Bryan Woolston/Reuters

Municipal workers attempt to remove paint from a monument dedicated to Confederate soldier John B. Castleman that was vandalized late Saturday night in Louisville, Ky., on Aug. 14, 2017.

Updated at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 16.

After President Trump belatedly denounced white supremacism two days after violent weekend protests in Charlottesville, he unleashed a second wave of bipartisan criticism for follow-up comments Tuesday. Again, he blamed both sides for the violence, causing Republicans and Democrats to usurp the president’s traditional role as the nation’s moral leader with unequivocal statements of their own.

“We must be clear,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin tweeted after Mr. Trump’s Tuesday remarks. “White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

Charlottesville is not the end of this story. The United States is dotted with hundreds of Confederate monuments whose potential removal, as is planned in the Virginia college town, is expected to galvanize the KKK, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacist groups, who feel they have an ally in the president.

Historians say an issue as divisive and consequential as racism requires moral leadership that includes consistent messaging and action from the highest office in the land – though it hasn’t always gotten it.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower shrunk from the debate until he sent troops to enable nine African-Americans to attend the all-white Little Rock Central High in Arkansas – three years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954.

President John F. Kennedy also acted belatedly on civil rights, while in 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater finally reversed himself and rejected the support of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was criticized for his “states’ rights” speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, just a few miles from the site of the racially motivated “Freedom Summer Murders” of 1964.

“There is no substitute for the president weighing in effectively on deep, moral questions,” says Brian Balogh, co-host of the public radio show “Backstory with the American History Guys” and professor of history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Presidents do this through repetition and follow-through, he says, pointing to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“LBJ demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice his party’s political future in the South with the Voting Rights Act” of 1965, he says.

And former President Obama raised the issue of police brutality and race in a “balanced” way, says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University in College Station. “He was finding moral issues and raising these matters,” he says.

“I don’t think you will find Trump on the front lines of moral leadership,” he adds. “I’m not saying he’s an immoral person. He’s just not sensitive to these things.”

Why some were dissatisfied with Trump’s statement

It was important for Trump to specifically denounce the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups as “criminals and thugs” that are “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” observers say.

But others would like the president to go a step further and fire Steve Bannon and other White House officials affiliated with the alt-right, an ideological movement combining racism, white nationalism, and populism. On Tuesday, the leaders of four House caucuses – black, Asian, Hispanic, and progressive – wrote the president demanding he remove Mr. Bannon and two other officials, claiming their presence emboldens white supremacists.

Trump’s statement on the day of violence on Saturday – condemning “in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides” – created a false moral equivalency between the cause of white supremacism and opponents of it, says Mr. Edwards, though that’s not to excuse violence perpetrated against the supremacists, he adds.

“There is a cause, a catalyst for all this violence, and the catalyst is the views of the alt-right.”

People lead busy lives, Edwards goes on. They don’t have a lot of time to invest in the news. So when they see violent images, they need a clear signal of what’s going on, and the president is the natural figure to provide that signal, which he did on Monday – but only after key members of his administration, lawmakers from both parties, and civil rights leaders beat him to it.

The apparent reluctance creates the perception among white supremacists that he’s sympathetic to their cause. Indeed, Richard Spencer, a leader of the so-called “alt-right” of white extremists, told reporters on Monday that Trump’s denunciation was “kumbaya nonsense.” He added: “I don’t think anyone takes it seriously, including the president.”

On Tuesday Trump defended his initial remarks, saying he didn’t want to rush into making a statement before knowing the facts. His second statement was made with more knowledge of the situation, he said. In a testy exchange with reporters, he said the “alt-left” was also to blame for the violence, and he stated that many protesters were there to oppose the taking down of Confederate statues. "Is it George Washington next?" he asked.

Again, white supremacists felt presidential support, with former KKK leader David Duke tweeting out thanks to the president “for your honesty & courage to tell the truth” about Charlottesville and condemning “leftist terrorists” and anti-fascists.

‘Praying for those with whom we disagree’

Trump made his Monday announcement after being briefed on Charlottesville by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The Justice Department, which Mr. Sessions heads, has opened a civil rights investigation into the killing of anti-hate-group protester Heather Heyer after a car plowed into her and other people in Charlottesville on Saturday. The alleged driver of the car, James Fields, reportedly has neo-Nazi sympathies and has been charged with second-degree murder.

Later on Monday, the president tweeted that he had made additional comments on Charlottesville, but that “the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied…” Historians such as Professor Balogh, however, say moral leadership on this issue is not a one-and-done kind of thing. The anti-hate-groups message “bears repeating.”

Absent persistent presidential condemnation and action against white supremacism, says Balogh, society has to step up – corporate leaders, educators, every day citizens, perhaps even comedians – even while recognizing those groups’ First Amendment rights.

“We can’t wait for our president to lead us to the high moral ground,” agrees Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware.

A lawyer with a master's degree in ethics from Yale Divinity School, the senator told the Monitor in a statement that moral leadership has to come from faith communities, elected officials at all levels, and from activists and inspired citizens who take action for justice and reconciliation.

