The Washington Post National Weekly - May 7, 2017

SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2017

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY Comrades in conservative values

American advocates on religion, family issues and gun rights find allies in Moscow PAGE 12

Politics A U.S. shift on strongmen 4

Business These interns are really cashing in 17

5 Myths France 23

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THE FIX

Abortion is still a major issue A MBER P HILLIPS

hold federal funds from Planned Parenthood and other health-care clinics that provide abortions. But he will sign a five-month spendouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ing bill that does include spending for Planned (D-Calif.) thinks Democratic voters Parenthood. just don't care about abortion anyAnd this has all happened as Democrats more, at least not to the degree they have been drifting away from fights over aborused to. tion, at least according to Pelosi.

“It’s kind of fading as an issue,” Though, on that point, whether she told Washington Post reporters A red America Democrats will vote for candidates on Tuesday. “It really is.” l 25 states with a Republican governor and Republican state legislature based on their stance on abortion is But conservative lawmakers cerup for debate. tainly still care a lot. In fact, antiDemocratic National Committee abortion advocates are on a roll Chairman Tom Perez recently said right now, successfully making it a candidate’s support for abortion harder for women to get abortions rights is “nonnegotiable” after he in dozens of states. and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) apWhich makes sense. When you peared on stage in April with an combine the right’s unwavering foOmaha candidate for mayor who cus on limiting abortion with the has sponsored bills to restrict aborfact that Republicans control a mation. jority of state legislatures and govAnother group that agrees with ernor’s mansions — as well as ConPerez that Democrats’ commitment gress and the White House AND to abortion rights is nonnegotiable with a favorable ideological tilt on held its annual conference Wednesthe Supreme Court — you get a day. Advocacy group Emily’s List focountry whose abortion landscape cused on training, recruiting and is leaning in antiabortion advohelping Democratic female candicates’ favor. * Nebraska’s sole legislative chamber is technically nonpartisan but dates’ message on a variety of topThere are now 17 states that ban Republican in practice. SOURCE: AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM; 2016 ELECTION RESULTS ics in the era of Trump. But Emily’s abortion after 20 weeks, which is List only endorses and works with when antiabortion advocates argue women who support abortion rights. bans. a fetus can feel pain. As the 2017 state legislaSo, do Democrats still value abortion rights?

“One of these states is looking to be that tive session wraps up, five states have passed That’s up for debate. (Also worth noting: Last state to enact the law that ends up at the Su13 major abortion restriction laws, and at least year, Emily’s List awarded Pelosi as its leader preme Court and overturns Roe v. Wade,” she two more are sitting on governors’ desks in of the resistance movement.) said. “That's what we’re watching for.”

Iowa and Montana.

But what’s not up for debate is the fact that This is unfolding against the backdrop of a Really, antiabortion advocates have actually abortion rights advocates are losing battles more antiabortion Washington, though less is been on a roll for six years and counting. Since across the nation, and they have been for a few happening than perhaps antiabortion advoRepublicans swept control of a majority of years now. n cates would have hoped. In April, President state legislatures in 2010, states have enacted Trump signed a law that allows states to withmore than 350 abortion restrictions. In the ©The Washington Post BY

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2016 state legislative session, some 14 states made it harder to get an abortion.

Elizabeth Nash, with the abortion rights research group Guttmacher Institute, said there’s an arms race in conservative states to pass increasingly strict abortion laws in hopes of being the trigger for a tidal wave of abortion

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. 30

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER On various issues, many leading U.S. conservatives have come to see Russia as a potential ally. Illustration by The Washington Post; original art from Istock

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POLITICS

Praise for strongmen raises alarms

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s vocal affection for totalitarians and his overtures to them mark U.S. policy shift BY

P HILIP R UCKER

I

t’s no longer just Vladimir Putin.

As he settles into office, President Trump’s affections for totalitarian leaders have grown beyond Russia’s president to include strongmen around the globe.

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has had his opponents gunned down, but Trump praised him for doing “a fantastic job.”

Thailand President Prayut Chanocha is a junta chief whose military jailed dissidents after taking power in a coup, yet Trump offered to meet with him at the White House.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has eroded basic freedoms of his citizens, but after a recent political victory, he got a

congratulatory call from Trump.

Then there’s the case of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte.

He is accused of presiding over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers and users. And in response to U.S. criticism of his human rights record last year, he said President Barack Obama “can go to hell.” Yet last weekend, in what the White House characterized as a “very friendly conversation,” Trump invited Duterte to Washington for an official visit.

In a undeniable shift in U.S. foreign policy, Trump is cultivating authoritarian leaders, one after another, in an effort to reset relations following an era of ostracism and public shaming by Obama and his predecessors.

For instance, it has become an

almost daily occurrence for Trump to gush about Chinese President Xi Jinping since their Mar-a-Lago summit last month. Trump has called Xi “a very good man,” “highly respected” and a “gentleman,” as he tries to persuade Xi to get North Korea to scale back or give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Trump’s praise is not limited to potential U.S. allies. Even as North Korean leader Kim Jung Un ratchets up his provocations, Trump called Un “a smart cookie” in a recent CBS News interview. Last week, Trump told Bloomberg News he would be “honored” to personally meet with Un “under the right circumstances.”

Every American president since at least the 1970s has used his office to champion human rights

President Trump’s outreach is designed to isolate North Korea and to build coalitions to defeat the Islamic State, officials say.

and democratic values around the world. Yet so far at least, Trump has willingly turned a blind eye to dictators’ records of brutality and oppression in hopes that these leaders might become his partners in isolating North Korea or fighting terrorism.

Indeed, Trump has neither delivered substantive remarks nor taken action supporting democracy movements or condemning human rights abuses, other than the missile strike he authorized on Syria after President Bashar alAssad allegedly used chemical weapons against his own citizens.

“He doesn’t even pretend to utter the words,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama. “Small-d democrats all over the world are

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POLITICS incredibly despondent right now about Donald Trump — and that’s true in China, in Iran, in Egypt, in Russia. They feel like the leader of the free world is absent.”

A tipping point for many Trump critics was his invitation to Duterte to visit the White House. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the topranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s “cavalier invitation” and called on him to rescind it.

“This is a man who has boasted publicly about killing his own citizens,” Cardin said of Duterte in a statement. “The United States is unique in the world because our values — respect for human rights, respect for the rule of law — are our interests. Ignoring human rights will not advance U.S. interests in the Philippines or any place else. Just the opposite.”

Yet Trump’s advisers said the president’s silence on human rights matters is purposeful, part of a grand strategy to rebuild alliances or create new ones. Trump’s outreach is designed to isolate North Korea in the Asia-Pacific region and to build coalitions to defeat the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa, senior administration officials said.

Inside the Trump White House, the thinking goes that if mending bridges with a country like the Philippines — historically a treaty ally whose relationship with the United States deteriorated as Duterte gravitated toward China — means covering up or even ignoring concerns like human rights, then so be it.

“The United States has a limited ability to direct things,” said Michael Anton, the National Security Council’s director of strategic communications. “We can’t force these countries to behave certain ways. We can apply pressure, but if the alternative is not talking, how effective would it be if we had no relationships? If you walk away from relationships, you can’t make any progress.”

Anton explained that Trump is trying to “balance” interests. He said the decision to invite Duterte to the White House — a symbolic gesture that gives credibility to the autocrat’s rule — was agreed to by most of Trump’s advisers.

“It’s not binary,” he said. “It’s not that you care about human rights so you can’t have a relationship with the Philippines, or if you have

ERIK DE CASTRO/REUTERS

A “very friendly conversation” The description of a call between Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

POOL PHOTO BY OLIVIER DOULIERY VIA BLOOMBERG NEWS

“A fantastic job” Trump’s praise for Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi during his U.S. visit.

a relationship with the Philippines you don’t care about human rights.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (RTenn.) described the Trump strategy as establishing commonality with offending nations before publicly chastising them for offenses.

“Their approach is to obviously continue to hold up the values that we have here in America,” Corker said in a recent interview. “But their approach is to build some commonality — never let go of that as an American cause, but to work on it in

WONG MAYE-E/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“He’s a pretty smart cookie” Trump on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s consolidation of power.

ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

“I always knew he was very smart!”

Trump tweet about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

ways where they achieve a result, and to not go in on the front end.”

White House officials cite the release last month of Aya Hijazi — an Egyptian American charity worker who had been imprisoned in Cairo for three years amid Sissi’s brutal crackdown on civil society — as evidence that their strategy is paying dividends.

Trump and his aides worked for several weeks with Sissi and his government to secure Hijazi’s freedom. The Obama administration had pressed unsuccessfully for her release, but once Trump moved to

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reset U.S. relations with Egypt by embracing Sissi at the White House, Egypt’s posture changed.

Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for human rights and democracy under Obama, said Trump appears to be living up to his campaign promise.

“The whole idea of ‘America first’ is that we’re not trying to make the world better,” Malinowski said.

“We’re trying to protect the homeland and the domestic economy, and the rest is all cutting deals with whoever is willing to cut deals with us. There’s not much room in that equation for standing up for the rights, freedoms and well-being of other people.”

Human rights activists are concerned that Trump is condoning the actions of dictators when he is warm to them or extends invitations to visit.

“Inviting these men to the White House in effect places the United States’ seal of approval on their heinous actions,” said Rob Berschinski, senior vice president at Human Rights First. He went on to say, “Nothing excuses President Trump’s clear inclination to reward mass-murders and torturers with undeserved honors.”

Asked at the daily White House press briefing whether Trump had “a thing” for totalitarian leaders, press secretary Sean Spicer suggested he was cultivating such leaders with the explicit aim of weakening North Korea.

“The president clearly, as I said, understands the threat that North Korea poses,” Spicer said. “Having someone with the potential nuclear capability to strike another country — and potentially our country — at some point in the future is something that the president takes very seriously.”

But McFaul posited that the Trump administration may be naive in calculating that personal outreach and warm praise will persuade authoritarian leaders to support U.S. interests.

