The Washington Post National Weekly - Nov. 1, 2015

2014 NH 27.4%

WA

Worst Week Jeb Bush 3

Politics Railroads derail their deadline 4

27.3%

VT 24.8% ME

OR

27.9%

28.2%

MT

ND

26.4%

32.2%

ID

MN

27.6% WI

SD

28.9%

30.9%

30.2%

NV

27.7%

UT

25.7%

30.7%

IA

NE

CA

IL

29.3%

CO

21.3%

27%

MI

29.5%

24.7%

NY

31.2%

29.8%

WY

KS

MO

31.3%

30.2%

PA

30.2%

OH

IN

32.7% 32.6% KY

WV

35.7%

31.6%

NC

29.7%

TN

AZ

OK

NM

28.9%

33%

28.4%

31.2%

AR

VA

28.5%

SC

32.1%

35.9% AL MS

33.5%

GA

TX

31.9% HI

RI 27%

NJ 26.9%

LA

34.9%

22.1%

MA 23.3%

CT 26.3%

30.5%

35.5%

AK

29.7%

DE 30.7%

FL

26.2%

MD 29.6% DC 21.7%

Health The obese states of America 16

5 Myths About candy 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Jeb Bush

by Chris Cillizza

I

f you spent Wednesday night watching the World Series instead of the Republican presidential debate, there was an easy way to figure out which candidates did well and which ones didn’t: Listen to the next­day spin.

The candidates who did well were boasting about their chances. One of those who did not, on the other hand, had this to say about his campaign Thursday: “It’s not on life support.”

That’s the unfortunate spot where Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor (and former 2016 front­runner), finds himself after a dismal performance at the debate in Boulder, Colo.

Bush needed a moment. His campaign’s fundraising has lagged over the past three months, forcing him to cut staff salaries even as polling suggests that he is falling further behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson, the race’s unlikely co­leaders.

And he did get his moment — but not the kind he wanted.

Twenty minutes into the debate, Bush turned to Sen. Marco Rubio, his onetime protege turned main rival, and attacked.

Bush asked why Rubio had missed so many Senate votes.

“What is it, like a French workweek?” he “joked.” “You get, like, three days where you have to show up?”

Rubio pounced, saying the only reason Bush was going after him now was “because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

The crowd at the University of Colorado went bananas, drowning out Bush’s retort, which I imagine was something like: “Oh, yeah? Well, the jerk store called and they’re running out of you.”

Bush seemed shell­shocked from the whole now­the­ student­has­become­the­master thing and never recovered. He spent the next 24 hours beating back questions about whether he would remain in the race, a remarkable shift for someone who was widely considered the odds­on favorite to win the nomination when he entered the contest.

Jeb Bush, for insisting that everything is fine when everything is most definitely not fine, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Flags and flowers decorate Trevor Casper’s gravesite in his home town of Kiel, Wis. The gravestone recognizes family and friends on one side and Casper’s status as a trooper on the other.

Photograph by WHITNEY LEAMING, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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POLITICS

A mighty lobby shows its clout

BY A SHLEY H ALSEY III AND M ICHAEL L ARIS

U

ntil a train barreled off the tracks at 9:26 p.m. May 12, it had been business as usual on Capitol Hill.

Among the bills quietly making their way toward a final vote was one that would postpone by several years a multibillion-dollar deadline facing the railroad industry.

A victory for the railroads, which maintain one of the most powerful lobbying efforts in Washington, seemed all but certain and likely to be little noticed outside of the industry.

But at that moment, an Amtrak train hurtling toward New York City derailed in Philadelphia, turning into a tangle of crushed metal that killed eight passengers and injured 200 more.

Everyone — including the railroad and federal investigators — agreed that the catastrophe could have been prevented by a single innovation called Positive Train Control (PTC). It’s an automatic braking system that federal regulators call “the single-most important rail safety development in more than a century.”

Now, after a period of reflection and several inquiries, Congress is postponing the deadline for use of PTC. Both the House and Senate approved a bill last week to delay the deadline until at least 2018.

This action comes in a new regulatory era for the railroads. Trains filled with volatile natural gas or oil have derailed seven times so far this year, and there is fear that one could cause catastrophic explosions as it passes through a city.

An order not enforced What has taken place since May provides insight into the influence that effective lobbyists wield in Washington and how ready access to members of Congress has helped one industry fend off a costly safety mandate.

Seven years ago, Congress ordered railroads to have PTC installed by the end of 2015. It was an uncomfortable deadline for the industry, one they argued should be postponed. PTC technology was

PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Railroads put brakes on costly safety device as dangers mount too complex, they said, and the $14.7 billion cost to equip freight and commuter lines was prohibitive. Federal economists put the cost-benefit ratio at about 20 to 1.

With their lobbyists in overdrive in 2008, the railroads might have persuaded Congress to delay the mandate. But in the middle of that debate, a head-on train collision in California killed 25 people and injured 102 others. The National Transportation Safety Board said PTC could have prevented the accident, and that moved lawmakers to settle on the Dec. 31, 2015, deadline.

The NTSB says it has investigated 145 rail accidents since 1969 that PTC could have prevented, with a death toll of 288 and 6,574 people injured.

In the years since Congress moved to finalize the deadline in 2008, the railroad industry has spent $316 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), to maintain one of the most savvy lobbying teams in Washington. It also contributed more than $24 million during the same time period to the reelection efforts of members of Congress, targeting in particular the chairmen and members of key committees that govern its business.

In 2011, the chairman of the House subcommittee on railroads spoke out at a hearing, denouncing the PTC mandate as “an example of regulatory overreach.” He said PTC would have “a very, very small cost-benefit ratio.”

Since then, that chairman, Rep.

A train derailment in Philadelphia in May killed eight people and injured 200. It is widely agreed that the tragedy could have been averted if automatic braking technology known as Positive Train Control (PTC) had been in place.

Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), has risen to lead the full House Transportation Committee. In late September, he introduced a bipartisan bill to extend the PTC deadline to at least 2018, and beyond if the “railroads demonstrate they are facing continued difficulties.”

“Railroads must implement this important but complicated safety technology in a responsible manner, and we need to give them the necessary time to do so,” Shuster said in a statement announcing the bill.

Since taking office in 2001, Shuster has received campaign contributions of $446,079 from the railroad industry, according to the CRP, with $141,484 of it coming in the 2013-2014 election cycle.

Money flows readily to the

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

5

POLITICS chairs of powerful committees, but other members of the House Transportation Committee also have benefited from railroad contributions. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, committee members received more than $1.25 million in direct contributions to their campaigns. As of the end of September, the railroads had pitched another $721,742 at the House committee members.

The Senate also has benefited from the railroad industry’s largesse, according to the CRP, with 77 senators receiving nearly $1.5 million in campaign contributions in 2013-2014.

Outside the Beltway, massive contributions may sound like the cost to buy a vote in Congress. But in this era of mega-money politics, campaign contributions win something almost as valuable for railroad lobbyists: face time with a member of the House or Senate.

“They call and they get a member meeting right away,” said a senior senate staff member. “They have a lot of access.”

Oil boom raises the stakes Rail safety has never been a more pressing issue than it is today. So far, the people who have died in U.S. accidents that PTC could have prevented have generally been crew members or passengers. That could change in dramatic, catastrophic fashion.

The number of rail tank cars carrying flammable material in the United States has grown from 9,500 seven years ago to 493,126 last year, thanks to the boom in domestic oil produced in the Bakken oil fields.

Those trains rumble from the oil fields in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan, Canada, to refineries on the coasts.

So far this year, seven trains have derailed, either leaking their contents or exploding. All of the U.S. explosions have come in remote rural areas where the erupting fireballs did little damage.

Canada was not so lucky.

In July 2013, a runaway freight train carrying 74 tank cars full of Bakken derailed in the town of Lac-Mégantic, setting off an inferno that destroyed 30 downtown buildings and killed 47 people.

Sarah Feinberg, acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, says worries that a train might explode in a city have caused her sleepless nights.

JOSEPH KACZMAREK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Preventable train crashes since 2004 Federal investigators have identified dozens of crashes that could have been prevented with Positive Train Control, an automatic braking technology that Congress mandated be in place by the end of this year.

Sept. 12, 2008: Chatsworth, Calif.

Deaths: 25

’05

’10

Oct. 1, 2008: Congress passes automatic braking mandate.

Source: National Transportation Safety Board

“If PTC is not fully implemented by Jan. 1, 2016, we can and should expect there to be accidents in the months and years to follow that PTC could have prevented,” she told the House subcommittee on railroads in June.

Many railroads are far behind The railroads’ pitch for an extension — both loudly in the media and quietly to Congress — was straightforward. If the deadline were not postponed, they had said: “Transportation of all goods over freight rail grinds to a halt; the U.S. economy loses $30 billion; household incomes drop by $17 billion; 700,000 Americans lose

NUMBER OF DEATHS

2

8

20

May 12: Philadelphia 8

’15

Dec. 31: Current deadline to install braking equipment. A proposal would delay it until at least 2018.

THE WASHINGTON POST

their jobs; millions of commuters are stranded.”

That was the message in October when officials from three commuter rail lines and Association of American Railroads President Ed Hamberger held a conference call with reporters to add their voices to a chorus call for extension of the PTC deadline.

“If the congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 31 is not extended, there will be a transportation crisis in the country with severe economic consequences,” said Michael Melaniphy, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

The call had an unintended

“Is a deadline a deadline?

We’re talking about fixing things that will eventually save lives, and you guys haven’t done it. Why?” Bob Gildersleeve Sr., whose son Bob, a Maryland father of two, was killed in the May crash

An investigator inspects a train car after the Philadelphia derailment.

KLMNO WEEKLY

subtext; all three of the commuter rail lines represented — Virginia Railway Express, Chicago’s Metra system and California’s San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission — said their installation of PTC would be substantially complete by the end of 2015. Amtrak also promises to have PTC operating in the northeast corridor rails that it owns by the current deadline.

But most passenger trains operate on track that’s owned by the freight railroads, and the freight rail lines are far from ready to meet the deadline. The freight companies say that without an extension, all traffic on their lines must halt to comply with the law.

When final regulations were put in place nearly six years ago, federal officials tallied up the expected benefits of having the automatic braking system in place.

The cost-benefit analysis put a price tag on crumpled locomotives, train delays, track damage, evacuation costs, the cleanup of hazardous spills and other consequences of the crashes.

Government economists also sought to calculate the human costs in injuries and deaths, using a figure of $6 million for each life.

Over 20 years, there would be $269 million in savings, they figured, or the equivalent of 45 lives spared, and another $200 million in prevented injury costs.

In all, they projected $674 million in safety benefits from the PTC system.

It would cost $13.2 billion over 20 years, including maintenance costs, to net those benefits, the economists calculated.

That came out to a cost-benefit ratio of about 20 to 1, a disconnect seized on by railroad executives, lobbyists and lawmakers sympathetic to their needs, such as Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.).

