Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

A protester calling for 'no cuts to Medicaid' is escorted away by police after being arrested during a demonstration outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's constituent office after Senate Republicans unveiled their healthcare bill on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 22, 2017.

Republican senators unveiled their long-anticipated healthcare plan to replace Obamacare on Thursday, and it includes significant changes to Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for the poor, elderly, and disabled.

The bill, which does not yet have the support of enough senators to pass, reflects the ongoing tussle of costs vs. social benefits that sharply divides the two parties as well as Republicans themselves.

Like the Republican legislation that passed the House in May, the draft bill put forward by Senate Republican leaders aims to rein in federal spending on the burgeoning program – a move they say will strengthen it in the long term. But over time, that will mean substantial cuts to some of the country’s highest-need populations, say advocates – though the full scope of those cuts won’t be known until the independent Congressional Budget Office releases its report on the Senate bill early next week.

“Medicaid is fiscally unsustainable,” says Steve Kelly, spokesman for Sen. Pat Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, the senator who represented the GOP conservative viewpoint on Medicaid as the bill took shape behind closed doors.

Thirty years ago, Medicaid accounted for less than 3 percent of federal spending. Today, it’s nearly 10 percent. About one fifth of the US population is enrolled in it, according to a Congressional Research Service 2015 report. It pays for almost half of all births. It’s the single biggest payer for substance abuse treatment. It helps rural hospitals stay afloat and supports jobs in the health sector. It covers nursing homes for the elderly and long-term care for the disabled.

America’s rising health-care costs – among the highest in the world – account for some of the growth in spending over the years, but most of it is due to increased enrollment in the program. When recessions hit, that ups the rolls because people lose their jobs and health insurance. Various vulnerable population groups have also been expanded incrementally over the years – such as children and pregnant women in the 1980s.

But a big addition came with the Affordable Care Act, which raised the income eligibility of Medicaid to allow more low-income Americans access to its services. About 11 million newly eligible people have enrolled in Medicaid under the ACA’s expansion provision, helping to drop the percent of uninsured in America to a historic low.

Medicaid’s costs have swelled, yes, but it is also less expensive per person than Medicare, which covers seniors, and less costly than private health insurance. Some see it as a good deal that provides essential services to America’s most vulnerable populations.

“It’s important to note that this program, relative to other players, has a pretty good cost per enrollee,” says Rachel Garfield, a Medicaid expert at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy research organization. “It also serves some of the highest-need individuals in the nation.”

And there’s another aspect to the cost issue. Unlike the common notion of jobless “welfare queens” draining federal coffers, two-thirds of Medicaid is actually spent on people with disabilities and the elderly. The remaining third covers children and other adults, who actually make up 75 percent of the enrollees.

“To get at cost growth, you have to address in very tangible ways those very difficult to manage populations of the frail elderly and disabled,” says Daniel Derksen, a physician and the director of the Center for Rural Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson. With more baby boomers retiring, the need to support long-term care of the aged will substantially increase, not decrease, experts point out.

How it differs from the House bill

When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the House Republicans’ American Health Care Act, it estimated that the bill’s structural changes to Medicaid would amount to an $834 billion cut to the program over 10 years and the loss of 14 million enrollees. The House bill has a public approval rating of 17 percent and President Trump called it “mean.”

Senate Republicans look like they’ve tried to round some of the sharp edges of the House version. Their draft, too, does away with the individual and employee mandates for insurance coverage and ends many of the taxes that supported Obamacare. Both plans allow young adults to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans.

But unlike the House bill, the Senate version ties tax-credit assistance for purchasing insurance to income, geography, and age, rather than mostly on age, so that older Americans take less of a hit. And it ensures coverage for consumers with pre-existing conditions.

On Medicaid, the Senate and House bills both fundamentally change the program from an open-ended, federal guarantee to pay at least 50 percent of a state’s Medicaid costs, to one that caps spending to the states.

The Senate version rolls back federal support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion more slowly than the House version. But it uses a less generous inflation index for the program than the House would, meaning less money over the long term.

Republican questions, opposition

These changes “strengthen Medicaid,” according to the summary of the bill by the Senate Budget Committee, by giving states more flexibility. “Those who rely on this program won’t have the rug pulled out from under them,” it maintains, pointing, for instance, to a guarantee that children with medically complex disabilities will be covered.

