*This show was originally broadcast February 3, 2018. *It’s been ten years since former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested for committing one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. For decades he ran a Ponzi scheme from a secret office in New York, duping thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Many of them lost everything when the house of cards fell.

How did Madoff pull it off? And what steps have regulators taken in the past decade to ensure that it doesn’t happen again? For this week’s episode, we teamed up with Steve Fishman, a reporter based in New York City who’s followed the story for years. He produced and hosted a seven-part podcast for Audible called “Ponzi Supernova.”

Through interviews with financial experts, federal agents, Madoff’s cellmates and Madoff himself, Fishman explains how the $60 billion con worked, and why Madoff was able to elude regulators for decades. Fishman says that while Madoff was the mastermind of the scheme, it was banks and other financial institutions who “weaponized” him, turning him from a “local swindler” into an unstoppable force.

Madoff will spend the rest of his life in prison, but no one from these institutions faced similar consequences. And even though some precautions have been put in place since Madoff’s arrest, financial experts warn that for the most part, investors are still on their own.

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Half of California’s 10 worst wildfires have struck in the last two years. We look at the recent Camp Fire, which is the deadliest and most destructive in state history. And we revisit an investigation from earlier this year looking at how extreme wildfires are breaking our emergency response systems. Produced in partnership with KQED.

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Four hundred years ago, English pirates brought enslaved Africans to America’s shores. We reflect on how the legacy of slavery has reverberated through the generations to the present.

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Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (which owns Google), and Facebook—known in the tech world as the Big Four—are among the largest and most profitable companies in the world, and they’ve been accustomed to the laxest of oversight from Washington. But the climate may have shifted in a significant way. The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the House Judiciary Committee are all investigating different aspects of the Big Four; Elizabeth Warren has made breaking up these companies a cornerstone of her Presidential campaign. Sue Halpern, a New Yorker contributor, sounds a cautious note about these developments. Current antitrust law doesn’t well fit the nature of these businesses, and breaking up the companies will not necessarily solve underlying issues, like the lack of privacy law. In a twist, Halpern says, the Big Four and now asking the federal government for more regulation—because, she explains to David Remnick, the companies’ lobbyists can sway Washington more easily than they can influence state governments like California, which just passed a rigorous data-privacy law similar to the European Union’s. “They’re being called to account, they have to do something,” she notes, “but they want to direct the conversation so that, ultimately, they still win.”

Mike Pompeo is the last surviving member of President Trump’s original national-security team. Pompeo entered the Administration as the director of the C.I.A., but, after the sudden end of Rex Tillerson’s tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo was elevated to the position of America’s top diplomat. All this despite the fact that Pompeo had no diplomatic experience, a résumé that includes exaggerations, and a history of criticizing Trump. Since the 2016 election, though, Pompeo has rebranded himself as a strong advocate for the President, and has come to embrace Trumpism alongside many other former critics in his party. Susan B. Glasser joins Eric Lach to discuss Pompeo’s journey from traditional California Republican to staunch Trump ally, and what it says about larger trends within the Republican Party.

On September 23rd, Representative Abigail Spanberger joined six other House Democrats—all from swing districts and all veterans of the military, defense, and intelligence communities—in drafting an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring President Trump a threat to the nation. The op-ed signalled a shift in the position of the moderate members of the House Democratic caucus. The day after the Post op-ed ran, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump. Spanberger joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss divisions within the Party, how Democratic candidates can win in 2020, and the Trump debacles in Ukraine and northern Syria.

Since 2016, Andrew Marantz has been reporting on how the extremist right has harnessed the Internet and social media to gain a startling prominence in American politics. One day, he was contacted by a woman named Samantha, who was in the leadership of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. (She asked to be identified only by her first name.) “When I joined, I really thought that it was just going to be a pro-white community, where we could talk to each other about being who we are, and gain confidence, and build a community,” Samantha told him. “I went in because I was insecure and it made me feel good about myself.” Samantha says she wasn’t a racist, but soon after joining the group she found herself rubbing shoulders with the neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer, at a party that culminated in a furious chant of “seig heil.” Marantz and the Radio Hour producer Rhiannon Corby dove into Samantha’s story to understand how and why a “normal” person abandoned her values, her friends, and her family for an ideology of racial segregation and eugenics—and then came out again. They found her to be a cautionary tale for a time when facts and truth are under daily attack. “I thought I knew it all,” she told them. “I think it's extremely naive and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this.”

