The Washington Post National Weekly - Nov. 22, 2015

Worst Week Ben Carson 3

Politics Trump vs. his Florida neighbors 4

Health Running a long, long way 16

5 Myths Common cold 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

IT PAYS TO NEGOTIATE Boston is offering classes on how to talk about money to every woman who works in the city PAGE 12

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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Gobble, Gobble, Gobble On Thanksgiving Day, we're delivering a newspaper that might weigh more than your turkey.

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November 18, 2014

110th year, No. 98

Mulch much

Prevent plants from drying out this winter At Home — Page C1 PUBLISHED IN THE APPLE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD AND THE BUCKLE OF THE

After the big game POWER BELT OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Ephrata beats Spokane, now faces semifinals Sports — Page B1

Arena firsts: Clean audit, extra money

BY MICHELLE MCNIEL World staff writer WENATCHEE — The Town Toyota Center hit a milestone on Monday when its governing board put money into a reserve account for the first time.

The arena is also celebrating its first clean state audit in years.

“This is an important day,” Pete Fraley, the arena’s attorney, said. “We’re planning for the future for the first time.”

He added that the financial plan laid out when two sales tax increases were passed and the arena’s $42 million debt was refinanced in 2012 “is working just as we hoped and anticipated.”

The regional .01 percent sales tax and 0.2

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Ben Carson

by Chris Cillizza

I

n Washington, there’s nothing rarer — or more damaging — than when people criticize you on the record.

In a town where “sources close to the campaign” and “senior operatives familiar with the plan” are as common as traffic jams, someone attaching his or her name to negative comments about a presidential candidate is shocking.

That’s why a New York Times piece published Tuesday on Ben Carson (headlined “Ben Carson Is Struggling to Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say”) hurts so bad.

The piece featured Duane R. Clarridge, 83, identified as a top adviser to Carson on national security and terrorism, absolutely blowing out his boss.

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Clarridge told reporter Trip Gabriel, adding that Carson needed weekly briefings so “we can make him smart.” Another “close friend,” Armstrong Williams, lamented Carson’s inability in a TV interview to say whom he’d ask to form a coalition against the Islamic State. He’d “been briefed on it so many times,” Williams said.

The Carson campaign’s response bordered on the comical. “For the New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices,” the

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JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

statement read.

Okay, so: Clarridge is too old or senile to give an interview to the Times but is plenty good enough to participate in briefings with Carson on matters of national security and terrorism? Riiiiight.

Though Carson is still leading the Republican field in some polls, this kerfuffle fuels the perception that the candidate has little grasp of foreign policy at a time when concerns about national security are surging.

Ben Carson, for watching your allies turn against you in public, you had the worst week in Washington.

Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 6

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER This fall, Boston launched America’s largest civic experiment to close the gender wage gap. Illustration by PABLO IGLESIAS for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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POLITICS

A case study in Trump guile and bile

STEVE STARR/CORBIS

For three decades, he has tactically entrenched himself in Palm Beach society

BY M ARY J ORDAN AND R OSALIND S . H ELDERMAN

Palm Beach, Fla.

T

he patriarchs of this quiet island of millionaires threw up roadblocks when Donald Trump swooped in and turned its historic oceanfront Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club.

The town council, seeing Trump as an ostentatious outsider, crafted a list of restrictions as he sought to transform the property in the 1990s. Membership, traffic, party attendance, even photography — all would be

strictly limited.

But Trump undercut his adversaries with a searing attack, claiming that local officials seemed to accept the established clubs in town that had excluded Jews and blacks while imposing tough rules on his inclusive one.

Trump’s lawyer sent every member of the town council copies of two classic movies about discrimination: “A Gentleman’s Agreement,” about a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to expose antiSemitism, and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” about a white couple’s reaction to their daughter bringing home a black fiance.

The move infuriated council members, who said it was a distraction from their concerns that Trump’s club would spoil a quiet street. But, in time, Trump got most of the restrictions lifted.

“He won in the court of public opinion,” said Jack McDonald, who was a council member at the time and who went on to be mayor and to join Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s relationship with Palm Beach, where he has spent three decades brawling with local officials and winning over many, was an early indicator of the personality traits and tactics that have helped propel him to the top

The Mar-a-Lago Estate was built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s and briefly donated to be used as the winter White House.

of Republican polls.

In buying and then winning the right to transform the property, Trump demonstrated how he gains leverage by exposing and exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents, combining bombast with a willingness to compromise, and casting every outcome as a resounding Trump victory.

The story of Trump’s ownership with Mar-a-Lago is also a reminder of the real estate mogul’s tabloid past — a time, long before he began courting conservative voters, when he reveled in extravagant parties, beautiful women and celebrity friendships.

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POLITICS Many in Palm Beach today recoil at his look-at-me ego and are appalled at his frequent displays of unfiltered Trump, like emblazoning his name on a coat of arms on Mar-a-Lago’s elegant facade.

“It’s all about the Trumpster,” said Laurel Baker, executive director of the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce. “I would venture to think that old Palm Beach doesn’t . . . consider him one of their own.”

But, just as Trump has forced many in the national Republican establishment to accept him as an enduring presence in this year’s presidential campaign, Trump and his club have become undeniable cornerstones of Palm Beach society.

“Whether they love me or not, everyone agrees the greatest and most important place in Palm Beach is Mar-a-Lago,” Trump boasted in a recent interview. “I took this ultimate place and made it incredible and opened it, essentially, to the people of Palm Beach.

The fact that I owned it made it a lot easier to get along with the Palm Beach establishment.”

The host with the most The property today, encompassing more than 17 acres on this narrow, 16-mile-long island, operates in two money-making ways.

It is a private club, open to members who pay a $100,000 initiation fee plus annual dues of $14,000, and a venue that can be rented for weddings and events.

Trump brags that Mar-a-Lago hosts superior events to another iconic Palm Beach property, the century-old Breakers Hotel, which he said “gets the leftovers.”

Last year, Trump made $15.6 million from Mar-a-Lago, according to financial disclosures Trump filed as part of his presidential campaign.

Trump closes off part of the main house as private quarters.

Many of Trump’s rivals in the presidential race have been to Mara-Lago for functions, including Ted Cruz, Chris Christie and Ben Carson. So have many Republican commentators, including Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.

Hillary Clinton came, too, attending Trump’s wedding to Melania Knauss 10 years ago.

Until he hit the presidential campaign trail, Trump spent many weekends at Mar-a-Lago, hopping table to table asking diners if they tried his mother’s meatloaf on the menu or enjoyed his ocean view.

ROSALIND HELDERMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

MARY JORDAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump, whose brother died of alcoholism, does not drink. Friends say his relaxation comes from golf and presiding over Mar-a-Lago, chatting with guests.

He lets Palm Beachers come to him, rarely venturing out to shops and restaurants in town.

“I do get along with people,” Trump said. “You have everybody there. You have people from the Middle East. You have Jewish people. I mean, you have Jewish people having dinner with people from the Middle East. You have Christians. You have old-line WASPs.” The winter White House Mar-a-Lago was opened in 1927 as a private estate by one of the richest women in the world, Marjorie Merriweather Post.

She donated her 128-room home to the U.S. government in 1973 for use as the winter White House. But under President Jimmy Carter, the government turned the property over to the private Post Foundation, saying it was too expensive to maintain.

Trump wanted it to be his.

So, according to Trump, when his first offer of $28 million was turned down, he decided to play hardball. He said he bought the beachfront property directly in front of it through a third party

ROSALIND HELDERMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

MARY JORDAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

and threatened to put up a hideous home to block its ocean view, he recalled in the interview.

“That was my first wall,” he said. “That drove everybody nuts.

They couldn’t sell the big house because I owned the beach, so the price kept going down and down.”

In the end, Trump bought the landmark in 1985 for a bargain, paying $5 million for the house and $3 million for Post’s antiques and lavish furnishings.

From the start, Trump’s approach stood out in Palm Beach.

He had Mar-a-Lago’s hedge chopped down to ensure passersby could see his castle. He has invited high-profile guests such as Michael Jackson to stay overnight, drawing paparazzi.

“It’s become part of the fabric of the social life of Palm Beach,” said Jane Day, who as the town’s historic preservation consultant at times clashed with Trump. But like many, she credited Trump with saving the historic home.

An open invitation Trump made Mar-a-Lago appealing even to his biggest skeptics. He brought in headliners including Elton John, Celine Dion, Diana Ross, Luciano Pavaratti and Jay Leno, who performed at charity balls and events open to anyone

At Mar-a-Lago, the walls of the ballroom are inlaid with $7 million of gold leaf. Donald Trump installed four goldplated sinks in a women's room nearby, each costing $25,000. Trump acquired a custompainted Steinway baby grand piano with the purchase of the estate. Mar-aLago also features an elaborate gold dining room and a Trump store that sells ties.

KLMNO WEEKLY

who could afford a ticket.

By opening access, Trump sought to dull opposition to him.

Allen Wyett, a frequent Trump critic, recalled that the morning after Wyett’s election to the town council in 1995, he received a phone call from Trump, who wanted to personally invite him to a show at Mar-a-Lago. Wyett declined and never joined Mar-a-Lago. But he said the invitations continued to concerts, to comedy shows.

Wyett, who is Jewish, said he would hear Trump talk with pride about Mar-a-Lago’s nondiscriminatory policy, but wondered if it was a business strategy: “Was he smart enough to realize that Palm Beach is about 40 percent Jewish and he was not going to attract the old guard anyway?”

Outrageous and effective Mar-a-Lago became a party destination in the late 1990s, particularly after Trump split from Maples and before he married Knauss. Rich men mingled with the models and beauty pageant contestants who always seemed to be floating around his tiled patio.

“It was 3-to-2, beautiful women-to-men,” recalled Roger Stone, a former adviser to Trump.

“That’s true,” Trump, laughed, stressing he was single at the time. “The point was to have fun.

It was wild.”

“He can be outrageous,” Wyett said. “He can be as gentle as a kid.

He can be gracious. He can be as vindictive as anyone you’ve ever met. He’s everything wrapped into one package with a ribbon on it.”

Flags and planes overhead Palm Beach has a lot of rules: No whistling allowed on public streets after midnight. No “Missing Dog” — or any sign — posted on a tree. And no flag poles taller than 42 feet.

In late 2006 Trump put up a giant American flag on an 80-foot pole. That led to a $1,250-a-day fine against him, drawing national headlines Trump basked in.

“Tonight, Donald Trump does legal battle again, this time with a bunch of millionaires down in Palm Beach, Florida, who told Trump he’s flying his flag too high,” is how Nancy Grace started her CNN interview in January 2007 with Trump. “Can you fly the continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

American flag too high?” she asked. Trump got fan mail when he said: “No American should have to get a permit to fly the flag.”

