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Learning to find her voice A teenager wanted to challenge gun culture in her conservative Wyoming town. Would anyone listen? PAGE 12
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Nation When a volcano is your home 8
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THE FIX
The thorn in this conspiracy BY
A ARON B LAKE
President Trump has turned the “witch hunt” dial up to 11, tweeting more than ever about his supposed persecution by law enforcement and even lodging a particularly pernicious conspiracy theory about the FBI spying on his campaign. This comes after he baselessly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his campaign and pointed to alleged bias in the applications to monitor a campaign aide, Carter Page. But there is one central problem with this entire conspiracy theory, as it’s been spun: The fact that these people who supposedly would do anything to stop Trump . . . didn’t. If Trump is to be believed, the FBI decided to spy on Trump’s campaign “for political purposes” during the 2016 election. But then it didn’t use the information it had collected to actually prevent Trump from becoming president? That seems to be a poorly executed conspiracy. And it did know some things. While it perhaps hadn’t nailed down concrete collusion or anything criminal, there were definitely allegations that could have been used to hurt Trump’s campaign if shared with a reporter or two. l The FBI knew Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat over drinks about high-ranking Russian officials who had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. (This is reportedly what launched the counterintelligence investigation in July 2016.) l The FBI and the Justice Department had enough reason to suspect that another foreign policy adviser, Page, was acting as an agent of the Russian government that it was able to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor him on Oct. 21, 2016. These applications require extensive evidence that supposedly took weeks and months to assemble.
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JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump has claimed, among other things, that the FBI spied on his campaign. l The FBI had reportedly been investigating the ties to Russia of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort since 2014 and had a FISA-approved wiretap on him before the election. (Manafort has since been indicted, albeit for alleged financial crimes and not election-related ones.) Any of these stories leaking out before the election would have caused an uproar and all kinds of digging by other reporters. Instead, the FBI seemed to take extra care to avoid anything affecting the election. The New York Times recently detailed just how careful it was, in fact, with only a small group of FBI officials even aware of the operation, which was code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.” The FBI was so careful about this, in fact, that it may have overcompensated. On Oct. 31, 2016, roughly a week before the election, the New York Times reported that the FBI had been investigating and saw “no clear link to Russia.” Officials even shrugged off the idea that Russia was helping Trump, which seems
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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 33
like a weird tack for an organization that set out to spy on a campaign to prove it colluded with Russia. This would seem to have been a pretty good opportunity to mention the possibility that certain members of the Trump campaign were suspected of being agents for the Russian government or had floated the prospect of collusion — which, again, the FBI knew at the time. Instead, the word out of the FBI was that Russia didn’t even favor Trump. And beyond that, there was the small matter of then-FBI Director James B. Comey announcing new emails in the Hillary Clinton investigation on Oct. 28 — a disclosure that Clinton and her allies still blame for her loss. If the FBI wanted Trump to lose, this would seem to have been quite counterproductive. And the combination of the FBI disclosing this and opting not to disclose anything suspicious about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia does a pretty good job arguing against Trump’s latest conspiracy theory du jour. But, some will say, maybe they just thought Trump would lose like everybody else did? Perhaps they sat on this information because they thought it was pointless? Comey has admitted that this possibility may have influenced his disclosure of Clinton’s emails, however subconsciously. But it sure seems like a lot of trouble to launch a conspiracy against Trump and then fail to follow through on it before the election just because he’s down by five points in the polls. If you’re Comey, it makes sense to consider the possibility that your decision will affect that race; if your goal in the first place was to prevent Trump’s election to the extent that you would launch an illegal spying operation against him, you probably don’t stop short. n ©The Washington Post
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ANIMALS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS
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ON THE COVER Moriah Engdahl, 16, practices a speech to the school board about why she doesn’t think teachers in Gillette, Wyo., should carry guns. Photo by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post
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POLITICS
Trump, McConnell now fragile allies BY S EAN S ULLIVAN AND S EUNG M IN K IM
O
n a Friday evening last October, Mitch McConnell was at Nationals Park watching a playoff baseball game when he looked down at his iPhone and discovered a missed call. It was President Trump. Trump and McConnell hadn’t made plans to talk, according to a person familiar with the call. But later that evening they spoke, two people familiar with the call said. It was the kind of impromptu conversation that would become a staple of the president’s relationship with the Senate majority leader, which has improved considerably from a low point last summer. “He calls me, and I call him multiple times a week, and sometimes at unusual hours,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview with The Washington Post. “About half the time, it’s just on his cell to my cell, without any intermediary.” Just nine months ago, Trump and McConnell were locked in a bitter feud in the wake of the GOP’s failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now they are plotting together to keep control of the Senate in the midterm elections, with each realizing the other is crucial to his success. “We’ve talked a lot about the Senate situation, the races, what he can do to help,” McConnell said. When it comes to energizing conservative voters this fall, McConnell said of Trump: “Only he can make that argument. He’s got the biggest megaphone.” Their alliance is among the most fragile in U.S. politics, built on recent victories, including the sweeping Republican tax law and a spate of successful Senate primaries. That winning streak needs to continue to preserve the detente, numerous allies said. But the sprint toward the November elections is dotted with political land mines that could wreck their partnership and create havoc in the Republican Party. Messy Senate races in Arizona and
ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
After feuding last year, both have come to see the other as important for the midterm elections Mississippi could divide them and imperil the majority, while looming showdowns over government funding and Trump’s continued demands for a border wall threaten to spark new tensions. “We haven’t done what we are going to have to do in order to get immigration done or to get infrastructure done or to get the wall done,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress. “So those are three friction points right now, as we speak, that’s going to stress that relationship.” McConnell and Trump have almost no shared personality traits
beyond a deeply rooted desire to win. The Kentuckian is softspoken and calculating; the president is garrulous and impulsive. McConnell has spent decades in elected office, while Trump is a political newcomer from the business world. “The president is a surprise every minute,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a McConnell confidant. “Mitch is a surprise about once every century.” They found common cause at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, working together to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch to a Supreme Court seat that McConnell had left
“He calls me, and I call him multiple times a week,” Sen. Mitch McConnell says of President Trump.
vacant for more than a year. But their next major undertaking ended in an embarrassing collapse, when Senate Republicans failed to unravel President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law. At the time, Trump made it clear he was “very disappointed” in McConnell, tweeting at him last August to “get back to work” on health care and a tax overhaul. McConnell mused that Trump had “excessive expectations” about the speed of government. Their relationship was further strained by controversial Republican Roy Moore’s defeat of their preferred candidate in a specialelection primary for the Senate in Alabama. “That was a low point for both of us,” McConnell said in the interview. “No question about it.” Private meetings and conversations slowly helped patch things up, according to interviews with
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aides, allies and associates of both men. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the relationship. One was a Sept. 5 huddle at the White House that lasted 10 to 15 minutes, according to one person briefed on the one-on-one meeting. Another person briefed on the talk said Trump and McConnell discussed the emerging tax plan and other matters on the horizon, without rehashing their summer spat. On Oct. 16, Trump and McConnell had a lengthy lunch at the White House that went a long way toward boosting the Senate leader’s confidence in his relationship with Trump. Afterward, they made a surprise trip to the Rose Garden for an impromptu 40minute news conference. Two months later, Republicans successfully passed the first tax overhaul in a generation, and McConnell presented the president with a Louisville slugger baseball bat to commemorate the win. “Continuing to get the victories,” said White House legislative
affairs director Marc Short, is “what’s essential to the relationship.” More recently, McConnell and Trump dodged disaster in West Virginia by joining forces to prevent Don Blankenship from winning the Republican nomination for Senate. The former coal baron spent a year in prison and may have risked an otherwise plum pickup opportunity in a year that Republicans are defending a narrow 51-to-49 majority. They hatched a plan two days before the May 8 primary when Trump called McConnell with a simple question: What can I do to help? McConnell advised the president that he didn’t need to endorse either of Blankenship’s two leading mainstream Republican opponents. Both could defeat Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III, McConnell reasoned. “And so he said, ‘Well, what if I just make the case that Blankenship would lose in November?’ ” McConnell recalled. “And I said, that’d be great.”
The episode illustrated how critical a functioning relationship between McConnell and Trump will be if the GOP wants to retain its fragile majority this year — and if Trump wants a Republican Senate that can help him rack up more wins in advance of his 2020 reelection bid. But Trump’s relationship with McConnell will face serious tests in Washington in coming months, including a September deadline to keep the government funded. Multiple senior Republican officials expect McConnell to shorten the annual August break at the behest of Trump, who has urged the Senate to stay in session to process more nominations and funding measures. Trump has said there will be “no choice” but to shutter the government in September if he doesn’t get money for the border wall he campaigned on. McConnell has vowed not to close the government. In the midterms, Senate Republicans are fighting on mostly conservative terrain and counting on
Trump and McConnell walk to a Senate Republican policy luncheon at the Capitol on May 15. There are still potential obstacles ahead, but their relationship has been buoyed as they work together to hold the GOP’s thin Senate majority.
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Trump to motivate the party’s voters to oust Democratic incumbents. McConnell has identified nine states he thinks will decide control of the Senate. One is Arizona, an open race in which his preferred candidate, Rep. Martha McSally, faces a primary challenge from two candidates running to her right: former county sheriff Joe Arpaio and former state legislator Kelli Ward. Some Republicans have privately wondered whether Trump should intervene like he did in West Virginia. “I don’t know that that will be something he’ll want to do,” McConnell said. “I don’t think any decision’s been made about primary involvement, nor have I pressed him to.” Republicans face a similar situation in Mississippi, where recently appointed Sen. Cindy HydeSmith faces a challenge from hardright state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a November special election. Trump has not gotten involved in that contest, either. With the exception of Alabama, Trump’s midterm Senate interventions have proved helpful. In addition to his last-minute push against Blankenship, Trump successfully shooed Danny Tarkanian out of his primary challenge against Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.). Now, McConnell is eager for Trump to go into full attack against vulnerable Democrats, as he did against Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana at a campaign rally. A recent Senate Republican luncheon at the Capitol began with a warm introduction of the president by McConnell, who noted to those assembled that 1 out of every 8 judges serving on appellate courts had been picked by Trump. “I think he had no way to really assess, based on past experience, just how much success he’d had,” McConnell said in the interview. “We’ve not had a better period in the time that I’ve been here. And I think that telling him that helped.” Nonetheless, senior Republicans acknowledge the McConnellTrump relationship could turn volatile as it faces major tests — and say there is little they can do if problems flare up again. “We can hope and pray,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (RTex.) said, “that it will stay strong.” n ©The Washington Post
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POLITICS
Calls to expand E-Verify fall silent BY
T RACY J AN
I
n President Trump’s many vocal pronouncements about stopping illegal immigration, one solution he promoted during the campaign has been conspicuously missing: a requirement that employers check whether workers are in the country legally. Eight states require nearly all employers to use the federal government’s online E-Verify tool for new hires, but efforts to expand the mandate to all states have stalled, despite polls showing widespread support and studies showing it reduces unauthorized workers. The campaign for a national mandate has withered amid what appears to be a more pressing problem: a historic labor shortage that has businesses across the country desperate for workers at restaurants, on farms and in other low-wage jobs. The urgency around that shortage was clear at a recent congressional hearing when senators pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on additional visas for seasonal foreign workers. “There’s not one manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, not one dairy farm, not one resort that can hire enough people,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. With the unemployment rate at a 17-year low and a Trump administration cracking down on foreign workers, lawmakers are reluctant to champion a measure that could exacerbate the labor shortage and hurt business constituents — even one that is popular among a broad swath of Americans. Despite his administration’s “Hire American” stance, Trump and the GOP leadership have gone quiet on mandating E-Verify, draining momentum from a top policy goal of grass-roots Republicans. “The president has been very weak on this subject,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA,
STEPHEN B. MORTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A shortage of workers has meant less interest in this tool to reduce the hiring of those here illegally an organization that has campaigned for a national E-Verify mandate since 1996 in its quest for reduced immigration. “Even though he’s not pushing hard for it and even though the Republican leadership has been really sluggish on this, the Republican Party as a whole is overwhelmingly for this.” E-Verify has proved effective at keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally from taking American jobs. In Arizona, which pioneered the mandatory checks in 2008, the number of unauthorized workers dropped 33 percent below what was projected without the requirement, according to a 2017 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The federal employment verification system, introduced more than 20 years ago, has wide public support. Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed last fall by The Washington Post and ABC News support requiring employers to
verify new hires are legally living in the United States — more than double the support for building a wall along the Mexico border. Ten percent of U.S. employers are enrolled in E-Verify. The eight states that require nearly all employers to use the system are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah. Trump touted a national E-Verify mandate while running for president. In October, he listed E-Verify among his immigration priorities and in February requested $23 million in his 2019 budget proposal to expand the program for mandatory nationwide use. But Trump has yet to use the platform of the presidency to rally support for a national requirement, opting instead to push for building a wall, further militarization of the border and stepping up deportations. The labor shortage in industries that most depend upon undocu-
Gustavo Salines delivers meals to a couple at Skull Creek Dockside Waterfront Restaurant on Hilton Head Island, S.C. Staffing at the restaurant is down 10 percent because of a labor shortage.
