“From the legislative branch side, we’re going to do as much as we can, as hard as we can, to send a signal to the world.”

Those forceful words – concerning the US response to the Saudi government’s murder of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi – were spoken Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by a United States senator.

They may sound like the stuff of any number of congressional Democrats who are promising a reinvigorated role for Congress in the oversight and carrying out of US foreign policy.

But in fact the comment was made by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

And what his words suggest is that Congress’s awakening from what analysts say has been a two-decades-long dormancy when it comes to foreign-policy activism won’t simply be the stuff of the Democrats’ retaking control of the House of Representatives in elections this month.

Indeed the factors that some experts cite in foreseeing a resurgent bipartisan congressional role in foreign-policy oversight range widely.

They go from the specific – disgust over the Khashoggi killing and a broad and building rejection of the US role in Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war in Yemen – to a growing bipartisan discontent with the executive branch’s foreign policy, which to many seems increasingly divorced from traditional American values such as human rights, press freedom, and democratic governance.

“On both sides of the aisle, in the House and the Senate, there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with a tendency of this president to cozy up to dictators … and to set aside the ideals of democratic governance and human rights that have traditionally played some part in US foreign policy,” says Thomas Carothers, an expert in democratization and US foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The next Congress will be “even more willing to challenge the president” and “increase its role” in the conduct of foreign policy, Mr. Carothers says, largely because the Democrats will take control of the House in January.

But he adds that the seeds of a foreign-policy “disconnect” between the executive and legislative branches were already planted by a Republican-controlled Congress – and could be seen in initiatives such as Russia sanctions that went beyond what President Trump wanted to see, and a successful bipartisan effort to resist administration proposals to gut democracy-promotion programs.

Yet it is the murder of Mr. Khashoggi by Saudi operatives in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul – and Mr. Trump’s response to it so far – that stands out to Carothers and other analysts. They see it as a kind of last straw for many in Congress who were already uncomfortable with what looked increasingly like a transactional foreign policy devoid of a values component.

“The Khashoggi killing and the way the president has stood by the crown prince [Mohammed bin Salman] despite the evidence was grotesque in a way that highlighted the unpleasantness and unacceptability of a purely realist approach to international relations,” Carothers says.

At odds with CIA findings?

Trump reaffirmed his faith in Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, in a statement Tuesday in which he said that while “it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event … our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a very important ally in our fight against Iran.”

In an interview aired Sunday, Trump told Fox News host Chris Wallace that the prince has repeatedly reassured him that he had no role in and did not order the journalist’s murder.

Saudi Press Agency/AP

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (front row on left) listens to Saudi King Salman give his annual policy speech in the ornate hall of the consultative Shura Council, Monday, Nov. 19, 2018, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Salman gave his first major speech since the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, expressing support for his son, the crown prince, and making no mention of the accusations that the prince ordered the killing.

That left the president appearing again to dismiss the findings of his own intelligence experts. The CIA made a preliminary determination, based on intercepts and knowledge of Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian regime, that the Khashoggi murder indeed occurred with direction from the prince. The agency’s high confidence in that assessment was expected to be part of a final report the CIA was to submit to the White House late Tuesday.

In his Tuesday statement, which seemed aimed at heading off the findings of the CIA report, Trump again emphasized the transactional nature of US relations with the Saudi kingdom – underscoring the $450 billion in trade and investment commitments the Saudis made to him during his first overseas trip as president.

At the same time, Trump acknowledged that “there are members of Congress who, for political and other reasons, would like to go in a different direction” in US-Saudi relations.

Indeed, Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky,  who generally has sided with Trump on foreign policy matters, tweeted in response to the president's statement – subtitled "America First!" – that “this statement is Saudi Arabia First, not America First.”

Senator Paul is sponsoring bipartisan legislation that would block arms sales to Saudi Arabia the administration has valued at $110 billion. 

