The Washington Post National Weekly - February 19, 2017

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

The Islamic State’s new weapon: Child terrorists The militant group is cultivating adolescents in the West PAGE 12

Politics A call, then Flynn’s fall 4

World In Iraq, ‘hell on Earth’ 11 5 Myths About Frederick Douglass 23

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

2

Calling all businesses in North Central Washington The Wenatchee World has just launched a brand new online business directory.

NCW BUSINESS DIRECTORY

is a comprehensive list of area businesses that are searchable by name or category and can be narrowed down by city.

It’s FREE! Your listing includes your business name, address, phone number, website, e-mail, hours and a Google map.

Want to stand out from your competition? Upgrade to our premium Featured Listing and add your logo, photos, videos, social media links, a full business description, plus a coupon option.

All for just $20 per month or save 25% with our annual plan that’s just $180 per year.

Log on to NCWBusinessDirectory.com where you can: • Upgrade to a Featured Listing • Update your current listing • Add your business to our site Need to reach us? Contact Chris Gerber at gerber@wenatcheeworld.com or 509-664-7121.

wenatcheeworld.com NCWBusinessDirectory.com

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

POST POLITICS

More stressed than usual BY

C OLBY I TKOWITZ

W

e’re a nation of people already wound pretty tight. But right now we’re more stressed out than we’ve been in the past decade, according to a new survey.

The American Psychological Association polls Americans about their stress every year, and it’s common for many of those polled to report anxiety around personal life issues like work and money. This time, however, people are also citing politics as a serious stressor in their lives.

Last year, the APA, which represents psychologists across the country, heard from its members that their patients were experiencing high levels of anxiety in the lead-up to the presidential election. Since November, those emotions haven’t let up. They’ve actually gotten worse with political talk consuming therapy sessions.

Muslim Americans, immigrants and victims of sexual trauma are especially prone to greater stress since the election, and mental health specialists who work in Veterans Affairs hospitals have reported their patients have made comments such as “This isn’t what I risked my life for,” said Vaile Wright, a licensed psychologist and member of APA’s Stress in America team.

Because so many of its members were reporting election-related stress, the APA added questions about politics to its annual survey in August. When the negative feelings didn’t ease up, APA did another survey in January to capture stress levels post-election.

In August, 71 percent of Americans reported feeling a physical or emotional symptom of stress at least one day that month. In January, 80 percent had symptoms such as tension

KLMNO WEEKLY

ISTOCK

headaches or feeling overwhelmed or depressed.

The survey released Wednesday and conducted by Harris Poll, found 66 percent of Americans reported stress about the future of the country, 57 percent about the current political climate and 49 percent about the election outcome. Minority groups, millennials, those living in urban areas, and those with a college education had higher levels of stress about the election, which is unsurprising since those demographics tend to lean left.

“The fact that two-thirds of Americans are saying the future of the nation is causing them stress, it is a startling number,” Wright said.

While Democrats surveyed were overwhelmingly more stressed about the election outcome than Republicans (72 percent to 26 percent), a majority of people from both parties, 59 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats, said they are stressed about the future of the country.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 19

Wright suggests the best way to ease stress related to what’s happening in Washington is to disentangle yourself from the minute-byminute deluge of negative news. There’s so much to consume and internalize that people’s hyper-vigilance is causing more harm than good.

“It’s not just about who won the election.

It’s having a much larger impact, and it likely has to do with this global sense of uncertainty, dividedness and this unprecedented speed of change,” she said. “So we try to seek out ways to control it, which is to be informed. And while it’s really important to stay informed right now, there’s a point where you have to know your limits; there’s a saturation point where there isn’t new information.”

Take national security adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation late Monday night, Wright said. Most people didn’t need that information at 11 p.m.; nothing would have changed if they’d waited until morning to hear that news.

“All it serves to do is get you riled up again when you should be prioritizing going to sleep, winding down, preparing for the next day.”

Maintaining such high levels of constant stress puts a strain on your relationships, work and health, which only increases the stress. It’s a vicious cycle that people need to actively remove themselves from by making a conscious choice to disengage and focus on friends, family and activities that bring them joy, she said.

“Know your limits — really prioritize taking care of yourself,” Wright said. “People think, if I choose to cope or do something for myself, I’m saying what’s happening isn’t a big deal.

But the reality is burnout isn’t going to help anybody.” n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY MUSIC BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER The threat presented by the Islamic State is taking on a new form: child terrorists either directly in contact with or inspired by the militant group. Illustration by ILEANA SOON for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

From a phone call to a swift fall

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

After the election, Flynn’s communication with a Russian ambassador got more scrutiny

BY G REG M ILLER, A DAM E NTOUS AND E LLEN N AKASHIMA

M

ichael Flynn was at a beachside resort in the Dominican Republic, a stretch of sand and sun that he and his wife had visited for years, when he took a few moments out of their postelection vacation for a call with

the Russian ambassador to the United States.

As a veteran intelligence officer, Flynn must have known that a call with a Russian official in Washington would be intercepted by the U.S. government, pored over by FBI analysts and possibly even shared with the White House.

But six weeks later, Flynn was forced out of his job as national

security adviser to President Trump over what was said in that conversation and Flynn’s inability to be truthful about it with thenVice President-elect Mike Pence and other officials now in senior positions at the White House.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that “the level of trust between the president and General Flynn had eroded to the point where he felt

President Trump talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office last month, joined by Vice President Pence, members of his staff and Michael Flynn, far right, who was national security adviser at the time.

he had to make a change.”

But Flynn’s removal was also the culmination of swirling forces and resentment unleashed by the 2016 election. His unusual association with Russia — and the discovery of his secret communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak — fanned suspicion among senior Obama administration officials of a more sinister

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

5

POLITICS aspect to Russia’s interference in the election. And ultimately, Flynn’s misleading statements about the Kislyak calls added to broader concerns about the Trump administration’s regard for the truth.

The sequence connecting Flynn’s call and his dismissal came to involve two presidents warily passing power, the leaders of national security agencies including the FBI and CIA, and incoming and outgoing transition officials who regarded one another with significant distrust.

Flurry of communications Flynn’s rising profile in the Trump campaign appears to have coincided with a resumption of his contacts with Kislyak. The two first met in 2013, when Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, met with military intelligence officials in Moscow on a trip that the Russian diplomat helped to arrange and coordinate.

As Moscow’s lead envoy in Washington, Kislyak’s communications were routinely monitored by the FBI, including diplomatic reports he filed with Moscow in which he documented his interactions with Flynn, according to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

At the same time, Russian intelligence services were carrying out an assault on the election, delivering troves of emails stolen from Democratic Party servers to the WikiLeaks Web site, according to U.S. officials. U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded that the effort was designed to destabilize U.S. democracy, damage Clinton’s prospects and help elect Trump.

No evidence has surfaced to suggest that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak were in any way tied to the Russian operation. Nevertheless, by mid-December, senior officials in the Obama White House began to hear about Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak, both from intelligence reports and other sources.

Obama administration officials weren’t sure what to make of the communications. To some, they appeared to be consistent with the kind of diplomatic outreach expected of any incoming administration. To others, the fre-

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Pence finally learned from The Post — two weeks after McGahn — that Flynn had misled him. quency of the contacts seemed excessive and the lack of any effort by Flynn to coordinate his calls with the State Department was regarded with suspicion.

Susan E. Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, did not give Flynn advance notice of the sanctions that the White House planned to impose on Russia over its meddling in the election. Instead, Denis McDonough, who at the time was Obama’s chief of staff, waited until the sanctions were announced to inform his Trump counterpart, a former administration official said.

Flynn had a flurry of communications with Kislyak in the days leading up to that announcement. The two also traded phone calls that Flynn said were limited to condolences over the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey and the downing of a Russian aircraft, as well as a preliminary conversation about setting up a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.

By that time, Flynn and his wife were in the Dominican Republic for a beachside respite before he moved into one of the most demanding jobs in the White House.

It was there, at a resort on the

eastern tip of the country, that Flynn fielded a Kislyak call as sanctions were announced.

An FBI agent prepared a brief intelligence report summing up the contents of the conversation, officials said.

The report was not widely circulated and might have attracted only scant attention were it not for a Putin move that baffled Washington. Rather than retaliate against the United States with comparable sanctions, Putin seemed to greet Obama’s punitive measures with an indifferent shrug. Putin’s reaction sent officials at the White House, State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies scrambling for clues.

What they began to focus on, in early January, were Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.

Telling the Trump team On Jan. 5, FBI Director James B. Comey, CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. briefed Obama and a small group of his top White House advisers on the contents of a classified intelligence report showing that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump. That’s when White House officials learned that the FBI was investi-

Vice President Pence, left, meets with Michael Flynn on Feb. 10. In January, Pence had said publicly that Flynn assured him he hadn’t discussed sanctions with a Russian diplomat.

Pence didn’t learn otherwise until a Washington Post report on Feb. 9.

KLMNO WEEKLY

gating the Flynn-Kislyak calls.

The issue was forced out into the open on Jan. 12 in an op-ed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. The piece revealed Flynn’s calls with Kislyak and called for an explanation from the White House on whether the two men had discussed sanctions.

Pence and other members of the Trump transition team, still a week away from assuming power, checked with Flynn before they publicly denied that sanctions had been discussed during the call with Kislyak.

In the days after the inauguration, FBI agents interviewed Flynn about his calls with Kislyak.

On Jan. 26, Sally Q. Yates, then the deputy attorney general, notified White House counsel Donald McGahn about concerns that she and former intelligence chiefs Clapper and Brennan had about Flynn’s misrepresentations to Pence and others. McGahn, in turn, informed Trump, leading to a review of whether Flynn had violated any laws. White House lawyers quickly concluded that no laws had been broken, according to Spicer.

Spicer also suggested that Flynn’s false account of the sanctions discussion was part of a troubling pattern, saying that a “series of issues and series of statements and pronouncements” had damaged Flynn’s standing beyond repair.

Flynn’s version of events finally started to crumble on Feb. 7, when he was informed that The Post was preparing to publish an article about his discussion of sanctions with Kislyak, citing nine current and former U.S. officials.

Flynn, at first, stood by his denials. Then, one day later, he acknowledged through a spokesman that he might have discussed sanctions but couldn’t recall.

Pence finally learned from The Post — two weeks after McGahn — that Flynn had misled him. It would appear that neither McGahn nor Trump had informed him of the false statements.

After Flynn apologized to Pence, the vice president seemed open to allowing Flynn to remain in place, according to a senior administration official. But Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff who had also come to Flynn’s defense in January, “didn’t want to let it go,” the official added. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Will activists turn on Democrats?

BY

P AUL K ANE

G

rass-roots movements can be the life and death of political leaders.

It’s a well-worn story now about how John A. Boehner, then House minority leader, joined a rising star in his caucus, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, in April 2009 for one of the first major tea party protests in the California Republican’s home town of Bakersfield.

A little more than six years later, after they surfed that wave into power, the movement consumed both of them. Boehner was driven out of the House speaker’s office and McCarthy’s expected succession fell apart, leaving him stuck at the rank of majority leader.

