash of demerara syrup.

The Milan Roastery will be housed in the historic Palazzo Delle Poste building, in Piazza Cordusio, just a three-minute walk from the core of the city’s financial district.

Schultz traveled to Milan for the first time in 1983. At that time, he was the marketing director for Starbucks. Experiencing Italy’s robust, centuries’ old coffee culture, with baristas preparing espresso in Milan coffeehouses, was eye-opening for Schultz. It influenced his whole concept for the Starbucks brand.

“I was overwhelmed with a gut instinct that this is what we should be doing,” Schultz later recalled.

So why did it take Starbucks more than 30 years to come back where it all began?

Partly, the delay was out of “our deep respect for the Italian people and their rich heritage and culture around the art of coffee,” a Starbucks spokesperson told NPR in an email. “We are coming to Italy to learn from the best, but also to bring our own unique offer to the Italian consumer: a third place between home and work to take time and enjoy a perfectly crafted cup of coffee. We believe that there is a strong consumer base in Italy.”

As a native Italian, I should note that bars, establishments where you can get both coffee drinks and the alcoholic stuff, have long offered a “third place” in everyday life for my fellow countrymen and women (and for me).

Working with Italian licensee and business partner Percassi, Starbucks will also open “a small number” of regular coffeehouses in Milan for the balance of 2018, the company said. All told, Starbucks says the stores will create around 350 jobs in Italy.

One thing is for sure: Starbucks will face fierce competition. There are some 149,300 bars in Italy, according to the 2016 annual report issued by Federazione Italiana Pubblici Esercizi (FIPE), an Italian network of 300,000 companies in the catering, restaurant, tourism and entertainment industry. Italy is home to almost 61 million people, which means there’s one bar per 406 citizens.

“Frankly, I’d be more wary of the Italian bars in my neighborhood than of Starbucks’ diluted coffee,” says Cristian Marone, co-manager of Bar dei Bossi, a coffeehouse that opened three years ago in Milan, a four-minute walk from Starbucks’ forthcoming Roastery location in Piazza Cordusio. “If I ever went to Starbucks, I would feel like a number, not a customer. In our bar, customer care is crucial.”

Eleonora Fornaciari, owner of Milan’s Caffè Rivoli, is also saying come at me. “Traditional espresso and cappuccino are deeply rooted in our Italian culture,” says Fornaciari. Starbucks’ fancy drinks may appeal to foreigners and curious Italians, but it will never displace authentic Italian coffee.

Plus, pricing will have a big impact on Starbucks’ success, she says. According to Fornaciari, customers who order a pastry and a cappuccino while standing in an Italian bar in the Piazza Cordusio area can expect to pay around $3. In the U.S., by contrast, a Starbucks Grande Cappuccino by itself can cost $3.95 before tax.

“Clerks working in that part of the city couldn’t afford prices like that,” Fornaciari says. “Although executives and lawyers working in Piazza Cordusio could.”

One might suppose that another coffeehouse owner, Vito Bossi, 60, would feel most threatened by the coming of Starbucks to Milan. Bossi’s coffeehouse, Bar Cordusio, is located right in front of the Palazzo delle Poste building, where Starbucks will open.

But Bossi almost looks forward to the opening, because, he says, he and Starbucks aren’t really in the same business.

“We’re an Italian bar,” Bossi says proudly. “In Italy, few people love Starbucks’ products.” The presence of the establishment, though, will attract more customers and tourists.

“There’s going to be business for both of us,” he says.

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The private company SpaceX has announced that it plans to send two passengers on a mission beyond the moon in late 2018.

If the mission goes forward, it would be the “first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the days of Apollo,” as NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce told our Newscast unit.

The two private citizens approached the company about the idea and have already paid a sizable deposit, CEO Elon Musk told reporters in a conference call. These private individuals will also bear the cost of the mission.

“I think this should be a really exciting mission that hopefully gets the world really excited about sending people into deep space again,” Musk said. As the company puts it: “This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the solar system than any before them.”

The plan for this private mission is to send the two people to loop around the moon and then return to Earth. They will not land on the moon’s surface.

