H John Voorhees III/Hearst Connecticut Media/AP

Barbara Allen, of Sandy Hook, holds a sign and a candle at a Newtown Action Alliance vigil outside the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, Conn., on Oct. 4 for the victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The advocacy group formed after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

It’s perhaps America’s most intractable life-and-death dilemma: The mounting human – and increasingly public – toll of gun violence.

The Las Vegas Strip massacre became the deadliest such attack since the Thibodeaux Massacre in Louisiana and several other mass killings of black Americans in the late 19^th  and early 20^th  centuries. It comes just over a year after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., which killed 49 people and previously stood as the largest mass shooting in modern US history. 

The Strip massacre, which targeted a country music festival on Sunday, killed 58 people and wounded more than 500. It shocked even a country that has grown wearily familiar with such killing fields, and for some, cemented a feeling of national helplessness.

Yet it has also prompted a flurry of movement around the question of gun rights versus gun control, from Washington to state capitols.

Even as police search for the killer’s motives, lawmakers are suggesting the country might be able to inch toward more open compromise, where both sides can hold their moral high ground – while, perhaps, saving American lives in the process.

So, what’s going on in Washington?

Congress has, since 1934, curtailed American gun rights on several occasions. But since 1994, there has been little appetite for more stringent gun controls. In fact, though the legislation was postponed after being set for a vote this week, Congress may yet revisit making it easier to buy sound suppressors – often called silencers, though they pop loudly – and push toward a national reciprocity for concealed-carry permits, meaning that states will lose much of their ability to control the practice inside their own borders.

After the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 grade-schoolers and six adults, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California tried to ban assault weapons, including bump stocks. But that effort failed, as did a broader package that would have strengthened background checks. She said this week that her daughter had a “near miss” after canceling plans to attend the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas that the shooter attacked from the 32^nd  floor of a hotel.

This week Senator Feinstein, one of the nation’s most outspoken gun control advocates, introduced a bill that would explicitly ban bump stocks.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., speaks during a news conference about gun legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 4.

Several Republican leaders signaled they would seriously consider voting for it. The more polarized House, too, began drawing up a ban bill.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin said he would have “no problem” banning the device. Mr. Johnson is a Republican who has an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association.

In Washington, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, who has a B-plus rating from the NRA, was more blunt.

"Look at Las Vegas,” he said. “That's how I account for it. Americans are horrified by it. They're horrified. And they should be." While the senator wants to see the details of the bill before making up his mind, he says it has merit.

The NRA also called Thursday for a federal review of whether bump stocks are legal, and, according to a report by Politico, already bans them at its own firing range.  

To be sure, banning the devices may not have much impact on crime and murder levels in the US, given that the device is basically a novelty in the gun world, argues Larry Pratt, the emeritus director of the Gun Owners of America, in Springfield, Va.

But small compromises can lead to trust, which can lead to more detailed – and perhaps effective – policy shifts, suggests University of Arizona sociologist Jennifer Carlson, who studies American gun culture through the use of data.

What about background checks? 

President Trump called the shooter “sick and demented.” But while Stephen Paddock may have been a gruff and enigmatic Vegas high-roller and former IRS employee, police say, he passed his background checks with flying colors as he bought dozens of high-powered weaponry in a 10-month period.

Mr. Trump became the first sitting president since Ronald Reagan to address the NRA’s annual conference, crediting the organization with assuring his victory. Trump earlier this year quietly rolled back Obama-era executive actions that empowered the Social Security Administration to make sure mentally unstable older Americans couldn’t get access to weapons.

Trump has also reversed policies that now make it easier for some ex-fugitives to have their gun rights returned, drawing complaints from some police quarters. The US Army Corps of Engineers has also whittled back bans on gun-carry on the 12 million acres of shoreline and trails that it manages in 43 states.

What’s more, the issue of whether to expand background checks to private sales remains largely stuck in neutral in Washington.

