The Washington Post National Weekly - November 4, 2018

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A month later, questions remain A month later, questions remain A DAM T AYLOR

States and other Western countries for decades.

As the second-most-senior royal his country, States andinother Western countries for decades.

BY A DAM T AYLOR Mohammed initiated economic and social re- royal in his country, n Oct. 2, Saudi journalist Jamal As the second-most-senior forms that were greeted warmly byinitiated many forKhashoggi walked into Mohammed economic and social ren his Oct.country’s 2, Saudi journalist Jamal eign allies, especially Trump.

His campaign of warmly by many forconsulate in IstanbulKhashoggi for what walked he forms that were greeted into his country’s arrests and crackdowns on political rivals and hoped would be a routine visit toingetIstanbul for what he eign allies, especially Trump. His campaign of consulate activists was less commented upon, and the on political rivals and some documents. Instead, he was slainwould during arrests and crackdowns hoped be a routine visit to get brutal Saudi war effortactivists in Yemen caused little that visit, and his killing a global was less commented upon, and the some sparked documents.

Instead, he was slain during trouble for Riyadh. backlash against Saudithat Arabia andand its powerful brutal Saudi war effort in Yemen caused little visit, his killing sparked a global But the killing of Khashoggi changed crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. trouble forhas Riyadh. backlash against Saudi Arabia and its powerful that. Even if the crown prince not directly Some of the details of whatprince, happened in the bin Salman.

But were the killing of Khashoggi has changed crown Mohammed involved, the cruel nature the if crime — andprince were not directly consulate have been confirmed, number that.ofEven the crown Some ofbut theadetails of what happened in the the incompetent attempts to cover it upnature — of the crime — and of key questions are stillconsulate unanswered: involved, the cruel have been confirmed, but a number JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS suggest deep dysfunction.

1. What happened to body? the incompetent attempts to cover it up — ofKhashoggi’s key questions are still unanswered: JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESSreputation Saudi Arabia’s in the United On Wednesday, Turkish investigators laid Journalist body?

Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi suggest deep dysfunction.

1. What happened to Khashoggi’s hasofbeen damaged.Saudi Numerous American out the most detailed explanation yet of how was slain 2 in Turkey.

Arabia’s reputation in the United On Wednesday, Turkishleaders, investigators laidOct.Journalist Jamal Khashoggi,States a critic Saudi and government pulled out Numerous American Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for Theexplanation yet of how Statesofficials has been damaged. out the most detailed leaders, was slain Oct. 2 in companies Turkey. of a recent investmentcompanies conferenceand in government Riyadh. dom has offered little practical help in uncoverWashington Post and prominent critic of Saudi officials pulled out Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The U.S.help lawmakers have suggested some form of conference in Riyadh. ing exactly what happened. leaders, was killed. They said the journalist was of a recent investment dom has offered little practical in uncoverWashington Post and prominent critic of Saudi targeted sanctions against officials, and Since the early ofexactly Khashoggi’s disapstrangled as soon as heleaders, enteredwas thekilled. consulate, U.S. Saudi lawmakers have suggested some form of what happened.

They said the journalist wasdaysing there is growing opposition in Congress to U.S. pearance, there has been a deep suspicion that in line with a premeditated plan. targeted sanctions against Saudi officials, and Since the early days of Khashoggi’s disapstrangled as soon as he entered the consulate, support for the that Saudi intervention in Yemen. the crown prince was involved inthere the plot.

But Khashoggi’s body still hasa premeditated not been there is growing opposition in Congress to U.S. pearance, has The been a deep suspicion in line with plan. theresupport has beenfor little high-ranking some of prince the suspects found. Turkish investigators are considering thepractical Saudi intervention in Yemen. crown was involvedSoinfar, thethough, plot. The But Khashoggi’s body still has not nature been ofthe change.

Trump has been reticent to criticize thehas been little practical identified

by Turkey made it hard tonature imagine whether Khashoggi’s dismembered body was So far, though, there high-ranking of some of the suspects found. Turkish investigators are considering Saudis and repeatedly suggested that he reticent to criticize the the plot was independent of Saudi leadership. destroyed in acid, either in the consulate or the change. Trump has been identified by Turkey made it hard to imagine whether Khashoggi’s dismembered body was consider canceling with suggested that he inconceivable an operation using ofwouldn’t nearby residence of thedestroyed Saudi consul general.

Saudis arms and deals repeatedly the plot was independent Saudi leadership. in acid, either in the“It’s consulate or the that theoperation kingdom. There any more action in royal guards, other court “It’s officials and the conThe remains might give investigators wouldn’t consider canceling arms deals with inconceivable that an using is barely nearby residenceaofnumthe Saudi consul general. other Western capitals.the Germany is There one ofisthe sulate was not authorized by guards, the crown prince,” ber of key clues, but they have a larger value kingdom. barely any more action in royal other court officials and the conThe remains mightfor give investigators a numcountries to make a major move so far, Germany is one of the Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow was at the Khashoggi’s friends andber family. other Western capitals. sulate notBrookings authorized byonly the crown prince,” of key clues, but they have a larger value for suspending arms salesonly to Saudi Arabia until a major move so far, Institution, said to TheBruce Post. Riedel, a senior fellow “He did not have a Khashoggi’s funeral yet. friends This is and not family. countries to make at the Brookings further notice.

U.S. intelligence intercepts suggested that acceptable in Islamic rules,” his fiancee, Hatice suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia until Institution, said to The Post.

“He did not have a funeral yet. This is not also unclear there will be major prince orderedU.S. an operation to lure Cengiz, said to ABC News, referring to the further notice. intelligence interceptsIt’s suggested thatwhether acceptable in Islamic rules,”the hiscrown fiancee, Hatice changes in Saudi Arabia itself.

Though Riyadh Khashoggi to Saudi his ordered home an Islamic practice of burying the dead afterNews, It’s also unclear whether there will be major theArabia crownfrom prince operation to lure Cengiz, said soon to ABC referringback to the is pledging itshome own investigation into the killing Heafter also described Khashoggi as a Arabia they die. changes in Saudi Arabia itself. Though Riyadh Khashoggi back to Saudi from his Islamic practice of burying in theVirginia. dead soon of Khashoggi, that’s toitssatisfy the dangerous Islamist in in phone calls He with Presi2. How high up did the is pledging own investigation into the killing Virginia. also described Khashoggi as a unlikely theyplot die.go? country’s critics.

Saudi royals have dentgo?