“We all have to show moral leadership by praying for those with whom we disagree and continuing to look for areas of common ground, instead of letting our disagreements keep us even from talking to one another.”

In the hours following the disturbing events in Charlottesville, he wrote, Americans saw a wide range of inspiring messages rejecting hate and urging Americans to come together. In his home state, all of Delaware’s political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, signed a clear and forceful statement that hate, discrimination, and violence aren’t welcome there.

“That,” Senator Coons said, “is what moral leadership looks like.”

Staff writer Peter Grier contributed to this story.

As a foot soldier in the Labour Party, Peter Chowney is a veteran of the doorstop pitch. But he often had to bite his tongue when the party, founded in 1900 to represent Britain’s industrial working classes, rebranded itself as New Labour and embraced global capitalism under Tony Blair, a thrice-elected prime minister.

Come election time, Mr. Chowney, a district councilor, canvasses for Labour in this seaside town. This year, it was his turn to stand as the candidate for Parliament. And this time he was pounding the pavement not to defend capitalist inequities but to denounce them as Labour vowed to hike taxes on the wealthy to fund public services, end university tuition fees, and nationalize private utilities, a repudiation of the center-left Blair consensus.

Chowney, an old-school leftist, was delighted. “This was the first time I actually got out with a Labour manifesto that I fully supported. Every other time it was a compromise,” he says.

He came within a whisker of taking this seat from the ruling Conservative Party on June 8. Elsewhere it was a night of humiliation for Prime Minister Theresa May, who had called a snap election in hope of building an unassailable majority ahead of crucial Brexit negotiations. Instead, she limped back into office in coalition with a Northern Ireland party, while Labour, which ran second, all but erupted in a victory dance.

Curiously, the party that actually won – Ms. May’s Conservatives – felt like it had lost, and vice versa.

Kevin Coombs/Reuters

Labour supporters Wendy May and Councillor Nigel Sinden collect electoral registration numbers outside a polling station in Hastings, Britain June 8, 2017.

That Labour is now seen as a government-in-waiting is a vindication for Jeremy Corbyn, its leader. A soft-spoken socialist whose politics are steeped in cold war-era anti-Americanism, Mr. Corbyn has become wildly popular among young voters hungry for a left-wing alternative to Conservative cutbacks, market reforms, and deregulation.

Not long ago, Corbyn’s calls for economic redistribution were seen by many within his own party as a liability, a socialist fantasy for the few. But the political volatility unleashed by recession and austerity, declining party loyalties and class-based voting, and two polarizing referenda in Scotland and Britain have scrambled the electoral compass to the point where a decisive shift to the left seems possible, even probable, in a bastion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

“Corbyn has shown that running on a more left-wing program doesn’t mean being annihilated,” says Patrick Diamond, a former policy adviser to Mr. Blair and Gordon Brown, his successor. “The big change that has taken place [since the recession] is that people no longer accept that the market economy is functioning as it should do.”

Yet that same volatility also makes it hard to judge what voters actually want, says Neal Lawson, who runs Compass, a left-wing advocacy group. He points to the rise and fall of the anti-Europe UK Independence Party (UKIP), which tapped populist frustrations on the left and right.

Voters “are like swallows,” he says. “People are looking for answers and they’ll keep looking for answers. When something like UKIP or Jeremy Corbyn comes along they’ll jump on it for a while. But then they’ll jump off.”

A divided party

Corbyn’s unlikely ascent parallels that of US Sen. Bernie Sanders, another elder voice on the leftist fringe whose plainspoken authenticity and distance from party power centers enraptured younger voters. Like Senator Sanders, Corbyn is a longtime lawmaker who seems to mark progress less by the laws he helps pass than by the principled causes he supports. That combination of Corbyn-the-outsider and a pledge to cut student debt proved potent in towns and cities popular with young people.

But the party’s platform was less persuasive in some traditional Labour seats in the North and Midlands, where industrial employment has been hollowed out by free trade and technology. Older voters also remember Labour’s tumultuous rule in the late 1970s, when Britain’s economy seemed to shudder to a halt amid ruinous labor strikes.  

Without a strong turnout next time in these communities, Labour’s chance of taking back power start to recede. “It needs to get older working-class men who are not impressed by [ending] tuition fees and Jeremy Corbyn,” says Steven Fielding, a politics professor at Nottingham University who studies the Labour Party.

Working-class Labour supporters are also leery of Corbyn’s pacifism and sympathies for groups like Hamas. These voters consider themselves patriots and likely backed Brexit, as much out of frustration with inequality in Britain as any deep-seated Euroskepticism, says Mr. Denham, who directs the Center for English Identity and Politics at the University of Winchester.  

“They say Labour used to stand for people like me. This is the great challenge for the party,” he says.

Analysts caution against drawing firm conclusions from a short, intense election campaign marked by repeated Conservative missteps and two major terrorist attacks. A vote for Labour was a protest against the Conservatives who nearly all polls predicted would win an outright majority, as much as an endorsement of Corbyn’s left-wing agenda, they note.

“I think we need to see another election before we can talk about [pro-Labour] realignment,” says Professor Fielding.