But Pew reports that 84 percent of all Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, support expanding background checks. And 89 percent of gun owners and non-gun owners alike want prohibitions on the mentally ill purchasing guns.

What the shift spurred by Las Vegas may augur, says Ms. Carlson, is a realization that the old gun debate is over. In its place, she says, there may be a more fundamental realization among policy-makers that most Americans support both some gun rights initiatives like expanded concealed carry as well as restrictions on gun rights, like expanded background checks.

Common ground, she says, may be found if the shifts that now appear to be unfolding in the wake of Las Vegas sustain themselves. 

What’s going on at the state level?

That kind of common ground is increasingly being found at the state level, says Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Gun Fight.”

Since the Sandy Hook killings in 2012, 138 new gun laws tightening restrictions on possession or purchase of firearms have been enacted in 42 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of them are related to prohibiting domestic abusers from possessing weapons, requiring mental health records to be added to background check databases, or expanding background checks themselves to cover more gun purchases.

States have been busy enshrining more gun rights as well, including Georgia’s decision to expand gun-carry to college campuses and Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, the world’s busiest.

At the same time, however, 19 states have strengthened mandatory background checks for gun purchases since 2013. That includes red states.

In fact, Texas has some of the strongest protections against mentally ill people acquiring guns, mandating that anyone adjudicated by a mental health professional to be ill cannot buy a gun. At the same time, Nevada is one of seven states that has approved mandatory background checks for gun purchases since 2013, in the wake of Sandy Hook.

Nevada also recently enacted a law that prevents those convicted of domestic violence or who have a restraining order against them from being able to carry guns. 

Winkler suggests that such laws are evidence that attitudes are, in fact, changing, in part because the NRA holds less sway at the state level than it does in Washington.

“You’re going to see a real push to regulate the gun modifications that make these guns inordinately deadly,” says Winkler. “Courts have said we can ban dangerous and unusual weapons like machine guns – and these devices take ordinary guns and make them dangerous and unusual.”

Is this just a government issue?

The Gun Shop Project doesn’t think so.

Instead of opposing guns on principle, the Harvard-based initiative is one of several groups collaborating with gun shop owners and employees to ease perhaps the biggest mental health issue: that two-thirds of all US gun deaths that are self-inflicted.

And profit-driven retailers, too, may be assuming a greater level of responsibility in the life-and-death debate over how lethal Americans are allowed to become.

Cabela’s, the sporting goods outfit, scrubbed bump stocks from their online sales this week, and Walmart booted third-party sellers from offering the product on their website.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed to this report from Washington.

This story was updated on Oct. 11.

The Islamic State suicide bomber disguised himself as a shepherd as he approached his target: A Shiite mosque in north central Kabul.

It was Friday, Sept. 29, on the eve of one of the holiest days on the Shiite calendar.

Stopped by civilian guards who just days before had been issued five Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, expressly to defend Shiite sites during Ashura commemorations, the bomber detonated himself 200 yards from the mosque, killing six people.

Without the guards’ vigilance, the toll in the latest ISIS attack on Afghanistan’s minority Shiite community could have been far higher. 

Throughout Afghanistan’s 16-year war, the primary fight has been between the Taliban insurgency and the government and US and NATO forces, as well as Taliban expansion across one-third of Afghan territory. The fight has been political, not sectarian, with even the Taliban seeing a sectarian conflict as counterproductive to its ultimate aims.

But recently the Afghan branch of ISIS, which calls itself Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), has grown in potency, especially taking aim at Shiites. Why now? 

One basic factor is their Sunni jihadist ideology that deems Shiites to be infidels. But another is revenge by ISIS for the procession of thousands of Afghans – most of them ethnic Hazaras, and other Shiite Afghans – who have been recruited by Iran to fight against ISIS in Syria, analysts say. 

Though ISKP currently accounts for a fraction of incidents in the Afghan war, at less than 5 percent, the resulting volatility risks changing the character of the battle. 

