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--:-- Leila Fadel: A rare look inside Sudan where a civil war has left cities in ruins and millions on the brink of famine. They forget about us. It's a forgotten war. Why is one of the world's worst humanitarian crises getting so little attention?
--:-- Michelle Martin: I'm Leila Fadel, that's Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News.
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--:-- Leila Fadel: Tyree Nichols was killed after a violent encounter with Memphis police officers during a traffic stop last year. Three of those officers are now on trial, accused of violating the 29-year-old black man's civil rights and attempting to cover it up.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Also, grocery prices remain high. Are big companies behind it, or is there something else going on?
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--:-- Leila Fadel: We have no other choice. We have to buy groceries. They use that to take advantage and keep raising prices.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.
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--:-- Announcer (Voiceover): This message comes from NPR sponsor AARP. Where do you see your career in 12 years? What are you doing now to help you get there?
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--:-- Leila Fadel: Since fighting erupted in Sudan almost 18 months ago, it's been hard to get humanitarian aid, let alone press access, into the country, which is one of Africa's largest by-land area.
--:-- Michelle Martin: As the ruling Sudanese army and the paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, fight for control of the country.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Millions of people have been displaced inside and outside of Sudan.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And the United Nations says the fighting has put millions of people on the brink of famine.
--:-- Leila Fadel: But with much of the world's attention focused on conflicts elsewhere, the war in Sudan has struggled to get attention for the humanitarian disaster.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And that's been made worse by the fact that it's so hard to get in.
--:-- Leila Fadel: But NPR correspondent Emmanuel Akinwotu did manage to get in. He's been in Sudan for the past two weeks, and he's with us now from the wartime capital of Port Sudan.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Good morning, Emmanuel.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: Good morning, Michelle.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So, Emmanuel, you've been covering the conflict and you managed to report from the outskirts of the capital, Khartoum. This is where fighting first broke out. What did you find there?
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: The scale of destruction is just hard to believe. In places, it was almost apocalyptic.
--:-- Michelle Martin: We walked through this once iconic market called Souk-Omdaman. It was this vibrant place, as vibrant as Times Square, but now it's a ghost town.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: The storefronts were shattered and broken. People's personal belongings, like their bags and slippers, were just littered out onto the streets.
--:-- Michelle Martin: There were even chairs covered in bullet holes set around this small table with a kettle where people used to drink tea.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: And there are so many areas like this.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Did you meet anybody? And can you tell us about them?
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: I met this 64-year-old man called Mohamed Keir. He was born in Omdurman and he actually worked in the U.S. for over 10 years, even as a security manager at Dulles Airport just outside of D.C.
--:-- Michelle Martin: He showed me his home built by his father about 100 years ago, but now it's in ruins.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: I cannot believe it. You cannot imagine it. I'm just trying to start from the beginning.
--:-- Leila Fadel: He told me the RSF looted his home. They took his TV, his air conditioners, his money before they were forced out of the city by the army in May.
--:-- Michelle Martin: There are parts of Umdurman that feel more normal, but even there, it's not really normal because of the shelling.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: Just across the river, the RSF control the capital city, Khartoum. And while the army conducts airstrikes there, the RSF are shelling Umdurman constantly.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Emmanuel, that just sounds horrific.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And now this fighting in Sudan has caused what is believed to be the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world. What does that look like on the ground? And how are people surviving?
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: Well, the scale of need is just immense. Half of the population are acutely hungry. Parts of the country are already experiencing famine.
--:-- Michelle Martin: It's the worst displacement crisis in the world. People are just not getting the aid that they need, mainly because of a lack of safe routes.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: But frankly, even if there were safe routes, the amount of aid still isn't enough.
--:-- Leila Fadel: There's this common feeling from people that the world just doesn't care and that they have to rely on themselves.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: One example I got to see are these incredible community kitchens where people are cooking meals for hundreds, sometimes thousands of people.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And it's funded from donations from within Sudan and from the diaspora.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Are there any particular people who stuck with you, any stories that's just stuck in your mind?
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: I spoke to one doctor called Jamal Mohamed. He works at Al-Nal Hospital, which has been shelled constantly and often lacks basic supplies.