Democrats are well aware of that history as they try to tap the energy of the roiling liberal activists who have staged rallies and marches in the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.

What if they can fuse these protesters, many of whom have never been politically active, into the liberal firmament? What if a new tea party is arising, with the energy and enthusiasm to bring out new voters and make a real difference at the polls, starting with the 2018 midterm elections?

The women’s marches that brought millions onto streets across the country the day after Trump’s inauguration — spurred organically through social media — opened Democratic leaders’ eyes to the possibilities.

With a 10-day recess beginning this weekend, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has instructed her members to hold a “day of action” in their districts, including town halls focused on saving the Affordable Care Act. Next weekend, Democratic senators and House members will hold protests across the country, hoping to link arms with local activists who have already marched against Trump.

“It was important to us to make sure that we reach out to everyone we could, to visit with them, to keep them engaged, to engage those that maybe aren’t engaged,”

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Leaders hope the growing movement doesn’t go the same route as the conservative tea party Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told reporters at a Democratic retreat in Baltimore. The trick is to keep them aiming their fire at Republicans and Trump, not turning it into a circular firing squad targeting fellow Democrats.

“Now we want people to run for office, to volunteer and to vote,” Luján added.

It’s too early to tell which direction this movement will take, but there are some similarities to the early days of the conservative tea party.

In early 2009, as unemployment approached 10 percent and the home mortgage industry collapsed, the tea party emerged in reaction to the Wall Street bailout.

It grew throughout the summer of 2009 as the Obama administration and congressional Democrats pushed toward passage of the Affordable Care Act. Many of the protesters were newly engaged, politically conservative but not active with their

local GOP and often registered as independents. Their initial fury seemed directed exclusively at Democrats, given that they controlled all the levers of power in Washington at the time; the protesters provoked raucous showdowns at Democratic town halls over the August 2009 recess.

By the spring and summer of 2010, the tea party rage shifted its direction toward Republican primary politics. One incumbent GOP senator lost his primary, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) defeated the Kentucky establishment favorite, and three other insurgents knocked off seasoned Republicans in Senate primaries (only to then lose in general elections).

One force that helped the tea party grow was a collection of Washington-based groups with some wealthy donors, notably the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, who positioned themselves as the self-declared leaders of the movement. For the next few years, they funded challenges to Republican incumbents, sparking a civil

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), seen on Capitol Hill last month, had his first encounter with the anti-Trump liberal movement at the Women’s March in New York on Jan. 21, when he spent 4 1/2 hours talking to people on the street.

war that ran all the way through the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. Boehner could never match the rhetorical ferocity of the movement. He resigned in October 2015.

Democrats want and need parallel outside groups to inject money and organization into their grass roots. There are signs it is happening: The thousands of activists who protested at a series of raucous town halls hosted by Republican congressmen recently were urged to action in part by sophisticated publicity campaigns run by such professional liberal enterprises as the Indivisible Guide, a blueprint for lobbying Congress written by former congressional staffers, and Planned Parenthood Action.

What is less clear is whether such energy and resources will remain united with Democratic leaders — or be turned on them if the activist base grows frustrated with the pace of progress.

There have been some signs of liberal disgruntlement toward Democratic leaders. But there are two key differences between the conservative and liberal movements: their funding, and their origins. Some anti-establishment liberal groups have feuded with leaders, but they are poorly funded compared with their conservative counterparts. And the tea party came of age in reaction not only to Obama but, before that, to what the movement considered a betrayal by George W. Bush’s White House and a majority of congressional Republicans when they supported the 2008 Wall Street bailout.

There is no similar original sin for Democrats, as the liberal protests have grown as a reaction to Trump, not some failing by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Pelosi.

Schumer remains unconcerned about the few protesters who are angry at Democratic leaders.

“I think the energy’s terrific,” Schumer said in a recent interview. “Do some of them throw some brickbats and things? Sure, it doesn’t bother me.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Discretion preferred, not required BY

R OXANNE R OBERTS

P

atrick Park doesn’t think of himself as a political person. The Palm Beach philanthropist spends most of his time and considerable fortune raising money for charity.

But when Donald Trump was elected on Nov. 8, he started thinking about how he could help the president and the nation.

“I wrote him a little note and said: ‘I want to serve our country. Is there something I can do?’ ” Park says.

“Something” turned out to be a possible ambassadorship — nothing definite, of course — when the two men talked in Florida over the holidays. They’ve been close friends for 18 years, and Park, 63, estimates that he has chaired close to 200 fundraisers at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, raising more than $100 million for a variety of causes.

Working in philanthropy, Park told Trump, was not unlike serving as an ambassador: It’s all about dealing with people, promoting the country.

They even talked about where Park might serve: A good fit might be Austria, because Park has a background in music and a long history of fundraising for the arts.

“It’s a very cultural nation,” he says.

There were no promises, but Trump assured Park that he’d hear more in due course. Now, like so many friends of the president’s, he’s waiting to hear from the White House and says that he’s honored to be considered.

And so it begins: the march of ambassadors.

It’s one of the most prestigious titles in public service and requires no diplomatic experience, just the blessing of the president and Senate confirmation. Most of the top postings — Western Europe and the Caribbean — go to political appointees, traditionally close friends and top campaign donors. The balance, about 70 percent of the 188 U.S. ambassadorships worldwide, go to career diplomats.

Traditionally, the selection has

LUCIAN PERKINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In break from tradition, those hoping to become ambassadors under Trump openly seek postings been a secret process with no public comments before a nomination. Trump loyalists such as Park, however, seem to be more forthcoming about their admiration for the president and their desire to represent him overseas.

Immediately after the election, the presidential transition team began collecting names and winnowing a list of top contenders.

(The White House did not respond to questions about the president’s selections or timetable.)

Traditionally, anyone with ambassadorial ambitions raised a ton of money for their candidate during the campaign, celebrated the victory, and then acted like a duck: gliding calmly on the surface while paddling furiously underwater.

Lobbying for the position was considered unseemly and unwise: Should a nomination go off the rails, there would be plausible deniability and no chance of embarrassment for all concerned. So the standard response was no

comment except for “I’m delighted to be considered.”

But Trump is a businessman, and his backers are less coy and more matter-of-fact about their ambitions.

One name that has been floated is Georgette Mosbacher, the colorful New York businesswoman, author, GOP fundraiser and another longtime friend who freely admits that it’s her dream to add “ambassador” to her long list of titles.

“I’ve always wanted to serve in that capacity,” she says.

Mosbacher, 70, has been active in Republican politics since she arrived in Washington in 1989 as the wife of Commerce Secretary Bob Mosbacher. She ran two skincare companies, wrote a couple of motivational books, co-chaired the RNC finance committee and serves on a number of boards. In 2015, President Barack Obama appointed her to the seven-member U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, and she was unanimously confirmed by the

Georgette Mosbacher, seen at her Manhattan apartment with her King Charles spaniel, is a businesswoman and GOP fundraiser who is hoping to become an ambassador.

Senate last year.

She was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Trump. She hasn’t talked to the president about an overseas post but submitted her résumé to key staffers in the White House and made it clear that she’d like to serve.

Becoming an ambassador used to be a rubber-stamp process: Once the president formally nominated a candidate, Senate confirmation was almost a given. All nominees go through a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then are confirmed by the full Senate.

With a Republican majority this year, this should be pro forma — but as the Cabinet hearings have demonstrated, even an easy confirmation isn’t that easy.

Career diplomats arguably have a smoother path: After they’ve worked for the State Department for two decades or so, they’re considered experienced enough to become an ambassador. If they’re interested, their names are submitted to the secretary of state for consideration; once nominated, they typically sail through hearings and are overwhelmingly approved by the Senate.

Political appointees have to be selected for the post by the president and his advisers. Once a name is agreed on, the country under consideration is given a heads-up and a chance to voice any objection, and the appointee goes through a vetting process involving background checks, security clearances and financial disclosures. The process takes about three months, and nominations are traditionally not announced until it’s completed.

Then there’s ambassador school (security procedures, language training, protocol) and the move overseas. All of Obama’s political ambassadors were asked to resign on Jan. 20; every embassy is currently headed by a career diplomat serving as acting ambassador until Trump’s replacements show up sometime this summer.

Until then, Mosbacher says, “I’m waiting. And hoping.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Protesters break camp, still hopeful J OE H EIM Cannon Ball, N.D. BY

T

he main camp here, once home to thousands of Native Americans and their allies who gathered to protest the completion of the Dakota Access crude-oil pipeline, was quickly turning into a gooey pit of mud.

Unseasonably warm weather month melted giant mounds of snow, and many of the remaining 200 or so pipeline protesters — self-described “water protectors” — gathered their possessions this past weekend and made plans to get off the 80-acre property, which sits in a flood zone near the Missouri River. The rising waters, and a federal eviction notice for this coming Wednesday, have forced their hands.

Others say they will stay and fight the Army Corps of Engineers, which decided this month to allow completion of the 1,172mile pipeline. After President Trump cleared the way, the corps granted an easement to Energy Transfer Partners to drill under a reservoir less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. The drilling began the other week.

The tribe has argued in court that this short stretch of the $3.8 billion pipeline threatens its water supply, crosses sacred burial grounds, and violates long-standing treaties between the Native Americans and the federal government. But the path forward for the fight is unclear; many are pinning their hopes on court challenges. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has joined a motion by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to halt the drilling.

In the slurry running through camp are the remains of a mostly abandoned mini-city: an unopened packet of Top Ramen, a broken shovel, a mud-soaked glove, a pacifier.

One day soon, all of this will be gone: the tepees packed away, the yurts pulled down, the abandoned tents and sleeping bags and boxes of belongings scraped

JOE HEIM/THE WASHINGTON POST

After the approval of the Dakota Access pipeline, many are shifting the fight to the court system up by bulldozers into waiting dumpsters and hauled off to landfills.

The question for the camp’s inhabitants and visitors and supporters is whether its dismantling becomes a catalyst for renewed Native American activism or fades into the hazy nostalgia of uprisings past.

Josh Dayrider, a member of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana, has been at the camp off and on since early last year. The 30-yearold isn’t quite ready to leave, but he knows departure is inevitable.

“We’re still in the fight,” Dayrider said. “And we’ve accomplished something amazing. We woke the world up by showing how the oil companies treat the land and the people. We’re still standing. We’re still fighting.”

Tanya Olsen stood next to her mini-camper, pulling out a mattress that had been soaked by rising waters.

“The plan is to stay until the last minute,” said Olsen, a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe of

South Dakota. She arrived here in November. “I was never an activist. I knew very little about pipelines. But what really caught my attention was the mistreatment of the Natives here. I thought, I’ve got to go there. I need to stand with my people.”

As she prepares to leave, Olsen says she takes solace from the impact the year-long protest has had on tribes.

“It has brought the people of all of our nations together,” she said. “It has awoken the children, the seventh generation, and it has been a learning experience for us as a culture. It’s sad that they went and allowed them to drill, but this hasn’t been all for nothing.”

