J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady of Texas, joined by House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (r.), holds a proposed 'postcard tax filing form' as they unveil a Republican plan that would be the first major revamp of the tax system in three decades, on Capitol Hill Thursday.

In laying down a sweeping tax reform Thursday, House Republicans have put all their trust into a central tenet of conservative thought: Tax cuts will spur growth.

By itself, it may not be that controversial an idea. But for the current US economy, it’s also not the obvious need.

In fact, a big challenge for the GOP is to show that its specific mix of tax cuts will provide enough short-term oomph to America’s economic engine now that it will have enough momentum to counter some of the long-term drag from more federal debt.

And that is an iffy proposition, economists say. It depends on two things: the timing of tax cuts and whether they make the economy more competitive.

From a timing perspective, the Republican tax cut looks odd. The economy is growing steadily. Wages are growing, albeit slowly. Unemployment is very low by historical standards.

Do America’s taxpayers really need a stimulus to spend more? Probably not.

“If you have tax cuts [to fight] a recession, that’s one thing,” says Michael Klein, an economist at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. But “if we’re already at full employment, it’s not clear how much you can goose the economy beyond that.”

Seeking to bring profits back from overseas

But from a competitiveness standpoint, the need for tax reform is urgent, Republican officials and some economists say.

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. By slashing it, the GOP has a chance to make US businesses more competitive internationally. And through various other reforms, the United States will eliminate loopholes and make it easier for multinationals to invest their foreign profits back into the US.

Even if, by eliminating loopholes, some industries pay more in corporate taxes, reform has the advantage of shifting incentives toward industries that provide the most economic growth, rather than those with the most lobbying power in Washington.

“It is an incredibly historic opportunity that we are embarking on,” says Jonathan Williams, chief economist of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which represents conservative state legislators. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to give the American people a Christmas present.”

But the GOP faces a problem in getting corporate tax cuts through Congress. They’re about as popular as fruitcake. In a CBS poll released Wednesday, only 17 percent of respondents wanted corporate taxes reduced; 56 percent said they should be increased.

Do tax cuts boost growth?

So the Republican leadership is twinning corporate tax reform with tax cuts for individuals, almost across the board, in a package they’re pitching as “pro-family, pro-growth.” Polling suggests the idea of lightening tax burdens on the middle class is a popular idea with the American public.

And economists generally see an opportunity to modestly boost gross domestic product (GDP) through reforms that simplify the tax code in a “revenue-neutral” way. Lower tax rates, with fewer deductions, might create a tax code with stronger incentives to work and invest.

With revenue-losing tax cuts, the view shifts. In the short run at least, a cut in taxes can provide a stimulus by putting more money in people’s pockets. Longer run, the effects aren’t so clear. In a nation with high and fast-rising public debt, and chronic deficits, a risk is that tax cuts financed by borrowing will if anything slow future growth, by worsening the nation’s credit rating and adding to the tax burden of future generations.

By blending reform and tax cuts, the Republican plan would be the most ambitious tax-code overhaul in 31 years, while deepening official deficit projections by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

What’s in the plan?

On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan touted the stimulative impact of putting an estimated $1,200 a year back into the pockets of a typical family of four.

“About half the country today is living paycheck to paycheck,” Mr. Ryan said in introducing the legislation. “If we don’t do this, we will not get the kind of economic potential that we know we can reach.”

For individuals, the plan developed by the House Ways and Means Committee would generally reduce tax rates, shrink the number of tax brackets, and eliminate the estate tax, while retaining some popular deductions (notably for retirement savings, property taxes, and interest on mortgages below $500,000). But state income taxes would no longer be deductible, a highly controversial blow to residents of high-tax states.

A question of timing

Why now? One big reason is political. Republicans have long wanted to try for a tax overhaul, and now control both the White House and Congress. But the math of passing a partisan bill is, well, taxing. Republicans are aiming to pass a parallel bill in the Senate with only a two-seat majority. Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine has already said she’s worried about a bill that adds to deficits.

The more substantive rationale is economic. The tax plan comes as annual GDP growth hasn’t clocked in above 3 percent (about its annual longer-run average) since 2005. The aspiration for stronger growth was a central theme of Donald Trump’s winning presidential campaign.

Yet the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has official forecasts of future growth of 2 percent a year. The reasons reflect the two main drivers of growth – the size of the labor force and its productivity. Better policies including on taxes might incentivize more people to work and more businesses to make productivity-enhancing investments.

It’s not just Republicans who think so.

