At the iron gates to Columbia University on Saturday, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside to vent their frustration. Inside on a campus lawn hemmed by neoclassical buildings, rows of tents signaled that a protest movement that began last October is far from over and could intensify after police swooped last week to make over 100 arrests. 

Behind one of the gates, where campus police guarded access, a female student in a keffiyeh led pro-Palestinian chants with the help of a megaphone. Other students flanked her and sang along. They wore khakis and graphic tees, and their protest signs and clothing were a swirl of red, black, green, blue, and white in the spring sunshine. The protesters have vowed to keep the encampment open until Columbia agrees to divest from Israel and companies that profit from “apartheid, genocide, and occupation.”

Shaket wasn’t among them. An Israeli undergraduate, she was gathered with friends who had just returned from Shabbat services with their kippot clipped in place. Shaket, who asked not to use her surname, wore a necklace with her name in metal Hebrew letters. She says it’s an unsettling time to be Jewish at a university where pro-Palestinian views are dominant. But she’s also dismayed more broadly at what’s happened to civil discourse and tolerance on campus and how Columbia has responded. 

“The university may have good intentions, but it’s not helping us with arrests,” she says, referring to the students taken into custody. “We need to cultivate the environment of a university where we discuss our differences of opinion. And I think we’ve lost that.” 

How Columbia navigates its free speech traditions at a time of heightened concern about antisemitism on campus and roiling political discord on the left over U.S. support for Israel is an open question. The decision to call the police last week has historical resonance: The last time it happened was in 1968 during mass protests over the Vietnam War. University administrators across the country are now watching Columbia closely, as similar protest encampments start to mushroom. Police were called to Yale University on Monday, where they made 47 arrests at a camp.  

Stefan Jeremiah/AP

Tents erected by pro-Palestinian protesters stand in an encampment at Columbia University in New York, April 22, 2024. More than 100 protesters were arrested April 18 after the university president called in the police.

For students and faculty who prize the spirit of free and open discussion in a trusted environment, the escalating tensions at Columbia over a Middle East conflict that shows no sign of ending are a sour note on which to end an academic year. And in an election year in which foreign policy, and Democratic divisions over Israel, may sway the voting behavior of millions of young voters, events at this and other universities could hold a sting in the tail. 

On Monday, Columbia’s campus remained closed to outsiders and classes were being held remotely, even as the protest encampment remained on the lawn. Administrators have asked students who live off campus not to go there. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the university to meet with administrators, students, and law enforcement. She spoke about the need to “fight antisemitism and protect public safety” and condemned recent harassment as “vile and abhorrent.” 

More than 100 students were arrested. Those who were later charged by police for trespassing were suspended by Columbia, which means they must vacate student housing and can’t enter libraries or dining halls. Some students have been told they may not graduate.

In Sacchariah’s dorm, two beds are unmade. Her friends who were at the protest camp were arrested and suspended last week, and Sacchariah worries about her own future at Columbia. A freshman of Lebanese descent, she sympathizes with pro-Palestinian protesters and not with students of opposing views. “At the end of the day, I don’t want a relationship with students who don’t support the cause,” she says. 

On Saturday, wearing a pink headscarf and glasses, she stood away from the protesters off campus. She was careful not to be filmed by journalists and asked for her full name not to be published. Some of her friends have begun talking about transferring to other schools, but to where, she wonders – and to what end. “Because the problem isn’t just [here]. ... It’s going to be the same problem like throughout other institutions after graduation,” she says. 

Uzma Afreen

Students form a barrier at the encampment on Columbia University's campus April 22, 2024.

The April 18 arrests at Columbia came a day after the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, testified in Congress about antisemitism on campus. She admitted that the university faced a challenge in preventing antisemitic speech and threats that made Jewish students feel unsafe. Republican lawmakers have for months lambasted elite schools over a surge in pro-Palestinian protests that have sparked sporadic incidents of violence against Jewish students. 

In December, the presidents of Penn and Harvard resigned after their own appearances before Congress in which GOP lawmakers pushed back on lawyerly statements about free speech when it came to what constitutes hate speech against Jews. Some Republicans have accused college administrators of fostering a generation of progressive students who see all conflicts as battles between oppressed and oppressing classes. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on X that what was happening at Columbia was “outrageous and un-American,” referring to a call from Elie Buechler, an Orthodox rabbi, for Jewish students to stay home. Other Jewish leaders at Columbia have been more measured, however, in their comments on the first day of Passover.

