Evan Vucci/AP

President Trump gestures after arriving at the Luis Muñiz Air National Guard Base in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Oct. 3, 2017. Trump is visiting Puerto Rico in the wake of hurricane Maria.

President Trump has been praised for his administration’s response to last month’s hurricanes in Texas and Florida – no small feat. It was the first time two Category 4 storms had hit the United States in the same year.

But Puerto Rico has been another story. Hurricane Maria left the island in utter devastation, and critics have accused the Trump administration of lagging in its response. Mr. Trump, in turn, attacked local officials as “politically motivated ingrates” and called coverage of the devastation “fake news.”

Complicating it all is Trump’s prickly relationship with Latinos, who have never seen this president as an ally. Trump’s visit Tuesday to Puerto Rico represents an opportunity to turn the page, but a narrative is already setting in: Maria is Trump’s “Katrina,” a reference to the charge that President George W. Bush had failed a devastated New Orleans after its own hurricane in 2005.

Can today’s downward spiral of recriminations and distrust be reversed?

It has to, at least to some degree, as Puerto Rico tackles the immediate task of storm recovery – an enterprise that by definition involves government at all levels, from local to federal.

“It’s almost beyond politics,” says Ed Morales, author of the forthcoming book “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture.” “People’s lives are turned upside down.”

After what was widely seen on the island as a slow response to the disaster, federal aid and personnel are now surging in, the island’s governor reported over the weekend. On Tuesday, after landing in Puerto Rico, Trump contrasted the low hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico – 16 people – with the nearly 2,000 who died during what he called “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” demonstrating his sensitivity to comparisons to the storm that ravaged New Orleans.

Trump also gave himself an “A-plus” on the response to all the recent hurricanes that have hit Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.

At his first briefing on the island, Trump was joined by the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, with whom he had conducted a high-profile feud in recent days via Twitter and television. Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz had accused the federal government of “killing us” with a slow response; Trump shot back with a charge of “poor leadership” and accusations that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them.”

Now the focus is the recovery itself, which promises to be a long haul. By Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the storm hit, only 7 percent of electrical service and 40 percent of telecommunications had been restored.

GOP’s challenge with Latino voters

But the longer-running narrative of Trump’s – and Republicans’ – problems with Latino voters is likely to persist long after Puerto Rico is fully back in business. Trump famously began his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and drug-dealers, and touting his plan for a southern border wall.

But he still managed to score slightly better with Latinos (28 percent of their vote) in the 2016 election than the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney (27 percent). The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll shows Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics at 21 percent.

Puerto Ricans are American citizens, albeit without voting representation in Congress or the right to vote in presidential elections. Therefore, they are not affected by immigration issues in the same way that many Latinos on the mainland are.

Still, there has been a sharp racial/ethnic dimension to the political messaging around Puerto Rico and the comparisons with Katrina, when images of displaced and suffering African Americans dominated coverage.

“I’ve got to be honest, there’s a lot of dishonest politics going on here,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “The Democrats are clearly trying to make this Trump’s Katrina through identity politics, just because of questionable statements made about Hispanics throughout the campaign.”

Another political dimension that roils the Puerto Rico story centers on Florida: If waves of Puerto Ricans move to the Sunshine State permanently, and begin voting there, that could be a game-changer in this critical battleground state.

“So in the most purple of purple states, there’s suddenly an influx of people who have already tended to vote Democratic in elections, now they’re moving to Florida, and they really aren’t happy with Donald J. Trump,” says Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist based in Tallahassee and a Trump critic. “So guess who gets the dirty end of the stick – Republicans in Florida.”

Special hurdles in helping Puerto Rico

Lost in the fierce political battle over the optics of Puerto Rico and Trump is the reality of the relief effort itself. Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert on emergency response at the Center for Global Development in Washington, cites three key factors in assessing the Puerto Rico situation.

First, the logistics of disaster response are always tough on an island, especially given the level of devastation that Puerto Rico experienced. Second, managing several disasters at once is especially difficult, with Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico all facing historic storms in quick succession. Third comes the role of the federal government.

“The buck always stops with the president,” says Mr. Konyndyk, who served at the Obama administration’s director for foreign disaster assistance at USAID.