“I strongly support tax reform in general and especially corporate tax reform on the model of the highly successful bipartisan 1986 tax reform,” Lawrence Summers, Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, wrote recently. “[It] achieved very large rate reductions, spurred economic growth and improved the efficiency of the economy.”

And Democrats don’t all dismiss the potential of tax cuts to boost growth. Christina Romer, who served as President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, co-wrote a paper in 2010 concluding that “tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output, … [and] tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.”

Deficits matter, many say

What economists widely dismiss, though, is any argument that a tax cut will boost growth so much that it “pays for itself.” And many question if deficit-financed tax cuts can boost long-term growth at all.

A recent survey of economists working largely for US businesses may be telling. Some 62 percent said they’d like to see policies to reduce federal deficits, versus 9 percent who want higher deficits, according the the August poll of members of the National Association for Business Economics.

And of course, the tax changes have many moving parts.

Although Americans generally want the rich to pay more in taxes, not less, this plan goes the other way with things like repealing the estate tax. The package also preserves the top tax bracket of 39.6 percent in 2017 income tax. But instead of a 2017 threshold of $470,700 per family, the House plan moves that up to $1 million. So assuming all other things held steady, a family earning $750,000 this year would see a tax rate decrease from 39.6 percent to 35 percent – a possible tax break of about $34,500.

Overall, a Tax Foundation illustration estimates that Americans’ after-tax earnings would rise anywhere from zero to about 2 percent in five sample households earning less than $200,000. Higher-income taxpayers could see even bigger gains, with after-tax earnings up 2.6 to 9 percent for three sample households. [Editor's note: This paragraph has been updated to reflect corrected numbers from the Tax Foundation website.]

But contrast those changes to the near halving of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. That would be a huge change. And even if many corporations don’t pay that amount, because of a bevy of loopholes, the new rate represents a serious attempt to redress the US international competitiveness versus nations with their own low rates.

But the vetting and debate over the tax plan’s details has only begun.

“Well-designed tax policies have the potential to raise economic growth,” economists William Gale and Andrew Samwick of the Tax Policy Center and Dartmouth College, respectively, wrote in a paper last year. “But there are many stumbling blocks along the way and certainly no guarantee that all tax changes will improve economic performance.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Buncombe County Chief District Judge Calvin Hill, shown at the Buncombe County Courthouse in Asheville, N.C. Oct. 25, 2017. As the lone African-American judge in Asheville, Hill next year will have to compete in a newly-drawn district composed largely of white rural and suburban Trump voters, part of an effort by the Republican-led state legislature to redraw the judicial system.

Buncombe County Chief District Judge Calvin Hill has practiced law in Asheville, N.C., for 25 years, rising from one of the city’s first black public defenders to a court appointment to winning three elections unopposed. He was elected to the county’s top judicial job in 2010.

But next year, when he’s up for reelection, the people of Asheville won’t be voting on whether Judge Hill keeps his job.

The lone African-American judge in the liberal mountain city, Hill will have to run in a newly drawn district composed largely of white rural and suburban Republicans, including many of the 55,000 locals who voted for President Trump last November.

“As an African-American who is now in the primarily Republican area, I don’t know how racial gerrymandering as it is applied to me – I don’t know how that’s not clear,” Hill says in a Monitor interview, noting that Gaston County, a similarly sized conservative enclave, was not touched. “From every angle, it feels like constitutional overreach.”

The new district is part of a broader effort by the part of state Republicans to redraw the state’s judiciary. GOP lawmakers say it’s a necessary step to recalibrate after a massive influx of people to the state's cities. Democrats, including Gov. Roy Cooper, call it an effort to “rig the system” – and point to the fact that the changes come after the legislature suffered a series of defeats in court, including a voter ID law that was declared unconstitutional.

In October, GOP lawmakers overrode Governor Cooper’s veto of a bill that eliminated judicial primaries in 2018. Other controversial steps include: reducing the size of the state Court of Appeals, preventing Cooper from appointing replacements to retiring Republican judges; forcing all state judges to identify party affiliation on ballots – becoming the first state in about a century to do so; and the new district boundaries, which in some cases force incumbent African-American judges to run against one another.

For Hill’s part, the legislature’s efforts to “double-bunk” some black judges to make them compete for the same seat smacks of cultural retrenchment – if not outright racial discrimination. Legal experts are concerned about the respect for rule of law. If this partisan turn is successful, they say, other states with rapidly changing demographics might turn to North Carolina’s model as a means for one party to hold on to power.

“I do think this transition [to partisan elections] will have impact and will entrench influence and will change the character of the North Carolina judiciary,” adds University of Illinois law professor Michael LeRoy.” “I think it’s a model for others to adopt – and it’s worrisome.”

