MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The political landscape of the Middle East transformed in a matter of hours over the weekend.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yeah. Lebanon announced three days of mourning after the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Lebanese militant and political group Hezbollah for the past 32 years. He was one of the region's most influential and divisive figures, and he was assassinated in a wave of Israeli airstrikes that took out a city block in Beirut. His killing and that of other senior leaders has left the Iran-backed group reeling, all while Israeli airstrikes continue. Over a thousand people have been killed, and the Lebanese prime minister says a million could be displaced.
MARTIN: NPR's Jane Arraf is with us now from southwest Beirut. Jane, good morning.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: Jane, so much has happened just over the last 48 hours. Tell us the latest from where you are.
ARRAF: Well, we are in a neighborhood in Beirut in front of a modest-looking apartment building which is missing one floor. This was the target of an Israeli strike. It appears to have been a drone attack since the building itself hasn't been collapsed. And the target - a senior Palestinian official from one of the Palestinian factions that has been fighting Israel for decades. This is important because it's not just geographically different from where Israel has been striking - so far, almost all of its strikes in Beirut have centered around the southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has bases - but also because it may have moved into a new front beyond Hezbollah. In addition to targeting a Palestinian official, there was an attack on Hamas leaders, the militant Palestinian group Israel's fighting in Gaza in the south of Lebanon.
MARTIN: So, you know, all this happened after the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed on Friday by Israeli airstrikes. How are people in Lebanon reacting to this news? You've been recognizing that so many people are on the move. I mean, it's hard to necessarily get your hands around it, but what are you hearing?
ARRAF: Yeah, it's really hard for people to get their heads around it, too. I mean, for many of the faithful, it is almost impossible to comprehend that Hassan Nasrallah, who has been the head of Hezbollah for 32 years - not just a militant leader and a political leader but a spiritual leader - hard to comprehend that he's gone. We're seeing less of the grief, the weeping in the streets and more defiance today.
I was speaking to a bus driver and some people who were scrambling onto a minibus to try to get out of Beirut. And they were saying that despite Nasrallah being gone, the fight would continue. He will be buried sometime this week it's expected, but so far, no details. And in the meantime, just waves and waves of people displaced from the south of Lebanon, the south of Beirut and nowhere for a lot of them to stay.
MARTIN: Do we have a sense of how Hezbollah is expected to react now?
ARRAF: Well, we are waiting to hear from the second in command, who is giving an address later today, and he's expected to say that they're going to continue the fight against Israel. There's not much else he could say. They're not going to lay down their arms. But this has become so much more complicated than it was, and it was complicated before because there's Iran in the mix. Hezbollah is Iran-backed. We need to see what happens with Iran. There's Syria next door, more than a million Syrians here and - extremely complicated.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Jane Arraf from Beirut. Jane, thank you so much.
ARRAF: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: In western North Carolina, flooding prompted by Hurricane Helene has left hundreds stranded, particularly in the states with rural, mountainous regions.
FADEL: The extent of the damage is still becoming clear. Yesterday, Governor Roy Cooper described it as, quote, "widespread and catastrophic." Authorities have already found 30 bodies in just one county.
MARTIN: We're going to get an update now from Asheville, one of the hardest-hit areas in North Carolina. Reporter Gerard Albert III of Blue Ridge Public Radio is with us now. Good morning.
GERARD ALBERT III, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Can you just give us a snapshot of what happened in North Carolina and where things stand now?
ALBERT: Of course. Yeah, this part of western North Carolina is mountainous. There's lots of streams and rivers. And before Helene even made landfall, it had been raining here heavily in the days before. In fact, it was historic rainfall for the area. And then Tropical Storm Helene hit. You know, the ground was already saturated from that rain before, and then some areas here got at least 2 feet of rain. That's when the flooding roared into cities and small towns, and mudslides crashed onto the roads and washed some of them out completely.
And now here we are days later, and some communities are still cut off. It's hard for rescue teams to get into some places. Still, tens of thousands of people are without power. There's no cell service in most of the region, and most places still don't have safe drinking water. The city of Asheville doesn't even have running water. It's a mess.
MARTIN: We're glad we were able to reach you because you were actually trapped yourself for most of the weekend. I understand you were south of Asheville. What happened? And what did you find there?
