The Washington Post National Weekly - October 15, 2017

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY ‘Hire American’? Tough job.

Mexican workers are vital to one landscaper’s business — because they’re the only ones who last. PAGE 12

Politics Officials’ travel draws critics 4

Nation Fitbits become police tools 8

5 Myths Gun violence 23

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

2

The Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide Fall 2017 & Winter 2018 Edition lley Wenatchee Va

Visitor Guide

FREE

Fall 2017 and Winter 2018

New This Year!

The Wenatchee World has just published our new 100-page Fall/Winter Visitors Guide, filled with activities, events, places to visit and hundreds of things to do over the fall and winter months.

Featuring

n u Leavenworth lley u Lake Chela Wenatchee Va Basin an u Columbia u The Okanog The Methow

Whether you enjoy hiking, skiing, snowboarding, wine-tasting, touring, shopping, or just day-tripping in interesting places, you’ll find plenty of great ideas and places to visit in the North Central Washington region.

Covering the areas of the Wenatchee Valley, Lake Chelan, Leavenworth, The Methow, The Okanogan and the Columbia Basin, even long-time residents will find new places to discover in our region.

Pick up a copy of the new Fall/Winter visitor guide at The Wenatchee World office or enjoy a digital copy at wenatcheeworld.com/vg/fall17/

wenatcheeworld.com

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Trump sets up Congress to fail BY

A ARON B LAKE

P

resident Trump has gone after many norms and institutions in American politics, often seeming to want to undermine them in the name of strengthening himself with his base.

Now he’s setting up Congress to fail. And if it does, you can bet he’ll gladly saddle it with the blame for everything bad that happens.

Two major decisions came to light late this past week: First, Trump’s decision to end federal cost-sharing subsidies for Obamacare and, second, his decision to effectively kick the Iran deal to Congress. With those moves, Trump has added immeasurably to the legislative branch’s burden in the days and months ahead. And as with his decision on the DACA executive order exempting from deportation the children of those in the country illegally, he’s basically putting the ball in Congress’s court and letting it figure things out.

Or, perhaps more likely, not.

That is at once a justifiable strategy and a hugely fraught one. Congress, after all, is the body that is supposed to make laws — not the president. But it is also a body that for a very long time has been riven by gridlock and infighting, and Trump is now giving it more to do in the next few months (with deadlines) than it has accomplished in years.

The Iran deal decision doesn’t void the nuclear agreement, but it does give Congress a couple of months to figure out how to proceed. Trump is forcing Congress to add caveats that will either strengthen it or lead to its demise.

The Obamacare decision will end about $7 billion in annual subsidies for health insurers to cover lower-income patients, in what amounts to an unprecedented and po-

KLMNO WEEKLY

tentially game-changing shock to the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. This adds to the growing list of ways in which Trump is helping usher in Obamacare’s demise, and it puts huge pressure on Republican and Democratic senators currently negotiating a bipartisan deal to solidify Obamacare.

GOP voters and blame for health-care bill failure If Congress is unable to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, who do you think is most to blame?

Blame Democrats 50% Blame Republicans 20% Blame Trump 6% All equally 16% Source: Marist College

As The Post’s Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin note, Trump previously resisted the urge to take this step, because “administration officials warned him such a move would cause an implosion of the ACA marketplaces that could be blamed on Republicans.”

That’s entirely possible, and it certainly is the big risk Trump is taking in making this decision. But we also have plenty of evidence that the only voters Trump cares about — the Republican base — are quite willing to blame Congress rather than Trump for bad outcomes. A Marist College poll conducted in July, when Republicans were still trying in vain to replace Obamacare, showed 50 percent of Republicans would blame Democrats if it didn’t pass, despite Republicans having

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 1

majorities in both the House and Senate. Only 20 percent said they would blame Republicans, while only 6 percent blaming Trump.

We’ve seen before how Trump has been more than happy to blame Congress — up to and including congressional Republican leaders — when things go wrong. He targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) when the Senate failed to do what the House did and pass its own version of an Obamacare replacement. He also blamed McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) for the debt ceiling “mess” that eventually led Trump to cut a deal with Democrats.

All along the way, Congress’s numbers have plummeted back near historic lows, thanks to Republicans souring on it. And so have the poll numbers of Republicans who ran afoul of Trump, including McConnell. Trump’s numbers, meanwhile, remain largely static. It’s clear which side is winning this battle for the GOP base right now, and it’s decidedly Trump.

If Trump has shown anything, it’s that he loves to lay blame and is prepared to lay it upon just about anybody else. Lurking behind all of that is his apparent desire to consolidate his own power and make himself the only thing that his supporters can rely upon. He has no loyalty to the Republican Party, and I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that he’s threatening to rip it apart.

This very much could play into that. In laying these things at Congress’s feet, Trump could either force Congress into an unprecedented amount of action in the months ahead, in which case he’ll probably take credit for whatever results they produce, or usher in its failure, in which case he’ll simply blame them and make life even more hellacious for the party he commandeered in 2016. n

© The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Jesus “Chuy” Medrano, owner of CoCal Landscape in Denver, gives a safety orientation to new workers, many of whom came from Mexico on visas. Photograph by NICK COTE for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Cabinet officials’ travel is scrutinized

BY D REW H ARWELL, L ISA R EIN AND J ACK G ILLUM

T

he Trump administration, one of the wealthiest in modern U.S. history, is facing widening criticism over travel expenditures among some of the billionaires, budget hawks and business executives who head federal agencies.

Inspectors general have opened at least five investigations into charter or military flights by Cabinet officials amounting to millions in federal spending.

Their decisions to veer away from cheaper commercial flights have led to criticism from Democrats in Congress and government accountability groups about a culture of entitlement in Trump’s administration.

New examples of questioned expenditures include those of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who this month turned over his travel records under pressure from House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.).

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces an expanding investigation into his travel by private jet.

The drumbeat of controversy over Cabinet travel threatens to undermine a core pillar of Trump’s relationship with his base — his promise to “drain the swamp” of elite Washington, rein in waste and represent the working class.

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin recently backed out of a congressional trip to Europe, The Washington Post learned, after criticism about another international outing, which combined official travel with sightseeing and a Wimbledon tennis event.

And Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke faced new criticism about his travel — often accompanied by his wife, who is managing a Republican campaign in Montana — which included stops at political fundraisers and donor events.

Adding to the costs are travel accommodations for Cabinet aides, guests and security details,

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Controversy threatens to undermine promise to ‘drain the swamp’ who accompany secretaries on all trips. Thus far, officials have assumed no financial responsibility for passengers on their flights.

Tom Price, a wealthy Georgia physician who resigned at the end of last month as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, ran up charter costs of more than $500,000 but pledged a $51,887 check to reimburse the government for his seats. An HHS spokesman told The Post that Price “was under no obligation” to pay but that this was “him wanting to make a gesture.”

Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who traveled with Price several times, is unlikely to repay the government for her travel cost, the White House said, because she was a guest.

To deal with fallout, the White House has imposed a new approval process for charter jet travel by

non-national-security Cabinet members. The protocol will be supervised by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.

White House approval for military flights, which have long required special permission, came under question when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ran up at least $800,000 on such trips, including a flight with his wife to visit the nation’s gold stash at Fort Knox. A report by the Treasury watchdog said the flights were legal based on Mnuchin’s schedule and need for secure communications but poorly justified.

White House spokesman Raj Shah called the use of military planes for Cabinet and other essential travelers “sometimes an appropriate and necessary use of resources.” One indicator of how the administration has tried to curb expenditures, he said, is the sharp reduction of what are

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is one of several top Trump administration officials facing additional scrutiny into travel by private or military jet. Also under increased scrutiny are the energy, interior, treasury and VA secretaries.

known as military air White House support missions — travel the president must request.

The White House said Trump officials took 77 military flights through Sept. 19, compared with 94 flights taken during the first eight months of President Barack Obama’s administration.

Some government accountability groups argue that the Cabinet behavior reflects the president’s own disconnect with government frugality, evidenced by his weekend trips to his private golf clubs and Mar-a-Lago, as well as the costly travels by Trump family members that must be monitored by government employees and Secret Service agents.

“The tone is set at the top,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that recently called for an investigation into

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

5

POLITICS Trump appointees’ travel. “When you have a president who is visiting his private resorts every weekend at great cost to taxpayers, it is not surprising that Cabinet members are using private jets to get to standard meetings.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has defended Trump’s trips as decisionmaking tools.

“Every weekend that he’s traveling, no matter where he is, the president is working,” Sanders said. “This is a president that is committed to helping move his agenda forward. And certainly I think that those weekends have been very successful in doing that.”

‘Drain the swamp’ Cabinet leaders have historically been background players, pushing their boss’s agenda. Trump’s appointees have joined in his vow to control spending by imposing employee travel restrictions, cutting programs and leaving positions open.

But in their own travel, many have swapped the cramped cabins of commercial airplanes for private jets, or have traveled across Denmark, France, Italy and the Caribbean while mixing official duties with vacations and political events.

Air travel costs for Mnuchin, a millionaire former Goldman Sachs partner and Hollywood financier, included eight approved military flights this year to destinations such as Italy, West Virginia and Kentucky, according to documents released by Treasury’s inspector general.

Perry has taken six trips on government or private planes, mostly to visit national labs in Washington state, Idaho and New Mexico; nuclear sites in Ohio and Kansas City; and a Pennsylvania coal plant. While the estimated $56,000 in trips all received ethics approval, many of the destinations are served by less-expensive commercial airlines. It is unclear whether Perry’s schedule could accommodate commercial travel.

Zinke, a former Montana congressman and Navy SEAL commander, flew for official business but spoke in Las Vegas to a campaign donor’s hockey team, spent a few weekends near his homes out West and attended political fundraisers from Montana to the Virgin Islands. His wife, Lola, of-

JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ten accompanied him on the trips.

An Interior spokesman said the department “has always and will always work to ensure all officials follow appropriate rules and regulations when traveling.”

Reps. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Grace F. Napolitano (D-Calif.) wrote recently to the EPA’s inspector general that the Cabinet trips are “symptomatic of a troubling culture that appears to have swept through this administration.”

Travel by Trump and the Cabinet has highlighted tensions among agencies and the White House over contradictory federal spending messages from Republican leaders.

After The Post reported that Shulkin, an Obama administration holdover, mixed business and pleasure during a July outing to Denmark and England with his wife and three agency officials, administration officials familiar with White House thinking said they had warned Shulkin’s staff about paying for such a large delegation. The optics were complicated by down time in the secretary’s schedule and the taxpayer-supported presence of his wife.

A former VA official with knowledge of the situation disputed that account, saying the White House was informed and did not weigh in.

A VA spokesman did not respond to questions about the visit, which is under investigation by the inspector general.

Recently, Shulkin and his wife

backed out of a trip with the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee to three European countries.