Moreover, congressional discomfort with the Khashoggi affair is spilling over into renewed efforts on the Hill to curtail US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has left in its wake what international experts deem to be the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

On Tuesday, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) of California, favored to become House Speaker in January, joined legislation that would force an end to US participation in the Yemen war.

Last week a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that would impose tougher sanctions on Saudi Arabia than the measures the administration has already taken against 17 Saudis deemed to have been involved in the murder plot. The Senate bill includes a blanket embargo on the sale of arms to Riyadh for offensive purposes and a ban on US refueling of Saudi planes engaged in the Yemen war against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

Beyond that effort, another group of senators and representatives is pushing for a vote to end all support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and to make ending that war US policy.

Congress’s record

Experts in Congress and foreign policy say it’s been decades since Congress exercised in any meaningful way its role in setting and overseeing US foreign policy.

Writing in the February 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Stephen Weissman, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Africa, noted that Congress experienced something of a golden era in “playing a constructive role in matters of war and peace” from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

“Congress weighed in responsibly on conflicts in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, and southern Africa,” he said, sometimes blocking “arguably misguided action on the part of the executive branch,” while at other times “partnering” with the executive to “improve outcomes.”

But Congress “started backsliding in the early 1990s” when President Bill Clinton sent forces to Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo without congressional authorization, Mr. Weissman wrote. By the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks it was total abdication, he added, noting how Congress set off a new round of executive-branch foreign interventions by the “rushed” 2002 authorization of the use of force in Iraq by President George W. Bush.

Now some foreign policy analysts say the Khashoggi affair may portend some limited revival of congressional involvement in foreign policy – but they aren’t holding their breath for much beyond some impact on the Yemen war and relations with Saudi Arabia generally.

“The two areas where a Democratic House with cooperation from a Republican Senate might be able to constrain administration policy is on Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen,” says Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington with long experience in administrations of both parties.

“But a higher profile for the Congress on a couple of specific issues will not necessarily translate to activism and impact across the full spectrum of our foreign policy,” he says, “so the real question is going to be if Congress can act in ways to affect policy. And that,” he adds, “will require the Senate.”

Role of public opinion

Simply “holding hearings and issuing reports” will not be enough to signal the end of Congress’s foreign-policy dormancy, Mr. Miller says. And he adds that the arrival of a Democratic House might mean little more than ramped up vocal opposition to Trump foreign policy without some corresponding interest in influencing foreign policy on the Senate side.

“I think we should stop talking about a more proactive Congress on foreign policy, because it’s not Congress people are referring to, it’s the House,” Miller says. “And the House is one-half of one-third of the three branches of government, with everything but the House pretty much under the influence of the president.”

Yet while that may be true, the Carnegie Endowment’s Carothers says such analysis fails to consider the role that another aspect of American governance – public opinion, or the constituents of the members of Congress – plays in influencing US interaction with the world.

“Polls over recent years consistently show that Americans want a foreign policy that supports democracy promotion, and they want a balance between promoting human rights and democratic ideals and the need to get along with useful allies that don’t always uphold those ideals,” Carothers says. But President Trump has gone so far to one side of that balance that “he has put the country in a place where most Americans don’t want to be,” he adds.

“We’ve seen Congress stand firm on keeping some of the foreign-policy programs that reflect and promote the values that the American public supports,” he says, “and I think the next Congress will be even more willing to challenge the president and increase its role in setting foreign policy.”

Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Members of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest white nationalist-type groups in the country, attend a rally at the state capitol in Little Rock, Ark., Nov. 10.

When French President Emmanuel Macron marked the recent centenary of the end of World War I with a spirited attack on nationalism, many saw it as a rebuke of one of his guests, President Trump, a self-proclaimed nationalist.

But Mr. Macron was also addressing the swelling ranks of voters who are lining up behind national-populist politicians across Europe, stirring what he called “the old demons” that had contributed to two world wars. Speaking at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, he appealed instead to Europeans’ sense of patriotism, which he branded “the exact opposite of nationalism.”