In a statement on Monday, Dr. Shafik, the university president, called for a reset and said outsiders were exploiting the tensions on campus. She also condemned “intimidating and harassing behavior” on campus and said that a working group of faculty and administrators would talk to protesters and try to resolve the situation. “Our bonds as a community have been severely tested in ways that will take a great deal of time and effort to reaffirm,” she wrote. 

Her decision to call in city police to arrest protesters continues to reverberate on campus. “Arresting students and preventing students from accessing food makes me really distrustful of the university’s ability to keep students safe,” says one student, a junior who asked that she not be named. “I think that the university needs to start with dismissing all their charges against the students if they want to rebuild trust.”

Given the timing of Columbia’s crackdown, one day after Dr. Shafik testified, students are right to be skeptical of her actions, says Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech nonprofit. But that doesn’t mean that students are immune from the consequences of their actions. 

“You don’t want to see cops in riot gear descend on peaceful student protests. But if they’re breaking the rules and engaging in civil disobedience ... sometimes that’s what has to happen,” she says. 

Still, universities are at fault in their failure to uphold neutrality in how free speech is maintained on campuses like Columbia, says Ms. Morey. Unlike in the Vietnam era, when opposition to the war galvanized a mass movement, the conflict over Gaza involves two groups with passionate and personal views on a complex political issue. In recent years, though, universities have taken progressive political positions on domestic issues, and neutrality has been jettisoned. 

“The college campus is the place to host all sides of a given debate. Universities really shot themselves in the foot by setting up this expectation that they would take a firm side on one side of Israel/Palestine,” she says. 

Since Oct. 7, when Hamas murdered around 1,300 people in Israel and took hundreds of hostages, leading to a punishing Israeli onslaught on Gaza, some leftists in the United States have cast the struggles of Palestinians as the equivalent of Black victims of police violence. In this framing, Israel is a colonial power guilty of “structural racism” in the Palestinian territories. At least 34,000 Palestinians have been killed as of April 21, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Another Columbia student, who wore a keffiyeh and a face mask, carried a tote of books to the quad where she was joining a teach-in. She also asked for anonymity because she feared a suspension or doxxing as a participant in protests. Two of her friends were arrested last week.

She blamed the university for prescribing “decolonial texts” in classes that, in her mind, are a moral imperative to support Palestinian rights. “They mandate we read these texts and arrest us when we put them into action,” she says. “The way I’ve been taught at Columbia is that you need to apply the theory. If you don’t apply theories in practice, you’re no better than someone who didn’t read them. What am I supposed to do?”

Shaket looks from her friends to the protesters in the distance. “We should be talking. We should be learning and building a community and disagreeing,” she says. “I think this is a wonderful school and there are wonderful people that go here.” And she should be able to respectfully disagree.

Can communities make it a crime to sleep outside?

That question lies at the heart of a case being heard at the Supreme Court Monday.

Everyone involved in the case, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, agrees that homelessness is a complex problem gripping the United States. But they disagree about how cities should be able to address it.

In 2013, Grants Pass, a small city in southwest Oregon, enacted an ordinance criminalizing public camping. A group of homeless individuals sued in 2018, arguing that because they had nowhere else to sleep – the city has a single 138-bed overnight shelter – the ordinance violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed. While cities can regulate camping in public spaces, they can’t criminalize it outright. Officials from both major political parties across the West, where homelessness is especially acute, say the ruling has hamstrung their ability to address homelessness. 

What is the case about?

The justices are only being asked to consider if “generally applicable” laws regulating camping on public property violate the Eighth Amendment. There are other legal issues and questions at play in the case.

The Supreme Court is now tilted toward originalism, the judicial philosophy that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public meaning. And Grants Pass is arguing that the high court’s Eighth Amendment precedents have strayed from the original meaning.

A series of rulings in the 1960s held that while someone can be punished for their conduct, it’s unconstitutional to punish someone for their “status.” You can criminalize drug possession, for example, but not drug addiction. In this case, the 9th Circuit cited those previous cases in ruling that Grants Pass can’t punish a person with no home for camping when they need to sleep.

Jenny Kane/AP

Volunteers help move an 80-year-old man and a woman who is blind in one eye out of Fruitdale Park in Grants Pass, Oregon, March 23, 2024. They risked being fined for staying too long.

Grants Pass argues that this interpretation of the Eighth Amendment is inconsistent with its original meaning. Courts are only supposed to determine if certain methods of punishment are “cruel and unusual,” the city says, not if punishments can be applied at all.