A draft itinerary for the Italy leg obtained by The Post showed the couple staying at an unspecified hotel in Venice, located about an hour’s drive from an Army base he was expected to visit after an evening of personal time the night before.

But VA spokesman Curt Cashour on Oct. 6 said Shulkin no longer plans to go. VA House Committee spokeswoman Tiffany Haverly said in an email that the trip itinerary had “not been finalized” and declined to provide details.

Paths of frugality Mnuchin was one of the first to come under fire, scrutinized for a $26,900 flight to Kentucky aboard an Air Force Gulfstream jet for a trip that coincided with a Fort Knox viewing of the Aug. 21 solar eclipse. He was not the only one watching the sky: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue that same day attended a “listening session” with farmers in Charleston, S.C., a city within the path of totality, and then watched the celestial event from Francis Marion National Forest. He tweeted eight times and thanked Forest Service officials. A Perdue spokesman did not respond to requests for details.

Mnuchin’s chief of staff, Eli Miller, earlier this year flew to Palm Beach aboard the private jet of Nelson Peltz, a hedge-fund billionaire who supports Trump’s

Air travel costs for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a millionaire former Goldman Sachs partner and Hollywood financier, include eight approved military flights this year to destinations such as Italy, West Virginia and Kentucky, according to documents from Treasury’s inspector general.

KLMNO WEEKLY

proposal to slash tax rates for the rich. The Treasury Department said ethics officials approved Miller’s acceptance of “a seat on a plane from a friend.”

Some members of Trump’s Cabinet have shown more restraint.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a 79-year-old billionaire, has flown commercial coach on several international flights, including for trade missions across Asia, department officials said. He has also flown several times domestically through a private jet-share fleet, paying for the flights himself, his spokesman said.

Zinke’s travel is sometimes a family affair. His wife, Lola Zinke, who has become a frequent presence at the Interior Department, has traveled on several trips official and political, according to participants. The Zinkes also joined a congressional trip to the Arctic.

An Interior Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Lola Zinke “has never taken a flight at the expense of the department” and pays for her meals and transportation in the instances “she occasionally meets her husband while he is traveling.” The department declined to provide receipts or other details about the travel.

Questions about the secretary’s mixing of official travel and political appearances became more pointed after Lola Zinke signed on in September as campaign manager for Troy Downing, a Republican candidate for a Montana U.S. Senate seat.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao prefers to fly commercial, according to her spokesman. But she took small Federal Aviation Administration jets seven times, including to New York and Paris, when her office said it was cost-justified or fit her schedule better.

Mary Peters, who served as transportation secretary under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009, said using the FAA fleet may prevent public servants from connecting with regular people.

“We needed to experience the same thing American people were experiencing on commercial flights,” she said. “We felt we needed to be on the planes with them and travel the way most Americans travel.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Republicans struggle to unite on taxes

BY D AMIAN P ALETTA AND J OHN W AGNER

Harrisburg, Pa.

P

resident Trump took his case for massive tax cuts directly to the public this past week, even as Senate Republicans struggled to unite behind the proposal ahead of a key Senate vote that could derail his entire approach.

Trump was in Pennsylvania on Wednesday touting what he asserts are the tax cuts’ benefits for the working and middle classes, making grand claims about the additional dollars that workers would see if tax rates were cut for corporations.

“You’re going to make more money, you’re going to do better than ever before, and we truly admire you,” Trump told a group of truckers. “You are our heroes.”

Trump’s speech came just one week before Senate Republicans must decide whether to pave the way for his tax plan. They are planning to vote on a budget that would allow the tax cuts to raise the deficit by as much as $1.5 trillion over 10 years. At least one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is expected to oppose the budget resolution, as he has traditionally voted against budgets that do not eliminate the deficit.

Republicans control only 52 of the Senate’s 100 seats, and they need at least 50 votes to advance the budget, as Vice President Pence would vote to break any tie.

And if the House and Senate don’t pass matching budget resolutions, the Senate cannot approve tax cuts with a simple majority.

That would require them to seek help from Democrats, who so far have mostly opposed the construct of the GOP tax plan on the grounds that it would largely benefit the wealthy.

With Paul’s support considered unlikely, Republicans can afford to lose at most one more vote if they hope to move the budget forward. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) opposed the White House’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and his support for the budget is unclear.

JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS

As a critical budget vote nears, the GOP is once again on the brink of derailing a Trump promise Meanwhile, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) has been ill and hasn’t cast a vote since midSeptember. Republicans hope he will be back by this week, but that is uncertain. And Trump’s public and messy name-calling exchanges with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) in recent days have also raised concerns within the GOP about whether his support for the budget will waver.

The budget resolution would essentially allow the tax-cut plan to add $1.5 trillion to the debt over 10 years, and Corker has said he wants assurances that it would actually reduce the deficit, not increase it. If Corker decides to buck GOP leaders on the Senate budget resolution vote, it could imperil the entire tax plan.

“It’s not something they are taking for granted,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist who is president of the American Action Forum, referring to Senate Republican leaders’ assessment of the upcoming budget vote. “They are worried.”

Until recently, Senate Republicans were touting progress on the budget deal as a sign of their party’s ability to unify, after party deficit hawks found a compromise with those pushing for the large, supply-side tax cuts to move the bill through committee.

But the budget’s prospects in the broader Senate again have become clouded.

The White House and Republican lawmakers are under a tremendous amount of pressure to pass the tax-cut plan, having come up short on other priorities.

The House already has passed a budget resolution that is very different from the one Senate lawmakers will consider this week, but leaders have expressed confidence that they can work out their differences.

For Congress, Trump also offered a blunt message about his plan: “All I can say is, you better get it passed.”

“They will. I know,” he added.

Corralling Senate Republicans for the budget vote is just one

President Trump touts tax reform in Harrisburg, Pa., on Wednesday. Trump has been pitching the Republican taxcut plan in states that he won in 2016 and where there are vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection next year.

part of the process that the White House is trying to pin down.

Trump is also trying to convince supporters of the plan’s benefits even though many details remain unresolved. He has said that a large tax cut will speed economic growth and lead to more investment and raise wages, with workers seeing an additional $4,000 in pay over eight years.

Trump based this assertion on findings from his Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Kevin Hassett, who has a contrarian view from other economists and says corporate tax cuts primarily help workers, not companies.

Democrats are skeptical of Hassett’s claim, arguing that the plan, as currently designed, would add to the debt and primarily help the wealthy. Some have asked how Trump could claim it would raise wages by $4,000 over eight years when specifics of the plan haven’t been released.

In a nod to the sway some Democrats might ultimately have on the tax plan’s fate, Trump has been pitching it in states that he won last year and where vulnerable Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2018.

Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (Pa.), a member of the Finance Committee, is one of 10 Democrats in the chamber who are up for reelection next year in states that Trump won. Casey did not attend Wednesday’s Harrisburg event.

Trump’s tax message is also being reinforced on the ground by operations set up by the Republican National Committee in 19 states, including Pennsylvania. The RNC, buoyed by robust fundraising this year from small donors, has targeted state party leaders it believes will be key to the GOP’s fate in next year’s midterms as well as Trump’s reelection bid.

Beyond preparing for elections, the field operations set up by the party are working to promote Trump’s tax initiatives with campaign-style tactics, including door knocking, phone banks and house meetings, RNC staff say. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Foreign diplomats eye an enigma

BY K AREN D E Y OUNG AND G REG J AFFE

A

fter nearly nine months of the Trump administration, many of America’s closest allies have concluded that a hoped-for “learning curve” they thought would make President Trump a reliable partner is not going to happen.

“The idea that he would inform himself, and things would change, that is no longer operative,” said a top diplomat.

Instead, they see an administration in which lines of authority and decision-making are unclear, where tweets become policy and hard-won international accords on trade and climate are discarded. The result has been a special kind of challenge for those whose jobs are to advocate for their countries and explain the president and his unconventional ways at home.

Senior diplomats and officials from nearly a dozen countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia expressed a remarkable coincidence of views in interviews over the past several weeks. Asked to describe their thoughts about and relations with the president and his team as the end of Trump’s first year approaches, many described a whirlwind journey beginning with tentative optimism, followed by alarm and finally reaching acceptance that the situation is unlikely to improve.

“We have to adjust to this,” said a second diplomat from a different continent.

Their concerns echo those expressed increasingly in public by Republican lawmakers such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has spoken of administration “chaos” and last weekend described the White House under Trump as an “adult day care center” where the president’s behavior must be managed.

Frustrations and fears, building for months, have grown especially intense in the past few weeks after Trump’s bellicose taunting of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his decision to ask Congress to

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

While some are enjoying better relations, many feel resigned about the confusion and challenges amend the international nuclear deal with Iran.

Although foreign diplomats are restrained by the nature of their jobs from speaking out about the policies and politics of their host governments, it is not unusual for them to trade tips and gossip in the early days of a new administration when information is in short supply and it is unclear which top officials have the most sway with the leader of the free world.

But their perplexing dealings with the Trump administration have become an obsession of late for ambassadors.

“It’s always an undercurrent when we get together,” a third senior diplomat said. “We’re always asking each other, ‘Who do you deal with inside the administration?’ ‘How do you handle difficult situations?’ ” “When somebody actually sees Trump, people immediately flock around: ‘What did you see?’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘Was Ivanka there?’ . . .

‘What kind of look was on Kelly’s face?’ ” he said, referring to White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. It

is, he said, a kind of Kremlinology.

Some diplomats choose to focus on the positive. Estonian Ambassador Lauri Lepik, whose country’s fears of a resurgent Russia on its eastern border are practically existential, praised Vice President Pence’s summer stop in his country. It helped reassure NATO allies after Trump, on an earlier trip to Brussels, failed to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to alliance mutual defense.

“That was a highly appreciated visit,” Lepik said. “The administration was engaged, and we were in constant contact.”

Others, some of whom had difficulty with the Obama administration, have found a new closeness with the United States. Saudi Arabia, after enduring President Barack Obama’s human rights criticism and policy objections, is now a favored Trump nation.

Newly arrived Hungarian Ambassador Laszlo Szabo, whose government hews to the nationalistic right, said bilateral trade “is improving nicely and constantly.” His prime minister, Viktor Orban, was

President Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Diplomats have said that Trump’s policymaking poses a challenge.

the first European leader during last year’s U.S. campaign to say a Trump presidency would be better for Europe — a view widely derided by his European partners.

Afghanistan’s Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib, whose government was alarmed by the Obama administration’s unfulfilled plans to withdraw the vast majority of U.S. troops from the country, said he and his government had regular high-level access to senior Trump administration officials this summer as the debate over the war heated up. “I was at the White House on a daily basis,” he said.

The access did not always bring clarity, especially when it came to figuring out how competing fiefdoms operated inside the West Wing. In August, Afghanistan paid $120,000 for a three-month contract with the Sonoran Policy Group, a lobbying firm with close ties to the White House, to gain “a better understanding of how the inside of the Trump administration works,” Mohib said.