A changing seaside

Since 1997, Hastings and Rye has been an election bellwether, siding each time with the winning party (it also voted for Brexit). Its MP is Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary; had she lost in June she would have been Labour’s most important scalp.

Hastings is the site of the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. The ruins of the castle built by the invaders on the rocky headland still stands. Small fishing boats launch daily from a pebbled beach, land that was granted in perpetuity to the fishermen and their descendants by Elizabeth I, apparently for help in restocking ships fighting the Spanish Armada.

Luke MacGregor/Reuters/file

People walk on the newly re-opened pier at Hastings in southeast England May 9, 2016.

Furious about EU fishing quotas and the Dutch and Spanish trawlers that ply these shores, the fishermen are vocal Brexit supporters. Some are former Labour voters who switched to UKIP. For them, the pledges of Labour’s manifesto are nothing without an end to EU quotas.

“I want a fishery out here that will be here for my grandchildren when I’m gone. That’s what we all want,” says Dean Adams, a boat-owner who voted Conservative because he wanted a so-called “hard Brexit.”

The town still has pockets of intergenerational poverty, drug addiction, and petty crime; it is considered the most deprived town in southeast England, the richest region of Britain. In Chowney’s ward, his main challenge at election time is apathy and alienation among likely Labour voters.

But Hastings also shows the emerging strength of progressive politics. In the last decade, the town of 92,000 has been reshaped by transplants from London, 90 minutes away by train. Many newcomers are young middle-class families priced out of London’s real estate and drawn by Hastings’ bohemia and bonhomie, the chance to telecommute and dabble in creative industries.

Three weeks after the vote, Corbyn staged a noisy rally on the seafront, drawing thousands of fans, as part of a summer-long roadshow of vulnerable Conservative-held seats.

Post-election surveys found that Labour’s support surged not just among college-aged voters, who were wooed by tuition-fee cuts, but also among those aged 25 to 44, particularly those who attended university. Votes came from party switching as well as first-time or lapsed voters, after a low turnout by pro-European youth in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

That this generation, which has lived through a major recession and is less likely than their parents to be homeowners, is receptive to redistributive policies isn’t surprising, says Mr. Lawson. “If capitalism isn’t delivering what it’s supposed to deliver for people in the form of consumer goodies ... then people are going to start to look around for answers.”

An annual survey of British voters shows support for this shift. Nearly half of respondents, the highest level in more than a decade, said taxes should be raised in order to spend more on health, education, and welfare. The survey, which was conducted in late 2016 and released in June, also found higher support for redistributing income to the needy: 42 percent said the government should redistribute to the needy, up from 34 percent in 2006.

A better way to tackle inequality

Mel Elliott moved here with her family from London five years ago. An artist and illustrator, she sells her products and those of other artists online and in her shop-cum-studio called “I Love Mel” that she opened last year.

Until last year, she considered herself an independent. She voted Labour or Liberal Democrat, but wasn’t passionate about politics. That changed with Brexit. Like many who favored staying in Europe, she hadn’t imagined that Britain would vote to leave the world’s largest trading bloc. “I didn’t take it too seriously because I thought that we were going to win,” she says.

The charged Brexit debate – Ms. Elliott says she no longer speaks to her father, a Brexit supporter – led her to rethink her assumptions. She began listening to Corbyn and his attacks on austerity and proposals to tackle economic inequality. “It just kind of happened. I got passionate.”

By the time this year’s election came around, Elliott was ready. She began printing large format posters by fellow artists, mostly anti-Conservative – “Open Your Eyes To The Tory Lies” around a black-and-white eye – and pro-Corbyn messages, and handing them out from her store. The posters began appearing in windows all over town, so Elliott cranked out more.

“For the first time in a long time we found someone who seems genuine. When he’s being questioned, [Corbyn] answers without a script,” she says. As an entrepreneur, she says higher taxes and minimum wages would be a fair way to tackle inequality. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

Mr. Diamond argues that Labour has two possible paths to victory. He calls the first the “Bernie Sanders” approach: doubling down on Corbyn’s pitch to middle-class progressives, idealistic cash-strapped youth, and the poor in seats like Hastings.

The other, he writes in a coauthored report for the Policy Network, a Labour-aligned think tank, is to refine the party’s platform to reach out to working-class households that feel pinched by stagnant wages and blame globalization and immigration. This requires firm stances on crime and immigration – a flashpoint for Brexit campaigners – as well as economic justice.

Just as the US Democratic Party has struggled to hold onto working-class votes in the Rustbelt as its urban progressive base grows ever larger, Labour needs to work harder to bridge these groups, says Diamond. “Labour is a very broad coalition,” he says.

But he admits that overly cautious electoral calculations could backfire in a populist climate where authenticity trumps triangulation. Even if voters don’t agree with everything that Corbyn says, he is often credited for saying what he believes.

'We can win next time'

On election night in Hastings, the vote was so close that Chowney asked for a recount. Rudd, the incumbent, was defending a majority in 2015 of nearly 5,000 votes. Both main parties had increased their vote. But Labour saw the biggest gain, up 41 percent, as youth turnout surged.

Finally, the council official in charge of the vote called the candidates into a back room. The recount was over, she told them: Rudd had 25,668 votes, 346 more than Chowney.