“The converse of that is that these leaders are taking him for a ride,” McFaul said. “He tends to over-personalize relationships between states. He says China’s ‘raping’ us, then he meets President Xi and suddenly he’s this wise man with whom he has a good chemistry. I hope this will produce outcomes that are good for us, but right now it’s producing outcomes that are good for China.” ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

@PKCAPITOL

Victory mattered more than bill’s contents BY

P AUL K ANE

R

epublicans pushed a health-care bill through the House on Thursday that few lawmakers truly liked. They instead viewed the measure as a necessary step to demonstrate some sense of momentum and some ability to govern in GOPcontrolled Washington.

Rather than embrace policy cobbled together to replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act, many Republicans simply decided the best move was to approve a flawed bill — and ram it through a flawed process — so that the Senate would get a chance to fix the House’s mistakes, setting up a major negotiation later.

House Republicans did so knowing that their votes will be portrayed by their Democratic opponents as ruthlessly denying millions of people health insurance and causing Americans with preexisting illnesses to shoulder higher costs.

And they did so knowing that there is a chance the Senate will choke on the legislation or that House and Senate negotiators will deadlock and never agree to a final product — leaving them on record voting for a bill that could have career-ending consequences.

“This bill is highly imperfect, imperfect, okay? There’s no doubt about that,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart said after supporting the bill.

The Florida Republican — who represents a competitive district — waited until the last 24 hours to come on board. He cited conversations with senators who vowed to address his concerns about how to handle the tens of thousands of his constituents who are signed up for the ACA insurance exchanges.

“Is this bill good? No, I don’t like it,” DiazBalart said. But he suggested that voting for the bill would allow him to be part of future negotiations: “So my decision was, how do I stay involved?”

The other critical factor was a desire for the House GOP majority to show that it can actually govern.

Inside the leadership team of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), there was a gripping fear of what failure would mean for its future overseeing a chamber seemingly incapable of moving important legislation. Ryan had already pulled his American Health Care Act from the floor once, in late March, amid a rebellion on his left and right flanks regarding its shortcomings.

The initial game plan was to simply give up on repealing Obamacare and move on to a broad rewriting of the tax code. But inside the White House, President Trump’s advisers became increasingly concerned about how little they had to show in terms of early victories.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

They helped nudge the hard-line House Freedom Caucus and some members of the moderate Tuesday Group back to the bargaining table.

Lawmakers produced a deal that eventually brought all but one member of the Freedom Caucus into the fold, and Ryan’s team realized it was as close as Republicans had been to passing the legislation. At that point, wavering members faced pressure to be loyal to the speaker and show that the House could act.

The consequence of failure — for a second time in six weeks, after the first retreat — became a compelling reason to vote “yes.”

“Some would have said it would have been apocalyptic, that if you, you know, go to the well once and you can’t get there and you go back again and you come up short, it says a lot about your ability to govern and to move legislation of consequence. And so I think it would have had rather significant ramifications,” said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), a member of the Freedom Caucus.

No one publicly spoke about it, but there were whispers that some or all of the House leadership team would fall if the legislation came up short. The fate of Ryan and his lieutenants hovered just beneath the surface — until Trump, with Ryan at his side, cracked a joke about it.

“For the last week I’ve been hearing, ‘Paul Ryan doesn’t have it, it’s not working with Paul Ryan, he’s going to get rid of Paul Ryan.’ Then today I heard, ‘Paul Ryan’s a genius.’ He’s come a long way,” Trump said, smiling at Ryan over his shoulder at a celebratory Rose Garden tribute after the bill’s passage.

Saturday marked the first anniversary of Ryan’s famous announcement that he was “not ready” to endorse Trump for president,

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) stands with other Republican representatives in the Rose Garden after the House pushed through a health-care bill Thursday.

launching a tumultuous relationship between the two leaders that lasted through the November election and has always been just underneath their shared attempt to manage Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill.

In that regard, Trump and Ryan needed a jointly forged victory, almost any victory, so that they could figure out a way forward. Not just on health care, but on other critical items — particularly the tax overhaul — for which Trump has released a plan that is at odds with what the speaker has been working on for several years.

The question is whether this short-term victory was worth the long-term squeeze.

The legislation passed by the narrowest of margins, 217 to 213. Twenty Republicans opposed the legislation, at a time when independent political analysts rate about 40 GOP seats as potentially vulnerable in 2018. If Republicans lose 24 seats, they lose the majority.

A couple dozen Republicans took risky votes on legislation that, so far, has not proved particularly popular among voters.

One of those was sophomore Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district favored Hillary Clinton by nearly 17 percentage points over Trump last year. Curbelo won reelection by a comfortable margin against a flawed Democratic opponent but now finds himself near the top of Democratic target lists for 2018.

Curbelo held out until Thursday afternoon to decide how he would vote. He met regularly with Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and a leading moderate who negotiated an extra $8 billion in the bill to lower premiums for those with preexisting conditions.

Even with that key addition, Curbelo still wasn’t sold on the bill. Like many other latedeciding Republicans, he placed his bet on the Senate after conversations with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) about his concerns that the tax credits in the House bill are not generous enough to help older workers who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare.

“I want as much of a guarantee as I can get from Senate offices that is a major priority, and that it’s going to get done,” he said Thursday morning.

If Curbelo gets washed out in the 2018 elections, Trump and Ryan might look back on Thursday as a long-term mistake.

Even Ryan acknowledged that the bill that passed Thursday was far from perfect.

“I want to thank all the other members who contributed to making this the best bill possible,” he said in the Rose Garden, adding that much work needs to be done. “Today was a big day, but it is just one step in this process.” n

©The Washington Post

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A successful immigration policy: Fear BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

I

n many ways, President Trump’s attempts to implement his hard-line immigration policies have not gone very well in his first three months.

His travel ban aimed at some Muslim-majority countries has been blocked by the courts, his U.S.-Mexico border wall has gone nowhere in Congress, and he has retreated, at least for now, on his vow to target illegal immigrants brought here as children.

But one strategy that seems to be working well is fear. The number of migrants, legal and illegal, crossing into the United States has dropped markedly since Trump took office, while recent declines in the number of deportations have been reversed.

Many experts on both sides of the immigration debate attribute at least part of this shift to the use of sharp, unwelcoming rhetoric by Trump and his aides, as well as the administration’s showy use of enforcement raids and public spotlighting of crimes committed by immigrants. The tactics were aimed at sending a political message to those in the country illegally or those thinking about trying to come.

“The world is getting the message,” Trump said last month during a speech at the National Rifle Association leadership forum in Atlanta. “They know our border is no longer open to illegal immigration, and if they try to break in you’ll be caught and you’ll be returned to your home. You’re not staying any longer. If you keep coming back illegally after deportation, you’ll be arrested and prosecuted and put behind bars. Otherwise it will never end.”

The most vivid evidence that Trump’s tactics have had an effect has come at the southern border with Mexico, where the number of apprehensions made by Customs and Border Patrol agents plummeted from more than 40,000 per month at the end of 2016 to just 12,193 in March, according to federal data.

Immigrant rights advocates and restrictionist groups said

SANDY HUFFAKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Despite other setbacks, harsh rhetoric and raids have reduced flow of migrants, experts say there is little doubt that the Trump administration’s tough talk has had impact.

“The bottom line is that they have entirely changed the narrative around immigration,” said Doris Meissner, who served as the commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration.

“The result of that is that, yes, you can call it words and rhetoric, and it certainly is, but it is changing behavior. It is changing the way the United States is viewed around the world, as well as the way we’re talking about and reacting to immigration within the country.”

Experts emphasized that it is still early and that the initial success the administration has had in slashing illegal border crossings could be reversed if it fails to follow through on more aggressive enforcement actions that will require more than just rhetorical bombast.

Many of the other initiatives Trump has called for — including additional detention centers and

thousands of new Border Patrol officers and immigration agents — are costly. Others, such as his vow to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that protect immigrants, are facing legal challenges.

Yet unlike areas such as trade, health care or foreign policy, where Trump has moderated his extreme campaign positions or failed to advance his agenda, the administration has systematically sought to check off the president’s immigration promises.

Most notably, Trump signed an executive order during his first week in office that, among other things, vastly expanded the pool of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants who are deemed priorities for deportation.

Deportations had fallen sharply in the final years of the Obama administration as the former president tightened enforcement guidelines to focus on hardened criminals. But under Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun to ramp up the number of

A Border Patrol agent stands on duty at the fence between the United States and Mexico in San Ysidro, Calif., in midApril. The number of people apprehended while trying to enter the United States illegally along the southern border have plummeted, according to federal data.

immigrants who are being placed in removal proceedings.

Federal agents arrested 21,362 immigrants, mostly convicted criminals, from January through mid-March, compared with 16,104 during the same period last year, according to federal data. Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled, to 5,441 in that period.

“This is the Trump era. Progress is being made daily, and it will continue,” declared Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has begun to reorganize the Justice Department to prosecute more immigration cases. “This will be the administration that fully enforces our nation’s immigration laws.”

The question is how successfully the administration can translate the tougher talk into sustainable policies.

Internal planning documents from the Department of Homeland Security leaked recently showed that the agency is preparing to significantly ramp up the nationwide deportation force that Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Immigration hawks have also continued to press the White House to do more, including overturning a deferred action program started under Obama that has granted work visas to more than 700,000 “dreamers” who arrived illegally when they were children.

Although he promised to overturn the program on Day One, Trump has yet to end it.

But just over three months into Trump’s tenure, the frame of the political debate over immigration policy has begun to shift.

“One thing this administration has done that the Democrats’ message has to recalibrate for is that it’s not credible to the American people to say enforcement plays no role in [reducing] the numbers of immigrants coming illegally,” Fresco said. “Some have tried to perpetuate a myth that it is not linked. To the extent the numbers stay low, one thing the Trump administration has been able to say that is a correct statement is that enforcement does factor into the calculus.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Schools struggle to rid water of lead BY

B RADY D ENNIS

T

ests last summer showed troubling levels of lead in the water at Summit Township Elementary School, perched on a quiet hilltop outside Butler, Pa. But for the next five months, no one told the parents of Summit’s 250 students.

When officials alerted families to the potential lead contamination in January, the dominoes fell quickly. The district superintendent and assistant superintendent resigned. The school board hired an independent investigator. Administrators shuttered Summit and moved students to another building several miles away. And the mother of a kindergartner filed a federal lawsuit, saying the inaction had created “a school full of poisonous drinking water.”

Nearly two years after a water crisis in Flint, Mich., triggered renewed pressure for lead testing and remediation in schools across the country, many districts continue to stumble.