These are slippery words, open to multiple interpretations that have cast a long shadow over US and European history.

Sometimes “nationalism” and “patriotism” are used in ways that suggest “a distinction without a difference,” in the words of Anatol Lieven, author of “America Right or Wrong: an Anatomy of American Nationalism."

More often they signal different ways of expressing attachment to your country. And the terms are freighted with very different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. Nationalism fueled the world wars that ravaged Europe but left America relatively unscathed. “That created a quite different historical legacy,” says Mr. Lieven. “Americans simply have not suffered as much from nationalism.”

Many writers have sought to distinguish between patriotism, which is universally admired, and nationalism, which until recently has been a dirty word in Europe. The 20th century French novelist Romain Gary put it pithily: “Patriotism is love for one’s own people; nationalism is hatred for the others.”

George Orwell, author of “Animal Farm” and “1984,” described patriotism as a benign “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” with “no wish to force [it] on other people.” Nationalism, he argued, was the malign “habit of identifying oneself with a single nation … placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

That is what most observers in Europe see in Mr. Trump’s slogan “America First” – not a patriot who defines his community by whom it includes, but a nationalist whose chief criterion is whom it excludes.

They see it too in his actions, his readiness to fight trade wars that risk harming the world economy, or his rejection of the Paris climate treaty, which put long-term global interests ahead of individual nations’ short-term economic interest.

Indeed, Trump draws on an American nationalist tradition dating back to President Andrew Jackson (whose portrait currently hangs in the Oval Office) that sets little store by international agreements or treaties. That outlook is the antithesis of the European Union’s founding principle that there is strength in unity and that unity is made stronger by compromise and cooperation among nation-states.

‘I love my country’

Exactly what Trump himself means when he calls himself a nationalist is unclear. At a recent White House press conference he said, “you know what the word is? I love our country.” That unexceptional sentiment would put him squarely in the patriot camp, for most people.

Then he added, “you have nationalists, you have globalists,” presenting them as two modern ways of looking at the world, which is very different from Macron. In his speeches, the French president posits “nationalists” and “progressives” as opposing camps, clearly identifying them as embodying the past and the future.

Unlike in Europe, where wars sparked by nationalism discredited the ideology for decades, nationalism has never gone away in the United States. It has shaped both Republican and Democratic administrations for most of the past century, says Lieven, either as the defensive, chauvinistic strain that Trump exemplifies, or as “civic nationalism” that expresses itself in terms of loyalty to American values, such as free speech, and institutions.

In Europe, nationalism was a modern force 150 years ago; 19th century stirrings of national pride in central Europe heralded the collapse of outmoded empires. But it proved a difficult force to tame. In the aftermath of WWII, the continent’s leaders made a deliberate effort to create the European Union as a post-national entity.

Yves Herman/Reuters/File

European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. TALK ABOUT EUROPEAN IDENTITY (alfredo's note)

At one level, it has worked. The EU has brought prosperity and made war between members unthinkable after many centuries of conflict. But at the human level, the European Union project has not stirred many hearts.

Just two percent of EU citizens identify themselves simply as “European,” a recent European Commission poll found. Another four percent see themselves as “primarily European.” Ninety percent still see themselves only or primarily as belonging to their country of origin.

'Take back control'

Few of those 90 percent would likely call themselves nationalists, but a great many of them worry about the EU’s tendency to undermine – or even erase – the national sovereignty that their parliaments once exercised. Nowhere is that concern clearer than in Britain, where anti-EU campaigners won the 2016 Brexit referendum that pulled the country out of the EU with the slogan “Take back control!”

That attitude is also making inroads in Eastern Europe. Countries such as Poland and Hungary may have joined the EU in order to preserve their national independence after half a century of subjugation by the Soviet empire. But their leaders are proving reluctant to pay the price the EU demands in terms of solidarity and burden-sharing when it comes to welcoming migrants, for example.

