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Taliban Attack Afghan Parliament In Kabul

Taliban militants attacked the Afghan Parliament in Kabul on Monday.

NPR's Philip Reeves reports that police say all of the militants were killed by Afghan security forces and more a dozen civilians were injured. Philip filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Police say the attack began when a suicide bomber in a car detonated outside parliament's gates.

"Inside, lawmakers were meeting to confirm the appointment of a new defense minster. TV pictures showed the speaker sitting calmly as a cloud of dust from the blast fills the room.

"A prolonged fire-fight then followed which police say ended when the security forces killed the six Taliban attackers. There's been a surge of Taliban attacks since last year's withdrawal of most U.S. and foreign forces.

"The Taliban will see today's attack as a propaganda coup — as it's against a major government power center in the heart of the capital. The attack is raising questions about how this security lapse could happen and about the overall ability of Afghan forces to combat the militants."

The New York Times reports this incident is an embarrassment for the Afghan government. Parliament was meeting to try to confirm a third nominee for the defense minister post.

The first two, the paper reports, were rejected by parliament leaving the country without a defense chief for 10 months. The Times adds:

"The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, posting what their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, described as 'live tweets.'

"'Parliament of the puppet administration of Kabul is under heavy martyrdom-seekers attack at a time which they were casting confidence vote for the minister of defense,' one of Mr. Mujahid's Twitter posts read.

"In another worrisome development for the Afghan government, a second district in the northern province of Kunduz fell to Taliban control, according to Afghan officials there. An Afghan Local Police commander said the Archi district fell to the insurgents Monday morning. On Sunday, the Ministry of Defense and other officials confirmed Taliban claims that another district, Chahar Dara, had fallen to the insurgents that morning."

The Wall Street Journal reports that all members of parliament were accounted for and safe.

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Snapshot Sleuthing Confirms Russian Military Presence In Ukraine

Reports of the Russian military helping pro-Russian separatist fighters in Ukraine are common — but can be hard to confirm. Russia denies that its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky decided to retrace the steps of one soldier — as documented in the soldier's social media posts — to see where exactly the soldier had been, and if this might help confirm Russia's direct involvement in Ukraine.

The Two-Way

Ukraine's President Warns Of Russian Invasion

Ostrovsky's new documentary, Selfie Soldiers, chronicles his journey in the footsteps of Bato Dambaev, who he'd confirmed was enlisted in the Russian military. He then contacted Dambaev directly.

The film follows up on recent work by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank that issued a report relying on open-source information to track and verify locations where photos and videos of Russian soldiers and equipment have been taken in Ukraine.

"I wanted to find any way to be able to confirm what pretty much everybody already believes, which is that the Russian government has been directly involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine," Ostrovsky tells NPR's Arun Rath.

"And it just happened to be that it was the Russian soldiers themselves who provided that proof inadvertently, by posting photographs of themselves online in Ukraine. And it couldn't have been simpler. So there it is."

Interview Highlights

On how he found Bato Dambaev

We were working together with the Atlantic Council and Elliott Higgins, who's a citizen journalist who's been geolocating — which is to say, finding the location of photographs — for a long time until we found one who'd posted a photograph of himself in an area that looked like it was a battlefield and was different from all of the other photographs that he'd posted of himself.

So once we saw that there was a photograph there that looked a lot like it could have been taken in Ukraine, we started focusing on this soldier. ... We traced his entire journey from Siberia, 4,000 miles away, to eastern Ukraine.

On Dambaev's reaction

He denied everything. I think he'd actually been prepared, as all soldiers are, that they're supposed to take off their insignia before they go into Ukraine. They're supposed to not take cellphones with them. He'd broken that rule, so he knew that he was in trouble.

I know that he reported me having contacted him immediately after I spoke with him on the phone. And this isn't in the film, but a few hours after I put the phone down, the security services came and paid me a visit in my hotel and I was essentially hounded by them out of Russia thereafter.

On Russia denying its role in Ukraine

It's a very sensitive issue, the participation of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, because everybody from Putin on down denies that it's happening. So until Russians understand, until the Russian government admits that it's taking part in the conflict, I don't think there's going to be any kind of a resolution. And I hope that this film brings us a little bit closer, at least, to that sort of an admission that it's going on. ...

One ... way I think the Russians are trying to prevent this kind of reporting is I've been applying for journalist accreditation, which I've been able to get before, for the last year, over a year. And it was a few days after I was basically pushed out of Russia that I finally got an email saying that I would be denied journalist paperwork.

An explanation was never given to me, and I think this is an extra method that the government is using to prevent reporting on its activities on Ukraine.

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For A British Man, Fighting ISIS Was Simply The Right Thing To Do

We have heard about how ISIS is recruiting foreign fighters to join its ranks. But it's happening on the other side as well.

Just last week, a Massachusetts man who died fighting against ISIS in Syria was laid to rest.

Last year, a British man who calls himself Macer Gifford left his job as a financial trader in London and went to join the Kurds and fight the self-declared Islamic State in Syria.

Gifford spoke on the condition that NPR not reveal his real name, because he fears for the safety of his family in the UK.

Though he had only a little military training — Gifford had joined the British equivalent of the National Guard — he was driven by a desire to defend people against ISIS.

"I was sitting at my desk in London, in an ordinary job, working in the city," he says. "Every day I'd flick on my computer screen and see the most horrendous crimes being committed in the Middle East. It just stirred me into action. I first wanted to donate money to charity, perhaps even work for a charity, but then the option came up that I could actually go out and volunteer and fight ISIS, so that's exactly what I did."

I'm very much poorer but a lot more satisfied as a human being, and in myself.

Macer Gifford

Gifford came back to the UK on the day the Massachusetts man, Keith Bloomfield, died.

"I never met him, although I met people who did know him," he says. "He had the same sort of values as me, and actually values that are very much ingrained within the culture of the United States, freedom, democracy, liberty."

Interview Highlights

On how he decided to join the Kurds

I was doing my research online [on] the different parties that were taking the fight to ISIS and the ones that were fighting generally in the region, and the one group that came up consistently in my research was the Kurds. It was the YPG in particular who were fighting for democracy. They weren't fighting [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, which for me, as a British subject, I couldn't actually volunteer to fight Assad directly, I could only fight the Islamic State ... The law is pretty hazy in this regard. Basically, you're not allowed to fight a state, whether that's an enemy of the United Kingdom or an ally. That's illegal. Me, I went out there just to fight the Islamic State.

On whether he had any second thoughts about his decision

Not a single one. From the moment that I arrived to the moment I left, I never questioned whether or not my decision was the wrong one, even when I learned of friends dying or even when I was fighting.

On the media attention he has received

It's strange that, if a Kurdish young man of 18 as well, 10 years younger than me, can volunteer to fight for his country, no one will blink an eyelid. But it takes a young man from the United Kingdom or from the United States or from Canada or Australia to go out and fight, for the media and the British government and the governments around the world to say, 'Ah, right, this is interesting,' and actually start to take notice.

On what he gave up in going to Syria, and what he gained

Before I left, I had a flat. I was just about to buy a house. I had a girlfriend. I had a job, a career, and I gave it all up to go out to fight. So now I've come back, six months later, I'm very much poorer but a lot more satisfied as a human being, and in myself.

