The Washington Post National Weekly - June 11, 2017

SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2017

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Nation Diversifying pot industry 8 Perspective 529 savings plans 23

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THE FIX

How Trump, Obama plug leaks BY

C LEVE R . W OOTSON J R.

P

resident Trump has not been known to quietly brood about government officials who leak confidential information to the media.

He’s thumbed out splenetic tweets and worn out microphones calling for the arrest of whoever’s leaking information about his administration.

Last week, Reality Winner became the first alleged leaker prosecuted during Trump’s presidency. She’s accused of leaking a classified U.S. intelligence document to the Intercept.

Trump is far from matching the total number of leak arrests of President Barack Obama — who rarely talked publicly about leakers until subpoenas were dropped and arrests were made.

What’s the key difference between how Obama and Trump have gone after leakers?

Experts on executive-branch leaks say it’s too early to gauge Trump’s legacy. But much has been made about the Obama administration’s hunt for leakers. Of the 13 people who have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking secrets, eight were arrested under Obama’s administration, according to Alexandra Ellerbeck, senior Americas and U.S. researcher with the Committee to Protect Journalists.

And prosecutors under Obama have spied on journalists and named a journalist an “unindicted co-conspirator,” according to the New York Times. Ellerbeck said that’s just a step away from arresting a reporter for writing a story — and raises dangerous constitutional issues about freedom of the press.

But Obama, who ran on a platform of open and transparent government, has defended

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the arrest of suspected leakers, saying his administration had gone after “a really small sample.”

“Some of them are serious, where you had purposeful leaks of information that could harm or threaten operations or individuals who were in the field involved with really sensitive national security issues,” Obama said in an interview with the Rutgers University student newspaper.

LINCOLN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE VIA EPA

Reality Winner was a federal contractor who is accused of leaking classified information.

Trump, on the other hand, has publicly shown less verbal restraint, stressing the need to “find the leakers.”

“Obama was furious over leaks, but his fury was directed internally,” said David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University who specializes in national security law. “What distinguishes Trump is that he is directing his [anger] to the public. What is the point of complaining about leaks in a public tweet? He can call up the attorney general at any moment of the day or night. . . . He’s the chief executive and he has powerful investigative tools at his disposal. Twitter is not one of the tools.”

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 35

How have leak arrests affected the country?

For Obama, arresting actual leakers dampened people’s desire to disclose confidential information.

Mark Mazzetti, an investigative reporter who covers national security for the New York Times, talked to The Post’s Greg Sargent about the effect of Obama’s leak investigations.

“There’s no question that this has a chilling effect,” Mazzetti told Sargent in 2013. “People who have talked in the past are less willing to talk now. Everyone is worried about communication and how to communicate, and is there any method of communication that is not being monitored. It’s got people on both sides — the reporter and source side — pretty concerned.”

Historically, leaking government secrets “has been a hard crime to prove and to prosecute,” he said. “What has happened in the last couple of decades is that contacts between leakers and the press are easier than ever to trace because of the electronic footprints that are left by their communication.”

“It certainly seems like they’re being very serious about hunting down people talking to reporters.”

Trump’s approach to leaks has had the opposite effect, experts say.

Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote that Trump has found it nearly impossible to plug leaks: “As Trump shuts down White House access to reporters, they will infest the departments and agencies around town that the president has peeved. The intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump.” n

©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY HEALTH BOOKS OPINION PERSPECTIVE

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ON THE COVER Maweya Abu Salah is a Palestinain woman with cancer who went to a hospital in Jerusalem for better care, but her children were unable to get permits to accompany her.

Photograph by LINDA DAVIDSON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

After Comey, what happens next?

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

The former FBI director’s testimony brought calls for expanded congressional inquiries

BY K AROUN D EMIRJIAN AND E D O ’ K EEFE

F

ormer FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony Thursday about possible obstruction of justice by President Trump prompted calls from Democrats and Republicans for an expansion of ongoing probes examining the actions of other senior administration officials.

Democrats said they’re especially eager to examine the roles played in Comey’s firing by Attor-

ney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. Members of both parties said they want copies of memos and other documents Comey said he has turned over to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, detailing his interactions with the president.

Nearly three hours of testimony by Comey — in which he detailed his interactions with Trump before his May 9 firing — raised the prospect of new lines of inquiry for at least four Senate and House committees looking

into various aspects of the matter.

It also suggested that principal characters in the drama, like Sessions, are likely to face pointed questions from Democrats when they come to Capitol Hill for other business.

Sessions is scheduled to appear Tuesday before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee to discuss the Justice Department’s budget.

Comey’s testimony left some lawmakers wanting more.

“Every good movie has a sequel,” quipped Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who first came

After Thursday’s testimony, Democrats in Congress say they want to examine the roles that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, top, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, above, played in the firing of former FBI director James B. Comey.

to national attention as a House lawmaker involved in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Some Democratic senators reacted to Comey’s testimony, saying they believe there is credible evidence that Trump may have obstructed justice in trying to persuade Comey to drop the FBI probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. But they cautioned that it will be up to Mueller to present such charges to Congress.

“Everybody wants to jump to a conclusion — we’re nowhere near

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POLITICS a conclusion,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

Precedent dictates that a sitting president won’t be indicted on obstruction-of-justice charges, according to legal experts. Congress must ultimately determine if matters raise the specter of impeachment.

“The evidence just keeps piling up that there has been a very real presidential abuse of power,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Intelligence Committee.

But when asked whether Trump’s actions amounted to obstruction of justice, Wyden deferred to Mueller and his legal team.

“I’ll leave the lawyers to make those decisions,” added Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat.

Comey did not say that he believed Trump’s conversations with him were an effort to obstruct justice. But his narrative of events — that Trump made a point of speaking with him alone and pressured him to drop the Flynn investigation — suggested that if they didn’t amount to obstruction of justice, they certainly came close.

There is “certainly a building, mounting, unfolding case of obstruction of justice” against the president, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

Republican leaders would only pledge to “take what we heard, and figure out how that moves our investigation forward,” according to Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who said later that he “didn’t hear” Comey answer questions in a way that “alluded to anybody obstructing justice.”

Other Republicans said they believe they have to learn more about how Trump tried to shape the FBI investigation.

“Whether it rises to criminality . . . I’m not prepared to reach a conclusion on that because we’re not done with all the other pieces that are missing,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), an Intelligence Committee member, said after the hearing.

Rubio said that the committee had yet to hear a full accounting from Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats or Adm. Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, about whether Trump also asked them to pressure Comey to drop the FBI’s

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Some Republicans said they believe they have to learn more about how Trump tried to shape the FBI inquiry. probe. Coats and Rogers appeared before the intelligence panel on Wednesday, but they refused to answer questions about their conversations with Trump or Comey — leading Burr to warn them that “at no time should you be in a position where you come to Congress without an answer” to questions.

Neither had been told not to speak about those conversations by the president or by Mueller.

Rubio said it is important to understand what Trump’s advisers had and had not told him, to understand whether people are dealing with “a concerted orchestrated effort to impede justice, or is this an unconventional nonpolitician who, because he has not worked in government before, either doesn’t understand or, quite frankly, is not interested in convention.”

That line of argument — that Trump is a first-time politician

worthy of leeway and understanding — was repeated across Capitol Hill on Thursday by senior Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that Comey’s comments “raise serious questions about Attorney General Sessions that he and the Justice Department must answer immediately.”

Democrats warned that Sessions will face questions about his involvement in the Russia investigation during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday.

Blumenthal and Graham are members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has pushed to have Comey appear to answer more questions about his interactions with Trump and other senior officials.

But aides and senators said it may be difficult to compel Comey, now a private citizen, to return for more questions — this time from

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) speaks to Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday that included testimony from Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and Adm. Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency. The two intelligence officials have yet to publicly say whether President Trump asked them to pressure Comey to drop the FBI’s probe.

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a panel packed with former federal prosecutors and state attorneys general whose queries may be more pointed.

A spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) didn’t return requests for comment.

The future work of the Senate Intelligence Committee, regarded across Capitol Hill as the most studious and advanced congressional probe, may be determined in large part by a meeting leaders are having with Mueller this week.

The committee is also sorting through some documents that Flynn provided in response to subpoenas for his business and personal records.

Flynn has also provided some documents to the House Intelligence Committee in response to a subpoena, according to that panel’s ranking Democrat, Adam B. Schiff (Calif.).

Burr and Schiff have indicated that more subpoenas may be coming in their respective probes.

Burr also said last week that the committee will soon issue more subpoenas for witnesses’ documents. In the House, members are still waiting on a response to subpoenas issued for documents and testimony from Flynn and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

In the House, aides to the chairmen of the Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Government Reform committees said they had nothing to say about whether Comey’s testimony might reshape their investigations. Jared Kushner, White House senior adviser, also will be meeting with the Intelligence Committee this month, according to aides familiar with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The House Judiciary Committee has said it will conduct oversight of Mueller’s probe but has no plans to launch a fresh inquiry.

Graham warned that any expansion of the controversies swirling around Trump will probably lead to more political fallout. He recalled how initial investigations of Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater land deal led to revelations of his extramarital affair with a former White House intern.

“You start with Whitewater and you end up with the blue dress? This is going to happen here,” Graham said. n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

The end of Kansas’s tax experiment BY

M AX E HRENFREUND

I

n a stunning repudiation of conservative tax-cutting philosophy, Kansas Republicans voted this past week to reverse deep tax cuts enacted by Gov. Sam Brownback (R), a move that lays bare the challenges of one-party control and the risks for Republicans in Washington pursuing a similar policy at the national level.

The vote by lawmakers in Kansas followed years of frustration about the damaging effects of tax cuts on Kansas’s state government. With huge Republican majorities, Brownback had pursued deep reductions in tax rates early in his administration, calling them a “real live experiment” in conservative governance, and tried to veto the legislation rolling them back.

The Kansas legislature’s decision to override his veto, however, could reverberate in many statehouses, where Republicans dominate, and in Washington, where President Trump and congressional allies have made passing similarly deep tax cuts a central pillar of their agenda for this year.

The tax reductions in Kansas had not delivered the economic growth that Brownback promised but caused massive holes in the state’s budget and led to unpopular spending cuts in areas such as education.

“Kansas has had a turn to the far right, and we seem to be centering ourselves,” said Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Republican who represents a suburb of Kansas City and voted for the tax increase.

Kansas’s legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, but moderate GOP lawmakers joined with Democrats after it became clear that support for Brownback’s policies had become a major political liability. In last year’s election, a number of Brownback’s allies lost key races to Democrats or moderate Republicans opposed to the tax cuts. On Tuesday, 18 of the state’s 31 GOP senators and 49 of the 85 Republican members of the House voted against the governor.

“In my estimation, I think the tax policy move last night by the

THAD ALLTON/TOPEKA CAPITAL-JOURNAL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

State Republicans’ override of governor’s conservative policy may echo in other states, D.C. legislature is a wrong move,” Brownback told reporters Wednesday. “It’s wrong for the long-term view of the state of Kansas. I think it’s wrong for growth.”