--:-- Michelle Martin: He said one of the worst moments was when he operated on two children. I had to amputate them without anesthesia.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: He feels the country has been totally abandoned. They forget about us. It's a forgotten war.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And he talked about just how overwhelmed hospitals are.
--:-- Michelle Martin: That's Emmanuel Akinwotu in Sudan. Emmanuel, thank you.
--:-- Emmanuel Akinwotu: Thanks, Michelle.
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--:-- Leila Fadel: Are greedy companies to blame for higher prices at the grocery store?
--:-- Michelle Martin: Well, many shoppers tell NPR they think so, like Arian Navarro from Houston.
--:-- Arian Navarro: I think it's the big corporations. We have no other choice. We have to buy groceries. They use that to take advantage and keep raising prices.
--:-- Leila Fadel: NPR's Alina Selyuk took on the task of figuring out if the data backs up this opinion. And she's with us now to tell us more about it.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: Good morning.
--:-- Michelle Martin: What a project. Where did you begin?
--:-- Alina Selyuk: It was hard. So I thought I'd start with three facts nobody seems to dispute.
--:-- Leila Fadel: One, many consumer brands and supermarkets have been reporting record profits.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: Two, companies almost always pass on their costs to shoppers.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And three, those costs rose a lot during the pandemic.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: I will call out one of those costs, higher wages for workers, which actually many economists have argued is the key driver of grocery inflation.
--:-- Leila Fadel: But so you put it all together, and the obvious question to me was, how much are profits outpacing rising costs?
--:-- Alina Selyuk: Turns out there are just very many ways to calculate this.
--:-- Michelle Martin: I started out crunching corporate reports of a dozen giants including Walmart, Kroger, Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, Procter Gamble.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: And what I tracked was the portion of money companies keep after paying just the cost of making or stocking those products just those direct costs.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Accountants call this the gross profit margin.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: OK, what did you find out?
--:-- Michelle Martin: For almost all the companies I analyzed from pre-pandemic to last year, the gross profit margin either grew less than 1% or it actually declined.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: That's interesting. So not taking an exorbitant cut here.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Not the smoking gun I think a lot of people thought you were going to find.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: No. So I started asking the smartest economists I knew, and they said that these individual reports don't really fully explain what's going on.
--:-- Michelle Martin: I've got to look industry-wide using government data.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: OK. So what did you find out there?
--:-- Leila Fadel: Turns out there are so many data sets to analyze, but most of them painted a similar picture, which is something new.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: I'm going to try to describe some charts that I should say folks can check out, all the charts, all the data on NPR.org.
--:-- Michelle Martin: But so food manufacturers got much more profitable during the pandemic.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: Then those profit margins dropped, and now they've settled close to pre-pandemic levels.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Grocery stores are a different story.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: They're a lot less profitable to begin with, and their profitability climbed more slowly than other types of stores.
--:-- Michelle Martin: But they've also been slower to give up those gains.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: So the grocery industry has kept a slightly bigger share of sales over time.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Yes, but it doesn't automatically mean greedflation.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: So it could be that stores are selling more things that are more profitable.
--:-- Michelle Martin: That's one of the factors. Like store brand items, for example, they're super popular, they're cheap on the shelf, and they are more profitable for the retailer.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: It could also be that stores are charging more because shoppers didn't really push back on higher prices until this year.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So on that original question, are greedy companies to blame for higher grocery prices?
--:-- Alina Selyuk: It's a very unsatisfying answer of it's messy, it's complicated, it's nuanced.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And the good news is things are changing. The grocery inflation is now the lowest in years.
--:-- Alina Selyuk: That was a project. It was.
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--:-- Leila Fadel: A jury in Memphis heard opening statements yesterday in the federal trial of three former police officers involved in the deadly arrest of a black man last year.
--:-- Michelle Martin: The three officers, who are also black, are charged with violating the civil rights of 29-year-old Tyree Nichols, who died after a traffic stop turned horribly violent.
--:-- Leila Fadel: They are also accused of conspiring to cover up their roles in the incident.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Surveillance and body camera footage captured officers restraining, kicking, and punching Nichols.
