The Washington Post National Weekly - July 22, 2018

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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‘Good guys with guns’ Two Oklahoma citizens killed an active shooter, and it’s not as simple as it sounds. PAGE 12 Politics Shaking up global order 4

Nation Who gets the embryos? 8

5 Myths The Supreme Court 23

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

A very weak week for Trump BY

A ARON B LAKE

T

hree times this week, President Trump was forced to walk back something he said about Russia. First it was comparing his own intelligence community’s credibility to Vladimir Putin’s.

Then it was his statement that Russia wasn’t still interfering in U.S. elections. And finally it was his apparent plan to allow Russia to interview Americans it accuses of crimes, including a former ambassador.

It was all one giant, self-inflicted wound.

And it all did precisely what Putin hopes and what Trump seems to fear most: made Trump look weak and ineffectual.

The White House finally shot down that last idea Thursday afternoon — three days after Trump called it an “incredible offer” and nearly a full day after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders inflamed congressional allies and even the State Department by suggesting it could actually come to fruition.

“It is a proposal that was made in sincerity

by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it,” Sanders said in a statement.

“Hopefully President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt.”

But even in backing down again, the White House seemed to take pains not to irritate Putin, and made it clear it’s not about to do anything close to getting tough. On Thursday the White House even announced that Putin had been invited to Washington in the fall.

The idea that the proposal was made “in sincerity” is laughable to pretty much anybody who understands Russia and the former KGB operative who leads it. It’s clear this was a trap sprung by Putin in their private, two-hour

KLMNO WEEKLY

CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES

President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands after their summit Monday.

meeting. Trump is a guy who likes cutting deals and to walk away from a meeting with a deliverable. So a deal like this, to a diplomatic neophyte like him, probably seemed pretty sensible.

But it was ridiculous from the start. And lawmakers weren’t about to let it happen, even drafting legislation to express disapproval.

Trump was forced to back down on an idea that he, according to his own comments, thought was fantastic.

The second part of Sanders’s statement doesn’t get any stronger. She expressed hope that Putin would extradite the 12 Russian military intelligence officers Robert S. Mueller III indicted recently, rather than saying that they must be sent to the United States to stand

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 41

trial. It seems a clear signal there will be no demand made and no leverage applied to actually make that happen.

For journalists and political watchers, it’s tempting to look for the strategy in all of this.

Maybe Trump is distracting us! Maybe he’s paving the way for something we can’t see!

Maybe he’s just trolling us for fun!

But to the outside world, it all has to look like Trump went over his skis repeatedly, only to be reined in by Congress and by the news media. Especially in this last case, it can’t help but look like he has no idea what he’s doing — and that he was completely out of his element when negotiating with someone like Putin.

If that’s the image Trump is trying to project on the world stage, mission accomplished. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Juan Carlos Nazario, left, and Bryan Whittle talk on June 21 about their experience of confronting and killing a shooter.

Photo by NICK OXFORD for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

Doubts over disruptive diplomacy

BY D AVID N AKAMURA AND C AROL M ORELLO

I

n five short weeks, President Trump has upended the established global order.

He cozied up to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who received worldwide attention while giving up relatively little in return. He waged rhetorical war against loyal U.S. allies in Europe, unsettling a 69-year-old security pact. And on Monday he slammed his own FBI and intelligence agencies in the course of defending Russian President

Trump’s foreign policy strategy gives rise to fears over U.S. standing abroad

Vladimir Putin against charges of interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

The moves have clearly served Trump’s desired image as a dealmaker willing to upset the status quo and throw conventional wisdom.

But what’s less clear to many, including Republican lawmakers and Trump’s own advisers, is what the president is trying to accomplish — and how he expects to get there.

“Dialogue is useful, but the question is: To what end?” said Thomas Graham, who served as a

President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Helsinki.

high-ranking Russia policy official in the George W. Bush administration. “What you don’t see is a clear articulation of what the American interest is. And it’s particularly disconcerting that you’re trying to build up a dialogue with China, North Korea and Russia at the same time when you’re undermining what has been, historically, a very productive dialogue between the U.S. and its European allies and East Asian allies.”

Trump has cast his high-stakes geopolitical endeavors as an overdue course correction for a U.S.

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POLITICS foreign policy that had become bogged down by groupthink and rendered ineffectual against threats such as terrorism, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and Chinese trade practices.

During the campaign, Trump cast disdain on multilateral institutions for trade and defense that have defined the post-World War II liberal order and were designed largely under U.S. leadership.

Once in office, he made clear that he was willing to give the leaders of rival nations the benefit of the doubt, casting their hostile actions as an outgrowth of “foolishness” and “stupidity” of past administrations, as he put it in a tweet Monday in relation to Russia.

Daniel Fried, a former diplomat who is an expert on Russia and Eastern Europe, noted that Trump has rooted his foreign policy in an affinity for nationalism, reducing global relationships to a transactional zero-sum contest among nations.

“That reduces the U.S. from being the leader of the free world to being just another grasping great power,” said Fried, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “It means the world becomes a world of 19th-century power politics, where might makes right. That undoes 100 years of America’s grand strategy, which worked out well for us. It won the Cold War, because people behind the Iron Curtain were inspired by our ideas and ideals.”

In pursuing meetings with Kim and Putin, Trump proclaimed that his ability to forge a personal rapport with his counterparts would pay more dividends than following the more traditional path of allowing diplomats and policy experts to engage in long, painstaking talks to determine whether a deal is possible.

“I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace, than to risk peace in pursuit of politics,” Trump said at a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, a quote he later highlighted on his Twitter feed next to an image of him standing next to the Russian leader.

Yet Trump’s approach also has been marked by an enthusiasm for disparaging U.S. allies. Where his White House predecessors sought to build consensus among Western nations to present a

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACK TAYLOR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

united front against adversaries, Trump has routinely reserved his most pointed criticisms for nations which have the most in common with the United States.

After departing an economic summit outside Quebec last month, Trump reacted to mild criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by abruptly yanking U.S. support for a joint statement among the Group of Seven nations that his

administration had signed on to just hours earlier.

Ahead of his summit with Putin, Trump demanded during a NATO summit that the other 28 member nations increase their defense spending under an implied threat that the United States would abandon the mutual defense treaty. Moscow has long sought to upend the alliance.

Trump also disparaged British Prime Minister Theresa May, crit-

President Trump has gotten blowback for embracing despots, such as North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, top, and lambasting allies, such as British Prime Minister Theresa May, above.

KLMNO WEEKLY

icizing her politically tenuous strategy for extracting Britain from the European Union, in an interview with a tabloid newspaper that coincided with his arrival in London for a state visit.

“Trump is doing enormous damage to an international order that is already unwinding,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the risk analysis firm Eurasia Group, who has written on the trend toward a world without global leadership. “It’s getting worse than I expected.”

A world in flux, with U.S. leadership among democratic nations in retreat, is marked by opportunity — for other coalitions in the West to assert themselves, but also for autocratic governments to fill the void, analysts said.

Adversaries can attempt to “build a competing image of what a world without American leadership would look like,” said Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. “It’s one that’s incredibly hostile to our interests and values and those of most of our allies and other democratic countries around the world.”

Trump associates noted that for all his bluster, the president did not seek to pull out of the NATO alliance or to lift U.S. economic sanctions on North Korea or Russia.

But Trump also has little to show for his meetings with Putin and Kim. The president’s defensive performance at the Helsinki news conference, during which he failed to denounce Russia for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, ratcheted up political blowback on both sides of the aisle in Washington.

And despite the president’s declaration after the Singapore summit that he had successfully defused North Korea’s nuclear threat, there are growing signs that Pyongyang has no intention of dismantling its program.

“He’s certainly showed that he’s going to take big gambles and shake things up,” said Dan Blumenthal, an East Asian security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “Yet there are huge risks involved. The risk with North Korea now is that if, in the next month or so, there’s no real progress . . . then we’re going to have to change tack again.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Democrats see openings in Midwest D AVID W EIGEL in New Albany, Ohio BY

T

roy Balderson, the Republican candidate for Congress, wanted to make one thing clear: He would not support President Trump on everything.

He would “not ever support separating families” to control immigration. He was not yet sold on tariffs on Chinese goods.

“I’m here to represent the people of the 12th Congressional District,” Balderson said. “Not Donald Trump.”

The district, which Republicans won in 1982 and have not relinquished, supported Trump by 11.3 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Ohio overall swung dramatically toward Trump, part of a near sweep of the Midwest that gave him the presidency.

But doubts about the ongoing tariff battle and about the administration’s agenda on health care, spending and immigration have changed the terrain. Rather than back the president and Republicans, the Midwest has begun to flirt with candidates who would keep them in check.

In Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, Democratic senators once thought to be endangered have rebounded and are in fairly safe positions. In House and gubernatorial races, Democrats have grown more competitive since the start of the year — especially in House districts drawn from suburbs that were thought to be safely Republican.

In special elections held in the Midwest since Trump’s inauguration, Democrats have improved on their 2016 performance by an average of 11 points.

Wisconsin Republicans lost two state Senate seats and a race for state Supreme Court; in Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota, Democrats have held onto districts where voters rejected Clinton.

Republicans in the region have been forced into a difficult choice.

They can declare independence, like Balderson, who is running in a special election Aug. 7. Or they can side with a president whose

JOSEPH CRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Voters once solidly in president’s corner are flirting with candidates who would keep Trump in check actions, while popular among Republicans, are decidedly not so among other voters.

Republicans made historic inroads into the Midwest in 2016 when four states that had backed Barack Obama — Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — flipped to Trump, and a fifth, Minnesota, nearly turned red for the first time since 1972. Since then, Republicans have struggled to preserve Trump’s gains.

Democrats have spotted openings on a number of issues, starting with trade. On a recent Midwest swing, Vice President Pence had a message for Republicans: Don’t worry about the trade war.

“We’re going to keep fighting for a level playing field for our farmers,” Pence said in Missouri at a stop to benefit the party’s preferred Senate candidate, Josh Hawley. “And as the president said, America will win that fight, and so will American farmers.

Don’t doubt it.”

The same day, every Republican senator from the Midwest backed a nonbinding resolution that urged the president to defer to Congress on tariffs.