After Years Of Blackouts, A Writer Remembers What She 'Drank To Forget'

When Sarah Hepola got her very first writing job at The Austin Chronicle, her editor-in-chief gave her an unlikely Christmas gift — a hat that could hold beers. "It was my top boss," Hepola recalls, who had drawn her name in a Secret Santa gift exchange. "He just threw it on my desk and said: 'So you can drink more at work.'"

Hepola's new memoir — Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget — is filled with such funny/tragic stories, about drinking until last call, blacking out, and then trying to piece it all together the following day.

"The truth is, I didn't feel like that interesting of a person," Hepola tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "It felt to me like my colleagues knew so much more than I did, was always so intimidated by them. They knew more about pop culture, they knew more about politics. What did I have? What were my stories? And suddenly, drinking was giving me these stories, it was giving me attention."

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For Ted Cruz, The Hard Part Comes Next

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz blew away another gathering of religious conservative leaders this week, preaching about threats to religious freedom to a receptive and hungry crowd.

"I will never, ever, ever shy away from standing up and defending the religious liberty of every American," the GOP White House hopeful thundered at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Road to Majority" conference in Washington.

"Religious liberty has never been more threatened in America than right now today," Cruz added.

Cruz hit all the right notes and could easily be declared the winner of the three-day conference, which wraps up Saturday. But despite the good receptions at events like these, Cruz's work on stage is not translating to the campaign trail. He not only lags behind in early state polls, but also in organization. And despite being the first major presidential candidate to declare this cycle, early state activists are baffled by how little they say they have seen Cruz.

"I've always thought that Ted Cruz was kind of the perfect caucus candidate," said Craig Robinson, who runs "The Iowa Republican" website and is a former political director for the state party. "But what we haven't seen is a real commitment to the state."

Speaking their language

There's a reason Ted Cruz does well in front of these crowds. He roams the stage with the gusto of a televangelist. He does not work from a podium, and he strikes just the right tone.

At the Road to Majority confab, he slammed other Republicans for backing down on Indiana's controversial religious freedom law, warned against a potential same-sex marriage decision from the Supreme Court and bashed the Obama administration for not standing up more forcefully to the threat of Islamic extremism.

He boosted his own bona fides, too, telling the audience how he had successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court on "religious liberty," such as protecting a Ten Commandments display at the Texas Capitol.

And with the cadence of a preacher, Cruz seamlessly and empathetically weaved in the tragic Charleston, S.C., shooting that had occurred the night before and left nine dead at a historically black church.

American flag at the Road to Majority conference on June 19, 2015. Lydia Thompson/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Lydia Thompson/NPR

American flag at the Road to Majority conference on June 19, 2015.

Lydia Thompson/NPR

Cruz led the audience of hundreds — they could have been congregants — in a moment of silence.

"Christians across our nation, across our world — believers across the world are lifting up the congregants at Emanuel AME," Cruz said.

Other GOP rivals touched on many of the same issues, but none with perhaps the same zeal or with the same visceral reaction from the audience.

The faithful ate it up.

"I like the fact that he fights even his own party for the right issue and the right cause," said John Redell, who was attending from Wilmington, Del. "That's the kind of strength we're going to need for a president: someone who can say no — even to his friends — to do what's right for the nation."

Jessica Burnett, a student at Georgia State University: "Ted Cruz was full of energy. He spoke a lot about the issues. He really got the crowd riled up a lot, and you can tell how serious he is about this and how much he cares about America."

The importance of retail politics

It's perhaps no surprise Cruz is able to channel a preacher. His father is an ordained minister, and he went to high school in Houston on the campus of a megachurch.

The former Ivy League debate champion has always loved performance art. He has moved between stages his whole life — from high-school musicals to the high-pressure collegiate debate circuit to the floor of the U.S. Senate. The challenge, though, for Cruz is coming down from the stage.

A majority of Republican caucus goers and primary voters in Iowa and South Carolina are white, evangelical or born-again Christians. In 2012, 57 percent of GOP voters in the Iowa caucuses described themselves that way, while 65 percent of the GOP primary electorate in South Carolina said so, according to entrance and exit polls.

The candidate who can unify them has a time-tested path to victory in those states and, with it, a springboard to the front of the presidential pack. But winning over those voters requires hand-to-hand, grip-and-grin campaigning — retail politics.

Members of the audience applause at the Road to Majority conference on June 19, 2015. Lydia Thompson/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Lydia Thompson/NPR

Members of the audience applause at the Road to Majority conference on June 19, 2015.

Lydia Thompson/NPR

It's what former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum did in Iowa in 2008 and 2012, respectively. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who built a career on this kind of campaigning, has already hit hard key sections of the state with deep pockets of religious voters.

The building blocks, the enthusiasm, are there for Cruz, but so far, observers in early states say, he has not shown the willingness to do the kind of required on-the-ground work — to the extent it's needed to win.

Craig Robinson, the former Iowa GOP political operative, noted Cruz's thin staff in the first caucus state compared to other candidates. What's more, Cruz, who is in Iowa this weekend, has held just 23 events in the state over a total of 16 days, according to the Des Moines Register's candidate tracker. That ranks seventh among Republican candidates and isn't in the top 10 overall.

Ted Cruz ranks seventh among Republicans for number of events held in Iowa so far. Domenico Montanaro/NPR/Des Moines Register Candidate Tracker, as of June 20, 2015 hide caption

itoggle caption Domenico Montanaro/NPR/Des Moines Register Candidate Tracker, as of June 20, 2015

By contrast, Santorum has already held 62 events over 29 days; Rick Perry 61 over 30 days; Rand Paul 41 over 16 days; and Mike Huckabee 37 events over 20 days. Even Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindal, who is set to declare Wednesday, have done more events.

"I still think Cruz has some work to do in terms of his retail campaigning in Iowa," Robinson said, "but I think he has it within himself to do it."

The battle for the evangelical vote

Some of those who have topped him in sojourns to the state are also competing for the same crucial evangelical voters, and were also well received at the conference this week.

Santorum reminded the audience of his long track record fighting for conservative issues, while others were just talk.

"You know me, I'm probably best known for issues of faith and freedom. In some cases, I'm only known for that," he laughed.

Jindal also spoke at length about the threats to religious liberty the day after Cruz, and was also well received by the crowd. Talking of his own conversion to the Christianity from Hinduism, he bemoaned how he felt it was no longer acceptable to stand up for unpopular opinions central to much of the evangelical faith, such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

"I'm tired of the hypocrisy of the left," Jindal said. "They say they tolerate diversity, and they do, unless you disagree with them. ... The United States of America did not create religious liberty. Religious liberty created the United States of America," he added to applause.

Ben Carson, another favorite of the crowd, Iowa conservatives and Tea Party supporters, spoke of how his faith helped him in his career as a world-renowned neurosurgeon. He said he saw the healing power of prayer and attributed his surgical skill to God after a child he didn't expect to recover went on to do so.

"I thought I was doing everything," Carson said. "I realized after that, that it wasn't me, it was God. I just said, 'Lord, you be the neurosurgeon, and I'll be your hands.'"

Carson, who rose to political fame in 2013 after giving a blistering broadside of Obamacare as the president sat feet away, had another critique for the president's administration.

"I know that President Obama says we're not a Judeo-Christian nation," Carson said, "but he doesn't get to decide. We decide."

While Cruz may have blown away many in the crowd the first day, others were left impressed by many others, underlining the difficult choice Iowa and South Carolina evangelical voters will have next year.