From across the camp, there’s a yell: “Mni Wiconi!”

Loosely translated from the Lakota language, it means “water is life,” and it has become the protesters’ rallying cry. The yell is picked up and repeated from different corners of the camp for a minute or so, echoing up to a

Unseasonably warm weather has led to snowmelt and rising water at the main camp of pipeline protesters near Cannon Ball, N.D. Most are leaving the camp, but they hope the protest will become a catalyst for renewed Native American activism.

snowy bluff overlooking the encampment where state and local police sit in a fleet of law enforcement vehicles, monitoring comings and goings. Quiet returns.

For the Standing Rock tribe and its supporters, the decision to allow completion of the pipeline without a promised environmental impact study came as one more slap in the face.

Particularly upsetting to Standing Rock Chairman David Archambault II was that he had traveled to Washington on Feb. 7 for a White House meeting with a Trump administration official the following day; he believed he would have one more chance to plead the tribe’s case. But he arrived at Reagan National Airport to learn that final approval had been granted while he was en route.

The snub was a sharp insult to the tribe’s 16,000 members. On a recent night at the Standing Rock High School gym in Fort Yates, 25 miles down the road from the protest camp, several hundred fans from the reservation gathered to watch the home Warriors girls basketball team take on the New Salem Holsteins.

In the lobby, members of the Standing Rock high school band were holding a bake sale. Their teacher, Kim Warren, a tribal member, said she made regular visits to the main camp in the fall, believing the protest was a necessary and valuable one.

“We can’t give up, especially with this new administration,” said Warren, who has been teaching at the school for 18 years. “We can’t give up. That’s what I tell my students every day. Every struggle that they have, I tell them don’t give up, keep going.”

Despite assurances from the pipeline’s owners that it is safe and is using the most advanced technology available, there is almost universal belief among Standing Rock tribal members that an accident is unavoidable and that their drinking water will be contaminated.

“Pipelines break all the time,” said Charles Bailey, 46, a tribal member, as he stood outside the

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

9

NATION gym. “Everybody knows that it’s going to break at some point. At my age, I’m thinking about how is this going to affect our youth, my daughters.”

As legal options dwindle and the prospect of a completed pipeline that could begin transporting more than 500,000 barrels of crude oil a day in two to three months appears more likely, its opponents are taking stock.

Dallas Goldtooth has been one of the leading voices of the protest, filing regular Facebook Live feeds to share the most recent developments. An environmental activist who is an Isanti Dakota from Minnesota, he wants supporters to know that their participation has not been in vain, no matter what the outcome.

“Some feel it is all or nothing, but we cannot adopt that frame of thinking,” Goldtooth said.

“We’ve seen defeat as indigenous people, but we still persist, we’re still striving. Whether we get a win here or not, we’ve pushed the boulder down the hill and it’s running. The fight never stops. It builds. It moves. It grows.”

Some activists have called for more protesters to come out to the site, but the Standing Rock tribe has discouraged that, asking that opposition be directed at the local level and at a March 10 march planned for Native American rights in Washington.

Joe Plouff, 67, a former Wisconsin state representative and an Army veteran from Prairie View, Wis., stood outside his tent near the entrance to the Sacred Stone camp, which sits across the frozen Cannonball River from the main camp.

He’s not hopeful at this point that the pipeline can be stopped, but since arriving here in December, he says he has drawn inspiration from the movement and from the number of young people involved.

“Will they be demoralized if they lose this battle? Yes. Depressed? Yes? Hurt? Yes. But I see a lot of young people here and I think they will take it as a start,” he said. “There’s optimism because the Native Americans here have brought forward an issue that most of us have not paid attention to, and that is the safety of our water. They’ve taken a local issue and made it a national one.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Is California’s epic drought finally over? Not really.

BY

D ARRYL F EARS

A

fter praying for rain over five dry years, Californians are now praying for a break.

The state is being soaked. Its biggest reservoirs, once at record lows, are at capacity or overflowing from record-setting rain and snow. That includes the Oroville Lake reservoir behind the Oroville Dam, where nearly 200,000 Northern California residents were evacuated last week for fear that an eroding wall that holds water back would crumble and wash them away.

The drama caused by massive amounts of precipitation raises a question: Is California’s epic, record-setting drought, five years long, finally over? The answer is yes and no.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the northern half of the state that gets more winter rain is drought-free, while much of the middle and southern portion is still in moderate to severe drought.

Santa Barbara County, where a lake that supplies its water remains at 16 percent capacity despite rain elsewhere in the state, is still experiencing extreme drought.

“The further south you go, well, it’s pretty arid down there,” said David Miskus, a meteorologist for the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA. Lake Cachuma, shared by Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez Valley, fell as low as 7 percent of capacity in October, but the area was “target zero for some heavy rain” forecast for this past week.

There were also high expectations for the end of the drought when snow poured onto the northern Sierra-Nevada Mountains, accompanied by a little rain in the south. But the snow quickly melted, the skies warmed and drought conditions returned.

That was then, Miskus said, and what’s happening now is a potential game changer. California’s last abnormal winter, 1982 to 1983, brought precipitation that was 88

JIM URQUHART/REUTERS

A cemetery is flooded in Marysville, Calif., after an evacuation was ordered Sunday for areas downstream from the dam in Oroville.

percent higher than the 30-year average. This winter’s precipitation is nearly 120 percent higher.

Together with last year’s high winter precipitation, it’s making a huge dent in the drought.

Last year, the snow stopped a bit too soon. This year, there’s so much more that “if it stops snowing completely and melted normally,” Miskus said, precipitation is so high that it would remain significantly above normal by April 1, when California’s winter ends and state water officials measure the amount of snow that will recharge rivers and reservoirs.

That’s good news, but nothing to celebrate yet. “Luckily, they got one record-setting winter this year, which is great,” Miskus said.

“But what will happen next year?

You don’t know what next winter will bring.”

Scientists at Stanford University and NASA have predicted a future of prolonged droughts for California and the Southwest.

Drought in the region is normal — it happens all the time. But when state water officials ventured to the Sierra-Nevadas to measure snow pack in April 2015 and saw nearly zero, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) ordered emergency

mandatory water restrictions for urban areas, the first in state history.

Soon the restrictions spread to agriculture, where farmers pumped so much water from rivers and the ground that fish had problems making it to the ocean and the wells of homeowners in areas such as East Porterville went dry. On top of that, the land started to sink significantly as aquifers were drained.

It will take years for the groundwater reserves to recharge. The surface is another issue. California’s blessing and curse right now are rivers in the sky.

Atmospheric rivers are picking up moisture over the Pacific Ocean and carrying it north to Oregon and elsewhere, dumping copious amounts along the way.

Usually, in a good year, there’s one atmospheric river. This year, they are coming back to back to back.

It’s dealing a major blow to the worst drought California has ever had. But Oroville is paying a price.

The Los Angeles Times quoted CalFire incident commander Kevin Lawson saying that if a wall holding back water at the dam collapses, a “30-foot wall of water coming out of the lake” would be the result, threatening hundreds of lives. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

‘O∞cially, we are not here’ J ACK L OSH Mariinka, Ukraine BY

A

jeep hurtles down a long, potholed road toward the front line. Inside, Misha, Monarch and Dinamo balance their assault rifles between their legs. The mood is upbeat; it has been days since these militiamen traded fire with their enemy entrenched across no man’s land.

They approach a Ukrainian army checkpoint surrounded by untended fields. This should be as far as these three gunmen get. The red-and-black flag fluttering from their SUV shows they belong to Right Sector, an ultranationalist group of paramilitaries banned from the battlefront.

But the guards wave them through. They drive on to join other members of Ukraine’s secret army holding the line on their country’s eastern frontier.

“Officially, we are not here,” says Monarch, a joyless man in his 30s who, like the others, insisted on being identified only by his nom de guerre. “Politicians say we’ve withdrawn. But things are different in the east. We have a good relationship with the soldiers. We share the same enemy.”

“We’re Ukrainian partisans,” Misha adds. “Politicians are scared that, once war ends, we’ll return to Kiev and turn our guns on them. And we should. We need to.”

Despite Kiev’s pledge to rein them in, rogue militias continue to fight against Moscow-backed separatists. When war erupted in 2014, Ukraine’s army was on its knees after decades of corruption and neglect. So the top brass joined forces with volunteer battalions to counter the pro-Russian insurgency. But these informal groups proved difficult to control, with some committing heinous abuses. Almost all have been incorporated into Ukrainian state forces.

One major group refuses to submit: Right Sector. This organization was formed during the 20132014 Euromaidan revolution from hardened protesters and far-right,

EVGENIY MALOLETKA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ukraine turns a blind eye to ultranationalist fighters in its war against pro-Russian separatists fringe parties. Analysts say Right Sector has thousands of members, including hundreds of armed men deployed alongside Ukrainian government troops.

Despite official claims to the contrary, fresh recruits continue to arrive and operate with regular troops. “It’s generally understood the army controls Right Sector fighters,” says Vyacheslav Likhachev, an analyst of right-wing radicalism. “Their every step is coordinated with Ukraine’s commanders.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. For now, Kiev benefits from these guerrilla units; they’re highly motivated and don’t qualify for state pensions.

Longer term, the government is playing with fire.

Right Sector’s existence undermines Kiev’s standing within Europe, and — if peace talks ever gain momentum — this group probably would reject any compromise and could push a volatile region deeper into conflict.

But with fighting picking up along the front here, just at the moment when many Ukrainians have been worrying that President Trump’s desire to reset relations with Russia will cast their country into the cold, there’s little likelihood that Kiev will move anytime soon against the Right Sector fighters.

They are admired for their fierce dedication, but belligerent statements and menacing demonstrations have sullied the group’s reputation. Russian state media demonize the organization and exaggerate its importance, painting it as the military wing of a (fictional) fascist junta.

Moscow has freely exploited Ukraine’s troubled history with the extreme right. Some Ukrainian nationalists fought against the Nazis during World War II, but others committed atrocities alongside the Germans.

The maverick organization does contain neo-Nazi elements. It also has fighters with no far-right sympathies. All despise Ukraine’s

A Ukrainian fighter affiliated with the Right Sector stand in a building damaged by shelling in Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine.

corrupt officialdom.

Volunteer units guard the little town of Mariinka, living in squalid, abandoned cottages. At a position overlooking separatist-held Donetsk, two foreigners stand out: an Italian neo-Nazi and a young Dutchman. The two share a thirst for adventure and a total ignorance of the local language.

Giuseppe Donene’s T-shirt echoes a Nazi-era war flag, emblazoned with the word “Hatred.” Despite his extreme ideology, he is disarmingly affable.

What prompted him to enlist?

“This is Europe, my house. But governments don’t let us fight,” he says. He complains that Europe is losing its identity to Muslims and African immigrants, and somehow eastern Ukraine is the place to take a stand. “Something big’s happening here. It’s worth fighting for.”

This 47-year-old married father of two has worked in private security in Angola, Iraq, Sudan and Syria. Every few months, he takes leave to join pro-Ukrainian battalions.

