The pitched partisan battles over procedure and witnesses. The solemn scene of all 100 senators sitting quietly at their desks. The chief justice of the United States presiding over the impeachment trial of a president – only the third in U.S. history.

The Senate trial of President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress began in earnest on Tuesday with wrangling over rules, but its endpoint appears to be a foregone conclusion. The Constitution sets a high bar – a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators – to convict and remove a president from office. That’s hard to imagine this time, in a chamber controlled by the president’s own party.

And yet Republicans and Democrats are furiously strategizing – not to change the end result, but to shape public opinion, says Steven Smith, an expert on the Senate at Washington University in St. Louis. “This really isn’t about convicting the president, obviously, so the real question is whether or not the political context is evolving in a way that favors one side or the other.”

Unlike President Trump, the last two presidents threatened by impeachment – Bill Clinton in 1999 and Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 – were not facing reelection. And while it’s true that most polls show a nation evenly divided on the question of impeaching and removing the president, this election won’t be decided at the national level, but in swing states.

At the end of this trial, what will voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida think about the president? Likewise, how will voters view endangered Republican senators up for reelection – such as Susan Collins of Maine and Martha McSally of Arizona? Both took a hit in approval ratings in the latest state-by-state Morning Consult poll, with Senator Collins now the least-popular senator in the country – quite a slide for a senator with a history as a political bridge-builder.

“Republicans have complained that this is a political process, but for many of the senators taking votes, I think it has a major political impact on their own political fortunes going into 2020,” says Jessica Taylor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Democrats have comparatively few competitive seats to defend, but for Doug Jones of Alabama, the most vulnerable Democrat, a vote to convict “could be his death sentence,” she says.

House vote set the stage

In the Democrat-controlled House, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Democrats voted with near-unanimity on Dec. 18 to impeach, charging that the president abused his power by pressuring the government of Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, for his personal electoral benefit, and then obstructing Congress as it sought to investigate.

Mary F. Calvert/Reuters

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leaves Senate chambers for a brief recess during the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump in Washington, on Jan. 21, 2020.

But the Senate is not the House. It has its own rules and is a more unpredictable body, led by its own wily, strategic politician, Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Democrats on Tuesday accused the majority leader of a “cover-up” and complicity with the White House by introducing rules that would compress the time frame for arguments and putting off the question of calling witnesses and documents. Under pressure, Senator McConnell agreed to expand the timetable for arguments from two days to three (and 24 hours total) for each side.

Democrats say that witnesses and documents are essential to a fair trial, and that unlike in the Clinton trial, they have not been able to question all relevant witnesses in advance. An attempt by Democrats to subpoena documents failed late Tuesday in a vote along party lines. 

A rift over witnesses

With Republicans holding a 53-seat majority, Democrats need four GOP senators to join them in the call for witnesses such as former national security adviser John Bolton. It’s not clear that they will get them, though Senator Collins has said “it is likely” that she will support a call for witnesses, but only after both sides have made their cases and senators have submitted written questions – as was agreed on in the Clinton trial.

Of course, witnesses perceived as friendly to one side may prove not to be. “It’s unlikely that the Republicans will approve witnesses for the House managers without witnesses for the defense, and then honestly, all bets are off. Who knows what will come of that. It’s going to be a circus,” says Professor Smith.

The president will be represented in the chamber by the White House legal team, his personal lawyers, and celebrity attorneys, including Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who triggered the impeachment of Mr. Clinton, and Harvard constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz.

The White House case

Over the holiday weekend, the White House submitted its first legal defense of the president. It does not dispute the basic facts of a request to investigate the Bidens and the withholding of military aid to Ukraine. But it describes the two articles of impeachment as a “brazen political act” and denounces the “rigged process” that brought them to the Senate.

The legal brief contends there was no abuse of power because the president broke no law and foreign policy is the domain of the president – not Congress.

As for obstructing Congress, the president’s legal team argues he has constitutional authority to protect the powers of the executive branch, and “asserting legal defenses and privileges is not ‘obstruction.’” The two articles of impeachment do not “remotely approach” the constitutional threshold for removing a president from office, they say.

The president himself remains a “wild card” in all this, says Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the center-left Brookings Institution. Majority Leader McConnell and other Republicans have been able to “corral him away from his instincts” to get behind what’s in his best interest – a short, streamlined trial.