In recent years, Kansas has served as a real-world example of what can happen if tax cuts fail to deliver promised growth. Since Brownback began cutting taxes in 2012, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has consistently lagged that of the rest of the country. Last year, Kansas’s gross domestic product increased just 0.2 percent, federal data shows, compared with 1.6 percent nationally.

At the end of 2015, the state was in what many economists would describe as a recession, with the economy shrinking for two quarters in a row.

The governor, however, blamed Kansas’s poor statistics on a lackluster global economy, which he said was slowing exports in agriculture and aviation, two of the state’s most important industries.

The legislature began this year’s session with the government in a

deficit of $350 million, leaving lawmakers mulling more budget cuts. They have drained the state’s reserves of cash, diverting money meant for roads, delaying payments to pension funds and, in essence, forcing local agencies to make loans to the state government.

Last year, the governor pushed back the schedule for 25 construction projects. In March, Kansas’s Supreme Court ruled that the lack of funding for public schools violated the state’s constitution, forcing lawmakers to act.

The newly passed tax increase in Kansas reverses the essential components of Brownback’s tax changes, raising rates for taxpayers of all income levels. The legislation also scraps a plan that would have further lowered rates in upcoming years.

In all, state budget analysts project the changes will raise an additional $600 million annually.

For Brownback’s opponents, the tax increase is a major victory in a years-long fight to stop the

“In my estimation, I think the tax policy move last night by the legislature is a wrong move,” Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) said Wednesday after state legislators voted to override his veto of a bill raising state income taxes.

governor from enacting increasingly conservative economic policy. Last year’s election substantially weakened the governor’s support in the legislature. In November, Democrats picked up a seat in the Senate, which has 40 members, and 12 seats in the House, which has 125. In primary elections in August, Republican voters had forced out 14 incumbent allies of the governor, replacing them with more moderate candidates. Other GOP lawmakers who supported Brownback retired last year, and moderate Republicans won a few of those seats as well. Rooker, the GOP legislator, said her former colleagues were not eager to confront frustrated voters in another campaign, or to deal with the fiscal headaches Brownback’s policies had created if they did win reelection.

“The elections reflected a mood in Kansas that possibly Kansas politics had shifted too far to the right,” said Rep. Don Hineman, a moderate Republican from a rural district in western Kansas who serves as the House majority leader. “It was time to return to a more centrist position, which is where Kansas has traditionally been governed from.”

Kansas is among many states where policymakers face fiscal duress, leaving lawmakers to make painful choices between cutting services and raising taxes GOP policymakers have long criticized.

In Alaska, Gov. Bill Walker (I) has proposed restoring the state’s income tax to raise money, which lawmakers there eliminated nearly four decades ago. Yet red states such as Indiana and North Carolina have successfully reduced taxes while maintaining a balanced budget, said Joe Henchman, an attorney at the right-leaning Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C. They have done so by reducing spending sufficiently to make up for the difference.

“They didn’t assume that the cuts would pay for themselves,” Henchman said. “It’s true that while tax cuts can boost economic activity, most tax cuts do not pay for themselves budgetarily.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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‘Chris Wray is not Trump’s lackey’ FBI nominee is seen by some as low-key and similar to Comey, Mueller

BY

M ATT Z APOTOSKY

P

resident Trump announced Wednesday that he would nominate Christopher A. Wray — a whitecollar criminal defense attorney who led the Justice Department’s criminal division during the George W. Bush administration — to serve as the next FBI director.

Wray, now a partner at King & Spalding, led the criminal division from 2003 to 2005, and his firm biography says that he “helped lead the Department’s efforts to address the wave of corporate fraud scandals and restore integrity to U.S. financial markets.” He oversaw the president’s corporate fraud task force and oversaw the Enron Task Force. Before that, he worked in a variety of other Justice Department roles, including as a federal prosecutor in Atlanta.

More recently, he has served as attorney for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a Trump ally. He also represented the Swiss bank Credit Suisse AG in a tax evasion case that ended in a $2.6 billion settlement with U.S. authorities. In 2014, the bank pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid and assist U.S. taxpayers in filing false income tax returns.

Trump said Wray would “again serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and model of integrity once the Senate confirms him to lead the FBI.” It is unclear how soon that could happen. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said the panel would begin consideration of his nomination once receiving it formally, which he indicated might take a few weeks.

People who had worked with Wray said he is an accomplished, low-key lawyer who would not hesitate to stand up to the president if necessary.

Bill Mateja, who worked with Wray in the Justice Department in the early 2000s and is now in private practice at the Polsinelli law firm, said, “If people thought that Trump might pick a lackey, Chris Wray is not Trump’s lackey.”

But others were not so sure.

Faiz Shakir, national political

KING & SPALDING VIA REUTERS

Christopher A. Wray was a white-collar criminal defense attorney in the Justice Department and an attorney for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that Wray’s firm’s legal work for the Trump family and his history of defending Christie, who was Trump’s transition director, “makes us question his ability to lead the FBI with the independence, evenhanded judgment, and commitment to the rule of law that the agency deserves.”

Wray represented Christie during the federal investigation into politically motivated lane closures at the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey and Manhattan. He kept a low profile during the scandal, but behind the scenes, he served as a comforting presence to Christie, who last week called Wray an “extraordinary lawyer” and “a nonpolitical choice.”

“When I was at the absolute lowest point of my professional life, he’s who I called,” Christie told reporters at an event in New Jersey. “I don’t think you can get a better recommendation than that.”

Christie would not say whether he recommended Wray to Trump.

Legislators vowed to scrutinize Wray — although he did not face immediate condemnation from Democrats.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (DDel.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said, “I’m encouraged that President Trump has nominated someone with significant

federal law enforcement experience, rather than a career in partisan politics, as was rumored over the past several weeks.”

Lawmakers will probably examine whether Wray’s work presents any conflicts of interest. Bobby Burchfield, another lawyer at Wray’s firm, was hired this year by Trump’s company as an ethics adviser — though there was no indication Wray did work for Trump or his businesses. Wray’s firm also indicates on its website that it did work for at least one unnamed major Russian oil company.

If confirmed, Wray will succeed James B. Comey, whom Trump abruptly fired last month amid the investigation into whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election. That probe is now being overseen by a special counsel, former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III. Andrew McCabe, who had been deputy director, is leading the FBI on an interim basis.

Mateja, who served as senior counsel to Comey when he was the deputy attorney general, said Wray and Comey are “very much the same,” although Wray is more introverted.

“I know both of them very well, and I will tell you first, I think the American people should feel good about the fact that President Trump did not pick a wallflower.

He picked somebody with a real moral compass that’s very similar

to Jim Comey’s moral compass,” Mateja said.

Neil MacBride, a former U.S. attorney who worked with Wray both inside and outside of government, said Wray’s selection was reminiscent of Mueller’s in 2001.

“Like Bob, Chris has great law enforcement chops; both were former heads of the criminal division, former [principal associate deputy attorneys general] and former line prosecutors who handled the department’s most serious terrorism and criminal cases. Both are men of integrity and independence, who are serious, thoughtful, even-tempered, with great judgment,” MacBride said.

Although Wray might not be the ultimate supervisor on the Russia probe, he could play a role in it, as FBI agents are still working on the case with Mueller.

Wray is no stranger to highprofile cases. His name appears on several redacted records in the ACLU’s database of torture documents. According to a 2005 profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he had to assess on his first day at the Justice Department how the FBI misplaced files in the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. He was also involved in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and helped coordinate the investigation into the D.C.-area snipers, according to the newspaper, although in an interview, he noted that his work was not all terrorism-related.

“I think a lot of people thought all the focus would be on terrorism and everything else would go into the ditch,” Wray said. “In fact, I think we’ve accomplished incredible things. I feel so fortunate to have had this job in this time.”

Joe Robuck is a retired FBI special agent who worked with Wray when Wray was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta and has remained in contact with him through the years.

“He’s completely missionoriented,” Robuck said. “It’s a tough job, it’s a really hard job, but he will deal with the pressure, and he won’t let anybody influence him.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Racial roadblocks in legal pot trade

BY T RACY J AN AND F ENIT N IRAPPIL

D

arryl Hill, hailed for integrating college football in his youth half a century ago, was a successful entrepreneur with no criminal record and plenty of capital when he applied for a license to grow marijuana in Maryland — a perfect candidate, or so he thought, to enter a wide-open industry that was supposed to take racial diversity into account.

To his dismay, Hill was shut out on his first attempt. So were at least a dozen other African American applicants for Maryland licenses. They were not told why.

Now, Hill, who has a history of helping minority firms get financing and federal contracts, has a new game plan for breaking into the industry — just as a number of jurisdictions are turning to address the racial disparities in the legal marijuana business.

States generally do not track the race and ethnicity of license applicants, but industry analysts and researchers say that dispensaries and the more-profitable growing operations across the country are overwhelmingly dominated by white men.

The lack of minority representation is especially fraught, given that research shows African Americans were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated during the war on drugs. Now that marijuana is seen as a legitimate business, advocates argue that minorities should also reap the profits.

“Here’s a drug that for years has been the bane of the minority community, sending young people to jail by the boatloads,” Hill said.

“Now, it could be a boon to these communities, but minorities have been left out.”

So the 73-year-old great-grandfather who was the first black football player at the University of Maryland sought an ally in his quest to help other minorities — and himself — break into the closed ranks of cannabis cultivation and sales.

Hill’s new business partner,

OLIVER CONTRERAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Even as more states legalize marijuana, analysts say the industry is dominated by white men Rhett Jordan, happens to be a groundbreaker in his own right.

The 33-year-old Colorado industry pioneer, who is white, founded one of the largest legal marijuana operations in the nation.

“The way minorities get into the game is they need top management, technical expertise and money,” Hill said. “If Jordan is involved, there’s automatic respect and credibility when it comes to raising money.”

The marijuana trade, legal in some form in 29 states plus the District of Columbia, is one of the country’s fastest-growing industries. The $6.6 billion in medical and recreational marijuana sales in 2016 is expected to expand to $16 billion by 2020, according to New Frontier Data, a cannabis data analytics company headquartered in Washington, D.C. But African Americans seeking to go into business as growers or retailers face a host of hurdles, researchers say. Many states bar convicted drug felons from the

industry, disproportionately hurting minorities because of historically higher conviction rates. Others have set high investment requirements. Some dole out licenses through appointed commissions that industry researchers say reward the politically connected, who by and large are wealthy and white.

“Marijuana legalization without racial justice risks being an extension of white privilege,” said Bill Piper, a lobbyist for Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for drug policy reforms.

The disparities have become such a source of consternation for some lawmakers and industry leaders that more than half a dozen states and municipalities are taking steps to boost minorities in the competitive licensing process.

Hill and Jordan plan to test their new partnership in Pennsylvania, where they are applying for one of the state’s first marijuana licenses, to be issued in June.

