Stories from The Apple Seed

Guest: Sir Michael Leigh, Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Former European Union Official Brexit negotiations are finally, in earnest, underway between British officials and the European Union. But they’re hung up early on something. The EU wants to talk about the terms of the breakup – who gets what, who reimburses whom – in the split. Britain doesn’t want to talk about that just yet, it’s more interested in establishing what a relationship will look like after the breakup.

Guest: Robert Keiter, JD, Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, Wallace Stegner Professor of Law, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah The US Secretary of the Interior – in an internal memo published by the Washington Post – is urging President Trump to shrink the boundaries of several national monuments designated by previous presidents. That includes two very controversial ones in Utah – the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which was created more than 20 years ago, and the Bears Ears National Monument created just last year. Other national monuments on the list are recommended for changes that would allow mining or commercial fishing. President Trump has not said what he’ll do. The fact is, it’s not entirely clear what he can do where national monuments are concerned.

Guest: Evgeny Afineevsky, Documentary Filmmaker, “Cries from Syria” A report by UNICEF earlier this year concluded that children have paid the heaviest price in the Syrian Civil War, now in its sixth year. Thousands have been killed. Nearly two million inside Syria are out of school, because their schools have been destroyed and because schools have been repeatedly attacked during the war.  UNICEF says nearly six million children in Syria now depend on humanitarian aid – food, shelter, medicine – for survival. Almost half of them have been forced to flee their homes and are now living as refugees in conditions only slightly better than the danger they left behind.  It’s a tragic situation, which filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky witnessed personally in making his HBO documentary “Cries from Syria.”