Recent Entries

Federal prosecutors in Tennessee have notified an 85-year-old nun they will not seek to reinstate her sabotage conviction for breaking into a nuclear facility.

It's All Politics

Court Throws Out Nun's Sabotage Conviction For Nuclear Site Break-In

Law

Supporters Say Imprisoned Nun Is Being Held In 'Unfair' Conditions

Defense lawyer Marc Shapiro, who is handling the case pro bono for Sister Megan Rice and two male accomplices, told NPR Monday he got word from the U.S. attorney's office in Knoxville that the Justice Department would not seek a rehearing by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and nor would it ask the Supreme Court to review the case. Last month, a three-judge panel threw out the sabotage conviction, ruling that the defendants' 2012 protest in Oak Ridge, Tenn., did nothing to injure the national defense.

Within days of that ruling, authorities released Rice from a detention center in Brooklyn. Two others who took part in the disruption also were set free. Shapiro, their lawyer, said all three already had served more time than necessary given their conviction on the most serious charge had been rejected by the appeals court. He said the lower court had not yet set a date for resentencing any of the defendants.

Rice's treatment behind bars drew attention this year after her supporters in the anti-nuclear movement reported she had lost a tooth and was being housed in unfair conditions.

European leaders hold an emergency summit in Brussels on Monday in an effort to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debts. Greece owes the International Monetary Fund $1.8 billion by the end of this month, and it needs Europe's help to make the payment. But the Athens government is refusing to commit to an economic overhaul package that officials are demanding.

Greece has come close to default many times before — only to work out a last-minute compromise with its creditors. This time, though, it faces much longer odds.

"This is a real deadline, unlike the others because we really are at the end of the road," says Jacob Kierkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Greece desperately needs Europe's help to roll over some big debt payments coming due. But the Athens government has strenuously rejected Europe's demands for further tax increases and pension cuts.

Over the weekend, Athens made a last-ditch effort to resolve the dispute with what it called a mutually beneficial proposal to European officials. It provided no details. But relations between Greece's leftist government and its creditors are chilly at best right now. And neither side seems inclined or able to budge much.

"There is now a dire risk of markets bringing forward the day of reckoning for Greece, leaving little room for pushing off the end game any further," says economist Eswar Prasad of Cornell University.

The concern in the markets is the recent surge of withdrawals from Greek banks. Many Greek citizens are worried that without the European Central Bank's backing, Greek banks will no longer be liquid enough to keep operating. And the government might have to impose capital controls to prevent a run.

The Peterson Institute's Jacob Kierkegaard says that if no agreement is reached at Monday's summit in Brussels, Greece may even have to shut down its banks altogether.

"It is quite likely that the Greek banks will not open up Tuesday morning, or at least open up with some variations of restrictions on access to the bank deposits," Peterson says.

He adds people and businesses would no longer be able to access their funds, and that would lead to a sharp deterioration in Greece's already weakened economy.

The emergency summit in Brussels is an attempt to prevent that kind of disaster and pull Greece back from the brink — yet again.

On potential misconceptions about Filipino workers

There's an over-arching sense of [overseas Filipino workers] as the heroes and saints of their families, who are making this huge sacrifice — which, of course, they are — of being apart from the people they love in order to support those same people. And I was curious about where some of these characters ... hew to that narrative and where they kind of go off script as well.

On unlikely friendships among migrants

When people are sort of thrown together in a place that's strange or foreign to them, Filipinos who maybe would not have socialized with each other back in Manila spend all their free time socializing with each other and kind of lean on each other and feel a responsibility to each other.

Book Reviews

Morally Messy Stories, Exquisitely Told, In Mia Alvar's 'In The Country'

Book Reviews

We're All Looking For A Home 'In The Country'

On writing in the second person

I think the second person is just polarizing for understandable reasons. People don't like being told that they are someone they're not, or that they're doing something that they definitely aren't. It can come across in ... almost an aggressive way.

And I sort of decided that I was OK, in this particular story, with aggressively insisting that the person reading identify with [the main character], whose real-life counterpart might not have time to read a literary short story collection.

I think the second person kind of speaks to the desire to have someone identify with this character, and also the impossibility of it.

Read an excerpt of In the Country

Philippines

Islamic State militants have sown landmines around ancient ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra, captured by the Islamist group in May, according to a British-based monitoring group.

It wasn't clear, however, whether the move is a prelude to destroying the Roman-era sites or securing them from Syrian government forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says.

"They have planted it yesterday. They also planted some around the Roman theatre, we still do not know the real reason," Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Observatory, told Reuters.

Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria's head of antiquities, told Reuters that the reports of Islamic State planting bombs in Palmyra "seems true."

"The city is a hostage in their hands, the situation is dangerous," he told the news agency.

Since ISIS seized the city last month, there have been fears that the group would destroy the ancient city's historic treasures as happened in Mosul in February.

The BBC writes: "Government forces are reported to be planning a bid to recapture the site," quoting Abdulrahman as saying that Syrian soldiers outside the city had brought in reinforcements in recent days "suggesting they may be planning an operation."

"He said government forces had also launched heavy air strikes against the residential part of Palmyra in the past three days, killing at least 11 people."

palmyra

Islamic State

When he first moved to Los Angeles, he worked as a garbage truck driver.

He's acted in Westerns alongside John Wayne — even though he couldn't ride a horse.

His big break was acting in Dos Equis beer commercials.

He is Jonathan Goldsmith ... the actor who plays "The Most Interesting Man in the World."

As it turns out, Goldsmith is pretty interesting himself.

The garbage truck driver-turned-Hollywood actor got his start with small parts in western movies.

"It wasn't easy," Goldsmith says. "Jewish boys that grow up in New York are not that adept at riding horses."

He lied his way into a part on the TV show, Gunsmoke. After director Marc Daniels hired him for a role on the show, he asked Goldsmith if he could ride a horse.

"I say, 'Like the wind, sir, without breaking stride.' Well, I had never been on a horse in my life," Goldsmith says.

When he glanced at the script, he realized he was in trouble. In Goldsmith's scene, he was supposed to vault on horseback and gallop into the night.

"As soon as I got on — the horses know," he says. "Off he went. Everyone's screaming at me, 'Turn him, turn him around.' Well, I think I'm breaking the poor horse's neck ... Every time we went round and round this wonderful, old director Marc Daniels, he looked at me, followed me, [and he] says, 'Like the wind, huh?' "

He stuck with westerns fora while, from a small part in The Shootist with John Wayne to Hang 'Em High with Clint Eastwood. In later film and television appearances, Goldsmith says he was typecast as the villain.

"All I ever wanted to do was comedy, but that was not available to me," he says. "Until the Dos Equis commercials."

It was at a time when Goldsmith was trying to resurrect his film career. He had left the industry and was working in the business world when he received a call from his then-agent, now wife, Barbara.

She suggested he try out for a commercial, playing a "Hemingway-ish character." It would be improvised and he'd have to end with the sentence, "And that's how I arm wrestled Fidel Castro."