“Sometimes [state houses] legislate really troubling laws ... that play to extremely skewed interests. And it often implicates core individual rights or liberties and often plays on prejudice. That’s where the role of the state court system is extremely important,” says Mr. LeRoy, author of “Open for Business: Illinois Courts and Party Politics.”

After North Carolina voters placed Republicans in power in 2010, lawmakers began redrawing the political landscape, turning the Old North State into Exhibit A for a national rise of hyper-partisanship and political payback.

North Carolina Republicans have characterized their sometime hardball tactics as tit-for-tat for when Democrats were in power. But the US Supreme Court ruled this year that the legislature created illegal racial gerrymanders when drawing election maps in 2011. And the high court sustained a lower-court ruling that the state’s 2013 voter ID law discriminated against black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

Legal experts such as LeRoy say the courts in North Carolina have simply served their constitutional purpose as “a brake on runaway legislatures.”

'We all stand for justice'

For at least one former North Carolina district court judge, the addition of partisan labels and the creation of racially-tinged judicial districts proves that the state is taking a “step in a bad direction.”

When Rep. Marcia Morey spoke to 270 district judges at a conference in October, it became clear to her that the reforms were not originating among sitting judges from either party.

“I got a standing ovation for saying that I didn’t know who in the room was Republican or Democrat, but that we all stand for justice,” says Representative Morey, a Democrat who served as a Durham County chief district judge for 16 years. “But even that reaction makes me worry that North Carolina has become the petri dish for the rest of the country: ‘Let’s throw it on the wall and see if it sticks and, if it does, let’s expand these concepts to other states.’ ”

To be sure, a handful of states still hang onto traditions of noting partisan affiliation on the ballot, though mostly for higher courts. But North Carolina is the first state since 1921 to add partisan labels to ballots, all the way down to the lowest courts.

Courtrooms as political battlefields

Critics see it as an invitation to outside money and influence, turning courts into political battlefields where robes are no longer black, but blue and red.

“It’s just politics gone crazy, really,” says Hill. “It makes it look like [the legislature has] got something in for the courts, because they have not been getting favorable rulings in the courts.”

At the same time, Democrats and Republicans agree that North Carolina’s court system, long a national model for how to administer justice uniformly across geography, needs reform.

Given the state’s massive population growth, especially in its cities, the state’s largest courthouse, in Charlotte, now represents a district 16 times as populous as the smallest district. In terms of resources and capacity, that means justice has become, in some respects, increasingly unequal, says Michael Crowell, a Carrboro lawyer.

Separation or 'sharing' of powers?

Republicans, too, may be right to say that the decision by a Democrat-controlled legislature to scrap political labels 15 years ago made it harder for Republican lawyers to win judgeships in liberal enclaves like Asheville.

Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Gerber, author of “A Distinct Judicial Power,” notes that, in the 1780s, North Carolina became one of the first states to constitutionally enshrine John Adams’s “Thoughts on Government” idea of independent judicial review. But Adams also noted that not only should the judiciary be a “check upon both” of the other branches, but also that “both should be checks upon that.”

“The work of the three branches overlaps considerably – it always has – and when you talk about separation of powers it’s really more sharing of powers,” says Mr. Crowell, who sat on a state court reform commission in the 1990s. But the GOP’s focus on court reform, he adds, “seems to be driven not by any effort to improve the courts but more of an effort to rein them in.”

'Shoe now ... on the other foot'

In part, after decades of what they have seen as court-packing by Democrats, the building resistance to party labels and redistricting is simply a result of “the shoe now being on the other foot,” says Carl Mumpower, who for years served as the lone conservative on the seven-member Asheville City Council. “This is an effort to right the balance, if you will, and to create an opportunity for fair representation.”

From the Republican point of view, he says, it is the courts, not legislatures, which need to be humbled. While courts concern themselves about discrimination and equal access, he argues, more fundamental ideals around citizenship, the immorality of intoxicants, and traditional gender roles are being lost.

Mr. Mumpower, however, adds that he does not view Hill as a judicial activist.

“I think a majority of Americans see Republicans as more attuned to our constitutional compass than they do Democrats,” says Mumpower, now the chair of the Buncombe County GOP. “If you don’t have a compass, you get lost.”

In that way, he adds, “I’m proud of the Republican Party for no longer pretending that the other side is sincere in their agenda. Their agenda is power and there’s no better example of that than Asheville, North Carolina.”

