Kqeds Forum

According to climate reports released this month, the hottest years on record all occurred in the last seven years with 2020 becoming another record-making year for global temperatures. From historic wildfires in California, Australia and the Amazonian rainforest to a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season last year, the impacts of this warming are being felt across the globe. Slowing temperature rise in coming years will require radical action, according to the United Nations, with one goal calling for decreasing fossil fuel production by six percent per year through 2030. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather says an upside is that energy producers have succeeded in making clean alternatives cheaper, which could boost more ambitious climate policy to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis. We'll talk with Hausfather about the latest climate news and its impact on Californians.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to deliver an article of impeachment against former president Donald Trump to the Senate on Monday. This clears the way for a Senate trial, which will decide whether or not to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection at the Capitol. We get the latest on impeachment proceedings and catch up with President Biden’s most recent executive orders.

The California Department of Public Health announced Monday that the state will lift the stay at home order, allowing reopening of outdoor dining and other services. The news comes as Governor Newsom faces criticism over its lack of transparency on key coronavirus data, including how it calculates the ICU projections that had been used as benchmarks for shutting down. We get the latest.

Millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would have a path to citizenship in eight years or less, under the sweeping reform bill President Biden submitted to Congress this week. Biden also issued orders preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, halting border wall construction and ending the travel ban that targeted Muslim countries. We'll review the Biden Administration's immigration plan and talk about its potential effects on California.

The ban on outdoor dining is “arbitrary, irrational, and unfair” according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a coalition of Bay Area restaurants and wineries. The suit says that there is no scientific evidence to support the spread of COVID-19 in outdoor settings, and it warns that businesses will continue to close unless the ban is reversed. The state says the ban is necessary to save lives and prevent hospitals from reaching capacity. We’ll hear from the coalition, and check in on the latest science on outdoor transmission of the virus.

George Saunders is one of the most celebrated fiction writers today but his new book looks back to examine great stories of the past. "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" is a close look at seven classic 19th century Russian short stories that grew out of a class he's long taught on Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol as a creative writing teacher. Saunders approaches the work with a writer's curiosity. "The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish," he writes. If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that? We talk to Saunders about reading, writing and great literature.

As COVID-19 continues to spread and mutate nearly a year into the pandemic, many people struggle with assessing the risk of day-to-day activities amid a sluggish vaccine rollout. The numbers in California -- more than 3 million cases and more than 35,000 deaths -- while rising, are beginning to level out. At the same time, California Gov. Gavin Newsom promised that the state would vaccinate 1 million people in 10 days, but delayed data collection makes it unclear if the state met that goal. During his inaugural speech on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “We must set aside the politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation,” signaling significant policy change toward a more aggressive response from the federal government. We talk about California’s current challenges containing the virus and what state and national leadership can do to curb the spread and mounting deaths.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn into office Wednesday with an inaugural message of unity. The new administration faces extreme challenges, from far right radicals and the pandemic to a failing economy and foreign cyber attacks. President Biden got right to work, signing 17 executive orders, many aimed at rolling back Trump policies. We’ll talk about the inauguration and calls for unity, and what it means for California, that so many state politicians are now in prominent national positions.

President Biden's proposed plan to halt the spread of the coronavirus includes federal oversight of vaccination via community vaccination centers and hiring 100,000 public health workers to help out. Epidemiologist and sociologist Nicholas Christakis joins us to assess the plan. We’ll also get Christakis’ thoughts on how and when we might get back to normal and his book "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live".

The inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday featured an optimistic address from President Biden and a stirring poem read by Los Angeles poet Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. Many young people, some who voted for the first time to elect Biden, are looking for the new administration to tackle challenges such as climate change, immigration reform and the coronavirus pandemic. As part of Forum’s post-inauguration coverage, we’ll hear young people's reflections on Inauguration Day and their hopes for the next four years. We'll also hear national reporting from YR Media, a national network of young journalists and artists, on what issues youth want the Biden-Harris administration to prioritize.