He arrived at the audition and, to his surprise, was surrounded by hundreds of young, Latino actors.

i

Goldsmith says actor Fernando Lamas was his inspiration for "The Most Interesting Man in the World." The two had become sailing buddies and Goldsmith perfected an impression of him. Archive Photos/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Archive Photos/Getty Images

Goldsmith says actor Fernando Lamas was his inspiration for "The Most Interesting Man in the World." The two had become sailing buddies and Goldsmith perfected an impression of him.

Archive Photos/Getty Images

"The line is out into the street. And I said, 'Oh boy,' " Goldsmith says. "If they're looking at these Latino guys, I better put on an accident."

The voice of the late Argentine-born actor, Fernando Lamas, instantly popped into his head. The two were sailing buddies and good friends, and Goldsmith had perfected an impression of him.

"So I thought about him and how funny he was and how charming and a great raconteur, so I put on my best Fernando imitation," Goldsmith says. "And they started laughing."

Barbara received a call from Joe Blake, the casting director. He told Barbara that they loved Goldsmith's performance, but they felt like they had to go younger.

"And in her infinite wisdom, she took a long pause and she said, 'Joe, how can the most interesting man in the world be young?' He said, 'I'll get back to you.' "

Soon after, the casting director called back. He got the part. It was Goldsmith's big break.

"At a time where many of my friends who have had far more credits than I have, were in the twilight of their career, it just started for me," he says.

"It only took 50 years. An overnight success."

We want to hear about your big break. Send us an email at mybigbreak@npr.org.

Four months after Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, one of the al-Qaida leader's sons requested a death certificate for his father in a letter to the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia, according to documents released by Wikileaks.

The reply, dated Sept. 9, 2011, comes from the consul general at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh and says that no certificate of death was issued. "This is consistent with regular practice for individuals killed in the course of military operations," the letter, from embassy Consul General Glen Keiser, reads.

According to Wikileaks release, Keiser wrote that instead Abdullah bin Laden could rely on a document requesting the dismissal of a criminal indictment against his father in U.S. federal court "in light of his death."

"I am providing a copy of the original English-language request to the court," the letter reads, ending: "I hope that these U.S. Government documents are of assistance to you and your family."

The letter is part of a release of 500,000 documents related to Saudi Arabia that Wikileaks is in the process of publishing. Some 60,000 – most in Arabic — have already been published, according to a statement by the website.

Pakistan

Saudi Arabia

Al-Qaida

Osama bin Laden

HBO's new comedy The Brink refers to a world on the brink of nuclear warfare — possibly one of the least-funny premises imaginable. But the two brothers who created the show cut their teeth on a particular kind of political scripted satire that had its heyday in the 1960s and '70s. Think Dr. Strangelove, M*A*S*H and Network and other films by Paddy Chayefsky.

"All movies that had a lot on their mind," says Roberto Benabib. He's the older brother, best-known for writing and producing the TV show Weeds. His younger brother, Kim Benabib, is also a writer. Their show is something of a response to the workplace and family-based sitcoms that seem so prevalent now and to the notion that sitcoms have generally ceded political satire to fake news programs, like The Daily Show, and sketch comedy. They wanted to put the situation room back in situation comedy.

Television

HBO's New Sunday Lineup Is Full Of Pleasant Surprises

"The show is about geopolitics," Roberto explains, "but it's also about nuclear proliferation."

The Brink tackles three main threads: the goings-on in a U.S. government filled with clueless ideologues, the struggles of fighter pilots living on a military carrier in the middle of the Red Sea, and the life of a Pakistani family coping with ongoing political turmoil.

Kim says, "I think that was very important to us — just knowing that there's this vast middle class that's educated and professional and moderate. That's not something you see on American television."

i

Aasif Mandvi plays a Pakistani driver and son of an educated, middle-class family in HBO's The Brink. Merie W. Wallace/HBO hide caption

itoggle caption Merie W. Wallace/HBO

Aasif Mandvi plays a Pakistani driver and son of an educated, middle-class family in HBO's The Brink.

Merie W. Wallace/HBO

The Brink relied on numerous consultants — including uncredited ones — who, the Benabibs say, delivered off-the-record details like what really happens in the situation room when everyone gets hangry.

"We did an enormous amount of research," Roberto says. "We knew that this show wouldn't play unless the backdrop of it was accurate."

NPR turned to another expert to see just how accurately The Brink captured Washington, the military and Pakistani people and politics: Moeed Yusuf, the director of South Asia programs at the United States Institute of Peace. While he found the show "hilarious," he believes the fundamental premise is fanciful, especially the idea that a nuclear weapon could fall into the wrong hands.

"I mean, at least the way they present it, it's almost like, you know, it's a cupcake that somebody's going to run away with," he says. Still, much of the show rang true for Yusuf — from family conversations to the political sausage-making. "A lot of this, quite honestly, probably happens in the real world."

A real world overripe for old-school scripted satire.

Locally Sourced Vegetarian Citrus Fizz? $5.99. Grass Fed Himalayan Tuna Salad? That'll be $9.99. Taking gentrification and a rent hike into your own hands? Priceless.

That's how the neighbors at Jesse's Deli in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighborhood are trying to save their local convenience store.

Owner Jesse Itayim opened his doors in 1984 at the corner of Bergen and Bonds Avenue, spending time in that location and another before moving to his current location, 402 Atlantic Ave., in 1989.

The fate of the family business was threatened recently by a hike in the monthly rent — from $4,000 to $10,000. Itayim could not afford it, and he prepared to close after more than 25 years in business.

When customers and neighbors asked about the bare shelves at Jesse's Deli, they found out it was closing by July 31.

A neighbor started a petition and sent 1,200 signatures in support of Itayim to the landlord, Karina Bilger. Bilger returned it unopened, with a note saying there would be no renewal on the lease, and declaring all past offers rescinded.

i

Jesse's Deli in Brooklyn, NY, where neighborhood supporters are looking for a way to keep the corner store in business after a rent increase. Jesse Itayim hide caption

itoggle caption Jesse Itayim

Jesse's Deli in Brooklyn, NY, where neighborhood supporters are looking for a way to keep the corner store in business after a rent increase.

Jesse Itayim

Bilger has not responded to NPR requests for comment, but she told dnainfo.com that she tried to come to an agreement with the owner two years ago.

The community showed support for Jesse's by making mock posters that advertise prices increased two and a half times and "gentrified" products. They called the campaign an "Artisanal Rent Price Hike Sale," and displayed the bright posters inside the store and in the front window. A social media campaign used the hashtag #jessespricedout on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Organizers also appealed to Mayor Bill de Blasio and local Councilman Stephen Levin to support Jesse's and other small businesses by getting behind the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. The measure would require, among other things, a minimum 10 year lease.

The bill and the protest campaign for Jesse's Deli, a neighborhood staple for the working class, middle class, and creative class in the area, may be too late. The family is looking for a new location, preferably in the same area.

Mohenad Itayim, Jesse Itayim's son, is still confident in the business his father started over 30 years ago. "We are fighting to the end," he said.

"We do not know where we'll end up."