But others say the changes will result in significant cuts that put the most vulnerable populations at risk. The Senate bill is close enough to the House bill to expect Medicaid “cuts on a similar scale,” says Ms. Garfield at Kaiser. “These are not changes on the margin,” she says.

Dr. Derksen is blunt about his view of the effect of both bills. “There’s really no plausible way a state can provide the benefits to the elderly, blind, and disabled through Medicaid with these massive cuts.”

Already four conservative Republican senators say they will not support the bill as it stands because it does not do enough to repeal Obamacare. Moderate Republicans from states that have expanded Medicaid or rely heavily on it are carefully studying the bill and are likely to have questions.

The bill is expected to move to the floor next week where it will be open to amendments. Republicans can only afford two defections, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking a tie. It’s going to be a dramatic week with much at stake.

(Editor's note: This story was updated to correctly identify the factors which determine eligibility for tax credits under the Senate plan.)

Marco Bello/Reuters

Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, speaks to the media at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela on June 22, 2017.

When Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reshuffled duties in his deeply embattled government earlier this week, it wasn’t the changes at the top of the transport and fishing ministries that caused a buzz.

Instead, it was the sacking of the heads of several branches of the military, in particular the general overseeing the National Guard, that drew widespread attention.

That, plus Mr. Maduro’s pointed announcement that he was retaining his defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, whom he described as a “loyal man.”

The unpopular president’s actions and words this week underscore just how dependent he has become on the country’s military, after more than two years of putting a growing number of generals in charge of everything from food distribution to new oil and mining projects.

But they also suggest an awareness on his part that a military with much higher popular support than his own could one day engineer his downfall. Some regional experts suggest that factions of the military could act to topple the leftist-populist Maduro and return the Venezuelan military to its more traditional role, as a guardian of Venezuela’s democracy.

“It’s not generally in the Venezuelan military’s ethos to want to seize power or to play the role of the go-to for the civilian political leadership,” says Brian Fonseca, an expert in international affairs and public policy at Florida International University in Miami. “But as the Venezuelan crisis deepens I think we could see a fracturing of the military,” he adds, “with some elements acting to force a political transition and ultimately return the military institution to its constitutional role.”

This week’s government reshuffle comes as protests against Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the country’s worsening food shortages turn ever more violent, with the death toll in recent weeks of protests reaching 74.

Indeed, some analysts say that in particular, Maduro replaced the general in charge of the National Guard after video showed security forces using live bullets against protesters, allegedly resulting in the death of a 17-year-old boy.

But others say Maduro’s motivations have nothing to do with reducing state violence against those marching in opposition of his rule.

A 'civil-military union'

“I don’t think Maduro is worried for one second about firing on civilians, although he may be trying to suggest he’s concerned about the civilian population,” says Mark Feierstein, who served as senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs in the Obama National Security Council. “I think what he’s concerned about is his own survival.”

For Maduro, survival has entailed driving the country’s military ever deeper into not just the domestic security quagmire, but also into civilian functions like the economy and social welfare.

Lamenting the militarization of Venezuelan society at a briefing this week, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Andean, Brazilian, and Southern Cone Affairs, Michael Fitzpatrick, said that more than 2,000 generals on active duty are in charge of “virtually every sector and aspect of the economy.” And he said that what Maduro refers to as a “civil-military union” is better known by a more pejorative name.

“Others in Latin America sadly would know what to call such a regime – a junta,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

But regional experts say the regime in charge in Venezuela is not so much a “junta,” in the most familiar sense of a military government resulting from a coup. Rather, it’s following another Latin American model in which a government struggling to meet basic needs and supply services while maintaining security turns to the military – for its competence, but also as a means of ensuring the regime’s survival.

In other words, Maduro’s Venezuela is less Pinochet’s Chile and more Castro’s Cuba.

A stake in the regime's survival

“What we’re seeing is Venezuela emulating the survival mechanics of the Cuban regime, where the military was brought in as the vanguard of their revolution,” says Mr. Fonseca, a former marine who trained foreign military forces in both conflict and peacetime operations.

“They resort to the military to fill socio-economic roles not only because of a reputation for being able to fix things,” he adds, “but also because of their ability to use force.” Cuba’s military is estimated to control as much as 85 percent of the island’s economy.

Others see another crucial reason for regimes to give the military an expanding role in governance: by giving military officials a stake in the economy, especially, governments ensure that they have an interest in the regime’s survival.

