The Washington Post National Weekly - May 21, 2017

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Americans’ dental divide For many working-class people, the cost of necessary procedures is out of reach. PAGE 12

Politics Who is Robert Mueller III? 4

Nation Hope amid tragedy in Baltimore 8

5 Myths Pregnancy 23

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

2

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

NCW BUSINESS DIRECTORY

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

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

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

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

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

wenatcheeworld.com NCWBusinessDirectory.com

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Comey’s notes could spill beans BY

A ARON B LAKE

T

his month, President Trump threatened former FBI director James B. Comey. He dangled the prospect that there were tapes of their conversations, suggesting he might use them if Comey leaked information to the press.

It turns out Comey has his own records of those conversations. And that should make Trump very worried.

The Washington Post has confirmed the existence of notes from February in which Comey wrote that Trump had asked him to close the investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and instead focus more on leaks to reporters.

“I hope you can let this go,” Trump said, according to the Comey notes, which were described by associates. Comey’s written account of the meeting is two pages long and highly detailed, the associates said.

In a news conference Thursday, Trump denied asking Comey to back off the investigation.

Officials have previously said that Trump and his senior staff have been pressing the FBI to prioritize leak investigations over the bureau’s ongoing probe into possible coordination between Russian officials and Trump associates. On Tuesday, people close to the matter said Comey kept detailed notes of his conversations with Trump.

That last sentence should strike fear into the White House. This one story is significant enough and will lead to more allegations of Trump obstructing justice. Those allegations are already in the news thanks to Trump firing Comey — the man leading an investigation into his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.

KLMNO WEEKLY

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

But the possible existence of a trove of Comey memos may be the real story here.

Comey is known to be a pretty meticulous keeper of notes, and CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that Comey kept extensive notes of his conversations with Trump for the precise reason that they made him uneasy — presumably because of Trump making requests that crossed a line for Comey.

And the reason Trump tweeted what he did about Comey is because the New York Times had just reported Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Comey at a dinner shortly after Trump’s inauguration. It’s difficult not to presume that Comey has notes about this meeting, too.

As the New York Times noted, these memos “are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.” The Times pointed to that famous incident back during the George W. Bush administration when Comey testified that there had been a race to reach the bedside of an ill Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as the FBI and senior White House officials fought over warrantless wiretapping. When the White House disputed Comey’s version, then-FBI Director Robert S.

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. 32

Mueller III’s contemporaneous notes were used as confirmation.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is already calling for Comey’s notes to be subpoenaed. And Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is also talking about subpoenas. If the notes do see the light of day, we could have a whole lot of stories like the one about the loyalty pledge and Trump asking Comey to shut down the Flynn investigation.

The reason we’ve learned about the Flynn memo appears to be because Comey shared it with others who are providing its details to the news media. Perhaps other memos weren’t shared with others, or not with people who would leak their details to the press. And if those other memos do come to light and show similar exchanges with Trump, that’s going to be very difficult for the White House to combat in the court of public opinion.

That’s because the notes will have been written before Trump fired Comey, and before Comey had an ax to grind. At that point, the White House would basically have to argue that Comey created a fictitious paper trail without a clear motivation.

There are a lot of ifs and assumptions in the above. We don’t know how extensive Comey’s notes are, how many of these situations there may have been with Trump or what will come to light. But the prospect of those memos seeing the light of day has to be frightening for a White House that is already taking on water.

And for a president who issued a pretty outlandish threat recently, it’s a remarkable turn of events. n © The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Dee Matello waits in line with hundreds of others for free dental care at a Salisbury, Md., clinic. She had not seen a dentist in nine years because of the cost.

Photograph by LINDA DAVIDSON of The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

A history of standing up to the White House

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former FBI chief Robert S. Mueller III has a reputation for diligence, reverence for the law

BY M ATEA G OLD, R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN AND T OM H AMBURGER

R

obert S. Mueller III, who served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the past two administrations, brings to his new role as special counsel a proven willingness to take on a sitting president.

In a high-drama episode in 2004, he and then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey were preparing to resign from their positions if President George W. Bush reauthorized the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretap program without changes. Bush backed down.

Now, Mueller is charged with

another politically fraught mission: the investigation of possible coordination between President Trump’s associates and Russian officials seeking to meddle in the 2016 campaign.

Former colleagues said the exMarine Corps officer and former U.S. attorney, who was sworn in as FBI director a week before the 2001 terrorist attacks, is uniquely suited to the task.

“He doesn’t sway under political pressure,” said Thomas J. Pickard, who served as deputy director of the FBI under Mueller on Sept. 11, 2001. He noted that President Barack Obama extended Mueller’s term, even after he had served through all eight years of the Bush administration. “For 12 years, he kept the FBI out of

politics,” Pickard added.

George J. Terwilliger III, who has known Mueller since both were assistant U.S. attorneys three decades ago, said that “if a special counsel had to be appointed, I think Bob is a terrific choice.”

“I have no doubt that he will be evenhanded — including going hammer and tong after anyone who is leaking investigative or classified information,” said Terwilliger, who served as deputy attorney general while Mueller led the Justice Department’s criminal division. “Bob’s got a career that is marked by handling the highest-profile matters out of the public eye with his nose to the grindstone and attention to the business.”

Neil MacBride, a former U.S.

Robert S. Mueller III, at a 2007 news conference as FBI director, was described by colleagues as evenhanded and steadfast under political pressure.

“For 12 years, he kept the FBI out of politics,” one said.

attorney who worked with Mueller in a variety of jobs, called him “the real deal, the most respected prosecutor in America.”

A former deputy attorney general who later did a stint prosecuting homicide cases in Washington, D.C., Mueller is known as a no-nonsense, relentless prosecutor with a deep reverence for the rule of law.

“The most devastating thing that can happen to an institution is that people begin to shade and dissemble,” he told Washingtonian magazine in 2008.

Mueller also has long ties to major players in the tumultuous political story that has engulfed Trump’s presidency. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who tapped Mueller for the task,

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

5

POLITICS served under him at the Justice Department as a criminal prosecutor. Comey, whom Trump abruptly fired this month, was his ally during the Bush era and then succeeded him as FBI director.

Until his surprise appointment Wednesday, Mueller served as a partner at WilmerHale, a firm that represents former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

Robert T. Novick, the firm’s co-managing partner, said Wednesday that Mueller had left effective immediately.

Two WilmerHale partners who worked with Mueller in the past are expected to join him in the special counsel’s office, according to Novick: Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s chief of staff when he was FBI director, and James L. Quarles III, who worked with Mueller at the law firm in the 1990s.

Mueller grew up in Philadelphia and went to St. Paul’s School, an elite prep school in New Hampshire, where he played hockey with John F. Kerry, who would become secretary of state.

At Princeton, he was inspired to join the Marine Corps by a former student who died in Vietnam, according to Washingtonian. He led a rifle platoon in Vietnam, eventually receiving numerous commendations, including the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, Mueller worked for a dozen years as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco and Boston, where U.S. Attorney William Weld described him as a “straight arrow.”

“He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy; he just put the cards on the table,” Weld told Washingtonian.

Mueller succeeded Weld as U.S. attorney in Boston and then went to Washington in 1989 as an assistant to Attorney General Richard L. Thornburgh, eventually rising to be chief of the criminal division. During his tenure, he worked on high-profile cases such as the prosecution of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega and the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

After a stint at a private law firm, Mueller took a big pay cut to work as a homicide prosecutor in Washington, D.C., for U.S. Attor-

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Steady under pressure: A week after Mueller took over at the FBI, planes hit the World Trade Center ney Eric H. Holder Jr. — a move that friends said showed how much prosecuting was in his blood.

Holder told The Washington Post that Mueller called him and explained he was “shaken” by killings in the city and wanted a chance to be a line prosecutor and do something about it.

Holder called the conversation “one of the most extraordinary calls I’ve ever gotten.”

Holder later tapped Mueller to serve as U.S. attorney in San Francisco.

In 2001, Bush selected him to replace Louis J. Freeh as FBI director, a position friends said Mueller had long sought. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

A week later, planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, upending his job and the

bureau.

Pickard, who briefly served as his deputy, said that in the days after the attack, Mueller worked so hard that Pickard told his wife he needed to take a break: “I told her, ‘He’s killing us,’ ” Pickard recalled.

“He had a tremendous work ethic,” Pickard said. “He wouldn’t think anything of staying there until 9, 10, 11 p.m. at night and then showing up at 6 a.m. the next day, bright-eyed and bushytailed and ready for work.”

Among Pickard’s duties was to brief Mueller. He said the FBI director would often reject summaries, asking instead to review the full notes taken by agents from their interviews. For exercise, he would stand for hours at a lectern, reading page after page.

“He’s a real student — getting down into the details,” he said.

President Barack Obama chose James B. Comey, left, to succeed Robert S. Mueller III, right, as head of the FBI in 2013. “I know very few people in public life who have shown more integrity, more consistently, under more pressure” than Mueller, Obama said.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Less than three years later, Mueller and Comey were involved in the standoff with other Bush administration officials over an effort to extend the warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency.

At one point, Comey rushed to the hospital bedside of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to try to persuade him not to certify the extension sought by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. Comey, who was serving as acting attorney general while Ashcroft recovered from gall bladder surgery, had refused to support the program’s continuation in its form.

Mueller arrived at the hospital shortly after the confrontation in Ashcroft’s room. He told the FBI agents guarding the room not to allow anyone else in to see Ashcroft without Comey’s permission.

When the Bush administration tried to proceed with the extension, Comey, Mueller and other Justice Department officials threatened to resign — forcing Bush to change the program.

After Obama was elected, he asked Congress to extend Mueller’s term past the statutory 10year appointment, making him the second-longest-serving FBI director, after J. Edgar Hoover.

“Like the Marine that he’s always been, Bob never took his eyes off his mission,” Obama said when Mueller stepped down in 2013, adding: “I know very few people in public life who have shown more integrity, more consistently, under more pressure than Bob Mueller.”