“Now, everybody has tremendous sympathy for those families that lost loved ones in the Amtrak accident but, my goodness, now we’re going to be spending billions to make something that already is one of the safest things in the entire world [safer]?” Duncan, who has received $303,250 in railroad campaign support during a 27-year career in the House, said at a June hearing. “And I’m thinking that we would be better off to spend those billions in many, many other ways — cancer research, and everything else.” n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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POLITICS

Cruz’s quiet fundraising strength

BY K ATIE Z EZIMA AND M ATEA G OLD

W

ealthy investors shot skeet with Sen. Ted Cruz in Park City, Utah, last month. Conservative lawyers gathered in a clubby Washington restaurant in midOctober to raise money for his presidential bid. And on Monday, billionaire tech entrepreneur Darwin Deason and five other wealthy Texans announced that they were coming aboard his campaign.

For all his bashing of “billionaire Republican donors” who “actively despise our base,” the antiestablishment senator from Texas is being bolstered by his own robust base of wealthy contributors.

Cruz raised $5.2 million through the end of September from supporters who gave him the $2,700 maximum — making him No. 2 in the GOP race for large donors, after former Florida governor Jeb Bush, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Cruz’s unorthodox campaign has hit on a fundraising formula that no other candidate has been able to match: raising millions from a robust base of grass-roots supporters while building a substantial network of rich backers.

The senator’s quiet fundraising prowess — he has collected $26.5 million to date — could help give him staying power in what is sure to be a hard-fought battle for the GOP nomination. The structure of his donor base closely resembles that of President Obama, whose vaunted fundraising operation focused on low- dollar givers as well as major bundlers, bringing in a record $783 million for his 2012 reelection.

Cruz has had trouble making inroads in New York financial circles or on Florida’s donor-rich Gold Coast. But he is finding support among like-minded constitutionalists, religious conservatives, and oil and gas executives, campaign finance filings and fundraising invitations show.

“A lot of Wall Street is out of touch with mainstream America,” Cruz’s wife, Heidi — who is on leave from her job as a managing

BRANDON WADE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Big donors join a robust base of grass-roots support in a powerful formula to fuel campaign Small vs. large donors Where the best-funded campaigns are drawing support from donors:

Ben Carson Ted Cruz

$200 or less

Max amount given ($2,700)

59%

6%

40

21

Jeb Bush 5

79

Primary money raised through Sept. 30: Carson, $31 million; Cruz, $24.5 million; Bush, $24 million Source: Campaign Finance Institute

director at Goldman Sachs and is one of his most prolific fundraisers — said recently. “That’s not our funding base.”

The senator is a different person in private fundraisers than out on the campaign trail, according to people who have observed the dynamic. He doesn’t back away

from his hard-line positions, but he quickly moves past them, trying to present a restrained, Harvard-educated lawyer.

“People are swayed by his intellect,” said Mica Mosbacher, a Houston fundraiser helping organize events for Cruz across the country. “He always says, ‘Ask me all the hard questions.’ And he is very polite and humble. I think the firebrand you see [in public] is his passion getting ahead of him.

Those who are supporting him admire that he will stand up for what’s right.”

A Republican strategist well connected to the donor world added: “When he’s with major donors, they expect the guy they see with all the red meat, but they instead see an intelligent, buttoned-down lawyer with real bona fides. He will say things like, basically, ‘This is politics — you’ve got to go out there and sell and perform.’ ” At a recent fundraiser in New York, Cruz made the case that he is

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) speaks during a North Texas Presidential Forum last month in Plano.

the candidate to unite a fractious GOP, arguing that he can energize evangelicals, tea partyers, military hawks and fiscal conservatives.

“His feeling — and I agree with him — is that you cannot make one segment love you and another segment hate you,” said venture capitalist Ken Abramowitz, who hosted the gathering. “He stressed that he would appeal to all the segments but still maintain his message.”

Shmuley Boteach, a New Jersey rabbi and former congressional candidate, has been introducing Cruz to members of the Jewish community in New York and Los Angeles. Boteach said Cruz is diplomatic when it comes to hotbutton issues — such as the time Boteach told the senator he has a gay brother and doesn’t think he should speak so stridently against same-sex marriage.

“He’ll respond very respectfully and say, ‘Okay, Shmuley, we respectfully disagree,’ ” Boteach said. “I do not find him dogmatic about it. . . . When you get to know the guy, he’s measured. This is a Princeton, Harvard graduate.”

It’s a different scene on the campaign trail, where Cruz’s fiery jabs have helped him amass a large pool of enthusiastic small donors.

By the end of September, he had raised the second-largest amount in low-dollar contributions among the GOP field: $9.9 million to retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s $18.2 million.

Overall, Cruz has the most balanced mix of donors among all the Republican hopefuls. Of the $24.5 million he has raised, 40 percent has come from contributors who have given him $200 or less, 25 percent from those who have given $201 to $999, 13 percent from those who have given $1,000 to $2,699, and 21 percent from those who have given the $2,700 maximum, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.

Obama, by comparison, raised 28 percent of his 2012 donations from people who gave $200 or less and 22 percent from max donors.

It remains to be seen whether Cruz, who is hovering around 8 percent in national polls, will gain enough momentum to scale dona-

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

7

POLITICS tions up as dramatically as Obama did in his campaigns.

Cruz has long said that his successful 2012 Senate run (and now his presidential bid) attempted to emulate Obama’s 2008 tactics.

Cruz gave Senate campaign staffers a copy of “The Audacity to Win,” written by Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe.

“When it comes to fundraising, I think one of the greatest surprises, from the perspective of the Washington chattering class, has been the incredible, astonishing fundraising that this campaign has benefited from,” Cruz said Monday in Houston, where he announced that six wealthy supporters of former Texas governor Rick Perry are now backing him.

Among them were Deason, who gave $5 million to a pro-Perry super PAC in June, and Dallas tax consultant G. Brint Ryan, who donated $250,000. Such supporters could inject huge sums into a group of super PACs supporting Cruz, which reported raising $38 million by the end of June.

Houston real estate developer Welcome Wilson Sr. was supporting Perry until he dropped out. He has close ties to the Bush family — his son went to school with Jeb — but said he was convinced that Cruz could best capture the imagination of voters now considering Donald Trump.

“Their support comes from the same type of people — the people who want a change,” Wilson said.

Heidi Cruz has said she made 600 fundraising calls in the second quarter, typically reaching 20 to 25 people a day.

She has even been reaching out to bundlers who are already backing other candidates. Andrew Sabin, a Jeb Bush supporter who has had the Cruz family to his Long Island home, said she gave him a call last month.

“I love his wife,” Sabin said — but he told Heidi Cruz that he is “100 percent” with Bush.

Others are coming over. Chart Westcott, a Dallas biotech investor, switched allegiance to Cruz after his first choice, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, dropped out.

Westcott is also impressed by Cruz’s ability to draw in both largeand small-dollar donors.

“I think when you look at the financial shape of all the campaigns,” he said, “Cruz has proven himself to be a powerhouse on both sides of the ledger.” n

CAMPAIGN

KLMNO WEEKLY

2016

At Wednesday’s debate, Rubio’s moment arrived BY

K AREN T UMULTY

M “When he’s with major donors, they expect the guy they see with all the red meat, but they instead see an intelligent, buttoned-down lawyer with real bona fides.”

A Republican strategist

arco Rubio was already cruising to a breakout performance in the latest GOP presidential debate when an attack from Donald Trump opened up more air time for him to respond according to the evening’s format.

“Well, I’ve learned the rules on this,” the senator from Florida said coolly — and proceeded to swat back the celebrity billionaire with ease on Trump’s signature issue.

If Wednesday’s debate was any indication, Rubio has learned not only the rules, but the playbook.

And he has reached the point where he appears ready to execute it.

Rubio showed during the debate that he could take a hit, and swing back — something that might have been in doubt, given his youth and the roughness of this election cycle. Until this point in the campaign, he has run a relatively low-key effort, not making a grab for the spotlight. His strategists have said he was waiting for a moment to put his natural political talents on display.

It came Wednesday night.

His unspoken invitation to GOP primary voters: Imagine the charismatic 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants on another debate stage a year from now, up against former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Privately, some strategists for the likely Democratic nominee, who has lately been on a roll, acknowledge this is the prospect they most worry about as well.

Of course, there is a long way to go between now and then, and many obstacles remain for Rubio.

“The election wasn’t decided last night, and we’re going to have another debate in 14 days, and that will replace in people’s memory this one, so it’s part of a process,” Rubio said Thursday morning on CNN. He also lags far behind in the polls — and in the traditional metrics of money, organization and endorsements. Rubio’s role in craft-

ing a comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013 may be a disqualifier in the view of many in the conservative base.

And to many Republicans, the idea of electing a first-term senator who is long on eloquence and short on accomplishments seems uncomfortably reminiscent of how the country voted to put Barack Obama in the White House in 2008.

Then again, with the Iowa caucuses less than 100 days away, it is hard to imagine anyone else in the sprawling, fractious GOP field

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) showed during the debate that he could take a hit — and swing back.

who is equipped to bring together the party’s establishment and insurgent wings.

The most memorable moment of the debate was an exchange between Rubio and his one-time political mentor, Jeb Bush, who is struggling to regain his standing as the establishment favorite.

Bush criticized Rubio for missing more votes than any other senator this year.

“What is it, like a French work week? You get, like, three days where you have to show up?” Bush said. “You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well; they’re looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.”

Rubio had seen that one coming and was ready with a devastating

counterattack.

He noted that Bush, in his attempts to regain his standing as the establishment favorite, had compared his efforts to those of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who resurrected a campaign that had been left for dead and went on to win his party’s nomination in 2008.

“I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” Rubio said. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

As Rubio took a victory lap of six network and cable news shows Thursday morning after the debate, he resisted all opportunities to keep bashing Bush. He told NBC’s “Today Show” host Savannah Guthrie: “I still have tremendous admiration for him both as a person and what he did as governor of Florida. I’m not going to talk bad about Governor Jeb Bush. My campaign is not about him.”

Instead, he trained his criticism on Clinton and the media.

Rubio also spoke to the frustrations within his own party, over the fact that its growing dominance of the legislative branch has not yielded the policy results that many had hoped.

“The time has come for my party, the Republican Party, and America to turn the page and elect a new generation of leaders, so that in the next Congress, when they start taking votes on some of these issues, they will be meaningful votes, not show votes,” he said, “because there is actually going to be a president on the other end of that process that is going to work for those things to pass, and then sign them into law.”

In other words, his argument suggested, the first thing the Republicans must figure out is how to winbacktheWhiteHouse.Andthat means finding a candidate who can express the aspirations of the entire country, and not just the agitation of the conservative base. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Who’s not online — and why BY

B RIAN F UNG

I

f the gap between technology rich and technology poor was primarily physical in the 1990s, the gap in this decade is increasingly skills-based.

To be “left behind” in the 21st century now means something completely different compared with what it meant at the end of the 20th. Then, Washington worried about getting enough telephones and personal computers into U.S. households. Although that challenge may seem like a distant memory, it has since been replaced by others.

Today, access to high-speed Internet — and the know-how to use it — have become regulators’ chief worry. They not only pose new problems for society but also, in subtle ways, change who needs the most help.

“It has more to do with knowledge and information literacy,” said Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine.