In Poland, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Sweden, France and the Netherlands, national populists are either in government or the second largest party. It remains to be seen whether their challenge will prompt EU leaders to recalibrate their dreams of a federal continent, and whether Macron and his allies will be able to divert the current tide of nationalism into the more manageable channel of patriotism.

Alexa. Siri. The voice that responds when you say, “OK Google.” These virtual assistants rely on artificial intelligence. They are increasingly ubiquitous, and they are female.

So far no Martin or Harry or Alexander. Ever wonder why?

Kate Devlin, a technology expert and senior lecturer at King’s College, London, says it may stem from biases that can lurk deep in human thought, perhaps even unnoticed. She recounts how, when she asked a developer of one of the digital-assistants why he chose a female voice, his answer was, ”I didn’t really think about it.”  

In sharing that anecdote in at the recent World Summit AI in Amsterdam, Dr. Devlin wasn’t alone in focusing on the link between gender bias and the fast-growing realm of artificial intelligence. In fact one of the hottest questions surrounding the technology is how to grapple with the tendency of AI to reinforce human prejudice, or possibly even expand the problem in new ways.

In September, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union joined with other groups in a lawsuit alleging that Facebook “delivers job ads selectively based on age and sex categories that employers expressly choose, and that Facebook earns revenue from placing job ads that exclude women and older workers from receiving the ads.”

Whatever the outcome of that lawsuit, many experts agree the challenge called algorithmic bias is real. It’s something that companies and academic researchers are now actively working to address. Lessening the skew of algorithms is becoming a business in and of itself. But it’s no easy task, due in part to the still-nascent understanding of how AI actually works, the lack of a regulatory framework, and the fact that biases are so deeply entrenched.

“AI creators and developers are all men. And in the West, they have been white men,” Francesca Rossi, IBM’s global leader of AI ethics, said in a talk at the conference, offering her own answer on why the digital assistants have female voices. “The stories used to program AI are created by men. It’s a vicious cycle between AI development and deployment.”

To be fair, companies such as Alphabet-owned Google tout diversity on the teams behind their automated voices.

Yet the basic challenge remains. AI algorithms are already being used in deciding who gets a mortgage or a credit card, who gets a job, who universities admit, and who gets parole – not to mention influencing how you shop.

‘Garbage in, garbage out’

IBM is one of the companies trying to become a leader in building a new ethic into algorithms.

“Most current AI systems are not free of bias,” the firm says in a short online video promoting the issue. “But within five years, the most successful AI will be, and only those will survive.”

The video is accompanied by upbeat music. But breaking that vicious circle – in which AI can both feed off and influence flawed human behavior – won’t be easy.

Gender bias, for example, goes back thousands of years. It was there when Plato and Aristotle espoused concepts of intellectual meritocracy.

“The wise, intelligent men ruled with a kind of legitimacy,” says Dr. Rossi, who is also a professor of computer science at the University of Padua. “The less-intelligent [considered to include all women] were seen as being somehow less human, and this gave men the right to rule and justified actions such as slavery,” she adds. “Without oversight and unless more women [and minorities] are involved in creating algorithms, this narrative of male domination will continue.”

An old rule of creating computer software is: “Garbage in, garbage out.” For companies seeking to use computers to fight bias, the key is giving machines better instructions.

The firm CompIQ in New York, for example, started in 2016 as a software platform for benchmarking the fairness of pay and benefits for companies. The goal is to help an employer set a wage scale that’s not only internally fair but also in line with other companies in the same sector.

Data on such things as location, seniority, and performance review is run through various AI tools to produce a market pay range for each employee based on all these factors. Variables such as gender, race, and age are not entered into the equation, so the machine doesn’t “think” about them in making its decisions.