Also in the room was Nicholas Wilson, an anticorruption campaigner who stood as an independent, mostly to attack Rudd publicly over what he called improper dealings with bankers.

Chowney looked at Mr. Wilson, whom he knew as a longtime Labour activist in Hastings. Wilson looked at the vote tally. He had got 412 votes, just enough to elect Chowney. Then, says Chowney, Wilson turned and ran from the room before the votes could be announced in public.

“Nobody has seen him since,” he says, laughing at the memory.

(Via Twitter, Wilson has rejected that he cost Labour the seat, arguing that his priority is fighting corruption.)

Two days after the election, Elliott registered as a Labour member. She wants to get more involved in campaigns and making sure that voters stay engaged. “I thought, you know what? We can win next time. And we need to win it.”

Jae C. Hong/AP/File

Students study in a library on the campus of California State University, Long Beach. The nation's largest public university system announced this month that starting in 2018 the 23 CSU campuses will begin replacing remedial classes with those that offer both credit and embedded support.

Lulu Matute still remembers the sinking sensation she felt when she heard the news.

It was the fall of 2012, and Ms. Matute had just taken the placement exam that gauged every prospective college student’s skill in math and English. She had hoped to earn her associate’s degree at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and transfer to a four-year institution within two years. “But based on the layout my counselor gave me, I was going to be there for three and a half, because I was starting at the lowest-level math,” she says.

The 18 extra months in remediation – work she would have to do for no credit – meant she was stuck juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet as she delayed getting a bachelor’s degree.

“What I needed for my life was to start where I was at. Meet me where I am, school. Move forward,” Matute says. “Remediation felt like we were going to move backwards.”

Others in her remedial math course felt similarly, she says. Every week, she watched fellow students drop out of class, discouraged. “By the end of that semester, there were only a handful of us left,” she explains.

Over the past decade, experiences like Matute’s – backed by a growing body of research – have served as impetus for a wave of reforms in remedial, or developmental, education at postsecondary institutions in California and across the country.

From Texas to Tennessee, policymakers and educators are revising their approaches to remediation in an effort to streamline the path from enrollment to graduation. This month, California State University – the largest four-year public university system in the country – announced “sweeping changes” to its developmental education policy, starting at placement and weaving through coursework and student support programs. About one-third of California’s 114 community colleges have adopted similar reforms.

The new direction stems in part from a broader shift in priorities, as educators recognize the economy’s growing demand for postsecondary certification.

“The focus for some time now has been on getting students in the door,” says Hans Johnson, director of the Higher Education Center at the Public Policy Institute of California. “The new focus has been on identifying better ways of overcoming the obstacles for students to succeed. Reforms in remedial education are one part of that.”

Also driving the call for change are findings that suggest that traditional remedial coursework disproportionately affects students of color and low-income and first-generation students.

“There was growing clarity that the systems we had set up hoping to help students were having these terrible unintended consequences,” says Katie Hern, an English instructor at Chabot College in Hayward, Calif., and co-founder of the California Acceleration Project, a remedial education advocacy group. “You’ll never increase college completion if you keep losing students at the front door in these remedial course sequences that they don’t even earn credit for.”

The right kind of support?

The thrust of the argument to overhaul remedial education lies in research that shows an overwhelming number of students who enroll in such courses never get on a graduation or transfer track. Nearly 70 percent of students at community college and 40 percent at public four-year universities take at least one remedial course, according to data from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University. Yet only 28 percent of community college students who start in a remedial course manage to earn a degree within eight years. At four-year institutions, only about 35 percent of remedial students graduate within six years, compared to more than 55 percent of students who start at college-level courses.

“This is the entire way we’ve set up ‘support’ for underprivileged students,” Professor Hern says.

Matute, raised by immigrant parents in a poor West Side neighborhood in Chicago, says she could easily have been a casualty of the system. But after her first semester, she signed up for a class that offered a faster way to become eligible for transfer to a four-year institution. The course plunged remedial students into pre-statistics.

Most of the students were like her, Matute says: immigrant, low-income, first-generation, all a little intimidated by the notion of statistics. “It was intense,” she says. “But it was high-support.” Their professor encouraged the class to work in groups, use the school’s free tutoring services, and keep each other accountable.

“It created a community,” Matute says, and that “became part of the equation that helped so many of us succeed.” Within two years of enrolling, she received her associate’s degree in behavioral sciences, arts, and humanities, with a 3.9 GPA.

Indeed, an early evaluation of the CCSF program showed that students who took pre-statistics did just as well in the school’s transfer-level math course as those who took the traditional remedial route, which involves one semester of elementary algebra followed by another in intermediate algebra. The students in pre-statistics also received their transfer qualifications within five semesters at a higher rate (42 percent) than those in elementary algebra (17 percent).

Similar results at other California community colleges – such as Long Beach City College and Cuyamaca College in El Cajon – spurred already burgeoning efforts to streamline the remedial process. In July, the state community college system released a document detailing a new vision for the 2.1 million students enrolled in its campuses. The report outlines plans for adopting revised policies around developmental education.

“We have had to take a hard look at how we get more students to complete a college credential in a more timely way,” says chancellor Eloy Oakley. 