“Most of the violence we’ve seen in Afghanistan is political, and this is an attempt to tip it over into a broader ethnic or sectarian conflict, which is why it is so dangerous,” says a Western official in Kabul who asked not to be further identified because of his work.

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Afghans pass through a Kabul intersection where Shiite believers put up religious banners and flags to mark Ashoura, one of the holiest days of the Shiite calendar, on Sept. 30, 2017. Security was tight since Afghan Shiites have been targeted repeatedly by Islamic State attacks, especially during the Ashoura period.

“There is a real effort by some actors here, like Daesh, to make this a sectarian war, just strike after strike on Shiite targets,” says the official, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. Conditions have become so bad that efforts are under way to raise a new militia, with government and NATO approval, to protect Shiite shrines.

The plan to distribute 2,500 guns mostly to Shiite groups to protect their own religious sites is controversial, because of Afghanistan’s past experience with abusive militias.

“Of all the various militias, this one is perhaps more justified because you’re arming a visible minority that is obviously being targeted by the ongoing violence,” says the official.

Some 200 assault rifles were rush-issued before Ashura, when Shiites traditionally march between shrines to mark the 7th-century death of Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, who is revered by Shiites as “lord of the martyrs.”

Numerous attacks

Shiite mosques have been targeted at least seven times since mid-2016, with five such attacks this year, according to a tabulation by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN). Among other non-mosque attacks, in July 2016 a suicide bomber struck a street protest organized by Hazara activists in Kabul, killing at least 80. 

Afghan security forces have grappled with territorial losses to the Taliban in rural areas and with massive Taliban strikes in the capital on government and Western targets, including a rush-hour truck bomb near the German Embassy in May that killed more than 150 people.

ISIS hostility to Shiites has frequently marked the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, with the slaughter of some 1,700 Shiite Iraqi conscripts in Tikrit in June 2014 a notable example.

But that anti-Shiite conviction has been intensified by the instrumental role that Shiite Iran has played in mobilizing Shiite militias to fight against ISIS in Iraq and alongside forces of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Among those Shiite militias, the Iran-created Fatemioun Brigade is entirely Afghan, recruited from among Afghan refugees in Iran, and inside Afghanistan itself, with cash, jobs, and even promises of Iranian citizenship. ISIS and ISKP propaganda both accuse Afghan Shiites of helping the “enemy.”

"For this reason the [Shiite] Hazara community … is [considered to be] the enemy because some Hazara fighters are in the battleground … in Syria, alongside the Assad regime against ISIS,” says Obaid Ali, an AAN analyst in Kabul.

ISIS delegations

When ISKP first emerged in Afghanistan and proclaimed loyalty to the ISIS leadership in Raqqa, Syria, ISIS delegations were sent to Afghanistan in 2015 and early 2016 to forge channels between Raqqa and ISKP, and to convince the Taliban to pledge allegiance to ISIS.

“That was largely ignored by the Taliban side,” says Mr. Ali. “Once they sent a specific delegation to … ask the Taliban not to allow Hazara fighters to go to Iran and join the Assad regime in Syria. And that, again, was largely ignored by the Taliban.”

The Taliban, who draw the bulk of their support from ultra-conservative Sunni Pashtuns, have their own reasons for not wanting to spark sectarian war at home, not least because they see the Hazaras and other Shiites as part of a nation they want to fully control.

ISKP attacks on Shiite targets “echo the approach of ‘Daesh Central’” to provoke a broader Sunni vs. Shiite conflict, though it “has not succeeded so far,” wrote AAN in a report last week.

“Indeed, attacks have been followed by calls on all sides for national unity and Muslim brotherhood. That includes the Taliban, who have condemned attacks against Shia worshippers and mosques,” wrote AAN.

Still, the death toll for Afghan Shiites has been rising. One result is that Shiite religious ceremonies like Ashura have grown more elaborate, as Shiite believers inundate streets and intersections with flags and banners to show their strength and numbers.