“Nothing in [the amendment’s] language immunizes certain conduct from all forms of punishment,” the city wrote in a brief. And neither the city’s civil fines for camping on public property nor its short jail sentences for serial offenders “are cruel and unusual.” 

The respondents counter that the city is punishing them for their very survival. The Eighth Amendment “prohibits punishing people for having an involuntary status,” they wrote in a brief. “Being involuntarily homeless is such a status, and when shelter is unavailable, it is a status that means you have nowhere to exist but outside.”

Furthermore, lower court rulings still allow jurisdictions to regulate camping on public property. The 9th Circuit ruled that Grants Pass can ban the use of tents in public parks and limit the amount of bedding materials used in a public place.

How can cities protect themselves?

Cities and officials across the Western U.S. say the ruling is stopping them from protecting residents. The city of Chico, California, in an amicus brief, said the 9th Circuit decision has “heavily restricted” its ability to combat homelessness.

“Residents do not understand why Chico cannot immediately address issues of open drug use, violence, theft, uncontrolled fires, environmental degradation, and other threats,” the city wrote in its brief.

The city says that it can only clear a homeless encampment if there is enough shelter space for every individual, and then provide at least 17 days’ notice before clearing the encampment.

In a brief supporting neither party, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote that the appeals court ruling is so ambiguous that district courts have held that it does prohibit cities from clearing encampments.

City policies “must respect constitutional rights and individual dignity,” he added, but state and local leaders need “flexibility ... particularly when faced with problems as complex as the crisis of homelessness afflicting many cities today.”

Advocates say that criminalizing homelessness is unlikely to reduce the homeless population. In another amicus brief, six states wrote that criminalization could even increase homelessness “by imposing debts or creating criminal records that make it harder to obtain secure housing.” 

Clare Pastore, a professor at the University of Southern California law school, admits that it is difficult for cities to enforce the 9th Circuit ruling, but only “because there’s no city that has ever provided enough [shelter] space.”

Homelessness “is a humanitarian tragedy. But making a humanitarian tragedy a crime doesn’t solve anything,” she adds. “Criminalization never housed people.”

The plaintiffs, for their part, call the cities’ position “political deflection.” As the issue has worsened, Western cities have found it “easier to blame the courts than to take responsibility for finding a solution.” 

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Grants Pass, it will force homeless individuals in the city to move elsewhere. That could trigger a harsh trend.

“What happens when those jurisdictions push them back by imposing [tougher] penalties, setting off an escalating banishment race among municipalities across the West Coast?” ask the respondents. “Neither the City nor its amici say.”

Jenny Kane/AP

Brock Spurgeon (second from left) puts away signs after demonstrating outside City Hall, March 20 in Grants Pass, Oregon. He said his self-proclaimed park watch group isn't against homeless people, but rather against public drug use.

How could the court rule?

The high court could rule narrowly, either upholding the 9th Circuit or saying the Grants Pass ordinance specifically is constitutional.

A broader rule could have significant consequences for U.S. cities and their homeless populations. The decision could also have broader consequences for the Eighth Amendment, which some conservative jurists have been calling for.

Thomas Hardiman, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, said last fall that the precedents are so “inscrutable” they “require judges to ignore the law as written in favor of their own moral sentiments.” The justices, he added, should “return to the text and original meaning of the 8th Amendment.”

In recent years, the Supreme Court has held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits juvenile life without parole and capital punishment for those who committed offenses as juveniles. (Three years ago, a more conservative court made it easier to for states to impose life without parole sentences on juveniles.)

The Grants Pass case, however, is not like other recent Eighth Amendment cases. Those cases concerned methods of punishment for people convicted of crimes. This case concerns the status-based versus conduct-based punishment question.

But today’s Supreme Court is also much more conservative. The 1960s, in particular, “was just a very different era for the court, and it’s not clear to me that this court is going to follow that approach,” says Steven Schwinn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago law school.

“It’s a little hard to [predict] the direction it’s going to go,” he adds.

Professor Pastore, though, would be surprised if there are five justices who would endorse a ruling that could trigger a race to the bottom on punishing people for not being able to afford a place to stay.

“Even this conservative court would balk at that, because it’s such an obvious problem, this race between cities over who is most punitive,” she says.