In Wisconsin, where two Republicans are competing for the right to challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D), the tariffs have landed with a thud. In a Marquette Law School poll in June, just 29 percent of Wisconsin voters expected Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs to improve the U.S. economy, while 55 percent expected them to hurt. Fifty-one percent of voters said free-trade agreements in general had helped the United States; just 28 percent disagreed.

In other states, Democrats are capitalizing on the administration’s decision not to pursue a large infrastructure funding package. Abby Finkenauer, the Democrat running in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District — another stop on Pence’s tour — said the

Vice President Pence and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, right, greet supporters on July 11 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. On his Midwest swing, Pence had a message for Republicans: Don’t worry about the trade war. But many voters are worrying.

lack of infrastructure funding had given her an easy opening among voters who had switched from Obama to Trump.

“The administration talks a big game about infrastructure but hasn’t done a whole lot,” Finkenauer said. “I tell people that I want to go to Congress, work across the aisle, pass an infrastructure bill, put it on his desk and see if he signs it.”

In Michigan, where both parties have contested primaries for governor, Democrats have seized on the lack of new infrastructure funding to argue for a break from Republican rule. In her first TV ad, Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Gretchen Whitmer, a former state legislator, made a memorable promise to “fix the damn roads.”

Whitmer’s most organized Democratic challenger, Abdul ElSayed, has joined in the criticism of infrastructure spending and homed in on another unpopular aspect of the Trump administration: the policies of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a member of an archconservative western Michigan family.

In an interview, El-Sayed argued that Trump won the state in 2016 only because Democrats had ceded the populist mantle to Trump — and he asserted that since then, Trump had not governed as a populist.

“People don’t feel like they have a shot anymore,” El-Sayed said.

In Illinois’s 6th Congressional District, where Pence concluded his swing, Democrats said they were benefiting from a different Trump administration priority — rollbacks of Obama-era health care and gay rights policies, reversals that were toxic to affluent, moderate voters.

“The Neanderthal wing of this party is not this district,” said Sean Casten (D), challenging Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.). “The antiwoman, anti-LGBT values that Pence represents are so out of touch with this community.”

Roskam did not attend the Pence fundraiser, citing his responsibilities in Washington. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Kavanaugh’s conservative heroes

BY R OBERT B ARNES AND A NN E . M ARIMOW

W

hen Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, he said he was “deeply honored” to have the chance to replace his old boss and the man he has called a mentor, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

But when Kavanaugh last September was asked to give a Constitution Day speech, he chose to celebrate his “first judicial hero,” the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, noting Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe v. Wade and his rejection of the idea of a “wall of separation between church and state.”

Rehnquist was “not successful in convincing a majority of the justices in the context of abortion,” Kavanaugh told the American Enterprise Institute. But he said the man who served from 1972 to 2005, a conservative who during his tenure pushed the court to the right, was key in “limiting the court’s role in the realm of social policy and helping to ensure that the court operates more as a court of law and less as an institution of social policy.”

Liberal groups, abortion rights activists and antiabortion organizations all have seized on the speech, as well as Kavanaugh’s rulings involving a undocumented teenage immigrant seeking an abortion while in federal custody.

Abortion will be a major topic at what are sure to be contentious confirmation hearings for the 53year-old judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But Kavanaugh’s speech, and other writings and talks he has given, underscore how different he is from Kennedy. President Trump has now nominated two former Kennedy clerks to the Supreme Court, and neither are in the mold of the retiring 81-yearold justice.

Both Kavanaugh and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch subscribe to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution associated with Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and clearly

JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee praises those who lean further right than mentor Kennedy not with Kennedy.

As White House Counsel Donald McGahn told the Federalist Society after Gorsuch’s confirmation, “This administration’s mandate on judicial selections is crystal clear: Choose judges in the mold of Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas and now Justice Gorsuch.”

Of course, it would be almost impossible to select a justice in the mold of Kennedy. His unique views provoked equally distributed frustrations: disappointing conservatives by authoring Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, and outraging liberals with Citizens United v. FEC, which authorized unlimited campaign spending for businesses and other entities.

In his speeches and writings, Kavanaugh is often noncommittal, describing in detail how different justices on the Supreme Court approach cases rather than offer-

ing what he thinks would be the best way.

But it is clear he would look to the approach employed by Scalia and Rehnquist. Kavanaugh thinks the Constitution affords the executive branch broad powers. At the same time, he would be far less likely than other judges to declare a law ambiguous and thus defer to an administration’s agency interpretations of regulations and implementation.

Kavanaugh has spoken approvingly of the metaphor Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. used at his confirmation hearings of the judge as umpire. But there are no objective rules, he said, which frees some judges to impose their own views.

Kavanaugh was more forthcoming in the AEI speech, although he did not say explicitly that Rehnquist had been right to cast one of only two dissenting votes in the court’s 7-to-2 ruling that recognized a constitutional

Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh arrives before meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on July 10 on Capitol Hill.

right to abortion.

But he did speak approvingly of Rehnquist’s reasoning. Because there is no stated right to abortion in the Constitution, Rehnquist said new “unenumerated” rights should be recognized only if they were “rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people.”

Abortion was not, he said.

The court considered overruling the decision in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Kennedy was on the court by then, and he was in the majority of the 5-to-4 vote to preserve abortion rights. Rehnquist again dissented.

In his speech, Kavanaugh did not mention Kennedy’s role in forming the Casey majority.

“It is fair to say that Justice Rehnquist was not successful in convincing a majority of justices in the context of abortion, either in Roe itself or in later cases such as Casey,” Kavanaugh said.

But Rehnquist did write the majority opinion when the court rejected the right to assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

In general, Kavanaugh described Rehnquist as having “righted the ship of constitutional jurisprudence” on the court in the period that followed Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure of sweeping change in areas such as racial discrimination, most notably to end segregation in public schools.

In another address, Kavanaugh touched on another topic that has new importance for him — the confirmation of federal judges.

Without referring explicitly to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote, or even a hearing, on President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, Judge Merrick Garland, Kavanaugh noted he was on record as saying a president’s judicial nominee deserves a vote in the Senate within 180 days.

But asked whether the Senate should consider a nominee’s ideology when his confirmation could lead to overturning precedents of the departed justice, Kavanaugh declined to answer. Such a decision is up to the Senate, he said, and “above my pay grade.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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NATION

Embryos law roils abortion politics

W

hen their marriage fell apart, the most contentious issue between Ruby Torres and John Joseph Terrell was the fate of their frozen embryos.

There were seven in storage, created with her eggs and his sperm before Torres underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast cancer.

Torres, 37, wanted to use the embryos to have a baby. In divorce proceedings, she told the judge that the embryos probably represented her only chance to have biological children. Terrell protested that he had no interest in having a child with Torres.

With the number of frozen embryos in the United States soaring into the millions, disputes over who owns them are also on the rise. Judges have often — but not always — ruled in favor of the person who does not want the embryos used, sometimes ordering them destroyed, following the theory that no one should be forced to become a parent.

Arizona, however, is taking the opposite approach. Under a firstin-the-nation law that went into effect July 1, custody of disputed embryos must be given to the party who intends to help them “develop to birth.”

“Most people believe that frozen embryos should have a chance at life,” state Sen. Nancy Barto, a Phoenix Republican, said in introducing the bill inspired by Torres’s case.

The legislation could dramatically alter the practice of fertility medicine, as well as the debate over when life begins. It is already fueling an argument by some conservative groups that frozen embryos are not mere tissue over which people may exercise ownership rights but human beings who should be accorded rights of their own.

Abortion rights advocates say any legal endorsement of those arguments, if upheld, would effectively gut the right to an abortion.

If a days-old embryo in a freezer has a right to life, why not a days-old embryo in utero?

Rich Vaughn, chair of the

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

New Arizona legislation awards custody to whoever wants to make them into babies American Bar Association’s committee on fertility technology and founder of the International Fertility Law Group, called the legislation “flawed” and said it could have potentially disastrous consequences for reproductive freedom and personal choice.

“The new law is in fact an end around aimed at establishing the ‘personhood’ of unborn embryos,” which is an important goal of antiabortion campaigners, he said.

Many other health, patient-advocacy and legal organizations have expressed similar views. In a letter to the Arizona House of Representatives, Barbara Collura, president of the national infertility group Resolve, wrote that it could be “exceedingly painful” to have children born against one’s wishes.

Judges in numerous states, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Jersey and California, have been swayed by that argument.

When Mimi Lee and Silicon Valley investment executive Stephen Findley split in 2013, they argued bitterly about what to do with the five embryos they had created. Lee wanted to use them, arguing that she had been treated for cancer and was unlikely to be able to have children any other way.

Findley refused, arguing that he would feel obliged to participate in the resulting child’s life and that he feared “18 years of interaction” with his ex-wife.

California Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo ruled in November 2015 that the embryos should be destroyed.

In Colorado, Mandy and Drake Rooks are fighting over six embryos. Mandy Rooks wants them preserved for future use, while Drake wants them to be discarded. After a lower court ruled in favor of Drake Rooks, Mandy Rooks appealed. The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in January

Ruby Torres is appealing a ruling that she cannot use her embryos. The judge said they should be donated instead of destroyed.

focused on balancing the procreative rights of the two, and a decision is expected later this year.

Many disputes, including the Rooks case, have become entangled in the politics of abortion.

Attorneys claim the right not to procreate is protected by the Constitution. With conflicting rulings in various states, many predict the issue will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the Arizona case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Ronee Korbin Steiner had to balance Torres’s probable inability to have a child without the embryos with Terrell’s desire to not be a father.

The couple had been dating off and on in 2014 when Torres was diagnosed with a severe form of breast cancer.

Things got intense quickly.

During an impulsive few weeks in July, the couple went to the Bloom Reproductive Institute in Scottsdale, where seven embryos were formed and frozen.

Four days later, the couple married.

Three years after those treatments, Torres said her doctors cleared her to try to become pregnant. She found out around that time that Terrell had been having an affair with another woman, and they agreed to divorce.

At first, the split was relatively amicable. A mediator helped them sort through the kitchen appliances and the workout equipment. They got stuck on two things — the dog and the embryos.

And so, a few months later, they found themselves in court.

Steiner, a former public defender in private practice who was appointed to the bench by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), who is known for his antiabortion stance, resolved the dog issue in about two seconds by ordering it returned to Torres. The embryo situation was more complicated.