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, It took the Saudi government two Khashoggi, that’stheunlikely to satisfy the dangerous Islamist and in phone calls with Presi-Few of 2. Howmore highthan up did the plot abilityKushner, to push and back against Mohammed binSaudi royals have the national adviser John Bolton.son-in-law, Jared weeks to admit that Khashoggi country’s critics. Few dent Trump’s It tookhad thebeen Saudikilled government moresecurity than two Salman, and he appears to still kingdom repeatedly denied that John and even longer to say thattothe killing ability tohave pushconsiderback against Mohammed bin security adviser Bolton. weeks admit that was KhashoggiBut hadthe been killed hasnational able support from andand fromhe the Saudi to still have considerMohammed had any involvement. deliberate. It eventually arrested 18 Saudi Salman, appears But the kingdom has repeatedly denied thathis father and even longer to nasay that the killing was public. n tionals and fired five top officials It in eventually response, arrested 3. What will the able support from his father and from the Saudi Mohammedbe? had any involvement. deliberate.

18 Saudi na- repercussions but Turkish investigators haveand said thefive kingSaudi has been a3. key ally of thethe United ©The Washington Post public. tionals fired top officials inArabia response, What will repercussions be? n but Turkish investigators have said the kingSaudi Arabia has been a key ally of the United ©The Washington Post

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WEEKLY

CONTENTS

CONTENTS 4 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Mourners embrace Wednesday during the COVER Mourners ON THE POLITICS 4 funeral of Joyce Fienberg, who was embrace Wednesday during the THE WORLD 10 killed during the shooting at theof Joyce Fienberg, who was funeral COVER STORY 12 on Oct. 27.

Tree of Life synagogue killed during the shooting at the HEALTH Photo by SALWAN16 GEORGES of Life The synagogue on Oct. 27.

Tree of BOOKS Washington Post 18 Photo by SALWAN GEORGES of The OPINION 20 Washington Post FIVE MYTHS 23

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OPINIONS

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TOM TOLES

Brazil’s unthinkable outcome FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO was the president of Brazil from 1995 to 2002. He is a member of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council.

This was produced by The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.

são paulo — The final outcome of Brazil’s presidential election last week confirmed a trend delineated in the first round: a significant victory for Jair Bolsonaro, a retired Army captain who for decades was a back-bench congressman without any significant legislative record.

He continually voted in favor of corporate interests and against a liberal economic agenda. He is also a relentless advocate of gun ownership and an ultra-conservative on moral and cultural issues like abortion and gay rights. Tellingly, his favorite motto is, “A good criminal is a dead criminal.”

How did the unthinkable happen? Bolsonaro surfed a tsunami of popular anger and despair that swept away the entire Brazilian political system, along with the old party leaders.

He was able to do so because of the people’s growing suspicion that representative democracy is incapable of delivering what they need. This disaffection was compounded by a brutal economic recession in Brazil, the longest in our history.

Unemployment soared, urban violence reached staggering heights — nearly 64,000 homicides in 2017 or 175 deaths per day. Organized crime spiraled out of control. Political parties, especially the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), floundered in corruption.

It was no wonder that the political system collapsed. Of the four presidents elected after the 1988 Constitution took effect, two were impeached, one is in jail for corruption and the other is me.

So far, the sweeping anticorruption investigation, known as Operation Car Wash, has resulted in the indictments of a former PT treasurer, a former presidential chief of staff, the president of the lower house of congress, a government minister and several state governors.

Beyond this long list of wrongdoings lies profound structural faults. The fourth industrial revolution modified the forms of production and the way people relate to each other.

Today, people are connected not just by their political

organizations. The Internet enhances connectivity and amplifies voices, subjecting voters to waves of opinion often driven by resentment and fear and sometimes hate.

Meanwhile, mainstream media is losing its influence. Society has lost its former cohesion. Political parties and trade unions, which once gave meaning to political projects and ideologies, no longer draw support and solidarity. As a result, people’s political choices are often guided by messages generated by their social networks. And when the corruption of political parties, statesmen and leaders is exposed, anger against politicians overshadows all other concerns.

That is exactly what happened here in Brazil.

It is imperative to reweave the threads that link political institutions with the dynamics of the economy and society. This will not happen by adhering to the regressive wave that divides society into enemy camps, but rather by exposing its inconsistencies with the national interest.

In contemporary, networked societies, people are no longer an amalgam of individuals compacted into “masses.” They seek information to make individual choices. The common

ground has not withered away, but it needs to be reframed, so that is felt as something good for all people. Whenever there is an epochal shift like this, what once was solid seems to vanish into thin air. But it does not disappear.

The challenge is to make values and interests coalesce in a contemporary way.

During this electoral campaign, fear, insecurity and the visceral rejection of corruption touched people’s hearts. The crossfire of accusations demoralized traditional parties and candidates. Social issues like the brutal rise in income inequality and unemployment levels, as well as the lack of public investment due to fiscal imbalances, added to a dysfunctional party system, paving the way to our “new” politics. The end result was no less than the emergence of a populist leader with no clear definition of public policies, no real congressional base of support and no long-term political organization.

Democracy was the overriding cause for my generation. It is always a work in progress. Today, it may be at risk in Brazil, as it is elsewhere. If human rights and the rule of law are threatened, our obligation will be to stand up and resist. n

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WORLD

New concerns on Saudi war in Yemen B Y S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN in Cairo

I

n Saudi Arabia’s version of its war in neighboring Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition carefully chooses targets for its airstrikes. The rapidly rising civilian death counts reported by the United Nations and humanitarian groups are highly exaggerated.

So are the accounts of an impending famine caused by war. And the coalition is in no way interfering with humanitarian aid or with assistance to Yemen’s beleaguered economy.

But now that narrative is wearing thin, critics say.

The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Oct. 2 by Saudi agents — and Saudi Arabia’s repeated denials of any knowledge of his fate — is raising new concerns about the Saudi account of how it is waging its devastating military campaign in Yemen.

“It’s thrown open the doors of doubt to the entire Saudi version of the war in Yemen,” said Elisabeth Kendall, a Yemen scholar at Oxford University. “It is no longer able to just tell the world what it wants it to think without the world now being suspicious and skeptical.”

As these doubts multiply, they are raising questions anew about whether the Trump administration can trust what Saudi Arabia is telling U.S. officials about its conduct of the war, especially its role in civilian casualties and human rights violations. Administration officials rely on the Saudi information in urging U.S. lawmakers to allow more weapons sales and other military assistance to the kingdom.

This past week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo separately called for an end to the conflict amid growing opposition in Congress to continue U.S. military support.

The United States helps the Saudi-led forces in their fight against a rebel insurgency by refueling their jets, and by providing intelligence and logistical support in addition to billions of

AHMAD AL-BASHA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Shifting stories on Khashoggi cast doubt on kingdom’s truthfulness dollars in weapons sales.

Since the war began in 2015, the Saudi-led coalition has sought to oust the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen and restore to power the internationally recognized Yemeni government.

While Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt are backing the government forces, the Shiite rebels are supported by Iran.