"I'm hoping, because we have such a large field, that as the field narrows down, the candidates are seeing what the American people really are looking for," said Terri Wical of Atlanta. "You know, getting back to our roots, getting back to character and all that. They don't want someone moderate. They don't want something that's going to accommodate everybody...They want somebody that's going to stand on a firm foundation."

Lauren Leatherby contributed.

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Battle Over New Oil Train Standards Pits Safety Against Cost

The federal government's new rules aimed at preventing explosive oil train derailments are sparking a backlash from all sides.

The railroads, oil producers and shippers say some of the new safety requirements are unproven and too costly, yet some safety advocates and environmental groups say the regulations aren't strict enough and still leave too many people at risk.

Since February, five trains carrying North Dakota Bakken crude oil have derailed and exploded into flames in the U.S. and Canada. No one was hurt in the incidents in Mount Carbon, W.Va., and Northern Ontario in February; in Galena, Ill., and Northern Ontario in March; and in Heimdal, N.D., in May.

Stephanie Bilenko of La Grange, Ill., (from left) Paul Berland of suburban Elgin and Dr. Lora Chamberlain of Chicago are members of a group urging more stringent rules for the oil-carrying trains. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Stephanie Bilenko of La Grange, Ill., (from left) Paul Berland of suburban Elgin and Dr. Lora Chamberlain of Chicago are members of a group urging more stringent rules for the oil-carrying trains.

David Schaper/NPR

But each of those fiery train wrecks occurred in lightly populated areas. Scores of oil trains also travel through dense cities, particularly Chicago, the nation's railroad hub.

According to state records and published reports, about 40 or more trains carrying Bakken crude roll through the city each week on just the BNSF Railway's tracks alone. Those trains pass right by apartment buildings, homes, businesses and schools.

"Well just imagine the carnage," said Christina Martinez. She was standing alongside the BNSF tracks in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood as a long train of black tank cars slowly rolled by, right across the street from St. Procopius, the Catholic elementary school her 6-year-old attends.

"Just the other day they were playing soccer at my son's school on Saturday and I saw the train go by and it had the '1267', the red marking," Martinez said, referring to the red, diamond-shaped placards on railroad tank cars that indicate their contents. The number 1267 signifies crude oil. "And I was like, 'Oh my God.' Can you imagine if it would derail and explode right here while these kids are playing soccer and all the people around there?"

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U.S., Canada Announce New Safety Standards For Oil Trains

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Safety Changes Are Small Comfort When Oil Trains Pass

New federal rules require stronger tank cars, with thicker shells and higher front and back safety shields for shipping crude oil and other flammable liquids. Older, weaker models that more easily rupture will have to be retrofitted or replaced within three to five years. But Martinez and others wanted rules limiting the volatility of what's going into those tank cars, too.

Oil from North Dakota has a highly combustible mix of natural gases including butane, methane and propane. The state requires the conditioning of the gas and oil at the wellhead so the vapor pressure is below 13.7 pounds per square inch before it's shipped. But even at that level, oil from derailed tank cars has exploded into flames.

And many safety advocates had hoped federal regulators would require conditioning to lower the vapor pressure even more.

"We don't want these bomb trains going through our neighborhood," said Lora Chamberlain of the group Chicagoland Oil by Rail. "De-gasify the stuff. And so we're really, really upset at the feds, the Department of Transportation, for not addressing this in these new rules."

Oil trains sit idle on the BNSF Railway's tracks in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. David Schaper/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Schaper/NPR

Oil trains sit idle on the BNSF Railway's tracks in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood.

David Schaper/NPR

Others criticize the rules for giving shippers three to five years to either strengthen or replace the weakest tank cars.

"The rules won't take effect for many years," said Paul Berland, who lives near busy railroad tracks in suburban Elgin. "They're still playing Russian roulette with our communities."

A coalition of environmental groups — including Earthjustice, ForestEthics and the Sierra Club — sued, alleging that loopholes could allow some dangerous tank cars to remain on the tracks for up to a decade.

"I don't think our federal regulators did the job that they needed to do here; I think they wimped out, as it were," said Tom Weisner, mayor of Aurora, Ill., a city of 200,000 about 40 miles west of Chicago that has seen a dramatic increase in oil trains rumbling through it.

Weisner is upset that the new rules provide exemptions to trains with fewer than 20 contiguous tank cars of a flammable liquid, such as oil, and for trains with fewer than 35 such tank cars in total.

"They've left a hole in the regulations that you could drive a freight train through," Weisner said.

At the same time, an oil industry group is challenging the new regulations in court, too, arguing that manufacturers won't be able to build and retrofit tank cars fast enough to meet the requirements.

The railroad industry is also taking action against the new crude-by-rail rules, filing an appeal of the new rules with the Department of Transportation.

In a statement, Association of American Railroads spokesman Ed Greenberg said: "It is the AAR's position the rule, while a good start, does not sufficiently advance safety and fails to fully address ongoing concerns of the freight rail industry and the general public. The AAR is urging the DOT to close the gap in the rule that allows shippers to continue using tank cars not meeting new design specifications, to remove the ECP brake requirement, and to enhance thermal protection by requiring a thermal blanket as part of new tank car safety design standards."

AAR's President Ed Hamberger discussed the problems the railroads have with the new rules in an interview with NPR prior to filing the appeal. "The one that we have real problems with is requiring something called ECP brakes — electronically controlled pneumatic brakes," he said, adding the new braking system that the federal government is mandating is unproven.

"[DOT does] not claim that ECP brakes would prevent one accident," Hamberger said. "Their entire safety case is based on the fact that ECP brakes are applied a little bit more quickly than the current system."

Acting Federal Railroad Administrator Sarah Feinberg disagreed. "It's not unproven at all," she said, noting that the railroads say ECP brakes could cost nearly $10,000 per tank car.

"I do understand that the railroad industry views it as costly," Feinberg adds. "I don't think it's particularly costly, especially when you compare it to the cost of a really significant incident with a train carrying this product."

"We're talking about unit trains, 70 or more cars, that are transporting an incredibly volatile and flammable substance through towns like Chicago, Philadelphia," Feinberg continues. "I want those trains to have a really good braking system. I don't want to get into an argument with the rail industry that it's too expensive. I want people along rail lines to be protected."

Feinberg said her agency is still studying whether to regulate the volatility of crude, but some in Congress don't think this safety matter can wait.

"The new DOT rule is just like saying let the oil trains roll," U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a statement. "It does nothing to address explosive volatility, very little to address the threat of rail car punctures, and is too slow on the removal of the most dangerous cars."

Cantwell is sponsoring legislation to force oil producers to reduce the crude's volatility to make it less explosive, before shipping it on the nation's rails.

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Detroit's Iconic Fisher Building Up For Auction

"Detroit's largest art object" is up for sale, and it's not part of a collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

It's the Fisher Building, a National Historic Landmark, and it's on the auction block — the online auction block, that is.

You could purchase one of Detroit's most iconic buildings online at Auction.com June 22-24.

The bank foreclosed on the 29-story art deco building recently and now some real estate experts are calling it a rare opportunity to get a piece of history at a bargain basement price.