Some courts consider embryos property — or “chattel” in legal terms — but figuring out what to do with them was not as easy as dividing them up evenly like other assets. Yet since they weren’t children who had been born, they

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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NATION were not subject to child custody laws, either.

In August, the judge said Torres had no right to use the embryos.

Instead, they should be put up for donation.

Torres could not bear her own baby — but a stranger could.

She is appealing the decision.

Oral arguments were made in June, and a ruling is expected any day.

News of the controversial ruling soon reached the Arizona legislature. Barto said she wanted to help people in Torres’s situation.

If someone selects Torres’s embryos, Barto told fellow legislators, “there will be children out there that Ruby will never be able to meet or care for” and the children “will never be able to know their genetic history.”

But the state senator also recognized the rights of those who don’t want their embryos used. The bill provided a resolution to the possibly messy financial obligations by providing that they would not be liable for child support.

Some of the other lawmakers vehemently objected.

“The legislature should not come between a woman, her doctor, her faith and her family,” argued Sen. Steve Farley, a Tucson Democrat, according to the local Daily Courier.

The Arizona legislature made quick work of the bill. The Senate passed it 18 to 12 in February, the House 33 to 25 in March. It was signed into law on April 3.

The law cannot be applied retroactively and therefore should not directly affect the Torres case.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys urged judges in the Arizona Court of Appeals, where their case now stands, to balance the interest of each former spouse.

“In these cases, the parties do not have equal claims: the constitutional protection against compulsory parenthood is in most situations greater than any procreative interest in pre-embryos,” the group wrote.

Work, Terrell’s attorney, said she believes the new law “was rushed into effect through emotion” and is unlikely to stand up to legal challenge.

“People have the right to change their minds,” Work said.

“And you cannot undo a child.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘Why are you still here?’: The last U.S. Blockbuster BY

A LEX H ORTON

A

man parked his motorcycle on the sidewalk, ruining the aesthetic of the last remaining Blockbuster in the contiguous United States.

“You can’t park there,” general manager Sandi Harding told the man as he walked into the store in Bend, Ore. “People are trying to take pictures.”

The man paused for a beat.

There was confusion in his response.

“Trying to take pictures?”

Somehow he had missed the past decade, when Blockbuster, the video-rental behemoth, became Blockbuster, the fallen victim of modernity.

In 2004, at the company’s peak, city blocks and suburban strip malls nationwide were studded with 9,000 Blockbuster outlets, a onetime indelible fixture of the family movie night. But soon after, Netflix, Redbox and the cold march of digital progress eroded the customer base at each store.

Thousands of Blockbuster stores were shuttered through the beginning of July, leaving only three: two in Alaska, and one in Bend.

Those Alaska locations closed this month, leaving Harding’s store on NE Revere Avenue as the last surviving Blockbuster.

“Every day, even before this, people would drive by and see the ‘Open’ sign and say, ‘Oh my gosh.

How are you still here? Why are you still here?’ ” Harding told The Washington Post in a Saturday phone interview as her store buzzed with activity, including the arrival of the oblivious motorcyclist in the central Oregon city.

The notoriety has led to an uptick in activity. Tourists flock to the city nestled outside the Deschutes National Forest, eager to get selfies with the Blockbuster sign. Some even stop in to buy something, she said.

But Harding conceded that the Internet and streaming services

RYAN BRENNECKE/THE BULLETIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Scott Thornton takes a selfie on July 13 in front of the Bend, Ore., Blockbuster, the only one remaining in operation in the United States.

Snagging the last copy of a new release provides a small thrill you cannot get from a download button. forever changed the way people consume entertainment, describing a “curve” from when Redbox and Netflix began to deliver more options.

It has been quite the fall from movie rental primacy. In 1989, a Blockbuster store opened every 17 hours. But in the late 2000s, it seemed that the stores were closing at that same pace.

Just a handful survived in the past few years since Dish Network bought the company in 2011 and dismantled most of the remaining locations.

Yet, some stores persevered.

Harding said many of her customers have been loyal for years.

Others come in for the nostalgic stroll in the aisles, picking feverishly through the inventory to find an obscure film. Snagging the last copy of a new and popular release provides a small thrill you cannot

get from a download button.

While some might view Blockbuster’s fate as comeuppance — a big chain that displaced small, family-owned stores only to be destroyed by innovation — Harding sees her store as a mainstay of the Bend community.

Ken and Debbie Tisher are local owners, she said, and they pay a licensing fee to Dish Network to use the name. It is the local video store for many in Bend. That connection to the community is a key reason the Bend store has survived, Harding said.

Once in a while, the Blockbuster is a godsend.

When Gene Wilder died in 2016, mourners took to Netflix and other streaming services to watch films such as “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.”

No luck. Customers flooded the store and called to ask whether Harding had the titles in stock. Of course, Harding told them.

The directions are simple when you can’t find a film anywhere else. Just head west on Revere, past the Redbox on Third Street, to find exactly what you need. n ©The Washington Post

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Troubles grow for India’s cattle trade B Y A NNIE G OWEN in Mahaban, India

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n the year since an extremist Hindu monk was tapped to lead one of India’s biggest states, the country’s Muslim cattle traders have seen their lives change in ways they could not have imagined.

First, mobs of Hindu vigilantes began swarming buffalo trucks on the road, intent on finding smugglers illegally transporting cows, which are sacred to the Hindu faith and protected from slaughter in many places in India. Some Muslim men have been killed by lynch mobs, as recently as June 18.

Then dozens of slaughterhouses and 50,000 meat shops were closed, severely limiting access to red meat, a staple of the Muslim community’s diet. Hundreds from the Qureshi clan, Muslims in the meat trade for centuries, lost their jobs.

Recent moves led by the Hindu nationalist party of Narendra Modi to tighten “cow protection” laws have contributed to a 15 percent drop in India’s $4 billion beef export industry, until recently the largest in the world, disrupting the country’s traditional livestock economy and leaving hundreds without work at a time when India needs to add jobs, not lose them.

The changes in the cattle industry mirror what’s happening nationally for many of India’s 172 million Muslims, for whom lynchings, hate speech and anti-Muslim rhetoric from a host of legislators from Modi’s party have taken a toll. In Mahaban, Muslim cattle traders say their way of life is being slowly strangulated by the policies of a government and its allies intent on establishing Hindu supremacy.

A dangerous drive Bhurra Qureshi, 40, loaded the last of the buffaloes on the truck, having negotiated the terms of their passage from the village’s livestock market to the meat-processing plant in Aligarh, about two hours away.

He was happy to get $80 to

PORAS CHAUDHARY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Hindu majority’s ‘cow protection’ laws imperil livestock industry and Muslims’ livelihoods transport the 14 hulking black buffaloes because his hauling business was way down. Buffaloes can be legally slaughtered in this part of India, where cows cannot, and it is buffalo meat that drives India’s beef export industry. But when he climbed into the rig, Qureshi’s mind turned to the pitfalls of the drive ahead.

There is new danger on State Highway 80, the only way to Aligarh. Once a sleepy backwater of religious pilgrims and camel carts, it has become a minefield of Hindu zealots waving bamboo sticks and police allegedly exacting hefty bribes.

Traders who run buffaloes legally — buffaloes are not revered in India as cows are — have been beaten and thrown in jail, and their animals and trucks confiscated by Hindu activists or the police, risks that have contributed to a 30 percent rise in transporta-

tion costs in the past year, according to Fauzan Alavi, vice president of the All India Meat and Livestock Exporters Association.

To buy “peace on the highway,” as he put it, these middlemen are paying less to the farmers in livestock markets and charging more to the meat exporters upon delivery.

Qureshi’s first test came at the railway junction at Bichpuri, where khaki-uniformed police officers stopped the truck and asked: “What are you doing?

Where are you taking this truck?”

To Aligarh, he told them politely. They waved him on.

Even as India attempts to move beyond its rigid social order of caste, critics charge that elite upper-caste Hindus, many of whom eschew meat, are increasingly imposing their vegetarian culture on a country where many eat meat and where buffalo is a cheap

Buffaloes are penned outside a cattle fair in Pinjari, India, on May 4 before being taken away for slaughter in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

source of protein for Muslims and those from lower castes. Modi once derided India’s soaring meat exports as a “pink revolution.”

When Yogi Adityanath — known for his inflammatory statements about Muslims — came to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh last year, he ordered slaughterhouses closed, and 50,000 meat shops also shut their doors. Some but not all butchers were unlicensed, part of India’s thriving informal economy.

The move has had broad repercussions for the 2,200 Muslims of Mahaban, a third of whom lost their jobs. The local slaughterhouse run by the municipal council was closed, along with four meat shops.

Since then, Adityanath’s government has made it harder for slaughterhouses to reopen, rescinding laws that required municipalities to run them and mandating that they be moved outside cities for hygienic reasons.

Adityanath’s chief spokesman defended the move, saying officials were enforcing environmental norms mandated by the courts in 2015. He also noted that the state is modernizing its 16,000 madrassas, or Islamic schools.

“Adityanath ordered a crackdown on illegal slaughterhouses.

It was not an ‘anti-Muslim’ drive,” Mrityunjay Kumar, the chief spokesman, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

But villagers disagree, and during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, known as Ramzan in India, the traders were outraged that their evening meal did not include beef. The town butcher, Yunis Qureshi, who closed his shop last year during the crackdown, now sells fried snacks on the side of the road.

“We’ve been forced to become vegetarians!” he said.

Worse, he said, the government’s actions have deepened the divide in the village between Hindus and Muslims.

“Ever since this government has come in, I feel like people look at me and see a Muslim for the first time,” the butcher said.

“They’ve shut down our business-

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WORLD es, changed the food we eat. . . . Of course we’re going to feel persecuted because we’re Muslims.”

‘We don’t go after innocents’ As Bhurra Qureshi’s truck rattled through the small town of Iglas, he was glad to see that the dusty lot where the Hindu cow vigilantes normally lie in wait, next to a sign that says “Yogi’s Army,” was empty.

“We don’t go after innocents,” Bobby Chaudhary, a leader of the vigilantes, said in a later interview. “We go in groups so there is no need to beat them. We catch them and call police.”