In September, Pompeo and Mattis certified to Congress that the Saudi-led coalition was making “every effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties.” A senior

White House official, speaking in Cairo last month, said the pair “did consult with a variety of sources” and were certain in their conclusion.

Those “sources” include the Saudis themselves, who are the only ones that investigate civilian casualties caused by air strikes.

And only in a handful of cases has the Saudi-led coalition found they had killed civilians, contradicting information collected by the U.N. and humanitarian groups.

The United Nations human rights office estimates that more than 16,000 civilians have been

Yemeni fighters from the Popular Resistance Committees, supporting forces loyal to Yemen’s Saudi-backed government, take part in a graduation ceremony in Taez on Oct. 27.

killed or injured since the war began, the majority by airstrikes.

The Saudi-led coalition is the only party to the conflict that uses military jets.

The independent Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project says the toll is far greater, estimating that more than 50,000 civilians have died over this period.

In most cases where there are reported civilian deaths, there are no subsequent investigations.

Saudi officials have regularly said civilian casualties are accidental, calling them collateral damage in strikes against carefully selected

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WORLD

YAHYA ARHAB/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

SALEH AL-OBEIDI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

military targets.

“It no longer looks like an accident, just like Khashoggi was not an accident,” Kendall said.

Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section and a critic of the Saudi leadership, was killed after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. While Saudi officials said for more than

two weeks that Khashoggi left the consulate alive, they later acknowledged he had died inside, but initially attributed his death to a fistfight. Saudi officials now say they accept the conclusion of Turkish investigators that his death was a preplanned murder.

Emily Thornberry, a British lawmaker, told her country’s Parliament that “we have seen a

repeated pattern played out” by the Saudis in how they handled the Khashoggi killing and the Yemen campaign.

“When major civilian casualties are reported, first they deny the reports are true, then they deny responsibility,” said Thornberry, a member of the opposition Labour Party. “And when the proof becomes incontrovertible, they say it is all a terrible mistake.

They blame rogue elements, promise those will be punished and say it will not happen again — until the next time, when it does.”

In Cairo, the senior White House official said the U.S.-Saudi relationship, traditionally very close, could be improved. “I think we do need more transparency generally,” the official said.

Regarding the Yemen conflict in particular, the official said the administration was “confident” in the information from Saudi Arabia. “In terms of Yemen, we have a fair amount of visibility,” the official told a small group of journalists, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely.

The continuing conflict is also deepening a humanitarian crisis

ABOVE: Yemenis walk past historical buildings in the old quarter of Sanaa on Oct. 27. LEFT: The Saudi ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed al-Jaber, arrives in the Yemeni port of Aden to oversee an aid delivery of fuel from Saudi Arabia on Monday.

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that has steadily worsened this year. At the U.N. Security Council in September, humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock warned that at least 14 million Yemenis — nearly half the country’s population — are on the verge of famine. More than 3 million Yemenis have fled their homes as a cholera epidemic rages, while thousands have died from preventable diseases.

Humanitarian agencies have accused the Saudi-led coalition of contributing to that crisis by waging economic warfare in Yemen.

There have been more than 18,000 airstrikes since the war began, and a third of those have targeted civilian sites, including farms, markets, water treatment facilities, power plants, hospitals, clinics, and food warehouses and other storage sites, according to the Yemen Data Project.

The coalition, meanwhile, has imposed import restrictions, in particular targeting the rebelcontrolled port of Hodeidah, a vital gateway for imports of food, fuel, medicines and other goods into the country.

The resulting shortage of fuel has in turn driven up transport costs, making food unaffordable for most Yemenis. The Houthis, too, are partly to blame for imposing heavy taxes on import businesses and at checkpoints.

“Yemen has long been bombarded with airstrikes and subjected to strangling tactics of war,” Jan Egeland, secretary general for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a statement.

“Mass starvation is a deadly byproduct of actions taken by warring parties and the western nations propping them up. The way the war is waged has systematically choked civilians by making less food available and affordable to millions of people.”

There is currently no direct American oversight of how aircraft refueled by the U.S. military carry out raids or how U.S.-supplied bombs are used. American officials say they rely on the Saudis for this kind of information.

Speaking in August, a senior Trump administration official said it was “possible” that U.S.-refueled jets had killed civilians, “but we don’t know.”

“We would have to have Saudis provide us information, but they don’t in the normal course of events provide to us.” n ©TheWashington Post

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POLITICS

Using his o∞ce’s power for campaigns

To aid GOP ahead of midterms, Trump mobilizes government JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND P HILIP R UCKER

P

resident Trump is mobilizing the vast powers of the military and other parts of the federal government to help bolster Republican election efforts, using the office of the presidency in an attempt to dictate the campaigns’ closing themes and stoke the fears and anxieties of his supporters ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Trump has recently made aggressive moves aimed at pushing policies that could boost Republicans next week — deploying more than 5,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in the largest such operation since the Mexican Revolu-

tion, floating the idea of ending birthright citizenship and warning that he intends to halt a caravan of Central American migrants.

He ratcheted up the rhetoric further Wednesday by saying that the number of troops at the border could increase to 15,000 — more than currently deployed in Afghanistan.

The president has also moved to lower Medicare drug prices and suggested the idea of a 10 percent tax cut for the middle class, sending administration and congressional officials scrambling to assemble a new tax policy.

The cumulative acts reflect the extent to which Trump has transformed parts of the federal bu-

reaucracy into a factory of threats, directives and actions — an outgrowth of a campaign strategy which the president and his political advisers settled on as their best chance to hold the Republican congressional majorities.

“This is the most focused and concerted effort to use all of the powers of the presidency to shape a midterm election that I have ever seen,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program and a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration.

“President Trump is pushing every button on the console and he is mobilizing all of the power, including the communications pow-

In recent days, President Trump has made aggressive moves aimed at pushing policies that could boost Republicans.

er, of the federal government on behalf of his party’s campaign in this midterm,” Galston said.

The president and his political advisers have decided that a base turnout strategy is the best way to preserve the GOP’s Senate and House majorities, with Trump wielding the polarizing issue of immigration as a cudgel in an attempt to motivate his 2016 supporters to vote.

Trump suggested in an interview with Axios released Tuesday that he intends to end the constitutional right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the United States to noncitizens. Many legal experts as well as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said the president does not have such uni-

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POLITICS TOP: Javier Flores Maldonado was one of thousands of migrants traveling in a caravan towards the United States border. The president has used the caravan to stoke fears and energize his party’s base ahead of midterms.

BOTTOM: The president has also announced plans to deploy around 5,000 more troops to secure the border.

“I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket. I want you to vote.

Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

President Trump, at a rally in Southhaven, Miss.

lateral authority. Still, Trump’s move seemed designed to revive the “anchor baby” debate that he helped lead en route to his victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.