As Nell explained, SpaceX “builds rockets and capsules that have taken cargo to the International Space Station for NASA.” SpaceX plans to use its Falcon Heavy rocket, which is set to launch its first test flight this summer. Next year, prior to the moon mission, it plans to start crewed missions by taking NASA astronauts up to the ISS.

That’s a lot of ground to cover before this mission can take place, as George Washington University’s John Logsdon, an expert in space policy and history, told Nell.

“Introducing this into the mix raises a fair amount of questions, but it’s an exciting prospect,” Logsdon said. “SpaceX is notorious or notable, depending on how you want to think about it, for setting very ambitious schedules and usually not meeting them.” He added that historically, SpaceX has eventually followed through on what it said it was going to do.

The moon mission vehicle is designed to be automated, Musk told reporters, but the passengers will be trained in emergency procedures in case there is a problem.

The individuals involved in the mission “are entering with their eyes open knowing that there is some risk here,” Musk said.

NASA has congratulated SpaceX on “reaching higher.” In a statement, the agency said:

“NASA is changing the way it does business through its commercial partnerships to help build a strong American space economy and free the agency to focus on developing the next-generation rocket, spacecraft and systems to go beyond the moon and sustain deep space exploration.”

SpaceX has seen some recent setbacks, including multiple delays launching and docking a capsule on the International Space Station earlier this month. It succeeded last week.

SpaceX said other potential customers have also expressed interest and it expects to launch further missions.

And it’s worth noting that this is far from the most ambitious goal that Musk has proposed. Last September, he unveiled plans to colonize Mars by sending at least 1 million humans there to establish a self-sustaining city.

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The Indonesian island of Java has long been synonymous with coffee. But it’s only in the past decade or so that Indonesians have begun to wake up and smell the coffee — their own, that is.

Big changes are brewing in the country’s coffee industry, as demand from a rising middle class fuels entrepreneurship and connoisseurship.

The trend is clear at places like the Anomali Coffee shop in South Jakarta. It roasts its coffee just inside the entrance on the ground floor.

If you walk into the roasting room at just the right moment, as the heat caramelizes the sugars in the coffee beans, it smells like someone is baking cookies.

Get close to the roasting machine, and you can hear the beans snap and pop. “It is the bean expanding because of the heat of the core,” explains Anomali’s founder Irvan Helmi.

Anomali Coffee includes a trading company that wholesales to hotels and other businesses. It also has a barista training academy.

And upstairs from the roasting ovens is one of its seven cafes. On a table, bags of beans from a half-dozen single origins are on sale. A blackboard ranks the beans in terms of their acidity and body.

“In Toraja, you also have a medium body, chocolaty and caramel, herbs,” Irvan says, picking up a bag of beans from Sulawesi Island.

Indonesia’s more than 17,000 islands teem with cultural diversity, and more plant and animal species than researchers can catalog.

Little wonder, then, that from Aceh in the west to Papua in the east, the archipelago has more coffees than Irvan’s tasters can get around to tasting.

“From Aceh alone, we have more than 100 samples each season,” Irvan says. “Can you imagine?”

Anomali sells coffees from nine single origins at a time. Irvan reckons he has sourced coffee from about 100 single origins since founding his company a decade ago.

“We put a score on it for each season,” he says, “and we select which coffee we want to bring for our customers.”

Then comes a slew of different procedures and techniques, from the way the beans are dried and hulled to the time and temperature at which the they’re roasted, and the way they are ground and brewed to bring out their characteristic flavors.

Irvan notes that Indonesian coffees are known for their “earthiness” and body. Indonesians often drink these coffees black, and therefore, he says, they don’t need the dark roast and acidity needed to be tasted above all the milk and syrup added to them in Western-style cafes.

Colonialists started growing coffee in what was then the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century. After parasites decimated plantations of Arabica beans in the 1880s, the Dutch introduced the hardier Robusta variety, which continues to account for most of Indonesia’s crop today.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest producer of coffee after Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia, and it exports more than it consumes.

But Irvan explains that this has been changing in recent years, as demand from Indonesia’s growing middle class has taken off, and improved logistics have helped build a thriving, archipelago-wide market.

And that’s where Irvan saw his chance.

“The mission becomes clear,” he declares, “to promote Indonesian coffee as a curator.”