School systems throughout the country have wrestled with lead in water for decades, in part because of the intractable problem of lead-bearing fixtures and pipes in aging buildings. In addition, the overwhelming majority of schools face no state or federal laws that require testing, and crimped budgets and understaffed districts mean water testing seldom rises to a top priority.

But in a growing number of places, parents have become increasingly exasperated by the lack of transparency and the delayed notification that often have accompanied the problem.

“We were not informed at all,” said Jeffery Hawkins, who said he learned from his daughter that fountains at her Milwaukee public school had tested for elevated lead levels. The school system had checked thousands of taps and fountains — promptly taking suspect ones out of service — but even then faced criticism for not quickly publicizing the test results.

In Portland, Ore., irate parents

BETH NAKAMURA/PORTLAND OREGONIAN VIA OREGONLIVE

Parents are pressing for more action and accountability, but districts face many challenges demanded accountability last summer after the state’s largest district failed to immediately inform them about elevated lead levels detected in taps and fountains.

The superintendent stepped down after the release of a scathing report that detailed the district’s failure to fix problems, and months later, Portland is still providing bottled water at its 90 schools — at an annual cost of about $850,000.

Officials are hoping that voters approve a record $790 million bond in May to modernize the city’s schools, which average 77 years old. The measure includes nearly $30 million to rectify water-quality problems.

“It’s definitely been a very challenging year. There’s been a lot of pressure from the community, very understandably so,” said David Hobbs, the district’s senior director of facilities. “We’ve tried to stem some of that by being much more transparent. . . . We’re trying to rebuild trust.”

Indeed, rebuilding trust has

become an increasingly common theme in systems small and large, even as they grapple with aging buildings, strained budgets and a regulatory vacuum. The latter could be changing, though.

In January, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) signed bipartisan legislation requiring that all elementary schools and day-care centers test every drinking-water source for lead contamination and notify parents of the results. But the new law, which came after widespread lead-in-water problems surfaced in Chicago public schools, mandates only one-time testing.

New York has gone further, with a new law requiring schools statewide to test drinking water for lead. Its biggest system, New York City, tested tens of thousands of fixtures last year. But criticism that the methods used were flawed and incomplete led to a second round of testing, which turned up nine times as many water sources with lead levels exceeding the federal “ac-

A fountain is covered because of lead in the water at Creston Elementary School in Portland, Ore., last year. The city is still providing bottled water at its 90 schools at an annual cost of about $850,000.

tion level” of 15 parts per billion.

In California, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D) is pushing legislation to require schools to test their water supplies.

The measure, which has passed one key committee, would require annual tests for schools constructed before 1986, when Congress prohibited the use of most lead solder, pipes and fixtures. For those built after 1986, tests would have to take place every three years. Administrators would have to notify parents within 24 hours if contaminated water is found.

“It’s shocking to me we’ve gone this long and still don’t know how much lead is there,” Fletcher, whose San Diego-area district has wrestled with the problem, said in an interview. “The most basic function of government is public safety and public health.”

Health officials agree that no amount of lead exposure is safe, whether through water, air, dirt or old paint. Even small amounts risk irreversible cognitive and developmental damage, particularly in young children.

Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech faculty member who has long studied lead contamination in water, said she is heartened that a growing number of schools are paying more attention to the problem — even though action often comes after pressure from parents.

But one-time testing isn’t sufficient, she said. “The science of lead in drinking water is very clear that lead release from plumbing tends to be highly variable at individual taps,” Lambrinidou said.

That means a tap that tests safe one day — no detectable lead — might show alarming levels in the water if checked another day.

“It’s like a lottery ticket,” she said. “I don’t think we can base a nation’s response to lead in school drinking water on a lottery game. Right now, that’s what I fear most of the states doing anything at all about lead in water are doing.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Title IX used as double-edged sword BY

T . R EES S HAPIRO

T

he landmark anti-discrimination law that empowered many young women to report sexual violence in college has become a legal weapon for a growing number of men to fight back against schools that kicked them out for sexual misconduct.

These men, alleging in lawsuits that college investigations treated them unfairly, are often securing settlements that clear the discipline from their record, lawyers and advocacy groups say. Some are allowed to return to campus.

The legal pushback from these men has emerged in response to a wave of campus activism in recent years and a shift in federal enforcement of Title IX, the law that led to more reports of sexual assault and major changes in how colleges resolve those complaints.

Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools, has become a rallying point for assault survivors who want colleges to pay more attention to the problem of sexual violence. But now more men are using the 1972 law to defend themselves. They often say that colleges are acting with gender bias against them.

Since 2011, more than 150 lawsuits have been filed against colleges and universities involving claims of due-process violations during the course of Title IX investigations and proceedings related to sex-assault allegations, according to a database kept by a group called Title IX For All. In the two decades before that year, the group found, only 15 such lawsuits were filed against universities.

For the young men who file the suits, the civil courts offer a last chance for justice and an opportunity to clear their names.

“One day all of your dreams are in front of you and you’re on a path and a trajectory for you to achieve those dreams — only then for it to be yanked from you, totally out of your control,” Grant Neal said.

Now 21, Neal was a sophomore football standout at Colorado State University at Pueblo when a

ISTOCK

A law that helps college women report rape is also used by accused men to clear their names night of sexual intimacy, and dueling views afterward about what happened, resulted in a multiyear suspension. He has sued the university and the U.S. Education Department, contending that his due-process rights were violated after the 2015 incident and that the school exhibited gender bias against him. The university declined to comment.

Some data suggest that suits such as Neal’s are getting results.

SAVE Services, a Marylandbased group that seeks to highlight what it calls “rape hoaxes” and protects the rights of the accused in sexual-assault cases, found in a survey that about 70 percent of these types of lawsuits filed against colleges from 1993 to 2015 ended in settlements or rulings that at least partially benefited the plaintiffs.

For survivors of sexual assault, the legal battles can amount to emotional torture, gashing open wounds that they had thought were healing after a perpetrator was suspended or expelled.

“It was blindsiding” said a 26year-old woman who reported

that she was sexually assaulted in 2013 at a public university in New York. The Washington Post generally does not identify sexualassault victims. The woman said that the perpetrator has been tried twice and expelled twice through the university’s adjudication process but is still fighting the findings in court.

“Throughout this process it’s been about his rights that are important, but I have to fight tooth and nail for my rights,” she said. His lawsuit, she said, is an attempt “over and over again to try and get a different result, but his actions will never change. He’s just trying to find some crazy loophole to get out of what he did instead of taking responsibility for it.”

Victim advocates say that the lawsuits are an attempt to circumvent a system designed to keep colleges safe. It is not uncommon for cases to end with settlements that expunge expulsions from a student’s academic record, which advocates say could allow a violent predator to transfer undetected and endanger another campus.

“It has almost created a new class of victims, and those victims are young men who essentially have been railroaded.”

Andrew Miltenberg, lawyer

“Does that put other students at risk? Yes, very possibly,” said Laura Dunn, founder of SurvJustice, a group that advises sexual-assault survivors.

In recent years, the number of lawsuits filed against universities for due-process violations has increased dramatically. Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer who has represented Neal and other male clients in such cases, said the federal guidance tilted the disciplinary process against the accused.

“It has almost created a new class of victims, and those victims are young men who essentially have been railroaded,” Miltenberg said.

But many plaintiffs are finding success in court with arguments that internal college investigations were flawed or biased.

Miltenberg said a crucial juncture in the suits comes when judges are asked to rule on university motions to dismiss the plaintiff’s complaint. Often judges side with colleges. But a growing number of suits, Miltenberg said, are surviving the dismissal motion. That means the cases move to the factfinding phase known as discovery.

Anxious to avoid that phase, many universities then choose to settle out of court. Often, the terms of the settlement call for the administration to rehear the original sex-assault allegation, with a new focus on protecting the accused student’s due-process rights.

The agreements can award a modest sum of money, expunge the suspension or expulsion from a student’s record and offer immediate reinstatement.

Among plaintiffs, Neal is unusual: He is going public with his story. He said he has found the aftermath of the allegation, investigation and suspension “hard to cope with” as he seeks to clear his name. “Basically, every day is a struggle to continue to go on and go forward,” he said.

But Neal said he is resolved to continue. “I’m willing to fight to the end and do whatever it takes to seek justice,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. I have no shame.” n ©The Washington Post

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City rebuilds but without its children K EVIN S IEFF Damasak, Nigeria BY

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onstruction workers are painting over the Boko Haram graffiti. Plywood frames are rising in the place of homes destroyed by grenades and bombs. Thousands of refugees are returning. On the surface, this city once occupied by Islamist extremists is slowly returning to normal.

Except for one horrifying fact: Hundreds of children are missing.

Most of them were seized by Boko Haram in the fall of 2014.

Months earlier, in April, the militants had carried off 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, a kidnapping that became the subject of a global campaign known by the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But there has been little attention to the lost children of Damasak. Residents say they total more than 500. All but a handful are still unaccounted for.

In the ruins of the city, everyone seems to be missing a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister.

Outside the mud walls of his roofless house, Aji Bakar holds a picture of his chubby-cheeked 9-yearold grandson, who was kidnapped from his classroom in September 2014.

“Our senators and governors are negligent,” he said. “Why can’t they find him?”

Fatima Kyari sits down next to Bakar. Her son, too, is missing.

“When Boko Haram fled from Damasak, they took him,” she says angrily.

Hearing that journalists are asking about the city’s vanished children, more people join the circle, under the half shade of a thorny tree.

Yusuf Aisami lost his 12-yearold brother. Umara Yakami lost his 10-year-old son.

Some details about the mass kidnappings had trickled out in the months after they occurred.

Human Rights Watch had reported in 2015 that at least 300 elementary school students had been seized in Damasak on Nov. 24, 2014, in what it called “the largest documented school abduction by

JANE HAHN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds from Damasak, Nigeria. Almost all are still missing.

Boko Haram militants.”

Many of the children had been held at the school by Boko Haram until March 2015, when a multinational military force converged on Damasak, part of a major offensive to defeat the guerrillas. The insurgents fled with the children — the last time they were seen.

Two years later, many residents have now returned from years living as refugees in neighboring Niger. Others had fled to remote villages in Nigeria. Some, like Bakar, spent time in the forest, living off wild fruit and running each time they heard Boko Haram fighters.

