The Washington Post National Weekly - July 31, 2016

Politics Quick fall after long tenure 4

Nation Which city uses pot most? 9

Food Breaking some egg practices 16

5 Myths Political speechwriting 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

Stretching the norm Middle Eastern women were once discouraged from sports.

A new generation now chases Olympic glory. PAGE 12

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The Wenatchee World

VOTER GUIDE:

Know the candidates and be informed on the issues before you vote.

Look for complete coverage of the election results from the Tuesday, August 2 primary election in the Wednesday, August 3 edition of the Wenatchee World, and on our elections.wenatcheeworld.com page.

The Wenatchee World and Jeffers, Danielson, Sonn & Aylward, P.S. have teamed up to present the most comprehensive online guide to the 2016 local and statewide elections.

Get to know the candidates and their positions, the pros and cons of the various initiatives, and stay informed and updated as Election Day draws near.

It’s your right to vote, so be an informed voter — knowledgeable about the issues and the positions of the candidates. It can be overwhelming, so get started today at elections.wenatcheeworld.com.

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Betting on Trump paid off huge Early predictors of Trump’s victory saw huge profits BY

K IM S OFFEN

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his month, Donald Trump “humbly and gratefully” accepted the Republican nomination for president, putting an end to perhaps the most unpredictable primary season in recent history.

And yet, this whole time, people still tried to predict it. Last summer at Trump’s announcement and through the fall and winter, journalists called his victory “an extreme long shot,” saying he was “not a real candidate” and had “no serious chance of winning.”

And people outside the news media seemed to agree. Betting markets run by companies like PredictIt and Betfair allow ordinary Americans to place bets on whether a certain event will occur. The more of a long-shot people think the outcome is, the greater the profit would be upon its occurrence.

Betting markets, then, can be used to trace the expected probability of an event over time. In the case of Donald Trump’s nomination, it started as a serious long shot, with more than 10:1 odds, which declined over the next nine months as it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the nominee. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, had the nomination on lock this whole time, in the eyes of the market.

In the graphic at right, you can see how the profit made off a bet for Trump and Clinton’s nomination changed over time.

These trend lines provide a look back at the events of the primary season and a glimpse into the psyches of the American people watching the unprecedented campaign unfold.

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People who placed bets Donaldvictory Trump’ssaw nomination profited by as much Early predictors of on Trump’s huge profits as 10 times their investment, while those who bet on Hillary Clinton People who placed bets on Donald Trump’s nomination profited by as much as 10didn’t times their come close to doubling their money. investment, while those who bet on Hillary Clinton didn’t come close to doubling their money.

PROFIT FROM MAKING A $100 BET ON CANDIDATE’S NOMINATION

$1,200

800

Univision and NBC cut ties with Trump over comments about Mexicans First GOP debate Trump proposes a ban on Muslim immigration

400

0 June 2015

Jeb Bush drops out

November 2015

March 2016

July 2016

DATE BET WAS PLACED

Source: PredictIt SOURCE: PREDICTIT

Trump’s odds of victory started out extremely volatile, falling by a third one day and doubling over the next two, as the Trump campaign’s initial provocations — calling Mexicans “rapists,” hiring actors to attend the announcement, fighting with Univision over holding the Miss USA pageant — were outside the political norm. Similar volatility occurred after his first debate appearance and subsequent conflict with moderator Megyn Kelly.

But over time, it seems the markets started to habituate to Trump’s unique style, showing almost no reaction after

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. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 42

KIM SOFFEN/THE POSTPOST KIMWASHINGTON SOFFEN/THE WASHINGTON

Trump proposed a ban on Muslim immigration in December. At times, the movements in the markets seemed to be logical and predictable. There was a noticeable dip as Trump’s polling surge continued through the summer, and after Jeb Bush, originally an establishment favorite, left the race.

Trump said it himself when he accepted the nomination: “Who would have believed that when we started this journey” that he would receive a record-setting number of votes. Well, someone did. And now, they’re rolling in it. n

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

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ON THE COVER United Arab Emirates ice skater Zahra Lari works out at the Zayed Sports City Ice Rink in Abu Dhabi in April.

Photograph by NIKKI KAHN, The Washington Post

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A swift exit after a resilient tenure

GASTON DE CARDENAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

DNC chairwoman Wasserman Schultz was a Washington survivor — until she wasn’t BY

B EN T ERRIS

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t was September 2014, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz was tumbling through yet another terrible news cycle. A couple of dozen Democrats had just unloaded a litany of mostly anonymous complaints about her chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in a mean, dishy Politico story; cable news pundits were salivating over her

imminent demise. (“Has Debbie Wasserman Schultz become kryptonite for the Democratic Party?” an MSNBC segment pondered.)

She woke up early that next morning, headed to a Starbucks on Capitol Hill and bumped into an odd source of comfort: thenHouse Speaker John A. Boehner.

The genial Republican, weary from internal discord within his own party, knew a thing or two about weathering attacks. He

pulled the Florida congresswoman away from her staff and told her to hang in there.

And she did. For far, far longer than anyone expected.

Wasserman Schultz may have resigned relatively quickly this past week after the release of hacked DNC emails that triggered questions about her leadership.

But there was nothing quick about her term as party boss. She ;eaves the job after hanging on to

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a ClintonKaine rally in Miami.

Less than two days later, she announced that she would be stepping down from her job.

it longer than any DNC chair in 50 years — this, despite a series of controversies and an aura of doom that have surrounded her through her five years in the job.

She was the ultimate Washington survivor. Until suddenly, she wasn’t. *** In an April interview on “The Daily Show,” Wasserman Schultz claimed to be comfortable with the role that had been, lately,

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POLITICS evolving for her — that of a Democratic Party punching bag.

“The reality is, I have a job as national party chair that is one that requires a thick skin,” she said. “It requires me to be able to absorb the body blows so our candidates can stay above the fray.”

But absorbing the blows never meant turning the other cheek.

“Chuck, this must stop,” she wrote in May to “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, in one of the leaked emails, after his MSNBC colleague Mika Brzezinski called for her to step down. She directed a staffer to contact MSNBC brass about the matter: “She must apologize.”

In the final hours before she announced her resignation last Sunday, Wasserman Schultz stubbornly fought against the attempt to push her out, Democrats familiar with the negotiations told The Washington Post, giving in only after President Obama called her.

And relatively early in her command at the DNC, when the knives were first coming out, she didn’t hesitate to push back when publicly insulted.

In 2012, GOP operative Tim Miller armed himself with copies of a devastating report by Politico’s Glenn Thrush claiming that Obama advisers already regretted the decision to appoint Wasserman Schultz, and he stood outside an event where she was speaking.

“When she walked by, I handed one to her,” Miller said. “She didn’t love it.” Later, he learned that she called his Republican National Committee boss, Chairman Reince Priebus, to express her displeasure. Thick skin or not, this felt like a personal attack.

“There are a lot of times that I feel for her,” Priebus said this month. Having watched a strongman hijack his party during his time at the RNC, he knows a little bit about what kind of year she’s been having. He said he has a friendly relationship with his counterpart and that they’d talked about getting together for dinner with their spouses after the election.

“We have similar experiences in some ways,” he continued. “It’s not easy to take the arrows and get hit in public.”

Elected to Congress in 2004 at age 38, Wasserman Schultz quickly developed a reputation as a rising star and a prodigious fund-

MATT SLOCUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some of the 20,000 hacked emails gave her adversaries ammunition to dredge up old grudges. raiser. As a Jewish congresswoman from Florida — women, Jews and swing states are crucial touchstones in presidential politics — she seemed like an appealing fit for the job of DNC chair, when her predecessor, Tim Kaine, stepped down in 2011 to run for Senate.

It’s hardly unusual for the chair of the DNC to be the target of criticism. The job description entails acting as both an antagonist to Republicans and as a rule-keeping schoolmarm for Democrats — qualities that aren’t going to win any popularity contests. But Wasserman Schultz’s rule was rockier than most.

In the past few years she was accused of: using DNC money to buy herself clothing, pitching donors to shell out to her own super PAC while on party business, and losing the ear of the president.

More recently, she found herself on the wrong side of the Bernie Sanders revolution, when a series of awkward moves — limiting the number of debates, a public feud with a Sanders surrogate and an incident in which she compared Sanders backers to Trump sup-

porters — prompted loud complaints from the Vermont senator and his voters that she was tipping the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Through it all, Wasserman Schultz acquired an untold number of Twitter antagonists, her first primary opponent in her 11year congressional career, and a deeply unflattering “Saturday Night Live” impersonation by Kate McKinnon, who depicted the congresswoman as stiff, sneering and foulmouthed.

Publicly she remained stonefaced about taking the hits — and despite a clamoring for her head, held steady atop the DNC. (Most chairs cycle out after two or four years; not since the mid-’60s, when Connecticut party boss John Moran Bailey hung on to the job for a roller-coaster seven years, has anyone exceeded Wasserman Schultz’s run.)

“When you’ve lived through breast cancer, it helps put the rest of this into perspective,” says Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), a friend who lives just a few blocks from Wasserman Schultz in Washington.

Bustos was a journalist in a

Protesters yell as Debbie Wasserman Schultz arrives for a Florida delegation breakfast on Monday during the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

The ousted DNC chairwoman and senator from Florida was booed during her speech.

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past life and says she knows how “hit pieces” come together. During one of those troubling times, she gave Wasserman Schultz a book called “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom” and pointed her to a passage she thought might be helpful: “Agreement 2: Don’t Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality.” *** And all along, too, she has had her support system. Team DWS, they call themselves, and these friends and staffers have been quick to chafe at portrayals they see as unfair. They say she’s nothing like the public perception of her, that much of the criticism reeks of sexism. How often, for example, do men get accused of being “ambitious”?

A typical criticism that set off Team DWS: In November 2012, Wasserman Schultz deplaned at the Fort Lauderdale airport, where RNC Co-Chairman Sharon Day happened to see that a Broward County sheriff deputy, acting as her police escort, was carrying the DNC chair’s bags.

“I asked, ‘Is it appropriate for Broward County Sheriff ’s officers to be carrying people’s luggage instead of protecting people at the airport,’ ” Day wrote on her Facebook wall, in a post that went viral. “I did not think it was appropriate.”

“That drove me crazy,” said one of Wasserman Schultz’s longtime staffers. “She needed a sheriff escort because she had been receiving threats. He was a gentleman who asked to take her bag and didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Trust me, she’s not the type of person to make other people carry her stuff.”

In all his years having worked for her, the staff member said, she asked him to carry her things once — and she had a good reason.

Back in 2009, Wasserman Schultz underwent surgery for breast cancer. To keep her medical condition quiet, she held a purse up against her wound, with a post-surgical drainage bag hidden inside. On one of those days, without a free hand, she asked whether he might carry her briefing book.

This past week was supposed to be a good one for Wasserman continues on next page

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from previous page

Schultz. She had had the privilege of spending four days in Cleveland, watching the Republican convention careen off the rails, while holding forth about the madness in media interviews just blocks away. The Democratic convention in Philadelphia was supposed to be a coming-together blowout for a once-fractured party.