Jesse's Deli

jesse itayim

gentrification

Brooklyn

In a decision that could have major implications for the entire sharing economy, the California Labor Commission has ruled that a San Francisco Uber driver is a company employee, not a contractor. In that decision, the commission awarded Uber driver Barbara Ann Berwick $4,152.20 in employee expenses, including mileage reimbursements, toll charges and interest.

The ruling was made public when Uber filed an appeal Tuesday in a state court in San Francisco.

The Associated Press says Uber claims the ruling is nonbinding, and only applies to one driver. And in a statement sent to NPR, Uber claimed the ruling in favor of Berwick actually contradicts a previous ruling from the same commission.

Uber says that classifying drivers as contractors is part of giving them the freedom they want. "It's important to remember that the No. 1 reason drivers choose to use Uber is because they have complete flexibility and control," spokeswoman Jessica Santillo said. "The majority of them can and do choose to earn their living from multiple sources, including other ride-sharing companies."

But Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer working on a class-action suit of drivers against Uber, told NPR that the company owes its drivers more than it's currently giving them. "Uber's obviously been wildly successful because it developed a concept that caught on," Liss-Riordan said. "But that gives it no excuse to ignore labor laws that have been put into place over decades that protect workers' rights. Uber is a $50 billion company, it says. And the idea that it somehow can't afford to pay for what employers are required to pay for is just a little bit beyond belief."

In Berwick's case, Uber argued that it is just a "technological platform" for private vehicle drivers to facilitate private transactions, that drivers are independent contractors, that Uber has no control over the hours drivers work, and that the company does not have to reimburse drivers for any "expenses related to operating their personal vehicles."

But the labor commission disagreed and found that Berwick is in fact an employee of Uber, saying, "Without passengers such as Plaintiff [Berwick], Defendant's [Uber's] business would not exist." Relying on precedent that applied to cabdrivers and pizza delivery employees, the commission ordered Uber to reimburse Berwick for 6,468 miles she drove while working as an Uber driver, at a rate of $0.56 per mile. Berwick was also awarded toll charges of $256.00, and $274.12 in interest.

Berwick also asked for wages for 470.7 hours she worked as an Uber driver, but she was not awarded that payment, in part because she failed to provide some payment documentation the court asked for.

Jonathan Handel, a law professor at the University of Southern California who has been following the sharing economy, said of the ruling, "Uber should be worried about this." He says it has the potential not just to increase the company's expenses, but also increase its liability. "It really could represent a major roadblock for the sharing economy model that Uber and other companies like Lyft and Airbnb, even, are dependent on."

"If not a surprise. It certainly illustrates the tension between a new economy model," Handel told NPR, "where Uber and others say, 'look, we're just information providers; we hook people up,' and an older model."

Handel says rulings like that of the commission could mean higher prices for Uber rides down the road. It sets up companies like Uber to be responsible for things like Social Security, health care and other benefits. The Los Angeles Times reports that just in California, if Uber drivers were classified as employees, they'd have to be reimbursed for gas, tolls, insurance, unemployment benefits, workers' compensation and Social Security.

Whatever happens with Uber's appeal of the commission's ruling, more challenges are on the way. A site for drivers involved in legal challenges against the company says a hearing for a class certification of one lawsuit will come in August.

Uber

sharing economy

Noisy trolleys roll bales of tobacco on and off the auction floors in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. Here they call it "green gold." Some of the country's estimated 100,000 small-scale tobacco farmers look on, hoping for profitable sales.

Auctioneers, quoting prices at high speed, pace up and down rows of extra-large jute-covered bundles, with yellow tobacco leaves spilling out.

Goats and Soda

How To Make A Living In Cash-Poor Zimbabwe

Goats and Soda

Zimbabwe To Street Vendors: Pack Up, Clean Up, Ship Out!

Closely behind the auctioneers follow the tobacco buyers. They indicate interest with a wink, a nod, two fingers up, eyes closed and all manner of gestures.
Celani Sithole is an auctioneer and floor manager at TSF — Tobacco Sales Floor — in Harare.

"Our standard sale speed is supposed to be five seconds per bale," she says.

Sithole says they're pushing through 7,000 to 8,000 bales a day. Farmers get their money the day their tobacco is sold.

"As soon as the bales are sold, before arbitration, the farmer has the right to cancel the bale or accept the price," says Sithole.

What we're witnessing on the auction floor is a far cry from just a few years ago. Output of most crops, including tobacco, dropped dramatically when President Robert Mugabe's followers violently drove white farmers, the backbone of the economy, from their industrial-sized farms, starting in 2000.

The government handed the annexed land to black farmers, many of whom had little or no experience. The result was disastrous and the economy collapsed in a spiral of hyperinflation.

Once the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe began importing food.

Tobacco production also suffered. Export earnings fell from $600 million in 2000 to $175 million in 2009.

But tobacco output jumped 235 percent last year, compared with 2009.

The CEO of the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board, Andrew Matibiri, says production has rebounded.

"It's back to normal almost," he says. "In terms of world production, we're nowhere near the top — but we're probably at number two or number three, after Brazil and the United States."

Matibiri says farming was especially hard-hit, in part because unlike the industrial white farmers who were landowners, Zimbabwe's new black farmers are leaseholders and couldn't get credit or bank loans without title deeds. So the tobacco sector and private companies stepped in with a new scheme. They contract with tobacco growers to produce the crop, providing fertilizers and chemicals.

Taizivei Chitaunhike is one of those farmers. The mother of four received her five-hectare farm from the government in 2003. She smiles shyly as she describes how her fortunes changed when she became a contract farmer two years ago.

"If you grow with contractors, you will manage to do all the things that you like on your farm," she says. "The amount of capital that they give me helps me. For sure, I'm now much better for farming production. Tobacco is much better, because I manage to do all my budgets on my farm, we manage to pay school fees, labor, get food and other things."

Chitaunhike says she has been up to the auction floors three times this selling season, with almost 25 bales of tobacco, and is getting good prices.

Sitting close by, under a young jacaranda tree, and listening attentively to Chitaunhike, is another tobacco farmer, Milca Matimbe. She's 53 and got her 27-hectare farm ten years ago. Matimbe has been growing tobacco for five years but does not have a contract with a company. She sells independently and is disappointed with sales this season.

"The prices are not so good for us," she says. "Last year it was better than this year, because the prices are not going up, they're going down. Ah but we have got good tobacco. We don't know if we can go back to the fields this coming season, because we've got no money."

Zimbabwe consumes only a fraction of its tobacco output. Tobacco marketing board CEO Matibiri says the flue-cured tobacco is top quality, much prized and expensive. Forty percent of exports go to China, followed by the European Union and South Africa.

"We produce a premium product, which is in demand the world over," he says. "It is said to have very good blending properties. In other words, it mixes very well with lower quality tobaccos produced in other parts of the world, producing nice, very pleasant cigarettes to smoke, if you're a smoker – yeah."

Back on the auction floor, brisk tobacco selling continues. It appears the banks are listening. The Bankers Association of Zimbabwe looks set to lend a billion dollars to agriculture this year — the lion's share going to tobacco farming.

tobacco

Zimbabwe

As South Koreans continue to struggle with the worst outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, ever recorded outside the Middle East, their comrades to the north say, "We've got a cure for that!"