Yes, cost is still a factor. As many as 10 million U.S. households without access say they might be persuaded to sign up for service if they received a government subsidy, according to Federal Communications Commission estimates. But if that sounds like a lot, it pales in comparison to the two-thirds of non-Internet users in the United States who say they don’t intend to sign up for broadband — at any price.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that only 19 percent of the 51 million people without Internet access blame high prices, and only 7 percent cite the availability of broadband.

Those who aren’t on the Internet are saying they lack something else: the guidance that would make it an object of value to them.

Far more, 34 percent, told Pew that the Internet simply isn’t relevant to their lives. And 32 percent said it is too hard to use. In other words, adding more connectivity won’t close the digital divide if those who stand to benefit aren’t interested in what the Internet has to offer.

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

Skill is replacing cost as primary obstacle, as two-thirds of non-users won’t sign up at any price Coaching low-income Americans to look up information or apply for federal benefits online, or showing seniors how the Internet can help them stay in touch with family members, are difficult goals to measure. They don’t lend themselves to reports about numbers of homes connected or miles of cable laid. But the evidence suggests that policymakers already have reached the vast majority of households for which accessibility, or price, was the single biggest barrier to adoption.

Some aspects of this newer, skill-based digital divide promise to resolve themselves over time.

Take seniors, for example, who account for one of the fastestgrowing groups of social media users (despite their overall reputation as late-adopters, generally). As mobile apps and devices become more ubiquitous, younger generations are finding it easier to introduce the technology to their parents.

Still, addressing some aspects of the digital divide probably will require more active investments.

The poor and the elderly tend to fare the worst, along with rural Americans and racial minorities.

Households living on less than $25,000 a year, for example, are half as likely to use the Internet compared with those earning $100,000 or more. Although blacks and Hispanics have significantly increased their rates of Internet usage since 2005, they still lag behind other groups — and what’s worse, according to Pew, their progress has stalled.

As many as 22 million rural Americans lack access to download speeds of 25 megabits per second, according to the FCC. One in 5 rural Americans lacks access to even slower speeds of 4 mbps.

While only 8 percent of urban Americans lack access to basic broadband, the FCC has said, that figure surges to 63 percent among those living on Native American

A man takes part in a class that teaches seniors how to use Facebook at a branch of the New York Public Library.

Seniors have been making friends on Facebook as a result of programs that help them learn how to brush up on social networking skills.

tribal lands.

Government programs and private initiatives have helped to close this gap considerably. The FCC said in August that it would award more than $9 billion to Internet providers such as AT&T, Frontier and Windstream over the next six years to help them extend their broadband infrastructure in rural areas. An FCC program known as Lifeline is expected to begin offering lowincome Americans subsidies for high-speed Internet plans. The White House is funneling an extra $1 billion a year into connecting schools and libraries to the Web. A slew of agencies have pledged to make broadband more accessible. They include the Justice Department as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is considering a proposal to automatically wire new low-income housing with built-in data connections. Tech giant Google has offered to connect residents in such buildings to high-speed fiber optic service for free.

Other firms provide basic Internet access to low-income Americans at a discount. A Comcast program recently began offering some Florida seniors and community college students in Illinois and Colorado Internet access for $10 a month. And Facebook’s Internet.org initiative is exploring the use of satellites to beam wireless broadband down to less developed countries.

But all of these efforts to build more extensive high-speed networks still overlook what Pew, AARP and others have been discovering: that to get the last of the United States’ late adopters online will take more than infrastructure. It’ll require deep investment in digital education and painstaking one-on-one work that ultimately convinces offline Americans that the Internet is worth their time.

As the country closes that gap, still others will open as new technologies come along, displacing the Web as the next killer utility and the key to unlocking the nation’s economic future. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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In Fla., a trail of horse carcasses BY

E LAHE I ZADI

T

he international prizewinning horse had just placed second in the Grand Prix of Le Pin, France, weeks before it came to the Stephenses rural farm for a new life in Florida.

Here in the United States, Phedras de Blondel was supposed to compete and take top prizes. But days after its arrival in Manatee County, the horse’s bloody carcass was found not far from where it slept.

The 12-year-old horse was led out of its pen and killed, with its remains discovered by the owners last Sunday, according to the Manatee County Sheriff ’s Office.

“We determined it was basically slaughtered right on their property,” said sheriff ’s office spokesman Dave Bristow, “presumably for the horse meat.”

Investigators suspect more than one person was involved in stealing and killing the horse. “It was a gruesome scene,” Bristow said. “There was a lot of blood involved.”

Owner Steve Stephens told the Bradenton Herald that his wife, Debbie, had grand ambitions for 1,300-pound Phedras de Blondel, valued at an estimated $200,000.

The horse was going to be a star jumper.

“It’s one of the cruelest things that could happen to any horse,” Debbie Stephens, an accomplished show jumper, told the Associated Press. “This just turned my life around.”

“I’ve never witnessed anything like it in my life,” Steve Stephens told ABC affiliate WFTS. “He was basically murdered.”

All that was left of the horse was its ribcage, neck and head, he told the station.

Such a case is uncommon in Manatee County, Bristow said, but horses have been stolen and butchered elsewhere in the state.

Horse meat is more common in other countries, including in various Latin American, Caribbean and European nations. But the meat is effectively illegal in Florida (it has to be processed by a licensed

RICHARD DYMOND/BRADENTON (FLA.) HERALD VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Recent butchering puts attention on black market for banned meat slaughterhouse and labeled).

Still, the demand for the banned commodity has spawned a black market in the diverse state, according to animal rights activists.

In 2009, at least 17 butchered horses were found in Miami-Dade County, where officials reported a dramatic increase in the horsemeat market. Activists at the time said the meat can cost anywhere from $10 to $20 a pound.

Last month, authorities in Palm Beach County raided three slaughterhouses and arrested six people in connection with the illegal slaughter and sale of horses. And in July, a 3-year-old competitive show horse named Smart Amanda Whiz was found slaughtered for its meat.

“It’s actually more common than you think,” said South Florida SPCA spokeswoman Laurie Waggoner, who noted that Phedras de Blondel’s killing was unique because it was so brazen.

“There’s a lot of horses that we never know about. [Authorities] find a couple of carcasses every month.”

Florida is home not just to a diverse population — generating demand for horse meat — but also a high concentration of horses, Waggoner said.

“Horses are very expensive to keep,” she noted; often it’s abandoned horses or those sold cheaply that fall victim to slaughter.

Often these horses are slaughtered on the spot, and with the average horse weighing about

Steve Stephens owns Imperial Farms Equestrian Center, top, in Palmetto, Fla. He and his wife found their horse, Phedras de Blondel, slaughtered and butchered, most likely for his meat.

1,200 pounds, the haul can be enormous.

As for Phedras de Blondel’s death, “this is not an easy case to solve,” Bristow said. There are no witnesses to the crime, which could have taken place anytime overnight Saturday into Sunday morning. Officials have no suspects and would consider burglary, grand theft and animal cruelty felony charges.

Steve Stephens told the Herald that the horse may have been targeted because of its size.

“These people came to butcher this horse out,” Stephens told the paper. “They didn’t just come with those sharp knives for nothing. They had all intentions of doing what they did. They knew what they were going to do.” n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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WORLD

Jews and Arabs, healing the injured At a Jerusalem hospital, the focus is patients — not ‘victims’ or ‘attackers’

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND R UTH E GLASH

Jerusalem

T

his isn’t really a good news story. This is a sad story about a special place where Jews and Arabs come together to heal the broken bodies of victims and their attackers, some of them children.

The staff call them “Bert and Ernie” or “Fried and Eid.” Ahmed Eid, 65, is a Muslim from the Galilee village of Dabburiya. Elchanan Fried, 41, is a Jew from Petah Tikva in central Israel.

They both live in West Jerusalem.

Eid wears green scrubs and a scrub cap. Fried wears green scrubs and a knitted kippa. Eid is the head of surgery at Hadassah University Hospital in Mount Scopus. Fried is the head of the Intensive Care Unit. They both keep glancing at the time on their smartphones. They are on call.

For the past month — during a wave of Palestinian attacks on Jews and harsh Israeli responses, including shoot-to-kill countermeasures — the two have worked side by side.

On Oct. 12, two Palestinian cousins, ages 13 and 15, from East Jerusalem stabbed a 13-year-old Jewish kid on his bicycle outside a candy store. They also wounded a 21-year-old Jewish Israeli man.

The 13-year-old victim, whose name is being withheld at his parent’s request, arrived at Mount Scopus in terrible shape.

“No blood pressure. Pulse was 40. Ventilated at the scene,” said Eid, who rushed into surgery and began to work on his patient.

“More dead than alive,” said Fried, who came to assist.

So did a Palestinian anesthesiologist from the West Bank, who worked alongside secular, ultraOrthodox Jewish, Muslim and Christian doctors and nurses, some from Israel, some from the Jewish settlements, others from the Palestinian towns.

When the patient was stabilized, Eid went briefly to the waiting room to speak with the patient’s father.

Eid told him: “Listen, your son

DAVID VAAKNIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Ahmed Eid, left, is a Muslim from the Galilee village of Dabburiya.

Elchanan Fried is a Jew from Petah Tikva in central Israel. During the wave of Palestinian attacks on Jews, the two have worked side by side.

is still alive. It’s going to be okay.”

Eid noticed the father was a religious Jew. “I told him my name is Ahmed Eid, I’m director of surgery. Then I made a joke, I guess. I said, ‘An Ahmed stabbed your son, and an Ahmed is going to save your son.’ ” Both doctors said they never ask whether the patient who comes through the door is a victim or assailant.

“We don’t ask who you are. We treat the terrorist the same as we treat the victim,” Eid said.

Fried was asked his opinion. “I rarely agree with Dr. Eid, but in this case I concur.” He was making a joke. Both doctors smiled and looked at the time on their phones again.

Fried called Hadassah hospital “a unique bubble.” He said half his staff in the ICU are Arabs. “Sometimes someone complains, but very, very rarely.”

“We treat patients by medical priority. Most sick first. To us this is obvious. Maybe to the outside world, it is hard to understand,” said Osnat Levtzion-Korach, director of the hospital.

At the same time Fried and Eid were helping the victims, a few miles away at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Kerem, a Jewish doctor treated the Palestinian assailant, 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra.

His 15-year-old cousin was shot dead at the scene by an Israeli police officer. Ahmed Manasra was run over by a car as he fled.

Miklosh Bala, 46, director of the trauma unit, attended. Bala was born in the Soviet Union and came to Israel years ago, one of a million Russian Jews to immigrate here.

“The patient arrived accompanied by the security services, but it was not immediately clear what had happened, his age was not obvious, although it was clear he was a child,” Bala recalled.

He does not call Manasra “the terrorist.”

“We did not have a long conversation with him. We just did what was needed. He was conscious. We took his vitals and did what we would do for anyone who arrives in our department. He had a CT scan, a full medical evaluation, he was checked by a surgeon, an or-

thopedic doctor, everybody, it was all standard for someone with his injuries.”

Bala said, “Only afterwards we heard the details of the incident.