As a partner at WilmerHale, which Mueller joined in 2014, he was frequently tapped by major corporations and institutions to conduct complex, sensitive internal investigations. Among his recent clients was the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, which hired him to review the company’s security procedures after one of its employees was charged with stealing classified data from the NSA. Another was the National Football League, which tapped Mueller to examine how the league handled a domestic abuse case involving Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS Stephen Miller Senior policy adviser

As part of a third major renovation in 1934, a second floor was added to the West Wing to add additional space.

Gary Cohn Director of the National Economic Council

Reception area

BY

Reception area

Reception area

Ivanka Trump Assistant to the president

Rick Dearborn Deputy chief of staff Marc Short Director of legislative affairs

Inside Trump’s West Wing

Kellyanne Conway Counselor to the president

A ARON S TECKELBERG

In 1902, the executive offices were relocated from the second floor of the White House’s main residence to what was planned to be a temporary structure built to the west. President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal office was located where the current Roosevelt Room stands.

In the years following, the building was expanded and renovated several times, becoming what we know today as the West Wing. n ©The Washington Post

Reception area

Donald McGahn White House counsel

EAST WING

R

D

N CO SE

OO FL

RESIDENCE The press secretary and other communications personnel offices are located near the northeast corner of the West Wing, in close proximity to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.

Sean Spicer Press secretary

PRESS BRIEFING ROOM

H UT N SO AW L

WEST WING

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Deputy press secretary Cabinet Room

Michael Dubke Director of communications

K. T. McFarland Deputy national security adviser H.R. McMaster National security adviser

Mike Pence Vice president

Roosevelt Room

Lobby

Joe Hagin Deputy chief of staff

President’s Study

Jared Kushner Senior adviser

Reince Priebus White House chief of staff

Of the senior staff, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has the closest office to the president.

F

O LO TF S IR

Madeleine Westerhout Personal secretary to the president

Keith Schiller Director of Oval Office operations

Hope Hicks Director of strategic communications

Donald Trump President

The vice president has two offices.

One here in the West Wing, and another — officially called the Vice President's Ceremonial Office — is about 150 feet west in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Most of the vice president’s staff and business are located there.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon are seen as political and philosophical opposites — and sometimes allies — but sit just a hallway apart from each other.

John McEntee Personal aide to the president

The first Oval Office was built in 1909 for President William Taft, and became the official work place for the President. The Oval Office was later rebuilt to its current location at the southeast corner of the West Wing during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, in part to accommodate easier access for his use of a wheelchair.

The unique shape of the office was designed to echo the oval shape of the Blue Room in the White House’s main residence.

R Stephen K. Bannon Chief strategist SOURCES: THE WHITE HOUSE, THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Special elections key for Democrats D AVID W EIGEL Dunwoody, Ga. BY

H

ouse Speaker Paul D. Ryan spoke for just four minutes and 20 seconds, but his message hardly needed more time than that.

Karen Handel, the Republican candidate in Georgia’s once-safe 6th Congressional District, was under attack from “the left and Nancy Pelosi.” It was up to Republican voters to stop them.

“You know what we’ve got to do this summer? We’ve got to repeal and replace Obamacare,” said Ryan (R-Wis.) while close to 200 Republican voters fanned themselves to counter the hotel ballroom’s rippling heat. “Then we’ve got to take this crazy tax code and replace it with one that actually works. We need Karen Handel to help us do that.”

There was no mention of President Trump — and nothing about the details of the American Health Care Act or various tax-cut blueprints. But there was an unmistakable sense of urgency that the Beltway GOP’s sagging approval ratings had taken their toll and threatened the party’s hold on elected offices — and that a win against Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia could quiet that until next year.

Georgia’s June 20 runoff election will wrap up a quartet of special elections for Republicanheld seats this year, in which the roiling Democratic base has stocked millions of dollars and giddily high hopes. But after a single-digit loss in Kansas, and after Ossoff ’s 48 percent showing led to a runoff in Georgia, Democrats are under new pressure to post a win.

All of the openings result from Republican lawmakers being tapped for positions in the Trump administration. In Georgia, Ossoff and Handel are vying for the former seat of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

If they can’t win in the aftermath of the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, or the revelation last week that Trump shared

DAVID GOLDMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The party is under pressure to win newly vacated seats and show it could retake Congress next year classified information with Russians, Democrats will stoke doubts about whether they can regain majorities in Congress next year.

The Georgia race, already the most expensive House contest in history, attracted early money because its wealthy and reliably Republican suburban voters backed Trump by just two percentage points.

The May 25 race for Montana’s sole House seat has excited liberals, too, with first-time candidate Rob Quist, a country singer, pulling in $3.3 million for a contested race that Republicans did not expect. In South Carolina, another June 20 election will pit Democrat Archie Parnell against a Republican state legislator who had to slug through an expensive and bitter primary fight.

In each race, Republicans are operating as though the turf has not shifted since 2016 — and Democrats are cautious. Although D.C. Democrats talk about a White House in collapse, the candidates trying to win

power are treading lightly. Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional staffer, has avoided obvious ties to national Democrats.

Democrats’ polling has found Ossoff ’s favorable rating ticking up but within every survey’s margin of error. And Ossoff ’s messaging is defiantly calm and center-left, even in settings where the party’s base seems to crave more.

Although activists argue for the party to endorse single-payer health care, Ossoff says he would “take what works” and build on the Affordable Care Act — including reforms such as letting people buy insurance across state lines.

In an ad that dropped the day the House passed the American Health Care Act, Ossoff pledged to cut waste from the budget, a deficit-hawk message that has fallen out of fashion among liberals. Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Ossoff ’s campaign have attacked Handel not as a Trump toady but as a spendthrift who used public resources to acquire

Marilyn Matlock, left, answers her door to Jon Ossoff, a Democrat running for Congress in Georgia’s traditionally conservative 6th District, and his fiancee, Alisha Kramer.

a luxury car and decorate an office.

Recently, Ossoff campaigned with three key segments of the district’s Democratic electorate — Latinos, Asian Americans and white liberals boiling over about the daily goings-on at the White House.

At a house party with several dozen white voters, in a hilly neighborhood thick with Handel signs, Ossoff was cautious. A voter who asked how he’d stand up to Trump received a textured answer about how to find solutions.

“I will work with the president if, for example, he puts together an infrastructure bill that’s fiscally responsible and serves the needs of this community,” Ossoff said. “I’ll stand up to the president if I think he threatens our interests or our values.”

It’s a far cry from the way Democrats in bluer districts talk — or the way Republicans talked about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. In Georgia, even more than in Montana or South Carolina, Democrats hope they can build a majority by adding their base to swing voters who are concerned with the ruling party’s competence more than its agenda.

Republicans aren’t being so cautious. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Ryan-aligned super PAC, has pummeled Ossoff for months for living outside the district (his fiancee is finishing a degree at Emory University in Atlanta) and linked him to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on the grounds that polls found her unpopular in the 6th Congressional District.

And last week, Handel spoke confidently, if with few details, about getting to work to help Ryan and Trump pass bills.

“I’ll work with Speaker Ryan to make sure we make health care better for families and businesses,” she said. It was her only mention of the GOP’s signature bill — and it came before Ryan made four references to Ossoff ’s home outside the district. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

A faint cry that carried volumes

BY P ETER H ERMANN AND T HERESA V ARGAS

Baltimore

N

o one saw the baby.

She sat in a gold-hued car with tinted black windows as her 26-year-old father lay on the ground outside, dying.

All eyes were on him, another fallen body in a city increasingly defined by them.

In portions of Baltimore, the strobe of police cars is as much a part of the landscape as boardedup homes. But the pace of the killings this year has been stunning as the city struggles to recover from rioting in 2015. As of May 12, 124 people had been slain, including five on a recent day, making Baltimore’s homicide rate one of the highest in the country.

It is more than triple Washington’s rate and higher than the homicide rates in New Orleans and Chicago, two places that have become national symbols of gun violence.

Each murder in Baltimore leaves a mark on those who witness it and those who investigate it. But few have been as haunting as the scene that played out on March 27 in front of a West Baltimore carryout that, in contrast to its cheerful name, Rainbow, has metal bars over its windows.

An area business owner drove by moments after the bullets flew.

He slowed his car enough to notice the fade of the wounded man’s haircut and that he wore expensive-looking jeans. Strangers stared at the victim, Ernest Solomon, from the other side of the police tape, some shouting supportive words.

Officers, too, focused on Solomon, walking past his car, which was surrounded by shell casings.

More than an hour had passed since he’d been shot and taken to the hospital and still no one had opened the locked car. It was a key piece of evidence, and officers knew the less they touched it the better. Following protocol, they planned to tow it to a police lot, then take it to a crime lab where a technician skilled in finding fin-

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

gerprints would await a search warrant signed by a judge. It could take hours, or even a day.

Then came a faint cry.

“Did you hear that?” homicide detective Lee Brandt asked another detective and then yelled for an officer to bring keys that had been retrieved earlier from Solomon’s pockets.

There, inside the car, he found Solomon’s 10-month-old daughter strapped in her car seat, wearing a pink and white onesie under a black sweatsuit. Brandt pulled her out and held her up, as other officers looked on, mouths agape.

The moment was captured by a Baltimore Sun photographer in a picture that quickly spread across social media and that Brandt keeps close as a reminder.

“We couldn’t be there for her father, but we were there for her,” he said. “We got her safe. We got

In Baltimore, where more than 120 people have been killed so far this year, the discovery of a baby in a car after her father was fatally shot becomes a symbol of hope in a city too often filled with despair.

Lt. Fontaine Smallwood, 40, grew up near where Ernest Solomon was killed and was there when Solomon’s daughter was found.

her taken care of. We had one tragic death versus two.”

‘Don’t give up on Baltimore’ Ernest Solomon was the 71st person killed in the city.

Beyond the other numbers were two boxers, a pregnant woman and the son of a slain police officer who was shot to death a decade after his father died the same way.

After Officer Troy Chesley was killed while off duty in 2007, Sheila Dixon, then Baltimore’s mayordesignate, expressed hope that the death wouldn’t embitter his sons and declared, “We have got to stop these senseless killings.”