The World Health Organization says there's no known cure or vaccine for MERS, but state-run media in Pyongyang reports a wonder drug called Kumdang-2 will do the trick. The report makes no mention of whether Pyongyang is going to offer this miracle compound to its neighbor to the south. Or as the news agency puts it: "the Korean puppet authorities" in Seoul.

Note to readers: The next few paragraphs require us to use the word "allegedly" more than a few times.

A North Korean pharmaceutical company allegedly developed the injectable drug, which is allegedly a mixture of ginseng, "light rare earth elements" and "micro-quantities of gold and platinum." Allegedly.

The drug has its own website (although really, who doesn't?). The site claims that Kumdang-2 allegedly cures just about everything, including AIDS, SARS, Ebola, skin rashes, diabetes, impotence, liver disorders, venereal disease, drug addiction, various cancers and tuberculosis. The TB assertion is particularly interesting given North Korea's astronomically high rate of tuberculosis.

The substance also allegedly has the power to heal bone fractures. The website tells of a man who fell off a cliff: "Administration of Kumdang-2 Injection ... recovered all the injuries more than 8 times faster than other medicines."

In the tone of a younger sibling rejoicing in an older sibling's misfortune, North Korean health officials said: "One can easily beat such diseases [SARS, Ebola or MERS] if one takes the DPRK-produced Kumdang-2 injection."

Even the shot itself allegedly doesn't hurt.

"It causes no pain," the site states. "Unlike chemical medicines, it has no adverse side effects. It has no contraindications and can be used together with other medicines."

As if all the other too-good-to-be-true claims about Kumdang-2 hadn't already undermined its credibility, the manufacturers state you don't have to take it on a regular schedule. In fact, they claim, Kumdang-2 works better if you follow no routine at all: "The rate of recovery was higher among its random users than its punctual users."

The wonders never cease!

In conclusion, we would note that this is not the first example of an outrageous health claim made for political gain. Just last year, the Egyptian military announced that its "Complete Cure Device" could wipe out the AIDS virus.

P.S. It couldn't.

MERS

North Korea

Noisy trolleys roll bales of tobacco on and off the auction floors in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. Here they call it "green gold." Some of the country's estimated 100,000 small-scale tobacco farmers look on, hoping for profitable sales.

Auctioneers, quoting prices at high speed, pace up and down rows of extra-large jute-covered bundles, with yellow tobacco leaves spilling out.

Goats and Soda

How To Make A Living In Cash-Poor Zimbabwe

Goats and Soda

Zimbabwe To Street Vendors: Pack Up, Clean Up, Ship Out!

Closely behind the auctioneers follow the tobacco buyers. They indicate interest with a wink, a nod, two fingers up, eyes closed and all manner of gestures.
Celani Sithole is an auctioneer and floor manager at TSF — Tobacco Sales Floor — in Harare.

"Our standard sale speed is supposed to be five seconds per bale," she says.

Sithole says they're pushing through 7,000 to 8,000 bales a day. Farmers get their money the day their tobacco is sold.

"As soon as the bales are sold, before arbitration, the farmer has the right to cancel the bale or accept the price," says Sithole.

What we're witnessing on the auction floor is a far cry from just a few years ago. Output of most crops, including tobacco, dropped dramatically when President Robert Mugabe's followers violently drove white farmers, the backbone of the economy, from their industrial-sized farms, starting in 2000.

The government handed the annexed land to black farmers, many of whom had little or no experience. The result was disastrous.

Once the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe began importing food.

Tobacco production also suffered. Export earnings fell from $600 million in 2000 to $175 million in 2009.

The CEO of the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board, Andrew Matibiri, says production has rebounded.

"It's back to normal almost," he says. "In terms of world production, we're nowhere near the top — but we're probably at number two or number three, after Brazil and the United States."

Matibiri says farming was especially hard-hit, in part because Zimbabwe's new black farmers couldn't get credit or bank loans. So the tobacco sector and private companies stepped in with a new scheme. They contract with tobacco growers to produce the crop, providing fertilizers and chemicals.

Taizivei Chitaunhike is one of those farmers. The mother of four received her five-hectare farm from the government in 2003. She smiles shyly as she describes how her fortunes changed when she became a contract farmer two years ago.

"If you grow with contractors, you will manage to do all the things that you like on your farm," she says. "The amount of capital that they give me helps me. For sure, I'm now much better for farming production. Tobacco is much better, because I manage to do all my budgets on my farm, we manage to pay school fees, get food and other things."

Chitaunhike says she has been up to the auction floors three times this selling season, with almost 25 bales of tobacco, and is getting good prices.

Sitting close by, under a young jacaranda tree, and listening attentively to Chitaunhike, is another tobacco farmer, Milca Matimbe. She's 53 and got her 27-hectare farm ten years ago. Matimbe has been growing tobacco for five years but does not have a contract with a company. She sells independently and is disappointed with sales this season.

"The prices are not so good for us," she says. "Last year it was better than this year, because the prices are not going up, they're going down. Ah but we have got good tobacco. We don't know if we can go back to the fields this coming season, because we've got no money."

Zimbabwe consumes only a fraction of its premium tobacco output. Tobacco marketing board CEO Matibiri says the flue-cured tobacco is top quality, much prized and expensive. Forty percent of exports go to China, followed by the European Union and South Africa.

"We produce a premium product, which is in demand the world over," he says. "It is said to have very good blending properties. In other words, it mixes very well with lower quality tobaccos produced in other parts of the world, producing nice, very pleasant cigarettes to smoke, if you're a smoker – yeah."

Back on the auction floor, brisk tobacco selling continues. It appears the banks are listening. The Bankers Association of Zimbabwe looks set to lend a billion dollars to agriculture this year — the lion's share going to tobacco farming.

tobacco

Zimbabwe

Shahjahan Selim was a supervisor at a garment factory in Rana Plaza in Dhaka. On April 24, 2013, he remembers a huge crash when the ceiling collapsed. Dead colleagues sprawled next to him. Selim got up uninjured, then heard people calling for help.

For two weeks the 37-year-old father wrested people from the mangled wreckage of concrete and steel. Selim rescued 37 people and recovered 28 bodies from the site of the world's deadliest garment factory disaster. More than 1,100 people died when the eight-story building collapsed.

He says, "From childhood I always tried to help people. In my mind I said, 'I'm not leaving this place. I will save my colleagues.' "

2 Years After Garment Factory Collapse, Are Workers Any Safer? April 24, 2015

The last person he saved was a man whose arm was pinned beneath concrete beams. Selim cut off the man's arm to free him but slipped and fell four stories. Today Selim is permanently disabled.

In developing countries with few resources and haphazard emergency response systems, civilians like Selim are often the first on site. Civilian first responders play an important role in disasters like the collapse of Rana Plaza or the earthquake in Nepal this April.

But the work is dangerous for volunteers, especially untrained ones. In 2011, Bangladesh started an earthquake preparedness program with the government and U.N. Development Program that trains "urban volunteers" to deal with disasters. The program has worked with about 30,000 in nine cities with a target of reaching another 32,000 over the next few years.