mented workers — such as agriculture, construction and hospitality — is driving up wages and deterring state authorities from rigorous enforcement of state E-Verify laws, factors that analysts say complicate any national campaign. There is just one unemployed person for every job opening in the country, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the lowest rate since the government began tracking this information in 2000. “If you cut off the labor supply like these laws do, you are going to see employers get desperate when it becomes a lot more difficult to hire, and if businesses are following the law, they have to raise wages,” said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Dallas Fed who found that states with universal E-Verify requirements typically saw substantial reductions in the number of unauthorized workers. Orrenius’s research has shown that E-Verify mandates resulted in increased wages for low-skilled workers born in the United States or otherwise naturalized. In the states that have mandated nearuniversal E-Verify, the average hourly wages of unauthorized Mexican men fell nearly 8 percent after the requirement went into effect, while wages for U.S.-born and naturalized Hispanic men rose between 7 and 9 percent. Even with the threat of fines or losing their business licenses, some employers in mandatory E-Verify states are not complying with the program, with states shying away from enforcement actions for fear of alienating business owners. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at Cato, said states have been reluctant to crack down hard because legislators know businesses will suffer. “The penalties aren’t used very often, because who wants to shut down a bunch of small businesses?” Nowrasteh said. “If you enforce immigration laws too much, you could do serious damage to the local economy and hurt a lot of small businesses that have a lot of political power.” n ©The Washington Post
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A historic win, but tough task ahead BY M ICHAEL S CHERER AND V ANESSA W ILLIAMS
T
he newest hope for a Democratic resurgence in the Deep South, Stacey Abrams, won her party’s nomination for governor of Georgia this past week in a walk — with a 53-point margin, a massive voter turnout and a campaign victory speech that recalled the optimism of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Her next challenge is to figure out how to do what Obama never could: win statewide in Georgia, a red state that Democrats have long hoped to lure into their column. Party strategists are hoping she can follow in the footsteps of two recent Democratic winners, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, who succeeded by appealing to suburban Republicans disaffected by President Trump and energizing minority voters in the Democratic base. But she will attempt that feat without two big advantages they enjoyed: In Northam’s case, the blue tilt of Virginia, and in Jones’s, the accusations against his GOP opponent of sexual contact with teenagers when he was an adult. “Creating a buzz during the primary is awesome, but you cannot stop there,” Jones said. “You have to roll past Democrats to make the case that you will be the candidate for all people.” Jones argues that the political moment has presented an opening across the country for a reshuffling that favors anyone who can rise above old political definitions. If elected, Abrams would be the first black woman to win a gubernatorial race. “For anybody who thinks that a black woman can’t win in Georgia, all they have to do is look at a white Democrat winning in Alabama in December,” Jones said. Abrams’s team is debating the best way to turn out its coalition of minorities, women, young people and liberal whites in the
JOHN BAZEMORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democrat Stacey Abrams looks to Virginia and Alabama as she vies to be governor of Georgia general election. Jones’s and Northam’s victories will also serve as templates for two long-shot Democratic Senate campaigns this year in Mississippi, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1982. Joe Trippi, a former campaign consultant for Jones, has started advising Mike Espy, a former member of Congress who is running for the seat held by Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. Trippi is also working in a more limited capacity with businessman Howard Sherman, who is running in the Democratic primary for the seat held by Republican Roger Wicker. In both cases, Trippi said, there is an opportunity to capitalize on
lagging excitement among suburban Republican voters and high enthusiasm among the Democratic base. Given the higher share of black voters in Mississippi, Trippi said, if blacks vote at the same rates as in the Alabama special election, a Democrat would need only about 22 percent of the white vote to win statewide. “It’s not just African Americans,” said Trippi of the political mood in Southern states. “There are Republican women, collegeeducated Republicans and younger Republicans who are open for voting for a Democrat.” While leading with appeals to the Democratic base, Abrams, 44, a Yale Law School graduate and former state legislator, has been
Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia on Tuesday. If elected, she would be the first black female governor in the United States. But that is no easy feat in the red state.
careful to infuse her campaign with broader messages. During the primary, she often cited her work with Republicans as minority leader in the Georgia House to assure voters that she knows how to reach across party lines — a typical pitch among Democrats in the South. “Stacey’s path to victory absolutely is predicated on getting more minorities and people of color to turn out in November, but she will also absolutely run an inclusive campaign with a message that speaks to the broader electorate,” said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster who has been advising Abrams. She will face either Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle or Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who advanced to a July runoff, and the GOP is preparing for a fight. The Republican Governors Association released its first attack ad against Abrams on Wednesday. Though Georgia has become more diverse and liberal in recent years, the underlying electoral math in the state remains challenging for Democrats. In recent cycles, black turnout in Georgia has been declining, while white turnout rose in the most recent presidential election. In 2016, 69 percent of registered African American voters cast a ballot, down from 76 percent during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, according to the Georgia secretary of state. By contrast, Trump’s candidacy appeared to drive up white voter turnout in 2016, with 80 percent casting ballots, compared with 77 percent in 2008. Trump won the state by 6 points. “It’s possible for a Democrat to win statewide office in Georgia, but it would have to be under unusual circumstances,” said Trey Hood, a professor and pollster at the University of Georgia, who has polled the race for local news organizations. “There would have to be probably depressed Republican turnout as well, and Abrams will have to win a certain share of the white vote.” n ©The Washington Post
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Life on a Hawaiian volcano S COTT W ILSON in Pahoa, Hawaii BY
T
he earth cracked open beneath Leilani Estates in middle-of-the-night darkness, glowing crimson against a black sky. Salvador Luquin awoke on his 50-acre ranch to acrid smoke billowing from the ground and a family, including two young daughters, that needed to get somewhere safe. There also were 140 head of livestock and horses on his hilly property that, as one crack spidered into many, were threatened by gas and fire. It took three days and many friends to get the animals to safety — to a county-run equestrian center near Hilo, to a ranch for the livestock in the south. The girls, Camila and Isabella, ended up with Mom and Dad in Luquin’s Mexican restaurant, sleeping on air mattresses under tables. “We all know that when we buy a piece of land here, you are on a big piece of lava rock that could pop open at any time,” said Luquin, 56, who arrived from Los Angeles in 1982 to visit a friend and never left. “But the volcano also makes new land, and suddenly you have something new and beautiful.” On this eastern edge of the nation’s southernmost state, the people who live here are accustomed to — and awed by — their volcanic real estate, perched on the side of an angry mountain that rises out of the Pacific. But this eruption of Kilauea, which began May 3 and shows no sign of abating, is the most severe in the community’s long collective memory. Several thousand residents of the Big Island’s southeast corner, far from the tourist destinations of the Kona Coast, have been displaced from their modest homes and patches of land owned for generations by the same, sprawling families. It is a region blessed by its serendipitous geography and cursed by the laws of gravity when Kilauea acts up — as it has on a nearly continuous basis for the past quarter-century.
LINDA DAVIDSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Residents see the most recent eruption as part of a trade-off that they’re all too happy to make No one who owns land intends to leave. For many Native Hawaiians, this moment on the lava is simply Pele, the volcano goddess who features in murals along the main street here, coming to collect a bit back from the bargain many know they made when they settled here. Live on the black rock and amid the skinny palms. Abide by the hang-loose “aloha” ethic. But know that at any moment you will be forced to wonder whether all you have will be lost in slow motion to creeping walls of lava. Island life is risky in its remoteness, and the thousands who have chosen this island for their home have long known that in times of emergency they probably will have to save themselves. Friends take in evacuated families, delivery companies rescue pets, restaurants donate meals for hundreds of people and helicopter companies offer cut-rate flyovers
to those who had to abandon homes. A fantasy for some on the mainland, this island — magma and all — is, to many, just home. “I wouldn’t even know where to go,” said Pauline McLaren, 77, who left her home of 15 years in the town of Kapoho a few miles from here on the eastern coast. Her neighborhood is famed for its tide pools, crystal clear and full of life. Now she lives in a pair of tents on a soggy athletic field behind Pahoa’s community center, transformed into a shelter. “Pele is my home girl,” reads a bumper sticker on a car parked near McLaren’s patch of grass. On a recent afternoon, between heavy rain showers, McLaren reclined on a plastic lounge chair, reading in shorts and slippers a mystery called “Ricochet” by Sandra Brown. Pookie and Beau, her mixed-breed rescues, watched strangers approach warily. A severe storm struck several
National Guard Col. Charles Anthony takes readings of sulfur dioxide gas May 18 near a fissure on Kupono Road in Pahoa, Hawaii. The Kilauea volcano on the Big Island has been increasingly active.