After his son Trayvon Chesley, 22, was shot in the head in April, a police major tweeted almost an echo: “Senseless killings have to stop in OUR city!”

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

9

NATION The oldest victim this year was 79 and the youngest 16. A 53-yearold man was shot when he heard a knock on his window and looked outside. A 26-year-old man was shot after he sat down in a barber shop to get a haircut.

Baltimore has long struggled with violence and a strained relationship between its police force and many African American residents. It went a decade with 300 or more killings each year in the 1990s before the numbers finally began falling in 2000.

But the homicide rate hit a high in 2015, the same year Freddie Gray died in police custody and the city erupted in civil unrest.

That year, Baltimore had 344 homicides, the deadliest per capita in the city’s history. The next year marked its second highest, with 318 deaths.

This year, it is on track to beat both records and surpass all other big U.S. cities. The 124 slayings in Baltimore, with a population of 614,000, brought the homicide rate to 20.2 per 100,000 residents.

Comparatively, Washington, with 681,000 people, has had 41 homicides so far this year, for a rate of 6.

Meanwhile, Baltimore’s police force has shrunk in the past several years, from 2,900 officers to 2,700. Washington has 3,800.

“Don’t give up on Baltimore,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh told officers gathered for a roll call in the Southern District police station recently.

Lt. Fontaine Smallwood also encourages his officers before he sends them onto the city’s streets.

He urges them to play with children and talk with residents. He said he tells them there will be more violence, but also that “it will eventually get better.”

Even before Smallwood was called to the scene of Solomon’s death, he knew that corner well.

Not only is it in eyesight of where the riots first erupted, but Smallwood grew up in a rowhouse two miles south. His house is no longer there. Instead, the vacant lot is a tangle of shoulder-high weeds.

Smallwood was 30 when he joined the police force a decade ago, and during the riots, he tried to hold back looters and watched a senior center burn. He said he has no answers when people ask him why the violence has soared since then.

“I think maybe it was a boiling point,” he said.

On the day of Solomon’s killing,

AMY DAVIS/BALTIMORE SUN

Smallwood’s job was to coordinate the response.

Brandt, who joined the force nine years ago after working as a lineman for Verizon, was looking for surveillance video that captured the incident.

His job often involves pulling video from crime scenes, including homicides, but he tries to avoid viewing them. This time, he watched. In the video, he said, Solomon and his killer can be seen wrestling, possibly over a gun.

Witnesses say Solomon was selling shoes out of his car and was targeted by someone who wanted to rob him. Police confirmed that he was robbed and also noted that he did not have a criminal record. Solomon’s family declined to be interviewed.

Less than two weeks before his death, Solomon wrote on his Facebook page: “Can’t really complain about anything as long as breathing and in good health #blessed.”

A few days later, he spoke about his hopes for his little girl: “I swear I want so much more for daughter I don’t want her to be nothing like these joints out here at all.”

In a funeral program for Solomon, he is pictured lying next to his daughter, both sucking in their bottom lips. In another frame, he holds her hand as she stands. A biography describes her as “the joy of his life,” and in a poem, he’s described as her “protector.”

“Rest easy my Daddy,” it reads.

“I will always love you with all my heart.”

Homicide detectives find Ernest Solomon’s 10-monthold daughter inside his vehicle after hearing her cries.

“We couldn’t be there for her father, but we were there for her,” detective Lee Brandt said.

‘This is a killing field’ In Baltimore’s most violent neighborhoods, obituaries plaster car windows and T-shirts bearing “RIP” crowd dresser drawers.

Wylie Funeral Home gives out wristbands bearing the name of the person being mourned, and some people have enough to stretch from wrist to elbow.

Because of privacy concerns, Brandon Wylie wouldn’t say which deaths his funeral home handled this year, but obituary listings show that it oversaw arrangements for several of the city’s homicide victims, including Solomon.

Wylie, who grew up above his father’s West Baltimore funeral home, said he’d be happy if there were no murder victims to bury.

Funeral homes often take a financial loss with killings because they are dealing with unprepared families, he said. He’s also grown tired of seeing some of the same young faces at one service after another.

“It’s desensitized them in a way,” Wylie said.

He recently started a mentalhealth program, called Above it All, that serves young people ages 5 to 18.

“People are living in fear,” Wylie said. Growing up, he used to walk to the corner without worry, knowing others were looking out for him. “Now, a kid might not have that luxury.”

After Gray’s death, theories circulated about how it contributed to the surge in killings that year.

Some people believed that the

KLMNO WEEKLY

drugs from looted pharmacies contributed to the violence or that old turf battles had been rekindled amid the chaos. But two years later, if there is a Freddie Gray effect, residents say it may lie in a heightened distrust of police that leads people to avoid reporting crimes and to seek their own justice.

The business owner who saw Solomon after he was shot also believes police have changed how they behave, for fear of getting in trouble. Six officers were charged in Gray’s death, though none were convicted. The police department — the subject of a scathing Justice Department report that found it had engaged in years of blatant racial discrimination on Baltimore’s streets — is being overhauled under a consent decree with the federal government.

“Since the Freddie Gray situation, even if you call the police and give a description, they can’t touch” the criminals, the business owner said. “They know they’re untouchable. That’s the key.”

He asked not to be identified, saying his life had already been threatened.

“This is a killing field,” he said.

When Brandt pulled the baby from the car that afternoon, the business owner said, everyone watching was shocked. Solomon had been shot at 1:16 p.m. and pronounced dead 40 minutes later. The baby was found at 2:30, somehow unharmed.

In the photo taken that day, Smallwood can be seen standing behind Brandt, his head tilted and mouth open in disbelief.

“It really hurts to know that our children are getting caught up in the crossfire of some of this violence,” Smallwood said. “I was shocked that the child was unharmed throughout that whole ordeal. It was almost as if an angel protected this child.”

A copy of the photo is now displayed in Smallwood’s office at the Western District police station, tacked to a cork board next to a readout of grim crime stats.

Brandt keeps the image on his phone.

“We have seen enough senseless killings,” he said. “To have one person live makes a difference.

Who knows what she will grow up to become, but we gave her an opportunity.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Europe’s far right seeks an image reset A NTHONY F AIOLA Berlin BY

T

he far right’s drubbing in the French election exposed the biggest challenge for European nationalists: convincing voters that they are no longer a bunch of intolerant haters. To argue that point, welcome to the political stage Alice Weidel, the improbable new voice of Germany’s far right.

In person, the cardigan-wearing former investment banker eschews fiery rhetoric in favor of almost academic answers. But there’s something else that distinguishes her from the populist pack. After days of campaigning for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the 38-year-old lesbian goes home to her partner and two sons.

“My election and my high acceptance within the party show that, contrary to public perception, my party is tolerant,” said Weidel, one of two politicians elected last month to lead the AfD into Germany’s national elections in September.

Weidel’s rise is the latest expression of a growing, if seemingly ironic, trend. In their policies, nationalist movements in the West often oppose full gay rights, including same-sex marriage. But many such parties are increasingly trying to portray themselves as more tolerant than their images suggest, in part by making space for gay men and lesbians.

This, observers say, amounts to an attempt to broaden their appeal — not only to gays but also to voters who view such movements as overtly bigoted and exclusionary.

Weidel “is a signpost; she is there to say, ‘Look, we’re not only old, angry white men,’ ” said Cornelius Adebahr, a fellow at Carnegie Europe.

Opponents, however, call such efforts disingenuous — optics that do not gel with nationalist voting patterns, actions and internal musings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

SASCHA SCHUERMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Political parties want to broaden their appeal, particularly to members of the LGBT community In France, for instance, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, despite equivocating on the issue at first, in February included a repeal of same-sex marriage — legalized in France in 2013 — in her campaign pledges.

More recently, however, gays have been promoted to the party’s highest ranks. National Front leaders Florian Philippot and Steeve Briois were outed by journalists in recent years. Nevertheless, Philippot is now Le Pen’s right-hand man, and Briois was named the party’s interim chief.

Le Pen’s views are a far cry from those of her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the 1980s, the elder Le Pen — an anti-Semite who referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history — was as outspoken about gays as he was about Jews.

During the AIDS crisis, he advocated for the creation of concentration camps for those infected with HIV. Despite her massive loss, Ma-

rine Le Pen’s different strategy may be gradually working.

Although the party opposes same-sex marriage, a 2015 poll showed that support for her party among gay couples rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 32 percent in 2015 — right after the November terrorist attacks in Paris.

Enter Germany’s Weidel, who last month was selected to help lead the AfD and is now tasked with helping the party avoid political implosion.

Founded in 2013 on the back of German angst over bailouts for Greece, the AfD morphed during the refugee crisis into an anti-immigrant nationalist movement that has opposed the building of new mosques and advocates leaving the euro currency union.

Should the AfD crash and burn following losses by nationalists in the Netherlands and France, it would amount to a massive setback for the far right in Europe.

Some of Weidel’s fiercest crit-

Alice Weidel, a lesbian economist, is the new voice of Germany’s far right, helping to lead the AfD into the country’s fall national elections.

ics have been German gay groups. Markus Ulrich, spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, dismissed Weidel’s election as a “clever strategy” meant to distract from the AfD’s hard-line platform.

Yet Weidel’s appeal also stems from a characteristic that has helped her rise in the AfD: She is not a traditional politician. An economist, she graduated best in class at the University of Bayreuth and earned her doctorate in 2011. She worked in China for six years and speaks Mandarin.

Her day job is consulting for start-ups.

In an interview with The Washington Post, she said she saw no contradiction between her party’s stated stance in favor of “traditional families” with “a father and mother” and her life with her female partner and children. Germany offers civil partnerships, she said, and she and her party remain in favor “of keeping the status quo.”

The pushback within the AfD against a lesbian as one of its leading voices, meanwhile, has been muted. For the most part, even fervent nationalists in the party appear to be backing her.

Although Weidel was initially attracted to the party because of its anti-euro stance, she also fiercely defends its anti-immigrant position.