'A dot of blue ... in a sea of red'

Asheville is a mountaintop Berkeley, in some ways, rife with brewpubs and tourism, where most restaurants, like the famous Buxton Hall BBQ, sport “gender-neutral” bathrooms. It’s where bumper stickers suggest: “It is OK to have too much fun.” All the district court judges are Democrats. So are all the city councilors.

In its loud opposition to Raleigh’s rightward swing, Asheville has become a political punching bag.

“We’re basically a dot of blue in a sea of red – and that’s how it feels,” says Asheville blacksmith Zack Noble.

For his part, Hill says, “I’m not worried about my race” next year. “This’ll be my third election cycle,” says the judge, who fresh out of law school interned with the late Buddy Malone, a pioneering black lawyer who defended one of the activists arrested in the Greensboro Sit-In.

“I’ve never been challenged,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of Republican support ever since I became a judge, and the reason why is people in this county know who I am, they know my position on most things, they have watched me as a lawyer and a judge, and none of them are going to say that I go Democrat or Republican in my rulings; they cannot.

“The other reason I’m not worried is I’ve still got a law license,” Hill adds. “I can always go to work as a lawyer.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the name of Gaston County.

Every weekday afternoon, lawyer Iacopo Maria Pitorri leaves his office for a few minutes to offer legal advice to a crowd of migrants waiting for him outside Rome’s Termini Station. 

“My colleagues don’t want these people to come into the office so I come downstairs,” Mr. Pitorri says.

Not far away, in Piazza Venezia, a group of security guards is trying to prevent another illegal occupation of a building that the police had violently evicted at the end of August. “We’re getting rid of all the" Africans, one of them says, continuing on in insulting language that produce laughter from the others.

Around the square, Romans shudder when asked about migration. In the outskirts of Rome, at a makeshift camp that is home to hundreds of migrants and refugees, volunteer Adelaide Massimi reflects on the mood shift in Italian society regarding the migration issue.

“All the newspapers talk about now is Muslims raping women and children dying from malaria brought to Italy by African migrants. People are attacking Doctors without Borders on social media for helping migrants. Something is changing in Italy,” says Ms. Massimi.

Italian society has traditionally welcomed migrants, but the tide seems to be turning as Italians grow increasingly polarized on the issue. The public's support for an open-door policy has dropped significantly in the past 12 months, and anti-immigrant parties won major gains in local elections this year. They seem set to repeat that performance in national elections in 2018.

As sympathy for migrants wears thin and the far-right gains ground, centrist political leaders have yielded to the increased pressure to take a tougher stance. Rome’s assistance to the Libyan coast guard, whose vessels return refugees to prisons where forced labor, torture, and rape are commonplace is part of that shift. Other efforts include pursuing administrative action against Italians who help illegal migrants and imposing a code of conduct on charities rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, making their mission more difficult. 

Gregorio Borgia/AP

Giuliano Castellino (c.) sings the national anthems as he walks with demonstrators from far-right groups Forza Nuova and Roma ai Romani (New Force and Rome to Romans) near a migrant and refugee shelter to protest against their presence in the Tiburtino neighborhood, in Rome, Sept. 8, 2017. As sympathy for migrants wears thin and the far-right gains ground, centrist political leaders have yielded to the increased pressure to take a tougher stance.

“What’s surprising is that these new measures were put in place by a center-left government. There’s a perfect storm right now in Italy – the public debate stigmatizes migrants, political decisions are bad and left-wing leadership adopts right-wing populism,” says Grazia Naletto of Lunaria, a nonprofit organization that chronicles incidents of racism in Italy.

A terrible country for migrants?

In September 2016, 43 percent of Italians were in favor of welcoming and integrating migrants arriving here. Less than a year later, only 33 percent agreed with that attitude, according to a survey by Italian polling company SWG. While the number of migrants arriving has dropped significantly in recent months, the authorities have struggled to cope with the half million who have entered the country in the past three years, while new asylum seekers arrive every month.

The public's pushback has had political ramifications; in June’s local elections, anti-migrant politicians surged and left-wing strongholds shifted to the right for the first time in decades. Also in July, a new anti-Islam political party was created to “fight against the Islamization of Italy,” according to Stefano Frassinelli, a journalist and co-founder of the movement. In the latest opinion polls for the general election in 2018, the far-right Northern League is poised to win 16 percent of the vote.

The sharp turn from warm welcome to cold shoulder is proving hard for arrivals like Medhanie M., who within six months of his arrival in Rome as am Eritrean refugee was told to leave the center that had given him assistance. He was later evicted from the building in Piazza Venezia. “Italy is a terrible country if you’re a migrant or a refugee,” Medhanie says. “Imagine you welcome a guest at your house and you give him water, the WiFi code and you make him feel OK. Then you throw him out the window. That’s how Italy treats us.”

