Policy 360

Recently, a team at the Duke Reporters Lab has been developing a fact-checking app for the Amazon Echo. Owners of the Echo can “ask the fact-checkers” about claims they hear on the news and social media. The development team is led by Bill Adair, founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site  PolitiFact. Student researcher Julia Donheiser and project manager Rebecca Iannucci join Adair to talk through the promise and pitfalls of the project.

There's a project happening now in North Carolina in which people from across the state who have very different political views are meeting on a regular basis. The idea is this: if we can build relationships between people with differing political views, can mutual understanding – or even solutions - be far behind?

In the 1930s, half of all unmarried women who got pregnant out of wedlock got married (a so-called "shotgun marriage.") By the second half of the 2000s, only 6% of women in the same situation married before giving birth. But recently shotgun marriages have actually risen among certain groups of women.

Jared Cohen said recently, “the world is in a perpetual state of cyber-warfare.” He should know, he's the the Founder and CEO of Jigsaw, the tech incubator focused on geopolitical challenges created by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Previously, Jared served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and thus as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Jared has a long-standing interest in international security issues; he has traveled to more than 100 countries, including Iran and North Korea, and has conducted interviews with members of various extremist groups including Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Al-Shabab, Somali pirates, and more recently, failed ISIS recruits. He talks with guest host Peter Feaver about the high-tech efforts Jigsaw is undertaking to harness the power of technology to make the world safer.

Across the globe more than 20 million people are victimized by human trafficking, the modern form of slavery. Judith Kelley has been digging in to the WikiLeaks documents to see whether ranking countries on how well they are tackling human trafficking issues is having an impact on their efforts. Her new book is Scorecard Diplomacy.

Think of the words "Illegal alien" or "welfare queen." What color faces do you see in your mind? Now think about about phrases like "real Americans," or  "hard-working taxpayers." What color faces do you see now? Ian Haney López argues such phrases are "dog whistles," coded language used by politicians to get certain messages across. López is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

Research shows Hispanic children in the U.S. worry a lot more than their non-Hispanic peers. Some told researchers they feared their parents would be taken from them and sent away. Given that more than one in four U.S. children live in a family with at least one immigrant parent, our guest argues we should work toward helping parents and their children feel integrated into U.S. society rather than isolated.

The number of hate groups in the U.S. has risen for the second year in a row and is close to an all-time high according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which conducts an annual census of such groups. There's been a huge spike in anti-Muslim hate groups. We talk with Heidi Beirich who leads the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, “one of the most respected anti-terror organizations in the world” and SPLC's president Richard Cohen. David Schanzer of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security is the guest host.

How can the U.S. increase security along the southern border without building a wall? Stephen R. Kelly says more cooperation between law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border is key. Kelly focused on border issues during his time as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to Mexico, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic establishments in the world. He served in a similar capacity in Canada. He says many of the tactics now in place in Canada could be implemented on the U.S./Mexico border.

This episode was originally published on September 9, 2016.

General Martin Dempsey is former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as such he was the nation’s highest-ranking military officer. In this episode of Policy 360, Dempsey joins host Kelly Brownell to talk about his unlikely rise in the military, changes in the military since 9-11, the one thing he wishes he could have accomplished during his time as chairman, and the words he found to comfort those left behind when a fellow serviceman or woman has been killed.

More about the Sanford School of Public Policy: www.sanford.duke.edu

Photo: Dan Nguyen/Creative Commons www.flickr.com/photos/zokuga/7976447467/

Music: Impromptu in Blue by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Artist: www.incompetech.com/