“But the president is watching this on TV, and will see those House managers go over his conduct, which he will take very personally,” says Ms. Binder. “Is the president going to fire off tweets, or get the Republicans to do a different kind of defense?”

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to lengthen the trial, allowing time for more evidence to come to light – as happened last week with Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, and last week’s finding by the independent Government Accountability Office that the president acted illegally in withholding congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine.

“The House managers will want [people] to pay as much attention to the trial as possible. Whatever they can do to make it more attractive to public viewing, the better for them,” says Don Ritchie, former Senate historian. “The president’s defenders will want to minimize this, and get it over as quickly as possible.”

Both sides will be making their case to the public – not really to the senators, he says. With President Clinton, Americans knew of his sexual relations with a White House intern and that he lied about it under oath, but they differed over whether it was an impeachable offense. The same is true now, says Mr. Ritchie.

“Quite frankly, everybody knows what this president’s doing. The question is, is it proper for him to be doing this or not?” he says. “People are going to have to sort that out for themselves.”

To see all of The Monitor's impeachment coverage, go here.

Judy and Alan Gillis live in Orrington, Maine, just a few miles down the Penobscot River from this former timber hub. It’s one of more than 100 small towns in the state that don’t have their own high school. Families in these “tuitioning” towns get to choose a high school, and the town pays the bill, up to the rate allowed by the state.

The Gillises’ three oldest children accessed high school this way – two at private school. Their youngest started ninth grade at the public school in nearby Hampden. But she soon felt ostracized for her religious beliefs.

“People were calling me a homophobe and stuff,” says Isabella, who sometimes goes by Isabelle. She told a friend who came out as gay that although she disagreed with it, she still cared about her as a friend. “She cut me out. And some of her friends were like, ‘Oh, look at Isabelle, little Christian girl who hates everyone.’ So that was not fun,” she says, fidgeting with a ring as she sits cross-legged next to her dad on their L-shaped sofa.

She transferred to the nearby Bangor Christian Schools before the end of freshman year. It, too, is accredited, but a religious school is the one choice the state won’t allow the towns to pay for. Now Isabella is a senior, and her parents have been paying the tuition themselves.

That restriction, they say, amounts to religious discrimination.

The Gillises joined two other families in taking the state to court. And while their case is on federal appeal, they’re keeping a close eye on Wednesday’s United States Supreme Court hearing for another case with the same core issues: Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. Low-income families in Montana say a state tax-credit scholarship was unjustly shut down simply because religious schools were among the options.

The key question in both: If a government entity allows parents to use tax dollars to pay for a school of their choice, including private schools, is it allowed to exclude religious schools? A decision in favor of the families in Montana or Maine could fundamentally alter the school choice landscape far beyond their borders.

The cases come at a time when religious people of various faiths say they feel marginalized in American society. In turn, President Donald Trump has been passing executive orders and speaking publicly to promote religious liberty, though critics say that’s primarily for Christians.

Two constitutional values hang in the balance. One is people’s right to freely exercise their religion, and another is the prohibition against the government establishing or favoring a religion.  

“This is the latest iteration of a long-running debate that we’ve had in American society about the interaction between religion and the state, and where that line is drawn,” says Mark Brewer, a University of Maine political science professor.

From Florida to Arizona, dozens of school voucher programs already include religious options. The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that governments may include such choices if private schools are part of the program. Now the question is, must they?

“At the heart of America’s commitment to religious freedom is that government and religion are separate,” says Charles Haynes, founding director of the Religious Freedom Center at the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington. When it comes to indirect funding for nonreligious activities, the high court has said that institutions can’t be excluded just because they are religious. But “saying that there is actually a free-exercise mandate to include religious schools ... would be a sea change” in First Amendment law.

“It’s just not right.”

“Why can they teach atheism or evolution at public school, which we don’t believe, [and then] say ... they won’t pay for [the Christian school]? ... To me, it’s just discrimination,” says David Carson, his wavy brown hair pulled back by propped-up sunglasses as he takes a break from his house-construction business.