The majority of those interviewed were far more critical and said they would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. Several spoke of the difficulty of determining where power lies within the administration and how decisions are made. “We are still not sure how the equilibrium in this administration is playing out in terms of who is responsible for what,” a senior European said.

“Is it the White House? The State Department? Is Defense calling the shots? . . . I’m being clinically analytical, not chiding. This is the situation. We are guessing, sometimes.”

A diplomat whose country has close and cordial relations and no obvious problems with the administration said his government is nonetheless exploring more extensive trade and diplomatic ties with Asia.

“At the beginning,” he said, Trump was “a fascination.” As the months have passed, he said, “all this perplexing noise from Washington, it becomes background noise. And the United States is a bit less important than before.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

When smart devices become snitches BY

J USTIN J OUVENAL

T

he firefighter found Richard Dabate on the floor of his kitchen, where he had made a desperate 911 call minutes earlier, court records show. Bleeding and lashed to a chair with zip ties, the man moaned a chilling warning: “They’re still in the house.”

Smoke hung in the air, and a trail of blood led to a darkened basement, as Connecticut State Police swarmed the large home in the Hartford suburbs two days before Christmas in 2015.

Richard, 41, told authorities a masked intruder with a “Vin Diesel” voice killed his wife, Connie, in front of him and tortured him. Police combed the home and town of Ellington but found no suspect.

With no witnesses other than Richard, detectives turned to the vast array of data and sensors that increasingly surround us. An important bit of evidence came from an unlikely source: the Fitbit tracking Connie’s movements.

Others from the home’s smart alarm systems, Facebook, cellphones, email and a key fob allowed police to re-create a nearly minute-by-minute account of the morning that they said revealed Richard’s story was an elaborately staged fiction.

Undone by his data, Richard was charged in his wife’s death. He has pleaded not guilty.

The case, which is in pretrial motions, is perhaps the best example to date of how Internetconnected, data-collecting smart devices such as fitness trackers, digital home assistants, thermostats, TVs and even pill bottles are beginning to transform criminal justice.

The ubiquitous devices can serve as a legion of witnesses, capturing our every move, biometrics and what we have ingested. They sometimes listen in or watch us in the privacy of our homes. And police are increasingly looking to the devices for clues.

The prospect has alarmed privacy advocates, who say too many consumers are unaware of the revealing information these devices

JIM MICHAUD/MANCHESTER JOURNAL INQUIRER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Man’s unraveling alibi shows how items like Fitbits are aiding police are harvesting. They also point out there are few laws specifically crafted to guide how law enforcement officials collect smart-device data.

Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District of Columbia law professor, says we are entering an era of “sensorveillance” when we can expect one device or another to be monitoring us much of the time. The title of a law paper on the topic put the prospect this way: “Technology is Killing Our Opportunity to Lie.” The business research company Gartner estimates 8.4 billion devices were connected to the Internet in 2017, a 31 percent increase over the previous year. By 2020, the

company estimates there will be roughly three smart devices for every person on the planet.

“Americans are just waking up to the fact that their smart devices are going to snitch on them,” Ferguson said. “And that they are going to reveal intimate details about their lives they did not intend law enforcement to have.”

A killing in the suburbs The Dabates’ yellow Colonial was festively decorated with wreaths on the windows the morning of Dec. 23, 2015. Richard, Connie and their two boys, ages 6 and 9, bustled around getting ready for the day.

To many of their acquaintances,

Richard Dabate, left, watches the casket bearing the body of his wife, Connie, being carried during her funeral in Vernon, Conn. He has since been charged in his wife’s death.

the family appeared to be an ordinary one in a quiet bedroom community. Richard was a network administrator, and Connie worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative.

Joann Knapp, a former neighbor of the Dabates, fondly recalls Connie popping over to her house to ask her out for walks while Knapp was having a difficult pregnancy. Knapp said Connie and Richard appeared to have a happy — even passionate — marriage.

“They couldn’t keep their eyes off each other,” Knapp said. “It was a look that you would want.”

But behind that public face, Connie’s killing would reveal a darkly tangled relationship and a

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

9

NATION major secret.

Richard and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. Richard gave a detailed — but shifting — account of Connie’s killing to detectives over six hours on the day of the slaying. It is contained in his arrest warrant.

On the drive to work that morning, Richard said, he got an alert on his phone that the home’s alarm had been triggered. He said he shot an email to his boss and returned home, arriving there between 8:45 a.m. and 9 a.m.

Richard told police he heard a noise on the second floor and found a hulking intruder wearing camouflage and a mask inside the walk-in closet of the master bedroom. The intruder demanded his wallet at knifepoint.

Soon after, Connie returned home from an exercise class; Richard told investigators he yelled at her to run. Connie fled into the basement, and the intruder followed.

When Richard arrived on the lower level, he made his way through darkness, finding the man pointing a gun at Connie’s head. Richard said that the gun was his own and that Connie must have removed it from a safe to defend herself.

Richard said he charged but heard a deafening blast and fell.

When he got up, Connie was slumped on the ground. Police would later determine the gunshot hit her in the back of her head.

The intruder disabled Richard and then zip-tied one of Richard’s arms and one of his legs to a folding chair, according to the account.

The intruder jabbed Richard with a box cutter. The man also started a fire in a cardboard box using a blow torch, which he then turned on Richard’s ankle.

Richard told investigators he saw an opening: He jammed the blow torch in the man’s face and singed it. The intruder ran out.

Richard said he crawled upstairs with the chair still attached, activated the panic alarm, called 911 and collapsed. The firefighter found him soon after.

Data tells a different tale The chaotic scene inside the Dabate home had all the hallmarks of a home invasion, but a few details would prompt investigators to take a closer look.

Dogs brought in to track the suspect could find no scent trails

leaving the property and circled back to Richard, according to arrest records. Richard also aroused suspicion when detectives asked whether their probe would reveal any problems between him and Connie.

He took a deep breath and offered: “Yes and no.”

Richard told a bizarre story. He said that he had gotten a high school friend pregnant and that it was Connie’s idea. He said the three planned to co-parent the child, since his wife wanted another baby but could not have one for health reasons.

STEPHEN DUNN/POOL/ HARTFORD COURANT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dabate stands with his attorney, Hubert Santos, in court. Dabate has pleaded not guilty.

Later, Richard changed his story, saying that the pregnancy was unplanned and that he had a romantic relationship with the friend. Detectives found no evidence Connie knew of the pregnancy.

“This situation popped up like a frickin’ soap opera,” Richard told detectives.

The admission pointed toward a possible motive for Connie’s killing, but it would be the data detectives uncovered that would give them evidence to conclude his story was a lie.

Detectives had noticed Connie was wearing a Fitbit when they found her body.

They requested the device’s data, which showed she had walked 1217 feet after returning home from the exercise class, far more than the 125 feet it would take her to go from the car in the garage to the basement in Richard’s telling of what happened.

The Fitbit also registered Connie moving roughly an hour after Richard said she was killed before 9:10 a.m. Facebook records also cast doubt on Richard’s timeline, showing Connie had posted as late as 9:46 a.m.

Detectives would also come to doubt that Richard left home that morning, after examining data from his home alarm system and his email account.

Records indicate he used a key fob to activate his home alarm from his basement at 8:50 a.m. and then disabled it at 8:59 a.m. from the same location.

Richard also told investigators he emailed his boss from the road after getting the alert about the alarm. But records from his Microsoft Outlook account showed he sent the email from the IP address associated with his home.

Combined, the data punched major holes in Richard’s story. Police obtained an arrest warrant for him in April.

The high school friend of Richard’s told authorities he had said he planned to serve divorce papers on Connie the week she was killed.

Richard had texted her the night before Connie’s death: “I’ll see you tomorrow my little love nugget.”

The future of evidence The Dabate case is just one of a handful in which law enforcement officials have resorted to smartdevice sleuthing.

In September 2016, an Ohio man told authorities he awoke to find his home ablaze, but police quickly suspected he set the fire himself. They filed a search warrant to get data from his pacemaker.

Authorities said his heart rate and cardiac rhythms indicated he was awake at the time he claimed he was sleeping. He was charged with arson and insurance fraud.

Prosecutors in a 2015 Arkansas murder case sought recordings from the suspect’s Amazon Echo when a 47-year-old man was found floating in the suspect’s hot tub after a night of partying. Authorities thought the voice-activated assistant may have recorded valuable evidence of the crime.

Amazon.com challenged the search warrant in court, saying that the request was overly broad and that government seizure of such data would chill customers’ First Amendment rights to free speech. But the challenge was eventually dropped because the

suspect agreed to allow Amazon to turn over the information.

(Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)

Virginia State Police Special Agent Robert J. Brown III of the High Technology Division said the current trickle of such smartdevice cases will probably soon become a flood.

“It will definitely be something in five or 10 years, in every case, we will look to see if this information is available,” Brown said.

Amazon and Fitbit said in statements that they won’t release customers’ data to authorities without a valid legal demand, but they declined to say how many such requests they have received from law enforcement.

“Respect for the privacy of our users drives our approach,” Fitbit said in its statement.

Ferguson, the law professor, said a case before the Supreme Court could be key in determining how exposed smart-device data is to searches by law enforcement.

In 2011, investigators in Detroit obtained months of cellphone location data on a suspect in a robbery investigation without a search warrant. Timothy Carpenter was later convicted, in part on this information gleaned from cellphone companies.

Carpenter is arguing in his appeal that such cellphone location data is so powerful it should be covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment and that police should be required to get a search warrant to obtain it.

Courts have long held that people who voluntarily disclose information to a bank, cellphone company or other third party have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Ferguson said that since many smart devices transfer data to company servers, this third-party doctrine could apply to them, as well.

Ferguson said a ruling against Carpenter might clear the way for authorities to seek smart-device data stored on those servers without a warrant.

“In a world of truly ubiquitous connectivity where we are recording our heartbeat, our steps, our location . . . if all of that data is now available to law enforcement without a warrant, that is a big change,” he said. “And that’s a big invasion of what most of us think our privacy should include.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

“It will definitely be something in five or 10 years, in every case, we will look to see if this information is available.”

Virginia State Police Special Agent Robert J. Brown III, speaking about data from smart devices

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Resisting a call to kill drug suspects E MILY R AUHALA Bogo City, Philippines BY

P

olice Chief Byron Allatog insists he is an ordinary officer. And in another time or another place, that might have been true.

The 39-year-old runs an ordinary station in an ordinary city set amid the sugar cane fields of the island of Cebu. People here farm and fish. They sing karaoke. Some take a form of methamphetamine known as “shabu.”

But these are not ordinary times.

Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, ordinary police in cities such as this have waged a spectacularly brutal and lawless campaign against anyone they suspect of using or selling drugs.

Officers of the Philippine National Police (PNP), which receives funding and training from the United States, have shot and killed thousands in late-night raids that often look a lot like executions.

Thousands more have been killed by masked assassins, often after being accused of doing drugs.