“My family don’t support me, but they try to understand,” he says. “It’s tough, though. An eternal conflict.”

He doesn’t worry that his presence could lend credence to the Kremlin line about fascists fighting for Ukraine.

“Russia doesn’t need to film my T-shirt to feed their propaganda,” he says. “They’ll say whatever they want.”

Nearby, Sjoerd Heeger, 22, grasps an AK-47 and surveys no man’s land through orange-tinted sunglasses.

“My mum doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe I’ll send her a photo of a grenade. She’s used to me disappearing,” he says. Heeger’s combat training consisted of firing off just four magazines. His instructor taught him first aid, “but I didn’t understand half of what he said.”

The unit’s commander welcomes such adventurers. “The more the better,” says Vano, 28, whose real name is Ivan Borisenko. “Sure, the Dutch kid doesn’t know how to use his weapon. But he’ll learn soon enough.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

In Iraq, fireballs and booby traps P ETER H OLLEY Qayyarah, Iraq BY

T

he flames exploded into the sky like a volcanic eruption, blanketing a swath of the Iraqi countryside in a noxious haze of black smoke.

The inferno reached more than 300 feet high on a recent afternoon when the wind shifted direction, bending the billowing wall of fire toward the men from Iraq’s North Oil Co. on the ground below.

Within seconds, a fast-moving cloud of hot gas and thick smoke washed over the work site, blotting out the sun and sending workers and engineers scurrying for safety.

Some of the men sprinted toward their vehicles; others took cover in corrugated tin sheds, where they patiently waited for the wind to change direction so they could return to the work without being burned alive.

It was just another day in the life of an Iraqi oil worker.

“If hell is fire, then this place is hell on Earth,” said Ayad al-Jboory, 42, assistant chief geologist for the North Oil Co. “It looks like the end of the world.”

Fifty miles north in Mosul, beleaguered Islamic State fighters have lost control of half of their last major stronghold as Iraqi security forces advance. But at least five of the 25 oil well fires left in the militants’ wake still rage, according to Reuters, forming a second front in the battle for Iraq that is no less dangerous for the proud men involved.

Each well is a battle unto itself, revealing the militants’ willingness to harness chaotic destruction as a weapon.

Oil workers are fond of saying that the best protective clothing when battling a stubborn blaze is distance. In that case, the 100 or so men manning Well 77 several miles outside Qayyarah work so close to the flames that they might as well be naked. Their goal sounds simple enough: control the fire, stop the oil leak, cap the well and move on to the next one.

The reality of the job is far more complicated.

PETER HOLLEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Workers risk their lives to extinguish raging well fires ignited by retreating Islamic State forces Aside from the unpredictable flames, poisonous gases and rapidly changing conditions, the men from the North Oil Co. — most of whom are from Kirkuk and Irbil — toil for long hours using equipment prone to overheating and failure. There is also the everpresent threat of booby traps and explosive devices, which are still being found around damaged wells. The men — wearing tarstained clothing, helmets and sometimes only scarves to cover their faces — keep photos of the homemade bombs on their cellphones to show family members and friends.

“This is a dangerous job — too hard,” said Mohammed Marouf, a 40-year-old firefighter and father of four from Kirkuk. “My wife and my children know it’s a hard job and it’s not safe, and my wife wants to know why I won’t stop. I tell her I am doing this for the

future of our country.

“This is good for Iraq,” he added.

The Islamic State “made hundreds of millions of dollars” by selling oil on the black market after capturing oil fields in Iraq and Syria in 2014, according to U.S. government estimates cited by Reuters.

Before Iraqi security forces retook this area in August, Islamic State fighters placed explosives at about 20 wells, and snipers detonated them from afar.

Experts say the militants may have many reasons for setting the flames.

“They tend to just do things to cause destruction and, basically, just to be nasty,” Oxfam spokeswoman Amy Christian said.

“They’ll destroy water plants so there’s no access to clean drinking water, for example.”

Hamza al-Jawahiri, an official in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, said oil work-

A firefighter takes refuge in a corrugated tin shed to escape the heat of Well 77 outside Qayyarah, Iraq.

“If hell is fire, then this place is hell on Earth,” said Ayad alJboory, 42, assistant chief geologist for the North Oil Co. “It looks like the end of the world.”

ers have fully repaired about half of the wells destroyed by the Islamic State. Collectively, he said, the damaged wells can produce 50,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day, much of which is bitumen — a particularly thick grade of crude used primarily in road construction.

All of the wells place the workers in extreme danger — for wages of about $50 a day.

“The biggest challenge that the workers are facing right now is the security situation, since they are working very close to a battlefield full of IEDs that have to be defused,” Jawahiri said. “There’s also the bad weather conditions. Working with huge fires means the wind can be deadly sometimes.”

To date, workers said, no location had presented more problems than Well 77, where they have been trying to contain the flames for months. When they arrived here, the men said, the Islamic State was still lobbing mortars at the well. Now, they had another problem: The well was badly damaged and unusually deep, causing equipment to break, disgorging toxic gases and unleashing at the surface a massive column of fire so intensely hot that it could singe the skin of a person 100 yards away. Engineers on the ground estimated that the well was burning between 500 and 1,000 barrels of oil a day.

The men work from sunrise to sunset, taking a midday break to eat lunch and pray under the billowing tower of smoke and fire.

There have been injuries and burns over the past few months, but so far, supervisors said, nobody had been killed. Parked among the trucks and digging equipment, an ambulance is always on call.

Despite the perilous conditions, Jboory said, his men volunteered for the job, mostly because of national pride but also out of contempt for the Islamic State.

“The men are sacrificing everything to do this job — just like a soldier,” Jboory added. “This is another way to fight ISIS. We already hate them, but each day under this fire and smoke, we hate them even more.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

12

Cover story

ILEANA SOON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

They’re young and lonely. The Islamic State thinks they’ll make perfect terrorists.

BY A NTHONY F AIOLA Essen, Germany

t

AND

S OUAD M EKHENNET

he package ordered online arrived at his second-floor apartment on a brisk Saturday morning, a cardboard box packed with magnesium, potassium nitrate and aluminum powder for a homemade bomb. Weeks ahead of the attack, police said, the terrorist cell’s leader — an Islamist his comrades called the Emir — had issued precautionary orders.

“Delete ALL pictures and videos of the Islamic State,” the Emir warned via WhatsApp. “Delete your chats.”

“Everything that is weapon-like or similar (also bombs) must be immediately disposed of. . . . Sell it, give it away, move it or destroy it.”

And then one night last April, officials said, the Emir — a Muslim title for an exalted leader — led two cell members to a Sikh house of worship in this industrial city and hurled the bomb toward its door. A deafening boom rang out. Orange flames lit a mosaic of blood and shattered glass. Inside, victims screamed as the assailants fled.

All three terrorists were 16-year-old boys, according to German police.

“Our children!” cried Neriman Yaman, 37, mother of the Emir, whose first name

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

13

German law was amended last year to allow for the collection of data on suspects as young as 14. But officials now argue that is not young enough. is Yusuf, in an interview after attending a court hearing for her son. “What is happening to our children?”

The threat presented by the Islamic State is taking on a new form: child terrorists either directly in contact with or inspired by the militant group. Even as it suffers setbacks on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State is cultivating adolescents in the West, who are being asked to stay in their home countries and strike targets with whatever weapons are available, such as knives and crude bombs. A 16-year-old girl was among four people arrested in the south of France on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack this month.

“The amount of Islamic State videos and propaganda aimed at children has really jumped in recent months,” said Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and Deradicalization Studies.

“We haven’t seen anything quite like this, not on this scale and of this quality. They know that in the West, you don’t expect a 10-yearold to be a terror suspect.”

Last September, German authorities arrested a 16-year-old Syrian asylum seeker after they discovered the young man was in contact with an Islamic State handler who was teaching him how to build a bomb.

In December, a 12-year-old German Iraqi boy — guided by an Islamic State contact in the Middle East who warmly addressed him as “brother” and groomed the boy via the encrypted messaging app Telegram — built and tried to detonate a bomb near a shopping center in the western German city of Ludwig-

shafen. The device failed to explode.

The boy had been “headhunted” by the Islamic State, officials said, after searching radical websites online. A 17-year-old accomplice was later arrested in Austria.

Last month, a 15-year-old girl — the daughter of a German convert to Islam and a Moroccan mother — was sentenced to six years in prison for an attack last February on a German police officer in Hanover. She gouged him in the neck with a kitchen knife, causing life-threatening injuries after being befriended and cajoled by an Islamic State instructor via a text messaging service.

All told in Germany, at least 10 minors have been involved in five plots over the past 12 months. In a country where militants disguised as migrants have been blamed for a terrorist plague, most of the minors were homegrown threats born in Germany.

Worse, authorities said, is that the intelligence community is often blind to the threat posed by these teens and preteens.

Officials lack the legal authority to track children the same way they monitor adults, creating what German authorities describe as one of their greatest counterterrorism challenges. Intelligence agencies here have identified at least 120 minors who have become dangerously radicalized — and some of them cannot be intensely monitored because of domestic laws protecting children, officials said.

German law was amended last year to allow for the collection of data on suspects as young as 14. But officials now argue that is not young enough.

“Our service mainly focuses on adults,” said Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. “We are allowed to monitor minors and record them in our databases in exceptional cases only, but they have to be aged 14 or over. Normally people do not expect children to commit terrorist attacks. But they can and are.”

He added: “What is really worrying is that people frequently look the other way. They say it’s just a phase of adolescence and surely they will grow out of it. Often parents don’t really know what their children are doing in their rooms.”

s

ince the start of the Syrian civil war, Europe has grappled with the kind of radicalization that led thousands of its Muslim citizens to travel to the Middle East, often to join the Islamic State. But as Turkey and other nations more actively block the path of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, the journey has become harder.

So the targets of radicalized youths are shifting, European intelligence officials said, with terrorist groups either enlisting or inspiring them to attack their homelands.

They are employing propaganda tailor-made for youths, including several recent graphic videos showing grammar-school-age children executing prisoners and a newly released computer game, inspired by “Grand Theft Auto,” in which users kill enemies under the Islamic State flag.

Islamic State recruiters carefully monitor continues on next page

Major Islamic State attacks involving teenagers in Germany FEB. 26, 2016

APRIL 16, 2016

JULY 18, 2016

SEPT. 21, 2016

DEC. 5, 2016

A 15-year-old girl of German-Moroccan origin who was in direct contact with an Islamic State agent stabs a German police officer in the neck with a kitchen knife in Hanover. He survives the attack after undergoing surgery.

Three boys, all age 16, build a homemade bomb and throw it at a Sikh temple, wounding three — one severely — and causing extensive damage. The leader of the group, who goes by the name the Emir, is a German-born son of ethnic Turks.

A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who professed his allegiance to the Islamic State attacks passengers on a train traveling through southern Germany with a knife and ax, injuring four people, two seriously.