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For Sale: Detroit Land Bank Seeks Buyers For Vacant Houses

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On The Road To Recovery, Detroit's Property Taxes Aren't Helping

The story of the Fisher Building begins in the late 19th century. The seven Fisher Brothers built carriages for horses, then, bodies for cars. General Motors bought out the Fishers in 1919 for $200 million, or about $2.7 billion in today's dollars. The Fishers used some of that money for civic causes, and some to build a palace to honor their legacy. They chose Detroit's most-prolific architect, Albert Kahn, to build it.

"So the Fisher brothers reach out to him, they say, we're going to give you a blank check. In return, we want the most beautiful building in the world," says Ryan Hooper with "Pure Detroit," a group that gives tours of the Fisher Building.

The New York League of Architects said the goal was achieved: They declared the Fisher the most beautiful building of 1928, largely because of the three-story arcade.

"We're talking about these art deco chandeliers hanging above us, this beautiful frescoed ceiling above us," Hooper says, pointing up at the ceiling

"The exterior of the building, it's marble clad, making it the largest marble clad commercial building in the world. Inside you have over 52 different types of marble, all different colors coming from all different parts of the world," he says.

And 430 tons of bronze to really put it over the top — some of which is on the lobby elevators.

"It's a cast bronze door, marble frame," Hooper says, admiring the elevator. "It's kind of mind blowing when you think about it."

These were once the fastest elevators in the world, Hooper says.

There's also a 2,000-seat theater inside the building. And all of this can be yours.

The 29-story Fisher building is up for auction online. Sean_Marshall/Flickr hide caption

itoggle caption Sean_Marshall/Flickr

The 29-story Fisher building is up for auction online.

Sean_Marshall/Flickr

"I think the property has the potential to trade in the $20 million to $30 million dollar range," says A.J. Weiner, the managing director for the real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle's Detroit office.

Keep in mind, the Fisher Brothers originally put $140 million in today's dollars, into the property. In Chicago or New York City, a building of this size and grandeur could sell for perhaps $500 million, Weiner says.

This week's auction also includes the neighboring 10-story art deco "Albert Kahn Building" and two parking garages.

But would buying the building be throwing good money after bad?

"I think it's throwing good money after great," Weiner says.

That's contingent on a few things though. This neighborhood, called "New Center," was once among the wealthiest commercial areas on earth. General Motors had its world headquarters here. Detroit boosters say it's the next commercial part of Detroit that's ready to take off.

Jim Bieri, with Stokas Bieri Real Estate in Detroit, says if the neighborhood can come back around, the Fisher Building's price tag would be really low.

"It's shocking because it is a magnificent architectural gem," says Bieri.

He says beautiful, historic buildings like the Fisher can attract more tenants and fetch high rents. But, he adds, people don't work in the marbled lobby.

"I haven't ridden the elevators much lately, but I'm told they don't operate like the used to," says Bieri. "I just know that when they get into a building like that, if you haven't been taking care of it, there's just issue after issue from electric to HVAC."

Tour guide Ryan Hooper took me to the vacant 19th floor. Occupancy rates in the Fisher Building have dwindled in recent years. The carpeting needs replacing, as does the plumbing and the bathrooms. Overall, it's drab.

It could cost a new owner $60 million to fix up the Fisher Building, perhaps double the purchase price. And it will also require an act of faith by any new owner that this neighborhood can indeed come back, and new businesses will want to move into the building.

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It's Hard For These Dads To Talk About Love ... But They Do

It's Father's Day! While the holiday isn't formally celebrated in the rural area of southern India where I live, I still have to tell my dad how much I appreciate him, love him and how thankful I am for all he has done — although I'm a little apprehensive about how he will respond to my mushy affections.

It's not uncommon for fathers to struggle with expressing their love for their children, but also with loving their children equally. Some rejoice at the birth of a son and grieve when a daughter is born.

I decided to go out and ask a trio of dads in my village to share their thoughts about fatherhood with me.

Mayilsami, 67, is a father of one daughter. Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Mayilsami, 67, is a father of one daughter.

Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Mayilsami

Some people in India may grieve when a daughter is born, but not Mayilsami. The 67-year-old retired factory worker says he tries to raise his daughter in the "jolliest" way possible.

"Whatever she asked, I would give her," he says, "so maybe that was the way I expressed my affection."

But he acknowledges that, like other fathers, he's often so busy earning a living that "we lose touch with our children."

His advice to younger fathers: "Work less and invest more in your family. Try to speak more to your children."

Rajagopal, 76, is a father of one daughter. Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Rajagopal, 76, is a father of one daughter.

Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Rajagopal

Rajagopal, 76, raised his daughter as a single dad after his wife's death at a young age.

"I had to make sure I let her know that she was loved," he says. "Expressing love is usually easier for the mother."

When it comes to boys vs. girls, Rajagopal says that it's part of the "culture" to favor sons.

"If I had a son I would give my house and land to him, not my daughter," he says.

Regardless of the child's gender, he says, discipline is key.

"If you do this when they are young," he says, "then you won't need to discipline them when they grow older and get into family feuds."

Ganesan, 62, is a father of four daughters. Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Ganesan, 62, is a father of four daughters.

Wilbur Sargunaraj for NPR

Ganesan

The 62-year-old former mill worker has four daughters, all of whom are married.

"I did my best to help my daughters in their schoolwork and to get them married," he says.

But he does wish he had had a son.

"You have to see it from the perspective that boys will be the ones to lift you up when you need help," he says. "With the girl, you have to pay dowry to get her married and then she belongs to her husband and in-laws. This is embedded within our culture."

It wasn't easy being a dad, he says.

"I struggled a bit to share my feelings, and things got even worse after my daughters got married," he admits. "I could not even talk to them, and they treated me terribly — maybe that is because of the lack of communication and affection I showed them as a father."

Now, Ganesan spends a lot of time with his grandchildren. The most important thing a father can do, he says, is "show our children that we are capable of love, just like their mothers."

daughter

village life

Wilbur Sargunaraj

fatherhood

Father's Day

India

пятница

Obamacare Repeal Would Add Billions to Deficit

Congress' official scorekeeper says repealing Obamacare would increase the federal budget deficit and the number of uninsured Americans by 24 million.

The report from the Congressional Budget Office comes as Washington awaits a ruling by the Supreme Court that could end insurance subsidies for some six million people in 30 states.

The report says repealing the Affordable Care Act's spending cuts and tax increases would add $137 billion to the deficit over the next ten years, and the number of people with health insurance would drop from 90 percent of the population to 82 percent.

The CBO says economic growth would be boosted a bit because more people would join the labor force, as the Affordable Care Act's subsidies make it easier for people to work less or stop working and not lose health coverage.

Reaction to the report, as with most things about the health care law, fell along party lines. The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming, chose to focus on how repeal would effect economic growth:

"'CBO has determined what many in Congress have known all along,' said Chairman Enzi. 'This law acts as an anchor on our economy by dragging down employment and reducing labor force participation. As a result, the deficit reduction that the Democrats promised when it was enacted is substantially unclear.'"

Democrats put their focus on the negative impacts of repeal. House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi said:

"The cost to the deficit would be surpassed only by the human toll of repeal. Republicans would add over 20 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured, and strip vital health protections from hundreds of millions of American families – shattering the newfound health security that has made a difference in the lives of so many families. Republicans should look at the numbers and finally end their fixation with repealing this historic law."

The new CBO report incorporates the principles of dynamic scoring, which takes into account a wider array of economic factors, and which Republicans say provides a more realistic picture of the economic impact of repeal. The CBO says under the old rules, the deficit would increase even more, by $353 billion over ten years.