For some, the evictions over the summer hit a nerve about migration and the lack of support for asylum seekers once they have entered the country.

“The problem is not in the number of migrants arriving, but in the fact that Italy has been dealing with migration flows from an emergency perspective for the last 20 years. There’s not a strategy to really integrate and accommodate these people in the long run,” says Ms. Naletto. 

'A strange change of heart'

For others on the right, Italy has reached a breaking point.

“We’ve been dealing with migration since the '90s. No politician wanted to talk about it for years, but now there are entire neighborhoods where Italians are a minority. Not to mention the bigger problem of terrorist attacks in Europe, even though Italy has been spared so far. Italians, Europeans are being replaced and we need to stop this,” says Lorenzo Fiato, coordinator of Generazione Identitaria, the Italian branch of Generation Identity, an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim group that aims to stop mass migration to Europe.

This summer, Generazione Identitaria tried to stop a Doctors Without Borders rescue ship from leaving port. Although they didn’t succeed in doing so, the group has been successful in raising money to continue targeting NGOs that rescue the migrants. 

In Piazza dell'Immacolata, where a multi-ethnic crowd used to assemble to play music, Valerio Capoccia, who owns a design store in the center of Rome, sits in confusion looking at an empty square.

“Migrants are not here anymore because Romans would be staring at people thinking they were possible terrorists. Italians didn’t use to fear a different face. Maybe 20 percent of us thought like that before. Now, everyone that comes to my store talks about how afraid they are there’s going to be a terrorist attack,” Mr. Capoccia says.

“Maybe the hostility had always been here and it’s only now reaching the surface,” he suggests. But making things worse, he adds, is the fact that "there’s no politician bucking the trend. It’s a strange change of heart. I never expected this to happen in my country. We’re losing our minds.”

As the girls pile through the metal front door of the Sufi Mohamed Islam Secondary School in Kabul, older fellow students standing in a row give them a pat-down search and check backpacks.

The daily ritual is a nod to chronic insecurity in Afghanistan, and to the continued challenge of educating girls in a deeply conservative society.

Unlike female students in some Afghan provinces, girls in the capital don’t have to cope with harassment, acid attacks, or poisoning of food and water supplies.

“Fortunately, we are not faced with these problems,” says Safa, a 17-year-old student who dreams of owning a computer or mobile phone business. “Unfortunately, we are faced with security problems like explosions and suicide bombs. This is a fact of life.”

Sixteen years after US-backed forces toppled the arch-conservative Taliban and overturned their ban on girls’ education, students here cram into classrooms to study calculus, conduct chemistry and physics experiments, and hone their English and computer skills.

Girls’ education is frequently put forward as a success by donors. And these young women are models of what can be achieved: Among this crop of future teachers, doctors, and businesswomen, aspirations could not be higher.

“I have this power and I believe in myself.… It’s my goal to serve my country, it’s my target,” says Safa, echoing other high-achievers within these walls, where 4,000 students attend class in three shifts each day.

But in many ways the shining example of Kabul is a rare urban island for girls’ education.

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Amid rising insecurity, Afghan girl students inspect the bags of arriving students before they attend class at the Sufi Mohamed Islam Secondary School in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 26, 2017.

As the Taliban insurgency has steadily gained ground in recent years – seizing control of more than one-third of Afghanistan so far, by the most conservative estimates – concerns are mounting that education trends for girls have begun to reverse.

While the demand for basic education for girls has risen even in rural areas, and individual families are making serious sacrifices to educate their daughters, the situation for girls is more typically grim beyond urban centers, educators and students here say.

Zubeidah’s family came from Wardak Province years ago, for example, where the Taliban closed the girls’ school in 2010. The girls who have been forced to study at home “are brave,” says the 17-year-old, who loves her math and English classes and aims to be a doctor “to serve my country, and my people.”

Her girlfriends in Wardak “are hopeless for their lives,” says Zubeidah. “They can’t learn. They want to be doctors and teachers, and can’t do it.”

Two-thirds still not in school

No one disputes the huge progress made by girls and women since the days of Taliban rule in the late 1990s, when education for girls was forbidden – except for the study of the Quran – and there were strict limitations on women working. In one memorable Taliban ruling, the windows of houses were ordered blacked out so that women could not be seen from the outside.

But even today, some two-thirds of Afghan girls don’t go to school, according to statistics compiled in a mid-October report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which charts the decline of girls’ education.