For days, Trump has been warning of “an invasion” of Central American migrants, even though they are traveling by foot in caravans, their population is dwindling and they are not expected to reach the border for several weeks. The administration announced Monday that it was sending 5,200 troops, military helicopters and giant spools of razor wire to the southern border. Trump has dispatched top administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, on a media tour to echo his hard-line position and draw attention to the caravan.

In addition, Trump has been preparing a major immigration policy rollout — initially scheduled for Tuesday but postponed in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre — that is expected to include the call to temporarily shut the border to the migrants and deny them the opportunity to seek asylum.

He kept up the drumbeat on Twitter on Wednesday: “We will NOT let these Caravans, which are made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!” Trump is hardly the first president to take actions aimed at energizing his party’s base, though he is arguably more aggressive about it than his predecessors. In 2004, President George W. Bush and his campaign championed a wave of state initiatives banning same-sex marriage that helped drive up turnout among conservative voters. In the summer of 2014, President Barack Obama announced his intention to use his executive authority to make changes to the nation’s immigration system.

Within the White House and Trump’s broader orbit, the president’s advisers and confidants are sensitive to the suggestion that he is leveraging the government to advance his political aims. Instead, they argue, Trump’s longheld beliefs and policy prescriptions on immigration align with current events while also politically benefiting the Republican Party.

“This is not a case where Trump is just politically calculating pol-

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

ZOE M. WOCKENFUSS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

icies to fit what he wants done politically,” said one former White House official, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “It’s a case where what helps him politically also matches up perfectly with where he is policy-wise.”

Vice President Pence said Tuesday that the troop deployment was not a political ploy but rather an appropriate and necessary response to the “crisis on our southern border.”

“I can tell you, being out among the American people, there’s great concern, great alarm among many Americans to see this vast throng of people coming up for the express purpose of coming into our country illegally,” Pence said at a Politico Playbook event. “The president is simply determined to make sure that we’ve got the manpower on the border.”

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser, said the presi-

dent’s recent moves on immigration are politically savvy.

“The optics of the president sending troops to the border along with having Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen announce that none of the illegal immigrants are getting through once again makes this a top issue which will increase base turnout this last crucial week,” Nunberg said.

Trump has sought to make the midterm elections a referendum on himself, believing his supporters will only turn out to support Republican lawmakers if they think his presidency is at stake.

“I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket,” Trump said at a rally this month in Southhaven, Miss. “I want you to vote. Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

In recent weeks, Trump has sought to take action in other areas as well to show progress and motivate voters. He teased a 10 percent tax cut for middle-income families — and said Congress

KLMNO WEEKLY

would take action on it before the elections, even though there is no official proposal and lawmakers are not scheduled to be in session until after the midterms.

Trump also took action to lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prices with drug companies — a move the president called “revolutionary.”

But Trump has focused mostly on hammering the issue of immigration, the most animating theme of his 2016 campaign. By doing so, he is effectively putting his name and agenda on the ballot, in spirit if not in letter. As a second former White House official put it, “immigration gives some of that 2016 flair” to the midterms.

With Trump heading to the campaign trail on Wednesday for 11 “Make America Great Again” rallies in the final six days before the elections, immigration has become a core theme of his stump speeches.

Polling consistently shows that immigration is an especially trenchant issue for Republican voters.

Three-quarters of registered Republicans ranked immigration as “one of the single most important” issues or a “very important” issue driving their midterm votes, just behind the economy and taxes, according to an early October Washington Post-ABC News poll.

“Immigration is obviously an important issue. There’s no question about that,” GOP pollster David Winston said. “Trump clearly believes this was a key part of how he succeeded in the Republican primary. As a result, it’s an issue he is particularly comfortable with introducing when he feels it’s needed.”

Immigration is a powerful motivating issue for Republican voters in many of the Senate battlegrounds — red states including Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia, where Trump is popular. But Trump’s focus on the topic presents complications for vulnerable House Republicans struggling to fend off Democratic challenges in suburban districts in states such as California, Florida and Pennsylvania.

But unlike in 2016, when the GOP was more divided over how closely to hew to Trump’s immigration rhetoric and policies, the party largely has fallen in line behind the president. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Delving into the fall of American politics N ONFICTION

B BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY BURN AGAIN Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

By Ben Fountain Ecco. 433 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

R OBERT G . K AISER

en Fountain has cast his unconventional book about the 2016 election as an engaging meditation on two large questions that surely preoccupy many Americans these days: What on Earth happened in and to the United States in 2016?

And why did it happen? In “Beautiful Country Burn Again,” Fountain confronts both these riddles in creative and provocative ways that force a reader to think hard about the sudden disappearance of familiar patterns of politics and government.

Fountain hates what has happened to his country’s politics over the past half-century, as our public life has stumbled right into the toilet. He hates vividly, with the verbal energy of a prizewinning novelist. But he also analyzes this history with considerable care. He has done the reading, as the book’s footnotes attest. He is as good on our politics as Norman Mailer was in the 1970s, and he is as indifferent to evenhandedness as Mailer was. It is fun to read.

Fountain writes about President Trump’s most ardent supporters as a population unmoored from traditional American optimism — embittered by demographic upheaval, by decades of stagnant or falling incomes, and by condescending, well-to-do elites. Trump gave these supporters affirmation of their view of the world and of their significance.

Fountain challenges readers to confront the centrality of race in our history. The racial attitudes of white people, he argues, have always shaped our politics. The transformation of the once-proud “party of Lincoln” into the rightwing Republican coalition we see today started, Fountain agrees, when Lyndon B. Johnson voluntarily gave up the “solid [Democratic] south” by signing the civil rights bills of the 1960s.

As the South’s importance in Republican politics grew, the region began to provide the votes that elected Republicans to the White House, and Southern Republicans became important leaders in Congress. The key Republican in the new era turned out to be a Georgian, Newt Gingrich, whom Fountain correctly identifies as a principal villain of this story.

Conservatives’ enduring idol, Ronald Reagan, helped make the GOP the party of the white South, Fountain reminds us. He recalls the dark story of how Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, just a few miles from where a Ku Klux Klan posse supported by local officials and police murdered three young civil rights workers in June 1964. No one was charged with the crimes for more than 40 years.

Reagan picked this symbolic venue to announce, “I believe in states’ rights” — the rallying cry of

segregationists for decades.

This speech was “a remarkable moment in American history,” Fountain writes, “one of the true masterpieces of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle that blew out the eardrums of every racist reactionary within three thousand miles.”

Trump also adopted dog whistles, Fountain writes, and exploited “the country’s ingrained racism” to become its president.

“Who would have thought,” writes Fountain, a Southerner, “that George Wallace would be reincarnated in American politics as a New York City real estate tycoon?”