Typically, the “response architecture” in a natural disaster has local authorities taking the lead and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) playing a support role.

But in a situation like Puerto Rico “where FEMA has to be the show, not just support the show, it’s a heavier lift,” Konyndyk says. “That’s where presidential leadership becomes such an important variable.”

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Shirley Connuck, right, of Falls Church, Va., holds up a sign representing a district in Texas, as the Supreme Court hears a case on possible partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures on October 3.

Unlike with racial gerrymandering, the US Supreme Court has been reluctant to confront partisan gerrymandering in recent years. Not only is partisan gerrymandering perfectly legal to some degree – making it difficult to judge when it becomes unlawful – but the justices are also traditionally reluctant to get too involved in politics, particularly local politics.

“They really feel like they’re not well situated to decide whether the line should be drawn here or on the other side of [a town’s] park,” says Michael Li, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

Every 10 years after a new Census is released, state legislatures redraw their voting district maps. The process is inherently political, with the majority party in the legislature controlling the process in 28 states (other states use independent commissions). In most states, redistricting has to meet specific criteria, including compactness, the preservation of counties and other political subdivisions, and the preservation of the cores of the old districts.

Today, however, the court heard arguments about whether that process can cross constitutional boundaries. The case, Gill v. Whitford, concerns the alleged partisan gerrymandering of state Assembly districts in Wisconsin.

With technological improvements making gerrymandering easier than ever, and a new Census on the horizon, critics of the practice say the court has to act now to place boundaries on it.

Since the case focuses on “extreme” partisan gerrymandering, locking in political majorities for multiple election cycles, it may be easier for the justices to avoid a sweeping opinion, some experts say. But perhaps more important, the technological advances that have enabled this kind of surgically precise remapping of voting districts – the same big data used by political campaigns to target likely voters – is only expected to get more advanced.

“There’s a real concern that if the court doesn’t step in, people both will have the tools to do it and have a signal from the court that [it won’t] stop them,” says Mr. Li. “They’ll know there’s no policeman on the block, and they’ll also have real robust tools to break into people’s houses.”

In the 2012 election, Republicans won 47 percent of the vote but 60 of 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly. Two years later, they won 57 percent of the vote and 63 seats in the Assembly. Two years after that their popular vote tally dropped to about 53 percent but they took 64 Assembly seats.

“That disconnect between what the state looks like, and state delegations,” says Li, “that’s what makes it an extreme gerrymander, because elections don’t matter; a majority is baked into the system.”

There are only about a half-dozen congressional maps and a dozen state legislative maps that fit that “extreme” profile, he adds. The issue also crosses party lines. While most of the states accused of partisan gerrymandering are Republican-controlled, states under Democratic control – Maryland, for example – are also judged to have engaged in the practice.

Some experts are also concerned that as the data collection and mathematical modeling technologies used to draw the districts improve, these kinds of gerrymanders could become easier to implement.

It’s this urgency that has seen politicians from both parties, including Sens. John McCain (R) of Arizona and Sheldon Whitehouse (D) of Rhode Island, urging the court to reach a decision "between district maps drawn based on legitimate political considerations and those constituting unlawful partisan gerrymandering."

SOURCE:

US Census, PennLive, Michigan Radio

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Michael Holtz/The Christian Science Monitor

Haroon Roshid and his wife, Khaleda Begum, help Rohingya refugees fleeing the violence in neighboring Myanmar.

When hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees began fleeing from Myanmar into Bangladesh six weeks ago, Haroon Roshid and his wife, Khaleda Begum, gave them what little they could: water, rice, plastic tarpaulins.

Their supplies quickly ran out. Then, last week, a local Islamic charity asked to use their house as a makeshift hospital. They didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their living room – its walls painted bright pink – became a delivery room, their muddy front yard a pharmacy. 

A team of volunteer doctors soon arrived and helped deliver five babies in three days. Outside, thousands of sick and injured refugees received medicine. 

“They are human beings just as we are,” Mr. Roshid says, standing next to his wife in their bedroom. She nods in agreement. “Our house is open to them for as long as they need,” he continues. “If the doctors stay forever, that is no problem for us.”