Politico says the CBO report could have political implications:

"The estimate will make it harder for Republicans to use so-called reconciliation to repeal the law because congressional budgeting rules bar lawmakers from using the parliamentary maneuver to move legislation that adds to government red ink.

The CBO report said over the long term, repeal would add even more to the deficit:

"Repealing the ACA would cause federal budget deficits to increase by growing amounts after 2025, whether or not the budgetary effects of macroeconomic feedback are included. That would occur because the net savings attributable to a repeal of the law's insurance coverage provisions would grow more slowly than would the estimated costs of repealing the ACA's other provisions—in particular, those provisions that reduce updates to Medicare's payments. The estimated effects on deficits of repealing the ACA are so large in the decade after 2025 as to make it unlikely that a repeal would reduce deficits during that period, even after considering the great uncertainties involved."

federal budget

CBO

Affordable Care Act

deficits

Should NPR Be Calling The Attack In Charleston 'Terrorism'?

Is the killing of nine people at a black church in Charleston, S.C. on Wednesday night "terrorism" and should NPR be calling it such?

Jeffrey Fields, assistant professor of the practice of international relations at the University of Southern California, wrote to my office last night, asking, "Why the resistance to characterizing the shooting of June 17 in Charleston, S.C. as terrorism?"

"By any stretch and using any of the definitions including the State Department's or 18 U.S.C. § 2331, this is terrorism," he wrote, in part. "Why is NPR (and so many other media outlets) 'avoiding' using this term? It only serves to reinforce the notion that terrorism equates to Muslims and foreigners. Yes, this is a hate crime. That doesn't preclude calling it terrorism either in common parlance or legal terms."

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines terrorism as "the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal." The New York Times and others have reported that the alleged shooter Wednesday night, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, can be seen in a now-blocked Facebook photo wearing symbols of two white supremacist former African governments. (The Times also had a good story about civil rights advocates who "are asking why the attack has not officially been called terrorism.")

Fields, in his letter, pointed out that NPR, in its initial reporting on the Boston Marathon bombings, " at least acknowledged that President Obama had avoided using the term. That's very telling because 1. NPR hasn't done that with Charleston and 2. At that point the bombers in Boston hadn't been caught or identified (so motive and intention were still unknown). Here the alleged perpetrator has been caught and there are already reports of his own words suggesting his motivation and it points directly to the textbook definition of terrorism."

Mark Memmott, NPR's standards editor, told me NPR's policy is to avoid rushing to throw a label on a situation. "We use action words to describe what happened and let the facts reveal whether it was terrorism, a hate crime, or murder," he said. He added, "We're certainly not going to shy away from reporting what is revealed about the suspect and his motivations."

I looked back at the Boston reporting and how NPR reported on day one of other similar acts of violence. In the case of the Boston coverage, in addition to the story Fields cited there were a number of stories on that first day quoting officials using the word to describe the situation. My quick takeaway is that NPR has been largely consistent in its policy. When the word "terrorism" pops up early on, it's because someone else, usually an elected or law enforcement official, has used it.

Moreover, NPR's policy seems appropriate to me, at least for the moment. The coverage that Fields was objecting to was from the first day after this week's horrific events. While NPR itself did not refer to the suspect as a "terrorist" or call the killing "terrorism," several stories, beginning yesterday afternoon, have quoted people using the word to describe the situation, and that also seems appropriate.

The situation is already evolving. Late this afternoon, NPR reported that, "the Justice Department said it was investigating Wednesday's shootings as a possible hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism."

As the coverage unfolds I'll keep track of how NPR's language does as well, and revisit the subject, if warranted.

Meanwhile, for more on "what this story tells us about the deeper foundations of racial hatred in America" read this piece from NPR's Code Switch blog.

After Verses Turn To Versus, Poet Emerges With Renowned Oxford Post

It's been a scuffle of candidate platforms, fickle endorsements and even a few dignified bouts of mud-slinging — and for once, the hubbub had nothing to do with American politics. In fact, it featured a cast of characters you might not have expected: those men and women of letters, the poets.

On Friday, British poet Simon Armitage won election as the newest Oxford professor of poetry. He edged out Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and American poet A.E. Stallings.

The post, which is widely considered the second-most prestigious position in British literature (behind only the country's poet laureate), was established at the University of Oxford in 1708. In the centuries since, the chair has sported an impressive list of title-holders — including Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden and, more recently, Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor at The New Yorker. The winner is chosen by a host of voters called the Convocation, a mixture of current and former faculty at the school, as well as Oxford alumni.

But enough of the throat-clearing; now to the fuss: Armitage had been just one of five candidates nominated for the position. The list featured not only Soyinka and Stallings, but also Ian Gregson and Sean Haldane. Shortly after voting began in late May, one of Soyinka's most prominent backers, former broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, publicly withdrew his support for the Nigerian poet and playwright.

"Soyinka is a grand man and would regard it as a grand post," Bragg said of Soyinka, in comments made to the Sunday Times, but "I also query his age." In the same conversation, Bragg also said that the 80-year-old poet "has not written much poetry recently and I now wonder how often he would bother to come to Oxford."

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, during a mentoring session at the Lagos Book and Art Festival in 2014. Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters/Landov

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, during a mentoring session at the Lagos Book and Art Festival in 2014.

Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters/Landov

Bragg later clarified, in a letter to The Guardian, that he did not intend to disparage Soyinka's age.

"I have had the greatest admiration for Soyinka's remarkable work and his political courage for many years. I was delighted when he won the Nobel prize," he added. "But when I learned that Simon Armitage had applied for the Oxford post, I thought that he would be a better choice for what I think is required."

Soyinka responded quickly: "How curious that anyone would even speculate that I would allow busy and committed people — friends, colleagues and total strangers — to waste their time nominating and campaigning on my behalf for such a prestigious position if I were not serious about contesting."

Soyinka had begun the voting period as a heavy favorite for the position, amassing more than 140 nominations compared with Armitage's 58. (A poet needs 50 to be considered a candidate.) And others had even gone so far as to declare that winning the position "should be a cinch" for Soyinka.

But as The Guardian notes, this is not the first race in recent years to draw a tumult, and not even the first to involve a Nobel laureate:

"In 2009, Ruth Padel was elected by Oxford graduates to the post, but remained in position for less than two weeks, resigning in the wake of charges that she had leaked to journalists the allegations of sexual harassment which had been made against her rival, the St Lucian writer Derek Walcott."

Despite all the intrigue and dust-ups, perhaps we should instead take a page from Armitage's own poetry and take a bird's-eye view of the drama. As he writes in his aptly titled poem, "Poem":

"Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that."

Armitage will succeed the current professor of poetry, Geoffrey Hill, this year.

Poetry

Oxford

Brazil Arrests Heads Of 2 Construction Giants In Petrobras Probe

Police in Brazil have arrested the leaders of the nation's two largest engineering and construction companies. Marcelo Odebrecht, head of Odebrecht SA, and Otavio Marques Azevedo, head of Andrade Gutierrez, were taken into custody in Friday morning raids linked to a scandal involving Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras.

As NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports for Newscast:

"It's really hard to explain just how omnipresent Odebrecht is in Brazil, and Latin America generally. They are everywhere and they have had a hand in building almost everything — four of the World Cup stadiums alone. For the Olympics, the company is helping to build the Athletes' Village, an express bus line and the Olympic Park, plus a subway line. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg — they operate in dozens of countries around the world, too, including in the U.S. So news that the head of the family-owned business has been arrested is huge news in the region."