Those licenses will award

Darryl Hill, left, and Rhett Jordan plan to help minorities get into the legal marijuana business by lobbying state legislatures for inclusive regulations, acting as consultants or active business partners for minority entrepreneurs, and starting a marijuana training academy.

points for diversity and community impact — potentially giving African American applicants like Hill an advantage.

“Maryland is a blueprint for Pennsylvania for what not to do.

There should be additional efforts put in place to ensure that groups that have been marginalized could be a part of this brand new industry,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia), chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus. “For years, people of color have been arrested and incarcerated for participating in this industry. The least we can do is to make sure they are included now that we want to make it legal.”

Hill and Jordan say they plan to lobby other state legislatures for inclusive regulations like Pennsylvania’s and to act as consultants or active business partners for other minority entrepreneurs.

They also hope to start a marijuana training academy in southwest Philadelphia to help minorities from Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania acquire the technical cultivation, extraction and retail skills to apply for their own licenses.

Jordan, who is expected to hold around a 15 percent interest in Hill’s dispensary, said he saw an opportunity to expand his potential customer base by increasing the diversity of growers and dispensary owners.

Colorado, one of the earliest states to legalize marijuana, has nearly 1,000 dispensary licenses and nearly 1,500 cultivation licenses. African Americans make up less than a handful of license holders, according to cannabis entrepreneurs in the state.

Wanda James, a former Navy lieutenant who says she’s one of the few black growers and dispensary owners in Colorado, blames regulations barring those convicted of drug crimes from owning, and working in, a dispensary or cultivation center.

“In Colorado, if you sell 10 pounds of cannabis today, you probably get written up in Forbes about what a great businessperson you are, but if a young black man sells a dime bag on a street

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NATION corner in Alabama, he’s probably going to jail for 10 years,” she said.

A black person is nearly four times more likely than a white person to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though the two groups use marijuana at similar rates, according to a 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report that examined arrests in every state using a decade’s worth of FBI crime data.

“In America right now, your Zip code determines whether you are a felon or a millionaire,” she said.

Some states also require applicants to have financial holdings upward of $1 million, a particularly high bar, given the documented wealth disparities between blacks and whites. Those without ready access to capital cannot turn to banks, which are unwilling to provide business loans for an industry that is still illegal at the federal level.

The Trump administration’s new focus on drug control and law enforcement has injected additional uncertainty into the industry, especially in the eight states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use.

Even with potential shifts in federal drug-enforcement policies, several jurisdictions have moved to address racial disparities in the industry.

Oakland recently voted to set aside half of all marijuana business permits for people who had been arrested for drug crimes in the city or lived in neighborhoods with high marijuana arrests.

Illinois, like Pennsylvania, awards extra points to minority applicants. Ohio requires 15 percent of licenses to be issued to minorities. Florida has reserved one of its future marijuana-cultivation licenses for a member of the state’s Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.

In February, Washington, D.C., lifted its prohibition against felons convicted of possession with the intent to distribute marijuana from entering the industry.

Hill, despite his first loss, is still hoping to enter the industry next year after receiving a preapproved license to open a Maryland dispensary in 2018.

It’s progress, Hill said, but he still hasn’t won the game.

“Before you can sell marijuana,” he said, “someone has to be growing some.” ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Now science knows why we love spiritual retreats BY

C INDY L AMOTHE

A

s she walked along a New York City street on an October night seven years ago, Katie Kozlowski was so upset that her boyfriend had stood her up that she didn’t even notice the taxicab before it hit her head-on and threw her across the road.

She was able, amazingly, to pick herself up from the gravel, deeply startled but completely unharmed. The accident prompted Kozlowski to reflect on her life.

After suffering through a string of abusive relationships and bouts of heavy drinking and depression, she knew something had to change.

“I wanted to go somewhere so I could figure out how to stop having all of these negative experiences,” she said. Not long after, she packed her bags and boarded a plane to gather with over 200 people on a week-long spiritual retreat in the heart of Ireland.

While there, Kozlowski learned to meditate and listen to herself, experiencing moments of awe and transcendence. She loved the feeling of deep calm and inner peace the group meditations gave her. “It brings awareness to what goes on inside of your subconscious mind,” she explained. She has since attended the retreat three more times. “Every single time that I would leave, I would have a better understanding and more acceptance of myself,” she said.

As meditation, adult coloring and other calming techniques grow, more people are turning to spiritual retreats as a way to unplug and reset. In the last few years, revenue for “wellness tourism,” which includes meditation and other spiritual retreats, increased by 14 percent, from $494.1 billion in 2013 to $563.2 billion in 2015, a growth rate more than twice as fast as overall tourism expenditures, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Christian retreats are

also reporting renewed interest.

In a recent study published in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, scientists from the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University have discovered that there are actual changes that take place in the brains of retreat participants.

The findings, although preliminary, suggest that engaging in a spiritual retreat can have a shortterm impact on the brain’s “feel

ISTOCKPHOTO

good” dopamine and serotonin function — two of the neurotransmitters associated with positive emotions. Researchers studied the effects of attending a weeklong retreat involving silent contemplation and prayer based on the Jesuit teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. They scanned the brains of 14 Christians who participated in the study, ranging in ages from 24 to 76, before and after the retreat.

The study subjects showed marked improvements in their perceived physical health, tension and fatigue, as well as reporting feelings of self-transcendence. Though more research is needed, the co-authors highlighted the strong emotional responses that have long been associated with secular and religious retreats such as “reduced stress,

spiritual transformation experiences, and the capacity to produce life-changing results.”

Not everyone is able to access or afford to attend a spiritual retreat, but a growing body of research has found that a daily practice of mindfulness meditation at home can also help reduce anxiety and bolster good health.

Psychologist Anjhula Mya Singh Bais experienced the benefits of meditating during a tenday Buddhist retreat last year.

“My body started regulating itself. . . . I could feel the stress and cortisol melt away.”

Before her trip, Bais had been struggling with several personal relationships and was unsure of how to move forward. By the end, she said she felt more in control of her thoughts. “After the retreat, one becomes simultaneously calm and exhilarated,” she said. “I was in a better position of not only enhancing my own life but [also] serving others.”

Some people who attend retreats return hungry to share what they’ve learned. Kozlowski is now a mindfulness teacher in Connecticut after her retreat experiences following the accident.

A lifelong nail biter who hid her habit by applying fake nails while secretly still chewing her own, she knew something profound had taken place when, after her second time at the retreat, she realized she had stopped nailbiting. More importantly, she noticed that the fears and negative beliefs she had about herself began to dissolve. “I used to be what people call very prickly, meaning I didn’t take criticism very well.”

Now, seven years after that fateful night with the taxi, Kozlowski said her life has been transformed. “I no longer have relationships with men who are verbally abusive — I don’t go out drinking in bars until I’m in a stupor,” she said. “All of those sort of behaviors, I would never do that now, because I actually like myself.” n ©The Washington Post

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A ‘lost generation’ of poor children A NNA F IFIELD Osaka, Japan BY

T

he country suffered a “lost decade,” and then another one, after its bubble burst some 25 years ago. To this day, despite Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to reinvigorate it, Japan’s economy remains in the doldrums.

Now, experts are warning of a “lost generation” — a whole tier of Japanese children who are growing up in families where the parents — or, often, a single parent — work but do not earn enough to break through the poverty line.

“The Japanese economy has been getting worse and worse, and that’s hurting poor people, especially single mothers,” said Yukiko Tokumaru, who runs Child Poverty Action Osaka, a nongovernmental organizational that helps families in need.

The judgment and stigma that single mothers face in many countries are taken to another level in Japan, a homogeneous society where those who do not conform often try to hide their situations — even from their friends and wider family.

But Japan also has a culture that makes it difficult for women to work after having children — changing this is a key part of Abe’s solution to the country’s economic problems — and that makes life exponentially harder for single mothers.

“We have this culture of shame,” Tokumaru said. “Women’s position is still so much lower than men’s in this country, and that affects how we are treated. Women tend to have irregular jobs, so they need several jobs to make ends meet.”

Japan does have a welfare system, and it provides benefits according to different situations. A 35-year-old mother in Osaka with two elementary-school-aged children and no job can expect to receive $2,300 a month.

But the number of families living on an income lower than the public-welfare-assistance level more than doubled in the 20 years after the asset price bubble

SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Facing Japan’s culture and lackluster economy, single moms struggle to escape cycle of poverty popped in 1992, according to a study by Kensaku Tomuro of Yamagata University.

Now 16 percent of Japanese children live below the poverty line, according to Health Ministry statistics, but among singleparent families, the rate hits 55 percent. Poverty rates in Osaka are among the worst.

“If parents are working poor, their children are poor as well, and the cycle of poverty is handed down to the next generation,” Tomuro said.

“Poor children can’t get higher education, so they end up with a bad job,” he said. The prolonged recession created a layer of second-tier jobs, in which workers do not get the security or benefits that had long been standard — damaging their prospects. “They can’t start a family as they can’t get married or have a child with a low income.”

This situation is all the more surprising given that Japan does not have anywhere enough children.

The country desperately needs

more taxpayers to fund the pensions of its rapidly aging society.

The falling birthrate means that the population, currently 127 million, is set to drop below 100 million by 2060, and onethird of Japanese will be older than 65.

Community centers in Osaka provide not only free dinners and playtime for children but also camaraderie for the mothers.

“I feel relieved when I come here with my kids,” said Masami Onishi, a 23-year-old single mother who stopped by an Osaka center called Nishinari Kids’ Dining Hall, which is in a small, two-bedroom apartment in a housing project.

“It’s a relief to meet fellow mothers and talk about any difficulties we are having. I realize that I’m not the only one going through this,” she said. Onishi has a job operating a machine at a sheet metal factory, but it’s a struggle.

“And it’s fun to come here because I get to see my children smiling and other children smiling, too,” she said as her daughters,

One visitor to the Nishinari Kids’ Dining Hall, a community center in Osaka, Japan, is Masami Onishi, 23, who rides a bicycle with her daughters, Yua, 3, left, and Sora, 6. Onishi has a job but struggles to make ends meet. Of the center, she says, “It’s a relief to meet fellow mothers and talk about any difficulties we are having.”

Sora, 6, and Yua, 3, ate octopus dumplings, an Osaka specialty.

“I want 20, and I’m going to eat them by myself!” yelled Masahide, an 8-year-old who came to the center by himself and repeatedly lashed out at other children, hitting them for no reason.

Such behavior is normal among these children, said Yasuko Kawabe, who started the Nishinari center, which relies entirely on donations, after meeting children who were always angry.

“I wondered if they were hungry,” she said, so she started cooking lessons as a way to feed the children. “I’ve seen dramatic changes in the kids’ behavior. Before, they wouldn’t even look into my eyes and couldn’t communicate. But they become much calmer here.”

But it’s not just about food. It’s also about attention.