“Titles alone are a very imperfect proxy for responsibilities. Responsibilities are the gold standard for compensation,” says Adam Zoia, the founder and CEO of CompIQ. And there’s a side benefit: “Looking at responsibilities often identifies issues employers never knew existed regarding compensation discrepancies and who is really doing what as part of his or her job function.”

Fair gatekeepers?

In addition to salaries, the business world is already using AI (fallible as it may be) to combat bias in hiring and promotions – particularly in the tech and finance sectors, where lawsuits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act have famously occurred.

One basic example: Companies including Johnson & Johnson say they’ve boosted the diversity of job applicants by using Textio, a data-driven tool, to word their job postings in more gender-neutral ways.

Other firms such as Plum, Pymetrics, and Hirevue aim to help employers make data-based and bias-free choices as they sift through job applications. For instance, job applicants play some simple online games, which test for traits and aptitudes – again shifting the focus away from things like gender. The AI software then looks at whether those traits match those of successful people in jobs like the one that’s being filled.

Boosters say such tools promise a world where people are better matched with jobs, and with less chance that good candidates never rise to the attention of humans, who still do the final hiring.

Critics say such efforts themselves warrant careful monitoring, including perhaps third-party audits to see if they are as successful in eliminating bias as they claim. Some also worry that the approaches might codify new kinds of bias, based on profiles of who will be a “good fit” at a job.

In fact, researchers have so far identified and classified more than 180 human biases.  

Paul Ohm, a law professor at Georgetown University, is looking into this issue with a research grant called “Playing with the Data” from Paris-headquartered AXA Insurance. His work focuses on screening the output of AI algorithms to identify and then rectify discrimination and bias, but the bias and its sources are not always obvious. To dig deeper, algorithms need an accountability function.

“If a computer program determines that I do not qualify for credit, at the very least it should be able to identify the critical factors that led to this decision,” he explains. Mr. Ohm believes such advances in transparency are coming through current research. “For example, a system might be able to say, ‘You would have qualified for this loan if your income was 10 percent higher and you closed one line of credit.’ ”  

Meanwhile, Rossi and fellow IBM researcher Biplav Srivastava have outlined ways to evaluate deployed AI systems even if the data that “trained” the machine are not available.

The research proposes an independent, three-pronged rating system to determine the relative fairness of an AI system: “1) It’s not biased, 2) It inherits the bias properties of its data or training, or 3) It has the potential to introduce bias whether the data is fair or not.” These criteria are designed to assist the AI end-user in determining the trustworthiness of each system.

Some experts are hopeful that, as research into AI systems discovers how human beings make decisions, we can also then identify our human biases more precisely and embrace more egalitarian values.

At a minimum, a successful future will depend upon software engineers taking responsibility for their products and keeping track of where their data come from.

“In all the years that computer science majors went to university, nobody educated them for this philosophical issue,” says Jim Stolze, founder of Aigency, an agency for artificial intelligence, who also teaches data science and entrepreneurship at Amsterdam Science Park and is a board member of “AI for Good” in the Netherlands.

“The ethics were part of the philosophy faculty, miles away from the informatics,” he says. “Only now we expect our ‘nerds’ to also understand the societal implications of their work.”

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, who wrote California’s corporate gender parity law, speaks at the State Capitol in Sacramento in June 2016.

When California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill this fall requiring publicly-owned companies to have female representation on their boards, he also wrote a letter. “There have been numerous objections to this bill and serious legal concerns have been raised,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, recent events in Washington, D.C. – and beyond – make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message.”

Governor Brown had made his opinion known: Women’s rights needed to advance faster. 

Written by Democratic state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, the new law makes California the first state in the nation to mandate a female quota on corporate boards and underscores a global movement toward bringing more women into corner offices. In parts of Europe, such as Norway, Iceland, and France, gender quotas of 30 to 40 percent were signed into law years ago, resulting in a spike of female representation – in some countries, to near parity. 