years ago, sealing her and Eddie, her husband of four decades, in their neighborhood for weeks without power. This time the eruption rattled the couple’s big landscape windows, the result of the frequent banging as vents thrust out steam and gas that serves as a nerve-jangling score to life here now. “We were thinking about putting the place on the market; it’s just too big for us now as we get old,” McLaren said. Would she leave the island? No, but perhaps move away from the volatile bottom of Kilauea’s funnel. “We’d move to Volcano,” she said, laughing and pointing uphill, where the town sits on the edge of Kilauea’s 4,000-foot peak. Old Pahoa Road, lined with pizza places and head shops, health-food stores and cultural museums, connects the community center with the highway junction at the entrance to the evacuated neighborhoods. Teams of National Guard troops operate the checkpoints, Humvees blocking the lanes in and out. Beyond them, the roads are empty. The palms, ferns and spreading monkey pod trees are withering in the fumes pouring from numerous fissures. Downed power lines hang in webs at intersections with 10foot-high walls of black lava sometimes appearing in the near distance, blocking roads. The noise around the most active fissures is deafening, a constant roar as they release gas high in toxic sulfur dioxide. The sulfur scent is potent. When members of the National Guard head into the neighborhoods, they measure air quality with handheld meters. “I’ve never been this close,” said Kuulei Kanahele, a researcher at a local cultural foundation, who joined a tour of Fissure 6 on a recent morning. Kanahele began a traditional chant in celebration of the lava, raising her voice above the sizzle and blast. She learned it at her hula school. “The power of this, it’s just amazing,” she said. In a vacant lot at the highway crossroads, residents have set up
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NATION a center for donations — food and diapers, shampoo and clothing, crates of water and cereal. The volunteers who work there call it Pahoa’s “city of refuge.” “Do you have a place to put critters?” asked Asa Hanson, a local businessman who is using his delivery truck to evacuate animals. Chasity Quihano, a supervisor at the center, began to make arrangements for a small number of pets to arrive. Her sister and three children have evacuated from the neighborhood, but her mother, though warned to do so, has declined to leave what Quihano calls “our family land.” “That’s just part of our culture, part of who we are,” she said. Princess Kuahiwinui, also volunteering at the donations center, lives in a family compound with five brothers and sisters. She runs a weekly night market, and despite the conditions, has kept it going through the eruption with far fewer customers. Despite the uncertainty of life on the volcano, Kuahiwinui said, there is a determination to keep it all as normal as possible. Her 12-year-old daughter, Kuupua, has not missed a class at Pahoa High and Intermediate School across from the donations center. “The bus still comes every morning at 6 a.m.,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen here. The earth may open up and we all fall into the water. But it’s impossible to leave.” The road into Luquin’s ranch and a second home he has inside Leilani Estates that is even more threatened is empty on a recent afternoon. Smoke from lavascorched trees, mixing with the steam and gas arising from fissures, hangs heavy over the roads. It is known as “vog.” “It’s eerie in here,” said Kirstin Heid, an equestrian expert and Luquin’s partner of a dozen years. Luquin walked the grounds, discussing post-eruption plans to line an old cinder quarry pit to turn it into a pond for fish. To him, the eruption is just a periodic nuisance, one he has managed several times over the years, if not to this extent. “I love this place, the peace of it after a day at the restaurant,” he said. “I just find it to be a relief, even though that might sound strange right now.” n ©The Washington Post
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A shortage of truckers is starting to raise prices for a lot of goods BY
H EATHER L ONG
J
oyce Brenny, chief executive of Brenny Transportation in Minnesota, gave her truck drivers a 15 percent raise this year, but she still can’t find enough workers for a job that now pays $80,000 a year. A year ago, when customers would call Brenny, she could almost always get their goods loaded on a truck and moving within a day or two. Now she’s warning customers it could take two weeks to find an available truck and driver. Shipping costs have skyrocketed in the United States in 2018, one of the clearest signs yet of a strong economy that might be starting to overheat. Higher transportation costs are beginning to cause prices of anything that spends time on a truck to rise. Amazon, for example, just implemented a 20 percent hike for its Prime program that delivers goods to customers in two days, and General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Betty Crocker, said prices of some of its cereals and snacks are going up because of an “unprecedented” rise in freight costs. Tyson Foods, a large meat seller, and John Deere, a farm and construction equipment, also recently announced they will increase prices, blaming higher shipping costs. The trucking industry shows an extraordinary labor shortage in one corner of the economy can spill out and affect the economy more broadly. “I’ve never seen it like this, ever,” said Brenny, who has been in the trucking industry for 30 years. “It doesn’t matter what the load even pays. There are just not drivers.” Trucking executives say their industry is experiencing a perfect storm: The economic upswing is creating heavy demand for trucks, but it’s hard to find drivers with unemployment so low. Young Americans are ignoring the job openings because they fear selfdriving trucks will soon dominate the industry. Waymo, the driverless car company owned by Al-
ISTOCK
Several factors are combining to create what trucking executives call a perfect storm, and shipping costs hit an all-time high this year.
phabet, just launched a self-driving truck pilot program in Atlanta, although trucking industry veterans argue it will be a long time before drivers go away entirely. Brenny anticipates she will have to raise pay another 10 percent before the end of the year to ensure that other companies don’t steal her drivers. The United States has had a truck driver shortage for years, but experts say it’s hitting a crisis level this year. There’s even more demand for truckers now as just about every sector of the economy is expanding and online sales continue to soar. On top of that, the federal government imposed a new rule in December that requires drivers to be on the road for no more than 11 hours at a time and track their time by an electronic device so they can’t cheat. “It’s as bad as it’s ever been” to find drivers, said Bob Costello, chief economist at the American Trucking Associations. “Companies are doing everything they can to make drivers happy: increasing pay and getting them home more often, but that means they aren’t driving as many miles.” America had a shortage of 51,000 truck drivers at the end of
last year, Costello found, up from a shortage of 36,000 in 2016. He says “without a doubt” it’s going to be even higher this year, even though many companies are giving double-digit raises. As driver pay rises quickly and diesel fuel costs tick up, shipping companies are charging higher and higher rates to move goods. It now costs more than $1.85 a mile to ship a “dry good” that doesn’t require refrigeration or special accommodation, a nearly 40 percent increase from the price a year ago, according to data from DAT Solutions. Shipping costs hit an all-time high earlier this year and have remained near that level ever since, according to DAT Solutions and the Cass Freight Index Report. Economists warn those costs are almost certainly going to end up resulting in higher prices for everyday items that many Americans purchase. “Every single good ends up on a truck at some point,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group. “Businesses that use trucking to receive and ship goods are going to do their best to pass on the costs to the rest of us.” n ©The Washington Post
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Migrant centers: Models or prisons? BY G RIFF W ITTE AND L UISA B ECK
in Ingolstadt, Germany
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ranklin Uweh’s home of eight months, ever since he arrived in Germany after fleeing his native Nigeria, is a squat, stucco compound in the verdant Bavarian countryside that he shares with hundreds of other asylum seekers. He’s not allowed to work. He’s not allowed to take language classes. His movements are strictly controlled. And every day he wakes up fearing that he’ll be deported, the one fate he considers worse than an indefinite stay in this government-run shelter. “There’s no life in this place,” the 27-year-old said. “It’s like a prison.” But to Germany’s top law enforcement official, it’s something else: a national model. That dissonance is at the heart of a debate in Germany about the country’s treatment of arrivals who have come seeking refugee protection but are unlikely to be allowed to stay. Germany has a new government this spring, and although many of the players remain the same, perhaps the biggest difference is a much tougher asylum policy in a country that accepted more than 1 million refugees during an unparalleled influx less than three years ago. The hardened stance reflects a souring national mood, with a far-right party now in Parliament for the first time in more than half a century and Chancellor Angela Merkel under pressure to pull up the welcome mat once and for all. Merkel has resisted doing so, arguing that the country must fulfill its humanitarian obligations to people fleeing war and persecution. But she has signed off on an upper limit to the overall number of asylum seekers, as well as a cap on family members who can join their relatives in Germany. And now Horst Seehofer, her new interior minister, is advanc-
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German officials say mass shelters streamline deportations, but critics see them as inadequate ing a “master plan” to deal with one of the government’s more vexing refugee-related challenges: how to quickly deport those who don’t win asylum. Core to his strategy are mass shelters such as the one where Uweh lives. Known as “anchor centers,” they are intended to house migrants who, because they come from countries whose nationals often do not meet German asylum requirements, are deemed to have little chance of securing refugee protection. Residents — most of whom are from Nigeria, Ukraine, Afghanistan or Balkan nations — stay there from the time they arrive in Germany until the day they are deported. Unlike facilities for likely refugees, which are often small and interspersed throughout cities, towns and villages, the anchor centers are isolated by design. They are located far from German communities and offer vir-
tually no opportunities for residents to integrate. Seehofer argues that they allow the government to conduct a speedy asylum review, with every step of the process under one roof, and to keep close watch on those deemed ineligible to stay in Germany. That has been a persistent problem: Last year, about half a million unsuccessful asylum seekers remained in the country, and efforts to reduce their number have fallen short. About 50,000 people have been deported in the past two years — a fraction of the some 450,000 who have applied for asylum in Germany during the same period. Unlike in the United States, where deportations sharply expanded under Presidents Barack Obama and Trump, the German government has struggled to increase its deportation totals. A lack of cooperation from home
Asylum seekers wait at the mass shelter in Ingolstadt, Germany. The center, one of several, houses people whose chances of receiving asylum are slim and who will probably be deported.
countries and a bureaucratic process that involves coordination among local, regional and federal authorities are among the reasons why. The issue became a focus of intense public debate in Germany in December 2016, when a Tunisian man who had been turned down for asylum but who slipped away before he could be deported rammed a stolen truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12. “When it comes to protecting the citizens, we need a strong state. I will take care of that,” Seehofer recently told the Bild am Sonntag in an interview touting his plans. Yet Seehofer’s goal of making Bavarian anchor centers a model that can be replicated nationwide has run into fierce opposition from refugee advocates and police officials, who argue that the facilities are inadequate and will only breed resentment among residents. That, they say, will ultimately harm, not enhance, public safety. “If we’re talking about thousands of people living together — people who don’t have any occupation, who may be traumatized, who are alone — it’s clear that there will be tensions,” said Jörg Radek, deputy chairman of the Federal Police Union. Although the average wait time for a decision among shelter residents is more than four months, some cases can take a year or longer because of appeals and the complicated nature of asylum claims for people who, in many instances, arrived in Germany without passports or other documents. And once in the centers, where details of their cases are first considered, residents have virtually no hope of making progress with their German integration. “There is no contact with neighbors because there are no neighbors,” said Alexander Thal, spokesman for the Bavarian Refugee Council, an advocacy group. “They just have to sit inside the center and wait.” n ©The Washington Post
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Warming, crowding plague Everest BY P RADEEP B ASHYAL AND A NNIE G OWEN
in Kathmandu
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s climbers begin to reach the summit of Mount Everest, some veterans are avoiding the Nepali side of the world’s highest peak because melting ice and crowds have made its famed Khumbu Icefall too dangerous. Not far from the safety of the Everest Base Camp, the icefall is a climber’s first real test: a treacherous 760-yard stretch of ice with shifting crevasses that has claimed the lives of about a quarter of those who have died on the Nepali side of the mountain, including 16 Nepali guides in 2014. Several veteran climbers and well-respected Western climbing companies have moved their expeditions to the northern side of the mountain in Tibet in recent years, saying rising temperatures and inexperienced climbers have made the icefall more vulnerable. Research by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development shows that the Khumbu glacier is retreating at an average of 65 feet per year, raising the risk of avalanche. “The icefall is obviously a dangerous place to be, especially later on in the season and with increased temperatures experienced in the Himalayas due to climate change,” Phil Crampton of the climbing company Altitude Junkies told the Everest blogger Alan Arnette this year. Nepali mountain guides — known as Sherpas — make the first trek through the icefall each year, installing ropes and ladders and carrying gear before the first climbers begin traveling through the icefall on acclimatizing runs in April and May. In past years, climbers would have to navigate the icefall two to three times, but now many have cut back, turning to other safer peaks with similar heights for their early training. This year, the “icefall doctors” — as the Sherpas are called — say
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Veterans are avoiding Khumbu Icefall because of melting ice and more climbers, including rookies that they’ve constructed a safe passageway. “There are fewer ladders compared to previous years and hardly any complex features to climb and cross,” said Ang Sarki Sherpa. Still, many veterans are unconvinced. “Although guides are calling it an incredibly safe route this year, multiple Sherpa have been injured (including one flown to Kathmandu with serious injuries), and there have been countless close calls for clients, guides and Sherpa,” said mountaineer Adrian Ballinger, who led an expedition on the Tibetan side of
the mountain this year because of safety concerns but retreated after an equipment malfunction. “Getting lucky (so far) does not mean the route is any safer this year.” Ballinger and others have suggested that a helicopter be used to ferry climbers and supplies to the first camp on the mountain, Camp 1, to improve safety, as is done on other peaks such as Mount Cook in New Zealand. A sharp increase in the number of “hobby climbers” aspiring to climb Everest and local companies catering to their comfort at cheaper cost than Western firms is adding to overcrowding
Climbers at Everest Base Camp practice their techniques on the Nepali side of Mount Everest, some 85 miles from Kathmandu, the Nepali capital.