In a free three-day course, urban volunteers learn about search and rescue techniques, earthquake response, first aid, fire safety, handling light equipment and more. Volunteers must be 18 to 40 years old with at least a high school education.

i

At the scene of the disaster, Selim told himself: "I'm not leaving this place. I will save my colleagues." Courtesy of Sariful Islam hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Sariful Islam

At the scene of the disaster, Selim told himself: "I'm not leaving this place. I will save my colleagues."

Courtesy of Sariful Islam

They include women like 23-year-old Syeda Rumpa, an economics graduate student in Dhaka. "Our country is very vulnerable," she says. "Any kind of disaster can occur. If I cannot take responsibility, who will?"

She learned to use saws and drills to cut through concrete. Her mother initially didn't want her to do the training but has since changed her mind. She later told her daughter, "You are doing a great job."

Volunteers say three days is too little time to master the skills. They want more training and events to stay motivated. Retention is also a challenge because volunteers move or drop out. The program officials want to add more sessios but funding is still up in the air.

But a commitment has been made to help victims and rescuers like Selim, who went through months of hospitalization and therapy and now uses a cane to walk with difficulty. He and thousands of survivors and relatives of the dead received compensation from the Rana Plaza Donor Trust, which finally met its $30 million target last week when an anonymous donor gave $3 million.

In addition, the neediest survivors like Selim got job training and funding from non-profits such as ActionAid as well as the International Labor Organization. He opened a small grocery shop on a quiet lane not far from Rana Plaza. He makes about 15,000 taka ($194) a month versus 10,000 taka ($130) in his garment factory job.

While some survivors still are unable to work, life goes on for Selim. In his tidy shop, cookies, juice, soap and other sundries fill bright blue shelves. Customers scoop rice from sacks because Selim cannot use one of his hands very well. Sometimes they make their own change from bills in a plastic box. More than 100 customers buy from Selim's shop each day. "They know he is a kind of 'superman,'" says Sayed Hoque of ActionAid.

A young boy peers over the counter and asks for candy from plastic jars on the counter. A woman wants laundry powder. A man calls, "Selim, brother," and requests three single cigarettes. With a trembling hand Selim gives them to his customer.

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Bangladesh

Nepal

Villains are staples of stories for kids. Making them bigger, meaner, madder, more impossible to defeat – that's how you build the ideas of fear and then, inevitably, of courage. A small person faces a giant, or a witch, or a wolf, or Jafar, or Cruella De Vil, or the Buy 'N' Large, and by watching that happen, you learn. You learn what it takes to beat the bad guy. You learn that you, too, can beat the bad guy. You learn not to lose heart and not to give up. You use something inside yourself to beat something outside yourself.

There is no villain in Pixar's new film Inside Out. That's not only because the action takes place inside the mind of 11-year-old Riley. It's also because even in there, where her Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust stand and argue and sometimes fumble at the controls, there is no villain. Riley isn't stalked by any invading monster; there's no hulking, lumbering beast named Insecurity or Hate or Depression who must later be defeated or vanquished in a climactic battle or persuaded to change its nature. Riley begins with a vibrant spirit humming with varied, vivid life, and her great battle – the battle that must be fought by her Joy and her Sadness but is being fought by Riley always, after all – is simply to master the fact that her assembled life is delicate and complex. Each segment affects the others; each decision and experience rattles the pieces and can imperil the whole.

Within this literally cerebral tale, there are clowns, vacuum hoses, glassy globes, a unicorn, a being that cries candy out of his eyes, and a literal Train Of Thought. But there's no intruder. Nothing in Riley's mind is ultimately tagged as not belonging or not wanted, because nothing in her mind can be separated from who she is. She is made up of the same things that cause her sadness, fright and disgust — those little emotions are her and she is them. There's nothing to defeat; if anything, what Riley is fighting against is the impulse to exile the feelings that embarrass her.

She's confronted with learning – through the interplay of emotions – how to balance all of the pieces of herself the way she will need to do as she becomes an adult and steps out of the part of her childhood where happiness could reliably be her dominant emotion and other feelings could be treated as temporary, meaningless flashes to be quickly soothed by the right sunny thought or driven off by the right distraction. This is the actual poignancy of adolescence: the arrival of more emotional nuance and more sophisticated understanding is the arrival of more sophisticated pain as well as more meaningful joy. Things blend, things bend, the world gets weirder.

Riley is, in one sense, fighting a battle we know she will lose: the battle for Joy to rule all things forever. But in another sense, her destination – the moment at which the story is aching to arrive – is balance, even if it's a kind of balanced chaos.

Admittedly, there's something very lonely about Inside Out if you compare its external structure and Riley's journey through her physical world to traditional kids' movies. There's no Donkey from Shrek or Abu from Aladdin or Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King cheering her up with "Hakuna Matata." This respect for the role of melancholy in the lives of kids is very Pixar, but it's particularly acute here: there are no other Incredibles, there is no EVE, there is no Dug the dog. Riley's allies and boosters in this adventure are not made or met along the way; they are summoned. They are hers – in fact, they are her. Her mom and dad love her, and she needs them, and they can help and they must help. But if you've ever known a kid this age, you know that sometimes, trying to help is like trying to grab onto a wet eel. They have to do some of the work themselves, and it's often the beginning of work they'll do imperfectly but tirelessly all their lives.

And honestly, some of what Riley is experiencing is lonely. Isolation is, for so many kids, a fundamental part of the rhythm of those years. At that age – at any age – there are times when it's just you and your little cartoon feelings, figuring stuff out. It's one of the reasons kids keep diaries: they turn into tumbling dialogues, whether you'd identify them as such or not, between your Anger and your Fear or your Joy and your Sadness.

But there's also a sense at the core of the movie that the fights you fight on the inside are integral to the relationships with other people you're going to have on the outside. Riley is feeling a kind of frightening centripetal force that makes her afraid she'll fly apart, so she turns and pushes inward. Inward, to where she has to go on her own journey in her own company, the better to turn back again toward her parents and her friends.

The structural decision to do without a villain, and ultimately to do without one of the easiest elements to make entertaining and marketable, means that the process Riley is undergoing – adolescence – is visualized as ... normal. Her mind is not a space that's been invaded by something that must be driven out, but a new environment to be mastered. And if other kids' stories are there to teach kids how to be brave when they see witches and giants, Inside Out is there, maybe, to teach them how to be brave when there's no witch and no giant, but things can feel broken anyway.

A subtle portrait of an EDM Adam, Eden is neither a star-is-born fable nor a soul-is-lost parable. In 1992, teenage Paul (Felix de Givry) gives his life to Paris' house-music scene. Two decades later, he reluctantly takes it back.

This bilingual drama continues in the restrained mode director and co-writer Mia Hansen-Love established in three previous features, including The Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love. If Eden is a little warmer than its predecessors, that's partly due to dance music's Dionysian vibe. But it also reflects the fact that Paul is based on the filmmaker's brother, Sven Hansen-Love, who co-scripted.