Buying more guns

Another result is self-defense measures taken by a community that has little faith that government security services can or want to protect them. A history of marginalization has contributed, with street protests in 2016 – which were targeted by ISKP – sparked by disputes over a mammoth electricity project bypassing Hazara areas, and a lack of services.

“The terms of the conflict are ethnic, people are angry, they want to show ‘We are here, we are a lot,’” says Daoud Naji, a Hazara activist and a leader of the opposition Enlightenment Movement. But there is also an underlying concern of vulnerability, he says, especially since the Hazara gave up their weapons in disarmament programs more than a decade ago.

“So now every single Hazara is buying the gun, because in the whole of central Afghanistan there is not one unit of the Afghan Army, because there was no violence,” says Mr. Naji.

“People are afraid that if the Americans go as Russia went, and the national government collapses, all other people are armed – so in this case we have to think about saving our lives,” says Naji.  

Preventing a worse sectarian shift has been the job of politicians like lawmaker Neamatullah Ghaffari, a Shiite from southern Helmand province.

“Unfortunately the Mideast issues affect our country. Their [ISIS] aim is to bring some differences between Shiites and Sunnis,” says Mr. Ghaffari.

“Those relations between Shia and Sunni are very strong in Afghanistan, unlike in other countries,” he says. “As a scholar of the Shia community, I will do my best to be sure that Shiites do not receive a negative message from those people.”

Hasan Jamali/AP/File

Aziza Yousef drives a car on a highway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in March 2014 as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving. The months-long campaign saw small numbers of women get behind the wheel almost daily. Now, after years of ridicule, a royal decree has ordered the ban be lifted.

A royal decree last week marked a watershed moment in Saudi Arabia. No longer would the kingdom be the only country on the planet to prevent women from driving.

Yet while some were quick to hail the long-discussed move as a giant leap forward for women’s rights in conservative Saudi Arabia, longtime observers are reserving judgment on whether the step is likely to lead to greater reforms or was simply a political maneuver.

It remains unclear, these observers say, if the measure was driven by a true desire for social reform, economic necessity, or a desperate need for good PR in the West. And that, they say, will determine whether the ground-breaking measure is a one-off gesture or the start of long-desired reforms.

Under the Sept. 27 edict, the new policy is to be reviewed by a ministerial committee and is to be enforced by June 24, 2018, a few days after the Eid holiday. Critically, a male guardian or relative will neither be required for women to receive a driver’s license nor be present as a passenger for women to drive.

The edict refers to a woman’s right to drive as in line with social and religious norms; indeed, no Islamic religious authority except for the hardline Wahhabi clerics, upon whom the House of Saud relies for legitimacy, had attempted to use Islam as an excuse to ban women from driving.

Economic benefit

The move to allow women to drive feeds into Saudi Arabia’s narrative of reform under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has announced plans to introduce tourism, social activities, and entertainment in the traditionally closed kingdom. But observers say a major factor behind the move is certainly economic.

The ban has been a major barrier to Saudi women entering the workforce. Public transportation in the kingdom is extremely limited, forcing families to hire private chauffeurs.

Saudi families hire an estimated 800,000 imported chauffeurs, mainly from South Asia, to drive female relatives around. Others use ride-sharing. Both are costly for middle-class families facing the squeeze of austerity measures and cuts in subsidies due to lower oil prices.

“Having a driving ban was becoming economically prohibitive for some working women. It made little economic sense to continue working if that meant they had to pay for a driver,” says Fahad Nazer, a political consultant to the Saudi Embassy in the US who does not speak on behalf of the Saudi government.

The crown prince’s Vision 2030 roadmap to make the kingdom less dependent on oil, calls for lower unemployment and for women’s participation in the workforce to increase from 22 percent currently to 30 percent by 2030. Oil accounts for nearly half of the kingdom’s gross domestic product and is forecast to run out in 70 years.

Lifting the ban is also bound to create additional economic opportunities for Saudis. Women driving instructors, administrators, and perhaps traffic cops will be needed, while the departure of foreign chauffeurs will open up opportunities for Saudi drivers – men and women – with ride-sharing companies such as Kareem and Uber.