Irvan acknowledges the contribution of Starbucks to the Indonesian market. He jokingly calls the Seattle-based chain his “marketing department,” as it has the financial muscle to penetrate new and remote cities and give local consumers an introduction to authentic espressos, cappuccinos and the like.

Irvan says most coffee companies blend different coffees together to make a consistent product. But each of Anomali’s coffees comes from a single origin.

“We don’t care about consistency,” he sniffs. “If it’s a high quality, we want it.”

So you could say that each of their coffees is, well, an anomaly. “That’s the big difference between Anomali and the mass market,” he says. “And we’re very proud of it.”

Mirza Luqman Effendy, a friend and colleague of Irvan’s who runs a café called Brewphobia (something he got over a long time ago), explains to me that younger Indonesians have different tastes in coffee from their parents’ generation.

“The fact is, my father is a coffee addict,” Mirza says. “He really likes very intense coffee, like Robusta, roasted very dark, and then basically he drinks coffee with putting some sugar and ginger.”

He says that recipe is way too old-school for him: “My father’s coffee is just like … coffee. You cannot taste any attributes besides the coffee taste.”

But Mirza tastes so much more in a cup than just coffee. He hones in on the attributes of each bean, the notes of citrus and spice, the feel on his palate and the lingering aftertaste.

Of course, it’s young people like Irvan and Mirza, sharing their passion for coffee, that drives the coffee scene in many countries.

But with its rich variety of beans and long history of cultivation, Indonesia is building a coffee culture — and a pride in it — that is truly homegrown.

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For more than a decade, Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S., Salem al-Sabah, has held a gala event every Feb. 25 to celebrate his country’s national day. The annual holiday commemorates the tiny Gulf state’s independence from British rule in 1961. Traditionally, the event has been held at the Four Seasons Hotel, in the heart of Washington, D.C.

But Sabah says he feels his guests have wanted a change. Last year, he held the celebration at the Newseum. For this year, he and his wife, Rima, looked into the newly opened Trump International Hotel as another possibility.

“It’s like a new restaurant opens in your neighborhood and you want to try it, and you hear good reviews about it and you want to go and see it,” Sabah tells NPR.

He says he and his wife realized it was a great place for holding events. “We found that it’s a great venue for our national day reception,” he says.

The Kuwaiti embassy canceled a “save the date” reservation with the Four Seasons and booked instead with the Trump hotel, a few blocks from the White House, for 600 guests. The event was held, Wednesday, Feb. 22.

Sabah says he has taken heat for moving the location, including suggestions that Kuwait is trying to curry favor with the new U.S. president, something he rejects.

“That is honestly absurd,” he says. “If people think that for us to rent a ballroom for two hours in a hotel is going to swing open the doors to the White House for us, it’s an absurd line of thinking.”

Sabah says he was under no pressure by the Trump administration to use the hotel. He says people should look at what Kuwait is doing for the U.S., rather than the other way around.

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Middle Eastern countries including Kuwait, says that country is the linchpin in the U.S. Gulf security strategy.

“There are thousands of U.S. forces in that country,” he says. “We operate on two Kuwaiti air bases, and the headquarters for the entire anti-Islamic State campaign is in Kuwait.”

Crocker says the problem isn’t Kuwait’s national day celebration — instead, it’s that there are properties all over the world bearing President Trump’s name. And any time a foreign government holds a reception or rents rooms at a Trump hotel, it opens up speculation about conflicts of interest.

Norm Eisen, an ethics expert at the Brookings Institution, says Trump is also violating the Constitution — which says a president cannot accept gifts or benefits by a foreign country.

“That’s what the framers put in the Constitution in the emoluments clause, because they were so worried about swag, any kind of swag, coming to an American president just for the reasons … that it would distort presidential decision-making to benefit himself,” Eisen says.

Trump’s attorney, Sheri Dillon, said at a press conference last month that the president has a way around that.

“He is going to voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotels to the United States Treasury,” she said.

NPR sent requests to the White House and the Trump Organization asking how they plan to account for the profits from events involving foreign governments, and how donation to the U.S. Treasury will be documented. The NPR requests received no response.

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Every spring convoys of trucks arrive in the almond orchards of central California. They are carrying bees. Millions of them.

They arrive from all over the country, but especially southern states like Louisiana, and they have to get there at just the right time, when the almond trees start to flower so the bees can pollinate hundreds of acres of almond fields.