Suddenly the kid was in the headlines, but when he first arrived, we did not know what had happened.

All we wanted was to see that he was alive, his eyes were open.”

Minutes after Manasra was struck by the car, a crowd of onlookers surrounded him, a raw scene captured on video. As he lay bleeding in the street, an Israeli mob shouted, “Die!” They cursed him as the “son of a whore” and shouted at police to finish him off with a bullet to the head.

Bala recalled that Manasra “did not answer many of our questions.

It was obvious that he was scared.

His parents did not come until later, but our staff took good care of him.”

In a speech in Ramallah last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of barbarism and pointed to the “coldblooded execution” of children by Israeli forces, including Manasra, whom he called a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

The following day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Abbas of “ lies and incitement” — and reminded his listeners that it was Palestinians stabbing Jews.

The Israeli government released video and photographs of Manasra alive and well in a bed in the Hadassah hospital — alongside security camera footage showing Manasra and his cousin with knives in their hands.

Asked what it felt like to treat a boy who stabbed a boy, Bala said, “It is difficult to answer such a personal question. I have a 13year-old son at home, and I did not really talk about it with my son. I do not understand what can make a 13-year-old carry out something like this.”

Bala said, “I don’t think I can’t be criticized for saving a life. It is holiest of holies. I just don’t understand the question when someone asks me why I saved the life of an attacker.”

“That is my job,” he said. n

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Russia’s supply line to Syria A NDREW R OTH Novosasitli, Russia BY

I

n 2013, a quiet 23-year-old from Russia named Ahmed decided to travel to Syria to fight with an Islamist battalion against President Bashar alAssad’s government.

Two years later, now a veteran of Syria’s civil war and on parole from a Russian prison, he looks back on that moment with a kind of dazed regret.

“It was a sickness,” the native of Dagestan, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia, said in an interview in his home town last month. “It was an epidemic.”

Ahmed is one of at least 20 men to have fought in Syria who came from Novosasitli, a village of 2,000 people in Dagestan where many have embraced Salafism, an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam that has spread in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

When Russia launched airstrikes in Syria in September, President Vladimir Putin in part justified the campaign as a preemptive strike against thousands of Russian-born militants fighting in Syria who could soon return home to spread terror, a fear shared by many Western countries. But as Russia puts on a show of force abroad, potent sources of extremism remain unaddressed at home.

Russian estimates of the number of its citizens fighting in Syria have grown quickly. In October, Putin said that as many as 7,000 people from the former Soviet Union had joined the Islamic State. Critics say his figures are exaggerated to justify Russia’s sudden intervention in Syria.

Most of the young men who left Novosasitli for Syria had studied together at madrassas, or religious schools, in the Middle East, locals said. They joined Islamist groups in Syria, often with other fighters from the former Soviet Union. Some joined the Islamic State. Seven died in Syria. Some are already back.

“We certainly cannot allow them to use the experience they are getting in Syria on home soil,” Putin said at a regional summit a

DMITRI BELIAKOV FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Men from the Caucasus are waging jihad in Syria, and 20 of them have come from one village few weeks ago.

Ahmed, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used because he feared reprisals, said he and four other men from Novosasitli were recruited while studying in Egypt and spent several months fighting in northern Syria near the border with Turkey.

After returning to Russia in March 2014, they were arrested, imprisoned for a year and paroled.

“Almost all the boys have returned; some received their punishments and went to prison, others did not fight at all,” said Akhyad Abdullayev, the village’s 45year-old administrator. “The boys are living peaceful lives in the village.”

Across Dagestan, many residents have a relative, friend or acquaintance who has left for Syria.

“Everyone here is talking about Syria,” said Abu-Muhammad Aliev, a former journalist and busi-

nessman prominent in ultraconservative Muslim circles in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital.

Salafist men are angry with police profiling, he said. Work is scarce. When young men get in trouble with the police, they often run. Syria has become one destination for those seeking to leave Dagestan, he said. Sometimes they come to him for advice.

“If one wants to go to the Sham, then I will not talk him out of it,” he said, referring to the region stretching from southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt.

“But I can try to convince him not to join the Islamic State,” Aliev added. “Because drowning people and burning them alive have nothing to do with sharia law.”

In Novosasitli, the flow of young men to Syria has brought new scrutiny to an old problem.

For nearly a decade, Dagestan and neighboring regions have endured a low-level insurgency led

Men walk through a cemetery above the city of Derbent in Dagestan, a largely Muslim region of southern Russia where many know someone who has left to fight in Syria.

by radicals hoping to establish an Islamic caliphate, and young men who join the rebels are said to have “gone into the forest.”

Many are killed or remain on the run for years.

“For fighters there is almost no option for rehabilitation and for returning to peaceful life, particularly in Dagestan,” said Varvara Pakhomenko, an expert on the North Caucasus region at the International Crisis Group.

Some residents have fought that trend.

Since 2010, Abdullayev, the administrative chief, has moonlighted as a negotiator, seeking to guarantee safe passage for young men in the insurgency to turn themselves in without fear of retribution from the police.

“It takes respect and trust to get people to believe in your authority,” he said in an interview.

In many ways, religious law has surpassed the Russian government’s authority in Novosasitli. Abdullayev spoke reverently about the town’s “double life” under communism, when disputes were still quietly settled under religious law.

Locals are proud of the village’s strong religious identity. They say that there is no alcohol to be found and that religious law has helped reduce crime.

Abdurakhim Magomedov, a Salafist spiritual leader from Novosasitli whose madrassa was shuttered by the government in 2013, said that “Dagestan must be independent from Russia for us to practice our religion as we should.”

But he was disturbed by the rise of the Islamic State, he said, and distraught at the death of the village’s youths in Syria.

“They have come back and hopefully this is behind us,” he said.

Ahmed called his sentence, a year in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, illegal. He does not believe he broke the law in Russia by fighting in Syria.

But he is lucky to be alive.

“Sometimes we joke: Will you go there again?” Abdullayev, the village head, said of those who returned. “And they say, ‘Never.’ ” n

DEADLY CONSEQUENCES Armed confrontations are often a prelude to fatal police shootings across the nation

MICHAEL SEARS/MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

BY AMY BRITTAIN in Fond du Lac, Wis.

S

topped in his patrol cruiser, Trooper Trevor Casper searched for a gray Toyota Corolla on a busy stretch of Highway 41. Behind the wheel was Steven Timothy Snyder, a bank robber and killer on the run. When Casper spotted Snyder about 5:30 p.m., he eased his cruiser into southbound traffic, following the Corolla at a distance, keeping his lights and siren off. ¶ But Snyder soon realized he was being followed. Outside the Pick ’n Save grocery store, he abruptly turned his car around. He raised his semiautomatic pistol and opened fire, striking Casper in the neck. ¶ Snyder and Casper jumped out of their cars while they were still rolling. The 21­year­old trooper, armed with a .40­caliber Glock, and the 38­year­old bank robber circled the cruiser, guns blazing. Casper fired 12 rounds; Snyder got off nine armor­piercing bullets, one of which penetrated Casper’s ballistic vest. And when it was over, Snyder lay dying of a gunshot wound to his back. ¶ “Bad guy is down,” a dispatcher reported. ¶ Casper collapsed and then dropped his gun. March 24 was his first solo day on the job — and his last. Shot three times, he became the youngest law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in Wisconsin history.

800

People have been fatally shot by police officers this year

595

Of them were shot after they fired or brandished a gun or attacked someone

31

Officers have been shot to death by perpetrators this year

Casper is among 31 officers this year who have been shot to death by perpetrators, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. He was hailed asaheroforstoppingSnyder,whohadmagazines of ammunition tucked in his socks and left a manifesto promising “to go down fighting hard.”

Snyder’s killing, as documented in interviews and police reports, is among the 800 fatal shootings by police so far this year. As the tally continues to grow, so does public debate and criticism over police use of deadly force.

But only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. The vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers were, like Snyder, armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, said The Post’s findings confirm what police officers already know.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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COVER STORY “We know that anecdotally, because typically that’s why police officers choose to use deadly force,” said Pasco, whose organization includes 335,000 officers nationwide. “These are circumstances where their lives or the lives of citizens around them are in imminent danger.”

In 74 percent of all fatal police shootings, the individuals had already fired shots, brandished a gun or attacked a person with a weapon or their bare hands, according to an analysis of actions immediately preceding the shootings, which draws on reports from law enforcement agencies and local media coverage. These 595 cases include fatal shootings that followed a wide range of violent crimes, including shootouts, stabbings, hostage situations, carjackings and assaults.

Sixteen percent of the shootings came after incidents that did not involve firearms or active attacks but featured other potentially dangerous threats. These shootings were most commonly of individuals who brandished knives and refused to drop them.

The 5 percent of cases that are often secondguessed include individuals who police said failed to follow their orders, made sudden movements or were accidentally shot. In 4 percent of cases, The Post was unable to determine the circumstances of the shootings because of limited information or ongoing investigations.

Much of the public outcry about police use of deadly force began in August 2014 when a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, after a struggle in Ferguson, Mo. A grand jury declined to indict the officer. Of the 800 people killed by police this year, almost half have been white, a quarter have been black and one-sixth have been Hispanic.

The Post is tracking all fatal shootings by police while on duty in 2015. Recently, the FBI and the U.S. attorney general acknowledged weaknesses in their own counting of fatal shootings by police and announced plans to more thoroughly collect data.

To identify trends among the shootings, The Post studied whether the individuals were unarmed or armed with weapons and reviewed the actions they took in the immediate moments before police shot and killed them.

Of the 595 cases in which a person fired a gun, brandished a gun or attacked an officer or individual with a weapon or bare hands: l The most common type of encounter — 242 fatal shootings by police officers — occurred when individuals pointed or brandished a gun but had not yet fired the weapon at a person. l The next-largest group — 224 shootings — included situations similar to the one that led to Casper’s death: an individual firing a gun at a police officer or a bystander. The Post found that in 87 percent of these cases, the gunfire was directed at police officers. l In 129 of the fatal shootings, individuals attacked police officers or civilians but had no gun. They were armed with weapons such as knives, hatchets, chemical agents and vehicles.

Of these, 70 percent of the attacks were directed at police.

COURTESY OF THE CASPER FAMILY

First day solo on the job With a population of 43,000, Fond du Lac is about halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay. Here, there were no protests and no moments of second-guessing after Casper’s decision to shoot and kill Snyder.

Elementary schoolchildren mailed stacks of hand-drawn cards to the troopers, and boxes of free pizzas were delivered to their post. Supporters tied ribbons to a local bridge and shone blue lights at night to honor Casper’s sacrifice.

“There are so many people who have 30-year careers and never have this happen to them,” said Clarissa Justmann, a trooper who responded to help Casper. “Trevor was on the job, by himself, for one day. And you just sit there, and you just wonder how this happened.”

Casper grew up in the rural Wisconsin community of Kiel, population 3,747. He was 5 feet 7 inches tall, with an average build, blue eyes and light blond hair. He wrestled and played soccer and was a big brother to his sisters, Olivia and Lauren.