woes. “The risks are higher when 99 percent of climbers are going up as tourists,” said Reinhold Messner, an Italian climber who was the first to ascend Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen. “Mount Everest has become a trekking route, not a place for alpinism.” Since 2013, the government of Nepal has been issuing about 300 foreign permits every year, which means that, with guides and porters, the slopes of Everest are crowded with about 800 people every year. Last year, Nepali authorities awarded a record-high 375 climbing permits — the most since 1953. The number is dropping to 347 this season. Although attempts to conquer Everest from the Tibetan side began in 1924, a Chinese team made the first summit on May 25, 1960, and the mountain was closed to foreign climbers from 1950 until 1980. According to the Himalayan Database, a record of expeditions in the Himalayas since 1903, out of 8,306 Everest summits so far, 5,280 have happened from Nepal and 3,026 from Tibet. Climbers say that China seems committed to avoiding the mistakes made by the Nepal government by issuing too many permits and increasing traffic. According to reports, China issued permits to only 22 Chinese nationals this year, out of the total 180 permits issued, in a bid to control traffic. The Chinese are also trying to boost their domestic tourism with a new mountaineering center in Tingri. Nepal Mountaineering Association President Santa Bir Lama said climbing Everest can never be risk-free, no matter the side of the ascent, and that those moving to Tibet miss the chance of working with Nepal’s famous Sherpas as well as — in his view — a more satisfying climb. “From what I understand, people are opting for the north side as it is easier and saves time and money,” Lama said. n ©The Washington Post
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PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Gun control? ‘That’s treason.’ E LI S ASLOW in Gillette, Wyo. BY
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lan Engdahl was driving home after an overnight shift in the oil field when his truck picked up a scratchy radio signal out of Gillette. It was the first sign of civilization since he had disappeared the afternoon before down 50 miles of wind-whipped prairie and rutted gravel roads, so Alan and his co-worker listened to the disc jockey tick
A Wyoming teen wages a lonely protest and meets resistance from the town — and her family
through community news. Cattle prices were flat. T&T Guns had antique rifles on special. The Cowboy Draw lotto was up to $1 million. “And here’s something you don’t hear every day,” the radio host said. “We apparently have a liberal gun protest happening right here in Gillette.” Alan had rarely heard anything described as liberal in northeast Wyoming, and now he listened as the disc jockey explained how 10 Campbell County
Moriah Engdahl, 16, talks with her father, Alan Engdahl, at home in Gillette, Wyo., last month. They disagree about gun control.
High School students had marched downtown the previous afternoon to demand tighter gun laws. They said they wanted mandatory background checks on all gun purchases. They said they wanted to build a guncontrol movement in solidarity with survivors of a shooting in Parkland, Fla., and tens of thousands of other teenagers protesting across the country. But this was Wyoming, where the high school yearbook devoted four pages to “Hunting: No Greater
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Sport,” and a local club funded college scholarships by raffling off AR-15s. The protesters had been met downtown with middle fingers and the warning of suspensions. “They should be expelled,” Alan remembered joking to his co-worker, once the radio switched back to classic rock and they turned onto the highway toward Gillette. “That bleedingheart nonsense might fly in New York or D.C., but in Wyoming? That’s treason.” If America had in fact begun to reconsider its relationship with guns after two decades of escalating mass shootings, then a crucial test was now arriving in the rural West, where that relationship has long been inseparable. Wyoming has more guns per
capita than any other state, with sales rising in each of the past five years, and more than 80 percent of adults in Campbell County have firearms in their homes. Alan once owned more than 250 — an entire storage unit of rifles, handguns and antiques — until he committed a drug felony in 2006 and lost his legal right to own guns. A popular state slogan remained taped to one of his trucks: “Welcome to Wyoming: Consider Everyone Armed.” He parked at a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town, where the newspaper waited at the kitchen table. On the front page he noticed an article about the gun protest, the first that anyone could remember in Gillette. “A Walkout for Change,” the headline read. Above that was a
picture of several students marching, and there in the midst of them, holding a protest sign, was his 16-year-old daughter, Moriah.
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ow a week later, that sign was in his house, tucked into the closet of a bedroom where Moriah had been spending much of her time, with her door closed, since the protest. In the days since the march, the “Campbell County Ten” had become the object of profane graffiti, the inspiration for a rival Freedom March and the favorite target of a new Instagram account, “Campbell County Students for America,” which shared memes comparing gun protesters to Hitler. For his part, Alan had considered grounding Mori-
After the Parkland, Fla., shooting, Moriah began reading online about guns and mental health. Gillette, a place of economic instability, has one of the country’s highest suicide rates.
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ah for skipping school but decided against it. “I’m pretty sure the rest of Wyoming is going to punish her for me,” he said, so instead he had chosen to needle Moriah at every opportunity, including now, when she came out from her bedroom and walked into the kitchen. “Win any popularity contests at school today?” he asked her. She rolled her eyes and ignored him, so he tried again. “Did you manage to get everyone’s guns yet?” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you it’s not about that?” she said. “We’re just pushing for more safety, a little more control.” “That’s a bad word,” Alan said. “First it’s gun control, then it’s confiscation. I don’t know where you learned any different.” She was the youngest of his four daughters, each a bit more empowered than the last, and by the time Moriah turned 12 she had begun questioning her parents’ Christianity, and then started favoring abortion rights, and then calling herself a feminist, and then refusing to eat the pigs her family sometimes slaughtered for meat. “The mouthy, hardheaded one,” Alan called her, with some pride, because that was how he saw himself, too, even if they often disagreed. She advocated for gay rights in her high school, and he thought acceptance was “part of the problem, because that stuff is better off staying hidden.” She was dating a Mexican American boy named Jon, whom Alan liked but also occasionally referred to as “Mexican Juan.” She was a journalist at the high school newspaper. He thought that journalists were partially to blame for ruining America and that “the fake news wouldn’t give Trump a slap on the back if he saved two babies from a fire.” But one thing they had rarely argued about was guns, at least until 17 people were killed at a Parkland, Fla., high school in February. Moriah occasionally went target shooting at the range on “ladies day” with her mother, who was remarried and living across town. Her mother’s freezer was filled with fresh venison from her latest October kill. Her father and his friends had sometimes fired off 1,500 rounds in a continues on next page
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day of target shooting before he went to prison for distribution of methamphetamine. Like her parents, Moriah had usually blamed Gillette’s high rates of gun violence not on firearms but on the character of the town itself. The coal and oil boomtown had sprung up amid the dust and antelope of northeast Wyoming, nearly doubling in size since the 1990s to about 32,000 people, many of whom worked to extract the natural resources below ground. The town suffered from high rates of transiency and wild economic swings, which contributed to one of the country’s highest suicide rates. “Gillette syndrome” was the term popularized by one psychologist, and it had become the favorite local explanation for all kinds of economic and emotional instability. After Parkland, though, Moriah began reading online about guns and became interested in research suggesting that guns are part of the mental health crisis, too. She read that suicides account for almost two-thirds of gun deaths, and that people are five times more likely to successfully commit suicide if they own or have access to a gun. Her cousin had killed himself with a hunting rifle in 2015. One of her classmates had brought a gun to school in his backpack a year later, sparking an evacuation before he shot and killed himself by the railroad tracks. And now, in the wake of the Parkland shooting, school districts across Wyoming were considering arming teachers with concealed firearms and abolishing gun-free zones. “Why is the answer here always more guns?” Moriah asked her father now, as they sat together in the kitchen. “It’s been 20 years since Columbine, and you’re still hiding under desks,” Alan said. “How’s that been working?” “What if someone gets depressed at school, grabs a gun and pops off ?” Moriah asked. “People are fragile.” Moriah had sometimes suffered from what she considered her own version of Gillette syndrome, waves of anxiety that led her to visit a hospital for help in 2016. She had decided that what she needed most was a fresh start, so she eventually moved
PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
out of her mother’s house and in with her father on the far edge of town. Theirs was a single-story place wedged between a cow pasture and a coal mine, where underground dynamite blasts shook the walls a few times each week. A dartboard hung in the kitchen, and red plastic cups filled the cabinets. Her father styled himself as gruff and imposing, with a mangy beard, broad shoulders built by swinging a sledgehammer on the rig and a stomach rounded out by peppermint schnapps. But he was also a big-hearted savior of damaged cars and lost people, both of which populated his five acres. There was Luke, who had nowhere to live until Alan offered up his shed; and a drifter who called himself Tennessee, who had come to Wyoming looking for work but failed a background check; and Scotty, who spent his days trying to fix some of the 17 trucks surrounding the house and his nights sipping Budweiser
on the couch. “Sweet-but-crazy uncles,” Moriah called them, because they were almost always following Alan’s lead, whether that meant watching old westerns on TV, firing darts across the sink or teasing Moriah from the living room. “You know why I like guns, Moriah?” Tennessee said now. “Because otherwise we’d be under British rule.” “It’s the foundation for this whole country,” Luke said. “This is the Cowboy State,” Alan said. “Point a gun at someone, and you’ll have 10 pointing right back at you, and that’s how we like it.” Moriah sat by the kitchen window and looked out at a nothingness that stretched as far as she could see. Gillette had no river, no lakes, no mountains and hardly any trees. Sometimes, out this window, she could watch the same jet trace across the sky for five minutes, reduced to slow motion by the vastness of the landscape, until Wyoming itself
Moriah visits a Dairy Queen in Gillette last month with her boyfriend, Jon Acosta, 16.
began to feel inescapable. Not long ago, Moriah told her teachers that she hoped to move away to New York and become the first person in her family to live outside Wyoming, but lately she thought that sounded laughably naive. She had never been on a plane, never traveled farther than Aberdeen, S.D. She stood up and grabbed a dart out of her father’s hand. “You’re all stuck in an old way of thinking,” she said. “You guys have no idea how many people are with us.”
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he truth was that she didn’t exactly know, either, so later that week the Campbell County Ten scheduled a meeting after school for “anyone open to gun solutions.” Moriah met a few friends in the school parking lot, and they walked past the rows of pickup trucks toward an adjacent shopping center. They passed Mystix Vapes, the Armed Forces Career Center and Rod’s American Market, where the
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COVER STORY American flag out front had tiny handguns in place of white stars. They continued by a tattoo parlor advertising the coming Silent Sinners Gun Raffle and then crossed the street to Starbucks. Moriah set her backpack down at the biggest table and waited for everyone else to arrive. Their original protest march had begun with 10 students but dropped quickly to nine, when an irate parent drove downtown and yanked her daughter into the car. In the days since, a few more students had dropped out of the group’s text-messaging chain after saying they wanted to focus on less-controversial issues, like remembering victims or discouraging bullying. Now the Starbucks table remained mostly empty. Moriah watched another former protester come into the coffee shop and walk by their table to sit with a few other friends out back. “I guess she’s ignoring us,” Moriah said. “Let’s start with what we have.” There were five of them in all, including one who opened the meeting by reminding everyone that she was not officially in the group and that her parents were trying to get her a job at a shooting range. “I’m just here to watch,” she said. That meant the Campbell County Ten was in fact down to Moriah and three others: a freshman wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt; a senior who described herself as “fiercely, fiercely liberal”; and the outspoken editor of the school newspaper, who had come up with the idea to make signs and march to the courthouse. “I want to change so many things about this town,” one of them said now. “We made up a few cheap signs at the Dollar Store, and you would think we declared war.” “I hate guns and what they stand for,” another said. “Really, I do.” A woman at a nearby table looked over. Moriah opened her laptop and adjusted her glasses. “Let’s stop venting and talk a little quieter,” she said. “What’s our next step?” She tried to take notes as everyone spoke at once about starting a group Instagram account, or writing to Wyoming senators, or boycotting Walmart until it stopped selling rifles.
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showed up for the meeting with a small group of protesters, it would be perceived as an affront. What she wanted instead was an approach that offered her more subtlety and more control, so she sent a message to what was left of the Campbell County Ten. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I think this is something I should do by myself.”