The residents have come back to find their houses burned and their shops looted. The Nigerian government, buoyed by a large international assistance package, has vowed to restore normalcy.

But the least normal thing about Damasak — its hundreds of missing children — remains unresolved.

“For now, we haven’t received

Boko Haram activity in the last 5 years

Detail

Less

More

NI GE R

Damasak

CHAD

Kano BENIN Abuja

NIGERIA Lagos CAME RO ON

G ul f of Gu i n e a

200 MILES

Source: IHS Conflict Monitor THE WASHINGTON POST

any information about where they are, or if they are still alive,” said Maj. Mohammed Kaigama, the deputy military commander in the city.

Residents have submitted the names of more than 500 missing children to local authorities, but the families have received differ-

Above, from left, Aji Bakar, 65; Yusuf Aisami, 30; Fatima Kyari, 40; and Umara Yakami, 35, speak about their young male family members who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Damasak, Nigeria.

ent versions of that disappointing response.

“After two years, parents of the missing children are desperate for information, but have received little more than rumors,” Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement.

Meanwhile, the Chibok girls have been the focus of protracted negotiations, including a deal mediated by the Swiss government that led to the release of 21 of the students in October. President Muhammadu Buhari has pledged again and again to free the rest.

“We really wonder about it — why those girls but not our children?” Bakar asked.

Thousands of other Nigerians went missing over the past decade, as Boko Haram gained strength and territory across Nigeria’s northeast, particularly in the state of Borno, which is about the size of Belgium. Many of the kidnapped girls and women were forced into marriage with the fighters. Other young women mysteriously reappeared as suicide bombers years later. The boys sometimes became child soldiers. The men were often killed immediately.

It’s only now, when cities such as Damasak are being restored, their residents pouring back, that the scale of Boko Haram’s ravages are becoming known, as people begin to tabulate the missing. Last month was the first time foreign journalists had visited the city of 105,000 people in at least two years. It offered a glimpse of the surreal afterlife of Boko Haram’s occupation. But the missing were Damasak’s most dystopian feature. Families were removing the ashes and rubble from their homes, but there were now empty rooms, where children once slept.

Many had gone to Zanna Mobarti Primary School. Others were studying the Koran in religious schools when they were abducted.

Some extended families lost more than a dozen children.

Bakar pointed to a place next to a mud wall that once was home to his grandson, Ajimi Dala.

“We don’t know if we’ll see him again,” he said. n ©The Washington Post

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Politicians forced out of backrooms M ARINA L OPES Brasilia BY

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he messy business of governing Brazil, a country with 35 active political parties, has long taken place far from the symmetrical towers and domes of Congress that dominate the capital’s skyline.

Instead, backroom deals have been the norm, with the country’s most powerful politicians and business leaders deciding the affairs of government over boozy lunches, steak dinners or drinks in dimly lit hotel bars. The daily scheming and bribing would kick off early, one participant told investigators, often at breakfast in the Golden Tulip Hotel on the city’s outskirts.

But three years into the massive corruption inquiry known as Operation Car Wash, an initiative now targeting more than 100 members of Brazil’s political elite, the dining room at the Golden Tulip is silent. The investigation has upended politics-as-usual in Brasilia and opened up a path for outsiders to have a say in government for the first time in generations.

The Car Wash inquiry uncovered a complex kickback scheme in which, among other things, Brazil’s largest construction companies paid lawmakers in return for lucrative contracts and favorable legislation. The investigation has been propelled by a string of plea-bargain agreements, leaving longtime friends and allies pitted against one another as more defendants turn state’s witness.

“It’s pretty much paranoia,” said David Fleischer, an expert on Brazilian politics and professor at the University of Brasilia. “At this point, everyone is apprehensive and has a lot of ulcers.”

The intricate system of alliances and favor trading on which the various coalitions depended meant that parties could ignore voters in presidential elections and still wield significant power in Brasilia. Even the current ruling party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, largely

YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

As a sweeping corruption inquiry hobbles Brazil’s governing elite, outsiders see their opening avoided contesting presidential elections, preferring to bargain for positions of authority with whichever party was in power.

That system began unraveling in 2015 after the Car Wash inquiry extended to the ruling government with the arrest of Sen. Delcidio do Amaral for allegedly taking kickbacks from the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, and offering to help a former company head avoid prosecution in exchange for his silence. The executive’s own son recorded Amaral, who had offered to help the executive flee to Spain.

Amaral soon struck a deal of his own with investigators and turned in a recording of the theneducation minister offering to pay for the senator’s legal defense if he promised not to collaborate with investigators.

Such deals unfolded for months, snaking their way up the political-establishment ladder and even bringing down the anticorruption minister, who re-

signed after leaked recordings appeared to show he had tried to derail the inquiry. The Car Wash investigation has now reached both heads of Congress, the foreign secretary, President Michel Temer’s chief of staff and five former presidents.

As Brazil’s old guard turns on itself, radicals and outsiders who once operated on the political fringe are taking center stage.

These politicians are among the few who have not been implicated in the corruption investigation — in part, critics argue, because they were never important enough to take part in the routine swindling engaged in by the governing elite.

“I’m on my seventh mandate, and I’ve never been accused of corruption. That’s like winning a trophy in Brazil,” said Jair Bolsonaro, a self-proclaimed admirer of President Trump and an ultraright representative in Brazil’s lower house. Some polls estimate that support for Bolsonaro — who has called for gay children to be

Brazilian demonstrators rally in late March along Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro at a protest political corruption.

beaten and praised a man who tortured guerrillas such as former president Dilma Rousseff during Brazil’s military dictatorship — at 30 percent among young people planning to vote in the 2018 presidential election.

João Doria, a millionaire who is often compared to Trump, capitalized on this anti-establishment sentiment to win Sao Paulo’s mayoral race last year, claiming he would run the city the way he managed his businesses. Analysts predict that he will be a favorite in the 2018 presidential race.

Rousseff, whose coalition government imploded last year, said in an interview recently that she worries the infighting in Brazil could carve out a path for such a candidate.

“When a government becomes irrelevant, politics becomes irrelevant,” Rousseff said.

But the changes in the landscape have not been lost on the political establishment, whose members are seeking to reinforce their grip on power even as they try to steer clear of Car Wash. Last month, the president of the Senate met with Temer and his top aides to discuss implementation of a closed-list voting system, which would require voters to cast a ballot for a list of politicians generated by each party, rather than for an individual candidate.

The party would then distribute seats in Congress accordingly.

The system, which needs a simple majority in Congress to pass, would shelter politicians involved in the corruption inquiry from the public’s ire by sandwiching them in a list of clean politicians. It would also give party leaders greater say over who can run, neutralizing the risk of outsider candidates.

“We are facing a key moment,” said Alexandre Bandeira, a campaign strategist and head of the Strattegia consulting firm in Brasilia. “The closed-list system will not only limit the players in politics, but it will further alienate an electorate that already feels disassociated from the political class.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

From Russia, with love for guns, faith

BY ROSALIND S. HELDERMAN AND TOM HAMBURGER

In his office, conservative Nashville lawyer G. Kline Preston IV displays a flag reading “Our President Putin” that was given to him on Russia’s most recent presidential election day.

G

rowing up in the 1980s, Brian Brown was taught to think of the communist Soviet Union as a dark and evil place. ¶ But Brown, a leading opponent of same­sex marriage, said that in the past few years he has started meeting Russians at conferences on family issues and finding many kindred spirits. ¶ Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has visited Moscow four times in four years, including a 2013 trip during which he testified before the Duma as Russia adopted a series of anti­gay laws. ¶ “What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” he said. “There was a real push to re­instill Christian values in the public square.” ¶ A significant shift has been underway in recent years across the Republican right.

PHOTOS BY KYLE DEAN REINFORD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union.”

Brian Brown, president, National Organization for Marriage

On issues including gun rights, terrorism and same-sex marriage, many leading advocates on the right who grew frustrated with their country’s leftward tilt under President Barack Obama have forged ties with well-connected Russians and come to see that country’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, as a potential ally.

The attitude adjustment among many conservative activists helps explain one of the most curious aspects of the 2016 presidential race: a softening among many conservatives of their historically hard-line views of Russia. To the alarm of some in the GOP’s national security establishment, support in the party base for

then-candidate Donald Trump did not wane even after he rejected the tough tone of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who called Russia America’s No. 1 foe, and repeatedly praised Putin.

The burgeoning alliance between Russians and U.S. conservatives was apparent in several events in late 2015, as the Republican nomination battle intensified.

Top officials from the National Rifle Association, whose annual meeting recently featured an address by Trump for the third time in three years, traveled to Moscow to visit a Russian gun manufacturer and meet government officials.

About the same time in December 2015, evan-

Nashville lawyer G. Kline Preston IV sits in his office, which includes mementos from various trips to Russia, such as a knife he was presented with.

gelist Franklin Graham met privately with Putin for 45 minutes, securing from the Russian president an offer to help with an upcoming conference on the persecution of Christians. Graham was impressed, telling The Washington Post that Putin “answers questions very directly and doesn’t dodge them like a lot of our politicians do.”

The growing dialogue between Russians and U.S. conservatives came at the same time experts say the Russian government stepped up efforts to cultivate and influence far-right groups in Europe and on the eve of Russia’s unprecedented intrusion into the U.S. campaign, which intelligence officials have concluded was intended to elect Trump.

Russians and Americans involved in developing new ties say they are not part of a Kremlin effort to influence U.S. politics. “We know nothing about that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Brown said activists in both countries are simply “uniting together under the values we share.”

It is not clear what effect closer ties will have on relations between the two countries, which have gotten frostier with the opening of congressional and FBI investigations into Russia’s intrusion into the election and rising tensions over the civil war in Syria.

But the apparent increase in contacts in recent years, as well as the participation of officials from the Russian government and the influential Russian Orthodox church, leads some analysts to conclude that the Russian government probably promoted the efforts in an attempt to expand Putin’s power.

“Is it possible that these are just well-meaning people who are reaching out to Americans with shared interests? It is possible,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 after managing Russia operations for 30 years. “Is it likely? I don’t think it’s likely at all. . . . My assessment is that it’s definitely part of something bigger.”

