National Security Expert On How, When US Military Decides To Shoot Down Airborne Objects
A U.S. fighter jet shot down an “unidentified object” over Lake Huron on Sunday on orders from President Joe Biden. It was the fourth such downing in eight days and the latest military strike in an extraordinary chain of events over U.S. airspace that Pentagon officials believe has no peacetime precedent.
Part of the reason for the repeated shootdowns is a “heightened alert” following a spy balloon from China that emerged over U.S. airspace in late January, Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, said in a briefing with reporters. Since then, fighter jets last week also shot down objects over Canada and Alaska. Pentagon officials said they posed no security threats, but so little was known about them that Pentagon officials were ruling nothing out — not even UFOs. Today on AirTalk, Robert Wayne Tomlinson, associate dean for the Naval War College at the Naval Post Graduate School and former colonel in the U.S. Air Force joins to discuss the latest and what it all means for US-China relations moving forward.
With files from the Associated Press
Parenting Is Harder Than Most Parents Expected and There Are Many Reasons Why
As the old adage goes, “children do not come with an instruction manual,” but most parents would welcome some kind of guide to help them navigate the challenges of parenting. According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, parents are finding the job much harder than they expected. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and reports of a growing mental health crisis among youth, parents have a host of worries to keep them up at night. Joining to discuss the findings of the survey, “Parenting in America Today,” is Juliana Menasce Horowitz, an associate director of research at Pew Research Center. We are also joined by Claire Cain Miller, a correspondent for the New York Times, where she writes about gender, families and the future of work. She recently wrote the article, “How Parenting Today Is Different, and Harder” which outlines how parenting has become more demanding and stressful.
LA's Composting Rules Are Finally In Effect, But What Even Are They?
Last January, California’s landmark composting law went into effect after being passed back in 2016. The goal is to keep food scraps out of landfills, where they decompose and release methane, a potent gas heating up the planet. That’s why landfills are the state’s third-largest source of methane. The program, officially called “organics recycling,” was launched as a pilot in 2018 with 18,000 homes across the city. Now it has expanded to all 750,000 single-family households served by L.A. Sanitation. Joining us today on AirTalk is climate energy reporter for LAist, Erin Stone and executive director and founder of Compost L.A., Michael Martinez.
Read the full LAist story here.
What’s Behind Some Children Rejecting Their Ethnic Identities & Native Languages At An Early Age And Choosing To Relearn It As Adults?
Being the child of immigrant parents can create a lot of confusion at an early age, one such reason is the trouble finding an identity. On one hand, someone wants to acclimate to the dominant culture, but many grow up thinking that it should come at the expense of your parent’s ethnic roots. A recent piece in the Los Angeles Times touched on this and a major outcome of it, with these children losing the ability to speak their parents’ native languages, creating a disconnect between the two sides. For many though, it’s when they become an adult where they begin to take necessary steps to rediscover the culture they grew up with.
Today on AirTalk, we discuss why exactly folks’ make that decision as children with Lucrecia Santibañez, associate professor of Education at UCLA and co-director for its Center for the Transformation of Schools and Zuzanna Fuchs, assistant professor of linguistics at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. We also hear from listeners about their experiences with rediscovering their cultural identities through language.