But then WikiLeaks messed the whole thing up.

Some of the 20,000 hacked emails gave her adversaries ammunition to dredge up old grudges. They also reinforced her reputation as a petty, ineffective boss.

Need evidence that she favored Clinton over Sanders? Or that she tracked her news coverage a little too closely? Or that she felt the world revolved around her? Well, there are emails for that.

“I have a job as national party chair that is one that requires a thick skin.”

Debbie Wasserman Schultz in April

She used a personal email account with the address hrtsleeve @gmail.com. She called Sanders’s campaign manager a “damn liar” and Trump a “sexist pig.”

“That’s a silly story,” she wrote to her communications director in late May, after Sanders said he would replace her as chair of the DNC after the election. “He isn’t going to be president.”

“Can you help me get 7 tickets to Hamilton?” she asked the finance director of the DNC. On Monday morning, she attempted to muster some wry humor as she addressed a crowd she might have expected to be the friendliest she might find in Philadelphia — a breakfast gathering of the convention’s Florida delegation.

“There’s a little bit of interest in my being here, and I appreciate that interest.”

Some cheered her. Many others booed, loudly. But she carried on nonetheless with her speech, promising to work to get Clinton elected in November.

“I thank President Obama,” she said, “for the honor of serving as the chair of the Democratic National Committee.” n

Is Russia plotting to elect Trump? Analysts doubt it.

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E LLEN N AKASHIMA

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he possibility that Russia is behind an information warfare operation to interfere in the U.S. election has sparked concern among administration officials, but it also generated skepticism that there is a Kremlin master plan to install Donald Trump in the White House, as some political operatives are now alleging.

Intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an issue under investigation, said there is little doubt that agents of the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee, and the White House was informed months ago of Moscow’s culpability.

What is at issue now is whether Russian officials directed the leak of DNC material to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks — a possibility that burst to the fore on the eve of the Democratic National Convention with the release of 20,000 DNC emails, many of them deeply embarrassing for party leaders.

The intelligence community, the officials said, has not reached a conclusion about who passed the emails to WikiLeaks.

“We have not drawn any evidentiary connection to any Russian intelligence service and WikiLeaks — none,” said one U.S. official. Doing so will be a challenge, in part because the material may not have been passed electronically.

Also unclear, the officials said, is the motivation, even if Russia is behind the leak. It may be that the Kremlin wishes to disrupt and discredit the U.S. political process without seeking any particular result.

Michael V. Hayden, former CIA director, said, “Frankly, I don’t think they’re motivated by thinking they can affect the election itself.” He said the Russians, already masters at “information dominance” or using information as a political and military weapon, may be flexing their muscles “to

demonstrate that they can — not necessarily to make Trump win or Hillary lose.”

If they are truly behind the email dump, he said, “they’re taking their game to another level.”

The email dump, current and former national security officials said, is highly troubling, regardless of its provenance. And it could warrant considering whether the elements of the electoral process should be raised to the level of “critical infrastructure,” such as

CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

Donald Trump has said he has no connection to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

power grids and key financial systems, which merit special protection from cyberattacks, some officials said.

Whoever shared the emails with WikiLeaks, the senior administration official said, “sure as hell didn’t do that for our benefit.”

The WikiLeaks release — and a promise of more to come — has presented the Obama administration with a fresh set of challenges.

The 2014 North Korean hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment was another such unprecedented event. Then in 2015, U.S. officials discovered that the Chinese government hacked the Office of Personnel Management, exposing the data of more than 22 million current and former federal employees and their families. The intrusion upended the security clearance process and raised significant counterintelligence issues.

But an influence operation by Russia to interfere in a presidential election — if that is what happened — would be a bold move, even for President Vladimir Putin, analysts say. It would take what began ostensibly as traditional political espionage into a new category of information warfare.

“I’m deeply concerned because, if Russia is behind this, it would represent an unprecedented and alarming escalation of Russian willingness to interfere in our political process,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. It would be an effort “to help pick a candidate who is favorable to an adversary.”

Some of Trump’s positions — including raising questions about mutual defense among NATO members and potentially recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine — would be applauded in Moscow, but the GOP candidate has said he has no connection to the Russian president.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are calling on the administration to quickly figure out who is behind the leak — and if it is the Russians, to call them out.

Not everyone is convinced that the Russians, if they did it, meant to influence the election. “This is not Putin trying to help Trump,’’ said Leo Taddeo, a former FBI special agent in charge of cyber and special operations in New York. “I think they were messaging Hillary Clinton, telling her that they can get in the way of her election if she doesn’t show some flexibility in her position toward them.”

Some analysts actually think Putin would see his interests better served by a President Clinton, who is well known in Moscow. “If I’m in the Kremlin, I’d love to see Hillary in office,” said one former intelligence official. “She’s incredibly predictable and not willing to do confrontation. Trump is both unpredictable and confrontational. As a game theory person, I’d much rather play poker against Hillary. I’d win every hand.” n

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Same country, very different views J OEL A CHENBACH Philadelphia BY

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nyone who went to both conventions, racing from the shores of Lake Erie to the banks of the Delaware with only a couple of days in between, may be suffering from ideological and tonal whiplash.

The Republicans convened in a country under siege, imperiled by terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals and most ominously by Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump in Cleveland said he’d be the lawand-order president, and then said it again, and then said it a third time on the off chance anyone missed the concept.

The Democrats gathered in a still-great, still-hopeful country, but one in desperate need of more love, empathy, justice and equality.

That softer tone emphasized diversity, togetherness and caring. Keynoter Cory Booker used the word “love” 10 times Monday night. The senator from New Jersey said, “We are called to be a nation of love.”

Even within the Wednesday theme of national security, President Obama and Tim Kaine, nominee for vice president, kept the focus on the positive. For most of the Philadelphia convention, the Democrats assiduously positioned themselves as the nurturing party.

The contrasting tones carry political risks for each party in what has been a violent and chaotic summer, with terrorist attacks at home and abroad. The Republicans are the party of change this time, led by an insurgent outsider who has never held elected office and says America is in a “moment of crisis.”

The Democratic establishment, fully in command here if not always in control, is banking that the public isn’t eager for a Trump-scale disruption of American political life.

The strategists want to send a message to the public: We hear you. We know how you feel. Beyond the presidential race, there is a battle for both houses of Congress and countless state and local contests; these conventions are golden opportunities for the parties to make an emotional connection with voters.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

While the Republican convention augured dark days, the Democrats embraced love and hope Michelle Obama used the word “kids” or “children” or referenced her own daughters or the role of parents 39 times in her much-lauded prime-time speech Monday.

“Certainly fear is a strong motivator, but I think hope and love is a better plan,” said Wisconsin delegate Karla Stoebig, 33, an aspiring veterinarian who stood in her delegation on the convention floor.

“Our platform is inclusive to all kinds of people, without the divisive, hate-filled rhetoric we saw at the Republican convention,” said Crystal Miller, 35, a beauty adviser in Wisconsin.

Fear vs. hope may be a simplistic and coarse framing of the presidential contest, but the candidates and their strategists have made that unavoidable. Some traditional issues, such as free trade, are topsyturvy this year, with Trump taking a position to the left of Clinton.

There’s been little talk of taxes.

Even fractious social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion haven’t gotten much attention. In-

stead there’s a sharp contrast in tone.

Some of the differences between the two conventions have been structural and geographical.

The Republicans met in an arena right downtown. The smaller dimensions of Cleveland, the natural perimeters created by the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie, and the decision by locals to take the whole week off meant that downtown Cleveland became a kind of GOP bathtub, all partisans and journalists and law enforcement officers with hardly a regular 9to-5 worker in sight.

The Democrats, however, soaked into the fiber of the much larger city of Philadelphia in a more subtle fashion. The big hotels were full of delegates, and the plazas around City Hall sprout protests reliably on the hour, but the convention proper is a long, hot ride by subway, taxi or Uber down Broad Street, in an arena surrounded by parking lots and media tents.

Another obvious difference is

Broadway performers sing “What the World Needs Now is Love” during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Keynote speaker Cory Booker used the word “love” 10 times Monday night during his address, and the nurturing theme was evident throughout the week.

that all the Democrats showed up here, showing off the party’s diversity and attendant divisions. Many of the most distinguished Republicans, including the two most recent Republican presidents, skipped Cleveland, unwilling to associate themselves with Trump.

The result was a convention comparatively heavy on testimonials from Trump’s wife and children.

One common feature of both conventions: organizational missteps and unscheduled dissent.

The Republicans had a plagiarism kerfuffle and then a stiff middle finger from Ted Cruz in prime time. The Democrats had their hacked email scandal, the deposing of the party chairman and then a steady series of disruptions and even a walkout Tuesday evening from Bernie Sanders supporters.

Party conventions are extraconstitutional; there is nothing in the historic document written in this city in the summer of 1787 that countenances such a thing as a Democrat or a Republican, much less a nominating convention with 15,000 credentialed members of the news media and associated protests and policing. So every convention is a staged event, more or less scripted, with improvisations and surprises and big moments that no one quite saw coming.

“In Cleveland we heard a message of ‘Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,’ ” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.) as he navigated a crowded concourse at the Wells Fargo Center. He said the more positive message from Democrats was not something carefully orchestrated by party leaders: “We’re Democrats; we’d never be that organized.”

Democrats said in numerous interviews that they think their sunnier message will resonate with voters in November. But this is shaping up as another highly competitive White House contest.

One Democratic operative who has worked on a number of campaigns, and did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, was somber as he rode the subway to the arena.

“I believe love is stronger than hate, but fear wins elections,” he said. n

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Satellite traffic creates real space jam BY

C HRISTIAN D AVENPORT

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ompanies around the globe are launching an increasing number of satellites, crowding Earth’s orbit in an effort to satisfy the ravenous on-demand desire for more broadband, satellite television and communications.

In the past five years, the number of operational satellites has jumped 40 percent, and nearly 1,400 now orbit the planet. And industry officials say the number could more than double in five years as a revolution in technology makes satellites smaller and more affordable. Entrepreneurs eye the ethereal real estate a couple hundred miles up as a potentially lucrative new market.

Companies such as OneWeb, Boeing and SpaceX plan to put up constellations of small satellites that could number in the hundreds, if not thousands, and beam the Internet to the billions of people not yet connected.

Last month, Boeing filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission that would allow it to send up nearly 3,000 satellites for broadband services.

But U.S. officials are concerned about all the traffic in space and the lack of oversight. Although the Pentagon tracks objects orbiting the globe and warns of close approaches, it does not have the power to order an operator to move a satellite out of the way to avoid a collision.

Some members of Congress say a civilian agency, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, should be made responsible for managing satellite traffic. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) has led that effort, saying the Pentagon should focus instead on how to “fight and win wars in space.”

He has introduced legislation that would give the FAA authority to monitor objects in space and play the role of traffic cop, warning operators when satellites are dangerously close to one another.

