International New York Times 14 April 2017 FreeMags Cc

RUNNING IT COULD ADD YEARS TO LIVES

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THE CZECH DRINKS SCENE BRNO IS BEST FOR COFFEE, BEER AND COCKTAILS

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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

Via Serbia, Kosovo feels Russia’s grip

Tech helps airlines, but it fails passengers

Enver Hoxhaj

STATE OF THE ART

OPINION

Silicon Valley has upended entrenched industries, but carriers elude disruption

PRISTINA, KOSOVO For centuries, dark

forces of history have found the Balkans a suitable proxy region for unleashing grand plans for global prominence and competition. Now, after two decades of stability and prospects for a prosperous future, Serbia again is returning to an old vocation — seeking regional hegemony. It is doing so by destabilizing the Balkans, expanding its own military and working toward economic dominance of a regional common market that Kosovo finds unacceptable and strongly opposes — all of this with Russia looking over Serbia’s shoulder. Russia is clearly using Serbia not just to regain a foothold in the Balkans, but also to seek vengeance on NATO, the United States and the West with schemes to restore the regional Many fear prominence it Serbia’s lost when the Soviet empire nationalists collapsed. are bent on Serbia has not destabilizing yet recognized the Balkans so the independence that Kosovo that they can won a decade justify power ago as a result of plays in the a liberation war, name of backed by NATO in 1999, to avert a restoring genocidal catasstability. trophe supported by Serbia’s despotic leader at the time, Slobodan Milosevic. Now, in their presidential election on April 2, Serbians have not only endorsed a nationalist government that continues to defy Kosovo’s independence; they have also provided a needed victory for Russia, which only days before had authorized a new shipment of fighter jets and battle tanks for Serbia, obviously to help it regain power in the Balkans. Serbia’s new president, Aleksandar Vucic, had campaigned from his former post as prime minister on the false premise that he wanted Serbia only to join the European Union and be a good neighbor to all. Nothing could be farther from the truth. While Serbia has opened talks to join the European Union, what we know and see is a Serbia moving day by day away from democratic Europe’s core principles. Serbia’s rapprochement with Russia clearly demonstrates a desire not for solidarity with the European Union, but rather for domination of the Balkans in Russian style — achieved by instigating instability to claim power in the name of restoring stability. In this pursuit, Serbia can therefore HOXHAJ, PAGE 11

BY FARHAD MANJOO

STATE, PAGE 8

Demonstrating in Caracas this month against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela has put off a reckoning on its tens of billions of dollars in debt, but avoiding a default will probably require much higher oil prices than appear likely in the next year or two, experts say. PAGE 7

After purge, a Turkey in chaos ISTANBUL

Government has fired 130,000 people since coup attempt last year BY PATRICK KINGSLEY

When Aynur Barkin became one of roughly 40,000 teachers purged from Turkey’s education system after last year’s attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she was not immediately replaced. As a result, her second-grade students were forced to join the third grade, tripling their original class size. “I could pay attention to each of them one by one,” said Ms. Barkin, 37, who was fired in February from a school west of Istanbul. “But their new teacher can’t do that.” That is one example of the administrative upheaval and chaos caused by the government’s vast purge of Turkish institutions since the failed coup in July — the backdrop for a referendum on Sunday to expand the president’s powers.

Mr. Erdogan’s government has sought to root out any remaining dissent by targeting nearly every segment of society. It has also used the purge as cover for a crackdown on dissidents of all stripes, including leftists like Ms. Barkin. The numbers are extraordinary. The government has fired or suspended about 130,000 people suspected of being dissidents from the public and private sectors. Most are accused of affiliations with the Gulen movement, the Islamic followers of Fethullah Gulen, the cleric accused of orchestrating the putsch. More than 8,000 army officers, 8,000 police officers, 5,000 academics and 4,000 judges and prosecutors have been forced out, according to estimates. The social cost has been significant. Watchdogs say that around 1,200 schools, 50 hospitals and 15 universities have been closed. Affected schoolchildren have usually been able to find places in local state schools — but their purged parents have mostly been frozen out of the job market. Turkey has become “like an open-air prison,” said Sezgin Yurdakul, 40, who was fired from the Istanbul ferry system because his daughter attended a Gulenrun school on a scholarship. Mr. Yur-