Yet of the thousands of Filipinos shot dead in Duterte’s selfproclaimed war, not a single man, woman or child fell on Allatog’s watch, according to the local government.

His extraordinary strategy: “I just told my officers, ‘Don’t kill.’ ” Don’t kill. That ought to go unsaid, but Duterte and his top officer, Gen. Ronald dela Rosa, talk incessantly of slaughter, casting mass killing as necessary, even just. The scope of the violence is such that the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor warned that they could be investigated on charges of crimes against humanity.

If rank-and-file officers oppose what is happening, few say so publicly.

There is a sense now that there is nobody left to police the PNP; a lack of accountability irks Allatog.

A proud graduate of both the Philippine National Police Academy and more recently a course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., he values procedure, order, discipline. The FBI teaches “no short-

EMILY RAUHALA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Although the practice is widespread in the Philippines, this police chief defies the president cuts, due process, rule of law — that’s their standard,” he said.

Policing, to him, is not politics but principle. “I’m not saying anything against the president,” he said. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

Allatog never planned to be here — not in Bogo City nor in the unenviable role of dissenting voice.

After graduating from the police academy in 2001, Allatog took several postings across the Philippines, working his way up. In 2014, he was named one of the country’s most outstanding officers.

When he returned from his training in the United States last year, he expected to be put on a specialist team in Manila. Instead, he was sent to Cebu. “I’d never heard of Bogo City,” he said. “I had to look it up.”

By the time he started his assignment, officers across the country had killed thousands, and journalists, human rights groups and foreign governments had gath-

ered extensive evidence of police abuse, from staged crime scenes to off-books hits.

Allatog saw that it would be tough to keep his men in line. They knew the president had promised to pardon officers who shot drug suspects. They also had heard rumors that off-duty officers were making 5,000 to 10,000 pesos, or $100 to $200, for freelance “vigilante-style” kills.

He told his men that they would be doing things differently. If they shot needlessly or for money, he would not protect them. And they should not count on the president either, he warned.

“Those are politicians. They don’t give a s--- about you,” he recalls telling them. “You are just a low-level officer. If you go to prison, that doesn’t affect the economy. They will not care.”

He believed anti-drug operations should tackle supply (bigtime dealers) as well as demand (users). From a policing standpoint, shooting street-level users

Bogo City Police Chief Byron Allatog told his officers that if they shot people needlessly or for money, he would not protect them and that they should not count on the Philippine president to do so either.

would not be enough.

Nor could he, as a Catholic, stomach it. “I’m not active in church, but I know what’s right, and it’s not right to kill somebody,” he said.

“It’s within the Ten Commandments that I’ve been memorizing since grade one,” Allatog said.

So when dela Rosa talks about “neutralizing” drug suspects, Allatog interprets the word differently than his peers. “When we ‘neutralize’ suspects — the thing is, they are alive. They are in jail,” he said.

When Allatog landed in Bogo City, he found allies in the mayor and vice mayor, Carlo and Maria Cielo Martinez, a brother-sister ticket who shared his belief that curbing drug use is part policing, part public health.

“Give them time, talk to those people, let them change for themselves,” Mayor Carlo Martinez said. “Violence is just a shortcut. It doesn’t really solve the problem.”

Rather than shooting suspects, the city gave them a chance to join a community-based rehabilitation program that combined twiceweekly drug testing with meetings led by a volunteer nurse.

The scale is small and the budget modest. Lacking doctors and trained drug counselors, the city has improvised and focused on helping a few people at a time.

At a recent meeting, about a dozen recovering users gathered in the humid locker room of the local sports complex. Most were men. Many were poor. One was still a teenager — exactly the demographic dying elsewhere.

Aldwin Alburo, a 45-year-old recovering addict wearing a “Progress, not perfection” T-shirt, said that he voted for Duterte and supports the idea of stopping drug use, but also that he wishes more men had had the chance to clean up before getting killed.

“They could have shown that they could really change,” he said.

“We should put more value on life rather than just taking it easily.”

Allatog stands by his record of ordinary, slow-and-steady work: “I didn’t kill anybody, but I was able to accomplish a lot.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Shining a light on Russian ‘troll farm’ D AVID F ILIPOV Shushary, Russia BY

S

he rode into a pitch-black truck stop on a scooter, stepped out of the pouring rain into a gas station cafe on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and recounted her quest to bring down Russia’s infamous “troll farm.”

Lyudmila Savchuk is one of a disparate handful of Russian journalists, activists and legal experts who have tried to shed light on the shadowy operation that has become a focal point of U.S. investigations into Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

And like most people who challenge the established order in today’s Russia, Savchuk and the others are jousting against a nebulous entity with apparent Kremlin ties and evident protection from government and law-enforcement agencies. For them, this is a task that entails significant risks and little chance of success.

How much the trolls affected the outcome of the U.S. election is unclear. But their omnipresence is evident on Twitter and in the comments sections of publications like The Washington Post, where trolls can be found criticizing news stories, lambasting other posters and accusing one another of being trolls.

While the troll farm’s operations have stirred concerns about the reach of Kremlin propaganda across Europe and the United States, Savchuk and her cohorts are worried about their own country.

“Every online forum, every comment section on every local site, everywhere I look, most of the commenters are trolls,” Savchuk said in an interview. “It’s like half the country is trolls.”

Savchuk, a 36-year-old single mother of two and a former employee of the Internet Research Agency, won a lawsuit against the troll farm in 2016. Since then, she has detailed the operations of her former employer in numerous publications and videos, served as a witness in another ex-troll’s lawsuit, and sought to get other trolls to tell their stories. She calls it

MAKSIM ZHABKO/OPEN RUSSIA

Shadowy operation has become a focal point of U.S. investigations into Kremlin’s 2016 meddling “bringing them into the light.”

Savchuk has also been accused of being a shill for foreign interests, the usual counterattack the staterun media mounts against whistleblowers. She has become withdrawn; she switches off her phone when reporters call. She agreed to meet at the remote roadside cafe only after weeks of phone tag.

“I wanted to take down this factory of lies, and I still do,” said Savchuk, who describes her two months at the agency as an undercover investigation. “But it takes a toll, and it isn’t easy.”

The lawyer who won her case agrees. Ivan Pavlov heads Team 29, a group that specializes in freedom of information cases.

“Social media was invented to promote free expression of ideas, and the trolls abuse it,” he said. “We want to stop this abuse.”

There is no law in Russia against anonymous posters flooding websites with misleading information or berating other posters. So, Pavlov said, he went after the troll farm “the way they got Al Capone,” the

Prohibition-era gangster in Chicago who was sent to prison for tax evasion.

When Savchuk was fired, he had his opening.

“We realized they pay people in cash. They don’t pay taxes. When they fire someone, they don’t pay severance,” Pavlov said in an interview. “We wanted to drag them into an open court case. We were able to ask questions. They had to acknowledge what they do.”

The court awarded Savchuk one ruble, less than 2 cents, in damages.

It was a symbolic victory, and a partial one. Savchuk had wanted prosecutors to check the company’s books, its adherence to safety regulations, and whether employees use licensed software. But Pavlov said Team 29 never heard back from investigators.

“That was a sign of protection by the authorities,” he said.

A clearer sign came with the lawsuit filed by Olga Maltseva, another former employee of the troll farm. A St. Petersburg district court

At top, protesters gather outside the troll farm’s St. Petersburg headquarters, one holding a sign saying “Hang the trolls.”

Above, former employee Lyudmila Savchuk won a lawsuit against the organization. She has sought to get others to tell their stories about working there.

ruled against her, although the defense never bothered to show up in court, Pavlov said. The city court last month upheld the lower court’s verdict — although, once again, the troll farm did not send a lawyer.

Pavlov said he is not giving up.

“We’re trying to remove the mask of anonymity, so that people know who is responsible for this activity, for the Internet attacks, for trolling,” he said. “The system is created to protect them, but sometimes the system makes a mistake, and that’s where we have to be ready.”

Russian media reports have linked the organization to the name of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg restaurateur known as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s caterer and favorite chef. In 2015, the New York Times Magazine reported that social media accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency had launched campaigns in the United States.

Meanwhile, the company has changed its name to Teka, Pavlov said. It also has moved its legal headquarters, although the trolling operation remains in a large gray building north of the St. Petersburg city center, near the head of the Gulf of Finland. There, young people work 12-hour shifts and make between $800 and $1,000 a month, “an attractive wage for former students and young people,” Pavlov said. It is impossible to get inside the building, and there are multiple entrances, making it hard to tell who is a troll and who is not.

Residents who live nearby say they have no idea that the troll farm exists, although protesters have tried to expose it. Recently, a few dozen protesters rallied at the entrance, throwing coins at the building while chanting, “Trolls, come out!” and “Shame on you, trolls!”

Police warned the protesters, but made no arrests. In the war on trolls, this was a victory.

“The goal of this action is to show to the Kremlin bots that they won’t be able to escape unpunished,” one of the activists, Diana Retinskaya, wrote on Facebook. “They still have time to stop and not to disgrace this country.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

a plan to hire local, but migrants finish job

BY TRACY JAN in Denver n

PHOTOS BY NICK COTE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Left, Antonio de Jesus Gomez, who lives in Mexico, works at a site in Westminster, Colo., on a guest worker visa. Above, Jesus “Chuy” Medrano, owner of CoCal Landscape in Denver, has struggled to retain American workers. Below, Adalberto Espinoza, from Mexico, unloads a truck in Denver.

are

T

he first day on the job for the 39 new hires at Jesus “Chuy” Medrano’s landscaping firm started as soon as they stumbled off the bus in the early morning, groggy and stiff from the 13­hour trip from the Mexican border. ¶ “Ready to work?” Medrano joked in Spanish — before the men had a chance to use the bathroom or eat breakfast. The 63­year­old grandfather, wearing a cowboy hat, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and grinned. ¶ Medrano, founder and owner of CoCal Landscape, had spent more than $32,000 recruiting and securing visas for the Mexican migrants after scrambling to find Americans willing to do backbreaking work under the Colorado sun. ¶ With this crew’s arrival, he thought, the season might be salvaged after all. ¶ Medrano’s extraordinary recruitment effort — which included three days in Ciudad Juarez while the U.S. Consulate processed the work visas — encapsulates the complex relationship between American employers and temporary foreign workers. ¶ In landscaping, tourism, seafood processing and other seasonal industries, employers are desperate to find Americans who will stay on the job for the pay they are able to offer — $14 an hour is the starting salary at Medrano’s firm. continues on next page

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

Until now, those industries have leaned heavily on a visa program for seasonal workers, called H-2B visas. But Congress has reduced the number of available visas by nearly 30 percent from 2016, and President Trump’s promise to limit legal as well as illegal immigration and protect American workers has Medrano worried. For the men stepping off the bus — some of whom have worked on his crew for years — this could be the last season.

Opponents of the H-2B visa program say the foreign workers steal American jobs and drive down wages.