“These kids don’t see much of their parents because they’re too busy working,” Kawabe said. “So when they’re here they’re very clingy. They crave attention.”

Local schools, which once tried to hide their problems, now refer children to Kawabe’s center.

Indeed, for women trying to operate support groups, even finding single mothers to help can be a challenge — because the sense of shame runs so deep.

Some women are so embarrassed about a relationship breaking up that they don’t tell their friends, or even their parents, said Junko Terauchi, head of the Osaka Social Welfare Promotional Council, a nongovernmental group helping single mothers with advice and emergency food packages.

Some change is happening slowly at the grass-roots level, with groups such as Kawabe’s and Tokumaru’s putting pressure on local authorities to do more to help single mothers. But change at a national level seems a long way off, they say.

“Japan is considered an economic power, but the government keeps saying we are in debt,” Tokumaru said. “I feel like Japan is such a cold country toward children.

It’s really embarrassing.” n © The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

When eating beef is a political act V IDHI D OSHI Kozhikode, India BY

A

s soon as the evening call to prayer sounded over Kozhikode, a line formed along the esplanade. Volunteers started heaping food onto plates, cautious to keep the beef-to-rice ratio low, making sure there was enough to go around.

One man took out his smartphone to film the action; videos of beef-eating have been doing well on Facebook recently. News cameras from local stations zoomed in on the slogans plastered on a nearby screen that read “our food our choice.”

In this sleepy, palm-fringed city in southern India, eating beef has become a political act. On May 23, the Indian government introduced new anti-animalcruelty rules, restricting the sale of cattle in markets. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to close in on the country’s thriving beef industry, in line with right-wing Hindu ideology, according to which the cow is considered holy.

Some think the new rules are too draconian. Recently here in the southern state of Kerala, people have gathered with pots and pans and firewood to cook beef and share it with strangers in the streets, a convivial form of protest. Many Hindus, who usually avoid cooking or eating beef, have joined the feasts.

At stake is the country’s $4.3 billion beef industry, which provides 23 percent of the world’s beef exports. Since the government’s new rules were introduced, global beef prices have shot up and major brands such as Prada and Armani, which source leather from India, are concerned about the stability of their supply chains.

Small-time beef and leather traders will bear the brunt in India. Most of them are Muslims and lowest-caste dalits — the people once called “untouchables” — because Hindus historically considered these jobs “unclean.” According to Jayakumari

VIDHI DOSHI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Some residents of southern India are protesting the government’s rules restricting cattle sales Devika, associate professor and historian at the Center for Development Studies in Kerala, the new rules will allow large supermarket chains to control supply.

“Beef will become scarce,” she said, “at least for the time being.”

But for many in Kerala, the new rules are more than an economic blunder. To them, it epitomizes the arrogance of Hindu politicians in faraway New Delhi.

Since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cow ambulances, cow hostels and even a system of ID cards for tracking cows have been introduced in veneration of the sacred animal. This bovine obsession hints at a bigger lurch toward the right in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Protecting the “gau mata” — the cow mother — has long been on the agendas of Hindu supremacist groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has close links to the BJP and its ruling elite. In

Hindu tradition, eating beef is considered unscrupulous, to be left to the morally inferior.

Many say that the Modi government’s anti-beef rhetoric has gone too far. Some argue it is emboldening bands of cow protectors, known to maul and even kill people suspected of carrying beef.

For Keralans, the Hinduism of the north is unrecognizable. Hindus here coexist peacefully with sizable Muslim and Christian minorities. They consider themselves ethnically and culturally different from those in the north.

Beef is a staple part of the local cuisine and culture. Even the state BJP here breaks with its northern allies on the issue; the state party promised better quality beef in a recent election campaign.

Since the ban, the hashtag #dravidanadu has trended on Twitter, calling for south India to break off from the north. In the

To protest the Indian government’s new rules against animal cruelty, which critics say will hurt the beef industry, people in Kozhikode have been gathering to cook beef and share it with strangers.

neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, students at the elite Indian Institute of Technology Madras wore black and ate meat in front of news cameras. At one beef party, an ox was slaughtered and the video was shared online. Rightwing parties retaliated, throwing milk parties of their own, and carrying out vigilante attacks against protesters.

Taking cues from the south, states in eastern India are crying foul too. In West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a fierce critic of Modi, said that the government’s passage of the rules using anti-animal-cruelty laws was underhanded and amounted to federal interference in state decisions. In Arunachal Pradesh, where the vast majority of people eat beef, Padi Richo, leader of the opposition Congress party, said the move was “dictatorial.” “Even China doesn’t do that,” he said.

In office, Modi has attempted to distance himself from the party’s far right and position himself as a modern, business-friendly statesman who can open India up to world. In 2016, he condemned overzealous cow protectors as “anti-social elements.”

But spurred by a recent electoral triumph in state elections, the BJP has become increasingly nationalistic. In Uttar Pradesh, a hard-line Hindu cleric named Yogi Adityanath was appointed as chief minister and immediately launched a crackdown on illegal slaughterhouses, strangling the state’s booming beef industry.

The BJP, already weak in the south, is showing signs that it is alarmed by Kerala’s reaction. Party President Amit Shah swooped in last weekend to do damage control, meeting with church leaders and party loyalists.

But for some, the government’s efforts to restrict access to beef are a sign of darker things to come. Referring to the largest ethnic group in Kerala, Devika said, “Beef has been a part of Malayali culture for many centuries. If there was a move to deny something very normal to you, wouldn’t you protest?” n ©The Washington Post

OCCUPIED: YEAR 50

The lonely journey of a Palestinian cancer patient

BY WILLIAM BOOTH AND SUFIAN TAHA in Jerusalem PHOTOGRAPHS

BY LINDA DAVIDSON

The patient in Room 120 was struggling, you could see right away, on what her oncologist called “the cancer journey.” She was three long years into this trip. ¶ Today she felt a pain jabbing its fist into her right side. But Maweya Abu Salah was not done yet. She was a mother who wanted to see her children again. ¶ “I just feel a little down,” she told us. “Come, come. Sit down.” She arranged herself under the bedspread. ¶ Outside her window at the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, the spring flowers were in epic bloom. She praised God and her nurses. She was going home, if not today, in a day or two, she said. ¶ Salah was quick to tell anyone who passed by about her kids: the accountant, the chemist, the math teacher. And the youngest, just 13 years old, a blessing, a handful.

The children wanted to be by her side. One son applied for a permit to accompany his mother to the hospital but was refused, Salah said. Another son was in Jordan and denied entry into Israel. In the days to come, her eldest daughter tried, too, but was turned away.

They were Palestinians stuck on the other side of Israel’s borders and barriers.

One of her doctors told us, “This happens every day.”

Only Salah’s husband of 34 years had a permit to come to the hospital and spend the night. He was alone, too, on his own journey, catnapping by his wife’s bed in a vinyl recliner, or pacing the corridors after midnight, when all was still, except for the beeping of machines.

“I need the kids here as much as she,” Jamal Abu Salah said.

There are many ways to tally the human costs of the Israeli occupation, which began 50 years ago in June.

Israel has faced rockets and three wars with the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza, whose members deny Israel’s right to exist. Israelis endured two Palestinian uprisings, the second marked by suicide-bomb attacks against civilians. More recently there was a wave of knife and vehicular assaults. Thousands of Israelis have died in Palestinian attacks. This is why Israelis say they need walls and permits.

On the other side, Palestinians in 2017 live their lives under a cone of control that they say Israelis or Americans would rebel against.

There are checkpoints, walls — and more than a hundred kinds of permits that a Palestinian needs to enter Israel.

Permit is a bloodless term. An automobile needs a permit. What is a permit for a Palestinian?

A permit is required for a sick Palestinian to go to a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem.

A permit is required for a son to be by his mother’s side in a cancer ward here.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem years ago.

Palestinians consider this half of the city “occupied territory.” Israel says all of Jerusalem is theirs — “eternal and undivided.”

Israel often highlights its generosity toward the Palestinians, especially their access to top-flight Israeli hospitals — care that the Palestinians, or their American and European patrons, pay for.

Left unsaid is the fact that Palestinians come to Israel because health care in the West Bank is substandard. It’s even worse in the impoverished Gaza Strip, which suffers from strict trade and travel restrictions imposed by Israel and Egypt and is ruled by the Islamist militant movement Hamas, a terrorist organization.

Last year, the Palestinian Health Ministry sent 4,500 patients from the West Bank and Gaza to Israeli hospitals. It sent an additional 20,000 to the six hospitals in East Jerusalem, institutions such as Augusta Victoria Hospital, a 120-bed facility run by a Lutheran charity and staffed by Palestinians.

Walid Nammour, director of the Victoria hospital, told us, “Believe me, we would go to the moon to get our people the care they need.”

Nammour praised Israeli doctors. He called an Israeli medical coordinator, “who works round the clock” to help get medical permits for his Palestinian patients, “a saint, an angel.”

Nammour said the cooperation between Jewish, Christian and Muslim medical workers is a model for how to put aside decades of hatred and suspicion, and to make peace together.

“As a Palestinian, I feel discriminated against everywhere I go, but never in an Israeli hospital,” he said.

But all was not right.

“Everything comes back to the occupation,”

Nammour said.

Opposite page: Maweya Abu Salah, 51, is treated for latestage kidney cancer in April at Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem.

Below: Motasem Sayes, a doctor at the hospital, tells Jamal Abu Salah that his wife has died.

Because they are Palestinian, their children weren’t allowed to cross the checkpoint without a permit.

“This is not fair,” Salah said. “Her kids should be here.”

I S R A E L

Jerusalem Checkpoint 300

1949 armistice Green Line

Gilo Har Homa

Bethlehem

Beitar Illit

Taweel’s work site

W E ST B A N K Taweel’s route Saer Legend Israeli settlements

Hebron

Taweel’s home

Kiryat Arba

Completed barrier Barrier under construction Barrier planned

2 MILES

Palestinian built up areas

A permit to get chemotherapy To come to Victoria hospital for treatment, Maweya Abu Salah and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza need two things. They must get a referral from the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is essentially a promise to pay for services rendered — a cumbersome process. They also need a travel permit from Israel’s military and intelligence authorities. Patients, especially those from Gaza, are sometimes required to submit to interviews with Shin Bet intelligence officers before getting a permit.

Palestinian medical patients visiting Israel are usually allowed one escort, sometimes two, a close relative.

The Israelis can refuse permits to younger family members, especially males, for security reasons. Doctors at the Victoria hospital said sometimes even mothers and fathers can be denied permits to accompany their sick children.

“These are the saddest cases,” the director said.

For what would be her last admission, Salah, 51, and her husband first traveled from their home in the northern West Bank by car, then bus, crossing from the West Bank to Israel via the Qalandia checkpoint, from Ramallah into Jerusalem, then another bus and finally a taxi to the hospital.

The 70-mile trip took four hours.

“If the situation was normal, we’d just take the family car,” Salah said on a Sunday afternoon in April. “But this is our life, what can you do? We have to thank God for what we have.”

