The Washington Post National Weekly - March 5, 2017

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017

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Learning to take on a new mission In Mali, U.N. peacekeepers became the target of terrorists — a fight they were not prepared for. PAGE 12

Politics Sessions plays critical role 6

Science Seeking new planet 10

5 Myths George Orwell 23

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THE FIX

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

A sense of the moment BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

here was one moment in President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night that people will remember for a very long time.

It came when Trump honored the wife of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, who was killed in a raid in Yemen last month.

Two important things happened there.

1. Trump rapidly grasped that this was a real moment — and he didn’t step on it by trying to immediately return to his speech.

Lots of politicians, obsessed with making sure they got the speech out in the allotted time, would have moved on too quickly — missing the resonance of the cascades of applause that washed over the rawly emotional Carryn Owens.

Trump understands moments; he stepped away from the podium, looked to Owens and just clapped. For the better part of two minutes, the only thing you heard in the room was loud applause and the only thing

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you saw was Owens crying and looking heavenward. Very powerful stuff.

Critics will say — and have already said — that Trump was using a widow’s emotion for political gain. But Owens willingly agreed to come to the speech knowing Trump would single her out. And politicians of both parties regularly use these tragic moments to make broader points about our country and its policies.

That’s politics. To suggest that Trump somehow broke with political norms here is to turn a blind eye to virtually every speech like this given by any recent president of either party.

2. Trump showed some grace.

There has never been any question that Donald Trump is happiest when people are talking about, looking at and generally obsessed with Donald Trump. He’s never shown much grace in the public eye, often exhibiting a sort of ham-handedness in situations where some delicacy is required.

But not Tuesday night.

Trump, dare I say, gracefully handed the

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. 21

spotlight to Owens — even taking a few steps back to let her have that moment. For a candidate, a man and a president who has shown a stunning inability to ever make it about anyone other than him, it was a very deft move.

Now, predicting that what Trump did on Tuesday night will be indicative of what he does at any point in the future is a fool’s errand. If the NFL is a week-to-week league, then Trump is a day-to-day president.

Yes, in that moment with Carryn Owens, he showed the best of what he can be. But, earlier that same day, when he seemed to place the blame for Ryan Owens’s death at the feet of his generals, he showed a far less appealing side.

There is no “other” Trump waiting to emerge. But what he proved during his address to Congress on Tuesday night is that he is capable of growth and capable of harnessing the powers of the presidency to work for him.

Keeping it up, of course, is the hard part. n

© The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A U.N. policeman stands guard during a night patrol in Timbuktu, Mali, on Jan. 9.

Militants linked to al-Qaeda have targeted peacekeepers in Mali.

Photograph by JANE HAHN for the Washington Post.

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POLITICS

BUSINESSES ARE REFLECTED IN A BANK WINDOW IN CORNING, IOWA. MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mixed feelings in Trump land Across Iowa, voters are willing to give the president a chance but are worried by his first month

J ENNA J OHNSON in Clinton, Iowa BY

T

om Godat, a union electrician who has always voted for Democrats, cast his ballot for Donald Trump last year as “the lesser of two evils” compared to Hillary Clinton.

He’s already a little embarrassed about it.

There’s a lot that Godat likes about President Trump, especially his pledge to make the country great again by ignoring lobbyists,

challenging both political parties and increasing the number of good-paying jobs.

But Godat was surprised by the utter chaos that came with the president’s first month. He said it often felt like Trump and his staff were impulsively firing off executive orders instead of really thinking things through.

“I didn’t think he would come in blazing like he has,” said Godat, 39, who has three kids and works at the same aluminum rolling plant where his father worked. “It

seems almost like a dictatorship at times. He’s got a lot of controversial stuff going on and rather than thinking it through, I’m afraid that he’s jumping into the frying pan with both feet.”

Of the six swing states that were key to Trump’s win in November, his margin of victory was the highest in Iowa, where he beat Clinton by nine percentage points. Yet at the dawn of his presidency, only 42 percent of Iowans approve of the job that he’s doing and 49 percent disap-

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POLITICS prove, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted in February.

While Iowa is still home to many strong supporters who say it’s too early to judge him, there are others who say they voted for Trump simply because he wasn’t Clinton. Many Iowans worry Trump might cut support for wind-energy and ethanol programs; that his trade policies could hurt farms that export their crops; that mass deportations would empty the state’s factories and meatpacking plants; and that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would yank health insurance away from thousands. While the hyper-simplicity of Trump’s campaign promises helped him win over voters, they are no match for the hyper-complexity of Iowa’s economy and values.

Godat commutes more than 30 miles south to Bettendorf, where he gets paid a base wage of $34 per hour to help prepare aluminum used for airplanes and cars.

There’s a shortage of trained electricians, and last year Godat said he worked 600 overtime hours, bringing his total pay to about $110,000. His wife provides inhome care for the elderly.

Godat hopes his son will get an apprenticeship at the plant after high school. He is confident that his employer won’t lay off workers or shut down the plant because it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Iowa and does specialized work that would be difficult to move. He hopes Trump can create more jobs like his across the country.

Lost Nation On the other end of Clinton County is the town of Lost Nation, where the president received 66 percent of the vote.

“He’s doing what he said he was going to do, that’s the biggest thing,” said Tyler Schurbon, 23, who was sitting in a pub with friends. He describes himself as a “progressive Republican” who falls asleep watching Fox News each night. “A lot of people get into the presidency, and they just completely forget what they talked about.”

Schurbon trims trees for power companies, a union job that pays $60,000 and offers full benefits.

He drives a pickup and bought a farmhouse for $50,000 last year.

While he doesn’t like how politicized unions have become, he’s

grateful for the wages they negotiated over the years. The Republican-run Iowa legislature, empowered by Trump’s win, voted this month to dramatically scale back the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public workers — worrying members of private unions like Schurbon.

Others in the bar insist that Trump backs unions, but Schurbon doesn’t think so: “Nope, he’s completely against them.”

Schurbon and his dad farm about 500 acres of soybeans and corn, so he’s also worried about the president’s promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which could hurt farmers that export their crops to Canada and Mexico.

“He’s really hurting us, even though everybody around here is conservative,” Schurbon said, thumping his bottle of Budweiser on the table to emphasize some of his points. “When you cut off trade, that cuts off everything.

Where do our crops go? They don’t stay here.”

Still, Schurbon likes much of what Trump is doing — and he wishes protesters would give him a break.

Newton About 140 miles southwest of Lost Nation is the much larger town of Newton, which for generations was home to a Maytag factory that once employed one in four residents. The factory closed in 2007, laying off more than 3,000.

Newton has somewhat recovered, although most locals commute out of town for work.

Nearly a dozen local retirees gathered at a barbershop downtown on a Thursday morning.

Nearly all of them voted for Clinton, although Trump won the surrounding county of Jasper.

At one point, a Trump-supporting 30-year-old truck driver stopped in for a haircut. The driver, who lives in the next town and didn’t want to give his name, said he mowed “Trump” into his yard last summer. While the older guys in the barbershop worked during the golden age of manufacturing and retired comfortably with pensions, the driver says his annual pay has decreased by $5,000 in the seven years he has worked for a dairy company.

Something has to change, and that’s why he supports Trump.

“He went against the grain —

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shouldn’t have voted, Dad, if you don’t like either one of them.’ ” Missouri Valley

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

took it up as a hobby and asked the questions no one wanted to ask,” he said.

Urbandale Another 40 miles west of Newton is the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale. Clinton narrowly won this city of nearly 42,000.

Merle Hay Mall was filled with retirees speed-walking and moms pushing strollers — including Steventjie Hasna and her 1-year-old daughter.

Hasna, 24, is a conservative who opposes abortion and usually backs Republicans. This election, she decided not to vote.

Hasna was stunned when Trump won, and her young family has deeply felt the ramifications of the president’s first month in office. Her husband, Hosen Hasna, is from Syria and came to the Midwest for college. He later took a job in the town where Steventjie Hasna — her first name is Dutch and she took her husband’s Arabic last name — grew up. He works as an electrical engineer at a tire factory, while she stays home with her daughter, Nehad.

Hasna is terrified that her husband’s mosque will be attacked or that he will be targeted.

Her husband is in the process of becoming a citizen, and they have discussed what they might do if they need to flee the country.

If her husband could vote, he probably would have voted for Clinton. Hasna’s mom and sister skipped voting — but her father cast a ballot for Trump.

“Yeah,” Hasna said, drawing out the word and then taking a deep breath, still clearly upset about it. “He didn’t want to vote for Hillary, so he voted for Trump.

I told him: ‘You know, you

Tom Godat eats breakfast with his son, Talon, 3, at Old Town restaurant in Clinton, Iowa. Hillary Clinton won the city, but Donald Trump carried Clinton County. A Democrat who voted for Trump, Godat wishes he could tell the president, “Focus on us, on our country, on our issues here.”

Continuing north and west takes you through the deeply conservative 4th Congressional District represented by Rep. Steve King (R), who fought for some of Trump’s immigration proposals back when they were fringe ideas.

Trump won the district by 27 points. His approval rating in the latest Iowa Poll was 55 percent.

The town of Missouri Valley sits nestled between the river of the same name and the railroad tracks. Trump received nearly 60 percent of the votes here.

On a recent Saturday morning — the day after a sudden snowstorm closed schools — women ranging in ages and political beliefs ventured to Abundant Moon Yoga.

Owner Rachelle Pfouts, 40, is careful to keep politics out of her studio — although she says compassion is a key tenet of yoga that seems to be lacking in Washington right now.

Pfouts’s 8:30 a.m. class included a 48-year-old special education teacher, a 39-year-old mother of three and a 42-year-old administrative assistant who doesn’t have children — all of whom voted for Clinton and are gravely worried about the future of public education in their state and across the country.

A 10 a.m. class attracted two retirees from Woodbine who usually vote for Republicans, although they consider themselves independents. Lois Surber, a 67year-old retired city clerk, said she didn’t like either candidate for president but voted for Trump. Libby Ring, a 70-year-old retired nursing assistant, said she didn’t vote — and she doesn’t approve of Trump’s first month.

Neither woman could name a thing the president has done that they liked, but they both said that protests and negative commentary are not helping.

“I’m going to support what he does just because I think that we need to,” Surber said.

Ring agreed: “We have to be adults and whoever is elected, we’re going to have to follow them.”