Interactions between Russians and American conservatives appeared to gain momentum as Obama prepared to run for a second term.

At the time, many in the GOP warned that Obama had failed to counter the national security threat posted by Putin’s aggression.

But, deep in the party base, change was brewing.

At least one connection came about thanks to a conservative Nashville lawyer named G. Kline Preston IV, who had done business in Russia for years.

Preston said that in 2011 he introduced David Keene, then the NRA’s president, to a Russian senator, Alexander Torshin, a member of Putin’s party who later became a top official at the Russian central bank. Keene had been a stalwart on the right, a past chairman of the American Conservative Union who was the NRA’s president from 2011 to 2013.

Neither Keene nor Torshin responded to requests for comment. An NRA spokesman also did not respond to questions.

Torshin seemed a natural ally to American conservatives.

A friend of Mikhail Kalashnikov, revered in Russia for inventing the AK-47 assault rifle, Torshin in 2010 had penned a glossy gun rights pamphlet, illustrated by cartoon figures wielding guns to fend off masked robbers. The booklet cited U.S. statistics to argue for gun ownership, at one point echoing in Russian an old NRA slogan: continues on next page

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from previous page

“Guns don’t shoot — people shoot.”

Torshin was also a leader in a Russian movement to align government more closely with the Orthodox church.

“The value system of Southern Christians and the value system of Russians are very much in line,” Preston said. “The so-called conflict between our two nations is a tragedy because we’re very similar people, in a lot of our values, our interests and that sort of thing.”

Preston, an expert on Russian law whose office features a white porcelain bust of Putin, said he had told Tennessee friends for years not to believe television reports about the Russian leader having journalists or dissidents killed.

Preston was an international observer of the 2011 legislative elections in Russia, which sparked mass street protests in Moscow charging electoral irregularities. But Preston said he concluded that the elections were free and fair.

By contrast, Preston said he and Torshin saw violations of U.S. law — pro-Obama signs posted too close to a polling place — when Torshin traveled to Nashville to observe voting in the 2012 presidential election.

In Russia, Torshin and an aide, an activist originally from Siberia named Maria Butina, began building a gun rights movement.

Butina founded a group called the Right to Bear Arms, and in 2013 she and Torshin invited Keene and other U.S. gun advocates to its annual meeting in Moscow.

The event, where about 200 people gathered at Moscow’s convention center, included a fashion show in which models donned “concealed carry” garments with built-in pockets for weapons.

One American participant, Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, recalled that Torshin and Butina took him and his wife out for dinner and gave them gifts that displayed research into their interests — exotic fabric for Gottlieb’s wife, a needlepoint enthusiast, and for Gottlieb, commemorative stamps that Torshin received as a member of the Russian legislature.

“They wanted to keep communications open and form friendships,” Gottlieb said.

Butina, now a graduate student at American University in Washington, told The Post via email that her group’s cause is “not very popular” with Russian officials and has never received funding from the government or from the NRA. She said she has never worked for the government and added that she and the American activists she has befriended simply share a love of gun rights.

“No government official has EVER approached me about ‘fostering ties’ with any Americans,” she wrote.

Hall, the former CIA officer, said he was skeptical. He said he did not think Putin would tolerate a legitimate effort to advocate for an armed citizenry and asserted that the movement is probably “controlled by the security services” to woo the American right.

When Torshin and Butina attended the NRA’s 2014 annual convention, their profiles as scrappy Russians pushing for gun rights were

OBTAINED BY THE WASHINGTON POST

Maria Butina, at right, attends a rally in Moscow in support of legalizing the possession of handguns. She founded a group called the Right to Bear Arms and has met with various gunrights supporters in the United States.

At top, a page from a pamphlet written by Russian senator Alexander Torshin that advocates for gun rights.

ANTON NOVODEREZHKIN/ITAR-TASS/ZUMAPRESS.COM

rising. Butina attended an NRA women’s luncheon as a guest of one of the organization’s past presidents.

Interviewed by the conservative website Townhall, Butina called the NRA “one of the most world famous and most important organizations” and said that “we would like to be friends with NRA.” While Russians are allowed to own shotguns, Butina said her group hoped to reverse a ban on carrying handguns.

That year’s turbulent events — in which Russia’s incursion into Ukraine prompted the Obama administration to enact strict sanctions against Moscow — illustrated the Russians’ alliance with U.S. gun advocates.

Butina argued in a Russian interview that firearm sellers in her country, including the popular Kalashnikov, were among the “most impacted” by sanctions, which specifically blocked its assets.

In Washington, the NRA’s lobbying arm blasted the order, saying that such restrictions have “long been used by the executive branch as a means of unilaterally enacting gun control.”

Relationships between Russians and American conservatives seemed to blossom in 2015, as the Republican presidential race geared up.

Butina posted social-media photos showing how she and Torshin gained access to NRA offi-

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KONSTANTIN ZAVRAZHIN/GETTY IMAGES

cials and the U.S. politicians attending events.

That April, Butina toured the NRA’s Virginia headquarters, and she and Torshin met Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), then a leading White House contender, at the NRA annual convention.

Torshin told Bloomberg last year that he had a friendly exchange with Trump at the 2015 convention and sat with his son Donald Trump Jr. at an NRA dinner the following year.

Walker’s spokesman said the encounter was brief, as speakers mingled with attendees before their remarks. A senior White House official said Trump may have briefly interacted with Torshin at the 2015 convention but did not recall. At the next year’s event, the official said Torshin briefly greeted Trump Jr. at a restaurant.

In June 2015, as Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Butina wrote a column in the National Interest, a conservative U.S. magazine, suggesting that a Republican in the White House might improve U.S.-Russia relations.

She wrote that Republicans and Russians held similar views on oil exploration and that cultural conservatives would identify with Putin’s party and its aggressive take on Islamic terrorism.

Butina that summer immersed herself in U.S. politics. In July, she showed up in Las Vegas at FreedomFest, a meeting of libertarians where Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a rival for the GOP nomination, were speaking.

She made her way to a microphone during Trump’s speech and asked in accented English, “What will be your foreign politics, especially in the relations with my country?”

It was the first time Trump had been asked about Russia as a candidate.

“I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” he said.

Trump would go on to repeatedly praise the Russian president as a strong leader.

But Trump, who at the time was considered a long shot for the nomination, echoed a sentiment then bubbling up from some corners of the conservative grass roots — that Putin was a potential friend.

That was the takeaway for Graham, the North Carolina-based evangelist, after his November 2015 Kremlin meeting with Putin.

The last time Graham had visited Moscow, with his father, Billy Graham, in the 1980s, the practice of religion was prohibited. On this trip, he said, conditions for Christians in Russia remained difficult. But Graham recalled that Putin listened as he described evangelical Christianity and the challenges facing Christians around the world. Putin explained that his mother kept her Christian faith even during the darkest days of atheistic communist rule.

“He understood,” Graham said of the Russian leader.

From left, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, Federation Council Deputy Chief Alexander Torshin and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attend a 2011 ceremony at the Kremlin.

Torshin first met with the president of the National Rifle Association in 2011.

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Putin offered to help Graham organize an international conference on Christian persecution in Moscow, Graham said. Instead, a Russian delegation is expected when the conference takes place this month in Washington, Graham said.

At the end of 2015, Butina welcomed a delegation to Moscow that included Keene, by then a member of the NRA board, as well as top NRA donors. The group also included a rising star in GOP politics, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who went on to be a campaign surrogate for Trump and has been mentioned as a contender for a high-level job at the Department of Homeland Security. Clarke did not respond to requests for comment.

The group toured a gun manufacturing company and met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who was among the officials sanctioned by the White House after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Keene told the Daily Beast, which first reported the meeting, that the interaction with Rogozin was “non-political” and consisted of touring the headquarters of a shooting group that Rogozin chairs.

After Trump’s victory, Torshin returned to the United States with a delegation of prominent Russians to attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in February. In addition to his gun-rights work, Torshin also had helped build a similar prayer breakfast in Moscow from an obscure monthly event a decade ago into one more resembling the annual ritual in Washington.

Putin now sends an annual greeting to the Russian event, a recognition of its value in allowing “Russian and American guests to come together under one roof in order to rebuild the relationship between the two countries that has degraded under the administration of President Obama,” said breakfast organizer Peter Sautov in an email.

Torshin, accompanied by 15 Russian church and government officials, requested to meet the new president before Trump spoke at the event, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

But they said the meeting was canceled as reports surfaced from Spanish authorities alleging that Torshin led an organized crime and money-laundering operation. Torshin has not been charged and denied wrongdoing in an interview with Bloomberg News, which first reported the allegations.

A White House official said the requested meeting was never confirmed in the first place.

The proposed meeting was first reported by Yahoo.

That night, Torshin gathered for a festive dinner at a Capitol Hill restaurant with conservative thought leaders who have supported warmer ties with Russia.

“There has been a change in the views of hard-core conservatives toward Russia,” a participant, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (RCalif.), said in an interview. “Conservative Republicans like myself hated communism during the Cold War. But Russia is no longer the Soviet Union.” ©The Washington Post

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HISTORY

‘Death sentence’ becomes survivable Thanks to the cells of Henrietta Lacks, the cancer that killed her is less of a threat today

BY

S TEVE H ENDRIX

H

enrietta Lacks probably didn’t seem so immortal to doctors when she was diagnosed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951.

The poor 31-year-old African American woman — the subject of a best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” and a new HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey — was suffering from cervical cancer.

“It was generally a death sentence then,” said Patricia Eifel, a professor of radiation oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Today, the effort to deal with the disease is considered a success story. Routine screening and improved treatment have driven its rates down from a major cause of death among women: Cervical cancer ranks just 14th in cancer frequency, and deaths from the disease have fallen about 70 percent since the 1950s.

But when Lacks, a mother of five, was being treated in East Baltimore during the Truman administration, it was an illness clouded in secrecy, shame and dread.

It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) was identified as the cause of most cervical cancer, but it still had whispered associations as a disease of the poor and promiscuous.

“Nuns famously didn’t get cervical cancer — you would hear that in medical school,” said Eifel, who has worked in the field for 30 years.

Lacks, in the public “colored wards” of the world-renowned hospital, got the standard treatment for invasive cervical cancer at the time: Doctors stitched tubes and pouches filled with radium inside her cervix.