Salah did not want to complain. But she did want to make one point. “I will say that the thing that exhausts me the most is the back and forth.”

One of her doctors, in English, whispered to us, “You know that this is an end-stage cancer patient making these crazy bus trips, right?”

He looked at Salah, smiled and said in Arabic, “She refuses to use the wheelchair!”

Three years ago, Salah felt a mysterious ache and went to the Palestinian Authority’s public hospital in Jenin. A Palestinian doctor performed an ultrasound. There was something suspicious about the right kidney.

A foreign surgical team visiting Jenin “opened me up and then sewed me back up,” she said.

It was not until Salah was awarded a medical permit by the Israeli military to travel to a hospital in Tel Aviv that a definite diagnosis was reached. The Israelis performed a PET-CT scan and did a biopsy that confirmed kidney cancer.

“They were very nice to me,” she remembered.

Three months later, Salah was given a referral and another Israeli permit to go to St. Joseph’s Hospital in East Jerusalem, where Palestinian surgeons removed her cancerous kidney.

Then she began her treatment here at Victoria hospital, where doctors had access to the latest drug therapies.

The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that half the medical patients from Gaza were continues on next page

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from previous page

denied access to Israel and East Jerusalem last year, while almost all the patients from the West Bank were accepted, though sometimes after lengthy delays. Israeli officials say they try to facilitate essential medical visits. They issued almost 112,000 permits to Palestinian patients last year. But they say they carefully watch whom they allow to accompany the patients.

“My treatment is not available in the West Bank,” Salah told us. “It should be, but I don’t know why.”

She said, “I will say it, health care in the West Bank is really not so good.”

This was the last time we would see Salah conscious.

A dire lack of options In many ways, Israel’s modern medical miracle helped Salah survive. But the occupation also threw obstacles in her path.

Her primary oncologist, Yousef Hamamreh, was trained by Israeli mentors at nearby Hadassah Medical Center, which is considered one of the leading medical centers in the world. Palestinian doctors at Victoria confer often on cases with their Israeli counterparts.

There are just seven Palestinian oncologists in East Jerusalem, and six in all of the West Bank, including two about to retire. There are three in Gaza. That’s it.

“This for a population of over 4 million people,” Hamamreh said, for all the West Bank and Gaza. “This is not right.”

Hamamreh said there are no PET-CT scanners in the West Bank or Gaza, because the Israelis will not allow them. The scanners, which have revolutionized medicine in the past decade, produce radioactive byproducts that Israeli security forces fear could be handled improperly or even deployed by terrorists in a dirty bomb.

And so radiation therapy is not available for cancer patients in the West Bank and Gaza, for the same reason as the PET scanners, which means that every woman who needs radiation for breast cancer or man for a malignant prostrate must secure permits.

Chemotherapy is a different challenge.

Hamamreh said many widely prescribed cancer drugs are not readily available in the West Bank, because the Palestinian Authority does not pay its bills.

“It’s much worse in Gaza,” he said. “Their shelves are empty.”

There are no targeted biological agents, either, no immunotherapy, all tools of modern cancer treatment.

Hospitals in Jordan and Egypt no longer accept patients referred to them by the Palestinian Authority, because they are not reimbursed.

In the past two years, U.S. taxpayers have paid off $60 million of the Palestinian Authority’s debt to the East Jerusalem hospitals. In May, the Victoria hospital threatened to stop taking new referrals, including cancer patients, because the Palestinian government owed it $40 million.

Israel’s modern medical miracle helped Salah survive. But the occupation also threw obstacles in her path.

Palestinian health officials blame the occupation.

Nammour said: “The money is there. But it’s not their top priority.”

‘She’s shutting down’ On a Wednesday, three days after our first visit with Salah, we found doctors at her door.

Things were bad.

“If she were an Israeli, I would have released her for palliative care, for end-of-life management. She’d get home visits, by a social worker, a psychotherapist, oncology nurse, a dietitian,” said Wasim Sharbati, one of her doctors.

It was too late now.

“She’s shutting down,” Sharbati said.

Her husband, Jamal, stood a few feet away.

He is 62 and has spent his life constructing homes, hotels and offices for the Israelis. The day before his wife fell into unconsciousness, he had rushed back and forth from a work site in Tel Aviv, under a different permit, one for work.

Friends and neighbors sit with Roa’a Abu Salah, 24, second from right, and Siwar Abu Salah, 13, as they mourn their mother in Arraba.

“How can Mother die without seeing me first?” the teenager had said, according to her father.

“You took her away alive and brought her home dead.”

His nails were still caked with plaster dust.

“We were wishing to go home,” he said.

His wife lay on the bed, making a gurgling sound.

Jamal combed her hair. He felt her forehead. He smoked outside and paced inside. He made phone calls. It was all very sudden.

There was no time to bring his children across.

“This is not fair. Her kids should be here,” Jamal Abu Salah said.

That night, Jamal said his wife suddenly stirred and spoke to him. She seemed frightened and confused.

She asked her husband why her grandchildren had come to the Israeli checkpoint alone.

Of course, they had not, this was just a dream or a delusion. The grandchildren were toddlers. They were at home.

“I was surprised by this,” Jamal said. “I didn’t imagine this would be on her mind. But she kept going on about the checkpoint, the checkpoint, over and over.”

Jamal said his wife, at her last moments,

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was not seeing angels but Israeli soldiers.

One last checkpoint Maweya Abu Salah died that Thursday afternoon.

A medical resident patted Jamal’s arm and said, “We think she’s gone.”

A nurse handed him his wife’s gold rings.

Jamal put his hands on his wife’s face. He read a prayer from the Koran.

With help, he packed a bag with her shoes, her robe, her purse. He went into the hallway, cried for a moment and then began frantically calling his adult children.

They had to make arrangements to get her home one last time.

Jamal hired a private Jerusalem ambulance to take them to the checkpoint. But not even ambulances are allowed to pass freely.

And so it was there, in a busy parking lot, that Salah’s body was transferred from one ambulance to another, one gurney to the next, in full view of the passing cars and commuters,

a steady stream of Jewish settlers and Palestinians, coming and going.

Jamal didn’t want his sons and daughter to come to the checkpoint to see this.

He warned them away. “Go and represent me in the village, I will bring her home.”

As her body was being transferred from ambulance to ambulance, an Israeli policeman, with an armed Israeli soldier standing by, checked her papers one last time.

The officer looked at her face. He looked at the photograph on her Palestinian ID, at her death certificate and her final permit.

Children say goodbye On that Friday, they buried her in Arraba, a picturesque hill town in the northern West Bank, with nearby ruins dating to Roman times and terraced fields.

Hundreds turned out for the funeral. She was carried on the shoulders of family and friends to a cemetery beside a grove of old olive trees. Her husband and two sons, Mohammad and Ali, the

Loved ones carry the body of Maweya Abu Salah to her final resting place in Arraba in the West Bank. As Salah was on her deathbed, “the only thing between me and my mother was five miles and the checkpoint,” a son said.

KLMNO WEEKLY

chemist and the accountant, placed her in the tomb. The eldest son, the math teacher, was stuck in Jordan. They shoveled the earth upon her.

Afterward, Jamal told us that his 13-year-old daughter, Siwar, was hysterical the night before, pounding him on the chest with her fists, asking, “How can Mother die without seeing me first?”

Jamal said his daughter told him, “You took her away alive and brought her home dead.”

Ali the son said: “I never gave up. I tried to get permits to be with her.” Seven times, he was refused, he said. Only once, for her first surgery, was he given permission. It was his first and only trip to Jerusalem in his life.

The son spoke quietly. Mourners were gathering for coffee, to share a meal, to offer condolences.

“The only thing between me and my mother was five miles and the checkpoint,” he said. “I was so close and so far.” © The Washington Post

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HEALTH

Out of the water, and onto the trail For Diana Nyad, walking isn’t an endurance sport — it’s an activity that could lead Americans to better health

BY

J ENNY R OUGH

D

iana Nyad — the endurance athlete who, at age 64, swam from Cuba to Florida — has another big dream. It doesn’t involve water, poisonous jellyfish or an exhausting 111-mile journey that took her 53 hours. Instead, it involves millions of feet, which Nyad wants to see stride across every state in America.

“Sitting has become the new smoking,” she often says, quoting James A. Levine, a Mayo Clinic physician, whose now-popular phrase speaks to the way our culture’s sedentary lifestyle is ruining our health. More than 70 percent of adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For both men and women, heart disease is the leading cause of death.

Half of U.S. adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes, a 2015 JAMA study reported.

“We are sick of being fat, America,” Nyad announced to TMZ Sports in 2014, a year after her swim, when asked what she was up to next. “We are sick of kids having diabetes. We’re going to be walkers. Just like the Chinese do tai chi every morning, we’re going to walk.”

In 2016, Nyad and her best friend, Bonnie Stoll, a former professional racquetball player and the leader of Nyad’s Cuba expedition, launched EverWalk, an initiative that aims to get Americans on their feet. Anybody can commit to walking at least three times a week by signing a pledge on EverWalk’s website (at everwalk.com), where Nyad and Stoll recently posted a training schedule and opened registration for their next big event: EverWalk New England, a seven-day, 150-mile trek from Boston to Portland, Maine, in September. Participants can register for a short walk (five or 10 miles), one day (20 miles), multiple days or the whole thing.

“It’s a stunning, idyllic New England showcase of a route, almost all of it along the ocean’s edge,” says Nyad, who recently gathered more than 600 EverWalkers to team up with the nonprofit River LA for a 6.5-mile morning walk to celebrate the development of a 51-mile no-car path along the Los Angeles River.

Unlike swimming, cycling or running, which require special equipment and can be hard on the body, walking is the perfect way to get fit and improve your wellbeing, Nyad, 67, says. It’s a lowimpact activity that almost anyone can do: young, old, fat, thin, rich or poor.

More than 3,000 people have taken the EverWalk pledge so far.

Eventually Nyad and Stoll envision tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even a million people joining them virtually for regular walks, no matter where people live. They are working on a website they hope will become “the word in all things walking,” where people can find walking partners, vacation walking routes, training tips and incentives.

EverWalk’s inaugural event in October was a seven-day, 133-mile trek from Los Angeles to San Diego. About 300 people participated as day-trippers, virtual walkers (who walked in their own home town) or epic walkers (who covered the whole distance). One of the epic walkers was Laura Petersen, 49, a statistician at UCLA. Petersen has never been the athletic type, even as a child. “I wasn’t picked last for the teams, but I was picked second to last,” she recalls. As an adult, she wasn’t particularly active either. That is, until eight years ago when her family began taking walks after dinner as a way to get more exercise. Petersen and her son would walk for 30 minutes while her husband and daughter went farther and faster. The 30-minute walk turned to 45. Then Petersen also started walking during her

MATTHEW BRAZIER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

lunch hour. When she came across an announcement about EverWalk’s first event, she felt ready to try 20 miles a day for a week straight.

