The Washington Post National Weekly - August 7, 2016

Politics A plan too heavy on details 4

World Overwork kills in Japan 10

Travel Epic trip to 47 national parks 17

5 Myths HIPAA privacy rules 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

THE S C ENT OF DANGER Humankind’s best friend may be our best bet for preventing attacks PAGE 12

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

2

S INGREDIE NT THE RIGHT rket See PAGE 3 s Oriental Ma Sony’

PAMPE RING

PE TS

PAGE 5 All For Paws See

AUGUST 2016

$2

s a e d i t h g i Br

ge 20 actices See Pa Earth-friendly pr

RLD’S BUSINESS WO

We publish a World of business news every month.

If you’re not already receiving a copy of this region’s leading business publication, Wenatchee Valley Business World, stop by our office and purchase a copy of our August edition.

You’ll find features on:

G PRESENTIN SPONSORS

EARTH-FRIENDLY PRACTICES FROM LOCAL BUSINESSES

Sustainable business practices are not only good for the planet, they’re good for business.

EVERYTHING ASIAN

We profile Sony’s Oriental Market in downtown Wenatchee, a favorite spot for local Asian cooks.

MEET THIS YEAR’S 30 UNDER 35 HONOREES

Read the accomplishments of the 2016 group of 30 individuals under the age of 35, as nominated by their peers.

Plus Rick Steigmeyer’s wine column, business briefs, real estate transactions and building permits, lively guest columnists, the Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce newsletter, local business achievements and much more.

You can find Business World and daily business news updates on our website at wvbusinessworld.com.

Enjoy the digital edition of August’s Business World at wvbusinessworld.com/digital/

Business orld Wenatchee Valley

W

PICK UP A COPY OF BUSINESS WORLD AT ALL AUT-TO MOCHA LOCATIONS, AND LES SCHWAB IN WENATCHEE AND EAST WENATCHEE. TO SUBSCRIBE BY MAIL, CALL OUR CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT AT 509-663-5161 OR ONLINE AT WVBUSINESSWORLD.COM/SUBSCRIBE-BW/ CAN’T GET ENOUGH BUSINESS NEWS? FOLLOW US ON LINKEDIN.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

@POSTPOLITICS

44 at 55 BY

D AVID N AKAMURA

I

f there’s one thing the sharply divided nation can agree on after nearly eight years of President Obama, it is that things have changed on his watch.

Most notably, his appearance.

Even the president has noticed. Opening his speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Obama praised his wife, Michelle, the 52-year-old first lady who “somehow hasn’t aged a day.”

“I know the same cannot be said for me,” Obama continued with a chuckle. Twelve years after a wunderkind 42-year-old Illinois state senator burst onto the national scene with a youthful vigor and forward-looking exuberance, the president’s once-black hair has gone nearly fully gray. The creases around his mouth and under his eyes have grown deeper.

“My girls remind me all the time: ‘Wow, you’ve changed so much, Daddy,’ ” he said. “And then they try to clean it up. Not bad, just more mature.”

On Thursday, the 44th president turned 55.

It was his final birthday in office, and came at a time when Obama is acknowledging that his own political shelf life is winding down.

Though mid-50s is young for an outgoing commander-in-chief, and he will presumably enjoy a long, active post-presidency, Obama has grown increasingly wistful in his final year.

“It’s true, I was so young that first time in Boston,” he said last week, reflecting on the speech at the 2004 convention that helped launch his political rise.

At times on the world stage, Obama has taken on the tone of the wisened dad, or at least big brother, dispensing advice to a new generation of younger leaders.

“I had no gray hair when I was in your shoes seven years ago,” Obama told Canada’s boyish

KLMNO WEEKLY

CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Many have commented on President Obama’s changed appearance since taking office, including the commander-inchief himself. The 44th president, shown at top in December 2008 and at bottom on Tuesday, recently turned 55.

prime minister, Justin Trudeau, then 43, during their first bilateral meeting last November.

“You need to start dyeing it soon, because it gets too late.”

“So young — and yet so cynical,” Trudeau interjected with a laugh. But the prime minis-

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. 43

ter then revealed what Obama told him during a congratulatory phone call after Trudeau was elected.

“What Barack pointed out to me about how fast his daughters grew in the seven years since that first night of his electoral victory really struck home for me,” Trudeau said.

In June, Obama declined an invitation to speak at older daughter Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends School, for fear that he might tear up.

For Obama, the gray hair is so obvious that it has become part of his stump speech, a way to disarm his audience by poking fun at himself.

But by other measures, he has remained fit and vibrant.

Though he has hung up his basketball sneakers, Obama’s morning gym workouts and frequent golf course outings, along with his famous personal discipline at the snack table, have left him not just leaner than he was two years ago — but also, incredibly, taller.

Obama checked in at 175 pounds and 6 feet 11/2 inches on his most recent personal physical — five pounds less and a half-inch taller than in 2014, according to a medical report released by the White House in March.

Once a smoker, the president remains tobacco free and only drinks alcohol in moderation; his bad cholesterol is low and his good cholesterol is high, the exam found.

“All clinical data indicates that the President is currently very healthy and that he will remain so for the duration of his Presidency,” his doctor, Ronny Jackson, concluded.

Even if Obama is suddenly feeling more in touch with his mortality, he can take some solace that he will be replaced by someone a lot older — Hillary Clinton is 68 and Donald Trump is 70. But that seems of little comfort to a president who took office at 47 years old, the fifth-youngest to assume the White House. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Armed with wet noses and whiskers, dogs are becoming the new face of security, sniffing out explosives and other potentially risky items across the country. Illustration by NOMA BAR for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Clinton loves details. Voters? Well . . .

J IM T ANKERSLEY New York BY

N

early two years ago, Hillary Clinton commissioned an armada of white papers on economic policy to prepare for what her team assumed would be a presidential battle with a Republican such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who were making wonky appeals to the middle class the central planks of their campaigns.

It was a strategic necessity, Clinton later confided to associates. She thought that voters would demand detailed plans from the candidates and reject what she called “easy answers” on the big challenges facing the country.

The campaign has not played out the way she imagined, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump offering little detail about his promises to make America rich again. Still, when Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination last month, she stuck with her plan to lay out her economic proposals, declaring, “I sweat the details of policy.”

Clinton is struggling to connect with an economically anxious electorate: General-election polls show that voters, and by vast margins working-class whites, trust Trump more than Clinton to handle the economy.

Campaign officials say they have constantly heard from donors and outside advisers that Clinton needs to simplify her economic message. It’s a challenge, they say, that weighs on them.

“You don’t want to be, as the expression goes, bringing a calculator to a knife fight,” one senior Clinton adviser said on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss the campaign strategy.

Clinton’s plan represents “a very sensible approach to economic policy and the challenges we face,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers who is advising Clinton in the race. “The risk in the campaign is

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Her taste for nuance could muddy economic message, strategists say it doesn’t fit easily on a bumper sticker.”

Events have made it difficult for Clinton to lean on what used to be her simplest pitch — a call to return to “Clinton economics,” the balanced-budget, pro-freetrade policies of her husband’s administration in the 1990s that helped fuel an economic boom but was followed by stagnating working-class wages and sharply rising inequality.

Complexity over simplicity Instead, she offers a layered explanation for why middle-class incomes remain lower today than they were when her husband left office, including globalization,

technology and poor choices by business leaders and policymakers. In contrast to Trump’s simplicity, she contends that her complicated solutions are the right way to address the challenges.

“It’s fair to say that my economic plans are detailed and varied because I think we are facing complex problems that require serious solutions,” Clinton said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But they’re all focused on a single, overarching goal, and that is to create good-paying jobs with rising incomes. That is the defining economic challenge of our time.”

Still, as she tries to consolidate support from anxious progres-

In Ohio in March, Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, gave a wonky speech on manufacturing and trade. She went on to win the state in the primaries, including voters who told exit pollsters they worry that trade takes away American jobs.

sives and court white workers, she is facing calls to go bigger, and simpler, on the economy.

“She needs to give people some hope that she ‘gets it,’ ” said Robert Reich, a former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the primaries. “Not only the stresses that people are feeling but also the need for a strong response.”

A vexing issue Arguably no issue represents the tensions facing Clinton’s economic agenda more than trade.

After Clinton lost the Michigan primary to Sanders, who had rallied voters against “disastrous

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

5

POLITICS trade deals,” donors pressured the campaign to adopt Sanders’s more standoffish message on trade, according to senior campaign officials. They wanted her to say, flatly, that trade was killing American jobs.

Clinton rejected those calls for broad brush statements. Instead, according senior campaign officials, Clinton embarked on a more targeted strategy: using details to show voters she recognized the downsides of trade, without embracing the full message they wanted to hear.

“I want to talk about specifics,” she told her advisers, and they consulted with the steelworkers union and the office of trade critic Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). In the end, she decided to focus on a provision in President Obama’s proposed Asia trade deal called “rules of origin” that was little known by the broad public but resonated among trade opponents. The provision would make trade with China easier by allowing cars manufactured primarily from Chinese parts to be labeled “Made in the USA” if they were assembled in the United States.

She centered a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, on her opposition to it. After that, “I started saying I trust her on trade and manufacturing,” said Brown, a top Senate liberal who was considered as a potential running mate. Clinton went on to win the state, including voters who told exit pollsters they worry that trade takes away American jobs.

Her advisers say that strategy exemplifies her nuanced approach to gaining the trust of anxious voters on economic issues. Trump is working hard to combat it, on trade in particular.

He has labeled the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (which Clinton supported publicly as first lady), expanded trade with China and other trade agreements “Clinton’s trade deals.”

In those attacks, Clinton’s supporters see a big risk.

On trade, “Donald Trump is formidable,” said Jared Bernstein, a former top economist for Vice President Biden. “He is talking about something real, and he is making many points that people on the left have been making.”

Clinton’s trade stance remains far more nuanced than Trump’s.

Asked in The Post interview whether the United States would

KLMNO WEEKLY

investments in our shared future.

And I don’t think it’s just greed, as serious as that is. It seems we’ve lost a sense of shared responsibility and forgotten we’re all in this together.”

Trade isn’t the only issue where she’s rejected the most liberal wing of her party. She did not endorse a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, even though the policy polls well. But she backs a $12-an-hour federal minimum and the ability for states to set higher ones if they choose. Aides say that is because she thinks that $15 an hour may be too high for states with lower average incomes and costs of living, such as her former home of Arkansas.

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

“My economic plans are detailed and varied because I think we are facing complex problems.”

Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee for president

have been better off not passing three contentious trade measures with North and Central America and China, she said, “That’s a hard question to answer.”

“I look at this from both sides,” she said. “We’ve got to make our trade agreements more enforceable and then enforce them.

We’ve got to renegotiate them so that we are not being taken advantage of. We have to make sure they’ve met the bar I’ve set. But at the same time, we have to support people who are affected, dislocated by trade. And we just don’t do a very good job of that.”