Reuters reports that the two executives were among a dozen people arrested in four states Friday. It adds:

"A lead prosecutor, Carlos Fernando dos Santos Limas, said he had 'no doubt' Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez led what he called a 'cartel' that overcharged Petrobras for work and passed on the excess funds to executives and politicians.

"While the arrests were somewhat expected, they nevertheless raised hopes among Brazilians that the investigation would not spare some of the most powerful people in a country where the wealthy have enjoyed relative impunity.

"Neither Azevedo nor Odebrecht have been formally charged and it was not clear how long they would be detained. Arrests of other top Brazilian executives resulted in months-long pre-trial incarceration."

The news service says the ongoing probe of alleged corruption at Petrobras has led to indictments of more than 100 people and implicated dozens of politicians, many of them from President Dilma Rousseff's Worker's Party.

Rousseff is a former chairwoman of the Petrobras board. She has not been implicated and has denied involvement in the scandal.

Brazil's comptroller general has been investigating some two dozen construction firms that are accused of having offered about $2.1 billion in bribes.

Bloomberg Business reports that Odebrecht and Andrade confirmed Friday's arrests:

"Odebrecht said in an e-mailed statement that its offices in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro had been searched and that arrest warrants had been carried out.

"Andrade Gutierrez in an e-mailed statement said it was aiding in the police investigation and denied any involvement in relation to the so-called Car Wash operation, referring to investigations into a scheme of alleged kickbacks on service contracts at state-run oil company Petrobras."

petrobras

Dilma Rousseff

Brazil

Settlement Reached To Overhaul Mississippi Juvenile Courts

The U.S. Justice Department has reached a settlement with the state of Mississippi to overhaul the way young people are arrested and processed through the juvenile courts, NPR has learned.

The deal follows a scathing report from federal civil rights investigators who uncovered systemic violations of due process rights of juveniles, some of whom moved into the justice system for minor infractions such as truancy or wearing the wrong clothes to school. Federal authorities sued the state and the city of Meridian in 2012, citing the area as among the worst examples of the "school to prison pipeline."

"Today's announcement really is about ensuring that school disciplinary issues are not inappropriately criminalized in public schools and that when children come into contact with the juvenile justice system, that they are afforded appropriate due process rights," Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Department civil rights unit, told NPR in an interview.

The terms of the settlement require city police in Meridian, Miss., to document they have probable cause to take juveniles into custody and bar law enforcement from interviewing those juveniles unless a guardian or defense lawyer is present. The deal also imposes new requirements on probation officers, to make sure young people understand their constitutional rights against self-incrimination.

"These agreements will help protect the children of Meridian from deprivations of educational opportunity as well as due process," said U.S. Attorney Gregory Davis of the Southern District of Mississippi.

The investigation and litigation in Mississippi is part of a stream of cases by the Justice Department's civil rights unit focused on juvenile courts. Gupta said that work represents an effort to "reframe the debate" and shine a light on justice for youth, who often get short-changed when it comes to resources for legal defense.

"The goal really is ... to use these agreements to promote best practices for when children actually come into contact with the system, while addressing the broader question of trying to keep children out of the system to begin with," she added.

Authorities continue to investigate the family court in St. Louis County, Missouri, and the truancy court in Dallas County, Texas, for alleged due process violations.

The Business Of Smuggling Migrants Across The Mediterranean

The massive wave of people fleeing the Middle East and Africa has taken on some retail features.

Smugglers sending desperate migrants across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Europe are looking to make money. But they do offer discounts. Small children can go for free. Migrants who organize a group to travel can go free as a sort of referral bonus.

The deals are part of the business side of a dangerous business. Hundreds of migrants have died so far this year, seeking to cross the Mediterranean on rickety boats and overloaded ships.

A coastal town in Egypt, Agami, near Alexandria, is now flush with Syrians who fled their country's civil war. Members of one family explained how they shopped for a smuggler.

The father of the family is using his nickname, Abu Mohamed, because he's worried about his family still in Syria and because he's sending his children across the Mediterranean on a dangerous voyage.

First there's the decision to go. Abu Mohamed made that decision for his children over a year ago. He then tracked down a broker through other Syrian families.

"It's easy to find them," he says of the brokers who funnel people into the system. It's all by word of mouth and most of the brokers here are Syrian.

Cutting The Deal

Then the deal is done on the phone.

The broker gets in touch with the smuggler who charges between $2,000 and $5,000 per person, depending on the nationality and legal status of the person trying to leave.

In Abu Mohamed's case, he's sending his 14-year-old son and his 20-year-old daughter. The smuggler gave him a deal. His youngest son gets to go for free because he's traveling with a group of 10 others.

"Ten Syrians means one Syrian for free," he says, laughing sarcastically.

In other cases, children under 11 commonly go for free.

Abu Mohamed's daughter's trip costs $2,500, which they paid for by borrowing money from a relative.

Abu Mohamed and his wife know the risk. They know they might lose their oldest children at sea. Some 2,000 people have drowned at sea just this year during the treacherous journey from North Africa to Europe. But they're doing it anyway. It's the only way they'll have a future, they say.

After the deal was made, they waited for the phone to ring.

"The person who calls tells you where to go to meet them," Abu Mohamed says. "After that, I don't know where they take them."

The Legendary Mr. Miyamoto, Father Of Mario And Donkey Kong

Nintendo's Mario games, in their various forms and genres have been played around the world by hundreds of millions of people. In the original, Mario is a plumber who must speed through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool.

All Tech Considered

Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto On The Origins Of Nintendo's Famous Characters

The game turns 30 this year. Its famed creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, was in Los Angeles this week at the big Electronic Entertainment Expo video game conference to promote the latest version of the game Super Mario Maker.

I had a chance to meet up with him and talk about his popular character and games. My first question was how a Japanese game designer came up with a character who looks like a white guy in overalls with a big nose, a mustache and a cap.

"When I was younger I used to enjoy comics and drawing comics," says Miyamoto. "And among the comics that I read, some were Italian comics. So I think that my connection to those Italian comics probably drew on that inspiration when we first drew the character."

And Mario didn't start out as a plumber — he was a carpenter in Nintendo's first big hit, Donkey Kong, also created by Miyamoto, which first came out as an arcade game in 1981.

In Donkey Kong, the character must climb ladders to rescue a princess from a gorilla. Miyamoto says he got named Mario when the game shipped to the US.

"There was somebody related to that warehouse whose name was Mario," says Miyamoto. "And the staff at Nintendo in America said that the character looked like the individual named Mario. So they started calling the character Mario, and when I heard that I said 'oh, Mario's a great name — let's use that.' "

The name and the character are part of the core storyline of a franchise that has helped Nintendo thrive for decades. Mario became a plumber in Miyamoto's next game, because he had to make his way through a series of pipes. He became Super Mario when Miyamoto added mushrooms that make Mario grow bigger and stronger.

"If you think about stories like Alice in Wonderland or other types of fairy tales, mushrooms always seem to have a kind of mysterious power," says Miyamoto. "And so we thought that the mushroom would be a good symbol why they get it and then grow big."

Mario grows big so he can overcome obstacles, including exploding Bob-omb's, and bad mushrooms called Goombas.