EverWalk provided her with a training schedule, and Petersen recalls her first long-distance warm-up walk of 18 miles.

“The blisters kicked in at about Mile 16,” she says.

By the time the actual event took place, she had learned to better care for her feet. Other EverWalk participants weren’t as prepared, but Nyad and Stoll had an EMT delivering first aid as well as a second EMT who biked back and forth along the route to keep an eye on walkers.

Petersen used each rest stop — about every five miles — to rehydrate and refuel. At night, she slept in local hotels where her luggage had been delivered.

She made it the entire distance.

“I learned that just because you think of yourself as a type of person, like nonathletic, doesn’t mean you have to live your whole

life that way,” she says.

That’s exactly what Nyad and Stoll are hoping for: a nation of people willing to push away from their chairs and take to the sidewalks and park trails.

“Most people will never swim from Cuba to Florida or run the New York City Marathon,” Nyad says. “You have to work so hard and be so focused. But people can imagine walking from Chicago to St. Louis or Portland to Seattle.”

The vision of an endurance event for the everyday American caught the attention of Chris Devona, 57, of Mount Prospect, Ill. Devona joined EverWalk’s first challenge despite his Stage 4 thyroid cancer. He walked with a brace because of knee replacement surgery, averaging about three miles every hour. Crossing the “achieve line” in San Diego was ultra-satisfying.

“To complete the whole route makes the average guy feel like he just won the Olympics,” Devona says. n ©The Washington Post

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More than just fashion coverage BY

J ULIA C ARPENTER

I

n December, an online opinion piece headlined “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” appeared in Teen Vogue magazine. Within hours, the harsh indictment of the then-president-elect exploded on the Internet: Comments sections erupted in debate, and egg-avatars trolled the writer, Teen Vogue Weekend Editor Lauren Duca, on Twitter.

But it wasn’t just the subject of the article that caused the uproar; it was the nature of the publication that ran it. What was a political piece doing in a teen magazine?

Unsurprisingly, when Duca appeared on a Fox News talk show to discuss her piece and the reaction to it, host Tucker Carlson admonished her to “stick to thigh-high boots.”

The comment — and the fuss — didn’t faze Duca. She’d heard it all before.

“There’s definitely a mode of stealthy condescension sometimes,” she told Mother Jones about the reaction to the piece.

“Other versions of the Tucker Carlson comment: ‘Her last post was about Selena Gomez’s makeup.’ ” But, she said, “it’s possible to like both those things.”

Yes, it is possible to like both makeup and politics, fashion and feminism. And yet, the last thing most people expect from a teen girl magazine is substantive articles or opinions on the issues of the day. Teen magazines are supposed to be about clothes and glamour and summer jobs and relationship advice, right?

Actually, wrong.

Duca’s piece — which Editor Elaine Welteroth called a “watershed moment” in Teen Vogue’s history — wasn’t the beginning of a seismic shift on the teen mag scene.

It was the culmination of one.

The intense conversation Teen Vogue has inspired is the latest flare-up in a decades-long history of teen girl magazines pushing the envelope, embracing serious subjects and expanding their audience beyond, well, teens.

Devoted readers remember

ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE ALVAREZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sassy, Jane and other titles that published reporting on politics, feminism, identity and more alongside fashion spreads throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

Casey Lewis, co-founder of Clover Letter, a newsletter for teen girls, wrote for Teen Vogue in the 2010s and finds the current furor over the magazine somewhat perplexing. She recalls the nowdefunct Teen People, published by Time Inc., which explored politics and world news in much the same way that Teen Vogue is doing now.

“Teen People was doing really serious reporting on immigration and AIDS” in the early 2000s, she says. “It’s wild. Teen mags have such a massive history of covering these issues for teen girls, and now a lot of adults are like ‘Oh, we need to take these magazines seriously.’ ” Teen magazine historians — a.k.a. people who actually used to read or subscribe to teen magazines — all had their favorites. Tavi Gevinson credits Sassy with inspiring her online hit Rookie (now also a podcast from MTV News),

At teen girl mags, political stories have been en vogue for a while

Lauren Duca wrote an article on Donald Trump in Teen Vogue in December that sparked debate.

and Sassy founder Jane Pratt went on to launch a number of legendarily successful teen brands, including her eponymous Jane.

Editor and writer Brandon Holley led the charge at Elle Girl when Hearst was first dipping its toes into the teen mag business in 2001. She recalls the reaction when Elle Girl ran a cover story titled “The F Word — are you a feminist?”

“People were like, ‘Ooh — feminism,’ ” she says, adding that she finds it “weird” that 17 years later, “we’re still having this conversation.”

From those early days, Holley saw the teen magazine landscape evolve and push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for teen readers. At Jane, where she worked from 2005 to 2007, she published reports on gay conversion therapy, essays on work and money, and even a multipage spread of reader-submitted nudes dubbed the Jane Guide to Breasts.

Around that same time, the oldest surviving teen magazine — Seventeen — was undergoing

some radical changes, led by editor Atoosa Rubenstein.

In the early 2000s, Rubenstein launched a religion section, a first for the magazine. Where competitors led their coverage with celebrity profiles and beauty shots, she fought to add a new section called Inner Girl.

Even earlier, in 1998, when she was at CosmoGirl, Rubenstein had launched a politics series called Cosmo 2024, named for the year when one of the magazine’s oldest readers could theoretically be elected the first female president.

Rubenstein and future Seventeen editor Ann Shoket interviewed leaders like Madeleine Albright, Barbara Walters and, yes, Donald Trump about their paths to professional success.

But CosmoGirl folded in 2008, as magazines across all genres struggled to meet teens where they were: online. As more and more once-iconic titles disappear, Teen Vogue has embraced its online audience.

And in fact, between April 2015 and March 2017, Teenvogue.com’s traffic has grown 226 percent, says a Condé Nast spokesman. As of March, politics is the most popular section on the website. And even before Duca’s piece went viral, more people than ever before had visited to read stories outside the stereotypical teen-mag genre.

So when Holley thinks about her time at teen magazines and their history, from Elle Girl to Jane, and now to Teen Vogue, she thinks about her 8-year-old son’s friend Fiona. Fiona loves lip gloss, but she can also ride backward on a surfboard. At the Women’s March on Washington in January, she held her own protest sign.

Girls like Fiona don’t need just any magazine, Holley says. They need a guide to womanhood that doesn’t preach or condescend but instead educates and uplifts — and, most important, reflects the girls who are reading it.

Teen magazines today “are introducing girls to feminism that isn’t bra-burning, which is also cool,” she says. “But you can be feminine and a feminist.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

How they each fought totalitarianism N ONFICTION

O CHURCHILL & ORWELL The Fight for Freedom

By Thomas E. Ricks Penguin Press. 339 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

L YNNE O LSON

ne way to measure the lasting influence of a prominent writer or other major figure is to see whether an adjective has been created from his or her last name.

“Dickensian” and “Machiavellian” come to mind. So do “Churchillian” and “Orwellian,” derived from the subjects of Thomas E. Ricks’s new book.

As Ricks points out, Winston Churchill is a far more consequential historical figure than George Orwell, a fellow Briton who labored in obscurity as a political journalist and author for most of his life. Yet the word “Churchillian,” which calls to mind the former prime minister’s larger-than-life personality and rhetorical skills, has a slightly musty quality about it now, evoking as it does World War II and its immediate aftermath.

By contrast, in today’s unsettled, contentious times, “Orwellian” is a word that pops up everywhere, especially since Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency. To many, the grim, dystopian world of Orwell’s masterpiece “1984,” in which the allcontrolling state Party orders its citizens “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” is chillingly similar to the mind-set of the authoritarian-minded Trump and his supporters, who define falsehoods as “alternative facts” and repeatedly insist that reality is whatever they say it is.

In “Churchill and Orwell,” Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has made the intriguing decision to write a dual biography of these two very different men — one a towering figure on the world stage, the other a quiet observer — who never met and apparently had little influence on each other. For Ricks, the thread connecting them is their resistance to the spreading threat of totalitarianism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. They were “kindred spir-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

George Orwell, left, and Winston Churchill both spoke out against tyranny. But to smooth Britain’s alliance with Joseph Stalin, Churchill’s government censored criticism of the Soviet Union from writers like Orwell.

its,” Ricks writes, who “steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.”

Churchill’s resistance took the form of political action and powerful rhetoric — first as the most outspoken foe of the British government’s appeasement policy toward Hitler before the war, then as the prime minister who rallied his compatriots in 1940 to stand alone against Nazi Germany.

Orwell, whose sole weapon was his pen, stood up against tyranny on a broader scale: His main focus was Soviet repression, but he also lashed out against the abuse of authority and denial of truth by governments and institutions everywhere. “His mission,” Ricks points out, “was to write the facts as he saw them, no matter where that took him, and to be skeptical of everything he read, especially when it came from or comforted those wielding power.”

As it happened, Churchill and his government were among those who felt the sting of Orwell’s pen, a fact to which Ricks pays little attention. Early in the book, he notes a comment by military historian Williamson

Murray that Britain, under Churchill, had survived the war “with her virtues largely intact.”

The key word here is “largely”: Freedom of speech in Britain, for one, took some hard knocks during the war, with Orwell as one of the victims.

To defeat Hitler, Churchill had cozied up to another totalitarian leader, Russia’s Joseph Stalin, who reluctantly joined the Allies after the 1941 German invasion of his country. As the war progressed, Churchill put pressure on the British press to keep quiet about controversial issues, particularly those involving the Soviets; on occasion, his government penalized publications for running stories and opinions of which it did not approve.

Even though he was a die-hard leftist, Orwell was appalled not only by what he called “this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally,” but also by the eagerness of left-wing intellectuals, the press and publishers to accept what he saw as a “fog of lies and misinformation.”

When he submitted “Animal Farm,” his biting satire about Soviet totalitarianism, to British

publishers in 1943, it was rejected by every editor who read it. One publisher, who initially accepted it, had second thoughts after receiving a warning from the British government that the book would damage Britain’s relationship with Russia.

“Animal Farm” was finally published in August 1945, three days after the end of the war. It was an instant bestseller.

Ricks’s book would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the wartime conflict between Orwell and Churchill’s government over the complexities of truth and its suppression.

Nonetheless, for all of Churchill’s shortcomings in this particular regard, there’s no question that, overall, both he and Orwell demonstrated moral courage and a fierce dedication to the importance of democracy and individual freedom — increasingly rare qualities today that Ricks rightly celebrates. n Olson’s latest book is “Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

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A thriller worth staying up to read

Beatles essay book is only partly fab

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

hen was the last time you stayed up late because you just had to finish a thriller? If you’d asked me that question a couple of weeks ago, I probably would have reached back to Ken Follett’s “Eye of the Needle” or Geoffrey Household’s “Rogue Male” — two classic World War II suspense novels. Now, though, I’d add the name of Heather Gudenkauf’s “Not a Sound,” a woman-introuble tale that kept me reading till the birds started chirping.