He met his wife at Bangor Christian Schools, and they didn’t think twice about enrolling their daughter there in preschool. Now she’s a high school junior – so they aren’t likely to benefit from tuition dollars even if they eventually win Carson v. Makin. But Mr. Carson says there are plenty of people in this rural state who can’t afford the $5,000 price tag of a school like theirs. “It’s just not right,” he says.

The Institute for Justice, a litigation group focused on individual liberty, challenged Maine in state court first, with no success. But it saw a new opening at the federal level when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that public playground-repair funding could go to the Trinity Lutheran Church.

Chief Justice John Roberts noted that “the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution.”

But the court stopped short of ruling more broadly on whether public money should go to more religious functions.

For its part, Maine allowed religious school choice for more than 100 years before a policy change in the early 1980s. At that time, just over 200 students were using public tuition dollars at religious schools, notes a history on the website of the Institute for Justice (IJ), which is also representing the parents in the Espinoza case.

“When a state decides to empower parents to choose the school that they believe is best for their child, to then say, but we are going to exclude religious [schools] … just strikes at the very core of our freedom of religion … and our rights as parents to choose the best educational setting for our children,” says Tim Keller, IJ’s lead attorney for the Maine families.

The U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in on behalf of the parents in both cases.

Separation of church and state

Maine and Montana officials, on the other hand, make a case for maintaining a strong separation between church and state.

“A public education system should be one that promotes diversity and tolerance and exposes children to a broad range of ideas. ... Parents certainly have the right to opt out of the public education system and send their children to religious schools, but public dollars should not be used for that purpose,” Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a statement.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and various religious and atheist organizations argue on behalf of Maine that the entanglement of public dollars with religious institutions could actually hurt those very institutions by subjecting them to government restrictions.

There is “no evidence that the state of Maine was motivated by animus against religion. ... They were motivated by legitimate anti-establishment interests of not wanting to fund religious training using tax dollars,” says Zachary Heiden, legal director at the ACLU of Maine.

Some civil rights groups say that public funds shouldn’t go to religious institutions, particularly if they discriminate in hiring and other policies on the basis of sexual orientation or other categories protected by laws in states such as Maine. And they say the curriculum at some religious schools promotes intolerance of other religious groups.

“Maine residents should never be forced to support religious education or discrimination,” said Alex Luchenitser, associate legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a statement.

To the Gillis family, those who raise the question of discrimination are demonstrating their own form of intolerance. “They seem to be very interested in having no discrimination against certain people, ... but they’re fine with discriminating against Christians,” says Mrs. Gillis, sitting on a love seat in their living room, decorated with white and red accent pillows, family photos, and a few religious figurines.

Tax money is “all our money, and the government spends all kinds of my money on things that I don’t agree with,” Mr. Gillis says.

Maine is the second least religious state, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, with 55% identifying as nonreligious, 22% as very religious, and 22% moderately so.

Just down the road from Bangor’s public high school, Bangor Christian Schools are housed partly in the church building and partly in a brick building next door. On a flagpole between the two structures, a white flag with a cross in its blue corner sits just below the American flag. In addition to regular academic subjects, they have chapel one morning a week and Bible class once a day, Isabella says. The head of the school declined to comment while the case is pending.

Isabella says the academic work at the school is more challenging, and her grades have gone up. She appreciates having classmates who “don’t believe in the stereotypes that a lot of the people at Hampden did. ... They understand that just because you’re a Christian, you’re not a homophobe and you don’t hate people who don’t go to church.”

Maine officials argue that the religious schools haven’t said whether they would even participate in the tuition program if they could. The Carsons and Gillises say their school would, as long as they wouldn’t have to change their religion-centered policies.

Yet opening up such doors could have unintended consequences, Mr. Haynes of the Religious Freedom Center cautions: “Religious people should be careful what they ask for, because if we continue down this road ... the temptation to draw on public money is going to grow and grow and grow. ... If you look at Europe and other places in the world where they do have government funding directly of religion, it has weakened religion, in my view. It has compromised religion.”

When French President Emmanuel Macron summoned the presidents of Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania to the French city of Pau for a summit on counterterrorism last week, the backdrop was somber.

Two months earlier, during a late night anti-terror operation in Mali, two French military helicopters had collided in the moonless sky, killing all 13 soldiers on board. It was the French military’s highest single-day death toll since 1983. Meanwhile, in the capitals of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, protestors marched in the streets with a message for Mr. Macron and his troops. “France,” their signs read, “Get out.”