Ring paused and then added: “But he’s very hard to follow.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A nearly indestructible bond

BY M ATT Z APOTOSKY, S ARI H ORWITZ AND R OBERT C OSTA

P

resident John F. Kennedy picked his younger brother to be attorney general.

President Trump might have picked the next closest thing.

Jeff Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump at a time when few Republican lawmakers supported the candidate. His early and fierce loyalty — and his ability to translate Trump’s nationalist instincts into policy — helped him forge a bond with the president, and he now enjoys access whenever he wants it, a privilege that few get, an official said.

Two of Sessions’s former Senate advisers — Stephen Miller and Rick Dearborn — hold key White House roles, and one official said Sessions still talks to them regularly. The attorney general also is friendly with Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and a powerful player in the administration who promoted Sessions for years on the Breitbart website.

On Thursday, not long before Sessions recused himself from any investigations related to the Trump campaign, the president proclaimed that he had “total” confidence in his attorney general. Later, Trump issued a statement calling Sessions “an honest man” who “did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional.”

Trump also derided the “whole narrative” as “a way of face saving for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win,” and he pointed — as he has in the past — to leaks of classified information as the “real story.”

“It is a total witch hunt!” Trump said.

The remarks — which came as pressure mounted for Sessions to step aside from any investigations of Trump associates and Russia, or to resign altogether — demonstrate the high standing Sessions has in Trump’s Cabinet and the critical role he will play in carrying out the president’s vision.

JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sessions is critical to carrying out Trump’s vision Already, the administration has moved swiftly to implement policies that correspond with the worldview shared by Trump and Sessions. In his inaugural address, Trump spoke of rising crime and vowed to end the “American carnage.” His attorney general, in his first speech, laid out how he plans to do that: a task force, a crackdown on drugs and an increased respect for police, who he suggested might see less aggressive scrutiny than they did under his predecessor. “I do not believe that this pop in crime — this increase in crime — is necessarily an aberration, a one-time blip,” Sessions told the National Association of Attorneys General.

On immigration, an issue that has consumed much of Sessions’s career, the ideological influence in Trump’s policies is vivid and clear, and his Justice Department will be tasked with implementing — and defending — the president’s plans.

In the Senate, Sessions was a crusader for a hard-line stance on immigration, arguing that even legal immigration to the United States should be moderated.

Trump has essentially implemented Sessions’s ideas by executive action — calling for the hiring of more Customs and Border Protection agents, expanding the pool of those who are prioritized for re-

moval, and temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

That last order has since been frozen by the courts, and Sessions’s Justice Department, which has forcefully defended it, has been involved in crafting a new one.

Sessions also has taken steps to undo the previous Justice Department’s policy toward transgender children, changed its position on a Texas voting rights law the department had been fighting for years and reversed the previous administration’s policy on the use of private prisons. His views on those topics match those of the president, who has cast himself a champion of private industry and alleged, without evidence, that massive voter fraud affected the election. During an internal White House debate over the transgender policy, Trump sided with Sessions over Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, according to the New York Times.

The attorney general holds a unique role in any presidential Cabinet — requiring the person in the job to implement the president’s policy goals on one hand, while faithfully enforcing laws on the other. Sessions is not the first attorney general to enjoy a close relationship with the president.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder

President Trump called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “an honest man” amid mounting pressure on Sessions over his undisclosed contact with a Russian ambassador.

Sessions on Thursday recused himself from any investigations related to the Trump campaign.

Jr., whose worldview was similar to President Barack Obama’s, enjoyed status as the former president’s favorite Cabinet member.

Sessions and Trump met in 2005, when Sessions invited him to Washington to testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing about his criticism of a U.N. project.

Sessions was taken with the billionaire developer and later said it was the best congressional testimony he had ever heard.

Two years ago, in June 2015, Trump and Sessions held a conference call on immigration policy.

After that, Trump began trying to persuade Sessions to endorse him for president, and by January 2016 Sessions had, in essence, lent his top aide, Miller, to the campaign.

In February of last year at a rally in Alabama, Trump told the crowd that Sessions supported him, and Sessions donned a red “Make America great again” hat as he praised Trump. Observers on the campaign trail noted how different the two seemed. But they bonded over their views on issues like immigration and law and order, with Trump’s view of those issues influenced by his father, Fred, and his early years in business in New York, and how he saw global competition threaten the U.S. economy. Miller, a former Sessions aide, is the author of many of Trump’s executive orders, and Dearborn, Sessions’s longtime chief of staff, works to turn Trump’s goals into law.

In Trump’s orbit, of course, support can evaporate in an instant.

Yet Sessions so far has largely weathered the storm. He confirmed Thursday that he met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a fact he had omitted at his Senate confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

Sessions said he would now recuse himself from any investigations having to do with the Trump campaign and insisted he had been talking with Justice Department ethics officials about doing so even before news broke of his meetings with Kislyak.

“I should not be involved investigating a campaign I had a role in,” Sessions said. n

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3 words expose a White House divide BY

G REG J AFFE

W

ith three words, President Trump exposed one of the biggest rifts inside his administration: the divide between the national security pragmatists and the ideologues pressing for more sweeping change.

Trump vowed on Tuesday that his administration is taking strong measures to protect the United States from “radical Islamic terrorism,” slowing his cadence to enunciate the words. The president was still speaking when Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, added an exclamation point to his remarks. “ ‘RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM!’ Any questions?” he tweeted.

The president’s remarks and Gorka’s tweet, which had been taken down by Wednesday morning, could be read as a direct rebuke of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security adviser. Less than a week earlier, McMaster told his staff in an “all hands” meeting that he did not like the broad label and preferred talking about specific adversaries, such as the Islamic State, according to officials who were in the meeting.

He said that groups such as the Islamic State, were “un-Islamic” and referred to them as “criminals” and “thugs.”

The disagreement is more than just rhetorical and sheds light on a significant divide in the White House between McMaster and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon leads the Strategic Initiatives Group, an internal White House think tank, and was also named by Trump to a position on the National Security Council, giving him a major role in the formulation of foreign policy. Gorka is one of his senior advisers, focusing on issues involving counterterrorism, immigration and refugees.

Bannon’s stark, nationalist convictions offer a contrast to the rest of Trump’s foreign policy team, which is dominated by generals, such as McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ERIC STEEN/U.S. ARMY

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ label has become a flash point have been strong advocates for an America engaged in the world through strong, multilateral alliances.

The differences are particularly sharp on Islam, where the views of Gorka and Bannon mark a fundamental departure from the approach that Republican and Democratic administrations have taken to counterterrorism and the Muslim world over the past 16 years.

Bannon has said that the United States is locked in a brutal and bloody civilizational conflict with a “new barbarity” that has its roots in radical Islam. McMaster, who led U.S. troops in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, has taken a different view, insisting that the primary drivers of jihadist terrorism are rooted in the collapse of governance, torture, and deep-seated sectarian and ethnic grievances.

“Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you’re working for the enemy,” he told his troops in Iraq when they were battling Islamic militants.

On Wednesday, Gorka defended the president’s use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” calling them the “clearest three words” of the president’s speech. “The enemy is radical Islamic terrorism,” Gorka said in an interview with NPR. “That has not changed, and it will not change.”

He also dismissed suggestions

that there was a rift inside the administration and insisted that McMaster’s words had been mischaracterized in news reports. He said that McMaster was referring specifically to the Islamic State when he said that the term “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful.

“We are talking about the broader threat,” Gorka said. McMaster’s remarks were first reported by the New York Times.

McMaster’s private remarks in the week leading up to Trump’s address were designed to help calm a staff that had been roiled and demoralized by the sudden resignation of his predecessor, retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn.

Flynn had misled the vice president about a phone call with the Russian ambassador.

In addition to talking about terrorism, McMaster also described Russia, China and North Korea as the three most pressing nation-state threats to the United States.

The public dispute, less than a week into McMaster’s tenure, highlights the perilous balancing act facing the general as he moves into the White House. Some of McMaster’s friends and former military officers have said that retiring from the military before taking the job as national security adviser would have provided him more leverage in internal debates.

“In a civilian capacity he has

From left to right above: Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the new national security adviser, and President Trump; Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president; and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist. McMaster has reportedly said he doesn’t like the broad label “radical Islamic terrorism,” which Trump has used in speeches, while Gorka and Bannon support using the term.

much more latitude to say, ‘In 48 hours, I am gone,’ ” said retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who served in the Clinton administration. “If he’s got to tell Bannon to shut the hell up in the next meeting, that’s easier to do as a civilian.”

McMaster is joining an NSC that has not yet been fully staffed and a Trump national security team that has yet to fill numerous positions. The absence of senior political appointees in those agencies could in the near term give Bannon and others in his group an outsize role in policy debates.

McMaster has a reputation for not holding back in disagreements with superiors. In the late 1990s, McMaster’s book “Dereliction of Duty” harshly criticized the military’s senior leadership during the Vietnam War for failing to tell President Lyndon B. Johnson that his strategy of gradual escalation could not work.

The debate over the exact nature of McMaster’s remarks suggests another challenge for the general. “He also shouldn’t let the president or other White House officials misrepresent his positions in public,” said a friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could talk frankly without compromising McMaster’s relationship with the White House. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

The ‘silent killer’ for firefighters

BY P ETER H ERMANN AND L YNH B UI

I

n 2012, Lt. Preston L. Williams Jr. recounted the day he was first diagnosed with the cancer that was slowly killing him.

It seemed to be “the longest day of my life,” when “time stood still,” the firefighter said in advocating for new health and retirement benefits he wouldn’t live to see.

Over a five-year period, Williams was diagnosed three times with prostate cancer. He said he believed he was sickened by the fumes and chemicals that leached into his skin and seeped into his lungs during his more than 20 years battling fires.

He died in February 2016, only months before the city where he worked — Washington, D.C. — joined a growing number of jurisdictions stating that because certain cancers in firefighters occur at such high rates, they should be presumed to come from on-thejob exposure.

Laws in nearly 40 states, have expanded medical, workers’ compensation and disability coverage for such cancer cases, and departments across the country are revamping training and how they handle gear to try to reduce risks.

“This is the hidden hazard and the silent killer in the fire service,” said Matthew Miller, a Maryland firefighter and cancer survivor who is developing cancer-prevention and safety reforms for his county. “We’re seeing just how bad the problem is.”