Medrano, too, says he would prefer to hire locally. Importing temporary labor exposes his company to too much uncertainty every year.

But there are simply not enough Americans who want the type of jobs he offers, with regular work only between April and October, especially in a state with one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates.

Over the past 25 years, Medrano has increasingly relied on the guest worker program to grow his landscaping business — until this year, when CoCal was denied visas for the 160 Mexican laborers it normally gets. Congress did not renew a 2016 rule that exempted “returning” workers from the annual H-2B cap, effectively cutting available visas from 85,000 to 66,000.

When the Trump administration unexpectedly released 15,000 additional visas for migrant workers in July, Medrano pounced, even though the landscaping season was nearly over.

He welcomed his best workers back to CoCal just before Labor Day. He recognized himself in these men, whose stories and economic fates are intertwined with his.

The men, 22 to 66 years old, had the same motivation to leave their families as he did when he first came to this country from Chihuahua 44 years ago: work.

A

ntonio de Jesus Gomez ordinarily makes a living shinnying up 40-foot trees, trying to avoid snakes as he picks avocados in his home state of Michoacan.

His fellow migrants, from all over Mexico, are farmers, house painters, taco vendors. They earn, on average, the equivalent of $100 a week.

That’s when the work is steady, which it often isn’t.

As landscapers now, the workers will make five times as much as they would in Mexico — even after taxes.

So when supervisors in fluorescent orange safety vests circled the newly arrived crew, Gomez jumped at the chance to start immediately. He’d slept six hours on the bus and eaten a breakfast of yogurt and muffins bought at a gas station rest stop in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s what I came for,” said the 28-year-old, whose wife is five months pregnant with their second child. “To give something better to my family.”

Gomez changed into his CoCal uniform — a long-sleeved gray polo shirt and black baseball cap — and hopped into a truck with a supervisor.

They drove to a municipal water treatment

plant, where Gomez was reunited with his father, a foreman who had started at CoCal as an H-2B worker but is now a legal U.S. resident on the company’s permanent staff. After a quick hello, Gomez poured gas into a weed-whacker and got to work trimming the lawn around two storage ponds of reclaimed wastewater.

M

edrano was 18 the first time he crossed into the United States, from the Mexican border town of Puerto Palomas into Columbus, N.M. He picked the seeds out of two truckloads of red chiles at a ranch for $2,000, then caught a bus to Denver, where an acquaintance connected him with a job at a cemetery.

Immigration authorities sent him back to Mexico, but he returned to Denver within days, eventually becoming a landscaper. It was 1973.

Twenty years later, Medrano started CoCal. By then, he had married, become a U.S. citizen and was a father of three.

In CoCal’s early years, Medrano said, he gave work to undocumented immigrants, just as work had once been offered to him. But he later decided that it was not worth risking his business by breaking the law. That’s when he turned to the H-2B visa program, initially recruiting family and friends in Mexico.

Medrano hired his first crew of nine migrant workers in 1997. As his company grew, the number of H-2B workers expanded to 160, accounting for 40 percent of CoCal’s total employees the past few years.

“Those guys, without pushing them, do the work of 11/2 people already here,” he said. “But it started bothering me that I was relying so much

Mario Salas, a supervisor at CoCal Landscape, adds fresh flowers to a shrine to the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe at the temporary home of foreman Jesus Gomez, a U.S. resident, and his son Antonio de Jesus, a migrant worker, in August.

on them. I knew one day we weren’t going to get them. And that was this year.”

Medrano said he went to great lengths this summer to recruit Americans to mow lawns, plant trees and fix sprinklers. He put up a digital billboard over the highway that flashed “We’re hiring!” in Spanish and English. He interviewed anyone who walked in.

“We hope they’re breathing and they have a pulse, and we hire them,” he said.

He raised the hourly wage for unskilled laborers to $13.95 — 50 percent more than Colorado’s minimum wage. He stopped firing workers for absenteeism, including a foreman who went AWOL during a two-week drinking binge. He hired more women, allowing mothers to work just the hours their children are in school, as well as high school and college students on summer break.

And still, he was short-staffed. Some showed up to orientation only to say, “I’m not going to do that for $14 an hour,” Medrano recounted. New hires unaccustomed to work boots complained of sore, blistered feet. Some walked off the job after three days.

Of the 222 workers hired since February, only 73 remained.

Economists say businesses would have better luck attracting American workers if they offered competitive wages. But Medrano said he pays as much as his customers could support, with entrylevel wages hovering at the industry’s state average. Any higher, he said, “I would drive myself out of the market.”

Quality control dropped this summer because supervisors had to stop overseeing and pitch in.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

15

COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY NICK COTE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Customers complained of dry spots on lawns where the sprinkler system was not reaching.

They grew angry over how long it took the smaller crews to complete each job. Competitors began to poach. And CoCal lost $1.7 million in contracts.

Then the Trump administration, after heavy lobbying from industry, made more visas available.

CoCal had to submit paperwork showing that the company would suffer permanent “irreparable harm” without hiring migrants.

The company’s request was approved within two weeks, and Medrano was on his way to Mexico to meet the workers.

“It’s like a little Band-Aid,” Medrano said.

R

amiro Espinoza, a 39-year-old father of three, jumped when CoCal came calling, even though it required a 25-hour bus journey from his home near Mexico City to Ciudad Juarez, where he would spend two days being fingerprinted and interviewed at the U.S. Consulate — with no assurance he would clear all the hurdles for a work visa.

“The uncertainty weighs heavily,” he said when he reached Ciudad Juarez. “And I think it also weighs heavily for the company not to be sure whether we are going to be able to come or not.”

Espinoza had been a taxi driver until April, when his cab was stolen. He drove school buses until July, when school ended and he got a maintenance job. But he can’t make ends meet on $10 a day.

He came with his 66-year-old father, Adal-

Jesus Gomez begins work at a site in Westminster, Colo.

CoCal’s migrant landscapers make five times as much as they would in Mexico — even after taxes.

berto Espinoza, whose passport is filled with guest worker visas from previous stints at Colorado landscaping companies and a Maine meatpacking plant. This would be their fourth season with CoCal. On their first day in Ciudad Juarez, the Espinozas gathered with other workers in a hotel’s courtyard. All had worked for CoCal before and felt a mixture of luck at being selected, guilt that former colleagues were not and sadness at the prospect of missing their children’s first days of school.

“You are happy when you get the call, but as it nears when you have to leave, you don’t want the day to arrive,” Ramiro Espinoza said.

That night, Espinoza discovered a letter that his 9-year-old daughter, Natalia, had tucked into his suitcase.

On a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook, she had written in Spanish, in rounded print: “I wish that poverty would not fall upon us so much. I’m not saying this because I want to be rich, but it’s that I don’t want you to go to the U.S. and be far from me and the family.”

Espinoza walked out to the patio and wept.

“They are an engine,” he said of his wife and daughters. “Behind every one of us, there are little ones who depend on us, emotionally as well as economically. We live half our lives over there and half our lives over here.”

T

he sun was just starting to rise over the trailer parked at one of CoCal’s equipment yards, where Gomez, the avocadopicker from Michoacan, and his father are living rent-free in exchange for keeping watch

KLMNO WEEKLY

on evenings and weekends.

A blanket draped across the window doubled as a curtain. An altar to the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe dominated the main room.

In the tiny kitchen, next to a bank of surveillance monitors, Gomez heated tortillas on a propane grill and used his free hand to call his 5-year-old daughter, Sophia.

His father wrapped the chicken burritos they were packing for lunch.

“A lot of people ask me why we want Mexican people to come here on work visas,” said Jesus Gomez, the CoCal foreman who has lived in Denver since 2008. “A great problem we have with many people here — you train them, and then they don’t come back if the work is rough, and you have to start over with others.”

Outside, supervisors in trucks started to pull into the gravel yard. It was the first full day of work for the migrants.

Medrano said he hoped that the Mexican workers would help CoCal end the season strong and make customers happy so that the company could renew as many contracts as possible.

But the migrants will be gone at the end of October, and he knew there are no guarantees they will be back.

“I got to find a way to hire more people from here,” Medrano said. “I don’t want to depend on H-2Bs. I don’t want to depend on a maybe.”

For the company to survive without guest worker visas, Medrano said he would need more Americans to see CoCal as a long-term career.

But it’s hard to get workers to invest in a company that does not promise year-round employment. Medrano will lay off most of his local staff at the end of the season, keeping only a third through the winter to plow and shovel snow.

He said he would offer one of his new stars, a Californian who moved to Denver, a raise, a winter job and a fast track to management.

And he was optimistic that other local hires would stick it out and return next year: the former waitress with three kids who instantly took to pruning and pulling weeds. The 65year-old who took on a second job at CoCal to supplement his salary at Bass Pro Shop.

The reality though is that few Americans last — illustrated that very afternoon when a familiar scene played out at CoCal headquarters.

Juan Gonzalez, a 22-year-old with a community-college education, came to say goodbye.

After two months on the job, he couldn’t take it anymore. Every night, he returned home exhausted and red. His feet bruised and blistered in his boots. He would shower and collapse on his bed, falling asleep without eating.

His grandfather, who had been a landscaper, suggested a change.

“He saw me drained and said, ‘This job is for tough men. You got a diploma. You could get out there and get a better job, an easier job,’ ” Gonzalez said as he walked out the door, his final paycheck in hand. “I was kind of embarrassed, but he was right.”

The young man would be the 137th American this season to quit. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

SCIENCE

The source of the next miracle drug?

BY

A DAM P OPESCU

F

or thousands of years, Komodo dragons have thrived on an isolated chain of rocky Indonesian islands despite competing with other venomous reptiles, hunting deer and buffalo capable of crushing bone with a single kick and dealing with annual monsoons, tsunamis and drought.

The reason for their success may be that the bite of these giant lizards — they sometimes weigh 300 pounds and grow seven or more feet long — is so poisonous that even a nip can kill. They have more than 50 varieties of bacteria in their mouths yet rarely fall ill.

They’re also immune to the bites of other dragons. Scientists say that’s because the blood of Komodo dragons is filled with proteins called antimicrobial peptides, AMPs, an all-purpose infection defense produced by all living creatures, that one day may be used in drugs to protect humans. That would be a welcome development because some antibiotics are losing their effectiveness as bacteria develop resistance to the drugs.

“Komodo peptides are unlike any others. The animals have bacteria in their mouth in the wild and they live in a challenging environment and they survive,” said Barney Bishop, a George Mason University chemist who codiscovered the unusual characteristics of the peptides in the dragons’ blood in 2013. “If we can find out why they’re able to fight bacteria and what makes them so successful, we can use that knowledge to develop antibiotics.”

Bishop and his team have identified more than 200 peptides in Komodo blood that hadn’t been seen before, using a process he calls bioprospecting.