“I don’t see this court saying anyone can sleep anywhere at all times. [But] I don’t see this court saying criminalization anywhere and everywhere is fine,” she adds. “This is a hard case to predict.”

The sustainable village of the future, if Martina Wiedemar and Joao Almeida have any say about it, will have solar panels, earthen buildings, and an eco-friendly agroforest, a form of regenerative agriculture that mimics nature to produce climate-friendly food.   

The field hands who work there will earn wages well above what’s standard for this rural area of Portugal. Those who take up residence here for a week, a month, or longer will be able to take classes on permaculture or local cooking, and to sample locally grown produce. Children will play together, exploring nature. 

There will also be a turquoise swimming pool with a chic poolside restaurant and coworking space, designed in a white-washed Mediterranean style, with fast internet.

“This place is an example that a sustainable life can be beautiful,” Mr. Almeida says of his family’s project, which they call Gandum Village. “It can be easy. It’s not just a hippie thing.”

Around the world, a growing number of ecological innovators such as Ms. Wiedemar and Mr. Almedia are reimagining landscapes, communities, and the way we live. In projects that range from “ecovillages” in sub-Saharan Africa to regenerative agriculture coworking spaces in Europe, to mines-turned-permaculture projects in Barbados, individuals and organizations are embarking on a hands-on rethinking of the future. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Martina Wiedemar sits outside the restored tannery that has been converted into a coworking space in Gandum Village, Aug. 28, 2023, in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.

These efforts are part of a global increase in intentional ecological communities, according to experts. Ten years ago, for instance, there were around 440 ecovillages registered with the Global Ecovillage Network. Last year, there were 10,000.

But unlike past Utopian collectives, projects like Gandum Village are decidedly pragmatic. They’re not isolating themselves from the mainstream world; they want the public to come and stay a while – or at least buy their produce.  

“Ultimately, we all have to be living in ecovillages, whether we call them that or not,” says Daniel Greenberg, co-director of the Foundation for Intentional Community and past president of the Global Ecovillage Network.

That’s not as radical as it might sound, he argues. These projects, Dr. Greenberg says, are “trying to create wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. They’re trying to create culture, stories about how we live locally and globally in harmony with each other and the planet.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Marika Raves (right), a project coordinator with RuralRevive, and Armanda Pieters, who works at the constituency office and connects with youth, stand by a garden at RuralRevive headquarters July 23, 2023, in Maltahöhe, Namibia.

Ecovillage life in the desert

Buying local is one goal of a new project called RuralRevive – Building a Desert Based Economy, based in the village of Maltahöhe in central Namibia, in southern Africa.

The village sits on the road between the capital, Windhoek, and some of the most-visited parts of the Namib desert. A former karakul sheep center that’s fallen on hard times, it is also the center of an effort to reimagine a future for people, wildlife, and agriculture.

RuralRevive is just over 100 miles west of NamibRand, a private conservation effort where tourists stay in upscale, low-impact lodgings – and the project is evolving into a service center for a desert economy. Its laundry facility helps hotels wash sheets and towels (as opposed to the hotels doing the same where water is scarcer), and it has a new greenhouse to provide relatively local produce. At the same time, it trains locals such as Elrico Bekeur in horticulture and entrepreneurship.

In a bright greenhouse, surrounded by the parched landscape made worse by Namibia’s persistent drought, Mr. Bekeur nurtures his broccoli and Brussels sprouts with a drizzle of water.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Elrico Bekeur, a gardener at RuralRevive, poses in the garden he grows at his home in a nearby informal settlement, July 23, 2023, in Maltahöhe, Namibia.

“These are just babies,” he says, gently tending to his plants. “Just like a baby cannot go a day without breastfeeding, they cannot go a day without water.”

Mr. Bekeur, whose parents died when he was 8 years old, quit school in eighth grade and started work as a “yard boy” at a farm. “That’s when I really fell in love with living things,” he says. He was always trying to grow a garden outside his family’s shack in an informal settlement on the edge of Maltahöhe. His late grandfather used to scoff at his effort – until the COVID-19 pandemic rendered them without any food other than what Mr. Bekeur could grow.

Today that scrappy garden has grown to three times the size of his simple shack, rigged with a sleek irrigation system feeding a jungle of greenery with the savvy he has learned from RuralRevive about growing fruits and vegetables in the desert earth. “I’m hoping in my heart that my neighborhood will all start growing their own produce, their own food for themselves,” he says. “I’m very happy that something has happened in my hometown. Maltahöhe is not just a place where people will have a job, but where they will learn something.”