“I said, ‘This is a dream to have someone sue me to take down the American flag,’ ” Trump said.

Trump sued Palm Beach for $25 million in damages, arguing it was protected free speech.

Trump reached a settlement with the town. He would put a slightly smaller flag farther from the road on a 70-foot pole.

Instead of paying any fines, Trump made a $100,000 donation to a veterans charity.

While gracious to many neighbors, Trump has mocked others.

He famously called actress Dina Merrill, daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post, “arrogant and aloof.” In his book “The Art of the Comeback,” he said she was working against his plans for the estate and was “born with her mother’s beauty but not her brains.” He called a civic leader who opposed his efforts a “loser.”

He has filed multimilliondollar lawsuits as casually as others file their nails. It’s a Trump strategy, critics say, to wear people out and get what he wants.

Trump has filed three lawsuits over perhaps his biggest irritation: the planes that fly over Mar-a-Lago, which sits just a couple miles from the West Palm Beach airport’s main runway.

A judge is now weighing a $100 million lawsuit Trump filed in January, arguing that airport director Bruce Pelly has engaged in a “deliberate and malicious” effort to direct planes over his home. The county has argued that traffic controllers determine airplane flight paths, not Pelly.

In his first lawsuit involving the airport, Trump won no money and planes continued to fly over Mar-a-Lago. But the county agreed to try to limit noise and said it would lease a 215-acre parcel of airport-owned land to Trump. That land is now the Trump International Golf Course West Palm, where Trump made $12.7 million last year.

People in town now speculate Trump might have finally found a way to clear the sky above.

If elected president and the house becomes the winter White House as the original owner intended, the Secret Service could order a no-fly zone n.

WHITE HOUSE DEBRIEF

Obama vs. Republican critics on terror — and core values D AVID N AKAMURA Manila BY

P

resident Obama is halfway around the world on a trip to promote American values, but in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, he was embroiled in a heated shouting match with critics back home over just what those values are.

The president’s visceral disgust at Republican suggestions that his administration deny entry to refugees fleeing war-torn Syria boiled over in the Philippines on Wednesday. Addressing reporters at an economic summit, he accused the GOP of being “scared of widows and orphans” and punctuated the upbraiding by calling the party’s rhetoric a “potent recruitment tool” for the Islamic State.

At its core, Obama’s fight with his political rivals is not just about refugees but about a broader sentiment among some Republicans that the president has consistently played down the threat posed by terrorist groups. Obama referred to the Islamic State as the “JV team” — a junior squad — two years ago and suggested just hours before the group’s attacks in Paris, in which at least 129 people were killed, that his policies had “contained” it.

Obama has used drone strikes to kill terrorists who pose a threat to the United States, even as he has worried that the threat posed by extremist groups has been consistently overstated, leading the United States to make costly foreign policy blunders and betray its core values. That tension between the president, who worries that Americans will overreact to the terrorism threat, and his opponents, who insist that his administration is minimizing or ignoring it, has persisted for years.

In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, that tension has come to a head. Instead of uniting Americans to battle a ruthless enemy, the massacre in France has exposed deep rifts among political interests with vastly differing

views of the terrorist threat and the proper response to it.

“Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” Obama said dismissively of his critics on Monday in Turkey.

But some argue that the president’s reaction was inappropriate.

“It’s been a bloodless response,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a top adviser during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “At one point,

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Barack Obama says he will not change course in foreign policy after the Paris attacks.

he used the word ‘setback,’ which is amazingly unresponsive to the emotionality of these events.”

As he has proceeded on his nine-day trip — the last stop was in Malaysia on Friday — Obama wearily defended his strategy against the Islamic State, saying time and again that he will not change course after Paris.

Obama’s extended rebuke of the GOP over the migrant crisis represents an effort to broaden the debate and turn the criticism back on his political adversaries.

Some Republican presidential candidates have suggested that the United States let in Christians fleeing Syria but exclude Muslims also fleeing that country.

Obama thinks his critics have been reckless with their rhetoric and simplistic in their approach to solving complicated problems in a dangerous world.

Republicans have argued that Obama is weak and feckless

abroad, beholden to a naive worldview and unwilling to deploy the military to defeat U.S. enemies — or even acknowledge who those enemies are.

They have accused him of not protecting U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya, pulling troops out of Iraq too quickly, and backing down to Russia’s advances in Ukraine and to China’s aggression in the South China Sea, relinquishing U.S. power along the way.

“We all have sympathies for people who have been uprooted,” former Florida governor Jeb Bush said Tuesday of Syrian migrants. “But we have a duty to protect our country as well. And that’s the point.”

To Obama, the GOP’s turn to military force to resolve disputes helped bring about the instability in the Middle East. He has pointed to times he has authorized the use of force, including the killing of Osama bin Laden and the decision this year to leave more U.S. troops in Afghanistan next year than were initially committed.

Obama also acknowledged that Paris, with its cafes and public parks and sports stadiums, reminds Americans of their own way of life, so that the attacks were perhaps more acutely felt in the United States than other Islamic State atrocities were. But, he said, “we are not well served when in response to a terrorist attack we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.”

He added that “when candidates say, ‘We wouldn’t admit 3year-old orphans,’ that’s political posturing. When individuals say that we should have a religious test and that only Christians — proven Christians — should be admitted, that’s offensive and contrary to American values.”

“They’ve been playing on fear in order to try to score political points or to advance their campaigns,” Obama said of Republicans. “And it’s irresponsible. And it’s contrary to who we are. And it needs to stop, because the world is watching.” n

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POLITICS

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It’s on: Rubio and Cruz clash

BY S EAN S ULLIVAN AND K ATIE Z EZIMA

T

hey are both young Cuban American senators who rode tea-party enthusiasm into office during Barack Obama’s presidency. But now, as fierce rivals for president, Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas represent two sharply contrasting futures for the Republican Party as it seeks to broaden its appeal and regain control of the White House.

Recently, an increasingly nasty fight has broken out between Cruz and Rubio, producing the deepest one-on-one debate over policy and voting records in the 2016 race so far. The conflict has revealed measurable differences between the two on national security and immigration issues — at a time when the world wrestles with how to respond to the Islamic State terrorist group believed responsible for the deadly attacks in Paris.

The face-off also mirrors the broader rift within the GOP between insurgents such as Donald Trump, who demand drastic measures at loud volume, and the more tempered approach of Jeb Bush and other establishmentfriendly candidates.

During their escalating spat, Rubio has accused Cruz of being soft on national security because he voted this year for the USA Freedom Act, which imposed more limits on government surveillance. His campaign aides have aggressively sought to spread the criticism on Twitter and in the media.

“We’ve parted ways” on defense issues, Rubio said in a Wednesday radio interview.

For his part, Cruz has repeatedly accused Rubio of being too soft on immigration because he co-sponsored a comprehensive Senate bill that would have created a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Cruz refers to the legislation, which died in the House, as “amnesty.”

“They are arguing about actual votes they cast,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. “They have somewhat

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Two Cuban American senators who rose together are now battling to be the new face of the GOP different views.”

The candidates, who both have been rising in the polls in recent weeks, are each hoping to emerge as a viable front-runner when — or if — current leaders Trump and Ben Carson fade away. But they are aiming for different parts of the GOP electorate: Cruz — a political flame-thrower who helped orchestrate the 2013 government shutdown — is aiming for evangelicals and tea-party conservatives; Rubio is positioning himself as a bridge-builder who can appeal to a broader electorate.

“I see Rubio and Cruz as two of the last people standing,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of a proCruz super PAC that is preparing ads hitting Rubio on immigration.

She said the men represent “transformational generational change” and it is important to show policy differences between them.

The Courageous Conservatives PAC, a small super PAC supporting

Cruz, has already put out at least two ads hammering Rubio on immigration reform.

Tensions between the two broke into the open recently when Cruz attacked Rubio for pushing the 2013 bipartisan immigration bill, which Rubio has since disavowed. Rubio countered by suggesting that he and Cruz hold similar views, noting Cruz pushed an amendment that would have allowed undocumented people to receive work permits.

Cruz’s campaign notes that the amendment singled out by Rubio was actually a “poison pill” aimed at foiling the legislation.

“I don’t think it’s surprising at all that the Rubio campaign is trying very, very hard to change the topic of discussion away from Marco’s long-time support and partnership with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama pushing a massive amnesty plan,” Cruz said this past week of Rubio’s attacks

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), left, and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) arrived in the Senate in 2011 and 2013, respectively, under similar circumstances, but they soon took divergent paths.

on his national security record.

After abandoning the comprehensive bill, Rubio has endorsed a piecemeal approach that begins with border security and enforcing current laws before offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants at some unidentified time in the future.

Cruz is proposing new limits on legal immigration — a reversal of an earlier position — and wants to end birthright citizenship. He has not said what he would do with the undocumented immigrants now in the country. He also introduced legislation this past week aimed at blocking war refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

Alongside their immigration fight, Rubio started slamming Cruz hard over his support for the USA Freedom Act, which banned the bulk collection of data of Americans’ telephone records and Internet metadata. After warning about the threat of a terrorist attack, Rubio said Cruz voted to “weaken” surveillance efforts.

Rubio was one of 32 senators who voted against the bill.

“We get along, we share a lot of views,” but not on defense, Rubio said in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“For the first few years in the Senate that he’s been there, he’s voted for budgets that have hurt the military,” Rubio said. “He voted for a budget that basically gutted our foreign aid program, particularly our defense of the Israelis and of aid that we provided them.”

At the same time, Rubio has come under fire from rivals for leading the Senate in missed votes. On Wednesday, Rubio missed private intelligence briefings on the Paris attacks while traveling to California to raise money; Rubio’s campaign said he received a thorough intelligence committee briefing on the attacks Tuesday.

Most agree that the Cruz-Rubio feud is likely to get more contentious. Chart Westcott, a Cruz donor, said that he doesn’t think things have really exploded between them yet.

“It’s pretty soft bickering,” he said. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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NATION

In Detroit, a glimmer of hope M ARK G UARINO Detroit BY

T

he house on Iliad Street is stripped to a skeleton: no appliances, no wiring, no doors. Upstairs reeks of urine and animal waste because someone once stashed dogs there for fighting. Downstairs, the floors are covered in rubble, empty whiskey bottles and other detritus left by squatters and junkies.

Jonathan Pommerville sees just one thing, however: possibility.

“This house can be rehabbed and brought back to life!”

