Uptown Radio

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An American flag hangs over the rubble from the devastating tornado that struck Concord, Alabama on Wednesday. Photo by Wynter Byrd/AP.

The death toll for this week’s destructive tornado reached 318 across seven states on Friday, making it the deadliest day for twisters since 1932.

Linda Abi Assi spoke with Tanya Ott, the news director at the public radio station WBHM  in Birmingham, Alabama about the aftermath of the deadly storm. She also spoke with Jared Guyer, a meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration; he explained why the weather conditions on Wednesday were extremely rare.

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The Nissan Leaf, the world's first mass produced electric car, was presented as the 2011 World Car of the Year at the New York International Auto Show. Photo by Richard Drew/AP.

The New York Auto show opened to the public today at the Jacob Javits Convention
Center in Manhattan.

It’s the biggest auto show in North America. But the timing for carmakers isn’t great. The price for gasoline is hovering around 4 dollars a gallon. Fuel efficiency is on the mind of many Americans, and many automakers.

The Javitts Center is packed. But a lot people are just window-shopping. Families are here with their kids to look at the pretty cars. There’s a long line in front of the new 20-11 Porsche Carrera Cabriolet… people are taking turns sitting in the drivers seat and posing for pictures.

A tourist visiting from Pennsylvania says she’s not looking to buy, but there’s one type of car she’d consider. “I’m interested in hybrids, so I can get better gas mileage,” she said.

Carmakers have predicted this. Hybrid and electric models are the main focus this year.

James Horsefield came alone… he’s going from car to car, his hands full of brochures and catalogues, and feeling concerned. “They’re paying 5 dollars in Washington DC, I work in Washington D.C area so I’ve seen the prices go way up… so it has to be a concern,” he said.

That’s why many automakers seem to be edging away from gas altogether. There are many models of electric car on display. Kevin Smith, a Marketing executive for Lotus, is standing in front of four of the company’s sports model. One of which is electric.

“We’re currently developing vehicles that will have range-extending engines on board to recharge the battery packs while driving,” Smith said.

Nearby, BMW and Nissan are sharing their electric models. Nissan’s is called the Leaf. Despite this hopeful environmental focus to all the marketing, no one is mentioning it much but the show is falling on Earth Day. They’re also not talking much about President Obama’s speech yesterday when he admitted that gas prices was a serious issue but there’s no comprehensive strategy for the future.

The New York Auto Show will run at the Jacob Javits Convention Center until May 1st.

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Commentator Linda Abi Assi speaks three languages–French, Arabic and English–and is a citizen of both France and Lebanon, her country of origin. Recently an American friend overheard her switch languages while talking on the phone with her sister, and asked Abi Assi which language she thought in. She realized thinking in one language while juggling two others is central to who she is: both a Lebanese native and a perennial expatriate.

Lebanese people have a standard greeting: “hi, kifak, ca va?” which, roughly translated, means “hi, how are you?”… using, in that order, English, Arabic and French words. It’s become a running joke in the country and was even made into a tee shirt that’s popular with tourists.

Mixing these languages is an unmistakably Lebanese trait: kind of like fighting over who gets to pay the check in restaurants, always being late, or making fun of Syrians.

Lebanese children wave French flags as they stand in front of a Lebanese national flag. Photo by Petros Karadjias/AP

We’re trilingual because Lebanon was under French mandate for more than 20 years until independence came in 1943. But the official language is Arabic, and some of the country’s best universities are American universities. I went to one of these, and that’s when I really began to speak English on a regular basis.

My first language was French, and as a teenager I sort of looked down on the mixed up Lebanese way of talking: it means we’re a nation with terrible grammar. But when I moved to Paris at 21, something awful happened… miles from home, I found myself speaking in the exact way I’d resented for so long.

Suddenly I had to always pay attention to the way I spoke in public. Otherwise, I would blurt out random Arabic words like ya3ne, khalas, eno, hek–basically “well, like, or because”… along with the occasional English word when, inexplicably, I couldn’t think of how to say it in French. To this day, “yalla” – similar to “come on” or “let’s go” in English- is part of my everyday vocabulary, not to mention I still swear exclusively in Arabic.

My age has a lot to do with the way I talk. I was born in Beirut in the late 1980s … during a civil war that tore Lebanon to shreds for almost fifteen years. When I was 2, my parents decided it would be safer to move to to France.

Despite my parents’ best efforts, my sisters and I never learned Arabic there, but when I was 9 we moved back to Lebanon. My Arabic illiteracy didn’t matter in some ways: I went to a French school and I lived in a French-speaking neighborhood. But something was missing. People often assumed I was French because of my slight French accent but I never felt French, nor did I ever feel truly Lebanese. I felt like—and I was– an outsider.