The soldiers’ deaths, combined with the French army’s tepid welcome in the region, had raised a looming question: What was France doing fighting West Africa’s war on terror, anyway? And was it even a fight they could win? 

Those questions have grown more pressing in recent months, as a new series of jihadist attacks have rattled the region – 89 Nigerien soldiers killed at an army outpost this month, and another 71 in December; 14 Burkinabé civilians, including 7 children, killed by a roadside bomb; a series of bloody attacks on military bases in Mali. Across the region, the death toll from terror is growing. Three years ago, 770 people died in terror attacks in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Last year, it was more than 4,000. 

But experts say ending the attacks will be far more complicated than simply bolstering French presence in the region. Violent conflicts in the region have local roots, they say, and demand localized solutions. Many West African armies have struggled to fight jihadism, but France’s involvement runs the risk of drawing the country into an ultimately unwinnable fight.

“Jihadism is only a symptom of the problem of weak states in the Sahel,” says Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, a French political scientist and the author of “Une Guerre Perdue: La France au Sahel” (A Lost War: France in the Sahel). “Fighting it cannot be the ultimate solution. That solution is political, and it’s in the hands of Africans, not the French.”

An evolving mission

The summit in Pau offered few reforms. In a statement after the two-hour meeting, the six presidents “reaffirmed their common determination to fight together against terrorist groups” in the Sahel – the 2,400-mile tract of arid land just south of the Sahara. Mr. Macron pledged 220 French troops to join the 4,500 already there, and the five African presidents affirmed that yes, they really did want the French to stay.

“Any time that a country asks that the French army leave, we will go,” Mr. Macron snapped at a Malian journalist who noted the opposition to the French military there. But until then, West Africans should ask themselves “who dies for their children.”

Mr. Macron’s defensiveness points to what experts say is the paradox of the French fight against terror groups in the region. It is hard for them to stay. But it would be harder for them to go.

“It has become a kind of trap,” says Niagalé Bagayoko, a French political scientist and expert on extremism in the Sahel. “France can’t afford to leave this war, or to lose it.”

Alvaro Barrientos/AP

French President Emmanuel Macron, center, poses with G5 African heads of state after the G5 Sahel summit in Pau, France, Jan.13, 2020. France is preparing its military to better target Islamic extremists in a West African region that has seen a surge of deadly violence.

That is in part because what France does in Africa “is closely linked with its place in the world,” she says – a main stage for its military interventions and aid. Since African independence in the 1960s, France has played a muscular role in the wars and conflicts of its former colonies, and it currently has four permanent bases in African countries (plus another two in African territories of mainland France).

When the current wave of French troops first arrived in the Sahel region seven years ago, Dr. Bagayoko says, the situation was different. They had a single, specific goal: help the Malian government drive back a constellation of rebel groups in the country’s rural north, many of them drawn from mercenaries who had returned home from Libya after that country’s 2011 collapse.

But as the insecurity began to seep over the region’s porous borders, the boundaries of the mission grew blurry. Instead of ending neatly, “that fight [in Mali] became the beginning of something else.”

Ostensibly, she says, France’s aims were to drive back terror groups and help the region’s governments reclaim control of territory threatened by militants. But in a region where the boundaries between Islamic terror, local rebellion, and simple banditry are often paper-thin, that quickly became a nearly impossible fight. Even helping governments reclaim their territory was a fraught mission in countries ruled by autocrats who often enjoyed little popular support. 

Over the years, the French government has claimed that fighting jihadism in the region is essential in the global struggle against terrorism. But despite the affiliation of some local militants with Al Qaeda and ISIS, “we are far from a global jihad in this region,” Dr. Pérouse de Montclos says. “Under the name ‘terrorist’ you find so many things, and in this case, the groups called terrorist by the West are mostly very local, and fighting for very local agendas.”

Troubled past

The shadow of France’s colonial history also hangs over its current presence in the region. Despite having a French president who speaks of the “crimes of colonization” and has promised a more equitable relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa, many here remain skeptical that the French could ever have Africans’ best interests at heart. 

Indeed, as opposition has built to the French military presence in the region, a parallel fight against French economic influence reached its own crescendo. In December, Mr. Macron and Alassane Ouattara, the president of Cote D’Ivoire, announced the end of a controversial French-backed regional currency called the CFA. The currency, which had existed since the colonial era, was pegged to the euro and required member states to keep half their foreign exchange reserves in the French treasury. (A new currency, the eco, will remain pegged to the euro but lose the other elements of French control.)

The anti-CFA movement and the protests against the French military “are surfing the same wave of discontent,” says Paul-Simon Handy, an expert on violent extremism in the Sahel at the Institute for Security Studies in Dakar. “France needs to do a serious analysis of its Africa policy to understand why it is losing the sympathy of so many sections of the population.”

NASA/AP/FILE

The first U.S. astronauts who will fly on commercial spacecraft are, from left, Sunita Williams, Josh Cassada, Eric Boe, Nicole Mann, Christopher Ferguson, Douglas Hurley, Robert Behnken, Michael Hopkins, and Victor Glover, seen here in front of mock-ups of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsules at the Johnson Space Center in Texas Aug. 3, 2018.

If all goes according to plan, 2020 will be the year that American astronauts rocket into space from American soil once again, after a 9-year hiatus. On Sunday, Jan. 19, SpaceX took a leap forward toward achieving that goal. The spaceflight company conducted the final major test of its spacecraft: a demonstration of its launch escape system, designed to help astronauts return safely to Earth if something goes awry during launch. 

NASA astronauts have had a continuous presence on the International Space Station. However, since the space shuttle program ended in 2011, the only route to space has been to purchase a ticket aboard Russian spacecraft. 

Both SpaceX and Boeing are putting space capsules and rockets through final tests, aiming to put humans on board before the end of the year. If they’re successful, it would not only return human spaceflight to the United States, but would open the door to expanding the human presence in space. 

“We are going into a new era,” says Christie Cox, utilization and commercial use manager for the International Space Station Division at NASA headquarters. “It has all of us pretty excited.”

Who’s who in spaceflight these days? 

With names like SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and NASA all cropping up in human spaceflight headlines, it’s difficult to keep track of who is doing what. 

Traditionally, NASA has hired a contractor to build spacecraft and rockets that the space agency would operate. But that’s shifting. Instead, through NASA’s Commercial Crew program, the government will purchase seats for its astronauts on privately operated crew vehicles.

Private aerospace companies SpaceX and Boeing both have agreements with NASA to transport astronauts to the International Space Station – as soon as they’ve proved their systems are safe enough. 

On January 19, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule passed its final major test before crewed flight: the in-flight abort test. That sets the company on track for a crewed test flight of the Dragon capsule in the first half of this year. 

Boeing is hot on SpaceX’s heels with its CST-100 Starliner capsule. The Starliner took its first uncrewed test flight into space and back in December 2019 (which SpaceX completed in March 2019). However, it may have to repeat the test, as the Starliner did not make it to the ISS due to a computer glitch. 

What about me? Can I go to space, too?

Virgin Galactic already has a waitlist for $250,000 tickets to take a 90-minute ride to suborbital space about 62 miles above sea level, where passengers would see the curvature of Earth and then experience weightlessness on the return. 

There have been some bumps in the road, including fatalities, but Virgin Galactic aims to launch its first commercial crewed flight this year. A top priority for 2020, the company has said, is to send founder Richard Branson into space to celebrate his 70th year on Earth.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has also set its sights on suborbital space tourism. The company has not sold any tickets yet, and has yet to perform any crewed test flights. 

Even NASA is loosening the reins on who can go into space. In June 2019, the space agency announced that it would open the International Space Station for some commercial research and development, which would include the possibility for private astronauts to spend up to 30 days there as early as 2020. 

Are we actually going to the moon ... and beyond?

NASA is currently laying the groundwork for human presence in low-Earth orbit to become more of a commercial domain, to pave the way for the space agency to focus its resources beyond. 

The last time people set foot on the moon was during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. NASA has long eyed a return to the moon, with plans to establish a base there to support interplanetary travel and commercial activities. In 2019, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, NASA set a goal of landing humans back on the moon in 2024 in a program dubbed Artemis. 

NASA’s Space Launch System – which is designed to launch the Orion crew capsule to the moon – will be put through some major tests in 2020. If there are no major snafus, the space agency will stay on track for the 2024 launch. 

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Will Howell is a young entrepreneur with a disability shaking up dismal employment prospects by opening his own online shop, WillPower Ties. "It hasn't just given him a job, but a purpose," says Melanie Howell, his mom and one of his business partners.

Will Howell doesn’t wear a tie every day, but he loves nothing so much as getting dressed to the nines for church or a wedding or, really, for any occasion at all.

He is the epitome of a Southern gentleman, shaking hands with all comers, hugging them, cheek-pecking, and generally charming the pants off them, sharply dressed in threads by Nautica and Brooks Brothers and sporting a jaunty bowtie.

Mr. Howell, who is 20, has cerebral palsy. But his megawatt smile hints at unique talents and abilities that he has put to profitable use. In the face of daunting odds, but fueled by his keen fashion sense, the young Georgian and his father launched WillPower Ties this fall, selling Mr. Howell’s favorite neckwear.

“It’s been really cool,” he says, pointing to recent orders from states as distant as California and Texas for ties in styles such as “Rock the Vote” (decorated with elephants, donkeys, and “Vote” buttons) and “Chick Magnet” (that one features fluffy chicks, magnets, and bolts of lightning).

Just before Christmas, Mr. Howell is wearing the multiple hats of an internet shopkeeper at his family’s modest home in this historic fishing village off Doboy Sound: founder, model, PR guy, packing clerk, and, finally, delivery man, hauling packages over to the post office on a custom trike.

Mr. Howell is part of a nascent but notable rise in the ranks of young entrepreneurs with disabilities, says Cary Griffin, a leading expert on self-employment for people with disabilities. As they lend their names, faces, ideas, and designs to businesses selling everything from popcorn to socks, these entrepreneurs are launching companies that serve to unleash their human potential, disdaining pity in favor of profit.

A new purpose

“Since he was an infant, Will has been significantly limited in his physical abilities, but he has more than made up for that in his level of enthusiasm and happiness and desire to be part of this world,” says Dr. Ben Spitalnick, Mr. Howell’s pediatrician.

Those qualities likely would not have been enough to secure him a job. Barely a third of the 24 million Americans diagnosed with severe mental and physical disabilities are employed part time.  

“People like him stay in school until they’re 20 or 21, and then they age out and they don’t know what to do. And for all the development and job skills resources that are out there, [agencies] can’t create jobs,” Dr. Spitalnick says.

But Mr. Howell’s attributes are well-suited to doing his own thing in his own business.

“This family created a job, a company,” Dr. Spitalnick says. “It’s given them a new direction and it’s given Will a new purpose.”

The inspiration for WillPower Ties is John’s Crazy Socks – founded by John Cronin, who has Down syndrome, and his father, Mark – which offers “socks, socks and more socks” on the web. Its success launched the pair on a speaking tour, which recently took them to Savannah, Georgia, near Mr. Howell’s home.

Hearing about the talk, “we immediately started thinking, ‘what could Will do?’” says Melanie Howell, his mother. “We landed on his love of ties.” Her husband, Carey, sold his convenience store to go into business with his son.

Decades of advocacy have done little to dent disabled unemployment rates in the United States. People with disabilities face barriers ranging from transport difficulties to government-imposed income ceilings if they receive Medicaid or supplemental Social Security benefits. Poverty and low self-esteem are common, according to the Institute on Disability.

“There’s a reason why people with disabilities have such a hard time finding a job,” says Megan Henly, project director for the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham. “Someone like [Mr. Howell] might have a good day or a bad day. It’s hard to find transportation.

“Self-employment seems like a way around that,” she says. “And the internet has created this ability to interact with the public that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.”

In 2011, a higher share of workers with disabilities were self-employed than those without disabilities – 11.8% versus 6.6% – piggybacking on decades of pioneering work promoting self-employment among the former group. 

Many of them also benefit from a Department of Labor program called Employment First, which stresses that “you have to adapt the environment to fit the person, not the other way around,” says Mr. Griffin, the co-author of “Making Self-Employment Work for People with Disabilities.” 

“There are unlimited ways to make a living in the world, but we tend to think of just a few things for people with intellectual disabilities: Clean the dishes at the humane society, work at the food co-op, work at McDonald’s – and then we’re out of ideas,” says Mr. Griffin.

It takes imagination to go beyond that, he says. “Sometimes we have to reframe” the challenge, Mr. Griffin says. If someone is fixated on railroad trains, for example, “let’s not try to get you to like trains less, which is what tends to happen.” Instead, think how that trait might be put to use. “Let’s move toward transportation,” he suggests.

“Behavior is the No. 1 thing to keep you out of the workforce,” he says. So why not ask, “Where does this behavior make sense?”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Will Howell signs a thank you card for every box of merch, packs the boxes, and then hand-delivers the packages to the post office aboard a custom trike. Mr. Howell is the founder, model, and PR guy at WillPower Ties, based in Darien, Georgia. "He wears a lot of hats," says his father, Carey Howell.

“Terrifying, Mom?”

The trend is gathering momentum at a time when people with disabilities are receiving more sympathetic treatment in popular culture.

The power of the media to shape attitudes is critical to encouraging a fresh approach to employment, says Susan Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York.

“People with disabilities are perfectly employable, and the reason they are not employed is stigma,” says Ms. Dooha, who herself has a disability. It’s “important to see us as contributors, and not needing to be inspirational and having to live up to an impossible stereotype, but also not being seen as a pitiable object of charity,” she adds.

Ms. Howell, a fifth grade teacher, says she long dreaded the moment her son faced adulthood.

“It’s been terrifying,” she says.

Although he tends to defer to his parents during conversations, Mr. Howell interrupts: “Terrifying, Mom?”

“Yes, it’s terrifying because I couldn’t be sure what would happen to you,” she says.

Ms. Howell chafed at the comfort that her late father-in-law, Archie Howell, tried to offer her. “You know, Will is going to find his way,” he would say.

“That used to make me mad,” Ms. Howell recalls. “But to see it now coming true has been divine.”

It was Ms. Howell who pushed to open the store by Nov. 1, which at times seemed impossible. Nov. 1 was “Papa Howell’s birthday,” explains her husband. “Papa Howell,” Will chimes. 

WillPower Ties is donating 5% of profits to AMBUCS, which provides free custom bikes to Americans with physical limitations. The ties are flying out the door, and the company has just launched its own custom brand with a tie that the young entrepreneur designed to draw attention to cerebral palsy.

“They are hitting it like rock stars,” says Dr. Spitalnick. “Will is enjoying it, it has brought his family together, and they’ve succeeded in not just a successful business launch but a successful launch of the next phase of Will’s life.”

AP

Health officials in Malaysia's international airport check arriving passengers for health conditions.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization will weigh whether to declare a global health emergency over the rapid spread of a virus that originated in China. Compared with a similar outbreak in 2002-03, known as the SARS epidemic, this time WHO has far more information from China’s tight-lipped rulers to make its decision.

The reason? Beijing is slowly learning that transparency in governance can create a stable and safe society, not threaten it.

International health experts give cautious praise for China’s quick response to this latest outbreak, which began in early December in the central city of Wuhan. In China, too, an official commentary explains why transparency on health scares is so important:

“Only by making information public can [we] reduce fear,” it said. “People don’t live in a vacuum and [we] will only provide a breeding ground for rumors to grow if we keep them in the dark and strip them of their right to [know] the truth.”

During the SARS epidemic, authorities hid the victims and denied the spread of the virus for months. Nearly 800 people died in a number of countries while the international scare slowed Asia’s economy. The loss of trust in China’s ruling Communist Party led it to rethink the secrecy that pervades official information, a result of the party’s own fears for its survival.

That struggle for openness continues. Under the personality cult that has developed around President Xi Jinping since 2012, China lacks the normal tools of democracy to hold the party accountable. Changes in governance are often forced on it by the rest of the world, such as in improving the accuracy of financial data or the independence of patent-court judges.

As China becomes even more reliant on the judgment of other nations – such as in its infrastructure investments – its leaders will realize transparency in governance is its own form of power. During a health crisis, openness acts like sunshine, offering reassurance and allowing swifter solutions.

The elements of democracy are not a luxury. They also help cure what ails society.