After high school, he studied criminal justice at Lakeshore Technical College. Casper appeared in a promotional video in 2014 to talk about the school’s program. In the piece, he conducted mock field-sobriety tests, wrestled down a perpetrator and hosed off a fellow officer with water after he was pepper-sprayed.

The interviewer asked him about the risks he might face in this line of work: “Are you ever worried?”

Casper paused and smiled. He admitted he had been a little nervous.

“I know that when I go out there, I’m always looking around, I’m always safe,” he said. “It could happen, but I think it’s kind of . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . but going out and helping people and putting a positive impact on people’s lives, I think it would be worth it.”

Kevin Casper, 52, remembers the day in June

Above, Trooper Trevor Casper and classmates share a moment at the Wisconsin State Patrol Academy.

Opposite page, law enforcement from Wisconsin carry Casper’s casket during his funeral.

“Trevor was on the job, by himself, for one day.

And you just sit there, and you just wonder how this happened.”

Clarissa Justmann, a fellow Wisconsin state trooper

KLMNO WEEKLY

2014 that his son found out he had made it into the cadet class of the Wisconsin State Patrol. He came out of the house — nearly flying — into the back yard to share the news. They jumped and yelled and hugged each other.

In December, he graduated in the top half of his cadet class. Because of his good grades, Casper got his top choice for his first post: Fond du Lac, just 45 minutes from his home town.

He spent his first 14 weeks on the job with field training officers. He would then get the chance to ride solo for the first time.

The family traveled down to Fond du Lac to visit with Trevor the weekend before the big day. Late that Friday afternoon, Kevin gave Trevor a haircut in his apartment kitchen. He asked him whether he was nervous.

Trevor spun around in his chair to face his father. “I’m not nervous at all,” he told him. “I can’t wait. This is what I want to do.”

The family took Trevor to dinner at Friar Tuck’s, a local restaurant. He ordered a halfpound burger and fries. They visited afterward at his apartment and then headed home.

A few days later, on Tuesday, March 24, Casper was scheduled to start his shift at 3 p.m.

When he went to get into his patrol car outside his apartment, the battery was dead.

Justmann, then 23, lived a few doors down, so she stopped by to jump-start his car. Justmann had been on the force just a year herself.

The two had become quick buddies, part of a self- described “wolf pack” of new troopers who forged a friendship over trivia nights.

The two chatted about Casper’s first day. She told him not to do anything too “dramatic.” Just make some easy stops, as they call them, for loud exhaust mufflers or for dark-tinted windows. She would be out there, too, and she would stay nearby just in case he needed her.

Casper hit the road.

‘Armed and dangerous’ Hours north, in Marinette County, Snyder had robbed a local community bank with a gun and ordered employees to empty the vault and cash registers. Outside the bank, he stole a van and drove to where he had parked his getaway car.

There, he encountered 59-year-old Thomas C. Christ, a grandfather who worked as a truck driver. Authorities think that Christ may have confronted Snyder because he parked his car near Christ’s property. Snyder shot Christ to death, leaving him in a ditch by the road.

Authorities would later determine that Snyder had a violent past.

Snyder, who lived in Michigan and worked as a mason, had been involved with skinhead and neo-Nazi movements, reflected in whitesupremacist tattoos on his body. Friends told investigators that he was the “lone wolf” type — a man who believed in anarchy and held strong anti-government sentiments.

He had attacked his estranged wife, grabbing and hitting her head last Christmas. She sought treatment at an emergency room for the injuries. At the time of the shootout, he was wanted in Michigan on a charge of aggravated continues on next page

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COVER STORY

“Going out and helping people and putting a positive impact on people’s lives, I think it would be worth it.”

Deadly shootings by police, 2015

WEEKLY

800 people have been shot and killed by police so far this year.

Individual was attacking someone

Individual was not attacking someone

224 SHOT A GUN AT SOMEONE

595 of the fatal shootings followed a wide range of violent crimes, including shootouts, stabbings, hostage situations, carjackings and assaults.

242 BRANDISHED OR POINTED A GUN AT SOMEONE

Trevor Casper, talking before his death about the risks of being a state trooper

Most fatal police shootings prompted by an attack In three-fourths of fatal shootings by police this year, officers were defending themselves or others from attack or a threat of gun violence. Here’s what happened just before the fatal shots by police.

129 ATTACKED SOMEONE WITH SOMETHING OTHER THAN A GUN

Fired a gun 28%

205 INVOLVED OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES

Other threat 16%

Attacked by other means 16%

Brandished a gun 30%

Undetermined, other 10% Includes sudden movement, failure to follow orders

Sources: Analysis of Washington Post data

from previous page

assault because of the incident.

Attempts to reach Snyder’s family for comment were unsuccessful.

After his death, the FBI and Michigan authorities would determine that Snyder was the man they had been searching for in a string of bank robberies. Using DNA samples, they linked him to nine bank robberies across three states since 2011. The FBI had dubbed him the “Respectful Robber” for his eerily calm demeanor and because he reportedly held the door open for a woman during a holdup.

In his getaway car, authorities would later find $137,960 from the robbery in Marinette County and a handwritten manifesto dated March 23. He vowed to be “relentless and dangerous till the last breath I take.”

THE WASHINGTON POST

Snyder texted goodbye messages to friends and family on March 24. Authorities tracked Snyder’s phone electronically and determined that he was driving south from the robbery and passing through Oshkosh, just north of Fond du Lac. “Bank robbery, homicide, Marinette County,” a dispatcher said, providing a description of the getaway car and the perpetrator. “Armed and dangerous.”

Casper scoured the highway for Snyder’s car. About seven miles away, Justmann and fellow trooper Andrew Hyer, 37, kept watch in a crossover.

Casper saw the car first.

The moment is one Casper’s family revisits again and again. What if he had glanced down to look at his phone? What if he had been

elsewhere?

“Being the first day, when the car came by, it would have been so easy to look the other way,” said his mother, Debbie Casper, 52.

Kevin stopped her. “That never would have happened,” he said. “I know Trevor was watching, and I know he wouldn’t have missed it.”

They both imagine their son sitting a bit taller in his patrol car, perhaps with a rush of adrenaline and a sense of pride.

‘Please keep trying’ As Casper followed Snyder’s car into Fond du Lac, his fellow troopers raced to provide back-up. They arrived just as the shootout had begun. Justmann remembers seeing Casper in a full sprint chasing the suspect around the car.

And she saw the fatal shot that killed Snyder.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

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COVER STORY “I remember seeing Trevor hit this guy, and the bullet went into this guy’s back,” she said. “I saw the shirt ripple, and there was an explosion of gray fabric.”

She reached for the shotgun in the trunk of her patrol car. She asked Casper if he was okay.

He seemed winded, perhaps out of breath.

He grabbed onto the trunk of his car to steady himself. Then, he fell. He dropped his gun to the ground. There was blood everywhere.

“Trevor, stay with me!” Justmann screamed.

Snyder’s body lay nearby in the grass, with his right hand clenching his gun to his chest.

Another handgun was found nearby, along with 137 rounds of ammunition.

Capt. Anthony Burrell, then 48, arrived just as Casper had fallen. Hyer dragged Casper along the ground. Justmann rolled him onto his side. She realized that he had been shot in his back. An armor-piercing bullet had traveled through his ballistic vest, into his back and out his chest, according to a district attorney’s report.

“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Burrell told the two troopers. They loaded him into the back of a patrol SUV, and as they sped from the scene, they saw paramedics parked nearby.

They transferred Casper to the ambulance and rushed to the local airport, hoping to catch a Flight for Life helicopter to a trauma center close to Appleton. Burrell paced in the airport hangar, waiting for them to load Casper in the helicopter. A nurse dressed in a flight suit told Burrell they were still working on him in the ambulance.

A few minutes passed. Then the nurse pulled Burrell aside. Casper hadn’t made it, she told him.

“Please keep trying,” he said. “You have to keep trying.”

“There’s nothing more we can do,” she told him. Casper had lost too much blood.

Burrell cursed. One of the paramedics took off his gloves. He asked Burrell if he wanted a few minutes alone in the ambulance.

Burrell sat with his trooper. A white sheet covered Casper’s body. With his right hand, Burrell lifted up the sheet. He stared at Casper’s face, now ashen. He said a prayer and then lowered the sheet.

Together, they began the 10-minute drive to the hospital.

‘The ultimate price’ The Caspers can’t remember how they first heard of the shooting. They think it was online or maybe on the local TV news. Debbie remembers searching Twitter and finding fragments of information. She called and texted Trevor.

The family paced in circles in the kitchen.

“You just keep hoping,” said Debbie. “You talk yourself into the idea that no news is good news.”

Debbie called Dave Funkhouser, the Kiel police chief and a longtime family friend. She was panicked. He called the State Patrol post to get answers.

They told Funkhouser that Casper was dead.

Top-ranking State Patrol officials were rushing toward Kiel to tell the Casper family but were concerned that word would leak to local media. They asked Funkhouser to quickly drive to the Caspers’ home.

It was dark outside. Funkhouser saw Debbie waiting in the doorway. He placed his hand on her shoulder and led her, along with Kevin and Olivia, to the living room. He sat on a loveseat, facing the family on the sofa.

He didn’t drag it out.

Trevor died, he told them. That moment, the chief remembers, was the worst in his 27-year career in law enforcement.

About 10 minutes later, the Wisconsin State Patrol’s superintendent, lieutenant colonel and chaplain arrived at the front door.

In the dark, the family began the 45-minute drive to Fond du Lac. There, the troopers had followed the ambulance to the local hospital. The Wisconsin Department of Justice later released dash-cam videos that captured the conversation in the patrol car between the two troopers who witnessed the fatal shootout.

Hyer drove. Justmann cried. He told Justmann there are “bad people” in this world.

“We try to make it safer for everyone else. We try to do our part.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But, oh, my God.” “It sounds like Casper was able to do something about it,” he told her.

“He did,” she said. “He paid the ultimate price.”

They stood in St. Agnes Hospital for hours, waiting outside the room that held Casper’s body. All of Casper’s clothing and personal belongings would be catalogued, at first for the investigation, and then, for his family to claim and divide among those who loved him.

Justmann kept his Taser. She wanted a piece of him with her on duty. His younger sister, Olivia, keeps one of his dress uniforms in her bedroom closet.

‘His heroic sacrifice’ As night fell on March 24, the top brass across Wisconsin descended upon the scene to begin a forensic analysis of how this had happened to one of their own.

Every bullet and every blood spatter would become evidence in the killing of Trooper Trevor Casper.

The state’s report would total nearly 1,000 pages. A second report, from Fond du Lac District Attorney Eric Toney, would conclude that “Casper eliminated the threat posed to our community by the suspect” and that Casper was both “privileged and justified” in defending himself and others by using deadly force.

“His heroic sacrifice,” Toney wrote, and the loss to the Casper family “should never be forgotten.”

The local sheriff, Mick Fink, arrived at the scene soon after the shootout. As Fink looked around, the scene already told the story. It was a battlefield.

“Holy cow,” he thought. “This kid died fighting.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Officer saved their lives, but he had to kill their son to do it 4:05 p.m. | Feb. 21, 2015 | Indianapolis

O

n a snowy Saturday, Officer Roman Williams-Ervin frantically tried to kick down the front door of the Norman family’s home. Someone had called 911 from inside the house. All dispatchers could hear was screaming and shouting.