Last month, a bill to create a national registry of firefighters diagnosed with cancer was introduced in Congress with bipartisan support to help track and research the issue. In January, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed into law a measure extending firefighters’ coverage for workplace cancers.

And in October, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation added names of firefighters who died of cancer to its memorial honoring line-of-duty deaths for the first time since the foundation’s creation in 1992, with 24 cancer deaths among the 112 deaths in 2015.

KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Higher cancer rates lead to new safety programs and benefits, but costs are concerning to some Yet with awareness comes anxiety from municipal governments, which are concerned about setting a precedent for other public employees and triggering spiraling costs.

The National Council on Compensation Insurance, which tracks workers’ comp proposals and legislation nationally, counted almost 90 first-responder cancer presumption bills in 2016. That number was already at 70 in the first six weeks of 2017.

Protracted legal battles have been fought to establish the workplace links to a cancer or expand the cancers covered as occupational hazards. Last month, the Washington state Supreme Court sided with two firefighters whose insurance claims about melanoma had been denied.

Cancer studies in emergency responders began in earnest after the Ground Zero cleanup after the 9/11 attacks in New York.

In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the final results of what is the largest study of cancer risk among career firefighters ever conducted

in the United States. The study of about 30,000 firefighters over a 60-year span showed that compared with the general population, firefighters on average are at higher risk for certain kinds of cancer — mainly oral, digestive, respiratory, genital and urinary cancers.

The CDC also found that firefighters who were exposed to more fires than their peers experienced more instances of lung cancer and leukemia, said Robert Daniels, the principal investigator of the project and a research epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The risks come on many fronts, research has indicated.

Fires carry soot and smoke from high-toxin synthetic material and electronics. Exhaust fumes from diesel fire engines present a hazard. The gear that insulates firefighters from heat and flames also raises body temperatures, opening pores to absorb chemicals.

Concerned with the results of the CDC study — and similar research coming out of Norway and

Preston L. Williams, a lieutenant with the D.C. fire department, personalized his helmet to include blue ribbons to promote prostate cancer awareness.

Williams pushed to strengthen protections for firefighters with cancer before he died of prostate cancer last year.

Australia — fire departments and firefighters unions nationwide revamped safety policies, such as washing jackets, helmets and pants after every call.

At the same 2012 hearing where Williams asked that benefits be expanded, a city official warned about costs and untangling whether lifestyle or family history might have determined a firefighter’s path to cancer. It was the kind of standoff repeated across the country since.

Paul Quander, then the deputy mayor for public safety, also testified that many firefighters have second jobs, some at rural fire departments that might not practice the same standards for decontamination.

“We’re going to be responsible for future health-care costs that might not be due to working for the District of Columbia,” Quander said.

Local governments often are “vocal opponents because it is a cost issue” and “they have to be financially solvent,” said Peter Burton of the National Council on Compensation Insurance, who added that the cancer presumption laws are among the top issues his organization has been monitoring since 2016.

Municipalities fear funding individuals who may have developed cancer regardless of whether they were firefighters, according to a report produced for the National League of Cities in 2009.

Across the country, firefighters suffering from cancer and their families have engaged in legal fights with local governments questioning who should be on the hook financially. In Philadelphia, a three-judge panel in October determined a retired firefighter could not claim workers’ comp benefits for his prostate cancer because he could not prove that he got sick from exposure on the job.

Katrina Williams still has the dingy white helmet her husband wore, adorned with two small blue ribbons for prostate cancer awareness and covered with soot from his final fire.

“We have to pay a debt,” Katrina Williams said, “to the people who save our lives.” n

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NATION

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Ready to buy, but priced out BY

K ATHY O RTON

F

or years, millennials looked at owning a home as a distant fantasy. Student debt and a weak job market seemed to conspire to keep this generation stuck in their parents’ basements, if not permanently locked out of the housing market.

But as millennials find betterpaying jobs, start families and begin searching for their first homes, they’re encountering an unfortunate reality: Just as they’re finally ready to buy, the housing market has the fewest homes available for sale on record. And those that are for sale are increasingly priced at values inaccessible to first-time buyers.

As a result, the housing market is booming for those with cash to spare — but not for millennials looking to own their first home.

Keona and Cameron Morrison, both 31 and with a combined income of $150,000, have been looking to buy in Los Angeles for two years.

“There’s stuff that comes [on the market]; literally, a couple days later, it’s pending,” Keona said. “It’s crazy.”

Teree Warren, a 31-year-old forensic scientist, isn’t faring much better in Dallas-Fort Worth.

“The houses go so quickly,” she said.

Overall, millennials are falling behind other generations in homeownership, with first-time home buyers, who usually consist of 40 percent of the market, stuck at 34 percent.

That could become damaging to this generation’s future prosperity. Housing experts say homeownership remains one of the primary ways for the middle class to build wealth, despite the ups and downs of the past decade.

And with mortgage rates beginning to creep up, millennials who have to wait to buy could miss out on historically low rates.

“Owning a home for a longer period of time creates more wealth,” said Christopher E. Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing

LUKE SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The number of homes for sale nationally in December fell to its lowest level since 1999.

The housing market is booming for those with cash to spare — but not for millennials Studies. “If you shrink that amount of time, you’re going to shrink how much wealth it creates.”

For Keona Morrison, the challenge of finding a home feels deeply personal.

“I feel like if there were more African Americans owning homes, we could set our children up for greater success,” she said.

“It’s all about having that leverage. . . . I guess what homeownership means to me is just having your own place, having something you can fall back on.”

For years after the recession, most millennials couldn’t afford to even consider entering the housing market. Many were saddled with student debt, and the labor market wasn’t friendly even to young college grads, contributing to the stereotypical image of the barista with a bachelor’s degree.

But as the economy has improved, so have millennials’ fortunes. The most recent employment data shows that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds in the

labor force is the largest in eight years. This group has also recently begun to enjoy stark wage gains.

Recent census data showed that in 2015, millennials’ incomes jumped 7 percent, far more than most other groups’. Seventy-two percent of millennials rate their personal financial situation as fairly good or very good in 2016, up substantially from three years earlier, according to a recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll.

In a stronger financial position, more millennials are starting families. The census projects that household formation will average about 1.5 million per year through 2020, up from the 900,000 annual average in the past five years.

But when looking to leverage some of their newfound financial strength to buy a home for themselves or their new families, millennials are finding a less optimistic picture.

The National Association of Realtors reported in December that the number of homes for sale nationally had fallen to its lowest

BY THE NUMBERS

34 percent

The proportion of firsttime home buyers in the market; the normal rate has been 40 percent.

7 percent Increase in millennials’ incomes in 2015, far more than most other groups’, according to recent census data.

level since the organization began keeping track of inventory in 1999. Inventory picked up slightly in January, but the year-over-year number of listings has dropped for 20 consecutive months.

At the current sales pace, the supply of homes would be exhausted in 3½ months. (A healthy market has about a six-month supply of homes for sale.)

Entry-level housing, the homes millennials can most afford, has been particularly scarce. In the Dallas area, where Warren is looking to buy, barely a one-month supply of those homes are for sale.

Warren said a friend of hers listed his house on a Thursday at 10 a.m. By noon, he had six appointments. By the end of the day, he had 10. His house sold on Sunday for far more than the asking price.

“It is very nerve-racking, the pressure that you have to make a decision very quickly,” Warren said.

Competition is the biggest factor driving up prices. The Morrisons have lost out on two homes, getting outbid by $10,000 each time. Now they are waiting to hear on a triplex three miles east of Inglewood, Calif.

“This last one my husband offered $10,000 over asking, and I was like, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” Keona said. “He’s like, ‘We lost out on the other two by offering asking.’ ” Some experts have suggested in recent years that millennials may not want to own homes. But surveys have consistently disproved that notion.

As bleak as homebuying prospects may seem for millennials, Harvard’s Herbert offers an optimistic perspective. Baby boomers who came of age in the early 1980s similarly faced a negative climate because of a double-dip recession and double-digit mortgage rates.

But then homeownership rates and housing prices boomed in the 1990s.

“That group started out on a slower trajectory, then caught up,” he said. “When you’re young, you have some time to make up for a slower start, depending on what happens with the broader economy.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Duterte’s ‘drug war’ targets children E MILY R AUHALA in Manila BY

O

nce, when Rodrigo Duterte got to talking about his anti-drug campaign, he mused about murdering his children. If his son used drugs, he said in April, he would kill him himself.

But seven months and about 7,000 deaths into his selfproclaimed “drug war,” the Philippine president’s children are alive and well. The same cannot be said for thousands of Filipino children and youths.

Duterte’s war on drugs is quickly morphing into a campaign against disadvantaged kids. Since he came to power last July promising to “kill all” of the country’s criminals, some of the Philippines’ youngest and most vulnerable citizens have literally been caught in the crossfire, with children as young as 4 and 5 shot dead.

Thousands of others have lost a parent, often the family breadwinner, to the violence, and even more have witnessed the macabre spectacle of a state-backed killing spree, surviving shootings by hiding, or peering at mutilated bodies dumped into ditches where children play hide-and-seek.

Now Duterte and his political allies are backing a bill that would lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 9, giving a police force known for violent impunity more room to target “suspects” who still have baby teeth.

Duterte pitched the move as a way to stop a “generation of criminals” in its tracks. School-age thieves and drug runners must be “taught responsibility,” he said.

The draft bill alludes to the “pampering” of young offenders.

Human rights groups and advocates for child welfare counter that the lives of children living at the margins of the drug trade are anything but pampered. Taking aim at 9-, 11- or 13-year-olds, they say, is both cruel and counterproductive.

“The war on drugs has been violent — torture, summary executions and extrajudicial killings have been used to eradicate sus-

JES AZNAR/GETTY IMAGES

The Philippine president backs a bill to broaden his crackdown to include those as young as 9 pected drug users,” said Rowena Legaspi, executive director of the Children’s Legal Rights and Development Center, which is documenting drug-war killings.

The bill is an effort to broaden the campaign, she said, “criminalizing” minors and “legitimizing” state-led violence against children.

Duterte pitched his call to “massacre” drug suspects as a means to protect future generations, but he seems to see the death of young people as a means to this end.

In August, a 5-year-old girl named Danica May Garcia was fatally shot by unknown assailants who had come for her grandfather, a drug suspect.