“The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future.” That’s according to historian Heather Cox Richardson, who observes that the political, racial and economic divisions in the country evoke the crises faced by the nation on the brink of the Civil War. And now as we prepare for a transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden and the nation’s first female vice-president, Kamala Harris, what can history tell us about the tumultuous moment we are living in? 

Throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, many media outlets across the United States were reluctant to label him a liar or a racist, even when his actions merited those terms, or to cover White supremacy as more than a fringe movement. Now, in the wake of the deadly pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, news organizations are grappling with the consequences of their whitewashed political coverage and failure to call out the president’s lies more aggressively. We’ll talk about how journalists are reckoning with how they shape and deliver the news, and what should change moving forward.

Preparations and security measures continue in Washington, D.C., for Wednesday’s inauguration, and the investigation into the insurrection at the Capitol continues. And as the nation looks to a transition in leadership, on Thursday, President elect Biden introduced an almost $2 trillion economic relief package. We'll discuss the latest political developments.

Our news this month is flooded with images of white supremacists storming the U.S. Capitol and of a confederate flag being hoisted through its halls. This after months of reporting on police killings of people of color, and the racial disparities in COVID deaths. And adults are not the only ones seeing these images and hearing these stories; they're seeping through to our kids too. Should we be shielding them from stories of racial violence? How much should we protect them? How much should we expose them? We know we should be having hard conversations with our kids. But how? On this Martin Luther King Day we'll discuss how to talk to kids about race.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But what would he say about this particular bend – four years of President Trump culminating in a violent insurrection? Emory University professor Audra Gillespie, who has written about the legacy of the civil rights movement in American politics, joins us to reflect on how Dr. King might respond to the current political moment and the pandemic, which have exposed glaring inequities in our society.

Faced with one of the slowest vaccination rollouts in the nation, California Governor Newsom announced Wednesday that Covid-19 vaccines would be available to seniors 65 years and older. While many welcomed news of an expanded eligibility group, local governments and health officials struggled to keep up with demand, and across the state, Californians are asking why it is so hard to get information about how to get vaccinated. Meanwhile, as the Bay Area remains in lockdown, hopeful signs of a turnaround emerged on Wednesday as Sacramento and its surrounding counties entered the purple tier with outdoor dining, hair salons and hotels reopening. Will the next few months of the pandemic be as bumpy as the first few weeks of 2021 have been? When can people expect to be vaccinated? We’ll talk about what lies ahead as California pushes to accelerate immunizations.

Several Capitol police officers have been suspended, and at least a dozen are under investigation for possible complicity in the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol last week. The actions of the officers -- including one who posed for a selfie with insurrectionists and another who appeared to direct the mob around the building -- have exposed anew the force's troubled history of discrimination against Black officers, who've lodged hundreds civil rights lawsuits against the force in the last two decades. We'll talk about the role of racism in igniting, and sustaining, the insurrection. And we'll also get an update on how state and federal authorities are responding to threats of extremist violence ahead of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration next week.

Rancor and division were on full display Wednesday as the U.S. House of Representatives debated and then voted to impeach President Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the nation’s Capitol last week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has excluded the possibility of an impeachment trial before the inauguration. We get the latest on the historic impeachment and what happens next.

A majority in the House impeached President Trump on Wednesday for inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol last week, while many Republican lawmakers continued to say they oppose impeachment in the name of "unity." And on Monday, President-elect Joe Biden's team announced that the theme for Inauguration Day will be "America United," echoing his campaign and post-election messaging calling for unity and healing. What does the idea of “unity” mean, though, amid such long-standing, deep divisions and continued threats of more insurrections? We’ll take a critical look at these calls for unity and hear from listeners about what you think is necessary, at this point, to unify the country.

The day before last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by violent insurrectionists, an angry, pro-Trump, anti-mask crowd threatened violence at a Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting. West Coast states voted solidly for Joe Biden, but California, Oregon and Washington have plenty of extremist groups promoting anti government rhetoric and ideas. We'll examine the history and ideology of those groups and the role they played in last week’s deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.