At the same time, without her knowledge or consent, the surgeon snipped a sample of her tumor for a research team down the hall.

Those cells grew robustly in the lab and became the “HeLa” line of cells that would transform medical research even as Lacks’s chil-

NATIONAL CENTER FOR MICROSCOPY AND IMAGING RESEARCH VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

dren struggled to understand their mother’s role in that transformation. That story of discovery, ethics and race is told in the HBO movie that debuted last month.

As the HeLa cells thrived, Henrietta failed, dying in agony a few months after the treatment.

A month after Lacks was buried, another woman whose name would live long after her death was wheeled into an operating room to be treated for cervical cancer — and she didn’t even know that she had it. Eva “Evita” Perón, the glamorous and powerful wife of Argentine President Juan Perón, was never told she had the disease.

There was such a taboo around cancer that many doctors didn’t want to use the C-word at all, lest the patient lose hope — or commit suicide — at a time when cancer seemed always to lead to a coffin.

“There were a lot of euphemisms used at that time: ‘You have a tumor,’ ‘You have an inflammation that we need to take out,’ ” said Barron Lerner, a physician and medical historian at New York University who has written about the Perón case.

Perón and Lacks fell to cervical cancer right at the beginning of a new age in fighting the disease.

The biggest breakthrough was

the introduction of a remarkably effective test for precancerous cells that was developed by a Greek-born violin player and doctor named George Papanicolaou.

His simple “Pap smear,” which allowed doctors to treat the cancer before it became established, was just coming into general use as a screening tool when Lacks fell ill.

By the early 1960s, radiation therapy was becoming more refined, too, with cobalt beams and linear accelerators allowing for targeted dosages that didn’t wreak such damage in surrounding tissue. Better anesthesia and surgical techniques boosted survival rates. Procedures that spared a woman’s ability to have children made many of them more willing to undergo treatment.

And then came the drugs.

Lerner noted that Perón was given a nitrogen mustard concoction in a last-ditch attempt to arrest her cancer, reportedly making her Argentina’s first chemotherapy patient. Today, of course, the pharmacopeia includes multiple agents capable of shrinking tumors.

Cervical cancers are now considered one of the more treatable malignancies, but not every-

Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. The standard treatments of the time failed to save her, but cells taken from her tumor led to a transformation in medical research. Top, a microscope image shows justdivided cells from the “HeLa” line, the first of which were taken from Lacks without her knowledge.

where. In poor areas where screening and treatment remain out of reach for many women, it’s still 1951.

Kathleen Schmeler, a gynecologic oncologist at MD Anderson, often works outside the bubble of modern medicine. In the border region of Texas, cervical cancer rates are 30 percent higher than the national average. In Mozambique, Schmeler found only one practicing medical oncologist in the entire country.

“She told me no one wants to go into oncology. ‘They say we just take care of the dead,’ ” Schmeler said. “I didn’t live in that [earlier] era, but I feel like I still see it in these countries.”

Most promising perhaps, are the vaccines that can keep people from contracting the cancercausing HPV viruses in the first place. If enough children are immunized — something that hasn’t happened yet — doctors predict another plunge in the rates of cervical cancer in women and the HPV-related head and neck carcinomas that are the fastest growing cancers in men.

And yes, those vaccines that might have spared Henrietta Lacks were developed from her own cells. n ©The Washington Post

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BUSINESS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Not all interns are barely scraping by BY

This is where it really pays to be an intern

J ENA M C G REGOR

S

ummer is nearing, and workplaces everywhere are awaiting the arrival of this year’s interns to help out on extra projects and shoulder the seasonal load. But among certain companies, they’re probably doing more than getting coffee and making copies. Or at least, they’re being paid that way.

According to a new report by the jobs site Glassdoor, the 25 bestpaying companies for internships each pay their median summer worker more than $4,500 a month.

That amount, if it was paid over the course of a full year, would be north of $54,000, exceeding the median annual pay for a U.S. worker, according to Glassdoor’s own local pay reports ($51,350), and the annual figure calculated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest weekly earnings data for full-time wage and salary workers ($44,460).

Topping the list was Facebook, where the median pay for interns is $8,000 a month, according to the reports from the newest analysis. That’s $1,800 more than the $6,200 the social media giant reportedly paid interns when Glassdoor last issued its highest paying internship report, in 2014. The next three were Microsoft (which pays a median $7,100 a month), ExxonMobil ($6,507) and Salesforce ($6,450).

Interns are “doing real work with real deadlines and very high expectations,” said Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor’s community expert, in an interview. “But they’re getting hired at a level that’s much more than the average U.S. worker.”

Glassdoor’s analysis is culled from self-reported salary numbers offered by current or recent interns (those who have completed an internship within the past year) and includes only companies that have at least 25 reports. Dobroski notes that the numbers are a median — sought-after engineering interns with specialized skills probably make more than summer workers in the marketing department — and that the more limited differences between experience levels and job categories for in-

STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

At a number of companies, interns reportedly earn more than the median U.S. worker Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg arrives at the company’s annual conference last month. Facebook pays its interns $8,000 a month, according to jobs website Glassdoor.

terns allow for the smaller sample size.

Among the top 25, the list remains heavily technology focused, with 16 of the top 25 in tech or tech-related fields, along with finance, oil and gas, and consulting firms. At all but three of the 16 companies that made repeat appearances from 2014, the median pay went up, sometimes sizably, with seven seeing percentage increases of 10 percent or more.

(Emails to representatives from the top four companies to confirm Glassdoor’s numbers were not immediately returned or declined to confirm the data.)

Some firms well known for high summer pay — investment banks, say, or law firms — might not be represented if there are not enough salary reports from interns to meet the sample size, Dobroski said. That was the case with firms such as Goldman Sachs, he said. Geography also plays a role: Companies with large employee

populations in big coastal cities, such as Bloomberg (No. 7) or the many tech firms on the list, end up paying more, even to interns. “Part of it is definitely driven by geography,” he said. “More than half of them are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area or New York.”

Dobroski says Glassdoor does not have data on whether the lawsuits in recent years over paid versus unpaid internships — or the general attention paid to that issue — may have had an impact on an increase.

“But what we see anecdotally and hear from employers and in policymaking is a push toward paying for interns, as well as guidelines within companies that they’re being treated more like full-time or part-time employees,” he said. “They’ve no longer just come in for babysitting. The internship is designed for you to get experience.” n © The Washington Post

The jobs site Glassdoor ranked the highest-paying companies for interns, based on salary reports from the interns themselves. The new analysis, released Tuesday, found that 16 of the 25 are in technology or tech-related fields and that most of the companies that also appeared on their list in 2014 were reported to be paying interns more. All values are median monthly pay, reported in dollars.

Facebook $8,000 Microsoft 7,100 ExxonMobil 6,507 Salesforce 6,450 Amazon 6,400 Apple 6,400 Bloomberg 6,400 Yelp 6,400 Yahoo 6,080 VMware 6,080 Google 6,000 NVIDIA 5,770 Intuit 5,440 Juniper Networks 5,440 Workday 5,440 BlackRock 5,400 Adobe 5,120 MathWorks 5,120 Qualcomm 5,040 Capital One 5,000 Chevron 5,000 Accenture 4,960 Deutsche Bank 4,640 AIG 4,616 Bank of America 4,570 Median 3,433 *The results are based on companies that have at least 25 salary reports shared on Glassdoor by current or recent interns. The median reflects the 178 companies that meet the requirements for the analysis and therefore it is not nationally representative.

Source: Glassdoor

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BOOKS

Who gets saved in a nuclear attack?

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

G RAVEN ROCK The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die

By Garrett M. Graff.

Simon & Schuster.

528 pp. $28.

arrett Graff says that his new book, “Raven Rock,” a detailed exploration of the United States’ doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of “how nuclear war would have actually worked — the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers — and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed . . . as leaders realized the horrors ahead.”

But if there is anything that “Raven Rock” proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief that Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that “my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place” to ensure the survival of the presidency. And after Richard Nixon’s first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons — there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1,000 warheads — national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the president’s dismay with his alternatives: “If that’s all there is, he won’t do it.”

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succes-

GALERIE BILDERWELT/GETTY IMAGES

sion planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as “a blur of acronyms and charts, minimizing the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook,” and at times this book commits the same offense.

Its power, however, lies in the author’s eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet “the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government,” Graff writes. Defense Sec-

retary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on Sept. 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. “That’s what deputies are for,” the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials.

A post-nuclear America could easily become “an executive branch dictatorship,” Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the U.S. economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food. When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of prewritten, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping

powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime.

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centers. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2,200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward U.S. targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five U.S. missiles heading toward the U.S.S.R. — except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. “The Soviet early warning system was a dangerous mess,” Graff writes.

Ours wasn’t that great, either.

For all the horrors it contemplates, “Raven Rock” proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defense as a priority, officials quickly realized how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes.

“Rather than remake the entire society,” Graff writes, “the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die.”

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that “it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property.”

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world. n Lozada is associate editor and nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Second novel feels stuck in the mud

Latest paean to a lost rock legend

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

hat made Paula Hawkins’s 2015 debut “ The Girl on the Train ” such a success? The novel’s plot — about marital infidelity and its homicidal consequences — was the standard stuff of psychological suspense fiction. But Hawkins’s distinctive zigzag storytelling style helped sell 20 million copies worldwide and turned the novel into a (so-so) Hollywood movie.

Now Hawkins is back with a second thriller, “Into the Water.”

Many of the elements that helped propel “The Girl on the Train” are present here: a vivid setting and a collection of unreliable narrators who tell variations on a single tale, adding a curious detail here, contradicting a crucial point there.

But something’s amiss in this second novel: It’s stagnant rather than suspenseful. “The Girl on the Train” may have rumbled back and forth on the same train tracks twice a day, but at least it moved; as a thriller, “Into the Water” is stuck in the mud.

Hawkins’s story opens with a young woman named Jules Abbott, who has just been summoned to her older sister Nel’s house by two police officers. That house, located in a small town in the north of England, is the family homestead, although it’s easy to see why Jules fled after she reached adulthood. The place sits so close to a river that it seems on the verge of toppling into the foul water below.

“So beautiful, everyone remarked upon the view, but they didn’t really see,” Jules says. “. . .

They never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things.”