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“It’s like there’s a gun addiction here,” one girl said. “Even my dad has started calling me a gun-control libtard,” said another. “Quieter. Please,” Moriah said again, because now the woman at the next table had set down her newspaper and was openly staring and scowling in their direction. Moriah leaned in and spoke just above a whisper. “We need to be completely anger-less, or else people will think we want to take away their guns and melt them into a statue of Obama. We’re not going to win a shouting contest. We need to stay on message and focus on one thing.” Moriah suggested her preference for what that should be: keeping guns out of Campbell County High. The school board in another Wyoming county had just voted to arm its teachers with concealed handguns after a survey showed 74 percent of residents supported that idea. Campbell County’s school board had begun meeting with law enforcement to explore a similar possibility. The next school board meeting was just days away. Each meeting was open to public comments. “They really would have no choice but to listen to us,” Moriah said. But one girl couldn’t go to that meeting because she
was rehearsing for the high school musical, and others said they also wanted to talk to the school board about bullying, suicide prevention and armed school guards. “One message,” Moriah said again, but now a few other customers had begun to gawk at their table, and some of the girls stood up to pack their bags. “Are we going to do this?” Moriah asked, and when there was no definitive answer, she started packing, too. She drove away from Starbucks, out of Gillette and up the dirt road toward her father’s house, where Alan was sitting with Luke and Tennessee on the couch and watching TV. “Take everyone’s guns yet?” Alan asked again, without bothering to turn around, and something about his dismissiveness made her want to push back. “We’re actually going to talk to the school board,” she said. Alan turned to look at her. “You better make sure you know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m trying to look out for you here. If you go up there looking dumb, they will eat you alive.” She rolled her eyes and walked to her room, but she also thought her father was right. If she
Wyoming has more guns per capita than any other state, and more than 80 percent of adults in Campbell County have firearms in their homes.
he wanted to prepare by learning everything she could about guns, so a few days before the meeting she traveled across town to a house where four mounted animal heads were on display above the entryway. Moriah’s mother, Tracey, was inside talking about a future hunting trip. Her stepfather was downstairs at his custom-built reloading station, which was stocked with bullet casings and gunpowder. “What is all of this?” Moriah asked him, pointing to shells and weight scales. “I don’t really understand much about gun stuff.” “Yeah, I’m starting to see that,” her stepfather said, because he’d read about the protest and had the same reaction as just about everyone else. She watched him work and began to ask questions about which bullets splintered upon impact and which ones mushroomed, and the differences between rifles with wood vs. synthetic stocks. She wanted to know whether people needed a special permit to buy guns in Wyoming. “No,” he said. She asked if Wyoming had specific limits on semiautomatic weapons or magazine sizes. “No,” he said again. “So there really aren’t that many regulations?” she asked, and her stepfather stopped handling ammunition shells and looked at her. “I don’t need a bunch of rules to tell me this is serious stuff,” he said. He picked up a tub of gunpowder and held it out toward her. “I mean, this right here is like having a bomb in the basement.” Moriah took a step backward. “Gun safety is about being able to handle your own business,” he said. “Like with hunting, I’m not a fan of taking the horns and leaving the meat, or just wounding an animal. There might not continues on next page
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be a rule against it, but in my opinion it’s the wrong thing to do. I want a clean shot. I want to eat all of it. It’s about taking personal responsibility.” “What if a person isn’t responsible?” Moriah asked. He started to put away his gunpowder, meticulously arranging it on the shelves, and Moriah went upstairs to see her mother — the gun owner she trusted most of all. Tracey had taken women’s gun safety classes, studied self-defense and become a good target shooter. She was a natural athlete, built by CrossFit and hiking, and she had killed her first deer while pregnant and still managed to haul it out of a plowed field. A few months later in the delivery room, she and Alan saw the Columbine High School shooting unfold on TV and watched as SWAT teams waited outside throughout 40 minutes of gunfire before finally entering the school. “Can’t they do something faster?” she had wondered then. Tracey had become an earlyeducation teacher at a local preschool, where she and the staff underwent active-shooter response training to prepare for whatever might come through their doors. They would act quickly to secure the children. They would barricade all entry points. They would sing songs to help the children stay calm. They would break a window to evacuate. And if none of that worked, they would create noises to distract the shooter and then rush out to tackle him. Each year when they reviewed their plan, Tracey felt increasingly certain that what she would really want in that nightmare scenario was something she couldn’t have. “Give me a gun,” she told Moriah. “Heck, yeah. I’d want to shoot that sucker.” “I can see that, but that’s you, and not everybody is so responsible,” Moriah said, because she had also read about several recent incidents when adults brought guns to school to protect students but endangered them instead: a teacher in California who accidentally fired a round into the ceiling during a presentation on gun safety, injuring three students; a school resource officer in Pennsylvania who left his gun in the locker room, where
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
it was found by a sixth-grader; a teacher in Georgia who barricaded himself in his classroom and fired a bullet out the window. “Not everyone can be trusted,” Moriah said. “We’re safer with fewer guns, not more.” “I can see your point,” Tracey said, and Moriah believed that if anyone in Wyoming was capable of changing views, it was her mother. She had recovered from a drug addiction early in life and become a Christian. She had gone from being intolerant of homosexuality to embracing a relative who had come out as gay. “When I talk to the school board, will you come?” Moriah asked, and her mother said she would. “I want to hear what you have to say,” Tracey said. “I know there’s some gray area, but you’re up against people who see black and white.”
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oriah bought a new dress and borrowed her sister’s best lip gloss. She trimmed her speech to the recommended three-minute allotment, double-checked her statistics and practiced six times in the living room. Then she went to a nondescript county building and waited her turn to speak, until the chairwoman called her up to a seat at the center of the room. “Thank you for your time,
trusted board members,” Moriah said. She smiled up at 12 school administrators seated on an elevated platform and then began to read from the speech that was now shaking in her hands. “I’m here to express my concerns about arming teachers,” she said. “I believe allowing firearms in school is an irrational idea to introduce here.” To her surprise, no one said anything, so she continued. She told the school board that she was worried about the mental health epidemic in Gillette and that some school employees inevitably suffered from those problems, too. She said that teachers were not trained for shootouts and that even armed school security guards had failed to stop shootings, including the one in Parkland. “Adding more guns to the equation will not be a universal solution,” she said, and now her three minutes were almost up. She asked the board members to “please consider” and “think deeply” and “search for new ways,” and then she concluded by smiling and thanking them again. The chairwoman grabbed her microphone and told Moriah that she wanted to “set her mind at ease.” She said the district was looking into many ways to ensure student safety, including bulletproof glass, door-jamming
Moriah waits to address the school board last month to speak against the possibility of arming teachers. Afterward, her mother congratulated her on her speech, but the teenager had doubts about whether they had really listened to her.
devices and, possibly, guns. “It will be a long and careful process,” she said, and then she moved on to the next speaker, who talked about incorporating technology into classrooms. Moriah retreated to the back of the room near her mother, her boyfriend and two of her sisters as the school board rolled through its agenda, from staffing issues to the science curriculum to the budget, until it began to feel to Moriah as if her speech had all but evaporated. “You did great,” her mother said, once they left. “Measured and respectful.” “But did they get it?” Moriah asked. “I feel like maybe they heard but didn’t exactly listen.” She hugged her mother goodbye and went back to her father’s house, where everyone was sitting in the kitchen. Her dad was back from another shift in the oil field. Luke was throwing darts, and Tennessee was watching a western on TV. “How’d the gun controlling go?” Alan asked, and Moriah started to tell him about the meeting until he cut in. “I guess it really doesn’t matter if they have guns or not,” Alan said. “Either way, if one of these shootings happened in Wyoming, you’d have parents breaking through the windows with more guns than you’d ever seen.” “Okay,” she said. “But that’s my point. I’m trying to —” “If you got a gun, then just bring it,” Tennessee interrupted. “I don’t see why we need much regulation myself.” “They are trying to push toward confiscation,” Luke said. “First it’s control,” Alan said. Moriah sat there as they talked over and around her, circling the same points. On the other side of the country, Parkland survivors had begun planning ever-bigger marches and protests — the beginning of what they called a “generational movement.” But here it was just Moriah and a protest that went silent as she sat at the table and waited for her opening to interject. She was trying to be patient. She was trying to compromise. She was treading lightly and remaining anger-less until she couldn’t do it anymore. “Hey! I’m trying to say something,” she said. n ©The Washington Post
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Planes, cranes and automobiles K EVIN S IEFF in Majete Wildlife Reserve, Malawi BY
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wo decades ago, this patch of Malawian forest was almost emptied of wildlife. The last elephants had been poached. The lions had been caught in snare traps. Other species died off as their range was diced by machetewielding farmers. Now the animals have returned in a modern-day Noah’s ark — a bold attempt by private philanthropists and environmentalists to move wildlife from other parts of the continent. Hundreds of miles from this dense forest, the animals were scooped up in harnesses dangling from construction cranes. They were carried into white metal storage containers, with the occasional elephant trunk peeking out. Then they crisscrossed southern Africa in commercial planes and flatbed trucks. By almost any measure, Africa’s wildlife has suffered immensely in recent decades. Ninety percent of the continent’s elephants have vanished over the last century. The lion population has crashed by more than 40 percent since 1993. There are fewer than 1,000 mountain gorillas in the wild. There are only three northern white rhinos in existence. African Parks, the nonprofit organization that arranges the shipments of the animals, aims to restore populations that once existed in some of the world’s most remote places. It has trucked 520 elephants across Malawi. It flew 20 black rhinos from South Africa to Rwanda. This month, it started bringing rhinos back to Chad, where they were wiped out three decades ago. And in southern Malawi, on a recent overcast morning, Craig Reid dragged the carcass of a gazelle across a grassy enclosure in Liwonde National Park, north of Majete Wildlife Reserve. Three cheetahs growled at him from about a foot away, showing their teeth. The cheetahs had been flown in
ADRIANE OHANESIAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A private group has undertaken a major effort to repopulate Africa’s decimated wildlife reserves as part of a process that African Parks has refined in recent years. The group transports animals to areas devoid of wildlife and works with governments to manage 15 parks across the continent — some of them in war zones. In the course of its work, the organization learned that in South Africa, privately run wildlife conservancies had protected a once-threatened cheetah population. There were now more of the animals than the conservancies could support. “We decided it was the right time to bring some back here,” said Reid, Liwonde’s park manager. On the recent morning in the animal enclosure, Reid eventually coaxed the cheetahs to follow the bloody gazelle through an opening in the fence, back into the nearwild: a pristine, verdant 220square-mile park that had itself come back from the brink. Two weeks later, the enclosure would be filled with imported lions, the next set of animals in
shipping crates, part of an experiment in turning back the clock to a time of greater biodiversity. After that, rhinos were expected. African Parks isn’t the first organization to translocate wildlife, a practice that is decades old and brought gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park from Canada in the 1990s, and reintroduced the giant pandas to China in 2011. Other groups have moved animals across the continent, but the organization is the first to do it on such a large scale — while managing parks in some of the most violence-plagued countries in Africa. It operates Chinko National Park in the Central African Republic, where a conflict has left thousands dead and forced displaced families into the wildlife refuge. It runs Garamba National Park in Congo, a nation scarred by civil war. Last year, four of the park’s rangers were slain by poachers, who hack off elephant tusks that can fetch $1,000 a pound in the
Chimwala, one of the first lions brought to Malawi’s Majete Wildlife Reserve from South Africa, sits inside a temporary enclosure in February. Chimwala was sedated and transported by truck in a crate.