Not long after, a 4-year-old was inadvertently shot in a “buy-bust” operation, caught between her drug-suspect father and the police.

Both cases generated a public outcry, but no change of policy came from the president or his team.

Asked about their deaths in an October interview with Al Jazeera, Duterte said the dead children were “collateral damage” in his

campaign. “We have three million drug addicts and it’s growing. So if we do not interdict this problem, the next generation will be having a serious problem,” he said.

“In my country, there is no law that says I cannot threaten criminals,” he added. “I do not care what the human rights guys say. I have a duty to preserve the generation. If it involves human rights, I don’t give a s---. I have to strike fear.”

For many children and teens, fear is now constant. Minors living with or near adults suspected of involvement in the drug trade are direct victims of the violence — and also witnesses to what many consider state-endorsed crimes.

In late December, a slight, softspoken 18-year-old who now goes by “Ryan” went to his girlfriend’s house to see whether her brother could fix his bike. Ryan, who has been working since he was 12, needed to ride it to work, he said.

While he was inside, four men approached on motorcycles, dismounted and opened fire on the ramshackle home, killing seven people, including three teenagers.

Relatives and friends grieve at the funeral of 16-year-old Sonny Espinosa in Caloocan City, Philippines, on Jan. 8. Young children have been killed in the crossfire of the war on drugs, and thousands of others have lost a parent to the violence.

Ryan was shot through the right hip but survived. As the only living witness to a “drug-related” massacre, he fears he will be taken out by masked assassins or their allies among the local police.

He now lives in sanctuary at a church in central Manila. “It’s the only place that’s safe,” he said.

Poor children will suffer most if the new crime bill passes, experts said.

The vast majority of drug killings target low-level users and dealers living in congested urban areas. As a recent report by Amnesty International put it, it is less of a drug war than it is a “war on the poor.”

Many of the 7,000 dead worked in the country’s gray economy, driving pedicabs, for instance, or selling food; some were sole breadwinners. Families in Manila’s slums struggle to come up with school fees or buy enough food, let alone pay funeral expenses. The killings perpetuate the cycle of poverty that sucks children and youths into the drug trade, child advocates said.

One veteran child-rights worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that the police would target her work, said some of Manila’s most marginalized children, including orphans and those living in the streets, were being picked up by police officers who needed “numbers” for their anti-drug operations.

Young people are being detained “for having a tattoo or for looking thin, like a drug user,” she said. They are often thrown into jails packed with adults and expected to fend for themselves.

Legaspi of the Children’s Legal Rights and Development Center said the overcrowded, underfunded system is ill-equipped to protect and rehabilitate minors. “Yes, there are children used by syndicates to commit crimes, but we point out that these children are victims,” she said.

“Children should not be punished by putting them in jail at [an] early age,” she added. “Then they will live in a culture of criminality. Young children will mix with adults or with 17-year-olds who committed murder.” n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Keeping a focus on Iranian relations BY

C AROL M ORELLO

F

ew people have watched the deteriorating relations between Iran and the United States with as much concern as Babak Namazi.

The stakes are intensely personal. His elderly father and his younger brother, both U.S. citizens, are imprisoned in Iran after being convicted of espionage and collaborating with the U.S. government. They had an appeals hearing Wednesday, but there is little hope the verdict will be overturned.

The Obama administration had pushed Iran to free Siamak and Baquer Namazi, and other Americans detained or missing in Iran, until talks collapsed in President Barack Obama’s final days in office. Since then, there has been no contact between Washington and Tehran, according to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

So Babak Namazi went to Washington last week to urge the Trump administration to restart efforts to gain his family members’ freedom after more than a year in custody.

“I was hopeful it would have been resolved ages ago,” said Namazi in an interview before he met Tuesday with a senior official from the National Security Council. “With a new administration in place, we hope it draws the attention we need. My father is running out of time. When he talks to my mom, he complains that he’s dizzy.

And he says something he’s never said before: ‘Pray for me.’ ” When President Trump took office, he inherited responsibility for the fates of Americans taken hostage or held for questionable reasons in foreign prisons.

At least six Americans are in the hands of militants, including a Pennsylvania woman, her Canadian husband and their two children born in captivity after their kidnapping near the AfghanistanPakistan border. At least four U.S. citizens with dual nationality and two green-card holders are behind bars in Iran, and a former FBI agent who disappeared there a decade ago may still be alive.

VAHID SALEMI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Worries mount for families of Americans held by Tehran and by militant groups around the globe The total number of American hostages is a tightly guarded secret. In 2015, when policy changed to not seek prosecution of Americans who negotiate ransoms for loved ones held abroad, Obama put the number at more than 30.

Efforts to bring hostages home continue through the work of career employees in the FBI’s Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell and the office of the Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs in the State Department, both created in 2015.

“The communication with us is as strong as it has been,” said Debra Tice, who recently spoke with homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert about her son.

Austin Tice was kidnapped while reporting in Syria in 2012 and is believed to be alive. “A lot of our team remains and was unaffected by the [presidential] transition.”

The change in administrations has created two voids, however.

When he was secretary of state, John F. Kerry pushed for prisoner releases during his regular conversations with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif

to discuss the Iran nuclear deal.

No one from the Trump administration has the same relationship.

And the hostage envoy position has not been filled since James O’Brien resigned on Jan. 20. A deputy is filling in, and it is not clear whether the job will be filled or have the same mandate to find new approaches to negotiations.

“My thesis in the job was that getting Americans home is right and shows that our government is effective, because it changes the behavior of people on the other side even before other, difficult parts of our relationship are addressed,” O’Brien said. “I hope that’s the same approach that the administration is using now.”

The White House insists it is fully engaged in the effort, even with Tehran.

“The Trump administration is truly, unwaveringly committed to the return of all U.S. citizens held in captivity in Iran, or anywhere in world,” said an official with the National Security Council, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the

Iranians march on a portrait of President Trump in an annual commemoration of the 1979 Islamic revolution on Feb. 10. Trump has inherited responsibility for the Americans held in foreign prisons, including IranianAmerican businessman Siamak Namazi, shown above in 2006, who has been convicted of espionage in Iran.

White House. “Specifically, the Iranian cases continue to be a high priority for the U.S. government.”

The Americans imprisoned in Iran have all been accused of spying for the United States. It is widely believed that the charges are baseless and that the prisoners are pawns for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Recently, the deputy head of the corps bragged that the United States had paid ransom to free Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian a year ago, a payment U.S. officials insisted was an out-ofcourt settlement of an old lawsuit.

But the boast suggests the powerful group is angling for a deal.

For the families, a way out cannot come soon enough.

Fatemeh Shahini, a San Diego woman whose brother, Robin, was convicted of espionage last year, said he is on a hunger strike that has caused him to lose 40 pounds and be beaten by prison guards.

Babak Namazi worries about the health of his 80-year-old father, Baquer, who has had triple bypass heart surgery. He was recently hospitalized in Iran, suggesting his captors do not want him to die on their watch.

“Siamak is under relentless pressure,” Babak Namazi said of his brother. “Interrogations have continued, even after his conviction, to the point he is despondent and has no hope.”

His attorney, Jared Genser, of Freedom Now, said a senior Iranian official vowed to Kerry that the Namazis would be released “soon” after Rezaian and four other U.S. citizens were freed in 2016.

“High-level discussions between both sides included detailed requests of what each might need,” Genser said. “But ultimately, the differences from the Iranian side far exceeded what the U.S. government would ever be capable of delivering.”

Now, their hopes lie in Trump, despite his sometimes bellicose attitude toward Iran and the nuclear deal. They quoted a Trump tweet two weeks before the election, in reaction to the Namazis being sentenced: “This doesn’t happen if I’m president.” n

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13

COVER STORY

The most dangerous PEACE OPERATION Under attack by terrorists in Mali, the U.N. debates its role going forward

S BY

K EVIN S IEFF | in Gao, Mali

ince World War II, U.N. peacekeepers have been dispatched to 69 conflicts — civil wars, border disputes and failed states. But now they are confronting an unsettling new threat: al-Qaeda.

Here in the vast, lawless desert of northwest Africa, their convoys are being torn apart by improvised explosive devices and their compounds blasted by 1,000-pound car bombs. It is a crisis that looks more like the U.S. ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than the cease-fires traditionally monitored by U.N. missions.

In the past four years, 118 peacekeepers have been killed — making the U.N. mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, the world body’s deadliest ongoing peace operation. The bloodshed has raised questions about how an institution developed in the 1940s can serve a world under threat from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

The issue is especially potent given the expectation that U.N. peacekeepers will eventually go to places such as Syria and Libya.

“We are trying to learn these lessons here, rather than in Iraq, Libya or Syria,” said Dutch Col. Mike Kerkhove, commander of the U.N. intelligence unit in Mali. “This is not the end of continues on next page

Children play in a courtyard in Timbuktu, Mali, in January. In the past four years, 118 peacekeepers have been killed in Mali.

JANE HAHN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY from previous page

PHOTOS BY JANE HAHN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: Members of former rebel groups wait to be registered at a police station in Gao, Mali, so they can participate with the Malian military in joint patrols as part of a peace agreement.

U.N. peacekeepers arrived in 2013 to enforce the agreement and train the local military. ABOVE: Women buy fresh produce at the market in Gao. Islamist radicals still threaten the nation.

this type of mission. It’s the beginning.”

In 2012, Islamist radicals linked to al-Qaeda hijacked an uprising by ethnic Tuareg people and went on to seize cities across northern Mali, holding on for nearly a year until they were forced out by a French military intervention. When 11,000 U.N. troops arrived in 2013, they were meant to protect a fledgling peace deal and train the Malian army. But Islamist extremists regrouped across the region. It did not take long before the militants started targeting peacekeepers, whom they dubbed “Crusader occupation forces.”

The United Nations was remarkably unprepared for the threat. Most of its troops from Africa and South Asia brought tanks and vehicles that were easy targets for explosives, unlike U.S. mineresistant vehicles. The U.N. compounds, dotted with metal storage containers turned into offices and bedrooms, had flimsy perimeter security and were vulnerable to the massive car bombs used by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the regional affiliate of the extremist group. For a while, U.N. forces didn’t have a single attack helicopter.