She says that neither she nor her party is “anti-Islamic.” But she described some conservative Muslims as “enemies of freedom” and said that those who do not integrate pose a risk to German culture.

She generally dismisses the criticism by fellow gays and lesbians.

“I was labeled by a gay magazine as the most dangerous homosexual in Germany,” Weidel said. “I called up my partner and said, ‘In Germany, especially in Berlin, we cannot show up at gay parties anymore.’ She was like, ‘We’ve never done that, and we won’t do that,’ so I have no problem.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

N. Korea spins an alternative history A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

A

ny day of the week, the North Korean propaganda machine can be relied upon to spew antiAmerican vitriol using some formulation of “imperialist” and “aggressor” and “hostile.”

The Kim family has kept a tight grip on North Korea for some seven decades by perpetuating the idea that the Americans are out to get them. From the earliest age, North Korean children are taught “cunning American wolves” — illustrated by fair-haired, paleskinned men with huge noses — want to kill them.

Kindergartens and child-care centers are decorated with animals holding grenades and machine guns. Cartoons show plucky squirrel soldiers (North Koreans) triumphing over the cunning wolves (Americans).

“North Koreans live in a war mentality, and this anti-American propaganda is wartime propaganda,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert in North Korean propaganda who teaches at Korea University in Seoul.

The thing is: There is some element of truth to the North Korean version of events. It’s only a kernel, and it is grossly exaggerated, but North Koreans remember very well what most Americans have forgotten (or never knew): The Korean War was a brutal one.

“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people,” said John Delury, a professor in the international relations department at Yonsei University in Seoul.

“But this has been ingrained into the North Korean psyche.”

The Korean Peninsula, previously occupied by Japan, was divided at the end of World War II. Dean Rusk — an Army colonel at the time who went on to become secretary of state — got a map and basically drew a line at the 38th parallel. To the Americans’ surprise, the Soviet Union agreed to the line, and the communist-

backed North and the Americanbacked South were established in 1948 as a “temporary measure.”

On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, installed by the Soviets to lead North Korea, decided to try to reunify the peninsula by force, invading the South. (Although in the North Korean version of events, the South and their imperialist patrons started it.)

The push south was successful until Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed his troops on the mud flats at Incheon, sending the northern troops back. Then the Chinese got involved, managing to push them back to roughly where they started, on the 38th parallel.

All this happened within the first six months or so. For the next two and a half years, neither side was able to make any headway.

The war was drawn to a close in 1953, after exacting a bloody toll.

“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached 3 million, 10 percent of the overall population,” Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University, wrote in an essay. “The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.”

The war ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. To this day, North and South Korea remain in a technical state of war.

American military leaders at the time called the Korean War a “limited war” because they did not let it expand outside the Korean Peninsula. But on the peninsula, it was total devastation.

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting the 32,557 tons of napalm, Bruce Cumings wrote in “The Korean War: A History.”

Rusk said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.”

The Kim regime keeps its people afraid by blaming the United States for its situation, especially sanctions for its economic plight.

This also helps it unify the populace against a supposed threat.

“Anti-Americanism is an ideological tool of the government,”

DAVID GUTTENFELDER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The country’s propaganda arm takes a kernel of truth and uses it to tell of terrible acts committed by American forces during the Korean War said Peter Ward, a North Korea researcher affiliated with the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “They need an enemy and a villain to blame for the division of the country, a scapegoat for the situation they are in.”

As tensions between North Korea and the United States have escalated in recent months, the North has turned up the volume on its propaganda machine, in addition to launching missiles.

In response, President Trump has threatened to use force to punish North Korea (although he has also said he’d be “honored” to meet Kim Jong Un).

“When a new and untested American president starts dangling out the prospect of a surprise missile attack as the solution to the North Korean problem, it plays directly into their worst narrative that the regime tells its peo-

Propaganda showing North Korean children attacking U.S., Japanese and South Korean soldiers hangs in a Pyongyang kindergarten.

ple,” Delury said.

From the very real events of the Korean War, North Korea’s propagandists have created a version of history that is designed to keep the shock and horror alive more than six decades later.

North Korea’s discourse on the Korean War — which it calls the “Victorious Fatherland Liberation War” — was constructed along the lines of Soviet propaganda against Nazi Germany during and after World War II. “North Korea’s propaganda writers were educated in the Soviet Union,” which portrayed its defense against the German invasion as “The Great Patriotic War,” Gabroussenko said.

“So, according to the North Korean version of the Korean War, they were also fighting a great patriotic war against American intruders,” she said.

Take the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities south of Pyongyang. It recalls what North Korea says was a massacre carried out by U.S. troops.

There was fighting and death in Sinchon during the Korean War, but North Korea is held to have vastly exaggerated its claim that 35,000 “martyrs” were killed by U.S. soldiers there.

Kim has visited it several times since he became leader at the end of 2011. During a visit in July 2015, Kim celebrated “the victory day when the Korean people defeated the U.S. imperialists.”

“No matter how crafty the U.S. imperialists become in their moves to cover up their crimes, they can never erase the traces of massacre of Koreans left in this land,” Kim said, according to a state media report.

He also ordered his cadres to “intensify the anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. education.” The Korean Central News Agency reported in March that “more than 18,000 service personnel, working people and youths and students visited the museum” in the first 10 days of the month, “their hearts burning with the resolution to punish the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean warmongers.” n ©The Washington Post

12

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

13

COVER STORY

The painful truth about teeth Many people can’t afford dental care — a visible reminder of the divide between rich and poor

BY M ARY J ORDAN AND K EVIN S ULLIVAN PHOTOS BY L INDA D AVIDSON IN S ALISBURY, M D.

T

wo hours before sunrise, Dee Matello joined the line outside the Wicomico Civic Center, where hundreds of people in hoodies, heavy coats and wool blankets braced against a bitter wind.

Inside, reclining dental chairs were arrayed in neat rows across the arena’s vast floor. Days later, the venue would host Disney on Ice. On this Friday morning, dentists arriving from five states were getting ready to fix the teeth of the first 1,000 people in line.

Matello was No. 503. The small-business owner who supports President Trump had a cracked molar, no dental insurance and a nagging soreness that had forced her to chew on the right side of her mouth for years.

“It’s always bothering me,” she said. And although her toothache wasn’t why she voted for Trump, it was a constant reminder of one reason she did: the feeling that she had been abandoned, left struggling to meet basic needs in a country full of fantastically rich people.

As the distance between rich and poor grows in the United States, few consequences are so overlooked as the divide in dental care. High-end cosmetic dentistry is soaring, and better-off Americans spend well over $1 billion each year just to make their teeth a few shades whiter.

Millions of others rely on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms to treat painful and neglected teeth. continues on next page

An event center becomes a dental clinic. Hundreds of dental professionals and volunteers come to treat more than a thousand adults on a first-come, first-served basis.

Above: Dee Matello has a painful tooth extracted.

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

1 in 5

Americans older than 65 do not have a single real tooth left.

Vita Elliott and Edward Hall, both 63, wait in below-freezing temperatures with hundreds of others, many of whom began waiting at 4 p.m. the afternoon before, to get into the Eastern Shore Mission of Mercy free dental clinic in Salisbury, Md.

COVER STORY

from previous page

Unable to afford expensive root canals and crowns, many simply have them pulled. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 do not have a single real tooth left.

Over two days at the civic center, volunteer dentists would pull 795 teeth. A remarkable number of patients held steady jobs — a forklift operator, a librarian, a postal worker — but said they had no dental insurance and not enough cash to pay for a dentist.

Matello had both problems, adding to her frustration about being cut off from a world that many wealthier Americans take for granted.

“The country is way too divided between well-off people and people struggling for everything — even to see the dentist,” she said.

“And the worst part is, I don’t see a bridge to cross over to be one of those rich people.”

Matello voted for Barack Obama in 2008, thinking he offered the best option for working people, but she sat out the 2012 election. Last year, she rallied behind Trump after listening to him talk about “the forgotten men and women of our country, people who work hard but don’t have a voice.”

“I’m running to be their voice,” Trump said repeatedly.

What Matello heard was a promise “to restore pride to the working poor.”

A big part of that promise was Trump’s assurance that he would build a “beautiful” health-care system to serve every American, a system that would cost less and do

more. But nearly four months into Trump’s presidency, Matello sees Trump backing a Republican health-care plan that appears to leave low-income people and the elderly worse off.

“I am hearing about a number of people who will lose their coverage under the new plan,” Matello said. “Is Trump the wolf in grandma’s clothes? My husband and I are now saying to each other: ‘Did we really vote for him?’ ” Matello said she has no option but to keep hoping Trump will devise “a plan so we can all feel the benefits of a better economy.” But since he took office, Trump has focused on so many other things that Matello has begun to wonder about his promises to the working class: “Was he just out to get our votes?”

‘What I am seeing is absolutely horrifying’ Straight, white teeth are associated with social success — just about everyone on TV or with a big job has them. People drop $2,000 per tooth on porcelain veneers to hide the smallest imperfections.

Trump has unusually perfect, snow-white teeth, prompting numerous cosmetic dentists to publicly note that he seems to have had expensive work done.

“If I see someone with perfect teeth, I think, ‘Oh, man, they’re out of my league,’ ” Matello said. “Us poor people ‘status’ each other.

We’re like, ‘Ah, dude, you don’t have any teeth!’ Or if you see someone with little jagged yellow stubs,

you think, ‘Oh, man, you have lived here your whole life, haven’t you?’ ” “Here” is Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the poorest part of one of the country’s richest states. It’s a region famous for chicken farms: Perdue’s national headquarters is here in Salisbury, a town of 30,000.

Matello lives 20 miles north, in Laurel, Del., near fields that sprout corn, watermelons and soybeans.

In these rural areas, even the water can work against people.

Many homes, including Matello’s, rely on well water. Unlike water from public systems, well water is not fluoridated. Nationwide, 25 percent of Americans are not connected to a fluoridated water system, and therefore are missing out on what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called one of the 10 great health advances of the 20th century.

