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Former Alabama Chief Justice and current US Senate candidate Roy Moore speaks at the Vestavia Hills Public library, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017, in Birmingham, Ala. Mr. Moore is facing pressure from allegations about sexual misconduct.

Few stories illustrate the zeitgeist of American politics and culture more clearly right now than that of the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, who is battling accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.

On the level of pure politics, Alabama's Senate seat – and possibly future control of the Senate itself – hangs in the balance. “I don't see how this ends well for Mr. Moore,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, who is one of a growing chorus of senators calling on Moore to drop out of the Dec. 12 special election.

What should be a safe seat for Republicans is clearly in jeopardy, with the latest state polling showing Moore now slightly behind Democrat Doug Jones, although within the margin of error. If Moore exits the race, Republicans would likely try to rally around a write-in candidate, possibly Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who held the seat for many years. If Moore stays in the race and wins, he faces a wall of rejection in the Senate, with a top GOP leader making the extraordinary statement Monday that Moore should be expelled once he got there – something senators haven’t done to a fellow member since the Civil War.

But the Moore story touches on bigger questions than one Senate seat or even the balance of power. For one thing, the starkly different reactions to the accusations – denied by Moore but given credence by party leaders – underscore a deep division between the GOP base and the “establishment” in Washington. For Moore supporters, the accusations fall into the Trump-era vortex of “fake news,” with many discounting them as the product of a “liberal media.”  

At the same time, the Moore accusations are bringing the #metoo story – the surging wave of women making public their accounts of alleged sexual abuse – squarely into the realm of politics, amid signs that a broad shift in attitudes may be occurring. Just last week, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution making sexual harassment training mandatory. The House today held a hearing to review its own policies, at which several female lawmakers who had previously worked as staffers testified about their own experiences of abuse on Capitol Hill.

“There are two members of Congress, Republican and Democrat, right now who serve ... that have engaged in sexual harassment,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D) of California told the Committee on House Administration on Tuesday.

After the hearing, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin issued a statement saying,“Going forward, the House will adopt a policy of mandatory anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training for all Members and staff. Our goal is not only to raise awareness, but also make abundantly clear that harassment in any form has no place in this institution.” 

Policy implications

The Moore allegations may even have indirect policy implications, with GOP lawmakers now feeling greater pressure than ever to pass their tax plan quickly, given the possibility that the Alabaman – or a possible write-in candidate – might lose to the Democrat in next month's election. That would bring the GOP margin in the Senate down to a single seat.

“This is not what Republicans need right now as they try to push major legislation through,” says Jennifer Duffy, who closely follows the Senate at the independent Cook Political Report.

No longer is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky couching his view that Moore should resign his candidacy “if” the allegations raised in a Nov. 9 Washington Post story are true. On Monday, Senator McConnell said flatly: “I believe the women,” and said Moore should exit the race.

Four women told The Post of encounters with Moore when they were in their teens and Moore was in his 30s and was an assistant district attorney in northern Alabama. One episode allegedly involved a 14-year-old girl he drove to his home, where he reportedly took off his clothes and removed hers, touching her over her underwear, and guiding her to do the same over his.

A fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson, came before reporters on Monday, accompanied by well-known attorney Gloria Allred. Ms. Nelson gave an emotional account of a sexual assault by Moore when she was 16 and working as a waitress and he was a prosecutor in Etowah County. Moore has denied the allegations.

On Tuesday, Speaker Ryan added his voice to those of Moore's critics in the Senate, calling the accounts “credible” and saying Moore should “step aside.”

Sen. Cory Gardner (R) of Colorado, who heads up the Republican senatorial campaign effort for 2018, has gone so far as to call for expelling Moore if he wins. That’s a long process, involving a Senate investigation and requiring two-thirds to agree. While the last Senate expulsion occurred in 1862, the process led to a high-profile resignation in 1995. Sen. Bob Packwood (R) of Oregon resigned the day after the Senate Ethics Committee recommended he be expelled for repeated sexual misconduct and other reasons. Senator McConnell was ethics chairman at the time.

Defenders in Alabama

But the prevailing sentiment is different in Alabama, where calls for Moore’s resignation are being dismissed by his supporters as an attempt by the media and the Washington “swamp” to drown an outsider candidate.