A day after Clinton spoke to The Post, Trump called NAFTA “the worst trade deal in history” in a speech. He said expanded trade with China had created “the greatest job theft in history.”

“This wave of globalization,” he told the crowd, “has wiped out our middle class.”

Spending to speed growth Clinton’s presidential policy apparatus began with a small group of formal and informal advisers conducting what amounted to a research project on what is wrong with the U.S.

economy — and how to fix it. They interviewed about 200 experts.

What she has released so far is the distilled product of that effort.

Her plan includes spending more than $1 trillion to rebuild U.S. infrastructure, allow students to attend college without incurring debt and help working families afford day care for their children. She thinks such spending would create jobs and accelerate economic growth, help lowand middle-income students gain skills that are increasingly necessary for high-wage work, and reverse a recent trend of women leaving the U.S. workforce.

She would raise taxes on the highest earners, to pay for those programs and to curb inequality.

She would add to the Obama administration’s wave of new regulations on Wall Street. And she would change the tax code to discourage companies from moving operations overseas, while encouraging them to share profits with workers.

“We skewed the tax code toward the wealthy,” Clinton said.

“We continued to undermine workers’ rights. We have blocked

Workers at an automotive parts company in Detroit listen during a Hillary Clinton campaign event in March. Clinton has developed a strategy of addressing complicated issues with specific examples.

Struggling to connect Clinton’s economic plan has drawn praise from a wide range of liberal and center-left policy experts, even when those experts have disagreed about how to address middle-class challenges.

James Galbraith, a prominent liberal economist who supported Sanders in the primary, said it is possible that Clinton could beat Trump with her current economic message, “but my gut would be not to be over-confident.” To energize progressives, he added, “there’s got to be a transition toward the positions Bernie Sanders has taken this time around, because that’s where the young people are.”

Clinton backers say her plan is plenty bold as is. “Many of the things that were the demands of progressives, she sang the words,” said Heather McGhee, the president of the public policy organization Demos and a liberal supporter of Clinton’s. She praises Clinton’s debt-free college proposal in particular: “Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him should declare victory on that.”

The trend for the past several election cycles has been for all candidates, Republican and Democratic, to add more detail to their policy proposals, especially as primaries give way to the general election. This year could be a massive exception.

Trump has begun releasing economic fact sheets for his major speeches, and he is promising updated details for his tax plan.

His website now has seven items under its “positions” heading.

Clinton’s “issues” section has 37. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Grinding noises in the Koch machine M ATEA G OLD Colorado Springs BY

T

hirteen years after billionaire industrialist Charles Koch gathered a small group of his fellow libertarian donors in a Chicago hotel to discuss how to promote their economic theories, the network he launched is one of the country’s most potent political forces, with 1,600 staffers across 38 states.

But Koch’s refusal to harness his singular operation in support of the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has put him at odds with some of his wealthiest peers — and forced the network to defend its relevance at the time of its greatest reach.

That tension rippled behind the scenes last weekend as about 400 donors met in Colorado Springs at a luxury resort encircling a manmade lake where white swans paddled in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Between panels extolling free speech and conservative policy victories on the state level, Koch and his top deputies heard out donors worried about the network’s decision to sit on the sidelines.

“I told him that it was very important that Hillary Clinton not get elected,” said Stanley Hubbard, a Minnesota media mogul who said his biggest concern is how she would reshape the Supreme Court.

Koch’s decision not to embrace Trump threatens to alienate some heavyweight network backers who have rallied to the nominee’s side in recent months — megadonors such as Wisconsin roofing billionaire Diane Hendricks and New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, both of whom attended last weekend’s conclave.

“A lot of donors are saying, ‘Why are we spending money on Senate candidates and not trying to beat Hillary?’ ” said one well-connected Republican familiar with the views of major-party financiers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Network officials sought to defuse some of the frustration by

PATRICK T. FALLON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The conservative political donor refuses to back Trump, dismaying fellow big-money contributors announcing that Koch-backed groups would feature the Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton, in Senate campaign ads, tying her policy stances to those of Democratic contenders in battlegrounds states such as Ohio.

And last Sunday, Koch made his most forceful rejection yet of the possibility that he would personally support Clinton in this year’s presidential race, calling such an idea “a blood libel.” But he reiterated that he would not get behind Trump, whose rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims has appalled the 80-year-old chief executive of Koch Industries.

Later, in a closed session for donors in one of the Broadmoor resort’s rose-colored villas, Koch and senior network officials detailed their reasons for staying out of the presidential contest. The 700 major contributors who support the organization were divided over the GOP nominee, they told attendees, and they think the

network will have a greater influence by focusing on Senate races instead of splitting its resources.

But their main argument came down to credibility: If the network lent its weight to bolster Trump, who does not share the organization’s positions on such core issues as free trade and limited government, how could it deny similar support to any other Republican in the future?

The reaction was supportive, according to multiple people in the room. “I think they made a very good case,” Hubbard said.

Still, some Republicans allied with Trump argue that he is being held to a different standard than the presidential nominee in the 2012 election, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who was accepted grudgingly by many on the right and got robust backing from the Koch operation.

“In 2012, many donors, and certainly conservative voters, were unhappy with Romney but were

Charles Koch says he will not support Donald Trump, but many large donors to his network want him to go all-in against Hillary Clinton.

told, ‘We can’t have Obama,’ ” said GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser who is close to the Mercers. “Where is that argument now?

“Mr. Trump has a number of donors within the Koch network that support him, and we welcome more of them in our campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton and her antifree-market policies,” she added.

Koch officials acknowledged that some donors are unhappy but said the organization was going to remain focused on candidates who share its free-market principles.

“Our network brings together hundreds of members with an aligned vision and values to advance a free and open society,” said Mark Holden, chairman of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the network’s funding arm.

“Not surprisingly in a group this large, filled with passionate people with strong opinions on various issues and strategies, sometimes partners disagree. And on occasion, they decide to support additional activities outside of our network.”

The friction comes in the throes of an election in which the Koch operation was aiming to have its largest influence yet. After years of investing millions in a massive voter database and a permanent ground force across the country, the network could boast of helping Republicans sweep statehouses and secure congressional victories in 2010 and 2014.

But this year, its array of nonprofit advocacy groups was poised for something even bigger: to succeed for the first time in getting its favored candidate into the White House.

Instead, the Koch operation scaled back its plans. After originally aiming to spend $889 million in the 2016 cycle, the network is now on track to invest $750 million, with roughly a third — $250 million — financing the policy and political campaigns of groups such as Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners Action Fund, Concerned Veterans for America, the Libre Initiative and Generation Opportunity, officials said.

Koch spent last weekend stress-

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

7

POLITICS ing that politics is just a piece of what the network finances in its efforts to spread free-market principles.

“I recognize reluctantly that politics needs to be a piece of this strategy, but we’ve got to keep in mind, just one piece,” he told donors.

Koch laid out the immediate political priorities: electing likeminded candidates to Congress and cultivating conservative leaders at the state level. So far, the network is active in six competitive Senate races, on its way to spending $42 million on paid ads in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

“To address the current political crisis, our first objective is to stop the worst federal policies, regardless of who is the next president,” Koch said. “And we’ve got to remember that Republican presidents advance a lot of bad policies, just like Democrats.”

A select group of top Republican elected officials were on hand for the gathering, including Sens.

John Cornyn (Tex.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Tim Scott (S.C.); Reps. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), Mike Coffman (Colo.) and Mike Pompeo (Kan.); and Govs.

Matt Bevin (Ky.), Doug Ducey (Ariz.) and Scott Walker (Wis.).

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) addressed the group Monday.

The Washington Post and other news outlets were invited to cover portions of last weekend’s events, on the condition that they did not name donors in attendance without their permission.

At least 300 major donors who had each committed at least $100,000 annually to support the network’s political, policy and educational efforts participated in the events. A hundred other potential contributors also attended.

Longtime donor Frayda Levin, who serves on the board of Americans for Prosperity, said she was not worried that the network would falter if major donors leave over the decision not to support Trump.

“What happens in any network is people come and go,” she said.

“You’ve got to remember: We have come from 2008, where Obama won and they had both houses of Congress. You know how devastated the network was emotionally?

That was much harder. People backed away. It’s true of any movement. It ebbs and flows.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Trump is in a polling bind BY

A ARON B LAKE

D

onald Trump likes to talk about the polls. Usually.

They are not giving him anything good to say this past week.

National polls now show Trump trailing by as much as 10 points, and swing-state polls released late Wednesday and early Thursday paint an equally bleak picture in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire.

Part of the reason for the bad polls could be a lingering bump for Hillary Clinton from the Democratic National Convention at the end of last month. But it’s hard to overstate how awful some of the new poll numbers are for Trump.

To wit, here are four of them:

Americans said they would not be proud to have Trump as president; just 30 percent would be. In other words, there are people who are voting for Trump — at least about 1 in 10 Americans — who nonetheless say they wouldn’t be proud to have him as president.

But Trump needs to get about 50 percent of the vote. And be-

ington Post-ABC News polling, this suggests people have indeed been consuming the various Trump controversies and judging him poorly for them. Americans were similarly critical of Trump’s comments questioning the neutrality of an American judge of Mexican heritage, Gonzalo Curiel, who is deciding his Trump Univer-

Just 15 percent say Trump is “very qualified” to be president.

Among those saying each is simply “qualified” to be president, Clinton also leads 65 percent to 43 percent.

SOURCE: FOX NEWS POLL

1. Just 15 percent say he’s “very qualified” to be president.

This has long been an area where Trump has lagged, but he’s now struggling more than ever and moving in the wrong direction. A Fox News poll released late Wednesday shows that just 43 percent of Americans think Trump is qualified to be president.

But then you drill down and see that just 15 percent — only about 1 in 6 Americans — say Trump is “very qualified” to hold that job.

That’s the worst that number has been for him in any Fox News poll this campaign — down from 17 percent in June and 19 percent in August.

These numbers are worse when you consider how strong Clinton is on the measure. The same poll finds that about two-thirds of Americans — 65 percent — say she is qualified to be president, and 40 percent see her as “very qualified.”

2. Seven in 10 say they wouldn’t be “proud” to have him as president.

This is from a CNN poll released earlier last week. It asked people whether the following statement applied to them when it comes to Trump: “Someone you would be proud to have as president.”

A whopping 69 percent of

cause right now just 30 percent would be proud to have him as president, that means he would need to get about 20 percent of those Americans who wouldn’t be proud to have him as president — 1 in 5 — to vote for him anyway.

3. Sixty-nine percent say he was “out of bounds” in criticizing the Khan family.

Trump supporters and Trump himself will regularly accuse the media of unfairly targeting his controversial comments and of making a mountain out of a molehill. But it’s clear that Americans see Trump’s widely denounced attack on the parents of a fallen U.S. Muslim soldier as being a mountain, not a molehill.