A few miles after that post comes the Aasna police station, where two dozen traders said in interviews that police officers have begun demanding bribes and beating them if they refuse to pay. Outside, officers man a barricade and wave the truckers to stop. Inside, beyond the temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, an officer sits behind a desk, writing dozens of tickets.

The traders have fistfuls of these tickets for offenses such as reckless driving or speeding, even though the police have no radar equipment and the closed-camera television monitor shows only the front of the station, where the trucks are already stopped.

“We are estimating,” explained R.N. Tiwari, the sub-inspector in charge, who denied that he or his officers roughed up the traders or asked for money above the ticketed amount.

“Everybody says we take more money, but we don’t,” Tiwari said.

“Whatever tickets we cut, that is the money we take, and that goes into government coffers.”

Just as Qureshi approached the city limits of Aligarh, he was stopped again and asked for cash by a state police officer parked in a black sport utility vehicle under a highway overpass. (The officer later denied taking money.)

By the time Qureshi arrived at the gates of the meat-processing plant, the temperature had soared to 105 degrees, but his face shone in relief. He had had to pay only $6 in bribes this trip, which dented but didn’t wipe out his day’s pay of $80. He would drive again the next day, Qureshi said, and began pulling the buffaloes off the truck.

He was smiling as the animals lumbered to their fate. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Ancient crumbs reveal earlier origins of bread BY

B EN G UARINO

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istorians and archaeologists have traditionally linked bread to the dawn of agriculture, when people domesticated plants such as wheat, cultivated them and ground them into flour.

But a new discovery of blackened crumbs at an ancient stone building in the Middle East indicates that people were baking bread thousands of years earlier.

Based on the radiocarbon dates of charred plants in nearby fireplaces, the food scraps are about 14,400 years old. That’s about 4,000 years before agriculture emerged, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our work shows that bread was not a product of settled, complex societies but a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society,” said study author Amaia Arranz Otaegui, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

Bread is an important food. Just look at a few of its many associations. We attach the word “bread” to the words “board,” “basket,” “crumb” and “winner.” Bread gave English speakers the word “lord,” from the Old English word “hlafweard,” which can be translated to “loaf-ward” (or, if you like, “keeper of the bread”).

Despite its few ingredients — flour, water and dry heat — bread is very nutritious. The finer the plant matter, the easier it is to digest and absorb nutrients, said Dolores Piperno, a Smithsonian Institution archaeobotanist who was not affiliated with this research.

Some ground and baked foods such as bread have become carbohydrate villains in modern diet advice books, including “paleo” diets that claim to mimic what our ancestors ate. But hunter-gatherers would have welcomed bread’s ability to boost blood sugar. The people who built the ancient structure, members of what’s called the

ALEXIS PANTOS/REUTERS

A stone structure at the Shubayqa 1 site in Jordan. Crumbs found in its fireplace, shown in the center, are believed to be 14,400 years old.

Natufian culture, struggled in a “hostile environment to gain more energy from their food,” said Ehud Weiss, an archaeobotanist at BarIlan University in Israel who was not involved with the study.

Archaeologists found the bread remains in sediment samples at a site named Shubayqa 1 in Jordan.

The structure was oval with a fireplace in the center.

Sifting through the sediment, Arranz Otaegui noticed samples she couldn’t place at first; they were not seeds, nuts or charred wood. Instead, they looked just like the crumbs that accumulate at the bottom of a toaster. Study author and University College London graduate student Lara Gonzalez Carretero, using Natufian technology, has been experimentally re-creating the flour and dough.

Pores in the samples mimicked the bubbles that appeared in the recreated bread.

“The main criteria on the identification of bread is its porous texture,” Arranz Otaegui said. “If we take other foodstuffs like porridge or gruel, we will see pieces of grain but not all these micropores.” She said the closest common bread to these crumbs might be a pita, but she also said the Natufian bread was probably unleavened, like matzoh or tortillas.

Archaeologists knew that hunter-gatherers in this region could grind and bake food, according to Weiss. “The Shubayqa breadlike find is, however, the first of its kind,” he said.

Cereal plants are high in calories. The traditional view was that early farmers domesticated those plants first, and then bakers began to turn cereals into bread. Study author Dorian Fuller, a professor of archaeobotany at University College London, said the discovery made him question “whether domestication was really driven by caloric necessity,” as has been claimed.

The Natufian people collected wild wheat and barley. An analysis of the starch in the crumbs revealed the presence of oats. But these ancient hunter-gatherers also ground a tuber called “club rush” into their bread. The tubers are “quite gritty and salty,” Arranz Otaegui said, but in experiments they were ground nicely into flour.

It was unclear to the study authors whether these breads were regularly eaten or occasional meals, or perhaps even luxury foods; other researchers have suggested that bread and beer were consumed during Natufian feasts. n ©The Washington Post

Bryan Whittle, left, and Juan Carlos Nazario confronted and killed a shooter on May 24 in Oklahoma City.

COVER STORY

They killed a gunman.

NICK OXFORD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The perils became clear later.

BY FRANCIS STEAD SELLERS AND MARK BERMAN in Oklahoma City

Juan Carlos Nazario was sitting on a lakeside bench waiting to play soccer when he heard the staccato popping of gunshots outside Louie’s On the Lake, a popular waterfront grill and pub. He ran to his car to get his gun and moved toward the sounds. ¶ Bryan Whittle was driving with his wife, heading off for a Memorial Day weekend getaway, when he saw a commotion outside Louie’s. He thought someone might be drowning, so instead of turning his truck onto the highway, he barreled into the parking lot to offer help.

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COVER STORY

As he jumped out, what he learned stunned him: There was an active shooter just yards away, and wounded victims were holed up in the restaurant’s bathroom.

Whittle, too, grabbed his gun.

In a matter of seconds, the two armed citizens became self-appointed protectors, moving to take up positions around the shooter, drawing their weapons and shouting for him to drop his. Time stretched and warped.

There was an exchange of gunfire. The gunman was hit several times and fell. As Nazario and Whittle converged over the man to restrain him, police arrived. Unsure who was who, officers handcuffed all of the men and put them on the ground as the shooter bled out into the grass and died.

“I was just doing what I was supposed to do,” recalled Nazario, a former police officer who said he now works as a security guard, always has his gun in the car and usually carries it with him.

“I just reacted,” said Whittle, who has served for nearly 20 years in the Oklahoma Air National Guard and works for the Federal Aviation Administration. “There’s a guy with a gun. I’ve got a gun. Stop the threat.”

Though they were loaded into police cars and taken downtown for questioning, they were soon hailed as heroes. They were also called champions of Second Amendment rights, gun-carrying examples of why Oklahoma’s Republican governor should not have vetoed a bill two weeks earlier that would have eliminated the need for a permit and training to carry a gun in public.

In a nation grappling with frequent mass shootings, Second Amendment activists have urged that more people carry guns so that they are prepared, like Nazario and Whittle, to respond to an armed threat. The morning after the May 24 Oklahoma City shooting, the National Rifle Association tweeted that it was “just another example of how the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Local police also praised Nazario and Whittle, saying their swift response ended what a police spokesman called “a very dangerous situation.”

But police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible.

“We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”

Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know. Whittle wondered whether he was going to jail. Nazario went over ways that the confrontation could have ended differently — perhaps with his own death. They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as

BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

NICK OXFORD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else.

Three shooters Louie’s sits on Lake Hefner, a northwest Oklahoma City reservoir dotted with sailboats and surrounded by parks. The restaurant is next to a jetty and a lighthouse, its large parking lot a jumping-off point for runners and cyclists who use a 10-mile path that rings the water.

It was about 6:30 p.m. when the shooting began. A man stood outside the main entrance of the restaurant and fired bullets at the facade, hitting a woman and two adolescent girls as they walked toward the glass doors.

People inside panicked, rushing two of the wounded to a bathroom.

Nazario, 35, said he heard five or six shots before he retrieved his .40-caliber Glock handgun from his car and headed for the restaurant.

He entered on the building’s lakeside corner, diagonally opposite the shattered main entrance, assuming the tactical stance he learned in firearms training. He crossed the room, assuring customers who had taken

TOP: Jennifer Stong hugs Tasha Hunt near the scene of the shooting in Oklahoma City on May 24. Stong was inside the restaurant when the incident occurred.

ABOVE: The shooting occured at Louie’s On The Lake, a popular waterfront grill and pub. A man firing shots outside was confronted by armed civilians and killed.

cover that he was there to help and asking where the gunman was.

Whittle, 39, learned about the shooting from Ron Benton, a Louie’s patron who had slipped out to the parking lot after the shooting began. Benton pointed out the gunman, who was standing on a grassy slope, still holding a Ruger pistol.

Whittle grabbed his .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun from his truck, ran toward the gunman, and took cover among parked vehicles to the west.

Nazario, emerging from the restaurant’s shattered entrance, also spotted the 6-foot-5 Benton pointing out the gunman and approached from the south.

Both men shouted at the gunman, with Whittle yelling: “Drop your weapon! I will shoot. Just drop it!”

When the man did not respond, Whittle noticed he was wearing protective earmuffs.

Whittle took his left hand off his gun and began signaling his command. The man tilted his head, looked sideways and raised his weapon.

Whittle was staring directly down the barrel.

“It looked like a cannon,” Whittle said.

He dove behind an SUV as the man fired.

Nazario then fired, and he believes he hit the gunman in the thigh. He saw the man stumble forward, then right himself and raise his gun again. Whittle, now crouched beside the SUV, took aim and fired. Nazario fired four rounds and Whittle seven. The gunman collapsed.

As Whittle lurched forward to kick away the shooter’s gun and check for other weapons, he heard a shout: “I got you covered. Clear him!”

It was the first Whittle and Nazario knew of each other, and both made the snap decision that they were friends, not foes.

Whittle dropped his gun. Nazario holstered his. Nazario grabbed the dying man’s right arm while Whittle took his left, just as the first police officer arrived, yelling at them both to get down.

“He doesn’t know how many active shooters there were,” Nazario said. “He could have gotten out of his car and shot me.”

As police gained control of the scene, Jabari Giles, father of one of the wounded girls, rushed to the scene. Seeing Whittle and Nazario handcuffed on the ground and a bloodied body that he took to be a victim next to them, he exploded.

“Which one of you did it?” Giles shouted.

“You f---ing shot my kid, didn’t you!”