There has been at least one major find. One of the dragon peptides was used to design a synthetic substance, called DRGN-1, that breaks down the layer of bacteria that attaches to the surface of a wound and can impede healing. When DRGN-1 was tested on living bacteria and

PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES

The blood of Komodo dragons has proteins that could be used to create more effective medicine on wounds infected with bacteria, the results were startling: The wounds healed significantly faster than if left untreated.

Microbiologist Monique van Hoek, who worked with Bishop on the project, described DRGN-1 in a George Mason news release last spring as “a new approach to potentially defeat bacteria that have grown resistant to conventional antibiotics. The antimicrobial peptides we’re tapping into represent millions of years of evolution in protecting immune systems from dangerous infections.”

Finding these peptides and testing them isn’t simple. DRGN-1 was developed after a mass spectrometer identified dragon-blood peptides with the potential to attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“If a peptide shows strong microbial activity” in lab testing, Bishop says, “we can look at it for other applications. If we’re lucky, it’s a new candidate right there.

Odds are, we’ll have to tweak the sequence and structure.”

The researchers hope to find other potential drugs based on Komodo blood — as well as in the blood of crocodiles and alligators — and then persuade a drug company to help bring their discoveries to market. So far, they’ve identified 48 potential AMPs in Komodo blood that have never been seen before. He says these discoveries might lead to applications to curb everyday problems such as acne and pneumonia and to counteract biological weapons such as anthrax.

Infections of antibioticresistant bacteria kill as many as 700,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization, a number that it projects could rise to 10 million a year by 2050. The WHO says that resistant bacteria are rising to “dangerous levels in some parts of the world . . . threatening our ability to treat common infectious diseases including pneumonia, tuberculosis, blood poisoning and gonorrhea.”

“The startling truth,” research-

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

George Mason University chemist Barney Bishop helped discover the unusual characteristics of the peptides in the blood of Komodo dragons, top. “If we can find out why they’re able to fight bacteria and what makes them so successful, we can use that knowledge to develop antibiotics,” he said.

ers wrote last year, “is that for large populations, the era of effective antibiotics has already, or will very soon, come to an end.” Governmental health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been pushing for research into new drugs and methods to combat antibiotic resistance.

Bishop and van Hoek are testing dragon blood AMPs against a panel of bacteria that includes those related to highly resistant bacteria labeled priority pathogens by the WHO. It’s tough to study an animal that is difficult to capture, both because of its remoteness and because of its poisonous bite.

Bishop has been using samples from Tujah, a Komodo at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida. Bishop’s collaborators take only about a pencil-tip’s worth of blood from the dragon, obtained by a quick needle poke in Tujah’s tail. They’ve taken only a handful of collections since 2012. “Every microliter of that blood is precious,” Bishop said. But “if it’s not going to work because he’s not up for it, we don’t get the blood. We’re aware of his health and well-being.”

Samples are then analyzed in a process that identifies substances with the potential to be developed into drugs.

Bishop’s Komodo dragon project began in 2012, with a $7.6 million Defense Department grant to analyze species that thrive despite major environmental challenges and interaction with pathogenic bacteria. In addition to the dragons, Bishop has been studying Chinese alligators and saltwater crocodiles, which have shown strong immunity against disease despite eating bacteriainfested animals and living in bacteria-rich environments and even surviving loss of limbs without getting infections.

Drug discovery is a long haul, yet he’s confident. “I’ve got a 7year-old daughter who sleeps on a stuffed Komodo,” he says. “I’d like her to grow up in a world with effective antibiotics.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

17

FOOD

KLMNO WEEKLY

More transparency for antibiotics BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

U.

S. consumers are about to gain a rare window into the use of antibiotics in the food system, an issue of skyrocketing concern among public health groups, shoppers and physicians.

Critics have argued the agricultural industry abuses these medicines, administering antibiotics to animals that do not need them and contributing to the rise of “super bugs.” Consumer groups have complained the public knows too little about how their food is raised — an issue compounded by a range of confusing labels.

Thanks to a new San Francisco city ordinance, due to be signed into law this month, a number of the country’s top meat and poultry brands will soon have to share far more details about their antibiotic use. Under the rule, which passed the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously, grocery stores will be required to document antibiotic use in the meat and poultry brands they sell and make the information available, via a city website, to consumers.

The ordinance will affect a number of supermarket chains with branches in San Francisco — including Safeway and Target — as well as their suppliers, which include Smithfield, Perdue and Tyson.

Like humans, animals raised for meat — including cows, pigs and chickens — receive antibiotics when they’re sick to fend off bacterial infections.

The Food and Drug Administration banned the use of antibiotics for the sole purpose of promoting growth earlier this year. But in many feedlots and broiler houses, animals continue to receive routine, preventive doses of antibiotics, designed to keep illnesses from spreading in close living quarters.

None of these uses pose an immediate threat to human health.

Federal law regulates the safety of antibiotics on the market and the timing of dosages to make sure residues do not linger in your steak, pork chops or chicken.

Recently, however, public health and environmental groups have

ISTOCK

San Francisco law will affect grocery chains and meat suppliers warned that high rates of antibiotic use in animal agriculture may contribute to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” that cannot be managed with traditional treatments. Studies suggest these bacteria, which evolve in the guts of poultry and livestock, can be passed to humans.

And demand for antibiotic-free meat is growing.

A 2016 report by Nielsen found that sales of “antibiotic-free meat” grew nearly 29 percent each year between 2011 and 2015, compared with just under 5 percent for conventional meat. In response to these concerns, a number of meat, restaurant and grocery brands have taken steps to reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics in their supply chains — as McDonald’s did with chicken in 2016.

The San Francisco ordinance seeks to push the industry further, requiring grocery stores to document — for each meat and poultry brand they sell — the average number of days each animal received antibiotics, the percentage of animals affected and the total

volume of antibiotics administered by that brand.

Ostensibly, the rule only applies to grocery and food retail stores with at least one location in San Francisco and a worldwide total of 25 stores or more. But because that encompasses national chains including Safeway, Target, Costco, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walgreens and CVS, the impact could be felt much farther. National meat brands whose products are sold at those stores will also have to disclose how they use antibiotics.

Public health and environmental groups hope the measure will put pressure on the meat and grocery industries to stock products with lower levels of antibiotics.

“Consumers really care about this issue, and they have a lot of influence on the marketplace,” said Avinash Kar, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So we hope that will push companies in the direction of better antibiotic use practices.”

But the North American Meat Institute, a national trade organization, and the California Grocers

29% the growth in sales of “antibiotic-free meat” each year between 2011 and 2015, compared with just under 5 percent for conventional meat, according to a Nielsen report

Association warned in comments submitted to the Board of Supervisors that the additional requirements could cause some brands to pull out of San Francisco and make meat and poultry in the city more expensive.

“The San Francisco ordinance . . . is a recipe for failure,” Barry Carpenter, the chief executive of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “The significant costs associated with the segregation and record-keeping for meat and poultry products to be sold in San Francisco will increase the cost of meat and poultry for consumers there and reduce options available.”

Some farmers are also worried that the movement against antibiotics could prejudice consumers against their use for any reason.

“I see my cattle every day like some of your readers see their dogs,” said James O’Brien, a horse breeder and cattle rancher in South Texas. “If they get sick, I want to treat them. To me, not using antibiotics is the inhumane practice.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The hidden figures of World War II N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

E LAINE S HOWALTER

I CODE GIRLS The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

By Liza Mundy Hachette.

416 pp. $28

n the past few years, forgotten women of science, from the genteel astronomers who classified the stars at the Harvard Observatory in the 1890s to the African American mathematicians who staffed NASA in the 1960s, have been rescued and celebrated. If you cheered the recovery of these remarkable pioneers, you will love reading about the women recruited by the Army and the Navy during World War II and trained in secret programs to break Japanese and German military codes. In “Code Girls,” journalist Liza Mundy tells the irresistible tale of the female cryptographers who learned to crack these diabolically difficult systems. Being chosen for this mission changed the lives of more than 10,000 young American women, took them out of their familiar surroundings and prescribed destinies, and offered them a thrilling opportunity to do urgent war work at the nation’s center.

But they took vows of secrecy, and this vast enterprise has been hidden for almost 70 years. In her research to uncover it, Mundy examined collections in the National Archives in College Park, Md., found dozens of recently declassified and archived oral histories, and tracked down 20 surviving code girls, centering on the intrepid Dot Braden Bruce, a RandolphMacon Woman’s College graduate and high school teacher from Virginia, who is still a firecracker at 96. Mundy skillfully interweaves the history of the war and the evolution of modern military intelligence with the daily lives of the women who were racing to decipher the messages of the enemy, while dealing with bureaucratic rivalries, administrative sexism, romance and heartbreak on the home front.

After Pearl Harbor, the military decided to build up its small intelligence operation by bringing female college graduates to Washington and teaching them crypt-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Intelligence analysts work to decipher coded Japanese messages at the headquarters of the Army cryptanalysis service in 1944.

analysis, codes and ciphers. The Army and the Navy competed with each other to find and recruit the most talented. In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had graduated from a four-year college. The elite Seven Sister colleges had their finest hour as the Navy tapped their presidents, deans and faculty to identify top students in mathematics, science and languages. Bryn Mawr President Katherine E. McBride noted that the war was creating unprecedented opportunities for highly educated women: “There is a new situation for women here, a demand that has never existed for them before.”

Once they were settled in their hastily adapted dormitories in Washington and Arlington, Va., the recruits ran early computers, built libraries, translated documents and formed teams to solve the elaborate, ever-changing codes of the Japanese navy. The water-transport codes, which

came from the merchant ships going around the Pacific to supply troops, were particularly useful. In 1944, the code-breakers intercepted 30,000 water-transport messages a month, a deluge of numbers that they miraculously managed to solve through an intensive search for patterns and some “golden” guesses. That information enabled the Navy to pinpoint and sink almost every supply ship heading to the Philippines or the South Pacific. Before D-Day, the teams participated in the effort to give the Germans false information and fake radio traffic about the site of the Allied landing.

Initially the women came to Washington as civilians, but in May 1942, the Army accepted them into military service with the WACs — the Women’s Auxiliary Corps. The Navy took longer to set up a women’s reserve; indeed, as Virginia Gildersleeve, dean of Barnard College, recalled, some of the older officers believed that “admit-

ting women into the Navy would break up homes and amount to a step backward in civilization.” But the Navy got a boost when an English professor from Barnard christened its female auxiliary the WAVES: Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

Not everything was triumphant. A cohort of code girls was still seen by some military administrators as extra secretaries, cute mascots or natural drudges. The code-breaker Ann Caracristi remembered that “it was generally believed that women were good at doing tedious work, and . . . the initial stages of cryptanalysis were very tedious, indeed.” Moreover, women were subject to stricter sexual and social punishment than their brothers and boyfriends. Lesbianism, abortion, pregnancy — even for married women — meant discharge. And after the war, women were expected to give up their jobs, go home and start having babies again. A few code girls went on to high positions at the National Security Agency, but as a cohort, their postwar job opportunities and their chances for further education under the GI Bill were mixed at best.