ALBERT: Yeah, I was in Brevard. It's a big tourist destination in Transylvania County. While I was there doing some reporting, the rain kept coming and coming - got at least 17 inches in that area and probably more. And I ended up getting trapped there for a couple days 'cause the roads between Brevard and Asheville were flooded. And I spoke with one man. He's a migrant farmworker, and he's in the U.S. on a work visa. He didn't want to give us his name because he fears deportation. The road to where he lives was totally wiped out by a creek, and here's what he had to say.
UNIDENTIFIED FARMWORKER: (Non-English language spoken).
ALBERT: So as he explained to me, he lives with his brother's family. They said they laid asphalt and logs to close the gap so that people could bring supplies in and out to where they live. I also spoke with Alex Globeck, who lives in the same neighborhood. She talked about how urgently they were told to evacuate as the flooding began.
ALEX GLOBECK: Fire department came through on this lower loop and were evacuating us first and the next-door neighbor, just letting us know if we wanted - if we needed to leave, we need to do it now. We took about 15 minutes. I have two cats. I grabbed them and a toothbrush, and that's all I grabbed.
MARTIN: OK, Gerard, the severe weather, the potential for flooding was actually pretty well forecast days in advance. Not to blame people, but why were so many people caught off guard?
ALBERT: I think it's a mix of things. Part of it is the self-reliant culture of south Appalachia. And, you know, even Sunday, before this all happened, local and state officials have been a bit on the defensive about their response - getting supplies to areas that need them. But residents are pretty frustrated that there's no timeline of when outside help and supplies will get here.
MARTIN: I understand that that also hadn't flooded that high before. So that's Gerard Albert III of Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville, N.C. Gerard, thank you so much.
ALBERT: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: For the first time in decades - since 1996, in fact - both nominees for vice president are veterans.
FADEL: Marine Corps vet JD Vance and National Guard vet Tim Walz will debate tomorrow night, so we wanted to talk about how each approaches veterans' issues.
MARTIN: NPR veterans correspondent Quil Lawrence is with us now to tell us more about all this. Good morning.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So what do we know about how each candidate would approach veterans and the VA?
LAWRENCE: I'll give you the good, the bad and the ugly...
MARTIN: OK, let's hear it.
LAWRENCE: ...The - I mean, the substance, the record and maybe then the partisan political attacks. You know, we know a lot about both of these candidates because, well, we saw four years of the Trump VA, and now we're nearly done with four years of the Biden VA, and there's a lot of bipartisan common ground on veteran stuff. But the main difference is the philosophy around using private care versus government-run health care.
The Trump administration pushed through the VA Mission Act, which greatly expanded private medical care options for veterans. And study after study shows that VA rates as well or better than private care, but private clinics can sometimes be closer or faster to see veterans than the VA. But it's much more expensive, and that's part of what's breaking the VA's budget. Right now they have $12 billion in the hole.
So the - you know, the now well-known Project 2025 leans more towards privatization. It has a chapter on the VA written by the former VA chief of staff under Trump. So essentially, that's it. It's - a Trump advance would lean more towards more privatization of VA care and safe to assume Harris-Walz would push back towards VA-provided care.
MARTIN: And what about the candidates' own military experience? How does that factor into things?
LAWRENCE: Yeah. I mean, they could have been two amazing, positive stories about military service. They both served post-9/11. Neither one served in combat, but that's true of the vast majority of veterans. Vance, in his memoir, says that the Marine Corps basically made him an adult. He's almost a cliche, like, the - his drill sergeant sent someone with him to buy his first car, so he wouldn't get swindled. And he ends up going from rural poverty to Yale Law School, right? And then Walz is also a cliche. He's your high school teacher and coach, but he does his National Guard service one weekend a month, and he juggles his civilian job and the family job with all these deployments for national disasters. Vance deployed for six months to a quiet corner of Iraq, and he's never embellished that.
MARTIN: And JD Vance has accused Walz of embellishing his record, right?
LAWRENCE: This is the ugly part. Tim Walz served, you know, 24 years and deployed a year to Europe in support of the war in Afghanistan. Vance has been attacking Walz over a couple of times he misstated this, including once when Walz said he carried weapons, quote, "in war" instead of maybe saying weapons in wartime. And after he retired to run for Congress, Walz's units - unit did deploy to Iraq, and some Republicans have slammed him for leaving just then, even though he had reenlisted after 9/11 and had served 24 years at that point.