But the purpose of RuralRevive, where on a quiet Sunday locals who live there are stringing up laundry to dry in the fresh air, is not just economic. For those involved, it’s also an expression of a much deeper narrative about what future they face as the planet warms – and a recalibration of their notion of progress.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Reinhold Mangundu, an environmental activist, poet, and storyteller, poses for a photo July 14, 2023, in Windhoek, Namibia.

Reinhold Mangundu, RuralRevive’s project manager, is a young climate activist who has received international attention for his fight against Canadian oil company ReconAfrica in the Okovanggo Basin. He began this project with a longing for past communal life. He remembers sitting by a bonfire, listening to his father, a subsistence farmer, tell him about the forest and birds of his birthplace in the north of his country. Those village fires lit a desire in him to restore and regenerate the earth and wildlife that he could only imagine. 

“I believe it’s time we start building beautiful stories about the future and use those stories ... of the future to address our current problems,” he says. 

Transforming a sand mine in Barbados 

Across an ocean, in the Scotland District of the eastern Caribbean island of Barbados – named, in part, for its green slopes plunging into the ocean – a project to repurpose one of the region’s largest sand mines is also seeking to design a new future.

Walkers Quarry once supplied the silica sand used in nearly all of Barbados’ construction projects. But these days the bulldozers are being replaced by the pickup trucks of horticulturalists, scientists, and volunteers who are exploring how to transform an extractive landscape into a model of future resilience in a warming world. They now call it Walkers Reserve. They are planting cuscus grass to help stabilize slopes, tending to mangroves that naturally clean riverways, and testing crops that not only might fare well in the wind-swept, warming coast of this island, but also could help capture carbon as a climate solution.

Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor

An aquifer lake and new plantings at the Walkers Reserve in Barbados are seen in July 2023. A former sand quarry, the Walkers Reserve is being transformed into a laboratory for climate resilience and regenerative agriculture.

Those involved in the project say the lessons learned here could help others across the island with everything from food security to reforestation.

“We are showing how nature-based solutions can be put into place, and how that can be scaled,” says Elize Rostant, managing director of Walkers Institute for Regenerative Research, Education and Design, the nonprofit founded to oversee the transition from extractive mine to regenerative solution.

Discovering new models 

But for many future-based eco projects, scale isn’t as important as finding a new model of living – one that is less about getting “bigger and better” and more about new understandings about what progress, and sustainability, can mean.

Some criticize these efforts as being so small that they barely make a difference – and say that isolated examples don’t do much to either shift wider patterns of consumption or counter the economic realities in which most people live. 

But those participating in building these projects say they’re simply taking the first steps for a better world. 

Five years ago, Ms. Wiedemar and Mr. Almeida purchased this abandoned 98-acre farm in the Alentejo region of central Portugal, a land of cork trees and cattle farms and increasing drought. They wanted to put into practice the book learning they had gathered in Ms. Wiedemar’s native Switzerland, through studies and careers focused on climate change and food sustainability. 

So with their three young children in tow, the couple had returned to Mr. Almeida’s home country and began to imagine Gandum Village – a place that would be a model not only of regenerative agriculture but also of a different, more sustainable way to live: one that was more collective, less focused on economic growth, more in tune with the earth, and exquisitely designed.

When the couple realized that small-scale agriculture would not be financially viable, they decided to open a set of short-term stay apartments and a hotel, along with a coworking center and an approach to child care that could allow people to work, eat, and live together. They are working with local farmers on their agroforestry project, and already see improved drought-resistance in some crops. They plan to hold events, from weddings to conferences, and work closely with a collective of professionals who have agreed to eschew economic growth in favor of community, creativity, and collaboration.  

“When they hear ‘sustainable,’ people think about the negatives, the ‘less,’” Ms. Wiedemar says. “We want to show them the ways for it to be positive.” 

Louise Delmotte/AP

A customer collects a take-away food plastic bag at Kuen Fat Kitchen in Hong Kong, April 10. Legislation aiming to stop the sale and distribution of plastic foam products and single-use plastic cutlery went into effect there on April 22, 2024.

Plastic is nearly everywhere. 

Scientists have detected microplastics from the peak of Mount Everest and the depths of the Marianas Trench to the air we breathe and the water we drink.

The challenge for humanity, then, is how to clean up our own mess. Hence today’s theme for Earth Day: planet versus plastics. 