Authorities arrest a 16year-old Syrian asylum seeker in Cologne after they uncover evidence that he has been in contact with an Islamic State representative who was passing on details for how to build a bomb.

A 12-year-old IraqiGerman boy who was in contact with the Islamic State via the messenger service Telegram leaves a homemade bomb that fails to detonate near a shopping mall in Ludwigshafen, authorities say. A 17-yearold accomplice is later arrested in Austria.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY celed the contract of one of its Muslim players — Anis Ben-Hatira — after a media uproar over his involvement in a legal Islamic charity that promotes a conservative brand of the faith.

The heightened sense of insulation and persecution among young Muslims, experts said, is only fostering more radicalization.

“Religious extremist propaganda, Salafist propaganda, can only work if it is addressed to an audience that is already marginalized and feeling uncomfortable in society,” said Goetz Nordbruch, co-director of Horizon, a German group offering counseling and workshops on Islamophobia in German schools.

“The public discourse is turning against these kids, against Islam,” he said. “It is making it harder for them to feel both Muslim and German.”

a

FELIX VON DER OSTEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Neriman Yaman is the mother of a 16-year-old who set off a homemade bomb in 2016 outside a Sikh prayer hall in Germany. In 2014, the men of True Religion had befriended Yusuf. “He never really had friends . . .” Yaman said. “But they welcomed him, included him. Gave him respect.”

from previous page

children who visit their propaganda sites or enter radical chat rooms, meticulously evaluating who may be suitable for cultivation.

Typically, they don’t immediately attempt to challenge children’s relationships with their parents but nudge them toward violence by convincing them that Allah smiles on those who defend the faith. They groom children much the way that pedophiles do — deploying flattery and attention while pretending to be friends, according to people who study the phenomenon.

“They’ve built a structured recruitment process. They’re online, scanning for young adults,” Koehler said. “They have stages of [cultivation]. They won’t even mention violence until later in their contact, until they’ve built up trust with these younger recruits.”

Often, radicalized minors are also children

at risk, either suffering from psychological disorders or living in broken or violent homes. For instance, the 12-year-old detained in December after building his own bomb — which failed to go off only because of a faulty fuse — had been visited frequently by social workers because his father had a history of violence, according to German officials familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a juvenile. The son of Kurdish Iraqi immigrants, the boy had begun attending a local mosque — alone — that had been previously linked to an Islamist movement.

In the face of terrorist attacks, freedom of religion is being tested in Germany — with even the progressive Chancellor Angela Merkel now calling for an election year ban on the full Muslim covering known as the burqa. A German soccer club recently can-

t 6:45 p.m. on April 16, Kuldeep Singh, a 62-year-old cleric and immigrant from the Indian state of Punjab, was passing inside the side door of the Gurudwara Nanaksar Sikh Temple in Essen. Situated on a curved road, the temple is right next door to a mosque.

The temple’s glass door was locked. The Sikhs — a faith based on the teachings of Indian gurus — had become concerned for their safety. Young Muslim men from the neighboring mosque had passed by the temple after Friday prayers, spitting at its gate.

That Saturday evening, a group of Sikh children gathered for singing classes had gone upstairs so that the adults could pray.

Singh was making his way to the altar when he felt a crushing force, searing heat and pain.

A piece of his left foot had been blown off.

Shards of glass were lodged in his body. Two wounded worshipers lay near him screaming.

The bleached-out blood from that day still stains the temple’s prayer room.

“I don’t understand where that much hate comes from,” said Singh, who is still unable to walk without crutches. “I try to grasp it, but I can’t. The ones who did this, they were very young, very young.”

Yaman — the mother of the Emir — is also trying to understand and attending all her son’s court hearings.

“I need to. I need to understand what happened to my son,” she said.

Yusuf — whose last name is being withheld because he is a minor — grew up the only son of a Turkish meat delivery man and his wife in old coal mining country in west Germany.

“Yusuf was the class clown,” said Yaman in

In class, Yusuf threatened to break the neck of a Jewish girl — resulting in his expulsion and an order to attend deradicalization classes sponsored by the state intelligence services.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

15

COVER STORY an interview in her kitchen. “But his jokes became disruptive behavior. He would go under a table or a desk at school and refuse to come out. We knew he had problems. We tried to get him help.”

In 2012, a child psychologist diagnosed him with attention-deficit disorder. Yet the prescribed medication — methylphenidate — made him so lethargic that he could not get out of bed. He complained of violent stomach cramps. “We took him off it after one day,” Yaman said.

His behavior nose-dived. He would berate his younger sister and her friends and would throw tantrums.

“He started seeing things — and he asked for God’s help,” she said. “He said he wanted to know more about his religion.”

Yaman’s answer was to take him to an event suggested by a friend — a speech by Pierre Vogel, a former boxer and Muslim convert known for spewing radical Islamist rhetoric who called for a public funeral prayer service for Osama bin Laden after he was killed in Pakistan.

“I didn’t know,” Yaman said, burying her head in her hands. “I had no idea the things [Vogel] said.”

But Yusuf was hooked — and he quickly sought out new friends. They were men in Islamic garb from a movement known as True Religion, which for years handed out free Korans from booths in German cities. In November, German authorities outlawed the group, calling it a recruitment network for the Islamic State.

In 2014, the men of True Religion welcomed Yusuf as “a brother.”

“He never really had friends — because of his behavior,” Yaman said. “But they welcomed him, included him. Gave him respect.”

And he absorbed their ideas.

In class, he threatened to break the neck of a Jewish girl — resulting in his expulsion and an order to attend deradicalization classes sponsored by the state intelligence services.

For 18 months, to little apparent effect, he received therapy and participated in discussion groups. At the time, his age prevented the authorities from monitoring his communications.

“What we can do is to open the door, but the people themselves have to go through it,” said Joerg Rademacher, spokesman for the domestic intelligence branch in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Yusuf ’s downward spiral continued. In 2015, he secretly married a burqa-wearing Muslim girl, 15, whom he had met on a

KLMNO WEEKLY

FELIX VON DER OSTEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Neriman Yaman holds her cellphone, which shows a picture of her son Yusuf, above. “I need to understand what happened to my son,” Yaman said in an interview with The Washington Post.

website. A radical Muslim cleric presided over the marriage — and chastised Yusuf ’s parents when they objected.

Using social media, Yusuf also connected with other Muslim boys his age who admired the Islamic State. There is no evidence to date that they had any direct contact with the group, but they collected beheading videos on their phones, praised the militants at school and began to plan their own attack.

In late 2015, the mother of a student at Yusuf’s school became alarmed and informed authorities after he allegedly bragged about having a gun. He had also celebrated the November 2015 Paris attacks and warned that students at his school “would die.” A search of his family home ensued, but no gun was found.

On Jan. 2, 2016, Yusuf and two other boys built a test bomb at his parents’ house,

pouring explosive compounds into an emptied fire extinguisher and attaching a fuse.

They detonated it at a local park — and showed a video they shot to classmates who reported the incident.

The school summoned Yaman to tell her and also informed the authorities. This time, Yusuf was called in for questioning, but he was not detained. The school did not pursue disciplinary action beyond alerting the police.

“Of course the school has taken action, but we have nothing to do with how the authorities react,” said Werner Gallmeister, principal at the St. Michael School that Yusuf attended.

Three months later, Yusuf and his friends attacked the Sikh temple that abutted the mosque where the boys had started worshiping without their parents, officials said. In their texts to one another, recovered by police, they described the temple as a den of infidels. n

Yusuf also connected with other Muslim boys his age who admired the Islamic State. . . .

They collected beheading videos . . . and began to plan their own attack.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

SCIENCE

Romancing the lab-grown stone BY

S ARAH K APLAN

A

t a drab office park, in an unmarked building’s windowless lab, Yarden Tsach grows diamonds.

Not rhinestones or cubic zirconia. Diamonds. Real ones. In a matter of eight weeks, inside a gas-filled chamber, he replicates a process that usually takes billions of years in the bowels of the planet. Carbon atom by carbon atom, he creates nature’s hardest, most brilliant and — if advertisements are to be believed — most romantic stone.

No outsiders get to witness this genesis, though. WD Lab Grown Diamonds, where Tsach is chief technology officer, guards its approach as zealously as its suburban Washington address.

These are the measures a company takes when it’s a target — of fierce competitors, potential jewel thieves and a traditional industry that would very much like it to go away.

“Everything is after us,” Tsach says. He doesn’t mean it as a joke.

Until the middle of the past century, all of the world’s diamonds originated more than 1 billion years ago in the Earth’s hot, dark interior.

Yet getting those stones up to the surface has required an enormous — and sometimes bloody — effort. The environmental impact of diamond mines is so sprawling that it can be seen from space. The humanitarian cost of some gems is also staggering: children forced to work in mines, “blood diamonds” sold to finance wars. The Kimberley Process, which certifies diamonds as “conflict free,” was established in 2003 to stem the flow of these stones into the global market. But critics have argued for tougher measures; in 2011, one of the leaders of the campaign to implement the vetting program pulled out after concluding that it had failed.

Scientists have been creating diamonds since the 1950s, mimicking the conditions deep within the Earth by heating carbon to extreme temperatures while

GILLIAN BROCKELL/THE WASHINGTON POST

Industry purists scoff at man-made diamonds, but they could be a scientist’s best friend squeezing it in a hydraulic press.

But it took them several decades more to cultivate large gemquality stones. These were still not as large or as clear as the best traditional diamonds, and most were colored yellow or brown from the nitrogen required to stabilize the growing process.

Still, the traditional diamond companies were on edge.

“Unless they can be detected,” a Belgian diamond dealer told Wired in 2003, “these stones will bankrupt the industry.”

Today, nearly a dozen companies worldwide produce diamonds that are all but indistinguishable from mined stones — good enough for any engagement ring. Four more companies focus solely on diamonds for use in factories and research labs.

Sales of lab-grown stones make up about 1 percent of the global commercial diamond market, but a 2016 report from investment firm Morgan Stanley suggested that proportion could jump to 7.5 percent by the end of the decade. In one unlikely scenario, analysts said, lab dia-

WD LAB GROWN DIAMONDS

monds might become so ubiquitous that the entire traditional market collapses.

After all, that market depends on sentiment and scarcity.

But lab-grown jewels shatter the illusion. They can be made on demand, in a matter of weeks, and they cost an estimated 10 percent to 40 percent less than a gem out of the ground. Technology being what it is, it’s likely they’ll get even cheaper.

So what happens then? Will a diamond be just another rock?

“A diamond is an extraordinary material,” said Russell Hemley, who led the development of

After eight weeks of growing, diamonds are given an initial cut by lasers.

At left, this cut and polished diamond was produced in a laboratory by WD Lab Grown Diamonds. Today, nearly a dozen companies worldwide produce diamonds that are all but indistinguishable from mined stones.

the process at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory in the late 1990s. He noted the stone’s strength, optical qualities and resilience. “Its intrinsic properties are remarkable.”

Wearing it on your finger is just about the least interesting thing you can do with a diamond.