The FAA would have the power to order operators to move satellites when necessary, Bridenstine said, and to require that satellites have propulsion systems to ma-

NASA VIA GETTY IMAGES

Thousands may be added soon, and lack of oversight worries officials neuver and transponders for better tracking. It would be up to the FAA, not Congress, to come up with the exact regulations, he said.

“As space becomes more congested and contested and competitive, there needs to be an agency with unambiguous authority that can compel somebody to maneuver,” Bridenstine said.

There is no guarantee the bill will pass anytime soon. And if it does, giving the FAA jurisdiction in space will require additional resources at a time of tight budgets. Creating rules of the road in space would also be an immense and complicated regulatory challenge. Bridenstine said he would favor only “light touch” regulations, but some interested parties

fear a new set of rules would impose a costly burden on U.S. satellite operators and put them at a disadvantage with competitors in other countries that would not have to abide by them.

Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, said the industry “wants to make sure that any transition that takes place is carefully thought through.” The FAA, or any other government agency tasked with the job, should have “sufficient resources to do it properly,” he said.

Any regulation should be drafted so that it “doesn’t drive business away,” he said. And the rules have to provide “an international solution,” he added, palatable to foreign governments and busi-

A time-lapse photo shows SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., with a communications satellite aboard on May 6.

nesses, much the way air traffic is managed across international borders.

Defense officials say such an approach would help them focus on the possibility of hostilities in space.

“It’s clear that we’re going to need a way to regulate that traffic just as we have a way to regulate air traffic,” said Douglas Loverro, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy.

Establishing rules of the road would not only help military satellites avoid collisions, he said, but also head off conflicts over nations’ satellites coming too close to other pieces of sensitive equipment.

The discussion comes as companies pursue plans to launch constellations of satellites that have

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NATION become smaller and cheaper, much the way computers have gone from massive mainframes to smartphones. Satellites once were as big as garbage trucks. Now there are versions as small as dishwashers, or shoe boxes — or even smaller.

The imagery of Earth that such devices provide could help weather forecasters, farmers and scientists studying climate change, aid rescue workers and guide soldiers on the ground.

OneWeb, in a joint venture with Airbus that is also backed by business magnate Richard Branson, plans to put up nearly 700 satellites, beginning in 2018. The company is opening an $85 million manufacturing facility near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida that it says will be able to build more than 15 satellites a week.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is best known for launching rockets that deliver commercial satellites to space and carry cargo to the International Space Station. But Musk has discussed plans to launch as many as 4,000 satellites that would provide broadband service to all parts of the globe. He said the effort “would be like rebuilding the Internet in space.

Raytheon, meanwhile, is building 50-pound “disposable satellites” for the Pentagon that could stay aloft for 60 to 90 days and provide soldiers with real-time imagery of the battlefield.

In its application to the FCC, Boeing said that it was aware of OneWeb’s plans and that it would work with the company “to develop an analysis of the potential risk of collision” and to prevent collisions from occurring.

Some observers were skeptical of leaving it to satellite companies to regulate themselves and work together to stop collisions.

“Do they pinky-promise?” said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation.

“What if the two can’t come to an agreement?”

Bridenstine is also wary of selfregulation. If a company knew, for example, that there was a 1-in10,000 chance of a collision, he said, it might decide to live with that level of risk and not perform a costly maneuver.

And the consequences, if there were a collision, could be severe, he said: “It could create 5,000 pieces of debris that will be up there for 100 years.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

High on a hill: San Francisco is tops in marijuana use BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

T

ake a bow, San Francisco: The Bay Area is home to the highest concentration of marijuana smokers anywhere in the country, according to new data released Tuesday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Every few years, SAMHSA combines data from the annual National Surveys on Drug Use and Health to derive estimates of monthly marijuana use among Americans 12 and older. The latest cut of that data, encompassing the years 2012 to 2014, include responses from about 204,000 people. That huge sample makes it possible to visualize marijuana-use rates with a level of detail not possible with traditional surveys.

Over 15 percent of San Francisco residents 12 and older use marijuana monthly or more, the highest rate in the country. By contrast, the lowest use rates are in the far south of Texas, where fewer than 4 percent use monthly.

The report finds that nationally, 7.7 percent of people 12 and older — roughly 20.3 million Americans — use marijuana monthly or more.

Broadly speaking, marijuana use rates are highest in the Western states and lowest in the South.

“We continue to see relatively wide variation in marijuana use” at the substate level, said Art Hughes, a SAMHSA statistician and a lead author on the report, in an interview. Overall marijuanausage rates are up by less than 1 percentage point since the period from 2010 to 2012, when SAMHSA last looked at these numbers.

Marijuana use rates have become a hot topic since Colorado first opened its legal marijuana market in 2014, with several other states following suit. But since this data mostly covers the period before 2014, SAMHSA’s Hughes says you can’t really see many of the effects of legalization here.

Marijuana use in Colorado is relatively high, but it’s been that way for quite a while. “There are

Where Americans smoke the most weed Percentage of Americans 12 and older who use marijuana monthly

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

SOURCE: SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ADMINISTRATION

some states where we see rates on the high end even before legalization,” Hughes said.

The map above does potentially illustrate the relationship between marijuana policymaking and marijuana use. Different states have had radically different marijuana policies in place for years now, evident in the sometimes stark differences in use rates on either side of a state border.

Look again at the high use rates in Colorado — where marijuana has been decriminalized for some time and medical marijuana has been available for years — compared with the rock-bottom usage across the state line in Kansas. Of course, the causality could run both ways here: States where people are naturally inclined to use more marijuana may end up enacting looser marijuana laws.

One thing that the survey does point out is a potential, if unsurprising, link between attitudes on marijuana and rates of marijuana use.

Across the board, people who use marijuana less are more likely to say that marijuana use is harmful. Con-

versely, those who use it more are less likely to say that use is harmful.

The most relaxed attitudes toward marijuana use were found in the District of Columbia. In one area of the city where household income is $253,000 a year, only 14 percent of residents said there was “great risk of harm” from smoking marijuana monthly.

By contrast, nearly 50 percent of people living in Miami-Dade county in Florida saw a great risk of harm in regular marijuana use.

Again, the causality here could go either way: People with lax attitudes about the risks of marijuana use may be more likely to use it. Or people living in areas where many of their peers smoke weed may adopt more relaxed attitudes.

Some researchers are starting to question the link between attitudes about marijuana’s harmfulness and rates of use of the drug.

For instance, federal surveys have shown that fewer high school students say there’s a great risk of harm in using marijuana. And yet, marijuana use rates among that group have also fallen. n

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The misunderstood plateau pika S IMON D ENYER Yushu County, China BY

A

s he gazes out across the rolling grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, where hundreds of his yaks are grazing, 70-year-old Awang Chumpey is less than happy. The land he shares with his neighbors is dotted with thousands of tiny burrows, home to a colony of plateau pika that he blames for eating his animals’ grass.

A relative of the rabbit, the plateau pika occupies an almost identical ecological niche to the United States’ prairie dog, and is equally unpopular in rural communities.

“They dig holes and eat the grass,” Awang said. “I hope the government can kill them.”

Herders like Awang are largely getting what they want. For decades, across hundreds of thousands of square miles of the plateau, a relentless extermination campaign has been undertaken to wipe out the plateau pika, with thousands of people fanning out to poison their burrows. Across vast swaths of grassland, the pika has been virtually eliminated Only now are some Chinese realizing they may have made a huge mistake — just as some Americans have concluded that the mass extermination of prairie dogs might not have been such a great idea.

Indeed, the plateau pika is the scapegoat for much deeper, manmade problems, a symptom, some Western scientists say, of decades of environmental mismanagement by China’s Communist Party, which threw out the natural balance that had endured on these grasslands for thousands of years.

Just like the prairie dog, the plateau pika — which has not been wiped out yet, by any means — is what environmentalists call a keystone species, playing a crucial role in the ecosystem that sustains life. And their burrows, it is now believed, play an important role in absorbing the heavy rains that fall during the summer monsoon, allowing water to percolate slowly through the earth rather than cause dangerous downstream flooding and erosion.

PHOTOS BY GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

China has waged a decades-long extermination war against them. Was that a huge mistake?

“The pika is very important for the food chain and for the grassland ecosystem,” said Hashi Tashi Dorjee, founder of the Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association and one of the Tibetan region’s most respected environmentalists.

“Poisoning them sets off a very bad cycle.”

Here, on the Alpine meadows that carpet most of the QinghaiTibetan plateau, almost all the major carnivores depend on pikas for food. That includes brown bears, Tibetan foxes, steppe polecats and Pallas’s cats — small, furry, real-life versions of the Cheshire cat of “Alice in Wonderland” but with a distinctly wild nature. Upland buzzards and saker falcons feed primarily on pikas, too; one way to spot a pika colony is to look for a buzzard flying overhead or perched on a power pylon.

But as pikas have disappeared from broad stretches of this grassland, so have many of these unique animals, said Andrew Smith, an Arizona State University expert who has been studying the ecology of the Tibetan plateau since 1984.

“For brown bears, what we call grizzly bears in the United States, 60 to 80 percent of their food is pikas,” he said. “Where the pikas have been poisoned, the bears go on the move to search for food, and they have been breaking into Tibetan houses.”

On the largely treeless grasslands, birds such as snow finches and Tibetan ground-tits nest in pika burrows. But, where pikas have been poisoned, the burrows collapse within a couple of years and these birds disappear or become scarcer, Smith said.

A pika warren can stretch underground for up to 20 yards and have several small openings, from which the nervous animals poke their heads, scanning the grasslands for predators and emitting a faint, high-pitched alarm call on any sign of trouble. Starting in 1962, the government sowed those burrows, first with sodium fluoroacetate and then zinc phosphide, across nearly 140,000 square miles of grassland. In 2006, it stepped up the campaign across huge parts of the vast, newly created Sanjiangyu-

Yak herder Awang Chumpey blames the plateau pika for eating his animals’ grass.

But Western conservationists say pikas tend to colonize areas where the grassland is already damaged.

an National Nature Reserve, now using botulinum toxin.

Justifying the campaign, some Chinese scientists blame the pika for grassland degradation and erosion. But many Western conservationists say they have it all wrong.

Far from causing grassland degradation, pikas tend to colonize areas where grassland is already damaged by overgrazing or has dried as a result of climate change.

Not surprisingly, they prefer areas where the grass is short, so they can spot predators easily.

Western conservationists say the overgrazing and degradation of grasslands should be blamed not on the pika but more on the government’s social and environmental policies, stretching back to the imposition of communal animal husbandry in the 1960s, and later moves to erect fences in the grasslands and resettle nomads into permanent houses.

The parallels with the prairie dog and the European rabbit are striking. Prairie dogs have been widely blamed for eating grass upon which livestock depend, and building burrows that cause cows and horses to break their legs. An extermination campaign brought them to the brink of extinction across much of the United States.