Williams-Ervin broke a window and reached inside to unlock the door, but the lock was jammed. He kicked again, and the door finally gave way. He and another officer stormed inside the three-bedroom home, not sure what they’d find.

Inside the kitchen, Kent Norman, 51, held a butcher knife to the neck of his 74-year-old mother, Mary Jane. His 78year-old father lay slumped nearby.

“The only way I could describe it is three bodies all tangled up together and blood on all of them,” said Williams-Ervin, an eight-year veteran of Kent Norman the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. “I knew someone would die if I didn’t take action. It all happened so fast.”

The officers ordered Kent to drop the knife. He refused.

“It was a decision that had to be made,” said Williams-Ervin, 31. “I gave Kent options, and he didn’t take those options.”

The officers opened fire, shooting seven times. Kent was shot in the chest and died almost instantly.

The fatal shooting of Kent Norman is one of at least 129 by police officers this year that involved individuals who committed attacks with weapons other than guns, including knives, hatchets, vehicles and bare hands.

Throughout his childhood and adult life, Kent Norman struggled with mental illness, his family said. In the weeks leading up to his death, his depression deepened, they said.

Mary Jane said Kent had been drinking that Saturday. He suddenly started cursing and grabbed her hair, pummeled her with his fists and pressed her face to the granite countertop. John tried to pry his son off Mary Jane, but Kent knocked him unconscious.

“Our inability to properly treat mental illness is what forces police officers everywhere to take the lives of so many,” Mary Jane said. “We loved our son so very much.”

With the increasingly critical coverage of police shootings, family friends told them that some people were beginning to wonder: Had the officers shot Kent for no good reason?

“We said, ‘No, that can’t stand,’ ” Mary Jane said. Through a family spokesman, they thanked the officers for saving their lives.

The police department and prosecutor’s office cleared the two officers of any wrongdoing.

Later, the Norman family met with the officers, and Mary Jane hugged them.

“We didn’t want them to second-guess themselves,” she said. “You have to make life-or-death decisions. A moment’s pause could cause the death of an innocent victim or themselves.”

— Amy Brittain

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

16

HEALTH

KLMNO WEEKLY

Our ever-expanding waistlines Rates of adult obesity now exceed 30 percent in 22 states, with three states hovering above 35 percent, according to a report by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. n

Adult obesity rate:

15–19.9%

10–14.9%

20–24.9%

1995

25–29.9%

30–34.9%

2005

35%+

2010

2014 NH 27.4%

WA

27.3%

VT 24.8% ME

OR

27.9%

28.2%

MT

ND

26.4%

32.2%

ID

MN

27.6% WI

SD

28.9%

29.8%

WY

24.7%

30.9%

30.2%

27.7%

UT

25.7%

30.7%

IA

NE

CA

IL

29.3%

CO

21.3%

27%

MI

29.5% NV

NY

31.2%

KS

MO

31.3%

30.2%

PA

30.2%

OH

IN

32.7% 32.6% KY

WV

35.7%

31.6%

NC

29.7%

TN

AZ

OK

NM

28.9%

33%

28.4%

31.2%

AR

VA

28.5%

SC

32.1%

35.9% AL MS

33.5%

GA

AK

TX

31.9% HI

22.1%

RI 27% CT 26.3%

30.5%

35.5%

29.7%

MA 23.3%

NJ 26.9%

LA

34.9%

DE 30.7%

FL

26.2%

MD 29.6% DC 21.7%

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

17

WORKPLACE

KLMNO WEEKLY

Your job may really be ‘killing’ you Amount of life lost to stress varies majorly by race, gender and education, study finds

BY

A NA S WANSON

P

eople often like to groan about how their job is “killing” them. Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true.

A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups.

Past research has shown an incredible variation in life expectancy around the United States, depending on who you are and where you live. Mapping life expectancy around the nation by both county of residence and race, you can see that people in some parts of the U.S. live as many as 33 years longer on average than people in other parts of the country, the researchers say.

Those gaps appear to be getting worse, as the wealthy extend their life spans and other groups are stagnant. One study found that men and women with fewer than 12 years of education had life expectancies that were still on par with most adults in the 1950s and 1960s — suggesting the economic gains of the last few decades have gone mostly to more educated people. The financial crisis and subsequent recession, which put many people in economic jeopardy, may have worsened this effect.

There are lots of reasons that people with lower incomes and educations tend to have lower life expectancies: differences in access to health care, in exposure to air and water pollution, in nutrition and health care early in life, and in behaviors, such as smoking, exercise and diet. Past research has also shown that job insecurity, long hours, heavy demands at work and other stresses can also cut down on a worker’s life expectancy by taking a heavy toll on a worker’s health.

But researchers say this is the

Years of life lost to working conditions By gender, education level and race Men

Women

Non-Hispanic white

Non-Hispanic black

Hispanic

3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 17 or more years of education

12 or fewer years of education

17 or more years of education

12 or fewer years of education

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG SOURCE: GOH, PFEFFER AND ZENIOS, 2015

Percentage of life expectancy disparity between the highest and lowest educational strata attributable to 10 distinct workplace exposures by demographic group.

SOURCE: GOH, PFEFFER AND ZENIOS, HEALTH AFFAIRS

first study to look at the ways that a workplace’s influence on life expectancy specifically break down by racial and educational lines.

To do their analysis, they divided people into 18 different groups by race, education and sex. They then looked at 10 different workplace factors — including unemployment and layoffs, the absence of health insurance, shift work, long working hours, job insecurity and work-family conflict — and estimated the effect that each would have on annual mortality and life expectancy.

The data show that people with less education are much more likely to end up in jobs with more unhealthy workplace practices that cut down on one’s life span.

People with the highest educational attainment were less affected by workplace stress than people with the least education, the study says.

Race and gender also played a role. Blacks and Hispanics lost more years of life because of work than whites did in every education and gender category. And women generally fared better than their male counterparts, with one exception: educated Hispanic women lost significantly more of their life span to working conditions than educated Hispanic men did.

Some of the categories that the researchers studied took a bigger toll on life expectancy than others.

Across all groups, unemployment and layoffs, and a lack of health insurance were the factors that exerted the biggest influence. Low job control was the next biggest influence for both men and women, followed by job insecurity in men and shift work in women.

The researchers say their findings have a clear takeaway: We need to focus more on creating healthier work environments, especially for workers with less education. The good news is that the way to accomplish this is relatively straightforward. They suggest that many of these issues — including long hours and shift work, the lack of health insurance and paid time off, and job insecurity — can be partly solved through better policies to support workers. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

The cost of having bases overseas N ON-FICTION

I BASE NATION How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World

By David Vine Metropolitan. 418 pp. $35

l

REVIEWED BY

C ELESTE W ARD G VENTER

n its July 4, 1970, issue, the New Yorker printed a remarkable 26-page article by William Whitworth, one of the magazine’s great writers and editors. The article, “Some Questions About the War,” was based on a series of interviews with Eugene Rostow, the undersecretary of state for political affairs from 1966 to 1969. The piece was derived in part from a book Whitworth published the same year, “Naive Questions About War and Peace.”

Whitworth wanted to understand the underlying assumptions and concepts of the foreign policy intelligentsia, particularly as they pertained to the Vietnam War. He observed that while many of the experts differed fiercely over Vietnam, they seemed nonetheless to share critical assumptions about the principal causal forces of global politics and the role of the United States. His “naive” questions were a return to first principles: What did these experts mean by their terms, and why were they so certain of the validity of their concepts?

David Vine’s new book, “Base Nation,” illustrates that this superficiality still pertains when it comes to the largely unstated and unexamined assumptions that support the massive infrastructure of U.S. military installations around the world. As he argues, “The presence of our bases overseas has long been accepted unquestioningly and treated as an obvious good.”

As Vine observes, a “forward strategy” that stations large numbers of American military personnel and equipment overseas “has been the overwhelming consensus among politicians, national security experts, military officials, journalists, and many others.” In fact, according to him, it is not altogether clear how many defense facilities the United States actually maintains abroad. (As he notes, there are many types of facilities with many names, from “post” to “camp” to “station,” et al;

CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Camp X-Ray, now closed, was a detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

he uses the word “base” for simplicity to mean all of the sites, a convention I will follow here.)

Though he found an official tally of 686, Vine, who teaches anthropology at American University, estimates that the number is closer to 800. He is not sure whether anyone knows the real number.

To understand the costs — to finances, reputation and even security — of America’s bases abroad, Vine traveled to a dozen nations and territories and more than 60 facilities.

In Vine’s view, overseas bases cause more harm than good, both for the United States and the countries that host them. Overseas bases are expensive, almost always costing more than the same facility would on U.S. soil.

Vine argues that in some cases, such as on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the central Indian Ocean, indigenous people were pushed off their lands to make room for runways. He suggests that the desire to obtain basing rights has caused the United States to cavort with dictators, tyrants and even mobsters. Meanwhile, the presence of

the Americans distorts local economies, sometimes providing a market for prostitution and human trafficking. Construction and service contracts for overseas bases fatten the bank accounts of mercenary businessmen, while service members and their families stationed abroad spend their money bolstering foreign economies, rather than those at home.

According to Vine, the few other countries that have bases outside their borders, such as France, Britain and Russia, maintain somewhere around 30 facilities combined. We rarely stop to imagine how the United States would react to another nation stippling the globe with hundreds of facilities, as we do, and with such an apparent lack of rigor in the attendant policy decisions and public discussion. “Base Nation” is a useful call to examine an issue that gets far less attention than it merits.

But at times Vine seems simply to throw every damning comment, tidbit, rumor or innuendo into his boiling denouncement.

I have lived at several different

overseas U.S. military facilities — in Iraq, Italy and now Germany — and they differ enormously. Not every facility suffers from every problem Vine cites. Some serve a more obvious and defensible purpose than others. Some facilities may embarrass and even imperil the United States, but certainly not all.

Nonetheless, he raises questions that receive insufficient attention or are too often answered with bromides and cliches. The book serves as an entreaty for an explanation, a discussion in plain language, about what the U.S. military is doing in so many places in the world and why. In that sense, Vine is continuing the kind of “naive” questioning of foreign policy elites that Whitworth did 45 years ago and that, in a world of shrinking military budgets and seemingly unending challenges around the globe, is something more of us should do. n Gventer is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who consults on a variety of defense and security issues in Europe and the Middle East.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

This ‘Banquet’ has a lot to chew on

A look back but without reflection

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

n “A Banquet of Consequences,” Elizabeth George presents one of the most wildly dysfunctional families you’ll find in fiction. At its center is the mother (and mother-in-law and wife) from hell, Caroline Goldacre, a pathological liar who has deeply damaged both her sons, driven one husband away and made the incumbent miserable, all the while proclaiming her own virtue and everyone else’s duplicity.

The story, set in London and two English villages, begins as Caroline’s troubled son Will kills himself, whereupon his girlfriend blames his domineering mother, who in turn blames the girlfriend.