Fountain is tough on Republicans but pitiless about the identity crisis of the modern Democratic Party. What happened to Franklin Roosevelt’s party of the American worker? How was it transformed into the party of the Clintons, “new Democrats” eager to deregulate Wall Street, end welfare as we knew it, befriend the rich and become rich themselves? Fountain detests Trump as a phony and a fraud, but in his hands, Hillary Clinton is hardly more appealing.

There was a “fatal blind spot in her sensibility,” her inability to see how awful her hunger for money, and her clumsy efforts to deny it, looked to ordinary Americans. He recalls Clinton’s interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in 2014 when she pleaded poverty. “We came out of the White House [in 2001] not

only dead broke but in debt.” Both Clintons had “blockbuster book deals.” Bill Clinton immediately began to rake in huge speaking fees. They were loaded.

“One wonders,” he writes, “to what degree money underlies Hillary’s ‘likability’ problem, or more to the point, the deficits of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ she regularly registers in the polls.” That’s a novelist’s insight. It seems like a good one.

Fountain’s research, including travels around the country in 2016 as a columnist for the Guardian, created a dark pessimist. He thinks “we’ve already lost. . . . The One Percent already owns American democracy.”

The only hint of optimism in these pages is Fountain’s idea that the country is ready for its third great reinvention. He notes two previous moments, the Civil War and the Great Depression, when “the United States has had to reinvent itself in order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy.” Rising inequality, a new oligarchy of the wealthy, the collapse of upward mobility and of hope — could these lead to another “profound act of reinvention?” n Kaiser is the author or co-author of eight books, most recently “Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

FROM LEFT: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in in 1939; Ronald Reagan, running for president in 1980, shakes hands at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi; President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton in 2000.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACK THORNELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

STEPHEN JAFFE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

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American Jews face surge in hateful acts B Y J OE H EIM AND S AMANTHA S CHMIDT

T

his is what they had long been fear­ ing. As the threats increased, as the online abuse grew increasingly vi­ cious, as the defacing of synagogues and community centers with swasti­ kas became more commonplace, the possibility of a violent attack loomed over America’s Jewish communities. ¶ A week ago Saturday, the worst of those fears was made real as a gunman stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 of its members and injuring many more, reportedly shouting “All Jews must die” during his ram­ page. It is the worst single attack on American Jews in the history of the country. And it is one that many who have been monitoring anti­Se­ mitic activity in the United States have been dreading.

Mourners join a vigil on Oct. 27 in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where 11 people were killed in a shooting earlier in the day at the Tree of Life synagogue.

“Unfortunately, in the atmosphere we are in, as shocking as these incidents always are, they are not surprising,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

In its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, the ADL chronicled a 57 percent rise of incidents in 2017 over the previous year. That includ-

ed everything from bomb threats and assaults to vandalism, desecration of cemeteries and the flooding of college campuses with antiSemitic posters and graffiti.

Pittsburgh’s deadly attack took place against the backdrop of a particularly toxic era in American political and social life. Many Americans believe that the increase in anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism

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COVER STORY

over the past two years has been stoked by the rhetoric of some of the nation’s top leaders, particularly President Trump, whose ongoing rallies are marked by denunciations of immigrants and the deriding of “globalists,” which is viewed as a code word for Jews.

Most recently, he has declared himself a “nationalist,” thrilling some of his followers who identify themselves as white nationalists.

It has been just 14 months since white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting, “Our blood, our soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” They were met not with an unconditional rebuke by Trump but a claim by him that there were “very fine people on both sides.” On the far right, the president’s words were taken as an endorsement of their behavior and ideas and an encouragement to pursue them.

“The response was not at all satisfactory,” Segal said. “It’s not hard to condemn Nazis or antiSemites unequivocally.”

Although anti-Semitism is surging, it is not new in the United States. The country’s Jewish groups and organizations have long been targets of zealots and bigots. But for much of American history, there have been relatively few large-scale violent attacks.

And nothing on the order of the mass murder. That it took place in such a politically poisoned atmosphere is also significant, observers say.

“We have seen acts of violence.

What’s new is the context of the acts of violence,” said Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center, an Oregon-based progressive group focused on social and economic justice.

“I have never seen this coupling of political violence with political rhetoric before,” said Ward, who has been studying anti-Semitism for the past 30 years. “It has primarily come out of the margins, and what’s different about this moment and chilling about this moment is that the rhetoric is now coming out of the mainstream, and it’s giving permission to people on the margins to act out.”

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, said that in previous decades, such as when she was growing up in the

How attack compares to those in Europe J AMES M C A ULEY in Paris BY

T SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

1950s and 1960s, anti-Semitism was more structural, in the form of discrimination in employment and education.

Attacks would happen on a personal level. “Kids would be beaten up in the street if you lived in the mixed neighborhood,” she said. But Lipstadt said she was taken aback by the scale and horror of the Pittsburgh rampage.

“This is beyond anything we’ve experienced,” Lipstadt said.

She said it and the recent wave of anti-Semitic incidents over the past two years are the result of “anti-Semitic dog whistles” from leaders — for example, she said, rhetoric painting George Soros as a “21st century Rothschild” — that have emboldened neo-Nazis and other white supremacists intent on committing acts of violence.

The increase in anti-Semitic attacks and harassment online, particularly on popular social media platforms, has been an acute concern in recent years for those monitoring far-right hate groups and white supremacists.

“The rise of the far right in America and Europe is tied to both the spread of anti-Semitic conspiracies about Jewish global domination and increased calls for stronger borders and nationalist policies in majority white countries,” said Joan Donovan, media manipulation research lead at Data and Society Research Institute, an independent non-

profit in New York. “Attention to conspiracy theories about Jewish people, especially Soros, has reached new mainstream audiences through Internet memes and right-wing news outlets.”

Although there are increasing demands for platforms to aggressively monitor and remove such material, not every social site has been vigilant in addressing the problem.

Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Washington-based Interfaith Alliance, said the current public display of anti-Semitism “is like nothing that I have seen in my lifetime, and I go back to the early ’50s.”

For Moline, the marches in Charlottesville last year were the first public demonstrations of anti-Semitism he had seen since the late 1970s, when American neoNazis fought in court to march in Skokie, Ill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he remembers synagogues and Jewish centers requiring identification from visitors and erecting barriers to prevent car bombers. Some of the precautions may have seemed excessive. Not anymore.

“I don’t know a Jewish institution who hasn’t considered the new security requirements of a dangerous world,” he said. “I think we have gone from theoretical to practical in a matter of minutes today.” n ©The Washington Post

Mourners walk in a procession Wednesday outside Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh for the funeral of Joyce Fienberg, who was killed in the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27 in the same city.

he killing of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue drew immediate comparisons to the problem of anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe, where violent incidents have claimed the lives of at least 18 Jews in the past decade. A number of anti-Semitic currents are coursing through the Europe of 2018 — across the continent and across the political spectrum. What, if any, are the connections?