In the United States, the growth has been slower but steady: The percentage of women holding Fortune 500 board seats increased from 15.7 percent to 20.2 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to a report from the consulting firm Deloitte. And women accounted for a record 38.8 percent of newly hired directors at Fortune 500 companies in 2017. 

Achieving gender parity on boards and in upper management is also linked to the success of businesses, studies have found. Companies with a higher representation of women in senior management positions financially outperform companies with proportionally fewer women at the top, according to a study from Catalyst, a nonprofit group focused on advancing women in business. 

“Women are 60 percent of global university graduates today [and] they are 80 percent of decisionmakers in an ever-expanding range of sectors. It’s a business issue because they are today’s talent and they are today’s customers,” says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the chief executive officer of a consulting company, 20-first, that helps companies achieve gender balance by changing workplace culture and leadership.

Outside boardrooms, investment companies are also pushing for more female representation. Asset management firm Blackrock announced in February 2018 it expects the companies in its portfolio to have at least two women directors on every board. Several months later State Street Global Advisors made a similar announcement. The chief executive officer of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mark Machin, also recently wrote a newspaper commentary supporting the effort.

Martha Crawford, independent director of Altran Technologies, an engineering firm, says this push from investment companies is an “extremely effective one” because “those folks are the ones making the decisions about who is getting nominated and how [the portfolio company] is recruiting.”

As head of the nomination committee for Altran, she has personally felt the pressure coming from investors. “If we don’t have our 40 percent women ... I know at the next general assembly, I’m going to be the one targeted by everyone else,” she says. 

But government-mandated quotas may not find such wide acceptance. Some states – Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Colorado – have already passed nonbinding resolutions without notable effect. When California’s bill passed, it received backlash from law professors and business groups who said the law invited discrimination against qualified men, violating the state’s civil rights statute. 

University of Delaware Prof. Charles Elson, who specializes in corporate governance, is one such critic.  

“It’s like saying ‘Gee, you can only elect to your Congress someone of a particular gender one way or another.’ In a democracy, we pick the best candidate,” he says. 

But Ms. Crawford says government action is now necessary. “As someone who studied engineering and went to top schools, I felt it was important to make it on my merit, not because I was a woman,” she says. 

“But ... we looked at how long it was going to take [to reach parity] at present rates of change and realized, well, no, this is something which is too important.”

Chia Morgan vividly recalls the fall 2009 dream – one she firmly believes was a message from God – that inspired her to organize her first Thanksgiving dinner for needy city residents with just two months’ notice.

“I was feeding kids and their families a Thanksgiving meal, and it felt amazing,” says Ms. Morgan, whose dinner, now an annual event, is called Blessed to be a Blessing. The dinner, named in part for Morgan’s thankfulness for being able to give back, marked its 10th year on Tuesday. “But the only food I distinctly remember is the mashed potatoes – and I don’t even like mashed potatoes,” she says with a laugh as she bought last-minute door prizes Sunday night at a local Walmart.

Today Blessed to be a Blessing boasts a DJ, dancing, and local celebrities – the mayor and police chief made appearances this year – who serve home-cooked food to more than 600 city residents.

Morgan’s effort, one of many charity meals being served across America this holiday week, is an example of how a community can be strengthened when one person sees an unmet need and takes action. Her annual Flint dinner is now backed by a wide range of entities: private donors both large and small, the local community foundation, a credit union, Morgan’s father’s church and its nonprofit, and the local Catholic Charities office that hosts the event.

Morgan’s dream woke her one cool September morning, with the nation in the shadow of a deep recession. She says she quickly got ready for her work day, hopped in her car and drove to a friend’s job to share her vision. “She was like, lets make it happen,” says Morgan, who friends describe as an unbelievably energetic community activist and natural giver.

“For certain people, this is the only opportunity to have a Thanksgiving dinner,” explains Morgan, who annually pulls all-nighters to stage the event. She likes to say that the meal includes “anything you would have at your gramma’s house for Thanksgiving, down to the German chocolate cake.”

