The Washington Post National Weekly - March 6, 2016

Top 15 states ranked by population of undocumented immigrants in 2014 (numbers in thousands):

california

Politics Brace for the fall race 4

texas

new york

Trends After the border crossing 17

+1

3,000

-11

florida

Books The bond: Malcolm X and Ali 18

illinois

5 Myths Lead in water 23

-9

-23

ABCDE 2014 2,598

2,250

1,500 750

% Change 2010-14

-11

% Change 2010-14

2014 1,737

% Change 2010-14

2014 817

2014 711

% Change 2010-14

NATIONAL WEEKLY new Jersey

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

3,000 2,250

-7

% Change 2010-14

GeorGia

.

nortH carolina

% Change 2010-14

ariZona

2014 455

VirGinia

IN COLLABORATION WITH

-13

% Change 2010-14

-4

% Change 2010-14

-7

% Change 2010-14

+7

% Change 2010-14

1,500 2014 452

750

wasHinGton

3,000 2,250

-3

% Change 2010-14

2014 345

Maryland

-2 -2

% Change 2010-14

2014 322

neVada

2014 277

colorado

-3

% Change 2010-14

+1

% Change 2010-14

2014 269

PennsylVania

+4

% Change 2010-14

1,500 750

Protectors become predators U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic are accused of raping and exploiting women and girls. PAGE 12

2014 234

2014 233

2014 180

2014 179

2014 158

SOURCE: ROBERT WARREN, CENTER FOR MIGRATION STUDIES; CMS 2016 ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

2

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Faust friends with Trump?

BY

S ARAH L . K AUFMAN

L

adies and gentlemen, a warm welcome, please, for Chris Christie, world’s worst actor and best scene-stealer.

Trump won GOP primaries in seven states on Super Tuesday, but he lost the spotlight at his news conference that night. He was upstaged by the New Jersey governor, the man who introduced him (woodenly) and who then stood (awkwardly) nearby as his face registered shell shock, confusion and frozen alarm.

Christie’s body language was irresistible, because the awk attack cannot be ignored.

After delivering his pained welcome of Trump to the candidate’s supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., Christie barely looked at Trump as he relinquished the podium. He waited a little too long to applaud. Christie shifted nervously from foot to foot. Maybe he was jacked up on the adrenaline rush of scaling the Mount Everest of politics: praising the rival you loathe.

He sucked in his teeth. He stroked his cheek for just a beat too long, lost, by the look of him, in “mother-of-God-what-am-I-doing-here” thoughts. At one point, clapping stiffly, he glanced aside, bit his lip and looked like he might break down. Finally, Christie settled into a heavy stillness, eyes fixed in an expression of helpless horror, mouth slack. Trump was talking on and on, waving his right hand as he spoke, the hand that kept getting in our way.

Because we weren’t listening to the words. The real drama was happening silently behind him, as Christie was slowly dying.

We’ve seen this spiritual agony before. Former House speaker John Boehner could be counted on for a good bit of anguish during President Obama’s State of the Union addresses. His reactions were overt, almost melodramatic. He was a master at etching consternation into his lips, pursing them and pulling in the corners of his

KLMNO WEEKLY

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, left, wordlessly said so much during Donald Trump’s speech.

mouth while Obama hit his applause lines and colleagues across the aisle cheered.

Women seem a little better at masking the awk attack. But even subtle edginess is riveting.

Think of the mute political wife standing by her man during a news conference to announce that he’s gay (New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey) or to address accusations of paying hookers (Louisiana Gov. David Vitter) or really expensive hookers (New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer).

Who can forget the stony, defeated presence of Spitzer’s wife, Silda Wall, a Harvard-trained lawyer reduced to a prop at the news conference where Spitzer announced his resignation?

Prop isn’t the right word; Wall was a living, motionless portrait of misery, her head down, her held-in and slightly turned posture telegraphing that standing by her man had no substantive meaning. She was clearly wishing

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 21

she were miles away.

When she moved, it was telling. “As human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling,” Spitzer said at one point, “but in rising every time we fall.” This statement caused Wall to break form, ducking her chin a bit, involuntarily flinching at her husband’s gall.

Awkwardness is weirdly entertaining, and it’s non-threatening. You don’t fear the awkward guy. In fact, you feel for him. Maybe that means suffering calls forth our empathy and fellow-feeling more than triumph.

On Thursday, he defended his support for Trump and his frequent absences from New Jersey. He even said, “I want everyone to know for those who were concerned: I wasn’t being held hostage.” Having to explicitly say that he wasn’t a prisoner of Trump?

Now that’s awkward. n

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

4 8 11 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A 16-year-old girl inspects the remains of her family’s home in Bangui, Central African Republic. She said that last year she was sexually exploited by a Moroccan peacekeeper.

Photograph by JANE HAHN for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS COMMENTARY

THE TAKE

Fall campaign looks to be a nasty one

TY WRIGHT/BLOOMBERG NEWS

BY

D AN B ALZ

S

uper Tuesday victories by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton put the nation on a path toward an ugly and contentious general election, pitting a pair of majorparty presidential candidates saddled with vulnerabilities in a contest that will be decided by a fearful and angry electorate divided along racial, cultural and ideological lines.

A Trump-Clinton general election would represent the continuation of a decade or more of politics marked by gridlock in Washington, distrust of institutions and leaders, and political discourse that has been on a

downward spiral. Whoever wins in November would face the enormously difficult task of trying to bring the country together in the hope of being able to govern effectively.

Trump would lead a Republican Party ruptured and with at least a portion of its followers dispirited by his nomination. He also would face resistance from legions of other voters who consider his nativist message bigoted and repellant.

Clinton would enjoy a more united Democratic Party, although not all would be enthusiastic about her candidacy. Democratic turnout in the primaries has been much lower than it was in 2008, a possible warning sign of

Donald Trump is leading the GOP nomination race, but he faces resistance from his own party and legions of other voters who consider his nativist message bigoted and repellent.

less energy behind the party’s nominee in the fall. Beyond her party, Clinton remains a sharply polarizing figure who engenders distrust, even anger, from her opponents.

For millions of voters, the motivating emotions in such a race would be largely negative — driven by stop-Trump or stop-Clinton sentiments as well as fears that the other party’s candidate might prevail and general distress over the state of the country. What the presidential campaign has shown is that positive messages and uplifting visions have barely resonated with the voters. The odds suggest that the general election would be an extension of that pattern.

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

5

POLITICS

DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Hillary Clinton has increasingly turned her sights on Trump, but she is still a polarizing figure who engenders distrust from her opponents.

It has not come to that point yet. Clinton must keep at least a partial eye on Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) as she steadily accumulates the delegates needed to win the nomination.

Trump, for all his success Tuesday, still remains far short of a majority of the delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination, leaving anti-Trump forces within the party clinging to the hope that they can derail him before he can attain the number he needs.

The spectacle of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) using his megaphone on the morning of Super Tuesday to reaffirm that the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, not bigotry or white supremacy, said everything about what Trump’s candidacy has done to the party he seeks to lead.

Ryan is among those in the GOP who have preached the gospel of positive ideas over personal insults as the party’s route to winning the White House. So far, these voices have been fighting a rear-guard action against the grassroots forces angry with their leaders in Washington and drawn to Trump’s populist message.

On Thursday, Mitt Romney, the party’s nominee four years ago, added his voice to those criticizing Trump and called on his fellow Republicans to reject Trump’s candidacy.

Clinton faces nothing like that resistance within the Democratic Party. Sanders has talked of carrying his antiestablishment message into the spring and possibly later. But Clinton is on a clear path to victory and as she showed on Tuesday night is already looking toward the general election.

Among her challenges will be trying to improve her image among skeptical independents and even Republicans turned off by Trump before the fall race begins in earnest.

Since her thumping victory in South Carolina, Clinton’s message has been focused increasingly on Trump, as she tries to position herself as the more optimistic and empathetic of the two.

What the country needs is “love and kindness,” she said again Tuesday night, not anger and insults. Playing off the New York billionaire’s theme to “make America great again,” Clinton said the United States already is a great country, and long has been one. What’s needed, she argues, is to make it “whole.”

Trump mocked that aspiration, although the sentiment might be shared by many voters after a year of poisonous political rhetoric in the Republican race. In recent days, the GOP race has descended into a trough of petty insults and vulgarities that most people consider unbecoming of the highest office in the land.

Whether Clinton is the candidate who can convincingly make the case that as president she could unite the country is a far different question. Other than President Obama, no Democrat inflames the opposition more than she does. Republicans have not forgotten that, in an early Democratic debate, Clinton said that among the enemies she has made about which she is most proud are Republicans.

A Pew Research poll in January asked

KLMNO WEEKLY

Americans to rate the prospects for many of the leading presidential candidates. The question was whether they would make good or bad presidents. For Clinton, 35 percent offered a positive response while 44 percent were negative. Just 11 percent said she would make a great president, while 28 percent said she would be terrible.

For Trump, about three in 10 gave him positive ratings, compared with about half offering a negative view. Those who said he would be a great president totaled 11 percent, the same as for Clinton. But 38 percent said he would be a terrible president, 10 points higher that for the former secretary of state.

Clinton’s weaknesses have been evident throughout the campaign — a lack of trust from voters, many of whom question her honesty. Her candidacy remains clouded by an FBI investigation of the use of a private email server as secretary of state. Trump’s weaknesses are even more glaring, as the turmoil inside the Republican Party highlights.

Uplifting visions have barely resonated with the voters.

The attack lines for a Trump-Clinton general election are already obvious and will become sharper. Trump’s failure to denounce the Ku Klux Klan last weekend is only one statement that could come at him. The criticisms launched by Marco Rubio in the closing days before Super Tuesday — that Trump is an unprincipled “con man” who has exaggerated his business acumen and who has no grasp of policy issues — only hint at what the Democrats would throw at him.

Trump said Tuesday night that he would be a “unifier” as the GOP nominee but he also signaled his intention to talk almost exclusively about Clinton in the general election.

Given his style of campaigning, the attacks on her would be even more personal and relentless, aimed not only at her honesty and the issue of her handling of the email issue but also at her husband’s past dalliances, at the Obama record overseas and her complicity in that record during her tenure as secretary of state.

That’s a recipe for a general election largely bereft of aspirational campaigning, more negative by far than the campaign of 2012 in which Obama and the Democrats pounded Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat and the Republicans hammered Obama as a president who was trying to take the country far to the left.

That campaign left the nation deeply divided, and the past three years have done little to change the environment. The fall campaign has not fully taken shape. But everything to this point suggest that’s where this crucial contest could be heading.n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

‘None’ Democrats: Spiritual, secular BY

M ICHELLE B OORSTEIN

J

oe Stone is part of an enormous but invisible voting constituency.

A “troubled atheist,” the retired Virginia accountant calls himself spiritual, celebrates Christmas and defines religious as the need to “do good.” He says organized religion — Christianity as well as Islam — has “gone off the deep end” and political candidates who emphasize the rightness of a certain faith turn him off. At the same time, Stone calls himself “religiously open-minded.”

When Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told a New Hampshire town hall that religion is a way of saying all people are connected, Stone agreed.

“He is speaking directly to me,” he said.

Stone is part of a massive group of Americans who reject any label or affiliation to describe their faith. At 23 percent of the U.S. population, this left-leaning group called “Nones” are the Democratic parallel to the GOP’s white evangelicals — except without organization, PACs, leadership and a clear agenda. They do, however, have one big expectation of political candidates: Be ethical, and go light on the God talk.

So far, Sanders has a large edge among Nones.

A huge group that skews under 40, white and non-immigrant, the Nones want politicians to tone it down not because they’ve made some final determination about God — the vast majority are believers — but because they are fed up with religious institutions they see as corrupt and discriminatory.

And in the process, they are rewriting the country’s political discourse on morality.

Experts say the country is just beginning to feel Nones’ political power, in good part because their turnout has been low at about 12 percent — unsurprising for a disproportionately young group.

But that is likely to change, with early research suggesting they are not inclined to become more religious as they grow older.

Political scientist David Camp-

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The party’s biggest faith constituency doesn’t want candidates to talk too much about God bell, who focuses on religion, compared the Nones of today to evangelicals of the 1970s — who grew in number and slowly became a massive, organized political force.

“You might say we are awaiting the emergence of a secular Jerry Falwell,” said Campbell, who chairs the political science department at the University of Notre Dame.

With their socially liberal viewpoints, Nones will pull the Democrats to the left — which is already happening with Sanders, said Mark Rozell, dean of the government and policy school at George Mason University and author of multiple books on religion and politics.

“It will make a profound change in American politics in the long run. Put up a candidate who challenges people’s right to love who they want and make decisions about their own lifestyles, and see

what happens among the unaffiliated. A lot of other issues go to the back burner,” Rozell said.

If Sanders or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton start talking too much about religion as the race veers South, among Nones that would be “dangerous,” he said.

Nones talk about tolerance, fairness, choice and “making the world a better place.” In interviews some describe their worldview as being more authentically holy than people who cite Scripture and denominational labels.

“My girlfriend said, ‘Greta, you’re the best Christian I know that doesn’t go to church,’ ” said Greta Clark, 81, of Youngstown, Ohio, an agnostic who says her religion is “do no wrong.” Stone says he has an answer for Christians who are skeptical of Sanders’s bio: “Wait a minute, Jesus was a Jewish socialist.”

In addition to their skepticism

Retired accountants Joe and Betsy Stone, shown at their home in Springfield, Va., are Democrats who reject any label or affiliation to describe their faith.

about religious institutions, Nones share anger at secular institutions they feel are immoral, interviews show. Their political priorities include reducing big money’s influence on politics, raising wages and making college affordable. They do not trust government to police personal morality.

“We need a revolution at this point because corruption is so vast,” said Cheryl, a 43-year-old chief financial officer from Atlanta. She spoke on condition that her last name not be used because she said the stigma of being not religious in the South would harm her career and her child. She doesn’t like it when candidates talk about religion, but it bothers her less if it seems like lip service — evidence that they probably won’t apply dogma to public policy. If they’re saying it just to get elected, that’s more okay, she said.

“It doesn’t bother me because I’ve done the same thing, tried to pass,” she said. “I have no idea whether there is a God and I don’t think that’s an answerable question.” Before she got married, however, she put “atheist” in her dating profile instead of “agnostic” only to turn off fundamentalist Christians who might misinterpret her as open to their belief.

Although most evangelicals and Catholics say terrorism is their top voting priority, Nones say theirs is the economy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in December.

The major check on Nones’ political power is their lack of group awareness.

“This cohort is as large as evangelicals, but very poorly organized, and they don’t have the discipline or political reflex. But you can’t tell me campaigns aren’t thinking about them, especially the Democrats,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University sociologist who has written several books about the role of religion in politics. Democrats, he said, have to straddle the Nones, most of whom feel candidates are talking too much about their faith and prayer, and the rest of the Democratic faith coalition — which includes progressive Jews,

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

7

POLITICS COMMENTARY Catholics and Protestants — “who don’t mind it as long as it doesn’t get overwrought.”

A quarter of President Obama’s voters in 2012 were religiously unaffiliated — by far the largest “faith” group in his coalition. Perhaps in consideration of his religiously independent supporters, the president gave the first inaugural nod to “nonbelievers” in his 2008 address.

At the moment, Nones are breaking hard for Sanders, a secular Jew who seems ambivalent about how to portray his faith. He has said he is not religious and chose to spend last Rosh Hashanah — a major Jewish holiday — speaking to evangelicals at Liberty University. When he won in New Hampshire last month, becoming the first American Jew to win a presidential primary, Sanders didn’t mention that fact in his victory speech, instead calling himself the “son of a Polish immigrant.” However, last fall when The Washington Post ran an article entitled: “Bernie Sanders: Our first non-religious president?” the Sanders campaign quickly emailed the reporter to point out a September interview about Pope Francis in which the senator referred to a “belief in God . . . that requires me to do all that I can to follow the Golden Rule.”

Mike McCurry, a communications consultant to candidates and faith groups who served as press secretary to Bill Clinton, said top Democratic advisers to campaigns “just don’t get” the role of faith groups — including the Nones.

“They don’t see it as a political constituency to mobilize,” McCurry said. That said, “it’s a delicate balance. [Nones] want to hear about your values and what gives you a moral stake, but they don’t want an agenda that’s forced down their throat.”

“I wish we didn’t have to talk about religion in politics. This is not a religious race,” Stone said. He grew up in a big religious family but feels church has become arrogant and intolerant. “We should be a spiritual country, meaning we should endeavor to have a good government in the eyes of whatever God you feel is right, or in the eyes of no God.” “Religions have gotten wacky,” Stone said. “Morality comes from another place. It’s a chicken or egg thing. The morality came before the stories” of religion. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

CAMPAIGN *** 2016 THE FIX

Debate winners, losers BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

he four remaining Republican presidential candidates gathered in Detroit Thursday night for the 11th debate of the GOP nomination fight. I picked some of the best — and worst — of the night.

WINNERS

Ted Cruz: The senator from Texas picked a nice moment to have his best debate of the primary season. He flashed his prosecutorial chops when making the case that Donald Trump was neither a real conservative nor someone who could win the White House for Republicans this fall.

His persistent calls for Trump to release the audiotape of an offthe-record interview with the New York Times were effective and put the real estate mogul off his game a bit. Cruz also benefited from the fact that Trump and Marco Rubio went after each other hammer and tongs for the first hour of the debate, a brawl that allowed him to look like he was above the fray and magnanimous.

John Kasich: The narrowing of the presidential field quite clearly helped the Ohio governor on Thursday night. Sure, it often felt as if he was participating in an entirely different debate than the other three candidates. But, when he got a chance to talk, Kasich’s uplifting and positive message made for a welcome relief from the name-calling, interrupting and general rudeness that dominated most of the conversation on stage in Detroit. Kasich effectively made the case for why being an insider was a good thing — a very hard one to make in an election like this one — and probably won himself some votes from voters fed up with all the fighting. Did he do enough to boost him into the top tier? No. Still, he deserves credit for putting his best foot forward.

Fox News moderators: Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace are a really good trio. They asked well-thought-out questions that anticipated — and avoided — the talking points of the candi-

dates. I l-o-v-e-d when Wallace called up a series of fact checks aimed at rebutting Trump’s talking points on how he would handle the debt and deficit issues.

Ditto the video triptych that Kelly introduced showing Trump contradicting himself over and over.

That’s what moderators should do; force candidates off their regular shtick, make them think on their feet a bit and, in the process, show viewers who they really are.

ing. Does any of the above matter?

It hasn’t yet.

Marco Rubio: The senator from Florida seemed to have resigned himself to a kamikaze mission against Trump during this debate. He jabbed at and with Trump over and over again in the debate’s first 60 minutes, turning every question — and answer — into an attack on Trump. It hurt Trump but hurt Rubio, too, as he struggled to get back to his more

JIM YOUNG/REUTERS

Donald Trump shows off the size of his hands as Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), left, and Ted Cruz (Tex.) look on during Thursday’s GOP debate.

LOSERS

Donald Trump: Trump totally dominated the debate in terms of speaking time and the broader conversation. As is usually the case with Trump in a debate setting, the more he talks, the less positive the outcome is for him.

He repeatedly came across as juvenile — calling Rubio “Little Marco” and Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.” Hell, within the first 10 minutes of the debate Trump was insisting that questions about his endowment — not the financial kind — were way off.

From a more substantive perspective, Trump took real body blows — especially from Cruz — regarding Trump University and the comments he made in an offthe-record session with the New York Times.

Trump, as he has in nearly every debate, showed a wafer-thin understanding of policy and, when pressed about that lack of knowledge, reverted to name-call-

positive “new American century” message. Rubio improved in the second half of the debate, but Cruz was better throughout. It’s hard to see how this debate changes the dynamic set in place on Tuesday night: Trump as the favorite, Cruz with the next best chance of being the nominee, Rubio as Trump spoiler.

The Republican Party: The first hour of the debate was an absolute disaster for Republicans hoping to rebrand their party heading into the 2016 general election. It looked more like a high school cafeteria food fight than an even semi-serious conversation about issues.

Assuming Trump is the nominee — and he has the most obvious path — then this debate will provide Democrats with roughly 100 minutes’ worth of raw footage of Rubio and Cruz savaging the real estate mogul that they can use in negative ads this fall. A lose-lose for the GOP. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Saving water comes with a cost D ARRYL F EARS Berkeley, Calif.

BY

E

verywhere he goes, Anthony Ambrose sees the dead and dying.

They haunt this city’s streets, the browning yards of stylish homes, the scenic grounds of the local University of California campus and dry roadway medians.

They’re urban trees, thirsty for water as the state enters the fifth year of the worst drought in its history, and thousands are keeling over.

“It’s definitely not a good thing,” said Ambrose, a researcher at the university who studies forest ecosystems. “They’re not as visual; they’re not as pretty. Along the highway you see a lot of dead redwoods. I feel sorry for the trees.”

Eight months after California’s governor ordered cities to cut water consumption by a quarter, residents and businesses have exceeded expectations. But now, the state’s furious conservation drive is not only threatening trees but also resulting in sluggish sewer lines and possible increases in water and tax bills.

In declaring a drought emergency in April, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said watering emerald-green grass every day “is a thing of the past.” He neglected to say trees were exempt, so residents, businesses and local governments stopped watering them, too.

Now the state is losing millions of trees that beautify their cities, improve air quality, offer shade in areas where temperatures can reach 100 degrees and provide habitat for squirrels, birds and other animals.

Trees are stressed and wilting from water loss in high heat. Leaves and limbs of redwoods, oaks, magnolias and other species are dropping, arborists say. Urban trees are now joining the 12.5 million wild trees that died last year, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

“I think it’s fair to say we think the drought is causing a problem,” said Carla Short, superintendent of the bureau of urban forestry in San Francisco, where 255,000 trees stand in the city and parks about a dozen miles from Berkeley.

DAVID WALTER BANKS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

California’s trees are dying, sewers are clogging, and residents are seeing higher taxes, utility bills The negative impact of the state’s conservation campaign has gone well beyond trees. Utilities that deliver the water to cities lost more than half a billion dollars over the last eight months as customers cut back, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.

Those revenue dips, which are projected to continue through October because of the board’s extension of the water-saving measures, probably will result in rate increases for at least some customers.

“There’s nothing that peeves customers more than to be told to conserve, and then turn around and say, ‘Good job, now we’re raising rates,’” said Max Gomberg, climateandconservationmanagerfor the water resources control board.

The water pinch has had several other unfortunate side effects. As customers cut back on the length of their showers, the number of times they flushed their toilets, and the clothes and dishes they washed, they lowered the outflow of water needed to push waste

through sewage tunnels.

The nation’s outdated sewers were designed to receive about 120 gallons per household per day to shove wastewater through the systems. “But the flow has dropped to 50 gallons,” said George Tchobanoglous, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at theUniversityofCaliforniaatDavis.

“You have solids that you flush, and there’s not enough water to carry the material,” he said. That material often sits and releases the telltale, rotten-egg odor of hydrogen sulfide. Besides smelling bad, it corrodes pipes. “When the city says buy low-flush toilets because we all want to save water and save the world, no one can resist,” he said. “But no one thinks about the consequences.”

Foul odors aren’t the only thing California city dwellers are complaining about. When the governor urged homeowners to rip out their lawns, he offered them a carrot: tax-free state rebates of up to $2,000 to help pay for replacement

Alejandro Sanchez, left, and Domingo Espinosa install an artificial lawn in Hermosa Beach, Calif., one of many ordered amid the drought.

desert-themed foliage. At least one of the state’s water suppliers did the state one better, offering rebates of as much as $4,000.

But California water officials who forgave state taxes on the rebates overlooked a major potential drawback — federal taxes. Now the Internal Revenue Service is preparing to tax the rebates as income, a move that could bring a key water conservation program to a halt.

“They’re being taxed for doing the right thing,” argued Dave Todd, land and water use program manager at the state Department of Water Resources.

The federal tax threatens to “reduce the appeal” of a key program to help California cope with drought now and in the future, Todd said. But Deven Upadhyay, who leads the water resource management group for the water district, said the problem resulted from an oversight by state officials and utility managers.

They thought rebates for water efficiency would be treated the same as energy-efficiency rebates, which the IRS doesn’t tax. But the IRS told the officials and members ofthestate’sunhappycongressional delegation that they were wrong.

Without rebates that encourage residents to replant their lawns with mulch and less-demanding plants, black dirt yards could become common. “We don’t want that to happen,” said Gomberg of the statewaterresourcescontrolboard.

Whether the state will save trees is also in question. “Generally just about any tree species is going to need a little bit of water going into a third or fourth year,” said Rhonda Berry, president and chief executive of Our City Forests in San Jose.

“Deep watering in the summer once a month will save a lot of trees.

In a city, every tree counts.”

But residents are unaware of how to care for trees, and efforts by cityleaderstoshowthemhavebeen uneven. Stressed from more than a year without water, even trees that survive will never be the same.

“It’s like a human being,” Berry said. “You’re impacted by stress, and you bounce back, but you’re going to have scars and your health is compromised.” n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

9

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Congress feels the squeeze BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

I

n a nation of expanding belt lines and buttocks, airline seats are bucking the trend toward bigger bottoms by shrinking in size.

Nowhere is the squeeze more passionately felt than on Capitol Hill, whose elected inhabitants jet home to their districts in far-flung states on a great many weekends.

“We have been squeezed long enough,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat who flies home to Memphis.

Cohen said his desire to end the squeeze has little to do with his own comfort or that of the 1.7 million Americans who fly within the United States each day. He says it’s all about safety.

“There will be a crash, and there will be people who will not be able to get out of an airplane,” he said at a recent House hearing.

His attempt to amend a bill so that the Federal Aviation Administration could study whether the tighter seats and narrowing distance between rows posed a risk died in committee, but the issue was revived this past week when Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would push for FAA action in the Senate.

Schumer said passengers are packed in “like sardines.”

“There’s been constant shrinkage,” he said. “They shouldn’t be cutting inches of legroom and seat width. It’s time for the FAA to step up and stop this problem from continuing.”

The problem of the shrinking seat has been exacerbated by the nation’s other problem: People are getting bigger. Almost 79 million Americans are obese, 35 percent of the population, and the number is projected to reach 50 percent by 2030.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the average weight of a woman these days is equal to that of the average man in the 1960s: 166 pounds.

The average man now weighs almost 196 pounds.

Seat a row of average men in economy class on a Boeing 777

JULIE WALKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The legislative frequent-fliers are pushing back against airlines’ shrinking seats and aisles and you’re looking at almost 1,800 pounds. The average seat belt is about 40 inches long, and the FAA requires flight attendants “to discreetly offer” a 24inch seat belt extender to passengers whose girth demands one.

As people have grown, airline seats have shrunk. In the 1970s, the average cheap seat was 18

79 million Americans are obese, 35 percent of the population, and the number is projected to reach 50 percent by 2030.

inches wide. Now it’s about an inch and a half smaller. In the old days, there was almost a yard of distance between rows in the economy section. Today it’s about 31 inches.

People who pay more for business or first class get more room to breathe. There is enough variation among airline seats that the website TripAdvisor provides a lengthy list of what fliers can expect.

For the airlines, it’s all about competition. They went through a lean time after 9/11 and then the recession, but after bankruptcies and consolidation they have returned to profit. They think the FAA should focus on safety issues — such as whether a plane could be safely evacuated in an emergency — but let discerning passengers decide whether they’re comfortable. If people feel too

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to require the Federal Aviation Administration to establish seat-size standards for commercial airlines.

squeezed, they contend, they’ll select another airline.

Jonathan Grella, executive vice president at the U.S. Travel Association, says it’s not so easy for passengers to be so selective.

“It’s not just limited seat size; it’s limited options,” Grella said.

“Not only are we down to basically the big four [airlines], but essentially they have carved up the country, so it’s not like you’re getting head-to-head options to get from Point A to Point B. You’re going to get a seat of a certain size, and that’s about it.”

Cohen’s amendment to the House FAA bill failed, in part, because other committee members said a provision already in the bill required the FAA to study whether airplane evacuation plans were adequate.

But his push for a more targeted study of whether shrinking seat size and distance between rows was a risk found plenty of sympathy from his colleagues.

“Boarding a plane has become a battle between passengers to secure space in the overhead compartments to avoid baggage fees,” said Rep. Janice Hahn (DCalif.), who co-sponsored Cohen’s amendment. “People are getting into fights over use of products like the Knee Defender, a gadget that actually stops the seat in front of you from being able to recline.”

And, said Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.), it gets worse than that in close quarters.

“I’ve witnessed some of those fights,” he said. “A guy trying to squeeze into a seat and he caught ahold of a woman’s hair in the seat in front, and she’s screaming at him because he pulled her hair and he’s screaming at her.”

Plus, Nolan said, while safety is a paramount concern, comfort also is an issue.

“We’ve just gotten bigger as people. We’re wider, we’re taller,” he said. “I sat in a seat on my last flight [next to] a big-shouldered guy and, for crying out loud, he had his knees up around his shoulders and half his body was in my seat, and it was just unbelievably uncomfortable.” n

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NATION

Making room for a behemoth BY

P EGGY M C G LONE

I

t took Shirley Burke three years to decide to donate the violin once owned and played by her enslaved great-grandfather to a museum, where it would be properly cared for and available for many others to appreciate.

But when Burke finally gave it away, she chose the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., and not her local African American museum in Detroit.

“I wanted to put it in a place where more people would have access to it, and more people will go to D.C.,” said Burke, 73, a retired high school assistant principal who lives in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield.

Burke’s choice of the Smithsonian museum over the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History didn’t surprise the Wright museum’s president and chief executive, Juanita Moore.

“There’s no jealousy at all,” Moore said. “It is so important for her and her family for that to be part of the national story.”

This is a scenario playing out across the country, as hundreds of African American museums grapple with the arrival of the new national museum, opening on the Mall on Sept. 24. Regional and local organizations can’t compete with NMAAHC’s national profile, its prominent location or its Smithsonian pedigree, and as a result, they’ve watched it snag gifts of family heirlooms and cold cash, sometimes from their most ardent supporters.

But they’ve also received benefits from the newest — and largest — African American museum, including funding for conferences, training workshops and internships for young museum professionals. Its opening will generate national headlines and interest in the African American story, and they hope some of that attention will spill over to their institutions.

“We look at the national museum as our champion on a national level,” said Leslie Guy, chief curator at the DuSable, in Chica-

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Regional black history museums must grapple with the effect of the new Smithsonian museum go, the nation’s oldest African American museum.

There are almost 300 museums in the United States focused on African American history, art and culture, according to Samuel Black, president of the Association of African American Museums. Most are small community organizations with volunteer or small staffs focused on local missions, although there are a handful of larger institutions in cities such as Baltimore, New York and Detroit. The museums work together, through the association, on everything from collection care to education and exhibitions, Black said. When the NMAAHC opens, it will become the largest in terms of budget, building and visitors, but it will be treated the same as its peers.

“We share things we normally share,” he said about the members’ relationships with the national museum. “It’s not so much a competition kind of thing. They’re going to do it anyway, so you might as well work with them.”

The NMAAHC has supported the national organization for many years, providing office space, conference funding, scholarships and administrative support, according to Deborah Mack, NMAAHC’s associate director for community and constituent services. Her office assists individual museums and state and regional networks to strengthen programs and staff. The museum works with historically black colleges and universities, too.

“It’s been gratifying to see when we, as a Smithsonian institution, partner” with a local organization, Mack said. “It brings a lot of visibility or new support for what has been an excellent program all along.”

Government agencies and local funders are influenced by the Smithsonian brand.

“They see them differently, or see them for the first time in a way that they weren’t aware before,” she said. “It’s a great leveraging of resources.”

But the institutions are often in

Artifacts destined for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington include a 1966 pamphlet for the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Ala., and a Buffalo Soldier’s Bible from about 1913.

competition, especially when it comes to donations. In this arena, the larger ones have an edge.

NMAAHC has been seeking gifts from individuals and foundations for more than a decade, Black noted, and it will continue to do so after the opening.

“I’ve heard the concern . . . that people in their local areas might be more inclined to donate to the Smithsonian because the name has cachet,” Black said. “I think that will remain a concern, and it will probably heighten once the museum opens and all the attention is on them and every one wants to participate in that shiny new thing.”

Gerald B. Smith, the founding chairman of the Houston Museum of African American Culture, made a gift of $1 million to the national museum with his wife, Anita, and family. Smith said he wanted to be part of a historic effort.

“Those of us, people of color who have the opportunity and the resources to give, should give,” he said. “The national museum has a broader perspective, a broader audience, a broader agenda. It is for all the people.”

The Smithsonian museum has raised $252 million of its $270 million goal, including major gifts from American Express, Target, Bank of America and Caterpillar.

Other African American museums don’t quarrel with these grants because “corporate monies have not been accessible to African American museums historically,” Black said.

The national museum has enjoyed an advantage in acquisitions, too. The NMAAHC has built its 35,000-piece collection from scratch by purchasing items, uncovering new artifacts and courting donors to give their art or family heirlooms.

“As a curator and historian, I have a bone to pick with them because there are things that I’ve lost to that institution,” said Charles Bethea, director of collections and exhibitions at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore. “I say that with a smile. It’s what we do, and I understand.” n

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11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

More Saudis are working at the mall H UGH N AYLOR Riyadh, Saudi Arabia BY

M

ariam al-Harbi is Saudi, and she works at Starbucks.

If you think a Saudi barista isn’t a big deal, just ask Harbi. In fact, just ask any of the small but growing number of Saudi citizens who flip burgers at McDonald’s, fold sweaters at the Gap, or work any number of fast-food and retail jobs in this oil-rich kingdom.

They’ll probably tell you how most of their compatriots have cushy government jobs. And they’ll probably tell you how many, at least until recently, have sneered at employment in the private sector.

“We shouldn’t be afraid to do these jobs,” said Harbi, 30, a college graduate who works on the women-only level of the Kingdom Center mall here in the capital.

She certainly isn’t.

On a recent day, Harbi hurried between the cash register and coffee maker to brew lattes and grab muffins and cookies. With laser focus, she took orders in rudimentary English and her native Arabic.

It’s relatively low-salary work, but Harbi beamed with enthusiasm, especially when it came to caramel macchiatos. “They’re so much fun to make! It’s like art!” she said.

Such keenness for serviceindustry employment may be exactly what Saudi Arabia needs as its economy struggles with falling oil prices.

The government’s overwhelming reliance on oil exports has recently forced it to adopt stinging austerity measures that threaten the country’s massive welfare programs and bloated public sector.

As authorities cut subsidies and spending, they have imposed hiring freezes that have made it harder for Saudis to find relatively rigor-free, well-paid employment with the government.

The change poses challenges for a conservative society in which two-thirds of the population of 22 million are younger than 30 and struggle with unemployment.

But it could also be an opportu-

HUGH NAYLOR/THE WASHINGTON POST

KHALID MOHAMMED/ASSOCIATED PRESS

nity for the country’s officials, who have long tried to get Saudis out of government work — where more than 90 percent are employed — and into the private sector.

“There just hasn’t been a comprehensive and effective strategy in place for Saudis to feel comfortable and secure in the private sector,” said Wahab Abu-Dahesh, an economist at Riyadh’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

For now, Saudi Arabia has been forced to rely on foreigners to power the private sector. Millions of people from countries such as Pakistan, the Philippines and wartorn Syria deliver FedEx packages, take orders at Chili’s and greet guests at hotel lobbies.

The imbalance is even more pronounced in neighboring Gulf Arab monarchies, where oil economies have produced spendthrift

Top: Abdullah alAwaji folds clothes at a Lacoste outlet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Above: Saudi women shop at a mall in Riyadh. More Saudis are turning to the private sector for jobs as the nation’s economy struggles.

lifestyles of Range Rovers, Cartier watches and shopping excursions to Europe. Thanks to epic naturalgas exports, for instance, Qataris overwhelmingly work in government and government-backed entities, earning an average annual income close to $100,000.

In Saudi Arabia, however, the welfare state has been stretched thin by rapid population growth.

As a result, many Saudis are far too poor to afford Porsches or to vacation in Paris. In fact, many are focused on scratching out a living, which helps explain why a rising number are turning to privatesector employment, said AbuDahesh, who noted that the government lacks reliable statistics on the number of Saudis who work these jobs.

Harbi said tight finances at home helped persuade her husband, a government-employed security guard, to allow her to work at the coffee shop, where she earns a little more than $1,000 a month.

So, too, did the shop’s location on the mall’s women-only level.

These men-free zones have been created to help religiously conservative women such as Harbi work without hassle or niqab, a face-concealing garment.

Money problems also persuaded Abdullah al-Awaji to take a job at the mall’s Lacoste outlet two months ago, where he also earns a monthly wage of just over $1,000.

The rail-thin 24-year-old has become the breadwinner for his sick father as well as eight sisters and six brothers.

He had hoped for government work, but having only a high school education made it difficult to get a foot in the door. Awaji said his friend and now colleague at the clothing outlet, Ali, also a Saudi citizen, encouraged him to apply for a position.

“I have retirement and health benefits here,” he said during a lunch break.

Awaji also seemed to embrace his tasks, approaching customers wearing a light-blue polo shirt and a gleaming smile.

“How may I help you?” he said in Arabic, greeting a man who was browsing for dress shirts. n

‘Sometimes when I’m alone with my baby, I think about killing him. He reminds me of the man who raped me.’

Members of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Central African Republic allegedly turned to sexual predation, betraying their duty to protect.

A 14-year-old breast-feeds her 3-month-old son in Bangui, Central African Republic. She says she was raped and impregnated by a U.N. peacekeeper from Burundi.

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COVER STORY

Rosine Mengue, 18, holding her 1-year-old son, says she was 16 when a Moroccan peacekeeper coerced her into having sex for money, giving her a total of $8 for two visits and making her pregnant.

STORY BY KEVIN SIEFF PHOTOS BY JANE HAHN

in Bangui, Central African Republic

T

he neighborhood is a patchwork of low-slung buildings scorched and looted at the height of the civil war, a place where the United Nations was supposed to come to the rescue. But in a number of homes, women and girls are raising babies they say are the children of U.N. troops who abused or exploited them.

“Peacekeeper babies,” the United Nations calls such infants.

“A horrible thing,” says an elfin 14-year-old girl, who describes how a Burundian soldier dragged her into his barracks and raped her, leaving her pregnant with the baby boy she now cradles uncom-

fortably.

The allegations come amid one of the biggest scandals to plague the United Nations in years. Since the U.N. peacekeeping mission here began in 2014, its employees have been formally accused of sexually abusing or exploiting 42 local civilians, most of them underage girls.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Kimoon has called sexual abuse by peacekeepers “a cancer in our system.” In August, the top U.N. official here was fired for failing to take enough action on abuse cases.

Nearly 1,000 troops whose units have been tied to abuses have been expelled, or will be soon. Among them is the entire contingent from the Democratic Republic of the

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

15

COVER STORY

Annie, 29, holds her 2-month-old son, who she says was fathered by a soldier from Gabon.

Congo.

But the victims appear to be more numerous than the United Nations has reported so far. In a corner of the capital city known as Castors, near the U.N. headquarters in the country, The Washington Post interviewed seven women and girls who described contact with peacekeepers that violated U.N. regulations against sexual exploitation and abuse. Five of them said they exchanged sex for food or money — sometimes as little as $4 — while their country was rocked by civil war and families were going hungry. Only two had reported their cases to the United Nations.

Five of the seven interviewed by The Post said they had borne the children of their abusers. The 14-

year-old mother said she was assaulted by a Burundian soldier, but the United Nations recorded her case not as rape but as “transactional” sex, in which acts are exchanged for money or food.

“Sometimes when I’m alone with my baby, I think about killing him,” the teen said, holding the little boy. “He reminds me of the man who raped me.”

The accounts by the women and girls could not be independently verified. But their stories are consistent with other accounts of abuse in the Central African Republic collected by independent groups and the United Nations.

The Post does not identify minors who are alleged victims of sexual abuse or exploitation.

The U.N. system responsible for handling and prosecuting such cases has been widely criticized as dysfunctional, even after scandals involving peacekeepers in other parts of the world. Only one criminal charge has been filed in relation to any of the 42 cases of sexual abuse or exploitation that have been officially registered in the Central African Republic, according to U.N. officials.

U.N. officials did file a report on the 14-year-old mother’s case, and a U.N. spokeswoman, Ismini Palla, said the organization was “monitoring the case of the girl closely.”

But nine months after the girl reported the alleged rape, investigators have not reported any results. U.N. officials had no comment on why they had classified the case as exploitation rather than assault.

The sexual abuse scandal is the latest horrific development in a war already marked by extreme brutality. The conflict began in late 2013 when mostly Muslim rebels overthrew the government in this Christian-majority country, setting off a cycle of revenge killings that in Bangui fell largely along religious lines. About 6,000 people have been killed. The U.N. mission, a 12,000-member organization that includes troops from 46 countries and is known as MINUSCA, was established to provide security and protect civilians.

In recent months, numerous allegations have emerged of peacekeeper abuse of vulnerable residents. Human Rights Watch issued a report last month documenting the cases of eight women and girls allegedly raped or sexually exploited by U.N. peacekeepers in late 2015 in the central city of Bambari. Amnesty International said last August that it had obtained evidence of a U.N. peacekeeper’s rape of a 12-year-old girl in the capital.

U.N. officials recognize that they are grappling with a serious breakdown in their peacekeeping forces. Last month, they said they were investigating the cases of four girls who were allegedly exploited or abused at a camp for internally displaced persons in central Ouaka prefecture. In January, they said that at least four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents for sex at a camp in Bangui. Parfait OnangaAnyanga, the newly appointed head of the U.N. mission, said he

KLMNO WEEKLY

fears that the cases discovered so far may be the “tip of the iceberg.”

“We’re going to be flooded by paternity claims,” he said in an interview.

Mission was quickly tainted It is not the first deployment in which U.N. forces have been accused of sexual abuse. In Bosnia in the 1990s, peacekeepers were accused of soliciting sex from women who had been trafficked and virtually enslaved in local brothels. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 2000s, more than 150 allegations of abuse and exploitation were registered against peacekeepers, and U.N. investigators found that many of the alleged victims were orphans. U.N. missions in Kosovo, Haiti, Liberia and other places also have been tarnished by such allegations.

The United Nations has conducted internal investigations and revamped training programs. But the complaints continue to roll in.

Perhaps no mission in recent U.N. history has been as quickly tainted by abuse allegations as the one in the Central African Republic, which is expected to cost $814 million this year. The first cluster of sexual abuse cases appeared within months of the mission’s September 2014 launch.

Even before the U.N. mission officially began, French troops were accused of sexually abusing a number of local children. In a report issued last year, a United Nations-appointed review panel sharply criticized U.N. officials in the Central African Republic as failing to take action or report the cases after uncovering them.

“The welfare of the victims and the accountability of the perpetrators appeared to be an afterthought, if considered at all,” the report said.

U.N. bases in the Central African Republic are now plastered with posters that list the rules that troops are already supposed to know.

“Sex with anyone under the age of 18 is prohibited.”

“Exchanging money, goods or employment for sex is prohibited.”

“Zero tolerance for sexual exploitation.”

But the Castors neighborhood is a shocking illustration of how brazen the peacekeepers became.

Residents say that troops skulked around the neighborhood looking continues on next page

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COVER STORY about 10 countries have been implicated in the sex-abuse scandal.

Most of the women interviewed

by The Post said they did not report their cases to the United Nations because they felt ashamed and did not think the organization would be able to help them.

A 17-year-old, sitting in the family room of her home, says that last year when she was 16, a peacekeeper from Morocco lured her into sex on a promise of money.

from previous page

for girls during the day and sneaked out at night to meet them in rented rooms or abandoned houses, or to take them into the barracks. Moroccan troops broke holes in the perimeter wall of their bases, witnesses said, so that they could leave undetected.

“There are so many girls here who slept with [peacekeepers],” said Thierry Karpandgei, a resident. “You can see their babies all over here.”

Most of the alleged cases of abuse and exploitation occurred at the peak of the conflict, in 2014 and 2015, when the fighting pushed residents to the edge of survival.

“There was no way to get food or money at the time, and they prom-

ised to help us if we slept with them,” said Rosine Mengue, who explained that she received the equivalent of $4 in each of two encounterswithapeacekeeper.She was 16 at the time. She spent the money on cassava leaves, which fed her family for two days. Mengue, who is now 18, told The Washington Post it could use her full name.

Like the rest of the women, Mengue never heard from the man after she became pregnant, she said. He went back to Morocco.

She dropped out of school and is raising her son in her family’s home, surrounded by charred palm trees and the ruins of halfdestroyed buildings.

U.N. officials have said that peacekeeping contingents from

A sense of impunity Castors is along the road from the sprawling U.N. headquarters, where Onanga-Anyanga, 55, a veteran U.N. official from Gabon, is scrambling to solve the problem.

In an interview last month, he sat in front of a sheet of paper that said in bold print: “Talking points — Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.”

When he looked up, he spoke angrily.

“We inherited troops that we cannot call troops. I realized that what was sent here was trash,” he said.

There are a range of explanations for the rampant abuse, including the poor training and discipline of many battalions, which are dispatched here for years-long rotations, said U.N. officials and analysts.

U.N. officials here have tried to encourage the reporting of sexual abuse by setting up a hotline for victims and buying radio ads in which they are encouraged to come forward.

Victims of abuse whose cases are documented are eligible for medical and psychological help and possibly other assistance. But many women are still unaware of how to register complaints.

Even as the United Nations has tried to improve training on sexual abuse, there have been mistakes.

Many of the new lessons, for example, are taught only in English and French, and some troops lack fluency in either language, said one U.N. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the issue.

Perhaps most problematic is that the United Nations leaves the adjudication of sexual abuse allegations to the troops’ countries of origin. But those nations’ investigations are often weak, U.N. officials said. That has contributed to a sense of impunity, according to U.N. officials and outside experts.

For peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, “the message is clear: You can rape or abuse women and girls, and you can get away with it,” said Lewis Mudge, an

Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Until troopcontributing countries bring peacekeepers accused of these crimes to justice, we can expect more of these cases in the future.”

Exploiting the starving The 14-year-old mother and other residents said they first saw the peacekeepers as a sign of security, proof that the world hadn’t forgotten about them.

But when the soldiers began arriving in 2014, there was still a massive food shortage. Some peacekeepers recognized their leverage over a city of starving women and girls.

The 14-year-old said that when she went to a U.N. base last year to ask for food, a Burundian soldier gently beckoned to her from his barracks, calling, “Come here.”

Then, she said, he pulled her into a room full of empty beds. He ripped off her clothes.

The teenager and her aunt said that three months later, they told two U.N. employees what had happened. The pregnant girl was then taken to a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, the medical group said. But aid workers who followed the girl’s case over the next few weeks said they were dismayed at how little help she received from the United Nations.

“There was absolutely no immediate or concrete measure of assistance available to this girl,” said Ondine Ripka, an international legal adviser with Doctors Without Borders.

A UNICEF spokesman, John Budd, said the organization does not comment on aid provided to individuals. The 14-year-old mother said she had not received any psychological counseling or financial assistance.

That leaves girls like the 14-yearold to raise their babies on almost nothing, as the war rages on. Last month, she sat outside her home, five rooms where more than 20 relatives sleep. Nearby, a man sold liquor from a plastic table. A white U.N. surveillance blimp flew overhead. Two hundred yards away, a group of Burundian troops was on patrol.

The teenager handed her baby to her mother, who looked at the ground. She fears that her daughter has been ruined by the abuse.

“If someone destroys what you love, what do you do?” the mother said. n

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TRENDS

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Over the borderline The estimated population of undocumented immigrants in the United States dropped below 11 million in 2014, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Michigan saw the biggest increase at 12 percent, but it is not among the top 15 states below ranked by population. — Annys Shin n

Top 15 states ranked by population of undocumented immigrants in 2014 (numbers in thousands):

california

3,000 2014 2,598

2,250 1,500 750

2,250

new york

+1

% Change 2010-14

-11

-11

% Change 2010-14

2014 1,737

florida

-7

% Change 2010-14

GeorGia

-9

2014 817

nortH carolina

-13

% Change 2010-14

-4

% Change 2010-14

illinois

% Change 2010-14

-23

% Change 2010-14

2014 711

% Change 2010-14

new Jersey

3,000

texas

ariZona

2014 455

VirGinia

-7

% Change 2010-14

+7

% Change 2010-14

1,500 2014 452

750

wasHinGton

3,000 2,250

-3

% Change 2010-14

2014 345

Maryland

-2 -2

% Change 2010-14

2014 322

neVada

2014 277

colorado

-3

% Change 2010-14

+1

% Change 2010-14

2014 269

PennsylVania

+4

% Change 2010-14

1,500 750

2014 234

2014 233

2014 180

2014 179

2014 158

SOURCE: ROBERT WARREN, CENTER FOR MIGRATION STUDIES; CMS 2016 ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY DATA

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

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BOOKS

Two galvanizing black men’s bond N ON-FICTION

I BLOOD BROTHERS The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X

By Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith Basic. 362 pp. $28.99

l

REVIEWED BY

W IL H AYGOOD

n the early 1960s, America was alternately beguiled and frightened by the urgency of demands for equal rights from its black citizenry. Attempts to register to vote, to integrate colleges and universities, to become part of the American Dream, as it were, often resulted in bloodshed. The news footage of the clashes — against the backdrop of state-sanctioned segregation — shocked the world.

Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali were two of the marquee figures from that era. Both were in the vanguard of black independent thinkers who shook up a host of people and institutions. They talked of racism in raw terms.

They even made some blacks of a conservative bent quite nervous.

Being denied the vote might give way to bullets, Malcolm X ominously intoned. As for Ali — who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964 — he pronounced he would not abide by the military draft. These were not men with the patience to wait for justice.

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith’s “Blood Brothers” tells the story of these two galvanizing and hypnotic personalities and of the America that produced them. Although the book promises more than it delivers, it is earnest and, by focusing mostly on 1962 to 1965, smartly constructed.

Family dysfunction lay in the upbringing of both men. Cassius Clay Sr. was a mean and petty man who beat his wife. The younger Clay — feral, handsome and loud — was a star in the Louisville boxing scene who wanted to get away from his father. He brought home a boxing medal from the 1960 Rome Olympics and began to find it harder to swallow that he must still dine in segregated restaurants.

Earl Little was Malcolm’s father.

His life came to a gruesome end in 1931inLansing,Mich.,afterastreetcar accident. Did he really slip beneath the streetcar? Blacks scoffed, believing it foul play at the hands of whites. Earl Little was a black na-

BOB GOMEL/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Malcolm X photographs world heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali), right, in 1964.

tionalist, a follower of the teachings of Marcus Garvey and a man who unsettled many Lansing whites.

“One man was scarred by his father’s absence,” the authors write, “the other by his father’s presence.”

Young Malcolm, fatherless and restless, became a thief, a pimp and a convict, entering a Massachusetts prison in 1946, where he would remain for six years. Once out of prison, Malcolm X — who had found Islam behind bars — became a rising star in the Nation of Islam, steadily promoted by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

The young Clay, entering the ranks of professional boxing, became intrigued with the Nation of Islam. Its teachings and guidance began to salve his wounds of second-class citizenship.

If the morphing of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali needed a final push, the stardom of Malcolm X seemed to provide it. Malcolm was leading protest marches through an assortment of major cities. He was claiming headlines

and gathering followers.

The prizefighter first met Malcolm X in Detroit. “My first impression of Malcolm X,” the boxer confided, “was how could a black man talk about the government and white people and act so bold and not be shot at?”

The narrative tightens as Malcolm X becomes despondent about Muhammad’s affairs.

When President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, Nation of Islam officials are ordered by their leader to say nothing that would deepen the country’s hurt. Malcom X ignored the directive and told the press that Kennedy’s killing was an example of “the chickens coming home to roost.” The comment infuriated many, especially Muhammad, who silenced Malcolm X, forbidding him for a period to speak on behalf of Muslims in the country.

Malcolm X — the fissures between him and the Nation of Islam deepening — took a pilgrimage to Mecca, coming back a changed

man. He softened his fiery rhetoric. He intended to work with integrationists and mainstream civil rights leaders. He desperately reached out to Ali, wanting him to understand, hoping that Ali would distance himself from the philandering Muhammad. Ali would not.

On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm was gunned down. Because their face time in life was actually rather limited, there is not quite enough here to convince one that Malcolm and Ali were “blood brothers.”

They were, true enough, figures in the brewing ferment of politics, sports and race, rather quickly enmeshed in a splintering, colossal family feud. But there is enough here to make one appreciate the dynamism of both men, whose reputations have undergone transformations, leaving both as fuller and more dimensional figures in the American mind-set. n Haygood is a distinguished scholar-inresidence at Miami University in Ohio and an author.

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A woman tries to flee troubled past

A visual journey to architectural fame

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

n the first sentence of Lisa Lutz’s novel “The Passenger,” 28-year-old Tanya Dubois tells us: “When I found my husband at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to resuscitate him before I ever considered disposing of the body.”

Once she’s satisfied that the man is dead, Tanya has a shot of his best bourbon and thinks hard about her next step. She assures us that she didn’t kill her husband — that he must have slipped and fallen down the stairs — but admits she doesn’t mourn his passing; among other sins, he snored, gambled and didn’t trim his toenails. Disposing of his body would be too difficult, she decides, but she won’t call police and report the death. Why? Because, she says, “they’d start looking at me real carefully and I didn’t like people looking at me.”

In other words, Tanya has secrets, many secrets, secrets the author will reveal slowly as the novel progresses. So she packs her bag, gasses up her husband’s car and leaves Wisconsin in search of a new life, pausing briefly for a parting romp with the chiropractor who has been her lover.

Low on funds, Tanya drives to Nebraska, checks into a motel and calls a Mr. Oliver to demand that he send her a new identity and $5,000. He finally agrees but is so hostile that she fears he may instead send someone to kill her. We have no idea who Mr. Oliver is.

She drives to Austin, where she happens to meet a woman known as Blue (for her ice-blue eyes) whose history is as murky as her own. One night, as the two women leave a bar, two men with guns force them into a car and head out of town. Tanya, assuming these are Mr. Oliver’s killers, manages to twist the steering wheel, whereupon Blue grabs a gun and shoots both men dead. It’s time for Tanya to leave Texas, but she and the formidable Blue will meet again.

Thus begins Tanya’s odyssey across the United States. She’s often desperate to obtain new IDs when old ones are compromised.

Sometimes she steals them from women who unwisely leave their purses unguarded. She often cuts and dyes her hair, and one time she changes her looks by gorging on sweets until she gains 25 pounds.

We are reminded that it’s all but impossible to exist in today’s United States without a driver’s license, a Social Security number and other forms of identification.

Tanya likes bars, but the men she meets there endlessly hit on her and ask unwelcome questions.

The only man she’s drawn to turns out to be a sheriff, which complicates their relationship. When she finds a job teaching in a private school in Wyoming, she loves the children, but a man from her past arrives to kill her. He pays for his mistake, and she moves on.

Everywhere she goes, dangers await. In Upstate New York, needing shelter, Tanya breaks into vacant country homes — only to have their owners arrive unexpectedly.

Two of them want to kill the intruder. If her adventures sometimes feel fanciful, they’re well told and exciting. The question is whether this intelligent, essentially moral woman can escape the disaster her life has become. She is, we come to think, more sinned against than sinning.

A series of email exchanges between Tanya and a man named Ryan gives hints of her past. Ryan loves her, but she spurns his offers of help. They haven’t seen each other in years and they speak guardedly of lies, even deaths. It appears that Tanya is struggling with problems that began amid the passions and confusions of high school. If she is to find salvation, she must stop fleeing her past and confront it. Or would that path lead to prison?

Lutz is also the author of the Spellman Files. With “The Passenger,” she has reintroduced herself as a more serious — and intriguing — author of crime fiction. n Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

I THE PASSENGER

By Lisa Lutz Simon & Schuster.

303 pp. $25.99

VOYAGE LE CORBUSIER Drawing on the Road

By Jacob Brillhart Norton. 192 pp. $35

l

REVIEWED BY

N ICOLE L EE

n his seminal work “Toward an Architecture” (1923), Le Corbusier compelled his contemporaries to forget the “kissing doves” of old architecture and embrace the beauty of the machinery and construction expanding before them. “May our eyes see,” he said, praising the innovative lines and structures of planes, ships and other transport vehicles.

But before he was considered the father of Modernism, the indefatigable Le Corbusier was Charles-Édouard JeanneretGris, an art student whose comprehensive sketches of classical monuments and ruins lay the foundation for his groundbreaking work in modern architecture, as well as his visionary theories on functionalism.

Architect and teacher Jacob Brillhart has gathered 175 of the young Jeanneret’s studies, for the first time, in the book “Voyage Le Corbusier.” Featuring his early drawings, sketches and watercolors taken from archives at Fondation Le Corbusier, this slim volume is a visual diary of the travels Jeanneret took through Europe between 1907 and 1911.

Brillhart, who used the sketches as a road map for his own European drawing trips, presents the book as an example of Jeanneret’s unflagging commitment to truly “looking and drawing to see and to understand in order to know.”

While Jeanneret did not train formally as an architect, his sketchbooks were a laboratory that helped the young artist develop the philosophies he would expound upon in “Toward an Architecture” and later on as Le Corbusier.

Each of the book’s five sections encompasses a period of Jeanneret’s travels: “La Chaux-deFonds in Switzerland,” where he was a high school student under renowned tutor Charles L’Eplattenier; “Italy”; “Europe”; “Germany”; and a section titled “Journey to the East.” A map of Jeanneret’s travels and Brillhart’s commentary accompany each section.

For those who know Le Corbusier’s work, the detail and commitment these youthful sketches display will not come as a surprise. In the “Italy” section, several analytical watercolors of the facades of the Baptistery in Siena reveal an intensity and rigor unusual for a 19-year-old.

In “Europe,” looser sketches of Nuremberg would provide an accompaniment for the ideas presented in his book “Urbanism” (1925) and later inform his visionary city planning.

Brillhart describes Le Corbusier as “a deeply radical and progressive architect, a futurist who was equally and fundamentally rooted in history and tradition.”

But those without an existing knowledge of Le Corbusier may find it difficult to sift through these sketches to see the specific connections between his early work and his revolutionary ideas on functionalism. Anyone looking for a deeper analysis of his work will have to turn elsewhere.

But for those seeking inspiration for travel drawing, this book is sufficiently annotated and provides a useful road map of Jeanneret’s experience “on the road.” As a commentator and guide, Brillhart is adept, pointing out Jeanneret’s developing skills and philosophies in a way that’s easy for an amateur artist or art student to understand. It’s fascinating, for example, to see the comparisons between the detailed drawings and watercolors of the earlier section and the fluid pencil sketches created later. Yet more of this commentary from Brillhart would have been useful.

Still, “Voyage Le Corbusier” is beautifully presented and a pleasure to view and hold. Brillhart’s collection of a young artist’s formative work is a useful addition to understanding the work of Le Corbusier and the tradition of travel drawing. It’s a reminder of how essential it is to truly see. n Lee is a writer based in New York.

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

If only guns had been harder for my son to buy SUE KLEBOLD is author of “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.”

I am not an expert on guns. I have never owned one, and my husband and I never kept one in the house. So when it comes to gun safety and reducing the number of mass shootings that take place in our country, I would be the last person to suggest there are easy answers. But I do have a tragically personal vantage point on the issue.

Nearly 17 years ago, my son Dylan and his friend Eric Harris walked into Columbine High School carrying an array of firearms and explosives. They killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others. It was an incomprehensible tragedy that I have lived with every day of my life since. Why did Dylan do it? How could this have happened? These questions have consumed my every waking moment.

Gun rights advocates, and many legislators, say that the solution to stopping horrific shooting tragedies such as Columbine or Sandy Hook or Charleston or Santa Barbara or San Bernardino or Roseburg is not to restrict or regulate our access to firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but to focus more attention on mental health. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, they claim. In the tragic instance of a mass shooting, guns are merely the instruments of a disturbed mind. And in fact, the overwhelming majority of gun owners act responsibly and safely. They would never fire on an innocent person, much less a child in a school. By focusing on guns, gun rights activists say, we miss the real challenge we need to address: identifying and getting help for those at risk because they are not brainhealthy.

And that is the approach I have taken in thinking about Columbine and my son. A number of factors brought Dylan to Columbine High School that morning to hurt his fellow

classmates. There were the deep depression and suicidal thoughts that he had been living with and that I was unaware of. There was his distorted belief that he was unloved and unlovable. There was the bullying that made him feel like an outsider at Columbine to an extent I will never know. There was his friendship with Eric and the ways each reinforced the anger and pain of the other.

After spending the past decade interviewing experts, analyzing Dylan’s journals, talking with my family members, revisiting the days and years leading up to Columbine and working with others in suicide prevention, I realize there were signs, however unclear, that I might have recognized, knowing what I know now. But it was only after my son took part in what at the time was the worst school shooting in history that I — or anyone else close to Dylan — had any idea that there was anything wrong with him. Before Columbine, I would have told you with absolute certainty that I would know if there were anything amiss with my son, and

ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Crosses on a hill above Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 honor the 15 people who died during a school shooting there.

even more so if anything were seriously wrong. But that raises an important question with regard to gun violence: If there are no flashing neon signs to alert us when someone needs help, how can we know who is and who is not mentally stable enough to be responsibly armed?

I’m convinced that by recognizing the signs that a child is struggling early on, we can get our children the help they need — before another Columbine takes place. So I am firmly in the camp of those who say we must focus more attention and resources on those who suffer from mental-health issues. I applaud the fact that since Columbine, a growing number of schools are making strides in identifying when kids are in crisis. But much more needs to be done.

Having said that, I still cannot help but believe that Dylan and Eric would not have been able to take the lives of so many if they

How can we know who is mentally stable enough to be armed?

had not had such easy access to guns. As I later learned, Dylan and Eric — both of whom were minors — secretly attended a gun show where they bought the shotguns they would use in the massacre and met a young man who sold them a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol.

Is our right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment so absolute that we cannot, at the very least, restrict access to certain kinds of weapons to protect the most vulnerable among us — especially teenagers, whose judgment at the best of times is compromised by hormones, impulsivity and immature decision-making? Is our right to bear arms so vital to what it means to be an American that there can be no limit on those rights whatsoever, whether raising the legal age at which one can purchase a gun, as we did with the drinking age or conducting more extensive background checks or restricting access to assault weapons designed for the battlefield?

Again, the issues are challenging, and both gun rights advocates and gun-control advocates have valid points of view. I only know that every night as I go to bed, I can’t help but see the face of my son and the faces of the 13 people he and Eric killed and wonder what might have been. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

The hard times we often forget ROBERT J.SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics.

By 1915, the United States was the world’s richest nation — and yet, most Americans were dirt poor by today’s standards. Adjusted for inflation, men’s average wages were about a third of what full-time workers now earn. The average workweek in manufacturing hovered around 50 hours, and many employees worked a half day on Saturday. Less than a third of homes had electric lights. Less than a fifth of the adult population were high school graduates.

How we’ve changed.

Every so often, we need to take note. For all of today’s pessimism, long-term trends in the United States are mostly positive. We tend to forget that and the parallel lessons. First, dramatic change is a constant; the notion that we’re living in a period of exceptional upheaval is a shortsighted fiction. And second, the United States has a solid record of adapting to change, albeit with some setbacks and regrets.

So let’s recall gains of the past century. The figures above and below come mainly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its flagship publication — the Monthly Labor Review — with an article by economist Carol Boyd Leon comparing 1915 with 2015. It’s a fascinating peek at the past that

raises important questions about the future.

A century ago, the United States was a country of about 100 million people, just shy of a third of today’s 321 million. Then as now, immigration was at near-record levels, with immigrants constituting about 13 percent of the population in both periods. Then as now, this was controversial. But the fact that we absorbed the newcomers then suggests that, despite many conflicts, we will do so again.

Since 1915, one vast improvement has been housing.

Although the rich and the uppermiddle class often inhabited spacious homes, that was not true of the lower-middle and working classes. Renters outnumbered owners, roughly 80 percent to 20 percent.

Contrast that with the 64 percent of households who are

now owners, even after the mass foreclosures of the burst housing bubble.

What they rented then was often crowded and dirty. In 1915, “few of the homes of workingclass families had running water, and almost none had hot running water,” writes Leon.

Heating was typically provided by “a potbelly stove or by a coal furnace in the basement.” For two-thirds of homes without electricity, lighting came from kerosene lamps or natural gas.

These homes required more upkeep. Homes dependent on coal or wood for heating were “harder to clean because of [the] soot.” Similarly, the “small size of iceboxes meant more trips to the grocery store.”

Given the incessant demands of housework and child-rearing, few women had jobs. In 1920, their labor force participation rate — the share of women older than 14 who had employment or were seeking it — was 23 percent, almost a quarter of men’s rate of 85 percent. Today, women’s rate of 57 percent is not far from men’s 69 percent.

Men also had it hard. Almost two-thirds of jobs were split evenly between farming and manufacturing. These were generally more dangerous than today’s jobs. In 1913, the Labor

Department counted 23,000 deaths from industrial accidents, a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. The most recent data on all occupations show a death rate of 3.3 workers per 100,000, a decline of 95 percent.

Not only was work more dangerous; it was also more insecure. “Factory-workers hours could be shortened from one day to the next,” writes Leon, “leaving workers with a severely reduced paycheck.”

The way we were in 1915 no longer describes the way we are.

Some of today’s problems stem from yesterday’s successes. Take health care. In 1915, life expectancy at birth was 54.5 years; now it is 78.8. Infant mortality has dropped from one in 10 babies to one in 168. On the other side of the ledger, today’s high health costs are a major challenge.

Modern appliances, cars, airplanes and universal electrification have transformed everyday life, as has more protective government (which has reduced, though not eliminated, insecurity). The question now is whether we will be as adaptive in the next 100 years as in the last. History offers a cautious case for optimism. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

‘Deadpool’ does right by teen girls ALYSSA ROSENBERG writes about pop culture for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

The best thing about the conclusion of yet another Oscar season is that we are free to start enjoying — or at least talking about — a whole new crop of movies. And it was in this spirit that I finally made it to see “Deadpool,” director Tim Miller’s hyper-violent movie about a mercenary-turned- . . . well, superhero isn’t the right word, at least not at this stage. Many writers have already weighed in on the phenomenal success “Deadpool” has registered at the box office, noting the film’s savage sense of humor, its clever romantic comedy and Miller’s commitment to making a superhero movie that’s aimed at the people who can get into an Rrated movie without an adult chaperon. And the New Yorker’s Richard Brody has offered a trenchant critique of the film’s ultimately fairly conventional values.

But I was struck by another element of the film. For all that “Deadpool” is an adult movie in its approach to sex and violence, it’s also unusually thoughtful — at least by the standards of its genre — about teenage girls.

Blake Snyder, author of “Save the Cat,” an influential book on screenwriting, argues that an important element of any successful movie is the moment from which his tome draws its title: “It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat —

that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.”

In “Deadpool,” the Save the Cat moment comes when Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) confronts a nerdy pizza delivery guy (Style Dayne) who has been stalking a teenage girl named Meghan (Taylor Hickson) and warns him to stay away from her. Meghan isn’t necessarily a damsel in distress; after Wade’s intervention, we see her chatting around a bonfire with some friends. But she’s grateful for his help. It’s not weakness to acknowledge that sometimes you need help.

And Meghan’s not the only teenage girl in the movie. After Wade becomes Deadpool through an experimental treatment paired with a nasty side of torture, the X-Men,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

particularly Colossus (Stefan Kapicic), keep trying to recruit him to the team.

As a result, Colossus keeps dragging along his mentee, the young mutant Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). She has facial piercings, close-buzzed dark hair and a laconic attitude, and while Deadpool knows precisely how to tweak Colossus, he keeps trying and failing to get a reaction out of Negasonic Teenage Warhead, teasing her about everything from her Goth look to the way teenage girls talk.

Deadpool and “Deadpool” take the revenge mission at the heart of the movie very seriously. But Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s relative indifference to his violent antics, and to Colossus’s dismay at those antics, functions as a sort of internal critique of all this frenzied running and jumping and moral debate. It’s not so much that she devalues Deadpool’s yearning for a love he thinks is lost to him, or his quest for some richly deserved vengeance.

But Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s presence in “Deadpool” punctures the selfimportance that so many superhero movies have adopted

in recent years. I’d love to watch Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans) try to impress her.

But just because Negasonic Teenage Warhead isn’t awed by the grown men in “Deadpool,” that doesn’t mean she’s ineffective when it comes time to throw down.

In fact, Miller and his colleague make Negasonic Teenage Warhead absolutely crucial to the final confrontation between herself, Colossus and Deadpool on one side, and Ajax (Ed Skrein), the rogue scientist who tortured Wade, and his compatriot Angel Dust (Gina Carano) on the other.

Without Negasonic Teenage Warhead, it’s likely that the grown men around her go down to a painful defeat.

At the end of the climactic battle, Negasonic Teenage Warhead finally renders her verdict on Deadpool, declaring him cool.

Maybe audiences have reached their own conclusions on him before this, and Deadpool reacts to her with a mixture of sarcasm and a tiny dose of sincerity. But in “Deadpool,” a teenage girl’s good opinion still counts for something. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Lead in water BY

Y ANNA L AMBRINIDOU

AND

M ARC E DWARDS

For months, the residents of Flint, Mich., were on their own in trying to bring attention to their city’s polluted water. In August, one of us, Marc, brought his research team to Flint and found that the city’s water supply contained very high levels of lead, a toxin linked to health problems ranging from tooth decay to neurological disorders.

Americans have banned lead paint, but when it comes to lead in wa­ ter, misconceptions persist.

1

Flint is an isolated case.

It’s not unusual for cities to have lead in their water supplies. In 2004, The Washington Post reported that 274 water utilities serving 11.5 million consumers had exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s lead standard in the previous four years and that several cities (including Boston, New York and Philadelphia) were out of compliance with EPA reporting requirements.

One problem is that health authorities don’t appreciate that the threat from leadcontaminated water can be just as dire as that from other sources.

But lead in water is a significant cause of elevated blood lead levels in children. In Flint, those levels doubled.

What’s more, the Flint water lead levels are similar to those encountered elsewhere.

2

If water meets EPA standards, it is safe.

The EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule, promulgated in 1991 under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, calls for municipalities to issue detailed annual reports about water quality.

Flint’s 2014 report says that 90 out of 100 samples of water collected in the second half of that year contained six parts per billion of lead or less — well within the permitted threshold of 15 parts per billion.

Technically, this meant that Flint was in compliance with national standards.

This is misleading. Flint was using water from the Flint River, which corroded city pipes and released lead into the water supply. But the evening before officials took their samples, they flushed water from the lines. It’s a practice that’s discouraged but not banned by the EPA. Flint residents found contamination by sampling from unflushed lines — the same way consumers drink water.

Even this method isn’t perfect.

According to a new study, the results look much different when the sample comes from water near the faucet versus water sitting in a lead service line.

Using the latter approach, 50 to 70 percent of utilities with lead service lines would exceed the EPA’s standard, and nationwide, up to 96 million consumers currently being told that their tap water is safe would need to be informed about potential contamination, according to figures from the American Water Works Association.

3

Testing proves that your water is safe.

Testing can reveal high lead levels and confirm contamination. But when it shows little or no lead, it doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.

The release of lead from plumbing can be sporadic. As a result, the way drinking water is usually sampled — by collecting

THOMAS TRUTSCHEL/PHOTOTHEK VIA GETTY IMAGES

one liter and sending it off to a lab — can miss high concentrations of lead not present at the time and offer false assurance.

One way to decrease the risk of contamination is to use filters certified to remove lead at the point where it emerges from your faucet.

4

It’s safe to partially replace lead pipes.

If you find out that your residence is connected to a lead service line, the EPA’s 2000 guidance says, “Partial removal of a LSL will reduce the likelihood of exposure to lead from drinking water because there will be a smaller volume of water in contact with the LSL.” But multiple studies show that replacing only part of a lead service line can result in lead spikes for days, weeks, months and even years after the disruption. A repair can make the situation worse. Children in homes with partially replaced lines were twice as likely as children in homes with intact lines to have elevated blood lead levels, according to a 2011 CDC study in Washington. Partial lead line replacements should be viewed as a serious public health risk and banned.

5

Flint’s crisis is all about children.

As the World Health Organization puts it, “There is no known level of lead exposure that is considered safe” — for anyone. Chronic lead exposure can cause high blood pressure, heart disease, reduced fertility, kidney damage and even cataracts in men and women.

Adults who work in fields where direct exposure to lead is more common, such as lead battery recycling, auto repair and various types of construction work, are at higher risk.

But in general, given the reduced likelihood of handmouth ingestion that often happens among children, adult exposure is more likely to come from water than from lead dust or paint. And adult lead ingestion can ultimately harm children: Pregnant women, in particular, may experience miscarriage, stillbirth and other adverse outcomes. n

Lambrinidou is an adjunct assistant professor in the department of science and technology in society at Virginia Tech.

Edwards is the Charles Lunsford professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech.

SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2016

24

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