Sure enough, the responses in Saudi social media have been overwhelmingly positive.

One man, one vision

One of the major factors that may have determined the timing of the royal decree is the man behind it.

Saudi Arabia has long been ruled by a committee, the royal family cautiously and carefully considering each issue. It’s a system that led the kingdom to move slowly on reforms, and at times be completely averse to change.

Western diplomats in Riyadh say Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, because of his closeness to his father, King Salman, and his unprecedented control of economic, military, and security portfolios, is “ruling the country in all but title.”

“Under the crown prince, it has been more centralized than ever; he has accumulated unprecedented power,” says Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “With centralized power, the crown prince can push through reform, whatever his motives are.”

Mohammed bin Salman, who in two years rose from anonymity to the heir in waiting, has not only been able to neutralize his opponents within the royal family, but has also curbed the powers of religious authorities unpopular with the public, such as the morality police.

“In the past, Saudi kings have recognized the costs of continuing the policy of not allowing women the right to drive, but they were not willing to take the criticism from the conservative circles,” says Gregory Gause, professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University in College Station. “Mohammed bin Salman just doesn’t care.”

Publicity move?

The decision to lift the ban could not have come at a better time for the kingdom, which has been bogged down in a war in Yemen with no end in sight. The war has left 7 million people on the brink of starvation – one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in the world – and stirred up opposition in the international community, including among Riyadh’s closest allies and arms suppliers

In June, a vote to block US arms sales to Saudi Arabia was a few votes short of passing in Congress; Britain’s government has been under public and opposition pressure to end arms sales to Saudi over potential war crimes; while Canada has pledged to review such sales to Saudi Arabia after Canadian-made armored vehicles were used by Saudi forces to lay siege to a Shiite village Awamiyah in the kingdom’s Eastern province of Qatif.

“They feel that they are under fire, Yemen war is disaster, Vision 2030 by all accounts is sputtering – I think they probably felt that they needed good news,” says Adam Coogle, a Middle East specialist at Human Rights Watch.

Many clerics have come out in support of the end of the ban. But others who have found themselves at odds with Mohammed bin Salman and his vision have increasingly found themselves out of a job or in jail.

A week before the decree, 20 prominent Saudi clerics and activists were detained alone. It is part of a two-month crackdown that has seen dozens of leading clerics, journalists, writers, academics, and human rights activists arrested in recent weeks.

Classic bait-and-switch?

“It is clear that the new leadership under Crown Prince Mohamad bin Salman is sending a chilling message: freedom of expression will not be tolerated, we are coming after you,” Amnesty International said in a statement in September.

The crackdown may be coming at a time that the prince, far from a liberal or a democrat, is looking to assume the throne and aiming to silence opposition once and for all. Lifting the driving ban may be the perfect distraction for the international community as the crackdown deepens, longtime observers say.

“You can argue this is a classic case of bait-and-switch; it is a classic authoritarian game where you have a bright shiny object of women’s liberation which appeals to Western audiences, meanwhile you are cracking down on dissent,” says Carnegie’s Mr. Wehrey. “It was staged very effectively.”

Observers say a more open Saudi society and tightened autocratic rule are not incompatible; in fact, they may go hand in hand as Riyadh looks to push through reforms despite the concerns of clerics, royal family members, and some more conservative members of society.

“Mohammed bin Salman clearly wants a more open society in terms of the public sphere and women in the workforce, but he is no liberal in the political sense. He doesn’t want an open sphere and free speech,” says Professor Gause.

“There is no contradiction between the ambitious agenda that [the prince] has set up for himself and the crackdowns; I think they go together," he adds.

Rollback or reform?

If the international community is weighing the value of a trade-off between women’s rights and respect for human rights and free speech, rights activists say governments and organizations must take a wait-and-see approach.