“It’s all well water, no fluoride,” said Patricia Higgins, one of the dentists volunteering at the Salisbury clinic. “In these places, we see people with a different level of dental problems.”

George Acs, director of the dental department at Chesapeake Health Care, a clinic near Salisbury, said people with oral pain and infections are inundating hospitals. Last year, more than 2 million U.S. emergency room visits were attributed to neglected teeth.

“What I am seeing is absolutely horrifying,” said Acs, who recently testified about the problem before the Maryland state legislature.

Although those hospital visits cost an estimated $1.6 billion a year, the ER is generally not equipped to fix dental problems, Acs told lawmakers. So ER doctors just medicate people with “a perpetual cycle of antibiotics and opioids.”

That cycle is feeding a nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction.

Meanwhile, Higgins said, Americans’ increasing reliance on all kinds of drugs is further ruining their teeth. Many drugs cause dry mouth, which leads to more cavities. When she started her practice 35 years ago, she said, people took far fewer prescription drugs. Now patients hand her computer printouts with long lists of them.

Matello’s problem wasn’t complicated: A molar shattered years ago. The 46-year-old mother of three had not seen a dentist in nine years. When parts of her tooth broke off, she knew fixing it

could cost hundreds of dollars, and other bills were always more urgent.

Then she heard on TV that the nonprofit Mission of Mercy was coming to the Eastern Shore to host one of the free dental clinics that had drawn overnight crowds in Nebraska, North Carolina and other parts of the country. So she decided to take that Friday off.

Matello and her husband own a small vending-machine business called DeeLicious, spending their days restocking 69 machines installed in factories, schools and office buildings.

Life was easier before the recession hit in 2007. Her husband managed a furniture warehouse, making more than $70,000 a year, and she sold fishing boats, adding to their income. But then people stopped buying big-ticket sofas and boats, and they both lost their jobs.

So they started buying vending machines and earn about $47,000 a year. Matello said she doesn’t know if the country’s rich-poor divide is worse now, but it sure feels more “in your face.”

She said people judge success based on what people wear or where they live, and she even catches herself doing it. Washington, for example, is just 150 miles west, but to Matello, it feels a planet away, totally out of reach.

“It’s a beautiful city to drive through. But I could never live there. I wouldn’t fit in,” she said. “I don’t have the toys, the education, the money to live there. We have nothing in common. That divide is why you see lower-income people rising up, being mad at affluent people.”

And teeth, she said, “are the telltale, visible sign of wealth.”

Fewest dentists available where need is greatest The Washington, D.C., region has one of the greatest concentrations of dentists in the world, with many offering high-end services in offices that resemble luxury spas.

More than 50 million Americans, by contrast, live in areas officially designated by the federal government as Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas. A great many of them are working poor.

“It’s completely skewed. You have the fewest dentists where the need is greatest,” Acs said.

Louis Sullivan, a physician who was secretary of health and hu-

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

15

COVER STORY

man services under President George H.W. Bush, said “broad systemic problems” block access to dentists.

First, new dentists often start out with significant debt, and they gravitate toward wealthy areas where they have a better shot at making money. The typical graduate from a four-year, post-collegiate dental school owes $260,000 — more than the average medical student.

Then they set up solo practices, shouldering pricey overhead — equipment, office space, a receptionist — that accounts for much of a patient’s bill. While younger dentists are more likely to join groups that share costs, the century-old model of the solo practice has resisted change.

Then there’s the matter of payment. Teeth generally are treated separately from the rest of the body, a tradition that dates to dentistry’s origins as a specialty of barbers, who performed oral surgery and pulled teeth. Today, many public health officials view that division as a mistake. Poor oral health can lead to heart disease and other serious medical problems, and tooth loss can lead to depression and difficulty eating and speaking.

The separation extends to insurance. Even Medicare, the federal health program that covers 55 million seniors and disabled people, does not cover dental problems.

For that, people must buy dental insurance, which typically limits annual benefits to about $1,500 per person — an amount that has

barely budged in decades, even as costs have risen.

The price of employer-provided plans varies greatly and can cost a family $500 a year or more, industry experts said. For those whose jobs don’t offer dental benefits, it can be even more expensive. So tens of millions go without: More than a third of American adults have no dental coverage, according to the American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute.

Children’s coverage has been improving. All states are required to provide dental benefits to children on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act currently requires medical plans to offer dental care to those younger than 19. But that requirement — and the dental benefits of 5 million adults newly covered under the ACA — are jeopardized by the Trump-backed health overhaul now being debated in Congress.

Adults who are poor enough, and live in certain states, can get coverage through Medicaid, the state-federal health program for low-income Americans. But only about 38 percent of dentists accept Medicaid — about half the rate of physicians — in part because of low reimbursement rates. On average, Medicaid covers about 37 percent of the bill, according to a recent ADA analysis. Dentists who don’t accept Medicaid also complain of bureaucratic hassle and high rates of canceled appointments.

In a handful of states, Medicaid offers no dental coverage for adults.

Delaware, where Matello lives, is one of them. Which is why, on a damp Friday morning, she found herself lining up with hundreds of other people with aching teeth.

116 dentists, 1,165 patients At 9:44 a.m., five hours after arriving in Salisbury, Matello finally made it inside the civic center and began to warm up.

“What do you need done?” she asked an older veteran in a wheelchair.

“Need nine teeth pulled,” he said. “My wife works at Rite Aid, and we don’t have any insurance.”

A little after noon, Matello’s number was called. A volunteer took her temperature; she was running a slight fever but not high enough to stop treatment.

Two more hours. Finally, she was waved over to an X-ray machine under a basketball hoop.

Just as Matello expected to be called for her turn in the dentist’s chair, a volunteer announced in a loud voice: “Those up to number 500 will be seen today. The rest will have to come back tomorrow.”

“You have to be kidding!” yelled a frustrated woman behind Matello. “I have to do this all over again?”

Matello’s eyes filled with tears.

She had been waiting 10 hours.

A volunteer gave her a wristband that would put her at the head of the line the next day. So she drove home in her 18-year-old Jeep, ate dinner chewing only on the right side yet again, and set her alarm.

By 7 a.m. the next day, she was finally in one of the reclining

chairs, with a dentist pointing a bright light into her mouth.

She stared up at the arena’s high industrial black ceiling. The whir of drills across the open room competed with Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” playing over a loudspeaker.

Robert Testani, a volunteer dentist from Catonsville, Md., examined Matello and checked her X-ray before easing a syringe of novocaine into her mouth. He prepared to pull her broken molar.

“Don’t worry. This is routine,” he said. He paused and looked around. “Except for the setting.”

Over two days, 116 dentists treated 1,165 patients, providing $1 million worth of fillings and other care, according to the Mission of Mercy. Matello was grateful. She was told her panoramic X-ray and extraction would have cost $600 to $800 in a regular office.

She looked at some of the others who had come here, despite working for a living cutting down trees, building homes, minding a town library, running small businesses.

“We are not staying home, not sleeping and living off the government,” she said.

She wondered why there wasn’t a better system for people like her.

She tried not to look at the 51-yearold truck driver lying next to her who had three teeth pulled, his mouth stuffed with bloody gauze.

“I am trying to think that this is not demeaning,” she said as she cleared the chair for the next person in line. “But it is. It’s like a Third World country.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

ABOVE LEFT: At home, Dee Matello tries to floss a broken molar. She hadn’t seen a dentist in nine years because she did not have dental insurance or enough cash to pay for treatment.

ABOVE RIGHT: Matello cries before having the tooth pulled at the Eastern Shore Mission of Mercy free clinic. “I am trying to think that this is not demeaning,” she said. “But it is.”

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

TECHNOLOGY

A robotic helper with ideas of its own BY

S TEVEN O VERLY

F

or a tiny tabletop robot, ElliQ has a lot of opinions.

When the weather is nice, it suggests a walk.

When it’s time to take medication, the device is ready with a reminder. Haven’t spoken to relatives in awhile? It thinks a call is in order.

Israel-based Intuition Robotics is developing the virtual assistant specifically for the elderly, a population shown to be more vulnerable to social isolation and physical inactivity. The founders expect that frequent engagement with a robot that makes positive lifestyle suggestions will promote physical and mental wellness, said chief executive Dor Skuler.

“Think of it as a fully autonomous agent,” Skuler said. “You tell it what your goals are, and it tries to measure how you’re doing on those goals and suggests activities accordingly.”

Advancements in artificial intelligence have given rise to inhome virtual assistants, devices that listen and respond as we command them to turn off the lights, purchase items online or order restaurant takeout.

ElliQ (pronounced L-E-Q) represents a new role for these technologies: proactively recommending ways in which humans could be living better lives, from getting more exercise to watching informational videos. Humans may not be taking direct orders from their technology, at least not yet, but it nevertheless suggests an emerging relationship where smart devices wield even greater influence over our decisions.

“If we’re focusing just on virtual assistance, I think so far the interaction has been very much human-initiated,” said William Mark, president of information and computing sciences at SRI International. “I put it that way because if we broaden the perspective, of course there are lots of examples of machines telling us what to do.”

Indeed, machines prod humans all day. Your alarm rings to keep you from sleeping through a

INTUITION ROBOTICS

The developers of ElliQ say it could make a good companion for the elderly by promoting wellness morning meeting. Your car beeps when you’ve started the engine but haven’t clipped your seat belt.

Your Netflix account suggests movies to watch based on your viewing history.

Virtual assistant robots are different in that they have a broader view of our daily lives and are designed to help us accomplish tasks. They can learn when we typically wake up and go to sleep, what we watch on television and what we purchase online. As the devices become capable of doing even more, they will store and analyze that information, too.

The key is that we invite those technologies to nag us and that we have control over them. We set the alarm clock ourselves — and have the power to hit snooze.

“We have a whole set of words for talking about this in English: persuade, hint, advocate, encourage,” Mark said. “There’s all kinds of things that have a wide variety of implications and very different feelings that are generated by it.”