Behind the couple’s generosity lies Roshid’s own experience. He has been a Rohingya refugee himself since 2000, when he fled violence in neighboring Myanmar for safety in Bangladesh, just as his Muslim compatriots are fleeing their burning villages now. 

He has since found work as an electrician and, six years ago, married Ms. Begum, a local Bangladeshi woman. Together they live with their four children on what was once the outskirts of the Balukhali refugee camp. Their concrete house now sits well inside the makeshift camp’s rapidly expanding boundaries, surrounded by tens of thousands of refugees who are living with nothing to protect them from the rain except plastic tarps hung over shaky bamboo poles. 

As Roshid and Begum tell their story, a pregnant woman arrives at the front door. She is about to go into labor. Begum runs to the kitchen to grab fresh water while two doctors help the woman onto a bed in the living room. Another woman lies on the floor next to her newborn baby. 

“We’re doing all we can to help,” Roshid says with a look of exhaustion. “There are just too many people.” 

Roshid isn’t the only one feeling overwhelmed. Since late August, when soldiers and Buddhist mobs in Myanmar began burning Muslim Rohingya villages, more than half a million Rohingya are reported to have fled into Bangladesh, creating the largest refugee crisis to hit Asia in decades. 

Bangladeshi authorities say the flow of refugees has greatly slowed in the past two weeks. Still, humanitarian groups are struggling to keep up with the demands of those who had already arrived. The United Nations World Food Program has appealed for $75 million in emergency aid over the next six months. 

"The bottom line? This is a deplorable situation,” David Beasley, executive director of WFP, told reporters after visiting some of the camps in Bangladesh. “This is as bad as it gets.”

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and this crisis has stretched the nation to its limit. As the government, the UN, and other nongovernmental organizations scramble to respond, long-time refugees and local villagers have shown remarkable kindness in their efforts to help fill in some of the gaps.  

“I saw what was happening on Facebook and decided to come,” says Joshaim, a fisherman from the port city of Chittagong, 100 miles north of the camps. He came with 1,500 taka, about $18, to hand out to refugees. “I know it’s not much,” he says as he walks along a muddy path through Balukhali. “I just wanted to help.” 

'Unfinished business'

This is not the first time Rohingya have poured into Bangladesh. They have suffered from bursts of violence at government hands for nearly 40 years, and each outbreak has provoked a wave of refugees. Even before the current crisis, some 500,000 Rohingya had lived in camps like Balukhali and neighboring Kutupalong for decades.

But the events of the past six weeks have been on a different scale. The UN’s top human rights official has called it “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” 

The current crisis began on Aug. 25, when Rohingya militants attacked about 30 police posts and an Army base in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, killing at least 12 members of the security forces. The Myanmar military launched a brutal “clearance campaign” in response, forcing people from their homes by burning them down. 

Satellite images obtained by Human Rights Watch show the near-total destruction of 284 villages across northern Rakhine. 

The Rohingya claim a long history in Myanmar that traces back to at least the 15th century. But the government of the Buddhist-majority country says they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They have long been denied citizenship and basic rights, living under conditions many observers have compared to apartheid. Their rights to marry and to have children are restricted by the government, and many have been confined to their villages since an attack by militants a year ago on security forces. 

Many analysts, including the UN special human rights investigator in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, have suggested that the government – strongly influenced by the military despite being headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi – plans to drive the Rohingya out completely. 

“For the Army, this is unfinished business,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “It wants them out of the country.” 

The military may be seizing its chance. The government has done nothing to rein in its violent campaign, and though international pressure is mounting, it may prove to be too little, too late.

More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in the past six weeks, according to UN estimates. An unknown number of other victims have been killed in the violent crackdown. 

Fires are no longer visible from the Bangladeshi side of the border, but refugees who crossed over in late September said the military and allied mobs were still burning down homes – sometimes with families inside. The parents of Jani Alam, a 19-year-old Rohingya man who had just crossed the border when I met him last week, suffered such a fate, he said. 

Shirtless and starving, Mr. Alam was walking with three other men along the road that led from the border to the sprawling refugee camps. Each of them looked as if he could collapse at any moment. They said they had spent the previous four days hiking barefoot through the forest, crossing two rivers on their journey. 