More than 400 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year, using thousands of chemicals scientists believe to be harmful. Plastic waste is expected to triple by 2060. Of the 48 million tons the United States generates, about 5% is recycled, leaving the rest to landfills, incinerators, and pollution. Meanwhile, plastic production accounts for 5% of the world’s carbon emissions and 12% of its oil demand.

The prospect of charting a new course is daunting. This week, leaders from around the world are gathering in Ottawa, Ontario, for the fourth of five sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4), tasked in 2022 with designing a global treaty on plastic pollution by this year. Already, in the past decade more than 60 nations have enacted some sort of ban on the use of polystyrene foam in things like cups and food packaging.

SOURCE:

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; Our World in Data; Morales-Caselles et al. (2021), "An inshore–offshore sorting system revealed from global classification of ocean litter"; United Kingdom Food Standards Agency

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Ideas for better ways of doing things abound, from using more traditional plastic alternatives such as paper, glass, and metal to adopting new materials. Bioplastics made from biomass – including starches, wax, and seaweed derivatives – are often biodegradable. That’s an important virtue in line with efforts to create a more “circular economy” with sustainability in mind.

Polylactic acid, made from sugarcane or corn, is being used to package fruits, juice, and yogurt, though it needs the right temperature and pressure conditions to decompose. 

“There is no one silver bullet that is going to solve this problem,” says Erin Simon, vice president of Plastic Waste and Business at the World Wildlife Fund, one of the world’s leading international conservation organizations. Using less plastic and improving recycling and waste management systems will continue to be essential. “No matter the technical solution, we need the infrastructure and the policy to go with it.” 

The good news, says Ms. Simon, is that public opinion is rallying against plastic waste. A global ban on single-use plastics is supported by 85% of people polled around the world, according to a WWF and Plastic Free Foundation survey. 

“There are so many things that we can disagree on,” says Ms. Simon. “But on this one, we all agree … There is no plastic that should be in nature.” 

For regular people who want to do something, she offers the same advice she gives large businesses: “Clean up your own house. Look at how you depend on single-use,” she says. “Make those choices. Don’t look for perfect. Take one step at a time. … Then advocate.”

Manhattan prosecutors have long telegraphed how they’ll frame their historic criminal case against former President Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, prosecutors allege, to keep her from selling the story of their sexual encounter to National Enquirer. (Mr. Trump denies the affair ever occurred.) Then, they say, he falsified business records to cover up the payment’s existence – all to ensure that news of his alleged infidelities was not splashed on front pages prior to the 2016 presidential election.

How Mr. Trump’s attorneys will defend him has been less clear. Until Monday, that is – when both the prosecution and defense made opening arguments summarizing their approaches before the newly empaneled jury in case of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche’s relatively concise opening statement in the trial outlined three key points the defense will push: The prosecution’s key witness is a convicted liar, Mr. Trump himself was not directly linked to the payoff, and there are holes in the prosecution’s complicated arguments.

1. Undermining key witness Michael Cohen

Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made the actual payment to Ms. Daniels with $130,000 of his own money, for which he says he was reimbursed. He will likely be the central witness called by the prosecution. He says that Mr. Trump personally ordered him to pay Ms. Daniels and subsequently directed the cover-up of Mr. Cohen’s reimbursement from Trump company funds.

The Trump defense intends to paint Mr. Cohen as a convicted liar who wanted a job in the new Trump administration but did not get one. In November 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to a congressional committee about efforts to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Mr. Cohen has ulterior motives to want to damage his former boss, Mr. Blanche told the jury on Monday, including revenge for perceived slights. After serving prison time for convictions on campaign finance violations and tax fraud, Mr. Blanche said, Mr. Cohen has become fixated on bringing down Mr. Trump, whom he accuses of betrayal.

“He’s obsessed with President Trump even to this day,” Mr. Blanche said in court.

2. Rejecting direct connections to Trump

A second aspect of the Trump defense seems likely to be an attempt to distance the former president from any actions taken to deal with Ms. Daniels or other efforts to kill damaging stories before they appeared in tabloid print.

It may be difficult for Mr. Trump’s lawyers to portray him as completely uninvolved. His signature appears on some of the checks to Mr. Cohen that prosecutors say were reimbursement for the hush money payment.

But “President Trump had nothing to do with the invoice” involved in the repayment, Mr. Blanche said.

After winning the 2016 election, Mr. Trump separated himself from business concerns, putting up “a wall” between the White House and the Trump Organization, his lawyer told jurors in his opening statement.