ElliQ monitors the user’s movements and learns their patterns to ensure its suggestions are well-timed, Skuler said. The user might prefer to take walks in the morning rather than after lunch or value quiet time in the evening over listening to music.

Currently, ElliQ is programmed with seven goals that the user can choose among, such as learning something new each day, being more physically active or communicating with family more often. The company sets one of the goals for you: developing a “positive affinity” for the robot.

“Meaning we don’t annoy you to the point you unplug us,” Skuler said.

Developing machines that can persuade people to act in a certain way is both a technological and psychological challenge, Mark said. Even humans struggle to know when advice will be well received and deliver it in a way that actually motivates the recipient.

ElliQ proactively recommends ways in which humans could be living better lives, from getting more exercise to watching informational videos.

“The system has to hit it just right in terms of giving you the information you need at just the right time without annoying you,” Mark said.

“You want to think that virtual assistance cares about you or has your best interest at heart,” he added.

That may seem like a tall order considering the robot does not, in fact, have a heart. But it’s not uncommon for people to develop bonds with technology and other personal inanimate objects. It’s why we give names to our cars or yell at our malfunctioning computer, for example.

Virtual assistant systems can take many cues from the way humans engage one another, said Justine Cassell, director emerita of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In her research, Cassell programs robots to replicate common features of human conversations that help people establish trust. For example, the machine might divulge information about itself before asking the human for information — creating a sense of equality and transparency.

The technology got a trial run at a meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, this year. Attendees had conversations with the system, which then recommended conference sessions they would enjoy or fellow attendees they should meet. In most cases, the attendees accepted the recommendations, Cassell said.

Of course, as virtual assistants gain greater influence, it’s easy to conjure up dystopian scenarios in which technology starts to actually exert authority. It’s one thing for a system to suggest you go for a walk after watching television for hours and another for a system to power off the TV until you’ve complied.

“The machines that we interact with need to be designed to keep sight of allowing people to maintain that very important sense of autonomy, that they are in control of their existence,” Cassell said. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

17

DATA CRUNCH

KLMNO

Dining around the world

Crunched

are not alonethe in theirworld love of dining out. In fact, Asians are just as enthusiastic as DiningAmericans out around

North Americans about eating outside the home, according to a Nielsen survey. Where diners

Americans are not alone in their love by of dining out. In fact, Asians are just food as enthusiastic as North Americans eating choose to eat varies continent, however.

Fast and casual dining are about popular outside the home, according to a Nielsen survey. Where diners choose to eat differs by continent, however. Fast food and casual especially in North America, while alsolike likeformal formal dining establishments, dining areeverywhere, popular everywhere, especially in North America, whileAsians Asians also dining establishments, street food and — Elizabeth Chang food and self-serve Europeans self-serve street cafeterias, and Europeans clingcafeterias, to the cafe. and — Elizabeth Changcling to the cafe. n

europe

asia-pacific

4% 10%

10%

5% 14%

20%

42%

once a day or more frequently 3 to 6 times a week once or twice a week 1 to 3 times per month less than once a month or never

32% 36%

28%

africa/middle east

latin america

10% 24%

Frequency of dining at restaurants or other out-of-home dining establishments:

north america

11% 12%

23%

13%

11%

9% 16% 21%

20% 34%

9%

30%

37%

31%

of global respondents say they eat away from home once a day or more frequently.

countries that exceed the global average: hong Kong 26%, taiwan 25%, malaysia 23%, Thailand 22%, morocco 20%, singapore 19%, Brazil 17%, Vietnam 16%, saudi arabia 15%, india 14%, United States 12%, egypt 12%, indonesia 11%

SOURCE: THE NIELSEN GLOBAL OUT-OF-HOME DINING SURVEY, Q3 2015; NOTE: PERCENTAGES MAY NOT EQUAL 100% DUE TO ROUNDING

WEEKLY

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

What is power, and how can we achieve it?

N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

S ARAH J AFFE

I YOU’RE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU THINK A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen

By Eric Liu PublicAffairs.

222 pp. $25.

n the hectic first days after the election of Donald Trump, a series of documents began to circulate on social media among newly motivated activists seeking inspiration and strategy for the fights ahead. One of those documents, called the Indivisible Guide, was put together by former congressional staffers who had survived the tea party onslaught early in the Obama administration and who had written down the tactics that had proved successful in pressuring members of Congress to stymie the agenda of a then-popular new president. The guide went viral and evolved, becoming first a website and then a series of organizations around the country, collaborating with progressive groups such as the Working Families Party and MoveOn. The tactics in the guide are nothing revolutionary: They are basic civics in action, lessons in finding members of Congress, calling their offices, attending their town hall meetings. But in a country where only a slim majority bothers to vote in presidential elections, the guide was the first introduction for thousands of people to political engagement beyond the voting booth.

Eric Liu’s new book, “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” has a similar feel. As an adviser to President Bill Clinton, he is, like the Indivisible writers, a former political insider. And in a country where so many are flummoxed by politics, the insights he offers may come as a surprise to many.

Liu has written sort of a selfhelp book for the would-be activist, packed with pithy, commonsense aphorisms such as: “Those for whom the system works will tend to defend it.” Drawing on an array of references, from pragmatist philosophers to billionaire stock traders, Liu assembles an argument that anyone can organize their community and be a “civic catalyst.”

At the heart of Liu’s book is the question of power, something that

ALLISON CARTER/(ALABAMA) TIMES DAILY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Demonstrators in Florence, Ala., call on President Trump to release his tax returns. Author Eric Liu writes that anyone can organize their community and be a “civic catalyst.”

he correctly notes is deeply obscured in American society. Power, Liu writes, “is the capacity to ensure that others do as you would want them to do. If that sounds menacing or distasteful, or makes you feel squeamish, I understand.

And I invite you to get over it.”

Instead of worrying that the possession of power, or the use of it, makes you a bad person, he argues that power is something we all have and need not be shy about using — after all, the people in charge certainly aren’t.

Though Liu determinedly draws his examples from bipartisan campaigns, he is at his strongest when he puts aside the need to speak to both sides and makes a serious case for his own values in the face of legitimate outrages.

Unfortunately, this is all too rare in this book. More often he relies on simplistic definitions of left and right that draw false equivalencies between the two, such as: “There are some on the left who think only business has power and some on the right who think only government has power.”

In part, this is a problem because a book purporting to teach skills for gaining power ought to acknowledge that goals and values will shape tactics: Conservatives and progressives alike may delight

in disrupting a town hall meeting, but beyond that, they often diverge. In one section, Liu jumps from a group of conservative campus “free speech” activists hosting a “Disinvitation Dinner” to organizer Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Despite both being examples of “theatrical” symbolic protest, the contrast between a bunch of well-heeled right-wing celebrities being feted at a blacktie gathering and a black woman scaling a flagpole to take down a symbol of slavery, and being taken away in handcuffs, could not be more striking. These are not both tactics for people with equivalent levels of power. As Liu himself notes, “Power, then, is an expression of our moral mindset.”

At times, for an author taking power as his subject, Liu seems naive about how it works. The chapter on using narrative for organizing makes little attempt to analyze the success of symbolic fights, cheering them more for their creativity than for concrete gains.

By optimistically declaring that “power is infinite,” that no one need lose power when another person or group gains it, Liu posits a kind of power that avoids direct conflict, that when it wins does not

cause anyone else to lose. This can be true when talking about something like Giving Tuesday or an advocacy group for people with Tourette’s syndrome, two of Liu’s examples and organizations that even the hardest-hearted Ayn Rand devotee would have a hard time opposing. But he avoids the subject of what happens if two diametrically opposed groups — say, the campus-carry advocates he describes and his own Alliance for Gun Responsibility — use the tactics he teaches in a head-tohead clash. The argument that power can always be gained without causing anyone else a loss is itself ideological. To create a more equal society, it is a fact that those who hoard power and wealth will have to give some of it up.

In exhorting the currently powerless to get involved, Liu therefore sometimes slides into bootstrap rhetoric. While it is deeply important to recognize that even the most exploited people in society have agency and should direct their own struggles for justice, it is simply wrong to state: “This means we are all complicit in every inequity we experience.” Language like this lets the already powerful off the hook.

Ultimately, Liu’s is still a greatman narrative of history, designed to persuade the reader not to view the world differently but to aspire to become one of those great men.

Encouraging people to “act as if you already had the social and civic power you seek” is well and good, but power is not, in fact, all in our heads. Liu knows this — it is evident when he writes about the need for “new systems” and that “getting these new systems will take a conceptual revolution no less significant than the ones that attended the birth of this nation.”

But like the Indivisible Guide, his book is less advice for that revolution than it is an introduction to the basics of civic engagement. n Jaffe is the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A family’s journey to the middle class

Nothing is a given in this investigation

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

T

l

REVIEWED BY

K RISSAH T HOMPSON

he newspapers at the time largely overlooked the massive movement of African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North. The Great Migration, as it would come to be known, began in the early 1900s and lasted decades as more than 6 million blacks left their homes for the seeming promised land of big cities.

Among them were the ancestors of Bruce D. Haynes, who explores the social and cultural implications of the exodus in “Down the Up Staircase,” a family memoir and social history written with his wife and co-author, Syma Solovitch.

Haynes traces his roots from the farming South to bustling Harlem, where his paternal grandparents settled and played important roles in the civil rights movement.

Haynes takes great pride in his family’s story, rifling through old papers to fill in the biography of his grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, a man of significant achievement whom history has nearly forgotten.

George Haynes was mentored and befriended by famed scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, helped found the National Urban League and was an adviser on race to President Woodrow Wilson. “If W.E.B. Du Bois was the great agitator and visionary of the New Negro movement, George Haynes — his protege — was its architect, forging critical partnerships and building the infrastructure to support these new artists,” the authors write.

George died in 1960, 10 months before Bruce Haynes was born, but he remains the pride of the family.

More than once, the authors note that George was included in a series painted by Laura Wheeler Waring called “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” which highlighted important figures in the Harlem Renaissance and was later exhibited at the Smithsonian.