“I’m dead sure voting for Roy Moore,” says Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama GOP activist and early Trump supporter who says he did not vote for Moore in the primary. But “they’ve solidified my vote,” he says in a phone interview. Mr. McCutcheon defines “they” as the “fake news” media, specifically the Washington Post and other “left-wing” outlets.

"I just don’t believe it," he says. "I think they’re trying to manipulate the election.” He says he read the original Post story, but it sounded to him like it was fabricated to meet a set of timelines. If Moore pulls out of the race, he says, it will “backfire on McConnell.”

Moore has run an anti-McConnell campaign, supported by the Great America political action committee, which is affiliated with Steve Bannon, former strategist to President Trump. Mr. Bannon has vowed to back anti-McConnell candidates in GOP primaries – including targeting some Senate Republican incumbents up for reelection next year.

“This is the world Trump has created,” says Ms. Duffy.

Duffy observes that most of the voices coming out of Alabama in support of Moore are male, and says the election in Virginia last week, where women made a strong anti-Trump showing, raises a cautionary note for Republicans. She also points to a double standard in Alabama. Last April, the state's governor resigned under a cloud of scandal after pleading guilty to abusing his office, allegedly to cover up an extramarital affair with a political advisor. “Moore supporters have ceded the ground on ever criticizing any politician for these accusations, regardless of party.”

Still, Moore’s supporters are rallying around him, pointing out the decades that have intervened since the alleged incidents and that the legal age of consent in Alabama is 16.

Others don’t buy that argument. Not Duffy, who says there’s a big difference between sex between a 16-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy, and a girl of the same age and a man in his 30s.

Neither does Senator Graham think much of the defense.

“A newspaper article is not proof in court, but this is not a trial in court,” Graham told reporters on Monday. The behavior described by Nelson and the allegations relating to a 14-year-old are not consensual and “have the ring of truth,” he said.

Staff writer David Sloan contributed to this report from Washington.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the number of senators needed to vote to expel a member. It's two-thirds.

George Frey/Reuters

Uranium One and Anfield's Shootaring Canyon Uranium Mill facility sits outside Ticaboo, Utah on Nov. 13, 2017. In 2010, a Russian nuclear agency purchased a controlling interest in Uranium One, a Canada-based mining firm. US officials, including the State Department under Hillary Clinton, reviewed the deal.

President Trump calls it the “real Russia story”: allegations that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale of 20 percent of US uranium supplies to Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear company.

The sale was greased by $145 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation from Canadian executives who benefited from the sale, according to these allegations.

Prosecutors at the Justice Department are now reportedly considering the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the transaction. Here is a look at some of the details of the case.

Q: Who bought what here?

In 2010, Rosatom, a state-controlled agency that runs all aspects of Russian nuclear power, purchased a controlling interest in a Canadian mining company named Uranium One. This firm then owned, and still owns, uranium mining rights in the United States.

At the time, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission noted that amount of American uranium involved equaled about 20 percent of the “in-situ recovery production capacity” in the country. Since then, the opening of new capacity by other firms has reduced that figure to about 10 percent, according to a lengthy investigation of Uranium One assets by The Washington Post. And the US is far from the Saudi Arabia of uranium – in 2016, the US accounted for about 2 percent of world uranium extraction.

For Rosatom, the key aspect of the Uranium One deal might have been the latter firm’s large uranium mine holdings in Kazakhstan, a nation once part of the Soviet Union.

Q: Is uranium a key national resource?

Yes and no. It is crucial to some manufacturing processes, and to the production of nuclear power, which generates about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Under US regulations Uranium One is not supposed to export US produced uranium.

Uranium production is not important to nuclear weapons, however, for either the US or Russia. Both countries have thousands of decommissioned warheads and stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. In fact, under a program named Megatons to Megawatts, which expired in 2013, Russia sold blended-down, formerly weaponized uranium to the US to use in civilian reactors. At one point earlier this decade, fuel produced from old Soviet warheads was producing about 10 percent of US electricity.

Q: Did the US government approve the Rosatom purchase? 

Due to the sensitivity of Rosatom’s investment in Uranium One, the deal had to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. This body consists of nine senior US officials, including the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Energy, the attorney general, and two White House representatives. They unanimously OK’d the transaction in 2010.

Under the Treasury Department regulations that established the Committee on Foreign Investments, it can either approve a deal or recommend that it be blocked. The power to actually stop a sale rests in the Oval Office, according to the regulations. Only the president – in this case, President Obama – has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction.

Q: Where do contributions to the Clinton Foundation come in?