But why make the 2,000 mile trek from the South instead of raising bees right in the Central Valley? It comes down to comparative advantage. Louisiana has better conditions for bees. It’s warm, green and there are plenty of flowers for the bees. And California has the edge in almond growing.

The journey has it’s own set of challenges. Not least of which is, you can’t stop during the day or the bees try to escape.

Today on the show, how bees keep our produce sections stocked with fruit.

Music: “Turquoise Sun” and “Cheyenne Shuffle.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Subscribe to our show on iTunes or PocketCast.

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New Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era memo that directed the Justice Department to reduce the use of private prisons, NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports

Sessions writes in the order that returning to the Bureau of Prisons’ earlier approach would provide flexibility.

“The memorandum changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system,” Sessions writes.

Outside companies currently house about 21,000 inmates for the Justice Department, the agency reports, down from a peak of 30,000. The overall federal prison population has been falling in recent years because of changes in how some low-level offenders are sentenced.

In announcing a phasing out of private-prison use in August, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote that the outside companies’ facilities were less safe, more expensive, and “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources.”

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This episode originally ran in 2015.

In 1980, Fidel Castro had a problem. The Cuban economy was in shambles. And there was open dissent in his tightly controlled country. People wanted to leave.

Castro said they didn’t ‘have revolutionary blood.’ So he decided, you know what? If you don’t like it here, you can leave. Get on any boat you can find at the port of Mariel, near Havana.

Over the next few months, more than 100,000 Cubans left the island on fishing boats, sailboats, and makeshift rafts, for Miami, just over 120 miles away.

When they arrived, they didn’t have a jobs, and most just had the clothes on their back.

And the U.S. was thinking, now what?

Today on the show, what happened to Florida when thousands of migrants showed up, and what that tells us about immigration.

Music “Feeeel It” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Subscribe to our show on iTunes or PocketCast.

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The 114th North American International Toy Fair boosts a chance for industry players to see “hundreds of thousands of innovative new toys and games before they hit store shelves.”

To attend the four-day event in New York City must be a lot like being a kid in a candy store — er — make that toy store.

At the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, hundreds of thousands of square feet are dedicated to the “hottest new toys and trends.”

“Many of the toys and games displayed here are being seen for the very first time — and are likely to top kids’ birthday and holiday wish lists throughout the coming year,” said Steve Parierb, president and CEO of the U.S. Toy Industry Association.

In a statement, industry officials said, “Last year, U.S. toy sales grew 5% and are estimated to be $26 billion. The industry supports more than half a million American jobs and has a total U.S. economic impact of more than $80 billion.”

But not everything is bright and shiny for toy retailers — toy shopping is shifting from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers.

Toys R Us is one retailer struggling with that change. The company last week laid off between 10 and 15 percent of its corporate employees.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“About 250 jobs were eliminated at the Wayne, N.J.-based company, people familiar with the matter said. The layoffs were announced Friday, a day before the toy industry’s annual convention kicked off in New York.”

Amy Von Walter, a spokeswoman for Toys R Us told news organizations:

“The recent changes are not just about cost-containment — our growth plans require us to have the right structure, talent and determination to transform our business and achieve the financial objectives we’ve set for the company.”

Forbes magazine reports that “multiple factors are contributing to the problems at Toys “R” Us or TRU:

People simply aren’t trekking to the malls that previously helped the toy chain dominate. Plus, savvy competitors like Walmart and Target have tripled their toy aisles & seasonal offerings during holiday season, allowing customers to cross TRU off the store list.

Amazon also cuts into sales as a major competitor, but it’s particularly painful as Toys “R” Us has historically had trouble getting products to customers. In 2015, they ran out of on-site goods which prompted TRU to try a new inventory algorithm, but ecommerce fulfillment issues were created as they underestimated holiday volume.

Other toy companies, and retailers in general, didn’t do as well as expected during the holiday season.

Toy’s R Us CEO David Brandon told The Wall Street Journal, “Like other primarily brick-and-mortar retailers, Toys “R” Us had trouble attracting enough shoppers to stores during the critical holiday season as e-commerce sales continued to pick up speed.”