Contemporary European antiSemitism is by no means the exclusive province of the political right. It has also seen a resurgence recently on the left, mostly via recycled caricatures that depict Jews as greedy capitalists or that present all Jews as colonial overlords of the Palestinians. Notably, Britain’s Labour Party, led by leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn, has come under fire for not dealing more decisively with accusations of anti-Semitism among some members. Britain’s Jewish community has spoken out against Labour leaders, and anti-Semitic incidents in Britain have soared to a near-record high in 2018.

In general, it’s difficult to ascribe a common narrative to all the anti-Semitic violence in Europe seen in recent years, and crimes have been perpetrated by people with various motivations.

In France, in particular, where the vast majority of Europe’s recent anti-Semitic killings have occurred, most suspects have come from immigrant backgrounds, and a number have been affiliated with Islamist terrorist networks.

France happens to be home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Arab populations, and some incidents have seen the Arab-Israeli conflict translated into a domestic political context. On a very broad level,

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the attack. In what became a national scandal, the Paris prosecutor initially declined to investigate the crime as a case of anti-Semitic violence, but President Emmanuel Macron formally declared the killing anti-Semitic several months later, in July 2017.

December 2017: Amsterdam Hours after President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a 29-year-old Palestinian man brandishing a Palestinian flag smashed the windows of the HaCarmel kosher restaurant in a Jewish district of Amsterdam. Dutch television broadcast video of the incident, and the footage shows the man smashing the window and breaking down the door. The incident followed a similar one from 2016, when a stabbing occurred at another Amsterdam kosher eatery; authorities concluded that incident was unrelated to anti-Semitism.

JUSTIN MERRIMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

recent cases — in France but also in Germany — have led many political leaders to worry whether the same countries that facilitated the Holocaust could again find themselves susceptible to antiSemitism, this time of an “imported” variety.

Here is a list of some of the of the cases of violent anti­Semitism that have occurred in Europe in the past 10 years.

2012: Toulouse, France Four Jews were shot and killed at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school outside Toulouse in southern France. The victims included Rabbi Yonatan Sandler, 30, and two of his children: Aryeh Sandler, 6, and Gabriel Sandler, 3. Miriam Monsonego, an 8-year-old student, also was killed. French authorities identified the perpetrator as 23year-old Mohammed Merah, who had a record of petty crime and was killed three days later in a standoff. Since Merah — a French citizen of Algerian origin — had killed three French police officers in the days before he attacked Ozar Hatorah, the Toulouse attack was widely seen as the beginning of France’s recent struggle with

terrorism perpetrated by its own citizens. According to a book published by Merah’s brother, he had been raised in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, and his hatred of Jews was to some extent a function of his hatred of Israel.

2014: Brussels Four people were shot and killed in an attack at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.

Two of the victims, Emmanuel and Miriam Riva, were in the city on vacation from their home in Tel Aviv. A French woman, Dominique Sabrier, also was killed, and Alexandre Strens, who worked at the museum, later died of his injuries. The suspect was identified as Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old Franco-Algerian whom authorities apprehended at the Marseille train station several days after the attack. Authorities suspect he had links to an Islamic State terrorist cell.

January 2015: Paris Days after the attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, four Jews — François-Michel Saada, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and Yoav Hattab — were killed in a siege at

Mourners gather around the grave site of Irving Younger, one of the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

the Hyper Cacher, a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris.

Authorities discovered that the attacker, Amedy Coulibalay, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and had met the two brothers who perpetrated the attack on Charlie Hebdo in a French prison.

October 2016: Moscow An armed man carrying a gas canister attempted to enter Moscow’s Choral Synagogue in the city center, a day before Rosh Hashanah services. As he tried to get in, the man struggled with one of the guards. The attacker then shot the guard, who suffered minor injuries. All that is known about the attacker is that he was a 40-yearold man believed by synagogue officials to be an ethnic Russian.

April 2017: Paris During the French presidential election, Sarah Halimi, 65, an Orthodox Jewish woman who lived alone in a Paris public housing project, was beaten to death and thrown out a window. Police identified her neighbor, Kobili Traore, a 27-year-old Malian Muslim, as the suspect, and neighbors interviewed by police said they heard him scream “Allahu akbar” during

March 2018: Paris In an episode that resembled the Sarah Halimi case, Mireille Knoll, 85, a Holocaust survivor who also lived in a Paris public housing project, was stabbed 11 times and left to burn in her apartment. Investigators identified her neighbor, Yacine Mihoub, 28, and an accomplice, Alex Carrimbacus, 21, as suspects. This time, authorities immediately included the dimension of antiSemitism in the investigation, and less than a year after the Halimi case, Knoll’s death became a lightning rod that led thousands into the streets of Paris to protest antiSemitism in France.

April 2018: Berlin Two men — ages 21 and 24, at least one wearing a skullcap — were assaulted in broad daylight by an attacker who whipped them with a belt in a gentrified Berlin district, Prenzlauer Berg. Three perpetrators appeared to have been involved, according to the victims’ accounts. One of the victims, Adam Armoush, later said that he was not in fact Jewish but had worn a skullcap to prove to a friend that doing so was not a risk in contemporary Germany. “I was saying it’s really safe, and I wanted to prove it, but it ended like that,” Armoush told German TV. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Think you’ll know who won on election night? Not so fast . . .

R EPORTING

BY

B ONNIE B ERKOWITZ, I LLUSTRATIONS

BY

S HELLY T AN

If you plan to stay awake on election night until you know the outcome of every race — or even until you know who con­ trols the House and Senate — you may need to buy a lot more coffee. ¶ An unusual number of key races are expected to be nail­biters, which often take a while to sort out. Quirky rules and procedures may prolong other races. And you can be sure that somewhere on Nov. 6, something that never happens will occur — and will delay the count in some unlucky ju­ risdiction. ¶ Here are some ways Election Day could turn into Election Week, Election Month or longer.

1. Some states count sloooooowly Sometimes, it’s the scale. Hundreds of thousands of votes take longer to tally than just a few, so huge urban areas often lag behind smaller places.

Other times, it’s the mail. California, for instance, where there are seven tight House races, is notoriously slow, in part because more than half of voters opt to use vote-bymail ballots (a.k.a. “absentee” ballots in some places). California ballots postmarked on Election Day have three days to show up at county elections offices. A few other states allow a week or 10 days; Alaska will accept ballots from abroad up to 15 days later.

“I’ve always speculated about a worst-case scenario where an Alaska Senate seat could determine control of the U.S. Senate, and there may still be ballots sitting at local ‘post offices,’ ” said Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College, in an email. “Post office,” he said, could actually mean a remote bait shop or grocery store from which ballots would need to be airlifted, validated and counted.