Paul, in fact, is supposed to be a writer. But he begins to neglect his literature studies after he discovers a new American sound that combines old-school soul with next-wave beats. The music's most famous outpost is Manhattan's Paradise Garage, and so it's known as "garage."

At first, Paul and his friends attend secret parties, whether in suburban warehouses or decommissioned submarines. Gradually, the rave scene is absorbed by commercial nightclubs. Paul and laconic fellow garage enthusiast Stan (Hugo Conzelmann) form a DJ duo, Cheers, to spin imported 12-inches at various venues. At their most successful, the two book gigs in New York and make a pilgrimage to Chicago to meet some house-music idols. (Several such figures have cameos in the movie.)

Dance music becomes Paul's job, but he can't figure out how to make it pay. He draws down his inheritance and borrows from all his pals who have money to spare. The DJ's enthusiasm for cocaine doesn't help, and neither does his musical purism. He keeps playing American house music as its popularity wanes. Meanwhile, cohorts Thomas and Guy-Man (Vincent Lacoste and Arnaud Azoulay) become famous as Daft Punk, purveyors of sleek second-generation Eurodisco.

If music is a fickle vocation, so is romance. Paul bounces from Julia (Greta Gerwig), an American who shares his interest in writing, to Louise (Pauline Etienne), an earthy Parisian scenester. Gerwig's performance is tentative, but Etienne is lively and believable, notably in a New York sequence where Louise jealously refuses to meet Julia.

Both women become mothers after leaving Paul, which is probably what actually happened in Sven's life, but which also highlights the DJ's inability to grow into adult responsibility. No wonder Paul's mom (Arsinee Khanjian) is worried — and she doesn't know even half her son's problems.

Eden was elegantly shot with handheld camera by Denis Lenoir, whose credits include Carlos, a film by Hansen-Love's spouse, Olivier Assayas. The two directors take similarly naturalistic approaches to exposition, based on short vignettes and evocative details and avoiding stagey scenes in which characters directly explain their motivations.

A moment of ecstatic musical release is an Assayas trademark, whether the elation is communal or — as in the recent Clouds Of Sils Maria — solitary. But in Eden, the rapture is muted. While the movie includes dozens of thumping tracks, it never tries to simulate the sensations of an intense dance-floor experience. Of the relatively small numbers of fiction films that examine rave culture, this may be the driest.

The director risks losing the audience in the second part, in which the joy drains from Paul's musical pursuits. In one scene, the DJ cleans up after a long night at a club, popping balloons that are as festive as dirty napkins now that the party's over. It's a ready-made metaphor, but Hansen-Love doesn't emphasize it.

Instead, she shows the slow deflation of Paul's passion. And how the beat goes on, without him.

Alexander Hamilton, who has had top billing on the $10 since 1929, will have to share the marquee starting in 2020, making way for a woman's portrait — but it is not yet clear who will get the honor.

"America's currency is a way for our nation to make a statement about who we are and what we stand for," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We have only made changes to the faces on our currency a few times since bills were first put into circulation, and I'm proud that the new 10 will be the first bill in more than a century to feature the portrait of a woman," he said.

Lew — who holds the same Cabinet post that Hamilton first occupied — will call for the public's input on whose portrait should be featured alongside the Founding Father. Whoever is chosen would be the first woman on the nation's paper currency in more than a century. (Martha Washington was on a dollar silver certificate from 1891 to 1896 and Pocahontas appeared on a bill from 1865 to 1869, according to The Associated Press.)

As the AP reports: "Lew is asking the public for suggestions on who should be chosen for the bill, as well as what symbols of democracy it should feature. Ideas can be submitted by visiting thenew10.treasury.gov website."

This summer, tell us how #TheNew10 can best represent the values of our inclusive democracy and feature a woman. http://t.co/NtwytsvHxC

— Treasury Department (@USTreasury) June 18, 2015

NPR's Sam Sanders reports that efforts to get a woman on U.S. currency have been building. And, as the Two-Way's Bill Chappell reported last month, in an online petition, former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman beat out Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and others.

President Obama last year mentioned the movement during a Kansas City speech: "Last week a young girl wrote to ask me, 'why aren't there any women on our currency?' and then she gave me like a long list of possible women to put on our dollar bills and quarters and stuff."

According to a Treasury Department FAQ on the redesign: "Secretary Lew has made clear that the image of Alexander Hamilton will remain part of the $10 note. There are many options for continuing to honor Hamilton. While one option is producing two bills, we are exploring a variety of possibilities. However, security requirements are the driving consideration behind any new design."

As The New York Post writes:

"The announcement comes a month after a grass-roots campaign was launched to remove Jackson — a slave owner infamous for the forced relocation of the Cherokee tribe — from the $20 bill and replace him with a woman.

"Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) even sponsored a bill to boot Jackson. But Wednesday night, she said she was also happy to dump Hamilton."

"'While it may not be the 20- dollar bill, make no mistake, this is a historic announcement,' Shaheen said. 'Young girls across this country will soon be able to see an inspiring woman on the 10-dollar bill.'"

Treasury Department

Jacob Lew

currency

Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy announcement this week, after months of campaigning, came as no surprise. One small surprise that did pop up in his remarks, however, was a lofty goal he has set for himself as president — to grow the economy at a 4 percent rate if he's elected.

He expounded on the claim Wednesday in Iowa.

"To grow at 4 percent, we have to have a better workforce," Bush said. "We have to have a better educated population, we have to embrace our energy future, we have to reform our taxes and deal with our regulation."

He added that power should be shifted from Washington, D.C., and called for "lower tax rates, eliminate as many deductions, bring back common sense, shift power back to communities and states so that we can grow at a rate where median income in Washington, Iowa, is growing and maybe median income in Washington, D.C., starts to shrink. That's what I think we need to do."

To the average Jane or Joe casually listening to his speech or hearing his follow up in Iowa, it might sound like just another campaign claim. If you do pay attention to economics, you know that it's ambitious, to say the least. But can he do it? The answer: Sustained 4 percent growth seems unlikely, and, either way, it's not something the president really can control — despite the credit and blame they receive.

How realistic is it, exactly?

Let's start by putting the ambitiousness of Bush's promise into perspective. Sustained growth over 4 percent doesn't happen all that often these days. Here's a look back at how economic growth has looked since 1980, just before Ronald Reagan became president.

Danielle Kurtzleben for NPR Blinder and Watson hide caption

itoggle caption Blinder and Watson

This is annual average gross-domestic product, or GDP, growth. The actual, quarter-by-quarter data is a bit noisier, and it does leap above 4 percent every so often. But the only time in the last 25 years it has hung out above 4 percent for any extended period was in the mid-1990s. So one way to look at this is to say that if Bush wants to look to anyone for guidance, it might be early term Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

Well, maybe.

Since 1980, Clinton's years came the closest, but they were just shy of the 4 percent mark on average — closer to 3.8 percent, to be exact. Reagan was next at about 3.5 percent growth, followed by George H.W., who was slightly above 2 percent. Obama comes in just below 2 percent, and George W. is behind him, at around 1.7 percent.