MARTIN: Do we have a sense of whether these attacks are landing?
LAWRENCE: It seems to fall along political party lines. It's tricky for Vance to be too critical on this because his boss, Donald Trump, famously avoided serving in Vietnam with five deferments. And he's got a track record of offending veterans, I mean, like mocking the late Senator John McCain's physical wounds from Vietnam or just last month, as, you know, we reported, filming a campaign ad in Arlington National Cemetery, which is against rules and custom, and his staff there got in a verbal altercation with a cemetery official. So a lot of this will probably come up in tomorrow night's debate. And sadly, I would guess it's going to be more on the partisan attacks than the policy stuff.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Quil Lawrence. Quil, thank you.
LAWRENCE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: If you're stressed, well, welcome to the club.
MARTIN: Yeah, well, there's everything going on in the world - extreme weather, war, elections - and then there's the stress of everyday life. Altogether, it's a lot to handle.
FADEL: And NPR has a new series aimed at helping you stress less. NPR's Allison Aubrey joins us now to talk about this, Allison, hi.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: So you're here to help.
AUBREY: Yes (laughter) - trying.
FADEL: Is it possible to eliminate stress?
AUBREY: Unfortunately, it is not possible to eliminate our stress, but there's a lot of research to show that a combination of strategies can really help people manage their stress and feel better. So imagine, Leila, that you're living with cancer...
FADEL: Yeah.
AUBREY: ...Or you're caring for a loved one with dementia. These are very difficult situations. But even amid challenges like these, a series of studies out of Northwestern University shows people can learn to experience more moments of joy and less anxiety. Here's the psychologist behind those studies, Judy Moskowitz.
JUDY MOSKOWITZ: We really have built a pretty large body of research showing that these skills can work for anyone no matter what type of stress they're experiencing.
AUBREY: So she has developed a course. You can kind of think of it as a master class that teaches people eight skills. And here's a really cool thing. NPR is collaborating with Northwestern to bring this online course to our audiences.
FADEL: Nice.
AUBREY: So if you sign up - yeah, it's really cool - you can be part of a research study to see if these skills help people with everyday stress, the kind we all experience in our day-to-day lives.
FADEL: OK, so give us more of a sneak peek of that course.
AUBREY: So the way it works is you'll be introduced to one or two skills each week, and then you practice them. So this includes exercise to help with self-compassion, a lesson on how to savor - to kind of get more joy out of everyday experiences - and another skill called positive reappraisal.
FADEL: OK, positive reappraisal - how does that work?
AUBREY: So disappointing things happen all the time, right?
FADEL: Yeah.
AUBREY: Yeah, and the skill of positive reappraisal is to look for the silver lining. This is a familiar concept, but it's hard to do because we have this kind of deeply ingrained instinct to be on the lookout for threats or danger. Here's Judy Moskowitz again.
MOSKOWITZ: So something happens. You're like, that's a bad thing, right? And that's adaptive. You know, humans have evolved to pay attention to the things that will impact them negatively.
AUBREY: And there's value in this. I mean, it helps us avoid bad situations.
FADEL: Right.
AUBREY: But in modern times, we can take it too far. We can forget to see the good. So what positive reappraisal does is help you reframe a situation or think of something good that may come from a negative experience. So on the fly, you want to try, Leila (laughter)?
FADEL: OK.
AUBREY: See if you can positively reappraise any annoyance in your life.
FADEL: I think I'm exhausted all the time.
AUBREY: I get it.
FADEL: And I'm tired of people being cruel to each other, even killing each other. So those are the annoyances in my life.
AUBREY: Yes.
FADEL: And positive reappraisal - I love the job that makes me tired. And I can see that human beings are amazingly kind also. And I'm glad that I'm in a place where I can eat and have a roof and all those things.
AUBREY: Yeah, I love the way you flipped the script there.
FADEL: NPR's Allison Aubrey. If you want to stress less, there's a link on our website, and we also have a newsletter journey packed with extra tips and tools. Allison, thank you so much.
AUBREY: Thank you, Leila. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