Gronke said some jurisdictions that depend

heavily on mail-in voting get quicker results by processing the ballots as they arrive rather than saving all the envelope-opening, signature-validating, scanning and such until after the polls close. That way, they just need to hit the button to count the ballots.

Traffic could be a factor, too. A few jurisdictions do “central counting,” where all ballots are delivered to a single location after the polls close to be counted all at once. One of those is massive Los Angeles County, where some votes arrive by helicopter and boat.

“It’s like a scene out of ‘M.A.S.H,’ ” said Doug Chapin, an elections expert at Fors Marsh Group and adjunct professor of election administration at the University of Minnesota. “The choppers land and people run in and unload the ballots and then load in empty boxes, and the chopper goes back out to get more.”

Caution plays a role as well.

When races are close, elections officials may wait to release information until they’re confident that their “unofficial” results are nevertheless pretty accurate, Chapin said.

It’s a pressure-filled balancing act. In 2010, a longtime Riverside County, Calif., registrar was fired over a slow count.

2. Random glitches cause delays Snowstorms strike. Voting machines break down. Squirrels knock out power.

“There’s always going to be one place at least that just has a bad day,” Chapin said.

“There are so many ballots being counted in so many jurisdictions in so many different ways, that something is going to go wrong. Even if nobody does anything wrong, something is

going to go wrong.”

That may lead courts to order that polling places be kept open later, which slows counting on top of the original problem.

Also, more states are switching from touchscreen machines, which are widely considered to be less secure, to paper ballots with optical scanners, which take a little longer to process.

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I FIN

SH 1 2 3

3. Runoffs may be required

4. Provisional ballots could come into play

In most races, the person who gets the most votes wins. But the winner of certain races in a few states must also get 50 percent of the vote.

If no one does, the top two vote-getters compete later in a runoff.

One of those races is Mississippi’s special Senate election, where four candidates are vying to serve out the term of Thad Cochran (R), who resigned in April for health reasons.

The runoff, which is considered to be very likely, would be Nov. 27.

Another is the Georgia governor’s race, where Stacy Abrams (D) and Brian Kemp (R) are running neck-and-neck. Libertarian candidate Ted Metz could siphon off just enough votes to keep Abrams and Kemp under 50 percent and trigger a Dec. 10 runoff.

Louisiana has no pre-election primaries to cull the herd of candidates, and each of its six House races has between three and seven names on the ballot. Any needed runoffs will be Dec. 8.

And then there’s Maine’s House and Senate races, where the “ranked-choice voting” ballot has a built-in runoff. Instead of voters choosing just one candidate in a race, they can rank all the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than half of first-place votes, all ballots will be trucked to Augusta for re-sorting.

First, elections officials will eliminate the candidate who got the fewest first-place votes.

If you voted for that candidate, your vote will instead go to the candidate you ranked second. This continues, round by round, until someone gets a majority.

Confused? The state made an animated explanatory video that includes the fantastic sentence, “In this example, the skipped ranking will be ignored, and Spider-Man will be counted as your second choice.”

If you go to the polls and run into a problem — say your name isn’t on the registrar’s list, or you forgot to bring your ID — federal law requires most states to let you cast a provisional ballot. (A few states that have same-day voter registration are exempt because you can register instantly.) Later, county election officials review those ballots and resolve the issues.

Not enough provisional ballots are cast to affect the final outcome of most elections, but they can delay results of a very close race.

And recently, several states, most notably Georgia, tightened voter ID laws and purged a large number of people who hadn’t voted recently from the rolls, which could mean more people cast provisional ballots than usual.

5. Someone can demand a recount In some places and for some races, recounts are automatic if the winning margin is below a certain percentage. In other places, a candi-

KLMNO WEEKLY

date (or even some other person) can request one.

Either way, the process can be excruciating.

The longest contested election in Senate history was for an open New Hampshire seat in 1974. After an initial count showed Lewis Wyman (R) beat John Durkin (D) by 355 votes, a recount showed Durkin won by 10 votes.

Then a re-recount came up with Wyman winning by two votes. A re-re-recount was done by the Senate itself — and ended with no resolution.

Finally, the candidates gave up and agreed to a do-over, and Durkin won a special election the following September.

6. Lawyers could get involved Gerrymandering. Perceived voter suppression. Lost ballots. Hacking.

Plenty of issues have the potential to cause a tight election to go into overtime in the courts.

Unlike a recount, which simply seeks a new tally, a post-election legal challenge alleges that the count was not accurate for some reason and does not represent the true result.

(This is also called “contesting” the election.)

In 2008, the race between incumbent Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman (R) and challenger Al Franken (D) was so close — 206 votes — that it triggered an automatic recount, then a legal challenge by Coleman based on how absentee ballots were counted (or not), then an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Franken was finally declared the winner nearly eight months after Election Day. All of these scenarios cause heartburn for elections officials who would much prefer smooth-running contests with clear winners whose victory speeches are finished by bedtime.

“The election administrator’s prayer,” Chapin said, “is, ‘Let the margins be wide.’” n ©The Washington Post

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HEALTH

Dogs could help eradicate malaria BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

S

teven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University in England, has been researching malaria control for decades. His preferred approach, he says, is to “sit on the boundaries,” drumming up ideas that others might not.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that his latest project was inspired by the baggage-claim area at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. If the beagles there could use their noses to detect explosives or contraband in suitcases, he wondered, could they also be trained to sniff out an intractable disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year?

Lindsay ended up tackling that question in a project that involved the dirty socks of hundreds of African children and a trio of sniffer dogs in England — and the answer strongly pointed to yes. The dogs correctly identified socks worn by malaria-infected children 70 percent of the time and those worn by noninfected children 90 percent of the time.

“I think it is quite extraordinary,” said Lindsay, the lead scientist on a study presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “We put these socks on African children for 12 hours, take them off, freeze them for 15 months before we start training, and then the dogs can pick up that odor.”

Funding for the project came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which put out a call for research on malaria tests that are noninvasive, unlike current tests that rely on blood samples.

Lindsay and his colleagues focused on asymptomatic carriers because they play a key role in malaria’s persistence, acting as hidden reservoirs. But finding them is a challenge because current methods make mass testing impractical.

Lindsay and his colleagues gave nylon socks to nearly 600 children who had been tested for malaria in Gambia, where the

DURHAM UNIVERSITY/MEDICAL DETECTION DOGS/LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE AND TROPICAL MEDICINE

Canines have been trained to sniff out the disease, and their success rate has been high disease is endemic, and asked them to wear them overnight.

Researchers ended up with 30 socks from asymptomatic malaria carriers and 145 socks from children who tested negative for the disease. Those were then wrapped in foil, frozen and sent to England, where they were stored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine while a charity called Medical Detection

Dogs trained the pooches.