The International Toy Fair closes later today. By the time the 2018 show opens, the industry will have a better idea of how retailers adjusted to the lessons learned from this past holiday season’s disappointing sales.

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This week the chief of Facebook made an ambitious announcement, though it would have been easy to miss. It came Thursday afternoon – around the same time that President Donald Trump held his press conference. While the reality-TV icon is a genius at capturing our attention, the technology leader’s words may prove to be more relevant to our lives, and more radical.

Mark Zuckerberg posted a nearly 6000-word essay to his page, entitled “Building Global Community.” Many are calling it a “manifesto.” His ambitions are global and his tone, altruistic. Zuckerberg writes: “Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses — like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics.”

Zuckerberg speaks to people who dream of global citizenship, a borderless utopia that many political leaders around the world don’t seem to be offering. “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”

And to build this global community, he encourages us to shift how we think about Facebook: stop looking at the app as a means of recreation. Instead, think of it as the way you connect to others – for work or for play. You can use it as a medium to let the world know about your startup or to recruit parishioners to your church or to announce your presidential campaign or to manage a multinational disaster relief effort. “Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall,” he writes. He adds that the strengthening of “meaningful online communities” will “strengthen our social fabric.”

It sounds noble, but behind that alluring vision is a profound power grab delivered by a savvy politician, say critics. At its core, Zuckerberg’s essay reads like a call to give up our open access to the Internet and the freedom that exists in a marketplace with real competition. Rather, Facebook wants us to step into its walled garden – where a handful of company chieftains set the rules – and live our social, economic, and religious lives inside it.

What he doesn’t address in his essay, however, are the responsibilities that come with this power.

Take for example, disaster relief. A well-intentioned non-profit could try to use Facebook to let refugees fleeing conflict know about safe places to go to for food and water. Now, a group of human traffickers, posing as well-meaning citizens, could do the same. What kinds of resources will Facebook invest in verifying what’s real versus fake?

Zuckerberg’s lofty goals require profound trust in his platform. And there are two industries – journalism and small advertisers – whose recent experiences with Facebook illustrate the dangers of over-trusting.

Journalists have been surprised to learn that Facebook is concerned with driving engagement – not to be confused with civic engagement. The algorithm that determines what you see in your Newsfeed prioritizes content that people want to share and comment on, even if it’s a lie. Consider how fake news influenced the presidential campaign of 2016. One such story that went viral last fall claimed the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.

If Facebook valued real journalism – where resources are poured into the expensive business of fact-checking – its corporate leaders could have decided to implement a simple solution to fake news: make the source for news stories more prominent (so I don’t have to strain my eyes to see if it’s the New York Times or the National Inquirer). Facebook already does that for celebrities, through the blue verification checkmark that tells you the platform has verified and confirmed the true identity of the person.

Imagine if Facebook had visually obvious verification for links that come from trusted news outlets. It would do an enormous public service. Facebook’s current corporate approach to fact-checking links is crowd-sourcing. Let the users flag suspicious content. It’s a system susceptible to warring factions sabotaging each other. And it’s not clear from the manifesto that Zuckerberg is willing to change the model to one that pays for essential human capital – far more expensive than software solutions.

Small advertisers have been discussed far less but probably have the best insight into Facebook’s volatility as a platform. Say I decide to start a page for my tire shop on the site. For the first year, I pay Facebook $5,000 to advertise and the Facebook algorithm shows my posts to all my “followers.” But the next year, the company decides to change the rules and say: for $5,000 we will show your posts to 20% of fans. If you want to reach the same number you did last year, you have to pay more.

These kinds of rule changes – some with dramatic financial implications – regularly occur on the platform. (See for example this change last April that severely limited which users are allowed to post commercial content.) They occur without a user vote and without a public comment period.

Right after CEO Zuckerberg posted his manifesto, NPR emailed the company to ask about the new responsibilities that will come with the hoped-for new power Facebook seeks. If Facebook wants people to rely on the platform as the tool to build important social ties online, what guarantees can Facebook give for its own accountability? Can it at least offersomething as basic as a customer service hotline, for example? Currently many users who are expelled without clear explanation or who have small business pages removed find it impossible to reach a human at the company for help. A spokesperson did not answer the question, and simply shared the company’s press release summarizing Zuckerberg’s points.

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