The stones are one of nature’s best heat conductors and electrical insulators; when used in the production of semiconductors, they keep the silicon from overheating. They’re also used to make drill bits, solar panels and high-power lasers. Someday, diamond nanoparticles might even help deliver medicine to cells struck by cancer.

Lab-grown gems extend the possibilities much further — allowing scientists to explore questions about the cosmos. Hemley, who is now a professor at George Washington University, is working to develop better stones for instruments called diamond anvil cells. By squeezing together two diamonds — the only material capable of withstanding such pressures — scientists can simulate the conditions found inside planets. They can compress the microbes that dwell in the Earth’s crust to understand how they resist the crushing weight of the rock above them. They can model the behavior of gases that endure the high pressure of planets such as Saturn.

Diamonds’ transparency is vital in these experiments. It allows researchers to send beams of light, from X-ray to infrared, through the anvil cell to probe the material inside. Reinhard Boehler, a scientist at Carnegie and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, uses neutron beams to probe elements such as carbon and hydrogen at very high pressures. The task requires diamonds that are perfect as well as large, so they can only come from a lab. Traditional diamonds often contain flaws, and those of any significant size are far too expensive — especially because the lab breaks so many of its anvils.

Boehler chuckled, “Diamonds, for us, are not forever.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

17

MUSIC

KLMNO WEEKLY

The king of pop parody

BY GEOFF EDGERS

Los Angeles

O

ne day last summer, LinManuel Miranda, on break from “Hamilton,” stopped by neighbor Jimmy Fallon’s house in the Hamptons. Both love music and Fallon has a listening room in the basement, so it wasn’t long before they were downstairs sharing another passion: “Weird Al” Yankovic.

“I said, ‘Do you know “Polka Party!”?’ ” Fallon says. “He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I know it word for word.’ ” Fallon threw Yankovic’s 1986 record on the turntable, and the Broadway phenomenon and the late-night TV star sang along to an accordion-driven medley that covers 12 songs in three minutes, from Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.”

“Picture Jimmy Fallon and I sitting in a basement laughing our asses off singing, ‘I’m gonna keep my baby, keep my baby, keep my baby,’ ” Miranda says.

“We were crying, laughing and singing,” Fallon says.

They’re not alone.

Yankovic has sold millions of albums, played 1,616 shows and outlasted so many of the stars he once spoofed. His most recent album, 2014’s “Mandatory Fun,” featured parodies of Iggy Azalea, Lorde and Pharrell Williams, a polka medley and his usual smattering of original songs. The album hit No. 1. At 57, he’s now readying a complete set of his 14 studio recordings, plus an album of bonus tracks. “Squeeze Box,” on sale through a PledgeMusic drive until the end of February, will naturally come in an accordion-shaped box.

Alfred Matthew Yankovic is unflinchingly polite, doesn’t curse and pays off his monthly creditcard bill on time. He lives in a beautiful but not ostentatious house in the Hollywood hills.

Sometimes, on a beautiful night, he and his wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Nina, 14, will bring their sleeping bags out on the deck and camp under the stars.

“He’s an introvert,” says Scott Aukerman, the comedian and

BRINSON BANKS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

After nearly 40 years of poking fun at celebrities, ‘Weird Al’ has become a legend in his own right “Comedy Bang! Bang!” host. “It’s tough to kind of break through that in interviews with him.”

He traces his personality to his late parents, Nick and Mary Yankovic. “My father was very outgoing and gregarious, and my mother was kind of withdrawn and softspoken,” he says. “Both sides of my personality are there.”

Yankovic was more than a good boy. He skipped second grade, got straight A’s and was Lynwood High’s valedictorian.

Did he ever do drugs? No. Because his parents told him not to.

Did he ever consider ditching an instrument that only Lawrence Welk’s mother could love? Never.

If he found an escape, it was through the satirical humor of Mad Magazine and novelty songs on the Dr. Demento radio show.

The host of that show, Barry Hansen, gave Yankovic his first break.

On March 14, 1976, he introduced “Alfred Yankovic” to his audience by playing a tape from the 16-yearold high school senior. “Belvedere Cruising” centered on the family’s

Plymouth. Yankovic accompanied himself on accordion.

“When he sang the line, ‘There’s something about a Comet that makes me want to vomit,’ that kind of perked up my ears,” Hansen remembers. “He would do far better songs after that and he’s a little embarrassed about ‘Belvedere Cruising’ today, but I thought, as soon as I heard it, ‘That guy has some talent.’ ” Yankovic arrived at California Polytechnic State University in the fall of 1976 and immediately made an impression. The mismatched clothes. The flip-flops. The accordion. One kid in the dorm derisively named him “Weird Al.” Meanwhile, he kept scoring with Dr. Demento. “My Bologna” was inspired by the Knack’s “My Sharona.” The Queen parody “Another One Rides the Bus” was recorded live in the studio. Both songs ended up on Yankovic’s selftitled 1983 debut.

He then made an important discovery. Funny songs could get you on Dr. Demento. Funny vid-

“Weird Al” Yankovic at his Hollywood home in January.

“I am, at heart, sort of a shy person,” he says.

eos could make you a star. In “Ricky,” Yankovic ditched his glasses and mustache to portray Desi Arnaz from “I Love Lucy.”

The song cracked the top 100.

“He made people stop and look at the TV and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ ” remembers Les Garland, MTV’s head of programming during the 1980s. “Every type of research that we did — Familiarity.

Do you like it? Are you getting enough of it? Do you want more?

— the numbers were huge. And from that, he absolutely was an MTV star.”

He was so polite and respectful it almost hid his subversive genius. Yankovic’s parodies poked holes in the bubble of pop pretension. Take his treatment of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It.” Jackson’s original, released in 1983, revolutionized music by ushering in MTV’s golden age, an era when a video could aspire to become art and take on something as serious as gang violence.

Yankovic’s “Eat It” video opened with the flatulent beat of “Musical Mike” Kieffer’s hand percussion before giving way to a sonically authentic backing track. “Weird Al,” slap-sticking through some of Jackson’s iconic dance steps, sang corny lines about food: “Have some more yogurt. Have some more Spam. It doesn’t matter if it’s fresh or canned.” As he pranced, viewers were treated to a steady stream of “Airplane!”-worthy sight gags.

Backstage in San Francisco at the Sketchfest comedy festival, a family has been ushered in to say hello and pose for pictures. Jill Gould, a longtime fan, makes her request. “Can I touch your hair?” she asks.

Yankovic doesn’t groan or pause, even if he is asked this all the time.

Instead, his eyes widen and he tilts his head toward Gould and returns the question with a mischievous, cartoon smile.

“Can I touch your hair?”

And like that, they stand there smiling, fingers running through locks. The most successful song parodist ever and a die-hard who heard him first 30 years ago on Dr. Demento. The moment is meant to be shared. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A mathematician who beat the odds in life N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARGARET W ERTHEIM

H A MAN FOR ALL MARKETS From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

By Edward O. Thorp Random House.

396 pp. $30.

alfway through Edward O. Thorp’s lark-filled account of his pioneering career as a gambler and inventor of stock-trading tools, he tells us that “gambling is investing simplified.” So by reverse, investing is gambling complexified. A good deal of Thorp’s life has been devoted to proving that the same kinds of mathematical skills that come in handy counting cards can also be fruitfully applied to “the greatest casino on earth”: Wall Street.

Thorp has won in both arenas.

As a young mathematician at MIT in the early 1960s, he developed a theoretical framework that showed how a blackjack player could beat the house advantage, despite centuries of mathematical reasoning that had supposedly proved this impossible. Once he published his “high-low” system in his best-selling book “Beat the Dealer” (1962), it unleashed an army of math nerds who brought such an onslaught of science to bear on the game that it forced casinos to change their rules, including moving from one deck of cards in a shoe to several. Legions of professional blackjack teams using Thorp’s system have engaged in a Darwinian war with casinos ever since, among them a legendary MIT team whose exploits inspired the film “21,” starring Kevin Spacey.

Thorp’s experience with the mathematics of blackjack, and later other casino games such as roulette and baccarat, prompted him to start applying his talents to the stock market. Here, too, he found ways to beat the system by discovering and exploiting pricing anomalies in securities. “Betting on a hedge I had researched was like betting on a blackjack hand where I had the advantage,” he writes, only instead of $500 a hand, the stakes were now “$50,000 to $100,000 per hedge.”

Although Thorp didn’t invent hedging, he made significant theoretical contributions to its development and thus became one of

RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After Edward O. Thorp devised a mathematical way to win at gambling, he turned his attention to beating Wall Street.

the quantitative data experts who revolutionized Wall Street. At one point, his Princeton/Newport Partners was beating the stock market by more than 20 percent.

For those lucky enough to have what eventually became a $10 million minimum, Thorp could almost guarantee brilliant returns: PNP “never had a losing year, or even a losing quarter,” he states.

With his Rockyesque rounds of beating the odds, Thorp has led a remarkable life, but what strikes me most about his story is what happened before he set foot in a casino.

Born in 1932, Thorp grew up a Depression-era son of caring, but hugely overworked, blue-collar parents, who often labored on night shifts and, of necessity, largely left their two sons to raise themselves. During World War II, his mother worked as a riveter at Douglas Aircraft, and his father, who’d attended college for a year on the GI bill, was unable to afford to complete his degree. Both hoped Edward would be able to partake of the education they’d been denied.

Left to his own devices in a C-grade school district, Thorp was a self-starter who taught himself chemistry and built a homemade

lab in which one of his chief lines of research was blowing stuff up.

He learned to make gunpowder and used it to launch rockets and rocket-powered sleds. He progressed to guncotton and nitroglycerin and nearly blew off his hand before wisely deciding to stop. Thorp understands the horror these exploits will induce in the minds of contemporary parents and is grateful for the freedom that gave him an education that couldn’t be learned solely from books.

As a high school junior, he decided to enter a chemistry competition in which the prizes were scholarships to leading universities. Having skipped a grade, he was just 15, and most of the competition would be 17- and 18-year-old seniors. But, since his parents couldn’t help him with college fees, a scholarship was the only way he might realize his dream of becoming a scientist. Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford a proper slide rule, so he was unable to complete enough calculations during the exam and only came in third in a field stacked with kids from L.A’.s elite schools. The next year, he taught himself physics and was one of 40 finalists, out of 16,000 entrants, in the national

Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which won him a scholarship to Berkeley.

There, too, he encountered unfairness, causing him to switch fields from chemistry to quantum physics, and finally to a PhD in math at UCLA. His trajectory reflects the movements in a pinball machine, and Thorp acknowledges that in other economic circumstances, his career might have been different. Financial difficulty helped fuel his attraction to gambling, though he insists he wasn’t in it for the money: “What intrigued me was the possibility that merely by sitting in a room and thinking, I could figure out how to win.”

There are several questions opened up here: What if this beautiful mind hadn’t been hampered by pecuniary problems? What else might Thorp have achieved? With a decent slide rule, he’d probably have won the chemistry competition and a place at Caltech. “Science [was] my playground,” he says, and one rather mourns the loss to science. How many other Thorps are being thwarted?