California State University followed suit in August with an executive order that calls for a replacement, beginning in 2018, of all traditional remedial courses across the system’s 23 campuses. In their place, the chancellor’s office called for the development of credit-bearing courses that provide embedded, or “corequisite,” support.

The order also expands the use of measures like high school GPA and SAT scores to assess whether or not a student is college-ready.

“We carefully considered the evidence that suggests if we revise the way we assess and place students, a great number of them can take college-level courses, especially if you give them adequate support,” says James Minor, CSU’s senior strategist for academic success. “That requires us doing business differently.”

Quantity vs. quality of graduates

Critics of the reform movement often chide advocates for prioritizing quantity over quality. “Too many administrators and legislators simply think of the bottom line – the number of graduates – and in doing so disregard quality and standards for all students,” educators Alexandros Goudas and Hunter Boylan wrote in a 2012 critique of CCRC’s research.

While remedial education today is far from perfect, they noted, policymakers need to be careful before advocating major – and potentially harmful – changes to developmental courses. “It is a disservice, to students and the country, to move them through without assuring proper understanding,” they wrote.

There’s also concern around the time and resources it takes to revamp something as unwieldy as remedial education, especially across campuses. And convincing educators on the ground that the returns are worth the investments has been a slog, says Lena Carew, founder of Students Making a Change, a student-led advocacy group that fights to reform remedial education.

But it’s the students who are perhaps the most thrilled to see change take place. Maggie White, president of the California State Student Association, says students have been talking about problems with remedial education for years. And as someone who took remedial courses herself, Ms. White sees great potential in CSU’s decision to scale up reform. “If it works, if it gets rid of barriers to graduation, I think we can see shifts across the whole country,” she says.

For Matute, who has since joined Students Making a Change, it’s extra personal. After wrapping up at CCSF in 2014, she transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. She now works with a progressive nonprofit that supports candidates of color nationwide, maintains a 3.9 GPA, and is set to receive her bachelor’s in American Studies come spring. 

Matute attributes much of her success to the pre-statistics course that she says redirected her educational destiny.

“It made a huge difference in time, in money, in academics, and in morale,” she says. “These policies are looking at the cracks [in the system] and filling them in. I’m a living testament to how they work.”

On Aug. 15, 1973, a flurry of American planes flew at least 225 military missions over Cambodia. It was the last day of a years-long covert bombing campaign, and it was ending because the secret was out – Congress demanded an end to the onslaught.

The Vietnam War was right next door, and the United States aimed to stop the North Vietnamese from moving troops and equipment into South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, part of which ran through Cambodia. To that end, US forces dropped 2.7 million tons of ordnance on more than 100,000 Cambodian sites – more than Allied forces dropped during all of World War II.

Sorl Blaet, a young woman in the remote northeastern province of Ratanakiri, was not yet born when those last bombs fell. But today, 44 years later, she lives with their consequences. Each morning, she wakes with soreness in her arms, legs, hands, and chest – the result of a 2008 accident when one of those bombs finally exploded, after lying dormant for decades. On bad days, she can feel the tiny fragments that remain embedded in her flesh. As a farmer, she worries about digging, and she fears for her two young children. “I’m still afraid there are more bombs underground,” she says.

Cambodia and the US have moved far beyond the war since its messy end more than 40 years ago. But its legacy regularly upends the lives of people like Sorl Blaet, prompting a complex debate: In the aftermath of war, who should clean up the mess? And what do governments owe people in post-conflict zones?

The relevance of these questions extends far beyond Cambodia. Ethicists have debated “just war” issues for centuries, but some say modern warfare demands new attention to post-conflict responsibility. And in this small Southeast Asian nation, the answers became even more complicated this year when the government again demanded that the US forgive a $500 million war-era debt — and the US, once again, said no.

Dangerous fields

On the day of the accident, Ms. Sorl Blaet was clearing brush from the field where she grows cassava. “I was cutting, cutting, cutting – then BOOM!” she says.

After the explosion, Sorl Blaet fell unconscious and awoke in the hospital. She couldn’t work for two months.

The family lives in Phum Saom K’ning, a remote farming village belonging to the Jarai, an indigenous ethnic group along the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

The Jarai had nothing to do with the conflict, says elder Poeuy Malep. “None of us ever joined the war. We were only running, escaping.” When Mr. Poeuy Malep was about 12 years old, he, too, had an accident, which blinded him in one eye and took off part of his left hand.

At least ten villagers have died in explosions since. Locals say they have found roughly 50 unexploded bombs in the past few years alone.

“We think about the bombs still there,” says elder Glan Lo, who lived through the war. “The bombs that stay underground, deep, which we cannot see.”

No one knows exactly how many unexploded bombs remain in Cambodia. US forces dropped approximately 26 million explosive submunitions, which had a significant failure rate: somewhere between 1.9 million and 5.8 million of those bombs didn’t detonate when they fell. About 130 square miles of the country are thought to be contaminated with these baseball-sized bomblets, dropped by the hundreds. Failed cluster submunitions look like rocks or toys and often sit inches below the surface – still deadly.