Despite the fantastical nature of Miamoto's games, he was trained as an industrial designer, so he often thinks of new ways to play his games from what he sees in his life. It wasn't until Miyamoto took up swimming, for instance, that Mario went underwater in Super Mario 64.

Miyamoto's imaginative and childlike universe has spawned more than 200 games in various genres.

Fact Check: Could Jeb Bush Really Grow GDP At 4 Percent? It's Hard To See How

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, eliminat[ing] as many deductions, bring[ing] back common sense, shift[ing] 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 he receives.

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 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 are a bit noisier, and growth does leap above 4 percent every so often. But the only time in the past 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 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. Bush, who was slightly above 2 percent. Obama comes in just below 2 percent, and George W. Bush 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 report from economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton. This paper (an update of earlier work) found two big things:

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

2. 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).

More important, 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 year and in the long run 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 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 Advisers. "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."

2016 Presidential Race

economics

Jeb Bush

Republicans

From The 'Inside Out,' A Lively Look Inside A Young Mind

Pixar's Inside Out is the perfect tool for coming to grips with what has happened to Pixar itself. The film's most valuable insight is that it's natural to feel sad about growing up, which is true even when the thing growing up is a movie studio that has shepherded countless childhoods. As of late, the vibrant creative energies that produced WALL-E, Up, and The Incredibles seemed to be fading into the past as the Disney-owned company did the adult thing: capitalize on its brand potential (Cars 2, Monsters University) at the expense of the unfiltered imagination that defined its younger years. So go ahead. Be sad, or angry, or disgusted, or afraid. It's normal.

When we're lucky, though, sadness can also bring joy, and Inside Out is joyous indeed. Enter 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), who seems to be the film's hero but is in fact the. . . setting. Hold that thought.

In her early childhood in Minnesota, Riley was living the dream: hyper-attentive parents, good friends, and youth hockey stardom. Now her dad is moving the family to San Francisco, where she knows no one at school, her parents are suddenly too busy for her, and hipster chefs have ruined pizza by slapping broccoli on top. The horrors of adolescence aren't making these changes any easier to stomach, as all survivors of that traumatic era can attest.

We know how Riley feels. In fact, we know her better than we've known any character in film history. From the beginning, directors Pete Docter (Up) and Ronaldo Del Carmen plunge us inside her mind to meet her emotions firsthand—the true heroes. What do emotions look like? Turns out they look like Disney cartoons: brightly colored sprites with effervescent shimmering skin, as though ready to burst at any moment. There's Joy (Amy Poehler), a Tinkerbell-ish golden girl who only wants to keep her host happy; Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a hunched-over, turtlenecked moaner who seems to turn Riley's memories as blue as she is; and their three coworkers, high-strung Fear (Bill Hader), posh Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Anger (Lewis Black in the role he was born to play), so hotheaded he shoots fire from his noggin when he boils over. They work in "Headquarters," a giant control room (think the Bridge on Star Trek) with buttons and switches to control Riley's actions, and their work produces the girl's hard-earned memories, which take the form of colorful glowing orbs that replay moments on a continuous loop, like GIFs in a snow globe.

Hang tight, because there's a lot more going on inside Riley's, and this film's, wonderfully warped mind. (Docter's inspiration was his own adolescent daughter's changing emotional state.) Half the fun is the surprise of seeing what turns up, so a spoiler warning is necessary here: The family's big move touches off a round of infighting in Headquarters, as Joy tries to squeeze Sadness out of the picture for what she believes is the good of Riley's health. But her efforts backfire, and the two are launched to the furthest recesses of the girl's headspace, leaving Fear, Disgust, and Anger running the ship. To get back, Joy and Sadness will have to hitch a ride on—what else?—Riley's Train of Thought.

The pair's odd-couple journey gives us a grand tour of the brain's many wonders. These include the impossibly deep storage facility that keeps and recalls memories and a literal dream theater—a Tinseltown studio backlot where a film crew in Riley's subconscious stages her nighttime entertainments. Each new stop is another masterstroke in visual storytelling, and the film boasts Pixar's most ambitious production designs to date. Though there's a candy-colored vibe to everything, reminiscent of midcentury filmstrips, there's also a darkness bubbling, a sense that maybe Sadness isn't so misplaced in the psyche of this rapidly maturing youth.

Given how easy it would have been for Joy and Sadness to feel like exhausting caricatures, Poehler and Smith's voice work is all the more remarkable. The stellar actors help turn their feelings into fully realized characters, in ways that may even override their purpose in the story (how can Joy feel sad? Does that make sense?).

The idea of a collection of separate beings wrestling over control of a human smacks on paper of the early-'90s sitcom Herman's Head, or the Eddie Murphy comedy Meet Dave, in which tiny aliens in Murphy's skull turned his every action into flamboyant performance art. But Docter's team pulls off a seamless fluidity between "real" life and the wild, abstract life of the mind. Even though five distinct personalities are behind the wheel, Riley's actions and reactions never feel anything but human, and she aches and jumps for joy just like everyone. It's this commitment to humanity that makes a seemingly low-stakes climax—Anger's misguided solution to Riley's California woes—pack such an emotional wallop. What's the worst that could happen? How about deep, irreparable rifts in a child's mental health?

Inside Out is only 94 minutes long, but stuffed with enough loving detail for five movies. What about the intricate designs of those "personality islands" formed from Riley's core memories? Or Bing-Bong, the imaginary friend from childhood? The "Abstract Thought" chamber, a treat for animation geeks? Above all, there is the film's stealthy, insightful approach to child psychology and its wonderful distillation of concepts that most filmmakers would never attempt to express in this medium. The movie is unabashed about its sentimentality, because it's teaching us about the raw power of sentiment: This is how memories are formed. Inside Out isn't just a sign of renewed youth from Pixar. It's the reason Pixar exists.

A note on the preshow: The latest Pixar short is "Lava," a love ballad sung between two volcanoes. Sadly, it's one of the company's weakest short films to date, lacking the clever conceits of classics like "Gerry's Game" and "Night And Day." Your brain will be sending the ukulele theme song up to Headquarters for weeks after, and no, that's not a good thing.

'Seven Good Years' Remembers Tiny Moments Writ Exquisitely Large

Author Interviews

'Seven Good Years' Between The Birth Of A Son, Death Of A Father

Author Interviews

What Etgar Keret Learned From His Father About Storytelling And Survival

There are a hundred writers that I want to have a beer with, but Etgar Keret isn't one of them.

I want to almost have a beer with him — to have plans and a time and a place — and then for everything to go wrong. For trains to break down, cabs to be late; for him to be delayed by a missing wallet or a flood in his hotel, for me to blow a tire and for my cell phone to die so that we miss each other, arriving at the bar at different times to find it actively on fire or already burned to the ground.

Only later, by the oddest of coincidences, will we find ourselves standing in line at the same pet store or waiting to cross the street and we'll both apologize and tell our stories and be equally impressed by the ridiculous lengths to which fate had gone to keep us from having that beer. But we will have gotten stories, which are sometimes better. Particularly for Keret, who'll undoubtedly write his down (referring to me glancingly as "an odd American book critic I was meant to have a drink with"), publish it in a collection of essays, and then go on (deservedly) to win every award ever invented.