ivory market in China. Amid the destruction of species across much of Africa, some subpopulations have nevertheless thrived in certain areas. In South Africa, for example, where the majority of the wildlife live on relatively secure private conservancies, a number of species have flourished, including lions. In Malawi, where the government has turned its attention to conservation, in part to expand its tourism industry, the elephant population has surged. “We can use these thriving populations to seed other areas,” said Peter Fearnhead, 49, the CEO of African Parks, which is based in Johannesburg. Fearnhead has been involved in conservation since he was a 13year-old in Zimbabwe, where he pushed his school to establish a 2,000-acre wildlife reserve. After working for South Africa’s national park service, where he focused on expanding the government’s reserves, he turned his sights to the rest of the continent. He founded African Parks in 2000. Forging relationships with governments, and flying wild animals across the continent, can pose an enormous challenge. Translocation is also enormously expensive, and securing the parks requires its own massive investment — the group now has the largest counterpoaching force of any private organization on the continent, around 1,000 rangers. But it has a substantial pipeline to the world’s wealthiest donors. Last year, Britain’s Prince Harry was named its president. In 2016, the group raised nearly $25 million, mostly from European benefactors. In the long term, the organization hopes that revenue from tourists will help sustain the costs of managing parks. In places like Liwonde and Majete, that’s still a long way off. Last year, only 10 percent of Liwonde’s $3 million operating budget, for example, came from tourist fees. “We have two options,” Fearnhead said. “One is we allow these places to disappear. The other is we make our own plan.” n ©The Washington Post
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BOOKS
A crusading justice and a cautious president N ONFICTION
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‘D EISENHOWER VS. WARREN The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties By James F. Simon Liveright. 427 pp. $35
umb son of a b----” and “d--- fool.” These insults are the words of President Dwight Eisenhower privately excoriating Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1953. Eisenhower’s antipathy challenges the conventional image of the relationship between these two highly respected moderate Republicans. It serves as a point of departure for James F. Simon’s illuminating and engaging account of their rivalry and a pivotal period in the history of civil rights and civil liberties. “Eisenhower vs. Warren” is the latest of several books that Simon, a legal historian and former dean of New York Law School, has written documenting enmity between a chief justice and a chief executive. Unlike earlier quarrels, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous showdown with Charles Evans Hughes over the New Deal, the fight between Eisenhower and Warren has received less attention. Simon exposes a fundamental difference between the relationship of Eisenhower and Warren and that of their New Deal predecessors. In the earlier conflict, Roosevelt sought to push the boundaries of change while Hughes fought for restraint. By contrast, Eisenhower resisted progress, while Warren pursued it. Eisenhower and Warren were born less than six months apart but had very different paths into the Republican Party and Washington. Tracing their routes to power, Simon underlines how neither had the traditional qualifications or experience for the positions they attained. Eisenhower, a retired general, had worked in public service for most of his life but had never held elected office before entering the White House. Warren was a lawyer and had served as California’s attorney general and governor but had never been a judge before he put on the robes as chief in the nation’s
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A new book examines clashes between President Dwight Eisenhower, above, and Chief Justice Earl Warren.
most powerful courtroom. Simon explores how each embraced his new position and revealed his natural acumen for politics and commitment to moderation and consensus, even as they came to demonstrate it in fundamentally different ways. Their differing approaches came into sharpest focus surrounding Brown v. Board of Edu cation in 1954. The arguments in the landmark case occurred just two months into Warren’s tenure (before he had even been officially confirmed), after a sharply divided Supreme Court previously failed to decide the case. Simon deftly explains the core legal issues and debates, and reveals how Warren skillfully brought the court to unanimity and wrote the groundbreaking opinion. Hoping to avoid alienating white Southerners, Eisenhower provided only the barest support for the decision. Warren was deeply frustrated with Eisenhower’s unwillingness to speak out more vigorously in support of Brown and its implementation. Their relationship frayed fur-
ther as the court took a firm stand in a series of cases protecting the civil liberties of individuals accused of subversion during the Red Scare. While Simon hints that the friction between Eisenhower and Warren dated back to their fight for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, he shows that after Brown, their battles intensified. What is perhaps most striking is that, with the exception of a few veiled comments in news conferences and oblique statements in their memoirs, Eisenhower and Warren kept their frustrations with each other private. The tacit agreement to keep their animosity out of the public eye reveals just how different Washington politics was in the 1950s. Simon shows sympathy for the political pressures Eisenhower confronted as president and his skill at navigating them. He acknowledges that Eisenhower wielded federal power on civil rights issues when he could, noting his role in desegregating the military, easing tensions over school segregation in Little Rock,
and advocating for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Yet in charting the rivalry, Simon makes clear that he favors Warren’s thinking and philosophy. He celebrates the chief justice’s “strong moral sensibility,” which Simon notes in Warren’s push as governor to ensure that California residents received adequate health care and in Warren’s belief that segregation was unconstitutional and immoral. Today, many of the individual rights and liberties that Warren defended are under threat by actions of the executive branch. Simon’s book offers a glimmer of hope that the court can and will once again take a stand. For, as Warren’s example makes clear, such a position is not only constitutional but also morally and ethically right and will allow the justices to join Warren on the right side of history. n Geismer is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and is the author of “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.” This was written for The Washington Post.
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Abduction and escape in N. Korea
Can classic rock outlive its stars?
F ICTION
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mid the diplomatic ups and downs with North Korea, D.B. John’s timely new novel offers a cool-eyed portrait of our adversary. “Star of the North” portrays a society in which an elite lives in luxury, the masses struggle to survive and many thousands accused of political dissent are condemned to prison camps where starvation and death await them. The Welsh novelist explains that when he toured the country in 2012, tourists were expected to bow to statues of the nation’s founder, “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung. He reluctantly did so lest a refusal cause trouble for the guides leading the tour, but once he returned home, he began reading books by North Koreans who had escaped their homeland. What he learned led to this novel. John tells his story through three main characters. Jenna Williams is the daughter of an African American father and a Korean mother. When she was 18, her beloved twin sister was kidnapped by North Koreans while swimming on a beach in South Korea. (At one point North Korean agents did kidnap hundreds of people to exploit in various ways.) A heartbroken Jenna refused to believe the official verdict that her sister drowned. She becomes a CIA agent who, at age 30, finds a way to visit North Korea and search for the sister she believes may be a prisoner there. Cho Sang-ho is a rising North Korean diplomat. In an early scene, he leads a delegation to the United Nations and dines with senior American officials at Manhattan’s 21 Club. But Cho falls from favor and is soon near death in a prison camp. Mrs. Moon, a woman of 60 who sells rice cakes and soup in a village market near the Chinese border, represents the ordinary North Korean. She and other women in the market must contend with young toughs eager to rob them and corrupt police who demand bribes. One of her
friends, found to secretly be a Christian, is executed. Mrs. Moon’s story also includes a flashback to a time of famine: “She saw hunger drive villagers insane. New graves were dug up and the corpses vanished. Parents took food from their own children.” The survivors were of course consoled that “The Dear Leader felt his people’s agony and wept for them.” It is necessary, in reading the novel, to distinguish between the father, son and grandson who have been the nation’s three leaders. The Great Leader is the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, whose name translates as “Kim becomes the sun” and who died in 1994. His son, Kim Jong Il, called the Dear Leader, is in power for most of this story. We also glimpse the Dear Leader’s son, Kim Jong Un, who takes over upon his father’s death in 2011 and is hailed as the Great Successor. Each is virtually a god and each lives exceedingly well. We’re told of the Dear Leader: “Children begged for grain in his streets, but the Guiding Star of the TwentyFirst Century maintained seventeen palatial homes around the country.” John tells his story with skill and offers facts about North Korea that may surprise some readers, such as the government, seeking to prop up its failing economy, manufacturing methamphetamine for its diplomats to sell to criminal gangs abroad. “Star of the North” builds to a gripping climax. Cho, having escaped the prison camp, is desperately trying to reach China, even as Jenna, still searching for her sister, sets out to confront the Dear Leader. Can either possibly survive? It’s an exciting ending to a novel that, in addition to being highly entertaining, suggests the difficulties we face in dealing with a small, distant nation with values and beliefs so different from our own. n Anderson reviews thrillers and mysteries regularly for The Washington Post.
B STAR OF THE NORTH By D.B. John Crown. 402 pp. $27
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS A Journey to the End of Classic Rock By Steven Hyden Dey Street. 305 pp. $25.99
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y the time rock journalist Steven Hyden was born, in 1977, the Beatles had been broken up nearly as long as they’d been together. The Rolling Stones were in Paris recording “Some Girls,” the band’s last essential LP. The Who and Led Zeppelin would soon lose their drummers to pills and booze and would stop recording new music by the time Hyden was old enough to buy it for himself. And yet classic rock, like The Dude, abides. Why? That’s the big question driving “Twilight of the Gods,” Hyden’s fleet-footed quest to understand the fascination — his and ours — with the boomer heroes who still hold an outsized place in the culture even as they’re once again dying like it’s 1969. While his first book, “Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me,” examined petty but humanizing rivalries among music stars, this follow-up investigates our compulsion to gaze upon these figures as gods. “Of course, those people weren’t gods at all,” Hyden writes, “but rather mortals who would grow old, make comeback records with Don Was and/or Jeff Lynne, and take money from beer companies for their overpriced, nostalgiadriven concert tours.” But if we can will ourselves to see the limber, virile, long-ago iterations of these bands in their latter-day selves — the way Hyden describes having done at a 2012 concert by the Who — what sort of veneration will we grant them in, say, the 2030s, once they really are all dead? It’s a question fans with drawers full of faded concert tees and hard drives full of bootlegs will find irresistible, which is to say, unavoidable. Because even the mighty crowd-surfing, knee-sliding, curfew-busting Bruce Springsteen (born in 1949) is statistically likely to kick the sweaty, all-American bucket eventually. In a book that’s structured like a double LP — 19 “tracks,” or chapters, apportioned over four “sides,”
Hyden dissects the traditions and punctures the myths of rock fandom (and rock criticism) with a specificity that can only be called love. He’s like a kinder, marriedwith-children version of Rob, the record-shop proprietor who narrates Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity.” Or rather, Rob wishes he’d grown up to be Steven Hyden. Hyden considers the radioformat-driven creation of classic rock as a genre, identifying its Alpha (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” 1967) and its Omega (Nine Inch Nails’s “The Fragile,” 1999). And he has so much fun chewing over the question of what will become of this genre that it almost comes as a surprise when he gets around to a few speculative answers. “When you can’t actually view Mick Jagger or Ozzy Osbourne or Neil Young in the flesh, loving classic rock will require a process of animation not unlike a religious ritual,” he says. “Also: holograms.” Mercifully, Hyden’s affection for vinyl and rock documentaries does not mean he’s a cultural reactionary. “The old classic-rock myth about the white-male superman who pursues truth via decadence and virtuosic displays of musicianship has run its course,” he writes. “The time has come for new legends about different kinds of heroes.” He even nominates a few, such as Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, transgender musician Laura Jane Grace and recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Kendrick Lamar. The crumbling of the monoculture means that you probably won’t ever have to squint to make out any of these artists from the other side of a football stadium, but that’s a good thing. Hyden’s warm and witty scholarship is, too. n Klimek is an editor with Air & Space/ Smithsonian magazine and a freelance critic. This was written for The Washington Post.
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OPINIONS
Trump’s summit flip-flop risks far-ranging fallout JOSH ROGIN is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security. Rogin is also a political analyst for CNN.