After I decided to become a journalist, I quickly realized I would never make it in Lebanon if I didn’t learn Arabic. I particularly remember a press conference given by then-Prime Minister Fouad Siniora that I had to cover for a French-written newspaper. I remember how baffled I was when he started speaking Arabic. I kept expecting for someone to translate but it wasn’t long before I realized I was probably the only non-Arabic speaker in the room.

One of the first things I taught myself was the Lebanese anthem.

It starts…all for the country, for the glory, for the flag… Learning it made my patriotism kick in. I realized that mixing the three languages actually makes me feel like I belong.

It’s been two years now since I left the country so I’ve kind of lost the habit. But whenever I speak to another Lebanese person, Yalla, eno, hek, ya3ne… somehow resurface. And at last, I’m fine with that.

Linda Abi Assi is currently pursuing a masters in journalism in New York and hopes her language skills will come in handy for her future profession… as long as she can resist the urge to mix different languages in the same sentences.

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A recent study shows that by the year twenty-25, as many as 15 percent of New Yorkers could be dealing with type 2 diabetes. The Institute for Alternative Future’s study says it could mean an almost 50 percent increase in a little less than two decades.

As part of a nationwide effort, the YMCA is expanding its 16-session Diabetes Prevention Program to several locations in New York City. The goal is to help people at risk of developing the disease prevent it through better nutrition and exercise.

Diabetes is a chronic illness. It occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin, a hormone meant to control blood sugar. There are two types: type 1 is usually diagnosed in childhood. Type II is far more common, and often begins in adulthood. It’s usually caused by lifestyle with diet, family history and age being the biggest risk factors.

“Diabetes is an insidious disease especially type II diabetes, so you can have it without having any symptoms,” said Ronald Tamler, a diabetes specialist at the Mount Sinai Diabetes Center.

Diabetes is an irreversible diagnosis, but it’s not unavoidable. Tamler says people who have pre-diabetes, a condition that precedes type-2 diabetes, have to take significant steps to keep from developing it.

“In many cases, it’s preventable,” he said. “Not only is it preventable but it’s preventable without taking any medication; changing your life has a bigger impact than any medication – isn’t that important, isn’t that fascinating?”

The answer to avoiding diabetes is to eat less and exercise more. But that’s easier said than done and changing one’s habits takes a lot of commitment… and a certain push.

On a Wednesday night, Kerry Watterson is getting on a treadmill at the Vanderbilt Y, on East 47^th street. He pushes the buttons and starts a slow jog.

“I’ve been coming 2 to 3 times a week, typically to do cardio, circa-training, the pool… some classes,” he said.

Watterson’s decision to get healthy was mainly motivated by fear. He watched his mother struggle with diabetes for 20-years, and that prompted him to get tested.

“About 2 and a half years ago, she ended up in a wheelchair,” Watterson said. “So my brothers and I were talking about how we have to change our futures but we all sat around and did nothing, apart from my older brother who lost 100 pounds on his own… so I decided I needed to do something about this.”

Watterson’s motivation came just in time. He was officially diagnosed pre-diabetic… so he turned to the YMCA.

Pilot programs for the Diabetes Prevention Program have already been operating at two of the city’s YMCAs for the past six months, including the Vanderbilt Y, where Watterson goes. He started the 16-week group-based program in August of last year; he’s since lost 22 pounds.

“It was hard,” Watterson said. “I’m 35, I’ve been overweight for 25 of these 35 years but I recognized I needed to make a change; otherwise I would end up like my mom in that wheelchair, and it wasn’t good enough for me.”

Watterson says he has some more weight to lose, but he’s keeping with the program. Jack Lund is the president and CEO of the YMCA of Greater New York. He says what differentiates the Y’s program from other diabetes program is that it’s fairly accessible to all, including communities of color and low-income communities where the prevalence of type II diabetes is almost double the national average.

“It amazes me that so many New Yorkers are pre-diabetic and yet almost 93 percent don’t even know it,” Lund said. “So there’s an enormous amount of public awareness that has to occur and it has to occur through channels, in neighborhoods, through trusted institutions like the Y and others.”

Lund says the Y is uniquely positioned to tackle the problem…

“One of the nice things about the New York City Y is we’re in every neighborhood and we’re in all 5 boroughs and we have about 150 satellite sites around the city,” Lund said. “So we really do have a fairly strong presence in every community.”

The YMCA of Greater New York has already started to implement the program in all of its centers across the city. To qualify, individuals must be overweight and have already been diagnosed with pre-diabetes by a physician.