Giles did not have a gun, but police turned theirs on him and briefly handcuffed him before helping him locate his child.

Confusion was still rampant inside the restaurant. A waitress didn’t know which way to run amid the shattering glass, upturned tables, volleys of gunfire. “We were told there were three shooters,” she said.

“In all reality, there were three shooters,” Benton said.

From the parking lot, he and others tried to help police tell the three apart.

“Those are good guys,” they called, pointing

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COVER STORY to Whittle and Nazario, who were now officially suspects in a homicide investigation.

Good Samaritans The NRA has brandished the “good guy with a gun” argument after several recent mass shootings. Wayne LaPierre, the group’s chief executive, invoked the phrase after the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school. He repeated it after the rampage in which 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February, even though an armed school resource officer was present and did not enter the school or engage the gunman during that attack.

The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI. Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters.

In two prominent recent examples, civilians have, as in Oklahoma City, successfully intervened in mass shootings. In November, Stephen Willeford, a former NRA instructor, shot a gunman who killed more than two dozen people inside a Sutherland Springs, Tex., church, hitting the attacker twice. The shooter fled and later shot himself in the head while under chase. And in June, a pastor and volunteer firefighter who had been through activeshooter training killed a carjacker who opened fire inside a Walmart store in Tumwater, Wash.

But interventions by “Good Samaritans” also have ended in tragedy.

In 2014, husband-and-wife attackers killed two Las Vegas police officers before going into a nearby Walmart and firing a shot in the air.

Joseph Wilcox, 31, a civilian with a handgun and a concealed-carry permit, pulled his weapon to confront the male shooter, but the man’s wife shot Wilcox in the chest, killing him.

When Prince George’s County police detective Jacai Colson responded to a 2016 attack on a police station in his street clothes, another officer mistook him for a threat and shot him.

Ronal Serpas, former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville who lived near Tumwater when he was chief of the Washington State Patrol, said such situations raise life-or-death concerns for police officers.

“How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ ” Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty expressed relief at the quick resolution at Louie’s.

But he also has seen how quickly things can go wrong. In August 2013, Oklahoma City police officers responding to the sound of gunshots opened fire on a man shooting at a car before realizing he was the owner of a liquor store who had been robbed.

How two armed citizens approached an active shooter Bryan Whittle Heading out of town for a trip, Whittle saw the commotion and pulled into the parking lot. When told there was a shooter, he grabbed his gun and approached from the west.

Juan Carlos Nazario While sitting on a bench by the lake with a friend, Nazario heard gunshots, grabbed his gun and ran through the restaurant.

He approached the gunman from the south.

Lake

Lake Hefner Hefn

Detail O klahom a C ity

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Louie’s

5 MILES

Nazario grabs gun from his car

Shooter opened fire in front of restaurant and then moved away from the building

Whittle grabs his gun and leaves his car Lak

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Sources: Post reporting, Google Earth, Maps4News/HERE

At Louie’s in May, the situation could have been far worse, police say. It is unclear why the shooter targeted the restaurant or what he wanted to accomplish, but he was out in the open in a busy area with a loaded gun — and was firing at Whittle when Whittle and Nazario shot him.

‘It is what it is’ Three patched bullet holes on an outside wall at Louie’s show where the gunman — later identified as Alexander Tilghman, 28 — had fired on customers. The restaurant’s glass entryway has been repaired. The three people who were shot as they walked in are expected to make full recoveries, though the two girls have undergone several surgeries.

Customers, employees and community members have thanked Nazario and Whittle, who met at the scene on a recent afternoon for the first time since the shooting. They had kept largely to themselves — discussing the case only in broad terms — because there was a possibility they could be charged.

Nazario and Whittle had no idea who Tilghman was when they killed him. Tilghman did not kill anyone, and any sentence he might have faced had he been apprehended certainly would have been less than death.

Though Tilghman did not have extensive interactions with police, his behavior had been raising concerns in Oklahoma City. Local news reports before the shooting indicated that Tilghman had posted fliers around the city alluding to “demons in cloned transsexual bodies,” and a local Fox television investigative reporter alerted authorities to Tilghman’s “bizarre” online postings.

In videos, Tilghman complained that he was “under hardcore demonic attack,” noting in

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THE WASHINGTON POST

“You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.”

Bryan Whittle

KLMNO WEEKLY

one recording: “I’m not doing well . . . doing really, really bad right now.”

Gerald Konkler, general counsel of the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, confirmed that Tilghman was licensed to carry a weapon and had been through training that would have included a psychological evaluation. Tilghman’s relatives could not be reached for comment.

The NRA was initially silent after the Parkland shooting. Now the group is pushing back against calls for new gun restrictions.

Police do not know what would have happened had they arrived before Tilghman was shot. Would he have fired on officers? Was he attempting “suicide by cop”? Would he have given up and been taken into custody? Could there have been far worse carnage?

“We don’t know what he was going to do,” said Mathews, the police spokesman.

Prosecutors took three weeks to conclude that Whittle and Nazario would not face charges; authorities determined that the men had been protecting themselves or others when they opened fire on Tilghman.

“The two civilians who engaged, and ultimately neutralized the threat . . . were justified and compliant with the law when they employed deadly force,” Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater wrote in a press release on June 18. He did not respond to requests for further comment.

Neither Nazario nor Whittle knows who fired the fatal round or rounds. The medical examiner listed the manner of the gunman’s death as “homicide” as the result of “multiple gunshot wounds.”

“It is what it is,” Whittle said. “You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.”

An Oklahoman who grew up among family members who taught him how to handle guns, Whittle vigorously defends the right to bear arms. He notes that not everyone takes action in perilous moments, even in a place where many people carry weapons.

Nazario, who also grew up with guns, emphasizes the importance of the numerous firearms training courses he has taken. “Not everybody knows what they are doing,” he said.

In the weeks since the shooting, he has replayed in his head different endings to the incident. What if instead of retreating to the grassy bank, the gunman had followed his initial shots through the broken glass door into the restaurant? And what if Whittle had followed the gunman inside?

“Bryan would have entered the front,” Nazario said. “I would have entered the back.”

There they would have been, two good guys with guns, face to face.

“He could have thought I was the shooter,” Nazario said. Or vice versa. And if Nazario had asked — and Whittle refused — to drop his weapon, Nazario said, “I would have had to take action.” n ©The Washington Post

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EDUCATION

Colleges expel mandatory essay test BY

N ICK A NDERSON

T

he SAT and ACT essay tests began with fanfare in 2005, a bid to assess the writing chops of collegebound students under the pressure of a clock.

Now, many colleges say time’s up for those exams. With a few notable exceptions, the consensus in higher education is that the tests are becoming an afterthought even though hundreds of thousands of high school students still take them every year.

One by one, major schools this year are dropping their requirements for prospective students to submit an essay score from the national testing services. Princeton and Stanford universities became the latest to end the mandate, following Dartmouth College and Harvard and Yale universities.

Those schools are dropping the requirement because they wanted to ensure that the extra cost of essay testing does not drive applicants away. Others have resisted requiring the essays because they doubted the exercise revealed much.

It is a remarkable and humbling fall for an initiative that arose little more than a dozen years ago with the hope of reshaping college admission testing, offering a tool to measure student potential on a massive scale, using just a pencil, a prompt and lined sheets of paper.

Fewer than 25 schools now require the essay scores, according to some tallies, including nine in the University of California system. Brown University, as of Friday, was the lone holdout in the Ivy League.

“I guarantee you it’s on the way out entirely,” said Charles Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University.

A longtime skeptic of the timed-writing exercises, Deacon said he never considers the essay scores when reading applications. “Just didn’t make any difference to us,” he said.

But Janet Rapelye, Princeton’s dean of admission , said she finds

MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Major schools say timed writing is unnecessary, has extra cost that may drive applicants away the scores helpful and sometimes reads the essay that yielded the score (colleges can view them) when she wants to know more about an applicant. “It’s actually a very good test,” she said. But the university dropped the requirement, she said, out of concern that testing costs or logistical issues would deter some students from applying.

Students are still welcome to send in essay scores, Rapelye said, but the university will now require applicants to send a graded sample of high school writing, preferably in English or history.

The SAT and ACT essays have proved controversial since they were launched at the urging of higher education leaders who wanted a more nuanced approach to testing than filling in bubbles on a multiple-choice score sheet.

The College Board, which oversees the SAT, added a mandatory 25-minute writing assignment to

the main test 13 years ago and raised the maximum total score to 2400. But that version flopped.

In a 2016 overhaul, the SAT’s top score reverted to 1600. The essay was retained, but the time for it was lengthened to 50 minutes. It was made optional and scored separately.

The format calls for students to read a given text and then write an analysis of how the author builds an argument to persuade the audience. The College Board said it is meant to resemble a “typical college writing assignment.”

The ACT’s essay, optional from the start, is a 40-minute assignment scored separately from the other sections of the test. The prompt presents a complex issue, gives students three perspectives on it and asks them to develop their own take, with reference to one or more of the other viewpoints. The essay does not factor

Stanford University, seen above, no longer requires applicants to submit SAT or ACT essay scores. However, according to an email from Richard Shaw, Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid, the university will “strongly recommend” them.

into the main ACT score of a maximum 36.

Versions of the tests that include the essay cost $16.50 to $17 more per student, though fee waivers are available in cases of financial need.

In the high school Class of 2017, about 1.1 million students took the ACT with its essay, slightly more than half of the total tested.

About 1.2 million took the essay option with the SAT, or 70 percent of that exam’s total group.

Many take the essay version because their states or school systems provide it to students free during the school day. Others do it on the advice of counselors or parents who want students to have the essay scores just in case they apply to one of the few colleges that require or recommend them.

Without doubt, the essay tests inject more anxiety into the annual frenzy over selective college admissions. Students who excel on the main SAT or ACT but get middling essay scores often fret about whether they should take the whole test over again or how colleges will view the scores and subscores they get from multiple tries.

What the essay scores mean can be confusing. Each SAT essay, for example, gets three scores on a scale of 2 to 8. The three scores are meant to reflect skill in the quality of reading, analysis and writing that a student displays in response to a written text. They are not meant to be combined. But students do so anyway.

One anonymous user of the online forum College Confidential reported getting a perfect 1600 on the SAT — but 15 out of a possible 24 on the essay. That was “very surprising,” the user wrote, “because I’m a pretty good writer.”