During the war, the Jarai abandoned Phum Saom K’ning to escape the incessant bombing. The village used to sit where Sorl Blaet had her accident. After the bombings ended in 1973, that land was heavily contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO); elders remember seeing bodies strewn across the fields.

So the village moved a couple of miles away, and used their old land for farming. In a dangerous, desperate move, villagers collected and destroyed as many bombs as they could.

“We had to; we didn’t have any other free land,” says Mr. Glan Lo.

Jerry Redfern

Soth Diep, Operation Manager for the Mines Advisory Group in Ratanakiri, Cambodia, points to markers placed near suspected buried US cluster munitions along a road.

Clearing the land

For years, Cambodia has had clearance groups working in the central and western parts of the country to clear one of the world’s worst landmine threats, remnants of the Cambodian Civil War. But there were no clearance groups working near Phum Saom K’ning when Sorl Blaet had her accident.

That changed the following year. Now, the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) – one of the primary clearance organizations in Cambodia – has an on-call team to assist locals. When villagers find a bomb, they report it to Sorl Oum, a 20-year-old volunteer who then reports to MAG. The MAG team identifies, records, and destroys the ordnance, in what’s known as “rapid response.”

Another other main method is “area clearance,” in which every inch of a particular plot is methodically searched with metal detectors and cleared of all dangerous items. It’s a painstaking process that takes months of planning, mapping, outreach and coordination, whereas rapid response happens on the spot, typically the same day. MAG has teams of both types working full-time in Ratanakiri, but the job is enormous. Only a small percentage of contaminated land has been cleared.

Villagers say rapid response is both comforting and worrisome – comforting to have a professional team to remove the danger when found, but worrisome to have the lingering fear of what remains below the surface.

“I still come here to farm,” Sorl Blaet says, standing on the open plain where the explosion knocked her to the ground. “If we don’t come here to farm, how can we support our lives?”

Phum Saom K’ning villagers seem to hold no grudge against the forces that battled across their land and left it hazardous for future generations. But while they appreciate the work done by MAG, they do have a couple of questions: Since everyone knows the bombs are there, why isn’t there more of an effort to take them all away? And whose responsibility is it to do so? 

Jerry Redfern

A team from the Mines Advisory Group uses a large-loop metal detector to find and mark possible US cluster munitions in a field along a road in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia.

Mounting costs

These are questions increasingly debated among scholars, policymakers, military leaders, ethicists, and religious leaders. And they came to a head late last year when Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen asked newly elected President Trump to drop the country’s war-era debt, calling it “dirty” money in light of Cambodia’s wartime suffering – a request he also made, unsuccessfully, to the Obama administration. The US again said no, igniting a public spat.

By the 1970s, the massive bombing campaign had prompted tens of thousands of villagers to flee the countryside. With no farmers at work, crops weren’t grown, and the US provided $274 million in loans to purchase food and goods for displaced Cambodians. With interest, those loans have grown to around $500 million. In March, when the US reiterated that it expected to be paid, Mr. Hun Sen refused, calling the money “blood-stained” by US bombs.

Then, in May, US Ambassador to Cambodia William Heidt hinted the US may reduce its funding for UXO clearance, suggesting Cambodia should “begin to take more responsibility” for those expenses. Over the past 24 years, the US has given Cambodia more than $114 million for clearance, about $8.4 million of that in fiscal year 2015.

“We are committed to addressing our legacy in Cambodia, including unexploded ordnance of US origin,” says David Josar, US Embassy spokesman. “To speculate on proposed budget cuts would be inappropriate at this time.”

Any notion of funding cuts makes clearance workers uneasy. “The US has been the largest and most long-standing donor to mine action in Cambodia, in terms of support to both minefield and cluster munition clearance,” said Greg Crowther, MAG Regional Director in Southeast Asia. “Any decrease in funding would therefore be a significant blow.”

Sophal Ear, an author and associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles, says Cambodia should brace for that blow in the Trump era of “America First.” Plus, he says, it doesn’t help that Hun Sen “likes to needle the US with alarming regularity.” Since the debt-related dustup, the Cambodian government has been targeting US-backed media groups working in the Kingdom.

“There’s really nothing President Trump will do for Cambodia except cut foreign aid unilaterally,” he predicts.

Jerry Redfern

Ethnic Jarai kids and adults sit in the shade beneath a stilt house in Phum Saom K'ning village in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia.

Laws to look backward

Ethical questions about who owes what to whom in the aftermath of conflict fall under an area of study known as jus post bellum, or “justice after war” – a burgeoning field that some scholars hope will influence international law.

For centuries, a doctrine called Just War Theory has offered guidance on the “right” way to undertake and engage in war. But those criteria lacked a key element for modern times: What happens after war? (For that matter, when does a war really end?) Chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and depleted uranium rounds can kill or maim well after fighting stops, and weren’t around in the times of Aristotle or von Clausewitz. As recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere show, questions about postwar responsibilities are increasingly germane, and murky.

Brian Orend, the director of International Studies and a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, has called for a new Geneva Convention centered on postwar problems, as the current Conventions primarily deal with treatment during war.