The Clinton Foundation received $145 million in pledges and donations from original investors in Uranium One, prior to its sale to Rosatom. Furthermore, these donations were not disclosed at the time they were made, according to a 2015 story in the New York Times. (The Times story was based in part on research by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at a conservative think tank and author of the controversial 2015 book “Clinton Cash.”)

Former President Bill Clinton also received $500,000 for speaking at a Moscow conference organized by a Russian investment bank after the Rosatom-Uranium One deal was announced, but before it passed muster with the US Committee on Foreign Investments, according to the Times story.

Most of the $145 million in Clinton Foundation donations came from one person, a major Uranium One investor named Frank Giustra. Mr. Giustra has said that he sold all his shares in Uranium One about 1-1/2 years before Mrs. Clinton became secretary of State – and three years before Rosatom and its Russian cash came calling.

There is no direct evidence of a quid pro quo between Clinton and Uranium One backers. As one of nine members of a US committee weighing the deal, it was not within Clinton’s power to approve the deal on her own. There is no evidence Clinton was even informed of the prospective deal while she was secretary of State. While cabinet heads make up the committee, that is a nominal position. As often the case in government, subordinates go to the meetings and do the work.

Q: Why is this coming up again?

Mr. Trump has continued to raise the issue as he pushes back against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In mid-October Trump told reporters in the Oval Office the Uranium One deal is the “real Russia story. Not a story where they talk about collusion and there was none.” 

In addition, the Senate Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation into the case, after The Hill published stories about Russian nuclear officials engaging in fraudulent behavior in the US around 2009.

According to The Hill, the FBI did not inform the Committee on Foreign Investments of its scrutiny of this behavior prior to the Uranium One decision. Right now there’s no evidence it was linked to the Rosatom deal, however. And perpetrators have already been prosecuted: in 2015, the Russian nuclear industry’s point man in the US, a director of a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation named Vadim Mikerin, was sentenced to 48 months in prison for money laundering.

For Iraq, guaranteeing the safety of millions of Shiite faithful on their annual ​pilgrimage to the shrine of a revered saint in Karbala has always been a monumental challenge.

The march, the largest annual religious pilgrimage on earth, ​is in defiance of Iraq’s chronic insecurity and the frequent attempts by Sunni militants – including, recently, Islamic State (ISIS) fighters – to derail this event with violence.

​This year, the pilgrimage ​to the shrine of Imam Hussein ​held special resonance, as ISIS in Iraq has been all but defeated in recent months by Iraqi security forces – supported by Iran-backed Shiite militias and a US-led bombing campaign.

Amid the striking iconography of Imam Hussein as “Lord of the Martyrs,” the pilgrims’ path was lined this year with posters of Iraq’s own Shiite “martyrs” who died battling ISIS – a blending of religious and political significance that is common to modern Shiite belief.

The risks of attack were high, but so, too, were the rewards for the millions of Shiite pilgrims whose faith overcomes fear.

“We don’t care about security – we just come,” says Fadl Abbas, a truck driver nursing blistered feet, swollen legs, and a new limp after his 50-mile march.

“The love of Imam Hussein takes you on the right path in your life. You don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t drink. He represents all the good things in life,” says Mr. Abbas. “If you love Hussein, you will not be afraid. It makes me brave.”

At the climax of days of walking on roads clogged with nearly 14 million fellow believers, pilgrims raise their arms in deference – and start taking video with their smart phones – when they first see the shrine of Imam Hussein, with its ornate tiled façade crowned with a gold cupola and minarets.

Inside at the gilt tomb itself, the emotional intensity of the march, known as arbaeen, overflows for the grandson of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. He was killed in battle in 680 AD, and the legend of his death – his small band overwhelmed by the vast army of an illegitimate caliph – demonstrated the qualities of faith and resistance that Shiites aim to emulate.

Around the tomb, true believers crush toward the gleaming silver and gold metal frame, hands outstretched and tears flowing, the air squeezed from their lungs by the press of humanity, as they try to physically touch their sacred imam.

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Violence no deterrent

The arbaeen pilgrimage has been targeted repeatedly by the Sunni jihadists of ISIS, who take the extreme view that Shiites are infidels. Those risks have grown since ISIS swept across the border from Syria in June of 2014, vowing to topple the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and destroy the “filth-ridden” Shiite shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf.