That malaria alters the volatile compounds that make up a person’s odor has been established, and previous research has found that the mosquitoes that spread the disease are more attracted to carriers, including asymptomatic ones.

“If a mosquito can do it,” Lindsay said, “why not a dog?”

Dogs, after all, have proved

Freya, a springer spaniel, has been trained to detect malaria carriers through sock samples taken from children in Gambia.

adept at sniffing out cancer, narcotics, human remains and even orca feces. Just what they’re smelling when they detect disease isn’t clear, said Jennifer Essler, a postdoctoral fellow who works with dogs that sniff for ovarian cancer at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center.

“What we present them with is the blood plasma,” Essler said, referring to her own research.

“Does that mean they’re detecting the body’s response to the cancer?

Is there something from the cancer in the blood? We’re not really sure.”

Essler’s team is working with scientists from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia to find out what ovarian-cancerdetection dogs smell. That’s because the end goal, she said, is not to have dogs screen patients, but to take what’s learned from the dogs to create an “electronic nose” that could screen for ovarian cancer.

“For many reasons, you can’t deploy dogs to a lot of places,” she said. What’s more, she added, “they’re still beings. There are still days when they come in and have a bad day.”

But the malaria research provides another strong example of dogs’ potential, Essler said: “It’s awesome that people are recognizing the capabilities of dogs and how they can be used to help people.”

When it comes to malaria, Lindsay said he does not envision squadrons of canines patrolling villages in sub-Saharan Africa.

Malaria-detecting electronic noses are also one possible outcome of further research, he said. But in the shorter term, malaria-detection dogs might work at ports of entry in countries that have eliminated the disease and want to keep it out.

There, dogs could identify carriers before they come in, Lindsay said. Training sniffer dogs costs many thousands of dollars, he acknowledged, but “it’s cheap compared to the cost of having malaria come back into your community.” n ©The Washington Post

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ENVIRONMENT

KLMNO WEEKLY

Paving another way to reuse plastic BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

U

ntil about a year ago, few people had reason to wonder where the plastic they tossed into the recycling bin ended up. It was being made into new bottles, bags, straws and beach balls, right?

Wrong: Almost half of it was shipped to China. Then, China announced last year that it didn’t want to buy the stuff anymore.

So, what should we do with all that plastic choking the world’s landfills? Why not recycle it and use it to build roads?

Bound together with plastic polymers, the asphalt will be cheaper and last longer than conventional pavement, according to independent experts.

One European firm already is combining plastic pellets with hot-mix asphalt to resurface roadways. A U.S. company says that once it finds financial backing, its product “could be deployed within six months” with a process that combines asphalt milled from the road’s surface with plastic urethane.

Mixing recycled plastic into asphalt is more common in India and Pakistan than in the United States.

And an ambitious Dutch company envisions 100-percent-recycled plastic roads built in sectional panels that can be popped into place like Lego blocks. So far, though, its biggest project has been the test of a 30-meter bike path in a city about 60 miles east of Amsterdam.

No one knows how many tons of plastic waste might be put to use in building roads, bike paths or sidewalks. But the plastic problem became prodigious the minute China stopped taking all but a tiny fraction of what the world produces.

More than 583 billion plastic bottles alone will be produced worldwide three years from now, according to the market research firm Euromonitor International.

Bottles take close to 500 years to decompose in landfills, and some plastic items last almost twice as long.

TECHNISOIL INDUSTRIAL

With China refusing to be world’s garbage dump, companies turn to roads as recycling alternative By 2050, plastic floating in the oceans will outweigh the fish, according to a 2016 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Without China paying to host the world’s biggest garbage dump, the rest of the world will have no place for an estimated 111 million metric tons of plastic waste that will accumulate in the next dozen years, according to University of Georgia researchers. Since 1992, China has accepted 45 percent of the world’s plastic recycling, they said.

Infusing plastic into highways is in its nascent hour, but the urgency of having no outlet for almost half the world’s plastic suggests traditional recycling may dry up, leaving landfills as the only other option.

“If you recycle plastic and you don’t have a market for it, what is the point?” said Hossain, who heads a test project that uses recycled plastic to shore up raised highway roadbeds in Texas. “So

now, we are recycling the plastic, we have a tremendous market.

So far, companies in the United States and abroad have embraced research into three types of roadway plastics: adding refined plastic pellets to hot-mix asphalt, grinding off the top surface of roads and adding urethane, and roads that essentially are nothing but recycled plastic.

There are several reasons that roads infused with plastic last longer. One company, TechniSoil Industrial, says its roads are eight to 16 times more durable. A key reason has to do with what the industry calls “flow,” a term that translates best to “flexibility.” When the weight of a vehicle presses down as it passes over the asphalt, that pavement doesn’t spring back to 100 percent.

“It flexes back only a percentage” of what it once was, said Sean Weaver, founder of TechniSoil.

“Well, that’s why you get potholes and roads start to fall apart. What

These samples show a product using recycled asphalt and G5 polymer from TechniSoil Industrial, a plastic-roadway company.

we’ve found with using plastic [in the recycled asphalt mix] was that we had zero flow.”

Weaver said his Californiabased company does pothole work for about 100 West Coast cities, using a plastic-mix process called TrowelPave.

“The cities are just amazed they can fix a pothole and never go back to that pothole,” said Weaver, who needs to get more funding for his small firm before it can engage in full-fledged road paving. “The road will fail around it before the pothole fails.”

Weaver’s paving process, which combines recycled asphalt with MDI (methylene diphenyl diisocyanate) urethane, was tested for five years by the University of Nevada at Reno.

“It’s 100 percent RAP — recycled asphalt pavement,” said Elie Y. Hajj, an assistant professor of engineering at the university, who specializes in paving research.

“You pulverize it, you add the liquid plastic, and it will come out with a cold mix that they can use as a surface layer” on the roadway.

A Scottish company, MacRebur, says it’s beginning to develop contracts worldwide for its product that puts recycled plastic pellets — a dozen or more could fit in the palm of a hand — into hot-mix asphalt. CEO Toby McCartney, in a video on the firm’s website, recalled first seeing the plastic-infusion process in India.

“Surely, everyone is doing this already, or people have thought about this?” he said he thought at the time. “But we just hit upon it [ourselves] and came up with the right mix.”

Another entrant in the plasticroad market is a coalition of three Dutch corporations that formed PlasticRoad, a company that says it intends to build roads made from 100-percent-recycled plastic.

One of its challenges is that plastic alone is a slippery surface.

“We have created a special coating — with proven safety — to make sure the plastic has a rough surface and wouldn’t be slippery,” Anne Koudstaal, an inventor of the PlasticRoad, said in an email. n ©The Washington Post

16

SUNDAY, November 4, 2018

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