Samantha appears in Andrew Marantz’s new book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” 

Just over a week ago, Bernie Sanders seemed to be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Then came some prominent withdrawals from the race, and, on Super Tuesday, the resurgence of Joe Biden’s campaign. (Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii remains in the race, but has no chance of winning the nomination.) But the narrowing of the field only highlights the gulf between the Party’s moderate center and its energized Left.  David Remnick talks with Amy Davidson Sorkin, a political columnist for The New Yorker, about the possibility of a contested Convention. Then Remnick interviews Michael Kazin, an historian and the co-editor of Dissent magazine. Kazin points out that Sanders is struggling against a headwind: even voters sympathetic to democratic socialism may vote for a pragmatist if they think Biden is more likely to beat the incumbent President in November. But Sanders seems unlikely to moderate his message. “There is a problem,” Kazin tells David Remnick. “A divided party—a party that’s divided at the Convention—never has won in American politics.” 

'We show real faith when we pray to the Lord for what we want but trust Him to do what’s best for us, even if at the time we don’t understand what is happening or why.'

173 years ago, the Choctaw Nation extended great generosity to the Irish people by donating famine relief during the Irish Potato Famine, despite having only recently survived the Trail of Tears themselves (previously). Today, the Irish people are paying that generosity forward by donating to the Navajo and Hopi nations en masse to support their struggles against the current coronavirus.

The Census Bureau says it is continuing the gradual relaunch of limited field operations for the 2020 census next week in nine states where the coronavirus pandemic forced the hand-delivery of paper forms in rural areas to be suspended in mid-March. On May 13, some local census offices in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington are scheduled to restart that fieldwork, according to an updated schedule the bureau published on its website Friday. All workers are expected to be trained in CDC guidance in preventing the spread of COVID-19, and besides a new reusable face mask for every 10 days worked and a pair of gloves for each work day, the bureau has ordered 2 ounces of hand sanitizer for each census worker conducting field operations, the bureau tells NPR in an email. The announcement means more households that receive their mail at post office boxes or drop points are expected to find paper questionnaires left outside their

Dr. Grace Farris is chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan. She also writes a monthly comics column in the Annals of Internal Medicine called "Dr Mom." You can find her on Instagram @coupdegracefarris . Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Monty and Rose met last year on a beach on the north side of Chicago. Their attraction was intense, immediate, and you might say, fruitful. Somewhere between the roll of lake waves and the shimmer of skyscrapers overlooking the beach, Monty and Rose fledged two chicks. They protected their offspring through formative times. But then, in fulfillment of nature's plan, they parted ways, and left the chicks to make their own ways in the world. Monty and Rose are piping plovers, an endangered species of bird of which there may only be 6,000 or 7,000 in the world, including Monty, Rose and their chicks. They were the first piping plovers to nest in Chicago in more than 60 years. After their chicks fledged, they drifted apart. Rose went off to Florida for the winter, and Monty made his way to the Texas coast. They'd always have the North Side, but were each on their own in a huge, fraught world. And then, just a few days ago, Monty and Rose were sighted again, on the same patch of sand on

This is a short one, and a change of approach. It’s a test run, really. (Every entry is an experiment of some sort.) Samples extracted from three different loops of the first-generation Buddha Machine, which dates from 2005, were recorded on the Teenage Engineering PO-33 K.O! and then run as a series of patterns, the […]

Selenium is one of the most popular tools for testing web-based applications. It allows QA engineers to write and automate tests across many different browsers and operating systems, without a special scripting language. This course introduces Selenium to new users, covering installation and basic use cases. Find out how to set up the test-writing framework, WebDriver, and Selenium Grid, which allows you to distribute the testing load and run tests against a remote server. Learn best practices to write effective tests using variables and functions, and to organize tests into suites that can scale over time. Instructor Meaghan Lewis—a QA engineer at GitHub—also explains the test pyramid paradigm, which details an ideal way to balance unit, integration, and UI testing.