George Haynes — who migrated to New York from Pine Bluff, Ark., and bought a stately home in Har-

lem — represents an upward leap in class and education, but the family struggles to keep climbing.

Bruce Haynes’s father, George Edmund Jr. (known as Edmund), lived in the shadow of his prominent father. Edmund was also college educated and trained as a social worker. He and Bruce’s mother, Daisy, raised three sons in Harlem in the large family home purchased by George Haynes.

The home is a potent symbol of the Haynes family’s social status.

While living there, Edmund and Daisy sent their sons to the best schools the city had to offer. But while the family’s public face seemed to continue to reflect middle-class respectability, life inside began to fray. Edmund and Daisy’s marriage hit a rocky patch and never quite recovered. She took out her unhappiness by an excessive use of her husband’s credit cards.

Despite excelling at elite private schools, Bruce’s eldest brother, George Haynes, became a drug addict and confronted mental health challenges. The second Haynes son, Alan, was a promising artist before he was shot outside a bike shop in the Bronx.

The family’s grand home slowly deteriorated. The neighborhood became rife with crime.

The author and youngest son, Bruce, was caught between his complicated home life and his privileged schooling. The dissonance left him feeling like a man without a community. He became an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Yale University. The Haynes family migration then took another turn when Bruce moved to California, where he is now a sociology professor at the University of California at Davis. Through his studies, Bruce has uncovered more of his family’s story and discovered his own link to his grandfather: George Haynes, like Bruce himself, was trained as a sociologist. n Thompson is a features writer for The Washington Post.

S DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE Three Generations of a Harlem Family

By Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch Columbia.

200 pp. $30.

TESTIMONY

By Scott Turow Grand Central. 483 pp. $28.

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

ome men cope with a divorce-turned-midlife crisis by running marathons or trading in their Volvo station wagon for a tangerine-colored sports car. Attorney Bill ten Boom, the narrator of Scott Turow’s smart, demanding new thriller, takes a more altruistic path. Forsaking Kindle County, the Chicago-like setting of so much of Turow’s fiction, Boom (as almost everyone calls him) accepts an invitation to be a special prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

His assignment is to learn exactly what happened in 2004 at a refugee camp in Tuzla, Bosnia, where 400 Roma were allegedly buried alive, it’s unclear by whom. One possibility is Serbian forces led by their sadistic, amoral and still-at-large commander, Laza Kajevic, described by Boom as having “the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country’s and his rantings the voice of his people’s long-suppressed rage.” Another possibility is the U.S. Army, because the atrocity occurred in an area under American control during a NATO peacekeeping mission.

What Boom knows about the massacre comes from Ferko Rincic, a Roma eyewitness and the sole survivor. Boom works closely with Ferko’s lawyer and interpreter, Esma Czarni. Outside the courtroom, Esma’s salient feature is her robust sexuality. She comes on to Boom like a tornado, and soon he is having the best booms of his life. Long before the smitten prosecutor admits to having played the consummate fool, the reader sees Esma for what she is: a femme with plenty of fatale.

Two other main characters resist easy categorization. One is Layton Merriwell, the American general in charge of NATO forces in Bosnia at the time of the massacre. As Boom interviews Merriwell, the two take a shine to each other. Merriwell would like

to help but must watch his step.

The sparring between the prosecutor and the general — antagonists who hardly bother to hide their mutual admiration — makes for lively reading.

Another powerful figure is Attila Doby, a retired U.S. Army sergeant major. Doby has become a one-woman employment agency, supplying, in her words, “Bosnian workers for U.S. military support operations all over the Mideast.” That’s what she professes publicly, at any rate. Under the radar, she’s a throwback to Milo Minderbinder, the finger-in-every-pie entrepreneur in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”

Attila is partial to American slang, but Goos, the Aussie who helps Boom with his investigation, goes her one better. Turow indulges an almost perverse yen for accuracy by larding Goos’s speech with irritatingly obscure Australianisms. In quick succession, for example, Goos talks about one chap who is “ropeable” and another who plans on “dobbing” Kajevic to NATO. At times, the movements of soldiers and civilians in the Bosnia of 2004 become almost too convoluted to follow, but don’t give up. Just when you’re wishing you had jotted down major plot points, a character will deliver a capsule summary of where things stand. Meanwhile, Turow devotees will enjoy the glimpses of stalwarts from previous Kindle County novels.

The real pleasure of the new novel lies not so much in solving the mystery of the massacre as in watching Turow knock down assumption after assumption made

by Boom — and the reader. In fact, I can’t think of another novel in which so many givens end up being exposed as either honest mistakes or outright lies. “Testimony” is a tour de force of collapsing perceptions. n Drabelle is a former books editor at The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Why I’m taking down Confederate monuments MITCH LANDRIEU is the mayor of New Orleans. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

Last month, New Orleans began the long-overdue process of removing four statues honoring the lost, and immoral, Confederate cause. Now, we continue the job.

Getting here wasn’t easy. It took a two-year review process, a City Council vote and victories over multiple legal challenges. The original contractor we’d hired to remove the monuments backed out after receiving death threats and having one of his cars set ablaze. Nearly every heavy-crane company in southern Louisiana has received threats from opponents. Some have likened these monuments to other monuments around the world from bygone eras, and have argued that civic resources would be better spent trying to educate the public about the history they embody. Respectfully, that’s not the point. As mayor, I must consider their impact on our entire city. It’s my job to chart the course ahead, not simply to venerate the past.

More than almost any other city in the world, New Orleans is truly a city of many nations.

Between the native Choctaw, Houma Nation and Chitimacha tribes, the colonial explorers de Soto and de La Salle, the Acadians, the Haitians, the Senegambians and other African nations, the imperial powers of France and Spain, and ultimately the United States, our city is a cross-section of humanity in all its colors and cultures. In recent decades, our Vietnamese and Latino communities have flourished. We are a melting pot, a gumbo. That is our strength.

But New Orleans was also America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of misery and torture. Our history is forever intertwined with that of our great nation — including its most terrible sins. We must always remember our history and learn from it. But that doesn’t mean we must valorize

the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal — literally — in our most prominent public places.

The record is clear: New Orleans’s Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were erected with the goal of rewriting history to glorify the Confederacy and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. These monuments stand not as mournful markers of our legacy of slavery and segregation, but in reverence of it. They are an inaccurate recitation of our past, an affront to our present and a poor prescription for our future.

The right course, then, is to excise these symbols of injustice.

The Battle of Liberty Place monument was not built to commemorate the fallen law enforcement officers of the racially integrated New Orleans police and state militia. It was meant to honor members of the Crescent City White League, the people who killed them. That kind of “honor” has no place in

MAX BECHERER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Protesters calling for the removal of New Orleans’s Confederate monuments face off against those who want them left alone. It’s time to look to the future instead of venerating a flawed past, Landrieu says.

an American city. So, last month, we took the monument down.

This month, we began the removal of a statue honoring Davis, and soon thereafter, Lee and Beauregard. It won’t erase history. But we can begin a new chapter of New Orleans’s history by placing these monuments, and the legacy of oppression they represent, in museums and other spaces where they can be viewed in an appropriate educational setting as examples of our capacity to change.

After we’re done moving these monuments, we’ll face an even greater task: coming together to decide who we are as a city — and as a nation. Over the past few years, before the monument removal effort, we began Welcome Table New Orleans, which facilitates tough conversations about race and brings various communities together on projects in their neighborhoods. As part of our work, residents have discussed and designed reconciliation projects, such as a mural and oral history project on what was once part of a plantation, as monuments to the future, not the past.

History, unfortunately, has seen great nations become lost, isolated and ultimately extinct by refusing to confront the sins of the past and evolve to meet

the demands of a changing world. If we don’t want to be forever held back by our crushing history of institutional racism, it’s time to relegate these monuments to their proper place.

Last year, when President Barack Obama opened the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, he spoke of the need to contextualize our history through one of the museum’s most telling artifacts: a slave auction block with a marker noting that Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay had once spoken from atop it. “For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history, with a plaque,” Obama said, “were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men” — not the families “sold and bid like cattle” on that same spot.

Just like the decision to publicly recognize the tragic significance of that stone, removing New Orleans’s Confederate monuments from places of prominence is an acknowledgment that it is time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soulsearching a truly lost cause. n

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Essential steps to stop cyberattacks NICHOLAS WEAVER is a computer security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

A massive cyber-extortion attack known as “WannaCry” wrought havoc across the globe recently, taking out much of Britain’s National Health Service and, in a delicious bit of irony, the Russian Interior Ministry.

The attack was a long time coming, representing the inevitable merging of two plagues that have long ravaged the Internet: the invention of programs that can rapidly infect digital systems and the rise of Internet crime. Without action, WannaCry represents just the first of what will undoubtedly be a long nightmare of self-propagating criminal attacks.

The first Internet plague arose in 1988 when a small program, written by computer scientist Robert Morris Jr., escaped. This program, clearly written as an interesting experiment, ran on a single computer and, from there, attempted to contact other computers. Once it found another computer, it attempted to exploit the victim using one of several vulnerabilities. When successful, it copied itself over and started running: First two computers ran the program — then four, then eight. Exponential growth caused it to quickly spread to all vulnerable systems on the Internet. Combined with a bug that caused it to overload its victims, this acted to effectively shut down the Internet of 1988.

This was the inadvertent

dawning of the worm, a program that spreads on its own from computer to computer. Since that time, we’ve seen many other worms, including Code Red (the first widespread worm in the modern era, infecting 300,000 systems over 13 hours), Slammer (spreading worldwide in 15 minutes and even infecting a nuclear power plant), Blaster (silently infecting hundreds of thousands of Windows computers) and Witty (which took down network security monitors belonging to the U.S. Army).

The second plague crept up on us more subtly in the form of criminals seeking to make money.

From spammers hawking Viagra to online bank-robbers seeking to take control over corporate accounts, this plague is organized

crime that doesn’t care much about the damage done as long as it makes money. One particularly vile criminal strain involves ransomware: programs that encrypt a victim’s files and demand money to access them.