There’s minimal blood and zero sexual depravity in Gudenkauf’s psychological suspense story. In terms of style, think Mary Higgins Clark or Lisa Scottoline, accented with a dash of inspiration from that vintage Audrey Hepburn movie “Wait Until Dark.” That’s the one where Hepburn plays a blind woman who outwits the bad guys by forcing them to meet her on her own turf: namely, her apartment, which she’s thrown into pitch-black darkness by breaking all the lightbulbs.

Like Hepburn’s character, Gudenkauf’s heroine, Amelia Winn, is physically challenged: a near-fatal encounter with a hitand-run driver rendered her profoundly deaf. It’s been two years since that accident, which caused lots of collateral damage. Amelia’s marriage crumbled and she lost her job as an emergency-room nurse. She fell into depression and alcoholism and lost contact with her beloved stepdaughter. In retreat from the world, Amelia moved out to a cabin owned by her father deep in the Iowa forest.

There, slowly and painfully, Amelia has willed herself back to life. She’s sworn off alcohol and has become adept at sign language and lip reading. Perhaps best of all, Amelia has gained a companion in Stitch, a 3-year-old, 55-pound Slovakian rough-haired pointer who serves as her hearing dog. Stitch and Amelia begin every day with exercise and, so, on this brisk fall morning, they’re paddling togeth-

er on the river. But when Stitch jumps off the paddleboard, swims to the riverbank and freezes in place, that peaceful riparian interlude shatters.

Floating beneath a watery carpet of leaves is a corpse. As a nurse, Amelia has seen plenty of dead bodies, but her professional cool cracks when she looks down into the eyes of Gwen Locke, a former nursing colleague and friend. As the shock wears off, Amelia recalls that Gwen had tried several times to reach out to her, most recently in a birthday email in which Gwen mentioned “a conflict at work.”

Curious, Amelia begins asking questions about Gwen’s work situation — an investigation complicated by Amelia’s profound deafness. Gudenkauf, who identifies as “hearing-impaired,” vividly depicts the obstacles of communicating and sussing out information, particularly over the phone.

As Amelia’s investigation widens, sinister stuff starts happening out at her cabin. Even something as routine as Sketch’s nighttime potty breaks become knucklebiting. Meanwhile, the murder suspects multiply.

Which brings us to the excellent climax of this inventive suspense story. Here’s a tiny snippet of the beginning of the end. Amelia is hiding on the second floor of her cabin: “I try to steady my breathing, close my eyes and lay my cheek against the hardwood and spread my fingers flat against the floor.

“He knows I can’t hear him. But I feel each step he takes. I feel the tremor in my jaw first. It’s barely perceptible, but it’s there. It slowly spreads to my fingers. I try to be patient. The vibration grows stronger with each of his footfalls.

He’s coming.”

Try to go to sleep after reading that paragraph. Just try. n Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University. She wrote this for The Washington Post.

D NOT A SOUND

By Heather Gudenkauf Park Row 352 pp. $15.99

IN THEIR LIVES Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs Edited by Andrew Blauner Blue Rider. 300 pp. $23

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL L INDGREN

oes the world really need another book about the Beatles? The people behind “In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs” think so, and they’ve come up with a seemingly irresistible wrinkle: ask a lineup of literati to choose the Beatles song that means the most to them. Since everyone likes the Beatles, the results are practically guaranteed to please.

Well, maybe. But the most predictable thing about this endeavor is how predictable it is. The Rule of Themed Anthologies says that one-third of such collections will be thought-provoking and insightful, one third will be just okay, and one third will be tossed-off words from writers too guilty or desperate to say no to the commissioning editor. “In Their Lives” satisfies this formula with eerie precision.

The only sensible approach to evaluating such a book is to enumerate the successes, of which there are several. Writing about “Eleanor Rigby,” Rebecca Mead notes, with typical clarity and grace, that the song, “which so perfectly captures the pathos of loneliness, was generated in an atmosphere of intimacy and friendship . . . a product of the extraordinarily fruitful four-way marriage that was the Beatles collaborative.”

Chuck Klosterman performs a wry and original bit of Klostermanian speculation, suggesting that the “lurid outlier” that is “Helter Skelter” is both more and less than it seems.

Best of all is Gerald Early’s essay on “I’m a Loser.” Early is African American and grew up with the sense that the early Beatles were not “for” him: Their music was intended for white girls, and their “appeal was for me to the wrong color and the wrong gender.” Early thus has the experience, unique in this book, of his love for the most popular band in history manifesting as a form of outsiderness. He

examines the implications of this phenomenon with measured gravity and concludes that he and a like-minded peer “were, if anything, fighting, unknowingly, against the racial politicization of taste.”

Early’s contribution inverts the book’s basic conception so radically that it’s a little difficult to take the essays that come after it seriously, especially as they begin to betray a fatal sameness. This is less a failure of imagination than a function of demographics.

Most of the essayists are wellestablished writers of a certain age who are slightly too young to have experienced the Beatles contemporaneously. This results in a surfeit of fractured childhood memories, breathlessly relayed but, like most childhood memories, essentially interchangeable. A good percentage of the writers report on how their own offspring also love, hate or dance to Beatles songs.

Depending on the reader, such passages generate either a sense of warm, inclusive identification or something rather less appealing.

Even those who are essentially simpatico will conclude, perhaps reluctantly, that most of these essays are not terribly interesting or original.

This doesn’t mean the Beatles don’t matter anymore — it just means that you have to dig deeper than this book is able to if you want to penetrate the mystery. Nicholas Dawidoff, in one of the collection’s more thoughtful entries, observes that the music of the Beatles makes it “possible to experience the essential pop music selfdelusion with them, that something so massively well-known could still be personal to you.”

The power of that “selfdelusion” sold untold millions of records. “Self-delusion” is also, by definition, invisible to the self but apparent to the outside observer — or reader. n Lindgren is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Comey’s testimony shifts focus to Trump’s conduct DAN BALZ is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.

It has been many years since a witness appeared on Capitol Hill and put a president in such potential jeopardy as former FBI director James B. Comey did Thursday.

For the first time in the long investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and questions about possible collusion by associates of President Trump’s campaign, the focus has moved inside the White House and, specifically, to questions about the president’s conduct in office.

Allies and adversaries of the president will interpret Comey’s accounting of events in different ways, but there is no question that his appearance dramatically reshaped what already has been a debilitating problem for the administration. It will be left to special counsel Robert Mueller to decide what it all means. In the meantime, Comey has made life more uncomfortable for the president.

Thursday’s open session provided no new information about what the Russians did and certainly not about what Trump associates may have done. Comey saved whatever he might want to say about that for a closed session Thursday afternoon.

Instead, the morning was a riveting portrayal of his interactions with the president in what amounted to a possible, though not proven, case of obstruction of justice.

For nearly three hours, the fired former director took questions from senators from both parties. He was direct and crisp in his answers, generally careful to avoid overinterpretation of the facts as he recalled them. He was businesslike throughout, truly animated only when he talked about the threat of Russian interference to this country and its democracy. “They’re coming after America,” he said. Overall, however, the effect of his appearance was to put the

president on the defensive in ways that will demand a sworn and substantive rebuttal in some forum at some point.

According to Comey’s recounting of a series of meetings and phone calls, the president was continually frustrated by the degree to which the Russia investigation was harming his efforts to move ahead with his legislative and executive agenda.

He wanted the cloud lifted with some kind of statement that would show he was not the focus of any investigation of collusion.

Now, with Thursday’s testimony, that cloud will persist until Mueller has concluded his work.

Comey’s testimony was damning to the president. The former FBI director said he did not trust the president, concluding after a Jan. 6 meeting at Trump Tower that he needed to take detailed and contemporaneous notes of his conversations with Trump because he feared the president would lie about their interactions. He took a statement by the president at a one-on-one meeting on Feb. 14 that he hoped Comey could let go of the investigation into fired national security adviser Michael Flynn as a directive, not a wish. Comey saw to it that the memo about those comments was leaked publicly after his firing in the hope that it would lead to the appointment of a special counsel — as it did.

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Former FBI director James B. Comey recounted his interactions with President Trump to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

But his testimony was not definitive. Although they continued to talk, Comey said Trump asked him only once to let go of the Flynn investigation, and that came the day after the president had forced his national security adviser to resign. No one else from the White House or the administration ever asked him to do so. At no time did Trump ask or suggest that the Russia investigation be shut down.

Comey never cried foul directly to the president, despite his claims that he felt the president’s actions were, at a minimum, highly inappropriate. He never threatened to resign or seemingly thought about it.

To punctuate how personal and threatening Comey’s testimony was, Marc Kasowitz, the president’s personal lawyer, offered a public and point-bypoint rebuttal Thursday afternoon. The president, he said, never asked Comey to “let go” of the Flynn investigation. He stated, as had Comey, that Trump had said if one of his associates had done something wrong, it would be good to find out. He denied that Trump had told Comey at a one-on-one dinner on Jan. 27, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.” He emphasized what Comey had said, which is that Trump was not under

investigation for colluding with the Russians.

Comey’s prepared testimony was released Wednesday. It was almost cinematic in the way the narrative unfolded, adding dramatic elements for a Washington thriller that has gripped the capital and the country for months and that has no foreseeable ending. The written testimony set up Comey’s public appearance as the latest episode in the reality show that has been the Trump candidacy and presidency.

The buildup to Thursday’s testimony was predictably breathless, as is the case with so much these days. Most of what Comey had to say was already known before he was sworn in.

Yet the moment and the setting took the story to a different level, with a tighter focus than ever on the president.

If the president had hoped that in firing Comey he would lower the temperature on his administration, Thursday brought the opposite. The investigation is far from its conclusion and, as with so much about the probe, the evidence is murky or disputable. But for the president and his White House, despite Kasowitz’s claim of vindication for his client, this was not a good day. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Revenge of Britain’s Remainers ANNE APPLEBAUM writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post.

Theresa May had a plan: Steal the policies of Britain’s “far right” — the U.K. Independence Party — and then steal their voters, too. Since she took office about a year ago, the formerly moderate British prime minister attacked foreigners, jeered at the European Union and held Donald Trump’s hand. In April, she called an early general election, confident that UKIP voters would now endorse her “hard Brexit” and her watered-down English Tory populism.

Never mind that the moderate centrism of her predecessor, David Cameron, won a Conservative Party majority only two years ago. Never mind that she herself has offered few details about Brexit and what it will mean: May called this a “Brexit election,” declared herself the “strong and stable” candidate, promised tough negotiations with Europe and clearly expected to win a larger majority.

Yes, May had a plan — but it was a plan designed for her base.

She ignored the 48 percent of the country that did not vote for Brexit, calling them “citizens of nowhere.” She ignored the anxiety that Brexit has created and the economic consequences that are now just beginning to bite. She ignored younger people, who preferred to stay in the E.U. last year and now prefer the

Labour Party to the Tories by a huge margin, 63 percent to 27 percent.