Unlike many previous presidents, however, Mr. Trump did not divest himself of his businesses or put them in a blind trust during his time in office. 

3. Asserting a house of cards

A final aspect of the Trump defense may be to cast the prosecution as little more than a rickety structure of unrelated legal elements stuck together with glue and a stapler.

Hush money per se is not illegal, after all. Mr. Trump instead is being charged with business records violations for falsifying payments made to Mr. Cohen. Prosecutors say that this was done with the intent of keeping the Daniels story hidden until the election had safely passed – a separate fraud allegation that, connected to the records violations, raises the entire alleged crime to the level of a felony.

Mr. Trump’s defense seems intent on highlighting the documents aspect of the charges in their arguments, an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the alleged actions and paint them as no big deal, as a misstated checkbook entry at worst.

Mr. Blanche seemed to telegraph this kind of approach when he noted that the checks allegedly used to repay Mr. Cohen totaled $420,000, while the initial hush money payment to Ms. Daniels was only $130,000. 

Why such a large overpayment?

“This was not a payback. ... [Mr. Cohen] was President Trump’s personal attorney,” Mr. Blanche told jurors.

In any case, Mr. Blanche added, the prosecution’s entire theory of the case is wrong.

“I have a spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” Mr. Blanche said.

Duane Taylor was combing through the southwestern port city of Izmail in war-torn Ukraine, looking for stray dogs. “Good boy, would you like some food?” he remembers calling out into the chilly night air. 

A skinny puppy trotted up to him fearlessly, ripped the pouch of food apart, inhaled it in one gulp, and smeared the little that was left across its muzzle. Mr. Taylor broke into a chuckle. He had to dodge bullets and missiles, and endure blown-up roads and wary border police during his two forays into Ukraine. But moments such as these made his risky enterprise worthwhile.

“He’s happy,” Mr. Taylor says of the satisfied pup, during an evening Skype call from his home in Ottawa, Ontario. “And it does make you feel good.”

The need to feed stray animals in Ukraine is huge right now, says Lori Kalef, director of programs at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International. Even before war broke out there in February 2022, the country was overpopulated with strays. But their numbers soared when the conflict began and millions of refugees fled Ukraine, many of them reluctantly leaving behind their pets.

Vivien Fellegi

Mr. Taylor helps a veterinarian in Chișinău, Moldova, during a procedure. Impact Express, a project he started, delivers food and medical supplies to help strays.

Living conditions for the abandoned animals have been dire, Ms. Kalef says during a phone interview from Victoria, British Columbia. Strays are vulnerable to hunger, thirst, and the vicissitudes of weather. And at a time when resources for displaced humans are scarce, strays are seen as a low priority. “Without people like Duane or other organizations,” Ms. Kalef says, “the animals who are still in Ukraine wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Mr. Taylor, who hails from Newfoundland, started Impact Express, a project that delivers pet food and veterinary supplies to stray cats and dogs in Ukraine and neighboring Moldova, about two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. He has completed two trips to Ukraine, delivering more than 66,000 pounds of food to thousands of strays, by his estimate. He has spent more than $75,000 – the bulk from his own pocket, after dipping deeply into his life savings.

Mr. Taylor says he has always had a soft spot for animals, ever since sharing his crib with the family cat. Over the years, he has adopted and cared for a wide array of creatures, even building a protective shelter once for a couple of pigeons that landed on his balcony and laid eggs. 

But in Mr. Taylor’s recollection, none of the animals he has known could compare to the floppy-eared Pyro. The pup’s abusive owner inflicted multiple injuries on the dog before turning him out onto Ottawa’s streets a few years ago. Mr. Taylor’s niece adopted Pyro, and Mr. Taylor helped to care for him, taking him on trips to PetSmart and the park. He also spent thousands of dollars trying to save the animal. Although Pyro seemed to bounce back, he died in Mr. Taylor’s arms six weeks later. The dog lover was devastated. 

That’s when he vowed to dedicate much of his life to helping abandoned pets. “I feel for the animals,” says Mr. Taylor, a senior policy adviser for Canada’s federal government, because “humans cause every bit of suffering for every animal.”

The war in Ukraine galvanized Mr. Taylor to act on a larger scale. After creating Impact Express, he flew to Romania in April 2022, procured a van, and filled it with pet food and medical supplies that he drove across the border to shelters in southern Ukraine. When he returned home, Mr. Taylor’s colleague at Impact Express, Gabor Petru, who heads his own nonprofit, Volunteers Without Borders, continued to drive the van on weekly trips to Ukraine, while Mr. Taylor oversaw his organization’s operations from his house in Ottawa. Mr. Taylor returned to Ukraine in September 2023 for another two-month stint. 

He recalls that he faced many obstacles while carrying out his missions to the war zone. Shortly after he had embarked on his first trip, he entered a military checkpoint outside Odesa. An officer there suddenly began screaming at Mr. Taylor in rapid-fire Ukrainian. Mr. Taylor tried to break through the impasse, deploying the only Ukrainian he knew: the words for “dog” and “food.” No dice. Then he tried a universal language, barking, “Woof, woof.” The officer didn’t understand that, either. Finally, Mr. Taylor called a colleague at a nearby shelter and passed the phone to the officer, and the incident was resolved.

During his second trip, Mr. Taylor recalls, he was forced to languish at the border between Ukraine and Romania for nine days. To leave, he had to navigate past highways obliterated by missiles. 

Staff members at Datcha Animal Shelter in Chișinău, Moldova, where many Ukrainians relinquished their pets, are glad Mr. Taylor persisted. Irina Marcu, who runs the place, says Mr. Taylor is “like a person who came from the sky. Our angel.”

Vivien Fellegi

Duane Taylor carries puppies to their kennel after they exercise outside Datcha Animal Shelter in Moldova. Many displaced Ukrainians reluctantly relinquished their dogs at the facility.

Mr. Taylor has almost single-handedly supplied the shelter’s 400 dogs and 80 cats with food, paid for veterinary care, and brought the animals to a nearby clinic through almost-impassable forest roads. He has also constructed large, comfortable cages.

Mr. Taylor says he has come to the aid of his own species, too. He regularly supplies refugee centers with basic goods. On one occasion, he passed through a Ukrainian village populated mostly by older people. When Mr. Taylor heard that they needed adult diapers, he bought a large supply in Romania and delivered it to them when he was back in Ukraine.

He is now back home in Ottawa and feels rewarded. He notes that he received “unconditional love” from the animals, made lifelong human pals during his travels, and has even found unexpected romance with another volunteer at a shelter for strays.

“I honestly think every single day, many hours a day, how can I help dogs better?” says Mr. Taylor. “It is my purpose in life.”

AP

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) hands the gavel to Speaker-elect Rep. Mike Johnson (R) at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 25, 2023.

Almost as soon as the presidential primaries began in January, one narrative of this election year in the United States was dominant: that Americans merely faced a rematch between a current and a former president that most said they did not want. Yet a second and more compelling narrative may be unfolding in the U.S. House of Representatives, one about the capacity for the renewal of the American model of self-government.

On Saturday, a wide bipartisan majority of the House passed four bills funding military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The measures also included humanitarian aid for war-torn Gaza and Sudan. The bills follow the recent adoption of legislation to prevent a government shutdown and extend a covert surveillance law.

The flurry of activity in the House could mark the maturing of a new generation of leaders learning to temper partisan passions through reason and consensus. In one way, this was forced on the lawmakers. Republicans hold only a two-seat majority, making House Speaker Mike Johnson vulnerable to being ousted by just a few Republicans, as his predecessor was. To keep his job, he had recently favored strong immigration reforms over funds for Ukraine. Yet after hearing the nation’s highest intelligence briefings about the Russian threat in Ukraine and Europe, he apparently shifted his thinking. That change of heart led him to ignore the threat of a revolt of a few within his own ranks and move forward on legislation that had been stalled for months.

“I could make a selfish decision and do something different,” he told reporters last week, “but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

The speaker’s decision reflects the design of American democracy to favor what James Madison called “the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest.” A study published last year by the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia found, based on 40 years of congressional activity, that bipartisanship is the key to effective legislating – especially amid division and polarization.

The reason for that may be rooted in what consensus requires. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries last week praised Mr. Johnson for being “open, honest, and highly communicative.” Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, told Politico, “I don’t think I agree with him politically on anything, but I do think he has integrity. And I do think he’s acting like a leader.”

Another quality at work was a willingness to listen to alternative views. “Only by having humility can leaders bring people together,” wrote Marilyn Gist, professor emerita of the Center of Leadership Formation at Seattle University, in The Hill in 2020. “When leaders display regard for others’ dignity ... compromise is much more likely.” This year’s election narrative might be about to change.