“In many countries, the military is seen as the more capable institution among all the elements of the national government, so it’s not atypical to turn to them when things go bad,” says Michael Desch, an expert in civilian-military relations in governance at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“But another reason frankly is to invest the military in the current regime and in its survival,” he says, adding, “In the Venezuelan case I’d say that getting them involved in the oil sector in particular suggests that motivation.”

Professor Desch says Maduro is by no means alone in the world in “co-opting” the military. “It’s what we see going on in China today,” he adds. “A lot of countries with authoritarian or increasingly authoritarian regimes need the coercive support of the armed forces.”

Yet Desch and other experts caution that the expanded role an embattled leader offers the military can often turn out to have been a “poisoned chalice” that results in blood on the military’s hands and corrosive corruption that debilitates the highest-ranking officers.

And, some experts believe, it’s recognition of the unwanted repercussions of the military’s expanded role in civilian governance that could lead some in the Venezuelan military to rebel. In such a scenario, the experts say, that could tip the scales in favor of a political transition and a return to the democratic governance the military traditionally supported.

Coup-proofing

“I’m not so sure the Venezuelan military is the professional and competent entity it used to be. It’s been highly politicized, and the levels of venality and corruption we’ve seen in recent years have been extraordinary,” says Mr. Feierstein, now a senior adviser on Latin America at the Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington.

The US government has accused a number of Venezuela’s senior officers of involvement in the illicit drug trade, and has slapped targeted sanctions on a number of those officers as well as on the country’s vice president and several Supreme Court justices. The Trump administration is reportedly planning additional sanctions.

But Feierstein says he has no doubt that some in the military are “thinking seriously about their future and the political transition that we know lies ahead. I’m sure Maduro is concerned about that,” he adds, “and rightly so.”

Florida International University’s Fonseca says the government has recently stepped up a “purging” campaign across the military in an attempt at what even Maduro openly refers to as “coup-proofing.” With the memory of a short-lived 2002 coup against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, still fresh, the military has detained dozens of junior officers accused of plotting against the government.

But Fonseca says he foresees a point where a growing force within the ranks will decide the country’s deterioration and the government’s repressive violence “is not sustainable” and will act to precipitate a political transition that reestablishes clear civil-military lines.

“Venezuela is bleeding out,” he says. “At some point, if other attempts to resolve this crisis continue to fail, someone’s going to step in to stop the bleeding,” he says. “At the same time, I think the aim will be to return the military to a more traditional role within a context of democratic governance.”

Jason Lee/ Reuters/ File

A villager transplants rice seedlings in the village of Basha in Congjiang county, Guizhou province, China on May 20, 2013.

Before the pigs arrived, Yu Anhen and her husband eked out a living as subsistence farmers in the remote mountains of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. Then, two months ago, a government official came to them with an offer of 5,000 yuan ($735) to buy three piglets. Ms. Yu eagerly said yes. She saw it as an opportunity to ease her family’s finances and help pay for her son’s college tuition.

“My husband and I are getting old and it’s getting harder for us to work outside,” Yu says. “Raising pigs will help us.” 

The largest pig should be ready for market in four to five months, where Yu hopes it will sell for about 3,000 yuan ($440). If the other two go for a similar price, she and her husband will be out of poverty, as China defines it, for the first time in their lives – and Beijing will be a fraction closer to its goal of eliminating poverty entirely by 2020. 

China has been at the forefront of the world’s poverty-reduction efforts for nearly four decades. More than 700 million people in the countryside have risen out of poverty, largely thanks to China’s economic boom. But there's an asterisk next to those accomplishments. Beijing considers people poor if they earn less than 2,300 yuan ($335) per year. By World Bank global standards, less than $700 qualifies as extreme poverty.

Today, in a country of 1.3 billion, 43.35 million people meet Beijing's definition of poverty. That number is down to 250 in Tuanjie, a shabby village of 3,000 people that is surrounded by terraced corn fields and green mountains in southwestern China. If all goes as planned, says Xiong Jun, the village head, “We will leave poverty in 2019.”

Mr. Xiong’s confidence is buoyed by the sheer scale of China’s poverty alleviation campaign, whose strategies include relocations, cash handouts, and job training. While much attention has focused on President Xi Jinping’s ambitious foreign-policy initiatives – from his military build-up in the South China Sea to the $900 billion “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure and trade program – poverty alleviation has emerged as one of his top domestic priorities.