“We weren’t ready for these challenges,” said Mohamed El-Amine Souef, a native of the Comoros Islands who is the top U.N. official in Gao, a city in northern Mali. Last year, Souef’s compound was struck by a suicide bomber, the shrapnel battering his front door.

But the United Nations’ dilemma goes beyond a lack of preparation or anti-terrorism equipment. At its New York headquarters and around the world, diplomats are debating: Should U.N. forces be engaged in counterterrorism at all?

“It’s time for us to realize that this kind of front-line role is central to the future of the United Nations,” said Peter Yeo, a senior official at the U.N. Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that supports the goals of the world body.

Yeo and others argue that without a counterterrorism capability, U.N. peacekeepers can’t operate productively in many of the world’s war zones.

But critics say that such a role would violate the peacekeepers’ core principle of impartiality and ultimately make them less effective.

“Peacekeepers are only meant to use deadly force to protect civilians or to stop spoilers from threatening a peace process, not to pursue any group’s military defeat,” said Aditi Gorur, director of the Protecting Civilians in Conflict program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research center.

If peacekeepers had a more aggressive counterterrorism mandate, she and others argue, that could hurt the United Nations’ ability to mediate between warring groups, which sometimes include violent Islamists.

Already in Mali, the International Committee of the Red Cross has described the United Nations as a “party to the conflict.”

I

n the slide-show presentation he shows to visitors at his base in Bamako, the capital of Mali, Kerkhove, the intelligence unit commander, includes an aerial photo taken last year of a compound that appeared to be used by a terrorist

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017

15

COVER STORY group. When he received the photo, Kerkhove debated what to do.

The men inside might be planning an assault on U.N. personnel, he thought, or a strike against civilians. Over the past two years, extremist groups have used Mali as a staging ground for attacks on luxury hotels, beach resorts and restaurants in West Africa. In 2016, al-Qaeda and its allies and affiliates launched at least 257 attacks in the region, according to the Long War Journal. But Kerkhove knew that the nearest battalion of U.N. troops, from Senegal, didn’t have the weapons or air support to engage in a fight with transnational terrorists. Ultimately, U.N. forces decided not to approach the compound.

The Mali mission is the only one of the 16 active U.N. peacekeeping operations that authorizes troops to deter and counter “asymmetric threats” — that is, terrorist groups — that could harm its work or civilians. Last year, the U.N. Security Council said the mission should become “more proactive and robust” — language that some read as encouraging more offensive operations.

“We need to be able to hit the terrorists where they are, before they hit us,” said Souef, the U.N. official in Gao. But peacekeepers worry that they don’t have the tools to deal with armed extremists.

“We are gathering the intelligence, but we lack the forces who can act on that information,” said Swedish Lt. Col. Per Wilson.

Richard Gowan, an expert on U.N. peacekeeping at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, said that U.N. missions lack the resources and doctrine for counterterrorism work.

He noted that even well-equipped Western military forces were outmaneuvered by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It is reasonable to ask why on earth the Security Council thinks that a U.N. force can do any better in Mali, even with European reinforcements,” he said.

Over the years, the United Nations has increasingly had to confront the scourge of terrorism.

Militants blew up its political assistance office in Baghdad in 2003, killing 22 people, including the U.N. envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

But the Mali mission marks the first time a significant peacekeeping contingent has been sent to help a state regain control over areas contested by terrorist groups.

In a review in 2015, a panel of U.N.appointed experts said that peacekeeping forces were “not the appropriate tool for military counterterrorism operations.” But it noted they do deploy in areas threatened by armed extremist groups “and must be capable of operating effectively and as safely as possible therein.”

On their patrols through the sandy side streets of Gao, an ancient city along the Niger River lined with mud-brick houses, U.N. convoys are greeted by throngs of residents.

The locals always have the same complaint, said Senegalese Capt. Diagne Meth, standing outside his armored personnel carrier during one patrol: “They want us to do more.”

Specifically, he said, they ask for more offensive operations, targeting radical Islamists as well as

KLMNO WEEKLY

A dangerous mission Since 2013, 118 peacekeepers have been killed in Mali, making it the deadliest ever U.N. mission. The country is plagued by several groups linked to al-Qaeda.

Deaths in terrorist attacks since 2013

U.N. peacekeeper 438 fatalities All U.N. since 2013 missions

S

A

H

40 25

A A R

10

118 Mission in Mali

109 6

ALGERIA

MALI

Kidal

250 MILES

Timbuktu MAURITANIA

SEN.

Gao

NIGER

Djenne

Bamako

BURKINA FASO

Detail

GUINEA

Sources: IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center, United Nations

criminal groups.

“But I have to tell them, ‘That’s not what we’re here to do,’ ” Meth said.

A

lready, the United Nations has tried to adapt in Mali. It has a fleet of surveillance drones.

It has the first U.N. intelligence cell, a Bamako-based unit with analysts spread across the country. It has counter-IED specialists. It also has thousands of European troops, including large contingents from Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, with soldiers experienced in fighting in Afghanistan.

Other U.N. missions have evolved in recognition of new threats. In Congo in 2013, for example, the United Nations launched its first brigade designed for offensive operations.

But the terrorism threat in Mali sets it apart.

“Sending out a patrol might work to deter an armed group in the Congo from engaging in violence, but it has the opposite effect in Mali, where terrorists are specifically trying to target peacekeepers,” said Gorur, of the Stimson Center.

More than a year and a half ago, Mali’s government signed a peace deal with separatist rebels in the north from the Tuareg and Arab communities.

Authorities hoped the radical Islamists who had once aligned themselves with the local rebels — and later fallen out — had been driven away. But

TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POST

today, the terrorists appear stronger than ever.

The French military continues to conduct its own counterterrorism mission across northwest Africa, including in Mali. The United Nations shares information with the French if it is deemed useful for protecting the lives of troops.

O

n Jan. 18, Islamist extremists drove a truck laden with explosives into a compound in Gao where the United Nations was protecting Malian forces. Seventy-six men — from national forces and armed groups that had joined the peace process — lost their lives in the blast. (No peacekeepers were killed.) The attack was claimed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which said it involved one of its allies, al-Mourabitoun.

The explosion was staggering, but so was the lack of security at an installation ostensibly protected by peacekeepers. Three days before the attack, a visiting Washington Post reporter saw only a few Bangladeshi peacekeepers sitting inside a personnel carrier outside the compound. Terrorist groups had already struck U.N. facilities in the city several times, but the base was protected by only a flimsy metal gate.

Souef, the U.N. official, acknowledged that his compound in the city was vulnerable.

“We shouldn’t be living in a place like this,” he said. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

SCIENCE

Help wanted finding the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ R. HURT/CALTECH

Astronomers are turning to crowdsourcing to search for the hypothetical world BY

J OEL A CHENBACH

T

he hunt for “Planet Nine” is intensifying, and anyone can join in. You’ll need a computer with an Internet connection, plenty of patience, and the determination to hunt for something that would be very dim and might not actually exist.

Planet Nine is the hypothetical planet beyond Pluto that astronomers have been buzzing about for a couple of years. If it’s there, it’s probably big — larger than Earth, perhaps a “mini-Neptune.”

A new initiative by NASA and the University of California at Berkeley, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, is crowdsourcing the hunt for Planet Nine. It will use archived observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which scanned the skies for asteroids and other faint objects. It’s possible that Planet Nine — or perhaps a “brown dwarf” star or two — is lurking in its speckled images of space.

This planet could be 500 times as far from the sun as Earth is, but it would still be part of our solar system, with a highly elliptical orbit that never takes it anywhere close to the sun. Planet Nine should not be confused with the many “exoplanets” discovered orbiting distant stars. (Nor is it the planet known as Nibiru, which exists only in the imagination of people peddling pseudoscience and apocalyptic narratives about

worlds in collision.)

The mystery planet’s existence is inferred from the orbits of many smaller bodies in the outer solar system. They orbit the sun and cluster in a manner that suggests the possible gravitational influence of an unseen, large planet.

The evidence for its existence has been getting stronger, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown told The Washington Post.

“I’m just going to tell you: It’s there,” Brown said.

Not everyone is persuaded.

“The evidence is very intriguing, but I don’t think I can put a high likelihood on it yet,” said Renu Malhotra, a University of Arizona professor of planetary science. “I see the evidence as being quite soft, still.”

Even the name is iffy. Planet Nine? Planet X? Planet 10? It’s confusing. There used to be nine officially recognized planets in our solar system — the ninth being little Pluto, discovered in 1930. But after Brown and other astronomers began discovering small planetlike objects in the outer solar system, a debate erupted over the definition of a “planet.” In 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was a member of a class of objects to be known as “dwarf planets.”

Astronomers kept discovering these distant objects in the remote Zip codes of the solar system, in what is known as the Kuiper belt.

And then a pattern seemed to reveal itself.

In 2014, astronomers Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii published a paper suggesting that there may be a massive “perturber” in the outer solar system that affects the orbits of smaller objects. Sheppard and Trujillo said those smaller objects orbit the sun at an angle as if avoiding the hidden, larger planet. “It would resemble a giant frozen snowball,” Sheppard told The Washington Post in 2015.

Brown set out to debunk Sheppard and Trujillo’s conjecture, but he wound up providing supporting evidence. Last year, Brown and Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin published a paper in the Astronomical Journal that offered a possible orbit for the hidden planet, which a news release from Caltech referred to as “Planet Nine.”

Brown said last week that additional observations of distant, small objects and ensuing calculations and modeling suggest that Planet Nine is roughly eight times as massive as Earth and slightly closer to the sun than previously thought. He said it is probably the core of a giant planet that was ejected from the inner solar system long ago. He said it’s likely to have an atmosphere, which would make it broader, warmer and easier to detect. If it’s a dense, rocky planet, it’ll be smaller, colder, darker and harder to find.

Sheppard said he has also be-

A new initiative by NASA and the University of California at Berkeley is getting the public to help hunt for Planet Nine, an artist’s impression of which is seen above. The initiative will use archived observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, in the hope that someone can spot the planet in the images.

come more optimistic about the existence of the planet.

“We still see a clustering trend.

That brings me to about 90 percent sure that this planet exists beyond Pluto,” he told The Post this week. “I don’t think there’s a credible alternative hypothesis right now.”

He doesn’t call it Planet Nine, though. Nor Planet X — which, historically, is what astronomers called a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune before the discovery of Pluto.