The second half of Thorp’s book is a history of the financial world over the past 50 years, with its growing reliance on math, and it makes for pretty unsavory reading. By his telling, the rewards will be deeply divided between the rich and the rest. Along with Warren Buffett, he urges us to put our money safely into index funds.

Just as most gamblers can’t beat the house, most of us can’t beat the market.

“Gambling now is largely a socially corrosive tax on ignorance, draining money from those who cannot afford the losses,” he writes in his closing pages. “Most of what I’ve learned from gambling is also true for investing.”

It is to Thorp’s credit as a human being that he lands his final punch straight. n Wertheim is a science writer and author of books on the cultural history of physics.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Wit where you’d least expect it

What really made Monet a success?

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

M

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

argaret Drabble has written a novel about aging and death, which for American readers should make it as popular as a colostomy bag. That’s a pity because Drabble, 77, is as clear-eyed and witty a guide to the undiscovered country as you’ll find.

The ominous title of her new book, “The Dark Flood Rises,” comes from a poem by D.H. Lawrence that you mustn’t post on the community bulletin board at Grandma’s retirement home.

Among its menacing stanzas is this bit of advice: Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Drabble’s feisty heroine, Francesca Stubbs, knows that ship is on its way, but she has no intention of waiting at the pier for its arrival.

And don’t think “heroine” is too lofty a honorific for Fran. “Old age itself is a theme for heroism,” she insists. “It calls upon courage.”

Newly single — again — and in her 70s, Fran has developed a survival plan that depends on outracing the Grim Reaper. “She needs to keep moving,” Drabble writes.

“She seemed unable to settle down to being elderly, she was forever on the move, as though in perpetual flight, in a restless panic.” Living in constant denial of the inevitable, she is, nonetheless, infected with “relentless broodings on ageing, death and the last things.” She can’t get lines from “Macbeth” out of her head.

The irony of Fran’s perpetual motion — and a source of the novel’s humor — is that she’s annoyed by the way her fellow senior citizens resist their golden years, years that now stretch on further for more people than ever before.

“She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the 21st century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending,” Drabble writes. “The result, in so many

cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity.”

Determined to avoid that fate, Fran, who always “dresses with bravado,” has dedicated her latter years to a charitable organization that evaluates nursing homes and retirement villages. She’s determined to study them, rather than be incarcerated in one of them. It’s a job that keeps her buzzing all over England, usually at high speeds. What better way to go, after all, than in a spectacular crash with a “complementary frisson of autonomy”?

And so once again, Dame Margaret, the author of more than two dozen books, has created a story that defies its own parameters.

Gentler than Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” but no less honest, “The Dark Flood Rises” examines aging from liver spots to liver failure, but the novel’s humor vaccinates it from chronic bleakness.

Eschewing chapter divisions, the novel races along like Fran, pausing just long enough to take a breath before darting off to follow some other story line involving one of Fran’s friends or relatives.

Running through all these aging lives are recurring references to a London revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days.” Although less famous than his “Waiting for Godot,” it’s the perfect complement to Fran’s manic efforts to stay above the ever-rising grains of sand collecting around her. Drabble never sinks to the level of Beckett’s despair, but she’s refreshingly frank about the tragicomedy of aging.

Remembering one of her dearly departed friends, Fran thinks, “She never said a dull word.”

The same might be said of Margaret Drabble. n Charles, editor of The Washington Post’s Book World, is host of the Totally Hip Video Book Review.

I THE DARK FLOOD RISES

By Margaret Drabble Farrar Straus Giroux.

327 pp. $26.

HIT MAKERS The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

By Derek Thompson Penguin Press.

344 pp. $28.

l

REVIEWED BY

J ONAH B ERGER

s Claude Monet a truly great painter or just the beneficiary of good early publicity? To hear Derek Thompson tell it, he was a highly skilled early impressionist. But there was something else subtly at work in Monet’s day that created his enduring popularity. Monet was one of a handful of impressionist painters whose work was given to the Museé du Luxembourg in Paris as part of a young man’s bequest in the late 1800s. As a result, his paintings, along with other impressionist art, were shown in the first national exhibition of such work, and that broad publicity, Thompson argues, was what made those artists popular. The bequest shaped what people thought impressionism was, and Monet rode the wave to fame. As Thompson argues in his book “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction,” Monet succeeded not because he was the best artist but because repeated exposure persuaded people to like his work.

In our age, the principles of popularity still apply. Books like “Fifty Shades of Grey” land on the bestseller list. Movies like the “Star Wars” franchise gross billions of dollars and ignite the imaginations of children everywhere. And social movements like the recent Women’s March bring communities together around a common goal or interest. But while it’s clear that some things grab collective attention, why these things in particular? That question lies at the heart of Thompson’s book. Mixing anecdotes and science, he explains the famous psychological principle of mere exposure, or the fact that the more you see something, the more you like it. He began pondering Monet’s success after seeing his famous painting “The Japanese Footbridge” at the National Gallery of Art. Thompson is a gifted writer and has a knack for finding intriguing stories. But rather than dwelling on any one in particular, or taking

the time to fully unpack it, he often flits to the next sexy example. This quickly gets overwhelming. It makes it hard to remember what the main point is or how it relates to the overall theme.

In a chapter on “The Viral Myth,” Thompson argues that nothing goes viral. If something spreads virally through social media, it typically doesn’t go from one person to the next, like a virus, but rather is propelled by a few people who have big followings, and it takes off from there.

Thompson is partially right.

When people use the word “viral” what they often mean is that something is popular. What Thompson glosses over is that some things do get highly shared.

And if you understand why people share, you can engineer things to be more contagious. This kind of person-to-person sharing gets short shrift in his book.

Thompson also argues the virtues of “optimal newness,” which occurs through a blend of familiarity and novelty. On the familiar side, hit songs tend to have a certain structure, Barack Obama’s speeches repeat the same refrains, and ESPN shows the same clips again and again. Familiarity can be good, but too much of it can be boring. So if you add a pinch of newness, then you’ve got a familiar surprise — something that seems new on the surface but is similar enough to things we’ve seen or heard before to evoke familiarity’s warm glow.

And that notion captures “Hit Makers” perfectly. Thompson takes well-worn research that has often been covered elsewhere and tries to give it new life through novel stories. It doesn’t make for the most revelatory book, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. n Berger is a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” and “Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior.”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Why do we still let 12-year-olds get married?

FRAIDY REISS is founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that helps women and girls escape arranged and forced marriages and works to end child marriage in the United States.

Michelle DeMello walked into the clerk’s office in Colorado thinking for sure someone would save her.

She was 16 and pregnant. Her Christian community in Green Mountain Falls was pressuring her family to marry her off to her 19-year-old boyfriend. She didn’t think she had the right to say no to the marriage after the mess she felt she’d made. “I could be the example of the shining whore in town, or I could be what everybody wanted me to be at that moment and save my family a lot of honor,” DeMello said. She assumed that the clerk would refuse to approve the marriage. The law wouldn’t allow a minor to marry, right?

Wrong, as DeMello, now 42, learned.

While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot marry.

Unchained At Last, a nonprofit I founded to help women resist or escape forced marriage in the United States, spent the past year collecting marriage license data from 2000 to 2010, the most recent year for which most states were able to provide information.

We learned that in 38 states, more than 167,000 children — almost all of them girls, some as young as 12 — were married during that period, mostly to men 18 or older.

Twelve states and the District of Columbia were unable to provide information on how many children had married there in that decade. Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.

Despite these alarming numbers, and despite the documented consequences of

early marriages, including negative effects on health and education and an increased likelihood of domestic violence, some state lawmakers have resisted passing legislation to end child marriage — because they wrongly fear that such measures might unlawfully stifle religious freedom or because they cling to the notion that marriage is the best solution for a teen pregnancy.

Many of the children married between 2000 and 2010 were wed to adults significantly older than they were, the data shows. At least 31 percent were married to a spouse 21 or older. (The actual number is probably higher, as some states did not provide spousal ages.) Some children were married at an age, or with a spousal age difference, that constitutes statutory rape under their state’s laws. In Idaho, for example, someone 18 or older who has sex with a child under 16 can be charged with a felony and imprisoned for up to 25 years. Yet data from Idaho — which had the highest rate of child marriage of the states that provided data — show that about 55 girls under 16 were married to men 18 or older between 2000 and 2010.

Many of the states that provided data included categories

BIZ HERMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Sara Siddiqui’s father arranged a marriage for her at age 15 to a stranger 13 years older than her. By 16, she was pregnant. Minors such as Siddiqui can easily be forced into marriage or forced to stay in one.

such as “14 and younger,” without specifying exactly how much younger some brides and grooms were. Thus, the 12-year-olds we found in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina’s data might not have been the youngest children wed in America between 2000 and 2010. Also, the data we collected did not account for children wed in religious-only ceremonies or taken overseas to be married, situations that we at Unchained often see.

Most states did not provide identifying information about the children, but Unchained has seen child marriage in nearly every American culture and religion, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim and secular communities.

We have seen it in families who have been in America for generations and immigrant families from all over the world.

In my experience, parents who marry off their minor children often are motivated by cultural or religious traditions; a desire to control their child’s behavior or sexuality; money (a bride price or dowry); or immigration-related reasons (for instance, when a child sponsors a foreign spouse).

And, of course, many minors marry of their own volition — even though in most realms of life our laws do not allow children to make such high-stakes adult decisions.

Regardless of whether the union was the child’s or the

parents’ idea, marriage before 18 has catastrophic, lifelong effects on a girl, undermining her health, education and economic opportunities while increasing her risk of experiencing violence.

Ending child marriage should be simple. Every state can pass legislation to eliminate exceptions that allow marriage before age 18 — or set the marriage age higher than 18 in states where the age of majority is higher. New Jersey is the closest state to doing this, with a bill advancing in the legislature that would end all marriage before 18.

But when Virginia passed a bill last year to end child marriage, legislators added an exception for emancipated minors as young as 16, even though the devastating effects of marriage before 18 do not disappear when a girl is emancipated.

Ending child marriage also does not illegally infringe on religious rights. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that incidentally forbid an act required by religion if the laws do not specifically target religious practice.

“Instead of seeing this as an abuse of young women,” said New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who introduced an unsuccessful bill last year to end child marriage in her state, “[some legislators] were seeing this as something we needed to protect for certain cultures.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Why Dodd-Frank needs fixing ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly economics column in The Washington Post.

Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary from 2009 to 2013, has come to tell you that much of what you “know” about Dodd-Frank — Congress’s response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis — is wrong. It’s a timely review because the Trump administration is promising to overhaul the law. The title of Geithner’s essay, carried in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, is simple: “Are We Safe Yet?” The answer is not so simple.

Let’s start with the good news. Like many others, Geithner — a critical player in containing the breakdown — doubts the United States faces “a major [financial] crisis anytime soon.” To justify this, he offers both statistics and common sense.

Since 2008, U.S. banks have raised roughly $500 billion in new shareholder capital, bringing the total to $1.7 trillion.