Robust Afghan government and Western donor efforts have “significantly faltered” in recent years, HRW found, as Western forces began to draw down, and donors packed their bags or shrunk their aid.

Based on nearly 250 interviews, the report found that “insecurity, poverty, and displacement are now driving many girls out of school,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, the women’s rights director at HRW, in a statement.

“The government needs a renewed focus to ensure all girls have a school to attend or risk these gains being lost,” said Ms. Gerntholtz. Government figures indicate that of 3.5 million Afghan children not enrolled in school, 85 percent are girls. Adolescent boys are nearly twice as likely to be literate – still just 66 percent – compared with Afghan girls.

Shift in Taliban policy

Despite indications that progress has stalled in girls’ education, critical changes have taken place during the decade and a half since Taliban rule – even among the Taliban, whose official policy now condones a degree of education for girls.

“I think the needle has moved,” says a Western official in Kabul, who could not be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Research indicates that “ordinary villagers are demanding at least basic education for their girls,” says the official. That alone is a turnaround from a decade ago, when the Ministry of Education set up a roving commission to prevent parents – let alone the Taliban – from burning down schools.

“Until what age they allow girls’ education is definitely unclear, and will vary according to the mores of the area, and the mores of whoever commands that area, whether it is a local militia or a Taliban commander,” says the official.

The more inclusive Taliban education policy penned in 2012 was approved by Hibatullah Akhundzada, who is today the Taliban leader and “has been a great promoter of consistent doctrine within the Taliban,” says the Western official. Mr. Akhundzada rose to fame in the 1990s, going from being a judge in a small court in Kandahar to doing internal discipline of Taliban forces as head of military courts in Kabul.

Akhundzada’s “efforts to regularize the policy have not really been successful,” adds the official. “We keep seeing places where it’s just impossible for a girl to go to school at all, because some local Taliban commander says no, despite the policy.”

But the official Taliban adjustment is nevertheless part of a broader progression in Afghanistan, says Abdul Qahar Jawad, spokesman for the Ministry of Higher Education in Kabul.

“Their strictness in 1996 was because they came off the mujahideen era, when the country was under war, and there was so much [lawlessness] ... and conservativeness was at a high peak,” says Mr. Jawad.

Taliban exposed to pressures

The Taliban’s hard-line rules were a bid to control the situation and exercise power, he says, but the militants have also experienced 16 years of increased social freedom, education, and a freer press.

“These tendencies might have affected the Taliban, too,” says Jawad. “Most of the younger generation are attracted to a new model for their lives, and that is not as strict a model as their fathers’ or grandfathers’.”

Indeed, the transformation could not be more dramatic, say educators at this Kabul secondary school whose careers spanned the Taliban era of the 1990s.

“It was a big difference, like between the ground and the sky,” says Ghulam Nabi, a 40-year-veteran math teacher with a slight build, who recalls how the Taliban devoted half of the curriculum – for boys only – to Islamic studies. Today he works on differential equations with his top girl students.

Things have improved significantly since 2001, he says, “but we are still dealing with problems.”

Those include fear of losing the gains of the past 16 years, even if a complete return to strict Taliban ideology is out of the question.

Families sacrifice

“Now people are educated, they won’t turn back to the past,” says Mina Durzad, the director of the school, who in the 1990s quietly ran a school for more than 2,000 girls. When Taliban enforcers arrived, she told them the girls were only learning the Quran – one copy of the Quran per student was kept in the makeshift classrooms – or she said she was not allowed to speak to any men, and they would have to return to speak to her husband.

The Taliban “will never return back because people don’t want them back,” says Mrs. Durzad. “I am not satisfied with [what I see in] the future, but if all people work together, work for their country, then education will become a base for progress…. If we were educated in the past, we would not face this problem.”

Parents have recognized the need for education, too, even if living in areas where prospects are limited, by militants or by custom.

“Many families are also fighting desperately to educate their daughters in the face of enormous obstacles and deserve support,” states HRW.

It found families who “moved across cities and even across the country to find a school for their daughters, who separated to allow girls to study, and who had older brothers make the dangerous trip to work illegally in Iran to pay school costs for their younger sisters back home.”

Such efforts have paid off for Safa and her younger sister Sana, who like all the students here wears the uniform white headscarf at school. Their mother stopped being a doctor and switched careers, in order to teach at their girls’ school.

“The important point is Afghanistan is back and dealing with many problems, because so many women are illiterate,” says Sana, 16, who hopes to be a computer scientist. “If you want to build your country, you should have educated women.”

Mark Reis/The Gazette/AP/File

Brynley Lorentz, 3, of Colorado Springs, Colo., looks at a dinosaur Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park, Colo.

