Canada on NAFTA, Mission to Titan, Dropping Spanish Use

Canadian View on NAFTA and Trade Guest: Stéphane Lessard, Consul General of Canada in Denver The latest round of negotiations to re-write the North American Free Trade wrapped up this week in what appears to be a stand-still. President Trump continues to threaten the US could just walk away from NAFTA, unless big changes are made. Both the US and Canada accuse each other of not playing fair in the negotiations. And in a strange twist this week, the US Trade Representative said negotiations are going better with Mexico – ironic since for a long time President Trump painted Mexico as the bad guy in this deal. Dragonfly Mission to Saturn’s Moon Guest: Jani Radebaugh, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University Besides Earth, there is only one other place we know of in our solar system where liquids accumulate in clouds, rain down and flow in rivers across the surface. That place is Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, and scientists are eager to know if it could sustain life – if they might even find some of the building blocks of life on the surface of Titan. BYU planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh is part of a team NASA has chosen as a finalist to receive funding for an exploratory mission to Titan that would involve landing a helicopter-like drone on the surface of Titan. Spanish Use Is Dropping in the U.S. Guest: Phillip Carter, PhD, Associate Professor of English and Linguistics, Florida International University During both the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, you could click on a button to read the WhiteHouse.gov website in Spanish, which is spoken by one in seven people in the US. But that Spanish-language content disappeared from WhiteHouse.gov when President Trump took office and it has yet to return. Perhaps not surprising, given this sentiment from then-candidate Trump during a Republican Presidential debate in 2015: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” President Trump need not worry—Spanish isn’t even close to pushing English aside in the US and it never will. The Legacy of the Cassette Tape Guests: Zack Taylor, Filmmaker, “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape”; Jared Ball, PhD, Professor of Communications at Morgan State University, and Author of “I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto,” Creator of www.iMixwhatILike.org If you’re of a certain generation, you probably remember hours spent in your bedroom with your dual-cassette recorder, making mixtapes for your crush or your friends. My how things have changed. You can loop your favorite song and artist on Spotify or YouTube all day long. Everything’s digital and on-demand and your entire music library can fit on thumb drive. So why are there musicians today putting out albums on cassette and music stores popping up that sell nothing but cassettes? Independent filmmaker Zack Taylor looks at this analog nostalgia in his new film, “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape."