The Washington Post National Weekly - March 12, 2017

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

‘After everything I did, they still sold her a gun’ A mother’s pleas weren’t heeded — with tragic results PAGE 12

Politics Expanding Trump’s brand 4

World A crisis in Somalia 11 5 Myths Historically black colleges 23

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SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

What it means to be ‘American’ BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

President Trump’s second executive order banning visitors from six predominantly Muslim states from entering the country lands in an America deeply divided on what it means to be, well, American.

That’s according to a new AP-NORC poll that suggests that there are really two Americas right now: a Republican one and a Democratic one.

Consider: l Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans (57 percent) think that “a culture grounded in Christian religious beliefs” is important to our American identity. Just 29 percent of Democrats say the same. l Forty-six percent of Republicans say that “a culture established by the country’s early European immigrants” is an important part of what makes us Americans, while just 25 percent of Democrats agree. l Two-thirds of Democrats cite the “mixing of cultures and values from around the world” as fundamentally American. Just a third of Republicans (35 percent) feel the same way.

“Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider the nation’s diversity and the ability of people to immigrate to the United States as important, while Republicans are more inclined to cite the importance of the use of English and sharing a culture, preferably based on Christian beliefs and European customs,” read a memo on the poll’s results.

What the numbers suggest is that not only are Democrats and Republicans living in two different countries — socially, culturally and politically — but they also don’t even agree on what the country should, at its center, be.

Partisanship now extends not just to whom

KLMNO WEEKLY

FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

you vote for and why but also what you think the United States is and should be.

What’s both fascinating and deeply problematic — from a political perspective — is that neither side has enough people to declare victory over the other.

The 2016 election showed the standoff in stark relief. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes — 65,844,610 for her to 62,979,636 for Donald Trump. But Trump won the electoral college 306 to 232 over Clinton. The county-by-county map of the election results, seen above, tells the story of just how divided we are.

What that map also shows is how little red

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 22

and blue America interact with one another.

Living near people who disagree with you politically is just something that no longer happens regularly in this country. Increasingly, Democratic America and Republican America don’t talk to each other. That makes it easier to demonize the other side. And easier to harden your own views of politics and what makes America great — or even America.

If we can’t agree on what being “American” really means, it’s going to be very hard to find common ground on anything else. Depressingly, that appears to be where we are. n © The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Janet Delana stands at the grave of her husband, Tex C. Delana, in Lexington, Mo., in December. He was killed by their daughter, Colby Sue Weathers, who has paranoid schizophrenia.

(Photograph by CHRISTOPHER SMITH for the Washington Post)

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POLITICS

Trump’s sons leverage campaign ties

ISAAC BREKKEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

They plan to expand family business with new hotel chain in dozens of cities they visited

BY J ONATHAN O ’ C ONNELL, D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD AND M ATEA G OLD New York

D

onald Trump’s adult sons, who are overseeing a nationwide expansion of the family business during their father’s presidency, are envisioning ways that their experiences from the campaign trail can help them establish a footing in dozens of new markets.

The idea is to move beyond a focus on luxury hotels in big metropolises and build boutique properties in a broader mix of cities, including some the Trump brothers came to know well during more than a year of intensive travel, fundraising and grass-roots

networking.

“I got to see a lot of those markets on the campaign,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, told The Washington Post in a recent interview from his office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. “I think I’ve probably been in all of them over the last 18 months.”

The initial plan is tied to the Trumps’ new chain, Scion, which is being designed as a lesscorporate feeling brand of highend hotels with a more affordable per-room price point than the Trumps’ five-star properties.

As with many existing Trumpbranded property deals, the developers would own the hotels while the Trumps would be paid licensing and management fees.

The company says it has signed

at least 17 letters of intent with potential developers. It is targeting an array of cities such as Austin, Dallas, St. Louis, Nashville and Seattle — and Trump Jr. said the campaign proved useful in forging potential new connections.

“I met people along the way that would be awesome partners.”

The expansion plan illustrates how President Trump’s political rise has the potential to affect his business even as he and his sons promise to adhere to a strict ethical boundary between the company’s moves and the Trump administration. And it shows the inherent challenge in separating the family’s political work from its corporate interests, with upsides and potential problems.

Extending the Trump business

Donald Trump, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, is flanked by his sons Eric Trump, left, and Donald Trump Jr. during the Outdoor Sportsman Awards on Jan. 21, 2016, in Las Vegas. The sons say they consider themselves to be protectors of the Trump brand.

into a greater cluster of American cities could bring political benefits for a president who has vowed to bring jobs and prosperity to struggling communities. But it also comes as Trump has faced criticism from Democrats and ethics officials after deciding to retain a stake in the company, a decision that means he stands to personally benefit from its growth.

Building new hotels, for example, could create issues — tax disputes, allegations of labor violations or environmental violations — that require federal departments to consider cases that could directly impact the president’s finances. And while the Trumps have vowed to sign no new foreign deals, pursuing a raft of new domestic contracts from coast to

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POLITICS coast means the Trumps are likely to engage in negotiations with private developers, banks and investors who see additional benefits in doing business with the president’s company.

“It’s just going to add fuel to the fire that is already burning . . . with him having still a foot in both the boardroom and one in the Oval Office,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel of the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The president in January added a team of ethics lawyers to the White House Counsel’s Office, while the company hired a longtime Republican attorney tasked with ensuring the Trump Organization minimizes conflicts of interest.

In interviews, the Trump sons waved off the idea that their plans created any potential ethical problems.

“There are lines that we would never cross, and that’s mixing business with anything government,” Eric Trump said.

Donald Trump Jr. said that since the inauguration, he has spoken with his father twice on the phone and once in person — when he and his brother attended the announcement of their father’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Eric Trump said he may ask his father how things are in the White House but would never discuss government or business affairs.

“Will we ever talk about tax policy? Will I ever ask for anything that could otherwise benefit the business? Absolutely, emphatically not,” Eric Trump said. “He has no need to know what we’re doing, and I certainly don’t need to know what they’re doing, and I don’t want to.”

The Trumps’ point man on the expansion is Eric Danziger, an experienced executive who was hired in 2015 after overseeing expansions at Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Starwood Hotels and the former Wyndham International.

One of the first Scion projects is slated to open in Dallas, where a Turkish-born developer aims to open a sleek glass six-story hotel as part of a $50 million mixed-use downtown development. The Austin, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Nashville, Seattle and St. Louis areas are also possible targets, according to reports by Bloomberg News and business trade publications.

The Trumps declined to say what other cities they were exploring for projects but said they were seeking contracts in many places.

Danziger, speaking last month to Skift, an industry publication, called Scion a “four-star lifestyle brand” with wide geographic appeal.

“That kind of brand can be in every city — tertiary, secondary,” he said. “So, how many is that? The opportunity is for hundreds.”

Because of the prohibition on foreign deals, Danziger said the company is “going to have full focus — instead of some focus — on growth domestically of both Trump and Scion.”

The expansion will not be easy, according to analysts. The Trumps will be entering a crowded marketplace of new hotel lines from Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt designed to appeal to a broad cross-section of customers, said Michael J. Bellisario, a senior research analyst with the firm Robert W. Baird & Co. “There are so many more competitors out there today,” Bellisario said.

For the Trumps to distinguish their projects from their competitors, they will need to be choosy about locations, Bellisario said.

“You’ve got to be on the right street corner in the right market. You can’t open these hotels in Topeka, Kansas,” he said. “So when you think about that, how big can the new line get?”

The plan is a big test for the younger Trumps.

Just as Donald Trump stepped out from his father’s shadow in the 1970s to build the family real estate business into today’s worldwide collection of golf courses, hotels, condo towers, branded merchandise and other commercial holdings, now Donald Trump Jr., 39, and Eric Trump, 33, have a chance to make their mark.

Along with their sister, Ivanka, who departed the company when their father entered office, the brothers have long served as executive vice presidents.

Before their father ran for president, the three siblings helped expand the firm from focusing on New York to including the management of luxury hotels in top U.S. cities and seven countries, plus more than a dozen golf courses.

The fruits of that work are still coming, as last month the company opened a new golf club in Dubai and, recently held a grand opening for a new hotel-condominium

RAFAL GERSZAK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Donald Trump Jr., center, and Eric Trump attend the opening of the Trump hotel in Vancouver, B.C., last month.

tower in Vancouver, B.C. A major transition for the sons is taking over a company in which the force behind every Trump company offering — whether it was selling hotel rooms, office buildings, golf outings, ties or raw steaks — was Donald Trump himself.

In interviews, Trump Jr. and Eric Trump said they consider themselves protectors of the Trump brand, an effort they said is sometimes misunderstood. Critics viewed the announcement of Scion during the campaign as a move away from the Trump name. The family’s intent was the opposite; since they view the name Trump as a standard for luxury that ought to be insulated, they will use other brands for less pricey products.

“We would never want to dilute the real estate brand by going into tertiary markets that can’t sustain the [luxury] properties as we build them,” Eric Trump said. “A lot of hotel companies have gotten this wrong.”

Both sons worked for their father starting at young ages, doing landscaping and other labor on his projects.

A University of Pennsylvania graduate, Trump Jr.’s first assignment at the company was to work with executives at New York City real estate projects.

Eric Trump joined after graduating from Georgetown in 2006.

He has overseen the Trump Winery near Charlottesville and worked on the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, where he developed a reputation as a hands-on executive.

“If there’s a property tax issue or any litigation, he flies into Las Vegas and takes care of it,” said Phil Ruffin, a casino mogul who is the Trumps’ partner in the Las

The Trumps’ planned corporate expansion comes as the president has faced intense criticism from Democrats and ethics experts for his continued ownership interest.

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Vegas project. “He hires the lawyer. If there are any capital improvements, he approves them.

He is very energetic like his father — he will just work night and day.”

The Trumps’ planned corporate expansion comes as the president has faced intense criticism from Democrats and ethics experts for his continued ownership interest.

A liberal watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has sued Trump, arguing that his hotel operations violate a constitutional provision barring the president from accepting gifts or payments from a foreign government. Some Democrats have argued that Trump’s international trademarks, including one longsought registration granted in February by China, also violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Trump has called the CREW lawsuit “totally without merit.”

Amey, of the Project on Government Oversight, said there were ways for the Trumps to avoid potential domestic conflicts related to the hotel expansion. He said they could put the hotel business under another corporate structure, which does not involve a trust directly owned by the president himself.

“There are solutions to solving this, [but] there doesn’t seem to be a will and a desire to do that within the White House,” Amey said.

The Trump brothers say they are taking ethics concerns seriously and are doing everything necessary to avoid distracting from their father’s work as president.

“Have I used him as a sounding board in the past? One hundred percent,” Trump Jr. said. “Have I learned a lot from him? Couldn’t have had a better mentor. But he’s got real stuff he’s got to deal with.

These are real people’s lives. . . . So this notion that he is still running the business from the White House is just insane.”

Trump Jr. scoffed at the idea that his father might have somehow viewed running for president — spending millions of dollars of his own money to run against more than a dozen Republican challengers and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when few pundits gave him a chance to win — as a moneymaking endeavor.

“That’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” he said. “That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.” n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

A long road to an infrastructure bill

BY D AMIAN P ALETTA AND J OHN W AGNER

P

resident Trump’s pledge to create a program that funds $1 trillion in new infrastructure programs has kicked off with numerous meetings but few firm decisions, beset by understaffing, bureaucratic challenges and major questions about how to pay for everything.

Trump promised in his February address to Congress that a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding plan would create “millions of new jobs,” but few of those jobs are expected to materialize this year, because no firm deadlines have been set and much of the planning could spill into 2018.

Despite those challenges, the White House’s infrastructure team has become one of its broadest task forces, with Trump considering it a central plank of his promise to create more jobs.

He has activated a team of White House and Cabinet-agency officials to identify a wide range of infrastructure projects across the United States and come up with a way to fund them, launching the internal deliberations to design the $1 trillion package he promised on the campaign trail.

On Wednesday, Trump hosted an infrastructure-focused luncheon with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, General Atlantic chief executive William Ford and a number of others.

On Tuesday, Trump discussed the subject with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

And on Capitol Hill at a Senate hearing Wednesday, highway officials and other parties aired some ideas for funding new projects.

Behind the scenes, a governmentwide effort kicked off a week earlier when White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn led a meeting with officials from 15 federal agencies and departments, pressing them for answers to six planks of the infrastructure plan.

They were told they need to identify new projects, find existing projects that need help with com-

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

There are many challenges to the president’s $1 trillion promise to deliver rebuilding jobs pletion, come up with policy reforms, regulatory reforms, and statutory reforms, and come up with a way to pay for it all.

Trump faces challenges selling members of his party on his plans once they gel, given GOP resistance to government spending.

“This is going to take a lot of work in the administration and on Capitol Hill,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former Capitol Hill staffer.

Daniel Slane, an Ohio developer who worked on an infrastructure package for Trump during December and January, said he crafted a list of more than 50 projects and turned them over to Trump officials before he left the team in January. These projects included expanding access to the Port of Baltimore and development of a wind power project in Oklahoma, among other things.

He said he has been frustrated by the slow start.

“It takes a long time to mobilize,” Slane said in an interview, frustrated that the program hadn’t been launched yet. “If you

want to be moving dirt in the fall you have to start now. Now the weeks are turning into months.”

He never had the authority, however, to expedite any projects and the Trump team had long planned on taking a more comprehensive review of the project.

One of the biggest challenges officials face is finding a way to pay for $1 trillion in projects.

“As the president has said many times, strong public-private partnerships will also be key to revitalizing our country’s ruined roads, crumbling bridges and outdated airports,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters this past week. “The government has wasted too much of the taxpayers’ money on inefficient and misguided projects. By looking at infrastructure from a businessperson’s perspective . . . we can restore respect for the taxpayer dollar and make the best investment.”

Infrastructure projects can be politically popular, but funding them is tricky, particularly as Republicans are torn about growing

Cargo vessels sit at the Port of Baltimore in 2015. Expanding access to the port is one of the projects that has been suggested for the infrastructure package.

levels of federal debt.

Trump has said he wants the financing to be a combination of public and private money. This could include tax credits for developers, toll projects and government payments to private developers who issue debt to finance specific projects, among other things, a senior administration official said.

Complicating matters, Trump has said the infrastructure plan must be revenue neutral, meaning it cannot add to federal debt. That means even if the government pays $200 billion of a $1 trillion package, it must find a way to raise revenue or cut cost elsewhere to offset the price tag.

In anticipation of a major infrastructure initiative promised by President Trump, the National Governors Association last month forwarded a list of 428 “shovelready” projects to the new administration.

The list, culled from the states, includes an array of transportation, water, energy and emergency-response projects. And the sheer size of it underscores the intense interest in the initiative from governors in both parties.

California alone offered 51 “priority” projects.

Some Democrats saw Trump’s infrastructure plan pledge as a possible opening for a bipartisan deal, as many liberals want more spending on roads and bridges in their states and districts.

“But as the weeks go by, it seems to be receding further and further into the background,” said Jim Manley, a lobbyist who served as a senior aide for former Senate minority leader Harry M. Reid (DNev.).

Still, supporters of Trump’s effort say the White House should not try to rush a plan into place.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address these issues, and we want to see it done right and not fast,” said Edward L. Mortimer, executive director for transportation infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who was among those who testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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‘They will suffer the consequences’ BY

P AUL K ANE

Rep. Erik Paulsen is a Minnesota Republican who survived one of the most competitive House races of 2016 by a surprising double-digit margin even as Donald Trump lost his suburban Twin Cities district by almost 10 points.

Four months later, Democrats have launched their campaign to unseat Paulsen in two years, and their weapon of choice is health care.

For the first time in eight years, Democrats are finally on offense on a key issue that could help them retake the congressional majority in 2018. As Republicans struggle to craft and pass a replacement for Obamacare, Democrats are sharpening their campaign messaging against Republicans such as Paulsen.

The new approach was on display at a House committee hearing this past week. The panel rejected a Democratic request to postpone the hearing to consider the GOP plan to roll back and replace the Affordable Care Act. By noon, Democrats were holding Republicans’ feet to the fire.

“Paulsen recklessly voted to put his party before his constituents and go full steam ahead on this bill without even knowing how much it will cost, how it will explode the deficit, and how many Americans will lose their health insurance,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote in a release.

The House Democrats’ campaign arm issued a batch of similar releases, targeting Republicans such as Illinois Rep. Peter J. Roskam — a colleague of Paulsen’s on the House Ways and Means Committee. Roskam’s suburban Chicago district is a new target for the party.

The question is whether Democrats can capitalize on this shift.

There are already signs of some rust: The release slamming Paulsen accidentally included a reference to how “Roskam should slow down and consider the consequences.”

Democrats have struggled to

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Democrats see Republicans’ plan to replace Obamacare as a weapon for the 2018 election explain the intricacies and benefits of the Affordable Care Act since they approved it — without any votes from the other side of the aisle — seven years ago.

Republicans, deriding the law as “Obamacare” before President Barack Obama adopted the term, regularly won the short-term fights in advertising wars and election debates, simply calling it a “government takeover” of an industry that would lead to “death panels” for the elderly. Fair or not, those simplistic explanations broke through to the public in a bigger way than Democrats’ complex explanations of the broad and complicated way in which the health-care system would change.

The messaging challenge is part of why the ACA remained steadily unpopular. From 2010 to 2016, anywhere from 35 to 48 percent of Americans approved of the law, according to the Pew Research Center. Only last month, when the prospect of repeal came

into focus with Republicans controlling every lever of power, did a clear majority back Obamacare.

Democrats are betting that Republicans are heading straight into the same quagmire that the left faced in the early years of Obama’s presidency.

“Republicans after today will own this bill and the impact it will have on the American worker,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, adding, “They will suffer the consequences.”

But Republicans pushed ahead and advanced the legislation with party line votes in two committees Thursday, hopeful that a vote to repeal Obamacare could pass the House this month and head to the Senate for final approval in early April. They have made a private calculation that there are three likely outcomes of the ongoing health-care debate, each with a different degree of political fallout.

Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) speaks during a news conference Wednesday in which he faced questions on health care.

Republicans have introduced a plan that is meant to replace the Affordable Care Act.

The worst possible outcome, according to Republicans in both chambers, would be to pass a straight repeal of the 2010 law without any fixes to it. That would end coverage for many millions of Americans and would then require Congress to try to build out the replacement parts of it through normal rules, meaning a Democratic filibuster could block any conservative change.

The next possible outcome would be deadlock on the overhaul effort, leaving the ACA in place. That would probably leave conservative base voters upset with Republicans for failing to deliver on a long-promised goal to end Obamacare.

Instead, Republicans are pushing their top choice, a mix-andmatch plan that leaves in place some popular ACA provisions while undoing key pieces such as a mandate to buy insurance, replacing it with tax credits to offer access to buying a plan.

They believe such an approach will meet the approval of conservatives, though several hardliners and outside groups are already balking. GOP leaders would then turn the summer and fall of 2018 into a fight to capture middle-of-the-road voters. Their bet is that Democrats will fail to convert their overhaul efforts into real outrage, just as they have failed to scare the public about the conservative policy ideas of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) for five years now.

Democrats believe now that Ryan’s proposals are possible — they never previously had any hope of becoming law with a Democrat in the White House — and that they will become more politically toxic as President Trump calls for their passage and is able to sign them into law.

Ahead of last week’s hearings, House Democrats huddled with the new Democratic National Committee chairman, Thomas Perez. The former Obama labor secretary made clear who he expected to politically suffer.

“They made their own bed on this,” Perez said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Robust desegregation effort may fall E MMA B ROWN Louisville BY

A

remarkable experiment in school desegregation has thrived for four decades in this Kentucky city and its suburbs, surviving fierce resistance from the Ku Klux Klan and a legal defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even as integration efforts faded across much of the South and schools nationwide have grown more segregated by race and class in recent years, Jefferson County persisted in using busing and magnet programs to strengthen diversity in the classroom.

White and black and poor and rich children share schools to a greater extent here than in most other large districts across the country, leading to friendships across the usual social divides and giving rise to what school officials say are stronger academic outcomes for disadvantaged students.

Now the program is in danger of being dismantled.

The threat is no longer from protesters in hoods throwing bricks at buses carrying black children into white parts of town, but from state legislators pushing a bill to require a return to neighborhood schools. The measure underscores the historic tension between the dueling ideals of classroom diversity and close-to-home education. If enacted, the bill would deeply shake the Jefferson district, by far the largest in Kentucky, with 101,000 students in 155 institutions.

“This is a bill that will resegregate our schools, taking us back to the ’60s and ’70s,” said Chris Kolb, a graduate of Jefferson schools and a member of the county school board, which opposes the measure. “This will be the death of integration.”

Kentucky’s House of Representatives, with a new GOP majority, passed the bill last month, 59 to 37, with every Democrat and one Republican opposed. It is now pending in the GOP-dominated Senate, which passed similar measures twice in recent years. A spokesman for Gov. Matt Bevin (R) did

MICHAEL NOBLE JR. FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Kentucky’s GOP legislature may force Louisville to return to neighborhood schools after four decades of busing not respond to a question about whether he supports the bill.

State Rep. Kevin D. Bratcher (R), sponsor of the bill, said it aims to bring common sense to a system that is unfair to children who can’t get into schools around the corner or across the street from where they live. Bratcher, who is white and represents part of Jefferson County, said he is sensitive to concerns about resegregation.

“But we have to look at what we’re giving up for desegregation,” he said. It’s harder for children in faraway schools to participate in extracurricular activities, he said, and for their parents to make it to PTA meetings and teacher conferences. What’s more, he said, busing costs student time and taxpayer money that could be better spent.

Bratcher cited his own experience in a county high school in the 1970s, when he was forced to leave his neighborhood and take a bus to a historically black school 45 minutes away. “Sending a child to a school just right down the street is a powerful benefit,” he said.

Many in Louisville, a Democratic stronghold, chafe at the notion that Republicans — known as the party of local control — want to override the wishes of local officials. Not only does the school board support desegregation via busing, but voters in board elections also have consistently rejected candidates who pledged a return to neighborhood schools.

“Local control as a principle goes out the window at convenience,” said Raoul Cunningham, president of the NAACP’s Louisville chapter.

Two-thirds of the district’s students come from low-income families. Nearly half are white, 37 percent are black; 9 percent Hispanic.

The vast majority of schools meet the district’s diversity target, which is determined by a complex calculation. Fewer than 15 percent of students attend a school in which either the white or nonwhite student population exceeds three-quarters of total enrollment, a Pennsylvania State University researcher found.

Students board a bus in Smoketown, a poor section of Louisville, to ride miles to an affluent school. Kentucky’s legislature is considering a bill to require neighborhood schooling, which could undo Jefferson County’s long-standing desegregation efforts.

Under the bill, more than half of students in the district would be moved to a new school.

Opponents say that would wreak havoc, overcrowding some schools and leaving others halfempty. They also say the bill contradicts the Republican push for school choice.

Jefferson County long ago replaced the forced busing of the 1970s with a voluntary approach to integration, offering arts- and science-themed magnet programs to draw students into different parts of town.

The bill would effectively eliminate many of those programs by requiring the district to allow children to attend the school closest to their homes. Such a provision is race-neutral on its face, but the deeply segregated housing patterns in the sprawling county mean that a return to neighborhood schools is likely to concentrate poor and minority students in schools apart from their white, affluent peers.

Courts have released hundreds of school districts from desegregation orders in the past several decades, and many of those have dropped their diversity efforts.

But Jefferson County, which was released in 2000, persisted. In 2007, it lost a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in which justices struck down the district’s use of racial identity of individual students to determine school assignments.

The district then retooled its plan to use the demographics of census tracts in which students live — including racial makeup, income and educational attainment — to ensure diversity at schools.

Since that change, segregation has increased slightly, according to Erica Frankenberg, the Penn State researcher who helped develop the county’s plan and has studied its effects. Neighborhood schooling would lead to significant resegregation, she said — and once it is gone, diversity is hard to bring back.

“I think that’s a harder lift politically than just continuing,” she said. n

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NATION

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ANDREW GOMBERT/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

CIA’s own vulnerability is revealed E LLEN N AKASHIMA AND J ULIE T ATE On his workplace bio, he describes himself as a “malt beverage enthusiast,” a fitness buff fond of carrying a backpack full of bricks, and a “recovering World of Warcraft-aholic.”

He is also a cyberwarrior for the CIA, an experienced hacker whose résumé lists assignments at clandestine branches devoted to finding vulnerabilities in smartphones and penetrating the computer defenses of the Russian government. At the moment, according to his file, he is working for the Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe, a major hacking hub engaged in electronic espionage across that continent and others.

The hacker — whose background appears in the thousands of CIA documents posted online Tuesday by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks — is part of a digital operation that has grown so rapidly in size and influence in recent years that it ranks alongside spying and analysis divisions that were created at the same time as the CIA decades ago.

The trove of documents exposed by WikiLeaks provides an unprecedented view of the scale and structure of this operation, which encompasses at least 36 distinct branches devoted to cracking the espionage potential of cellphones, communication apps and computer networks supposedly sealed off from the Internet.

But in their descriptions of

elaborate exploits and sketches of specific employees, the documents also point to the CIA’s vulnerabilities. As much as it is organized to exploit the pervasive presence of digital technology abroad, the CIA’s own secrets are increasingly created, acquired or stored on computer files that can be copied in an instant.

“This is the double-edged sword of the digitization of everything,” said Daniel Prieto, who served as director of cybersecurity policy for President Barack Obama. “Think back to the James Bond movies with a guy in the backroom with a camera that looks like a cigarette lighter taking 20 pictures of a weapons design system. Nowadays, one thumb drive can contain hundreds of thousands of pages.”

U.S. officials said this past week that they were still in the early stages of investigating the breach that left WikiLeaks in possession of thousands of sensitive files.

The complexity and magnitude of the theft have prompted speculation that it was carried out by Russia or another foreign government with the skills, resources and determination to target the CIA. But others said that the decision to put the files on public display, rather than exploit their value in secret, makes it more likely that a disgruntled employee or contractor was responsible. WikiLeaks said the documents, which The Washington Post could not independently verify, came from a current or former CIA employee or contractor.

If so, that would be consistent with earlier breaches: the expo-

sure of U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013 and the discovery of classified National Security Agency files in a Maryland home last year were the work of insiders.

The CIA declined to comment on the authenticity of the documents or the direction of any internal inquiry underway. In a statement, a CIA spokesman said that the agency’s mission “is to aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries. … It is also important to note that CIA is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans, and CIA does not do so.”

What WikiLeaks has released so far is not huge, amounting to about 1 gigabyte of data, experts said. And the cache does not appear to include source code for creating hacking tools.

Nonetheless, there are descriptions of tools and techniques that could be used to exploit computer systems as well as “implants” that can be deployed to collect data once inside a phone or a computer.

These tools or “implants” are often used in the last stage of the “cyber kill chain” to spy on users, steal their data or monitor their activity.

The exposure of these capabilities is “hugely damaging” and probably will require the CIA to figure out a way to replace them, said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition InfoSec, a cybersecurity firm. “We’ve never seen these tools in the wild.”

WikiLeaks disclosure shows scale of agency’s digital operations but also how its secrets are easily available

Beyond describing specific weapons, the files provide a remarkably comprehensive bureaucratic map of the cyber-divisions and branches that have multiplied across the CIA’s organizational chart in recent years, as well as glimmers of the geek humor shared on internal networks.

As part of a sweeping reorganization in 2015 under then-CIA Director John Brennan, the agency consolidated much of its computer expertise under a new division, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, that reports to the CIA chief.

The bulk of the CIA’s offensive capability appears to reside in an entity called the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an organization that oversees dozens of subordinate branches and groups devoted to specific missions and targets, from cracking security on Apple iPhones to penetrating the communications nodes of the Islamic State. Though the center is based at CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia, it appears to have major outposts overseas.

Some described the damage as extensive but far from permanent.

Vulnerabilities in phones and other devices tend to be fleeting, lasting only until the next patch or operating system upgrade. The documents make clear that the CIA has adapted to this timetable and will probably accelerate its development and purchasing cycles to reopen any hacking windows that WikiLeaks closed.

“It’s not some huge crisis,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

A return to German military might?

Defense spending increases amid worries about Russia and pressure from Trump

A NTHONY F AIOLA Sestokai, Lithuania BY

A

vermilion-colored locomotive slowed to a halt, its freight cars obscured in the blinding snow. A German captain ordered his troops to unload the train’s cargo.

“Jawohl!” — “Yes, sir!” — a soldier said, before directing out the first of 20 tanks bearing the Iron Cross of the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army.

Evocative of old war films, the scene is nevertheless a sign of new times. Seven and a half decades after the Nazis invaded this Baltic nation, the Germans are back in Lithuania — this time as one of the allies.

As the Trump administration ratchets up the pressure on allied nations to shoulder more of their own defense, no country is more in the crosshairs than Germany. If it meets the goals Washington is pushing for, Germany — the region’s economic powerhouse — would be on the fast track to again become Western Europe’s biggest military power.

Any renaissance of German might has long been resisted first and foremost by the Germans — a nation that largely rejected militarism in the aftermath of the Nazi horror. Yet a rethinking of German power is quickly emerging as one of the most significant twists of President Trump’s transatlantic policy.

Since the November election in the United States, the Germans — caught between Trump’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia — are feeling less and less secure. Coupled with Trump’s push to have allies step up, the Germans are debating a military buildup in a manner rarely witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps nowhere is the prospect of a new future playing out more than here in Lithuania — where nearly 500 German troops, including a Bavarian combat battalion, arrived in recent weeks for an open-ended deployment near the Russian frontier. The NATO deployment marks what analysts describe as Germany’s most ambitious military operation near the Russian border since the end of the

How Germany compares in defense spending In 2014, Germany agreed to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense within 10 years. Until recently, however, many German officials privately acknowledged that such a goal was politically untenable.

0

0.5

Luxembourg 0.44%

Belgium 0.85

1

1.5

NATO Guideline 2

2.5

Germany France Estonia Greece 1.19 1.78 2.16 2.38

Canada Poland 0.99 2.00

3

3.5

4%

U.S. 3.61%

Britain 2.38

Estimates for 2016 Source: NATO

Cold War. It arrived with a formidable show of German force — including 20 Marder armored infantry fighting vehicles, six Leopard battle tanks and 12 Fuchs and Boxer armored personnel carriers.

“Maybe, with respect to the United States, you need to be careful what you wish for,” said Lt. Col. Torsten Stephan, military spokesman for the German troops in Lithuania. “Mr. Trump says that NATO may be obsolete, and that we need to be more independent.

Well, maybe we will.”

The German-led deployment — also involving a smaller number of troops from Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway — is designed to send a muscular message from Europe to Putin: Back off.

Yet on a continent facing the prospect of a new Cold War, the deployment is also offering a window into the risks of renewed German strength — as well as the Russian strategy for repelling it by dwelling on Germany’s dark past.

In the 21st-century world of hybrid warfare, the first proverbial salvos have been fired.

Recently, coordinated emails were sent to Lithuanian police, media and top politicians, falsely claiming that the new German troops had gang-raped a local 15year-old girl. The Lithuanian government quickly disproved the allegations — but not before a few local outlets and social-media users had spread the false accounts.

Officials are investigating wheth-

THE WASHINGTON POST

er the Russians were behind it.

“But if you ask me personally, I think that yes, that’s the biggest probability,” said Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis.

Pro-Russian websites, meanwhile, are preying on old stereotypes, harking back to Adolf Hitler and portraying the NATO deployment in Lithuania as a “second invasion” by Germany.

As Germany grows bolder, outdated imagery is roaring back to life through Russian propaganda.

Recently, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the building of a reproduction of the old German Reichstag at a military theme park near Moscow, offering young Russians a chance to reenact the 1945 storming of the structure during the fall of Berlin.

Yet in Lithuania, a former Soviet republic now living in the shadow of Russia’s maw, the Nazi legacy is seen as ancient history.

To many here, modern Germany is a bastion of democratic principles and one of the globe’s strongest advocates of human rights, free determination and measured diplomacy. And facing a Russian threat in times of uncertain NATO allegiances, the Lithuanians are clamoring for a more powerful Germany by its side.

“I think U.S. leadership should be maintained, but also, we need leadership in Europe,” Karoblis said. Noting that Britain is in the process of breaking away from the European Union, he called Ger-

many the most likely new guarantor of regional stability.

“Why not Germany?” he said.

For many Germans, however, there are many reasons — including overspending and fears of sparking a new arms race. According to a poll commissioned by Stern magazine and published this year, 55 percent of Germans are against increasing defense spending in the coming years, while 42 percent are in favor.

The German military has staged several military exercises in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, and its pilots form part of the air police deterring Russian planes buzzing the E.U.’s eastern borders. It has also begun to take on more dangerous missions — deploying troops to the Balkans, Afghanistan and, last year, to Mali. The military also has taken on a logistical support role in the allied fight against the Islamic State.

But the Germans are slated to do much more. In 2014, German officials agreed with other NATO nations to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense within 10 years — up from about 1.2 percent in 2016.

Since Trump’s victory, German politicians, pundits and the media have agonized over the issue, with more and louder voices calling for a stronger military. Last month, the Defense Ministry announced plans to increase Germany’s standing military to nearly 200,000 troops by 2024, up from a historical low of 166,500 in June.

After 26 years of cuts, defense spending is going up by 8 percent this year.

The new German troops, meanwhile, have received special sensitivity training about the Nazi legacy in Lithuania and to insist on gentle interactions with locals.

“I don’t feel part of that history — the history of Germans who were here before,” said Sebastian, a 27-year-old German private stationed in Lithuania who only gave his first name per the German army’s rules for the interview.

“What I know is that we are in a kind of new Cold War, and now we are here to help.” n

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Somalia’s ‘nightmare’ hunger crisis K EVIN S IEFF Baidoa, Somalia BY

T

he new leader of the United Nations visited Somalia this past week to issue a global appeal for aid as the war-torn nation teeters on the brink of its second famine in a decade.

It was António Guterres’s first field visit as U.N. secretary general, a position the former Portugal prime minister assumes during a time of historic humanitarian crises. South Sudan recently declared a famine, and three other countries — Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria — are on the cusp of similar disasters.

“Conflict, drought, disease — the combination is a nightmare,” Guterres said Tuesday.

More than 6 million Somalis, about half of the country’s population, are grappling with severe food shortages, according to the United Nations. At least 110 people, mostly women and children, died of malnutrition or a related disease in a two-day period in just one region earlier this month, according to the country’s prime minister.

Somalia’s hunger crisis is the result of two major factors — droughts that have badly damaged the country’s agricultural production and a protracted conflict that has obstructed humanitarian access to affected areas.

Further complicating matters is the recent spread of cholera, which left 38 people dead the other week.

Somalia has been in a nearconstant state of turmoil since civil war broke out in 1991. Nearly 1 million Somalis have fled the country, and another million are internally displaced.

In 2011, famine consumed much of the Horn of Africa, killing nearly 260,000 people in Somalia alone, according to the United Nations. The international community subsequently determined that more must be done to prevent a similar disaster in the future. Yet as one of the U.N. officials briefing Guterres on Tuesday made clear, a lack of funding last year to help

ANDREW RENNEISEN/GETTY IMAGES

Severe food shortages affect over 6 million in the nation, and other countries may soon follow Somalis affected by drought contributed to the current crisis.

“With more resources last year, we would have been infinitely better off today,” said Peter de Clercq, the deputy special representative of the secretary general for Somalia. In 2016, the United Nations fell $240 million short of its $885 million funding goal for Somalia.

Now, Guterres is lobbying for a “massive response” to the worsening hunger crisis — $825 million in the first six months of 2017.

“Without that support, we will have a tragedy that is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

So far, only $105 million has been received.

The situation in Somalia has not yet been declared a famine — a designation meaning that at least 30 percent of a population is acutely malnourished and two adults or four children per every 10,000 people are dying each day.

But de Clercq told Guterres that the situation was “rapidly deteriorating.”

During a trip to the crumbling southwestern city of Baidoa,

scarred by years of fighting, the U.N. leader saw proof of that need.

Hundreds of people had moved to an informal displacement camp after leaving drought-affected parts of the country, including some areas where Islamist alShabab militants were blocking the delivery of humanitarian supplies.

Their tents were made of whatever they could find — torn mosquito nets, bedsheets and towels.

Inside, families of eight to 10 huddled, waiting for assistance. But little has arrived.

Guterres, wearing a white button-down shirt and a black bulletproof vest, walked from tent to tent asking people why they had fled their homes, whether alShabab was based near their villages and whether they had been fed in the camp.

Ugudow Mohammed Noor, 52, left her village near the southern city of Kismayo last month with her seven children. They traveled mostly on foot for 15 days in the stifling heat to reach Baidoa.

“But there is still no food dis-

A child is treated for malnutrition last month at a hospital in Garowe, Somalia.

In a two-day period this month, at least 110 people, mostly women and children, died of malnutrition or a related disease in just one region, an official said.

tributed,” she told a reporter, adding that she had taken to begging for scraps. Two days earlier, she said, her brother had died of cholera, an easily treatable disease caused by consuming contaminated food or water.

Of the four current hunger crises in Africa and the Middle East, Somalia’s is the most closely linked to environmental factors.

Noor explained that as the drought intensified, she watched her six cows die one by one. Food for her family became increasingly hard to find, or afford.

Al-Shabab militants have made the situation worse. Checkpoints run by the group stop food from reaching those in need. Other times, insurgents levy a heavy tax on those distributing the rations.

Similar tactics led to thousands of deaths during the 2011 famine.

This time, U.N. officials are hopeful that al-Shabab might be more willing to allow private food suppliers or humanitarian workers to pass.

“Last time, there was a clear decision by al-Shabab to be obstructive,” said Michael Keating, the top U.N. official based in Somalia. “This time, there isn’t.”

In other countries dealing with famines or near-famines, aid workers have also struggled to reach the hungry. In South Sudan, the government has created “administrative and bureaucratic impediments” for humanitarian groups, said Stephen O’Brien, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In northeastern Nigeria, aid workers have been unable to reach desperate people because of military restrictions and the threat posed by Islamist Boko Haram fighters. In Yemen, clashes between pro-government forces and Houthi rebels have made it difficult for aid groups to travel.

Across the four countries, the United Nations estimates that 20 million people are caught up in hunger crises.

“In modern world history, we’ve never confronted the prospect of four major famines in four countries,” O’Brien said. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

12

COVER STORY

CHRISTOPHER SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A mother’s warning, a gun sale and then tragedy

BY A NN E . M ARIMOW in WELLINGTON, Mo.

She called the police. Then ATF. After that, the FBI. Janet Delana was desperate to stop her mentally ill adult daughter from buying another handgun.

Finally, Delana called the gun shop a few miles from her home, the one that had sold her daughter a black Hi-Point pistol a month earlier when her last disability check had arrived.

The next check was coming.

Delana pleaded.

Her daughter had been in and out of mental hospitals, she told the store manager, and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She had tried to kill herself. Her father had taken away the other gun, but Delana worried that her daughter would go back.

TOP: A photo of Janet Delana and her late husband.

ABOVE: Their daughter, Colby Sue Weathers.

“I’m begging you,” Delana said through tears. “I’m begging you as a mother, if she comes in, please don’t sell her a gun.”

Colby Sue Weathers was mentally ill, but she had never been identified as a threat to herself or others by a judge or ordered to an extended mental hospital stay — which meant she could pass the background check for her gun.

At the Odessa Gun & Pawn shop, Weathers approached a manager: “Something like what I bought last time.”

She seemed nervous, the manager, Derrick Dady, would recall to police.

The Hi-Point pistol and one box of ammunition cost Weathers $257.85 at the store on the main drag of the small town of Odessa, about 40 miles east of Kansas City.

Weathers headed back to the house that the 38-year-old shared with her parents, stopping along the way for a pack of unfiltered cigarettes at a gas station. A firefighter who

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

was an old acquaintance saw her acting skittishly and muttering.

An hour after leaving the gun store, Weathers was back home where her father sat at a computer with his back to her.

She shot.

Weathers planned to kill herself next but told a 911 operator: “I can’t shoot myself. I was going to after I did it, but I couldn’t bring myself to it.”

Delana lost Tex, her husband of nearly 40 years, and her daughter, who was charged with murder. And beneath her anguish, Delana seethed.

The store had made about $60 profit on the sale, court records would show.

“After everything I did, they still sold her a gun,” Delana said recently. “The more I thought about it, the madder I got. I wanted someone to pay.”

Delana sued the Odessa Gun & Pawn shop for negligence in the June 2012 sale and won a decision at the Missouri Supreme Court that said that nothing in federal law barred Delana’s type of lawsuit. Under state law, the court ruled that dealers can be held liable if they should have known a buyer was dangerous.

Last fall, with a trial set to start in January in the wrongful-death case, the gun shop settled with Delana, saying it had followed the law and done nothing wrong.

“I can’t just go by what a phone call says,” Dady said in a deposition. “If the person that comes in . . . passes the background check, I can sell them a gun.”

The gun shop agreed to pay Delana $2.2 million.

Gun-control advocates say the state court’s decision combined with Delana’s settlement are significant victories for those who want to reduce gun violence by changing the financial equation for the firearms industry.

The Missouri case, brought with the help of lawyers from the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, provides a legal road map for similar lawsuits around the country, according to the Brady Center, which said there are at least 10 other civil cases pending, including in Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

Jonathan E. Lowy, Brady’s legal director who argued Delana’s case, said it sends a “powerful message to the gun industry nationwide, and to the companies that insure them, that if you supply a dangerous person with a gun, you will pay the price.”

Gun rights supporters counter that a 2005 national law that shields gunmakers, distributors and sellers from lawsuits never provided blanket immunity and already has exceptions to cover knowingly illegal sales.

Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said the lawsuits brought by the Brady Center and others are an effort to impose gun control through litigation instead of legislation. There is “nothing remarkable” about the Missouri settlement, Keane said. “What’s remarkable is

13

that the law is functioning just as Congress intended.”

Growing up with guns Far from Washington, where vast fields of corn and soybeans surround a community of 800 on the bluffs of the Missouri River, the gun debate is personal.

Delana grew up around guns. Her father was an avid hunter. Her husband, the high school sweetheart she married when she was 17, cleaned guns on the porch of their twobedroom cottage in Wellington. Their dates included target practice.

A Browning pistol her husband bought still rests in the gun safe next to her bed, as much for sentiment as protection.

Delana doesn’t want to take guns away from everybody — just from people like her daughter who are struggling with mental illness.

After a career in state government helping other people navigate Missouri’s social services system, she is frustrated she couldn’t do more to stop her daughter from getting a gun.

She said she is determined to bring attention to gaps in the background-check system and to expand the number of mentally ill people barred from buying firearms.

Even if her daughter had previously been deemed a threat by a judge, Delana has learned, there was no guarantee a background check would have caught that exclusion. The federal background-check system that is used

to prevent convicted felons from buying guns is missing scores of state health records that would also flag and disqualify those who are seriously mentally ill.

Regulations finalized late in the Obama administration, but overturned in February with President Trump’s signature, extended restrictions on gun purchases to people who receive a federal disability payment because of mental illness and also have that check sent to someone who manages their financial matters.

But, Delana also has learned, if the Obama regulations had been in place when Weathers bought her weapon, they would not have barred her purchase because she received and managed her own Social Security disability checks.

Dismantling those regulations now, her mother said, is a mistake.

Delana retired from her job last year and at 61 is a newly minted activist, making speeches in New York and Washington, and meeting with congressional members about gun buying and the mentally ill.

“I will do whatever I can. I’m working for justice for Tex. I’m not sitting around brooding.”

The downward spiral As a child, Delana’s daughter often was anxious and insecure.

She had interests — basketball, volleyball and playing the clarinet — and as a young continues on next page

Delana lost Tex, her husband of nearly 40 years, and her daughter, who was charged with murder. And beneath her anguish, Delana seethed.

CHRISTOPHER SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The Delana family house in Wellington, Mo., where Colby Sue Weathers lived with her parents.

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

14

COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Janet Delana, seen at left next to the gun safe in her house, sued the Odessa Gun & Pawn shop, right, after she pleaded with the manager not to sell a gun to her daughter, who is mentally ill. Colby Sue Weathers was able to buy one anyhow and killed her father. The store settled the suit. from previous page

woman held work as a computer technician at the local middle school and later as an administrative assistant for the Missouri Public Service Commission.

But by 33 and in her second marriage, Weathers had started hearing voices, became depressed and lost weight at an alarming rate.

Between 2007 and 2010, she was hospitalized four times for bipolar disorder and suicidal behavior, according to court papers. She tried to kill herself with prescription pills and spent weeks in a hospital before coming home to live with her parents after her last stay.

Tex Delana knew the ravages of mental illness, his wife said: A brother had a diagnosis similar to Weathers’s, and a sister had committed suicide. Tex Delana always worried he hadn’t done enough to help his sister. When his daughter was diagnosed, the retired steelworker stayed home to take care of her.

Weathers for a time was monitored by a case manager who helped her apply for federal disability benefits through a local psychiatric program that also helped her stay “on the borderline of being a mess.” “She was out there,” but she was taking her medication, Delana said.

In 2011, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and her illness was “poorly controlled with medicine” and she posed a “significant risk to injure herself,” according to a court filing.

Sitting cross-legged on the sofa with her dog in December, Delana wiped away tears as she talked about Weathers cycling out of control in the months before the shooting.

A girls’ girl who always kept her hair and makeup well done, Weathers quit bathing. She

ran compulsively, three and sometimes four times a day. She took up cross-stitching and sewed until her fingers bled. She began sewing and made a dozen of the same skirts.

In May 2012, Weathers announced that she was moving out and had bought a gun for protection. Her no-nonsense father told her to buy a baseball bat instead and locked up the gun until he could sell it.

By June, Weathers was on a high dose of a new drug that her mother says put her over the edge. Weathers was either disconnected and accusing her mother of “being in her head,” or mean and certain her mother was trying to poison her.

Her fingers were yellow from chain-smoking, and she stayed up all night listening to radio sermons.

Delana made an appointment with Weathers’s doctor, who recommended taking her off the medication until a meeting set for the upcoming Thursday.

Four long days.

A disability check probably would arrive before then, and Delana believed if Weathers could buy another gun, she would try again to kill herself.

From the conference room at her office,

A clerk called the situation “a shame” but said the store did everything “by the book.

We followed the law.”

Delana began working the phone, looking for help to block her daughter’s gun buy.

It was Monday.

As Delana said in her deposition, a Lafayette County sheriff’s deputy recommended calling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF referred her to the FBI. And the FBI told her that it could take six weeks or more for the agency to review medical records submitted by her daughter’s psychiatrist. Delana said she was told there were no guarantees that the bureau could prevent Weathers from buying a gun.

Just before 9 a.m., Delana called Odessa Gun & Pawn directly.

She gave the store manager her daughter’s name, birth date and Social Security number.

She told him that Weathers would probably try to buy another gun after getting her disability payment. She asked him to post the information on a sticky note on the cash register to alert other employees about her daughter.

Dady, the manager, thought that the call was “odd” and that he didn’t get calls like that every day, he said at a deposition.

He listened, noncommittal, Delana said, and after four minutes the call ended.

Two days later, on the Wednesday morning of June 27, 2012, Tex Delana and Justin, Weathers’s brother, planned to mow their lawn, a slope so steep it required using a rope to pull the mower up and down.

He went out to buy ice and picked up a candy bar for his pair of grown kids. When he got home, the temperature was close to 100 degrees and the mowing was put off.

Tex Delana went inside, sat down at his computer and pulled up photos of fishing boats.

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

15

‘As normal as you and me’ Sometime before 11 a.m., Weathers walked into the gun shop wearing a red sundress with brown flowers, her blond hair in a ponytail.

Dady asked her how the first gun had worked out, as he later told police. She’d sold it, Weathers told him, but she seemed “nervous and in a hurry,” Dady would recall.

Bill Cook, a store clerk, was cleaning guns behind the glass display counter where hunting rifles and shotguns are mounted row upon row. He remembers the encounter differently.

“She was normal. Just as normal as you and me,” he said in a recent interview as he stood packing black handgun cases for a gun show in Kansas City.

Shaking his head, Cook called the situation “a shame” but said the store did everything “by the book. We followed the law.” He blamed law enforcement for not flagging Weathers.

“She never would have gotten a gun,” Cook said. “That’s ate on me ever since the beginning.”

On Weathers’s second visit to the shop in two months, Dady called in a background check through the FBI’s national system. She passed and was on her way home with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Odessa Gun & Pawn did not always do everything by the book, according to ATF records made public after a records request from Delana’s lawyers. Over eight years starting in 2006, ATF inspectors dinged the store for a long list of violations of federal gun laws and regulations.

The company was cited for failing to run background checks, for not complying with the three-day waiting period for delayed background-check results and for selling firearms to people who indicated on federal forms that they were not the true purchasers of the gun.

In a letter to ATF’s Kansas City field office in January, Delana’s lawyers say the office knew that the store “had a record of willful violations of the gun laws that are supposed to keep America safe.” They faulted ATF for “failing to take appropriate action” that can include the revocation of a dealer’s license.

License revocations are rare. ATF pulled or

ANN MARIMOW/THE WASHINGTON POST

Colby Sue Weathers bought a black Hi-Point pistol similar to the one pictured here.

Janet Delana got a text from her daughter. “You did this to me. Our blood is on your hands. Good bye,” Weathers messaged to her mother, “dad is dead.” denied less than 1 percent of licenses based on inspections conducted in 2015, according to statistics from the bureau, which declined to comment on the Odessa store’s track record.

Through his attorney Kevin L. Jamison, the store’s owner, Charles Doleshal, attributed some of the violations to clerical errors.

Dady, who sold the gun to Weathers, no longer works at the shop and declined to comment beyond what he said in court filings.

In the sale to Weathers, Jamison said Delana did not provide the store with proof of her daughter’s illness and the clerk “did not connect the buyer with the call when she came in.”

A volunteer firefighter who had graduated with Tex Delana and had taught Weathers’s brother, saw her as she stopped at a minimart for cigarettes. He was there picking up lunch.

David Twente said Weathers was talking loudly to herself but made no sense. As she walked out, she shielded her face with one hand to avoid making eye contact.

Not long after Twente paid his bill, his emergency pager blared. A possible shooting.

In 25 years, Twente had worked only one other homicide.

He knew the address.

As he pulled up, Weathers was standing in front of her house, arms waving.

Her single round had bored through a black desk chair before striking her father’s upper back, killing him.

Weathers told the 911 dispatcher: “I know I need to go to jail, but I am trying to kill myself first.”

“I’ve been insane for a long time,” she continued.

It was an unusually quiet afternoon in the state social services office when Janet Delana got a text from her daughter.

“You did this to me. Our blood is on your hands. Good bye,” Weathers messaged to her mother, “dad is dead.”

‘What’s wrong with me?’

As Weathers’s murder case proceeded, Delana could not hug her daughter for two years and could speak to her only through a glass partition or on the phone.

Early on, Weathers asked her mother, “What’s wrong with me? Why are you even talking to me?” Delana said.

In September 2014, a judge accepted Weathers’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and committed her to a state mental-health facility.

“I didn’t feel there was any other way to resolve it,” said Lafayette County prosecutor Kristen Ellis, who was called to the Delanas’ home on the day of the shooting and agreed with findings of two doctors that Weathers suffered from a severe psychotic mental illness.

“I’m not sending someone to prison who didn’t understand at the time why she was acting the way she was acting,” Ellis said recently.

In the years since the shooting, Delana has shed the 40 pounds she gained during the height of her daughter’s illness. The bloodstained hardwood floors ruined by chemical cleaners have been replaced. The chair with the bullet hole was removed, even before she came back into the house.

Weathers is held at the Northwest Missouri Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center about an hour and a half from home.

Delana has a routine down after making the drive at least twice a month. In the cheery lobby, the receptionist prints an ID sticker and hands Delana a padlock for the locker where she stores her purse.

She clears locked double doors after the sound of a buzzer and pulls her pockets inside out, lifts her shoes and splays her arms for a security check.

Delana doesn’t want other mothers to go through what she did, what she still does.

Going forward with a jury trial over the gun sale might have made a bigger statement than reaching a settlement where no one is assigned fault.

But as the court date approached, Delana said she began to worry what a high-profile trial would mean for her daughter if Weathers were called to testify.

And Delana wanted to steel herself for what could be the next fight — to bring her daughter home.

“I still have to take care of Colby. I have to try to live a full life and be upbeat for her,” Delana said.

“If I’m weepy, she says, ‘I’m so sorry. I did this to you.’ ” n

THE DELANA FAMILY

Tex Delana plays with his two children in an undated family photo.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

PARENTING

The know-it-all robot playmates BY

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

K

from Microsoft. As children get older, they can ask or answer questions. The company says, “Aristotle was specifically designed to grow up with a child.”

Boosters of the technology say kids typically learn to acquire information using the prevailing technology of the moment — from the library card catalogue, to Google, to brief conversations with friendly, all-knowing voices.

But what if these gadgets lead children, whose faces are already glued to screens, further away from situations where they learn important interpersonal skills?

It’s unclear whether any of the companies involved are even paying attention to this issue.

Amazon did not return a request for comment. (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose middle name is Preston, according to Alexa.) A spokeswoman for the Partnership for AI, a new organization that includes Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other companies working on voice assistants, said nobody was available to answer questions.

“These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.”

Children certainly enjoy their company, referring to Alexa like

just another family member.

“We like to ask her a lot of really random things,” said Emerson Labovich, a fifth-grader in Bethesda, Md., who pesters Alexa with her older brother Asher.

This winter, Emerson asked her almost every day for help counting down the days until a trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida.

“She can also rap and rhyme,” Emerson said.

Today’s children will be shaped

by AI much like their grandparents were shaped by new devices called televisions. But you couldn’t talk with a TV. Ken Yarmosh, a 36-year-old Northern Virginia app developer and founder of Savvy Apps has multiple voice assistants in his family’s home, including those made by Google and Amazon.

Yarmosh’s 2-year-old son has been so enthralled by Alexa that he tries to speak with coasters and other cylindrical objects that look like Amazon’s device. Meanwhile, Yarmosh’s now 5-year-old son, in comparing his two assistants, came to believe Google knew him better.

“Alexa isn’t smart enough for me,” he’d say, asking random questions that his parents couldn’t answer, like how many miles it is to China. (“China is 7,248 miles away,”

BEE JOHNSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

ids adore their new robot siblings.

As millions of American families buy robotic voice assistants to turn off lights, order pizzas and fetch movie times, children are eagerly coopting the gadgets to settle dinner table disputes, answer homework questions and entertain friends at sleepover parties.

Many parents have been startled and intrigued by the way these disembodied, know-it-all voices — Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft’s Cortana — are affecting their kids’ behavior, making them more curious but also, at times, far less polite.

In just two years, the promise of the technology has already exceeded the marketing come-ons.

The disabled are using voice assistants to control their homes, order groceries and listen to books.

Caregivers to the elderly say the devices help with dementia, reminding users what day it is or when to take medicine.

For children, the potential for transformative interactions are just as dramatic — at home and in classrooms. But psychologists, technologists and linguists are only beginning to ponder the possible perils of surrounding kids with artificial intelligence, particularly as they traverse important stages of social and language development.

“How they react and treat this nonhuman entity is, to me, the biggest question,” said Sandra Calvert, a Georgetown University psychologist and director of the Children’s Digital Media Center.

“And how does that subsequently affect family dynamics and social interactions with other people?”

With an estimated 25 million voice assistants expected to sell this year at $40 to $180 — up from 1.7 million in 2015 — there are even ramifications for the diaper crowd.

Toy giant Mattel recently announced the birth of Aristotle, a home baby monitor launching this summer that “comforts, teaches and entertains” using AI

Artificial intelligence gadgets, like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and Microsoft’s Cortana, are shaping children’s behavior in startling ways

Google Home says, “as the crow flies.”)

In talking that way about a device plugged into a wall, Yarmosh’s son was anthropomorphizing it — which means to “ascribe human features to something,” Alexa happily explains. Humans do this a lot, Calvert said. We do it with dogs, dressing them in costumes on Halloween. We name boats.

And when we encounter robots, we — especially children — treat them as near equals.

In 2012, University of Washington researchers published results of a study involving 90 children interacting with a life-size robot named Robovie. Most kids thought Robovie had “mental states” and was a “social being.” When Robovie was shoved into a closet, more than half felt it wasn’t fair. A similar emotional connection is taking hold with Alexa and other assistants — even for parents.

“It’s definitely become part of our lives,” said Emerson’s mother, Laura Labovich, who then quickly

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

17

PETS corrected herself: “She’s definitely part of our lives.”

The problem, Druin said, is that this emotional connection sets up expectations for children that devices can’t or weren’t designed to meet, causing confusion, frustration and even changes in the way kids talk or interact with adults.

Yarmosh’s son thought Alexa couldn’t understand him, but it was the algorithms that couldn’t grasp the pitch in his voice or the way children formulate questions.

Educators introducing these devices into classrooms and school libraries have encountered the same issue.

“If Alexa doesn’t understand the question, is it Alexa’s fault or might it be the question’s fault?” said Gwyneth Jones, a librarian who uses Amazon’s device at Murray Hill Middle School in Laurel.

“People are not always going to get what they are saying, so it’s important that they learn how to ask good questions.”

Naomi S. Baron, an American University linguist who studies digital communication, is among those who wonder whether the devices, even as they get smarter, will push children to value simplistic language — and simplistic inquiries — over nuance and complex questions.

And then there is the potential rewiring of adult-child communication.

Although Mattel’s new assistant will have a setting forcing children to say “please” when asking for information, the assistants made by Google, Amazon and others are designed so users can quickly — and bluntly — ask questions. Parents are noticing some not-so- subtle changes in their children.

In a blog post last year, California venture capitalist Hunter Walk wrote of his 4-year-old daughter’s relationship with Alexa: “Cognitively I’m not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person. At the very least, it creates patterns and reinforcement that so long as your diction is good, you can get what you want without niceties.”

“There can be a lot of unintended consequences to interactions with these devices that mimic conversation,” said Kate Darling, an MIT professor who studies how humans interact with robots. “We don’t know what all of them are yet.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Making ‘a world where no old dog dies alone and afraid’ BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

W

hen a German shepherd rescue organization posted Elmo’s photo online last fall, it made no effort to mask the dog’s problems. He wore a cone around his neck to prevent him from licking the large open sore on his hip.

His fungus-ridden feet were swollen. His graying, 11-year-old face held a pathetic, ears-to-theground gaze.

Steve Frost, a retired fire captain in Northern California, said he saw the photo and thought Elmo “looked like hell.” He immediately decided he wanted the dog.

Four months later, Frost sits by his fireplace every morning and evening and gives Elmo four pills for his various ailments, “like an old man.” Recently, he took Elmo in for prostate surgery. Frost, who had not owned a dog in several years, is now ushering one through its final years of life, which he says he figures will be “a lot better than living in a kennel.”

Frost, 59, met Elmo through the Thulani Program, one of a growing number of animal organizations focusing on adopting out older dogs, or “senior dogs” that are typically 7 years or older. Their age makes them some of the hardest-to-place animals in a society that still adores romping puppies, although that is changing as books on elderly dogs and social media campaigns convince petseekers that the mature pooches often come with benefits, such as being house-trained, more sedate and less demanding of people with busy lifestyles.

But some of those adopters go further, selecting pets from programs for dogs in need of hospice care, or what amounts to assisted living for very ill or very old dogs.

These programs usually commit to covering the cost of a dog’s medical and dental care, which might otherwise be a major obstacle to finding them homes, said Lisa Lunghofer, executive director of the Maryland-based Grey Muz-

DAVID WRITZ

David Writz of Eau Claire, Wis., took in Dante, a 10-year-old black Lab mix, even though the dog had to have an eye removed.

zle Organization. The donorfunded group gave $225,000 in grants last year to 38 senior dog programs nationwide, several of which now promote hospice adoptions.

Frost, who lives in Redding, Calif., and is a part-time professional pilot, said he knew he wasn’t up to the task of raising a puppy. He also knew he wanted a German shepherd. An Internet search led him to Thulani, and that led him to Elmo, one of the organization’s hospice dogs.

Frost knows little about Elmo’s past, other than that he was turned over to an animal shelter in Los Angeles and had clearly been neglected. His ears had mites, his innards had worms, his prostate had a tumor and he was puppylike in one key way: At age 11, he wasn’t house-trained. Now Elmo has two beds in Frost’s home and a permanent place in the back seat of his four-door Ford F-150, and the two take what Frost called “a man shower” together every few days.

“This guy has just burrowed his way into my heart,” Frost said.

Lunghofer stresses that most senior dogs do not require the

kind of care Elmo has. The majority “just need a good home,” she said, and many “regain their vitality and reward their families with years of unconditional love and devotion.”

And more of them are finding those homes, she said. Grey Muzzle — which says it envisions “a world where no old dog dies alone and afraid” — recently surveyed its grantees, the majority of which said the situation for older dogs has improved in the past two years and that young people are more open to such adoptions. Nearly all said the main reason people adopt aging dogs is “altruism,” although mellowness and potty skills were also cited.

“This is a great way to ease into dog ownership,” said Erick Smith of Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, a Grey Muzzle grantee. “It’s not this epic commitment that you’re staring down.”

David Writz, 34, said he’s hoping his newly adopted 10-year-old black Lab mix, Dante — who is not a hospice case — will stick around for five years or so. Like Frost, Writz found his dog online after deciding he didn’t have time for a puppy. When the two met in person at Bob’s House for Dogs in Eleva, Wis., Writz was smitten, despite the fact that Dante was about 20 pounds overweight.

Then the shelter called and told Writz that the dog would be having emergency surgery to remove an eye with glaucoma. Did Writz still want him?

“I was like, ’Obviously,’ ” said Writz, who works in a payroll office. “I figured at the very least I’d just get him an eye patch.”

Knowing that Dante won’t be around for long “is the depressing aspect of it,” said Writz, who regularly takes Dante to a local brewery, where the dog happily begs for pretzels. “But I figure he’ll be happy the rest of his remaining years.”

In Redding, Elmo is recovering from his prostate surgery.

“The best you can do is make him have a great life, because his life up until this point has been hell,” Frost said. n

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BOOKS

Romantic mystique meets sobering reality N ONFICTION l

A

HAVANA A Subtropical Delirium

By Mark Kurlansky Bloomsbury.

259 pp. $26.

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL M EWSHAW

happy hybrid, “Havana: A Subtropical Delirium” invokes the Cuban capital as an occasion to discuss the country’s history, politics, food, architecture, music, religion and passion for baseball. No author is as well equipped to take on this task as Mark Kurlansky, who has previously published half a dozen books on international cuisine, two on baseball and one — “A Continent of Islands” — that surveys the Caribbean situation. The danger is that such a polymathic author has no fixed identity and might fall between categories and be dismissed in this case as a mere travel writer.

That would be a great shame, given the manifold pleasures of his brief, breezy new book.

Kurlansky approaches Havana like an Impressionist painter, building the image of this metropolis of 2 million inhabitants with subtle brushstrokes. Visible from almost everywhere, the sea provides a blue surround, one that is ironically empty of boats. As Kurlansky explains, Cubans are wary of the ocean, the source of many murderous invasions — the Bay of Pigs was one of many — and killer hurricanes. Then too, after Fidel Castro took power and the United States cut off contact, authorities from both countries have patrolled the Straits of Florida, capturing all but the luckiest immigrants trying to reach the American mainland in rickety improvised crafts.

While Cuban exiles might complain that Kurlansky doesn’t sufficiently catalogue the cruelty and repression of the Castro regime, he does note that “Che Guevara — a man with the looks of a cinema hero — held his tribunals and executed so many people by firing squad that Castro removed him from his post.” Che then moved on to South America, trading his role as the Robespierre of the Cuban revolution for his lasting iconic image as a martyr for socialism.

With estimable evenhandedness, Kurlansky remarks that Cuba’s previous dictator, Fulgen-

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The ocean is visible from most places in Havana, but Cubans are wary of the sea, Mark Kurlansky writes.

cio Batista, richly deserved to be toppled. He ran “a murderous kleptocracy in close partnership with American organized crime. . . . Foreigners remember the Havana of that time as a kind of romantic brothel.” Kurlansky points out that prostitution continued to flourish under Castro, and he offers fascinating insight into how the history of commercialized sex on the island was an outgrowth of slavery, which wasn’t abolished in Cuba until 1872. Under Spanish rule, slaves had advantages over their counterparts in the United States; they could legally sell things on the street, “including their bodies.” If they managed to earn enough, they could buy their freedom, and any children they had by white men were “automatically considered free.”

Transplanted African culture pervades society at every level and in every sphere, and Kurlansky describes at length its influence on Cuban food, music, dance and religion. Indeed, he spices his chronicle of the city with recipes for favorite Cuban dishes and drinks such as picadillo and ajiaco, and

the rum-based daiquiri and mojito. He discusses the restaurants and bars where this fare originated and notes that in the 19th century, ice was imported from New England directly to Havana, then crushed for thirsty American soldiers, who favored Coca-Cola liberally spiked with rum.

Cubans liked Coke, too, and this presented a problem during the U.S. embargo — but not one that couldn’t be surmounted. With a typical flair for improvisation, they produced Tropi-Cola, which ultimately became so popular that it was exported to other countries.

This talent for adaptation, Kurlansky points out, served Cuba not just when the United States isolated it, but when the Soviet Union collapsed and could no longer subsidize the Castro regime with billiondollar infusions of food and fuel.

Schools and hospitals continued to function at high levels, and if the national diet was diminished, at least this resulted in a drop in cases of diabetes and heart disease.

Kurlansky is hardly an apologist for the Castro regime or a Pollyanna about conditions in Ha-

vana. The reality is laid out by the author in numbers — “20 percent of the population lives in housing that has been deemed ‘precarious’ ” — and in powerful descriptive passages. “With structures sagging on their sturdy columns, sunken roofs, stained gargoyles, and cracked and blackened stone ornaments, Havana looks like the remnants of an ancient civilization in need of teams of archeologists to sift through the rubble.”

Kurlansky doffs his cap to indigenous writers ranging from José Martí to contemporary poets and novelists. He also pays deference to foreign authors associated with Havana.

The book ends without a dramatic crescendo or sweeping conclusion. This is no criticism. It could hardly be otherwise now that President Barack Obama’s opening to Cuba is being reassessed by the Trump administration. But readers interested in the debate couldn’t do better than inform themselves with Kurlansky’s book. n Mewshaw is writing a memoir about his friendship with Pat Conroy.

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BOOKS

Unnerving novel gets into your head FICTION

B

l

REVIEWED BY

that germinates more terror than sorrow. There’s something irresistibly creepy about this story, which stems from the thrill of venturing into illicit places of the mind.

“Ill Will” is told through shifting narrators, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, but not one of them has the full story of what happened or what is happening. It’s all part of Chaon’s ingenious design that makes us participate in this family’s collapse, struggling to establish lines of culpability and discern the real threats from a shifting body of evidence.

As Dustin tries to maintain his psychology practice, he is increasingly concerned by what his justreleased brother might do in return for those stolen decades. Perhaps it’s that alarm that makes him susceptible to the entreaties of one of his patients who wants him to help solve a series of drowning deaths that the police have written off as accidental. Slowly at first and then quickly, Dustin abandons his professional distance and throws himself into an investigation that relies on the same dubious psychological theory that convicted his brother three decades ago.

If all this sounds a bit chaotic, it’s meant to, and the book’s complicated structure — jumping back and forth in time and between narrators — exacerbates that sense of disorientation. Chaon’s great skill is his ability to re-create that compulsive sense we have in nightmares that we’re just about to figure everything out — if only we tried a little harder, moved a little faster.

Chaon’s novel walks along a garrote stretched taut between Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock.

By the time we realize what’s happening, we’ve gone too far to turn back. We can only inch forward into the darkness, bracing for what might come next. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

WEEKLY

Tupperware’s forgotten visionary

R ON C HARLES

y now we should all be on guard against Dan Chaon, but there’s just no effective defense against this cunning writer. The author of three novels and three collections of short stories, he draws on our sympathies even while pricking our anxieties. Before beginning his exceptionally unnerving new book, go ahead and lock the door, but it won’t help. You’ll still be stuck inside yourself, which for Chaon is the most precarious place to be.

“Ill Will” revolves around Dustin Tillman, a 41-year-old psychologist who recently lost his wife to cancer. The shock of her illness and death has rendered Dustin even more distracted than usual. “His brain seemed murky with circling, unfocused dread,” Chaon writes, “and the world itself appeared somehow more unfriendly — emanating, he couldn’t help but think, a soft glow of ill will.”

Dustin may think his atmosphere is dark, but the fog of animosity is just starting to gather.

His brother, Rusty, has been exonerated after almost 30 years in prison. He’d been convicted of killing their parents, along with their aunt and uncle, in a trial that hinged on young Dustin’s sensational testimony of sexual abuse and occult rituals. A fraternal reunion is the last thing Dustin wants right now — not only because he can’t shake the sense of Rusty’s malevolence, but also because he can’t exactly recall what happened the night of those murders. Nothing made sense amid all that carnage. Thirty years later, devastated anew by his wife’s death, his memories feel even hazier, but no less alarming.

The difficulty of separating fact from fantasy, history from memory, pierces the heart of this novel.

Chaon, who lost his own wife — the writer Sheila Schwartz — in 2008, captures the obscuring effects of grief with extraordinary tenderness. But he sows that misery in the soil of a literary thriller

KLMNO

N ONFICTION

W

ILL WILL

By Dan Chaon Ballantine. 458 pp. $28.

LIFE OF THE PARTY The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire

By Bob Kealing Crown Archetype.

298 pp. $26.

l

REVIEWED BY

M EGAN M C D ONOUGH

hen Tupperware — the now-ubiquitous plastic-container brand — first hit retail stores in 1945, it sat on the shelves gathering dust. The new kitchen helpmate needed to be demonstrated and explained to consumers.

“The product itself was revolutionary,” Bob Kealing writes in “Life of the Party.” “Now it just needed someone equally innovative to figure out how to sell it.”

Enter Brownie Wise, the trailblazing entrepreneur and executive whose marketing genius and sales method of targeting women transformed Tupperware into the international, billion-dollar business it is today.

Kealing’s book, originally released under the title “Tupperware, Unsealed” in 2008, has been revamped to feature Wise even more prominently alongside Tupperware founder and inventor Earl Silas Tupper. Exhaustively researched and skillfully detailed, Kealing’s thorough and engrossing account chronicles the pair’s unlikely, dynamic and often tumultuous relationship, and Wise’s meteoric rise and subsequent precipitous fall from grace within the company she made a success.

Kealing aptly describes how, before becoming the face and force behind Tupperware, Wise, a divorcée and struggling single mom, worked as an executive secretary in Detroit and sold Stanley Home Products — mops, cleaners, detergents — to supplement her income. Although she would eventually become a sales leader at Stanley, she was admonished by her mentor, the company’s founder, that management wasn’t a place for women.

Wise then discovered Tupperware and realized firsthand the importance of hands-on home demonstrations to effectively promote the product when she accidentally bumped a Tupperware bowl to the floor: It bounced and did not break. Right away, she realized its durability as a key fea-

ture of its marketability.

She had found her niche. Capitalizing on her experience at Stanley, she began buying and selling Tupperware independently. She ingeniously recruited suburban housewives to sell the product at large gatherings of friends, relatives and neighbors in their homes, which soon became social events.

In turn, they received merchandise, a share of the proceeds and personal recognition.

The growth was immediate and explosive: Within her first year of selling independently, her team garnered more than $85,000 in Tupperware orders (close to $850,000 today), outselling department stores across the country.

Tupper, noticing her remarkable sales, saw an opportunity and astutely pulled Tupperware off store shelves. He pivoted the company’s strategy to capitalize on Wise’s home parties and promoted her to general sales manager.

By 1958, the company had hit $10 million in sales (more than $80 million in 2016 dollars). Tupperware and Wise were quickly becoming household names. Wise was also becoming a PR maven.

But Tupper’s displeasure with Wise’s self-promotion soured their relationship. This, coupled with a series of missteps, led to Wise’s ouster from the company she effectively built. In 1958, she was abruptly fired, with no stock, only a year’s salary (almost $35,000 today) and a noncompete contract, while Tupper left the business a year later with $16 million.

Yet Wise’s profound impact on the company and its iconic product is still evident. Her sales techniques also paved the way for other successful big-name companies, such as Mary Kay and Avon.

Kealing’s book is a muchdeserved tribute to Wise, shedding light on the life and legacy of this groundbreaking, formidable and visionary woman. n McDonough is a weddings and obituary writer for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Don’t let Big Marijuana put profits above safety PATRICK KENNEDY is a former U.S. representative from Rhode Island and an honorary adviser of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

KEVIN SABET is a former White House drug policy adviser and president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

L

ast month, White House press secretary Sean Spicer sent shock waves through the nascent — but growing — marijuana industry when he indicated that the Trump administration intends to pursue “greater enforcement” regarding nonmedical marijuana. The comments drew quick rebuke from elected officials in several states that have begun experimenting with pot legalization.

Certainly, we shouldn’t lock people up for marijuana use or low-level offenses, or revert to a “Reefer Madness”-style war on drugs. But we should also recognize legalization for what it is: the large-scale commercialization and marketing of an addictive — and therefore highly profitable — substance.

Many marijuana advocates have one goal in mind: to get rich. What we need, therefore, is a federal enforcement strategy that not only promotes human rights and social justice, but also actively targets and deters the special interests driving Big Marijuana.

Simply put, the current fragmented patchwork of laws governing marijuana in states is unsustainable. Despite the oftrepeated refrain that marijuana enforcement is an issue of “states’ rights,” the consequences of legalization are not confined by geographic borders. Since Colorado legalized, marijuana has streamed into neighboring states and emboldened drug trafficking organizations there.

In fact, in Nebraska and Oklahoma, the inflow of marijuana trafficking has been so dramatic that the states sued Colorado. Interstate drug tourism is thriving, with companies in states with legal pot advertising across state lines and online.

The courts also agree that marijuana is not a “states’ rights” question. In 2005, the Supreme Court examined this issue in Gonzales v. Raich, where the federal government had enforced

the law concerning marijuana plants in someone’s yard. The highest court ruled 6 to 3 that federal law supersedes state law when it comes to enforcing drug statutes — even in states where marijuana is legal (in this case for medicinal purposes) — because marijuana sales affect interstate commerce. If that is true with pot plants in someone’s yard, then surely large, industrialized pot growers catering to out-of-state tourists also affect interstate commerce.

Issues of federalism aside, federal enforcement would serve as a needed check against an exploding for-profit marijuana industry that often prioritizes profits over public health and safety. In states with legal marijuana, special interests have built industrial-scale growing and dangerous THC extraction operations and are looking to advertise the product on television. They’re targeting minority communities to sell their products and — increasingly — financing politicians to do their bidding.

There are now more pot shops concentrated in poor communities of color in Denver than anywhere else.

And while advocates are quick to tout tax revenue as a counterbalance to this arrangement, like with the lottery, the funds are less than expected. In Washington state, more than half of the revenue promised for drug prevention and treatment programs didn’t materialize. And in Colorado, bureaucracy to regulate the industry continues to consume a

FRANCIS BLACK/GETTY IMAGES VIA ISTOCKPHOTO

The patchwork of marijuana laws is unsustainable, the authors say.

large percentage of the revenue made.

According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, fatal crashes in Washington state involving drivers who had recently used marijuana more than doubled after legalization.

Colorado has seen similar increases. In states that have legalized, youth marijuana use now exceeds the national average, the black market continues to thrive and employers struggle with more drug-impaired workers than before pot was legalized.

More heavy users of marijuana are reporting to drug treatment, and there have been more school infractions among kids caught with pot. Worse still, the only statistically representative national survey on marijuana use found last year that Colorado

is the No. 1 state for youth marijuana use in the country.

Without action, the marijuana industry is poised to become the next Big Tobacco — a profithungry special-interest group looking after profits, not public health. We need to acknowledge that marijuana comes with its own set of health risks, including a strong link to psychosis and schizophrenia, memory loss and low academic achievement.

Meanwhile, the industry is already bringing us back to the bad old days of smoking in restaurants, and the tobacco industry itself has been eyeing marijuana since the 1970s. We cannot forget the century-long fight against cigarettes — and the trillions of dollars and millions of lives it cost our country. We need smarter solutions — now is the time to find them. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Pence takes power in foreign policy JOSH ROGIN is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security.

T

he role and influence of the vice president, not enshrined in any law, is determined in any administration by three things: his direct relationship with the president, his building of a personal portfolio of issues, and the effectiveness of his team. When it comes to foreign policy, Vice President Pence is quietly succeeding on all three fronts.

Inside an administration that is characterized by several power centers, Pence must navigate complex internal politics while serving a president who has an unconventional view of foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world. Pence, a traditional hawk influenced heavily by his Christian faith, is carefully and deliberately assuming a stance that fits within the president’s agenda while respecting the prerogatives of other senior White House aides who also want to play large foreign policy roles, according to White House officials, lawmakers and experts.

But Pence’s growing influence on foreign policy is increasingly evident. The vice president was deployed to Europe last month to reassure allies that the United States will stay committed to alliances such as NATO, despite President Trump’s calls for Europeans to pay more for

common defense. During Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit, Trump announced that Pence and his Japanese counterpart would lead a new dialogue on U.S.-Japan economic cooperation.

“The vice president seems to be building on his foreign affairs experience, finding a niche in that arena,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who served with Pence in Congress.

“He brings a level-headed steady hand to the foreign policy of the administration. He’s also building up his own team.”

Inside the White House, Pence is in the room during most of the president’s interactions with world leaders. He receives the presidential daily brief. As head of the transition, he was instrumental in bringing traditionally hawkish Republicans into the top levels of the administration’s

national security team, including Director of National Intelligencedesignate Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Trump and Pence met with Haley recently just before the United States decided to confront Russia and the Syrian regime at the U.N. Security Council about Syrian President Bashar alAssad’s use of chemical weapons.

The move seems to run counter to the White House’s drive to warm relations with Moscow, but Trump decided, with Pence’s support, that it was important and necessary, officials said.

Pence’s national security team is also in place and humming. Just days after the inauguration, Pence announced that he had brought on Andrea Thompson as his national security adviser. A former military intelligence officer with extensive combat zone experience, she also worked for the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees. Most recently, she worked for the firm run by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Pence is seen by many in Washington as a figure who might stand up for the traditionally hawkish views he espoused while in Congress, a proxy of sorts for the GOP national security establishment. But those close to Pence say his stance is more

nuanced. Pence is committed to advocating Trump’s foreign policy objectives, not his own, and endeavors to stay above the fray of most internal disputes.

“He definitely brings a different perspective, but he’s nuanced and subtle in how he engages,” one White House official said. “He’s adapted somewhat, at least in terms of not putting his views above those of the president.”

Pence preserves his credibility with the president so it can be most effective when deployed. The chief example was when Pence personally spoke to Trump about removing national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had lied to him about conversations with Russian officials during the transition.

“When Flynn was in the NSA role, there was no center of gravity where traditional Republicans could come together on policy,” said Bruce Jones, vice president at the Brookings Institution. “In the days since Flynn exited, Pence has occupied more of that space.”

It’s a tricky balancing act, but if Pence can keep the president’s trust, stay above the internal politics and build out his portfolio, he will be able to continue to increase his influence on foreign policy inside the White House and on the world stage. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

We train Marines to be this way KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2010.

An old Marine told me that Marines guard Marines from the other side. And when one of their brothers is being threatened, the Devil Dogs (a.k.a. Marines) will “go wild on them” for eternity.

Yes, but what about the sisters? Do the Devil Dogs protect them, too?

What about the female Marines whose nude photos were posted to a Facebook group where comments ranged from raunchy to suggestions of violence?

Do female Marines count in the Devil Dogs lore?

The questions arise as the Defense Department begins an investigation into recent revelations about the Facebook group Marines United, which the Associated Press reports was composed of active-duty and retired male Marines along with some Navy Corpsmen and Royal British Marines.

Some of the nude shots were grabbed from Instagram. Others were shot surreptitiously. Most were passed along a testosteronerich grapevine. More than two dozen active-duty women in the photographs were identified by their rank, full name and location. Needless to say, the women were horrified to learn that they had been sexually objectified by their peers.

One said the scandal had ruined her Marine experience

and that she wouldn’t reenlist.

One active corpsman said he’d seen the photos on the Facebook page, which also provides news and support, but wasn’t interested and skipped over them. He didn’t find the collection surprising, however.

The young women who knowingly had their photos taken apparently thought that the viewers would be of the women’s own choosing. One can imagine, however, that a libidinous corpsman who discovers a picture of a seminude or nude female Marine might be inspired to share it. Isn’t “sharing” the operative term in today’s narcissistic, show-andtell-all culture?

The difference and the distinction, however, is that the Marines United boys club basically stole the images and used them without the subjects’

BY SHENEMAN

consent. Marines being Marines?

Or are they guilty of something more sinister, potentially deserving court-martial?

To the civilian mind, the answer is rather simple: The Pentagon, now fully infiltrated and indoctrinated by modern feminists, has decided to put women in combat (thank you, President Barack Obama).

Therefore, women must be treated as men.

But what about the vice versa?

Must men be treated as women?

That is, should they be trained to be more “sensitive”? If so, can you simultaneously create sensitivity in the desensitizing, killing culture that breaks down an 18year-old’s humanity and instills in him an instinct for brutality?

Put another way, how stupid are we?

There’s a reason we say in times of great peril, “Send in the Marines,” and it’s not because of the few brave, committed women among them. But try to find someone in today’s military willing to say so.

Older vets with nothing to lose will sometimes open up. Two of my regular Marine correspondents, “Jack” and “Russ,” both of them Vietnam vets, explained the culture that creates killers and how this environment isn’t conducive to

civilian norms.

Jack, who told me the afterlife story, is my brother. Russ is a retired Methodist minister who counsels veterans navigating post-traumatic stress disorder.

Neither they nor I intend to justify the Facebook group but rather aim to illuminate the mind-set that might have led to it and the misunderstandings that create havoc.

“Marines embrace the warrior archetype more than other branches,” Russ said. “The shadow of this is patriarchy, misogyny and brutality. We are trained to be killing machines, deadening all emotion except anger. We’re told we don’t have the luxury of sensitivity, so we objectify everything, including women.”

Still, he’s optimistic, saying that we need to return to “the embodiment of the hero archetype in the medieval knight.

Aggressiveness can be coupled with honor, nobility and compassion.”

Maybe so. But knights typically didn’t joust with women, which may be the most salient inference. That said, chivalry has a place here. An apology to the women who exposed themselves to the few, not the proud, would be appropriate — both as gesture and punishment. n

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Historically black colleges BY

S HIRLEY C ARSWELL

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos cast historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as “pioneers” in “school choice” recently, her critics scoffed at the notion that black students could choose to matriculate wherever they wished during the days of segregation. The episode revealed just how many misconceptions persist about the nation’s more than 100 HBCUs. MYTH NO. 1 Black colleges were founded by black people.

Some of today’s most wellknown HBCUs were founded by white Americans. Howard University, which celebrates its sesquicentennial this year, in Washington, D.C., is named after one of its founders, Gen. Oliver O. Howard, a white Union officer who led the federal Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War. Spelman College was founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles, two white teachers from Massachusetts. Later renamed, the all-female college had among its early benefactors John D. Rockefeller and the family of his wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

The Rockefellers and the Baptist organization that underwrote the teachers’ mission also provided major financial support to the nearby all-male HBCU, Morehouse College.

MYTH NO. 2 It’s racist to have black colleges.

This sentiment obscures a key distinction. As Morehouse graduate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it in 1957, “Although Negro colleges are by and large segregated institutions, they are not segregating institutions.”

There’s a reason “HBCU” stands for “historically black” and not simply “black” colleges and universities. Although they were originally founded to educate black students who were shut out of white schools, they have always

enrolled non-black students.

According to the Department of Education, “In 2014, non-Black students made up 21 percent of enrollment at HBCUs, compared with 15 percent in 1976.” White students account for most of the non-black HBCU student population, but schools such as Howard increasingly attract international interest.

MYTH NO. 3 HBCUs are inferior.

HBCUs have a relatively low graduation rate (30 percent) compared with all black college students nationwide (42 percent), according to a 2015 New America report. But nearly 73 percent of HBCU students qualify for Pell grants and in many cases come from low-income households where the cost of college is a high barrier to completion. HBCUs see their mission as serving these students, many of them firstgeneration college students who otherwise might not attend. And these schools, which represent only 3 percent of postsecondary institutions, produce about 20 percent of all African American graduates — and 25 percent of those in the STEM fields, according to the United Negro College Fund.

A 2015 Gallup report measured five elements of well-being — social, purpose, financial, community and physical — and found that black HBCU grads were “thriving,” to a greater degree, in all categories, than their black counterparts who attended other institutions.

ANDRE CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Like many historically black colleges and universities, Howard University in Washington, D.C., had white founders.

MYTH NO. 4 Students are fleeing HBCUs. Indeed, some HBCUs have seen declining enrollment. But writing for The Washington Post last year, Dillard University President Walter Kimbrough pointed to an uptick in enrollment at a number of HBCUs. “Freshman enrollment is up 49 percent at Shaw University, 39 percent at South Carolina State, 32 percent at Tuskegee University, 30 percent at Virginia State University, 22 percent at Dillard University, 22 percent at Central State University, 20 percent at Florida Memorial University, and 19 percent at Delaware State University. Dillard, Philander Smith College (overall enrollment up 29 percent) and South Carolina State University all rely on overflow housing to accommodate the influx of students,” he wrote.

MYTH NO. 5 Obama was anti-HBCU. President Barack Obama’s first budget called for a $73 million cut in funding for HBCUs. (The next year, that money was restored.) In 2011, the administration tightened loan standards, resulting in a 36 percent reduction in federal

PLUS loans available to HBCU parents and causing a number of students to interrupt their college educations. The new rules disproportionately affected schools that served a high share of disadvantaged students. A Post analysis found that the move translated to an annual cut of more than $150 million for HBCUs. The Obama administration acknowledged the unintended impact and took steps to adjust the loan rules.

Morehouse President John Silvanus Wilson Jr., a former director of Obama’s initiative on HBCUs, told Inside Higher Ed last year: “It is a fact that just before President Obama took office, total annual federal funding to HBCUs was under $4 billion. During his first term, that figure climbed to nearly $5.2 billion, largely based on a very intentional boost in federal grants and loans to HBCU students. To this day, HBCUs are getting nearly $1 billion more per year than they were getting when Obama took office. That is not the behavior of a leader who thinks these institutions do not matter.” n Carswell is a lecturer at the Howard University School of Communications and a former deputy managing editor of The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2017

24

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