The dinosaur family tree has two main branches: the bird-hipped dinosaurs and the lizard-hipped dinosaurs. Paleontologists have built upon this idea for nearly 130 years. Textbook writers know it. Museum curators know it. Even children know it.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the established dinosaur family tree is, well, a dinosaur?

That question has sparked a heated debate among paleontologists. The Victorian-era model now has a formidable rival.

The debate reverberates beyond paleontology, as learning about dinosaurs often marks our first interaction with evolutionary biology. So as the scientists delve into the data, they open a window for the public to view how scientific models change.

“Just because we grew up with these ideas doesn’t mean that that’s set in stone,” says Peter Makovicky, associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago. “We have to continuously revisit the evidence.”

It began in March. With all the new dinosaur fossils – just last year saw 36 new species described – it’s time to rethink the structure of the dinosaur family tree, according to Matthew Baron, who was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge at the time. After examining a massive dataset of dinosaur fossils, Dr. Baron and his advisors proposed a new model, placing the typically two-legged lizard-hipped theropods (like Tyrannosaurus) on a branch with the bird-hipped dinosaurs (like Stegosaurus and Triceratops), and the four-legged lizard-hipped, long-necked sauropods (like Brontosaurus) off on their own branch.

That shake-up of the dinosaur family tree set off a whirlwind of press activity and a flurry of exchanges among paleontologists. But we shouldn’t rewrite the textbooks just yet, say another group of paleontologists, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. This team, led by Max Langer of the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, reexamined the data underpinning the Baron et al. paper and concluded that the traditional dinosaur family tree should still stand – at least for now.

But the debate is still far from settled. This responding study actually found support for both models. The difference was “statistically indistinguishable,” says study co-author Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, although the results slightly leaned toward the traditional model.

The Victorian model

That family tree traces its roots back to 1888, when a British paleontologist, Harry Seeley, proposed that the distinction between dinosaur groups hinged on the hips. Seeley noted that all the dinosaur hip fossils on hand could easily be sorted into two groups determined by whether their pubic bones pointed forward or backward. Those that pointed forward resembled the hips of lizards, so Seeley dubbed that group saurischians (“lizard-hipped”). Likewise, the ornithischians (“bird-hipped”) had backward pointed pubic bones resembling those seen in birds.

Courtesy of the University of Cambridge

Left: The traditional dinosaur family tree, with sauropods and theropods (both considered "lizard-hipped" dinosaurs) more closely related than ornithischians ("bird-hipped" dinosaurs). Right: The dinosaur family tree proposed by Baron et al. in March, 2017. Here, ornithischians (like Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Iguanodon) share a branch with theropods (like Tyrannosaurus). The long-necked sauropods (like Diplodocus) have their own branch.

So what does it take to overthrow a scientific model?

“Right now we’re at a point where we don’t really know with a lot of confidence” what the best model is, Dr. Brusatte says. “There have been so many new fossils, and now there are new datasets and some new techniques that are being used, and it’s thrown everything up into the air.”

What’s a paleontologist to do? The dinosaur family tree, or phylogeny, as scientists call it, underpins the major questions about how these creatures came to rule the Earth millions of years ago. And toppling an established scientific model is no easy feat.

“When you propose such a radical change to a well-established idea, you need very strong evidence,” Dr. Langer writes in an email. “The evidence they were putting forward in support of their model was not as strong as necessary to overthrow decades of studies pointing to another direction.”

Baron and his colleagues penned a rebuttal to the new paper. Still, Baron hopes that the debate will ultimately transcend the back-and-forth of papers and that all the scientists will find a consensus as a team.

For living animals, building phylogenies can be a bit less controversial, because the animals’ genomes are available. And that foundation can reveal surprising relationships. For example, genetic research in 2014 revealed that a tiny shrew that lives in Namibia is actually closely related to elephants.

But when it comes to dinosaurs, all paleontologists have to work with is appearance. DNA degrades too quickly to have lasted the millions of years that have elapsed since the dinosaurs went extinct (sorry, “Jurassic Park” fans). And bones and footprints can be ambiguous.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re making it up,” Brusatte says. “It just means that it’s going to be different depending on which human is looking at these bones and trying to make sense of them.”

With so many dinosaur fossils turning up around the globe, paleontologists have to rely heavily on each others’ descriptions of a new specimen to classify where the species fits in. And that’s where the disagreements come in, right at the root of the discussion.

For more than a century, paleontologists largely sought to place each new find somewhere on the tree that grew out of Seeley’s categorizations. Baron says that when a fossil wasn’t a perfect fit, “we always tried to shoehorn the new find into the old model somehow.”