The Chinese government has allocated more than 140 billion yuan ($20.5 billion) for poverty alleviation programs this year alone. For Mr. Xi, pulling everyone out of poverty is “the baseline task for building a moderately prosperous society.” But as the campaign enters its final stretch and as China’s economy slows, the work is likely to only get harder. 

The campaign ramped up two years ago after Xi paid a visit to Guizhou on June 18, 2015. A week earlier, four young siblings in a village not far from Tuanjie had committed suicide by drinking pesticide, after their parents abandoned them in search of work. Their deaths sparked a national debate about rural poverty, with some blaming local officials for a lack of services, and renewed the government’s push to end it.

“Poverty is nothing to fear,” he said in the impoverished village of Huamao. “If we have determination and confidence, we can overcome any difficulty.” 

The landlocked province of Guizhou has since emerged as ground zero. In April, Chen Miner, the provincial party chief and one of Xi’s close allies, reaffirmed his commitment to helping more than 3.7 million people in the province escape poverty over the next three years. More than 750,000 will be relocated from mountainous villages to more prosperous towns and cities this year. In a move underscoring Xi’s support for the campaign, party members in Guizhou unanimously elected him to represent the province at the important 19th National Communist Party Congress that will take place this fall.

Considerable hurdles remain. Analysts say the next 2-1/2 years will be the hardest because many of the remaining poor in China have physical or mental disabilities that make it difficult to hold down a steady job. The Civil Affairs Ministry announced in January that about 40 percent of China’s poor are poor because of their health. 

Meanwhile, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies have hampered poverty alleviation programs across the country. In March, the party secretary from the county that includes Tuanjie was expelled from the party and faces criminal charges for having allegedly embezzled more than 174,000 yuan ($25,000). In 2016, authorities launched a five-year campaign against corruption in the anti-poverty programs, but problems persist.

Then there’s the physical challenge. The government plans to relocate 3.4 million people from poor areas by 2020, but providing support to people who remain in China’s most remote communities is no easy task. 

“We’re getting to a point now where it’s more difficult to access these populations,” says Ben Westmore, a senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who has studied China’s poverty alleviation efforts. “There aren’t deep pockets of poverty anymore. It’s more widely spread, which can be more of a challenge to target.”

Perhaps nowhere is that truer than in the steep mountains and isolated hamlets of Guizhou. But the province’s budding technology industry may help not just with jobs, but government oversight. Officials in a district of Bijie, the prefecture-level city that includes Tuanjie, have developed a smartphone app for tracking every person and household below the poverty line. Field workers can use the app to look up information about poor families across the district and to provide updates. Zhu Yongzhen, deputy director of agriculture for the district, says the app will soon include a “public supervision” feature to improve transparency.

For now, Mr. Zhu uses the app whenever he visits one of the 12 households he supervises. He’ll upload photographs and write brief messages to explain how much progress they’ve made. Sometimes he’ll write simple observations, like he did on a recent visit to an elderly couple’s home. 

“The government takes care of them,” he wrote. “They don’t need to worry about their food and clothes. Hope they keep healthy.”

Xie Yujuan contributed reporting.

Tony Avelar/AP Images for LEGO Systems, Inc./File

Matt Boetger, a worker at music streaming service Pandora, accepts a trophy at a LEGO robot-building competition among tech companies in San Francisco in 2013. Millennials will soon make up half of the American workforce, and companies are evolving to accommodate their transition into leadership roles.

They are the so-called “trophy generation,” those young, budding leaders who, the conventional wisdom goes, want it all with a pat on the back and a promotion every two years. In the most competitive industries, the perks tailored to them – the ping pong tables and free food, to name a couple – have become as par-for-the-course as health insurance and a retirement plan.

Still, independent-minded Millennials, broadly defined as those between 20 and 36 years old, have a somewhat uneasy coexistence with their employers. That looms large especially now, as many begin to inherit a new title: boss.

As companies plan for that future, they’re focused on figuring out the priorities of workers like Jessica Schaeffer, who has stuck with Chicago-based LaSalle Network, a professional staffing firm, for the past six years since graduating from college. Ms. Schaeffer has gone from handling some of the firm’s marketing responsibilities to a chief of staff role that has her in charge of the growing company’s internal and external communications, including pinch-hitting for LaSalle chief executive Tom Gimbel at public speaking events.