“I like to call this Planet Y, because it’s beyond Planet X,” Sheppard said.

Malhotra points out that this hypothesis is based on relatively few observations — that this is still in the “regime of small numbers.”

But she says there’s another possibility that emerges from the way the ecliptic — the plane in which the plants orbit the sun — gets warped in the farther reaches of the solar system. That could be a sign that there’s yet another planet, maybe the size of Earth, that’s not as far away as the hypothesized Planet Nine, Malhotra said.

So why wouldn’t we have seen it? “It could be hiding in the galaxy,” Malhotra said. She means the Milky Way. Finding a dim, icy planet against the thick river of bright stars is a challenge. “There are parts of the sky that our surveys haven’t covered well,” she said.

So apparently the universe isn’t about to run out of surprises. n

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17

HEALTH

KLMNO WEEKLY

For women, a pattern of addiction BY

C AREN L ISSNER

L

ast year, American novelist Joyce Maynard faced a harsh realization: Her habit of reaching for a glass of wine whenever she felt stressed had crossed the line into an addiction.

“It kind of crept up on me,” said Maynard, 63, whose novel about a single mother with a wine dependence, “Under the Influence,” came out in paperback in November.

“The way I was drinking is the way a lot of women drink and don’t see it as any kind of problem. And for a lot of them, it may not be a problem. It wasn’t the quantity; it was the space wine occupied in my life.

I could tell it was occupying an unhealthy one. I was using it increasingly as a comfort and a reliever of stress. I would say, ‘I’m not going to drink,’ and then I would.”

Maynard is part of an increasing cohort of women who have been drinking (or abusing) alcohol more than women did only a few decades ago, and in patterns increasingly similar to men’s.

Health officials are watching the situation with concern, and some addiction specialists are making comparisons to other dependencies to which women may be more vulnerable, such as food addictions.

Recent research makes the pattern with women and alcohol clear. Analyzing 68 alcohol-use studies from around the world dating to the mid-1900s, Australian researchers found a remarkably steady “gender convergence.”

Their review and analysis, published in October, showed that men born in the early 20th century were more than twice as likely as women to drink and three times as likely to have an alcohol problem — but for those born closer to the end of the century, those ratios were 1.1 and 1.2 to 1, respectively.

In other words, the difference between male and female drinking had all but disappeared.

The study reinforced earlier, smaller studies, including one in September 2015 that used data from the National Survey on Drug

PIERRE MORNET FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Use and Health to demonstrate how the U.S. gender gap in drinking had narrowed from 2002 to 2012.

The authors of these studies don’t explain why this is happening. But clinicians and other professionals have opinions.

“It’s presumably [caused by] all the factors associated with women having a different culture than they did 100 years ago,” George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said in an interview.

“Instead of being at home, they’re in society, and drinking is part of business and social gatherings.

Another issue that’s relevant, there has been a decline in underage drinking in men that is not happening with women.”

He added that “women report depression and anxiety twice as much as men, and . . . depression and anxiety are often comorbid with addictions.” Furthermore, among women who drink, “alcohol use tends to escalate more quickly than with men” — what doctors call a “telescoping effect.”

The main problem with women drinking like men is that they

don’t have the same physiology as men. Women are more susceptible to alcohol’s effects, largely because they have lower body mass, and in particular less water to disperse the alcohol through their bodies.

In the short term, alcohol is quicker to affect women’s ability to function. Long term, women who drink are more likely than men who drink to develop breast cancer, alcoholic hepatitis and certain heart problems.

Food addiction, in contrast, can lead to weight gain and its welldocumented health effects, including higher risks of diabetes and heart disease. Food addiction is still an emerging field of research, but the relatively few studies so far that sort data by gender show that women appear to be more vulnerable here, too. Of the 652 adults who participated in a 2013 Canadian study, more than twice as many women as men met the Yale Food Addiction Scale criteria for food addiction. And a 2016 U.S. study designed to test an update of the Yale Scale found that “gender was significantly associated with addictive-like eating symptoms with women, on aver-

“It stops being about how much you like it. . . .

You start to feel you can’t control it.”

Ashley Gearhardt, the lead developer of the Yale Food Addiction Scale

age, reporting a higher number of symptoms” than men.

Ashley Gearhardt, the lead developer of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, noted that women might be more vulnerable to addictive eating patterns because of “so many pressures” in their lives — “pressures in the workplace, pressures regarding child care.”

And there are other social pressures. “Women, more than men, are held to unattainable beauty ideals against the backdrop of a toxic food environment,” she said.

“This can increase the likelihood that women will bounce back and forth between the extremes of intense dietary restriction and binge eating.”

No matter where stresses come from, experts agree that they can push a merely unhealthy food or drinking habit into an addiction.

But how does one tell when a fondness for a snack or nightly cocktail starts becoming an issue?

“It stops being about how much you like it,” Gearhardt said. “People say, ‘I don’t even like it anymore. I want it or crave it.’ You start to feel you can’t control it.”

Recently, scientists have been fine-tuning the diagnostic tools for what constitutes a substanceuse problem, making it easier for people to recognize when their ritual becomes risk.

Notably, when the American Psychiatric Association updated the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, it changed the way it categorized drug and alcohol issues: Instead of dividing them into two categories — abuse and dependence — the new DSM-5 established a spectrum of “substance use disorders,” based on 11 questions about symptoms.

“One of the really good things about the DSM-5,” Koob said, “is that it emphasizes that you don’t have to be what we used to call an ‘alcoholic’ to have a problem. Now you can try to seek out a counselor, seek out a family physician, seek out a religious person in your community so that problems with alcohol can be stopped before they progress. . . . Alcohol use disorders pervade our society.” n

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BOOKS

To rewrite history, Nazis destroyed books N ONFICTION

I THE BOOK THIEVES The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

By Anders Rydell Translated by Henning Koch Viking. 352 pp. $28.

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S . R OTH

opened “The Book Thieves” with a fair amount of skepticism. There are by now many thousands of studies of how the Nazi regime developed its merciless machine of human destruction. We know about Nazi scientists and artists, about censorship and misinformation, about the looting of museums and private collections, and about the many ways the totalitarian German state attempted to remake the cultural landscape of Europe.

As I began reading Anders Rydell’s account of the Nazis’ concerted effort to destroy book collections on Judaism, Freemasonry and Marxism, my skepticism only deepened. Of course the Nazis attacked these elements of European culture and politics. When organized murderers destroy a group’s places of worship or assembly, when they kill in horrific ways, there is nothing surprising about their also destroying property, including books.

But Rydell makes the important point that books are not just property, they are “keepers of memories.” He sees them as messengers from an all-but-vanished past that can be reunited in the present with the descendants of those persecuted by the Third Reich and its allies.

Compared to the valuable paintings stolen by Nazis from their Jewish owners, which after the war became famous cases of restitution, books are much quieter messengers. They are often not worth much to anyone except the family members of those who were killed.

But books persist as traces of the lives of those who once pored over their pages, and they recall communities of readers who are no more.

However familiar, the sheer scale of the Nazi effort to destroy the literature of their enemies is staggering. Tens of millions of books were incinerated, buried or simply left to rot in the basements of official buildings. From Amsterdam to Rome, from Warsaw to Paris, soldiers of the Reich hunted down public repositories and pri-

VIKING

A crowd gathers to witness thousands of books, considered to be “un-German,” burn in Berlin in 1933. “The Book Thieves” reminds readers that books aren’t just property but “keepers of memories.”

vate collections. The intensity of destruction was greatest in Poland, where there was a concerted effort to exterminate the entire country’s literary heritage. According to Adolf Hitler’s doctrine, Poles were subhuman. When Polish Jews could be targeted, Nazi officials were particularly motivated. “For us it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy,” a Nazi soldier noted, “which has been known as the greatest in Poland.”

In uneasy coexistence with the campaign to destroy the books of the Jews was the push to study their “secrets” and those of other enemies of the Reich. Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s chief ideologists, led a team of researchers bent on rewriting the history of the Jews from the National Socialist perspective. “Jewish Studies without Jews” was the goal. Rosenberg had competition from Heinrich Himmler, whose SS had special squads to tease out hidden messages from myths and occult texts that might be useful for the creation of the new Aryan science. Jewish scholars were recruited by the SS as a Talmudkommando group — they were to spell out Jewish esoteric wisdom be-

fore they themselves would be murdered. The scholars worked as slowly as possible.

The Nazis were bent on creating new knowledge and not just on destroying their enemies. This was not an issue of mere facts.

They wanted to be taken seriously in their quest for profound truths.

“What is more frightening,” Rydell asks, “a totalitarian regime’s destruction of knowledge, or its hankering for it?”

Actually, the Nazi “hankering” for knowledge was far less frightening than its capacity for destruction. Rydell notes that the Third Reich did pseudo-research on witchcraft and witch-burning for its propaganda value in justifying attacks on the Catholic Church.

While the research was ridiculous, the grimly efficient engine of annihilation wrecked havoc across the world. That havoc has been described and analyzed by numerous historians before, and Rydell adds little to their contributions.

The effort to save books, particularly Jewish books, has also been told before — Aaron Lansky’s powerful “Outwitting History” (unmentioned by Rydell) is a stirring account of a young American going to extraordinary lengths to

save Yiddish books. “The Book Thieves” does have its own story to tell, but it would have been more effectively told, say, in a long magazine article than in a book -length project.

Still, there are moving moments in “The Book Thieves,” as the “people of the Book” are hunted down along with their venerated objects of study. Despite it all, Jews continued their devotion to texts even as the stranglehold on their communities tightened.

Rydell says more than once that the Nazis were engaged in a battle for memory as well as for physical domination. “The Book Thieves” is an effort to ensure that historic connections to communities of study and learning are preserved.

He quotes the famous line of the 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine: “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned, too.” No longer a new insight, but still something very much worth remembering. n Roth is president of Wesleyan University. His most recent books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Exploring life’s abundant harvest

How many cats equal compulsion?

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

F

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REVIEWED BY

E LLEN A KINS

rom the dreamy, disorienting opening of “Autumn,” we are in the strange territory that will be familiar to readers of Ali Smith, whose books play slyly with notions of time, character and plot. The first of a projected quartet, “Autumn” hovers around the season of harvest and final things, but the possibility of transformation is also very much in the air.

Daniel Gluck, 101 years old, seems to be dreaming his death.