“I’m very happy to be in Bangladesh,” Alam says. “Now I’m finally safe.”

Ahmer Khan

A mother and her newborn baby, named Zainab, take shelter inside a house owned by Haroon Roshid and his wife, Khaleda Begum. Their house was being used as medical clinic, and several babies were delivered here.

Settling in

The new refugee camps across the border from Myanmar in southern Bangladesh stretch for miles in every direction. Before Aug. 25, tree-covered hillsides were dotted with lush rice paddies. Today, the slopes have been denuded of all but the largest trees, and covered instead by a rain-lashed city built from tarpaulins and bamboo, wallowing in a sea of mud. 

Entrepreneurial locals have set up food stalls along the main roads and crowded paths. (The prices of bananas, rice, and vegetables have all doubled since the refugees started to arrive.) UN and non-governmental aid workers have set up medical tents, food distribution centers, and even a hilltop cemetery. They are building latrines as fast as they can to ward off cholera. UNICEF, the UN children's agency, plans to build more than 1,300 schools over the next year, since 60 percent of the refugees are children. 

The conditions in the camps are dismal. Frequent rains turn the dirt roads into rivers of mud and sewage. Children swim in streams of murky brown water to cool off in the tropical heat. But despite the palpable sense of desperation, many refugees are already trying to carve out new lives for themselves.

Zakid Hossain, a 25-year-old man who arrived in Balukhali five weeks ago with his mother and wife, has opened a small shop along one of the camp’s main arteries. He sold his wife’s gold earrings to buy an assortment of cigarettes, dried snacks, and fresh vegetables from a wholesale market in a nearby town, which he sells at a markup. His shop is nothing more than a black tarp on which he can sit and display his goods.  

“I don’t know how many days or months or years I will stay here, so I decided to open the shop,” says Mr. Hossain, who previously worked as a day laborer in Myanmar. “If I earn money, I will use it to buy food for my family. We’re in God’s hands now.” 

If history is any guide, Hossain and his fellow refugees won’t be returning to Myanmar anytime soon. While the Bangladeshi government has said it hopes that Myanmar will eventually repatriate them, the authorities there have said that they will accept only those with documents proving they have a right to return. Few refugees have such papers, either because they were never issued, or because they lost them in the chaos of their sudden exodus.

Ahmer Khan

People in Kutupalong refugee camp build a new mosque.

A place to pray

As the new refugees struggle to piece together some semblance of a normal life, mosques have started to sprout up alongside the schools and roadside stalls. Some have been paid for by Bangladeshi donors, others by long-time camp residents.

The refugees build most of the mosques with the same materials they use for their homes: strips of bamboo are woven into walls, and plastic tarps serve as roofs. Without electricity or loudspeakers to broadcast the call to prayer, muezzins must rely on the strength of their own voices for the five-times-a-day ritual. 

Abu Sallhe, an Arabic teacher from Rakhine who fled to Bangladesh in 1992, donated money to pay for a mosque on a hill that overlooks one of the sprawling camps. He and a few relatives started work on it two weeks ago. “In times like this, it’s important to have a place to pray,” Mr. Sallhe says.

On a recent afternoon, Sallhe was resting beneath the tarpaulin roof of the partially finished mosque with a half dozen refugees who had volunteered to help build it. The heat made it too difficult to work in long stretches. They needed a break. 

As they sat in the shade, the new arrivals shared tales about their journeys to Bangladesh and about their lives back home. Their villages had all been burned and most had lost loved ones at the hands of the military, they said. This was their new home, and they saw the mosque as an integral part of it. 

“It makes me feel proud to help build this mosque,” said Zafor Hossain, who had been living in the camp for two weeks with his wife and two teenage sons. “Now I just pray that God will help us.”

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, US President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), talks to reporters after meeting with Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R) of West Virginia in her office on Capitol Hill in Washington on January 4, 2017.

In a Trump cabinet filled with controversial appointments, one of the most polarizing is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: Scott Pruitt.