But scientists say that, just like the pika, they supported prairie falcons, eagles, badgers and bobcats, while their presence helps increase the richness and diversity of plant species on the grasslands.

Today, millions of dollars are still spent in the U.S. killing prairie dogs, and millions more are spent trying to preserve the ferrets that eat them. In China, the establishment of a nature reserve goes hand in hand with the extermination of a native keystone species.

“It is clear that the antagonism of government and ranchers towards prairie dogs was in part based on purposeful ignorance, even when accurate knowledge was available, and on vested interests in continuing a well-funded killing program no matter how outdated and harmful,” George Schaller wrote in his book “Tibet Wild.” “The story of the pika has been remarkably similar.” n

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Israel on alert over Hezbollah growth W ILLIAM B OOTH Misgav Am, Israel BY

W

hen Israeli army commanders describe how the next war against Hezbollah could unfold, they often search for words not used in military manuals. The future conflict, they warn, will be “ferocious” and “terrible.”

For both sides, the Israelis fear.

Yet far worse for Hezbollah and the civilians of Lebanon, they promise.

Ten years after Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody but inconclusive 34-day war that left more than 1,000 soldiers and civilians dead in July and August of 2006, the Lebanese Shiite militant group has been transformed.

Hezbollah is now a regional military power, a cross-border strike force, with thousands of soldiers hardened by four years of fighting on Syrian battlefields on behalf of President Bashar alAssad. There are 7,000 Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Israeli commanders say.

Hezbollah troops have been schooled by Iranian commanders, funded by Tehran and have learned to use, in combat, some of the most sophisticated armaments available, such as fourthgeneration Kornet guided antitank missiles. They pilot unmanned aircraft and fight alongside artillery and tanks. They have taken rebel-held villages with Russian air support.

More than 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have died, the Israelis say; they do not describe Hezbollah as “demoralized” but “tested.”

“In 2006, Hezbollah fought a guerrilla war. Today, Hezbollah is like a conventional army,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general who teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Israel fought the first Lebanon war in 1982 against the Palestine Liberation Organization, a conflict that saw Israel occupy southern Lebanon and lay siege to Beirut. Hezbollah arose during that war. The second Lebanon war broke out in July 2006 after Hezbollah abducted a pair of Is-

MOHAMMED ZAATARI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Neither group wants another war, but both sides fear one and the price that civilians would pay raeli soldiers on the border.

Ten years ago, Hezbollah fired 4,000 short-range, relatively crude rockets at Israel, about 100 a day, killing some 50 Israeli civilians. Today, the group has 100,000 rockets, including thousands of more accurate midrange weapons with larger warheads capable of striking anywhere in Israel, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, according to Israeli army commanders and military analysts in Israel and Lebanon.

Hezbollah poses a far greater threat to Israel than it did 10 years ago. The challenges posed by Islamist militant movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip are almost trivial by comparison, Israeli senior commanders say.

Earlier this year, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot called Hezbollah Israel’s “main enemy” now that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may have been delayed by a decade or more.

Whether Hezbollah’s arsenal of

rockets and the overwhelming retaliatory response promised by Israel serves as a dual deterrent is one of those questions that can never be answered — but probably keeps commanders on both sides awake at night.

In Israel’s far north, Misgav Am kibbutz sits on a hilltop above the Lebanon border. There is a popular overlook. There is a gift shop for the tour buses.

On a sunny morning, an Israeli army colonel stood on the hill and pointed toward Lebanese villages at his feet.

“You see villas, red tile roofs, summer homes. You don’t see soldiers in uniforms. They don’t wear uniforms. It looks nice and peaceful, right?” said the commander of a paratrooper reserve brigade, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is serving on active duty on the Lebanon border.

“I see rocket rooms, weapons caches, underground compounds,” he said. “I can pinpoint to you,

Hezbollah fighters stand atop a truck mounted with mock rockets in Nabatiyeh, Lebanon, as supporters chant at a rally on the 13th day of the sacred Islamic month of Muharram.

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah warned in a February speech that the militant group’s real arsenal can “cover the entirety of occupied Palestine with missiles.”

below, a house with washing on the line that is a Hezbollah outpost.”

Israeli military leaders say Hezbollah has spent the past decade transforming hundreds of villages in southern Lebanon into covert fire bases with hidden launchpads, many rigged to operate by remote.

The Israeli commanders in Tel Aviv and here on the Lebanon border may be issuing propaganda as a warning to Hezbollah.

Both sides do talk to each other through the media, yet there is broad agreement in Washington, Jerusalem and Beirut that another Lebanon war could be devastating, especially for civilians.

“Hezbollah is not a group or a organization or a movement. It’s an army. A big terrorist army,” said the paratrooper commander, who is a veteran of the 2006 Lebanon war. “We understand that people here find themselves in the middle. The next war will be a terrible war. I think they understand, too, that the next war will be different.”

Speaking publicly, the Israeli generals promise that if Hezbollah launches mass strikes against Israeli cities, Israel will be compelled to respond, similarly, with 10 times as much force. The commanders say they cannot allow Israeli cities to face 1,000 Hezbollah rockets a day.

As the 10-year anniversary of the 2006 war approached, both Hezbollah and Israel stressed that they do not want another war — even as both declared themselves ready for one.

Simon Abu Fadel, a political analyst in Lebanon, predicts that in the event of war, Hezbollah would try to inflict heavy damage on Israeli cities, power plants and airports to degrade national morale.

“In case of a new war with Israel, Hezbollah’s missiles would be painful to Israel,” he said.

“However, the damage would be far less than what Israeli airstrikes could do to Hezbollah and Lebanon.”

“It is not a win-and-lose game,” Fadel said. “It is a mutual exchange of bombing and destruction.” n

‘I lift

BY CHUCK CULPEPPER in Dubai

I

n a coffeehouse with the world’s tallest building preening from two miles out the front window, here sits another groundbreaker: a 26­year­old, female, Emirati, Arab, Muslim, competitive weightlifter with a vitality in her tone, a hijab on her head and a herniated disk hollering from her lower back. ¶ Not so long ago, Amna Al Haddad never would have guessed she would reach the spring of 2016 speaking in enthusiastic paragraphs about her

unforeseen odyssey. She never would have envisioned herself just off her national team’s attempt to qualify for next month’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She certainly wouldn’t have imagined herself as part of a concept gaining familiarity in the Middle East in the 2010s, that of the female athlete. ¶ “I’m seeing it unfold, basically,” she said, and 20 athletes from seven nationalities, plus those who raised them or coach them or know them, agreed in recent interviews. They said there’s less loneliness in being a female athlete in the region, even as they acknowledge that women still face significant impediments toward achieving Olympic­level excellence — entrenched cultural norms about the role of women foremost among them. ¶ In London four years ago, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei became the last three countries to send female athletes to the Olympics, which have seen a sprinkling of medals for Muslim women over the years. Sixteen Muslim countries from the Middle East sent a total of 158 women to the London Games, according to nation­by­nation figures compiled by the British Broadcasting Corp., with Egypt sending its largest continent of female competitors — 37 — since it began participating in the Olympics in 1912. Just outside the region, continues on next page

a nation.’

WEIGHTLIFTER AMNA AL HADDAD; PHOTOS BY NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

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from previous page

Algeria sent 21 women, including a volleyball team; Morocco sent 18; and Tunisia’s Habiba Ghribi, with a silver medal in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, became that country’s first female medalist.

The Summer Olympics that open in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 5 could see an increase in the totals. It would be a remarkable development for a region in which the idea of women competing in sports was discouraged, if not forbidden, less than a generation ago.

“It is at the birth of something,” said Fatima Adwan, a spokesman for the six-year-old Fatima Bint Mubarak Ladies Sports Academy in Abu Dhabi, a government-backed organization aiming to increase female participation in sports, including its organization of weekly workouts routinely attended by 1,300 women.

“We don’t want to get rid of anything,” Adwan said. “The culture is what it is, and it’s a beautiful culture as it stands. We want to say that you don’t need to go against your culture to participate in sports.”

‘Never, ever, ever, ever’ Invariably, the region’s female athletes seem to have the furnace-like insides of pioneers, as if charisma might stem from endorphins. Even when shorter than average, like Al Haddad at 5 feet 2, they might talk in compelling barrages as she does, once ending a long answer with, “I don’t know what I’m saying now. Ask me a question.” They range from the ambitious to the recreational, and they often have support from governments. Here and there, they’ve renovated thinking, ignored critics in the dungeons of social media and transformed households.

“Amna has made all of us in the house love sport,” said Amira Budebs, mother of six, with Amna the second. By now, their spacious house contains the gym Al Haddad carved out of a storage room, a training area she calls “raw” and “rough” and “dusty,” with a squat rack against the wall and a silver barbell with stacked weight plates. It’s among the places where she revs herself up by listening to metal such as the American bands Papa Roach, As I Lay Dying and Disturbed.

Nowadays, a conversation around the house might feature her proud father, Salman Al Haddad, a retired oil and gas executive who keeps a gardening company, saying, “You were in the newspaper the other day,” and Amna saying, “Really, which one?” Her mother, hailing from a generation in which young women didn’t consider going to gyms, now goes thrice weekly.

She smiles and says something once inconceivable: “I love Zumba dancing.”

Somehow, her daughter has waged a path that has led from the storage room to Seoul and Akron, Ohio, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

At a CrossFit event in Seoul in 2012, Al Haddad, as the only athlete covered in a headscarf, had the transformational experience of a camera crew following her, of strangers encouraging and congratulating her.

In Akron, mostly in 2015 after she had sharpened her focus to weightlifting, she did some-

thing rare for Middle Eastern single adults: She lived in her own apartment, learned to cook, do laundry, pay the WiFi bill. She worked with a trainer she had met in Columbus, where she competed three times in the Arnold Sports Festival, and he painstakingly deconstructed and then reconstructed a technique that needed help because of her late start in the sport.

She had come to joke that, in Akron, the only two Nike-sponsored athletes she could think of were herself and, as she charmingly misstated, “James LeBron.”

In Tashkent, in April 2016, she competed in the Asian Weightlifting Championships, marveled at the Chinese team nearby, marveled further that the number of covered athletes had increased, from the Pakistani pioneer Kulsoom Abdullah, to the friendly Iraqi team, to one Thai athlete. She competed with her United Arab Emirates team — seven women, three men, some promising female teenagers — that came within a puny two points of Olympic qualification, then awaited the drugtesting results of the teams up ahead.

Near the end of the 10 days she had an epitome of an experience at the sports complex, on a stairwell. There, she happened across one of her 6,200-odd Instagram followers, Mohammed Simsim, the president of the Saudi Arabian Weightlifting Federation. “And he said to me, ‘Amna, you are doing a great job.

You’re very well-known for your manners.

Maybe, you know, I would like to have, one day, a Saudi female weightlifting team. And you could come in and teach.’ ” If such thinking graces the officialdom of Saudi Arabia, renowned among its conservative neighbors for being far more conservative than its neighbors, then, she said, “Now, that is a memorable conversation for me! That, I could not forget, ever!”