Nel’s corpse has been found in the Drowning Pool, a notorious spot beneath a cliff that she has been obsessively photographing.

Nel was researching the history of local women who died in the Drowning Pool — some were suicides, others met their oblivion unwillingly. The first known

drowning was that of Libby Seeton, a young girl who was accused of witchcraft. She was fatally dunked in the river in the autumn of 1679. Other victims include poor Anne Ward, whose husband returned from World War I a violent man; and, just recently, Katie Whittaker, a close school friend of Nel’s 15-year-old daughter, Lena.

Into this murk wades Jules.

She’d been estranged from Nel for years, but now she assumes guardianship of her angry and devastated niece, Lena, and begins investigating her older sister’s mysterious drowning. Suspects begin to hatch like mayflies here: There’s the handsome high school teacher, the nasty retired policeman along with his peculiarly doting daughter-in-law, and Katie Whittaker’s grief-racked mother, who irrationally blames Nel for her daughter’s death. These characters, along with almost everyone else Jules meets in this damp burgh, tell their own versions of the truth, tainted by mold and malice. Jules dredges up dirt until, inevitably, there’s a climactic scene at the water’s edge, where another victim seems destined to vanish into the drink.

In “The Girl on the Train,” Hawkins ingeniously created a situation where an emotionally stuck heroine is jolted back to life in the course of her daily rides past a landscape that alters radically. In “Into the Water,” however, Hawkins’s stock townspeople circle round and round the Drowning Pool, whose sinister nature has remained static for centuries. The revelations about her sister’s life and death produce but a ripple in Jules’s day-to-day life.

“Into the Water” is a dull disappointment of a thriller; one good flush would put everybody — characters and readers alike — out of their misery. n Corrigan is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air” and a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She wrote this for The Washington Post.

I INTO THE WATER

By Paula Hawkins Riverhead 388 pp. $28

A PORTRAIT OF BOWIE A Tribute to Bowie by His Artistic Collaborators and Contemporaries

By Brian Hiatt Cassell. 224 pp. $34.99

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REVIEWED BY

C HRIS R ICHARDS

f David Bowie’s nonstop mutations taught the children of rock-and-roll to crave variety, it only makes sense that the breadth of Bowie scholarship continues to grow.

Now here comes Rolling Stone magazine’s Brian Hiatt, who seems to have smooshed three of my favorites together to form “A Portrait of David Bowie,” a coffeetable tome of portraits, ponderings and remembrances by Bowie’s admirers, collaborators and friends. Like most smooshings, it’s kinda fun, kinda messy.

The photographic portraits themselves are, fittingly, all over the place: outtakes from album cover shoots, assorted magazine leftovers and whatever else could be scrounged up. All together, these images will make you wonder if the man ever appeared anything less than beautiful. “David knew what he looked like from every angle, from the back of his head even,” says the painter Derek Boshier, whose 1980 impasto portrait of the singer appears here. “He knew every part.”

Between the pictures, those close to Bowie take turns dredging up memories, many fond, some odd. Bowie’s childhood pal, Toni Basil — of “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine” fame — glowingly recounts how she got her start in popland by choreographing Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” tour in 1974.

More ominously, keyboardist Mike Garson claims that Bowie took a fortuneteller’s warning that he would die at age 69 very much to heart.

It’s wild to hear how so many of these folks just stumbled into Bowie’s godly aura, as if by accident. (Human League’s Martyn Ware describes an unannounced backstage visitation from Bowie like so: “It was like Jesus stepping out of a medieval painting and walking into your front room.”)

And while entering the singer’s orbit was effortless for some, it wasn’t easy for all. Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s musical director for

many years, says, “If you’re a dud, or dull, or got bad personal hygiene, you’re not going anywhere!”

Alomar is the first of two contributors who make this book worth cracking open. Musically, he’s the guy who helped Bowie successfully scratch his itch for funk music, and he seems to have developed a special awareness to his boss’s personal vulnerabilities, too. “Part of what made David so special was that he was a listener and he was curious,” Alomar explains. “People like that, I think that they never outgrow their childhood. A child is fearless in that he wants to know what’s around the corner, he wants to touch that hot stove.”

The book’s other hot spot is the testimony of Nile Rodgers, founder of Chic and producer of Bowie’s 1983 smash album, “Let’s Dance.”

According to Rodgers, when Bowie first reached out to collaborate, he handed Rodgers a snapshot of Little Richard and told him that he wanted his next album to sound like the photograph. Somehow, that picture opened up a telepathic pathway, and everything started to flow. Rodgers dashes through his studio tales as if he and Bowie cut the album last week, and for a moment, you can almost hear the music getting made.

Unfortunately, it’s at this point in the book that the words and the pictures finally slide too far out of sync. In a book overflowing with admiration for its subject’s fastidious attention to detail, the chronological slippage feels careless.

And yes, expecting every book about David Bowie to be as eloquent, artful and refined as David Bowie is expecting a bit too much.

But it’s important to remember that we’re all custodians of his image now. And like the man taught us, image is everything. n Chris Richards is the pop music critic of The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

In Congress, the airlines are in the pilot’s seat DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

This is what laissez faire looks like.

Washington, in its wisdom, deregulated the airline industry and later looked the other way as it underwent a series of mega-mergers leaving a four-carrier oligopoly controlling 85 percent of the market. And what do we have to show for it? Reduced competition; packed cabins; tiny seats; proliferating fees for food, bags and flight changes; outsourcing of maintenance; boarding delays; higher fares in many cases; labyrinthine contracts that protect airlines rather than consumers; and routine overbooking.

While airlines invest millions in perks for those who fly in premium classes, recent weeks have found United Airlines “reaccommodating” a paying passenger, a doctor, by hauling him off a plane, bleeding, to make room for United employees, and American Airlines suspending a flight attendant who allegedly hit a mother with a baby stroller.

Congress summoned airline executives to testify Tuesday before the House Transportation Committee, and while they offered the requisite apologies for the highly publicized abuses of the doctor and the mom, they offered Orwellian rejoinders when confronted with the ordinary abuses they routinely inflict on millions of travelers.

The overbooking that causes thousands to be bumped from flights they paid for?

“We view overbooking as something that actually helps us accommodate and take care of thousands more customers than we would otherwise be able to,” said United Airlines President Scott Kirby.

The imposition of steep ticketchange fees?

“They’re mostly about our way of offering low fares to consumers,” Kirby maintained.

And will those checked-bag fees, imposed because of high fuel costs, go away now that fuel prices

are low?

Kerry Philipovitch, American Airlines’ senior vice president of customer experience, said that “we put our fees in place to give customers more options and more choices.”

How considerate.

Bob Jordan of low-cost Southwest Airlines explained why his airline, unlike the big boys, doesn’t charge such fees: “If you’re going to travel, it makes sense that you can bring your clothes along with you.”

The executives even used their appearance to request that Congress deregulate the industry further, asking for the government to privatize the Federal Aviation Administration — there is legislation pending to put the air-traffic control system under the airlines’ control — and to relax regulations on how airlines advertise fares. “Y’all place a lot of stuff on us,” complained United chief executive Oscar Munoz.

Such chutzpah at one time would have led legislators to reaccommodate the executives, United-style. But this GOPcontrolled Congress, and the Trump administration, are all about relaxing business rules.

“I don’t believe in overburdening our businesses,” Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) told

OLIVER CONTRERAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, left, and its president, Scott Kirby, testify Tuesday at a House Transportation Committee hearing.

the executives, saying only that Congress would act “the next time” if they don’t police themselves this time.

Likewise, Eric A. “Rick” Crawford (R-Ark.) said he didn’t want to “apply re-regulation,” instead encouraging the industry to “do some self-regulation to demonstrate that you don’t need interference from Congress.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Munoz replied.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.) assured the executives that “I don’t like regulation if I can get away with it,” while John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) embraced the industry view that “more people are able to fly at lower prices because of overbooking.”

With the prospect of legislative action off the table, committee members took turns complaining about their own aviation experiences.

Duncan complained about a maintenance delay last week in Knoxville. “It caused me to miss votes last night, and I hate to miss votes,” he said.

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) let it be known that he has “elite status on every airline up there except for Alaska.”

Rep. Jason Lewis (R-Minn.) said he just spent “30 hours getting from Washington, D.C., to Minneapolis.”

Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) complained that an airline

recently failed to notify her of a flight cancellation, and “I could have changed flights.” And Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) complained about the “teeny tiny, awful seats” on his flight Monday.

“I apologize that you had an uncomfortable flight,” Philipovitch replied.

Here’s what’s more uncomfortable: The abuses of the unfettered airline industry, and Washington’s refusal to do anything about them, are typical.

Nearly a decade after the financial crisis, corporate chieftains are again astride the country like a colossus, while workers and customers languish. President Trump promised to help the forgotten man, but his solutions do the opposite: repealing banking reforms, granting large tax cuts to the wealthy, and cutting government efforts to protect workers and consumers.

And passengers. At Tuesday’s hearing, the chairman, Shuster, offered the perverse suggestion that Congress help airlines and other industries by enacting tort reform so that they wouldn’t face so many “damn lawsuits” from pesky customers.

It was a revealing proposal.

Airlines are caught abusing passengers in graphic ways, and the top House lawmaker overseeing the industry responds by proposing a crackdown — on passengers. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Please put down the fruit juice

BY HEATHER FERRIS, ELVIRA ISGANAITIS AND FLORENCE BROWN Ferris is assistant professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Virginia.

Isganaitis is assistant investigator of pediatrics at the Joslin Diabetes Center. Brown is assistant professor of medicine and director of the Diabetes in Pregnancy Program at the Joslin Diabetes Center.

They wrote this for The Washington Post.

Mrs. G. came to our offices for her first visit distraught. Her primarycare doctor had just diagnosed her with diabetes, and she was here for advice. She was shocked by the diagnosis. She had always been overweight and had relatives with diabetes, but she believed she lived a healthy lifestyle. One of the habits that she identified as healthy was drinking freshly squeezed juice, which she saw as a virtuous food, every day. We asked her to stop drinking juice entirely. She left the office somewhat unconvinced, but after three months of cutting out the juice and making some changes to her diet, her diabetes was under control without the need for insulin.