MOSCOW

Garage Museum hosts uneven but ambitious showcase in Moscow BY NEIL MACFARQUHAR

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TURKEY, PAGE 4

JUAN BARRETO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Low oil prices rock Venezuela

OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Critics say that to fill holes in the bureaucracy after the purge, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has relied on right-wing and hard-left nationalists, novices and Islamists.

dakul’s name is blacklisted on a national database, so no employer has yet dared to give him a new job. He, like thousands of other purged employees of the state, is now living off his savings. The vacuum left by people like Mr.

Art scoured from 11 Russian time zones

It was an old Soviet tradition: No national art exhibition in Moscow was complete without at least one work from every region. Never mind that geographical balance often resulted in kitsch. Look at “The People’s Friendship Fountain,” for example, which dominates a major park here that is still called the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. (Soviet, or what?) The fountain consists of 16 gilded maidens, each in the national attire of one republic of the Soviet Union, proffering local bounty like wheat or corn. So the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art faced a certain quandary as it

Yurdakul has prompted many Turks to question which individuals are permitted to fill the void — and which factions, if any, have benefited. Mr. Erdogan’s allies argue that a wide

There are many reasons for the sorry state of commercial aviation in America. When it comes to your routinely terrible flight — not to mention the sort of exceptional horror that took place aboard United Airlines Flight 3411 last weekend — regulatory failures as well as consolidation, which the authorities have allowed to occur unabated for decades, can be blamed. But I come to you as a technology columnist to tell you that technology, too, has failed you. People in Silicon Valley pride themselves on their capacity to upend entrenched industries. Uber defeated taxi cartels. Airbnb made getting a room cheaper and more accessible. Streaming services are undoing the cable business. Yet the airline industry has not just stubbornly resisted innovation to improve customer service — in many ways, technology has only fueled the industry’s race to the bottom. Everything about United Flight 3411 — overselling, underpaying for seats when they are oversold, a cultish refusal to offer immediate contrition, an overall attitude that brutish capitalism is the best that nonelite customers can expect from this fallen world — is baked into the airline industry’s business model. And that business model has been accelerated by technology. Travel search engines rank airlines based on price rather than friendliness or quality of service. Online check-in, airport kiosks and apps allow airlines to serve customers with fewer and fewer workers. What we are witnessing is the basest, ugliest form of techabetted, bottom-seeking capitalism — one concerned with prices and profits above all else. “The airline industry has been on a steady downward trajectory when it comes to customer service for nearly 40 years,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, the president of the Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry research firm. He noted that American carriers were improving on some metrics — on-time service is up, baggage loss is down and prices keep getting better. What keeps deteriorating are comfort and quality of service for low-end passengers (i.e., most people). Legroom keeps shrinking. Airlines keep tacking on fees for amenities we used to consider part of the flight. And customers keep going along with it. “Consumers have shown that they’re willing to put up with an awful lot,

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The artist Ilgizar Khasanov with his work “Red,” which addresses Soviet-era gender roles, at the Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art at the Garage Museum in Moscow.

took on the challenge of assembling the first representative sample of contemporary art today in Russia — did it have to be a traditional geographic catalog, or would some other criterion work for a country that covers 11 time zones? “The country is so huge that we do not always understand it,” said Daria Kotova, the spokeswoman for Garage. The museum was developed by the art collector Dasha Zhukova and her oil billionaire husband, Roman A. Abramovich. Six curators scoured some 40 cities, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, examining works by hundreds of artists and whittling the selection down to 68 works in seven representative categories. “We discovered criteria, categories, optics and dimensions that we could not have in any way imagined before our trips,” said Tatiana Volkova, one of the curators. The resulting exhibition, given the somewhat ambitious title of the Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, opened on March 10 for two months to mixed reviews, underscoring just how RUSSIA, PAGE 2