May also assumed that the centrists and moderates who had voted Conservative in 2015 and to “Remain” in Europe in 2016 would have to vote for her because they would have nowhere else to go. They couldn’t possibly vote for Jeremy Corbyn, the quasi-Marxist, left-wing Labour Party leader who campaigned on high taxes for the rich, heavy spending and deep skepticism toward Britain’s traditional defense and foreign policies. They couldn’t possibly prefer a Labour Party that is itself divided over Brexit. But as the campaign went on, as May grew stiffer and more prone to error, as her “strong and stable” tagline wore thin, a lot of people in the floating center looked at Corbyn and thought, “Is he really

that much worse?”

And the result? Remainers’ revenge. In Canterbury, a longstanding Brexiteer member of Parliament lost to a Labour candidate, apparently thanks to a surge in student voting. In Kensington, an overwhelmingly Conservative seat — but also overwhelmingly anti-Brexit — the vote was so close that recounting was suspended at 8 a.m. Friday so that election officials could go home and rest.

Across the country, people voted Labour despite not liking Corbyn. People told pollsters that they were worried about the future of the National Health Service, that they didn’t like May’s flip-flops on elderly care, that they were unnerved by instability unleashed by the Tories.

Play to your base, insult your opponents: It’s a tactic beloved of many, including President Trump. But here’s a lesson for the opponents of populists all over the West: “Play to your base” doesn’t work when you have high turnout — and in this election it was higher than predicted. It doesn’t work when you face angry, alienated voters. And it didn’t work in Britain at all.

The outcome is a disaster, but it’s hard not to enjoy the many ironies. The Tories campaigned

against a “coalition of chaos” — but now it is they who lead exactly that. May campaigned to get a larger majority, but now Britain has a hung Parliament, meaning that no party has enough seats to form a government. May tried to portray herself as a singular leader, but now she can stay in power only with the help of one of the small Northern Irish parties. If she remains prime minister — if her famously regicidal party doesn’t defenestrate her immediately — her majority will be neither strong nor stable, particularly because her party is riven by divisions over Brexit, too.

It’s funny — but it’s also tragic, for May could have played all of this differently. When she took over last year, she could have recognized Brexit for the constitutional and political crisis that it has turned out to be. She could have called for national unity to deal with this divisive issue. She could have appealed across party lines, or asked people what outcome they preferred, or sought compromise. Instead she stuck to her formula — “Hard Brexit,” tough-sounding language, “it’s all about immigration.” She kept her base — and lost everyone else. n

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OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

It’s time to stop a dangerous buzz PAT CRAWFORD AND WENDI GOSLINER Crawford is the senior director of research at the University of California’s Nutrition Policy Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Gosliner is a project scientist at the Nutrition Policy Institute. They wrote this for The Washington Post.

In late April, a 16-year-old tragically lost his life after consuming an energy drink, a soda and a latte — drinks routinely consumed by and often intensively marketed to youths — all within a few hours. The boy’s heart simply couldn’t cope with the amount of caffeine in the beverages, according to the coroner.

The teen wasn’t the first to pay a terrible price for drinking popular beverages that are commonly (but mistakenly) considered safe, but he should be the last. The government must take steps to reduce caffeine levels allowed in energy drinks; to clearly provide recommendations on safe caffeine consumption for children and adolescents; to ban the marketing of energy drinks to young people of all ages; and to help educate the public on the health risks of high caffeine intake.

Caffeine is a strong and potentially dangerous stimulant, particularly for children and adolescents. When people think of the drug, they generally think of coffee. But less widely known is that a single serving of an energy drink (Monster Energy, Red Bull, 5-hour Energy and Rockstar, to name a few) may contain many times more caffeine than a cup of coffee.

Making matters worse,

consumers do not know the risks of the high levels of caffeine in an energy drink. Nutrition labels are not legally required to include information about caffeine content — a critical and potentially life-threatening omission. Many drink manufacturers have initiated voluntary labeling initiatives, but they are not consistently applied and do not provide adequate information to ensure consumers appropriately interpret the level of risk a beverage presents.

Labels are a first step — necessary, but not sufficient.

Unlike coffee, energy drinks are widely marketed to adolescents, putting them at risk of extreme caffeine overload with potentially devastating cardiovascular and neurological consequences. From 2005 to 2011, energy-drink-related emergencyroom visits rose from 1,494 to 20,783. This included high rates of unintentional exposure in

BY JOE HELLER FOR THE GREEN BAY PRESS-GAZETTE

children younger than 6.

In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report on the appropriateness of sports and energy drinks for children and adolescents, concluding that “energy drinks pose potential health risks because of the stimulants they contain, and should never be consumed by children and adolescents.” In 2013, the American Medical Association adopted a policy supporting a ban on the marketing of energy drinks to those under 18, arguing that energy drinks could lead to a host of issues in young people, including heart problems.

Still, energy drink consumption has skyrocketed in recent years, even as soda consumption has begun to decline. Given the danger energy drinks pose to children and teens with no potential benefit to their health or well-being, the marketing and advertising of these products to young people must stop.

Because manufacturers add caffeine to energy drinks, it is subject to regulation by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive. In fact, the FDA has recognized the risks of high caffeine consumption and imposed a 71-milligram limit on the amount of caffeine that may

be added to a 12-ounce soda.

However, no limits are imposed on the caffeine content of energy drinks, and containers easily can hold 200 to 300 milligrams or more. There is no justification for this regulatory distinction.

Children and adolescents drinking energy drinks need as much protection as those drinking Coke and Pepsi.

Young people ages 12 through 17 — almost one-third of whom consume energy drinks regularly — are entitled to information that could save their lives. The FDA’s limits on added caffeine in colas should be applied to energy drinks, and the amount of caffeine added to an energy drink should be listed on its nutrition label, including a distinct frontof-package warning for drinks with caffeine levels greater than those allowed in soda.

Information based on scientific testing should also be made available on the effects of energy drink additives, such as guarana and taurine, that can increase the potency and increase the effects of caffeine.

As sales of energy drinks rise every year, the need to act becomes even more critical. Steps to protect the health of our children are both feasible and necessary. The problem has been identified. Now is the time to act. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

PERSPECTIVE

Myths about 529 savings plans BY

MICHELLE SINGLETARY

said. “You can use 529 plans to pay for twoyear and four-year colleges, as well as certificate programs and vocational-technical school. You can even use the money to pay for graduate school.”

E

ven though it’s been around for 21 years, many people still don’t know what a 529 plan is.

Seven out of 10 Americans couldn’t identify the tax-advantaged savings account, according to recent findings by financial services firm Edward Jones.

Under a 529, if the money is used for qualified educational expenses, your earnings are tax-free.

I think part of the reason this savings vehicle isn’t widely known stems from a number of misconceptions about how it works.

So let me do some myth-busting.

To help, I’ve asked Mark Kantrowitz, my go-to guru about paying for college. Kantrowitz is publisher of Cappex.com, a free website about college admissions and financial aid.

Here are five common misconceptions about 529s:

3. The returns in a 529 plan are lousy.

“All 529 college savings plans include an S&P 500 investing option that will mimic the performance of the stock market as a whole,” Kantrowitz said. “However, since the

4. You can use money in a 529 plan only for tuition.

Nope. In addition to room and board, the money you save can be used to pay for books, supplies and equipment, including a computer, peripherals, software and Internet access. You can even pay for expenses for special-needs services.

5. I’ll lose my money if the beneficiary doesn’t go to college.

If the beneficiary doesn’t pursue a higher education, you have options because the money is yours. You can switch the beneficiary to someone else, including yourself.

But let’s say there isn’t anyone else you want to give the money to or who needs it.

You can withdraw the funds, but you’ll have to pay ordinary income taxes and a 10 percent tax penalty on the earnings portion of the distribution if the money isn’t used for qualified education expenses. By the way, the 10 percent penalty is waived if your child gets a scholarship.

For more on this topic, read Kantrowitz’s blog post “Most common college savings mistakes” at Cappex.com.

Some parents tell me that they haven’t set up a 529 because they believe their child will win enough money in scholarships.

Reality check: The average scholarship amount is just under $4,000 a year, according to Kantrowitz’s research.

“Less than 1 percent of students win a completely free ride through scholarships,” he said.

Maybe your child will beat the odds. But do you want to take that chance?

Invest in a 529 plan, because hoping is not planning. n ISTOCKPHOTO

1. Contributing to a 529 will hurt my child’s chances for financial aid.

I’m always perplexed by this notion, because most federal aid comes in the form of loans. Sure, there’s a bit of truth to the statement but not enough that it should stop you from saving in a 529 plan.

As Kantrowitz points out, if a dependent student or the custodial parent owns the account, it is reported as a parental asset on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The savings reduces eligibility for need-based aid by a maximum of 5.64 percent.

“If you save $10,000 in a parent-owned 529 plan, need-based aid will be reduced by, at most, $564,” he said. “That still leaves you with $9,436 available to pay for college costs. The college savings provides the flexibility to choose a more expensive college than you otherwise could afford. It also reduces debt, since every dollar you save is a dollar less you’ll need to borrow.”

2. A 529 plan means my child is limited to going to a school in the state where I open the account.

You can use money saved in a 529 to pay for college costs at any college or university that is eligible for Title IV federal student aid.

“You can even use 529 plan money to pay for college outside the U.S. at one of a few hundred eligible institutions,” Kantrowitz

stock market will drop by 10 percent at least two to three times in any 17-year period, it is smart to manage the risk by using an agebased asset allowance. Like a target-date fund, an age-based asset allocation shifts the mix of investments from aggressive to conservative as college approaches.”

Here’s something else to keep in mind.

Your state may give you a deduction for 529 contributions up to a certain amount. Vanguard has an online calculator that estimates what you could deduct (van­ guard.wealthmsi.com/stdc.php).

Singletary writes the nationally syndicated personal finance column, “The Color of Money.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

24

SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2017

STARTS MONDAY AT 8 AM!

JUNE 2017

The Online Auction

The Online Auction starts Monday June 12th at 8 am.

Save up to 60% on gift cards from restaurants in this guide. wenatcheeworld.com/auction/

A supplement to The Wenatchee World

Published Friday, June 9th

We’ve collected gift cards from restaurants featured in our Bite Me! publication and we’re auctioning them off on our website.

3 Days Only!

Monday - Wednesday, June 12-14 Bid online at wenatcheeworld.com/auction/ If you’ve bid in the past, you’re already registered.

• Save up to 60% off! • Buy it Now option • Incremental Bidding - Don’t be outbid!

Bidding starts Monday, June 12th, at 8am. Bidding ends Wednesday, June 14th, at 8pm.

Winners can pick up their gift cards after the auction has closed at: The Wenatchee World, 14 N. Mission, Wenatchee Monday - Friday, 8am - 5pm There will be a $.50 handling fee for each item purchased.