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Unidentified troops drive past in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Friday, April 1, 2011.Heavy fighting raged Friday near Ivory Coast's presidential palace and mansion and the state TV broadcaster as armed forces loyal to the elected leader tried to install him to power and oust the country's strongman. Photo by: Emanuel Ekra / AP

The stand-off between an ousted president and the elected successor is being fought in the streets between armed groups, loyal to each side.

The country’s last president, Laurent Gbagbo, has blocked Alassane Ouattara from taking office since the election in November.

Linda Abi Assi spoke with Michael McGovern, a professor of political anthropology at Yale University. McGovern has written about Ivory Coast and said Ouattara’s armed followers have gained considerable ground since yesterday.

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New York City subway riders. Photo by Shiho Fukada/AP.

Over the past few years, the new York City Department of Health has been running ad campaigns decided to shock people out of bad habits like smoking or over-eating. At the beginning of February, it launched a new campaign online and in the subways; it’s aimed at increasing awareness of HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men. But some activist groups want the city to end the campaign.

The video opens like a French film noir, showing portraits of grave-looking men standing against a black-and-white backdrop of menacing New York City streets.

The narrator’s tone is just as somber.

The video warns that the virus causes diseases like dementia and osteoporosis. Towards the end, a graphic picture of an anal cancer growth briefly appears on screen before the narrator delivers the punch line.

New York City subway riders can now see a follow-up poster, which features that same tagline and pictures of men, some of them African-American and Latino.

Kristin Goodwin is the director of New York City Policy and Organizing at Housing Works, an organization that deals with AIDS and homelessness. She says that’s a problem. “Portraying young black and Latino men who are at risk or who are HIV positive as doomed to get horrible illnesses doesn’t necessarily make people want to get HIV tested.”

Goodwin, along with other advocacy groups for people with HIV and for gay and bisexual men, says that fear doesn’t necessarily lead to behavioral change. She says the ad campaign is sending the wrong message. “With the music, the somber faces and the allusions to other illnesses, it certainly adds a layer of stigma of people at risk,” she says.

The Department of Health declined comments. But in a video posted on YouTube, Monica Sweeney, the assistant commissioner for HIV prevention and control, said the ad was effective and necessary. “These ads are hard hitting and sometimes unpleasant but so is HIV and silence isn’t stopping the spread,” Sweeney said.

She also said the ad specifically targeted men who have sex with men because they represent a growing proportion of the 4000 New Yorkers who are newly infected every year. “This increase in new HIV infections 30 years into the epidemic is unacceptable to me, and should be unacceptable to all of us,” she added.

The HIV campaign is the latest in a series of graphic advertising efforts that tackle health issues. The city released ads against smoking, obesity and lead poisoning among children. All of the ad drives use fear to get their messages across.

Kim Witte is a professor of communication at Michigan State University. She says fear works when it comes to health campaigns, but under certain conditions. “In my studies, I’ve scared the bejeepers out of people and as long as they really believe they can do something to avert that threat, the higher the fear, the more motivated they are to act,” she says. “Fear appeals or scare tactics are extremely effective as long as people feel that they’re able to do something to effectively avert a threat.”

Howard Grossman is an HIV specialist who treats mostly lesbian, gay and bisexual patients. He agrees that scare tactics can be effective and thinks a lot of younger gay men today don’t have any first-hand experience with the potentially deadly effects of the virus. “We have this whole group of younger people who never knew anybody with HIV, who never saw anybody die, and they’re not afraid. To them HIV is just another disease that you take one pill for and in fact that’s not HIV disease, but they’re not scared and they’re not having safe sex,” he says.

The Department of Health says its recent anti-smoking campaign has been effective and it thinks the HIV campaign will be too. But activists say the city has taken concrete steps to prevent smoking: it’s distributed Nicotine patches and banned smoking in public spaces. They say there is nothing comparable to prevent HIV once the scare tactics wear off.

Kristin Goodwin of Housing Works says a lot of these problems with the ad campaign could have been avoided had the Department of Health consulted with them and other advocacy groups in the first place. “There was no mention of expanding the ad campaign into the subway and we found out about it the same day that it got posted. I have concerns that the Department of Health is not listening to the concerns of people who are infected and affected and also people that do prevention and outreach in the community.”

Goodwin says there are more positive ways to get the message across. Like the bus campaign released this month by the Washington DC Department of Health, which involves African American gay men. Goodwin says that instead of inducing fear, the campaign encourages people in relationships to reaffirm their desire to be safe for each other.