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Issue Number No. 41,706

.. 2 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

page two

China’s longevity capital BAMA COUNTY JOURNAL BAMA COUNTY, CHINA

Visitors flock to hamlet hoping to cure ailments or simply have a longer life BY JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

His legs numb from a stroke, his head throbbing with pain, Wu Weiying came to the jagged green mountains of southern China in search of a cure. Mr. Wu, 66, had been hearing about Bama County for years — it was the longevity capital of China, the brochures promised, where illnesses vanished and people lived long past 100. Mr. Wu, eager to regain his vitality so he could once again play mah-jongg, set out in September for Bama’s turquoise rivers. In Bama, he adopted the local lifestyle, eating mushrooms said to possess divine powers, drinking water from a river that promised a long life and exercising in a cave known for its pristine air. But after seven months, his condition showed no signs of improvement, and he fell into depression. “I’ve lost all hope,” he said, his eyes brimming with tears. “It’s impossible to cure my disease.” Once a largely undisturbed hamlet hidden in the karst mountains of the Guangxi region, Bama has in recent years become a magnet for China’s sick and aged. Visitors come seeking exotic medicines, bottles of “longevity water,” visits with centenarians and advice on living healthier lives. Many leave after a few days feeling hopeful and rejuvenated. But for people battling grave illnesses over the long term, the experience can be agonizing. Many are drawn by promises of miracles, only to confront setbacks. Others fall victim to scams and doctors with fake credentials. “This is my last hope,” said Li Ming, 57, a retired postal worker from Shanghai, who was told by doctors in December that liver cancer would kill her within a year. “If this doesn’t cure me, I’ll be forced to accept my death sentence.” As the number of seniors rapidly increases in China, medical and longevitythemed tourism is blossoming. The Chinese government, hoping to tap into the rising popularity of elder care, has encouraged villages across the country to refashion themselves as longevity destinations. In Bama, once an impoverished backwater, the local government has turned centenarians into celebrities, posting their portraits on billboards and building their homes into shrines. Developers are rapidly buying up land from villagers to build five-star hotels, resorts and luxury housing with names like “Secret Land,” marketing them as retirement investments for health-conscious families. The Chinese news media has heavily promoted the village lore, and scientists are investigating why some residents there live exceptionally long lives. (A 2012 study suggested a genetic variation might partly account for the phenomenon.) Each year, more than two million people visit the county, which has a population of 270,000 and a sprightly club of 82 centenarians. These days, tourists arrive by the busload, mainly from northeast China, the southern provinces and Hong Kong. They bring offerings to the centenarians, pestering them for photographs and asking for the secrets to a long life. The influx of tourists has created a thriving market for dubious health products. There are endless varieties of “lon-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAM YIK FEI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Baimo Cave, an attraction said to harbor healing powers. Visitors to Bama County note the high concentration of negatively charged oxygen ions in the regional caves, which scientists say help purify the air.

gevity water” — starting at about $600 for a ton — with ads promising an escape from illnesses like diabetes and osteoporosis. Street vendors hawk medicinal sprays said to contain secretions from snakes and scorpions, presenting them as cures for smelly feet, menstrual cramps and arthritis. The surge in visitors has at times created tensions with residents, who say they are pleased by the economic benefits but worry that the tranquillity of the area has been ruined. “It used to be quiet and pristine,” said Liu Sujia, a farmer. “Now it’s filled with litter and ill people.” Li Hongkang, a doctor who practices traditional Chinese medicine in Bama, said he had seen a long list of patients in recent years, including an actor who portrayed Mao Zedong on television, Communist Party officials and a billionaire who brought three cars and two nurses for his ailing mother. He said many visitors were willing to invest small fortunes in health treatments, convinced they could overcome their illnesses in Bama. Most people stay in Bama for a few days, though it is becoming increasingly popular to rent short-term residences. “They live a lot better here,” Mr. Li said. “Even if they can’t be cured, it’s much more comfortable.” Many visitors to Bama say their health has been transformed, noting that the area is virtually free of pollution, unlike many parts of China. They also point to a high concentration of negatively charged oxygen ions in the re-

Exercising in Bama. Many visitors say their health has been transformed, noting that the area is virtually free of pollution, unlike many parts of China.