The ability of companies to nurture employees like Schaeffer up toward the C-suite will be critical to their future success. Millennials make up one-third of the current workforce, headed toward half by 2020 as more Baby Boomers retire. In order to attract and develop Millennial talent, companies are making big changes, from boosting professional-development opportunities to moving their headquarters to cities like Chicago where young adults prefer to live.

Most fundamentally, many firms are responding with a values shift – by aiming to embody the sense of higher purpose that appeals to Millennials as workers and, by extension, as consumers too.

“Young people are calling the shots and they don’t even know it,” says Josh Bersin, a Deloitte consultant who studies trends in company culture.

Actually, some young managers are helping to lead the change, even as they learn the practical limits of policies like flexible scheduling.

‘Money is ... not everything’

Schaeffer remembers entering the work world as something of a “shock to the system,” handling long commutes, early mornings and – as an English and Spanish double major with no business experience – learning the job and the business world on the fly. Mr. Gimbel and the company’s open approach gave her something she says many younger workers want – the ability to learn from older mentors and company executives directly.

“I reported to a CEO that’s running a $30 million company, I learned how to do an RFP [business proposal], how to create social media … I listened to people, I watched people,” Schaeffer says of her first months at LaSalle. “I made friends with accounting and HR. I got really unique perspective, and I got to build those relationships and have that exposure.”  

Gimbel, her boss, emphasizes the importance of investing in employees like Schaeffer. In April, his company sprung for an all-expense-paid trip to Nashville for its 150 employees, and LaSalle has won dozens of awards for its office culture.

“Money is important and it pays the bills … but it’s not everything,” says Gimbel, 45, whose firm now has three Chicago-area offices and one in San Francisco. The firm’s effort has paid off in worker retention.

“Everybody’s staying. Our voluntary turnover rate is one of the lowest in the industry. We’re the destination of choice,” he says.

Making worker values company values

Not all companies have been as successful on this front as LaSalle. A 2016 Gallup poll found that 1 in 5 Millennials had changed jobs in the past year, job hopping at three times the pace of older workers.

Executives seem to know that keeping young talent happy and on the payroll is an issue, even if they’re not quite sure how to address it. A recent survey of executives by Deloitte points to the struggles: It found that while 8 in 10 executives put a high priority on the employee experience, only 23 percent rate their own solutions on work-life balance as excellent. And a 2015 study from the consulting firm found that some 70 percent of Millennials eventually want to start their own businesses. And very few – just 20 percent – are happy in a job for which they don’t perceive a broader mission or purpose.

A company with an ethos that reflects and amplifies the values of its employees is one that will have staying power through the decades, says Deloitte’s Mr. Bersin. He cites the book “Firms of Endearment,” which makes the case that passion and purpose beyond the bottom line also leads to profits and long-term success.

“I won't mention any names,” he says, “but if you look at companies that have fraud, huge government liabilities, ... all of a sudden they kind of wake up and say ‘our culture was kind of screwed up, wasn’t it?’ ”

Bersin argues that Starbucks started the trend of leadership on corporate culture when it began to offer part-time employees health insurance. It was an expensive proposition that most corporate bean counters deemed unnecessary, but the move sent a signal to both its employees and the public that it wasn’t going to be a large corporation in the traditional mold.

Some large corporations, facing the task of a culture reboot, are moving their headquarters from rural areas and suburbs toward livelier environs downtown.

Last year, McDonald’s announced it will be leaving its suburban Chicago complex in 2018 and moving corporate headquarters into a smaller building in one of the most desirable neighborhoods downtown – near where Google has recently placed its Chicago office. Caterpillar’s company executives are exiting Peoria, Ill., for a locale closer to Chicago. General Electric is in the process of moving from its longtime home in suburban Connecticut to a new campus along Boston’s seaport.

If catering to Millennials is vital for the corporate future, it’s because they’re the rising generation of consumers as well as workers. (Pertinent for McDonald’s, for instance: The younger generation values healthy eating.)

Flexibility – to a point

The transition to the next American workplace isn’t always smooth, but Millennials themselves are helping to carve the path. At LaSalle, Schaeffer says the company constantly views its Millennial-friendly culture as a work in progress.

“We want to instill fun, but we want to instill accountability as well,” she says. It’s also not just about the perks. “You can’t copy what Google and Netflix and Facebook do.” She points to the trend of offering employees “unlimited” time off as an example. “I think a lot of companies think it’s a quick fix. It doesn’t work.”