Caroline’s meddling has also shattered the marriage of her other son, Charlie, who spends much of the novel trying to win back his estranged wife, who wants to move on to another, more stable man.

Caroline’s constant abuse of her entirely decent second husband (“You’ve actually become a bigger fool than you were when I married you”) has driven him into the arms of a kind and loving woman, a development Caroline greets by threatening suicide even as she’s denouncing her rival as a slut.

Somehow, amid this turmoil, the scheming, grasping Caroline has found work as an assistant to a well-known feminist writer named Clare Abbott. We learn that the vivacious Clare has secrets to protect and that her friend and editor Rory, a lesbian, is in love with her.

When someone is poisoned, the question is whether Caroline, who is clearly a monster, is also a murderer. Or, as she insists, was she the intended victim?

Enter beloved Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, whose personal lives add to the drama unfolding around them. This story takes place 18 months after Lynley’s wife was murdered and, although Lynley remains heartbroken, he has managed a brief, unwise affair

with his attractive superior at Scotland Yard, Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery. He’s also smitten with a vet at the London Zoo, but she fears that his aristocratic origins are too unlike her hardscrabble past for them to truly connect. “A Banquet of Consequences” is, among other things, a novel about relationships, some hopeless, most difficult and one or two miraculously sweet.

Havers, as unruly as ever, lets fly at Lynley an occasional backhanded compliment such as, “You’re a decent bloke for all your fine ways and your family silver and ancestral portraits.” Havers is said to resemble “a barrel on legs with porcupine hair,” and with her Pop-Tarts diet and fanciful T-shirts (“On the eighth day God created bacon”), she exists mostly for comic relief, which the novel sometimes needs. George has one character relate in excruciating detail how she and another woman were raped by a knife-wielding intruder. The scene is not essential to the story but neither is it gratuitous; George is grimly reminding us just how ugly this world can be.

For readers determined to puzzle out who’s guilty of the poisoning, the problem is that the hateful Caroline is so obviously a suspect that our instinct is to search for a less likely candidate.

Or will we be outsmarted if we jump that way? George’s mystery unfolds with great psychological depth, finely drawn characters and gorgeous portraits of the English countryside. Yet it must be said that this is a long novel and some readers, facing yet another leisurely look at English landscapes, may feel an urge to skim until the plot kicks in again.

To skim or to savor? Either way, George, an American who sets her novels in England, is an essential writer of popular fiction today. n Anderson regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.

W

A BANQUET OF CONSEQUENCES

By Elizabeth George Viking. 576 pp. $28.95

THE EDUCATION OF KEVIN POWELL A Boy’s Journey into Manhood

By Kevin Powell Atria. 285 pp, $26

l

REVIEWED BY

G ERALD E ARLY

hen hip-hop journalist, social activist and performance poet Kevin Powell moved from New Jersey to New York City at the age of 24 in 1990, he was an unknown aspiring for recognition and achievement. He wrote in his diary that he “wanted to be remembered as one of the best writers of [his] generation.” It is difficult to say whether his new memoir, “The Education of Kevin Powell,” will help fulfill that fate.

The memoir is divided into two sections: The first describes Powell’s single-parent childhood in Jersey City in the 1970s where he and his mother live in various roach- and rat-infested places with his mother’s sister and her son. Here, he strongly echoes Richard Wright’s classic comingof-age autobiography, “Black Boy” (1945). There is a scene of Powell being given liquor as a child by irresponsible adults, just as Wright was. And in both books, there are references to hunger and catalogue descriptions structured by repetitive sentence patterns.

There are larger themes as well: Powell and Wright are abandoned by their fathers. (Both books have scenes of the mothers begging for child support.) Both decide their wish to be writers at a young age.

And both Powell and Wright are rebellious boys who cannot be beaten into submission. This section is the strongest, most coherent and most intricately developed, making the most obvious bows to the black male autobiographical tradition. But it is also the most conventional and predictable.

The second part covers Powell’s years as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, where he becomes an overbearing and overcommitted black ideologue and activist largely as a protective reaction to being thrust into an alien white environment. He writes of his wilderness years in Newark after being expelled from Rutgers for

threatening a student with a knife.

And he describes his arrival in New York, where he launches himself as a performance poet and journalist. That work leads to his reviewing records and covering the hip-hop scene for Rolling Stone, the Source and other publications, which leads to his becoming a staff writer for a new black music magazine called Vibe doing cover stories on such rappers as Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur, with whom he develops something of a rapport. He also becomes a celebrity as one of the original cast members of MTV’s “The Real World.”

Alas, this success is precarious.

His temper and tendency to violence lead not only to his decline as a journalist but also his inability to maintain relationships with the various women he encounters.

This odyssey into adulthood and early middle age lacks the organic fixity of his childhood narrative. It is told in such a happenstance sort of way that in the end, the reader can make no greater sense of what any of it means to the author.

In this latter part of the book, Powell comes across as the angry black male tourist of his own life who “threatened, intimated, and bullied people” when he wasn’t trying to hustle them with his charm as an ambitious ghetto boy.

The narrative here is also marked alternately by a series of disillusionments and apologies.

Though at times entertaining and evocative, on the whole, “The Education of Kevin Powell” suffers from confusing its graphically confessional tone with mature consideration of the demands of living a moral life. It is, in fact, surprising how unreflective this memoir is.

Bedeviled by the mystique of being the cheeky black punk, Powell’s education is ultimately about that lonely kid forced to sit outside the classroom door. n Early is professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Obama’s proposal to fight addiction isn’t enough PATRICK J. KENNEDY a Democrat, represented Rhode Island’s 9th Congressional District in the House from 1995 to 2011, and is co-founder of the Kennedy Forum on mental health and addiction and co-author the new book “A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction.”

Last month, President Obama announced a multipronged effort to address the epidemic of addiction to prescription opiate painkillers in this country. This is long overdue and, unfortunately, like most action on addiction and mental illness, comes after the problem has reached Stage 4 — and is that much harder to treat — when it could have been diagnosed and treated at Stage 1, or perhaps even prevented altogether.

I bring a unique perspective to this issue, one I would prefer I did not have. For 10 years, I sat on the House Appropriations Committee, overseeing every federal agency charged with addressing this subject. And during much of that time, I was addicted to prescription opiate painkillers myself. I would keep them in an aspirin bottle in my jacket so nobody would think it was strange when I popped one during an appropriations hearing.

I started taking OxyContin for back pain and then started seeking it for other, psychic pain.

And when the original prescribing doctor wouldn’t give me more — after I explained that I lost my pills in my luggage, down the sink, the dog ate them, whatever — I could always find another who would write a prescription. You don’t have to be a congressman or a Kennedy to do this. All drug-seeking behavior is pretty much the same, as is society’s response to it: Mostly we ignore it, and when we decide to do something, our approach is usually limited and focused on impeding supply and shaming users rather than treating substance-use disorders and other mental illnesses as medical problems.

Now that I have been sober and well for more than four years, I can see the cycles of my illness.

There were too many times when I went away to be medically

detoxed from opiates but refused to look at the bigger picture: that if I wasn’t treated for my underlying mental illness as well as my addiction, and if I wasn’t treated as if both conditions were chronic illnesses instead of passing emergencies, I would never be truly healthy and sober.

My worry about what Obama has proposed — and about what his and previous administrations have done to try to address prescription opiate addiction — is that it focuses primarily on restricting and regulating supply and on medical detoxification. In reality, we need to face opiate addiction as part of a wider revolution in the way that we diagnose, treat and insure against mental illness and addiction. When patients are flagged for gaming the system while seeking Oxys, as I was many times, we need to view their situation as a cry for fully integrated medical care, not just a case for opiate detox.

On paper, the president has presided over the greatest expansion of mental-health and substance-use-disorder benefits in American history. My father, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and I were proud to have been part of that effort, first with the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 — which made it illegal to discriminate in care and coverage for diseases of the brain — and then the Affordable Care Act, which built upon and

DARREN MCCOLLESTER/GETTY IMAGES

Addiction to OxyContin and other painkillers has been growing.

codified those parity protections.

But the Obama administration has still not put in place many of the enforcement mechanisms necessary to make these measures a reality in our day-today medical lives. And the publichealth epidemic of prescription opiate addiction brings this failure into sharp focus.

We will not be able to address this new and troubling addiction issue until we embrace the idea that all addiction care, and all mental health care, needs to be delivered in a radically different, holistic way — fully integrated into the rest of our medical care, and no longer viewed, as it has too often, as palliative care for moral failings or “demons.”

I applaud the president and the stakeholders he brought together to announce new training for medical professionals in opiate prescribing, public-service announcements on the subject and a broadening of the certification of physicians who can offer “medication-assisted treatment” for addictions — drugs that help block cravings or the actions of opiates — so that more patients can get and stay in recovery. But I urge the White House to think bigger.

Prescription opiate addiction is not an isolated problem, and it shouldn’t be dealt with in a lineitem way: It reflects our larger failure to integrate addiction and

mental illness care into our general medical care. The pills don’t cause this problem, they exploit a vulnerability in our medical safety net.

This vulnerability can be addressed only if this administration — and the next one — commit fully to enforcing the protections of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act and the Affordable Care Act. These protections require full disclosure by all medical insurers of how they make medical-management decisions on approving, refusing or prematurely shortening care for addiction and mental health.

We need to be able to determine, once and for all, if the same criteria are being used for braindisease care as for treatments of disorders of any other organ.

Medical insurers — including the nation’s biggest insurer, the federal government through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — are not fulfilling their responsibilities under these laws.

We have to hold them accountable, just as we have to hold doctors and pharmacists accountable for the way they prescribe and dispense medications; hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for the way they promote medicines; and hold patients accountable for misusing their medications. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

GOP dysfunction began with Palin WILLIAM M. DALEY was White House chief of staff from 2011 to 2012.

When The Post’s front page declares: “Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national party,” it’s time to ask: How did this come to pass?

You can choose from a litany of insurrections, government shutdowns and other self-inflicted wounds. But this year’s carnival-like GOP presidential primary makes one event, in retrospect, stand out as a crucial turning point on the road to upheaval: the 2008 embrace of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat from the presidency.

Palin’s blatant lack of competence and preparedness needs no belaboring. What’s critical is that substantive, serious Republican leaders either wouldn’t or couldn’t declare, before or after the election: “This is not what our party stands for. We can and must do better.”

By the campaign’s end, GOP operatives were shielding Palin from even the simplest questions.

(She had flunked “what newspapers do you read?”).

Barack Obama cruised to victory.

Palin became a Fox News fixture, reinforcing the newly formed tea party’s “never compromise” demands. Bombast, not reason, reigned. Now the “settle for flash” aura of Palin’s candidacy looks like a warning that the party was prizing glib, red-meat rhetoric over reasoned solutions.

Sadly, Palin owes her fame to

2008 presidential nominee John McCain, who is generally one of the party’s more thoughtful and substantive veterans. Whether McCain actively sought Palin in 2008 or passively yielded to aides’ pressure, he set a new standard for GOP candidates who rely on lots of sizzle and little substance.