The user, aiming for the Ivy League, wondered whether it would be advisable to take the SAT again just to get a better essay score.

Selective colleges don’t need essay scores to find evidence of writing skill.

They ask what grades students earned in English and whether

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HEALTH their classes were at an advanced level. They scrutinize teacher recommendations. They read personal essays students send with applications — mindful that those are often heavily edited. And they note scores applicants receive on the ACT or SAT in multiple-choice assessments of reading comprehension, grammar, rhetoric and other language skills.

The College Board and ACT contend that their essay tests remain useful.

“We believe that the SAT Essay provides a strong complement to the multiple-choice section by asking students to demonstrate reading, analysis, writing, and critical thinking skills in the context of analyzing a provided source text,” the College Board said in a statement.

Marten Roorda, chief executive of ACT, said that for many reasons, the personal essays students submit with their applications do not provide a “valid and reliable” assessment of writing skill. “The ACT writing test can do that,” Roorda said in a statement. “It is standardized, comparable, and reliable and can provide a lot of useful information for improvement.”

Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid, Richard Shaw, said in an email that his university will “strongly recommend” essay scores even though it will no longer require them.

Most public universities, including the state flagships in Maryland and Virginia, do not require essay scores. The University of California, a major exception, was one of the main advocates for the SAT essay before its launch in 2005.

Duke University’s dean of admissions, Christoph Guttentag, said he relies heavily on personal essays that applicants submit.

“It’s a singular opportunity for students to take some time and present themselves to us,” he said.

“There’s real value in that.”

But what personal essays reveal about writing skill is inconsistent, he said, because the advice and support students receive in preparing applications varies widely. That’s one reason Duke also is one of the few to require an SAT or ACT essay score. Earlier this month, however, Guttentag said Duke’s policy is under review. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

For a price, seniors find ‘grandkids on-demand’ BY

T ARA B AHRAMPOUR

W

hen Andrew Parker’s grandfather began suffering from dementia three years ago, his grandmother had to start taking care of the house and caring for him. It was hard work, and one day, Parker got the idea to hire a college student to help out. “I said, ‘Hey, can you go hang out with my grandfather and make him a sandwich or something? I’ll pay you, lets see how it goes.”

His grandfather loved it, as did his grandmother. For a few hours, he said, “She got to go do her own thing.”

It got Parker thinking. “There’s so many seniors and so many college students out there.” So in January, the 30-year-old Miami resident launched a business called Papa, after his name for his grandfather. It connects students with seniors for light housekeeping or driving chores, but the company’s real goal is in its slogan: “Grandkids on-Demand.”

“We are specifically a service that links two generations,” Parker said. “Our emphasis is this is a really fun day for a senior. Someone who might say, ‘I don’t want to bother my daughter or son, but I want someone who can be with me for a day so I don’t have to annoy my kids.’ ” To date, the company has around 250 members who pay a monthly fee of $15 to $30 to belong, and then pay $15 per hour for visits by students, or Papa Pals.

Pals must be enrolled in a 4-year college, or be working on a master’s, social work, or nursing or medical degree. They must have a four-door car and pass a background check. And they are given a personality test that looks for people with empathy, patience and the ability to draw people out in conversation.

“The biggest thing we’re focusing on is curing loneliness,” Parker said. “If a senior calls, they’re not calling and saying, ‘I’m lonely.’ But what starts as a visit to a doctor or

ZUNY MEZA

Maria Piloto, 80, likes to “dance” in the car to Cuban music with Zuny Meza, 23, her Papa Pal.

a grocery store can go from a twohour visit to a 10-hour visit.”

Sometimes they’ll call for one task and then add on an activity.

They might go to the park with a Pal, or go to the mall, go sit on the beach. The average visit lasts three hours, but some can go for eight or nine hours.

Recently a member brought a Papa Pal to a wedding. Another member was on the campaign trail with Ronald Reagan and is working on a book about it; three Papa Pals are helping her.

Connie Piloto of Dallas hired a Pal for her mother, Maria Piloto, 80, who lives in Miami and has dementia. “I asked for someone who could speak Spanish because that’s my mom’s primary language,” she said. “In some ways it’s been a lifesaver. . . . Caregiving is hard, and it’s even harder when you’re thousands of miles away.”

The intimate and casual nature of the relationship — and the relative youth of the Pals — can also make them easier to work with than more traditional aides, Connie Piloto said. “These young kids are not scared of new technology and they’re not scared of telling the doctor, ‘We really need to call her daughter,’ and they get on the phone and they FaceTime me.”

Zuny Meza, Maria Piloto’s Pal, says she asks her to drive a block

out of her way to pick up flowers for her, because it reminds her of the flowers her husband used to bring her each week. Meza, a 23year-old student at Florida International University, also plays Cuban music for Piloto as she drives her to appointments, and the two “dance” in the car together.

The service is available only in Florida, but Parker plans to expand to 10 more states next year.

He said the services Papa Pals provide fall under some of the nonmedical care services that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid has said it will start covering as a supplemental benefit for 2019.

Barbara Carroll-Marks, 66, a retired systems analyst and author in Pompano Beach, says the interactions she has with her Papa Pals are a stark contrast to her experiences with other paid care providers, who didn’t seem like they wanted to be there.

“I loved them from the first day I got them,” she said. Marks, who has Parkinson’s disease, alternates between the same three Pals, and they come almost every day, often for six to nine hours. It reminds her of being with her own grandchildren, she said.

“I’ve had aides; these are Pals,” she added. “It’s a very different thing.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Overcoming his injuries and his demons N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

A LLAN F ALLOW

A

THE COMEBACK Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France

By Daniel de Visé Atlantic. 371 pp. $27

rider training for the 21stage, 2,000-mile Tour de France may look “like a POW,” as Kathy LeMond said of her gaunt husband, Greg, before the 1981 season. But once the tour starts rolling, it takes no prisoners: An overeager photographer who knocked a rider off his bike one year received a retaliatory wheel to the face.

Compare that reaction with LeMond’s upon colliding with a spectator during his three-peat tour in 1990, as recounted in Daniel de Visé’s “The Comeback”: “He leapt up to aid the woman, asking, ‘Are you okay?’ For the moment, he cared more about her welfare than the outcome of the Tour. Her husband did not. “ ‘Go on, get out of here,’ the husband cried. ‘Don’t worry about her.’ ” That blend of chaos, kindness and cruelty typifies the scenes that journalist de Visé brings to life in this retelling of LeMond’s trailblazing career (first American to enter the tour, first to win it).

To parse LeMond’s competitive edge and capacity for suffering, de Visé points us to a young LeMond as a “tow-headed whirlwind” roaming the wilderness of Nevada’s Washoe Valley near Lake Tahoe, displaying reflexes “so quick he could catch fish without a pole.”

Nine months after surviving the cynical treachery of French teammate Bernard Hinault to win the 1986 tour, LeMond nearly died in a turkey-hunting accident on his uncle’s remote ranch.

Eight months pregnant with their second child, Kathy arrived at the hospital to find LeMond’s body “a colander,” stippled with 60 holes dripping blood. Later on, their 3-year-old son, Geoffrey, spied the circular scabs on his father’s back and cried out: “Oh, Daddy. Why do you have spots?”

That night the boy insisted that his aunt add spots to his back, too; she obliged with a felt-tip marker.

That anecdote and countless

LAURENT REBOURS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Greg LeMond, left, with Claudio Chiappucci of Italy going into the final stage at the Tour de France in 1990.

others suggest that de Visé, a former Washington Post reporter, enjoyed unfettered access to the LeMond family. The shooting’s aftermath, he reveals, was carefully stage-managed: “Without telling any untruths, Greg’s doctors and his loved ones did what they could to spin the narrative as a minor setback in his career.”

Minor it was not — news that soon leaked across the Atlantic. A letter from La Vie Claire team owner Bernard Tapie, the Svengali of 1980s French cycling, appeared in LeMond’s mailbox a month after the mishap, “politely apprising Greg that he was fired.”

Having escaped death the year before, LeMond now engineered a miraculous resurrection — an uphill slog that would make the 21 switchbacks of L’Alpe d’Huez look flat as a crepe. Starting over on his old training route, LeMond got dropped (cycling slang for “left in the dust”) on a climb by a passing recreational cyclist.

The capstone of the comeback

was LeMond’s razor-thin victory margin — eight seconds, the smallest in race history — in the legendary 1989 tour. It came at the expense of his perfectly matched rival Laurent Fignon. “The Comeback” claims one of its many stage wins by elevating Fignon from cardboard Gallic villain to complex human being: If he “greeted the world with the surly indifference of a bistrot waiter,” writes de Visé, it was only because the clinically shy Fignon hid his “private angst” behind a facade of “public prickliness.”

LeMond prevailed again in the 1990 tour, this time by a margin of 2 minutes 16 seconds. And unlike a certain now-disgraced Texan who would use strong-arm tactics to co-opt the media and accuse LeMond of doping, LeMond was “cycling’s Mr. Clean” his entire career. All of which crowns LeMond “the True King of American Cycling” in the author’s eyes (and my own).

For decades, LeMond’s goofy

smile and conflict-averse nature camouflaged a dark shadow that fell across his adolescence: A Tahoe neighbor sexually abused the 13-year-old LeMond — a secret he hid from even his wife until his drinking and depression threatened their marriage in 2002. After disclosing “his darkest secret,” LeMond grew closer to Kathy.

Their union survived.

As a reporter, de Visé skates lightly over the objective facts of that ordeal. As an author in quest of his protagonist’s motivation, though, he subjects it to extreme torque: “Greg found, in cycling, the ultimate distraction from his own demons, the pain of guilt and sorrow and humiliation that still roiled his brain from the months of sexual abuse.”

With “The Comeback,” LeMond appears to have finally dropped his demons. n Fallow is an avid cyclist and freelance book editor living in Alexandria, Va. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A clash of families and personalities

Steely Dan’s brand of American cool

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

G

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REVIEWED BY

A NNE B OYD R IOUX

race Dane Mazur’s “The Garden Party” is an obvious homage to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”

The novel takes place over the course of a day, culminating in a party, and weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters. It’s a bold move to invite comparisons with such a revered classic, and it doesn’t always work in “The Garden Party’s” favor, as the novel labors to contain the perspectives of a massive cast of characters.