The added capital provides a larger cushion against losses (and, of course, the new shareholders enjoy any profits).

This bolsters confidence that the system can survive unexpected setbacks.

In addition to more capital, banks also have a more stable base of funds used for lending.

According to Geithner, deposits now represent 86 percent of U.S. banks’ liabilities, up from 72 percent in 2008. Deposits tend to be stable, because most are insured by the government.

The result is a strengthened banking system. “Today, the major U.S. banks could probably

sustain losses greater than those experienced in the Great Depression and still have enough capital to operate,” Geithner writes.

Psychology reinforces these changes. It has shifted toward caution. Loans may be harder to get; but they’re also more likely to be repaid.

Still, Geithner serves up some bad news, including four unhappy propositions: Proposition No. 1: A financial crisis “is certain at some point” — we just don’t know when and how bad.

Conditions change. Memories fade. Government regulators aren’t superhuman. They can’t “protect against every conceivable bad event.” They also face a dilemma: If regulations are

too tough, they will cause “some financial transactions to shift away from banks and toward less regulated institutions.”

Proposition No. 2: A true crisis is “not self­correcting.”

Most declines in markets (for stocks, bonds, loans) are selflimiting. Prices drop to levels that buyers think are a bargain. Not so with a panic. Selling pressures reflect fears that tomorrow’s prices will be lower than today’s.

The resulting “fire-sale prices . . . make large parts of the financial system appear to be insolvent.”

Someone or something must intervene to stop the spiral.

Proposition No. 3: In a panic, only the federal government can mobilize the needed financial resources “to preserve the functioning of the credit system necessary for economic recovery.”

In the 2008-2009 crisis, the government provided trillions of dollars of aid through money creation by the Federal Reserve and by Treasury borrowing.

Absent this torrent of emergency credit, it’s not clear what would have happened.

Proposition No. 4: Despite this, Dodd­Frank has crippled government’s ability to defuse future financial crises.

It has restricted government’s “ability to act as a lender of last resort.” The Fed’s power to lend

to individual institutions is curtailed, making it harder to nip future crises in the bud. The Fed can’t act until many institutions are in trouble. Consequently, we are “even less prepared to deal with a crisis” than in 2007.

This, of course, is madness. But it is madness with a political logic. The lesson that much of the public took from the financial crisis is that banks, and Wall Street in general, were “bailed out” and that this rescue was a bad thing. So Dodd-Frank became a vehicle for making sure this never happened again by weakening the Fed and other arms of government to deal with financial crises.

The real Dodd-Frank scandal is that this misinterpretation of events, widely embraced by both parties, has been allowed to stand. The point was not to protect banks but to prevent a collapse of the financial system.

If the Trump administration doesn’t repudiate the conventional wisdom and change the law accordingly, it risks creating a future, self-inflicted wound. Suppose it is 2028, and the Fed is coping poorly with a huge financial crisis. Someone asks, “What were our leaders thinking when they revoked so many of its powers?” And the answer will be: They weren’t. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

Liberals undermine food stamps CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy.

Congress created the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, or food stamps, “to alleviate . . . hunger and malnutrition” and to “permit low-income households to obtain a more nutritious diet through normal channels of trade,” in the words of the federal statute establishing the program.

It’s a good goal. Whether SNAP is optimally designed to achieve it is a separate question, to which the answer seems to be “no,” according to new research commissioned by the Agriculture Department.

The report, published in November, found that SNAP households spend 20 percent of their benefits, typically about $255 per month per household, on sweetened beverages (including both sodas and nonfizzy drinks), desserts, salty snacks, candy and sugar.

That’s right: One of every five SNAP dollars goes to items that are perfectly permissible under the program’s rules but utterly lack nutritional value — and may contribute to chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity.

Data in the report came from a large-scale survey of grocery store purchases in 2011. Applied to the program’s annual spending of $66 billion in fiscal 2016, they would translate into $13.2 billion worth of SNAP-funded junk food.

Numbers like these cry out for common-sense reform: a

prohibition on the use of SNAP benefits to buy sodas and, if possible, other nutritionally empty products.

Such changes have been proposed by everyone from thenNew York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine but keep getting shot down by powerful food-industry lobbies.

Lately, these corporations have been getting de facto backing from journalists and policy intellectuals. When the New York Times published a front-page article on the USDA-backed study last month, Mother Jones vilified the paper for “shaming” the poor.

Writing for The Post, Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggested it was “paternalism” to curb the poor’s

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

SNAP options in the name of health.

Accusing the Times of stereotyping the poor as irresponsible, the critics noted that SNAP households’ junk-food consumption in the USDA-backed study may be high but is still roughly equivalent to that of nonSNAP households.

This is an accurate reading of the report — and a non sequitur.

Taxpayers, through their representatives, have no legitimate interest in purely private food purchases; they do have a right to be concerned how federal money is spent, especially when it is being spent contrary to Congress’s express intent, and contrary to the best interests of the intended beneficiaries.

Bernstein and Spielberg say that’s hypocrisy, since no such strings are attached to consumption subsidies for betteroff Americans: “Should the rest of us be able to weigh in on the home purchases of those claiming the mortgage interest deduction?” they ask.

As it happens, only “qualified homes” meeting certain (albeit very permissive) criteria get that deduction. The main point, though, is that it’s pretty late to be decrying SNAP’s paternalism, since the program has never been about pure freedom of choice. It

already bans certain items: wine and beer, restaurant meals, even soup from a grocery store’s prepared-food bar. The separate Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutritional program limits purchases to a list of healthful foods.

A ban would clarify lines of financial responsibility for junkfood purchases, bolstering SNAP’s overall legitimacy.

And that is a crucial point: For all its shortcomings, SNAP is a vital element of the social safety net that helps lift millions of people out of poverty each year, many of them children. It needs all the legitimacy it can get.

Those who argue for the SNAP status quo may do so with good intentions, because they fear that airing concerns about SNAP’s junk-food subsidy plays into the hands of conservative budgetcutters looking for reasons to gut the program.

The opposite is just as likely to be true: A SNAP purged of sodas or candy, or both, could be less vulnerable to cuts.

Supporters could seek full funding, not in unholy de facto alliance with Big Junk Food, as they do now, but armed with a truly compelling argument: Every dollar for SNAP will help nourish the poor, just as Congress intended. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Frederick Douglass BY

H ENRY L OUIS G ATES J R.

AND

J OHN S TAUFFER

President Trump this month said Frederick Douglass has “done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” If Trump was referring to our awareness of Douglass’s historical legacy, then the president was on the money: More than 120 years after Douglass’s death, his impact on our country is still unfolding. But as Douglass’s fame has grown, so too have myths about his history and personality.

MYTH NO. 1 Frederick Douglass is “being recognized more and more.”

In fact, Douglass was more famous in the 19th century than he is today. His first two autobiographies, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” (1845) and “My Bondage and My Freedom” (1855), were bestsellers. In addition, he was one of the nation’s greatest orators, a widely read journalist and the most-photographed American of the 19th century. He was truly among the most famous Americans of his time.

When Douglass died in 1895, thousands of tributes from the United States and abroad honored him. Collected in a 350page closely printed book, they highlight his stature. The Washington Post began its tribute by saying, “Frederick Douglass was one of the great men of the century.” And the Chicago Tribune declared: “No man, black or white, has been better known for nearly half a century in this country, than Frederick Douglass.”

MYTH NO. 2 Douglass, a Republican, would fit in with today’s GOP. In 1855, Douglass was a selfprofessed radical as a founding member of the Radical Abolition Party, which wanted to upend the status quo in the most dramatic way: immediate and universal emancipation; full suffrage for all Americans, regardless of sex or skin color; the redistribution of land so that

no one would be rich and no one poor; and violent interventions against slavery. Other founders included two of Douglass’s close friends: the militant abolitionist John Brown and the nation’s first university-educated black physician, James McCune Smith.

During the Civil War, Douglass became a Republican and remained a devoted member of the party for the rest of his life. At the time, the GOP — the party of Lincoln and Charles Sumner — consistently received enormous support from black voters and advocated a strong central government and certain entitlements for the underprivileged. In other words, it bears little resemblance to today’s Republican Party.

MYTH NO. 3 Douglass escaped from slavery on foot.

It’s a dramatic notion, but Douglass’s escape was more prosaic, mirroring many selfemancipations from the period that depended more on logistics and less on romance. Dressed in a sailor’s suit (a red shirt, black cravat and tarpaulin hat) and traveling under an assumed identity, Douglass boarded a train in Baltimore on Sept. 3, 1838. Then he took a steamboat from Wilmington, Del., to Philadelphia, then boarded a night train to New York.

As soon as Douglass reached safety in New York, he wrote his fiancee, Anna Murray, and asked her to join him at once. They moved to New Bedford, Mass., then the nation’s whaling

ASSOCIATED PRESS

capital, where Douglass began work as a free man.

MYTH NO. 4 Douglass was an American patriot.

Douglass never defined himself as an American patriot — indeed, he was highly critical of the United States. In 1845, as a fugitive slave, he fled to the British Isles for two years, almost settling permanently in England. For the first time in his life, he said, he experienced “an absence, a perfect absence, of everything like that disgusting hate with which we are pursued” in America. Only a sense of duty to his fellow African Americans and a desire to fight the scourge of racism and slavery persuaded him to come back. “I have no love for America, as such,” he announced upon his return. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.”

MYTH NO. 5 Douglass was a pious Christian.

His views on the religion were less than conventional. While a practicing member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church for most of his adult life, Douglass used the

Bible to interpret the North’s role in the Civil War allegorically, with “Michael and his angels” battling “the infernal host of bad passions” in our country’s version of the apocalypse. He frequently expressed his disgust at the fact that slave owners cited Scripture to argue that slavery was divinely ordained and that the Lord demanded the docility of the enslaved.

In his final years, Douglass became drawn to Unitarian beliefs and openly critiqued many traditional doctrines. His home contained artifacts and writings from several world religions, as well as busts of his favorite philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss, both of whom viewed Jesus as a moral person but not the son of God. n Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher university professor at Harvard, coeditor of “The Portable Frederick Douglass” and host of the PBS series “Africa’s Great Civilizations.” Stauffer is a professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard and the author or editor of six books on Frederick Douglass, including “Giants” and “Picturing Frederick Douglass.”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

24

Vote Now for the 2017 World’s Best Voting ends February 26th

2017

Win a $50 gift card!

#worldsbest2017

Everyone who completes a World’s Best ballot is automatically entered into a drawing for a $50 gift card.

5 lucky winners will win a $50 gift card from one of the following: World’s Best Breakfast • World’s Best Lunch World’s Best Dinner • World’s Best Date Restaurant

World’s Best Coffee

Log on to: wenatcheeworld.com/worldsbest/ Vote using your computer, tablet or smart phone, you just need an email address to register.

(Limit one email address per person) The 2017 World’s Best contest is a promotion of The Wenatchee World Advertising Department.

Scan this QR code to vote for your favorites!

Winners published Sunday, March 26th