To fans, Mr. Pruitt is a champion of industry who can undo regulatory overreach by the EPA. But for critics, Pruitt – a climate-change skeptic who in the past has been part of 14 lawsuits against the agency he now leads – embodies the idea of the fox guarding the henhouse. 

The direction of the EPA typically ebbs and flows with the shifting political tides in Washington. So a shift away from the regulation-heavy focus under the Obama administration would have been expected regardless of whom President Trump installed at the helm of the agency. But Pruitt appears to be initiating a more dramatic overhaul of the agency than the typical course correction seen with changes in presidential administrations, historians say. 

What his ultimate impact will be, however, remains an open question.

For one thing, Pruitt has already run up against bureaucratic and legal limits to some of his attempted rollbacks of Obama-era regulations, and it’s become clear that many of his stated goals may be harder to put into motion than he thought. But for many, including a number of career staffers who have previously weathered changes in leadership as a matter of course, the steady trickle of small changes that he has been able to enact amount to a major shift for the agency.

'A thousand attacks'

Compared with the agency under former President Barack Obama, when there was a strong focus on strengthening regulations to incorporate scientific advances, particularly research about pollutants and climate change, the shift in direction under Pruitt’s EPA is a stark one. It has more in common, say historians, with the EPA in the first couple years of former President Ronald Reagan, under Anne Gorsuch (the mother of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch). That two-year period was marked by budget cuts and a relaxation of enforcement and regulations that ultimately ended in scandal.

“They have built on the Reagan-Gorsuch strategy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they kind of studied that,” says Christopher Sellers, an environmental historian at Stony Brook University in New York.

In the first 200 days of Trump’s presidency, Pruitt has asked for a 31 percent budget reduction – which Congress rejected – and has sought to undo many environmental rules put in place during Mr. Obama’s administration.

Many of those moves have flown relatively under the radar compared with the massive media attention given to Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. But taken together – along with proposed budget cuts or lack of rule enforcement – these incremental changes could have an even greater impact.

“It’s a thousand attacks,” says Scott Slesinger, legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit based in New York. “On everything [Pruitt] does, he’s trying to weaken environmental enforcement, weaken environmental protections, and let industry polluters off the hook.”

To deregulation and states rights advocates, meanwhile, Pruitt’s efforts are in keeping with Trump’s campaign promises to scale back government overreach and industry-stifling environmental regulation.

“It's necessary and a lot more than necessary,” says Steven Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team and author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.” “We've had 45 years of bad science, overregulation, and tyranny by the EPA.” Mr. Milloy argues that many of the regulations are based on biased science and aren’t necessary for public health in the ways proponents claim.

Many of the proposed rollbacks can seem dry and technical, and they may not mean much to the average voter. But even small changes to rules can have a big effect on clean air and water and public health, advocates say, pointing to rules governing coal ash management, the listing of various toxic chemicals, risk management plans at industrial facilities, and methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. The targets that have received the most attention, like the Obama-era Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Plan still haven’t hit the radar screen of most voters.

The devil is in the details

Pruitt’s position on Obama’s signature environmental regulations has always been clear. As Oklahoma attorney general, he was part of lawsuits against the EPA involving the Clean Water Rule, the methane rule, and the Clean Power Plan. But actually undoing those rules is difficult, legal experts note. If adopting a rule is a time-consuming, bureaucratic process, involving detailed fact-finding, cost-benefit analysis, and comment periods, undoing those rules is also cumbersome. Most notably, a new rule – backed by evidence – must replace the old one.

Likewise, removing the teeth from adopted rules has proven difficult. A federal appeals court ruled in July that Pruitt’s decision not to enforce parts of the methane emissions rule represented an “unreasonable” delay and declared that as long as the rule is on the books the agency must enforce it. 

That setback may have discouraged Pruitt from announcing similar delays in other rules. Observers say that he is likely to have an easier time delaying implementation of controversial rules like the Clean Power Plan or the Clean Water Rule, however, which were already under court stays.

“Some of the things he’ll try to do he won’t be able to get through the courts, but some he will. It will be a mixed bag,” says Daniel Farber, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the co-author of a recent report looking at the potential consequences of the Trump administration for the environment.

