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Hurricane Maria is moving toward the eastern Caribbean’s Leeward Islands where it could make landfall later this week. Many islands are only now starting to rebuild and recover from Hurricane Irma.

Here & Now‘s Robin Young speaks with Hugh Riley, secretary general of the Caribbean Tourism Organization, to assess the impact of the hurricanes on tourism, which is vitally important to the region’s economy.

More on the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s storm watch center

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The practice of holding an inquest used to be common, but it’s rare in the U.S. these days. And in several states, juries are still called to consider the facts when someone dies at the hands of the police. The inquest format is controversial — some say it promotes transparency and even healing. Others call it a farce.

KUOW’s Amy Radil (@AmyRadil) reports. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For some, there’s nothing quite like being onstage. But acting can feel inaccessible if you’re someone with a physical or intellectual disability.

KJZZ’s Stina Sieg (@StinaSieg) visits a theater company in Scottsdale, Arizona, that welcomes everyone. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

St. Martin, St. Thomas and Tortola’s ports have all been closed indefinitely to cruise liners. What does this mean for passengers as the winter season approaches?

Here & Now‘s Robin Young speaks with cruise analyst Andrew Coggins, a management professor at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, about this hurricane season’s impact on the industry. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The biggest winners at last night’s Emmy Awards were Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” both shows with strong female leads. It was also a big night for people of color, and politics were front and center throughout the evening.

Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) about the most memorable moments, from a surprise Sean Spicer appearance to a “9 to 5” reunion to historic wins for African and Asian Americans. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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Last night’s Emmy Awards had several firsts:

Lena Waithe became the first black woman to win for best writing for a comedy, for “Master of None”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus became the first actor to win six consecutive Emmys for playing the same character

Donald Glover became the first African-American director to win the Emmy for directing a comedy, for “Atlanta” (and Glover is the first actor to win an Emmy for directing a show he was in since 1977)

Riz Ahmed became the first Asian man to win an Emmy for acting

Hulu became the first streaming service to win the award for best drama series for “The Handmaid’s Tale”

And Sean Spicer was the first former White House Press Secretary to use the Emmys stage to joke about telling potential mistruths.

We’ll get into the groundbreaking and cringeworthy moments from a historic awards show.

GUESTS

Eric Deggans, TV critic, NPR; @Deggans

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On Oct. 19, 1987, the stock market fell 22.6 percent, the largest single-day loss in Wall Street history. Though the day became known as “Black Monday,” many of the details of what happened have been lost to history.

New York Times financial reporter Diana Henriques (@dianabhenriques) examines what led up to Black Monday and what lessons can be learned from it in “A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day In Wall Street History.” She joins Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson to talk about the book.

Book Excerpt: ‘A First-Class Catastrophe’

By Diana Henriques

He was a towering six foot seven, his round, balding head perpetually wreathed in cigar smoke. Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, was formidable even when he was cheerful. On Wednesday afternoon, March 26, 1980, he was furious.

Volcker, in office for barely seven months, had been pulled out of a meeting by a frantic message from Harry Jacobs, the chairman of Bache Halsey Stuart Shields, the second-largest brokerage firm on Wall Street. The Fed had almost no authority over brokerage firms, but Jacobs said he thought “it was in the national interest” that he alert Volcker to a crisis in the silver market—a market over which the Fed also had virtually no authority.

Jacobs’s news was alarming. Silver prices were plummeting, and two of the firm’s biggest customers, a pair of billionaire brothers in Texas named William Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, had told him the previous evening that they could not cover a $100 million debit in their Bache accounts, which they had used to amass millions of ounces of actual silver and paper claims on millions more. If silver prices fell further and the Hunts did indeed default on their debt to the firm, the silver they had pledged as collateral was no longer worth enough to cover their obligations. Bache was confronting a ruinous loss, possibly a threat to its financial survival. Jacobs suspected the Hunts also owed money to other major banks and Wall Street firms and may well have pledged more of their silver hoard as collateral.

Volcker immediately wanted to know which banks had made loans to the Hunts. He didn’t regulate Wall Street brokers or silver speculators, but he emphatically did regulate much of the nation’s banking system. There, at least, his authority to act was clear.

Indeed, Volcker had been responding to fire alarms in the banking system for weeks, as banks and savings and loans struggled with rising interest rates—themselves a consequence of Volcker’s attack on the raging inflation that had sapped the economy for nearly a decade. Confidence in America’s banks was as fragile as blown glass, and the last thing Volcker needed was a “bolt from the blue” like this. Yet, here was the head of Wall Street’s number-two firm warning him that some big banks were financing what sounded like wildly speculative silver trading by a couple of Texas plutocrats.

Within minutes, Volcker had reached out to Harold Williams, the urbane and seasoned chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the primary U.S. government regulator of Bache and its fellow brokerage firms. Williams was at a conference in Colonial Williamsburg; he ducked into a side room, spoke with Volcker about Bache, and then phoned to tell his staffers to check immediately on the rest of Wall Street’s exposure to the silver speculators. Williams then hurried back to Washington. A senior Treasury Department official and the comptroller of the currency (another bank regulator) were also alerted to the potential crisis. Both headed for the Fed’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue. Together, perhaps they could cover all the financial corners of this unfamiliar crisis.

To do that, the group needed a regulator with some authority over the silver markets. Volcker called the office of James M. Stone, who had been tapped less than a year earlier by President Jimmy Carter to be the chairman of

Protesters led a silent march Monday morning in St. Louis, continuing the dayslong rallies after former police officer Jason Stockley, who is white, was found not guilty of first-degree murder in the 2011 fatal shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, a black man.

Protests began peacefully Sunday night, but later erupted into violence, resulting in more than 80 arrests. Here & Now‘s Robin Young gets the latest from St. Louis Public Radio’s Nancy Fowler (@NancyFowlerSTL). Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Hurricane Maria is spinning toward some of the same Caribbean islands that were destroyed earlier this month by Irma.

Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson talks with meteorologist David Epstein (@growingwisdom), who is tracking the storm. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.