But the violence has never dented Shiite enthusiasm for arbaeen, despite sectarian incidents such as a suicide car bomb in November 2016 that killed at least 125 pilgrims returning home to Iran.

This two-week marching period, which peaked on Nov. 10, passed without serious incident. Some 55,000 extra security personnel were deployed, and strict rules kept all non-official vehicles 20 miles from the shrine.

Columns of ordinary people, many holding religious flags, stretched along roads on every horizon. Among them came entire families, from old men in wheelchairs and young hipsters with gelled hair and tight T-shirts, to young mothers in headscarves pushing strollers with determination.

All along the way, volunteers grilled fish over open fires, or made bubbling stews and soups for pilgrims in cavernous aluminum tubs.

“People of course keep worrying about security, because it’s a legitimate worry,” says the governor of Karbala province, Akeel al-Toreihi.

Bigger than the hajj

New high-tech cameras were installed west of Karbala “because we expect the enemy to come from the desert,” he says – the same place security forces fought ISIS to stymie an attack two years ago. Four or five new drones monitored roads and farmlands.

Some 650 buses carried pilgrims who couldn’t walk the final stretch. Approaching the shrine itself, pilgrims passed through five pat-down body searches.

Security has improved, but the challenge was acute for the largest annual gathering of any kind on the planet. According to the Karbala shrine authority, some 13.8 million pilgrims took part in arbaeen this year. More than 2 million Iranians were issued visas, with many more crossing overland without them. Some 30,000 Afghans came by air, and another 30,000 overland through Iran. Upwards of 200,000 Gulf Arabs and 50,000 Lebanese also joined the march.

By comparison, the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia – a rite which all of the world’s estimated 1.8 billion Muslims are meant to undertake at least once in their lifetime – receives far fewer than 3 million pilgrims.

In Iraq, the numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who conduct a vast logistical exercise along every road leading to the city, sometimes well over 100 miles distant, by setting up food, water, rest and health facilities along the way. All such services are free for pilgrims.

Unified by threat

And yet, instead of deterring pilgrims, the threat from ISIS has unified Iraq’s Shiites, says Governor Toreihi.

“It’s a big challenge to prove your presence [for Shiites]. Many people think that they will be blessed because of these rituals,” says Toreihi. “Because Hussein rose up against injustice, he became the symbol for revolution. That principle … became a part of the subconscious of Shiites.”

Iraqi soldiers securing the route often wear sashes in the red, white, and green colors of Iraq’s flag, and post banners stating they are “honored to serve” passing pilgrims. A clear reverence is shown to martyrs of Iraq’s anti-ISIS fight – regular soldiers and Shiite militiamen alike.

For many arbaeen pilgrims, though, politics are secondary to connecting with their beliefs in divinity.

“It is always an amazing feeling when you get to touch Hussein,” says Amal Hussein, a college graduate who has joined her family for numerous journeys to Karbala.

“It is like reaching heaven,” she says.

In a rundown park in the shadow of Rome’s Colosseum, Eleonora Venturelli takes her dog Maya for a walk after finishing a day at nursing school.

She says if Maya needed more – an emergency visit to the vet, for example – she wouldn’t hesitate to drop everything, as she would if a member of her family needed her. “Maya, for me she is as important as my mother, as my father,” says Ms. Venturelli.

“I’m an only child. She is like my sister, though she is better than a sister,” she says with a wry smile. “She is a sister who doesn’t speak.”

The place of pets in the family hierarchy is on Italian minds – after a university employee was granted a paid sick day by her employer to care for her English Setter earlier this fall. The situation became the talk of water coolers in a nation still reeling from high unemployment and years of austerity, where nevertheless dog ownership is growing and demographics are expected to keep that trend robust. Ultimately the decision reflects a shift in mentalities about the rights of animals versus the responsibilities humans bear in caring for them.

“In most countries animals are considered chattels, they are simply possessions,” says Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln in Britain. But that is starting to shift in many countries, he says, as animals are starting to be seen as members of society who are not fully autonomous, like young children or the very elderly. Increasingly, he says, “animals fit like that, that we actually have a responsibility towards them as society.”

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Eleonora Venturelli, walking her dog Maya in Rome, says her dog is like a sister to her.

That is what the Anti Vivisection League (LAV), an animal rights group in Italy, argued in the situation of the employee at Sapienza University of Rome, named in the Italian press only as Anna. The group pointed out that Anna would be held liable if she failed to care for her sick pet, since under Italy’s penal code those who abandon an animal to “grave suffering” face jail time and hefty fines.