Once McCain put Palin on the ticket, Republican “grown-ups,” who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down of the party. They stood by as Donald Trump and others noisily pushed claims that Obama was born in Kenya. And they gladly rode the tea party tiger to sweeping victories in 2010 and 2014.

Now that tiger is devouring the GOP establishment. Party elders had hoped new presidential debate rules would give them greater control. But they are watching helplessly as Trump leads the pack and House Republicans engage in fratricide.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy. The Republican establishment’s 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar.

Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect.

In Delaware, the utterly unprepared Christine O’Donnell promised “I’m not a witch,” but it didn’t save a Senate seat that popular, centrist Republican representative Mike Castle would have won, had he been the nominee.

In 2012, Missouri Republicans hoped to oust Sen. Claire McCaskill (D). Those hopes died when GOP nominee Todd Akin opined that “the female body” could somehow prevent pregnancy from “a legitimate rape.”

Party leaders aren’t responsible for every candidate’s gaffe. And Republican primary voters, not party honchos, choose nominees. But it’s easy to draw ideological lines from Palin to O’Donnell to Akin and so on to

some of the far-from-mainstream presidential contenders of 2012 and today.

Now the Republicans’ leading presidential contenders are Trump — who vows to make Mexico pay for a “great, great wall” on the U.S. side of the border — and Ben Carson, who questions evolution and asks why victims of the latest mass shooting didn’t “attack the gunman.”

This isn’t to heap new scorn on Palin. But let’s not diminish the recklessness of those who championed her vice presidential candidacy. It was well known that McCain, 72 at the time of his nomination, had undergone surgery for skin cancer. It wasn’t preposterous to think Palin could become president.

Now Republicans ask Americans to give them full control of the government, adding the presidency to their House and Senate majorities.

This comes as Trump and Carson consistently top the GOP polls.

Republican leaders brought this on themselves. Trump calls Palin “a special person” he’d like in his Cabinet. That seems only fair, because he’s thriving in the same cynical value system that puts opportunistic sound bites above seriousness, preparedness and intellectual heft. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DANZIGER

BY MATT DAVIES

Colleges must work with industry VIVEK WADHWA is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and a distinguished fellow at Singularity University.

The University of Virginia’s provost, Tom Katsouleas, once told me that less than 1 percent, by his estimates, of basic research is commercialized and that there may be as few as one near-term commercialization for every $10 million invested in fundamental research. This is an awful waste, especially when America is undergoing a reinvention in which entire industries are being wiped out and new ones are being created.

A broad range of technologies is now advancing at exponential rates and converging, which is affecting entire industries. When computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics converge, for example, we get smartphones, smart TVs and augmented-reality systems.

Computing, medicine and sensors join to produce wearable medical devices such as the Apple Watch — which will transform health care — and Apple Research Kit, which will revolutionalize clinical trials. Uber has already disrupted the transportation industry with its GPS-based cellphone apps; and WhatsApp has decimated the SMS revenues of telecom providers with its mobile-data technologies.

Corporate executives have no idea what to do to survive this tsunami of technology convergence; even the innovation

models that they were trained on, such as Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” have become defunct. The competition no longer comes from within an industry; it comes from elsewhere, and not having domain experts in fields such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and robotics, most companies have no idea how to respond to these new threats.

Universities, though, do have the experts. As a result of decades of government investment in basic research — in fields such as computing, medicine, sensors, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, robotics, nanomaterials and synthetic biology — they have an abundance of talent and intellectual property. This is a gold mine for industry.

Businesses that are under siege or are trying to expand into new

markets usually look to buy startups or form partnerships with research universities. And some simply take what they need. What better place is there to acquire intellectual property and talent than the universities, after all?

Uber wanted to urgently build self-driving cars, so it lured away more than 40 researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in January this year. Being nice or ethical didn’t matter to Uber; it took what it wanted and then came back to the university with a relatively small consolation prize: $5.5 million for a robotics faculty chair and three fellowships. Apple was also found guilty of incorporating unlicensed microchip technology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison into its iPhones and iPads — and was ordered to pay more than $234 million in damages. We will see much more of this in the next few years. If universities don’t cooperate, businesses will take whatever they can get — because they are desperate. In order to keep its researchers, academia will need to put aside its historical aversion to working with industry.

Universities are better off forming industry partnerships to jointly develop technology, as Stanford and MIT did in accepting $50 million from

Toyota for research in A.I. and autonomous-driving technology.

Several months after being raided

by Uber, Carnegie Mellon University agreed to partner with Google to turn its campus into a living laboratory for Internetconnected sensors and gadgets.

Companies such as Toyota have been blindsided by technologies emerging from other industries; visionaries such as Google have realized that they can’t do everything on their own. So this is a win-win strategy.

A huge opportunity exists to teach businesses about emerging technologies and have them fund research-commercialization efforts — if universities seriously rethink their traditional ideals of academic freedom and the sanctity of the industry-academia division. Such partnerships can make up for the declining government funding of academic research. And it doesn’t have to be a Faustian bargain. Both partners can benefit if the partnerships are structured in a meaningful way.

Stanford University’s faculty members are encouraged to work closely with industry, and these collaborations have led to innovation on a grand scale in Silicon Valley. This has led to an endowment of more than $20 billion through donations from its billionaire alumni. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Candy BY

B ETH K IMMERLE

From conversation hearts on Valentine’s Day to candy canes at Christmas, sweet treats are a big part of every major holiday, and none more so than Halloween. As families sort through Saturday’s treats, let’s brush off the sugarcoating on five myths.

1

Natural and sugar-free alternatives are healthier than candy.

It’s no secret that candy isn’t health food. Makes sense, then, that well-meaning adults are often looking for something else to hand out to trick-or-treaters.

The Internet is full of healthy suggestions to replace all those Butterfingers with “natural” snack bars, apples and sugar-free alternatives topping the lists.

Those snack bars go by many names (protein bars, granola bars, energy bars, nutrition bars), but no matter how they’re marketed, they can have more sugar and calories than their candy bar kin. Their wholesome chia, oats, fruit, flax and nuts are often bound with corn syrup, rice syrup, agave or other hidden sweeteners, not to mention the chocolate coatings, yogurt chips and superfruits that have been plumped up with sugar.

And those sugar-free candies?

Just read the reviews for sugarfree gummy bears, made with sugar alcohols. Aside from unpleasant aftertastes, sugar alcohols can have adverse gastroeffects, causing intestinal pain and diarrhea. Sugar-free candy labels don’t always carry warnings about these potential laxative effects.

2

Old candy should be thrown out.

I once visited a call center for a large candy company and was mesmerized by a Sudoku-like poster on the wall titled “How to Read Our Date Codes” — those number or letter sequences strategically placed on hard-to-find wrapper seams that signal when a candy was produced. There’s no standard

sell-by date for candy; the confectionery industry uses a variety of practices. The codes don’t tell customers much, which probably explains the regular advice to toss old candy. Better safe than sorry.

But eating an old Charleston Chew is very unlikely to hurt you.

Typically, candy is cooked to high temperatures and lacks the moisture of fresh foods.

Microbiologically, little moisture means little chance of spoiling. If a confectionery piece contains more than cooked sugar and has added fats from butter, nuts or chocolate, or contains an egg product (as in nougat or marshmallow), then its shelf life shortens. Still, nuts won’t go rancid for about a year. As Slate points out, the greater danger in eating a very old, brittle candy bar is probably to your teeth, not your digestive system.

3

Dark chocolate is good for you.

In the past few years, numerous outlets have reported the health benefits of chocolate.

Here’s what these stories don’t always mention. Chocolate is indeed from a plant and (like red wine) has some antioxidant benefits, but not when it’s highly processed and loaded up with sugar or milk products. To get any real benefits, you need to eat powdered, unsweetened raw cocoa or even cacao nibs, the heart of the cacao bean.

You may have been tempted by recent headlines to eat vast amounts of chocolate and lose lots of weight . But the “chocolate diet” story was actually concocted by science journalist John Bohannon to expose how quickly and easily

WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION USING ISTOCK PHOTOS

bad nutrition science is disseminated in the media.

The takeaway about chocolate health claims is this: Read the fine print. To get optimum benefits from any superfoods, go for the types that are less processed and closer to pure plant form.

4

Big candy brands use a uniform recipe to keep the flavors consistent.

First-to-market strategies and regional differences in ingredients make producing consistent candy (while also trying to expand globally) challenging, and it’s quite common for products to differ from country to country. Take a look at a Kit Kat from Europe and then inspect one from the United States. The ingredient lists aren’t the only things that are different; the manufacturers differ, too.

Sometimes, to bring a product to a new market, a company relies on long-term licensing deals allowing another company, even a competitor, to manufacture the confectionery item.

The standard of identity for chocolate itself varies from country to country, so it tastes different depending on locale. In Britain, chocolate may be made with up to 5 percent vegetable oil, while the United States requires anything labeled as

chocolate (not “chocolatey” or “chocolate flavor”) to contain cocoa butter, the natural fat found in the cacao bean.

5

Halloween was invented by candy companies.

I have never met a candy company that was antiHalloween, but today’s trick-or treating is based on a tradition that dates to well before the invention of Fun Size M&Ms and Welch’s Fruit Snacks. Halloween has roots in a centuries-old Celtic harvest festival during which spirits were thanked for fall’s bounty. Originally called Samhain, that ritual evolved into All Souls’ Day, when families would hand out “soul cakes” or sweetened breads to the poor in exchange for prayers for deceased relatives.

By the 1950s, popularized by European immigrants, Oct. 31 had become an Americanized blend of fall harvest festival, recognition of the dead through scary costumes and, naturally, pillowcases filled with delicious candy. Do the companies profit?

Of course. Did they manufacture a holiday to push their wares?

Don’t give them so much credit. n

Kimmerle is a confectionery expert and the author of four books on the history of America’s candy industry.

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In the November–December edition of Foothills Magazine, you’ll find that our holiday edition lives up to its name. Enjoy our feature on 12 Days for Christmas—gift items which highlight a memorable day’s experience, from a winter sleigh ride to a night out at the roller derby rink. There’s no shortage of fun and distinctive day trips throughout the North Central Washington region that make for great gift experiences.

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On the home front, we take a look inside a Leavenworth home which overlooks the Wenatchee River, built on a challenging building lot but the results are outstanding.

12 DAYS FOR CHRISTMAS ary Out-of-the-ordin gift ideas

Inside

SaddlegivUe,pneed love ber 2015 HoFrses thatSeptember / Octo 40 oothills

With Thanksgiving just a few weeks away, foodie Marlene Farrell has a tasty recipe for dressing/stuffing—whatever you call it— that includes local apples and pears.

For you active types, you’ll enjoy our piece on Run Wenatchee, and for you more sedentary readers, enjoy the flavors of France while sipping wine at Cairdeas Winery in Lake Chelan.

Standinfugn inDthais te run Lots of

Pick up a copy of Foothills at locations throughout the valley— find the complete list of locations on our website at ncwfoothills.com.

Or if you’d prefer to receive Foothills in the mail, you can subscribe to all six editions published annually for just $14.99.

Subscribe online at wenatcheeworld.com/subscribe/foothills/ or call 509-663-5161 to begin your subscription.

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