Professor Farber and others say that the most significant changes may come through less direct means: cutting the budget, and therefore the agency’s capacity; reducing scientific research and monitoring; and (unofficially) doing less enforcement of existing regulations.

“The courts won’t intervene on that,” says Farber. The EPA under former President George W. Bush and Mr. Reagan also tried for regulatory rollback, he notes, somewhat less aggressively than now, and met with legal obstacles.

“What turned out to be their strongest weapons were budget and enforcement cuts,” says Farber.

Brain drain

Perhaps the most significant sign of the depth of changes taking place under Pruitt is the departure of career employees from the agency.

“A lot of people who are really good are leaving the EPA. The best people will find other things people want them to do, and the people who aren’t as good are stuck,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and a former EPA employee and consultant. “That’s a typical human resources story in these kinds of conditions.”

Researchers, including Professor Sellers of Stony Brook University, conducted dozens of interviews of current and former EPA employees for The EPA Under Siege, a report released this summer that examines the agency both historically and in the Trump era. Excerpts of those interviews, in an appendix, reveal a demoralized staff that describes feeling at war with the new political appointees. Along with the effort to undo regulations, the interviewees expressed dismay over what they view as disregard for science at the current EPA, new protocols that favor secrecy over transparency, and the decision to use part of the scant budget for a security team for Pruitt, not something that prior administrators have had. (The EPA did not respond to requests for comment from the Monitor.)

A similar scenario played out during the Gorsuch years as well, when EPA staff was reduced by 26 percent and its budget by 21 percent, according to the report.

Sellers sees a prime distinction between the two eras, however. In the Gorsuch era, Democrats had control of both houses and were a prime driver of the hearings that eventually uncovered scandals with how the EPA had mishandled the toxic waste Superfund and led to a broad turnover there. Today, Republicans have control of both houses. Congress’s decision to block Pruitt’s proposed budget cuts suggests that legislators may not necessarily be ready to give him carte blanche to shape the EPA, however.

One area where both critics and proponents of Pruitt’s EPA agenda can agree: States play an increasingly important role in most environmental monitoring, clean-up, and regulation these days. Trump fans like Milloy see this as yet another argument for why the EPA has outgrown its usefulness and should be far smaller, playing more of a coordination and advisory role.

In 1970, not many states had a good environmental department, says Milloy. Today, that’s changed. “Washington doesn’t need to dictate solutions to everybody.”

But whereas states like New York and California have been growing their governmental agencies and aren’t likely to be as affected by a shift in the national EPA, many other states have low capacity for environmental monitoring and enforcing regulations.

“There are places where the impact will be larger than in other places,” says the Earth Institute's Mr. Cohen. He wonders if it will take a real disaster – a failure to clean up a spill, or problems from Superfund sites in the wake of flooding like Houston saw – to raise environmental issues to the top of voters’ minds.

And he and others worry about the most basic result of Pruitt’s ideological shift: the lack of forward movement.

When it comes to environmental laws, “I think we have enough safeguards,” says Cohen. “The danger is that instead of advancing as we need to to keep pace with the technologies we’re introducing, we’ll be running as hard as we can to keep still.”

Some 1.3 billion years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, two massive black holes collided violently, setting off ripples in the fabric of space-time. These ripples, called gravitational waves, passed through Earth on Sept. 14, 2015. And for the first time ever, humans detected the nearly imperceptible motion of gravitational waves. 

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity had predicted gravitational waves a century earlier, but it wasn't until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) was built at the turn of the 21st century that there was any chance of finding evidence of them.

LIGO found that evidence in 2015. And again, three months later. And again this past January. And again in August. Each of the four gravitational wave detections added further support for Einstein's theory, ensuring that the LIGO team would go down in history.

Tuesday, that legacy was etched in gold, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded LIGO architects Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work designing, building, and using LIGO. 

But these first four detections and the honor bestowed upon the scientists are just the beginning. LIGO's success signals the dawn of a new kind of astronomy.

“This opens up a new window on the universe,” says Saul Teukolsky, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “And each time a new window has opened up, we’ve made incredible discoveries.”