“We got no funds right now,” says Chrystal Williams, a 34-year-old Flint native and mother of two who brought her 13-year-old daughter Yanni and her one-year-old daughter Fatiah to the dinner this year after her mother saw a story about it on a local news station. “It made a big difference. I didn’t know what we were going to do,” says Ms. Williams, who is currently unemployed.

Morgan is a care coordinator at the Hurley Medical Center in Flint by day. Her job is to help patients who are victims of crimes such as sexual assault and gun violence get the support they need once they leave the hospital. Morgan says she herself has lost two close friends to gun violence.

Her work in Flint, one of America’s poorest, most dangerous, and most traumatized cities, has drawn the admiration of many in her community. The single mom’s enthusiasm led her to make an unsuccessful run for city council in 2017, but community leaders say they believe her political future could be bright.

“She’ll run again, and she’ll find her place in the politics of this community, because she cares that much,” says Isaiah Oliver, president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. “She’s doing amazing work…. The water crisis [involving lead pollution] accelerated and catapulted her work.”

Another signature event of Morgan’s, known around town, is an annual summer resource fair for Flint residents at a neighborhood park. The fair connects residents with everything from affordable health-care plans to free haircuts.

Blessed to be a Blessing is an example of the lengths the rare person like Morgan will go to ensure those less fortunate have an authentic holiday experience.

The dinner “makes people feel good inside, and reminds them they are still loved,” says Garrett Rice, a longtime Flint resident and co-worker of Morgan’s who volunteered at the event and dropped off a donation of socks last week. “She’s really about helping people.”

Morgan’s supporters include the public safety department at the local community college, which she and her mom attended alongside one another. The pair went on to attend college and graduate school together, and both hold a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Michigan-Flint.

Her mother, Debra, cooks most of the food that is served each year, including the yams, the dressing, and mashed potatoes. The greens and green beans are all grown in the garden tended by Morgan’s father, Will, the pastor at Pentecostal Temple Apostolic Church in Flint, which like many Flint churches is small but highly active. He is also the president of Well of Hope, the church’s nonprofit and a sponsor of the dinner. Another hat Morgan wears: Treasurer on Well of Hope’s board.

“If there’s a nonprofit organization in the community looking to make change, Chia is normally there,” says DeAndra Larkin, a vice president at the Flint & Genesee Chamber of Commerce. “When I see Chia at something, she has a really good vibe and energy, so usually I know that it is going to be a good conversation.”

Morgan’s plans for the first Thanksgiving dinner started off piecemeal. As word of mouth spread, one person would offer a can of corn, and so on. Someone else offered a cake from a regional grocery chain. Morgan laughed recalling those early offerings as she she sorted donated socks with 9th-grader Zaire Riley, for giveaway at the dinner.

The teen volunteer says, barely above a whisper and with a sheepish smile, that “it feels nice to be helping out.” Morgan verifies volunteer hours for students like Riley, and says it’s nice to have an opportunity for younger volunteers who aren’t as outgoing to be able to help in a more private setting than a big volunteer-heavy event.

Thousands of socks are given away at Morgan’s dinner each year. Morgan started giving out donated socks after she noticed some of those in attendance weren’t wearing any.

Morgan’s first Thanksgiving dinner fed 100 people, and spread mostly on word-of-mouth. Today, it is annually highlighted in advance by local media. Morgan advertises heavily on social media and receives donations via Amazon from strangers she never meets. 

Morgan grew up on Flint’s north side, which has the rougher reputation. She says that, as other residents moved out amid a decline in automotive jobs, her parents decided to stay “to be a light in the neighborhood.”

“That’s where my love for the community came from,” says Morgan. “My parents are my lifeline.”

She grew up in a home that took in numerous foster children; one where her father often introduced kids from his church and in the neighborhood as his own. He bought winter coats, shoes, bicycles, and even threw birthday parties for children who had less than his own three. Morgan, the middle child, has a 6-year-old daughter everyone refers to as MRB. She often helps out at events her mother organizes.