WannaCry is simply the merging of these two plagues.

Dealing with worms is a technical problem — one that researchers have and will continue to focus on. But dealing with online criminals is a policy and economic problem.

Even when we can identify these criminals, many of whom are Russian, far too many escape capture. And since we can’t seem to dissuade Russia from directly attacking Western democracies with its hacking and information operations, it is highly doubtful we can get Russian cooperation on cybercrime.

There is a potential, however, to disrupt payments: Don’t play Whac-A-Mole on criminals; play Whac-A-Mole on criminal business models. In the past, cybercriminals used Liberty Reserve until the U.S. government shut it down and arrested its founder for money laundering.

This proved a substantial blow to the criminal underground.

Likewise, ransomware actually looked poised to take off earlier with payments through Green

Dot MoneyPak and similar networks, but pressure from the Treasury Department has stifled the cash-out network used by criminals to convert MoneyPak into currency. That leaves bitcoin as the only game in town for those wanting to conduct cyberextortion at scale.

Perhaps it is time for the United States to actually take meaningful action against bitcoin. For noncriminal transactions, bitcoin is decidedly inferior to all the alternatives, as it is expensive, cumbersome and surprisingly slow. Bitcoin’s only “superiority” over other electronic payment systems is its censorship resistance: There is no central authority that can say “thou shalt not.” Thus, it is only superior for criminal uses.

U.S. bitcoin exchanges can be pressured to not enable ransom payments, and the Treasury Department can exert pressure on foreign bitcoin exchanges to comply with U.S. moneylaundering laws or be cut off from all international bank transactions. There is also a possibility for a technical solution: clogging the bitcoin network with spam transactions.

Unless something can be done, we can only expect the merged plagues — the crimeware worms — to continue to create chaos. n

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY LISA BENSON

A human rights policy for Trump JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post.

Donald Trump has made it clear enough that he has no interest in pursuing the traditional U.S. human rights strategy of pressuring foreign regimes, including U.S. allies, to release political prisoners, stop torture or allow free elections. But what about an America First campaign to deter other governments from mistreating or unjustly imprisoning U.S. citizens — in some cases, simply because they are Americans?

A bit haphazardly, the Trump administration has already made a start at such a policy. If it wants to build on it, there is plenty of opportunity.

The start includes Aya Hijazi, a 30-year-old Egyptian American who was freed in late April after Trump raised her case with strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sissi.

Hijazi and her husband had been imprisoned for nearly three years on bogus child abuse charges; they had established a nonprofit to help Cairo’s street children, thus drawing the attention of a security apparatus that targets all civil society groups with American connections.

Releasing Hijazi was an easy way for Sissi to pander to Trump without altering the most repressive regime in Egypt’s modern history. Trump, in turn, was foolish to embrace the dictator, who is slowly driving his country over a cliff.

Still, Hijazi was freed. So was the family of Xie Yang, a

courageous Chinese lawyer who released a damning account of how he was tortured after his 2015 arrest. When his wife and children fled to Thailand, Chinese agents tracked them down and had them arrested.

They were on the verge of being forcibly returned to Beijing when U.S. diplomats spirited them out the back door of a local jail, according to a report by the Associated Press. Xie’s wife, Chen Giuqiu, and her two daughters — one of whom is a U.S. citizen — arrived in Texas in March.

In April, American business executive Phan Phan-Gillis was deported two years after being arrested on spying charges.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly raised her case during his first visit to Beijing.

If Trump chooses to make such

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

cases a priority, there are plenty more out there. North Korea is holding four Americans. Iran also has at least four. Venezuela keeps Joshua Holt, who was arrested on bogus charges after he traveled to Caracas to marry a Venezuelan. And at least three more Americans are among the 40,000-plus political prisoners imprisoned by the Sissi regime.

The abuse of Americans abroad is in part the inevitable result of a nation of immigrants and the resulting ubiquity around the world of U.S. passport holders. But it’s probably been encouraged by the failure of the past several administrations to take it seriously enough.

President Barack Obama, like a couple of presidents before him, preferred to downplay cases where U.S. citizens were held.

When Post reporter Jason Rezaian was arrested in Iran, Obama declined to connect his jailing to the ongoing nuclear negotiations. Rezaian and several other Americans were released only after the administration agreed to a prisoner swap.

Obama did manage to free an Egyptian American, Mohamed Soltan. But that took a year, and the administration eschewed tough measures recommended

by State Department human

rights staff, such as expelling Egyptian military attaches in Washington if a deadline for Soltan’s release was not met.

“I’ve always felt we should be more militant about getting unjustly detained Americans out of prison,” said Tom Malinowski, the former State Department assistant secretary in charge of human rights during the Obama years. Malinowski defends Obama’s record of advocating for imprisoned Americans but said, “I think if we were willing to signal in several such cases that we are prepared to go to war for our people, fewer countries would mess with Americans in the future, and quick, quiet diplomatic solutions would become easier when they do.”

Of course, Malinowski does not mean actual war, but tough steps such as expelling envoys and holding up aid payments.

Neither he nor other human rights advocates see it as a substitute for a global policy.

Trump has an opportunity to carve out a role as a fierce defender of Americans abroad, distinguish himself from past presidents and score a few relatively easy wins. If he seizes it, even those of us who despise his values-free foreign policy will have to give him some credit. n

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Pregnancy BY

A MY T UTEUR

Pregnancy has never been safer. Ironically, as major risks have reced­ ed into the past, minor risks have taken center stage. Pregnancy often feels like a minefield: Watch what you eat, watch how you exercise, watch what you do. But many of these worries are based on myths.

MYTH NO. 1 Prenatal vitamins are necessary for healthy pregnancies.

Where did we get the idea that big, expensive multivitamins are necessary for a healthy pregnancy? As with so many aspects of nutrition in pregnancy, researchers studied women from developing countries, often women who were severely nutritionally deprived. Not surprisingly, for women who are chronically malnourished and lacking essential vitamins and nutrients, prenatal supplements can make a difference. That does not mean they’re necessary for women who already eat all the vitamins and minerals they need.

For women who aren’t malnourished, nearly every vitamin and mineral contained in those bulky pills (with the exception of folate and iron) appears to have no impact on pregnancy outcomes. Since folate and iron are available on their own, there’s no need to take a huge, often nauseating vitamin.

MYTH NO. 2 Pregnant women must monitor their diets carefully.

Despite articles warning against foods from coffee to chicken wings, elaborate dietary rules aren’t necessary. Studies show that nutritional changes can help women who are malnourished, but eating specific foods in specific quantities appears to have no effect on pregnancy outcomes in industrialized countries. There’s no evidence that fad or restrictive diets have any impact on the health of the baby or the incidence of complications.

The most important guidance for pregnant women in the United States involves foods that can transmit illnesses; that’s why women should avoid undercooked meats and raw dairy products. But there is no evidence that small amounts of caffeine affects unborn babies.

Studies on alcohol are more ambiguous. Although it is quite clear that large amounts of alcohol can cause fetal alcohol syndrome, the limit of safe consumption is unknown. There are some doctors who insist that if we don’t know the exact limit, women should avoid any alcohol.

But most believe that an occasional glass of wine or beer will not cause any problems.

MYTH NO. 3 Bed rest can prevent miscarriage.

Miscarriage is not a rare experience: Up to 20 percent of pregnancies will naturally end that way. The most common cause is a serious genetic abnormality. In some cases, the fertilized egg divides and grows for a period of time but eventually dies. In many cases, no fetus develops, only placental tissue. So nothing can prevent most miscarriages.

More broadly, studies have found that bed rest does not change a woman’s chances of having a miscarriage. So why did doctors start recommending bed rest to reduce miscarriages? It’s not because there was ever highquality scientific evidence to support it. At most, it seemed like a harmless recommendation — a way for women to feel that they were doing something to preserve the pregnancy, though

ALY SONG/REUTERS

benefits in the first trimester are usually limited to peace of mind.

MYTH NO. 4 Pregnant women should not have X-rays.

Like any medical procedure, X-rays carry risks, whether one is pregnant or not. But as the Mayo Clinic notes, having an X-ray while pregnant usually poses no danger to the developing fetus.

And addressing a mother’s health issues could be vitally important to both her and her child.

After all, the baby is not the only patient in pregnancy; the mother is an equal (if not more important) patient. If a woman develops a health problem that requires X-rays, medications or surgery to diagnose and treat, that problem should be addressed. Untreated maternal medical issues are not merely dangerous for the mother. If they are serious enough, they can lead to miscarriage, premature labor or stillbirth. So treating the mother is also in the baby’s interest.

MYTH NO. 5 Pregnant women should avoid vaccinations.

It’s best to make sure you are fully up to date on your vaccinations before you become pregnant, since some vaccines

(such as the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) and varicella vaccines) do pose risks during pregnancy. But others are safe, such as those for tetanus, flu and pertussis (whooping cough).

In fact, the pertussis vaccine also protects babies after birth.

Whooping cough is one of the greatest infectious threats to infants. With the recent resurgence of the disease because of under-vaccination, babies younger than 6 months (and therefore not fully vaccinated) face serious risks.

We’ve always known that mothers can pass whooping cough antibodies across the placenta. Immunizing or reimmunizing women in the third trimester boosts the production of maternal antibodies, thereby increasing the antibodies their babies get. This can dramatically reduce the risk of an infant contracting whooping cough, with its high incidence of serious complications and death. A pertussis vaccine is recommended for every pregnant woman. n Tuteur is an obstetrician-gynecologist and former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2017

24

Scholarship Awards Program & Hall of Fame Ceremony Keynote Speaker

past “Just one of our recipients!”

Lake Chelan native Joe Harris Jr. – Brooklyn Nets

WVC Hall of Fame Inductees

John Murio

Gene Baker, coach (far left)

Gene Baker and John Murio were both instrumental to the WVC Football program from 1980 - 1991 season, which was the last season for football at WVC.

June 6th • Town Toyota Center Tickets at ncwsportsawards.com Sponsored by:

Wenatchee North Rotary