--:-- Leila Fadel: He died in the hospital three days later.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Katie Reardon from member station WKNO was in the courtroom for opening statements, and she's with us now to tell us more.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Good morning.
--:-- Michelle Martin: So let's start with the prosecution. What is their case?
--:-- Katie Reardon: Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Rogers told jurors to prepare themselves for evidence that's hard to watch and listen to that they see Tyree Nichols beaten to death on camera from multiple angles.
--:-- Leila Fadel: She referring to that publicly released footage that you mentioned.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Rogers says the video will show that Nichols tried to calm officers down after they pulled him over and that he struggled with their inconsistent commands before he pepper sprayed and flees on foot.
--:-- Michelle Martin: We also know that two other former officers who've pleaded guilty to federal charges will be called on to testify.
--:-- Katie Reardon: And on Wednesday, Rogers said they'll talk about a so-called run tax.
--:-- Leila Fadel: That was the first time this term has surfaced in this case.
--:-- Katie Reardon: She described it as a kind of understood punishment that this group of officers would inflict on people who ran from them.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Prosecutors also want to convince jurors that the officers failed to tend to Nichols' serious medical needs after the beating and that they didn't tell arriving EMTs about his injuries, which the prosecution says could have helped save him.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So as you said, very disturbing thing. This is going to be obviously very challenging for people to sit through, including you, I would think.
--:-- Katie Reardon: So let's turn to the defense now. What did we find out about their strategy?
--:-- Michelle Martin: The defense attorneys haven't been speaking publicly, so this was jurors and really our first peek at their version of events.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Each of the defendants, Tadarius Bean, Justin Smith, and Demetrius Haley, have their own attorneys.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So we heard three opening statements.
--:-- Katie Reardon: They had some common themes saying these officers work in a dangerous city and have dangerous jobs.
--:-- Michelle Martin: The officers were part of a special police unit called Scorpion that was stationed in areas with high crime rates in Memphis.
--:-- Katie Reardon: One attorney described Nichols as a quote high-risk suspect because he failed to stop for the officer's blue lights for some time after driving erratically.
--:-- Leila Fadel: After he eventually did stop, the defense says Nichols heightened the situation by fleeing.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Lawyers also talked about how the officer's police training allows for escalated force in certain situations.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And they told jurors that the officers radioed for paramedics to check out Nichols right away.
--:-- Katie Reardon: We also learned that Smith's attorney says his client will take the stand to tell his side of the story.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Interesting. So we are going to hear, we're likely to hear from at least one of the officers.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Well, the prosecution has already called their first witness.
--:-- Michelle Martin: She's a nurse practitioner who tended to Nichols at the hospital and testified about the severity of his injuries.
--:-- Katie Reardon: And of note, outside of these court proceedings, the Department of Justice is currently conducting a civil investigation to determine if issues like an excessive use of force are systemic within the Memphis Police Department.
--:-- Leila Fadel: That is Katie Reardon with member station WKNO in Memphis. Katie, thanks so much for sharing this reporting.
--:-- Katie Reardon: Thanks for having me.
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--:-- Leila Fadel: And that's Up First for Thursday, September 12th. I'm Michelle Martin.
--:-- Michelle Martin: And I'm Leila Fadel. For your next listen, try Consider This from NPR.
--:-- Leila Fadel: In their latest episode, they take a deep dive into Tuesday's presidential debate in Philadelphia.
--:-- Michelle Martin: With the race to the White House neck and neck, will Vice President Kamala Harris' dominant performance make a difference?
--:-- Leila Fadel: Listen to Consider This wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Today's episode of Up First was edited by Rebecca Rossman, Susanna Capilouto, Emily Kopp, Mohammed Elbardisi, and Alice Wolfley.
--:-- Leila Fadel: It was produced by Imant Ma'ani, Ziyad Butch, Nia Dumas, Chris Thomas, and Lindsay Totti.
--:-- Michelle Martin: We get engineering support from Carly Strange, and our technical director is Zach Coleman.
--:-- Leila Fadel: We hope you'll join us again tomorrow.
--:-- Michelle Martin: Thanks for listening to Up First.
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