A whopping 69 percent in the Fox poll say Trump was out of bounds in his criticism of Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, after they spoke out against Trump’s Muslim immigration ban at the Democratic convention. Trump suggested that Khan’s wife was not allowed to speak because of their religion and that Democratic speechwriters put words in Khizr Khan’s mouth.

Just 19 percent said his criticism of Khan was acceptable.

Much as with previous Wash-

sity case. After that controversy, 68 percent said Trump’s comments were inappropriate.

4. Two-thirds say he does not have the right experience.

From the CNN poll: 68 percent say Trump does not have the right experience to be president.

This, again, would seem to be a big hurdle for about 1 in 5 Americans to get over. How do you elect a man you don’t think has the right experience for the job? Or who you think is not qualified or would make you proud?

The answer is probably twofold: if the alternative is even less appealing (which Clinton has been for many people at times) and if voters are voting on something other than experience and qualifications .

The question, as it has long been with Trump, is whether enough people who don’t have much regard for his preparedness for the job find another, more important reason to cast a ballot for him.

But winning the election means persuading lots of people who would not be proud of or confident in his presidency to vote for him.

That’s a pitch Clinton won’t have to make. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Cloud of fear shadows Fla. tourism BY

D REW H ARWELL

M

ike Rigelsky, a lawyer in Ohio, last fall planned the Disney World vacation of a lifetime: A week of theme parks in the Orlando sun, including a planned family photo shoot during which his sister would announce her pregnancy.

Yet as concerns mounted over Zika, the crippling virus that health officials say is now spreading by mosquitoes in South Florida, Rigelsky and his sister did what scores of bridesmaids, parents and other vacationers did before them: They canceled, unwilling to risk an infection of Zika, which can have devastating effects on an unborn child.

“A lot of people were hitting the panic button, but we were very clinical about it: We took it from the perspective that we just didn’t know enough,” Rigelsky said. We “had to make a decision: Do you take a risk, however minimal, just for the sake of a vacation?”

With recent reports of Zika infections spreading in the continental United States, including news this past week that 10 more people in an area north of downtown Miami probably contracted the disease from mosquitoes, Florida is finding that tourism, its most vital industry, is faced with a unique threat.

Tourism is the bedrock of the Sunshine State’s economy, and businesses across the nation’s third-biggest state rely heavily on the year-round flocks of travelers to its beaches, theme parks and tourist traps. Florida last year reestablished its dominance as America’s vacation king, becoming the first state to welcome more than 100 million tourists from across the country and around the world.

But the Zika virus presents hazards unlike many the state has encountered: A fearsome, fastmoving, undetectable virus — and an accompanying anxiety, which so far has expanded beyond the virus’s still-minimal spread.

The threat has heated up at the end of Florida’s summer, when the state’s vacation business is at a lull.

But it also comes in the thick of

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Recent reports of Zika’s spread in Miami threaten the bedrock of the Sunshine State’s economy mosquito season, raising alarm about how quickly the virus could spread.

More than 1.2 million Floridians work directly in the state’s tourism industry, and tourism and travel spending in Florida totaled $89 billion last year, state economic data show. But tourism stands at the peak of Florida’s economy: Those dollars filter down into virtually every industry, including hotels, restaurants, health care and housing.

The state has released no data on Zika’s effects on tourism, including trip cancellations or postponements. And the infections so far remain clustered in a squaremile neighborhood of South Florida, 220 miles south of Orlando’s theme-park mecca.

But businesses say they are worried that even the appearance of a dangerous outbreak could shake confidence in the state’s tourism backbone: young families.

“That’s absolutely what’s frightening a lot of businesses here: Tour-

ism is Florida’s major economy, and the service sector is hugely dependent on people coming from everywhere,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “Businesses want to believe it’s very localized in Miami. But on the other hand, they’re realistic — and fearful it’ll go beyond that.”

Disney offered no comment, but Orlando’s tourism agency, Visit Orlando, said the county has “a highly effective mosquito prevention and monitoring program in place.”

Becca Bides, a spokeswoman for Visit Orlando, said. “Orlando has a world-class infrastructure and network in place designed to keep our community and visitors secure, healthy and happy.”

Many people infected with Zika will show few symptoms, or nothing at all, but the virus can have devastating consequences for a fetus. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the unborn infant of a woman infected with Zika during her pregnancy is at

A Miami-Dade County mosquitocontrol inspector uses a fogger to spray pesticide to kill mosquitoes.

Officials said that infected mosquitoes, in the Miami area, had for the first time spread the Zika virus in the continental United States.

greater risk of microcephaly, severe brain defects and other problems.

In recent months, more than 1,650 people across the United States have been infected with Zika, almost entirely while traveling abroad. There is no vaccine against the Zika virus, but travelers to Zika-affected areas are counseled to avoid mosquitoes, wear insect repellent and cover exposed skin.

Some countries have already begun warning against travel to Florida, including England and Ireland, which in recent days told women who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant to “consider postponing their travel” to the state.

Federal officials on July 29 said infected mosquitoes had for the first time spread the Zika virus in the continental United States, pointing to four suspected cases, of one woman and three men, in the Wynwood neighborhood just north of downtown Miami.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) said Monday that the state had identified 10 people — adding to the four on July 29 — who had been infected with the virus, probably from mosquitoes. An official managing the CDC’s Zika response said that the agency expects additional cases of “homegrown Zika” within the coming weeks.

Scott said the CDC was issuing a travel warning, telling women who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant to avoid unnecessary travel to the Miami area where infections were identified.

Scott said he is formally requesting that federal health officials activate an emergency response team to help investigate the spread and aid with mosquito control. But he also rolled out the welcome mat for the state’s tourism customers.

“While I encourage all residents and visitors to continue to use precaution by draining standing water and wearing bug spray, Florida remains safe and open for business,” Scott said. “This year, we have already welcomed a record 30 million tourists and we look forward to welcoming more visitors to Florida this summer. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

9

NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘We have to teach them to stay alive’ N ATALIE P OMPILIO Philadelphia BY

I

t was the fourth time Mike Abdullah was attending the class in basic combat medicine for civilians, and he still shook his head ruefully at the scenes playing out before him.

An 11-year-old boy lay on the ground and tried his best to be limp, dead weight, while a former Navy medic taught those around him the best way to carry him to safety. A female nurse in scrubs showed a group of adults and children how to locate the brachial artery and stop massive bleeding with the pressure of a single thumb. One of her male counterparts watched some of his young trainees wince as he taught them to apply and tighten tourniquets.

Community organizer Abdullah — who lost a brother and four nephews to gun violence — recognized the importance of these lessons, especially for the younger crowd. He just wished they never had to be taught.

“I’m ashamed. I want them to be kids,” Abdullah, 61, said. “A child wants to be a child, and their biggest problem should be going to school and making A’s and learning. But we have to teach them to stay alive.”

The class is part of a Temple University program called Fighting Chance, which takes a practical, if startling, approach to help save lives in crime-addled areas, training residents how to triage victims of shootings and other violent crimes before an ambulance arrives.

Scott Charles, Temple’s trauma outreach coordinator who helped develop the class, said he thinks people intuitively want to help others. He noted the many bystanders who rushed to aid the victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and the lives saved in June during the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where strangers made tourniquets out of T-shirts.

“In Philly, we haven’t had a terrorist incident, but we do have people getting shot every day,” Charles said.

While overall cases of violent

MARK MAKELA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Amid fears of shootings and other crime, a class in Philadelphia teaches city kids how to triage crime are decreasing in recent decades across the country, Philadelphia is one of 26 large U.S. cities — Chicago, Boston, Las Vegas, among others — that have reported an increase in homicides this year. Reports show that through June, there were already 122 murders, up from 115 in 2015.

Charles said that at training sessions, “When we ask people if they know someone who’s been shot or they’ve seen someone who’s been shot, most of them say yes.”

Charles said the classes were prompted by a resident who said he was tired of seeing shooting victims lying bloody in the streets while bystanders either ran away or stood by, sometimes shooting video on their cellphones but otherwise not doing anything to help.

That resident, 66-year-old Wayne Jacobs, said the problem was that “people just don’t know what to do, but if you give them the knowledge and teach them, you empower them.”

Fighting Chance, he says, does

that. “It makes people feel like they’re firemen, gives them that mentality that they can help if they run into the fire,” he said.

About 250 people have received the training so far. Some say they’ve already used what they learned. Some just wish they had received the training earlier.

The simple techniques the program teach can make a huge difference, says Tim Bryan, assistant director of emergency medical services at Temple, who took the lead in developing the class with Charles. Bryan served as a combat medic in the Navy.

“Even if you’re shot in the leg and chest and they only deal with the leg in field, that’s one less pint of blood lost and that’s one more pint in reserve and that buys the trauma surgeon five more minutes,” he said.

On a recent, muggy evening, about 60 children, teenagers and adults sat in Hunting Park Recreation Center, without air conditioning, in North Philadelphia. As

At the Hunting Park Recreation Center in Philadelphia, attendees practice carrying a shooting victim at a Fighting Chance workshop, a new Temple University program that teaches residents of communities with high rates of violence how to provide basic first aid.

many fanned themselves, Bryan began with the standard disclaimer: Personal safety is always the priority, he said, and warned against rushing into the middle of a gunfight to help.

The trainers stressed that not every intervention requires contact. Someone needs to make sure a 911 call occurs. Others can take steps to maintain order around a victim, perhaps clearing a path so emergency vehicles aren’t delayed.

Then the group began cycling through the five stations staffed by Temple University Hospital volunteers. Abdullah watched as Khyzaire Wright, 11, played dead and let others carry him to safety.

“Most of the times it’s the kids who are the victims, or they’re the first on the scene. It’s them on the basketball court playing till the dark of night,” Abdullah said.

After his acting turn, Khyzaire said he would come to the training because “I want to know how to survive. I was always scared.” His 19-year-old cousin was shot and killed in 2014.

“Now I’ll be the one to help, to talk and even touch them to keep them alive,” he said.

Bryan assigned one man the role of victim and told the rest of the group to pretend they were at a block party. All of them began dancing to unheard music.

Then the gunshots — shouts by Bryan — rang out, and the victim fell. Some people froze, others ran, others began shouting. There was initial chaos, but slowly order came to the scene: “I’m calling 911!” one woman shouted. A man on his knees spoke loudly to the victim on the ground, “Come to me! Can you come to me?” Another man tried to keep people at bay while a third pretended to be on alert for the ambulance.

The scene ended with the Temple team applauding the newly trained residents. There was laughter and high-fives and hugs as people went their separate ways, many promising to bring others.

“This is not a war zone,” Bryan said, but a community grappling with a serious violence problem.

“And people are working very hard to fix it.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

In Japan, until death do workers quit A NNA F IFIELD Kashiwa, Japan BY

I

n the United States, there’s no end to stories and listicles and books telling you how to work more productively so you can spend more time with your family or doing the things you love.

