The Future of Drones

Guests Claude Salhani, journalist and Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University

But this service is lopsided, favoring the Northeast Corridor — the electrified route from Washington to Boston. Here, you have a choice of two levels of service. The premier level is the Acela Express, a Swedish import. Reaching speeds of 150 mph, the Acela trains compensate for tight curves with sophisticated tilting technology. The second level is the Northeast Regional with traditional trains running up to 125 mph, but mostly traveling much slower and with frequent stops. In both levels of service, the trains seem to be clean and well-maintained.

The two principal Northeast stations, Penn Station in New York and Union Station in Washington, are a different story. They are both horrific in their own way, and both are maintained by Amtrak.

Penn Station has a lot of low-grade retailing that seems to attract people who have no plan to ride the train and add to the sense of urban threat.

Union Station is less threatening, but it seems to have given itself over to chain retailing. The grandeur of this architectural masterpiece has been undermined by a proliferation of chain stores. Passenger accommodation is an afterthought: The restrooms are inadequate and too few, seating is scarce and often shabby, and passengers stand in long lines waiting to board their trains. This gives the feeling that the trains are as bad as the stations; they are not.

Outside of the prized Northeast Corridor, Amtrak shows decades of underinvestment. It tries to deliver rail service across 46 states. Correspondents tell me that this is often inadequate and is a last resort. I've been told horror stories about delays in Florida and the Midwest and breakdowns in California. One has to think seriously about whether one wants to take a long-haul train, even a sleeper, outside of the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak came into being 42 years ago because passenger rail service from commercial railroads had collapsed and Congress felt that the United States couldn't be without passenger rail service. In those days, it was thought that Amtrak would serve those who couldn't afford to fly and those who simply didn't like flying. Amtrak wasn't set up as a government department but rather as a business, although it was understood that government funding would be necessary.

So began a long struggle; ostensibly over money, but more so over ideology. Conservatives in Congress have never liked Amtrak, and have believed that it should either perish or survive without government funding. Amtrak initiated relentless mallification of its station properties and predatory pricing in the Northeast Corridor, euphemistically called revenue management. Here Amtrak, like the airlines, charges what the traffic will bear. The Acela between Washington and New York and between New York and Boston is fast, elegant transportation for those who can afford it. The Northeast Regional uses the same revenue-management pricing, but charges somewhat less for slower rail service.

By means of its commercial struggling, Amtrak says it is able to cover 88 percent of its costs from revenue. The government subsidy amounts to $1.3 billion — $443 million for operations and $705 million for capital improvement. The total Amtrak budget is around $4 billion. By comparison, the much-admired European rail systems, with their sleek trains that run at 220 mph, have huge subsidies amounting to about 50 percent of the ticket price. In that sense, Amtrak may be a model performer.

As a passenger, someone who is infused with a sublime sense of well-being when a train pulls out of a station, I'm glad to report that despite its limitations, its chaotic terminals, its gotcha pricing, Amtrak has rolled into middle age, proving that rail transportation is still the most civilized way to travel and should have a bright future. Will Congress get smart and take the train? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Europe; its Problems and its Promise

Guests Annette Heuser, Executive Director, Bertelsmann Foundation; Darren Gersh, Journalist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies

What’s Ado in Washington

Guests Joe Madison, SiriusXM Radio

newspapers across the country, including famous ones like The Washington
Evening Star and The Chicago Daily News.

Morning newspapers with a more elite, less blue-collar readership,
thrived, although often their front pages were curiously long-winded
and out-of-date. They told people what they already had learned the
night before, but in greater detail — sometimes mind-numbingly so.

Al Neuharth, who died last week, had the courage to take on television
head-to-head with the first newspaper totally designed for the fight
against television: USA Today. It mimicked television with fact
boxes, short breezy stories and scads of weather coverage. It employed
color with a confidence that few newspapers had done. Other newspapers
followed its lead.

Critics dubbed the newspaper “McPaper,” which might actually have
pleased Neuharth, who had an eye for the bottom line. Looking at the
success of McDonalds, Neuharth might have thought to himself that if
his newspaper sold like hamburgers, well, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Noel Coward, the British playwright and entertainer, when asked what
he thought about his last musical “Sail Away” drawing vast crowds and
scornful critiques told a reporter: “Once again, I shall have to
comfort myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.”
Those words might well have belonged to Neuharth as, after a 10-
year struggle, the newspaper broke through to real profitability, even
while the critics, inside and outside Gannett, scoffed.

For Neuharth, USA Today was the jewel in his crown. It was the one
achievement that redeemed his status as a newspaperman rather than a
corporate titan.

At Gannett he grew the company, taking over whole newspaper chains,
but not its journalistic renown. Papers like The Louisville Courier-
Journal were seen to deteriorate under a regime of relentless cost
control which homogenized and standardized the newspapers as
products, like hamburgers. All 75 papers in the chain were driven to make money not stars. It was the rank and file of the Gannett papers that might have been given the sobriquet “McPapers.”

With USA Today, Neuharth relied heavily on a new technology that
enabled the papers to be printed across the country. He accepted that
readers of the paper might already know the bare bones of the news, and
so he gave them that in short form and reserved longer pieces for the
lead in each section and the “cover story” on Page One. These were not
the news of the day, but news behind some aspect of American life. He abandoned the habit of “jumping” stories off Page One to an inside page. Only the cover story got this treatment.

Neuharth realized that to succeed, he would have to do something that Gannett papers did not do: spend money. He did so on talent, news bureaus and offices.

Jan Neuharth, one of two children from Neuharth’s first marriage,
operated an equestrian center in Middleburg, about 50
miles from Washington in Virginia's famed Hunt Country. It was there that she married Joseph Keusch, in a wedding that demonstrated her father’s organizational genius.

Neuharth was a great businessman, a great newspaperman, but most importantly he was a great organizer – whether he organized the growth of Gannett or the production and distribution of USA Today. Remember how you could not check into a hotel without a copy of USA Today appearing in front of the door in the morning? That was Neuharth the Organizer at work.

At his daughter’s wedding Neuharth did it all: tents for the members
of the wedding to get their hair and makeup done, a leafy chapel that was
transformed into a dance floor after the ceremony. But above all
Neuharth made sure that everyone, from the great and famous of the
Hunt Country, like NBC's Willard Scott and a scattering of senators and
billionaires, to the lowliest stable hand was there. He had grown up poor in South Dakota and hadn’t forgotten.

Maybe that’s how he knew what people wanted in his newspaper and why,
late in his life, he and his third wife adopted six children, across
the spectrum of ethnicity.

And to the end, he hadn't forgotten his old newspapering skills: he wrote his column on a manual typewriter. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

A Discussion of the Anti-terrorism College at the National Defense University

Guests Michael Bell and Sebastian Gorka, College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University

Balance In The Media

Guests Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California

A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26^th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), who crawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.

Political Dysfunction

Guests Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute; Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University