The driving ban is several months from being lifted, and it may be altered before being put into force. Rights activists remain concerned that authorities may amend it; such as implementing a curfew banning women from driving at night, only allowing women with work contracts to get behind the wheel, or raising the age limit of driving from 18 to 30.

Then there is the guardianship system, legal codes that require Saudi women to get permission from a male relative to travel, obtain a passport, enter a hospital, or sign a work contract. There have been hints that the kingdom may be willing to amend or drop the system entirely. But rights advocates say the kingdom has to go beyond a royal edict and enact legislation to dismantle the discriminatory system.

“It is not enough for the government to say that it is not our fault for social discrimination, they must step in and end discriminatory practice through legislation,” Mr. Coogle of Human Rights Watch says.

The kingdom has signaled it may be prepared to part with the system. Last month, King Salman issued a royal decree making it harder to enforce the guardianship system.

Another, less-reported royal edict came two days after the driving ban decree, instructing the interior ministry to draft legislation to criminalize sexual harassment – another potential win for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. The Shura Council, Saudi Arabia’s king-appointed advisory body, also voted for a measure granting Saudi women greater influence in religious affairs.

These are “positive” signs from the House of Saud, say multiple Saudi activists, asking not to be named amid the ongoing crackdown.

“The reverse of the driving ban is an important first step,” says one. “But only time will tell if this is lip-service to the international community, or the start of long-needed reforms in the kingdom.”

Sea turtles are on the path to recovery, say scientists. But this is not a turtle story, this is a human story.

After half a century of conservation efforts, scientists are seeing long-term growth in some populations of the globe’s seven species of sea turtles, according to a paper published last month in the journal Science Advances.

“It's a success story,” says Gail Schofield, a postdoctoral researcher at Deakin University in Australia and coauthor on the study. Although not all populations of sea turtles are seeing the same boost, scientists say this is a sign that conservation efforts are on the right track. And shifts in human behavior and awareness about sea turtles have played key roles in this success.

Threats to sea turtles are largely human-related: habitat destruction, overharvesting females and eggs on nesting beaches, accidental bycatch, and increased predation of hatchlings and eggs by animals, like dogs and rats, introduced by humans.

Bans on commercial harvesting of sea turtles and innovations in fishing techniques have helped reduce adult mortality rates. But that success is tricky to track directly, as the foraging grounds where turtles spend much of their lives are widely dispersed throughout the globe's oceans and difficult for scientists to pin down.

So conservationists focus much of their attention on the turtles' nesting sites: beaches. And turtles are particularly vulnerable there, too.

Female sea turtles leave the ocean to lay their eggs, dragging their massive bodies slowly up the sand. Once a mother sea turtle has dug a hole, laid her eggs in it, and concealed them in sand the best she can, she crawls back to the ocean. When baby sea turtles hatch weeks later, they are just a couple of inches long, and commence an awkward sprint toward the water on freshly formed flippers, hustling to avoid predators, guided by cues such as moonlight glinting off the water.

Some conservationists simply monitor the nests and educate local communities to minimize disorienting light pollution and obstacles for turtles' beach voyage, while others build enclosures to protect them from predators and beachgoers.

Once the baby turtles make it to the ocean, the females won't return to lay their own eggs for decades. Scientists estimate that various species take somewhere from 10 to perhaps even 50 years to reach reproductive age.

Scientists rely on nest counts to estimate sea turtle population sizes, an imperfect and challenging gauge for conservation success. But with decades of conservation efforts ongoing now, encouraging numbers are starting to come in.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A hawksbill sea turtle swims over a coral reef near Turneffe Flats, off the coast of Belize.

Green turtles in Hawaii are an oft-cited success story in sea turtle conservation. From 1973 to 2012, nesting numbers have grown from approximately 200 to 2000 nests.

The enforcement of the Endangered Species Act helped facilitate the recovery there through protection of turtles at nesting beaches and foraging habitats. But a ban on commercial fishing of the green turtles probably played the biggest role in this rebound, says George Balazs, a biologist who has spent much of his career working with Hawaii’s green turtles.