Instead, she says, “it's figuring out ‘what does my company stand for, who owns the culture … how are we scaling it as we grow?’ ”

That requires constant vigilance toward questions of company culture. A few years ago, for example, the company experimented with flexible work schedules – something much of its workforce preferred. But LaSalle’s clients weren’t able to reach its employees easily enough, and the company abandoned the practice.

“As a professional services firm we need to be available for when our clients need us,” she says. “We want people who want to be [in the office].”

In other words, the corporate world is the Millennials’ proverbial oyster – to a point.

Nicholas Blanford

Zeinab Moukalled, the founder of Nidaa al-Ard, stands outside the warehouse on the edge of Arab Salim that is the hub of the village's garbage sorting and recycling project.

On the outskirts of this straggly, southern Lebanese hilltop village lies a small, tin-roofed warehouse. Packed inside are bundles of crushed plastic water bottles and barrels of empty soda cans, plastic bottle tops, and glass shards.

The warehouse is the hub of a small but thriving local recycling initiative that began when a group of women came together to improve their village’s environment.

But in a country that still struggles to modernize its infrastructure, including an at times headline-grabbing inability to collect its garbage, the warehouse also stands as a testament to the perseverance of a doughty octogenarian who defied local customs, government negligence, official indifference, a lack of funding, and even the perils of intermittent warfare to realize her modest vision.

When, more than 20 years ago, Zeinab Moukalled pulled together volunteers among Arab Salim’s women to sort and recycle the village’s overflowing trash, she says it was an attempt to compensate for the near-total absence of the Lebanese state in tending to their municipal needs.

“We really don’t have any government to help us, so we have to do things by ourselves,” says Ms. Moukalled, now 81 and popularly known around here as Haji Im Nasser. (“Im Nasser” means “mother of Nasser,” and “Haji” denotes she has performed the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.) “What we did was for the environment and to improve our lives in the village.”

And it has served as an inspiration. The success of Moukalled’s campaign has not only ensured a safer and healthier environment in Arab Salim – where it helped eradicate a traditional culture of haphazard garbage dumping – but has also led nearby villages to try and establish their own recycling projects.

Deficient infrastructure

Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, yet this tiny Mediterranean country continues to be wracked by infrastructural deficiencies left over from that 16-year conflict: from daily power cuts and water shortages to a lingering crisis over garbage disposal. Two years ago, mass protests broke out against the government when garbage accumulated for weeks in the streets of Beirut after the main dump site south of the capital was closed.

A national solution to the trash problem has yet to be found, as politicians bicker over who stands to benefit from potentially lucrative garbage-disposal contracts. With successive Lebanese governments more often than not failing to adequately address such deficiencies, it is often left to individual civil initiatives to improve living conditions in local communities.

Moukalled came up with the idea for her recycling effort in 1995. At the time, there was no functioning municipality in the village, and community needs were supposed to be handled at the level of the governorate. Moukalled visited the then-governor of the area in Nabatieh, a market town three miles to the south, to enlist his support, but was unsuccessful.

“We tried to persuade him to help us, but we gave up and decided to do it ourselves,” Moukalled recalls.

There was no money for the project, and some women were initially less than enthusiastic about sifting through their household’s garbage each day to separate bio-degradable trash, plastics, glass, and metals.

But these weren’t the only obstacles facing Moukalled as she pressed ahead with her agenda.

Recycling under fire

In the mid-1990s, Arab Salim was on the frontline of the Israeli army’s occupation zone in southern Lebanon. Soaring to the east of the village was a craggy mountain surmounted by a military outpost manned by Israeli troops or their local Lebanese militia allies. Fighters from Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah organization routinely fired mortar rounds at the outpost or scaled the mountain to launch close-range attacks. The resulting retaliatory Israeli artillery fire often hit the village and its outskirts, killing and wounding residents and causing damage to property.

“At the time, we were under occupation, and people didn’t care about the garbage situation because we had shelling every day,” says Moukalled.

Another early challenge was finding a place for the barrels and sacks of sorted trash. A public appeal for recycling companies to contact her and collect the trash inspired a newspaper article about her innovative campaign. That exposure led in turn to a meeting with UN aid officials in Beirut and a grant of $29,000. At last, a newly elected governor in Nabatieh – after initially chiding Moukalled for allegedly circumventing the government – gave the volunteer women some money and land for the warehouse. It was built with funding from the Italian Embassy.