Until now, astronomers have largely relied on electromagnetic radiation to observe the universe. Objects emit electromagnetic waves across a broad spectrum, some visible to the human eye as light, but all detectable by the telescopes currently in use on Earth or in orbit.

But gravitational waves allow astronomers to look at the universe in an entirely different way: through motion.

“Everything generates gravitational waves. You and I generate gravitational waves by opening our mouths and talking. Every time matter moves around, gravitational waves are generated,” explains Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University. 

Just as electromagnetic radiation can travel in a spectrum of wavelengths, so can these gravitational ripples. Over centuries of telescope construction, astronomers have honed their ability to observe the universe across that electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. And now, astronomers aspire to build better and better detectors that can capture the full range of gravitational waves as well.

“This is a totally new type of astronomy,” says Manuela Campanelli, director of the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, in Rochester, N.Y.

And incorporating gravitational wave observations with data from existing techniques could revolutionize astronomy. 

Multi-messenger astronomy, as it is known, offers astronomers insights into cosmic events dating back to the beginning of the universe. By combining data from electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays, scientists can assemble detailed pictures of collisions of black holes, neutron stars, and other massive objects.

“There is a possibility of learning a lot of what's going on about and around these sources,” Dr. Campanelli says, “because now you have many independent means to extract information.”

The spectacular fireworks of colliding neutron stars, for example, can currently be observed in electromagnetic wavelengths, so scientists know a bit about what they are made of, says Professor Teukolsky. But how they work, the nuclear physics of neutron stars, has yet to be determined. And gravitational waves might be able to add that key piece of information.

That's because gravitational waves, unlike electromagnetic waves, are not absorbed by other objects as they pass through the universe, Teukolsky explains. So, with gravitational waves, he says, “we're able to see things deep inside these violent explosions that are going on.”

Astronomers hope to answer questions about basic physics, nuclear physics, and continuous phenomena using gravitational waves propagating from collisions of massive objects such as black holes to the subtle ripples of steady motion in the universe. And, perhaps, gravitational waves will carry astronomers answers to questions about the origins of the universe itself.

Some of the discoveries that lie ahead could even be unfathomable for astronomers now.

“This is just the beginning of a whole new wave of astronomy,” Dr. Krauss says. “I can't think of another time when we've opened up this vast new window and we haven't been surprised. What else creates gravitational waves? What other cataclysmic events are there in the universe that we might observe? Who knows? That is the great thing about discoveries: they're discoveries.”

Staff writer Eoin O'Carroll contributed to this report.

Reuters

Actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks outside the Supreme Court Oct. 3 after oral arguments in the Gill v. Whitford case and to call for an end to partisan gerrymandering in electoral districts.

On Oct. 3, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could produce the most important ruling of its term: Can a state legislature, dominated by one party, draw voting districts with the intent to ensure election victories for that party? 

From the questions asked by the justices, it is clear why the high court has long avoided a ruling that would put it in the business of deciding how legislators should group people into political communities. They differ widely on this core aspect of democracy.

The court has already ruled that states cannot create districts according to race, a negative bias that is clearly unconstitutional. But what is a “workable standard” to divide up voters using neutral or positive criteria, such as party affiliation, geographic proximity, school districts, employment patterns, or other shared interests?

The justices could again decline to rule on the common practice of partisan gerrymandering, as they have in the past. The courts may not be the best branch to define the intimate contours of each society in particular states. That could easily lead the high court to act as a referee in many disputes between Republicans and Democrats.

In a democracy, citizens retain the right to determine their collective identity by promoting candidates for office and then electing the ones that best define the common good. Some states let a “citizens commission” draw up districts using criteria such as the compactness of a district. But in most states, voters still prefer to elect legislators who draw the voting boundaries after each census.

At heart, elections are really an invitation for voters to confirm the bonds of community and imagine a different future together. “No society can survive,” writes British philosopher Roger Scruton, “if it cannot generate the ‘we’ of affirmation: the assertion of itself as entitled to its land and institutions.”

The ballot box is the best way for Americans to create and affirm their values – and determine how to draw voting districts. And those values should include a respect for the views of other citizens, a humility to listen, and an honoring of the democratic process. If more voters elected representatives with those values, the Supreme Court would not be faced with such a hard decision.