The next question is whether Clinton (or any of the recent U.S. presidents) can actually be held responsible for the economic growth on their watches.

The evidence is against GOP presidents (kind of)

Presidential candidates make promises all the time about how they can transform the economy. Back in 2011, for example, GOP presidential hopeful and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty promised to achieve economic growth of 5 percent.

It's easy to see why candidates make these sorts of statements — the economy is always high (and, lately, the highest) on voters' priority lists. But there's ample evidence that presidents have little control over how well the economy fares. Consider one of the most famous recent papers on this topic, a 2014 paper from economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. This paper (an update of earlier work) found two big things:

Since 1947, the economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. But...

A lot of that appears to be luck.

Economic growth under Democrats, it turns out, has on average been 1.8 percentage points higher than under Republicans. That's a pretty huge gap. But from what they could ascertain from the theories they tested, it doesn't appear to be Democratic presidents' doing.

"Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to macroeconomic policy choices, but the data do not support such a claim," they write. "It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly 'good luck,' with perhaps a touch of 'good policy.'"

Democrats, they write, have presided over better productivity shocks — think improvements in technology that boost the economy, like the Internet boom — better international conditions, and better consumer expectations. Presidents would be hard-pressed to say they created large-scale technological change, a better global economic environment, or, the researchers find, better consumer confidence.

Presidents do have a little control, of course — sharp oil price spikes and dips are one of the factors that Blinder and Watson found to affect growth, and foreign-policy decisions in places like the Middle East can affect those. But amid a huge mix of factors, this is only one small part of the many forces affecting the economy.

Not only that, but they also ruled out the idea that presidents set each other up for growth. That is, it's not that George H.W. Bush's policies set the stage for Clinton's booming economy (or that Carter set the stage for Reagan).

Importantly, the factors Blinder and Watson studied only explain around half of the gap. The rest remains "a mystery," they write. That means there could be something about presidents that Blinder and Watson didn't investigate that could allow Bush (or any president) to boost growth to 4 percent, theoretically. But given the current economic landscape, that seems unlikely.

The coming few years

The bottom line here is that 4 percent economic growth is maybe possible, but it seems highly unlikely. And it's certainly highly unlikely that any politician can promise a set of policies that would definitively set the economy on that kind of growth course.

For one thing, no one foresees anything approaching 4 percent growth in the next few years. The Federal Reserve's interest-rate decision makers, for example, mostly see GDP growth staying at or below 3 percent in the next few years, and, in the long run, they see it at just over 2 percent.

Not only that, but consider where the economy will be when the next president takes office.

"If you look at the what we believe will be the state of the economy in November of 2016, which is pretty close to full employment, predicting above-trend growth would be hazardous," said Blinder, who also served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. "To say you're going to do 4 percent per year for four years when the trend is only 2 is making a claim, I think, almost anybody would find outlandish."

Even if Bush (or any candidate) does happen to have a package of policies that could create gangbusters economic growth, the other thing a president needs is a Congress to enact those policies. Even so, it's tough to see what those policies might be.

"I would say there's probably nothing that the U.S. Congress could do to raise the growth rate from 2 percent to 4 percent," Blinder said. "And there's even less that the president could do under the Constitution."

He also built a home in a stately subdivision where the rules governing property-owners fill 21 typewritten pages. The staunch defender of individual freedom couldn't even choose his own mailbox.

The neighborhood's developer, Jim Skaggs, was also chairman of the Warren County Republican Party. He says Paul was never active in backslapping party politics.

"He never attended a meeting while I was chairman," said Skaggs, who also serves on the Executive Committee of the Kentucky GOP. "You get to know who is and who isn't interested in politics."

Skaggs was surprised five years ago when Paul came "out of nowhere" to win a Senate seat, beating Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's hand-picked candidate. To be sure, 2010 was a good year for Tea Party insurgents. But Paul proved a more savvy politician than Skaggs had given him credit for.

"I under-rated Rand," Skaggs admitted. "He's one of the more intellectual and hardest working people there."

People who knew Paul back home in Texas were not surprised. Mary Jane Smith said it wasn't just Austrian economics that Paul picked up around the family dinner table. He also learned the nuts and bolts of running a political campaign. In fact, she added, Rand Paul was often more interested than his father in the tactics it took to get elected — such as how to use polling data to fine-tune a campaign message.

"Ron would say, 'Oh no, no, no. We're not changing anything. No, no, no, no, no.' But Rand would make it adaptable to what's going on," Smith said. "He is more realistic about the campaigns than his father is."

A view of Lake Jackson, Texas. Judy Baxter via Flickr hide caption

itoggle caption Judy Baxter via Flickr

Supporters argue now that he's been elected, Rand Paul is also more strategic about governing than his quixotic father, whose views were often too extreme for his own Republican party. The younger Paul didn't exhibit much willingness to compromise during the recent Senate debate over government surveillance. But Munisteri believes on most issues, Paul is willing to cut deals, if that's what it takes to move beyond dorm-room dogma into legislation.

"The difference maybe between his dad and Rand is his dad didn't mind being the only vote, 434 to one," Munisteri said. "Many times you cannot get everything you want. The key question is do you move government closer to the direction you want it to be or farther away."

And the direction Rand Paul wants to move the government is still the dramatic downsizing he heard discussed around the kitchen table all those years ago.

Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy announcement this week, after months of campaigning, came as no surprise. One small surprise that did pop up in his remarks, however, was a lofty goal he has set for himself as president — to grow the economy at a 4 percent rate if he's elected.

He expounded on the claim Wednesday in Iowa.

"To grow at 4 percent, we have to have a better workforce," Bush said. "We have to have a better educated population, we have to embrace our energy future, we have to reform our taxes and deal with our regulation."

He added that power should be shifted from Washington, D.C., and called for "lower tax rates, eliminate as many deductions, bring back common sense, shift power back to communities and states so that we can grow at a rate where median income in Washington, Iowa, is growing and maybe median income in Washington, D.C., starts to shrink. That's what I think we need to do."

To the average Jane or Joe casually listening to his speech or hearing his follow up in Iowa, it might sound like just another campaign claim. If you do pay attention to economics, you know that it's ambitious, to say the least. But can he do it? The answer: Sustained 4 percent growth seems unlikely, and, either way, it's not something the president really can control — despite the credit and blame they receive.

How realistic is it, exactly?

Let's start by putting the ambitiousness of Bush's promise into perspective. Sustained growth over 4 percent doesn't happen all that often these days. Here's a look back at how economic growth has looked since 1980, just before Ronald Reagan became president.

Danielle Kurtzleben for NPR Blinder and Watson hide caption

itoggle caption Blinder and Watson

This is annual average gross-domestic product, or GDP, growth. The actual, quarter-by-quarter data is a bit noisier, and it does leap above 4 percent every so often. But the only time in the last 25 years it has hung out above 4 percent for any extended period was in the mid-1990s. So one way to look at this is to say that if Bush wants to look to anyone for guidance, it might be early term Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

Well, maybe.

Since 1980, Clinton's years came the closest, but they were just shy of the 4 percent mark on average — closer to 3.8 percent, to be exact. Reagan was next at about 3.5 percent growth, followed by George H.W., who was slightly above 2 percent. Obama comes in just below 2 percent, and George W. is behind him, at around 1.7 percent.