In Mazur’s novel, the party is a rehearsal dinner near Boston where the families of the bride and groom are meeting for the first time. The Cohens are impractical academics, who brace themselves for the coming invasion of the Barlows, a family of matter-of-fact lawyers. Their daughter, a vet, has oddly become betrothed to the Cohens’ poet son.

The novel begins with Pindar Cohen, the groom’s father, a professor of ancient history, who is working on a cookbook of Babylonian recipes, none of which have survived intact. While his professional life concerns itself with fragments, his home has remained whole. But his son’s marriage feels like “a sundering,” as if his offspring’s union will jeopardize his own. It’s a touching way to begin — with the sadness that underlies a parent’s happiest moments.

At first, “The Garden Party” feels like it will be Pindar’s novel.

He has the depth and idiosyncrasy to become the Clarissa Dalloway of this story, but he fades into the background as each member of the Cohen family comes into focus. Pindar’s wife Celia, a literature professor, is supposed to be the glue of the family, but she does not provide the same function for the novel. She is less distinct than most of the other characters and even says of herself, “I have no attributes.” Adam, the groom, is even more of a shadowy outline.

Although the center of the party, he and his bride Eliza look away

from their families — and us — turning instead toward each other.

The two Cohen daughters shine more brightly but exist primarily as further evidence of the family’s peculiarity. Sara has recently left her PhD program studying scorpions. She is now secretly dating a Jesuit priest whom she invited to the party. Naomi, the youngest, just returned from a disastrous trip to Romania where she tried to help ease the orphan crisis but became dangerously ill. Naomi is a special concern for the family, and her efforts to re-enter a Western world of plenty without shocking her system add poignancy to the novel. That portrait is later complicated, however, when she begins a serious flirtation with one of the bride’s married brothers.

When the ultrapractical, literal, and lawyerly Barlows arrive, 10 of them in all, the novel further flits from one perspective to the next.

Eliza’s father, Stephen, is perhaps the most interesting. Staring at Pindar and Celia, he wonders what sort of “practical contributions to society” they could possibly make with their study of literature and obsolete languages.

Such moments of delightful perception proliferate, but by the end, Pindar’s sense of impending dissolution has become a reality, for the party as well as for the novel. It is not so much that there are too many characters, but that we are invited into the consciousness of virtually every one of them.

The family, as an institution, is elastic enough that it can stretch its borders without breaking. So is a novel, within limits. But by trying to expand a story of such compact design to contain 19 unique adult personalities (plus the fleeting perspectives of six children), Mazur has pushed those limits to the breaking point. n Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans, is the author and editor of six books. This was written for The Washington Post.

I THE GARDEN PARTY

By Grace Dane Mazur Random House.

240 pp. $27.

MAJOR DUDES A Steely Dan Companion Edited by Barney Hoskyns Overlook. 319 pp. $27.95

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REVIEWED BY

S IBBIE O ’ S ULLIVAN

t’s been nearly five decades since Steely Dan released its breakthrough hit, “Do It Again.” (Are you humming it now?) Few would dispute the band’s influence or popularity — all told, it has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide — but with “Major Dudes,” Barney Hoskyns delivers a 300-page block of solid evidence of the musical and lyrical brilliance that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the originators of Steely Dan, unleashed on the world beginning in the 1970s.

The book — featuring essays, reviews and interviews about and with Fagen and Becker — covers the duo’s pre-Dan years through their solo careers and ends with Becker’s death in 2017.

It shows how the band was shaped by American radio and television in the 1950s and early ’60s, before escaping the suburbs for Manhattan. There, Fagen and Becker imbibed jazz and took on a Beat-infused style of dress and attitude. After playing college gigs at Bard, they toured with Jay and the Americans and then relocated to Los Angeles, where they perfected their “brand of ruthless cool,” a style that made their albums, from “Can’t Buy a Thrill” (1972) to “Gaucho” (1980), instant classics.

Unlike a straight biography about the band — or even a memoir — “Major Dudes” filters the group’s rise through its interaction with journalists. As such, it offers a more critical take. The interviews are compelling and revealing (if at times repetitious), showcasing Fagen and Becker’s secluding habits and snarky put-ons.

Fagen and Becker’s lyrics have been described as cynical and sinister, and the artists themselves as “sociopaths masquerading as benign dictators,” a reference to their perfectionist methods in the studio. Regardless of whether one agrees with these assessments, Becker’s prediction

about the future was correct. The lone shooter in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” from the band’s 1976 album “The Royal Scam” has, sadly, become a regular headline today.

The interviews also uncover a great deal about the influences that shaped Fagen and Becker’s art. Fiction was a big one — both on the style and content of their songs. As young men, Fagen and Becker read the iconic writers of the ’50s and ’60s: John Barth, Terry Southern, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Hesse and, of course, William Burroughs.

When singing, Fagen says he becomes a song’s “character,” or acts as the “narrator” of a particular story. The song “Everything You Did,” also from “The Royal Scam,” stings like a Raymond Carver three-pager.

Unfortunately, the book, which unfolds chronologically, loses momentum (and possibly the reader’s patience) by needlessly repeating already-stated facts throughout the text.

That said, “Major Dudes” does effectively show how Fagen and Becker soaked up, skewed, and reformatted American images, habits and mismanaged dreams and made a groove out of them.

In their songs, the “old, weird America” — to piggyback on Greil Marcus’s phrase — becomes the new, weird America, shining forth in urban present-tense and on into the future, even into other worlds. Although some readers might fault “Major Dudes” for its dearth of longer essays that place Fagen and Becker in a wider cultural context, the book does give us plenty to read and think about. I have no doubt we’ll be thinking about and listening to Steely Dan until “California tumbles into sea.” n O’Sullivan, a former teacher at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Putin’s offer to help in probe really is ‘incredible’ DAVID VON DREHLE is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post.

Four years ago this past week, on July 17, 2014, a Boeing 777­200 rose from a runway at the Amsterdam airport bound for Kuala Lumpur. Aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were 298 human beings. As the plane passed over Ukraine and neared the Russian border, a 9M38 series Buk missile, fired from a launcher belonging to Russia’s 53rd Anti­Aircraft Missile Brigade, streaked skyward.

It was a kill shot. Bodies fell like rain on the fields below.

The launcher crew slipped back across the border to its base in the Russian town of Kursk.

And ever since, the government of Vladimir Putin has denied any involvement in the disaster while stonewalling the painstaking fact-finders from the multinational Joint Investigation Team.

This is a story one would expect the president of the United States to have at his fingertips when he sits down for a chat with his Russian counterpart. So that when Putin slyly offers to, uh . . . help — sure, that’s it: help — with the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian cyberattacks on the United States, the president could fend him off as the world watches.

How about some real help with the Flight 17 investigation first?

Trump likes to exaggerate the danger of pushing back against Putin, as though the slightest disagreement could escalate to World War III. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse,” he tweeted on the eve of Monday’s summit with the Russian leader in Helsinki (evidently unaware of the Berlin blockade, the capture of Francis Gary Powers, the Cuban missile crisis or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to name a few hot

moments).

There’s no danger, though, in pressuring Russia to come clean.

Quite the opposite: The request could be couched as an olive branch toward Czar Vladimir the Chesty. The United States once found itself in a similar spot, dissembling over the 1988 disaster in which a missile fired from a U.S. Navy warship destroyed an Iranian passenger jet with 290 people aboard. Time has shown that honesty would have been a better policy, and it’s not too late for Putin to learn the lesson.

But Putin can’t, or won’t, learn the lesson, because his lies about Flight 17 are enmeshed with so many other lies. Acknowledging the truth about the downed airliner would require him to acknowledge the truth about Russia’s shadow war in eastern Ukraine, which would lead to an honest discussion of Russian expansionism in general. Civilian deaths in Ukraine would naturally bring up civilian deaths in Syria, where Putin continues to prop up the murderous tyrant Bashar al-Assad.

So what did Trump do instead of pointing out Putin’s allergy to honest investigations? He hailed the Russian’s preposterous proposal of help in the hunt for his own hackers. “An incredible offer,” Trump said, inadvertently landing on precisely the right word. Incredible, meaning not to

ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK/

Portraits of lost passengers are shown during a mourning ceremony at the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines flight in Ukraine this month.

be believed.

Putin is no truth seeker. He tried this same gambit in Britain recently, offering to . . . help . . . British authorities with their investigation of the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The British didn’t buy for a moment the idea that Putin wanted the truth about an attempted assassination in which his government is the prime suspect. He wanted to inject his own agents so they could help him spy on, disrupt, undermine and impede his foes.

It gives me no pleasure to say so, but this appears to be the common ground on which Trump and Putin bonded in Helsinki. Trump, too, would like to spy on, disrupt, undermine and impede special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The president’s unnerving remarks in the post-summit news conference made clear that he seeks a partnership with Putin to protect their respective hides from the decorated former Marine turned prosecutor.

Trump called the Mueller

probe “a disaster for our country” that has “kept us apart” from Russia. “It’s kept us separated.”

Putin, added Trump, “offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12” — the Russian military intelligence officers charged with hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee. “I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay?”

Yes, incredible — also shocking and appalling. Look next for Trump’s lap dogs on the House Intelligence Committee to start promoting this unholy alliance.

I’ve always said, and I’ll say it again: I don’t know where the Mueller investigation will end up. But think about what the president has done to impede it. He has attacked the Justice Department. Maligned the attorney general.

Threatened firings. Fostered conspiracy theories. Dangled pardons.

Now he’s enlisting the aid of the KGB-trained leader of a longtime rival state. What is Trump so scared of ? n

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Hamas must help the Palestinians JARED KUSHNER, JASON GREENBLATT AND DAVID FRIEDMAN Kushner is an assistant and senior adviser to President Trump.

Greenblatt is an assistant to the president and special U.S. representative for international negotiations. Friedman is U.S. ambassador to Israel. This was written for The Washington Post.

At the end of a productive six-day trip to the region recently, one reality was painfully clear: The nightmare of Hamas’s leadership is continuing and needlessly prolonging the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Despite the billions of dollars invested for the benefit of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 70 years, 53 percent of the people there live below the poverty level, and the unemployment rate is a crippling 49 percent. The Palestinians of Gaza are stuck in a vicious cycle where corrupt and hateful leadership has provoked conflicts leading to reduced opportunities and the poverty and hopelessness that follow.

International donors are conflicted: Should they try to help the people directly, at the certain risk of enriching terrorists, or withhold funding to Hamas and watch the people it is supposed to govern suffer? In the past, investments in badly needed infrastructure have been diverted for weapons and other malign uses, and even the projects that are built are often destroyed as a consequence of Hamas’s aggression. Until governance changes or Hamas recognizes the state of Israel, abides by previous diplomatic agreements and renounces violence, there is no good option.

Seventy years after the founding of Israel, it would be wise for Hamas to acknowledge

that the existence of Israel is a permanent reality. Almost all in the Middle East have come to accept this fact, and many even embrace it. At the expense of the Palestinian people, Hamas is fighting a morally bankrupt, decades-old war that has long been lost.

Peace will provide opportunity to break this stalemate, and peace will be achieved only by embracing reality and dismissing a flawed ideology. Life could significantly improve in short order for the Palestinian people if Hamas allowed it. There are engaged, interested parties with resources who are ready to get to work. Yet without real change accompanied by reliable security, progress is impossible. If Hamas

demonstrates clear, peaceful intentions — not just by word but, more importantly, by deed — then all manner of new opportunities becomes possible.

There is no reason the Palestinians (in both the West Bank and Gaza) can’t enjoy economic success and integrate into a thriving regional economy — if they let us help. As President Trump has said so many times, economic security is national security. By encouraging economic recovery in the region, we can enhance our efforts to increase stability as well.

Hamas must immediately cease provoking or coordinating attacks on Israelis and Egyptians, and on infrastructure projects sponsored by donor nations and organizations.

Rather than looking for opportunities to weaponize everything from kites to mirrors in order to attack Israel, Hamas should focus its ingenuity on improving the Gazan economy.

Rather than cynically attempting to exploit its barbaric holding of Israeli soldiers and citizens, Hamas must return them to their families. Instead of exploiting crossings such as Rafah and Salah al-Din to smuggle weapons and siphon off tax revenue for illicit purposes and personal enrichment, Hamas must hand

those functions over in their entirety to the Palestinian Authority so that badly needed materials can get through to the people of Gaza. The international community stands ready to work with the Palestinian Authority on this vital effort.

The cycle is clear: Rockets, mortars, terror tunnels, kite bombs and other weapons of aggression lead only to stricter constraints on the people of Gaza. Hamas’s acts of aggression have produced only misery for the people of Gaza. The true victims of this terrible situation are the many Palestinians who are not rioting but whose futures are dimmed by Hamas’s radical approach.

The international community bears some blame. More countries want to simply talk and condemn than are willing to confront reality, propose realistic solutions and write meaningful checks.

For far too long, Gaza has lurched from crisis to crisis, sustained by emergency appeals and one-time caravans of aid, without dealing with the root cause: Hamas leadership is holding the Palestinians of Gaza captive. This problem must be recognized and resolved or we will witness yet another disastrous cycle. n

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

We’re losing the conservation fight ERIK VANCE is a science writer based in Baltimore. This was written for The Washington Post.

The northern white rhino isn’t going out with the thundering charge that it’s due. It won’t go out in a blaze of glory, fighting a pride of lions, as would befit such an inspiring creature. It’s going to die sad and old, withering away under armed guard in central Kenya while dozens of scientists — and millions of other humans around the world — look on, helpless.

It’s not that scientists have given up on the animal. They haven’t. But even the researchers who are pouring immense resources into technology to preserve the subspecies, which recently lost its last male, acknowledge that we are past the point of no return.

If you feel like you’ve heard this story before, you have. It’s the same way the western black rhino and Vietnamese Javan rhino went out. It’s the same story as the Chinese river dolphin, the Pinta Island tortoise and the passenger pigeon.

If you’re tired of hearing it, that’s too bad. Dozens of iconic species are lining up to join them.

You see, the stories we have seen in recent years — where a species tilts toward extinction and scientists rush in to save them — used to be the exception.

Today, it’s the new normal.

Modern conservation is increasingly about maintaining insanely thin populations with shallow gene pools. Not only is this expensive and often futile, but it also undermines the whole

point of wildlife management.

Last year, I spent six months writing about the doomed vaquita, the world’s smallest porpoise and rarest marine mammal. I was struck by two things: first, how preventable the mess was. Mexico has been focused on the vaquita since the early 1990s, and yet its policies have only served to inflame locals and encourage poachers.

Second, everything changes when a population gets too low. In the past, managing for a species such as a spotted owl or a bald eagle wasn’t really about that species but about the ecosystem in which it lives.

But if a species gets down to just a couple dozen individuals, a whole new problem emerges: genetics. Scientists need to be

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

careful with breeding to stave off health problems. When Florida panthers dropped to about 20, scientists were forced to breed them with Texas cougars. This saved the subspecies but also changed it forever.

Red wolves dropped to even lower numbers, but a targeted captive breeding program brought them back to a couple hundred (pretty inbred) animals.

Will that be a problem? Are there so-called lethal alleles — fatal genes that sometimes pop up in very small populations — that will cause them to suddenly die?

Should we go in and edit their genes to fix what inbreeding has done, as experts are trying with the pink pigeon? Or maybe, as has been argued with tigers, we should just change the classification of the animals so that there are fewer subspecies and thus fewer barriers to carting them across a continent to refresh the gene pool. Because all it takes is one bad season or one disease to cripple the species.

Seeing a trend? These are profoundly disturbing choices. In the old days, we used to worry about how many acres were needed to maintain a species and whether a corridor might keep animals connected. Today we have to figure out whether there is a gene that will kill off the

entire population before we can get them all into zoos and breed them in test tubes.

And we’re still not sure how living in captivity for generations on end might change an animal.

In 1987, when biologists put every California condor in captivity to save the species, it was front-page news for years. Today, there are about 200 species of birds alone in similar endangered straits.

This is not to blame the environmental community or take away from the accomplishments of biologists and activists across the globe. (We have them to thank for rebounding bald eagles, Siberian tigers, giant pandas and all the southern rhinos.) But they are just no match for all the things pushing animals toward extinction.

Conservation is not winning.

Even when it does, like with the red wolves near Kitty Hawk, N.C., it still loses. This was an animal that successfully returned from just 14 individuals. But in a story eerily similar to the vaquita, local and national politics forced local managers to all but give up on the animal.

Humans don’t need pink pigeons or rhinos to survive. This isn’t about saving humans, or even animals. It’s about saving our humanity. n

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Supreme Court BY

J EFFREY S EGAL

As Judge Brett Kavanaugh prepares for his confirmation hearings, no institution of American government is more shrouded in mythology than the Supreme Court. The uber­myth is that the court is an objective institution that makes decisions by applying the facts of a case to the relevant statute, constitutional text, intent of the framers and precedents. But in fact, scholars such as Eric Segall write, the role of politics is so substantial that “the Supreme Court is not a court and its justices are not judges.” Here are five of the most persistent misconceptions.

MYTH NO. 1 Nominees are not approved in election years.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) cited this concept when declaring that the upper chamber should not consider a replacement during a presidential election year in 2016.

But while the Senate has rejected Supreme Court nominees during election years (six of 15 candidates) far more often than during the first three years of a president’s term (17 percent of about 160 candidates), it has still confirmed a majority. The Senate has approved six other justices during the “lame duck” period between the election and a president’s departure.

MYTH NO. 2 The Supreme Court hears only important cases.

Losing litigants appeal as many as 8,000 cases per year to the Supreme Court, and the justices hear just 1 percent of them.

Nevertheless, the job of the Supreme Court includes harmonizing federal law among the 13 federal circuits directly below it. Federal retirement benefits must be the same for workers in the 9th Circuit as for workers in the 1st Circuit. One result of this need for homogeneity is that the Supreme Court hears a substantial number of Employee Retirement Income

Security Act (ERISA) cases. The Constitution’s commerce clause, which gives Congress the authority to “regulate commerce . . . with the Indian Tribes,” also leads to many relatively lowsalience Supreme Court cases.

MYTH NO. 3 The court’s rulings on constitutional issues are final.

The principle of judicial review gives the Supreme Court the power to strike laws passed by Congress and actions taken by the executive branch, including the president; in Marbury v.

Madison, the justices claimed the authority to say what the law is.

Yet the justices do not always get their way. An article by political scientist Robert Dahl found that the Supreme Court was most effective in holding up legislation, but if it blocks legislation that the people desire, the president and Congress can threaten the institutional authority of the court — by packing the court, limiting its appellate jurisdiction and cutting its budget — in the short run. In the longer run, presidents can nominate justices who will support the legislation in question.

MYTH NO. 4 Originalism limits the discretion of judges.

While there are many permutations of originalism, they

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Supreme Court is seen as the final arbiter on the nation’s weightiest legal questions — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overruled.

all rely substantially on the text of the statute or constitutional clause under construction, as well as the original public meaning of the statute or clause.

Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of legal disputes exceeded the imagination of the framers. The authors of the Fourth Amendment (protecting Americans’ “persons, houses, papers and effects”) could not have imagined police monitoring a suspect’s location without a warrant through cellphone towers. There exists no evidence that the framers of the 14th Amendment’s equalprotection clause thought the clause would protect women, as Supreme Court rulings eventually decided it must.

MYTH NO. 5 Bork’s nomination failed because he was too forthcoming.

Republican President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to take Justice Lewis Powell’s place. Bork had written extensively about major constitutional issues, so he

declined the usual tactic of dodging Judiciary Committee questions about matters that might come before the court.

Many scholars declared that this was why his nomination failed.

But according to Paul Collins and Lori Ringhand’s examination of Senate Judiciary hearings, subsequent nominees answered just as many questions as Bork did. The difference is that they answered the questions correctly — at least from the viewpoint of the American people and their representatives. Kennedy, for instance, told the committee that he supported a right to privacy, that the First Amendment covered more than just explicitly political speech and that the equal-protection clause required more than the lowest possible constitutional standard (a rational basis) for gender discrimination to be upheld. All of these positions were at odds with the views Bork pronounced. n Segal is a distinguished professor of political science at SUNY Stony Brook.

This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2018

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