Po Yue village. Developers are rapidly buying up land from villagers to build five-star hotels, resorts and luxury housing, marketing them to health-conscious families.

gional caves, which scientists say help purify the air. Every morning, people file into Baimo, or Hundred Devils, Cave, a natural attraction in the county that is said to harbor special healing powers. By midday, they are all there, perched atop the cool rocks of the cave. They read spiritual texts, watch soap operas on their cellphones and ask each other whether they believe in the cave’s supposed healing powers. Chen Rangzhi, a former manager of a trading company in Changsha, a south-

there’s no cure, then even if you come here, there’s still no cure.” For those who do not improve, the experience of moving to Bama can be draining and disappointing. Mr. Wu, a former supervisor at a plant that produced baijiu, a clear Chinese liquor, had a devastating stroke four years ago. Every morning, Mr. Wu takes part in what are called life revival exercises. On the banks of the Panyang River, he throws his arms into the air, twists his waist and slaps his thighs, repeating lines of encouragement along the way

ern city, described the area as “magical.” He learned he had lung cancer in 2013 but had stayed healthy, he said, through tai chi exercises inside the cave and a diet heavy in boiled pigeon and apples. Inside the cave one recent day, Mr. Chen, 62, counseled a group of visitors, advising them to eat dates and drink a glass of hot water every morning. He said that many people wrongly believed that just by visiting Bama they could overcome their illnesses. “This place is for nursing your health,” he said. “If the hospital tells you

(“Surprise yourself! Try harder!”). But Mr. Wu still struggles to walk long distances, cook and hold a conversation. His wife has grown tired of living in an area with so many sick people, she said. Mr. Wu said he had given up on Bama and would return to his hometown in the northwestern province of Gansu next month. “As long as I can manage my own life and not bother other people, I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just want to be healthy.”

Sarah Li contributed research.

Contemporary art scoured from 11 Russian time zones RUSSIA, FROM PAGE 1

difficult it is to boil down such a vast, complex country to just one exhibition. Despite the effort to find unknown talent in the hinterlands, there was a high percentage of works from Moscow and St. Petersburg, critics found. At least one argued that a universal theme would have been better than seven. “I would have liked to see more new, but maybe there is none,” Olga Kabanova, the art critic for the Vedomosti newspaper, said in an interview. “The Triennial does give an understanding of contemporary art in Russia — there are national stars and there are unknown artists worthy of attention and support.” A total of 200 portfolios are to be displayed eventually on the Triennial’s website. The Garage Museum has been housed here since 2015 in a former 1,200seat Soviet-era cafeteria in Gorky Park retrofitted by Rem Koolhaas. The founders helped kindle something of a rage among Moscow tycoons for building private art museums, with about 10 open or under construction. Russian plutocrats buy plenty of pricey Western art, too, but like a dowager who wears only her paste jewels in public, they tend to stash their Picassos, Bacons and Richters abroad. Given the fickle hand of Russian law, expensive art serves not least as Midas-

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Taus Makhacheva’s “The Way of an Object” consists of three puppets, modeled on museum objects from her native Dagestan, which take on a life of their own.

like savings accounts out of reach over the border. Instead, these new institutions mostly specialize in Russian art from different epochs. Ms. Zhukova, from the outset, said she wanted to use Garage to explore Russian contemporary art, and from there give it international exposure.