It’s possible that, by pulling out of the U.S.North Korea summit planned for next month, President Trump is set ting up a future negotiation where the United States gets a better deal. But it’s far more likely that Trump’s reversal will lower the chances for successful diplomacy, strain alli ances, harm U.S. credibility, increase tensions and make peace and security harder to achieve. ¶ The official White House line is that Trump boldly decided to meet with Kim Jong Un to test North Korea’s willingness to give up its nukes; then Trump boldly called off the meeting when he concluded Kim wasn’t serious. Trump’s Thursday letter to Kim offered him a chance to calm down his rhetoric, give in to Trump’s demands and come back to the table later. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had to defend scuttling the summit he circled the globe twice to arrange, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that U.S. policy on North Korea will now return to where it was two months ago: pressuring North Korea in conjunction with our allies. “In some ways, it’s situation normal. The pressure campaign continues,” Pompeo testified. “I don’t know what to say. . . . Our process remains the same.” Pompeo explained that the North Korean government failed to respond to recent private outreach. Publicly, North Korean officials have been lashing out at national security adviser John Bolton and Vice President Pence for invoking Libya in the context of their negotiations. The North Koreans were certainly acting badly; it’s what they do. The Trump administration should know there are always ups and downs when dealing with Pyongyang. If you thought the Trump-Kim
summit was always a folly, Trump’s withdrawal is good news. Now, Trump won’t get outmaneuvered by Kim. It’s true that expectations rose out of control. The president may have realized that barreling into a high-level summit without proper preparation was fairly reckless, although he argued consistently it wasn’t. But by cutting off the diplomacy in the middle with no certainty of what comes next, Trump has opened up a world of possible consequences, most of them bad. For one, “maximum pressure” is already loosening and will be extremely difficult to replace. The idea that squeezing North Korea more will bring it back to the table is aspirational at best. The U.S.-South Korea alliance is headed for tough times. Pompeo didn’t deny that Trump neglected to give President Moon Jae-in warning that he was scrapping the summit. Moon was in town just this past week. His legacy hangs in the balance. Trump made Moon lose
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a Senate committee that U.S. policy on North Korea will return to where it was two months ago.
face and put distance between the two allies. Pompeo could lose credibility, not only with Kim but also any world leader who now can’t be sure he speaks for the president. Pompeo must now pivot from his optimistic rhetoric about bringing North Korea into the 21st century and toe the more hawkish Bolton line of pushing more sanctions all the time. China could take advantage, putting itself forward as the new key broker in diplomacy. By pulling North Korea away from the United States (and by extension South Korea), we may end up pushing Kim back into Beijing’s arms. Xi Jinping now holds the key to enforcing sanctions and getting back to negotiations. He might use that leverage against Trump to get concessions in trade and other areas. Perhaps the biggest risk is that Trump loses interest in North Korean diplomacy, feeling burned and calculating that his best chances for a Nobel Peace Prize lie elsewhere. Trump’s personal momentum was driving the whole process at blistering speeds; slowing it down may sacrifice his attention. Internally, Trump’s more hawkish advisers, including Bolton, triumphed over those more invested in the summit,
such as Pompeo, who testified Wednesday he wanted the meeting to happen. The skeptics persuaded Trump the risks of diplomacy did not match the realistic expected rewards. But the real problem is not with the policy; it was how it was handled. “We should have never legitimized a pariah regime without first setting clear boundaries,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Thursday. “But in hastily agreeing to a summit and then being the one to walk away, President Trump must understand he has now weakened and further isolated the United States.” As with Iran, Trump’s secondyear foreign policy allows for no compromise, no predictability and no clear explanation of what happens next when the United States turns on a dime. Unpredictability as a tactic only works on adversaries when it’s intentional — for allies, it’s always bad. Maybe a deal with North Korea was never in the cards. But Trump’s actions on North Korea have broader regional and international implications. The least the administration can do now is work diligently to mitigate the risk that Trump’s about-face does more damage than good. n
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KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
Even spies love ‘The Americans’ JONNA HIESTAND MENDEZ worked in the CIA’s Office of Technical Service for 27 years, retiring as chief of disguise. She is a founding board member of the International Spy Museum and with her husband, Antonio J. Mendez, is an author of the forthcoming book “Moscow Rules.” This was written for The Washington Post.
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fter 27 years in the CIA, working on operational assignments around the world, I am somewhat numbed to the fictional espionage that engulfs us — the books and movies and TV shows that always get it wrong. That’s why I have largely shunned the genre, barely noting the reviews of the latest creations celebrating the lives of intelligence officers. “Homeland”? No. The Bourne movies? No. “Alias”? God, no! It’s the main reason I work as an adviser and speaker at the International Spy Museum in Washington: to present an informed but still entertaining picture of the work of a spy. But then came “The Americans,” the FX TV series set to finish its sixth and final season this week to nearunanimous critical acclaim. It proved to be the outlier in my perception — and I wasn’t surprised when The Washington Post reported that Gina Haspel, the career CIA officer who will now direct the agency, is a fan of the show. I was late to “The Americans,” but from the first spectacular episode, I was hooked, because the setup resonated. The show centers on a modern American family of spies with children and a suburban lifestyle. That had once been my life. But wait. These spies are not American at all. They are faux Americans — Russians, in fact — something I also knew a little about. There had once been Soviet sleeper agents posing as Americans. The structure of the
FX show, predicated on the family dynamics that result when espionage is the parental career, allows for a thoughtful exploration of the necessity of managing the daily deception that is part of the job of a spy (or, as we would call it at the CIA, an operations officer). My husband, Tony, and I had 52 years between us working with the CIA in mostly foreign assignments. We had to convince nosy neighbors and casual acquaintances, as well as office mates, that we were what we purported to be — somewhat boring administrative professionals. If we made it boring enough, it worked. Tony’s children, however, would eventually notice that their dad was gone far more often than
their friends’ dads, that he never talked about his job and that he was meeting strangers at home with great privacy. Then he would take them, one by one, to a very grown-up lunch and give them “the talk.” He told me that his kids handled the information more carefully than many adults do. While “The Americans” concerns itself with maintaining the charade of a false identity and masquerading as someone you are not, it also pushes further, exploring the nature of love when you live with someone who lies for a living and the moral dilemmas that can arise from those circumstances. On one long assignment to Europe, my husband and I kept a guest book on a shelf inside our front door. When I came home from days away, I would sit down and write him a note, give him the departure and return details of my next trip, and then go again. He would do the same. Today that book is one of my treasures, something like a diary, but without any of the personal stuff. It is the unclassified record of multiple deceptions, covers and meetings. “The Americans” gets the tradecraft and the technology of the 1980s generally right, at least the way it worked when Ronald Reagan was president. The script
is littered with dead drops and communication protocols, disguises and cyanide pills, secret writing and signals used for impersonal communication with your agent or your team. It is all properly executed; it is done the way we did it, and it is one of many ways that Joe Weisberg, the creator of this series and a former CIA officer, shows his hand and his familiarity with CIA tactics and methods. The makeup artists for “The Americans” get it right, too. It is universally recognized that women wear disguises more easily than men do. I went on to become chief of disguise at the CIA and had compelling disguise materials to offer, but the men were never a natural fit. Rhys makes the case, however, for disappearing under nothing more than a knit cap and a pair of glasses, a scruffy mustache and a messy wig. He becomes the consummate little gray man, invisible. We will miss this show, where the action is both shaken and stirred, where the chemistry between Keri Russell, who plays the wife, and Rhys became so real that the actors are a couple now, with a child. Interesting that a real relationship was born out of a TV “marriage” that began as an absolute lie. n
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OPINIONS
BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS
Italy’s populists look to leave euro MATT O’BRIEN is a reporter for The Washington Post’s Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at the Atlantic.
The first rule of leaving the euro is you don't talk about leaving the euro. That’s because, if you do, you’ll not only alienate the vast majority of voters who all want to stay in the common currency, but you’ll also be blamed for the resulting bank run that will cripple your economy. Nobody, after all, wants to see their euros turned into, say, lira that wouldn’t be worth anywhere near as much, so everybody would try to get their money out of the banks before that could happen. That’s why the best way to actually exit the euro is to say that you don’t want to at the same time that you prepare to do so. Disingenuousness is required. Which is to say that Italy really might blow up Europe’s 20-year experiment with sharing a currency. It just elected a populist government that’s made up of the ideologically incoherent protest party known as the Five Star Movement and the Russia-loving, immigrant-hating, far-right League, both of which have flirted with euroskepticism in the very recent past. Now, it’s true that they’ve tried to reassure investors about this by removing the most explosive parts of their platform — calling on the European Central Bank to write off the $300 billion worth of Italian bonds it owns and for an end to the euro zone’s budgetary strictures — but this barely even qualifies as a fig leaf. They are still proposing to do things that they
aren’t allowed to under the euro’s rules. In particular, Italy’s populists want to run much bigger deficits than they are “supposed” to. That’s the only way they will be able to push through the basic income for poor families that the Five Star Movement campaigned on, the much flatter tax system that the League did, and the more generous pension system, undoing cuts that a previous government was forced to make, that they both want. This would already be a big enough challenge to Europe’s prevailing orthodoxy, but what would be even more so is the way they want to pay for this: by either printing money, or adding new debt that they
BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
pretend isn’t. It has to do with what goes by the catchy name of “mini-BoTs,” but what are better understood as IOUs. These would be “bonds” that, like money, would neither pay interest nor ever come due, and, also like money, could be used by whoever had them to pay taxes with or buys things from state-owned enterprises. Private businesses, however, would not be required to accept them. This means that mini-BoTs wouldn’t be quite as useful as euros, and so would almost certainly trade at a discount to them — just like a new Italian currency would. The only question here is whether these IOUs really would be backed by future tax revenue like the government claims. If they were, they would just be bonds that Italy wasn’t allowed to sell, and if they weren’t, they would be money that Italy wasn’t allowed to print. In either case, though, Europe wouldn’t be too happy. That, at least, is the plan. The idea is to provoke a reaction from Europe, like the European Central Bank pulling the plug on their banks, while at the same time proclaiming their fidelity to the euro. That way it looks like they were pushed into something they didn’t want when they really did — specifically, a fight over their future in the common currency —
and consequently their people might support the kind of confrontation that they otherwise wouldn’t have. That, in turn, would give the government the political capital it needs to play this particularly high-stakes game of chicken. Which is where the mini-BoTs come in. By creating what’s potentially a new currency, Italy is trying to make it so Europe can’t threaten to push them out of the euro so much as they can threaten to leave it — and maybe win some concessions. That’s what Greece’s populists unsuccessfully tried to do in 2015, and what Italy’s are hoping will work out better this time for the simple reason that their economy is so much larger that there’s no way Europe could contain all the fallout if they do ditch the euro. The only difference is that Italy’s populists seem much more willing to abandon the euro than Greece’s were. The League’s leader Matteo Salvini seems to actually welcome this prospect since it would probably also force them out of the European Union, and thus free him to deport as many immigrants as he wants as interior minister. I guess the second rule of leaving the euro is you can talk about it all you want once you have a plan to print your own money. n
SUNDAY, MAY 27, 2018
23
KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Seasonal allergies BY
N EETA O GDEN
Spring allergy season brings millions of sneezing and wheezing Americans to pharmacy aisles, health food stores and doctor’s offices looking for relief. The causes and treatments of seasonal allergies are still the subject of some persistent myths. Here are the biggest ones. MYTH NO. 1 Taking allergy medicine daily can make it stop working. Multiple studies have debunked this concern. While it is a common complaint among allergy sufferers, the reality is that taking daily allergy medications does not lead to tolerance. Patients who think their medicines aren’t working anymore may be finding that their symptoms are getting worse because of new allergies or a move to a new city or home. Longer, more intense allergy seasons may mean medicines that used to work well are no longer as effective. Some allergy sufferers don’t take their medication correctly or believe wrongly that all medications are the same. There is some overuse of some over-the-counter nasal decongestant sprays, which offer temporary, quick relief of congestion. Continued use of these types of sprays can cause rebound congestion and worsening nasal congestion, called rhinitis medicamentosa. To avoid this, people should stop using these sprays after three days. But intranasal steroids, a cornerstone of seasonal allergy treatment, are not habit-forming and can be used throughout the spring. MYTH NO. 2 Blooming spring flowers cause allergies. Actually, springtime allergies are caused by tree pollen, not flowers. The most allergenic trees — like oak, birch or maple — don’t have showy blooms. Their impact is significant because they produce a lot of pollen,
which is designed to be windborne and can travel miles. Trees with pretty flowers, such as dogwoods or cherries; planted bulbs like tulips; and flowering bushes such as hydrangeas, roses and azaleas attract insects for pollination. So their pollen is rarely airborne and doesn’t lead to allergies, though it could be an irritant if someone gets too close. MYTH NO. 3 A cold winter and a late spring mean allergies won’t be so bad. In fact, spring allergies start well before spring. The plant life cycle begins in winter, with snow and rain providing moisture essential for growth. Rising temperatures and longer days with more sunlight trigger pollination; by February and early March, U.S. cities are already recording pollen in the air, especially in the South. Studies show that warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels associated with climate change are contributing to earlier, more robust plant growth and pollination. As a result, one 2013 study at Rutgers University found, allergy season has been increasing in length by about half a day for the past 20 years. A “late” start to spring doesn’t mean much when the Earth is generally warmer, the seasons are longer and pollen exposure is more intense. MYTH NO. 4 Allergies aren’t a problem until pollen is everywhere. Most allergists recommend that their patients start treatment at least two weeks before the season begins. The end
KARL-JOSEF HILDENBRAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
A cloud of pollen swirled by the wind hangs over a lake in Germany in April. Springtime allergies are caused tree pollen, which is designed to be wind-borne and can travel miles.