“It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.”

Amazed, delighted and embarrassed to find himself young again but naked, he stitches together a swanky green coat of leaves.

Daniel is in the “increased sleep period [that] happens when people are close to death,” as the care assistants inform Elisabeth, the young woman who visits him — and reads aloud from what invariably become literary touchstones for Smith’s story. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” for instance, echoes Daniel’s many arboreal manifestations. “Brave New World” gestures at our dystopian moment, but also at its source, “The Tempest,” which makes an appearance.

Most salient, though, is “A Tale of Two Cities,” because it is just over a week since Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. “All across the country,” Smith writes, “people felt it was the wrong thing.

All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing.”

It was, in other words, “the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a very good time to take up Dickens’s novel, whose opening words “acted like a charm” for Elisabeth.

“They’d made everything happening stand just far enough away.”

Putting things into perspective is very much what “Autumn” is

about. Smith weaves in and out of the story of Elisabeth and Daniel, who meet when Elisabeth, 8 years old, is tasked with creating a portrait in words of a neighbor. Her mother tries to dissuade her. “You can’t just go bothering old frail people. . . . Why don’t you make it up? Pretend you’re asking him the questions. Write down the answers you think he’d give.”

“It’s supposed to be true, Elisabeth said. It’s for News.” Handed over by her mother, the meeting brings Elisabeth and Daniel together — “Finally,” Daniel says, perplexing the 8-year-old. “The lifelong friends,” he explains. “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”

Daniel, who takes Elisabeth to see “The Tempest,” is something of a Prospero to her Miranda, a fatherly magician summoning the wealth of words and images that will shape her life. Through his reminiscences about one long-ago love, he introduces her to the painter who will preoccupy her as a student of art history: Pauline Boty, a real-life female British Pop artist whose joyous depictions of female sexuality and fate touch on some of Smith’s favored themes, specifically the ways in which experience, in life and in art, is subject to the vagaries of time and place.

History is one story, but then there are all the others waiting to happen, waiting only for someone to make them up. “And whoever makes up the story makes up the world,” Daniel counsels the 13year-old Elisabeth, in a very serious game of make-believe. “So always try to welcome people into the home of your story.”

This is guidance straight out of Ali Smith’s playbook — and it makes for a novel that, under all its erudition, narrative antics, wit and wordplay, is a wonder of deep and accommodating compassion. n Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “World Like a Knife.”

A

AUTUMN

By Ali Smith Pantheon.

264 pp. $24.95.

CAN’T. JUST. STOP. An Investigation of Compulsions

By Sharon Begley Simon & Schuster.

295 pp. $27.

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REVIEW BY

M ARIANNE S ZEGEDY- M ASZAK

psychologist friend once described a series of questions one of her professors had posed to her abnormal-psychology class. “A woman has one cat,” she began. “Is that unusual?” Of course not, was the overwhelming consensus. “Okay, what about two cats?” she continued. “Would that raise flags about her mental state?”

Again the consensus was no.

“Three cats?” she asked. A few students expressed a little discomfort with the three-cat threshold. “How about four? Or six? Or 10?” she continued, with each additional feline adding a new layer of psychopathology. For some, three cats suggested that the woman might have attachment issues. Could the 10-cat owner be a hoarder? The cat escalation concluded with this query: “How many cats indicate crazy?”

Just what kind of crazy 10 cats illustrate might be answered in Sharon Begley’s compelling new book, “Just. Can’t. Stop.: An Investigation of Compulsions.” This investigation by the STAT writer and former science columnist for Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal explores the meaning and the neuroscience of some of the hardy perennials of compulsion — obsessive-compulsive disorder, for instance, and hoarding — but also those that might be less debilitating. Why would the selfless act of donating a kidney be considered a compulsion to do good? It would when the donor feels “irresistibly, often inexplicably driven to engage in” this level of selflessness, especially given that this act is, perforce, only possible once. Is labeling so much of what we do as “compulsions” just another way to pathologize the full spectrum of human behavior?

The answer is clearly no. But one of the strengths of this book is Begley’s rigorous clarity about her subject matter. She admits that she does not want to seem like the “hammer-wielder to whom everything looks like a nail,” but the

breadth of her knowledge and journalistic rigor prevent such excess. She draws a bright line between our collective and nearly universal smartphone-scanning, computer-dependent actions and those that are evidence of a deeper dysfunction.

In her vast reporting, Begley introduces us to a compulsive shopper, Sophie, whose attempt to purge the mountains of stuff in her house was cut short by a call from her abusive father — after which she bought eight vacuum cleaners.

We meet a compulsive gamer, Ryan Van Cleave, who played the video game “World of Warcraft” for up to 80 hours a week, more than 12 hours a day, at the obvious expense of his family and professional life. Only a failed suicide attempt loosened the grip of his gaming compulsion. And there’s Tom Somyak, whose worry about his door being unlocked shaped his waking hours and was only a precursor to his fanatical fear of being unsafe after his son was born. Every germ became a potential fatality, and every mail delivery could contain anthrax.

These may be the disorders of our anxious age, but we hardly created them. Begley takes us on a tour of compulsions through history and the fascinating transition as they moved from being seen as a religious phenomenon to being regarded as a medical illness. In one swift chapter, Begley takes us on a brief history of compulsions from the 6th century through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment — yes, of course, the inevitable Freud — to present times. The grand sweep illustrates the real takeaway from this fine work: While some of us may have 10 cats, in the end, “there is no bright line between mental illness and mental normality.” n Szegedy-Maszak is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones and the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.”

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OPINIONS

Trump, Netanyahu force U.S. Jews into bad choice SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN is a former religion columnist for the New York Times and the author of “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.”

Since the end of World War II, American Jewish identity has rested on a three-legged stool. Those legs, the positions that were embraced by virtually the entire community, were Holocaust remembrance, support for Israel and vigilant opposition to domestic anti-Semitism.

Admittedly, this formula for personal and collective definition had its limits. It depended too much, perhaps, on the reinforcement of Jewish suffering. It scrupulously avoided differentiating between the practice of Judaism as a religion and the enactment of Jewishness as ethnicity or peoplehood. Still, that stool largely served its unifying purpose for a famously fractious people.

The new alliance of Donald Trump as America’s president and Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister, however, has smashed the stool. American Jews are being forced to choose between their Zionism and their battle against anti-Semitism.

Suddenly, by dint of Trump and Netanyahu, those stances cannot be readily reconciled.

Trump’s feeble and belated bemoaning the other week that anti-Semitism is “horrible” and “painful” only accentuates the problem. The same president who touts his “no daylight” partnership with Netanyahu’s right-wing regime could manage his statement only after months of strenuously avoiding a condemnation of anti-Semitism, which in normal times is not exactly a politically risky position.

Along the way, Netanyahu served as the public guarantor of Trump’s putative tolerance.

During their joint news conference on Feb. 15 at the White House, after the president offered an evasive response to an Israeli journalist’s question

about the rising incidence of anti-Semitic vandalism and rhetoric, the prime minister hailed Trump as a great friend of the Jewish people. He also echoed one of Trump’s own defensive talking points: the fact he has an Orthodox Jewish sonin-law, Jared Kushner.

None of these assurances come near to repairing the damage the American and Israeli leaders have done to American Jewish comity. Rather, the men’s political actions have compounded problems that have been building for decades.

For the majority of American Jews who are liberal or moderate — that is, most of the three-quarters who did not vote for Trump — an ongoing commitment to Zionism relied on viewing Israel as a valiant, outnumbered innocent that is eager to equitably solve its conflict with the Palestinians.

Such attitudes were easy enough for such American Jews to harbor during the existential wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 and during the terms of leaders jointly seeking a two-state solution, namely the Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert and the American presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

But American Jews of the center and the left saw as well as anybody else how Netanyahu sought to undermine President Barack Obama by aligning with the Republican opposition and how he has carried on a visible bromance with Trump. A big

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met President Trump on Feb. 15, he hailed Trump as a great friend of the Jewish people.

part of their chumminess is Trump’s diminution of U.S. support for a two-state solution, which his supporters wrote into the Republican platform last summer, and the close ties of his ambassadorial nominee, David Friedman, to the settlement enterprise.

For American Jews who skew conservative in politics, the fight against anti-Semitism in the United States was once invariably and conveniently framed as one against left-wing campus activists and Palestinian advocates. The discomfort of Jewish college students when put on the ideological defensive by events such as Israel Apartheid Week was treated as a mortal threat to Jewish survival.

Well, now both subsets of Jews have had their respective illusions dashed. Since Trump was a long-shot candidate, he has dallied with the words and images of classic anti-Semitism — that Jews control the world economy, that Jewish money buys the allegiance of politicians. The alt-right movement that supplied so much of the energy to Trump’s campaign has been a safe zone for Jew-hating.

So the most recent examples of bigotry — the bomb threats against Jewish community centers, the toppling of gravestones in several Jewish cemeteries across the country — did not come from nowhere.

And they sure did not come from campus professors and

protesters who assail Israel in acceptable forums of public discourse. Vice President Pence’s spin-control visit to a vandalized cemetery in St. Louis and his later remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition were way too little, way too late.

The trade-off that Trump and Netanyahu have almost literally offered American Jews is a blunt one: If you want lockstep support of Israel, then shut your mouth about anti-Semitism here.

Don’t complain when the official White House statement for International Holocaust Remembrance Day omits mention of the extermination of 6 million Jews. Don’t call attention to growing examples of anti-Semitism when they appear enabled, if not inspired,

by Trump’s white nationalism.

Don’t get upset when the president ridicules and humiliates a journalist from an Orthodox Jewish magazine who asks him an explicitly polite question about anti-Semitism.

One can only imagine the wrath of the American Jewish right had Obama done any such thing.

For the vast majority of American Jews, though, an anguishing reality is now clear.

To support Israel when it is cross-branded with Trump’s intolerance is to avert their eyes from a threat right here at home. To rest on the threelegged stool is to find yourself abruptly crashing to the floor. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Tech holdouts, enough is enough LARRY DOWNES is an Internet industry analyst and author on business strategies and information technology.

Even as fanatic customers can be counted on to line up outside the Apple store for the latest iPhone, there are still millions of Americans who don’t use a smartphone at all. For that matter, there are still plenty of happy owners of tube televisions, rotary dial telephones, film cameras, fax machines, typewriters and cassette tape players.