This neighborhood in northwest Detroit might seem an unlikely candidate for revitalization.

Decades of population loss have left block after block of boardedup houses and vacant lots. For years, it was a dumping ground: tires, appliances, furniture, toilets, gas tanks, bags of garbage and, in one house, a dead body.

But the remaining residents of Brightmoor are determined to rebuild. Over the past few years, they have used social media to kick out drug dealers, harass arsonists and shame illegal dumpers. And they have solicited energetic homesteaders and farmers to repopulate vacant houses and lots, people willing to work for a renaissance even out here, far from the highrise condos and upscale restaurants of downtown Detroit.

“As citizens, we are taking it back,” said Pommerville, 38, a biker with a hanging goatee and a mischievous smile.

Pommerville has lived all his life in Brightmoor, which was built as a bedroom community for white factory workers in the 1920s. For years, it was solidly middle class.

But then came the 1967 riot and Mayor Coleman Young’s admonition to white people to move out, and people did, leaving their properties to rot.

Today, Brightmoor is empty even by Detroit standards. Between 2000 and 2010, its population shrank by 36 percent, according to Data Driven Detroit, a local think tank. With a poverty rate of nearly 55 percent, more than half of Brightmoor’s children grow up

SALWAN GEORGES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Citizens are ‘taking back’ a vacant, crime-ridden dumping ground poor. And with 46 percent of adults not working, odds are they will stay that way.

The neighborhood is also geographically isolated from jobs, nutritious food, transportation and medical care. Jennifer Mergos, 33, who grew up in nearby Riverdale, said she didn’t realize how desperate the situation was until she returned from Tennessee to work as a home-care nurse.

“I saw a population that I had not been exposed to poverty-wise.

In Third World countries on mission trips? Yes. But biking distance from my home? Never,” she says.

Three years ago, Mergos helped found Northwest Brightmoor Renaissance, a nonprofit group of about 50 households. She and her fiance also bought “the house of our dreams,” a cottage on two acres along the Rouge River.

Three weeks after they moved in, however, the couple and their

three sons awoke to 40-foot-high flames. Witnesses later told them the arsonist lived nearby.

Though their home burnt to the ground, their dream grew more vivid. Mergos and her neighbors equipped themselves with digital cameras and smartphones to catch criminals in the act.

“I decided I’ll put all of them on YouTube,” Pommerville said. Today, his page is filled with video clips, shot from his truck, showing him pulling up on unsuspecting junkies and prostitutes and ordering them to leave.

Surprisingly, they tend to comply. And the outside world has taken notice. A two-minute video from July shows Pommerville ambushing a man who is illegally dumping building material in the back yard of an abandoned home. The video has received more than 85,000 views on YouTube and was picked up by a local television station.

Jonathan Pommerville stands by a window of an abandoned house that was recently burned in his Detroit neighborhood of Brightmoor, where some residents are determined to rebuild.

Now, Brightmoor residents routinely snap photos of license plates of trucks dumping garbage in front of their homes. They rummage through the garbage for evidence leading to the responsible parties.

And they call each other when they spot a suspicious car.

The group is also sealing up blighted homes to keep prostitutes and junkies out. Nearly 60 homes were shuttered this year using 190 pieces of pinewood, each one colorfully decorated with inspirational messages. While most communities see boarded-up homes as blight, the NBR sees them as a sign of stability.

Meanwhile, NBR has begun scouting online for responsible homeowners to move in and fix things up.

That’s how they found James and Theodore Washington, two former chefs, who jumped at the chance to move to Brightmoor af-

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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NATION ter Pommerville reached out to them in August via a community Facebook group. A neighbor who lost his job five years ago had fallen far behind on his mortgage and was about to abandon a 1932 farmhouse on a three-acre lot.

With James, 49, suffering from brain cancer and facing mounting medical bills, the Washingtons jumped at the chance to cut their housing costs. They immediately moved into the vacant home, hauled out four truckloads of trash and lined the wooded front lawn with flowers .

Theodore, 27, said if the couple hadn’t reclaimed the property, the general consensus in Brightmoor was that “it would have been trashed” by looters. The couple are now in the process of purchasing the house from Fannie Mae. As residents negotiate to expand their ranks, they are also working to create economic opportunity with the one resource they have in abundant supply: land. In 2010, 1,215 properties were vacant in Brightmoor because of demolition, fire or both. On some blocks, only grass remains.

Another group has sprung up to take advantage of the free soil.

Neighbors Building Brightmoor opened a community greenhouse last spring to produce crops to sell at local markets around town. The group has also led volunteer drives to clear blocks and make way for local gardens and nature trails.

So far, the most ambitious agricultural effort is Beaverland Farms, a for-profit enterprise that takes up 23 vacant lots. Founded in 2011, the farm is run by Brittney Rooney and Kieran Neal, both 23.

They support a proposed city ordinance, set to be put to voters next March, that would permit them to add livestock: chickens, ducks, goats, rabbits, sheep and bees.

Since the fire, Mergos she has built a bee farm and a water-catchment system on the grounds of her burnt home. Walking through the dusty soil where her dream house once stood, Mergos said farming offers the neighborhood’s best hope.

“There’s a lot of talented people here,butsocietyshunspeoplewithout money,” she said. “I don’t have money to move. But I do have myself, my talent, and my three boys.

“To me, this looks like a pretty bright future.” n Guarino is a freelance writer.

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Sage grouse in middle of a Utah turf war BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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n a sparsely populated county in southern Utah, man is imitating nature.

Just as male sage grouse posture and threaten to brawl over turf during mating rituals, state and federal officials are in a tense standoff over a coal-mining operation’s proposed expansion near the habitat of birds in the area.

Federal officials say a move by Alton Coal onto 3,600 acres controlled by the Interior Department could decimate the tiny population of sage grouse there. State officials say the mine’s growth would create sorely needed jobs, with displaced sage grouse easily flying to another spot nearby.

This sharp disagreement comes less than two months after the two sides supposedly resolved the issue of better protection for a species that once numbered in the millions. Today, fewer than 400,000 birds survive across the West.

In exchange for a five-year conservation push by 11 states that invested money and other resources to keep the federal government from invoking the Endangered Species Act and taking over millions of acres of sagebrush, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided against listing sage grouse as threatened or endangered.

But the Bureau of Land Management still moved to protect them with new rules that would limit mining, development and cattle grazing — all of which represent lucrative revenue for industries and the states.

The battle over the mine expansion is proof that those proposed rules are not widely embraced and that the federal-state agreement is built on shaky ground. Not only do officials differ sharply on how to reduce human effects in the bird’s habitat, they don’t agree on whether state or federal agencies should lead it.

A decision by the BLM, which manages public land controlled by Interior, is expected by the end of

the month. Alton Coal could not be reached for comment.

“It’s definitely the first big test post-listing decision,” said Allison Jones, a wildlife biologist and director of the nonprofit Wild Utah Project, which opposes the expansion.

“Alotofpromisesweremadetokeep the sage grouse from being listed.

Let’s see if those promises are kept.”

BOB WICK/BLM VIA REUTERS

A sage grouse.

From Washington to New Mexico, states in the vast sagebrush range have much to lose. The range covers 160 million acres with mineral deposits worth billions of dollars. The estimated value in Utah alone is $40 billion.

Days after the BLM and U.S. Forest Service announced the conservation plan in late September, Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter (R) sued the federal government, saying its restrictions were too harsh.

Otter complained that the Obama administration essentially ignored Idaho’s efforts to improve sage-grouse conservation.

Weeks later, the administration of Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert (R) took a swipe at federal officials.

Public lands director Kathleen Clarke sent an angry letter to the BLM’s state office, criticizing it for saying Utah officials agreed with a federal assessment that land near the proposed mine expansion site was unsuitable for development because sage grouse were there.

The Public Lands Office has also accused the bureau of backtracking on its previous assessment of state efforts to create an alternative place for the birds to nest. As part of that work, Utah removed juniper trees that allowed predators to perch and launch attacks on sage grouse, forcing them to flee to other areas.

Interior spokeswoman Jessica Kershaw said the federal government’s reasoning is clear. Based on Alton Coal’s 2011 environmental impact statement , which suggested that pockets of birds might be harmed, “the BLM has determined that the tract is unsuitable for surface mining,” Kershaw said.

The agency is still considering the company’s proposed expansion, she added, because a technicality gives it a chance to move forward if BLM “determines that all or certain stipulated methods of coal mining will not have a significant long-term impact on the species being protected.”

Even with that BLM determination, conservationists are worried.

For decades the agency provided industry leases despite warnings about environmental impacts — leases that they contend contributed to the sage grouse’s decline.

Jones, of Wild Utah Project, said the small group of sage grouse near the mine site is the only population that far south.

Her organization is one of several that doubts Utah and other states will continue working to save sage grouse. In these groups’ views, the states allowed industry to drive the species to the brink of an endangered listing.

Alton’s environmental track record also undermines the environmentalists’ trust. This year the company was fined $3,200 for improperly constructing ditches that released sediment-laced wastewater, according to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune. Regulators also placed a hold on a $10 million bond for a phase of mining because Alton failed to complete reclamation work, the story said. n

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For Colombia’s rebels, a leap of faith N ICK M IROFF Bogota, Colombia BY

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f the Colombian government and the country’s largest rebel group finalize a historic peace accord in the coming months, they will set in motion a process of daunting logistical complexity.

The government’s most immediate challenge: to persuade more than 6,000 heavily armed fighters to come down from the mountains, hand over their weapons and start new lives as lawabiding civilians.

The price for failure will be steep. Many of the guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have been at war since age 14 or 15. Some never learned to read or write. Their previous work experience will make them prized recruits for drug traffickers and criminal gangs but few other potential employers.

The government and FARC have agreed that this process, known as demobilization, disarmament and rehabilitation, or DDR, should begin within 60 days of a peace deal. Precisely how it will happen is another matter. It remains the last major sticking point for the two sides in their attempt to end the bloodiest and most intractable civil conflict in the Americas, one that has hobbled Colombia for 50 years.

FARC commanders insist that they will not give up their guns unless they are assured that the government is ready to protect them from myriad enemies: paramilitary groups, drug cartel assassins and others who might view their disarmament as an opportunity to exact revenge.

For the rebels, demobilization will be a major leap of faith, requiring them to cease viewing Colombian soldiers as their enemies and accept them, virtually from one day to the next, as trusted protectors.

The government wants the rebels to leave their strongholds and amass in special secure areas it will set up with housing, medical care, counseling and other services.