“I am an athlete who is sponsored

by Nike from the U.A.E. That’s huge.

That is something that I’m very proud of.”

Amna Al Haddad

All along, all over the place, she has seen hints of sports’ social effects. Having competed for three years running (2013-15) in Columbus, she said, “In the States it’s, ‘Oh, she’s covered, but she’s doing sports. So they’re not as oppressed as we think they are.’ ” She got thank-yous from a Kuwaiti CrossFit athlete who saw fit to compete covered, from a woman in Portland, Ore., who decided to keep going to the gym even though everybody stared, even from Saudi husbands whose wives had joined them in sports.

She has met weightlifting bright lights such as Pyrros Dimas and Valerios Leonidis. She appeared, with seven other women from various nations, in the January 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan — or, as she puts it cheerily, “Cosmo U.S.A.!” (She meant it wasn’t the foreign editions.) She says, “I am an athlete who is sponsored by Nike from the U.A.E. That’s huge. That is something that I’m very proud of.”

It has been quite a seven-year path for an erstwhile 19-year-old university student on anti-depressants, a detail Al Haddad volunteers counter-culturally. (“I don’t care. For me, it’s about educating people.”) It began when she took a walk in Safa Park in Dubai. She decided she would have to change herself to elude her misery. She became a “fitness junkie,” as she put it. She quit the anti-depressants with a haste not generally prescribed. In her typically ardent research, she started reading that strength training cuts body fat. Once going, she adored the feeling of improved strength, eventually channeling full-on into weightlifting.

“Weightlifting is a very frustrating sport,” she said. “And I feel I have grown a lot because of that frustration that I dealt with, with the sport. For me, what kept me going and not giving up on the sport, because I learned to become patient. I’m far from patient. I’m an angry person normally. For some reason, the sport really calmed me down. I have no idea how. Like, one of the best gifts I’ve had is when I approach the bar with such coldness.”

It matters enough to her that she persisted after six months ago, when her doctor expressed worry that her back would shriek through her “second life,” or post-competitive life. In early May, when the back wouldn’t let her so much as organize her closet — her sister helped out — the doctor ordered six weeks off.

It would be her longest hiatus from exercise since her walk in Safa Park.

This is some way from when she first told her mother of plans so alien that they never would have even glanced across a mother’s mind.

“Never, ever,” Budebs said. “Never, ever, ever, ever. No, this is a surprise in my life.

Something unusual. And you know our culture, people see it and it’s very strange. But with her ambition, her will power, she did it.”

She joked, “Maybe I am too much patience.”

She said, “It was something strange for me, and in my heart, I wanted her to change her mind. But she is the one who let others believe in what she is doing.”

Inspiring the older generations That kind of parental realization has dotted

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COVER STORY the region.

Just 75 miles down the wild and gleaming highway in Abu Dhabi, an 11-year-old girl in the middle of the last decade saw the film “Ice Princess,” whereupon she hurried out to buy skates, whereupon she accidentally bought hockey skates and headed to Abu Dhabi’s ice rink inside a sports complex. She quickly became a mainstay, until she reached midteens, when Zahra Lari’s father, Fadhel, echoed a sentiment held around the region: that sports are not serious business, and that there comes a time to home in, especially on school.

Lari’s mother, Roquiya Cochran, recalls her husband saying to Zahra, “It’s time you started to back away from it. You’ve done it. You’ve enjoyed it. Okay, there’s other things in life, and move on.”

He did take the family to Dubai for a skating event in which Zahra would have competed had she continued, and where she could cheer for her still-skating friends. “And it just, honestly, it broke his heart,” Cochran said, “because she was cheering and she was happy for everyone else, but you know, you could see that she felt sad for herself. You could see it. . . . And yeah, it just broke his heart and he said, ‘Okay, I give up. You can continue.’ ” Zahra, by now 21, the only daughter amid two supportive brothers, tacked on even more respect for a father she clearly adores. “He was like, ‘You know what? Forget about what colleagues say at work,’ ” she said. “ ‘Forget about whoever tells him anything.’ And he was like, ‘I know it’s something that you love.

You’re not doing anything wrong. Then why not? Just go and work hard.’ Because my Dad, at work, he’s got people telling him, ‘Why do you allow your daughter doing this?’ But I mean, he just ignores it. He’s like, ‘It doesn’t matter what they say. I’m your father. I want the best more than anyone. And if I knew this was something wrong, I wouldn’t let you do it.’ ” So in their fine house in a residential area just outside Abu Dhabi, a 21-year-old university student sets her alarm each day for 4 a.m., pushes the snooze button several times, mulls sleeping in, thinks of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, rises at 4:30 and drives to the ice rink.

Even for parents who never wavered in finding sports healthy, revelations have come.

Zaid Al Bitar and Rania Dalloul, the parents of Sameera Al Bitar, the 26-year-old triathlete who swam for Bahrain in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, already staunchly advised Sameera to ignore such troubles as a local newspaper columnist who objected to her competing in a swimsuit. Yet along the way, an even deeper feeling materialized. “What made us also give her the support, was herself, how much obedience [to her training], how much persistence,” Zaid Al Bitar said by telephone from Cairo, where he and Dalloul reside nowadays.

He said, “That was really something to us we could not ignore.”

And, he said, “She inspired us more than we inspired her.”

At the Abu Dhabi World Professional Jiu Jitsu Championships in April, as men and women competed on adjacent mats, the male Lebanese-Syrian coach and teacher Khalid Walid Merii, 29, spoke of the fresh trickle of Middle Eastern women participating and said, “I think the more the generations keep going, it will keep changing more and more.”

In a further wrinkle hatched this decade, 15 universities now hold intercollegiate competitions for about 550 men and about 450 women, said Peter Dicce, the assistant dean of students and director of athletics at New York University Abu Dhabi. Ninety percent of the women are local, he said. For soccer, they play in shorts at venues at which all the people — players, coaches, referees, assistants, spectators — are women. The women often find a possibility long unseen in the region: that sports can complement, rather than imperil, their academics.

Speaking, competing for a nation Of course, like other members of this flowering sisterhood, Al Haddad does note the obstacles. They far exceed the slight complications of when a headscarf slips during weightlifting.

She feels disconnected from peers who tend to lack her seriousness. In cultures where just about everyone yearns to get married, she surmises it will take “a very secure man” to marry her, even as she hopes for just such. She feels disconnected from peers who tend to lack such drive. “So as I get closer to 30, I’m my own woman,” she said. “Nobody can tell me what I can and cannot do.” She paused. “I mean, no one ever tells me what I can and cannot do anyway.”

She laughed.

Starting late, in a generation that tended to start late, brought “a lot of challenges” and “a lot of struggles,” Al Haddad said. “The way my

“He was like, ‘You know what?

Forget about what colleagues say at work.’ ” Zahra Lari

KLMNO WEEKLY

body reacted is not the way I wanted it to.”

Technique suffered, becoming “a major setback for me, because the older you get in your sport, the harder it is to teach yourself the motor skills. And honestly just to see how I used to lift a few years ago and how I lift now, to me that’s an achievement on its own.”

As always, there’s the issue of what to do about critics, who seldom pop up face-to-face but do tend to lurk behind keyboards.

“It is very easy to be criticized when you are a covered woman and you are doing sports,” she said. “It is not something that is common.

It is not something that is looked positively upon for some. So obviously I get a lot of negative comments. Personally, I never pay attention to the comments, positive or negative, to be honest, because I know who I am and what I set out to do. Those who support me, I appreciate them, but those who don’t, they don’t even, like, exist, you know?”

If, for others, such critics are within families, that can prove prohibitive. “I know there are women who may love sports but may not want to ever pursue it further because they are afraid of what their family will say,” she said.

“Because it is ‘shameful for a woman to do this and that,’ blah-blah-blah.”

With that reality in mind, she said, “Amna is more than a clean-and-jerk, a snatch and a total [points score]. I tend to get a lot of questions, and one of the first questions I get from people is, ‘How much do you lift?’ My answer is, ‘I lift a nation.’ ” Come late June 2016, the United Arab Emirates team would learn it had qualified for the Olympics because three teams ahead of it had failed doping tests. Based on recent results, the federation chose Aisha Al Balushi, 24, to represent the team in Rio de Janeiro. “I’m just really, really happy I was part of this, and I could say that I actually did it,” Al Haddad said.

Earlier, in May, another woman who ventured from norms a generation ago, when she went away to university in Jordan, sat on the last seat of the left side of a front row of an auditorium at New York University Abu Dhabi.

There, Amira Budebs would hear a daughter she never imagined speak to a 100-strong assembly of students, professors, administrators.

She had never seen Amna speak in person. She felt nervous just going, then sat wordlessly in front in her traditional black abaya. Outside, the merciless summer heat was well on its way, but indoors in the air conditioning, listeners heard of a different intensity.

For an hour, Al Haddad showed some of her Nike videos, showed quotations on the screen and spoke encouragements such as: “This is why I’m here today, because I did not try to get ahead of anyone, but ahead of myself.” She told the listeners, “I used to get so angry. And now I’m super-chill.”

When the loquacious speaker finished speaking, her mother’s mind had been on some journey. “I had so many thoughts,” she said, eyes wide, and soon she added, “Today when I am listening, I’m listening not to my daughter. I am listening to my teacher.” n

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FOOD

Push for cage-free eggs goes global BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

D

ozens of American restaurant chains, supermarket chains and dining service companies have committed in the last two years to ending their use or sales of eggs laid by caged hens. This past week, one of the world’s largest food service suppliers, Paris-based Sodexo, upped the ante, saying it would switch to cage-free eggs in all its global operations by 2025.

The announcement on Monday is a sign that the rapid shift in the United States to cage-free eggs, led by consumers but long championed by animal rights activists, is going more global. It came after talks with animal rights groups, as well as an international animal rights coalition recently formed by the Humane League, a small American farm-animal rights organization that has driven several U.S. companies’ pledges to swear off eggs from caged hens.

Sodexo had already pledged last year to use only cage-free eggs and egg products in its U.S. operations by 2020. The new decision will affect both liquid eggs and the 250 million shell eggs the company purchases annually for use at 32,000 schools, hospitals, corporations and other sites it services in 80 countries.

It’s unclear how many of those eggs already come from uncaged hens. Battery cages — small wire enclosures whose floors are smaller than a piece of letter-sized paper — are banned in the European Union, and Sodexo, which says it generates about 40 percent of its revenues in Europe, said in a statement that it already uses only cagefree eggs in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. But about half of egg-laying hens in the E.U. are housed in larger “enriched cages,” and David Coman-Hidy, the Humane League’s executive director, said Sodexo had agreed to stop purchasing eggs from farms using those systems.

In a statement, Sodexo’s senior vice president of supply management, Michel Franceschi, said the company plans to “support and contribute to the progressive

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Paris-based Sodexo is the latest company to say it’ll shift practices transformation of the whole industry.” He said it would “take advice” from the Humane Society, Compassion in World Farming and the Humane League “to accompany the conversion and the evolution of the local industry so that by 2025, we will be able to source cage-free eggs from local producers in each country where we operate.”