of winter means the miserable cycle of symptoms we typically associate with spring is already underway. When temperatures first begin to warm, allergy sufferers are exposed to some pollen, which can trigger mild symptoms. Often, temperatures dip again and pollen exposure is minimal, but when warmer temperatures and higher pollen counts return, the body is “primed” and hyper-reactive. Even minimal amounts of pollen can cause a strong reaction upon re-exposure. Physiologically, the priming effect is due to increased nasal membrane reactivity with repeated exposure to pollen. Once priming occurs, it can take days to weeks to reverse — hence the benefit of being armed with allergy medications early. MYTH NO. 5 Eating local honey will cure allergies. While honey may have some antimicrobial and antiinflammatory properties, the idea that it can prevent allergies is a misconception. The theory is that as bees move among flowers, they pick up pollen spores that
are then transferred to their honey; gradual exposure to these local allergens allegedly provides immunity. The concept isn’t so off-base: Allergen immunotherapy, or “allergy shots,” works in a similar fashion, but the shots contain a much higher concentration of pollen than the minimal amount in honey. Besides, the pollen that causes allergies is wind-borne and doesn’t come from the flower pollen that bees disseminate. A 2002 study in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology followed three groups of allergy sufferers through the spring allergy season. One group consumed a daily tablespoon of locally sourced honey; another ate commercial honey; a third was given a corn syrup placebo with honey flavor. The subjects’ symptoms were recorded, and after several months, scientists found that honey had no benefits over the placebo. n Ogden is a pediatric and adult allergist and immunologist in private practice in New Jersey. This was written for The Washington Post.
SUNDAY, MAY 27, 2018
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In Sunday’s edition, you’ll enjoy TV World, the Washington Post National Weekly, Parade Magazine and preprinted advertisements from retailers throughout the area. And in Wednesday’s newspaper, shop the local grocery ads and enjoy Relish Magazine published on the first Wednesday of each month. And both editions feature local, regional and national news & sports, feature articles, opinion pieces plus much more.
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COURT, Page A7 yee, per year on Please see DRUG be $275 per emplo AN fruit smoothies, that gross at BY DANIEL BEEKM serve pastries and for-profit companies AY 13023 Highway fresh fruit and year in the AND MATT D in addition to the produce, Lisa Bee’s, least $20 million per like gifts ead lture s retail per-h agricu Time local $500e a The Seattl produce and 2/97, is in a 5-acre city — down from r She also obtained designed to n threatened to World staff write honey and cider. commercial zone, proposal that Durka a weekend of of lifestyles while a liquor license. She secured SEATTLE — After provide a variety nveto. iations between EE — Music, ercial agricultural permits from the county, Chela a homelessness high-stakes negot EAST WENATCH protecting comm The city declared ers and and state s, produce trivia nights e City Council memb las Health District in late 2015. A Seattl Doug ency activities. Fruit stand il painting parties and Bee’s emerg of state . n, the counc inment are tallied Lisa Liquor Control Board summer. Mayor Jenny Durka tax the city’s e count last yearsen markets and agrita might be good for point-in-tim World photos/Mike Bonnick ly to xes, bed and they could be She lost money that homeless people voted unanimous allowed, as are duple stables. 11,600 balance sheet, but ss than addre added more help to part of the The next year, she the largest employers breakfasts and riding agritviolating county code. of Douglas speed to drag alongsee SEAT TLE, Page A7 ded lists rn ss.ibles,” used his super Please on Saturday in Incred espresso and expan menu. She home “Thelessne The county code That is the conce Mother 5K” ” from will Your and tax “Dash for on the as tion and d y “Run who year, recrea S) ers dresse baker se , next Starting hoolers (MOP Wenatchee s, including cider the 5K run. 7, ofng, ainment as day-u County commission Hettick,buildi Calebred tchee Mothers of Presc after participating in tiesr,cente whether a few At cente nt: activi at the Wenaparty. hoste Above run event bottle to cool down She entertainme 1K dfun Tuesday questioned customers the kids like corn Christmas t tape, during Wenatchee uses a water g and ltural g linetheme tastin startin n, a8, of Eastsaid. events helping attrac stand qualify on an agricu Wilso Park. Below: Ahnaleigh sleigh still lost money, she hard ice cream ront rides. Riverf mazes and to Lisa Stanton’s fruit of activities one In 2017, she added n said her customers -site Stanto off By Bridget Mire as “agritainment,” and ng on because of the rd property. r and started cateri attend her events allowed on orcha World staff write that theme. ding to events. The debate, accor orchard, which fits private parties tial stand and ers, was She also hosted 20 EE — Facing a poten , cider She bought the fruit from Bob ATCH the three commission mous nights y. WEN Lego agenc spy family g, the 2015 lead the as well as er said it had shortfall in United Way fundin still have 20-acre orchard in prompted by an anonyy’s code , an egg hunt, a Warn IA ZENGERLE ted nights Mark ATRIC or P opera Y trivia B will g, Senat r who tastin cited Women’s Resource Cente and Karen Rogers complaint. The count a pumpkin hunt helps rs cult decision,” but tion show, that ed Reute “diffi am a opera talent review progr been a Their cer . family r at the CIA on three h money to keep it as First Fruits enforcement offi the some trips to farmers Haspel’s 33-year careeworkforce and enoug and booked live music money. running for at least included weekend the issues and found stopped by its less D.C. — The top homeless families and support from Stanton, with s. He WASHINGTON, occasions. She lost ed to add unity leaders. next few months. e Intelmarkets in Seattle. potential violation day could not make past intelligence comm Council on Thurs This year, she decid to break the crat on the U.S. Senat City she Demo e tchee live d believ ay I Wena , booke two young children, Lisa Bee’s last week Tuesd The has said on 5 in existing “Most importantly more events and ligence Committee will stand a transfer of $22,91 Saturday that work. news, Stanton said. President Donald is someone who can and ed to do approved the center’s Landlord Liaison for another way to music on Friday and he would support if order “I needed to find On Tuesday, she asked Labor Day funds from itional Housing ent,” she to be CIA director, up to the President evenings through Trump’s nominee the mortgage paym ant to its Bruce Trans make clarification. subgr A7 her Page ing nd. done INEE, ensur u I’ve weeke Please see NOM Gina Haspel, all but rts like those “I don’t know what said. subgrant. They’re not conce first woman to to add a issue or a S, Page A7 Her first move was confirmation as the wrong, if it’s a safety said. “It’s my Please see FUND TS, Page A7 n to the existing she Please see EVEN commercial kitche noise ordinance,” allowed her to fruit stand, which belief I fit in the code.”, bakery and and goals. bistro lives its for their d guest about Toute sOn des childcare, hosts s to big a The group provi By Mikaila Wilker mom such crafts for the r “MOPS has been speakers and creates y collected through World staff write mone take part in. The ’s general help S for moms who feel l gift toward the group e Wenatchee MOP Mom’s music the fun run went Day, a ”family got a specia 1940s ’s ted. WENATCHEE — Th rs) group hosted ies. before Mother day and the The isola hoole ng and other suppl tion, butler fundi may“event lost d to a recording from bian in Robot youan listene run/ was (Mothers of Presc they ce fun interac as 5K the ra past er human the of that Moth from not a kfansaid Hettic sy the accordion, The Colum in Embas more its first Run For Your s Public Market on If you’re r playing k s toatget mothe in Seattle ettiC lateH staymom wered sara your next r n of their bookempo a vintage of shop of Moth him ersrecord want tothat ers withi g fundraiser at Pybu moth24-hou The owner walk now offers d.memb er of reporte Lesson eludesSelah it, other ’s name . Thehhotel ver d Sunday mornin and woman Square hroug Vancou r a arreste er with was ed.” T Pionee ng Runn in man Thethe recordi Suitesinvolv e Relay. about out for Saviok since heSaturday. A 23-year-old namedfind had come across the , who a robotcould Oregon from unity been such a big help It was the fourth time service the comm Preschoolers down a relative of the woman up. or snacks join, drinks and deliver after a high-speed chase. has been arrested for trying to“MOPS has lost and isolated,” said Sararoom butler like am things taped to it. He tracked S progr does MOP Butler the tesHills ’s children. time, s who feel at Sage run and robot localguest It also elimina turned 18 that Austin Herald-Republic reported. This mom need. ers meet then contacted the woman memb S might a participated in the organi- whateverMOP who Yakima k, the to Hettic police, tried elude attendant. Please see RUN, Page A7 S, a nonprofit stop signs and stop lights, a to tip the room a member of MOP iscity childrenneed he allegedly ran several ed 90 mph through Yakimazation that offers moms of young can talk ram a patrol car and exceed sOn unity where they failed to stop him. supportive comm By Mikaila Wilker streets. Even spike strips r World staff write CDANIELS BY NEVONNE M
City moves funds to help family shelter Democrat
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have stable or kids who don’t will extend agreed with The shorter week homes. People who goals of by about 10 it would benefit Nelson said that the are to each class session the idea believed sOn week staff because By Mikaila Wilker going to a four-day minutes. both students and ement, r learning the staff achiev ed nt ded stude exten inform se n for World staff write s Nelso increa it allow teeism members of oom. reduce chronic absen quality and school board time in the classr The State thing gh an email WATERVILLE — attract and retain Nelson said the first revising the approval throu has approved and herself. ers. y after finding out Board of Education going to happen is teach shortl that’s the for nge absen week the challe ar to reflect a four-day school “If we decrease the “We’re excited for the school calend l District. nt l will bring,” ule. The school Waterville Schoo teeism, then stude that the new mode next year’s sched the se,” er a that ed increa consid ail. to will reliev t “I was achievemen she said in the em board is expected so that we ng was onth. “The 23. decision was made A school board meeti Nelson said last m new calendar May Superinpment that public can move forward,” professional develo to our held on April 25 for ioned n said. “We me quest on: 665-1173 able to provide ent. So tendent Cathi Nelso to do Wilkers we’re comm Mikaila help them get week system eworld.com just have a lot of work teachers will also how the four-day wilkerson@wenatche s kids which will affect special-need now.” better at their craft, the achievement.” would The board approved day. then affect student shorter week on Thurs 13, 2018 SUNDAY, MAY
.
IN COLLABORATION
WITH
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In vitro, we trust
led to 7 million In 40 years, IVF has religious babies — and profound questions.
In 40 years, IVF has led to 7 million babies — and profound religious questions. PAGE 12
Washington Post Politics A paradox
of ending Iran deal
4
Nation California hides
its homeless 8
5 Myths British royals
23
ing along the TONASKET — Flood ted to Tonasket is expec rising Okanogan River near coming week before decrease early this nd. weeke next feet — up to 21.38 major flood stage The river reached , 11:30 a.m. Wednesday e. 18 feet — around Servic nal Weather according to the Natio 5:30 p.m. Friday. Since ly It hit 19.71 feet at about has decreased slight then, the water level at 5 p.m. Saturday. and was at 19.28 feet e expects the river to servic er ay. The weath around 11 a.m. Mond feet 18.86 to dip down se again continue to increa From there, it will Please see OKAN
What’s next
Inside
In vitro, we trust
Okanogan River expected to rise again
Ethiopian adventure Boy raises money for Ethiopian school. Plans to meet pen pal Tuesday
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