“Academic and even military-officer interest is substantial and growing,” he says, but “these things take a long, long time to get the attention of state governments. Plus, there are reasons why states might never agree to such a new Convention, mainly as they are leery of restraining themselves at all.”

International bodies have put forth several documents to address post-conflict responsibilities. But few are binding by law, and the US has not signed several of them. Furthermore, most initiatives look only toward ongoing and future wars, not past conflicts.

The US ratified Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War (ERW), for example, which requires warring parties to survey, assess, and clear ERW as soon as feasible after conflict. But “you can’t apply it retroactively,” according to Britta Sjöstedt, a postdoctoral fellow and senior lecturer in international law at Lund University in Sweden.

When it comes to the Jarai questions about responsibility and postwar cleanup, Dr. Sjöstedt says, “there is nothing really that you could argue” in terms of international law: nothing that compels a country to clear all that land, so long after war.

Forty-four-year-old messes present questions less in the realm of legal obligation and more in the area of moral duty, she says. However, countries don’t operate on morals: they run on laws and self-interests.

“Governments are fickle when it comes to moral claims, and are much more responsive when it comes to interests,” Dr. Orend says. “So, an argument needs to be made as to how it's not ‘merely’ moral, or just to attend to postwar reconstruction, but that it's usually, quite overwhelmingly, in one's national interest to do so as well.”

But Cambodia “is of no importance to the US,” says David Chandler, an emeritus professor at Monash University in Australia, who has studied Cambodian society for more than 50 years. 

The other question posed by the Jarai — who is responsible for cleaning this up? — has a simple legal answer, for now:

No one.

But that answer leaves Blaet hanging. Meanwhile, she has a message and one last question: First, she thinks someone should clear all the bombs from her field and village so she and her children can live and farm without fear.

And second, she wonders: Can anyone help her? The explosion happened in 2008. Almost one decade later, she still hopes the fragments inside her, an ever-present reminder of that day, will be removed.

Doug Struck

Editor Art Cullen, shown here in the office of the Storm Lake Times, is a a fearless town scold in a small town in conservative Iowa. This spring he won the Pulitzer Prize for his scathing editorials.

Chicago newspaperman Wilbur F. Storey once reviewed a local performer with unvarnished bluntness: She was a “large-limbed, beefy specimen,” he wrote in 1870. The offended woman tracked him down on Wabash Avenue and horsewhipped him.

Art Cullen is not afraid of horsewhipping, but he allows that some folks really don’t like what he writes in his newspaper.

Mr. Cullen, too, has a penchant for telling it like he sees it. In the small town of Storm Lake, Iowa, where agriculture and slaughterhouses rule, he has taken on powerful interests.

He forced the mighty Agribusiness Association of Iowa to back down, and embarrassed the local county superintendents. He has berated the area’s popular congressmen (“morally reprehensible”), jabbed the legislature (“abysmal”), and run roughly on his longtime friend, former Gov. Terry Branstad. He dismissed a chunk of his own farmer readers (20 percent “could beat the devil at his game”). Deep in Trump Country, he has defended the tide of immigrants who have rushed into this conservative northwest corner of Iowa.

For that, he won the Pulitzer Prize this year. His editorials foiled a secret arrangement by local authorities to allow big-farm interests to fight a lawsuit seeking improved water quality in the town’s namesake lake. The Pulitzer board said his commentary was “fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing.”

The Pulitzer Prize for such a small paper warmed the hearts of those who see the loss of tough journalism in local reporting. As small-town papers have lost advertising, cut staff, and been bought by corporate chains, too often they have lost the sharp teeth of their traditional watchdog role. Not Cullen’s Storm Lake Times.

“Art Cullen speaks his mind. And he is articulate,” says Jon Kruse, Storm Lake’s long-time mayor. He chooses his words as though tiptoeing through a minefield.

Cullen relishes the effect. He is tall, with a shock of white hair and a horseshoe mustache. He looks startlingly like Mark Twain, and writes like Samuel Clemens, too: sometimes folksy, sometimes eloquent, frequently mocking, and customarily outraged.

“It’s important for somebody to say, ‘Hey, we are going too far.’ That’s our basic function as a free press in a small rural place,” Cullen says simply.

It’s not puffery. The editor of The Storm Lake Times is cut from the newsprint of journalistic tradition. He is passionate about it. His small newspaper – circulation 3,000 – is a family affair. His brother John started it in 1990 and is publisher; his son Tom is the chief reporter. His wife, Dolores, writes features and takes pictures.

The paper publishes twice a week. It serves a community that on the surface looks typical, Midwestern, idyllic: neat homes on elm-lined streets, set on the shore of a sparkling lake. A closer look, though, shows its peculiarities. Whites are almost a minority here, with Hispanics, Laotians, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Micronesians, and Hmong making up nearly half of the population. Much of the chatter on the street is in foreign tongues. Downtown is not abandoned, as it is in many rural towns. Storm Lake is gaining population while most small towns are hemorrhaging.

There are two newspapers in town, also unusual. Cullen dismisses the competition as the product of out-of-town owners. “I never read it. If I need to read the Pilot Tribune to find out about the news, then I ought to go sell shoes.”