The accelerating pace of disruption means more and more products are facing an early retirement. But even as computers, electronics and health products move quickly from must-haves to museum artifacts, a small but loyal following often carries a torch for the old stuff, sometimes out of nostalgia, sometimes from sheer stubbornness. For them, familiar and functioning technologies are good enough.

My “Big Bang Disruption” coauthor Paul Nunes and I refer to these have-won’ts as “legacy customers,” users who simply refuse to migrate to disruptive innovations even after they’ve become both better and cheaper, and even after almost everyone else has made the shift.

Legacy customers are a niche market, although not necessarily a bad one. Much of Brooklyn, it seems, has been turned over to rediscovering handmade goods — which, ironically, are sold over the Internet.

But in some cases the devotion of the laggards can cause major headaches. When the market for outmoded products shrinks, most manufacturers just stop making them. By law, however, some

technologies can’t be put to sleep until regulators give permission — usually long after the dying market has become unprofitable.

Car manufacturers must keep up to a decade’s worth of spare parts, for example, even for discontinued models. And the U.S. Postal Service, teetering on bankruptcy for over a decade, still has to deliver mail to 155 million households, even as first-class volume continues to decline precipitously.

As the post office has learned, the cost of keeping old technologies on life support skyrockets when expensive networks of equipment and people must be spread over a dwindling number of users.

No surprise, our research

found legacy customers are largely older consumers who long ago gave up trying to keep up with the latest and greatest. Many are perfectly happy with worse and more expensive products; perhaps even take pride in still knowing how to use them.

Data recently issued by the Commerce Department finds that 13 percent of Americans still don’t use the Internet at all, even though it’s now available nearly everywhere. (More homes have access to Internet service than indoor plumbing.)

You might think the holdouts just can’t afford it, which certainly remains an important factor despite programs that subsidize both wired and wireless broadband. But the real holdup is that non-adopters — mostly older, rural and less-educated — just aren’t interested in Internet access, at any price. As other factors such as price and usability fall, a perceived lack of relevance now dominates.

Public and private efforts to overcome that perception are crucial for two important reasons.

The first is that the resisters are wrong — the Internet has become the starting point for government services, news, employment, entertainment and, increasingly, health care and education. Life without it is increasingly and

unnecessarily isolated.

The second is that nonadopters ultimately cost more to serve. Printing information is increasingly a waste of scarce resources as digital alternatives continue to get better and cheaper. And all of us pay for the waste.

To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, it may be appropriate for governments to step in. The United States has long had programs aimed at making broadband more affordable for lower-income Americans and more accessible for those living in sparsely populated areas.

At the other end of the life cycle, some technology dinosaurs need help being euthanized. Here, regulators can serve as a catalyst, providing the final nudge for legacy customers.

While things got a little messy at the end, in 2009 Congress succeeded in turning off analog TV, switching the few remaining holdouts over to digital.

As a bonus, the more efficient digital signals have made it possible for the FCC to reclaim and auction prized radio frequencies to feed exploding demand for mobile services. So far, the auctions have deposited nearly $20 billion in the Treasury. n

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

New drugs need rigorous testing CARY GROSS is a professor of medicine and cancer researcher at Yale University School of Medicine.

When my 80-year-old father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, he was so weak that he could no longer walk, and his oncologist worried that chemotherapy might do more harm than good. But there was a new drug available, a “targeted therapy” that uses antibodies to destroy cancer cells while apparently leaving the rest of the patient’s cells alone.

My father understood that signing on for a treatment that hadn’t been available for very long was risky. “How do we know if the new drug is really better than the chemotherapy?” he asked me one day on the phone. “Isn’t this the kind of research that you do?”

Indeed it is. I’m a cancer outcomes researcher. I study whether new cancer treatments that succeed in initial small studies actually help people once adopted into routine clinical practice. With no large, reliable studies of this particular treatment to guide his decision, I told him to go with his gut.

Looking back, I wonder whether my father would have chosen the new therapy if he had known more about the possible side effects. Initially, the tumors shrank and he regained some strength, even allowing him to walk across the room on his own. But after a few months, he noted some mild pain in his feet. Soon, severe pain shot through his legs. His doctor explained that this “nerve pain”

was a side effect from the therapy, preventing him from walking and once again making him bed-bound. This time, it wasn’t the disease that was debilitating him; it was the treatment.

Like many people in his shoes, my father opted to try the new drug because he thought it might help. It was expensive, but his insurance would cover it, and the high price seemed to suggest it was special. It was also better than doing nothing.

The Food and Drug Administration had approved the treatment based only on a small study of about 100 patients, one-third of whom demonstrated complete remission. Although side effects were rare, the average age of

BY ANN TELNAES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

patients in the study was 31.

This is typical of cancertreatment studies, which most often test new drugs in younger and healthier people — not older people with lots of medical conditions. New cancer treatments often represent important scientific advances, but the actual impact on patients is almost always far from a slam-dunk. The absence of data oversimplifies complex new treatments as shiny black boxes. There appear to be no trade-offs to consider. The default for many patients looking for treatment is “yes” — cost be damned.

Unfortunately, our government’s commitment to evaluating new drugs is about to take a step backward. At a recent meeting with pharmaceutical company executives, President Trump announced he would be cutting regulations “at a level nobody’s ever seen before.” His candidates for FDA commissioner share the view that new drugs need to reach the market more quickly and with fewer required studies.

The 21st Century Cures Act has already created a pathway for companies to obtain FDA approvals with less rigorous evidence. At the same time, large funders of research that

study the safety and effectiveness of drugs, such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, face uncertain futures in the current Congress.

To be sure, patients deserve prompt access to effective, cutting-edge treatments. But what if a treatment turns out to do more harm than good? This is why we need to double down on our efforts to evaluate new treatments in the real world. We need more evidence, not less.

The FDA shouldn’t shy away from requiring thorough evaluation of new drugs. The same level of enthusiasm and funding that goes into developing new treatments should be invested in testing whether they are safe and effective in patients outside of the initial small trials.

Undertested drugs with unclear safety profiles and efficacy should not be given to broad swaths of the population.

During one of the last conversations I had with my father before he died, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be studying this in people like me?” A rhetorical question of sorts, but I still answered: “Yes, Dad, we should.” n

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FIVE MYTHS

George Orwell BY

G ORDON B OWKER

George Orwell’s classic novel on totalitarianism and surveillance, “1984,” has again become a bestseller thanks to the affairs afoot in Washington. As we reconsider Orwell’s work, however, it’s worth re­ evaluating what we know about the man, around whom many mis­ conceptions and legends have grown up over the years.

MYTH NO. 1 “Orwellian” refers to ascendant government control.

Orwellianism isn’t just about big government; it’s about authoritarianism coupled with lies. Newspeak, as Orwell described it in “1984,” is language that means the exact opposite of what it says. Contemporary examples include the labeling of news organizations as “fake news” and falsehoods as “alternative facts.” “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it,” one of Orwell’s characters says.

Moreover, Orwell did not see oppression issuing strictly from governments. In “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” Gordon Comstock’s landlady spies on him, making him feel a loss of privacy and liberty. In the autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell writes that in boarding school, he suspected that a spy had been set on him by his headmaster and depicted the environment as institutionally oppressive. An equivalent today might be mass surveillance via social media: Facebook logging your purchases, Skype eavesdropping on your calls and the cellphone camera’s all-seeing eye. A surveillance society can have many Big Brothers and Sisters watching us.

MYTH NO. 2 Orwell was hostile to religion.

Orwell retained a lasting

affection for the Anglican Church, choosing to be married and buried, per instructions in his will, “according to the rites of the Church of England.” And he maintained a religious imagination, especially during his final days. In a last letter from his hospital bed, Orwell asked a friend whether an advertisement he’d found in a newspaper might be blasphemous. Another friend, who visited him just before he died, found him reading the first volume of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” raising the possibility that he was preparing himself for some kind of afterlife.

MYTH NO. 3 Orwell insisted on simple, straightforward prose.

It was not always so. In his early novel “Burmese Days,” for example, we find the following: “In the borders beside the path swaths of English flowers — phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia — not yet slain by the sun, rioted in vast size and richness. The petunias were huge, like trees almost. There was no lawn, but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes — gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom, frangipanis with creamy, stalkless flowers, purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus and the pink Chinese rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind. The clash of colours hurt one’s eyes in the glare. A nearly naked mali, watering-can in hand, was moving in the jungle of flowers like some large nectar-sucking bird.” And he raved to his girlfriend Brenda Salkeld in 1933

ASSOCIATED PRESS

George Orwell, author of “1984,” did not always write in simple prose.

about “my dear ‘Ulysses,’ my greatest discovery since I discovered Villon,” referring to James Joyce’s labyrinthine novel.

It was only when he turned to political writing in 1936, after living with unemployed miners in Wigan, in northern England, and fighting in Spain, that he decided that, for honesty’s sake, he must write prose that was transparent — devoid of jargon, misleading metaphors, foreign words and phrases, and cliches.

MYTH NO. 4 Orwell was politically and socially progressive.

Orwell was a socialist, but he was also a realist. He thought that in 1940, after the British defeat at Dunkirk, Britain was on the brink of revolution. Instead, the moment passed, and at the end of the war he threw his support behind the Labour Party, whose policy was one of sober gradualism rather than violent revolution.

In other ways, he was an outright traditionalist: His attitude toward women and gay people was boorish and retrograde. Orwell’s friend and contemporary Stephen Spender

noted that ‘‘Orwell was very misogynist . . . a strange sort of eccentric man full of strange ideas and strange prejudices.

One was that he thought that women were extremely inferior and stupid. . . . He really rather despised women.” Orwell also opposed modern urban sprawl and machine technology.

MYTH NO. 5 Orwell was sadistic.

Orwell belonged for a time to the pacifistic Independent Labour Party, deplored the sadism of communists in Spain and felt uneasy with gratuitous violence in media. He disparaged what he called “the Yank Mags” and American films like “High Sierra,” which he felt encouraged and glorified cruelty and violence, as did novels such as James Hadley Chase’s “No Orchids for Miss Blandish.”

Orwell might have had a temper and some morbid curiosities, but he certainly did not approve of inflicting suffering on others without reason. n Bowker is the author of “George Orwell,” a biography.

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017

24

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