People are getting out and biking more these days. Are you one of them, or do you want to be? I've been biking the streets of Portland for 7 years. I can look at Portland's bike maps with you and help you figure out the BEST route that will get you where you want to go.

time/date flexible

Mon May 11 at 8:00 PM,

God became a man to save humanity. There are some things we cannot understand, like the mystery of the incarnation, but here are some points we can learn about this marvelous subject.

Binnen einer Halbzeit zerlegt Bremen vor 16 Jahren den Rekordmeister und krönt eine großartige Saison. „Wir haben gefeiert, bis es nicht mehr ging“, erinnert sich Ivan Klasnic an den Coup. Nationalkeeper Kahn mag davon nichts mehr wissen.

Die Bundesliga darf wieder spielen – das ist besonders für den wirtschaftlich angeschlagenen FC Schalke 04 überlebenswichtig. Dessen Spieler beziehen jetzt ein Quarantäne-Trainingslager. Auf sie werde aber kein Druck ausgeübt, sagt Sportvorstand Jochen Schneider.

Rafael Nadal zeigt sich über die verheerenden Folgen der Corona-Pandemie tief erschüttert. Im Interview spricht der Tennisstar über seine Heimat Spanien, Lehren aus der Krise und eine komplett verlorene Saison.

Uber is testing a new feature in California that allows some drivers to set their own rates. The move comes in response to a new state law that requires more companies to convert their contract workers to employees, which means offering them benefits and added protections. Companies including Uber, Lyft and delivery app Postmates argue that doing so would upend their business model and eliminate the flexibility inherent to the gig economy. Uber is currently testing a feature at airports in Sacramento, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara that allows drivers to increase fares in 10% increments, up to five times the base rate. Riders are then matched with the lowest fare. In the coming days, Uber says it will also allow drivers to decrease their prices below the base rate and opt out of surge pricing. It's part of an effort to give drivers more control — and bolster the argument that they're truly contractors rather than employees. The company acknowledges the experiment could have unexpected

Bürger müssen sich nicht nur das Virus vom Leib halten, sondern auch die vielen Betrüger, die jetzt an ihr Geld wollen. Wie Kriminelle die Lage ausnutzen – und wie Sie sich dagegen wappnen können.

the thing is that all that is offered is futility ... i could make you run to the sky says the great keeper of the lie i am the reason why you medicate i am the reason why you hate turn away and find something small to occupy your time turn away and find something small to occupy your mind i could give you vast kingdoms i could give you the song of the sea i could give you the heart of the crane i could give you eternity turn away and find something small to occupy your time turn away and find something small to occupy your mind there's no sense in standing on that rock there's no sense in praying to the clock there's no sense in counting all the stripes there's no sense believing all the hypes turn away and find something small to occupy your time turn away and find something small to occupy your mind

Es gibt wilde Wälder in Deutschland, in denen man nur selten einer Menschenseele begegnet. Sie sind ideal zum Abstandhalten und zum Beobachten scheuer Tiere. Wir geben fünf Empfehlungen – von Niedersachsen bis Baden-Württemberg.

Auf Great Barrier Island warten alle Besucher, dass die Nacht anbricht. Denn die neuseeländische Insel ist ein Sternlicht-Reservat. Nur an wenigen Orten auf der Welt lassen sich die Gestirne so gut beobachten wie hier.

Seit fast 40 Jahren liegt das Wrack der „Dimitrios“ in der griechischen Bucht Valtaki. Wer will, kann das Geisterschiff erkunden. Eine waghalsige Angelegenheit ist das aber, denn der Auflösungsprozess ist in vollem Gange.

Außenminister Heiko Maas gibt keine Prognose für die Reisesaison im Sommer. Die Bundesregierung kann nach wie vor „kein sorgenloses Reisen“ empfehlen, so Maas und begründete damit die Verlängerung der weltweiten Reisewarnung bis zum 14. Juni.

Den Osterurlaub hat das Coronavirus bereits auf dem Gewissen. Nun muss auch der Pfingsturlaub dran glauben. Zumindest was Auslandsreisen angeht. Dabei äußert sich der Außenminister auch eindeutig zu Rückholaktionen.