He chats at his newspaper office on Railroad Avenue; it is a small warehouse, thoroughly cluttered. It is adorned by memorabilia, including a signed photo of JFK and an ancient Apple computer that sits beside his old typewriter. Rough boards separate a few offices for the 10-person staff. The only inside door barges open, and furry Mabel the news hound regally inspects – and dismisses – a visitor.

Cullen will jump up in mid-conversation to jot down a reminder, and cut short his high dudgeon over some issue with a laugh – “That will be my next column.”

His son Tom endures the heat of the sparks his father fans. Tom is rainspout-tall like his father, bespectacled, and full of nervous energy. As the “chief” – about the only – general assignment reporter, Tom hustles about town chasing the news. Spend a day or two in Storm Lake and one will cross his path often. Tom Cullen’s news reports are straight; most town officials concede he is accurate and fair.

But when his father rails on the editorial page, the afflicted officials often see Tom’s face next. He admits he has walked into a hostile public meeting “feeling like a lamb going to slaughter.” The room lights have been turned out on him, and “I’ve gotten the death stare” from angry officials.

Tom is 25, but he has an old-time reporter’s thrill for the chase. He recounts running in dress clothes to the 14^th hole at a golf tournament to try to catch officials who had been dodging him. “The looks they gave me were golden.” And he admits to the journalist’s secret pleasure: “When you see your name in a byline, it’s awesome. I love it.”

His father said he nudged Tom to forgo law school to be a reporter because it is more fun. Tom tells a slightly different story: “I bombed the LSATs. I was terrible at taking tests.” But he relishes his occupation. “I think we have made a difference. People always have to answer to us. That’s built on 20 years of scrupulous reporting. Sometimes they refuse to talk to us, but eventually they come around. Even Republican lawmakers who probably hate our guts.”

But Art Cullen’s editorials are equal-opportunity offenders, as likely to take on environmentalists as the bumbling city manager who tried to close a city council session but accidentally left the public-address system on, broadcasting the secret meeting to Tom Cullen sitting on a bench in City Hall.

Writing on President Trump: “He is a fool. He is ignorant. People who prop up an ignoramus should question themselves, unless they don’t have the wits to recognize it.”

On Iowa’s revered presidential caucus: “It’s ugly. It’s dishonest.”

On the Buena Vista County Board of Supervisors: “They are doing everything they can to hide from the public… the chutzpah of it.”

On complaints that immigrants have undercut labor by taking slaughterhouse jobs at $15 an hour: “The wages aren’t Manhattan, but they’re enough to get by in Storm Lake. It is the best a proud person illiterate in English from El Salvador could hope for. It offers the freedom that is yet a dream in Myanmar. It offers peace from the civil war in Sudan, and a place for the long-wandering migrant to plant some roots.”

He saves his strongest acid for US Rep. Steve King, the Republican who has won seven elections in the northwest Iowa district (though he did not carry Storm Lake in the last one). Representative King is an arch-conservative on abortion rights, gun rights, and his comments on immigrants are, in the eyes of critics, thinly covered racism. Mexicans “have calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King has said. America “can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies,” he has said.

“He feeds off what we say,” Cullen acknowledges. “I can be his foil.”

Do you ever pull punches?

“No.” A pause. “Well, yes, yes I do. But not with morally reprehensible people.”

With whom?

“Bankers!” Cullen laughs explosively. “When you are $500,000 in debt on revenues of $700,000, you are careful.”

Reuters

Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma talks to young entrepreneurs and students at the University of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya, July 20.

It’s not every day that one country accuses another of not being innovative enough. Yet on Aug. 14, the United States, the world’s largest economy, threw that charge at China, the world’s second-largest economy. The US complained that China prefers to take the technology and intellectual property of foreign companies rather than rely mainly on its own ingenuity to build a more competitive economy.

The complaint was in the form of an order by President Trump to investigate China’s alleged theft of specific US patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property. The US calls China the world’s greatest infringer of IP. In particular, the US wants to stop China from targeting American companies and forcing them to hand over their trade secrets when they try to enter the large Chinese market.

The US probe could result in new restrictions on Chinese imports. But it might also have a positive effect rather than risk a trade war. It could force China to focus even more on developing a business culture that fosters creativity and a freedom of thought that challenges norms.

That is still difficult under an authoritarian regime that prefers conformity and even commands the large state-run businesses on which industries to invest in. In fact, the government has directed its top firms to dominate high-tech industries such as robotics and new energy vehicles in the next eight years.

Most of all, Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs need to become better at overcoming a fear of failure in trying new ideas. According to a survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, China does not rank well against other countries in the “fear of failure” rate among its would-be entrprepreneurs. The government acknowledges the pressures to succeed and avoid the shame of failure. It has lately told researchers to tolerate mistakes.

China’s most famous entrepreneur, Jack Ma of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, highlights this issue in his talks. “Failure has never stopped me; instead, it has trained me,” he says. Rather than be afraid of failure, he advises, people must get used to it. Change, he adds, is the best opportunity to develop new business ideas.

The US investigation still has far to go. But at the least, it is another signal for China to expand freedom and reduce fear among its researchers and entrepreneurs. The rest of the world expects – and assumes – China can do this.