Arab Salim lies along the crest of a mountain ridge with views to the west that reach the Mediterranean. Although the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon ended in May 2000, reminders of war are still found across this Shiite village. Hezbollah has a strong presence, and the streets are lined with sun-faded portraits of “martyrs” killed fighting the occupation two decades ago. More brightly colored pictures commemorate a new generation of fighters killed on Syria’s battlefields.

Everyone here knows Haji Im Nasser and speaks of her fondly.

“Her work is the best thing that ever happened to Arab Salim,” says Amin Shrara, 30, who owns a sandwich shop in the village center. “The village was drowning in garbage when I was a kid. But Im Nasser educated us not to throw garbage out of the window, but put it in dumpsters. The village is unbelievably clean because of her.”

'Government gives us nothing'

Lebanon’s national garbage crisis has elicited greater interest in the work of her project, now a non-profit NGO called Nidaa al-Ard, or Call of the Earth. A steady stream of visitors come to Arab Salim to see how the operation runs. The neighboring villages of Kfar Ruman and Jarjouaa also have begun similar sorting/recycling schemes.

“We started six months ago. We have given barrels to all the houses and have employed four people to collect the garbage,” says Ali Moukalled (not a direct relative), the mayor of Jarjouaa.

The problem facing these new recycling start-ups, however, is still the lack of funds – and government inaction. The Arab Salim warehouse is too small to accommodate all of Jarjouaa’s waste.

“We are knocking on the doors of foreign NGOs asking for money for our needs,” says Ali Moukalled. “The government gives us nothing.”

Today Nidaa al-Ard is expanding its activities into water protection and conservation and regulating stone quarries. The Arab Salim warehouse also contains a small classroom for school children to learn about the environment, conservation, and recycling.

“People’s attitudes [toward the environment] have changed, of course. There was a little boy who saw her mother throw trash on the street and he said, ‘Mama, don’t do that or Im Nasser will be angry,’ ” Zeinab Moukalled says with a soft chuckle. “It’s been a long journey, but we have done well.”

AP Photo

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford testifies on Capitol Hill. He said Washington and Moscow are in delicate discussions to tamp down tensions arising from the U.S. shootdown of a Syrian fighter jet, which the Russians called a violation of a U.S.-Russian understanding on avoiding air incidents.

In at least five countries, American military personnel are on the ground battling terrorists. In March, the Trump administration threatened a preemptive strike on North Korean nuclear facilities. In April, it launched missiles against Syria for its use of chemical weapons. And in recent days, the United States has shot down Iranian drones and a Syrian fighter jet, creating a potential flashpoint with Russian forces.

Like many presidents before him, Mr. Trump has initiated military actions as commander in chief without clear approval from lawmakers. The last time Congress fulfilled its constitutional duty by actually declaring war was in 1941. But now many on Capitol Hill say recent US military actions, including those during the Obama era, should compel Congress to provide a new type of approval.

The last time Congress granted some broad powers to the president for military action was in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Lawmakers – most of whom are gone – passed two resolutions called Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Since then, however, terrorist groups have evolved. To many scholars, AUMF is out of date. And the US, even as it fights Islamic State in many places, is struggling in Syria to define which of the many warring parties is a foe.

Nonetheless, the real reasons for a new authorization are moral ones.

Soldiers who put themselves at risk must know that Americans, through a bipartisan consensus of lawmakers, support a strategic goal. In addition, an open deliberation in Congress over authorization might improve a military strategy or drive the US to seek peaceful means. And to prevail in a conflict, the US must make clear to its adversaries that it has long-term national resolve.

By acting lawfully in its military operations, the US can also influence other countries to do the same. Such behavior then encourages more countries to follow international norms and laws in the use of force across borders.

For the first time in years, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing June 20 on a new AUMF. The panel considered a bill, proposed by Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, and Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican. The measure attempts to bridge differences between the parties over how much operational authority should be given to a president. It sets limits, for example, by defining specific terrorist groups in six countries. And the AUMF would be valid for only five years.

In his last year in office, President Barack Obama proposed his own AUMF. But in an election year, it didn’t go anywhere. Now Congress should seriously consider such a bill. What it needs first, however, is a concrete counter-terrorism policy from the White House. That would be a starting point for a national debate.

Waiting 16 years to renew such congressional authority has consequences for the nation’s integrity. As Kathleen Hicks of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told legislators, an out-of-date authorization “jeopardizes our nation’s principled belief in the rule of law and thereby risks the legitimacy of the institutions designed to create, carry out, and enforce such laws.”