But not all gay activists think NYC’s campaign is bad. Larry Kramer is a writer and founder of the organization Act Up, and HIV positive himself. He wrote in an email to friends and fellow activists after seeing the spot that he thought it was honest, true and not nearly as scary as HIV itself.

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NFL's Roger Goodell (left) and NFLPA's DeMaurice Smith are the main players in these negotiations. Photo by Charles Dharapak/AP.

The National Football League and its union, the NFL Players Association announced today they’ve agreed to meet with a federal mediator for the next week. It’s an effort to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and avoid a strike that could mean an entire year without football.

Simply put, team owners and players are at odds on how to divide football’s massive revenues: a 9 billion dollar pie. Other points of disagreement include the addition of two regular season games, increased benefits for retired players and a rookie salary cap. Robert Boland is a sports business professor at New York University. He says team owners have considerable leverage.

“The worst-case scenario probably right now is that the owners would choose to shut down the game to force an agreement on the players,” he said. “The players would eventually run out of money and sue for peace.”

This is called a lockout. It’s the management’s way of offsetting a strike. Boland says strikes are legal in football, but costly.

“A lockout allows management to stop that economic damage from happening at a critical time by saying we’re just going to cease operation so you can’t hurt us,” he said. “It’s been quite effective in hockey and basketball.”

In the event of a lockout, players wouldn’t get any bonuses or workout off-season money. Team owners on the other hand would still be able to rely on billions of dollars in television revenue. Recently, the players’ union director, DeMaurice Smith, reminded reporters that team owners have consistently earned more since 2006, when the last union contract was struck. Yet, player’s salaries are still years behind.

“We have pushed hard to first get a proposal to understand a justification for a rollback in players share that would put us back around 1992 or 1993,” Smith said. “It’s that serious.”

But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says the process can’t be rushed. During his annual State of the League press conference on February 4^th, the mood was pretty light, even when player and sometime journalist Chad Ochocinco took the mic.

But then, the Cincinnati Bengals receiver asked him when to expect a deal. Goodell wouldn’t commit.

“We will get an agreement, and I think that’s only going to happen when there’s intense negotiations between your union and the owners,” he said. “This is this the window of opportunity to get this done right because otherwise uncertainty is going to seep into all of our operations.”

Both sides have yet to make concessions. Ken Belson writes about the business of sports for the New York Times. He says the dispute has been somewhat sensationalized by both parties and the media.

“It feels a little bit like a Hollywood negotiation, just given the stature of the players and the league,” he said. “I’ve covered enough labor negotiations to know that a lot of this is theater for our consumption to get one side’s point across or the other side’s point across, and both sides will sort of claim that Armageddon is near.”

Boland, the NYU professor, says the ball is now in the owners’ hands. He says if games are shut down, they would lose money because they wouldn’t sell any tickets or play any games.

“However, they would have a long period of time before they actually play any of those games,” he said. “If they locked out in March, they’d have six months really before games started to be played again and they had any real loss. So they would at least make money in the short run from their television revenue, and not have to play the players.”

A lockout would still  end up hurting team owners, if only for the potential loss of thousands of fans. Boland says that every sport that’s had a significant work stoppage, like a loss of half a season or the loss of a championship, has always taken a lot of time to recover.

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The Nassau County crime lab is closed until further notice. The lab was shut down today after its drug testing section produced a series of errors in analysis of controlled substances…. says Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice. “In a review of 9 cases of which 6 had erroneous results in term make it impossible for our prosecutors to offer narcotics evidence to the court with the fairness and integrity that I believe are required.” Rice said it appears that these problems remain confined to the drug testing section.

New York State has the most expensive Medicaid system in the nation. Today, a task force released a list of recommendations to cut costs. One is to charge hospitals and nursing homes $750 million more in taxes over the next two years. Health care facilities fear this will force layoffs and reduced services. The tax increase is one of  49 items listed by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Medicaid task force.

The man accused in a stabbing rampage across New York City last week is due before a Brooklyn judge this afternoon. Authorities say  Maksim Gelman stabbed his stepfather, then killed 3 other people and wounded 4 more over the next 28 hours. He was apprehended on a subway underneath Times Square and is being held on charges of murder and assault.

In his weekly radio address, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg used the last day of fashion week to talk about  immigration reform. He said current rules prevent many foreign fashion models from working runways and photoshoots in New York and elsewhere. He’s urging fashion designers to join his Partnership for a New American Economy. The coalition wants to help companies to attract overseas talent.

Florists, pharmacies and supermarkets in East Harlem are taking part in Age-Friendly New York City. It’s an initiative to make businesses nicer for senior citizens. Stores will provide chairs so shoppers can rest while waiting for service. And window stickers and educational materials will be given out citywide over the next few months.