The curators excavated some unexpected works in unexpected places. Take Chechnya. That Northern Caucasian republic is best known as the rather brutal fief of Ramzan Kadyrov, the warlord who gained added notoriety this month amid accusations that his security goon squads have been systematically arresting and murdering

homosexuals. Yet Ekaterina Inozemtseva, one of the curators, discovered two striking works there. One included in the “Common Language” category is a short video by a budding filmmaker, Zaurbek Tsugaev, 33, titled “Hands-iPhone.” In it, an elderly grandmother runs her hands over an iPhone, seemingly trying to figure out how it works. “What a contrast between the landscape of her hands and the flatness of the new gadget,” Ms. Inozemtseva said during a tour of the show. Another piece from Chechnya in the “Fidelity to Place” category consisted of black-and-white metal house numbers from a Grozny street, with half missing at random. The artist, Aslan Gaisumov, 25, said he searched for artifacts from old Grozny and the 50 battered plaques were all he could find from one of the many streets leveled during recent wars with Russia. “To me that was like a countermemorial that brought back a certain memory before the war,” said Roxana Marcoci, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who was in Moscow for the Triennial’s opening. “It was done in a way that was postconceptual, but dealt with history.” Ms. Marcoci found the “Art in Action” category — basically political art — especially intriguing because Russian do-

mestic politics rarely make headlines abroad. Much of the art in this section, often created by collectives, focused on the plight of Russian women. For example, a piece by the Nadenka Creative Association in Omsk, in southern Siberia, took everyday objects like potholders or panties and embroidered them with important dates or facts related to women. The panties, for example, read “1920 1936 1955 my right for an abortion,” referring to the years when abortion laws came into effect. One embroidered oven mitt read: “As a result of domestic violence in Russia more than 14,000 women die per year. Legislation in domestic violence has been adopted in 140 countries but not Russia. Happy New 2016!” The “Master Figure” category grouped artists with long-established reputations. Ilgizar Khasanov, 58, from the Kazan in the south, presented a trilogy, “Female, Male, Red,” addressing gender issues. The striking centerpiece, “Red,” was inspired by starkly different gender roles in the Soviet Union. It consisted of a giant mobile made up of dozens of ordinary objects — all Communist red — used by the two sexes as they matured. Objects like a hairbrush and a dress are on one side; male icons like boxing gloves and toy cars on the other. Mr. Khasanov said that he was struck

by the growing nostalgia for the Soviet Union despite its many problems, so he wanted to explore why people “want to become Soviet again.” The plethora of work disguised just how hard it is to become an artist, noted Taus Makhacheva, 33, whose work “The Way of an Object” consisted of three puppets, modeled on museum objects from her native Dagestan, which take on a life of their own. The Soviet Union treated artists well, she noted, granting them subsidized apartments, studios and vacations, and helping to distribute their work. No art scene in any Russian city receives any remotely similar support, she said. “All these scenes exist ‘despite’ — despite the reality, despite no support, despite everything,” Ms. Makhacheva said. “It is art despite, which makes it incredibly real and incredibly beautiful.” Over all, both locals and outsiders find the Triennial uneven, but ultimately an engaging start toward exposing contemporary Russian art to the world. Ms. Marcoci, from MoMA, called the exhibition “an eye-opener” with a “conversational feel.” “It is the first triennial of Russian art, but what is Russia?” she said. “Russia is a place grounded in multiple cultures — it is uneven, but it felt like an exhibition with a lot of energy and an element of disruptiveness.”