“I’m very proud of my daughter,” says Mr. Morgan, Chia’s father. “When she sees a problem that touches her heartstrings, she tries to address it.” He calls her a “beautiful spirit” with a charismatic daughter “about as well known as Chia.” He adds that she “grew up in a home full of love, surrounded by family.”

Sometimes the obstacles she and her father have faced together are daunting. An event Morgan organized that connected police, community organizations, and young people to combat violence went on for three years, but then lost momentum after the air conditioner was stolen at its community-center location, her father recounts. 

But people who know her say she’s not at all easily deterred.

“She’s a go-getter, when she gets an idea in her mind, she’s gonna make it happen,” says Vicky Schultz, CEO of Catholic Charities of Shiawasee and Genesee, which has hosted Morgan’s dinner for years. When Morgan has an idea, says Ms. Schultz, who volunteered at the dinner this year, “you don’t think twice, you just get on board.” 

NASA/Roscosmos/Hando­ut via REUTERS

The International Space Station is seen from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking Oct. 4, 2018.

What is the most expensive machine ever built, costing roughly $150 billion?

If skies are clear, it can be spotted daily overhead at locations all over the world since it’s the third-brightest object in the night sky, after the moon and Venus (best viewing times are dawn and dusk).

The International Space Station is marking its 20th anniversary circling Earth, completing 16 orbits of the planet each day. Construction began on Nov. 20, 1998, but perhaps the station’s most remarkable achievements came in November 2000, when the first human crew arrived: a US Navy Seal and two Russian cosmonauts. Since that time humans have continually lived in space; some 230 visitors from 18 countries have come and gone from the ISS. 

As such, the space station is not only a technological achievement but also a remarkable example of international cooperation. “The way we have put that program together with our international partners is absolutely the best example of how we can peacefully, successfully do complicated things,” retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott told CNET earlier this year.

The construction of the ISS has been an engineering marvel; all the materials had to be shot into space in a series of launches, then assembled in an airless, hostile environment. 

“Performing just one of these voyages safely was a major challenge but the station’s design called for 30 of them just to deliver the station’s basic building blocks,” writes David Nixon in his book “International Space Station: Architecture Beyond Earth.” (In the end, 42 flights brought up the principle components, 37 on US shuttles and five on Russian spacecraft.) “Against the odds, all arrived on orbit safely and flawlessly where they fitted together correctly and precisely.”

The final US shuttle mission in 2011 provided the materials to complete the station. Today it’s as long as a football field, powered by nearly two-thirds of an acre of solar panels. 

For its 20th anniversary the ISS is about to receive a 3-D printer that will help it recycle its waste plastic into useful new items. Called the “Refabricator,” the device should cut down on the amount of cargo that arrives via costly resupply missions from Earth.

Despite its record run, the ISS may not have a long-term future. The United States may decide to end funding within the next decade. The station then might pass into private hands, part of the continuing privatization of space flight.

Even if the station were abandoned, it will have recorded a long list of achievements. With her 665 days aboard the ISS, for example, NASA’s Peggy Whitson set the record for the longest human stay in space.

The station has helped researchers learn much about how humans respond to living and working in space (crew members have undertaken 205 spacewalks to construct and maintain the ISS). That’s valuable preparation for the possible construction of a space station orbiting the moon, which would play a key role in humans returning to Earth’s nearest neighbor. And, of course, for the possibility of long-duration trips to Mars.

The great expense and difficulty of space travel and colonization means it will be best accomplished with the combined efforts of the world's nations. Regardless of their home country travelers looking down from the ISS at the blue ball called earth see no national boundaries, only a common home. The multinational effort behind the building of the ISS should be an inspiration – and a springboard – for closer international cooperation back on earth.

So look up sometime in the night sky. You just may spot a bright dot, the place where the permanent settlement of space begin.