In Florida, green sea turtles have also seen a dramatic increase in numbers. In 1989, just 267 nests were identified; By 2015, that number had increased more than 100-fold to 27,975 nests. And public education and awareness has played a key role in that shift.

Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, Fla., for example, does outreach with local hotels and condos so that visitors and residents alike can learn how to avoid disrupting nesting areas. An army of a couple hundred community volunteers also walk the beaches, marking off turtle crawls, the trails left behind when a mother turtle drags herself onto the beach to nest.

People stop and ask these patrols questions about the turtles and how best to coexist with them, says Kristen Mazzarella, senior biologist at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, Fla. "I think it's definitely opening people's eyes that turtles actually share the beaches here."

Despite regional successes, not all the populations analyzed in the study saw a long-term increase. Most showed no change, and leatherback turtles in the Pacific ocean are still declining.

“We need better data,” says North Carolina Sea Turtle Project biologist Matthew Godfrey, perhaps in the form of tracking technology, although it is prohibitively expensive. Nest counts are helpful, he says, but they only account for reproductive females; A direct index of population size would provide a more complete picture.

Scientists suspect that climate change could alter the sex ratios of populations, as warmer sand temperatures yield a higher number of female hatchlings than male. More holistic monitoring could help scientists better understand this effect, agrees Deakin University’s Dr. Schofield. That will take a globally coordinated effort, she says, as sea turtles' foraging grounds cross international borders.

“The conservation to this point has been phenomenal but we have to just keep going,” Schofield says.

Hannah Schlomann contributed to this report.

A24/AP

Valeria Cotto (L.) and Brooklynn Kimberly Prince star in 'The Florida Project.'

“The Florida Project” is an astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists. It’s doubly remarkable because most of its cast, with the exception of Willem Dafoe and a few others, have had little or no theatrical experience. Director Sean Baker and his co-screenwriter, Chris Bergoch, advance the story in ways that at first seem random but gradually cohere into an enchanted vision. The movie is both unassuming and exalting.

Most of the action, such as it is, takes place in the first few weeks of summer in and around the budget motels neighboring Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. Originally intended to accommodate the overflow of tourists, these motels have long since gone to seed. One of them, the ironically named Magic Castle motel, with its faded purple paint job, is home to 22-year-old single mom Halley (Bria Vinaite), an ex-stripper with bright green hair, and her rambunctiously precocious 6-year-old daughter, Moonee, played by Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, who gives one of the best performances I have ever seen from someone so young. Moonee’s newfound best friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) lives across the way with her doting grandmother in the Futureland Inn. Mischief is the girls’ chief activity, and for a while they are joined by co-conspirators Dicky (Aiden Malik) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera).

Because these children are living an aloof, hardscrabble life, it would have been easy for the filmmakers to romanticize their poverty, or present their plight in the direst of terms. But one of the movie’s many marvelous qualities is how offhandedly it avoids these pitfalls. Moonee and Jancey have the furious diligence of kids who are so caught up in the adventurousness of the everyday that, on some level, they don’t even recognize their station in life. They are too busy turning life into a kind of gambol. 

They mooch money from tourists at a local ice-cream shack by claiming, with a straight face, that they need the drippy cones for medicinal purposes. They dance in the rain. They accidentally set fire to an abandoned crack house. On a lark, Moonee and the others turn off the main power switch in the Magic Castle, just to see what happens and, especially, to rile the motel’s manager, Bobby (Dafoe), whose gruffness is no match for his underlying decency. (He may oversee a dump, but he takes pride in his work.)         

Not entirely without his compliance, Bobby becomes a surrogate parent to the children, in particular Moonee. He is always at odds with her mother; he knows that she is scamming tourists and turning tricks to pay the rent, on which she is forever behind, but his threats of eviction are tempered by his sympathy not only for her gumption to survive but also for Moonee. He realizes Moonee is set up for a difficult life. When, as is right and inevitable, the local child protective authorities finally step in, he is torn apart, although he tries not to show it. And so is Moonee. The look of deep confusion and fear that suddenly crosses the face of this normally pugnacious girl is heartbreaking. Dafoe has often been cast in roles that draw on the demonic, but here, he is as humanly approachable as he’s ever been. It’s a masterly, fully lived-in performance.

Baker’s previous movie, “Tangerine,” about transgender prostitutes in Los Angeles, was shot entirely on iPhones. “The Florida Project,” shot by Alexis Zabé, is filmed in widescreen on 35-mm film, and the expansiveness heightens the washed-out bubble-gum colorations of the motels and fast-food emporiums. Seen through the children’s eyes, this shabby, extended playground becomes a veritable casbah. And yet Baker never discounts the real hardship underscoring the children’s makeshift wonderland. In the film’s most emotionally complex scene, Moonee and her mom and Jancey, sitting in a swampy field, celebrate Jancey’s birthday by sharing a cupcake as they watch from a distance the fireworks show from Disney World.

Baker pays tribute in the end credits to “The Little Rascals” shorts from the 1920s and ’30s, and I suppose one could mistake “The Florida Project” for a transcendent episode from that series. But what it really reminded me of was “Little Fugitive,” the great 1953 independent movie, about a boy let loose in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, that influenced the French New Wave, or François Truffaut’s “Small Change,” in which childhood is comprehended, without sticky sentimentality, as an enraptured time of life. It is because Baker views the world without blinders that the moments of lyricism in “The Florida Project” are so piercing. When a rainbow shows up in the sky, it’s not just a rainbow; it’s a benediction. Grade: A (Rated R for language throughout, disturbing behavior, sexual references, and some drug material.)

Reuters

Hector Santiago, a horticulturist, waters plants at his nursery that is powered by solar energy, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in Barranquitas, south of San Juan, Oct. 3.

When a giant tornado with 250 miles-per-hour gusts wiped out Greensburg a decade ago, the small prairie town in Kansas looked a lot like Puerto Rico today, more two weeks after hurricane Maria. Power was out for days, many buildings were laid flat, and the future seemed bleak. As many now predict for Puerto Rico, about a third of the residents then moved away.

To those who left, the idea of using a catastrophic storm to reinvent the community could not even be imagined.

Puerto Rico, like Greensburg soon after its disaster, is only now emerging from survival mode. But its 3.4 million American citizens have a rare chance to do what 900 people in Greensburg were able to do over the past 10 years: They can not only rebuild their community but rebrand it with a new vision.

After Greensburg’s tornado, residents gathered together for weeks and finally declared they were “blessed with a unique opportunity.” The disaster forced the farming community to look to its “community treasures”: the prairie winds and bright sun. Greensburg decided to become the greenest town in the United States, a showcase of sustainability.

Today Greensburg relies mainly on wind and solar for power. And in reconstructing the town, residents relied on highly energy-efficient standards. Greensburg today has the most LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certified buildings per capita in the world. The cost savings and other benefits from thinking afresh saved the economy and the town.

Could Puerto Rico reinvent itself by also thinking afresh?

One idea, which was planted a few years ago as the island went into a fiscal crisis, is to return the economy to its roots – literally.

Before World War II, Puerto Rico relied mainly on agriculture, a result of its tropical climate and fertile soil. But a social stigma grew up around farming as the island became urbanized and industrialized. Working the land was seen as the lowest class of labor. Today only about 1 percent of the economy relies on agriculture. And – hard to believe – the island must import about 80 percent of its food.

In the past few years, however, some entrepreneurs have tried to break that stigma by introducing new farming techniques or by setting up farm-to-table restaurants. About 2,000 new farms have been started and cultivation has risen about 50 percent.

Just as Greensburg had to shed old ways of thinking, Puerto Rico could finally shed the false shame associated with farming. Its recovery may lie in seeing a blessing after a storm – and by gaining new appreciation of its basic treasure, a rich landscape in which farmers could someday be honored.