FARC fighters would not have to surrender to government troops and could turn over their weapons

LUIS ROBAYO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

When peace pact is finished, nation will need to persuade some 6,000 fighters to lay down arms to a U.N. group or another third party, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Santos said that he is aware that FARC commanders want no part in a peace-signing event choreographed to look like a defeat or capitulation. He has envisioned a ceremony involving a broad array of Colombians, which would send a message that FARC will be making peace with Colombian society, not just the government or the military.

That will be the easy part.

The rebels are supposed to begin laying down their arms within 60 days of the signing of the peace deal. But the agreement will be subject to approval by the Colombian people through a referendum process, and its different components will require approval from Colombia’s congress. Santos has a majority coalition and is seeking fast-track powers that would allow him to push the peace deal through.

When asked whether FARC would want to hand over its weapons before knowing whether its agreement with the government will hold, Santos said the process could start during the 60-day period but would not need to be completed in that time frame.

Another question is whether FARC fighters will leave caches of arms in the mountains that they could quickly dig up if the peace agreement falls apart. For rebel commanders to qualify for the “transitional justice” elements of the peace deal — which would allow lesser punishment — they must relinquish their weapons and access to them.

“We know each and every weapon they have,” said Gen. Mauricio Zúñiga, the military commander in charge of the government program that has decimated FARC’s ranks by encouraging rebels to defect.

The program whisks FARC fighters off to resortlike retreats

Men walk amid the rubble of houses destroyed by FARC rebels in El Mango.

FARC commanders insist that they will not give up their guns unless they are assured that the government is ready to protect them.

with pools, movies and plentiful food, but it also pumps them for intelligence while they are in government custody. Since 2002, these “individual demobilizations” have taken more than 20,000 FARC guerrillas off the battlefield, Zúñiga said.

Over the years, he said, the program has demonstrated to FARC fighters that they will be treated with respect by Colombian soldiers and afforded protections once they accept their new status as civilians. “We know them: their fears, their interests, their needs,” Zúñiga said. “They’re tired of fighting. They want peace, too.”

According to military tallies, FARC still has 6,230 fighters in its ranks, he said. Colombian forces have seen no signs that FARC is secretly stockpiling weapons, Zúñiga added.

Zúñiga challenged the claim that demobilized rebels will grow bored as construction workers and drivers and hire themselves out as gunmen for trafficking groups. “Ordinary FARC soldiers don’t handle cash. They don’t have money,” he said. “It isn’t difficult for them to accept humble jobs.”

Alex Fattal, a Harvard University anthropologist who is writing a book about Colombia’s demobilization programs, said the government’s track record with mass or “collective demobilization” is far more mixed. It is also fundamentally different for rank-and-file fighters who may be laying down their guns because they are following orders, not because they have had a change of heart.

Many right-wing paramilitary fighters who agreed to collective demobilization and entered government rehabilitation programs starting in 2006 have since dropped out, lending muscle to the shadowy drug gangs known as “bacrim.” If a peace deal is reached, the gangs will look to quickly take over the drug trade in areas where FARC stands down.

And they will be hiring.

“If the state doesn’t refocus its vast security resources on the bacrim, Colombia’s law and order problems could get worse before they get better,” Fattal said. n

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Pakistan uses phones to fight polio T IM C RAIG Islamabad, Pakistan BY

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n a surprising turnaround, Pakistan appears to be finally getting a handle on its polio epidemic, thanks to unorthodox tactics such as tracking residents’ cellphones.

The 85 percent decline in new cases this year is boosting confidence that Pakistani officials are on pace to stop the spread of the virus here, perhaps as early as next year.

If Pakistan can achieve that goal, the world will take a major step toward becoming polio-free.

In late September, the World Health Organization declared that polio was no longer “endemic” in Nigeria, leaving only Pakistan and Afghanistan on the list of countries where the crippling virus continues to spread.

The revelation that the CIA had used a fake polio vaccination campaign to gain intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden in 2011 had been a huge blow to Pakistan’s efforts against the disease, especially in areas where Islamist militant groups were strong.

But as the militants have loosened their grip on Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt, health officials are now vaccinating hundreds of thousands of children for the first time.

As a result, Pakistan has reported 40 new polio cases this year, compared with about 240 at this time last year. Pakistani officials say that they now believe they are on track to vaccinate nearly all children under the age of 5 by next summer.

“If the next few vaccination rounds are implemented, and we continue to reach all the children we need to reach, we should be home very soon,” said Mazhar Nisar,headofPakistan’semergency polio office.“The key challenge had been security, but now the government has taken that on head-on.”

Many international health experts remain skeptical that Pakistan can rise to that challenge, citing bureaucratic obstacles and uncertainty about whether the country’s improved security can be maintained.

A MAJEED/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Traceable SIM cards have helped officials identify where vaccinations were needed And last month’s earthquake, which killed more than 200 people and left tens of thousands of residents homeless, served as a reminder that Pakistan has a reputation as a magnet for crises that quickly distract political leaders and relief organizations.

But Hamid Jafari, director of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative for the WHO, said Pakistan’s government has shown progress as it lurched onto a war footing to combat the disease.

“You see the senior officers of security agencies, and the Pakistan army, now sitting with program managers in emergency operations centers co-planning and co-coordinating,” Jafari said. “You get a very good sense that all the ministries of the government are involved.”

That coordination began late last year as Pakistan’s army pressed into North Waziristan, which had been controlled by Tali-

ban militants and was largely offlimits to vaccination teams.

When more than 100,000 families were evacuated from the area, they were stopped at roadside checkpoints and forced to take a drop of the polio vaccine.

Later, when the displaced residents were registered at refugee camps, they were given a surprising offer: free SIM cards for their phones.

Unbeknownst to North Waziristan residents, health officials used the SIM cards to track them as they resettled in other parts of the country. Their locations were mapped in new polio-eradication command centers. When clusters of residents from North Waziristan were identified on the map, teams of vaccinators were sent to those communities to, once again, administer the vaccine.

“Wewereabletotracethem,map them and follow up with them,”

A Pakistani health worker administers polio drops to a child during a polio vaccination campaign in Peshawar in September. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where the virus is still spreading.

said Safdar Rana, head of Pakistan’s Program on Immunization.

The controversial strategy was combined with outreach to religious leaders, the creation of community health centers and a renewed push to put women — not men — on the front lines of the country’s campaign to eradicate polio. But as with many other aspects of life here, the battle against polio is inextricably linked to efforts to overcome the threat posed by Islamist militancy.

Attacks on polio vaccination teams, provoked by the CIA ruse in 2011, resulted in the deaths of 74 people from 2012 to 2014, including 41 last year. So far this year, however, the number of deaths has dropped to 10, according to government figures.

With security improving, health officials are now able to vaccinate more children. They estimate that just 16,000 to 18,000 Pakistani children are still “inaccessible” to vaccinators compared with the half-million who were out of reach two years ago.

But the gains made in Pakistan this year are threatened by continued insecurity across the border in Afghanistan, Jafari said. To be declared “polio-free,” Pakistan and Afghanistan must go three years without any reported cases, he added.

As for the tracking of North Waziristan residents, Rana said the SIM cards were initially designed to give the government a way to notify the displaced residents about when they could pick up cash assistance payments. Intelligence agencies also had an interest in keeping tabs on where the displaced residents were, according to government officials familiar with the matter.

But when someone suggested that the SIM cards could also be used in the fight against polio, Rana said that his office, the army and the country’s telecommunications office quickly implemented a plan that involved the tracking of about 75,000 families.

“We saw an opportunity, and we took that opportunity,” Rana said.

“We will continue to look for opportunities to finish this job.” n

JUST WORKING HARD IS ‘NOT ENOUGH’ To close the gender wage gap, women are being encouraged to speak up when it comes to salary negotiations and raises.

BY DANIELLE PAQUETTE

“I GET NERVOUS EVEN ACTING THESE SCENARIOS OUT,” SAYS CHRISTY BETIT. “I CAN’T EVEN PRETEND TO ASK FOR A RAISE WITHOUT WANTING TO THROW UP.”

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BOSTON leven women huddle in an aging community center, leafing through 27-page guides on how to negotiate pay. They speak of watching YouTube tutorials, of Googling market rates, of practicing at home with partners, of vowing not to cry at the office.

They’re part of America’s largest civic experiment to close the gender wage gap, launched this fall in Boston.

Women here earn 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, 4 cents higher than the national statistic. Disparities persist across age groups, industries and companies, researchers have found — even when colleagues of the opposite sex hold identical education levels and job titles.

That’s why Boston is offering free, two-hour salary negotiation classes to every woman who works in the city. They started in October, two years after former mayor Thomas Menino pledged that Boston would become the first U.S. city to achieve pay parity.

Think of it as an intimate conversation with 170,000 women.

Economists doubt the unprecedented approach will yield much of a difference, considering the social forces that exacerbate the gap.

Also, a growing body of research suggests continues on next page

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LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

from previous page

employers may be predisposed to respond negatively to women who request more.

City officials stress that Boston’s focus on equal pay is an economic imperative. The breadwinners in most local households with children, after all, are women. And since a raft of studies has shown that women don’t negotiate less skillfully, they simply negotiate less often, the central message of the program is: Give it a shot.

Tonight’s instructor is Megan Costello, executive director of Boston’s Office of Women’s Advancement.Sheasksthegrouptorole-play.Some pretend to be employees, gunning for $66,000, and the rest act as bosses, offering up to $54,000.

The employees practice their pitches: I’m worth it, and here’s why.

“I get nervous even acting these scenarios out,” says Christy Betit, a woman with long chestnut hair who works in hospitality. “I can’t even pretend to ask for a raise without wanting to throw up.”

She takes a deep breath.

“Okay,” she says, “I’ve trained hundreds of students who have gone on to get great jobs. I

“IF I ACT AGGRESSIVELY,” SAYS MARIA FERNANDES, ABOVE, “THEY’LL SEE ME AS THE ANGRY BLACK WOMAN. AND NO ONE WANTS THAT IN THEIR ORGANIZATION.” studied theater, and I know how to engage a room.”

Remember, Costello tells them: You have power. A company’s search for new workers takes time and money. Smart managers try to hold on to the talent they have.

“And trust me,” she says, “every man does this. Every man negotiates.”

‘It starts with leadership’ Boston’s feminist makeover reflects a strategy from its native Harvard Business School: Experiment until something works.

A decade ago, the university acknowledged its own gender equity crisis. In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers ignited a public relations firestorm by suggesting at an economics conference that “innate” differences between women and men may explain the dearth of elite female scientists.

By 2007, business school leaders knew they had a gender problem after a third of junior female faculty members quit in a single school year. Female students who arrived with the same test scores as their male counterparts also appeared to disproportionately fall behind in class participation grades.

So professors took action. They recorded lectures, for example, to see if male students truly spoke up more than female students, a perception reflected in the grades. They found no significant difference in speaking frequency

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COVER STORY or comment quality, concluding the men simply sounded more authoritative. Assessed for substance over style, women saw better scores.

The grade gap closed in 2011.

“Heightened consciousness among the faculty and students probably made the biggest difference,” said Robin Ely, an organizational behavior professor at the Harvard Business School. “It starts with leadership. There has to be support in terms of information and resources to help organizations take a look at their culture and understand how they operate.”

Boston’smissionhasgoodintentions,shesaid, butthecityshouldcarefullyconsideritsmessage.

“The conversation should not be around women’s deficiencies, which is inaccurate,” Ely said, “or special treatment, which creates backlash.”

Conventional wisdom, the kind that climbs bestseller lists, suggests women in pay talks should be kinder, gentler, a team player.

“But the emphasis should be on the employer,” said economist Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

“Women shouldn’t have to contort themselves into pretzels and go through all these social gyrations to be taken seriously.”

Boston wants to build a successful model for other major cities to adopt, said Costello, who oversees the salary negotiation program. “Legislation alone won’t fix things,” she said. “We need to change the culture to move the needle.”

Like professors making subjective calls on class participation, how employers respond to women asking for more pay also deserves serious attention, Costello said.

She warns students that bosses may discriminate against them, consciously or not, and emphasizes that such behavior isn’t legal. A tip from Page 25 of the guide: “Employers cannot make stereotypical comments about women and their work habits or make assumptions about the work habits of women with children.”

It’s just one insight from the American Association of University Women, which designed and funded the Work Smart curriculum, intended to reach 85,000 women over five years.

The program is projected to cost up to $1.5 million, not including marketing and community outreach from the mayor’s office. Its teachers — city employees and local businesswomen — volunteer their time and personal anecdotes about wrangling more vacation days or, say, maternity leave.

The city’s collaboration with the AAUW started with Katharine Lusk, policy adviser to former mayor Menino, whose friend worked on the national nonprofit’s salary negotiation workshops. They wanted to make the training available on a mass scale and measure the results.

Lusk, who wrote Boston’s 2013 report on its wage gap, said Menino was inspired by the pay equality advocacy of Evelyn Murphy, the state’s first female lieutenant governor, and research emerging from Harvard and other intellectual hubs across the country.

When Menino, the city’s longest-serving mayor, stepped down in 2014 and died that year of cancer, his successor inherited the work and amplified it.

“We know that the wage gap continues to be an issue all across this nation, and it’s time to stop talking about it and start taking action,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced at an entrepreneurs conference in April.

To that point, Costello’s team at the mayor’s office is asking employers to sign a public declaration of their commitment to end the wage gap and submit anonymized salary data, to be published in a later report.

Such actions, she said, may make more hiring managers aware of any potential biases.

Academic literature on the matter is particularly grim.

In a 2005 study, Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of “Women Don’t Ask,” famously showed people videos of men and women asking for a raise, using the same words. Among male viewers,

“WOMEN SHOULDN’T HAVE TO CONTORT THEMSELVES INTO PRETZELS AND GO THROUGH ALL THESE SOCIAL GYRATIONS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY,” SAYS ECONOMIST HEIDI HARTMANN. the men’s negotiating style won approval, while the women registered as too demanding.

These judgments, Babcock wrote, probably don’t happen on purpose. In some ways, that makes them harder to fend off, which is why some scholars advise business owners to entirely ban salary negotiations.

“People will think, ‘I’m not sexist’ or ‘I’m not racist,’ ” said Hannah Bowles, a public policy professor at Harvard University, “but certain biases can creep into their perceptions.”

She found in her research on gender differences in wage negotiations that simply telling managers that this form of discrimination exists might actually reinforce that such assumptions are acceptable.

“The surprising thing is,” Bowles said, “if you just tell employers the first part of the message, they actually internalize that it’s okay to judge people for breaking gender stereotypes.”

So, she said, it’s important to also say “our company doesn’t do that.”

Boston’s lesson plans don’t encourage women to embrace stereotypical femininity in pay talks. Its success rides on one persistent finding: Women will negotiate as much as men, even harder than men, if they receive social

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permission to do it.

Research shows when companies remove ambiguity from wage-setting, such as establishing clear pay ranges for workers at every level, disparities between the sexes start to disappear.

Labor economists at the University of Chicago found in a 2012 study when “salary negotiable” appears on a job listing, women negotiate more than men. The opposite was true, however, when the phrase vanished.

She’d asked for a raise, once On a recent Tuesday, class meets in south Boston’s BCYF Holland Community Center, down the hall from an indoor swimming pool.

A Spider-Man poster on the wall shouts: Be your own hero.

Maria Fernandes, who works to connect low-income families with affordable housing at a national nonprofit group, learned about the training on Twitter. She saw an open invitation from Mayor Walsh.

Fernandes writes her age (33) and race (African American) on a form.

She’d asked for a raise, once. Her former boss at a local hospital declined, blaming a tight budget. Then, she heard, he found a little extra cash for her white, male colleague.

She quickly started looking for another job.

“My mom, an immigrant, always told me to keep my head down and work hard,” Fernandes says, shifting in a red plastic chair. “She said that would be enough. I know now it’s not enough.”

Economists say negotiation accounts for just a sliver of the gap. They also point to the disproportionate number of women in lowpaying jobs and the time mothers spend out of the workforce with their children. Discrimination, they note, also plays a role.

For women of color, pay disparities tend to be much wider. Fernandes, whose family hails from Cape Verde, an island off Africa’s west coast, says her heritage adds another layer of complication.

“If I act aggressively,” Fernandes says, “they’ll see me as the Angry Black Woman. And no one wants that in their organization.”

Just before her seventh birthday, her family landed in a cramped apartment in Brockton, Mass. Her mother and sole guardian worked at a shoe factory, warning her five children, “If you ever act up, they’re going to send you away.”

Fernandes, a graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., carried this mentality into the workplace. The fear has influenced the way she speaks (proper English, always) and wears her hair (rarely natural; blown out and shiny — the Michelle Obama look, she calls it).

“Your experience and background would be valuable to any employer,” Costello tells her, referencing a study that shows diversity in race and gender makes companies more profitable.

The other women nod.

When Fernandes started working at the nonprofitgrouplastyear,therolecamewithaslightly higher salary. She’s been documenting achievements, including the company event she organized without a hitch last month in Kentucky.

Her next performance review is three months away. She plans to ask for a raise. n

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Leaving marathons in the dust For runners in ultra events, 26.2 miles is just the start of the race BY

B ONNIE B ERKOWITZ

S

ometime in the past couple of decades, the idea of running a marathon became less crazy.

Since Oprah Winfrey finished the Marine Corps Marathon in 1994, millions of average Joes and Janes have tackled the distance, and now “26.2” shows up routinely on bumper stickers and bucket lists.

But for some people, a 26.2-mile marathon just isn’t long enough. These athletes are turning to ultrarunning, a sport that not long ago was considered the reclusive, funky-smelling cousin of traditional road racing.

About 1,000 lined up Saturday in Boonsboro, Md., to run the JFK 50 Mile, the country’s oldest ultramarathon and one of the two largest. (An ultra is anything longer than 26.2 miles; the most common distances are 50 and 100 miles and 50 and 100 kilometers, or 31 and 62 miles.)

No one is saying that a marathon is short or easy, but there are some huge differences — physiological, logistical and psychological — between running far and running really, really far.

In contrast to big-city marathons, U.S. ultramarathons tend to be spartan, low-key affairs, often beginning in very small towns near very long trails. JFK, for instance, is run mostly on the Appalachian Trail and the C&O Canal Towpath.

Many ultramarathons have fewer than 100 runners and almost no spectators.

“You’re surrounded by nature,” said Amy Pope Fitzgerald of Chantilly, who has run both Marine Corps and JFK each year since 2012 and has completed one 100-miler. “I like the fact that ultras are smaller, and you’re just running, so you make friends. I’m not having to fight for my spot on the course.”

Not yet, anyway.

The closest thing ultrarunning has had to an Oprah moment was the 2009 publication of Sources: Martin Hoffman, research director for the Western States Endurance Run; Mike Joyner, physiologist and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic; “The Runner’s Body,” by Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas BONNIE BERKOWITZ AND RICHARD JOHNSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Ultramarathons are different from marathons in many ways, starting with how the extra distance affects your body.

Hallucinations are part of ultra lore. When you run around the clock, extreme fatigue and strange shadows in the wee hours can sometimes play havoc with your mind. A nap usually fixes the problem.

Headlamp

Heart problems are rare in long races; running usually makes the heart and circulatory system stronger. But some recent studies indicate that distance runners may be at slightly higher risk for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat. Other research has shown some temporary cardiac dysfunction after long races, particularly in the least-trained participants.

Temporary blurred vision can happen in longer ultras, probably due to corneal swelling.

Insect stings and bites are more common in ultrarunning.

Hydration tube

A high rate of respiratory ailments found among ultrarunners in a 2014 study may be largely attributable to dust and flora along trails.

GPS watch Cuts and bruises from falls are common because of the uneven terrain of ultras.

All distance runners should be aware of the risk of exerciseassociated hyponatremia, a potentially deadly condition in which drinking too much water or sports drink dilutes the body’s sodium, causing cells to swell and burst.

Hydration vest

Marathoners burn a higher percentage of carbs and can get by on sports drink and gels. Ultrarunners burn a higher percentage of fat and usually need real food, which can mean more gastrointestinal problems.

Packing light: Ultrarunners have to be more self-sufficient than marathoners because aid stations may be hours apart, but they don’t want to weigh themselves down. Some things they may carry: toilet paper, wet wipes, antacid, painkillers, a needle (to drain blisters), snacks, anti-chafing lube, duct tape, a trash bag, b gloves, an ear warmer, rain gear, sunscreen, quick-energy snacks.

a Body temperature is more likely to drop too low (hypothermia) in an ultra, when energy stores are depleted and weather conditions vary. Heat illness is more common in marathons, in part because of the more intense effort.

1 2

c 3

Eating on the run: At marathon aid stations, you’ll find water, sports drink and maybe energy gels. Ultra aid stations have those things plus real food, such as sandwiches, pasta, cake, pickles, soup, burgers, M&Ms, salted potatoes, baby food, bean burritos, soda — occasionally even liquor and beer.

The longer the race, the more likely muscle cramps will strike, most often in runners’ quadriceps (1), hamstrings (2) and calves (3). No one knows exactly why cramps occur, but most research points to fatigue in the mechanisms that govern muscle control and contraction.

Stress fractures and other musculoskeletal overuse injuries can plague long-distance runners. Feet are the most common site of stress fractures in ultrarunners, but fractures of the pelvis (a), femur (b), tibia (c) and fibula (d) also occur.

Blisters are more common in ultras, thanks to mud, water, rocks and dust that can get into shoes and socks. Also, moving on varied terrain, such as steep downhills, can cause friction spots.

d

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HEALTH

PAUL KITAGAKI JR./THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen,” a bestseller that introduced many readers to ultras. U.S. participation has more than doubled since then.

More than two-thirds of those participants are men, according to UltraRunning Magazine, and more than half are older than 40.

Longer distances seem to attract older runners who can compensate for lost speed with greater perspective and experience — not to mention perseverance.

Most people finish a marathon in three to six hours and make it home in time for lunch. But a 50-miler takes an average of 10 hours, said Karl Hoagland, publisher of UltraRunning Magazine, and 100-milers typically take 24 to 30 hours or more of nonstop forward motion.

“As you get older, you realize the sun’s going to come up, and you get less rattled,” said Mike Joyner, a distance runner and a Mayo Clinic physiologist who studies how human bodies respond to exercise.

Not long after runners cross the start line, other factors unique to ultramarathons appear.

In marathons with huge fields and prize purses to match, the top runners fly off the start line and maintain a pace of less than five minutes per mile until they finish a little more than two hours later.

Top ultrarunners also start fast, but courses and human physiology don’t permit them to maintain a constant breakneck pace for hours on end. Even the fastest competitors hike rather than run at times.

“Everything has to be adjusted. You’d crash too soon if you run at marathon pace,” said Jim

Jeff Boutte fuels up at an aid station 29.7 miles into the Western States Endurance Run. A showcase for top racers, the event is a robust research arm.

Much of the data that scientists have on ultrarunners has been gathered at this competition.

World’s longest: The longest race on a certified course is the Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, which consists of 5,649 laps around one long block in Queens, N.Y. Suprabha Beckjord of Washington, D.C., finished the race 13 times.

Hage, who won Marine Corps in 1988 and 1989, then won JFK in 2002 at age 44. “You have to take everything a little bit easier . . . and if you get in trouble at 20 miles? Wow, that’s a long way home.”

The lower intensity is measurable. Marathoners’ hearts often beat at 75 to 85 percent of their maximum heart rate for the duration of the race, Joyner said. That’s not a sprint, but it is a moderately hard effort.

Ultrarunners, he said, spend a lot of time at 50 to 65 percent of their maximum heart rate, with elites on the higher end and the justhappy-to-finish folks at the lower end.

Hoffman said ultrarunners’ age and experience also means any hidden cardiac problems probably surfaced earlier in their running lives.

As for recent studies concluding that long bouts of vigorous exercise over a lifetime are dangerous for the heart, Joyner said other studies show the opposite, and the question may never be settled because there are so few people to study who don’t have mitigating factors such as coming to running to try to reverse a health problem.

Although most ultrarunners don’t have to worry about their hearts during a race, they do have to worry about their stomachs.

Unlike marathoners who can get by with sports drinks and maybe a few energy gels to fuel them to the finish, ultrarunners usually need to eat real food along the way — some salty, some sweet, such as sandwiches, potatoes, chips, pickles, candy — which can lead to gastrointestinal distress.

Hoffman said this is probably because blood is diverted from the digestive system to muscles

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to keep them churning and to the skin to remove heat.

“Digestion is not the body’s priority at the time, so blood is shunted elsewhere,” he said.

“Once that happens, there can be certain things that enter the bloodstream from the GI tract that can cause inflammatory reaction throughout the body and cause nausea.”

In some cases, he said, the problem may be simply that the stomach isn’t moving its contents down the line quickly enough, so fluid and food just sit there. In other cases, food is jostled down the line too quickly, causing diarrhea and abdominal cramps.

Runners who don’t manage their food well can “bonk” or “hit the wall,” which occurs when the body runs out of energy and the brain tries to put on the brakes. A unique and instant kind of despair follows — and ultrarunners can hit more than one wall during a race.

Most marathons are run on exactly 26.2 miles of asphalt streets, which are wide enough to accommodate lots of runners, flat enough to not scare away the masses, smooth enough to allow for even pacing and accessible enough for fans who want to watch. Many offer prize money and some, such as Boston, Chicago and New York, offer six-figure paychecks for first place.

Most ultras, at least in the United States, are the exact opposite.

They often occur on rocky, root-filled, narrow, steep and slippery trails with big elevation changes. Organizers gleefully scare people away with names like Mountain Masochist, Badwater, Bear Bait and Frozen Dead Guy. Most offer little or no prize money.

And the distance is almost always a ballpark number because trails are so hard to accurately measure. That means a 100-mile event could actually be 99.4 miles or 110 — which is just as well because most courses don’t have many mile markers.

The uncertainty can make pace-obsessed former marathoners crazy, and the transition can be unnerving even for the fast folks.

“I had no idea where I was on the course,” said Hage of his 2002 JFK 50 Mile (which is actually 50.2 miles, according to race director Mike Spinnler). “You’re running through the woods; it’s easy to get lost. That’s never an issue in a marathon. You can still figure out your splits and go, ‘Oh, that last mile was a little slower, a little faster.’ But in an ultra, the lost-in-the-woods feeling prevails.”

Ultrarunners often carry many of their supplies because aid stations can be spaced 10, 20 or even more miles apart, compared with every mile or two in most marathons.

The terrain, the unknown and the solitude mean that ultras require a different frame of mind for runners trying to conquer a new distance for the first time.

“You have to almost trick your mind that you are invincible and that you are going to finish this,” Fitzgerald said. “The ultras allow you to do something that’s awesome, but you do it at your own pace. You don’t have the pressure to finish in a certain time. As long as you’re finishing, it’s considered awesome.” n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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BOOKS

A compassionate tale of change N ON-FICTION

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BECOMING NICOLE The Transformation of an American Family

By Amy Ellis Nutt Random House. 279 pp. $27

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REVIEWED BY

S UE H ALPERN

hen Wyatt Maines was almost 3 years old, he told his father, Wayne, that he hated his penis. Distressed as Wayne was, he was not completely surprised. Almost from the moment Wyatt could talk, he would describe himself as a boy-girl or a girl-boy, attempting to capture the duality he felt as an anatomical male who, nonetheless, understood himself to be female.

Wyatt and his identical twin, Jonas, were adopted at birth by Wayne and his wife, Kelly, in 1997; their biological mother was a teenage relative of Kelly’s. At the time, the Maines were living in the small town in the Adirondack foothills where Wayne grew up. As Amy Ellis Nutt makes clear in her exceptional chronicle, “Becoming Nicole,” Wayne Maines was certainly not the sort of man anyone, himself included, would imagine championing transgender rights.

And yet, that is precisely the man he became.

It took awhile. And in the years when Wayne was dodging and withdrawing, Kelly Maines was largely on her own, searching for answers that would explain the enigma of a little boy who was drawn to tutus and princess costumes, a boy who was waiting, he said, for his penis to fall off. “Transgender” had not been in Kelly’s vocabulary, but once it was, it seemed to describe Wyatt more accurately than “gay” or “transsexual” — words Kelly discovered when she queried the Internet.

Kelly began to understand that the gender dysphoria Wyatt was experiencing was not a phase, not something he would outgrow, but something real and innate and in need of addressing for the long haul. It was a constant negotiation, trying to balance the social costs of letting Wyatt express himself as a girl against the psychological costs of denying that. Kelly and Wayne (somewhat reluctantly) allowed Wyatt to grow out his hair, wear girls’ clothing and, in the fifth

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Twins Jonas and Nicole Maines, 18. Nicole was born male but as a young child began describing herself as a boy-girl.

grade, change his name to Nicole.

The Maines also enlisted their children’s elementary school — by then they were living in Orono, Maine — to help with the transition. One request, which the school granted, was that Nicole be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom.

All went well until a classmate’s grandfather began waging an ugly public campaign to require Nicole to use the boys’ bathroom. The grandfather argued, among other things, that if Nicole could use the girls’ bathroom, so could his grandson. To make his point, he had the boy follow Nicole into the bathroom to assert this right and to harass, bully and stalk her. The school’s response was to require Nicole to use the staff bathroom and to be followed throughout her day by an adult minder. Nonetheless, the harassment did not stop.

It was then, with his child — his

daughter — under attack, that Wayne became a transgender activist. In 2009, he and Kelly sued the Orono school district for discrimination, for failing to provide proper public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation and for not remedying a hostile educational environment. As the case worked its way through the judicial system, and as the public weighed in, often with vitriol, Wayne stood up, spoke out and put himself in the crosshairs.

“My name is Wayne Maines, I live in Old Town,” he said, stepping up to the microphone in the Maine statehouse in April 2011, as the legislature considered a bill to block transgender rights. “I have a 13year-old transgender daughter. In the beginning I was not on board with this reality. Like many of you, I doubted transgender children could exist. I doubted my wife, and

I doubted our counselors and doctors. However, I never doubted my love for my child. . . . When my daughter lost her privileges at school and both children and adults targeted her, I knew I had to change, and I have never looked back.” At the beginning of 2014, five years after the suit was filed, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine ruled in favor of Nicole and other transgender students.

Much of the literature on gender dysphoria focuses, appropriately, on the person experiencing the disassociation of body and mind. But in the case of a young child, especially, and in the case of a young child with an identical twin, that disassociation is felt in various ways throughout the family. As Nutt underscores with her subtitle, “The Transformation of an American Family,” it was not just Wyatt who was transitioning. It was also Kelly and Jonas and Wayne, each responding differently. Surprisingly, Jonas had the least distance to cover: He’d known all along that the boy who was his mirror image was his sister, not his brother.

When she was about 12, Nicole started taking drugs to suppress the physical changes of male puberty and then, a few years later, began taking female hormones to soften the architecture of her face, raise the register of her voice, limit her growth and, eventually, grow breasts. Last year, at age 17, she took the final step and underwent gender reassignment surgery, fulfilling that early wish for her penis to disappear. She is now female, in mind and body.

“Stories move the walls that need to be moved,” Nicole told her father last year. In telling Nicole’s story and those of her brother and parents luminously, and with great compassion and intelligence, that is exactly what Nutt has done here. n Halpern is the author of, most recently, “A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home.” She is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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BOOKS

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Snappy action, but familiar anguish

The benefits of uncertainty

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

ohn Fortunato, who served in the Pentagon as an army intelligence officer and is now an FBI special agent, sets his first novel in New Mexico amid murder most foul, rampant political corruption and a wealth of Native American lore.

“Dark Reservations” begins with a mysterious event 20 years in the past, when married Rep. Arlen Edgerton and his attractive secretary, Faye Hannaway, set off by car for the Navajo reservation and are never seen again. Their disappearance stirs much debate about whether they were lovers who escaped to some distant, sunny shore, or they were simply murdered.

As the story returns to the present, the long-gone congressman’s wife, Grace Edgerton, who replaced him in the House, is running for governor. The election is only weeks away when the bulletridden remains of her husband’s car are found in an isolated corner of the sprawling Navajo reservation. No bodies are discovered, but she and her obnoxious campaign manager fear the news will revive speculation that she ordered her husband killed because of his alleged infidelity.

Joe Evers, a special agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is assigned to unravel this mystery.

He soon finds an abundance of suspects, including the widow; a corrupt U.S. senator who wants to run for president; a millionaire who deals in illegally obtained Navajo artifacts and employs a homicidal bodyguard; a surly cop who was spurned by the missing woman; a trio of Native American activists who are, in fact, con men; and a lawyer who launders money for legislators who enrich themselves off Indian-owned casinos.

Evers has other problems. His beloved wife’s death from cancer two years earlier led him to excessive drinking and a bungled investigation that might cost him his job. Many of his BIA colleagues have turned against him, even

though they frequent the same bars after hours.

Fortunato writes crisp action scenes wherein Evers and an assortment of evildoers do battle armed with guns, knives, fists and various blunt instruments. Evers is blessed with a rare ability to dodge bullets, and even when he requires hospitalization, he’s soon back in action.

Although Evers is drawn to two women he meets during his investigation, he remains in anguished mourning for his wife. He also adores his bright, college-age daughter, whom he persists in calling Brainy Bug. In dramatic terms, his love of family is intended to win our sympathy, even as he keeps drinking and is often a lousy, or at least distracted, cop.

Near the end of the book, Evers goes to the cemetery and tells his wife that he’s seeing someone, and that he’s sure she’ll understand.

If I was unmoved by these scenes, it’s in part because this is the third novel I’ve read in a month in which a widowed cop agonizes over a new romance.

Thus do writers pluck our heartstrings. These scenes led me to recall a talk I once had with John Sandford, author of the great “Prey” series, at the National Book Festival. Early in that series, he said, his Lucas Davenport was a dedicated womanizer, but soon Sandford worried that an endless bedroom odyssey might make his hero unsympathetic. He therefore married Davenport to the lovely Dr. Weather Karkinnen. Alas, after a few novels he started to fear that marriage was too boring a state for his red-blooded hero, so he began to ponder killing off the admirable Weather.

The last time I looked, Karkinnen was still among the living, and I could only cheer if Fortunato lets Evers once again explore the joys of matrimony. But I do pray that he disposes of Brainy Bug. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

I DARK RESERVATIONS

By John Fortunato Minotaur. 343 pp. $25.99

NONSENSE The Power of Not Knowing

By Jamie Holmes Crown. 322 pp. $27

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REVIEWED BY

WEEKLY

M ATTHEW H UTSON

f we ever undertake a muchneeded overhaul of the way people are taught in schools, we might want to add another R to reading, writing and arithmetic: rationality. Rationality has the benefit of being a very useful skill that will make you better at nearly any job, while also expanding your range as a person in a way that, say, touch-typing will not. It fits into both a vocational and a liberal arts curriculum. And, to some degree, it can be taught.

Rationality, mind you, is more than pure logic. It employs a heavy dose of meta-cognition: thinking about how your mind works and the errors it tends to make. It’s more psychology than mathematics and thus helps solve interpersonal disputes (what assumptions am I making about this guy?) as astutely as it does scientific conundrums (what other explanations fit these findings?). One key element of rationality is knowing how much you don’t know and how much more you ought to know before drawing a conclusion. A new book focuses on those gaps in our knowledge and the power therein.

“Nonsense,” by Jamie Holmes, a fellow at the public-policy think tank New America, explores ambiguity and uncertainty, arguing that in many cases we too quickly run for the safety of certitude.

Holmes is a fine writer and a clear thinker who leads us through the uses of confusion in art, business, medicine, engineering, police work and family life, using academic studies and narratives. In the process, he offers several useful takeaways.

The first type of lesson addresses when to induce uncertainty. For instance, ambiguity is good when seeking creative insight. One method for straying into the wild is what the researcher Tony McCaffrey calls the “generic parts technique.” Looking at a set of ingredients, we tend to fixate on their intended function: A candle is for creating light. Instead, list all

components with no assumptions about their purpose, and you might find, say, that the string in a candle can tie two objects together. This technique is how Alexander Graham Bell came to see the telegraph as a tool that could transmit voices.

You might also encourage uncertainty after getting feedback — win or lose. Failure typically does that for us, as it upsets our expectations of what works. But sometimes we don’t win for the reasons we think, so if you want to extend the streak, a debriefing is de rigueur. Query what you think you know.

Holmes also touches on formal education. “We need graduates who can tackle problems without obvious solutions,” he writes, and so teachers should offer unfamiliar challenges and sometimes let students wallow in confusion before offering guidance.

In addition to pointing out the uses of uncertainty, Holmes notes the necessity of merely recognizing its effects on us. Feeling offkilter in one realm of life can lead us to prematurely seek closure in others, eliciting rash actions or judgments. Research shows that a momentary need for closure also increases stereotyping.

“In an increasingly complex, unpredictable world, what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know,” Holmes writes. “It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand.”

That’s a broad, unfalsifiable statement (the kind required on a book’s back cover), but it’s hard to deny that, in addition to smarts and stamina, self-awareness also enables success. If we want people prepared for the work of life and of living together, we should encourage lessons in the art of skepticism. When searching for solid answers, the best place to start is with solid questions. n Hutson is a science writer and the author of “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.”

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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OPINIONS

Terrorists’ targets and methods are changing JOEL ACHENBACH writes on science and politics for the Post’s national desk and on the “Achenblog.”

NEW YORK — At first glance, New York’s Penn Station looked like it always does, crammed with people rushing to be somewhere else, many of them clustering under the departures sign and waiting for their track to be called. On second glance, you would have seen the soldiers.

They were arrayed last week around the concourse in camouflage uniforms, bulked out with body armor. One leaned against a wall with an assault rifle clutched to his chest, barrel down. They were there in case terrorists showed up.

Security has tightened because Penn Station is an example of what is known, chillingly, as a “soft target.” It is a gathering place for civilians. There are no metal detectors, no checkpoints where you have to take off your belt and shoes. Civilians are expected to help with security by being alert.

“IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SUSPICIOUS OR UNUSUAL SAY SOMETHING!” reads the safety card tucked into seat-back pockets on Amtrak trains.

But when fear takes hold, everything is suspicious, everything unusual.

Eccentricities that might once have been charming can be unnerving. That heavyset, raggedy guy walking around the concourse, talking to himself, making eye contact with strangers. Lunatic? Undercover cop? Or just a guy walking off a hangover?

In the land of soft targets, we live shadowed by the potential for violence, all too aware that it can visit us without warning, remorse or logic. In America, the threat in recent years has been from domestic terrorists and deranged gunmen, often seeking notoriety in a blaze of gunfire in which the innocence of the victims is irrelevant to them. For the mass shooter, like the jihadist, body counts are all that matter. There is no such thing as a collateral fatality.

The attackers in Paris chose multiple soft targets exclusively.

There was no pretense of attacking nodes of the power structure.

They didn’t try to blow up a naval vessel, an embassy, a military barracks. They did not attack government buildings or police stations. The killers went after people having fun — dining out on a Friday night, going to a concert or watching a “friendly” between France and Germany at the soccer stadium.

The victims were, according to a statement attributed to the Islamic State and taking credit for the attacks, “pagans” and “crusaders.” But the statement contained no information that was not already available in the news media, and some counterterrorism experts were not ready to conclude that the Islamic State had masterminded the assault.

The killers were armed not only with guns but also with explosive vests.

The explosive vest exploits the human desire to assemble and socialize. The suicide bomber leverages that sociality. The explosive vest does not discriminate among victims; proximity is all that matters.

“The targets seem to be almost at random,” Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Mumbai's main railway station is lit in the colors of the French flag to express solidarity with victims of the deadly attacks in Paris.

from Indiana who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, said Sunday. “Six places just where people gather.

Not particularly targets of military or law enforcement value.”

He went on: “This attack shows a highly sophisticated, coordinated effort. We’ve been very much focused on the lonewolf type of attack. . . . This is a different type of attack.”

Counterterrorism experts liken the Paris attacks to what happened in Mumbai in November 2008, when a team of 10 Islamist militants, pledged to fight to the death, terrorized the city for four days and killed 164 people.

“The Paris and Mumbai attacks both used small, well-armed bands of terrorists striking simultaneously and sequentially against multiple soft targets in an urban area. The Paris attackers added suicide vests to increase the carnage,” former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel wrote on a Brookings Institution blog devoted to Middle East politics.

The similarity isn’t by accident, said Peter Bergen, vice president at the think tank New America.

“In the United States, school shooters study other school shooters, in particular Columbine. This is true of terrorists as well. They study tactics that have worked before,” Bergen said.

There has been a slow evolution in tactics toward greater use of firearms and away

from building bombs, said William McCants, author of “The ISIS Apocalypse.”

“The big worry is that more people will decide to attack using handguns and rifles and not focus on bombs. That sounds counterintuitive, but when you’re building the bomb, there’s usually a lot of people involved and you have to buy material that the government has monitored, so it’s easier to identify and disrupt a plot that involves a bomb,” McCants said.

He also cited Mumbai as a catalyst for the change in tactics.

“You had a relatively small number of men capture the world’s attention and slaughter a lot of people using small arms,” he said.

There is no single template for terror. In the past two weeks, three major incidents have occurred, each with its own technique. A Russian jetliner with 224 people aboard crashed in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, with the Islamic State asserting responsibility for blowing it up.

Suicide bombers killed 43 people in Beirut. And now the horror in Paris.

Bergen said Americans should keep in perspective their relative security compared with people in Western Europe. Terrorists can strike here, but not as easily. He said, “A much more reasonable threat is a fellow citizen who happens to be unhinged and has access to semiautomatic weapons.” n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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TOM TOLES

Islamic State sets trap for Europe HARLEEN GAMBHIR is a counterterrorism analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

This month, President Obama said that the Islamic State is “contained ” in Iraq and Syria, but the group’s attacks in Paris soon afterward showed that it poses a greater threat to the West than ever.

The Islamic State is executing a global strategy to defend its territory in Iraq and Syria, foster affiliates in other Muslim-majority areas, and encourage and direct terrorist attacks in the wider world. It has exported its brutality and military methods to groups in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now it is using tactical skills acquired on Middle Eastern battlefields to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash that will generate even more recruits within Western societies. The United States and its allies must respond quickly to this threat.

The Islamic State’s strategy is to polarize Western society — to “destroy the grayzone,” as it says in its publications. The group hopes frequent, devastating attacks in its name will provoke overreactions

by European governments against innocent Muslims, thereby alienating and radicalizing Muslim communities throughout the continent. The atrocities in Paris are only the most recent instances of this accelerating campaign. Since January, European citizens fighting with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have provided online and material support to lethal operations in Paris, Copenhagen and near Lyon, France, as well as attempted

attacks in London, Barcelona and near Brussels. Islamic State fighters are probably responsible for destroying the Russian airliner over the Sinai. These attacks are not random, nor are they aimed primarily at affecting Western policy in the Middle East. They are, rather, part of a militarily-capable organization’s campaign to mobilize extremist actors already in Europe and to recruit new ones.

The strategy is explicit. The Islamic State explained after the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine that such attacks “compel the Crusaders to actively destroy the grayzone themselves. . . . Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize . . . or they [emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the

Crusader governments and citizens.” The group calculates that a small number of attackers can profoundly shift the way that European society views its 44 million Muslim members and, as a result, the way European Muslims view themselves.

Through this provocation, it seeks to set conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West.

Unfortunately, elements of European society are reacting as the Islamic State desires. Far-right parties have gained strength in many European countries.

France’s National Front is expected to dominate local elections in northern France this winter; on the Saturday after the attack, Marine Le Pen, its leader, declared “those who maintain links with Islamism” to be “France’s enemies.” The Danish People’s Party gained 21 percent of the vote in national elections in June on a nationalist, anti-Islamic platform.

The anti-foreigner Sweden Democrats is steadily growing in popularity.

The Paris attacks will surely prompt an anti-Muslim backlash, as demonstrated by protesters who brought a banner saying “Expel the Islamists” to a vigil in Lille, France. The Islamic State does not have to invent tales of Western hatred: It can simply publish photos of Dutch

politician Geert Wilders, who recently proclaimed, “The less Islam, the better.” Arsonists conducted scores of attacks on asylum seekers and shelters in Germany this year, while extremists have targeted Muslim citizens in France. The continuing influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa creates a perfect environment for the Islamic State’s campaign.

None of these anti-Islam activities justifies the horrors that the Islamic State has committed, nor have they caused those atrocities; Europe could be as welcoming as any could wish, and still the Islamic State would send fighters and recruit disaffected locals. But backlashes against Muslims who have no part in the Islamic State’s ideologies or actions make the situation much worse. Europe must avoid the trap that the Islamic State is setting by focusing its responses to the Paris attacks and other outrages against the perpetrators and their supporters.

The Paris attacks must become calls to action to end the wars that are tearing the Middle East apart and flooding the world with desperate refugees. They are yet more proof that we cannot live in peace at home while millions of people are engulfed in war. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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OPINIONS

BY JONES FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

It’s time to ground Congress DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital.

House Republican leaders this month did something that should outrage Americans of all parties and creeds: They declared that the people’s representatives will be working only two days a week next year.

The House will be in session just 111 days in 2016. This means the chamber will be closed more weekdays (150) than open, and many of the 111 are partial days. That’s upward of 30 weeks of paid vacation for all 435 members of the House. Is it any wonder the House is not doing what the people want?

Worse, American taxpayers are subsidizing members of Congress so that they can take more time off. Lawmakers have awarded themselves essentially unlimited travel budgets so they can spend more time at home.

It began with good intentions years ago: Members of Congress, out of a desire to be in touch with their constituents, made sure they could travel home to their districts as often as they wished.

But this has contributed to a culture in which lawmakers fly to Washington on Tuesday morning and fly out Thursday evening when in session (and perhaps make a quick trip home Wednesday night for the odd Rotary speech).

And how has being closer to their constituents worked out for them? Job approval of Congress stands at 13 percent in polls, near

historic lows.

Lawmakers are spending too much time at home and not enough solving problems in Washington — and taxpayers are enabling lawmakers to blow off work rather than toil the five-day workweek that other U.S. workers do.

This month, I wrote that new House Speaker Paul Ryan (RWis.) could solve much of the dysfunction in Washington by moving his family here, encouraging others to do the same and extending the congressional workweek to the standard five days. This would force lawmakers to get to know each other as human beings rather than partisan adversaries, and the result would be a more cooperative, functional legislature.

After reading that, lobbyist Vin Weber, a congressman from

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BY BAGLEY FOR THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Minnesota in the 1980s and 1990s and a member of Republican leadership, suggested another measure: curtail the unlimited congressional travel allowances.

This would encourage collegiality in Congress while also getting taxpayers out of financing what amounts to an incumbent protection racket.

“We’re subsidizing their campaigns,” he said. “The impact is these guys spend no time with each other and less quality time doing their jobs, and it contributes enormously to the dysfunction of the Capitol.”

In a statement justifying the two-day-average workweek, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) argued: “This calendar ensures that ‘the People’s House’ always remains in-touch with those back home. Discussing ideas and concerns is a critical function of a responsive, representative democracy, and for this reason, our schedule will continue to provide members considerable time for constituent services in their districts each month.”

Nice try. But what we have now is not responsive democracy but reactive democracy, in which lawmakers answer to parochial and shortsighted views — generally those expressed by the last wealthy donor to buttonhole them — rather than thinking

about the national interest or working with colleagues to build a consensus.

“It’s a great irony, really, that by every measurement it looks as if Congress is more out of touch with constituents than ever before,” Weber said, “and yet they’ve been back with their constituents more than they’ve ever been.”

And we pay for this new parochialism in many ways: free parking spaces for lawmakers at Reagan National Airport, discounted government rates for lawmakers, the privilege of booking themselves on multiple flights while regular fliers get bumped.

A complex formula determines flight allowances based on distance from Washington and other factors. But because lawmakers can move funds from personnel and office budgets, the upshot is their travel home is unlimited.

And what if it were restricted?

Surely tea party types wouldn’t object to eliminating this welfare for lawmakers and ending this taxpayer-subsidized campaigning. Americans of all ideologies can agree that their representatives should spend as much time in the workplace as their countrymen do.

Let’s ground Congress. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

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FIVE MYTHS

The common cold BY

N EDA F RAYHA

The common cold is aptly named. It affects more adults and chil­ dren in the industrialized world than any other short­term illness, and it is responsible for up to 40 percent of all missed workdays in the United States. For a disease that affects so many people so fre­ quently, modern medicine offers surprisingly little by way of rem­ edy. As we enter cold and flu season, let’s dig into some myths about the common cold.

1

Colds can be spread only if someone sneezes or coughs.

A 2008 study in Clinical Infectious Diseases found that people infected with cold-causing viruses sent particles carrying these viruses into the air by coughing, talking and even breathing.

However, direct contact with someone who has a cold is even more likely to make you sick.

Several major studies have shown that hand-to-hand touch is the most common way to spread rhinovirus, the family of viruses that causes most colds.

You can even catch a cold from someone without touching them or being near them when they sneeze. Viruses can live on furniture, toys, phones and other common household or office surfaces for several hours. A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1982 showed that when young, healthy adults touched either coffee cup handles or plastic tiles that had been contaminated with rhinovirus, and then touched their faces, half of them came down with a cold.

Fewer of them became sick if they touched a plastic tile that had been sprayed with a disinfectant.

Either way, good hand hygiene helps reduce the spread of infection.

2

Hand-sanitizing gels are as effective as handwashing to prevent the spread of the cold.

If given a choice between

washing with soap and water or coating your hands in a dollop of sanitizer, the old-fashioned soapand-water combination is the safer bet. Sanitizing gels don’t work well if your hands are visibly dirty. And they must contain at least 60 percent alcohol to reduce the spread of diseases such as the cold, but some varieties at your local pharmacy contain significantly less. A study published in Pediatrics in 2005 found no significant difference in the spread of the common cold in families that used hand sanitizer compared with families that didn’t. If you have access to running water and soap, use them. If not, then a handsanitizing gel with at least 60 percent alcohol is better than nothing.

3

Air travel increases your risk of catching a cold.

Whether it’s because of the low cabin humidity, the recirculated air or all the sneezing and coughing passengers, many of us develop a fear of flying at this time of year.

In reality, though, recirculated air doesn’t give you colds: A large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2002 showed that traveling in a commercial aircraft with recirculated air did not increase the risk of catching a cold compared with flying in a plane that pumped in fresh air. Of 1,100 travelers in the study, 47 percent were passengers in airplanes using fresh air for ventilation, and 53 percent flew in

ISTOCK

planes using recirculated air.

About 1 in 5 passengers — regardless of which kind of air they were exposed to — developed cold-like symptoms in the week after their flight.

And overall, there is no evidence that air travel makes us any sicker than our normal working environments on the ground.

4

Colds cause fevers.

Fever is listed as a symptom of the common cold in television commercials for over-the-counter remedies and in a variety of online resources. And in young children, fever is common in most upper respiratory infections.

In adults, however, fever — defined as a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher — is actually very rare in rhinovirus infections.

It is much more common for a cold to cause a sore throat, a stuffy and/or runny nose, sneezing and cough, but with a normal body temperature.

If you have these symptoms plus a fever, then you and your health-care provider should think about other possibilities, including strep throat, sinusitis, pneumonia or the flu. A true fever often means something else is going on in your body.

5

Home remedies such as chicken soup don’t work.

There are dozens of home remedies that are said to help speed up recovery: ginseng, zinc, vitamin C, neti pots. There is little evidence to support them; some can even be harmful (for example, some zinc formulations can lead to permanent loss of smell).

Chicken soup is a soothing exception. In 2000, researchers at the University of Nebraska studied homemade chicken soup and found that it had antiinflammatory benefits, which can ease cold symptoms. Specifically, the ingredients inhibited something called neutrophil migration, in which special blood cells move to parts of the body that are sick (such as the nose and lungs during a cold) and release chemicals that lead to even more inflammation. Inflammation can be helpful in fighting a short-term infection, but it can also cause long-term health problems if left unchecked. By blocking this neutrophil migration, chicken soup exerted an antiinflammatory effect — which could help a person feel better faster. n

Frayha is an internist, a clinical assistant professor of medicine and an assistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 4th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at ncwfoothills.com/photocontest Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2016

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com