In February 2015, Sodexo became one of the first large companies to commit to a totally cagefree-egg future in the United States, expanding a policy of using only cage-free shelled eggs to include liquid eggs as well by 2020.

That came after what ComanHidy described as a “contentious” campaign against the company by animal rights groups, and it was followed by a string of other similar corporate pledges. Aaron Ross, the Humane League’s campaigns director, said this time, Sodexo seemed “excited to be a leader” on the issue globally.

“Our hope is that just like we

went industry by industry in the U.S., we can take the same approach and just shift the global practice away from cages,” ComanHidy said in an interview, referring to the Open Wing Alliance, a coalition he said his organization has formed with 12 animal rights groups from countries including France, Australia and South Korea, to focus on taking the cage-free momentum international.

In the United States, increasing consumer concern about how animals are raised for food has driven demand for meat and poultry that is free-range, antibiotics-free, grass-fed and otherwise perceived as healthier or more humane. Last month, Perdue, the country’s thirdlargest chicken producer, announced that it would change the way it raises and slaughters chickens, including by giving them more exposure to natural light, in response to customers’ animal welfare concerns.

Whether the issue of hen housing conditions will have the same

Uncaged chickens roam in a fenced pasture at a farm near Waukon, Iowa, last year. For many hens, “cage free” still means a crowded barn.

traction at a global level remains to be seen. Coman-Hidy, whose group also negotiated a commitment from Grupo Bimbo in Mexico, said he thinks “the issue of caging animals in cages that are just barely larger than their bodies is universally reviled by people.”

Cage-free eggs, however, do not come from hens pecking and clucking in verdant pastures. They are able to roam freely in large, crowded barns, stretch their wings and do things like dust bathe. But their beaks are often still partially cut off to prevent them from pecking one another, and they do not go outside.

And as the corporate timelines suggest, the switch won’t affect hens for many generations to come.

Egg producers say the process of converting caged systems is logistically mammoth and unlikely to happen by 2025, corporate commitments notwithstanding. Currently, less than 10 percent of eggs sold in the United States are laid by cagefree or free-range hens. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

Boldly going for decades of diversity BY

M ICHAEL C AVNA

J

ohn Cho was in the United Arab Emirates, seeking an Asian husband.

“Star Trek Beyond” was shooting in Dubai, and Cho’s character, Sulu, would come out as gay in the new movie. The filmmakers had decided on a simple, brief scene of family reunion in which we glimpse the warm, quiet embrace of the starship Enterprise helmsman, his co-parent and a child. The only snag? Trying to cast a spouse, as they looked about while overseas.

“I know that they were having some trouble finding the right actor,” said Cho, in his third turn as Sulu, “and I knew that had to do with finding an Asian actor in Dubai that was willing to be gay.”

The ultimate decision: The film’s own co-writer, Doug Jung, was cast as Sulu’s husband.

The Sulu reveal might be a character milestone in the long arc of “Star Trek,” which celebrates its 50th birthday this year, but the scene is played with an understatement that feels in line with the franchise’s history of normalized inclusiveness.

When Gene Roddenberry created “Star Trek” in the mid-’60s, the show was among TV’s forerunners in reflecting diversity on the screen. And upon its 50th anniversary, in a political year marked by much divisiveness, “Star Trek” is still seeking to boldly go where relatively few aged franchises have gone before — even when such decisions meet with unexpected turbulence.

From the outset, “Star Trek’s” episodic morality plays managed to entertain while also commenting with critical optimism on those tumultuous times. Now, with “Beyond,” which opened July 22, what do we see in Star Trek’s 23rd-century diversity that might illuminate events in 2016?

“In so many ways, the diversity issue is a question that was alive in 1966,” when “Star Trek” (a.k.a.

“The Original Series”) debuted, Cho said. “We obviously talk about a lot of parallels [between each end of ] those 50 years in the politi-

KIMBERLEY FRENCH/PARAMOUNT PICTURES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

‘Star Trek’ pushed for more inclusion long before most franchises — and that mission continues cal climate. . . . We were talking about race in similar ways.”

The original series, “Star Trek” historian Mark A. Altman said, was “progressive” in that it included characters from different cultures and eschewed national exceptionalism — a theme that still speaks to us.

“How do we make this relevant to the 50th anniversary?” Jung said was the question that he, director Justin Lin and co-writer Simon Pegg kept asking themselves. “That means being relevant to the socioeconomic climate of society.”

And in “Star Trek Beyond,” some of the new, gritty and selfdetermined characters act out of feeling abandoned or minimized by a system.

When the show was created, Altman notes, NBC was very much pushing for diversity in its casting, in such shows as the Bill Cosbystarring “I Spy,” which started in

1965 — in part as a push from the network’s Stanley Robertson, who was one of the few African American television executives. “Diversity was important to him and he was dealing with racism,” Altman said. “In a way, he was the Sidney Poitier of television.”

The series included Nichelle Nichols, who played the communications officer Lt. Uhura, a rare position of authority at the time for a black, female TV character.

Uhura never got to assume the captain’s chair — at least not until “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” Altman noted — but he said she was sixth in the line of succession on the Enterprise.

And now, Zoe Saldana, who returns as Uhura in “Star Trek Beyond,” said that in inheriting the role, she feels a responsibility of upholding Nichols’s torch for representing positive social change.

“It’s a flame for women,” Saldana said. “My mission is not col-

Zoe Saldana, left, plays Lt. Uhura and John Cho plays Sulu in “Star Trek Beyond,” the latest installment in the 50year-old franchise.

or. … My mission is for women to be equal, for women to be relevant, and to hear from more women who are making decisions.”

In addition, the character of Sulu, played by George Takei, was a big step forward. “It’s hard to appreciate the impact of a Japanese helmsman only two decades after World War II — there was still a lot of resentment toward the Japanese,” said Altman, the coauthor of the new “Star Trek” oral-history book “The Fifty-Year Mission (The First 25 Years)” (Volume 2, covering the next 25 years, arrives in August).

Cho was conscious of racial representation, as well — like when he asked the filmmakers to cast his “Beyond” spouse.

“The reason I wanted him to be Asian is that it was a tribute,” the actor said. “My Asian friends who are gay say they have felt it was extra-hard for them because of the culture, so I wanted to represent a future in which it was totally normal.”

Takei surprised many fans this month when he expressed dissatisfaction with the decision to out Sulu. Takei, who came out himself in 2005, eventually clarified his remarks to say that he welcomed the addition of a gay character, but that having Sulu be gay wasn’t part of Roddenberry’s original vision.

“I respect where he’s coming from, and I admire him so much as an actor and as a political activist,” Cho said of Takei’s reaction. “It’s a hard thing to argue because Roddenberry isn’t here to speak out.

We have to infer what he would have approved and disapproved of.

“I choose to believe he would have been tickled by it,” Cho said.

“There is inspiration in the line he always said: ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ [the basis of the series’s Vulcan philosophy].

Were he alive, he would have addressed this lack of gay representation in space way before we did.”

Screenwriter Jung said of adding an LGBT character, “It seemed a logical extension of how the world really is.” He added, of the inclusive utopia of “Star Trek,” “This is just everyday life there.” n

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BOOKS

Why we so often act like sheep N ON-FICTION

O INVISIBLE INFLUENCE The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior

By Jonah Berger Simon & Schuster.

264 pp. $26.99

l

REVIEWED BY

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

ther humans basically control our minds. That’s what Jonah Berger argues in his new popularpsychology book, breaking out the kind of research that would make a policy wonk cry.

The most persuasive ideas don’t grab us with detail and compelling evidence, he writes. No, the likability of a concept depends on, well, who already likes it. Take this 2003 study from Stanford professor Geoffrey Cohen. The academic wanted to better understand how social influence colors our views.

So, he dreamed up two opposing welfare policies: One that offers $800 each month to eligible families with one child — more than twice the national average — and one that provides just $250. He slipped the mock proposals to people who self-identified as either liberal or conservative. He waited to see which idea they embraced. As expected, the left leaners preferred the more generous proposal. The right wingers opted for the more stringent one. Nobody seemed eager to step beyond the traditional bounds of their ideology.

But something strange happened when Cohen added another detail to the policies — something that would make lawmakers wonder why they should bother with, say, functionality. Conservative respondents actually loved the $800 policy if they were told that Republicans embraced it. Liberal re-

spondents, meanwhile, dramatically increased their acceptance of the $250 policy if they believed Democrats championed it.

Berger, an associate marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, explains that, in this instance and myriad others, association can trump logic.

“People’s attitudes weren’t just slightly nudged one way or another depending on group endorsement,” he writes. “Their attitudes completely changed based on which party supported or opposed them. . . . When it came to political views, party was stronger than policy.”

Cohen’s research, while depressing, isn’t exactly shocking to anyone who has clicked through 2016 social media. But Berger oversimplifies complicated findings. That slightly bruises the credibility of “Invisible Influence,” his second book after his 2013 bestseller, “Contagious.” Readers, for example, might assume that Cohen had presented the fake policies to a nationally representative sample of adults. A scan of the original study, however, reveals that the people who apparently valued party over policy were all college students. Probably on the younger side, too. Cohen recruited many from an introductory psychology course.

Explaining humankind’s unconscious tendencies with nuance requires time and space. Berger’s

book moves quickly, taking readers on a journey through dozens of findings. This winding exploration of our collective psyche is fascinating, especially when Berger focuses on the specifics of one piece of research. It’s limited, too.

Each case study yields truths for one set of people in one moment of time. We don’t always get to know their ages, their races, their incomes. We should take each big reveal as a suggestion, not a fact.

The messages are still humbling.

Five chapters seek to describe the ways people around us lead us to stumble or grow stronger. We might think we’re acting independently, molding our lives with free will and elbow grease, but we’re often responding to cues that escape the eye. Not that we’re powerless against social influence. “By understanding how it works,” Berger promises, “we can harness its power. We can avoid its downsides and take advantage of its benefits.”

Much of “Invisible Influence” rings true — even if we don’t want to admit it. Berger is careful to acknowledge that humans are complicated and that our socioeconomic backgrounds generally condition us to be one way or another. Our fates, though, are never completely sealed.

Without imparting too many spoilers, Berger seeks to answer some of life’s more perplexing questions: How do we win people over?

How do we effectively battle climate

change? Why do kids hate broccoli?

Why do we love who we love?

For couples who believe that their bond was uniquely fated, the author unleashes a sobering statistic: More than a third of Americans meet their husband or wife at work or school. We tend to gravitate toward people who share our values and social status.