Mrs. G. is not an uncommon patient. As diabetes specialists, we see patients like her all the time, who for one reason or another believe that juice is a health food. The truth is that fruit juice, even if it is freshly pressed, 100 percent juice, is little more than sugar water. Yet many Americans believe that juice is good for them. In one survey of parents of young children, 1 in 3 believed that juice was at least as healthy as fruit. We are inundated with the message that juice is healthy. Juice bars abound in gyms, spas and health food stores, while government programs supply large quantities of juice to low-income children and pregnant mothers. The commercial juice industry is happy to take advantage of this

idea.

At first glance, it is reasonable to think that juice has health benefits. Whole fruit is healthy, and juice comes from fruit, so it must be healthy, too. But when you make juice, you leave some of the most wholesome parts of the fruit behind. The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin. When your body can no longer keep up with your need for insulin, Type 2 diabetes

can develop.

Finally, when you drink your calories instead of eating them, your brain doesn’t get the same “I’m full” signal that it does from solid food, even though you wind up consuming far more calories in the process. Whereas an orange may contain 45 calories, an eightounce glass of orange juice contains 110 calories, and a large kale, banana and orange juice blend at a leading juice chain contains 380 calories. We always counsel patients to chew their food; people tend to overconsume liquid calories.

Our perception of juice needs a radical makeover, starting with our kids. Juice comes in easy, single-serving, shelf-stable packages that parents don’t hesitate to give to kids anywhere.

Yet children don’t need juice for nutritional purposes, and most juice boxes contain more than the 4-to-6-ounce maximum recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for daily consumption by kids under 6.

The perception that juice is good for kids comes in part from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, better known as WIC, which provides food assistance to 25 percent of all pregnant women and half of all children in the United States at

some point in their first five years of life. WIC supplies a narrow range of foods deemed healthy for pregnant women and growing children. This includes healthy staples such as milk and eggs but also a gallon of juice per month.

So what can we do to start fixing this problem? First, recognize juice for what it is: a treat. It doesn’t belong at your breakfast table or in your postworkout routine. Next, get juice out of your children’s lives. Ditch the juice boxes in favor of water or shelf-stable milk boxes. Not only does milk contain about a third of the sugar of juice, it’s also a great source of the protein, calcium, vitamin D and magnesium that growing kids need. Make sure that their day care or after-school program is following current guidelines and serving only milk or water. Finally, the National Academies recently released recommendations for revisions to WIC, including a lower juice allowance. Write the Department of Agriculture and let officials know that you support the reduction or elimination of juice in the WIC program.

While we can’t solve the diabetes and obesity epidemics with any one move, rebranding juice from a health food to a treat would be a major step in the right direction. n

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OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

AHCA is a major step forward CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS a Republican, represents Washington’s 5th District in the House and is the chair of the House Republican Conference.

She wrote this for The Washington Post.

Hearing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional monologue this past week about his son’s condition and his family’s experience in the moments after his birth, I had a flashback to the day my son was born and we learned he had Down syndrome.

My husband and I had a lot of questions about Cole’s future. Whether he’d have health care shouldn’t have had to be one of them. When you’re facing years of doctor’s appointments, you want to know that having a preexisting condition,such as an extra 21st chromosome or a heart defect, won’t prevent you or your loved ones from accessing the care you need.

Protections for children such as Cole Rodgers and Billy Kimmel have long existed, as they should.

And despite what people are saying, House Republicans aren’t seeking to strip these protections — or anyone’s protections — away.

It’s the people we love — our children, friends and neighbors — who are the inspiration behind our American Health Care Act, which we passed in the House on Thursday.

We’re working hard to build a health-care system that puts the American people back at the center of their health decisions.

We’ve had tough conversations with people from all walks of life, and we’ve passed a bill that we’re confident will improve lives.

When Obamacare was introduced, Republicans and Democrats knew the status quo

wasn’t working. But Republicans rejected the notion that to help 2 million people with preexisting conditions get access to care, we needed a 2,000-page bill that transformed one-sixth of the economy.

At each point of our process to repeal Obamacare, we have not lost sight of our responsibility to the most vulnerable in our communities. Safety nets and protections are important and must be maintained for those who need them most. Our plan accomplishes this mission in two key ways: by guaranteeing that access to health coverage can’t be denied for people with preexisting conditions, and by empowering states to innovate with new models for better patient outcomes at a lower cost.

This bill isn’t perfect. It doesn’t

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

include every single component I wanted. But it came down to the AHCA or the continued disaster of Obamacare, which was an easy choice. The AHCA is a major improvement, because a federal one-size-fits-all approach to health care isn’t the answer. A major feature of our plan is returning control to states, through both funding and reducing red tape, which empowers them to innovate and to stabilize costs.

With Obamacare, our healthinsurance system relies on younger, healthier people subsidizing the costs of the older and sicker. As a result, insurance costs consistently increase to cover the costs of people who are considered “high-risk,” namely those who are sick or who have preexisting conditions. High-risk pools and reinsurance programs at the state level address this concern and have been successful.

Our plan establishes a program to provide federal resources for states to create high-risk pools, reduce out-of-pocket costs or promote better access to services.

States know better than the federal government how to allocate and manage resources to address the needs of their people.

Our plan allows states to serve and provide financial support directly to vulnerable populations, including people with preexisting

conditions. We’ve seen this system work before — just look at Maine.

After the state created an “invisible” high-risk pool (“invisible” because it did not cordon off people with preexisting conditions from the traditional market) and relaxed its premium rating rules in 2011, people with preexisting conditions continued to have access to health care and their premiums were cut in half.

Young and healthy people could finally afford to enter the market, and prices stabilized even further.

This approach was more personal, reasonable and innovative than anything a bureaucrat in D.C. could have imagined.

To me, protecting people with preexisting conditions isn’t just good policy — it’s a personal mission.

All across the country, families like mine have real concerns about the future of health care, and they are why we’re focusing on results and working on these reforms.

Obamacare is wrong for America.

It has failed, and it’s only getting worse — making health care more expensive and less accessible. To stand by and do nothing would be irresponsible. The AHCA is a monumental step forward that trusts the American people — not the federal government — to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. n

SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

France BY

J ONATHAN F ENBY

France’s past and present reveal a complex saga of aspirations and dis­ appointed hopes, from the revolution of 1789 to the present morosité (a despairing, very French species of gloom) gripping the land that gave the world la joie de vivre. These contradictions may help explain the myths surrounding the nation and its people, among them these five.

MYTH NO. 1 France is succumbing to far-right nationalism.

Most of these concerns were based on the alarming popularity of National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. Those worries now look overblown, though Le Pen’s rise has undoubtedly changed the political landscape.

In the first round of voting, on April 23, Le Pen won 21 percent of the vote, well down from her opinion poll standing of 28 percent at the start of the year.

Now, Le Pen seems bound to be defeated by Emmanuel Macron, a liberal centrist candidate, in the second round of balloting.

Meanwhile, her party has only two of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, and it failed to gain control of any of the regional councils in elections in 2015. Le Pen has made the National Front a major player in French politics, but thus far that does not mean the country of the revolution of 1789 is being swept away by rightwing nationalism. Rather, it simply suggests that a lot of French citizens are unhappy and looking for standard-bearers for radical change.

MYTH NO. 2 French unions are extremely powerful.

French unions are certainly noisy: Their protests are famous for shutting down cities and even, on occasion, winning concessions from politicians. But despite their penchant for public displays, French unions are rather weak and show no signs of growth. In France, less than 8 percent of workers are unionized — a lower rate than in

the United States, Britain or Germany. In addition, French unions are divided into three main competing factions, and the political parties associated with them — the Communists and the Socialists — are in decline, with Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon earning only 6.4 percent of the vote in the recent election. While French unions once had quite a bit of pull thanks to membership numbers and affiliations with strong political parties, both of those sources of power are on the downslide.

MYTH NO. 3 The French tend to surrender in conflicts.

While the French may choose their battles carefully, they’re no cowards: Recently, for example, French forces have been deeply involved in fighting extremists in Africa and the Middle East. In 2012, French troops went into Mali to hold back an Islamist advance there, followed by operations in Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. France has also been the Western nation most involved in combating the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. It has intervened to try to bring stability in the Central African Republic and took a leading role in the intervention in Libya, where its special forces are still fighting terrorism. Likewise, the French Foreign Legion — renowned for its strength and bravery — is still active globally.

France began airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq in 2014, followed by missions in Syria. In fact, President François Hollande was ready to launch strikes against Bashar al-Assad’s regime

OLIVIER MORIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Graffiti on the ground, referring to France’s second round of the presidential election, reads “Neither Le Pen, nor Macron” on April 26.

in Syria after its use of chemical weapons in 2013 — but was held back by the refusal of the Obama administration to do so.

MYTH NO. 4 The French are not obese.

The French are ranked by the World Health Organization as the 122nd fattest nation in the world.

But they are getting heavier.

The latest statistics show that 25 percent of French adults have a body mass index of 30 or greater, more than in Germany and Italy (20 and 21 percent respectively) but behind the United States and Britain (34 and 28 percent). The same data showed that the incidence of obesity in French women in 2014 was 24 percent and almost as much among men.

How to explain expanding French waistlines? Nutritionists blame fast food and the spread of sedentary office work. More and more, food is prepared in factories or industrial kitchens rather than being carefully made at home. Snacks with fattening ingredients are increasingly common, and the tradition of the leisurely lunch, with time to digest and perhaps a walk afterward, has given way to sandwiches at the desk for many office workers. In 2013, fast-food purchases accounted for 54

percent of all restaurant sales in France, overtaking traditional restaurant sales for the first time.

The government has claimed some success in a campaign against obesity in children, which researchers have linked to poverty and inequality.

MYTH NO. 5 The French drink a lot of alcohol.

In recent decades, young French people have been switching to soft drinks instead of wine and spirits. Wine consumption has plummeted in the past 40 years. In 1980, more than half of French adults were consuming wine on a near-daily basis. By the beginning of this decade, that figure had fallen to 17 percent, while 38 percent did not drink wine at all. The acreage of vineyards is now greater in China than in France, though France remains ahead in actual production. It ranks 18th in the world in alcohol consumption per inhabitant — pretty modest, compared to its reputation. n Fenby is the author of “France: A Modern History From the Revolution to the War With Terror” and the director of European political analysis at the TS Lombard research service. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

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