'We show real faith when we pray to the Lord for what we want but trust Him to do what’s best for us, even if at the time we don’t understand what is happening or why.'

If you're so ignorant that you think any promotion involving a gun on the streets in this day and age is appropriate you are a fucking idiot and detainment is the least of your worries.

This is the sort of mentality that leads to minority kids getting killed for having the temerity to play with toy guns.

Middle school spans those tween and early teenage years when, for many, puberty hits. Bullies seem to reign supreme. And we begin to grow into ourselves. Like most, writer and reporter Judith Warner was once a middle schooler. She's also the mother of two former middle schoolers. In her new book, And Then They Stopped Talking To Me , she investigates why the middle-school years can be so awful — and what we can do to help make them a little bit better. Interview Highlights On asking people what words come to their mind when thinking of middle school Soul crushing. Shattering. A rush of nausea. Any variation on the word misery that you can come up with. By and large, the answers were so powerful. And yet then there were a couple of people who had good memories too. And that was something that was important for me to hold on to and listen to in more detail. On deciding to write the book It really grew out of a kind of random thought one day when my daughter was in middle school and I

Magician and animal trainer Roy Horn, of the legendary Las Vegas duo Siegfied and Roy, died Friday from complications related to COVID-19. Horn tested positive last week. He was 75. "The world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend," Siegfried Fischbacher said of his partner in a statement. "Roy was a fighter his whole life including during these final days. I give my heartfelt appreciation to the team of doctors, nurses and staff at Mountain View Hospital who worked heroically against this insidious virus that ultimately took Roy's life." Roy Horn was born in Germany in 1944. He and Siegfried began their act in Las Vegas in 1967. In 1989 they began a 14-year run at the Mirage Resort performing illusions with exotic animals, making tigers, lions, even elephants vanish and reappear. In October of 2003, Roy Horn was performing with a 400-pound white tiger named Mantecore when the great cat grabbed him by the throat before a stunned audience and dragged him

Dr. Grace Farris is chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan. She also writes a monthly comics column in the Annals of Internal Medicine called "Dr Mom." You can find her on Instagram @coupdegracefarris . Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Samanta Schweblin is not a science fiction writer. Which is probably one of the reasons why Little Eyes , her new novel (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) reads like such great science fiction. Like Katie Williams's 2018 novel Tell The Machine Goodnight before it, Little Eyes supposes a world that is our world, five minutes from now. It is a place with all our recognizable horrors, all our familiar comforts and sweetnesses, as familiar (as if anything could be familiar these days) as yesterday's shoes. It then introduces one small thing — one little change, one product, one tweaked application of a totally familiar technology — and tracks the ripples of chaos that it creates. In Tell The Machine , it was a computer that could tell anyone how to be happy, and Williams turned that (rather disruptive, obviously impossible) technology into a quiet, slow-burn drama of family and human connection that was one of my favorite books of the past few years. Schweblin, though, is more

NPR's Scott Simon speaks with author Amy Jo Burns about her debut novel, "Shiner," set in the West Virginia mountains.

Die EU-Kommission hat wegen der Corona-Pandemie eine Verlängerung des Einreisestopps nach Europa um einen weiteren Monat empfohlen. Zuletzt gab es immer mehr Forderungen, Deutschland solle die Kontrollen an den Grenzen zu seinen Nachbarländern aufheben.

Der Konflikt zwischen seiner Partei und Boris Palmer spitzt sich zu: Die Grünen fordern den Tübinger Oberbürgermeister auf, die Partei zu verlassen, der Beschluss fiel einstimmig. Palmer weist die Forderung entschieden zurück

Die allgemeine Reisewarnung ist die höchste Eskalationsstufe der Hinweise des Auswärtigen Amts. Normalerweise wird sie nur für Kriegsgebiete und besonders gefährliche Regionen ausgesprochen – jetzt gilt sie weltweit. Was Reisende wissen müssen.

Ein TV-Stick ist die Lösung für all jene, die keinen Smart-TV besitzen, aber auch auf ihrem Fernseher auf Netflix, Amazon Prime & Co. zugreifen wollen.