“It is a significant step forward,” said LAV President Gianluca Felicetti in a statement, which noted that the university's decision to grant paid leave recognizes pets as “members of the family.” Anna's situation did not go through the courts, but the group nevertheless called it an important “precedent.”

Pet ownership continues to grow in most emerging and developed markets, according to Euromonitor. So does pet “humanization,” the market research provider notes in a 2016 report, “as the companionship provided by pets, particularly cats and dogs, appears to address a fundamental psychological need in many people as society becomes more urbanized and atomized.” The level of dog ownership in the US increased from 36 percent to 37 percent between 2011 and 2016. In Italy, 23 percent of households had dogs in 2016, according to figures from Statista.

And companies are taking note. One of the best examples is the Scottish company BrewDog. On its staff benefits page, alongside offerings of private healthcare or parental leave, is listed “pawternity,” a week off for owners who take on a puppy or rescue dog.

Camilla Pagani, a social psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome who has studied relationships between youths and animals, says she sees societal attitudes towards animals softening as part of a civil rights movement. But the case at Sapienza has been controversial because of the hard economic times. “People are quite worried about themselves,” she says, “and they don’t feel like taking care of animals.”

Dr. Mills has done cost-benefit analyses with his team at the University of Lincoln, and he says that while pet ownership is often discussed in policy terms as a drain on public resources – when there is a rabies outbreak, for example – he says that studies show pets providing potential health benefits that represent savings. “In this period of austerity rather than seeing companion animals as a luxury and a burden on society, there is probably a real opportunity to rethink the way we do things.”

That might include new housing with space for residents to walk dogs, which fosters community relations, he says. Dr. Pagani says that demographic forces in Italy – low birth rates with smaller families like Venturelli’s, coupled with an aging society – could give pets a more prominent role.

That's true for Mauro Giansanti, on a recent fall day at the Colosseum park where he takes a walk every day with his dog, Yuma, a boxer.

Mr. Giansanti wasn’t always a dog owner. He decided to take the plunge only at retirement, even though his wife worried the dog would be too aggressive. Now Yuma has found her place in their family. “Yuma is like my daughter,” says the father of three grown sons. Still, not all is quiet on the home front. “Now my wife is jealous of her.”

Reuters

Holding a book about Lenin, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro attends his weekly broadcast "Los Domingos con Maduro" (The Sundays with Maduro) in Caracas, Venezuela, Nov 12.

The country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves was declared to be in a debt default by Standard & Poor’s this week. Like many petrostates, once-rich Venezuela has squandered its natural wealth, mainly by a poverty of democracy. To fix the debt crisis will now require that its socialist dictator, President Nicolás Maduro, return the country to democratic ideals, starting with a presidential election slated for next year.

Mr. Maduro may still find ways to delay a full default in coming months. Russia and China, both of which seek influence in the region, could offer temporary help. But with Venezuela’s red ink estimated at well over $100 billion, what’s needed is a political deal with the duly elected leaders of the National Assembly. That body was recently sidelined by Maduro.

Successful talks are the only path for curbing the misrule and corruption that have led to a decline in Venezuela’s oil production, a shrinking of its economy, mass shortages in food – and the accumulation of the world’s largest public external debt as a share of gross domestic product.

Maduro cannot stay in power long if he defaults on all foreign debt. Creditors will be able to seize the country’s assets abroad, such as cargo ships and the Citgo company in the United States. That would jeopardize the flow of oil revenues. In addition, both the US and the European Union have imposed new economic sanctions on the regime over its human rights abuses and anti-democratic tactics.

Maduro still has a chance to save his country from further ruin. A new round of internationally mediated talks is planned between the government and the opposition in coming days. The focus should be on holding well-monitored and fair elections for a new president. Then the country, under new leadership, can start to wean its economy off oil and invest in people’s skills and create useful ideas for non-oil businesses.

Norway is a good example of a petroleum-rich nation that has been prudent in recycling its natural wealth into building a non-oil economy. Saudi Arabia is only now trying to overcome the mistake of being a corrupt petrostate under dictatorial rule. As in Russia, the Saudi regime has long used oil riches to stay in power.

With a full default looming, Venezuela can now escape the so-called resource curse of petrostates. All it would take is to put power back in the hands of the people with pluralist and transparent democracy.