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.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 3

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

World Ahmadinejad seeks comeback in Iran TEHRAN

Former president to test hard-line clerics in bid to oust incumbent Rouhani BY THOMAS ERDBRINK

The race for the presidency of Iran has expanded unexpectedly, with former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a maverick politician who was sidelined over tensions with the political and religious establishment, registering as a candidate. The surprising decision on Wednesday by Mr. Ahmadinejad, who became notorious in the West by threatening Israel and denying the existence of the Holocaust, is likely to present a test for Iran’s establishment as it prepares for the presidential election on May 19. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2009 led to the largest antigovernment protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Millions of people took to the streets claiming that his re-election had been marred by fraud. He left office in 2013 after a major falling-out with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah Khamenei and the rest of the establishment could simply choose to disqualify Mr. Ahmadinejad, as a vetting council they control is expected to do to hundreds of others who have registered as candidates. But responding to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s desire for a political rebirth might require a more finessed response, analysts said. President Hassan Rouhani is favored to win re-election. But many Iranians have been disappointed over the lack of economic recovery after the nuclear deal Iran reached with the United States and other major powers in 2015. Iran’s hard-liners strongly dislike Mr. Rouhani’s desire to reach out to the West and even to the United States. They accuse him of wanting to smooth the sharp edges of Iran’s ideology and being too willing to consider compromises on cultural issues. The hard-liners have seized on popu-

ABEDIN TAHERKENAREH/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, was surrounded by members of the news media after registering to run again for the office he held from 2005 to 2013.

lar discontent over the economy, and they tried to undermine and pressure Mr. Rouhani where they could. About a dozen pro-Rouhani activists who oversaw social media pages have been arrested in recent weeks. Mr. Rouhani’s brother, Hossein Fereydoun, was summoned to court last week on allegations of corruption. Morality police officers, whom Mr. Rouhani had promised to remove from the streets during the 2013 presidential campaign, are back and arresting wom-

en deemed to be wearing their Islamic scarves improperly. Mr. Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, has been quietly trying to rebrand himself. Ever since his falling-out with Ayatollah Khamenei, which was over the selection of the minister of intelligence, a position that requires the supreme leader’s approval, Mr. Ahmadinejad has been presenting himself as an anti-establishment figure — someone who is not afraid to ignore the will of Ayatollah Khamenei.

planning to fight with the hard-liners, not us. Let them be.” In their election calculations, hardliners have been lining up behind Ibrahim Raeesi, a former judicial official. Many of them hope that Mr. Raeesi will one day succeed Ayatollah Khamenei as the supreme leader, and they think having executive experience would increase his chances. Mr. Raeesi heads the extremely powerful Imam Reza Foundation in Mashhad, in the east of Iran. But his credentials are

At a news conference last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad was reminded of a remark last year by Ayatollah Khamenei in which he hinted that he had told Mr. Ahmadinejad not to run again for office. “This was only an advice, not an order,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told reporters. Supporters of Mr. Rouhani carefully welcomed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to register as a presidential candidate. “Ahmadinejad registering is a big plus for Rouhani,” said Hossein Ghayoumi, a cleric who supports Mr. Rouhani. “He is

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J. Geils, the guitarist who lent his name to the J. Geils Band, which in the early 1980s produced a string of catchy pop hits, including “Love Stinks,” “FreezeFrame” and “Centerfold,” was found dead at his home in Groton, Mass. He was 71. The Groton police said officers found Mr. Geils in the late afternoon on Tuesday after they were asked to check on him. Mr. Geils, whose full name was John Warren Geils Jr., appeared to have died of natural causes, the police said. No other details were given. The J. Geils Band was formed in the mid-1960s as Snoopy and the Sopwith Camels, while Mr. Geils was attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, according to the band’s Facebook page. It switched focus in 1967, recruiting the energetic frontman and lead singer Peter Wolf and becoming the J. Geils Blues Band, an acoustic trio that later turned more toward rock and dropped the “blues” from its name as it added members. The band spent years establishing roots in the Boston area through live shows before signing with Atlantic Records in 1970. That year it released its debut album, titled simply “The J. Geils Band,” to modest acclaim. A follow-up in 1971, “The Morning After,” helped push the group to the national stage as its sound developed. Adding bouncy synthesized pop to its blues roots, the band became a major commercial success with the hit single “Love Stinks,” from a 1980 album of the same name. The group’s 1981 album, “Freeze-Frame,” yielded two more hit singles as the group leaned further into the increasingly digital pop-rock of the era. “Centerfold” spent six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, while “FreezeFrame” reached the No. 4 spot. As the group prepared to record another album after “Freeze-Frame,” Mr. Wolf left the band, beginning its unraveling. (“Basically, they threw me out,” Mr. Wolf said.) The group disbanded in 1985 but reunited in 1999 for a brief concert tour. It had since reunited periodically, once to perform at the opening concert for the new House of Blues in Boston in 2009 and the next year as the opening act for Aerosmith at Fenway Park. There was no immediate word on Mr. Geils’s survivors.