People who think love is a mere chemical reaction might snicker at Berger’s explanation of what else might factor into our coupling decisions. He cites the work of psychologist Richard Moreland, who turned his undergraduate personality psychology class at the University of Pittsburgh into an experiment. At the end of the semester, he gave students a photo survey, asking which of four women was the most attractive. He also quizzed students who hadn’t been in the lecture hall. Respondents didn’t know that one woman had sat in the front row 15 times, while the others had attended less and less often. The students who hadn’t taken Moreland’s class didn’t identify one woman as particularly attractive; their answers shook out evenly. The other group clearly singled out the woman who had shown up 15 times.

Makes you wonder how many other seemingly insignificant forces might shape our lives. n Paquette is a policy reporter for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A girl who’s just wired differently

From fishing town to posh getaway

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

S USAN C OLL

s David Sibelius boils the lobsters for the annual dinner he hosts for his graduate students at the Boston Institute of Technology, his 12-year-old daughter, Ada, observes him with a sense of foreboding. “She could not articulate what was different in his demeanor, but it triggered a deep-seated uneasiness in her,” writes Liz Moore in her enthralling new novel, “The Unseen World.” Ada will soon learn that her brilliant, enigmatic computer-scientist father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Later that evening, David, who still has the presence of mind to know that he is faltering, gives Ada a floppy disc, encased in a white plastic clamshell. On the disc is a curious string of code that will take Ada more than two decades to decrypt: It will unlock dark secrets from David’s past and provide the key to “The Unseen World.”

Set in the 1980s in the pre-Internet days of the emergence of artificial intelligence, this is a novel that artfully straddles genres. It is a rich and convincing period piece that captures daily life in the modest neighborhood of Dorchester in an era of wall-mounted phones, frozen Salisbury steak dinners and first-generation home computers, like Ada’s 128K Macintosh.

But “The Unseen World” is also a cerebral, page-turning thriller, a novel about code that is itself written in a kind of code. Traversing time, it takes us back to Kansas in the 1920s, skips ahead to San Francisco in 2009 where Ada works for a tech firm, and then projects briefly a sci-fi-ish glimpse of the future.

Ada is a quiet, brainy, observant child who was birthed by a surrogate, raised by a single father and home schooled — or really “lab schooled” since she accompanies David to work at the Steiner lab most days. She works on David’s project, ELIXIR, a chatbot program aimed at simulating human conversation. Ada is asked to converse with ELIXIR to help it acquire language. The program is

designed to be continuously selfteaching, “to attain more intelligence with each conversation it conducted.”

Ada is well suited to this task.

“You are more machine than human,” her father says. She does not disagree. “ELIXIR triggered Ada’s emotions in unexpected ways. . . .

It brought out the same warm feelings in Ada that a friend might have.”

Once David is no longer able to care for her, Ada moves in with the family of her father’s close colleague, Liston, and is enrolled in the eighth grade at a Catholic school. It is a rough transition for Ada, who shows up the first day unaware of school rules or teen etiquette. She continues to sneak back into her father’s house where she converses with ELIXIR. It’s a way to stay connected to her former life, and many years later she will again turn to ELIXIR to help solve the riddle of her father’s life.

Language in this novel is sensual and precise starting with the critical opening dinner party scene: “The light that day was the color of honey or of a roan horse, any warm organic thing like that, coming through the leaves of the tree outside the window in handsome dapples, lighting parts of the countertop generously, leaving others blue.” The clarity of this scene will come back to haunt and demand to be reread through the newly acquired lens of the novel’s epilogue.

There is, however, sometimes an overabundance of detail that threatens the otherwise sharp narrative. Ada’s awkwardness in school begins to feel unnecessary and veers toward cliche. And David’s backstory is arguably more elaborate than it needs to be.

But these are minor complaints in what is otherwise an elegant and ethereal novel about identity and the dawn of artificial intelligence, and a convincing interior portrait of a young woman. n Coll is the author of five novels, most recently “The Stager.”

M THE UNSEEN WORLD

By Liz Moore W.W. Norton. 451 pp. $26.95

MAKING MONTE CARLO A History of Speculation and Spectacle

By Mark Braude Simon & Schuster. 289 pp. $27

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARY M C A ULIFFE

onte Carlo is an international symbol of glamour — a playground for the well-to-do and for celebrities such as Ringo Starr and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it has not always been so.

In “Making Monte Carlo,” Mark Braude illuminates the unsavory dealings and outright flimflam that underlay the development of this out-of-the-way principality on the French Riviera. Braude’s wellresearched and deftly written history whisks the reader through Monte Carlo’s colorful past, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th, culminating in the 1929 inaugural of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Along the way, the reader is treated to accounts of the early speculators who created this fantasy land.

At first sight, Monaco was merely a dusty fishing village, with little to attract tourists. But it was the only place within hundreds of miles where it was legal to gamble, and several investors took interest, encouraged by Monaco’s rulers, the down-at-the-heels Grimaldi family. Within a remarkably short period, the turnaround began, led by the cunning businessman François Blanc.

Blanc recognized that Monaco’s location on the Mediterranean was a major asset, and he began to build his dream world at the far edge of the tiny principality, constructing it around the casino that was its lifeblood and naming the venture Monte Carlo.

His concept, which proved a winning one, was to greatly extend the pool of Monte Carlo’s visitors by attracting middle- as well as upper-class vacationers and encouraging them to stay — and gamble — for long periods. He accomplished this under the pretext that this was a spa, and therefore a healthy destination, and by providing top-notch free entertainment and fine food in lavish surroundings. These in turn were brightened by lush tropical plantings (mostly imported) and a warm winter sun.

The secret to maintaining Monte Carlo’s aura of elegance, Blanc realized, was to foster the illusion of exclusivity, even while admitting all comers — at least, all those who dressed and behaved properly. The siren call of glamour and excitement worked, and once Blanc had improved the roads and prodded the railway to extend its services to Monte Carlo, people flooded in.

Braude, who teaches history and urban studies at Stanford, tells how Monte Carlo survived its World War I downturn, emerging more glamorous than ever during the 1920s, when it became a summer as well as winter destination.

His story ends there, but it would have been interesting to know how the place fared during the ’30s and World War II, wedged between Vichy France and Mussolini’s Italy.

Braude’s narrative also deprives the reader of any account of the fairy-tale marriage of Hollywood’s Grace Kelly into the ancient House of Grimaldi, although he does provide a tantalizing tidbit about Kelly’s mother-in-law, the Hereditary Princess Charlotte, another commoner who entered the Grimaldi family. Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of a Grimaldi prince and a laundress, and received recognition and titles only after a pragmatic decision to continue the direct line.

But life in Monaco, especially in Monte Carlo, had always been a pretense of grandeur and happily ever after. According to the fantasy, the sun always shined, and everyone was carefree. Except for the occasional rainstorms, suicides and rebellions by the tax-free but disgruntled citizens of Monaco, all was well, in the best of all possible worlds. What went on behind the scenes was nobody’s business. n McAuliffe is the author of “When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends,” due out in September.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

With Russia decision, IOC shows its warped priorities SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

The latrines that failed a stress test in the Olympic Village are the perfect emblem for the International Olympic Committee. You can see the shoddy innards and peeling plaster on that wilting, corrupt organization in its refusal to issue a blanket suspension against Russia for state­sponsored doping. The IOC is such a broken toilet that the only athlete it decided to definitively punish is the whistleblower, Yulia Stepanova.

State-sponsored doping is different from other doping. It’s one thing for an individual to take certain risks with his or her health to help them perform better than a competitor. Every aspirational working person alive does that to a certain extent, from a roofer on Vicodin to a college professor on Ritalin.

It’s a personal choice. But statesponsored doping is something else entirely. When athletes are pressured to take a needle or a pill at peril of displeasing a governmental strongman and given substances without informed consent, when officials are told to cover up positive tests and have to flee the country for telling the truth about it, that’s a human rights violation.

It’s a critical distinction, and it’s a distinction the IOC declined to make, because it’s too busy climbing into financial beds with said governmental strongmen. There was zero chance the IOC was ever going to penalize their business partner Vladimir Putin, who gave them a $51 billion construction project in Sochi.

Thomas Bach’s declaration that the IOC decision on Russia “was reached after hard debates” was laughable. They debated for three hours, not even long enough for one of the ice sculptures on their buffet tables to melt.

Russian Sports Minister

Vitaly Mutko cheerfully announced he was “grateful” for the decision.

The IOC used the rights of individual athletes as its cloak.

Bach claimed the IOC wanted to find “the right balance between collective responsibility and individual justice.” That’s a noble sentiment, but it would be more persuasive if the IOC didn’t constantly trample over individuals, whether in displacing them from homes to make way for Olympic structures, or failing to protect peaceful protesters from arrest in China, or sanctioning athletes for not wearing the correct sponsor label.

If the IOC was really concerned about individuals, it would allow whistleblower Yulia Stepanova to compete.

Stepanova, an 800-meter runner, has been cleared to resume competition by the international track and field federation. She served a twoyear drug ban from 2011 to 2013, fully paid her debt, and showed enormous courage in outing the Russian state program. The IOC has left the decision on whether to ban other Russian athletes to 28 individual sports federations — so Stepanova should be able to compete, right? Wrong. Not in Stepanova’s case. In her case, her reward from the IOC for exposing the Russian doping system is an individual ban for failing “ethical requirements”

GEERT VANDEN WIJNGAERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Yulia Stepanova’s reward for displaying honesty about statesponsored doping in Russia was a ban on running in the Olympics.

and for technical reasons. The IOC, that champion of individual rights, reasons that it has no system in place to accommodate an individual athlete under a neutral flag.

Hosts of other Russian athletes will compete in Rio, but not Stepanova. The IOC has given sports federations less than two weeks to approve Russian athletes if they pass “an individual analysis of each competitor’s anti-doping record, taking into account . . . the specificities of each sport and its rules, in order to ensure a level playing field.”

The result of this directive is that various federations are rushing to declare Russian athletes eligible for Rio. The International Tennis Federation confirmed before Sunday was over that Russia’s seven tennis players can compete.

But Stepanova can’t. With this, the IOC has basically sent a warning to any other whistleblower: Embarrass the IOC and its bureaucratic partner, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which sat on evidence of Russia’s state-sponsored doping for years, and you will be punished for it not once, but twice.

There are no doubt some

innocent athletes among the Russian contingent. This did not have to compromise the IOC’s ability to issue a ban on the entire state.

Athletes who can absolutely prove they passed drug tests that weren’t administered by their state’s tainted system easily could have been allowed to compete under a neutral or blank banner. Instead, the IOC issued a Putin-pleasing decision rife with unreasonable inconsistencies: Justin Gatlin can compete after serving a doping ban but Stepanova cannot?

Russia is hardly the only large-state offender. Other countries, including the United States, have, at the least, turned a blind eye to systemic doping at times. But in no other case has a national government colluded on the scale that Russia did, using its national agencies and even its police to falsify drug test results.

The IOC’s refusal to sanction Russia calls into question the entire purpose of its anti-doping effort. Why does it even exist?

Originally, the stated purpose was “to protect the health of the athlete.” But the fact is, the only health the IOC cares about is its own. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

What would Ronald Reagan think?