Bei jedem dritten Gebrauchtwagen in Deutschland soll der Tacho manipuliert worden sein. Selbst die elektronische Überwachung ist nicht fehlerlos. Was Käufer tun können, um nicht übers Ohr gehauen zu werden.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money 's newsletter. You can sign up here . A majestic unicorn Pixabay In late March, the scooter-sharing company Bird invited about a third of its employees to attend a thirty-minute "COVID-19 update" via Zoom. The meeting only lasted about two minutes, and it wasn't really an update. With what one employee later described as a "robotic-sounding, disembodied voice," an executive told the 406 employees they were fired. "It felt like a Black Mirror episode," the employee said . (Bird later issued an apologetic statement, saying the employees got severance pay and extended health insurance. Their CEO's salary is also supposed to get cut to zero). The Bird layoffs are part of a widespread collapse in the startup world right now. Billions in investment dollars are drying up. Companies are going bankrupt. Thousands of workers are losing their jobs. Martin Pichinson, a Silicon Valley veteran, says the downturn caused by the coronavirus is

There's a call Laura Jean Truman is dreading, and she's convinced it's just a matter of time before it comes. Truman, who's a server at Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta, says the source of her angst is the fear that sometime in the next few weeks her boss is going to call and say it's time to go back to work, putting her in the position of having to make a choice between her safety and being able to pay the bills that continue to arrive despite the coronavirus. "Right now, everyone who is not working at restaurants is able to be on unemployment," she told NPR. "But once restaurants decide to open, and if we decide that we don't feel safe going back into those restaurants, we then are no longer eligible for unemployment because then we have a job opportunity that we're turning down," Truman explained. "It's a tremendously scary thing to have to think about," she said. The predicament is one in which millions of people receiving state unemployment benefits along with federal dollars from the

Fernbeziehungen stellen Pärchen auf eine harte Probe: Zu wenig Zeit für Zweisamkeit ist anstrengend – überall lauern Fallstricke. Doch auch mehr Nähe heißt nicht automatisch mehr Glück.

Vergeben – das fällt vielen Menschen schwer: Es braucht Kraft und vor allem auch Zeit, um aus tiefer Überzeugung heraus wirklich verzeihen zu können. Doch der Weg lohnt sich, sagen Therapeuten.

Trennungen müssen kein Zeichen des Scheiterns sein, sie können auch richtig und wichtig sein. Dennoch sind sie schmerzhaft und erfordern Mut und Kraft – besonders wenn Kinder mit betroffen sind.

Oft wird eine Covid-19-Erkrankung ohne Klinikaufenthalt durchgestanden. Drei Betroffene erzählen von ihren Symptomen, wie gesund sie sich fühlen und vom Leben nach dem Virus.

Ärzte aus mehreren Ländern beobachten in der Corona-Krise eine seltsame Häufung von Hautveränderungen an Füßen und Händen. Vor allem ansonsten symptomlose Kinder und junge Erwachsene sollen betroffen sein. Was hat es mit den Symptomen auf sich?

Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn, Chris Knight, Sue Foley, The Quebe Sisters and Maya de Vitry, live on Mountain Stage with Larry Groce.Support for this podcast is provided by Adventures on the Gorge. https://adventuresonthegorge.com/

Johnny Mercer grew up in Savannah and went on to write some of the most popular love songs of the 20th century. You may not know his name, but you certainly know his music, which includes "Something’s Gotta Give," "Moon River," and "Autumn Leaves." Between 1929 and 1976, Mercer wrote the lyrics—and in some cases the music too—to some 1,400 songs. We explore the life and music of Johnny Mercer with Georgia State University archivist Kevin Fleming . Georgia State is the repository for Johnny Mercer’s papers as well as a vast collection of other materials related to his life and career.

On this edition of “Two Way Street,” Tom Johnson shares stories about his life and career in journalism. We’re revisiting this conversation — and other favorites — as part of our “Two Way Street” anniversary celebration. To kick off our fifth year, we’re listening again to the shows that we can’t let go: the conversations that challenged us, surprised us and have stuck with us all these years. This show originally aired on January 14, 2017.