phone -- the indiscernible] -- union switching for years ago, 5% money and budget, udget, they told the nca, the guy who called, attention to budget, budget, bankrupt. illinois is going bankrupt and us, that's it. host: pennsylvania is next, line, barbara, hi there. caller: hi, i'm a democrat. you. will surprise something about taxation in the state that bugs me. tax or personal sales the personal tax, it is or the ocal taxes, it is the school board, they are independent. beserk, they gone are spending, spending and taxes. people are losing their homes because taxes are so high. i've gone to my local representatives and said, can you do anything about this, they said, no, we have no control board and what they do at all. that has to change. don'tgood education, kids need palace, they need solid teachers, that is what they need. host: locality can't come in if proposes to meet budgets, they can't have a veto power over it? absolutely not. that is wrong. ecause i believe in education, i don't have any children and i've never objected to paying for education, but it's gone crazy. and i've talk

well, what is new this year is that the finnish ice break in nordica, was able to go from vancouver to nca nuuk and arrive earliest ever recorded. >> sreenivasan: meaning it's a warmer temperature? >> yes, the ice coverage fluctuates year by year. sometimes it increases a little bit. sometimes it's less. what that meant for our trip was, we were able to enter the northwest passage earlier and found remarkably little ice. and the ice that we did find was quite thin. >> sreenivasan: what are the consequences if the ice is thinning earlier, and if this passage is opening? >> well, there's a lot of speculation in the last few years ago about whether or not the northwest passage might become a new shipping highway. cargo ships, tourist ships, pleasure boats, those kinds of things. and if the northwest passage becomes completely ice friday or virtually ice free, sort of large parts of the summer, then that does become a distinct possibility. >> sreenivasan: there were several researchers on board this vessel. what were they studying? >> the impact of global warming on societies in the arctic, so

used the nsc to go around congressional oversight and run a shadow foreign policy, separate from state nca defense. the other reason to use the nsc was internal to the reagan administration and not a runaround congress. it was also a runaround with reagan's own defense apartment because the secretaries of state to defense were very cool all of these ideas, particularly iran arms sales, and they had qualms about what was going on in nicaragua. reagan wanted to circumvent them and use the nsc to do it. the other thing essential to understand is how central ronald reagan was. there were a lot of people eventually took refuge in the idea reagan had been asleep at the switch and had some berkman's who run amok -- had subordinates who ran a buck and he did not know a lot of the operational details going on. the documents that have been declassified make it clear reagan was deeply involved in each of the two pieces of iran-contra. questionthe lingering about whether he was aware of the links between those two and that became a point of controversy. reagan was deeply involved in each piece of it.