The next question is whether Clinton (or any of the recent U.S. presidents) can actually be held responsible for the economic growth on their watches.

The evidence is against GOP presidents (kind of)

Presidential candidates make promises all the time about how they can transform the economy. Back in 2011, for example, GOP presidential hopeful and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty promised to achieve economic growth of 5 percent.

It's easy to see why candidates make these sorts of statements — the economy is always high (and, lately, the highest) on voters' priority lists. But there's ample evidence that presidents have little control over how well the economy fares. Consider one of the most famous recent papers on this topic, a 2014 paper from economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. This paper (an update of earlier work) found two big things:

Since 1947, the economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. But...

A lot of that appears to be luck.

Economic growth under Democrats, it turns out, has on average been 1.8 percentage points higher than under Republicans. That's a pretty huge gap. But from what they could ascertain from the theories they tested, it doesn't appear to be Democratic presidents' doing.

"Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to macroeconomic policy choices, but the data do not support such a claim," they write. "It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly 'good luck,' with perhaps a touch of 'good policy.'"

Democrats, they write, have presided over better productivity shocks — think improvements in technology that boost the economy, like the Internet boom — better international conditions, and better consumer expectations. Presidents would be hard-pressed to say they created large-scale technological change, a better global economic environment, or, the researchers find, better consumer confidence.

Presidents do have a little control, of course — sharp oil price spikes and dips are one of the factors that Blinder and Watson found to affect growth, and foreign-policy decisions in places like the Middle East can affect those. But amid a huge mix of factors, this is only one small part of the many forces affecting the economy.

Not only that, but they also ruled out the idea that presidents set each other up for growth. That is, it's not that George H.W. Bush's policies set the stage for Clinton's booming economy (or that Carter set the stage for Reagan).

Importantly, the factors Blinder and Watson studied only explain around half of the gap. The rest remains "a mystery," they write. That means there could be something about presidents that Blinder and Watson didn't investigate that could allow Bush (or any president) to boost growth to 4 percent, theoretically. But given the current economic landscape, that seems unlikely.

The coming few years

The bottom line here is that 4 percent economic growth is maybe possible, but it seems highly unlikely. And it's certainly highly unlikely that any politician can promise a set of policies that would definitively set the economy on that kind of growth course.

For one thing, no one foresees anything approaching 4 percent growth in the next few years. The Federal Reserve's interest-rate decision makers, for example, mostly see GDP growth staying at or below 3 percent in the next few years, and, in the long run, they see it at just over 2 percent.

Not only that, but consider where the economy will be when the next president takes office.

"If you look at the what we believe will be the state of the economy in November of 2016, which is pretty close to full employment, predicting above-trend growth would be hazardous," said Blinder, who also served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. "To say you're going to do 4 percent per year for four years when the trend is only 2 is making a claim, I think, almost anybody would find outlandish."

Even if Bush (or any candidate) does happen to have a package of policies that could create gangbusters economic growth, the other thing a president needs is a Congress to enact those policies. Even so, it's tough to see what those policies might be.

"I would say there's probably nothing that the U.S. Congress could do to raise the growth rate from 2 percent to 4 percent," Blinder said. "And there's even less that the president could do under the Constitution."

When an e-mail arrived the other day promoting an "Interfaith Service Focused on Below the Belt Cancers," I was definitely intrigued.

It turns out Thursday, June 18, is the start of the third "Globe-athon to End Women's Cancers," two days of events in New York City dedicated to making people more aware of the cancers that strike over 1 million women a year and figuring out the best strategies for diagnosis and treatment.

Events include a service at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. (featuring a performance by the rock band N.E.D., or No Evidence of Disease) and a U.N. symposium to raise awareness of gynecological cancers, which include uterine, cervical, ovarian, vaginal and vulvar.

There's a particular emphasis on getting the message out in the developing world, where cervical cancer rates are on the rise.

To learn more, I spoke with Dr. Larry Maxwell, founder and executive director of the Globe-athon, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting gynecological cancers around the world, and a gynecological oncologist at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia.

I was a bit surprised by the term "below the belt cancers." I've never heard that phrase before. It's referring to gynecological cancers, correct?

"Gynecological cancers" is a mouthful. "Below the belt cancers" provides a less intimidating way of conveying what we're focused on.

Cervical cancer is a big killer. How many cases are there each year?

Over half a million women each year get cervical cancer worldwide. About half of them are dying.

Why is cervical cancer a growing problem in parts of the developing world?

There's a lot of speculation. In sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of HIV and AIDS have been historically high, we now have control of [HIV/AIDS] through retroviral treatment of women.

But a lot of these women are now succumbing to the effects of AIDs-related diseases like cervical cancer. In parts of Asia — again this is speculative, we don't have strong epidemiological evidence — people speculate [that the reasons for the increase in cervical cancer] may be environmental effects, such as high rates of smoking and pollution.

But we need to not only try to understand what environmental influences may be affecting cancer rates but get out on the front end and do what we can to prevent cervical cancer through vaccine.

In the case of cervical cancer, a vaccine for human papillomavirus would presumably keep them safe.

I would say 90 percent of patients at risk for developing cervical cancer could have it prevented by the vaccine. Countries around the world are trying to roll out national vaccination programs. The age range in some countries is 11 to 13, in others 9 to 11.

Can older women be vaccinated?

You can give it to women until they're age 26, but preferably before age 21.

How many doses do you need?

Three. But there's data being presented tomorrow at the U.N. that indicates two may be enough. There's even data speculating that one may be enough. The reason this becomes such a hot issue in developing areas of the world is the economic impact of the difference between three vs. two or two vs. one.

Does the vaccination against human papillomavirus have any negative effects?

In the U.S. there've been over 70 million doses. Although there have been adverse effects reported among women receiving the vaccine over six months [after inoculation], there's not any data to date that show causal relationship between those adverse reported events and the vaccine.

If a woman is diagnosed with cervical cancer, what's the treatment?

If it's caught early, surgery is an option. If there's advanced disease, surgery is usually not performed. Chemotherapy with radiation is an option.

How often?

If it's advanced cervical cancer, chemo and radiation are given five days a week over five weeks.

That must be hard on the patient, especially if they live far from the treatment center.

In the developing world, it may be an hour and a half bus ride each way on a daily basis. That's logistically a nightmare. So compliance rates with even getting treatment are less than ideal.

You've traveled to different countries as part of your work with Globe-athon. What kind of reaction to cancer have you seen?

If women have symptoms suggestive of cancer – spotting blood, malodorous discharge — they say, 'You know what if I got cancer, I'm dead. I can't get to [a facility to] have treatment, my husband's going to kick me out of the house. I've got nothing to live for.'

So I guess the stigma means they're not inclined to go in for exams and tests.

It really is going to take a lot of input from sociologists in addition to physicians to bring [cancer awareness] to the attention of health care providers, laypersons and policy makers.

gynecological cancers

cervical cancer

Women's Health

Cancer