LOU CANNON covered the 1980 campaign and the Reagan presidency for The Post. He is the author of “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.”

The presidential nominee quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Paine, the most radical of the Founding Fathers. He asked all Americans for their support. “More than anything else,” he said, “I want my candidacy to unify our country; to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose. I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values.”

This was Ronald Reagan, accepting the nomination of the Republican Party on July 17, 1980, at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit with a speech that in tone and much of the substance was the resonant opposite of the dark vision that Donald Trump presented in Cleveland. Reagan wanted to govern. He believed as firmly as Trump does now that the Democratic administration then in power had failed the American people, but he also realized he needed the support of many Democrats and independents — not just to win but to have a successful presidency.

Beyond tactical calculation, Reagan had an in-bred distaste for the politics of derogation that have become a Trump hallmark.

Reagan would have been appalled

by Trump’s description of opponents as “Lying Ted” or “Crooked Hillary.” I covered Reagan’s two campaigns for

governor of California and his four presidential campaigns, and interviewed him for books. I could count on one hand the number of times he engaged in personal put-downs.

When he did, he regretted it and sought to make amends.

Early in his governorship, Reagan blamed several state problems on his predecessor, Pat Brown. An aide told Reagan it was beneath him to put down Brown, whom he’d defeated by nearly a million votes. Reagan agreed and never did it again. Brown told me that when he was in Washington after Reagan became president, Reagan heard he was in town and invited him to the White House where they reminisced for nearly an hour.

In 1980, Reagan ran against President Jimmy Carter. The toughest assertion in Reagan’s acceptance speech, not really all that harsh, was a claim that “the

Carter administration lives in the world of make-believe” on foreign policy. Reagan made it less personal by adding the word “administration.” That was typical Reagan, whose usual targets were “Washington” or an anonymous “they” who were in various ways ruining our lives.

There were personal attacks aplenty in the 1980 campaign.

Most of them came from Carter, who told a partisan audience, “You’ll determine whether or not this America will be unified or, if I lose this election, whether Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.” Reagan publicly said he was “saddened” by these words. I was with Reagan that day, and he said privately that he was surprised at Carter’s language and thought it showed that the president knew he was losing.

Reagan, who was winning, kept mostly to the high road, with occasional lapses. When someone told him that Carter had been quoted as saying he liked cold showers, Reagan quipped that a man who claimed to like cold showers would lie about anything. It was an oddball jest of the sort that would land Reagan in trouble at various times as governor and president.

For the most part, however, Reagan was a comfortable and self-secure politician. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, believed in civil discourse, possessed a generous spirit and realized that “compromise” is not a dirty word in politics. In private, he challenged fellow conservatives, saying that liberals accepted partial victories and came back for more. Why couldn’t conservatives do the same? This insight helped Reagan secure many compromises from legislatures and a Congress in which he often lacked the votes.

Nor did Reagan denigrate, as Trump does, the contributions of immigrants who arrive in the United States without authorization. Trump wants to deport them. In 1986 Reagan proposed and signed into law a bill that provided amnesty to 3 million unauthorized immigrants. During a 1984 presidential debate, Reagan said, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”

Some Republicans, among them vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, claim that Donald Trump is the rightful political heir of Ronald Reagan. The record belies them. n

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22

OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

A troubling turn for two U.S. allies JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs and writes a biweekly column that appears on Mondays.

When he launched his attempt to rebuild U.S. relations with the Muslim world seven years ago, President Obama started with Turkey and Egypt, vital U.S. allies that seemed to be on the cusp of change.

Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey was pioneering a model of moderate, democratic Islamism. Egypt was still ruled by an aging strongman, but with prodding from the George W. Bush administration, it had allowed the flourishing of a liberal civil society and was attempting to modernize its economy.

Since then, the two countries have, indeed, transformed their political systems and their relations with the United States — and the result has been a disaster for U.S. interests. Turkey and Egypt are emerging as twin models for a 21st-century Muslim authoritarianism, one Islamist and one secular. Their regimes are far more repressive than they were in 2009 and far less open to liberal ideas. But their most distinguishing feature, compared with a decade ago, is their antiAmericanism.

Erdogan and Abdel Fatah alSissi, Egypt’s general-turnedpresident, have become certifiably paranoid in their views of the United States. They not only embrace wild anti-American conspiracy theories, but articulate them in public. They seed the media they control with

propaganda that makes Vladimir Putin’s anti-U.S. diatribes look tame. They go out of their way to persecute civil society groups, politicians and journalists they perceive as having U.S. support or connections.

Sissi, who carried out a coup against an elected Islamist government, blames Washington for that regime’s rise to power and suspects that the U.S. aim remains to destroy the Egyptian state through something he calls “fourth generation war.” Erdogan, an elected Islamist who just put down an attempted military coup, blames the Obama administration for harboring the man he accuses of orchestrating the move against him. One of his cabinet ministers directly accused the United States of sponsoring the coup — and Erdogan hasn’t contradicted him.

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY KAL FOR THE ECONOMIST

Sure, Turkey, a NATO member, still hosts U.S. forces, and Egypt is still one of the largest recipients in the world of U.S. military and economic aid. But those look like relics of bygone relationships — or, in Egypt’s case, the price the United States must pay to avoid a complete breach. As it is, most U.S. economic assistance to Cairo is unspent, because Sissi refuses to allow U.S. funds to flow to nongovernmental organizations he believes are part of the U.S. plot against him. And both Sissi and Erdogan have taken to courting Putin and shopping for Russian weapons.

Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have helped to inspire the Muslim models of authoritarianism. A decade ago, dictatorship looked untenable in a globalizing world dominated by the United States; consequently, Erdogan was pushing Turkey toward membership in the European Union, while Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was allowing his son to privatize state companies and tolerating Western funding of Egyptian groups promoting democratic politics and the rule of law. Now the Chinese and Russian regimes seem to offer proof that it’s possible to exclude democratic competition, suppress civil society, censor the Internet, practice crony capitalism, defy

Washington — and still flourish.

So both Muslim governments are importing those practices.

Erdogan has copied Putin’s political path, shifting from prime minister to the presidency while seeking a constitutional reform that would vastly increase the powers of the executive. Since the coup, he has targeted more than 50,000 perceived opponents. Sissi is preparing a draconian law that, like those already passed in Moscow and Beijing, would shut down any NGO with foreign connections or support.

Is all of this Obama’s fault? Of course not. Politics in Egypt and Turkey have been roiled by the failed Arab Spring, the rise of the Islamic State and the megalomania of their rulers, among other forces. But Obama’s plan backfired in these strategic countries. An important factor was his inconstancy: His administration veered between backing Mubarak and pushing him out; warning against an Egyptian coup and then endorsing the Sissi regime.

The 44th president will walk away from all this in January. His successor will find that the pillars of U.S. engagement in the Middle East for 40 years and more have been replaced by Muslim anchors of an emerging global movement: unfree and anti-American. n

SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Political speechwriting BY

J EFF S HESOL

The tumult over Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention — a search for a plagiarist that turned up an in­house writer for the Trump Organization — was an anomaly: Speechwriters are rare­ ly figures of public note. The job is more often than not a quiet grind.

Americans are predisposed to distrust the words that leave the lips of politicians, and the opacity of the speechwriting process can heighten those suspicions. Here are five misconceptions about our role.

MYTH NO. 1 Politicians are puppets.

Yes, something consequential was lost when political leaders abandoned the practice of working out their thoughts on paper, as Abraham Lincoln did.

Writing, for him, was how he clarified his beliefs and determined a course of action.

The maniacal repetition of partyline talking points is a poor substitute for cognition. Still, it’s wrong to assume that today’s politicians are mere puppets or parrots. Speech writing, for the most part, is intensely collaborative: Writers and speakers trade outlines and drafts, reconsider the flow or the focus of an argument, refine (and sometimes ruin) a good line.

And woe be to the speechwriter who strays too far from the intentions of his principal — as I learned in 2000 after I removed, from an important speech, a passage that President Bill Clinton had written. “Put it back the way I had it,” he told me sharply. And then he uttered a word that was definitely unscripted.

MYTH NO. 2 Speechwriters are stenographers.

Most speakers don’t want their own words fed back to them untouched, unconsidered.

If what they’re looking for is someone to take dictation, there’s software for that now, and it never needs its ego stroked or leaks anything to reporters.

Smart speakers demand more than a stenographer.

Elected officials have policy and political advisers, and the most effective speechwriters conduct themselves as speech advisers — making recommendations about the form, content, purpose and intended audience of remarks.

MYTH NO. 3 “Off the cuff ” means “from the heart.”

One of the weirdest obsessions of the Republican Party is a piece of technology more than 60 years old: the teleprompter. The GOP is opposed to it. True, many Republicans use one, but the party’s semiofficial position was articulated by Fred Davis, a media strategist, in 2011: A teleprompter, he said, is “a sign of inauthenticity. It’s a sign that you can’t speak on your own two feet.”

The backlash against teleprompters, as the rise of Donald Trump reveals, is not purely cynical; it reflects a widespread frustration with contrivance in politics. We have come to equate “off the cuff ” with “from the heart,” as a former White House colleague of mine has put it. Which is just silly. Much of what Trump blurts out is demonstrably false, while a well-crafted speech can be deeply revealing. Consider Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, in which he spoke about “love and loss” and living with cancer. He read it from a sheet of paper —

PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE

For a while, President Obama and his staff seemed to believe that a big speech by the president could bring about change.

though it wouldn’t have been any less genuine if he’d read it from a screen.

MYTH NO. 4 We can’t believe a word they’re saying.

Our collective skepticism — to put it politely — about the truth of what politicians have to say is well grounded in the betrayals of the past half-century.

This has given rise to a cottage industry of lie detectors. Yet observers might be surprised by the conscientiousness of most public servants, or by the scope and serious-mindedness of the fact-checking operation in the White House or a typical campaign. Data is checked and rechecked by the economic team; anecdotes are thoroughly vetted and scrapped if they seem suspect; grand claims are qualified in ways that result in accurate, if sometimes awkward, phrase-making. Clinton wanted to set a goal in his 2000 State of the Union address of making America the safest country in the world. He had to settle for “the safest big country in the world”; senior policy advisers warned that the United States was never going to top little Iceland or

Denmark.

MYTH NO. 5 Political speeches don’t matter anymore.

The transformative power of speeches has, no doubt, been overstated, not only by people like me who write them for a living but by Aaron Sorkin productions like “The American President” and “The West Wing.”

For a few years, at least, the Obama White House seemed to share the romantic notion that a big speech — whether on health care or on U.S. relations with the Muslim world — could change the game. But by Obama’s second term, his aides came to feel that it was virtually “impossible to break through” the “media filter” or the noise on social media, as a senior White House staffer told me in 2014. It’s hard to get heard.

The national audience is fragmented, overstimulated and distracted.

Yet the timeworn method of repeating a clear message can still, over time, change minds and then outcomes. n Shesol is a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a founding partner at West Wing Writers.

SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2016

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 27 Presented by

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON