The Washington Post National Weekly - December 6, 2015

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End of the line

Near the Arctic Circle, the wave of refugees reaches a tiny Finnish town PAGE 12

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Source: Mass Shooting Tracker

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Secret Service

by Chris Cillizza

F

or the Secret Service, 2015 can’t end soon enough.

Between high-profile security breaches and widespread concerns over how the agency tasked with protecting the president does its job, the past 12 months have brought an unrelenting series of body blows.

One more big one landed Thursday, when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a bipartisan report examining the state of the Secret Service. In addition to the major problems we already knew about thanks to my Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague Carol Leonnig, there were other incidents detailed in the report that made an already terrible situation that much worse.

A man impersonating Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.) not only managed to get backstage at the 2014 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation annual gala — he also had a conversation with President Obama. That same fall, an employee at a Los Angeles hotel where Obama was staying was allowed to enter the premises without going through the proper screening procedures.

And my personal favorite: In 2013, four people went fishing at a lake on Vice President Biden’s Delaware property without being detected.

The congressional report didn’t just detail embarrassing incidents for the Secret Service. It condemned systemic problems within the organization — a result of staffing declines, poor morale and a cavalier

KLMNO WEEKLY

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

A Secret Service agent guards a door as President Obama speaks in Los Angeles.

attitude about its own weaknesses.

“The agency’s recent public failures are not a series of isolated events, but the product of an insular culture that has historically been resistant to change,” the report read.

The Secret Service, for proving that things can always get worse, 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. 8

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY PHILANTHROPY BOOKS OPINION GUN VIOLENCE

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ON THE COVER Refugees, primarily from Iraq, walk from a bus station in Sweden en route to Finland. Photograph by LINDA DAVIDSON, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

GOP field’s diversity poses quandary BY

M ARC F ISHER

J

uan Rodriguez, a Colombian immigrant and Republican businessman in Des Moines, is on a mission to persuade his employees, nearly all Hispanic Democrats, to elect a president from what they think of as the party of white guys.

This year, with three minorities among the top four GOP contenders, Rodriguez thought he had a shot. “You are against abortion, yes? Against same-sex marriage, yes?” he tells them. “Then you are a Republican!”

“No, no,” comes the response.

The workers can’t get past what they hear from some Republican candidates about immigrants and immigration. They respond, in other words, with what many Republicans have long argued — that ethnic identity is not as important as what candidates stand for.

After years of deriding Democrats for dividing Americans into hyphenated subgroups, Republicans face a tantalizing and vexing prospect this year. With two sons of Cuban immigrants, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, joining a famed African American surgeon, Ben Carson, near the top of the polls, they have a unique opportunity to reach out to minorities as the party has long wanted to.

Some party officials say the Republicans’ more diverse field of candidates — especially in contrast to the Democrats’ all-white list — is evidence of conservatism’s broadening appeal. But others, loath to adopt the identity politics they associate with liberalism, maintain that the focus must stay on conservative ideas rather than the ethnicity of the people touting them.

“The fact that you have Latinos and a black among the leading candidates is just coincidence,” said J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who became one of the nation’s most prominent African American Republicans. “It doesn’t speak to what’s beneath the surface. We’re still not talking about the concerns of that young black couple starting a business or that young Hispanic family,” he said, adding: “Where are our solutions

DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER VII FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Candidates are reluctant to play identity card, despite a strong hand to deal with incarceration reform, unemployment, the trouble blacks and Hispanics have getting home mortgages? Republicans who ignore Ferguson and Baltimore and Black Lives Matter are refusing to hear the depths of what people are experiencing.”

The GOP’s quandary has surfaced three years after the official autopsy of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat concluded that Republicans must persuade a rapidly diversifying electorate that the party is not scary or narrow-minded. But that effort is more complicated for the GOP than for Democrats, who have eagerlytappedintoidentitypolitics, mobilizing minorities to help elect the first black president and, now, emphasizing the historic potential

of making Hillary Clinton the first woman to hold the job. The Republican calculus has been made even morecomplexbyfront-runnerDonald Trump’s sharp rhetoric about immigrants and black activists.

The Republican National Committee has invested heavily in outreach to Hispanic voters in the past three years, with 40 Hispanic staffers connecting with business leaders and showing the party flag at community events. The Libre Initiative, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is touting the benefits of the free market and smaller government on Spanishlanguage radio stations and at neighborhood health fairs and food giveaways in states with large Hispanic populations. A similar,

Juan Rodriguez, a Republican businessman in Des Moines, hopes to persuade his workers, nearly all Hispanic Democrats, to vote Republican.

party-funded effort called Committed to Community woos black voters with church events, concerts and ads on black-oriented radio stations.

But Republicans’ efforts to broaden their appeal seem to run smack up against many conservatives’ belief that too much of a focus on group identity detracts from American unity — that what comes after the hyphen in any ethnicAmerican identity risks becoming overshadowed by the front end.

Rubio, Cruz and Carson avoid emphasizing their ethnicity as a selling point. Rather, they tell their family stories of upward mobility — an effort to connect to a universal American narrative of assimilation rather than what they see as a sepa-

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

5

POLITICS ratist instinct on the other side of the nation’s ideological divide.

Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, said his candidate actively seeks Hispanic votes by doing interviews with Spanish-language media but “he delivers the same message as he does in English. We have a president who for eight years has tried to pit Americans against each other. Rubio is more interested in speaking to all Americans, not just to one group.”

Similarly, “Cruz talks about his father’s story, from dishwasher to having a son who’s a candidate for president,” rather than about being Hispanic, said campaign spokesman Rick Tyler. “If the answer is to be the party of identity politics, then we’ll just lose.

There’s nothing for us there, because the Democrats will say things we can’t and won’t say about the government giving people things. Instead, we have to show we’re the party of success.”

Cruz’s campaign is premised on the idea that it’s the conservative base, and especially evangelical Christian voters, who can put him over the top. Winning a larger share of the Hispanic vote would be nice, but the realistic upside isn’t high enough to make a difference in the outcome of the election, they believe.

To make his case about how misguided it is to focus on Hispanics as a separate voting group, Tyler likes to ask people what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) have in common. Most people come up empty.

“They’re both Italian American, but people don’t get that at first,” Tyler said. “But there was a time when that would have been the first thing people noticed. Democrats don’t like it, but we’re approaching a time when you’ll say ‘Rodriguez and Gonzalez’ and nobody will see what they have in common until you remind them they’re both Hispanic.”

Carson, too, has criticized identity politics, calling the Black Lives Matter movement “sickening” and accusing its activists of “bullying people.”

Some party leaders worry that the GOP has painted itself into a tricky spot: The party can’t play the identity card because it would violate a core principle and turn off many of its most loyal voters.

Yet identity plays an increasing

role in a country in which California and Texas are already majority minority and many other states are moving in that direction.

“Obviously, Secretary Clinton’s focus on being the first woman was chosen because she thinks that will work,” said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only black Republican. “Rubio and Cruz can talk about how America provided opportunity for their families, but will that be enough?

The election will tell us.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) says the high-profile presence of minority candidates at the top of early polls presents a “pivotal, transitional moment” for the party.

“Can we redefine ourselves, or do we have to lose a third straight election, like the Democrats did in the ’80s, before they redefined themselves?” Cole asked. “We have not done a good job of making people who feel as we do comfortable in our party. We have to change not what we believe but visually who we are. I take a great

deal of pride in the political success of a Rubio, Cruz or Carson.”

Watts argues that ethnicity still matters. “Republicans claim they don’t play identity politics,” the former congressman said, “but my value to the party was they needed me on poverty issues. I have a party that doesn’t have a relationship with minorities. Ben Carson and Rubio and Cruz need to be talking about these groups and their issues. They need to be a bridge. Most of my white friends, I’ve been to their homes. But most of them have never been to my house. How can you as a party relate to me if you’ve never been in my world?”

Some Republican leaders believe the way to soften the Democrats’ hold on minorities is to field more black and Hispanic candidates and stay true to the party’s ideals.

“It’s obvious when one looks at the field on both sides which one is more reflective of America,” said Daniel Garza, director of the Libre Initiative. “But Ted and Marco are

thriving because of their ideas, not their skin color. Yes, there are people who say, ‘See, we love Ben Carson and he’s black,’ but it’s his ideas that attracted them, not his skin color. The fact that they’re black or Latino is a bonus.”

Some Hispanic Republicans say the days of ethnic identity determining voting are waning. Immigration policy still drives many Hispanics’ votes, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into support for Hispanic candidates, said Alfonso Aguilar, director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, a Washingtonbased group that recruits Latinos into the conservative movement.

Aguilar, who hasn’t endorsed a candidate, said Hispanic conservatives looking for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants “find Marco and Carson to be constructive, and we have a problem with Trump and with Cruz. But it’s not a matter of voting for someone who looks like them. It’s what they would actually do.”

Rodriguez’s experience with his workers in Iowa has convinced him that the rhetoric coming from some Republican candidates is more destructive than the ethnic identity of some of those candidates is helpful. “I can tell Latinos who work for me that ours is the moral party and the party for the church,” he said, “but they hear Trump and how he talks about us, and they hear how Cruz talks about immigrants, and they are driving people far from the party.”

But Alex Rios, a 30-year-old ad salesman in Des Moines who was born in Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles and Iowa, has settled on Cruz as his man in the February caucuses.

Rios doesn’t really agree with Cruz’s approach on immigration — Rios wants a clearer path to citizenship for people who arrived here illegally — but he says it’s time for Hispanic voters to make decisions based on bigger issues.

“People say to me, ‘No, man, don’t vote Republican, because the Democrats are going to help us with citizenship,’ ” Rios said, “but I don’t care about citizenship if we’re killing babies and destroying our Earth’s environment and making people dependent on government. There are more important things. I can’t get them to see that yet. They’re still thinking like Latino is more important than American.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

With a famed African American surgeon, Ben Carson, and two sons of Cuban immigrants, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, near the top of the polls, the GOP has a unique opportunity to reach out to minorities.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

A glaring holdout of Clinton support

BY A NNE G EARAN AND M IKE D E B ONIS

T

he tableau surrounding Hillary Clinton on Monday was impressive: 13 female Democratic senators endorsing the Democratic 2016 presidential front-runner en masse.

The evening fundraising event on Capitol Hill brought in a chunk of campaign cash ahead of an often difficult fundraising month in December. But it was also meant to underscore Clinton’s nearmonopoly among Democratic lawmakers who have declared a preference, and her appeal as the first woman with a strong shot at becoming president.

But one particularly influential female Democratic senator didn’t join her colleagues: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the anti-Wall Street crusader who was courted to run as the darling of very liberal Democrats — has not endorsed Clinton, nor has she promised she will.

Her absence served as an awkward reminder of Clinton’s enduringstruggletogeneratesupportand enthusiasm among an influential segment of her party’s most liberal members. It also illustrates the leverage that Warren holds in an election that Democrats are calculating will be waged on issues of economic advancement and fairness.

Warren has also declined to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Clinton’s main challenger on the Democratic side. When Warren took herself out of the race earlier this year, Sanders was the main beneficiary — inheriting much of the disaffected liberal support that has eluded Clinton.

“It definitely gives more weight to her endorsement, for whatever she would like to use that weight for,” said Democratic strategist Bill Burton, who was a senior aide in the Barack Obama campaign that defeated Clinton in 2008.

Clinton took the stage to the booming refrain from Katy Perry’s girl-power anthem “Roar” and thanked each of the senators by first name. She drew some of the loudest applause of the night with an emotional pledge to defend

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Elizabeth Warren was not among the 13 female senators who gathered to endorse the candidate abortion rights.

Invoking the recent killings at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, Clinton said she and the “strong, strong soldiers” on stage with her would defend the organization against Republican attacks.

The event drew about 1,000 supporters who paid between $250 and $2,700 for a ticket. Clinton also held two other fundraising events in Washington on Monday.

“It would take something extraordinary to get all 13 of us here at one time,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) “That something extraordinary is Hillary Clinton.”

Each of the senators appearing Monday night with Clinton has previously indicated at least tentative support for her presidential run. Warren, on the other hand, has stayed studiously neutral while pushing the candidates toward more liberal economic policies.

A senior Democratic aide familiar with the planning for the event did not believe that Warren was invited to participate.

Boxer dismissed the suggestion that Warren’s endorsement holdout might indicate deeper tensions among Democrats. “We have 83 percent of the senators supporting Hillary, and it’s wonderful,” she said Monday.

It was unclear what that figure referred to. Thirty-three of 44 Senate Democrats have officially backed Clinton, or 75 percent, while 93 percent of the 14 Democratic women have.

While Warren has clashed at times with the Obama administration — particularly over appointments to the Treasury Department — her relations with Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill have generally been positive and respectful. One notable exception was last December, when she criticized Democratic leaders for failing to strip a provision weakening the Dodd-Frank financial regulations from a massive spending bill.

But the fact that Warren has not yet endorsed a presidential candidate has been widely interpreted

At an endorsement event by Democratic female senators Monday, Hillary Clinton hugs Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), center. They are flanked, from left, by Sens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Patty Murray (Wash.).

in Democratic circles as an effort to maintain her influence on the campaign agenda rather than as a snub of Clinton. That perception, however, could erode in the coming weeks, especially as more congressional Democrats endorse Clinton. Sen. Sherrod Brown (DOhio), who is frequently out front alongside Warren on issues of economic justice, endorsed Clinton in late October.

“It would be notable if Warren were there,” the Democratic aide said of Monday’s event. “I don’t think it’s hugely notable that she is not there.”

A spokeswoman for Warren declined to comment on the event.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Before Clinton entered the race, Warren spoke about her in glowing terms and joined all of her fellow female Democratic senators in signing a 2013 letter urging Clinton to run. But with Sanders in the race championing key planks of her economic agenda, Warren has assumed a role above the fray, pushing the candidates to abide by that platform.

Pushed in September about whether she would eventually endorse a candidate, she said, “Right now that’s not where we are.”

Sanders is closest to Warren’s philosophy that the financial system is rigged and that government has been complicit in creating a profoundly unfair balance of power. But Clinton has added a populist edge to her mostly centrist economic platform, telling audiences that the deck is stacked against the middle class and that women, immigrants and the working poor are too often cheated out of their rightful earnings and influence.

Clinton’s camp resists comparisons with Warren or any suggestion that Clinton takes her cues from the former Harvard professor, who has far less experience in government.

“Hillary’s position is very strong, and I don’t think a process story here or there is going to have much impact on her stance with any particular group in the Democratic orbit,” Burton said. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

7

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Fear, faith and the rise of Carson S TEPHANIE M C C RUMMEN Montrose, Ala. BY

S

he had known exactly what Ben Carson meant when he spoke of leaders who are trying to “destroy America.”

That meant President Obama. She had understood perfectly when he spoke of all the “secular progressives who don’t like Judeo-Christian values” and “want to destroy your family.”

That meant all the liberals who would ridicule Christians like her.

And when Carson said at a rally in Mobile, Ala., on Nov. 19 that God himself had opened his path to the presidency, Toni Ledet, 59, cheered with the crowd of hundreds.

“Christians are tired of what’s going on — they want a leader with strong faith,” she said that night, and now she was home with her husband, Mike, 57, saying something else that explains the deep-rooted appeal of the famed neurosurgeon, even as some recent polls show his popularity slipping.

“I’m afraid,” Toni began, sitting on her front porch in Montrose.

“I’m really and truly afraid.”

The rise of Carson toward the top of the polls in the Republican presidential primary race has baffled many political pundits, liberals and some within the GOP establishment, who find his positions short on details, and certain assertions — that the biblical figure Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain, that the Chinese are operating in Syria — out of touch with reality.

But to see Carson from Mike and Toni Ledet’s front porch, the reverse is true: To them, Carson is the only candidate who fully grasps what they see as the one reality that matters most — that America has fallen away from God. And while other Republican contenders express some version of that sentiment, Toni says it is Carson who seems both the closest to God and the furthest from Obama, who troubles her deeply.

“I think there is going to be an issue in the near future,” she says, sitting in her rocking chair. “He’s got, what, eight months left in his

MAX BECHERER/POLARIS IMAGES

Many of his Christian supporters say that only a ‘godly’ man like him can rescue the country term?”

“A year,” says Mike, a doctor, sipping a glass of water.

“Still, that’s the short term,” says Toni, a fiction writer. “I think he’s staging a certain situation for himself before he leaves office. I think he’s preparing this country to suit his benefit — i.e. refugees, medical issues, gun laws . . . ” She stops herself and smiles, not wanting to explain further.

“He’s weakening the country is how I’d put it,” Mike says.

“Oh, he’s weakening the country all right,” Toni says.

In the life of Ben Carson, they see a man in tune with the will of God. “I read his book, and I was just awed,” Mike says, referring to “Gifted Hands,” Carson’s book about his rise from impoverished child to world-famous brain surgeon, in which he describes a God who answered his every prayer, no matter how urgent or mundane — from taking away his anger to giving him exam answers to locating his passport. “He believes there’s a higher power.”

She is sick and tired of feeling

uncomfortable, which is how she’s felt ever since Obama’s election — and why she decided to go to the Carson rally two days before.

It was her first presidential candidate rally, and as she arrived and saw hundreds of people waving signs that read “Heal” and “Inspire,” she realized she was not the only one feeling sick and tired.

When Carson spoke so quietly that he almost whispered, the audience saw a wise and humble servant of God. When he spoke of the Lord’s plan for his candidacy, someone yelled “Amen!”

And when he described a nation that had entered a “dark” period, and Christians who had been “bullied,” and all the things that a nameless person everyone understood to be Obama would do to deliberately destroy the nation from within, Toni Ledet felt as if someone understood her deepest fears at last.

Now, sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch with Mike, she is sure she is not alone in her thinking. “You should have heard him,” she says to Mike.

Toni and Mike Ledet at home in Montrose, Ala. They say they don’t trust President Obama, but they like Republican Ben Carson’s “Christian attitude” and say the nation needs a leader with strong faith.

She talks about what Carson said about the Syrian refugees whom Obama has urged Americans to accept.

They discuss how the refugees relate to Obama’s plans.

“How ironic is the timing that Obama’s allowing these refugees to come in?” she says.

“Not allowing — forcing,” Mike says.

“Again, that’s where I go back to my belief that he’s bringing them in for a purpose,” she says. “He’s positioning this country, like playing chess. I think we will have another major tragedy like 9/11.

He’s positioning certain people in this country to make that happen.”

She describes her darkest fear of all, of what will happen if things keep going in this direction, away from what she and Mike call “the biblical way.”

“A lot of people feel like the world is changing drastically for the worse, and I think Satan has his hand in it,” she says, and goes on to explain that she sees evil everywhere. In the legalizing of same-sex marriage. In babies being aborted. In the rise of the Islamic State and what seems to her an insistence by liberals on embracing Muslims and a parallel belittling of Christians for their faith.

“There’s a biblical verse — I wish I could remember it,” Mike says now. “It has to do with when a nation goes against the biblical way, God won’t listen to our prayers.”

Like Carson, they pray about every aspect of their lives, asking for guidance on everything from money to their eternal salvation in heaven.

“We’re going to lose our blessing,” Mike says.

And if that happens?

“Oh, God help us,” Toni says, looking out at the trees.

“It will basically destroy America,” Mike says.

“It’s like an ice cube melting,” Toni says. “You can see it going down, and you can’t stop that ice cube from melting. Unless we take a stand.

“And I think Carson’s trying to take a stand.” n

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NATION

Abortion rhetoric blamed in shooting BY

S ANDHYA S OMASHEKHAR

T

o many abortion rights advocates, it seemed only a matter of time before something like this hap-

pened.

Ever since the summer, when an antiabortion group accused Planned Parenthood of illegally selling fetal tissue, threats against the organization had escalated to unprecedented levels, abortion providers say. They stepped up collaboration with the FBI and local police and stiffened security at clinics. But on Nov. 27, their worst fears came true: A man walked into a health center in Colorado Springs and opened fire.

Police have not yet identified a clear motive for the shooting, which killed a police officer, Garrett Swasey, and two other people and left more than six injured. But the suspect, identified as Robert Lewis Dear Jr., attacked a clinic run by Planned Parenthood, a longtime foil of antiabortion activists that has been under heightened scrutiny in recent months.

During his arrest, Dear referred to “baby parts,” a law enforcement official said.

Abortion rights advocates say the connection is clear. Over the summer, a little-known antiabortion group called the Center for Medical Progress released a series of covertly filmed videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells fetal tissue, or “baby parts,” as abortion foes refer to it, for research. The century-old nonprofit agency has denied wrongdoing, and state and congressional investigations have so far failed to produce proof supporting the allegations.

Nevertheless, the casual and sometimes graphic conversations about abortion procedures captured on the videos have provided fodder for conservatives on Capitol Hill, in governor’s mansions and on the presidential campaign trail to seek to strip the organization of government funding. The efforts have led to sometimes passionate commentary on the part of conservatives and Republicans against abortion and sharply criti-

MATTHEW STAVER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Many worried an attack was inevitable after the summer’s videos vilifying Planned Parenthood cal of Planned Parenthood, striking a tone that abortion rights advocates say created an atmosphere that put clinic workers and patients at risk.

Antiabortion groups were quick to condemn the shooting and assert that, despite often impassioned and emotional language, their years-long campaign is about saving lives, not taking them. They emphasized that there was still no clear explanation for the shooting, which was carried out by a man who was known by friends and acquaintances as a malcontent who often clashed with neighbors and had encounters with police. Grass-roots activists connected with the antiabortion movement said they did not know Dear and that his name was not familiar.

“Our prayers and concern are with the victims today of the Colorado Springs shooting, people who did not deserve such violence,” Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, an anti-

abortion group, said in a statement last Saturday. “While we don’t know all the details of this horrific event, we know that it was an evil act, one condemned by pro-life Americans nationwide.”

But Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, a professional association for abortion providers, said the antiabortion rhetoric had grown so heated in recent months that something like this was bound to happen.

“They have ignited a firestorm of hate. They knew there could be these types of consequences, and yet they ratcheted up the rhetoric and ratcheted it up and ratcheted it up,” Saporta said. “It’s not a huge surprise that somebody would take this type of action.”

On the Sunday morning talk shows, Republican presidential hopefuls walked a fine line, condemning the attack while also defending the criticism heaped on Planned Parenthood. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” real estate mogul and Republican presidential can-

Cambria Hooks watches a video of shooting victim Garrett Swasey during a service last Sunday at Hope Chapel in Colorado Springs.

didate Donald Trump called the shooter “mentally disturbed” and reiterated the complaints about Planned Parenthood. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, also a Republican hopeful, decried “extremism on both sides,” on ABC’s “This Week.”

On “Fox News Sunday,” former Hewlett Packard chief Carly Fiorina called the shooting “obviously a tragedy,” adding, “nothing justifies this.” In the past, she has accused Planned Parenthood of “butchering babies for body parts.” But the Republican presidential candidate resisted the notion that the fiery rhetoric contributed to the shooting.

But abortion rights advocates say the videos have also led to a spike in threats against the organization — with a worst-case scenario unfolding in Colorado Springs.

“Politicians need to stop escalating the rhetoric against Planned Parenthood, and that means by and large the Republican Party,’’ said Laura Chapin, a pro-abortion rights political communications consultant and former press secretary to former Colorado governor Bill Ritter (D). “Right-wing politicians need to back off.’’

David Daleiden, project leader for the Center for Medical Progress, did not respond to a request for comment over the weekend.

But Troy Newman, who sits on the board of directors, defended the project, which he said shed light on a matter of public interest.

Newman has described abortion doctors as “butchers” and has called women who obtain abortions “murderesses,” and the vice president of his organization served two years in federal prison for conspiring to damage a clinic.

But he said his actions are not incitements for violence but rather “truth-telling” in the face of a corrupt industry.

“There’s a frustration that all of us experience from a lack of prosecution of Planned Parenthood by the federal authorities, but that frustration should never be taken to the point of extremism where people are killed as a result,” he said. n

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The last days of the New York mob P HILIP B UMP New York BY

I

n November, a New York jury reached a verdict regarding the Lufthansa heist, the notorious theft of $5 million in cash and nearly $1 million in jewels from a Lufthansa terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1978.

The crime was immortalized by the movie “Goodfellas,” in which gangster Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), working off information passed to him by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), masterminded a latenight burglary that made everybody millionaires — even the guitarist from their favorite nightclub (Samuel Jackson!) — without firing a shot.

The defendant in the trial wasn’t of any of those guys, however. All of them are dead. The defendant was Vincent Asaro, 80, who wasn’t even mentioned in the movie. A real-life mobster from Queens, Asaro unwisely talked about the heist with his cousin Gaspare Valenti, who was wearing a wire for the feds.

Had he been convicted, Asaro would have been the first alleged Mafioso to face punishment in connection with the robbery — and only the second person, after Lufthansa cargo agent Louis Werner, to be convicted. But after a relatively short deliberation, the jury acquitted Asaro of racketeering conspiracy, as well as the unrelated murder of a warehouse owner in 1969.

The not-very-Hollywood trial in a courtroom just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Lower Manhattan was almost certainly the prosecution’s last chance to hang the Lufthansa heist on anyone, famous or not. The New York Post declared it the “last old school Mafia trial.”

The New York Times, more prosaically, suggested that the trial was a sign that the old rules of the New York mob, like not ratting each other out, had once and for all been abandoned.

New York is by no means Mafiafree. But the mob isn’t what it once was, enfeebled by decades of police crackdowns, media attention

BRYAN R. SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York City’s changing Italian demographics make Italian culture more a part of pop culture and old age. The Mafia has been relegated largely to the realm of entertainment, just as Manhattan’s Italian culture has become a tourist attraction.

The city has changed dramatically since April 1972, when Joseph Gallo showed up for a bite to eat at Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. “Crazy Joe” had spent a decade in prison for extortion, but he had shifted careers, working with actor Jerry Orbach on a script about his time in the pen tentatively titled “A-Block.”

The late-night trip to Umberto’s, though, was just him, his wife of three weeks, her daughter and a few friends. Oh, and his bodyguard, although that didn’t do him much good. In the middle of the meal, a man with a .38 came in and opened fire, hitting Gallo three times and the bodyguard once.

Gallo made it to the street outside before he died.

When Gallo died — six years before the Lufthansa heist — orga-

nized crime in New York was already intertwined with the Hollywood image of the Mafia. Gallo was working on a screenplay; a New York Times story compared his death to a scene from “The Godfather.”

By the time the much-maligned third film in the “Godfather” series came out, Gallo’s life and death had become part of the plot, serving as inspiration for the character Joey Zasa.

Umberto’s isn’t on that corner in Little Italy anymore. It has moved around Mulberry a few times, eventually winding up across the street and up a few storefronts. The only trace of the restaurant where Gallo was shot are patches of concrete that fill the sidewalk outside of a different restaurant, filling gaps that once held the letters U-M-B-E-R-T-O-S. It’s one of the few corners that’s still part of Little Italy. Technically, the neighborhood stretches across a dozen-plus blocks, from Canal to Houston, south to north, and from

Vincent Asaro, 80, leaves the federal courthouse in Brooklyn on Nov. 12 after having been acquitted of conspiracy in the 1978 Lufthansa heist, immortalized in the film “Goodfellas.”

Mulberry past Mott to Elizabeth, west to east.

Walk along Mott or Elizabeth, though, and the fiction is quickly exposed; Chinatown has jumped Canal and Bowery streets and is a much bigger presence. From the north comes another menace: gentrification. Above Kenmare Street, you’re far more likely to find hipsters than wiseguys. Even the Little Italy parts of Mulberry Street are mostly a tourist trap, filled with souvenir shops and mediocre Italian restaurants. Little Italy ain’t itself.

In part, that’s because New York’s Italian population is fading.

The 1920 Census found that the city was home to more than 390,000 people who were born in Italy. In 1950, the Italian-born population was still more than 344,000. But by 1980, there were 156,000 native-born Italians, with the number in Manhattan under 9,000. According to the most recent census estimate, about 50,000 Italian natives now live in the city. There are still thousands of people of Italian descent, of course, but the culture — legal and criminal — is diluted.

Just like Mulberry Street.

“A lot of Americans. All the Italians are dead. Gone. Moved out of here,” said Vinny Sabatino, proprietor of Vinny’s Nuthouse, the last pushcart on Mulberry Street.

Sabatino has been selling roasted nuts and torrone candy since the early 1980s, taking over from his grandmother, Antoinette Sabatino, who opened the cart nearly a century ago.

Sabatino still lives on Mulberry, in the apartment where he grew up. But the neighborhood has changed. Even the annual San Gennaro festival (think of the assassination scene in “The Godfather, Part Two”) isn’t what it used to be.

“San Gennaro’s dying out. It’s not the same anymore,” Sabatino said. “We used to have buses, the old Italian people came from Philadelphia, from Pennsylvania. We don’t have that anymore.”

Soon the Nuthouse will be gone, too, Sabatino said; there is no heir apparent. n

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Start-up culture blossoms in India R AMA L AKSHMI New Delhi BY

I

n a sprawling wholesale market of timber, glass and marble, businessman Amit Gupta supervises workers loading sheets of glass on trucks for builders across India — his family business for five decades.

As plumes of sawdust float, Gupta says he wants to play a role in the new economy. For the past year, he has been reading newspaper stories about the booming start-up culture, with millions flowing in from venture capitalists and nerdy graduates of India’s tech universities becoming millionaires overnight.

About $6.5 billion has been invested in start-ups this year, up from $2.2 billion last year, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, an industry group. Three to four tech start-ups are born every day in India, it says.

Gupta’s family has for years invested in land. But this year they decided to take $700,000 and invest in start-ups.

“India is going to change in a dramatic way, and start-up companies are going to drive the change,” Gupta, 40, said.

Two decades of India’s information-technology success and the large pool of English-speaking engineers have created a fertile ground for e-commerce companies and innovative tech start-ups.

Angel investors and venture capital funds are mushrooming.

Investment in start-ups is a new trend among affluent Indians, triggered by the Silicon Valley-like successes of a number of start-ups in the past year.

Many Indians who traditionally invested in land, art, gold and stock markets are beginning to invest in start-ups, said Sunil Goyal, founder of Your Nest, a venture capital fund in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi. This year, his firm has 140 such new investors, up from 35 in 2012.

“Old money, new money — everybody wants a piece of our startup boom,” Goyal said.

It’s also a risky proposition —

RAMA LAKSHMI/THE WASHINGTON POST

As old restrictions are eased, investors are flocking to forge a Silicon Valley in South Asia far more unreliable than a cache of gold or land. Even as Indians are celebrating the new millionaires, there are signs that the country’s fledgling e-commerce companies are overvalued, and the market may be slowing soon. In recent weeks, some restaurant and food delivery start-ups laid off hundreds of employees.

“Investment activity in startups is at an all-time high now. But it is also risky,” said Arun Natarajan, head of research service Venture Intelligence, in Chennai. Only 3 of 10 start-ups are likely to be super-successes, he said.

But for now, Indian and international investors are tempted by the sheer size of India’s market — with a rising middle class and increasingly global outlook. At over 350 million, India has the third most Internet users in the world, after the United States and China. Most of them are using the Web on mobile devices. That number is expected to grow to 580 mil-

lion people by 2018.

In recent months, India’s government, led by tech-savvy Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has launched an initiative called “Start Up India, Stand Up India.”

Authorities have set up a $300 million fund for start-ups and eased restrictions on Indians abroad who want to invest in venture capital funds here.

The success in China of companies such as Alibaba has inspired many to say that India is the next big consumer Internet market, said Nandan Nilekani, a leader in India’s IT sector and co-author of the new book “Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations.”

Players are emerging that are unique to India — such as RailYatri, which helps riders navigate the Indian rail system.

Some entrepreneurs are also cashing in on social and cultural changes underway in urban India.

One of them, Vishal Gupta, became a parent a few years ago, and

Brothers Varun, center left, and Amit Gupta oversee workers loading sheets of glass onto trucks for builders in New Delhi. Their family has run the business for five decades. After years of land investments, the family this year decided to take $700,000 and invest in start-ups.

noticed urban Indian families were changing. More couples were living far from home instead of in the traditional extended family system — where generations live together. Hoping to tap into that market, Gupta (who is not related to investor Amit Gupta) launched a portal called Mycity4kids.com to help parents connect with other parents, schools, nannies and local events. Five years later, the site has 1 million visitors a month. He’s seeking an additional round of venture capital funding — $3 million — to reach 3 million more a month.

“This is the best time to scale up,” Gupta, 40, said.

The success stories are hard to miss, especially in Bangalore, a fast-growing start-up hub. Entrepreneurs are trading up from apartments to villas, said Harish Bijoor, a brand consultant who surveyed the industry. In the past two years, Indian start-ups have been acquired by Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Ibibo.

The e-commerce company Flipkart.com, an Indian version of Amazon.com, attracted $1 billion from investors, including the New York-based fund Tiger Global this year. The company is worth $15 billion today, and its two owners are featured in the Forbes India list of billionaires.

Another buzz-creator this year was Vijay Shekhar Sharma, 37, the founder of Paytm, a mobile payment company that was funded with $680 million from Alibaba and its affiliate.

Sharma said a lot has changed since he launched his first start-up in 2001. Back then, it took him four years to raise $12,000 from a “friend of a friend.”

Yet some investors, fearing an overheated market, have begun to proceed a bit more cautiously.

Amit Gupta, the investor, says he is aware of the risks.

“We are not looking to make a quick buck. We want to be part of what’s new,” Gupta said. “As my father said to me last month: ‘I took risks and created this glass business 50 years ago. Now you need to create something new for your children, too.’ ” n

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Fair vote or ‘foul play’?

The election in Venezuela could deal a blow to the ruling party — and trigger a crisis

BY

N ICK M IROFF

U.

S. officials and Latin American leaders were awaiting Venezuela’s parliamentary elections this weekend with trepidation, worried that instead of defusing the country’s deep tensions, the vote could instead detonate a new crisis.

With Venezuela’s petroleumbased economy projected to contract 10 percent this year and citizens suffering chronic shortages of basic goods, the ruling socialist party is expected to lose control of the legislature for the first time since the late Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998.

Such a defeat would be an unprecedented blow to the movement known as “Chavismo” that rose to power by electoral means yet views its uninterrupted rule as a part of a “revolution” that dismisses, at least rhetorically, democratic norms such as alternating power and divided government.

Defiant statements by President Nicolas Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials have offered few assurances to those looking for signs that the government is ready to compromise with the opposition. An opposition candidate in central Venezuela was slain by a gunman Nov. 25 at a rally, an ominous sign to many of what may be in store on election day.

“They are at a dramatic crossroads,” said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Venezuelan government is quick to label any public criticism by foreigners an act of “meddling.”

“Chavismo expected it would be the dominant political force for decades, but it has discovered that in democratic societies, people hold leaders to account,” said the U.S. official. “Ideology and the image of Chavez isn’t enough to maintain a hold on power.”

Maduro is not on the ballot, and his term doesn’t expire until 2019. Still, if the opposition takes control of parliament, it could

MARCO BELLO/REUTERS

WILFREDO RIERA/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Auri Carrasquel, top, a supporter of the ruling party of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, cheers at a rally for pro-government candidates in Caracas. Above, supporters chant for opposition-party candidates.

mount a recall attempt against him as soon as next year.

The leading polls show Maduro’s United Socialist Party headed for steep losses. But with few international observers expected to monitor the election, anything other than an opposition win is likely to produce charges of fraud.

The presence of credible international observers was critical in past elections because Venezuela’s government and opposition leaders are barely on speaking terms.

During his 14-year rule, which ended with his death in 2013, Chavez was arguably the biggest beneficiary of missions by groups such as the Carter Center and the Organization of American States (OAS), which stamped his victories as fair.

This time there will be no such

referee. The Carter Center closed its Venezuela offices in August.

The government has rejected OAS offers for an observer mission.

The opposition has little faith in the neutrality of the country’s election officials, and the leading international observer delegation, from South America’s Unasur bloc, will be headed by a longtime Chavez ally, former Dominican president Leonel Fernández.

The Unasur delegation has yet to convince the opposition that it can be an impartial watchdog.

Regional power Brazil pulled out of the delegation in October after the Maduro government did not accept its delegate, former defense minister Nelson Jobim, even though the government of President Dilma Rousseff has long been a Chavez ally. The

Unasur group will also lack delegates from Uruguay and Chile.

Maduro insists that the polls are wrong and that his party will prevail. Elias Jaua, a top Chavista official, said recently that his government would never make a pact with “the bourgeoisie,” the socialists’ slur for members of the opposition.

“The restoration of capitalism and neoliberalism in Venezuela will not happen,” Jaua said.

It is this type of all-or-nothing rhetoric, combined with the notion that any electoral setback would be an unacceptable stain on the legacy of Chavez, that worries observers.

“A lot of people are going to think there will be foul play, so not having more international observation is something that will hurt the government more than anyone, especially if there is surprise at the results,” said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.

The nightmare scenario is a return to the street violence of early 2014 that followed Maduro’s narrow presidential victory. Dozens of Venezuelans on both sides of the political divide were killed, and opposition leaders defused the tensions by urging supporters to put aside their anger and organize ahead of today’s vote. But that rage could erupt again.

Analysts have cautioned against expecting a sweeping opposition victory, noting that the country’s electoral map favors rural districts where the Chavez movement is still strong. The government also freely uses state resources to promote its candidates and bring its supporters to the polls.

With as much as 95 percent of Venezuela’s income generated from petroleum exports and no recovery in sight for oil prices, Smilde and others note that it might not be such a bad thing for Maduro, politically speaking, to share power with an oppositioncontrolled parliament. If he does not, he will continue to bear full responsibility for the country’s economic debacle. n

As refugees arrive in Finland, both sides cope with questions, fears

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

The last stop

BY STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN Siilinjarvi, Finland

Svolvaer

Kandalaksha Umba Kovda

tion,” says another, who is taping “No smoking” signs in Arabic to the walls. “I want to ask Haparanda Lulea about that.”

Oulu Border There are so many questions, and so far, all he buses are coming. No one knows crossing Namsos Umea Kokkola that the 22,000 residents of Siilinjarvi know when, how many, or exactly who will Siilinjarvi Kondopoga Joensuu Ornskoldsvik Trondheim Vaasa Ostersund Molde about who might be coming is what they’ve be in them, only that they are coming Sundsvall FINLAND NOR. SWE. Tampere seen on the news: People pouring out of Syria, — buses filled with refugees who beRUS. Vyborg Lahti Lillehammer Helsinki St. Petersburg Iraq, Afghanistan and countries in Africa. A gan their journeys thousands of miles away Turku Bergen Oslo Uppsala Tallinn and will arrive any day now at their final Haugesund Velikiy Novgorod little boy who drowned and washed up on a Stavanger Skien EST.Tartu Parnu Stockholm shore in Turkey. Seventy-one refugees suffodestination, this remote town in the piney Pskov Linkoping Kristiansand Jonkoping Goteborg cated in a smuggler’s truck in Austria. Crowds forest of eastern Finland.

Velikiye Luki LAT. LAT. Riga being tear-gassed in Hungary. A vast, ever“I want to know how long they’ve been Baltic Liepaga Daugavpils Vitsyebsk Aarhus DEN. DEN. Sea i growing line of more than 750,000 people traveling,” one town resident says, helping to t LITH. Malmo a l Vilnius B Copenhagen RUS. RUS. Kaliningrad zigzagging all across mainland Europe as far prepare an old empty hospital to house them.

Minsk Gdansk west as France — where on this October day “I was wondering if they have families,” says 0 200 Hamburg GERMANY Bremen GER. POL. MILES the Paris attacks are still a month away — and another, who is fitting gurneys with donated Amsterdam Brest The Hague Warsaw Lodz in increasing numbers heading north. sheets bearing the image of Justin Bieber.

THE WASHINGTON POST Into Germany, where a government that has “And the whole situation — the war situaKemijarvi

Arctic Circle

Rovaniemi

Tornio Kemi

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Sea

(Prime Minister's Office) (City Hall) (Government Chancellery (Government Chancellery

c

T

Kiruna

Bodo

200 miles

Kem Belomorsk

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KLMNO WEEKLY

How should a nation balance its obligations to humanity with its responsibilities to its own citizens? Is there a point at which a nation’s identity is lost? How many refugees should a nation, or a town, take in?

registered more than 500,000 refugees this year has begun to discuss limits. On to Denmark, where officials began offering free passage north into Sweden. On to Sweden, where officials in October began offering free buses all the way to the northeastern border — a one-way refugee express to the very last place it is plausible to go: Finland, beyond which is nothing except Russia and the Arctic Circle.

“This is like the final stop,” says Jaana Vuorio, director general of the Finnish Immigration Service in Helsinki. “Nobody goes to Russia. This is the end.”

Until now, only about 3,000 refugees reached Finland most years in the orderly processes established by the United Nations, the European Union and Finland itself after World War II. Finnish officials estimate that 30,000 people will arrive by the end of the year, or perhaps it will be 50,000. The number keeps changing, even as a frantic improvisation is underway to send refugees to cities and towns across the country including, soon, Siilinjarvi, whose population includes exactly two refugees, a Somali man and his wife who arrived in 1992.

“We need to have all the rooms ready,” says Eija Teerineva, whose organization has a contract with the Finnish government to prepare the hospital.

“Also we will have guards soon,” she tells the volunteers, who know that refugees have been greeted with rock-throwing protests in some

towns.

Will there be rock-throwers in Siilinjarvi?

People are wondering about that, and about everything else being debated across Europe as the continent faces its biggest influx of refugees in 50 years. How should a nation balance its obligations to humanity with its responsibilities to its own citizens? Is there a point at which a nation’s identity is lost? How many refugees should a nation, or a town like Siilinjarvi, take in? All of them? Some of them?

None?

“They will need lots of clothes,” says a volunteer at the hospital.

“Some will arrive with short pants and sandals, and it’s going to be winter this week,” says another. “Snow is coming from Lapland.”

Snow is coming, and meanwhile, thousands of miles away in places where temperatures are hovering around 100 degrees, word is spreading on social media that the place to go at this moment is Finland.

Syrians are on the way, and Afghans, too.

But more than any other group, it is Iraqis who are coming, flying to Istanbul, driving to Izmir, boarding rickety boats to Greece, blending into the long march across Europe, making their way to Sweden and the free buses to a final, barely discernible seam in the asphalt that is the border between the Swedish town of Haparanda and the Finnish town of Tornio.

As envisioned by the European Union, this was supposed to be an unguarded border

Opposite page: Newly arrived Iraqi refugees, right, attract the attention of local residents while walking in a grocery store in Siilinjarvi, Finland, in October.

Above left: Mika Korhonen and Mika Oksman show their dismay at a public forum on the influx of refugees in Siilinjarvi.

Above right: Tsega Kiflie, who works at a migrant center, issues room assignments to new arrivals.

where shoppers could move freely.

Now, though, there are bomb-sniffing dogs and black-booted border guards, one of whom is walking toward a woman from Afghanistan who has just crossed from Sweden with dozens of others on a cold Sunday morning.

“What is the name of this place?” she asks.

“Tornio,” he says pleasantly.

“Tornio,” she says, repeating the name to the man next to her, who types it into his smartphone, and now another man whispers “Tornio, Tornio” as the guards separate people into lines that move into a school transformed into a refugee registration center.

“Valkommentill Finland!” says a sign inside the gym, where on this day more than 550 refugees will be fingerprinted and asked to fill out asylum applications.

“I have family,” an Iraqi man says to a guard as he enters the school, pointing to a young man separated into a different line.

“What kind of family?” the guard asks.

“Wife? Brother?”

“Cousin,” the man says, growing more desperate.

“You will meet him later,” the guard says without elaborating that later might mean weeks, or months, because no one knows how any of this will play out. Because even as the lines are lengthening in Tornio, Finland’s president is talking about his country’s generosity and “responsibility to humanity.” And continues on next page

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from previous page

even as he is saying that, the head of Finland’s immigration service is saying, “There will be more negative decisions.”

And meanwhile, in Tornio, the Iraqi man stops looking at his cousin and says to the guard, “Okay, okay.”

Nearby, a man named Magid holds up a left hand missing two fingers. “In market — bomb,” he says.

“In the sea, so many died with us,” another Iraqi man named Wissam says as he enters the new registration center.

“Here is Finland?” someone asks.

“Here is Finland,” a guard says.

“It is very beautiful,” says an 18-year-old from Baghdad.

“Very nice,” says an Iraqi woman from Anbar province.

“I thank God, but we wait about the rest,” says another young man from Baghdad holding a battered suitcase. He looks around.

Cars pass, but the drivers keep their eyes focused straight ahead. A man on a bike stops and watches the long line of people crossing the road.

In a few days, they will all get into buses and leave Tornio, and because everything is so uncertain, no one will know where they are going — not even the driver — until an official radios the destination miles into the journey.

After that, some will keep heading east. The highway will become a two-lane. The two-lane will at times become gravel. Soon, the landscape will become forests of birch trees and skinny pines, a long curtain of green, and six hours after leaving Tornio they will arrive at a faint cluster of lights that is Siilinjarvi, a town of winding roads and neat brick homes where, at the moment, it is late afternoon.

At the old hospital on the hill, a volunteer has finished painting over graffiti someone sprayed in the driveway the night before: “Refugees Out.” Just down the little hill, someone has removed a swastika flag draped on an overpass, and a bit further, people are filing into town hall for a hastily called meeting.

“Conversation About Asylum Seekers, 5:30 p.m.,” reads the sign in the lobby of the plain brick building, where employees usually handle health care, day care and the schedules of the local moose-hunting and accordion clubs.

Now a volunteer is handing out fliers that read “What is a Refugee?” A room with blond wood tables is filling up with retirees, young couples, students and a few men with buzz cuts and tattoos on folded arms.

“Everything has proceeded very quickly,” the mayor begins, and some people groan and shift in their chairs. The police chief reminds people that racist speech or acts will be prosecuted.

“Keep yourself calm and don’t panic,” he says, and an elderly man raises his hand.

“Why are we the last to hear?” he says, and some people clap.

“Who will pay for their education?” someone asks, and there is more clapping.

“Why is it only young men who are coming, very strong young men?” one man asks.

“Are they real refugees?”

“Why is it only young men who are coming, very strong young men?” another man asks.

“Are they real refugees? Also, with young women, there are some issues with rape.”

Soon the only dark-skinned person in the room stands up, an Ethiopian Finn named Tsega Kiflie, who works at a refugee center in another town.

“You can see I have a lot of suntan here,” he begins in Finnish, laughing nervously. “I understand this issue interests you a lot. The fear is realistic. I also have two boys, and I understand. But as the police say, we have to testify to our values.”

When the meeting ends, a couple named Jari Karjalainen and Riitta Vaananen drive home, where the view through their front window is the hospital on the hill, dark now except a few lights on the fifth floor where volunteers are working late.

They sit at their kitchen table and talk about what it will be like when the hospital is full.

“All males, no females — no hope,” says Karjalainen, shaking his head. “Waiting day after day with nothing to do — it’s bad energy.”

“The situation with women in their culture is so different,” says Vaananen, referring to Muslim societies. “Anna was talking about it — Anna!” she calls to her daughter, and in comes tall, blond Anna.

“Yes, I’m concerned about men trying to rape young women,” the teenager says.

They worry about that. They worry about whether there might be terrorists among the

Migrants use a sauna inside a reception center as a smoking room.

Abbas Rubaee, 32, was an Iraqi police officer until the political climate became too dangerous.

He eventually made his way to Finland, where he hopes to bring his wife and two children.

refugees, and how it is almost taboo in Finland to express concern about how any of this might change the country for the worse.

“They say you’re a racist or a Nazi,” Karjalainen says.

Next door, Liisa and Markku Laakkonen are having their own conversation.

“I trust those refugees coming, but I don’t trust our own people,” Markku says.

“They are afraid of something they don’t know,” Liisa says.

“We are thinking in a cosmopolitan way,” Markku says.

“We have to be international,” Liisa says.

“Not like an island — we can’t be here in this small little island of Finland.”

This is not the first time refugees have come to Finland, but the post-World War II history is short. A few Chileans in the 1970s. Around 3,000 Vietnamese in the 1980s — people selected from refugee camps and settled in towns that chose how many they would accept. One town, for instance, took five.

Then in the early 1990s came an unplanned influx of some 4,000 Somalis fleeing civil war, many of whom came via Moscow, which had a Cold War policy of issuing visas to Somalis.

Their arrival coincided with a recession and gave rise to gangs of skinheads and the anti-immigration Finns party, an episode that came to be known as “Somali shock.”

Among the 4,000 was Bashir Hassan, who was sent to Siilinjarvi.

He remembers getting used to his ears always feeling frozen. He remembers his first Finnish word, terve, which means “healthy.” It was difficult getting used to how reserved Finns can be, but he felt welcome. After five years, he became a Finnish citizen.

“I learned how to live here,” says Hassan, a metal worker with two sons in the Finnish military. “I think the Finnish people are honest and good people.”

That is how things can go for one refugee.

But now tens of thousands are coming, and once again as Finland is struggling to pull out of a recession.

“How many will stay this time?” asks Siilinjarvi’s mayor, Vesa Lotjonen, who is worried about how the town will afford the influx. “By Finnish law, we are obliged to give municipal services, day care, school, education, health care.”

And they will, he says, because Finland is part of the European Union and “there are agreements. We must take responsibility for those that come to us.”

But how? Claiming to stand for Finnish values, the Finnish prime minister offered his vacation home to refugees. Claiming to stand for Finnish values, a Finns party parliamentarian wrote of the “nightmare called multiculturalism,” vowing to “fight ’til the end for One True Finnish nation.”

In Helsinki, there have been pro-refugee demonstrations; in the southern town of Lahti, people met a refugee bus with torches and rocks. One man dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

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COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Word has spread that Finland has a high rate of approving asylum In Siilinjarvi, word is spreading that not was born just before he left three weeks ago. requests; the journey there takes migrants nearly as far as the Arctic Circle. only are the refugees arriving soon but also He hangs up and looks around his room.

Kiruna Umba Kovda that a second refugee center is being set up — White walls. Sheets with the huge pouting face Bodo Kemijarvi ICELAND Rovaniemi Arctic Circle Ar Tornio Mo i Rana this one at a Lutheran camp 30 miles into the of Justin Bieber. A large window, where he can Kem Schengen area: ctic Ci D Kemi ETAIL HaparandaLulea Belomorsk rcle Oulu Passports not required woods by a lake. see a blue sky with pearly clouds, the yellowing 0 200 to cross common borders.

Namsos So there is a second hastily called meeting, leaves of birch trees and the edge of a lake.

MILES FINLAND Umea Kokkola NORWAY SWEDEN Siilinjarvi Thorshavn Joensuu Ornskoldsvik Trondheim Vaasa MONGOLIWhat is this place? He wonders about that, Ostersund this one at a chapel at the camp, where a Molde U.K. RUSSIA NOR. SWE. Sundsvall FINLAND volunteer hands out laminated lawn signs that and about the people who live in it, and DEN. Tampere RUS. Vyborg Lahti Lillehammer read, in Arabic, “Access is strictly prohibited!” whether anyone will ask about how he came to Lerwick Helsinki St. Petersburg RUSSIA Turku BergenOslo GER. Inside, a minister begins. be here. How he was a lieutenant in the Iraqi N Uppsala GERMANYPOLAND Tallinn Velikiy Novgorod E Wick BELARUS Haugesund G Stavanger Skien EST.Tartu “It is deep in our values that we always want police and a Shiite — Will anyone know what a KAZAKHSTAN N Parnu Stockholm Pskov FRANCEE Linkoping A Kristiansand H E to side with people who are in trouble,” he says, Shiite is? How, in Baghdad, he was under UKRAINE UKRAINE Jonkoping Goteborg R C Velikiye Luki Finland expects as many as LAT. Riga A Edinburgh Glasgow S and now a man with a beard raises his hand. pressure to join the Shiite militias fighting the SPAIN Liepaga Baltic Daugavpils ROMANIA 50,000 migrants this year; the RUSSIA Belfast Aarhus DEN. Sea UZBEKISTAN “What kind of people are expected? Lone Islamic State. Will anyone know what that ITALY typicalMalmo yearly average is around Vilnius Copenhagen RUS. single men or families?” he asks. means?

Kaliningrad Liverpool Minsk 3,000. Some TURKMENISTAN are bound for Gdansk “Are they Sunni or Shiite?” another man “It means you must kill Sunnis, you must Hamburg Siilinjarvi, population 22,000.

Birmingham TURKEY Bremen TURKEY GERMANY asks. kill Shiites, you must take their homes, you Cardiff AFGHANISTAN GREECE Amsterdam Brest Hague Warsaw Rotterdam London The Lodz AFGH.PAKISTAN “A question for the police,” the bearded man take their cars. And if you don’t, they say you SYRIA IRAN Cologne Brussels Dresden IRAN SYRIA says, asking if other towns have had problems are a traitor, and they kill you,” he says.

IRAQ Le Havre MAURITANIA ALGERIA Lvov Note: generalized IRAQ Prague PAK. Krakow Frankfurt Luxembourg with refugees. “An honest answer, please.”

Maybe he will tell people how he fought migrant routes shown Nurnberg Paris Rennes Stuttgart Strasbourg LIBYA “There have been some arguments, but we during the war, in Najaf and Sadr City, and Bratislava Munich Vienna LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST should not exaggerate,” the police chief says. trained with U.S. forces. Or that he has buried The bearded man raises his hand again. “I seven members of his family so far, most have a question about rapes. . . . Who is recently a cousin killed in a bomb blast. Maybe responsible if something like that happens? I he will tell them that actually, they only buried want names of the responsible people,” he his cousin’s head, legs and one hand, which says, raising his voice. “We have children, and was all they could find afterward. they walk to school and back every day. If Probably someone will ask, “Why Finland?” something happens to them . . . ” He will tell them what he heard on Facebook — “Calm down,” the police chief says. that Finland is “generous” to Iraqis, and that “No — I won’t calm down,” the man says, his when he saw the TV images of refugees face getting red. flooding into Europe, he thought the time to “Is security going to be here all the time?” leave is now. another man asks.

He may try to convey how it felt stepping “Yes,” the priest says wearily as people fan into a smuggler’s boat in Turkey — how wobbly themselves with laminated signs, and the “God help us,” he says. it was under his foot, how powerless he felt. He bearded man stares straight ahead at a cross, Another man steps out and puts on a jean held hands with other passengers and whishis arms folded. jacket. pered to children not to be afraid, although “in “I’ve lived in Iran,” a man begins. “We were “Where am I from?” he says, practicing his my heart, I thought we would die.” warned that we should not walk alone.”

English. “Iraq.”

He might tell them how he made it all the “I used to live in East Savonia,” another “Are we in the middle of nowhere?” someway across Europe, walking, standing on woman says. “There was a black man walking one asks. trains, sitting in buses, all the way to Tornio, in the road. I bumped into him. It was dark, “Are we going to stay here?” says a man where he says some police officers laughed at and I couldn’t see him. They should wear holding a plastic yellow bag and a backpack. him and said, “‘You will be here for 21 days and reflective vests.”

“I need a doctor,” an elderly man says. then back to Iraq.’”

Somali refugee “In Sweden, there are gangs.”

“Salaam aleikum,” a man says to the translaBut now he is here, 6,000 miles from Bashir Hassan “In Iran, people drive on the left.” tor, who pats the man’s back and ushers the Baghdad. He rubs his face. trains to become An elderly woman raises her hand. line inside — “Keep going, keep going,” he says He walks into the hallways of the hospital, a welder at the “They will be more than us,” she says. “We — up five flights of stairs and into what had and the floors feel thick and solid under his Savo Consortium will be a minority here.” been a hospital waiting room, where they sit feet. The volunteers are kind, but now he for Education in Now the priest looks around the room. on leather couches and chairs, lean against needs to find out how the rest of Siilinjarvi will Toivala, Finland.

“Are there any more questions?” he asks. “If walls and sit on the floor. Kiflie looks at them treat him. Will they throw rocks? Will they Hassan fled to you have them, you can answer in your own in the bright fluorescent light. smile? Will they be afraid? Will he?

Finland in 1992 minds — do unto others as you would have Eyes are bloodshot. A man’s bare heels are “I must go out into the street,” Rubaee says. and ultimately them do unto you.” jutting out of a pair of too-small tennis shoes.

So he and his friends go, out the front doors decided to settle The next morning, an official from Tornio Another rubs his knee and groans. and into the cold and bright day. his family in the calls the hospital.

“I have seen from TV that you’ve been alone, Rubaee pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt. small community A bus is coming tonight, just one for now, 49 that you’ve traveled far and across difficult He looks at the statue in front of the hospital, a of Siilinjarvi. people total, 39 from Iraq, six from Afghaniroads,” Kiflie says before starting to assign barefooted boy playing the flute. He looks up stan, two from Syria, one from Morocco, one rooms. “Now you are safe.” at the Finnish flag. He looks across the street from an Algeria, no women, no children, all Now it is morning. Abbas Rubaee, 32, wakes at the row of apartments. He heads left, down men. up at 10 a.m., reaches for his phone and calls the little hill.

It is after 1 a.m. when the headlights of the his wife in Baghdad. Siilinjarvi, he tells her, A car passes, and the driver glances at him. bus appear at the bottom of the hill. The night trying to pronounce it. A hospital, he says. She Rubaee glances back. is clear and freezing, and Kiflie, the Ethiopian says her son wants to talk.

He keeps walking down the hill toward Finn, and two Arabic translators hurry outside “I miss you, my father,” the 7-year-old says. town. He starts walking faster, and faster, and the hospital as the bus comes to a stop.

“Just be patient — you will come here soon,” because he is elated, and scared, and safe, and The door opens, and a man with a backpack Rubaee tells him, even though he has no idea sad, and exhausted, he starts running. And walks out. He looks around. when he might see him or his daughter, who now he is running as fast as he can. n HReykjavik

Faroe Is. (Denmark)

Shetland Is.

Hebrides

Orkney Is.

HOslo

HHelsinki

HStockholm

IRELAND

HTallinn

ESTONIA

HDublin

DENMARK

LATVIA

HCopenhagen

HRiga

LITHUANIA

NETH.

HLondon

HAmsterdam

Kanliningrad (Russia)

HBrussels

HMoscow

HAstana

HMinsk

LUX.

HParis

HVilnius

HBerlin

BELGIUM

HWarsaw

HLuxembourg

(Prime Minister's Office) (City Hall) (Government Chancellery (Government Chancellery

HPrague

CZECH REP.

SWITZ. H Bern

HVaduz

AUSTRIA

HKiev

SLOVAKIA

HVienna HBratislava

HBishkek

HBudapest

PORTUGAL

HUNGARY

HLjubljana

SLOVENIA HZagreb

ANDORRA HAndorra la Vella

HLisbon

HMadrid

KYRGYZSTAN

MOLDOVA

CROATIA

HMonaco

HChisinau

HSan Marino

HTashkent

BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA

Corsica

HBelgrade

HSarajevo

Balearic Islands

SERBIA

HRome

HBucharest

TAJIKISTAN

Pristina

CROATIA

MONTENEGRO

HPodgorica

Sardinia

HDushanbe

BULGARIA

HSofia

HSkopje

HRabat

HTirana

MACEDONIA

GEORGIA

ALBANIA

HAlgiers

MOROCCO

Sicily

HTunis

HTbilisi

ARMENIA

GREECE

HYerevan

HBaku

AZERBAIJAN

HIslamabad

HAshgabat

HKabul

HAnkara

Euboea

TUNISIA

HAthens

MALTA HValletta

HTehran

200 miles

Rhodes

HTripoli

Crete

NORTHERN CYPRUS HNicosia

CYPRUS

LEBANON HBeirut

HDamascus

HBaghdad

ISRAEL

JerusalemH

HCairo

HAmman

JORDAN

HKuwait

KUWAIT

Now he needs to find out how the rest of Siilinjarvi will treat him. Will they throw rocks? Will they smile? Will they be afraid?

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

TECHNOLOGY

That’s just how this student rolls D ONNA S T. G EORGE New York BY

T

he robot has a little girl’s face, her soft voice. It comes to life on weekday mornings at Peyton Walton’s elementary school in Maryland, attending her classes as she works the controls from her room near a hospital here.

Peyton is 10, thin and blue-eyed, a girl who loves penguins and the color green and clothes that sparkle. She goes to school 250 miles south of the radiation therapy she is receiving for a rare type of cancer.

In the past three weeks, it’s the robot — fondly nicknamed PAVS, for Peyton’s Awesome Virtual Self — that connects her to the lessons she can’t physically attend. She joins in the day’s activities, talks to teachers and navigates her classroom, her face showing in real time on a raised iPad screen on the fourfoot, 15-pound rolling machine.

“I really like math and science, so I just like being there and learning what they have to teach me,” the fifth-grader said.

For Peyton, the two-way robot system gives her a greater sense of normalcy, a stronger connection to friends, more focus on the familiar rhythms of childhood that preceded her whirl of medical treatments.

The experience is being studied by officials in Montgomery County, where the technology has become a pilot program.

“We really are just beginning, and we are learning a lot,” said Kara Trenkamp, the district’s director of technology integration and school support. “The initial start has been very positive.”

The school-based robot appears to be a first in Maryland public schools, according to state officials, and it has sparked other interest, too. Educators in neighboring Fairfax County, Va., recently dropped by to take a look — and they liked what they saw.

At her school, students and staff have embraced Peyton’s robot, which resembles a small Segway, with a rolling base and an iPad at the top.

“It’s really cool,” said fifthgrader Tilly Gaughan. “She’d prob-

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Robot keeps fifth-grader connected to friends and lessons while she receives cancer treatment ably get a little bored in the hospital and get a little sad not seeing her friends.”

Some of her friends waved at Peyton when they saw PAVS one recent day. She gave a wave back from New York. Her mother said the robot’s importance goes beyond instruction; it’s also her daughter’s primary way of socializing, penetrating the isolation that comes with serious illnesses.

“It makes all the difference,” said her mother, Lynn Schaeber, who pressed on all fronts to get the device for Peyton, doing research, writing letters and meeting with educators.

Schaeber said the technology enables Peyton to keep up, preventing gaps in her learning. But more important is the sense of normalcy that comes from being able to do “the one thing that kids do — go to school,” she said. “We forget as parents that school is

their life. They wake up preparing to go to school, and the last thing they do at night is homework.”

Peyton’s doctors in Washington and New York say that her experience is the first they’ve seen with robot technology.

“I think it’s a really exciting technology that could potentially benefit lots of kids,” said AeRang Kim, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s National Health System.

Double Robotics, which made Peyton’s device, has sold about 5,000 such “telepresence robots” since 2012, mostly for use in the business world, said Sara Broyles, a company spokeswoman. About 350 K-12 schools in the United States have bought such robots from the company, she said.

On Long Island, a robot stood in for a ninth-grader last year after the teen had emergency surgery and was about to miss an important week of classes. The robot,

Peyton Walton, 10, seen on an iPad screen, uses a twoway system to attend her Poolesville, Md., school while receiving treatment in New York.

borrowed from his mother’s employer, took his place, connecting him from home, said Roberta Tropper, principal at Long Island School for the Gifted.

“It was easier than anybody anticipated,” she said. “It was almost seamless. The first day it was a real novelty for the children here. But after that, everyone just adapted to it.”

Satyandra K. Gupta, director of the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland, said that although the industry is growing, it might take time before telepresence robots become common in schools. It’s not just an issue of acquiring the technology — Peyton’s tech costs about $3,000 — but also raises questions about logistics and privacy, he said.

“If you’re going to have a robot walk the hallways, it could create challenges,” Gupta said.

The robot provides video conferencing, so a student can see and hear a teacher’s lesson, much like Skype or Google Hangouts. But it also allows a student to be a part of class, zooming in on a presentation, moving to a small group discussion or turning to hear better as a teacher walks around the room.

In New York, Peyton is staying at the Ronald McDonald House on the Upper East Side. She and her mother share a room with big windows that overlook the rush and wonder of the city.

In social studies one day, where the class is studying the Constitution and the government, Peyton tells her teacher that she’s ready to take her turn at reciting the preamble to the Constitution.

She steers her robot toward teacher Sharon Zgoda’s desk. “Ms. Z,” as everyone calls her, is a cancer survivor and has made a point of taking Peyton under her wing.

Peyton looks into her iPad at the teacher and begins.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . . .”

She does not forget or fumble.

The teacher gives her a top grade — then fist-bumps the computer screen.

Peyton fist-bumps back. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

17

PHILANTHROPY BY

J EFF G UO

I

n 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they would commit 95 percent of their wealth to charitable work. Together with Warren Buffett, they also created the Giving Pledge, which asks the richest people in the world to devote half or more of their fortunes to philanthropy.

One of the earliest people to sign the pledge? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. So it was not a complete surprise when Zuckerberg and Chan announced on Tuesday their plan to set aside 99 percent of their Facebook shares — “about $45 billion” — for philanthropic efforts.

The news is this: Taking a page from the Gates family, they will use the money to pump up their venture, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The private foundation is an especially American style of charitable giving. Nonprofit groups in the United States play a disproportionately large role in public life, in part because American tax laws make it attractive for the rich to donate. Much of their wealth could otherwise be captured by capital gains and estate taxes.

Private spending on social welfare in the United States is four times the average in advanced economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The wealthiest countries, like France and Germany, are far more likely to use government resources to promote social good, and far less likely to use private resources.

This gap in national philosophies helps explain why the Giving Pledge has been popular with American billionaires, yet not quite as popular abroad. German shipping magnate Peter Krämer is one of the most vocal detractors of the pledge, and the American tradition of government-sponsored charity.

Above right is an excerpt from a 2010 interview with the German paper Der Spiegel, which asked him for his reaction to the plan.

Compared to the richest nations, the United States ranks near the bottom in terms of public spending on social support, according to the OECD. But that’s because a large chunk of the work is carried out by nonprofit organizations, or otherwise subsidized by the government through tax breaks.

On average in well-off countries, private social spending accounts

The risk from big pledges

COURTESY OF MARK ZUCKERBERG VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Krämer: I find the U.S. initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.

Spiegel: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

Spiegel: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end. the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal. for 2.6 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, private social spending is 11 percent.

Americans are some of the most charitable people in the world in part because there is a centuriesold tradition of private nonprofit groups helping people in lieu of the government.

Even Alexis de Tocqueville observed the trend in the 1830s, writing: “In every case, at the head of any new undertaking where in France you would find the government, or in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association.”

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the U.S. system of taxsubsidized charity, of course. As de Tocqueville argued, promoting charity has the benefit of improving social cohesion. He wrote that when the government taxes and gives to the poor, people feel slighted. When people voluntarily give to the poor, they feel better about themselves.

The critique is that this system affords too much power to the rich, whose decisions may not align with what’s best for society. This is not to say that the government is a paragon of efficacy either, but it risks a lot to depend on a handful of mega-

billionaires to be prudent, effective philanthropists.

The U.S. tax code “ends up subsidizing the gifts of high-income taxpayers the most, lower-income renters the least, and middle-class homeowners in the middle,” Duke University’s Charles T. Clotfelter has written. “One of the most significant consequences of this tax treatment of charitable giving is to give tothewealthiesttaxpayersadisproportionate role in allocating public resources and influencing the direction that institutions will take.”

In his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty proposed a wealth tax as one way to address rising inequality — and transfer wealth from individuals to the state. In the United States, estate and gift taxes achieve some of that function by prodding people to donate their wealth instead of bequeathing it to their children. (Economists like Piketty tend to regard those measures as too modest.)

The debate is whether the money is better off in the hands of the government or in service to private nonprofits. There’s no denying the good intentions of the billionaire philanthropists, but it can be hard to know whether the decisions they make about how to use their money ultimately serve society in the best ways.

Gates has already given away more than $30 billion, and Buffett has parted with $22 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock.

What genre of philanthropy will Chan and Zuckerberg invest in? Possibly anything. Their letter Tuesday set two missions, both ambitiously vague: “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality.” They mention curing diseases, improving clean energy, promoting entrepreneurship, fighting poverty and hunger, empowering women and minorities, and so on.

The pair do not have a sterling track record when it comes to effective charity. One of their previous efforts, a high-profile $100 million donation to fix the schools in Newark, N.J., has been widely criticized as a failure.

Chan and Zuckerberg write in their announcement that they have learned from their past experiences with philanthropy. For now, they will start with their own community in San Francisco, focusing on education, health and “connecting people.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Social expenditures As a percentage of gross domestic product: France, public 31% France, private 3.6 l Germany, public 25.5 l Germany, private 3.2 l UK, public 22.7 l UK, private 6.2 l OECD, public 21.5 l OECD, private 2.7 l U.S., public 19 10.9 l U.S., private l l

Source: OECD

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Troubled love a≠air with Castro N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C ARLOS L OZADA

O FIGHTING OVER FIDEL The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution

By Rafael Rojas.

Princeton.

312 pp. $35.

ne of the sharpest divides between political and intellectual life is that changing one’s mind is unforgivable in the former and inevitable in the latter. For politicians, consistency is prized; switching positions elicits the dread flip-flopping charge. Among intellectuals, by contrast, dalliances with competing ideologies over the years are an almost required rite before settling on a worldview — ideally one stronger for the journey — that underpins subsequent inquiry.

Historian Rafael Rojas has written an oddly captivating account of the Cuban revolution as a moment when these two worlds clashed, when a political revolt in one nation upended intellectual forces in another. Rather than focus on Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, John F. Kennedy or the other usual suspects of this Cold War era, Rojas tells the story of the left-wing academics, beat poets, Black Panthers and radical journalists in the United States, particularly in New York, who initially embraced Cuba’s transformations only to splinter over Castro’s repression of individual freedoms and the island’s move toward the Soviet orbit. “The complex relation between the New York left and Cuban socialism,” Rojas writes, “oscillated between a sense of the promise Cuba represented for leftist libertarianism and the sense of disenchantment that resulted from Havana’s alignment with Moscow.”

The initial optimism emerged from Castro’s early promises.

When the New York Times interviewed him in 1957, in a dispatch from the Sierra Maestra mountains

by Herbert L. Matthews, the young revolutionary declared that he held no animosity toward the United States, that his struggle was against dictatorship in his own country. In 1959, during his first U.S. trip, he pledged that elections would come quickly to Cuba, as soon as the revolution’s social transformations to end poverty and improve health and education were underway.

At the time, American leftists

FIDEL CASTRO IN 2010; ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

were inclined to regard the revolution less as a Cold War battleground than as an upstart victory in the global conflict between rich capitalist nations — especially that great imperialist to the north — and colonial or post-colonial countries. So strong was this perspective that in his book “Listen, Yankee,” Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills (popularizer of the term “new left”) wrote that “the Cuban Government, as of mid-1960, is not ‘communist’ in any of the senses legitimately given to this Word. . . . The leading men of Cuba’s Government are not ‘Communist,’ or even Communisttype.” By the third printing of the book, Castro had pronounced the socialist character of the revolution and — after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 — had lauded the scientific prowess of the Soviet Union, his soon-to-be patron.

Condemnation would arrive, though with caveats. In the leftwing journal Dissent, Daniel M. Friedenberg wrote critically of the Castro regime’s “xenophobia, hate campaigns, the retreat into phantasy fears, the dependence on communist support, the swollen Army,

the rigid control of radio and press.”

But he concluded that such “frightening symptoms of dictatorship” were responses to the colonialist, interventionist mind-set of U.S. foreign policy. The prime mover, the true culprit, was still outside the island; Castro remained absolved.

The beat poets, exemplified by Allen Ginsberg, were less forgiving. Initially impressed by Castro’s meeting with Malcolm X in Harlem in 1960, Ginsberg would soon portray him “as one more Latin American caudillo,” Rojas writes.

In his “Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution,” published in 1961, the poet decries the mechanisms of social control that he saw in laws and codes against drug use and homosexuality, in communist as well as capitalist systems.

Rojas is most energized when discussing the multiple views of the Cuban revolution among African American civil rights activists and leaders of the Black Panther Party in particular, perhaps because their opinions were varied and less easily categorized. Party co-founder Huey P. Newton “advocated subordinating the black cause to a larger socialist cause,”

Rojas writes, and admired the mix of nationalism and socialism that he saw in Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba. Others such as Stokely Carmichael, however, rejected any prospect of Cold War alliances with the Soviets or did not necessarily link racial emancipation in America to a socialist project, Rojas explains.

Cuban revolutionary intellectuals, for their part, admired America’s militant black civil rights leaders, even devoting a full issue of Pensamiento Critico, a journal edited by Cuban philosophers and Marxists, to the Black Power movement in 1968, interviewing Carmichael, Newton and others.

A warning: If you’re wondering how the evolution of left-wing thought in New York affected the Cuban government or U.S. policy toward the island — indeed, affected anything beyond itself — don’t look here. Rojas admits early on that “New York’s critical debates on the Cuban Revolution naturally had few effects” on Washington’s approach to Cuba. “Fighting Over Fidel” is intellectual history entirely for its own sake, and as such, it succeeds. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A dog wins hearts as unusual hero

An antic history of a subversive genre

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

R

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

obert Crais has long been one of the finest American crime writers, but he has won new praise and new fans with a surprising new character: a fearless 85-pound German shepherd. Maggie is a K-9 dog with the Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad and has bonded deeply with K-9 Officer Scott James.Both are combat veterans of Afghanistan, and each would kill — or die — for the other.

They were introduced in Crais’s 2013 novel “Suspect,” and together they help make his new novel, “The Promise,” one of the most entertaining thrillers of the year.

Scott and Maggie are only part of the story, of course. As with most of Crais’s novels — “The Promise” is his 20th — his star is wisecracking private eye Elvis Cole. As the book begins, Cole is hired to find Amy Breslyn, whose son was killed by a terrorist’s bomb in Nigeria. Half-mad with grief, Amy has reached out to Los Angeles gangsters who say they will put her in contact with terrorists who can answer questions about her son’s death. Because she’s an expert on explosives, she can promise the terrorists weapons they urgently want in exchange for their information.

Cole’s search for Amy leads him to a cache of explosives. That brings Scott James and Maggie into the story, because of Maggie’s bomb-sniffing skills. The troubleprone Cole is soon at odds with the LAPD and the Department of Homeland Security. When a DHS official shows Cole his photo ID, the detective quips, “Nice picture.

Makes you look tough.”

Scott and Maggie are soon threatened by a killer whose golden rule is “Never leave a witness.”

Scott and Maggie, alas, were witnesses who saw him leave a murder scene. The man’s effort to poison Maggie leads to one of the book’s most moving moments, when Scott says, in rage and disbelief, “He tried to kill my dog.” As far as Scott is concerned, this is

enough to justify revenge.

“The Promise” is filled with suspense, surprises and ably-drawn characters, but its most fascinating moments involve Maggie. We learn that she was wounded in Afghanistan, suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder and dreams of her first handler, a Marine who was killed there, after which she came home and partnered with Scott. Maggie has been conditioned to protect a human partner, and the novel shows how law enforcement makes excellent use of her loyalty and skill.

There is, for example, her remarkable sense of smell: “With more than two hundred million scent receptors in her long shepherd’s nose, and almost a fourth of her brain devoted to her sense of smell, Maggie could recognize scents so faint they were measured in parts per trillion.” Moreover, the dog can hear “thousands of sounds as invisible to Scott as the scents he could not smell.”

She is thus poised for action when she senses danger to Scott: “The fur on her back and shoulders bristled like wire, and her nails raked the asphalt like claws.

A danger she couldn’t see or hear or smell was coming, but a fire passed down from a hundred thousand past generations prepared her. Maggie knew what she needed to know.

“Hunt.

“Attack.

“Pull the threat down with her fangs, and destroy it.

“Maggie didn’t need to know anything else.

“Nothing else mattered.”

Maggie is both a superhero and a wonderful character. The Mystery Writers of America last year honored Crais with its Grand Master Award, putting him in the company of such greats as James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton and Stephen King. “The Promise” shows once again why he belongs there. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

I THE PROMISE

By Robert Crais Putnam. 402 pp. $27.95

THE COMEDIANS Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy

By Kliph Nesteroff Grove. 425 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL S IMS

n 1962, after eating Thanksgiving dinner together, Richard Nixon and Jack Paar lit cigars. Paar put on the stereo a new record co-written by George Foster and one of his former writers, Earle Doud. A satire of the Kennedy family and administration, starring the comedian and pianist Vaughn Meader, it was called “The First Family” and within a few months would become the best-selling album in any category in history up to that time.

Paar and his other friends laughed, but Nixon walked over to the stereo and lifted the needle.

“That man is the president of our country,” he complained. “Neither he nor his family should be the butt of such jokes.”

“The Comedians,” Kliph Nesteroff ’s antic history of U.S. comedy, overflows with such anecdotes. You will learn who paid for Lenny Bruce’s funeral and what was thrown into his grave (a microphone), how the young Buster Keaton’s father flung him around onstage without hurting him (except for that time he knocked him unconscious), and how hard network wonks fought to make David Letterman get dental surgery to fix his gapped teeth.

Like the Phantom of the Opera, Nixon prowls the sewers underneath “The Comedians.” Once while Tom Smothers was producing a low-budget satirical film about Nixon, starring impressionist Rich Little, Smothers returned home from an editing session to find his furniture upended. During the Watergate hearings, comedian David Steinberg recognized members of the Nixon administration on TV who had interrogated him while claiming to be FBI agents. When Woody Allen created a half-hour satire of Henry Kissinger for PBS in 1971, the Nixon administration, already antagonistic toward public television, made it clear that broadcasting the program “would result in funding cuts.”

Nesteroff is a former stand-up comic, as well as a programmer at the Cinefamily, a nonprofit theater in West Hollywood, where he has hosted events with Mel Brooks and other comedy legends. He is also moderator of Classic Television Showbiz. He writes with insider perception but never seems to be either white-washing or trashing any of this outrageous cast.

Like a biblical epic, “The Comedians” seems to have a cast of thousands. One act barely somersaults offstage before Nesteroff leads on the next. The anecdotes are memorable and often hilarious. When the Three Stooges found success without their unstable manager, Ted Healy, a former blackface vaudevillian, “Healy filed a lawsuit that laid claim to all poking, slapping and nyuk nyuk nyuking.”

Comedians famously don’t get no respect. (Yes, Rodney Dangerfield is here, too.) “Sunday Nite — Amateur Nite,” ran an advertisement by impresario Billy Rose: “Come and throw vegetables at actors!” Antagonistic audiences pummeled the early Marx Brothers with, as Harpo recalled, “sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane.”

It’s a long and winding road from those vaudeville spitballs to Eddie Murphy’s reign over the 1980s and the debut of “The Daily Show” in the new millennium, but Nesteroff takes us the whole way. With his encyclopedic knowledge, a talent for vivid anecdotes and tireless gusto, he drives this busload of rowdy clowns into the 21st century. By the end, he provides a telling montage of how snarky TV hosts responded to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Altogether, “The Comedians” is an insightful overview of the most independent and subversive entertainment genre of the last century. n Sims’s most recent book is “The Adventures of Henry Thoreau.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

After my husband died, Facebook was my lifeline KRISTINA DOAN GRUENBERG is a civil litigation attorney living in Orange County, Calif.

“You’re not going to post this on Facebook, are you?”

My husband, Alex, always wanted to know if I was posting a picture or status update about him. As extroverted as he was, he was private about many things. He also was humble, so he didn’t want too much attention drawn to his birthday or most recent job promotion.

Despite our political differences — I’m a Democrat; he was a Republican turned “independent” — we hardly argued about anything. But we often debated the usefulness of social media. He didn’t think it was important what casual acquaintances thought or were doing, while I love seeing everyone’s pictures and reconnecting with old friends.

But when Alex passed away in March after a massive brain aneurysm at age 30, I couldn’t worry so much about what he might think of what I was posting on Facebook. Very abruptly, I’d lost my best friend and partner of 10 years. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t imagine what my future might look like.

It was terrifying and surreal, and Facebook became my lifeline to the outside world — one that I could turn on or off at any time depending on my roller coaster of emotions. As much as I appreciated the family members and friends who immediately came to my side, sometimes I just wanted to be alone and scroll through pictures and like the memories people were posting. I could hear Alex’s voice telling me to get off my phone, that I was ruining my eyes. But as I laid alone in the king-size bed he made us order for our new home, I remember thinking, “Sorry, Alex. You haven’t given me many choices.”

The first time I posted about Alex after he died, I couldn’t find any words that felt right. So I reposted a candid picture of us from a friend’s wedding that needed no caption: We were standing in a crowded church, Alex was holding my arm, we were smiling.

Two weeks later, friends and family gathered for Alex’s memorial service at UCLA, where Alex had worked and where we met as undergraduate students.

I didn’t make a speech at Alex’s memorial, but I did feel ready to write something about him on Facebook. I must have rewritten it in my head at least a dozen times: I thanked Alex for being my best friend, personal comedian, travel companion and loving husband.

Hitting “post” made it feel real that Alex was gone, much like the memorial service itself. It also helped me feel more comfortable about opening up.

The love and support from family members, friends and coworkers was beyond what I could have imagined. In addition to visits, phone calls and texts, I received messages and wall posts from people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. I reconnected with a high school classmate who lost her husband about the same time, a college roommate whose father was killed in a tragic accident, and an acquaintance whose fiancé died while trying to save someone else.

I went from feeling like no one could possibly understand what I was going through as a young widow, to realizing that I knew

THE GRUENBERGS AT THEIR 2011 WEDDING; LIN AND JIRSA PHOTOGRAPHY

people who were going through the same thing.

Although returning to work helped me regain normalcy, waves of grief hit me periodically.

They could be spurred by a song, or nothing at all.

Once, I came undone after receiving a letter from UCLA congratulating Alex for making it into a doctoral program for education. I was proud of Alex’s accomplishment, and simultaneously angry that his dream and our future had been taken away.

And although I could share it on Facebook (which I did), I needed more than neatly composed and edited status updates, which didn’t reflect the range of my emotions. I was not going to post a selfie, for instance, of me crying in my car.

So I picked up the phone, something I hated doing, and called some of the young widows who were friends of friends. I also found a bereavement group at my church.

Another source of support came via social media when Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, posted about losing her husband, Dave. Her post about the first 30 days after his death ended with a vow that she would do everything she could to “kick the s--- out of option B.” I loved the raw emotion in that post, including the fact that she swore.

In my own effort to kick the s--out of Option B, I went on a spontaneous trip to Colombia with a friend. Alex had traveled

there, and I wanted to visit places he had told me about. When I came back, people commented about how happy I looked in the pictures and how proud they were of me.

I try to be less self-conscious about what I post on Facebook or Instagram, as Alex was with everything in life, but it’s not easy.

Sometimes I worry that people will think I moved on too fast or that I am not grieving enough.

On the other hand, I worry that if I post too much about Alex, it will make people feel uncomfortable. So I try to get others involved in the remembrances. For instance, I made Alex’s birthday “Live Like Alex Day” on Facebook and challenged people to do something Alex would do. I was overwhelmed with joy when people told me they reconnected with old friends, helped a dog find its owner, or wore their rainbow sandals in his honor.

Although I haven’t weaned myself off Facebook as much as Alex would have wanted, nine months after his death I use it less as a lifeline or an escape. Instead, it’s a way to reassure everyone that I’m okay, and that I’m living life like Alex would want me to, whether that’s trying kickboxing or going on vacation with my 1year-old niece.

In the end, Alex and I were probably both right about social media. It will never replace inperson relationships, but it has given me a way to grieve and to celebrate Alex’s life with so many others. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Understanding anger in the GOP E.J. DIONNE JR. writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and is a a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University.

With election year a month away, American politics is caught up in tensions, ironies and a certain amount of sheer madness.

On the one hand: The U.S. economy is a marvel, driven forward by technological innovation, the promises of Big Data and Advanced Manufacturing, a relative independence in energy supply, and a population younger than those of most other wealthy nations.

On the other hand: Wages have been stagnating since the turn of the millennium, inequalities are widening, college is out of reach for many, suicide rates among white middle-aged working-class people are rising and, in a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll, 72 percent of Americans said “the economy is still in a recession.”

On the one hand: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections and have, at best, a very narrow path to an Electoral College majority next year. The rising groups in the American electorate — Latinos, Asian Americans and young people — are hostile to the party, a problem its presidential front-runner is making worse with his unapologetic xenophobia.

On the other: Democrats have their fewest seats in state legislatures since the 1920s, their

fewest in the House since the late 1940s, and they control only 19 governorships. In the past two midterm contests, they have suffered wipeouts.

If reality is so contradictory, we shouldn’t be surprised that different groups choose to see it differently. We are divided evenly, 49 percent to 49 percent, on the question of whether “America’s best days are ahead of us or behind us,” according to the PRRI poll. Among liberal Democrats, 67 percent think our best days are yet to come; only 40 percent of conservative Republicans share this confidence.

One of the tasks of political analysis is to make sense of conflicting information, and a new book by Stanley Greenberg, who was a political scientist before he became a Democratic pollster, does not shy away from the messiness of our social and electoral landscape. My

Dickensian “best of times, worst of times” analysis is drawn partly from Greenberg’s new book, “America Ascendant.” In it, Greenberg sees Republicans in a long-term demographic “death spiral.” But the book is also unsparing in acknowledging that Democratic weaknesses among older white and rural voters leave the GOP “almost unopposed in nearly half of the states.”

I should say that I have been an unabashed Greenberg fan for a quarter-century. I especially like his resistance to gloom about America’s future. I truly believe (and maybe this just proves I’m a liberal) that only the dysfunction of our politics will keep our country from having another good century. Yes, we face real threats, including terrorism. But we are not paying enough attention to our strengths, including the advantages of a social diversity that is causing such unease among many of our fellow citizens.

The power of Greenberg’s analysis is that he doesn’t dismiss the anger of these Americans, so many of whom are rallying to Donald Trump. Written before Trump’s rise, the book doesn’t mention him, but Greenberg treats what has become the Trump constituency with a heartfelt empathy.

The sorts of voters who rally to Trump have reason to be upset, he says, because the very economic and social changes that contribute to growth also create “stark problems for people and the country that leave the public seething, frustrated, and pessimistic about the future.”

There are no wage gains for most, “working-class men have been left marginalized,” and the proportion of children being born to single parents has soared.

Greenberg is open to changes in our mores and insists that progressive policies on family leave, pay, taxes and prekindergarten programs are more plausible responses to these problems than sermonizing. But if his book provides Democrats with good news about their national political advantages, it pointedly challenges them to address rather than ignore or dismiss the reasons for the thunder on the right.

Republican presidential candidates should propose ways of easing the discontents that Trump and others in their ranks are merely exploiting. “The citizenry is ready for a cleansing era of reform that allows America to realize its promise,” Greenberg writes. It would be helpful if the campaign gave us more reason to think he’s right. n

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

The link in all mass shootings EUGENE ROBINSON writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

The common denominator in mass shootings is the use of firearms.

Variables such as political ideology, religious fervor and mental illness are motivating factors, but death comes from the gun.

Until our society recognizes that simple truth, the list of place names to which Colorado Springs and San Bernardino were recently added will have no end.

I don’t know which is more obscene, the fact that deadly shooting rampages have become almost routine or the way we so quickly seek to make each incident follow a familiar script.

This process played out Wednesday after 14 victims were gunned down in San Bernardino, Calif. Quickly the speculation began. The carnage happened at an agency that worked with the developmentally disabled — not the kind of public place that terrorists generally choose for attacks. The alleged assailant worked for the county health department, which was having a holiday party there, so maybe this was a “disgruntled employee” story line. But there were two shooters, which would be weird in a workplace dispute. And they had Muslim-sounding names.

And one of them was described as religiously “devout,” a word often used to imply saintliness in Christians and fanaticism in Muslims. So maybe it was terrorism after all.

But it turns out that one of the shooters was a woman. And that the couple was man and wife. And that before the shooting, they casually dropped their infant off with Grandma, saying they had a doctor’s appointment. Is that what you do when you’re about to kill a bunch of people and then die in a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style shootout with police?

As of this writing, the San Bernardino massacre does not yet conform to one of the politically convenient templates. We’ll make it fit eventually, though. If the motive is deemed to have anything to do with religion, the far right will be able to rail about putting mosques under surveillance and giving the National Security Agency carte blanche to snoop into Americans’ lives. If an office-related grudge

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

was the cause, we can all spend a couple of weeks bemoaning the inadequacy of mental-health services in this country, then do nothing about it.

In the case of the Planned Parenthood mass shooting in Colorado Springs, by contrast, we’ve already retreated to our ideological corners. The accused killer reportedly told police “no more baby parts,” so he must have been inspired by incendiary antiabortion rhetoric. Or else political speech had nothing to do with the atrocity, since the man is clearly deranged.

The truth is surely “all of the above.” What balanced, welladjusted person is capable of mass murder?

After every incident, someone launches the mental-health discussion but it goes nowhere.

Likewise, we can argue to no end about political or religious motivations. I do fear that Muslims will become even more stigmatized, but the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom is absolute.

Similarly, I deplore extreme political rhetoric that might inspire the vulnerable to commit violence — but the truth is that I probably deplore it more if it’s rhetoric I disagree with.

What we ought to do is stick to the facts, and the facts of these

mass shootings are the guns.

More than 30,000 people are killed by firearms in this country each year. We are riveted when the victims number in double digits or hostages are taken or the venue is a place such as Planned Parenthood or Sandy Hook Elementary School, but these killing sprees are but a drop in the bucket of blood.

About two-thirds of deaths by gunshot are suicides. (Cue the mental-health discussion.) How many of these people would find other ways to kill themselves if a gun were not at hand? Some, surely, but not all.

Most of the remaining gun deaths are homicides. Other countries have people with mental illness and disgruntled employees and jihadist preachers and political fanatics of every stripe, but no other developed nation has a body count remotely this high.

The only difference is that, in the United States, virtually anyone can amass an arsenal of handguns and assault rifles.

As long as there are as many guns in this country as there are people, as long as we don’t meaningfully restrict firearm purchases or keep track of weapons, we will have mass shootings and individual killings and gun suicides. Tragically, this is the choice we make. n

336 days, 355 mass shootings

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

23

KLMNO

WEEKLY Number of mass shootings (4+ victims, including shooter) by day of year, 2015 0

1

2

GUN VIOLENCE

3+

336 days, 355 mass shootings

Number of mass January February shootings (4+ victims, Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat including shooter) by 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Number of mass 1 shooter) 0 2 by 0 day 0 of1 year, 1 2015 1 1 1 day of year, 2015 shootings (4+ victims, including 0

1

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5

0

11

12

4

336 days, 355 mass shootings Sun

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1

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18

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n San Bernardino, Calif., on 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 Wednesday, 14 people were 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 21 22 23 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 killed and at least 17 were 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 2 injured in a mass shooting at 29 30 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 26Sun 27Mon 28 Tue 29Wed 30Thu Fri Sat 24 Sun 25 Mon26 Tue 27 Wed28 Thu 29 Fri 30 Sat 28 aSun center for people with develop3 1 0 4 1 1 0 3 1 2 0 2 0 0 0 3 4 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 mental disabilities. 1 This2 is at 0 0 1 4 2 2 0 1 1 0 1 0 31 least the third mass shooting since 5 the6 rampage 7 8in Colorado 9 10 11 3 4 5 6 7 8 94 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Springs 1 0 1 2 2 1 5 2 0on Nov. 1 27.0 0 0 0 4 2 0 0 1 0 0 These are just the latest in 17a Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon Tue Mon 11 Tue Wed Thu 14 Fri Sat 16Sun Mon 12 13 14 15 16 18Sun 10 12 13 15 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 year of more-than-daily mass 2 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 5 3 0 2 1 1 2 0 3 0 4 3 1 2 1 shootings in America. In fact, 1 1 2 200 211 22 4 23 17 18 19 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 19 had 20already 21 been 22 one 23 mass 24 25 there 1 0 on Wednesday 1 0 0— in the 0 2 5 1 6 2 7 1 8 1 9 0 10 0 11 1 2 2 3 1 4 2 5 1 6 1 7 1 8 3 6 7 8 shooting 4 240 251 260 270 280 290 30 5 281 29 0 30 1 0 1 1 0 2 3 26 morning 27 28 29 one30 early hours, person 12 4 13 1 14 1 15 0 16 3 17 1 18 2 was 0 killed 2 and0 three 0 were0injured 13 14 15 9 3 10 1 11 0 12 13 14 15 in an incident in Savannah, Ga. 4 2 3 311 1 5 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 3 3 0 1 There have been at least 355 19 4 20 21 22 23 24 25 20 21 22 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 mass shootings so far this year, 4 0 0 1 1 4 2 2 2 0 2 1 1 1 1 0 1 according to news reports colSat 23Sun 24Mon 25Tue 26Wed 27Thu 28 Fri 29Sat 27 28 29 Sun Mon Wed community Thu Fri Sat 26Sun 27Mon 28 Tue 29Wed 30Thu 31 Fri lected by a Tue Reddit 0 3 0 0 1 2 0 1 14 21 3 1 1 2 The 3 4 10 31 43 5 2 that tracks these incidents.

1 30 31 0 4 1 0 0 Reddit tracker defines 2 0 mass 1 4 shootings 2 0 5 6 as incidents 7 8 in 9which 10 11 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 four 4 or0more1 people, 0 including 0 0 0 5 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 2 3 0 0 1 4 the12gunman, are injured 13 14 killed 15 or 16 17 18 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 by3 gunfire.

The Mass Shooting 4 2 1 1 5 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 3 3 0 1 0 2 0 1 Tracker is different from other 19 20 21 22 that23it uses 24 25Sun 16 Mon 17 Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 22Sun Mon Tue 22 Wed 23 Thu 24 Fri 25 Sat 26Sun Mon Tue 20 21 18 19 20 21 shooting databases in 4 0 0 1 1 1 2 4 32 1 2 2 2 3 0 4 3 5 1 6 1 71 1 definition 1 1 1 mass 0 1 a 2broader of 1 26 27 the 28 29 definition 30 31 shooting; old FBI 2 271 28 0 29 0 271 282 291 300 0 23 24 25 26 3 1 0on four 3 or0more0 people 1 2 focused 4 0 5 0 6 1 7 4 8 1 9 1 10 3 6 7 8 8 2 9 3 10 1 11 0 12 13 14 killed as part of a single shooting.

30 31 2 1 0 0 0 2 1 ---0 0 1 0 0 1 2 The number of mass shootings 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 17 11 2 12 0 13 14 15 16 13 14 15 so far this year has already 2 2 1 1 0 1 1 ---0 1 0 0 0 0 2 surpassed the total number of 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 24 18 19 20 21 22 23 20 21 22 mass shootings in 2014, accord5 3 1 0 1 2 0 ---1 1 0 0 0 1 1 ing to the tracker. And the pace is well 2013,ThuwhenFria Sat 25Sun 26Mon 27 Tue 28Wed 29 Thu 30 Fri 31 Sat 29Sun 30Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sun above Mon that Tue ofWed Sat 27 28 29 total of 363 mass shootings oc1 0 ---1 1 1 0 0 1 34 1 2 SOURCE: MASS SHOOTING TRACKER 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 curred. n

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2015

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