In Japan, there’s not even a term for “work-life balance.” What there is, though, is a word for “death by overwork.” It’s “karoshi,” and it’s considered such an inevitable result of Japan’s notoriously grueling work culture that it’s hardly even discussed.

But every year here, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Japanese people literally work themselves to death.

Kiyotaka Serizawa was one of them.

A year ago in July, the 34-yearold killed himself after working crazy hours — 90 hours a week during the last weeks of his life — at a company that does maintenance at apartment buildings.

“His colleagues told me that they were amazed how much he worked,” his father, Kiyoshi Serizawa, said in an interview in their family home. “They said they’d never seen anyone who didn’t even own the company work so hard.”

Japan has a working culture where spending long hours at the grindstone, or in compulsory socializing with superiors after work, is the norm.

It began in the 1970s, when wages were relatively low and employees wanted to maximize their earnings. It continued through the boom years of the 1980s, when Japan became the world’s secondlargest economy and everyone was on the juggernaut.

And it remained after the bubble burst in the late 1990s, when companies began restructuring and employees stayed at work to try to ensure they weren’t laid off.

Still, irregular workers — who worked without benefits or job security — were brought in, making the regular workers toil even harder. Now, no one blinks an eyelid at 12-hour-plus days.

While the basic workweek is 40 hours, many workers don’t put in

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Grueling culture spawns thousands of early-age maladies and job-related suicides each year for extra hours for fear of being given a bad performance evaluation. This has led to the concept of “service overtime” — “service” being Japanese for “free.”

This relentless schedule has led to karoshi — either from a fatal heart attack or stroke or a suicide triggered by overwork — becoming a recognized cause of death. Labor Ministry figures show that 189 deaths were classified this way last year, although experts think the actual number is in the thousands.

Karoshi has long been considered a male problem, but advocates say they’re seeing an increasing number of women dying, almost always by killing themselves.

The striking thing about them is that they’re very young, often in their 20s, said Hiroshi Kawahito, a lawyer and secretary general of the National Defense Counsel for Victims of Karoshi, which fights for victims’ families.

Once a death is classified as karoshi, a victim’s family is enti-

tled to compensation through a kind of workers’ comp system. The number of claims for karoshi-related cases rose to a record of 2,310 in the year ending in March, government figures show. But less than a third of applications are successful, Kawahito said.

Kiyotaka Serizawa’s death was officially certified recently. He was a supervisor responsible for overseeing building janitors in three separate locations in this town northeast of Tokyo.

Struggling to keep up, Kiyotaka tried to resign a year before his death, but his boss refused to accept his notice.

He would sometimes stop at his parents’ house to sleep as he drove between offices. “He would lie here on this couch and go into such a deep sleep that I would come and check on him to make sure his heart was still beating,” his mother, Mitsuko Serizawa, said.

The last time she saw him was July last year, when he came to

Kiyoshi and Mitsuko Serizawa with a portrait of their son, Kiyotaka, a supervisor who killed himself a year ago. In Japan, there is no term for “worklife balance.” There is one for “death by overwork”: karoshi.

collect the laundry he had been too busy to do.

On July 26, he went missing.

Three weeks later, his body was found in his car, not far from a place where he had gone on family camping holidays as a child. He’d burned briquettes in his car and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Although karoshi has been a problem for several decades, it was only 18 months ago that the government passed legislation to try to tackle the problem.

The act sets specific targets, such as reducing the percentage of employees working for more than 60 hours a week to 5 percent by 2020, from the 8 to 9 percent range recorded in the past few years.

Kawahito, the lawyer, said the government’s efforts could have some effect at the margins but that they don’t deal with the fundamental problem. But “there’s nothing that’s stated under this act to penalize companies that break the rules,” he said.

Most Japanese college students go into a company or ministry after graduation, expecting that they will be there until retirement.

“In a country like the U.S., people have more freedom to move to a company that treats you better,” said Kenichi Kuroda, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo who specializes in labor culture. “But in Japan, people tend to stay at one company for life, so it’s difficult for people to move on.”

Japan’s population is aging fast, and the workforce is expected to shrink by at least a quarter by 2050. That means fewer people are available to work, growing the workloads of those who remain.

Koji Morioka, an emeritus professor at Kansai University who is on a committee advising the government on ways to combat karoshi, said eliminating death by overwork means changing the entire working culture in Japan.

“It’s impossible to get rid of karoshi alone,” he said. “We need to change the overtime culture and create the time for family and hobbies. Long working hours are the root of all evil in Japan. People are so busy they don’t even have the time to complain.” n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Brexit may put scientists in a crucible

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND K ARLA A DAM

Canterbury, England

B

ritain has been a powerhouse of discovery since the age of science began.

Newton, Darwin, Crick?

They parted the curtain on gravity, evolution and DNA. Now comes Brexit, and to use a nonscientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out.

Since the vote in June to leave the European Union, leaders of Britain’s scientific academies are making dire predictions about what could happen to research and innovation here.

Damage to British research, the scientists warn, could be among the cascade of unintended — and largely unappreciated — consequences of the vote to exit the bloc.

The researchers worry that Britain will not replace funding it loses when it leaves the E.U., which has supplied about $1.2 billion a year to support British science, approximately 10 percent of the total spent by governmentfunded research councils.

A whiff of panic is in the labs.

Worse than a possible drop in funding is the research community’s fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and that Britain’s universities will find themselves isolated.

British research today is networked, expensive, competitive and global. Being part of a panEuropean consortium has helped put Britain in the top handful of countries, based on the frequency of citations of its scientific papers.

Student bodies, especially graduate students in master’s and doctoral programs, are filled by young scholars from the continent.

The community is asking: Will the foreigners continue to be welcome in British laboratories and will British researchers continue to be partners with collaborators from abroad?

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, said a third of the research staff at leading universities in Scotland are E.U. passport holders.

PETER NICHOLLS/REUTERS

British researchers worry that leaving the E.U. will cut funding and isolate them from global partners “They are all very twitchy right now,” Burnell told a science and technology committee in Parliament last month. “If good opportunities show themselves elsewhere in Europe, they will be off.”

The new prime minister, Theresa May, vowed that preserving the country’s innovation was “a priority” and that British negotiators would focus on scientific collaboration in any future talks in Brussels.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that headhunters may already be circling. Analysts with the Conference Board of Canada advised that Canadian universities try to lure talent across the ocean: “With Britain’s wealth of talent facing an uncertain future after Brexit, we can reasonably expect them to consider their international options.”

About 15 percent of lecturers at British universities hold E.U. passports (and are not British). At the highest-ranked universities, that number rises to 20 percent.

Here in Canterbury, the Univer-

sity of Kent calls itself “the U.K.’s European university,” with outposts in Athens, Brussels, Paris and Rome. The vice chancellor, Dame Julia Goodfellow, said of her location in Kent, “It’s an hour to London but almost as quick to Paris or Brussels. It just makes sense to look outside Britain.”

Europeans make up 18 percent of the school’s graduate students and 22 percent of the faculty. The university pumps almost $1 billion a year into the local economy.

Harmonie Toros, 42, is a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, where her speciality is international conflict resolution. She is FrenchTurkish, and her husband is an Italian academic also at the university.

She said Brexit has hit her professionally and personally.

“Professionally, I would be planning to apply for a European Research Council grant now. It would be the right thing to do in my career.

But it is a huge undertaking, 90 pages, will take a month and a half

A student works in a cancer laboratory at Oxford University.

Leaders of Britain’s scientific academies are making dire predictions about what could happen to research and innovation, which relies on collaboration with scientists from abroad.

to do. And my chances of getting it are between 5 and 10 percent.”

She’s worried those odds may now have fallen.

“Do I put a month of my time or more into an application I will have even lesser chance of getting?” she asked. “There are quite a few of us in this kind of position asking, ‘Is it really worth it?’ ” On the personal side, Toros said that for the first few weeks after Brexit, she would eye people on the streets and wonder how they voted.

The county of Kent came out strongly in favor of leaving the union.

“You look at neighbors, and you know some of your neighbors voted ‘leave,’ ” she said. “My entire work is on dialogue. I’m not going to stop talking to people because they voted ‘leave.’ That would be crazy.”

Vid Calovski, president of the Kent Graduate Student Association, said, “We’re scared the vote will change what makes the university such an eclectic community.”

Research today is more collaborative than ever, scientists say.

Anne Rosser is a professor at Cardiff University in Wales and a joint director of the Brain Repair Group there. Her focus is Huntington’s disease, a rare neural disorder. With partners at eight other labs, the consortium is searching for ways to transplant stem cells into damaged brains.

“You can’t do this kind of research in one country,” Rosser said. Asked whether Brexit could hurt her research, she said, “It could certainly slow down what we are doing.”

“In science, the last thing you want is isolation,” she added.

The scientific journal Nature pointed out that much of the anxiety in British science is so far based on anecdotal evidence — as well as mere emotions — which are unreliable for proving that British innovation is going to take a whack. Regardless, Nature reported that Britain’s science minister, Jo Johnson, has set up a specific email address (research@bis.gsi.gov.uk) for researchers to send him stories of lost opportunities. n

FIND THE BOMB! GOOD BOY! At Lackland Air Force Base, an elite canine corps is training to be the new face of security

I

n San Antonio, the din of awakening trainees pierced the quiet of a new day.

The noise traveled uphill, to the parking lot of the main office, and penetrated the windows of a van carrying guests down to the yard. The commotion intensified as the vehicle drew closer to the barracks. As the passengers unloaded, a staff member handed out earplugs.

The residents barked, whined and pawed at the concrete walls and chain-link fencing. The winter classes of the Transportation Security Administration’s Canine Training Center at Lackland Air Force Base, which instructs up to 150 recruits, were ready to serve. They just needed someone to let them out.

“Comin’ out,” a trainer hollered while leading a German shorthaired pointer outside.

One by one, the instructors exited the kennels with their charges tight at their heels.

“Coming by, coming by,” said another staffer, gripping a Belgian Malinois.

The march of dogs continued: Weimaraners, German shepherds, Dutch shepherds, springer spaniels and retrievers of varied coat lengths and colors.

“Stopping,” shouted an instructor holding a black Labrador.

He guided the animal into an air-conditioned unit set on wheels — a mobile dog motel.

The tag clipped to his door read: Bruno.

The cubbies quickly filled up, and the trailers rattled off. The barking subsided.

Calm returned. continues on next page

On a mock train car in San Antonio, a Labrador retriever demonstrates a training drill in which dogs sniff for explosive materials.

PHOTOS BY BEN SKLAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY Iraq and Afghanistan wars. All handlers attend a 12-week basic-training course, where they meet their partners-in-security.

“It’s essentially a big game,” Neffenger said, “but a game that has dangerous consequences if it’s not played right.”

The agency has also expanded its areas of oversight. Travelers are one of the newest fragrances. Previously, the dogs focused on static objects: cargo, luggage and vehicles. Five years ago, the agency created a passenger-screening canine division. The animals added ambulatory targets to their hunt for dangerous material, such as the businesswoman hustling to her gate or the backpacker gliding through the checkpoint line.

“The dogs are a visible deterrence factor and a disruption,” Neffenger said. “They also calm the whole screening environment. Animals are inherently fascinating to watch.”

from previous page

DOGS, DOGS EVERYWHERE. Roaming through cruise ports, train stations, courthouses and college campuses. Appearing at Super Bowls, marathons and holiday parades. Inspecting vehicles in airport parking lots and planes on the tarmac. Sniffing luggage and legs in security lines. In public places across the country, dogs are becoming as ubiquitous as security cameras and as visible as X-ray machines. The dog, all wet nose and whiskers, is the new face of security.

“There is no better overall detector of explosives than a dog’s nose,” TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger said. “Dogs work an environment like no technology can. They are versatile, mobile and very accurate.”

John Ensminger, a lawyer and consultant on legal issues involving working dogs, said U.S. police departments employed about 5,200 dogs in 2000; the current figure has probably doubled. Since 2011, the number of explosives-detection canines with the TSA has grown from about 800 to 1,000.

The Penn Vet Working Dog Center, which opened on Sept. 11, 2012, in Philadelphia, focuses on research, breeding and training detection dogs, and advises law enforcement and federal agencies on how to best exploit their canine resources. Ninety percent of its graduates are employed in such fields as search and rescue; narcotics, explosives and bedbug detection; and diabetes alert. The other alumni are pursuing therapy support and ovarian cancer detection. Cindy Otto, executive director of the center, envisions dogs branching out to cinemas, schools and private security firms.

Could a dog have even stopped the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando?

“Explosives-detection dogs will often detect pistols and other small weapons,” Ensminger said. “Assuming that the shooter had entered at a door when a dog was working there, it is quite likely he would have been stopped.”

In these anxious times, dogs could have a twofold effect on potential terrorist attacks: deterrence and detection.

“It’s time to start thinking about deploying these dogs in different ways,” Otto said.

Will the new world order resemble a Planet of the Dogs, where humans pass through a phalanx of canine noses to enter event venues?

Do dogs, which have stood by humankind’s side for at least 15,000 years, represent the next generation of scientific innovations?

“We refer to dogs as real-time mobile detection technology,” said Craig Angle, co-director of the Canine Performance Sciences Program at Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama. The program, which competes for government contracts and grants, developed methods for dogs to find improvised explosive devices with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and patented Vapor Wake technology. The researchers are currently studying virus detection: Imagine a canine identifying Ebola on an individual entering the country.

“The dog is the gold standard,” said Paul Waggoner, also a co-director at the Alabama

center. “We are not in our lifetime close to emulating a dog’s nose.”

THE TSA’S NATIONAL EXPLOSIVES DETECTION Canine Team Program, which the Federal Aviation Administration founded in 1972, is the government’s second-largest dog-training program. (The Defense Department ranks first.)

The Lackland-based facility prepares dogs and handlers for service with the TSA, the Federal Protective Service, the Coast Guard and Amtrak.

Nearly 1,000 six-legged teams safeguard more than 100 airports, mass transit stations and cargo-hold sites. The agencies assign the dogs to spots with the most people and greatest potential risks. In May, the TSA moved dogs to some of the busiest airports, in Chicago, Newark and Atlanta, to handle the surge in summer travel.

About 230 canines graduate from Lackland annually, and Neffenger has secured funding for additional teams next year. The agency will need to acquire and train the dogs, expand its chest of toys and tennis balls, and sign up more handlers. TSA fields candidates internally and from the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies and private-sector organizations. No prior dog experience is required, but many résumés include explosives-detection work during the

TOP: Kristopher Knight instructs Caki, a German shorthaired pointer, in a facility meant to simulate an airport baggage area.

BOTTOM: Instructor Andrew Baxter works with Caki as he demonstrates the sniffing procedure on people pretending to wait at an airport.

FROM THE OUTSIDE, LAB 7 AT LACKLAND resembles a warehouse that might house secrets — a fleet of world-dominating drones, perhaps.

The featureless exterior, absent windows and signage, did not yield any clues. No sound escaped the heavy metal door. But once inside, any preconceived notions of covert operations evaporated when a pup named Bator bounded for a tennis ball, which released a mousy squeak.

The canines start explosives-detection training with basic skills courses held in controlled settings like Lab 7. Over 35 to 37 weeks of instruction, they will progress to advanced-level challenges staged in mock environments — fuselages, railway cars, airport terminals, a parking lot — constructed on the base. In the final phase, they will embark on field trips to real venues with real dangers, such as malls and the San Antonio airport.

“We’re preparing them for the bad guy,” said Diana Thomas, a training instructor.

On an early March morning, the dogs at Lab 7 were about three weeks into their training — still grunts. The exercises were rudimentary, the canine version of playing with wooden alphabet blocks. The instructors started by planting the material at snout level.

Chad Perraut took his trainee, Dory, into an adjoining room furnished with airplane seats.

The Munsterlander snuffled the orange cushions. She followed a methodical flow — seat by seat, row by row. She scooted up onto a seat and pushed her nose under the cushion. She hopped back down and sat.

“Woo-hoo, there it is!” Perraut exclaimed in a who’s-a-good-doggie voice. “You’re going to save the world!”

Perraut next tested Dory in a series of chambers rife with distractions, such as stacked furniture and idling strangers. In a faux hotel room, Dory uncovered hazardous material stashed in a nightstand. In Rooms 2 and 4, she exited without a positive whiff (not finding is as crucial as finding). In Room 3, she exposed an item tucked inside a credenza.

“She’s a sweetheart,” Perraut said as Dory attacked her Wubba dog toy. “She’s going to be the face of TSA.” Over the next few months, she would set her

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

15

COVER STORY nose loose in planes, trains and cars. If all went well, she could sniff her way through a career that could last through middle age, in dog years.

“I look at these animals like pro athletes,” said Rob Grauel, a lead training instructor.

“They have to keep practicing and practicing.”

In the “terminal,” the sprawling space pulsated with the frenetic energy of a real airport.

Classic-rock tunes blared over the speakers.

Two actor-passengers chatted softly. Individuals would suddenly bolt out of their seats. An information board posted arriving and departing flights. The 10:05 a.m. to Dallas was canceled. There was no shortage of verisimilitude.

In spite of the hubbub, Caki moved as though he were inhabiting his own soundproof bubble.

The German shorthair pinned his focus on a woman in a purple shirt. She strutted off, but Caki wouldn’t let the perpetrator — or the explosives concealed beneath her pant leg — get away.

The team repeated the exercise with a slight modification: This time, Caki would work the security line. The passengers snaked their way to the ticket counter; each person passed Caki without incident. Then the woman in purple approached. Busted again.

CANINES ARRIVE ON THE JOB WITH THE proper equipment. They breathe through the center of their nostrils and smell from the sides via an olfactory express lane. They possess a chamber in their nasal cavity that collects odors like a perfume bottle. Their olfactory bulb, the neural tissue responsible for processing scents, is about 40 times as large as a human’s. They also know how to communicate.

“Vultures may be great,” said Otto of Penn Vet WDC, “but they don’t care.”

Otto says dogs smell in color, yet a nose is not always enough. The animals need a companion who acts as coach and cheerleader.

“It’s not as simple as you wait for the dog to sit and then you pay him,” said Sasha Garcia, a handler at the San Jose International Airport.

As the connection grows between dog and handler, the duo learns to transmit a secret language, like spouses or twins. While patrolling an area, the handler must read the animal’s cues, which often manifest as slight behavioral changes, such as raised ears or a closed mouth.

But the partnership is not equal; the dog’s hunches usually trump the human’s.

“There’s a saying: Trust your dog,” said Annemarie DeAngelo, training director at Penn Vet WDC. “Dogs don’t lie.”

As an example, DeAngelo recalled a case from her time as a New Jersey state police officer. The other officers on the scene had told her that a suspicious tractor-trailer was clear of drugs. Her partner didn’t agree. Buster uncovered 1,200 kilograms of cocaine.

“Any challenge you place in front of them, they are capable of doing,” she said, “if you explain it to them properly.”

In Australia, authorities rely on dogs to uncover illegal shipments of firearms attempting to enter the country. In the United States, AMK9, a private company specializing in canine security, has Vapor Wake dogs capable of expos-

KLMNO WEEKLY

sider keeping him and planned to train with a new canine. Then her heart flipped.

“I can’t give this dog up,” she said. “He’s never been a dog.” She paused as the emotion welled.

“I’m the only life he’s known for the last eight years. Just because I don’t treat him like a pet, he’s still my best friend and he’s loyal to me. I know that I am responsible for him.”

After her decision to adopt, she told her husband he could now feed and walk the dog.

ABOVE: German shorthair Bator sniffs for explosives in a training lab that familiarizes dogs with smells and working with a handler. BELOW: Dory, a Munsterlander, eyes a dog toy her handler threw after she alerted him to the smell of explosives.

ing weapons hidden on bodies and inside bags.

Auburn University’s team is looking beyond present dangers to future menaces. The researchers want to learn how dogs can identify emerging threats, both naturally occurring and cruelly triggered.

“Too often, security-related technologies, especially the use of dogs for detection, are only of interest in the moment of a tragedy or an immediate threat,” said Waggoner, the program co-director.

Otto noted a separate wave of innovation: liberating the dogs so that they can work more independently. The handler, minus the leash, will direct the animal via cameras and radio.

“The handler will have less influence on the dog and will communicate remotely,” she said.

For now, however, the handlers are bound to their partners — in more ways than one.

Garcia, the San Jose handler, spent eight years working with Truck, a Hungarian vizslaLabrador mix. She sent out clear signals that the dog was not a household plaything. Truck slept in a kennel outside, and Garcia hid him in the garage when friends visited so they would not baby him. She banned her husband from pet-care duties.

After Truck retired at age 8, she didn’t con-

“The dogs are a visible deterrence factor and a disruption. They also calm the whole screening environment.

Animals are inherently fascinating to watch.”

Peter Neffenger, TSA administrator

SOME UNINFORMED OBSERVERS MIGHT bristle at the idea of a working dog’s life. They might assume that the dog would prefer to spend the day lounging on a sheepskin bed or frolicking with friends in the park instead of putting in grueling hours at the office. But countless canines live to labor.

“It can be hard for the average dog owner to see stuff like that,” said Kenny Lamberti, a companion animal expert at the Humane Society of the United States.

Among animal rights advocates, the central concern is quality of life. The animals also require frequent interaction with humans.

Hugs and behind-the-ear scratches are good for the head and heart.

“It is important for the dog to have a family life and socialization,” said Vicki Berkowitz, Penn Vet WDC’s associate director. “They need to be a well-rounded dog.”

Sentiments aside, the dogs are an expensive investment; TSA budgets $25,000 to $36,000 per dog, including purchase, training and upkeep.

Most U.S. agencies and departments draft dogs from Old World breeders, who have a longer history and deeper experience with bloodlines than their Yankee counterparts. But over the years, the heightened demand has elevated the cost and diminished the quality. Otto hopes to organize a summit this fall to discuss creating a national breeding program.

“We see the threat of not having control of our own national security program,” she said.

The TSA carefully monitors the health and wellness of its pack. Once a month, the dogs and handlers — 650 pairs in early March — meander down to the Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland AFB for heartworm pills and flea and tick prevention treatments. Every six months, they return for a more thorough physical.

The 32-“bed” institution is as sophisticated as an infirmary for people. A dozen clinical specialists tend to most maladies. The rehab department is even outfitted with underwater treadmills and therapy pools.

Andres Lopez, a San Antonio airport police officer, had dropped Cora off for a CT scan. The Belgian Malinois suffered from an achy leg.

Lopez fidgeted during the wait. To pass the time, he showed a guest photos on his phone.

There was Cora seated in a field of bluebonnets and the pair posing in front of the Alamo.

“There’s no off button,” he said. “She’s like a rabbit. She’s always on the go. Even with her leg bothering her, she still wants to work.”

Until Cora’s recovery, Lopez was down a partner. And the world was a little less safe. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY

EDUCATION

J OE H EIM

C

ursive writing was supposed to be dead by now.

Schools would stop teaching it. Kids would stop learning it. Everyone would stop using it. The Common Core standards adopted by most states in recent years no longer required teaching cursive in public schools, and the widespread reaction was succinct: good riddance.

But like Madonna and newspapers, cursive has displayed a gritty staying power, refusing to have its loop-de-loops and curlicues swept to the dustbin of handwriting history. Just last month, Louisiana passed a law requiring that all traditional public schools and public charter schools begin teaching cursive by third grade and continue through 12th grade.

Arkansas legislators passed a law mandating cursive instruction last year. And 10 other states, including Virginia, California, Florida and Texas, have cursive-writing requirements in their state education standards.

The cursive comeback is championed by a mix of educators, researchers, parents and politicians who lament the loss of linked-letter writing and cite studies that learning cursive engages the brain more deeply, improves fine motor dexterity and gives children a better idea of how words work in combination.

And some also just like the way it looks.

“I think it’s really discouraging to get a note from a college graduate that is printed like a secondgrader” wrote it, said Beth Mizell, the Louisiana state senator who introduced the cursive-writing bill in her state.

The Republican lawmaker said she acted when she heard from a surveyor who told her he couldn’t find young people who could read the notes on old land documents.

A grandmother, Mizell said she was shocked to find out that students were no longer learning cursive in school.

“It seemed we had made a decision that was arrogant on our part that we didn’t think these kids needed something that we had taken for granted, that was our way of communicating for generations,” she said.

Those pushing for a return to cursive cite studies that show it benefits students in many ways, from improving their spelling and

don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for The writing don’t write epitaph for cursivestyle just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaphendures for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w despite for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y laptops epitaph for cursive just yet.and don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi emoji write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epita just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t w for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just y epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursive just yet. don’t write epitaph for cursi

Don’t write an epitaph for

cursive just yet

comprehension to helping them generate ideas and compose them more easily.

“There’s a myth that in the era of computers we don’t need handwriting. That’s not what our research is showing,” said Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor who has co-authored studies on the topic and followed the same children every year for five years to track their development. “What we found was that children until about Grade 6 were writing more words, writing faster and expressing more ideas if they could use handwriting — printing or cursive — than if they used the keyboard.”

She said the connecting strokes in cursive help children speed up handwriting, making it easier for them to compose thoughts: “It helps get your words down on paper more quickly.”

But Berninger is not an absolutist on cursive. She recommends a minimal amount of daily instruction that is less focused on drills than acquiring the basics.

Although it was widely taught in schools in the early 20th century, cursive’s dominance has been in jeopardy ever since. First, it was threatened by printed handwriting, and then it fell further from favor as typewriters and personal computers gained widespread use. More recently, it’s the smartphone, on which indifferent thumbs batter out texts and tweets on mini keyboards or screens.

Many who want cursive back yearn for the artistry of the handwriting style. But if the early 20th century marked the golden age of cursive, it was less about beautiful penmanship than it was about dis-

cipline and conformity, said Tamara Thornton, a University at Buffalo historian who tackled the subject in her 1996 book, “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History.”

“Learning cursive has never been just about learning how to express yourself in writing,” Thornton said. “In the early 20th century, it’s about following models and suppressing your individuality.”

Handwriting drills at the time were compared to military drills, with the idea that an emphasis on repetition and perfection would keep students in line and lead to standardization. Thornton sees a correlation between cursive’s waxing and waning fortunes and the nation’s political and cultural climate.

“We get very interested in cursive when we feel that our morals are in a state of decline, all hell is breaking loose, people are doing whatever they want,” Thornton said. “And I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch that the sort of people who believe in the standard model of the family get very nervous when we depart from the standard models of the cursive script.”

Like many school districts across the country, D.C. Public Schools leaves the decision on whether to include cursive as part of the curriculum up to individual principals and teachers.

“I trust our teachers to teach kids what they need to know without mandating every little thing,” said outgoing D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who is retiring in October after a fiveyear run leading the system.

As he prepares to enter fifth grade this fall, Sean Beilke, 10, of

Bethesda, Md., has been learning to write in cursive, something that is not taught in the Montgomery County public school he attends.

“When I first saw it in first grade, I thought: ‘That’s neat. I’d like to try that someday,’ ” Sean said. “It’s kind of fancy.”

Sean’s parents both work in high-tech, but they wanted their sons to be able to write in cursive because they believe a foundation in handwriting could affect their ability to innovate.

“There’s just a huge difference in the creative part of the brain when you are writing and when you are typing,” said Sean’s mother, Molly McCarthy, who works for Microsoft. “I really support our public schools, but I feel like we’re doing a huge disservice by not teaching handwriting and cursive.”

For Jan Olsen, the renewed push for more cursive instruction is good for business. Olsen is president of Handwriting Without Tears, a company she founded more than two decades ago in suburban Washington that has 150 employees and has become one of the leading handwriting and cursive curriculums in the country.

Many of the school districts that still teach cursive use Handwriting Without Tears materials.

Olsen worries about the loss of cursive’s signature contribution: the signature.

“Handwriting is meant to be personal,” she said. “That’s why a signature is a signature. Because nobody writes exactly like anybody else.”

But Thornton, the handwriting historian, isn’t swayed by the signature argument.

“People do like to express their individuality, but they can do it in many ways,” she said. “For all I know, people are coming up with their own emoji and maybe that will replace the signature.”

The debate over whether to teach kids cursive will probably not go away soon.

Lawmakers in Indiana and Washington introduced bills this year to return cursive to classrooms. Texas, where third- and fourth-graders are required to learn cursive, is considering extending instruction to second-graders.

Even as keyboard-fueled communication grows its dominance, educators, politicians and parents continue to evaluate the handwritten word and its relevance to young students. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

17

TRAVEL

KLMNO WEEKLY

A monumental trip to 47 national parks BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

T

his month, the National Park Service marks its 100th anniversary. Randal Olson, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to mark the occasion by creating a map of the shortest possible road trip through all 47 national parks in the continental United States.

The trip spans just a hair under 14,500 miles, from Acadia National Park in Maine to the Redwood National and State Parks in California. Olson estimates it would take about two months to run the circuit, depending on your tolerance for long driving days.

The trip omits places that are under the management of the Park Service but are not property considered a national park, such as national monuments (sorry, Devil’s Tower) and national historic sites (sorry, Ford’s Theatre).

The difference between a national park and a national monument can come down to a simple

The journey covers every one of them in the continental U.S. — if you’re up for the 14,500-mile drive matter of politics; the creation of a national park requires an act of Congress, according to the Sierra Club, while a president can declare a national monument without Congress under the Antiquities Act. Many of our most wellknown national parks, such as Grand Canyon and Death Valley, started out as monuments.

Calculating the shortest path through every national park in the Lower 48 is no easy task.

Some may recognize this as an instance of the “traveling-salesman problem” that looms large in computer science: Given x number of points,

RANDAL OLSON

what’s the shortest route you can take that passes through all of them?

In an earlier version of this map, Olson computed the shortest trip that would pass through one landmark in each of the Lower 48, plus one in the District of Columbia and a second site in California (for 50 landmarks).

Other creative applications have included trips to all of America’s top-rated breweries, and a 215,000 mile trip through all 37,000 Zip codes in the continental United States. And of course, the data-driven way to solve every “Where’s Waldo” book.

Of course, the likelihood of anyone actually taking one of these mega-trips is slim. But the latest national-parks trip seems quite a bit more practical than most, considering how many people plan epic road trips out West to visit multiple parks in a few weeks’ time.

If you’re planning one of these trips for August, give Olson’s map a gander before you hit the road. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

An inside view of Silicon Valley’s self-importance and greed

DAVID RAMOS/GETTY IMAGES

N ONFICTION

T CHAOS MONKEYS Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

By Antonio García Martínez Harper. 515 pp. $29.99

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARGARET S ULLIVAN

he blood-chilling email from Mark Zuckerberg arrived in every Facebook employee’s inbox at the same time. Its subject line: “Please resign.” As Antonio García Martínez tells the story in his book “Chaos Monkeys,” the Facebook founder was furious. He was looking for an employee, identity unknown, who had leaked information about a new product to the tech news media, and he wanted his minions to know that he regarded this employee’s action as the basest kind of betrayal. Although the story sounds apocryphal, it has the ring of truth for those who have experienced the overblown world of Silicon Valley. García Martínez heard it soon after he joined Facebook in 2011. For him, Zuckerberg’s extreme reaction became the basis of “a parable.” The lesson: At Facebook, secrets are many and they must be kept; employees forget that at their peril.

What happens in Silicon Valley has affected — or maybe infected — every moment of modern life. But what do we really know about the Northern California subculture that lurks behind our collective inability to put down our iPhones?

Mostly, we know the caricature: Silicon Valley is where CEOs wear hoodies and where nerdy coders have been able to get filthy rich without any social skills.

García Martínez wants to give

us the skinny and fill in the gaping holes. In this tell-all, he dishes the inside information he gathered as a former Wall Street strategist who put a 21st-century spin on Horace Greeley’s advice and went West to join the digital gold rush. He started a digital ad company, AdGrok, and began living the Silicon Valley life — where founding a start-up, he observes, can amount to just a warm-up for a job interview at Facebook or Twitter. Nearly every start-up, he writes, had the same unsavory ingredients: “Backroom deals negotiated via phone calls to leave no legal trace, behind-theback betrayals of investors or cofounders, seductive duping of credulous employees so they work for essentially nothing.”

What Tom Wolfe did for New York society and George Plimpton did as goalie for the Boston Bruins, García Martínez tries to do for the digerati. Scattered, fast-paced and overwritten, this memoir of his Silicon Valley adventures doesn’t approach that rarified literary quality — but it does entertain.

As the founder of his start-up and later a product manager at Facebook and an adviser at Twitter, he exposes the Valley subculture from the inside. He recalls his “on-boarding,” which aimed to turn new employees into disciples.

As a Facebook newbie, he received a lecture: Forget anything you learned working elsewhere. The

all-in approach, García Martínez writes, was “designed precisely as the sort of citizenship oath that new Americans took in front of a flag and a public official.”

And, he reports, it worked: “Even in a culture brimming with irreverent disdain, I never heard anyone utter a word of cynical trollery about Facebook and its values, either at on-boarding or during my years of work there.”

That was partly because nobody dared, since disloyalty was considered treason — and a firing offense — and partly because they’d all drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. As García Martínez explains, “Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo.”

There’s a whiff of Hunter S. Thompson in García Martínez’s frenzied pace and bad-boy exploits, though his prose is inferior.

But who can object when the insights are so pointed and the details so juicy?

García Martínez’s Silicon Valley life began when he left his staid Goldman Sachs job to join a digital-ad start-up. Soon, he left that company to conjure one of his own. With much drama along the way — hostile takeover attempts, backstabbing rivals and financial

sleight-of-hand — he eventually skipped to Facebook’s ad team, only to get forced out and land as an adviser to Twitter.

Along the way, he became one of the “chaos monkeys”: tech entrepreneurs who destroy everything in their path on their way to untold wealth and the next digital brainstorm — Uber, Airbnb, Netflix — that will change the world. The term “chaos monkeys” also refers to the kind of testing digital products must endure and how well they survive random mishaps.

“Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center,” García Martínez writes. “He yanks cables here, smashes a box there, and generally tears up the place.”

Although this would have been a better book at 300 pages, instead of more than 500, it’s still perceptive and funny and brave. García Martínez doesn’t seem to worry about permanent excommunication from the digital congregation.

And his vantage points — from a Goldman Sachs desk to the 40-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay where he now lives — couldn’t be much better.

The resulting view of the Valley’s craziness, self-importance and greed isn’t pretty. But it’s one that most of us have never seen before and aren’t likely to forget. n Sullivan is The Washington Post’s media columnist.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A dire road to save their autistic child

From aristocrat to guerrilla vanguard

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

A MY M AC K INNON

n the opening pages of Carolyn Parkhurst’s fourth novel, “Harmony,” there’s a line so jarring, so utterly discomfiting that in the hands of another writer it might feel gratuitous. But in Parkhurst’s deft treatment, “Harmony” becomes a story of our time, a compassionate treatise on how society judges parents, how parents judge themselves and how desperation sometimes causes otherwise rational people to choose irrational lives.

The story begins with 11-yearold Iris in the back seat of the Hammond family car. She’s on a road trip with her parents, Alexandra and Josh, and sister, Tilly, headed to a new life at an off-thegrid camp in the New Hampshire woods. There, they’ll join several other families who also have children with challenges.

You will probably be lulled into believing that you’re being led by Iris, a sweet and typical child whose bothersome older sister is susceptible to vulgar and sometimes violent outbursts. Yes, technically, the girl is narrating, but soon Parkhurst proves she’s in control of the story and her unsuspecting audience. Only six pages in comes that line that casts readers into the angst-ridden lives of the Hammond family. It’s a bold risk with a satisfying payoff.

In her 13 years, Tilly has been diagnosed with what her mother calls a series of false starts: obsessive-compulsive disorder and the standard childhood go-to, ADHD. So it’s almost with relief that Alexandra learns Tilly falls somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Her relief doesn’t last long. Alexandra discovers that there’s no destination for her little girl who’s compelled to lick restaurant floors.

There may have been lulls, periods in which Alexandra let her guard down enough to believe that the OT, PT and cognitive-behavior therapy were benefiting Tilly. But then the most recent in a series of Tilly’s schools calls to say she has become a source of danger to her-

self and others and that perhaps she should be home-schooled. Or worse, institutionalized.

Desperate and out of options, the Hammonds sell off all of the comforts of their modern life with its questionable vaccines, processed foods and nonspecific toxins to find hope. It manifests itself in Scott Bean, an enigmatic parenting expert who treats children on the autism spectrum with painful observations and tender care.

But not always, as Iris soon discovers and the adults refuse to see.

Perhaps Scott Bean and his seemingly cult-like ways can save Tilly. Perhaps he can save them all.

Told primarily from the points of view of Iris and Alexandra, “Harmony” has a strong plot moved forward by Iris’s keen observations. If the story is largely predictable, it sometimes zags when you expect it to zig. Yet Iris tells the real story, the one the adults hide from themselves and each other. She observes their failures with startling insights that sometimes reveal Parkhurst pulling the strings; channeling an authentic child’s voice is ambitious.

It’s in Alexandra’s chapters that we find the soul of this novel. Here, Parkhurst cements herself as a writer capable of astonishing humanity and exquisite prose and whose wisdom parents and their judges should heed. “ ‘I am,’ you think, and ‘I want.’ And you have no idea how either sentence ends,” may at first seem to be a simple turn of phrase to conclude a chapter, but it’s what came before the line that demands a moment of self-reflection. All of Alexandra’s musings are too brief and end with a gasp of understanding and universal commiseration.

Perhaps the best part of this novel is the potential in those chapters. They hold the promise for Parkhurst to be bold with her next work, to throw off all expectations and conventions, and realize what could be her best work yet. n MacKinnon is the author of “Tethered.”

T HARMONY

By Carolyn Parkhurst Pamela Dorman/ Viking. 278 pp. $26.

AMERICAN HEIRESS The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst Doubleday.

371 pp. $28.95.

l

REVIEWED BY

G ARY K RIST

he photograph is unforgettable: that attractive, somewhat diffident young woman — the victim, we thought, of a savage political kidnapping — standing in front of the flag of her captors, clearly one of their number now, with a sawedoff M1 carbine in her hands. For parents of the World War II generation, the image must have been terrifying. What more apt symbol could there be of the increasingly sinister tide of radicalism that was turning their children against them in the 1960s and ’70s?

The abduction and subsequent radicalization of Patricia Hearst is one of the most bizarre but illuminating episodes of that tumultuous era of protest (now more than four decades in the past), and in “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin retells the story with a full-blown narrative treatment that may astonish readers too young to remember it themselves. Toobin’s subtitle is no exaggeration: The “wild saga” that began with Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army on Feb. 4, 1974, would strain credibility in anybody’s novel. But somehow, in the context of real-life California in the big bad ’70s, it was just another day in dystopia.

The SLA was a case in point.

Hardly an army, it was a small cadre of young white radicals led by a charismatic but unstable black ex-convict, Donald DeFreeze. The group was willing to bomb, rob, carjack, kidnap and even murder, without being overly fussy about the identity of the target.

The kidnapping of Hearst, granddaughter of legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, began as another hazy act of provocation. The SLA operated under the “foco theory,” based on the notion that a minor guerrilla action can spark a rebellion by the masses. Taking an aristocrat hostage seemed in line with this philosophy. But Hearst turned out to be anything but a convenient symbol of the oppressor class. She proved

she could despise the fascist insect just as vehemently as they did.

Hearst’s exploits as a fugitive outlaw lasted about a year and a half before her capture Sept. 18, 1975. In those months, she actively participated in two bank robberies, a shootout, a carjacking and a series of bombings. The fact that Hearst and the other SLA members were able to elude capture for so long is testimony not only to FBI impotency (few people would even speak to agents who came to their doors) but also to the remarkable willingness of so many ordinary citizens to hide and assist a fringe political group intent on violence.

At one point, DeFreeze and two SLA disciples even went door to door in San Francisco, seeking allies among total strangers. Amazingly, they found some, and even those who refused to help them never reported the encounters.

In “American Heiress,” Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a senior legal analyst at CNN, spins this complex history into an absorbing and intelligent page-turner. I wish he’d provided more extensive endnotes and that he’d done less marveling at the SLA’s ineptitude and ideological confusion and more explaining of why its message found such a sympathetic audience in the mid-’70s.

But his overall assessment of Hearst’s behavior is valid.

As Toobin sees it, Hearst (who refused to cooperate in the publication of this book) was a rational actor. She embraced her captors’ cause not because she was too frightened to resist (as her lawyers later argued in court) but because cooperation with them was in her best interests. So too was cooperation with law enforcement after her arrest, when she readily turned against her former cohorts to lighten her sentence. As Toobin writes, “In the closet, she became a revolutionary; in the jail cell, she became a Hearst.” n Krist’s most recent book is “Empire of Sin.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Donald Trump knows nothing about sacrifice GHAZALA KHAN Khan’s son, U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. He said he would like to hear from me. Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.

Donald Trump said I had nothing to say. I do. My son Humayun Khan, an Army captain, died 12 years ago in Iraq. He loved America, where we moved when he was 2 years old. He had volunteered to help his country, signing up for the ROTC at the University of Virginia. This was before the attack of Sept. 11, 2001. He didn’t have to do this, but he wanted to.

When Humayun was sent to Iraq, my husband and I worried about his safety. I had already been through one war, in Pakistan in 1965, when I was just a high school student. So I was very scared. You can sacrifice yourself, but you cannot take it that your kids will do this.

We asked if there was some way he could not go, because he had already done his service. He said it was his duty. I cannot forget when he was going to the plane, and he looked back at me.

He was happy, and giving me strength: “Don’t worry, Mom. Everything will be all right.”

The last time I spoke to my son was on Mother’s Day 2004. We had asked him to call us collect whenever he could. I begged him to be safe. I asked him to stay back, and not to go running around trying to become a hero, because I knew he would do something like that.

He said, “Mom, these are my soldiers, these are my people. I have to take care of them.” He was killed by a car bomber outside the gates of his base. He died trying to save his soldiers and innocent civilians.

That is my son. Humayun was always dependable. If I was vacuuming the house and he was

home, he would take the vacuum from my hand and clean the house. He volunteered to teach disabled children in the hospital how to swim. He said: “I love when they have a little bit of progress and their faces, they light up. At least they are that much happy.” He wanted to be a lawyer, like his father, to help people.

Humayun is my middle son, and the others are doing so well, but every day I feel the pain of his loss. It has been 12 years, but you know hearts of pain can never heal as long as we live. Just talking about it is hard for me all the time. Every day, whenever I pray, I have to pray for him, and I cry. The place that emptied will always be empty.

I cannot walk into a room with pictures of Humayun. For all these years, I haven’t been able to clean the closet where his things are — I had to ask my daughterin-law to do it. Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

ABOVE: Khizr Khan, father of deceased Muslim U.S. soldier Humayun Khan, at left, shows the Constitution as he speaks at the Democratic convention, criticizing Donald Trump. His wife, Ghazala Khan, stands by him. BELOW: Humayun Khan’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself.

What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?

Donald Trump said maybe I wasn’t allowed to say anything.

That is not true. My husband asked me if I wanted to speak, but I told him I could not. My religion teaches me that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes. Husband and wife are part

of each other; you should love and respect each other so you can take care of the family.

When Donald Trump is talking about Islam, he is ignorant. If he studied the real Islam and Koran, all the ideas he gets from terrorists would change, because terrorism is a different religion.

Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Stop moving the Games to new cities PAUL GLASTRIS is editor in chief of Washington Monthly.

Those of us who enjoy experiencing the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” of the Olympic Games could probably do without one particular emotion: the fear that the Games, which began Friday in Rio de Janeiro, will be an operational disaster. So far, the headlines do not inspire confidence. Armed robbers taking a German TV crew’s equipment. “Uninhabitable” residential facilities for athletes. Marathon swimmers being told not to open their mouths while competing in sewage-contaminated Guanabara Bay. The 2004 Olympics in Athens were preceded by similar worries right up until the day they began.

In the end, those Games were a great success. So there’s reason to hope the same will happen in Rio. Still, the ill-preparedness creates real risks. And those risks are part of a larger set of problems that have long dogged the modern Olympics and that derive from a single, avoidable source: the International Olympic Committee’s insistence on picking a different city to host each Games.

There is nothing sacred about this policy. It began because the founder of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin, after holding the first competition in Athens in 1896, decided to have the next one in his native Paris. Since then, the IOC has grown accustomed to the clout that comes with choosing Olympic sites — a prize that

nations compete for almost as hard as their athletes do in the Games themselves. This power inspired decades of corruption by IOC officials, culminating in the bribery scandal over the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Despite reforms since then, allegations of corruption persist.

The policy has also led to allowing authoritarian regimes to host the Games — from Hitler’s Berlin to Vladimir Putin’s Sochi.

Putting on a modern Olympics is a massive undertaking. Doing it with no prior experience taxes the management capacities of even a wealthy, sophisticated city or country. The Atlanta Olympics’ finance chief once said that her job was to “create a Fortune 500 company from scratch, then take it apart at the end.”

The pop-up nature of the enterprise drives up the costs of

construction and operations, according to a study released last month by the University of Oxford. The study found that every Summer and Winter Olympics from 1960 to 2016 experienced massive cost overruns averaging 156 percent.

These overruns are related to another resource that is inevitably squandered when the Games get moved around: human capital. The hard-earned expertise a city derives from hosting the Games can’t be put to use again in the same way if that city won’t be hosting another Olympics four years later.

Then there are the insanely wasteful infrastructure projects that host cities typically build and that are often of little use after the Games leave town. The beautiful stadiums and training facilities that Athens constructed in 2004 have mostly sat idle since — though some of them now house refugees.

The billions of dollars Greece borrowed to build these facilities helped tip the country into its current crushing financial crisis.

All of this waste, risk and corruption is utterly unnecessary.

The ancient Greeks held the Olympics in the same wooded sanctuary on the Peloponnese for a thousand years with no evident complaints in the extant literary record. We should do something

similar for the modern Olympics: pick a city or country to be the permanent host — one each for the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Any number of places could do.

But Greece is the obvious choice, at least for the Summer Olympics.

It has an undeniable historical claim. And the extra tourism money that Greece would receive would help it pay off its debts.

The current Olympic siteselection system has become so obviously ridiculous that countries that might otherwise host the Games are thinking twice about bidding. Two years ago, Norway pulled out of contention for the 2022 Winter Olympics because of the expense and revelations about the entitled demands of the IOC — including specially designated highway lanes for IOC members. Last July, despite efforts by the IOC to help host cities reduce costs, Boston dropped its bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics after a statefinanced report concluded that the only sure way for a city not to lose massive amounts of money would be for the Games to return to that city every four years. A permanent home for the Olympics is such a practical idea that it’s possible to imagine its garnering widespread support — except, of course, within the IOC. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

Why less homeownership is good CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog

You might have missed it amid the recent Campaign 2016 turbulence, but there’s been a major development on the economic front. The U.S. homeownership rate has just fallen to its lowest level since the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1965.

During the second quarter of this year, only 62.9 percent of U.S. households were owner-occupied residences, down from the all-time high of 69.2 percent reached in the fourth quarter of 2004.

Contrary to entrenched conventional wisdom, the decline of the homeownership rate is good news.

Here’s why: Thanks to recovering real estate values, today’s homeowners have the same equity in their property — roughly 58 percent — that the record-size cohort did in late 2004, according to the Federal Reserve.

Ergo, there’s now more equity, on a per-household basis; current homeowners’ tenure is that much more sustainable and secure.

“They are now more able to weather an economic disaster,” says Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist of Trulia.com, the online home-listing service.

To put it another way: The United States has more homeownership, in economic terms, than it did when the homeownership rate, a measure of mere legal ownership, was

higher. Accordingly, the economy should also be less vulnerable to another real estate shock.

We’re still not back to the rocksolid days of 1983, when the homeownership rate was a hair under 65 percent and equity hit an all-time high of 70 percent.

But the current situation approximates a happy ending to an unhappy story: the brutal real estate shake-out that impoverished and destabilized so many families across America.

To be sure, the reconcentration of home equity, while positive for those who own homes and for the overall stability of the economy, is regressive with respect to wealth distribution. This is especially so because African Americans and Hispanics remain less likely to own homes than whites.

But the solution to that is not to try to pump up

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

homeownership through subsidies in the name of expanding opportunity — as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did.

The typical instrument of government home-buying aid, a federally backed low-moneydown mortgage, is not the road to wealth. By definition, it confers little or no equity. In economic terms, it’s roughly equivalent to renting.

Yes, unlike a renter, someone who takes out a home mortgage might eventually get rich, if the house’s market value rises above the purchase price. Then again, unlike a renter, he or she might get wiped out in a market correction.

Our national return to Square One, homeownership-rate-wise, is thus an opportunity to rethink wealth-building strategies for people of modest means. We should de-emphasize house buying and explore alternatives that do not require people to bet on a single illiquid asset class — or make it harder to relocate in pursuit of opportunities, which is another drawback of home buying.

This, in turn, implies an even deeper ideological shift away from the age-old American belief — dating to Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “small landholders are

the most precious part of a state” — that widespread homeownership produces thrift, civic virtue and “the stable communities that are the backbone of this country,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) put it in 2013.

Leave aside the fact that mass extension of low- or no-downpayment home loans, with and without federal backing, arguably destabilized communities. Other countries’ modern experience suggests no simple connection between a high homeownership rate and the “positive externalities” often attributed to it.

Germany and Austria, to name two solid democracies, have much lower homeownership rates than the United States, 53 percent and 57 percent, respectively.

But when Europeans own a house, they really own it — it’s a sustainable situation, for individuals and society. Europe has reached this point, for the most part, without special tax breaks, government-backed mortgage securitization or other U.S.-style market manipulations.

Americans, by contrast, have been goosing homeownership rates with subsidies for the past 50 years — and, as the latest data confirm, we have literally nothing to show for it. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

HIPAA privacy rules BY

C HARLES G . K ELS

Shortly after the recent massacre at an Orlando nightclub, the city’s mayor declared that the White House had agreed to waive federal privacy rules to allow doctors to update victims’ families. News of the waiver was widely reported, but as the Obama administration later clarified, both the mayor and the media were “simply mistak­ en.” No waiver was granted because none was needed. The confu­ sion amid the tragedy in Orlando underscores widespread miscon­ ceptions about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. Here we shed light on a handful of myths that bedevil doctors and patients alike.

IMAGE SOURCE/GETTY IMAGES

MYTH NO. 1 HIPAA prohibits communicating with patients’ loved ones HIPAA sets national standards to safeguard the privacy of individuals’ health information.

As in Orlando, it is often perceived as a barrier to effective communication between doctors and patients’ loved ones.

In most cases, the privacy regulation permits doctors and nurses to talk with a patient’s family, friends or caretakers.

When the patient is present and clearheaded, the law allows hospitals to share relevant information with loved ones as long as the patient does not protest. This can be done through the patient’s agreement or acquiescence or based on a doctor’s professional judgment that the patient does not object.

When the patient is either unavailable or incapacitated, doctors can also exercise professional judgment to determine whether to disclose information.

The only time the law truly forecloses the sharing of such information sharing is when the patient is present, lucid and tells doctors not to — and even then, patients’ wishes can be overridden if they pose a serious and imminent threat to health or safety.

MYTH NO. 2 Same-sex-marriage rights are critical to equality under HIPAA. Before the rumors of a HIPAA waiver in Orlando were quelled, various news outlets reported that it marked a “victory for gay rights.” Waiving the privacy laws was portrayed as a prerequisite for sharing information with same-sex partners.

In reality, HIPAA enables discussions with anyone the patient allows. Providing information to family and friends under HIPAA is linked to their involvement in the patient’s medical affairs, not their relationship’s legal status.

But spouses — unlike parents vis-a-vis their minor children — are not automatically presumed to have access to patient records.

It is up to the patient to designate them or doctors to involve them as clinically appropriate.

MYTH NO. 3 HIPAA provides extra protections for mental-health information.

HIPAA does not distinguish between physical- and mentalhealth information, nor does it provide extra protections for the latter. The drafters of the privacy regulation acknowledged that many states had laws specifically guarding records related to mental illness and “other

stigmatized conditions” but declined to follow their lead.

The rare instance in which HIPAA affords greater protection to sensitive information involves “psychotherapy notes,” which exist only for therapists’ personal use and must be kept apart from patient charts to retain their designation. Any information of wider utility — such as treatment or diagnosis — is excluded from protections.

MYTH NO. 4 HIPAA stops doctors from reporting threats.

Mass shootings involving mentally ill suspects often prompt discussion about what doctors should have reported.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, one of Obama’s executive actions was to clarify that “no federal law” prohibits health-care professionals from reporting threats of violence to police. HIPAA allows doctors to give warnings when they think that patients present a serious and imminent threat to themselves or someone else. In such cases, doctors can disclose necessary information to anyone in a position to avert the danger.

When patients make threats or pose a high suicide risk, doctors often have a “duty to warn” because of state laws, court

decisions or professional ethics rules. HIPAA does not in itself impose such a duty, but it explicitly permits health-care professionals to take action “consistent with” these standards.

MYTH NO. 5 HIPAA is the reason for medical privacy.

Privacy was a core value in health care long before HIPAA was promulgated in the early 2000s.

The Hippocratic Oath admonishes doctors to keep secret what they “see or hear” from patients.

In practice, HIPAA provides a federal floor of privacy protections, not a ceiling. It defers to state laws that are “more stringent” or protective of patient rights. Neither does HIPAA override other federal laws.

Even where HIPAA allows health information to be shared, it almost never requires it. Doctors and hospitals must still be cognizant of other applicable laws that impose stricter limitations.

Even if the law disappeared, the legal precepts and ethical norms that long preceded it would remain in place — as would many of the frustrations cited by HIPAA’s most ardent detractors. n Kels is a senior attorney at the American Medical Association and a judge advocate in the Air Force Reserve.

24

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 2016

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.