Still, they cherished their experience. Ann White reflected that “never in my life since have I felt as challenged as during that period. . . . When the needs of society and the needs of an individual come together, we were fulfilled.”

We owe Mundy gratitude for rescuing these hidden figures from obscurity. Even more valuable is her challenge to the myth of the eccentric, inspired, solitary male genius, like Alan Turing. As Mundy demonstrates, codebreaking in World War II “was a gigantic team effort,” and “genius itself is often a collective phenomenon.” n Showalter is the author, most recently, of “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

This mystery requires patience

Portrait doesn’t quite rise to art

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

n his latest novel, “Reservoir 13,” Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that, by the close of the case, doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore. Whether you find McGregor’s innovations brilliant or boring will depend on your tolerance for delayed gratification — very delayed gratification when it comes to the rudimentary questions of “what happened?” and “whodunit?”

Critically speaking, I’m on the fence. McGregor’s writing style is ingenious. Indeed, “Reservoir 13,” which was published in Britain earlier this year, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a testament to its artistry and a tip-off that this is not, in any conventional way, a mystery novel. But, as admirable as McGregor’s achievement is, I frequently found myself looking for excuses to stop admiring it and read something else. Staying inside his finely wrought construction for long stretches of time made me feel wistful for Agatha Christie. I wanted clues to track, criminals to nab and, most of all, a timely solution that would lay evil to rest.

The opening paragraph of “Reservoir 13” describes the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl. Rebecca Shaw and her parents were enjoying a getaway in England’s Peak District during the New Year’s holiday, but their vacation goes awry on the afternoon the family takes a walk on the moors. Rebecca’s parents tramp the frozen ground at a brisk pace, while she dawdles. Her parents impatiently call to Rebecca to hurry up. When they turn around their daughter has vanished; it’s as though the earth has swallowed her.

In standard thriller fare, we readers would then follow police detectives as they comb the heather, interrogating hermits, village busybodies and the girl’s school friends. But McGregor deliberately invokes that conventional sus-

pense opener to challenge his readers’ well-worn expectations.

Through the voice of his deadpan omniscient narrator, McGregor describes what happens in the village during the next 13 years. At first, Rebecca’s disappearance is all the villagers talk or think about. As years pass, the girl’s vanishing becomes just one more thing for the village to absorb into its long communal history.

The inventive — and enervating — quality of McGregor’s novel derives not only from its refusal to bend to conventional thriller expectations, but also from its form.

Paragraphs frequently run on for pages — monoliths of prose in which the minutiae of life in the village is recounted. McGregor’s omniscient narrator hovers above the village watching all and relating every development in a uniformly flat, democratizing tone.

Updates about Rebecca’s case are accorded the same emotional weight as a villager taking a new job in the meat section of the local supermarket or a new yoga class starting up. Those bland details of everyday life fill McGregor’s mammoth paragraphs like foam insulation being sprayed into walls.

Once in a very long while, however (every 50 pages or so), a startling update on Rebecca’s case suddenly emerges.

“Reservoir 13” generates suspense, not out of chase scenes or sly dialogue, but out of the extended narrative experience of waiting — waiting for something, anything, to break in Rebecca’s case.

Maybe this is not so much a thriller, but a “post-thriller” — a novel that meditates on tragedy and its inevitable fading away in memory.

No matter how it’s classified, “Reservoir 13” requires an extraordinary amount of patience from its readers; I suspect that most will feel that the narrative payoff doesn’t justify that demand. n Corrigan is a book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air.” This was written for The Washington Post.

I RESERVOIR 13

By Jon McGregor Catapult. 290 pp.

Paperback, 16.95

GRANT

By Ron Chernow Penguin Press. 1,074 pp. $40

l

REVIEWED BY

T . J . S TILES

n the essay “The Art of Biography,” Virginia Woolf asks, “Is biography an art?” She admits that the question is “ungenerous” but adds, “There it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow.”

Woolf’s question hovers over all biographers, even the most accomplished. It comes now for Ron Chernow, the author of “Grant,” a new account of the Civil War general and two-term president. Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Chernow won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book, “Washington,” and the National Book Award for his first, “The House of Morgan.” Lin-Manuel Miranda adapted his best-selling “Hamilton” into a musical.

And yet — that shadow. To Woolf, every biographer is “a craftsman, not an artist. . . . The trouble lies with biography itself.

It imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based upon fact.” She argues that only unrestrained imagination can make art. I disagree. Facts are simply the medium, as paint is to the painter. Of course, most painters succeed as artisans, not artists, and so do most biographers.

To rise above craftsmanship, one must work with abundant, varied and complicated facts.

Chernow does that, presenting research that bulks “Grant” to nearly 1,000 pages of narrative. It allows him to write a rich and sensitive portrait of the inner Grant — from reluctant West Point cadet to civilian failure to triumphant general.

He exhaustively investigates Grant’s alcoholism and fraught relationships with his family. I admire Chernow’s honesty about contradictory evidence as well as Grant’s mistakes.

We read a biography to know a life but also to ratify our conviction that the individual matters.

This forces the biographer to be researcher, writer and historian simultaneously. How does the

world shape the individual, and the individual the world? To what extent are convictions, judgment and personality merely typical, embedded in a larger context — and where does the individual wriggle free? A biography that succeeds as art combines scholarly and literary virtues. It explains, interprets and carries a reader fully into a human existence. It offers illumination and immersion.

As a historian, Chernow proves somewhat uneven. His research into Grant’s struggles with alcohol would be better if he discussed the scale and intensity of the temperance movement; that would explain contemporaries’ obsession with drink and Grant’s personal shame. Chernow’s account of Grant’s military career, however, works well, particularly in exploring his closest relationships. Most important, the book centers on the story of black liberation, from Grant’s embrace of emancipation as a general to his enforcement of civil rights as president. If African Americans play too passive a role in this telling, Chernow’s emphasis is exactly right, and his account of Grant’s views is revealing.

Every biography is a broken mirror, reflecting the past inexactly — but what about Chernow’s writing? His design does not delight with artful structure and delivers no pleasures of expectation, revelation or surprise. He rarely opens a chapter with sentences that hum the themes to come. He does not switch the point of view to allow a secondary character to expand the book’s scope. He stacks up adjectives and stock phrases.

Yet, Woolf liked good craftsmanship, which Chernow delivers. He guides us into the character of a famously reticent man, revealing how he could be both a failure and a conqueror, principled yet surprisingly naive. n Stiles is the author of, most recently, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Save the treaty that I signed with Reagan MIKHAIL GORBACHEV was leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991. This was written for The Washington Post.

This December will mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the treaty between the Soviet Union and United States on the elimination of intermediate­ and shorter­ range missiles. This was the start of the process of radically cutting back nuclear arsenals, which was continued with the 1991 and 2010 strategic arms reduction treaties and the agreements reducing tactical nuclear weapons.

The scale of the process launched in 1987 is evidenced by the fact that, as Russia and the United States reported to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2015, 80 percent of the nuclear weapons accumulated during the Cold War have been decommissioned and destroyed. Another important fact is that, despite the recent serious deterioration in bilateral relations, both sides have been complying with the strategic weapons agreements.

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, however, is now in jeopardy. It has proved to be the most vulnerable link in the system of limiting and reducing weapons of mass destruction. There have been calls on both sides for scrapping the agreement.

So what is the problem and what needs to be done?

Both sides have raised issues of

BARRY THUMMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Ronald Reagan, second from right, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, second from left, sign the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty in the White House on Dec. 8, 1987.

compliance, accusing the other of violating or circumventing the treaty’s key provisions. From the sidelines, lacking fuller information, it is difficult to evaluate those accusations. But one thing is clear: The problem has a political as well as a technical aspect. It is up to the political leaders to take action.

Therefore I am making an appeal to the presidents of Russia and the United States.

Relations between the two nations are in a severe crisis. A way out must be sought, and there is one well-tested means available for accomplishing this: a dialogue based on mutual respect.

It will not be easy to cut through the logjam of issues on both sides. But neither was our dialogue easy three decades ago.

It had its critics and detractors, who tried to derail it.

In the final analysis, it was the political will of the two nations’ leaders that proved decisive. And that is what’s needed now. This is what our two countries’ citizens and people everywhere expect from the presidents of Russia and the United States.

I call upon Russia and the United States to prepare and hold a full-scale summit on the entire range of issues. It is far from normal that the presidents of

major nuclear powers meet merely “on the margins” of international gatherings. I hope that the process of preparing a proper summit is in the works even now.

I believe that the summit meeting should focus on the problems of reducing nuclear weapons and strengthening strategic stability. For should the system of nuclear arms control collapse, as may well happen if the INF Treaty is scrapped, the consequences, both direct and indirect, would be disastrous.

The closer that nuclear weapons are deployed to borders, the more dangerous they are: There is less time for a decision and greater risk of catastrophic error. And what will happen to the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty if the nuclear arms race begins anew? I am afraid it will be ruined.

If, however, the INF Treaty is saved, it will send a powerful signal to the world that the two biggest nuclear powers are aware of their responsibility and take their obligations seriously.

Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, and relations between Russia and the United States will finally get off the ground again.

I am confident that preparing a joint presidential statement on the two nations’ commitment to the INF Treaty is a realistic goal.

Simultaneously, the technical issues could also be resolved; for this purpose, the joint control commission under the INF Treaty could resume its work. I am convinced that, with an impetus from the two presidents, the generals and diplomats would be able to reach agreement.

We are living in a troubled world. It is particularly disturbing that relations between the major nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, have become a serious source of tensions and a hostage to domestic politics. It is time to return to sanity. I am sure that even inveterate opponents of normalizing U.S.-Russian relations will not dare to object.

These critics have no arguments on their side, for the very fact that the INF Treaty has been in effect for 30 years proves that it serves the security interests of our two countries and of the world.

In any undertaking, it is important to take the first step. In 1987, the first step in the difficult but vitally important process of ridding the world of nuclear weapons was the INF Treaty.

Today, we face a dual challenge of preventing the collapse of the system of nuclear agreements and reversing the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations. It is time to take the first step. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

One stupid leap for mankind DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He was previously an editor-atlarge for Time magazine and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”

Juvenal, that biting pundit of the Roman Empire, complained of weak leaders distracting the people with “panem et circenses” — bread and circuses. In our day, it’s moon bases and missions to Mars.

Europe is splintering. North Korea has gone full “Dr. Strangelove.”

Disaster in Puerto Rico. Massacre in Las Vegas. Crickets chirping on Capitol Hill, where Republican promises go to die. With so much to be done and few plans for doing it, the people need to be distracted. So Vice President Pence was trotted out to revive a long-dormant presidential commission and get American astronauts back into space.

Perhaps you thought our astronauts never left space.

Haven’t they been space walking, repairing telescopes, performing experiments and making music videos up there for years? Turns out those missions take place in “low Earth orbit,” less than 350 miles from home.

Though Pence’s commission is unlikely to tell you, there are very good reasons Americans, and other humans, abruptly stopped going deep into space. It’s deadly.

It’s unnecessary. And to borrow from Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there.

Doubtless, Americans could return to the moon, and even stay there for a while. It would cost vast sums, but we have good credit and high tolerance for debt. The question is why. The moon is still the same dead, dusty

desert we left in 1972. Ice-covered Antarctica and the Sarahan sands are both far more hospitable to human life than the moon.

A moon base makes zero sense on its own terms, so it’s pitched as a trampoline to Mars. Face it: The Red Planet has the best PR in the solar system. What Scientology is to creepy movie stars, Mars travel is to swashbuckling billionaires.

Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeffrey P. Bezos (owner of The Post) have all set their sights on the fourth rock from the sun, with Musk saying he hopes to die there — “just not on impact.”

A human traveler to Mars should make the most of its airless monotony, because there is no coming back. The long passage through the vacuum of space will expose astronauts to intense and prolonged

bombardment by cosmic rays and unimpeded solar radiation — a death sentence for which NASA has no solution (though scientists continue to seek one). At the Hotel Mars, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

What’s more, Mars is a dead end. As fatally desolate and brutal as Mars is, our neighbor planet is the most habitable destination for many, many lightyears in any direction.

Science fiction can be seductive. Of course we want to boldly go where no one has gone before. But space exploration is a job for robots, not humans.

Nature has adapted us exquisitely and precisely for life in one particular ecosystem in one remote corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe.

But here’s the good news: It’s a really nice ecosystem! Earth is blanketed with a breathable atmosphere, and the gravity’s just right to hold us in place without crushing our bodies. There is snow for skiing, and there are beaches for tanning. Land and seas teem with food — so much that the ever-growing human population has never been better nourished than today. There are wondrous things to see, such as Yellowstone, the Louvre and Willie Nelson.

The vice president touted the commercial prospects for humans in space, but that, too, is a distraction. There is no economic enterprise (apart from space tourism) that can be done more efficiently by humans in space than by space robots or humans on the ground. It’s all pie in the sky.

Other promoters of moon bases and Mars colonies are doomsday theorists, grimly laboring under the belief that humans are going to destroy the Earth and need to have a lifeboat ready. This is dangerous thinking.

For all the troubles in our current home, they are small compared with the problems of living in a terrarium on a frozen rock under skies composed of 95 percent carbon dioxide. If we have money and energy and brainpower enough to build settlements on distant wastelands, we are better off deploying those resources to preserve the bountiful planet we already have.

The vast and murderous universe has conspired to maroon the human race — but what a wonderful island we’re on.

Rather than go in search of dust bowls to die in, let us send our robot eyes and ears to explore the lifeless seas of space, marveling at their findings while giving thanks that we’re not with them. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

Did the media help Weinstein?

MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist.

Previously, she was the New York Times public editor and the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

It wasn’t just the complicit silence around Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment that made it so dangerous.

It was the opposite of silence, too.

It was the public humiliation that could be used to retaliate against alleged victims who spoke out.

Weinstein used the media like a bludgeon to keep his alleged victims in line, by many accounts. He did it skillfully — and with plenty of help.

“Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine,” Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine’s the Cut about an altercation in 2000 with Weinstein.

One technique: supplying information that would drag an accuser’s name through the mud.

The Italian actress Ambra Battilana Gutierrez found that out when she filed a sexual assault complaint against Weinstein in 2015.

“Details about Gutierrez’s past began to appear in the tabloids,” the New Yorker reported Tuesday in its exposé

of Weinstein’s sexual misbehavior. (The New York Times broke its major story on the same subject the other week; and in its wake, Weinstein was fired from his own company, though he denies many of the accusations.)

The gossip pages reported that Gutierrez had attended one of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous orgyparties, and that, as a teenager, she had made a charge of assault against a business executive but later backed out of cooperating with prosecutors.

It was a powerful — and a tried-and-true — method of control.

Just recently, as a blockbuster New York Times story on Weinstein moved toward publication, negative information about one of Weinstein’s accusers was offered to a Washington Post reporter.

The timing could, of course, be

BY PHIL HANDS FOR THE WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

coincidental, but seems suspicious and tracks with Weinstein’s well-known practices. (The Post had begun checking into it when the Times story, naming the accuser, was published.)

All of this raises a tricky journalistic question: Should reporters consider, before deciding to publish, a source’s motivation, or the effect of a story on reputation and career?

In politics, opposition research on a candidate has resulted in many legitimate — and important — news stories.

The journalistic standard is fairly simple: Is the information true, and is it newsworthy?

This same standard tends to be used for public figures of any kind — and Hollywood actresses may, or may not, fit into this category. (Are we talking about Meryl Streep or an unknown starlet?)

What the conventional practices often ignore is the reality of a vast power imbalance — the kind experienced by the women victimized by Roger Ailes at Fox News, or by the dozens of accusers who have come forward regarding the television star Bill Cosby.

Weinstein’s media manipulation could also cut in

quite another direction, Jordan Sargent wrote in a 2015 piece, published by Gawker Media’s Defamer site, “Tell Us What You Know About Harvey Weinstein’s ‘Open Secret.’”

He could hype the reputations of aspiring actresses who cooperated with his demands. A blind item in one gossip column was widely read as a cautionary tale planted by Weinstein: An unnamed actress mysteriously scores a prestigious magazine cover as the next It Girl, but then withdraws her favors from her powerful benefactor.

“Well, It never happened,” the item read. “So she’s gone back to the major player who tried to make it happen for her the first time.”

The message, over time, was clear: Cooperate with me and you might be a star. Accuse me and you’ll be smeared.

Far more than complicit silence, this was Hollywood buzz at its most insidious. But then serious reporting, amplifying the voices of courageous accusers, came along to change all that.

Given Weinstein’s decadeslong media manipulation, it’s fitting — gratifyingly so — that what brought his downfall was media exposure. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Gun violence

BY D ANIEL W EBSTER, J ON V ERNICK, C ASSANDRA C RIFASI AND B ETH M C G INTY

With the killing of 58 and the wounding of hundreds in Las Vegas recently, Americans are once again debating gun violence. Adding to the passion and the entrenched political and economic interests that make this conversation so intense are a number of myths. Here are some of the most stubborn ones.

MYTH NO. 1 Gun violence in the United States is at an all-time high.

Data from the FBI indicates an alarming 32 percent increase in the number of homicides committed with firearms from 2014 to 2016. The number of robberies and aggravated assaults committed with firearms increased by 17 percent over that time. The number of people shot in mass shootings has also risen sharply in the past 12 years.

Yet the current rate of firearm violence is still far lower than in 1993, when the rate was 6.21 such deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 3.4 in 2016. The high rate in the early 1990s was linked to a variety of conditions, most notably the emergence of a large and violent market for crack cocaine. It’s too soon to determine the causes of recent increases in gun violence or whether the upward trend will continue.

MYTH NO. 2 Background checks save lives, research shows.

There is solid research indicating that laws that keep guns out of the hands of high-risk individuals, such as domestic abusers and people convicted of violent crimes, reduce violence.

But there is no research indicating that background check laws as they currently exist save lives. Studies suggest that the federal Brady Law, which mandates background checks for firearm sales but exempts sales by private parties, has not been strong enough to reduce

homicide rates. There is no compelling, peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of extending background check requirements to private sales — unless those requirements are paired with a permitting or licensing system for purchasers.

Still, state laws requiring checks via a permitting system do reduce the diversion of guns for criminal use, homicides and suicides, and they may lower the risk of police officers being shot in the line of duty. Only 10 states and the District of Columbia require permits for handgun purchasers; eight states require background checks for private sales but do not require permits.

MYTH NO. 3 Mental illness is behind most gun violence against others.

Only an estimated 4 percent of violence against others is caused by the symptoms of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Impulsivity, anger, traumatic life events such as job loss or divorce, and problematic alcohol use are all stronger risk factors for gun violence.

Research also shows that mentalhealth-care providers are poor predictors of which patients will go on to harm others. Further, most people with mental illness will never become violent, and most gun violence is not caused by mental illness.

But mental illness is a strong risk factor for firearm suicide, which accounts for the majority of gun deaths in the United States. While improving America’s mental-health system

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Dozens attend a vigil Oct. 4 in Newtown, Conn., for the people killed in the Las Vegas shooting and to call for action against guns.

would benefit millions of people with mental illness, it would not substantially reduce gun violence against others.

MYTH NO. 4 Right-to-carry laws decrease crime.

The most comprehensive study on the effects of these laws found that violent crime rates increased with each additional year such a statute was in place, presumably as more people were carrying guns. By 10 years after the adoption of a right-to-carry law, violent crime rates were 13 to 15 percent higher than predicted had such laws not been in place.

Additionally, armed civilians are rarely able to deter or interrupt various crimes or even mass shootings. In fact, in zero of the 111 gun massacres analyzed by researcher Louis Klarevas did an armed civilian stop a mass shooting in progress. A separate FBI analysis revealed that unarmed civilians are more than 20 times as likely to end an active shooting than are armed civilians (excluding armed security guards).

MYTH NO. 5 Mass shootings are random.

Most mass shootings are directed at a specific person, group or institution against which the perpetrator has a grievance. A HuffPost analysis of mass shootings — which the FBI defines as four or more people killed with a firearm, not including the perpetrator — between 2009 and July 2015 found that 57 percent of the incidents involved a perpetrator’s current or former intimate partner or a family member, and 70 percent occurred in private dwellings.

While mass shootings in public spaces that kill and wound dozens or even hundreds of people receive plenty of media attention, smaller-scale gun violence occurs with far too much regularity in the United States, claiming nearly 100 lives every day. Most killers, including those who perpetrate mass shootings, aren’t trying to kill strangers but are targeting people they know well. n Webster is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Vernick is the center’s deputy, and Crifasi and McGinty are faculty members at the center. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2017

24

BWusOinReLssD Wenatchee Valley

C ES S FRES H SUC Lemolo Café

See PAGE 3

LE S SOLD ON SAEstate Group McLean Real Nick

See PAGE 5

7| OCTOBER 201

$2

Y A W R I E H T G N FINDI Y OW YOUR LOCALL

NED BUSINESS

MAGAZINE

RS CARVE THEIR WOMEN LEAUDSEINESS SUCCESS PATHS TO B See Page 20 WO BUSINESS

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 October edition.

You’ll find features on:

RLD’S

G PRESENTIN SPONSORS

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

Meet the women who are making a difference in our business community.

THE BRIGHT SPOT IN DOWNTOWN WENATCHEE

We profile Lemole Café and Deli, where the colorful decor might lure you in, but the fresh and tasty food will bring you back.

SOLD ON A SYSTEM

The Nick McLean Real Estate Group had a rather rocky start with its promise to buy any house it couldn’t sell.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Plus lively guest columnists, 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 October’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.