A 'Rosetta Stone' fossil

Could there be some sort of Rosetta Stone fossil that sits just at the right point in the Triassic period, when dinosaurs first emerged, that could resolve the debate? Possibly, says Brusatte. If that animal had a mix of features distinctive of both ornithischians and theropods, then that would be evidence that Baron and his colleagues are correct.

But evolution itself could confound such a revelatory find. Sometimes two unrelated species can undergo convergent evolution, a process by which two different animals independently evolve a similar trait. For example, birds have backward oriented pubic bones (aka bird hips), and they’re dinosaurs. But they are not ornithischians (“bird-hipped” dinosaurs). Birds actually evolved from the theropod lineage, which is one of the two main groups classified as “lizard-hipped.”

Furthermore, evolution isn’t linear, it’s bushy and has many dead ends. In other words, a fossil with features of two different groups might not be in the middle of a transition from one to the other. And because not every organism is preserved in the fossil record, determining what is and is not a dead end can be tricky.

“There’s a lot of gray areas and a lot of debates, and there’s a lot of things that we just don’t know. It’s not because we have no evidence. It’s not because we’re not looking. It’s because we have so much evidence that it’s kind of conflicting, and we have to find a path through that chaos.” says Brusatte. “At the end of it all, something might emerge, some kind of consensus, but it might not be for a while.”

Despite the dramatic headlines, a new dinosaur family tree might not actually be a scientific revolution, says Derek Turner, a philosopher of science at Connecticut College. “I do think it would be a pretty significant change if the new model catches on,” he says, as it will open up new questions about dinosaur evolution. “But I think a lot of the upheaval would be more on the public understanding side.”

Dr. Makovicky, who was not an author on either paper, agrees. For many children, this is the first evolutionary family tree they learn about from the deep past, he says. And that divide between bird-hipped and lizard-hipped dinosaurs is deeply entrenched in books and museum displays.

But just as dinosaurs have long helped engage children and adults alike with science, this debate can help communicate a key piece of how science works. “Science is not just pushing the boundaries of what we can call new knowledge,” Makovicky says. “A big part of science is actually self-correction and revising things that we assumed we knew.”

AP Photo

Players sit at slot machines in the Lady Luck Casino Nemacolin near Pittsburgh, Penn. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed a bill Oct. 20 authorizing a major expansion of gambling in what's already the nation's second-largest commercial casino state. The bill will make Pennsylvania the fourth state to allow online gambling, allow the state's current 10 casinos to apply for the right to operate satellite casinos, put video gambling terminals inside truck stops, and allow gambling parlors in airports.

Almost every month, another statehouse in the United States dangles a new opportunity for citizens to spend money on gambling. This isn’t a response to a public clamor for more gambling. It is to shore up the public purse with tax revenues. Pennsylvania is the latest state to extend the false lure of “luck” as a path to rapid riches.

On Oct. 23, a law took effect in the Keystone State that allows casino-style gambling on mobile phones and websites. It also puts video gaming terminals in big truck stops. Pennsylvania is now the fourth state with online gambling. It expects to rake in an additional $100 million a year. Yet state officials have little notion of the law’s impact on problem gamblers and their families and communities.

This sort of expansion in government-sanctioned gambling is an odd trend in the US as many other countries are trying to restrain gambling. A good example is Britain. After allowing a rapid expansion of high-speed betting terminals in 2007, the government announced Oct. 24 that it will reduce the amount of money that players can spend on the machines – which number more than 34,000 across Britain – from $132 to perhaps as low as $1.50.

The fixed-odds terminals are particularly addictive to many people. They are considered the “crack cocaine of gambling.” A government report earlier this year found 43 percent of people who use the machines are either problem or at-risk gamblers.

In addition to reducing the take on gambling terminals, the government says it will no longer allow access for children to gambling sites through social media. And a mass advertising campaign will try to protect those at risk of problem gambling.

“It is vital that we strike the right balance between socially responsible growth and protecting the most vulnerable, including children, from gambling-related harm,” said Gambling Minister Tracey Crouch.

More state officials in the US should take a stand, especially since gambling hits the poor the hardest. In Britain, the gambling terminals are concentrated in the least-wealthy communities. Of those areas with more than 30 betting shops, more than three-quarters have above-average rates of child poverty.

If more American states took a greater regard for the effects that gambling has on the most vulnerable, maybe they would think twice before raising more money from gambling. Poor people and those with gambling addictions instead need help in using talent, teamwork, and education to get ahead.