That might very well be how his newest book, The Seven Good Years, came together — this collection of unusual coincidences, and tiny vignettes of a life lived on the constant, bittersweet edge of surrealism. This scattering of laughs. This pack of sighs. This charming and heartbreaking pile of stories that cover the years between the birth of Keret's son, Lev, and the death of his beloved father. It starts with a terrorist attack — with Keret in a hospital maternity ward where the doctors have all been called away, waiting for his wife to give birth — and ends with a rocket attack on Tel Aviv, with Keret, his wife and son all lying on top of each other (playing "Pastrami Sandwich") by the side of the road and listening to the air raid sirens and distant explosions. In between, it has anti-semites, air travel, war, telemarketers, Hebrew Book Week, the magic of dreams, war, IKEA boycotts, preschool, Disneyland, Ehud Olmert pretending to be a cat, war and war.

Keret calls it a memoir but it's really a TARDIS — a time machine that does two kinds of magic at once. First, it takes us back through seven years of Keret's history, showing us the world (its beauty, madness, and inescapable strangeness) through his sharp and sympathetic observations. It's not an overtly political book, but one defined by violence, bookended by life and death.

Second, he writes stories that are bigger on the inside. Keret can give us a day in a handful of words, a life in four paragraphs, a war in two pages, then downshift and spend five discussing the fundamentalist and geopolitical implications of playing Angry Birds ("Under the adorable surface of the funny animals and their sweet voices, Angry Birds is actually a game that is consistent with the spirit of religious fundamentalist terrorists...a game in which you are prepared to sacrifice your life just so you can destroy the houses of unarmed enemies and vaporize their wives and children inside."). The stories, despite their length, feel full and generous. They never leave you feeling cheated because there is value in every word. Even the silly ones.

Maybe especially the silly ones. Because Keret is a funny guy in the way that sad guys can be when they don't let the sadness and their general displeasure with the world turn them sour. When they transmute this sadness into something else: hope, satire, a meditation on doing pilates with injured ballerinas, a conversation with his newborn son, whatever.

"Six hours later, a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button comes popping out of my wife's vagina and immediately starts to cry. I try to calm him down, to convince him that there's nothing to worry about. That by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled." This is the author meeting his son—born in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, in the hospital stripped of doctors, on a day that is just any other day except for Keret and his wife, and for Lev. "He quiets down and then considers his next move. He's supposed to be naive — seeing as how he's a newborn — but even he doesn't buy it, and after a second's hesitation and a small hiccup, he goes back to crying."

Seven years later, the Middle East is still a mess. There are still attacks and there are still tears, but so, too, is there still Keret and his wife and Lev. Time goes. Babies are born and old men die and all we can hope for is to gather some beautiful, small stories to make sense of where we've come from and where we're going.

Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his newest book.

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As NAFTA Memories Linger, Unions Hold Fast Against New Trade Deal

If the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal isn't revived in the next few days, labor unions will have helped defeat one of President Obama's main foreign policy goals. But what will defeating the TPP, an agreement that covers 12 nations along the Pacific Rim, do for labor?

Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, has had a front-row seat to the trade negotiations on Capitol Hill.

She opposes many of the provisions in the new trade deal, but she can't tell you exactly which.

"We are sworn to secrecy, so we can't talk about it — not to our colleagues, not to our members, not to the press, and so that's frustrating," she says. "If I talked to you specifically about what I think the shortcomings of the labor chapter are, I could lose my security clearance. I don't know if I'd go to jail, but ..."

So she's left talking in generalities.

"These deals make it easier for multinational corporations to move jobs overseas," Lee says.

She, as well as other union leaders, point first and foremost, to the North American Free Trade Agreement that took effect 21 years ago.

Roland Zullo, a University of Michigan labor and employment policy researcher, says that for organized labor, NAFTA's wounds still linger.

"Labor has enough of a institutional memory to know what happened with NAFTA," he says. "There was a theory behind NAFTA; there was a theory that by integrating Canada, U.S. and Mexico, there would be a sort of overall net economic benefit."

But that didn't happen for U.S. workers in sectors like manufacturing. Michigan auto workers, for example, lost more than 100,000 jobs in the years that followed NAFTA's passage.

But it's not a clear case of cause and effect. This is the period when Japanese automakers were setting up shop in the U.S. and taking market share away from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Other industries, and consumers, did benefit from NAFTA.

The Problem With Donald Trump's One-Page Summary On His Wealth

Just how much is Donald Trump worth?

"I'm really rich," Trump declared during his presidential announcement Tuesday in New York at Trump Tower, one of the many buildings around the world donning his name.

But just how rich has always been a question. It was one before the real-estate mogul declared for president and, well, it remains a big question afterward, too, despite Trump holding up a one-page form declaring he is worth roughly $9 billion.

Trump has never liked to get specific about his wealth, but presidents and presidential candidates have no choice. Federal ethics law requires them to file annual disclosure reports, including a financial disclosure form 30 days after officially announcing.

"A lot of pundits on television said he'll never run," Trump boasted. "He's too private, and he's probably not as successful as everybody thinks."

And with that, he brandished his answer: a one-page "Summary of Net Worth," which he said was produced by his accounts and a "big accounting firm, one of the most highly respected."

The summary puts Trump's assets at $9.24 billion and his liabilities at just $503 million, giving him a net worth of just over $8.7 billion.

That's more than double an estimate from the Forbes list of billionaires, which pegged it at $4.1 billion. But, particularly at this level of personal wealth, the numbers released hardly tell the whole story. The one-page summary makes it difficult to unravel how the math is calculated. Specific buildings, real estate and holdings are not itemized, like they are required to be in a more detailed candidate financial disclosure.

The properties Trump owns can be assessed at book value — roughly speaking, the initial cost minus depreciation — or they can be assessed at fair-market value. The real-estate market can be volatile, and sometimes there are big gaps, especially if the real estate is Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Trump appears to be leaving millions of dollars on the table, a real-estate investment adviser said, by paying off his mortgage debt rather than using low-interest loans to leverage the real estate for reinvestment.

Another questioned whether the real-estate values might be overstated. Both advisers asked to speak on the condition on anonymity.

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"There's not enough information to really understand it," said Frederick Chinn, an advisor at the Atalon Group in Henderson, Nev. "There are a lot of questions I would have just looking at the statement."

Then there's the value of the Trump brand. Trump's statement judges his "real estate licensing deals, brand and branded developments" to be worth $3.3 billion.

But to Forbes, the brand is worth less than $300 million, said Anand Chokkavelu, managing editor of the Motley Fool investing website Fool.com.

"I side with Forbes," Chokkavelu said. "I don't see any reason to take his self-reported net worth at face value."

Trump has a July 16 deadline for filing the official disclosure. He said he would do it on time.

"Everything will be filed eventually with the government," Trump declared at his announcement, "and we don't [need] extensions or anything. We'll be filing it right on time. We don't need anything."

There are legal liabilities for misreporting. Although the feds can grant deadline extensions, Fox News might not. It has a Republican debate scheduled Aug. 6, and candidates must file if they want to participate.

But even when a candidate files a more detailed disclosure, accuracy is hard to nearly impossible to enforce, watchdogs warn. Newt Gingrich in 2011, for example, filed a disclosure that did not list his paid speeches or television analyst contract. They were lumped in with income from Gingrich Productions, obscuring the details.

"Once you throw your hat in that ring, there's a bunch of laws that are supposed to apply to you, not all of them are enforced with the same level of rigor," Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, told NPR's Joel Rose. "And the financial disclosure is one of those areas where candidates have a lot of leeway to fudge the numbers."

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