The last surviving animals in the Montazah Al-Morour Zoo in the war-ravaged Iraqi city of Mosul — Lula, a bear, and Simba, a lion — have reached safety at a wildlife shelter in Amman, the Jordanian capital. Their home at the zoo was severely damaged as battles for control of the city, Iraq’s second largest, have raged for months between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants. A half-million people are thought to be unable to escape the city. The Islamic State has used civilians as human shields, and American airstrikes, supporting Iraqi counterterrorism forces, have leveled parts of Mosul. About 40 animals had died at the zoo in recent months. Some starved and some were killed by bombs, according to Four Paws International, an animal welfare organization based in Vienna that carried out the rescue. Workers said that the animals’ cages were filthy and that Simba and Lula urgently needed veterinary care. Amir Khalil, a veterinarian with Four

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Paws who led the rescue mission, called it an “authentic odyssey” that ended when the bear and lion reached the shelter Monday night. The animals, he said, will now have proper food and medical care, “without living in constant danger.” Mr. Khalil visited the Mosul zoo in February to check on the animals and organize regular feedings for them. His group’s previous attempt to rescue the two animals failed when workers carrying them were stopped at a checkpoint. The aid workers were asked to leave Mosul. Lula and Simba were sent back to the zoo. “We never got to know the exact details why we were not allowed to pass,” Mr. Khalil said Wednesday in a telephone interview. Mr. Khalil said Islamic State militants had been at the zoo and had painted over a sign with the animals’ faces. He said he had heard criticism about his attention to the animals at a time when so many people were suffering. “I like this kind of criticism,” he said, “because in my opinion humanity cannot be divided.” He said Simba and Lula were a symbol of that humanity. “War rages on but all those fighting cannot ignore animals, put them in a cage, starve them to death, deprive them of water,” he said.

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Guitarist Mosul zoo’s last animals whose band taken to safety in Jordan had ’80s hits

MUHAMMAD HAMED/REUTERS

The easiest part of the world’s greatest crossword is saving 50%. The challenge is deciding whether to choose today’s puzzle, select from our endless archive or quickly solve a Mini. So subscribe today, save half and start solving.

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AHMAD GHARABLI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Top, Lula, a bear from the Mosul zoo, after arriving at a shelter in Amman, Jordan. Above, Simba, the zoo’s last surviving lion, being treated two weeks ago in Mosul, Iraq.

tainted by accusations that he was involved in a so-called death committee that issued verdicts that led to the executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Many Iranian news outlets had been predicting that the presidential race would fundamentally pit Mr. Rouhani, the incumbent, against Mr. Raeesi, the challenger favored by hard-liners. But Mr. Ahmadinejad, at his news conference last week, suggested a three-way contest. Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line political analyst who supports Mr. Raeesi, noted that an aide to Mr. Ahmadinejad, Hamid Baghaee, had also registered as a candidate on Wednesday. “In his dreams he might envision a sort of Putin-Medvedev interplay, where he or one of his aides can hold power,” Mr. Taraghi said of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The Guardian Council, a 12-member committee that screens the candidates, will announce on April 26 which candidates it determines are qualified to run. Usually, hundreds of hopefuls are disqualified because the council decides they are insufficiently Islamic or because their plans are not in line with the Islamic republic’s ideology. Most analysts think Mr. Ahmadinejad is not likely to make the cut, unless he can make a significant show of support. He would have to mobilize his supporters over the next two weeks, said Hojjat Kalashi, a sociologist who is critical of the establishment. “If he can’t show that he still has supporters, they will easily disqualify him,” Mr. Kalashi said. Mr. Ahmadinejad has called upon his supporters to gather on Friday in East Tehran, a middle-class area where he has lived most of his life. But the authorities seldom allow large gatherings, and the area around his house can easily be cordoned off by the security forces. Whatever the outcome, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to seek another run for the presidency presents a dilemma to Iran’s establishment. “Both a qualification or a disqualification will be costly for the ruling establishment,” Mr. Taraghi, the hard-line analyst, said. “Just how costly remains to be seen.”

.. 4 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

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world

Ephemeral art at Japan’s sand museum TOTTORI, JAPAN

In an effort to draw tourists, a city exhibits improbably intricate, grainy sculptures BY MOTOKO RICH

Tottori, a remote outpost on the west coast of Japan, is frequently defined by what it lacks. It has the lowest population of any prefecture in the country. No bullet train stops here. It ranks 39th out of the nation’s 47 prefectures in attracting tourists. But what Tottori does have, in abundance, is sand: Undulating golden dunes stretch for about 10 miles along the coast here, so majestic that they have been turned into a national park. For the past decade, sand sculpture artists have gathered here every year for two weeks at the world’s only indoor sand museum to mount an exhibit of improbably intricate tableaus, all crafted from about 3,000 tons of sand. This year, 19 artists from countries including Canada, China, Italy and Russia traveled to Tottori to sculpt scenes on the theme of the United States. Previous themes have included Africa, Russia and South America. Working nine hours a day, the artists — five of whom are from the United States — built, among other things, Mount Rushmore, the New York skyline (yes, Trump Tower makes an appearance), oversize busts of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, scenes from the gold rush and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. With Japan’s population declining, Tottori officials are mounting a campaign to attract more foreign tourists to the region, and the sand museum and dunes are central to the effort. Japan in general is seeking to lure more tourists. Last year, 24 million foreign visitors traveled to Japan, a record high. The national tourism bureau wants to increase that number to 40 million by 2020, the year Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics. Foreign visitors typically stick to what tourism officials describe as the “golden route” of well-known destinations in Tokyo, Mount Fuji, Kyoto and Osaka. In an attempt to expand that range, particularly among tourists who may be returning for a second or third visit to the country, the Japan Tourism Agency has allocated 1.64 billion yen (close to $15 million) to help develop and market suggested routes through 11 regions, including around Tottori. Fewer than 500,000 people visit the Tottori sand museum every year. The number has declined slightly in recent years, and it does not come close to the two million people who visit the much better known snow festival in Sapporo, Hokkaido, every year. Local tourism officials acknowledged that Tottori’s distant location remained a challenge, but said they had suggested that visitors be allowed to watch the artists at work, or even help knock down the structures at the end of each exhibition. The sand museum was founded in 2006 when the city of Tottori decided it

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KO SASAKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

For the past decade, sand sculpture artists have gathered every year in Tottori, Japan, at the world’s only indoor sand museum, to mount an exhibit of elaborate tableaus.

Undulating golden dunes stretch for about 10 miles along the coast of Tottori, so majestic that they have been turned into a national park.

wanted to better exploit its proximity to the sand dunes. Officials invited Katsuhiko Chaen, an artist who had mounted sand sculpture festivals in his hometown in Kagoshima prefecture in southern Japan, to help develop an exhibition in Tottori. Although the dunes’ sand is actually off limits because of the national park designation, the city had saved a trove of

sand unearthed during a road-building project above the dunes a decade ago. For locals who had mounted a campaign to save the dunes from erosion, the ephemerality of the sand sculptures appealed. “One attraction of the sand sculptures is their frailty,” said Yoshihiko Fukazawa, the mayor of the city of Tottori, the capital of the prefecture. “All the

This year, 19 artists from around the world traveled to Tottori to sculpt scenes on the theme of the United States.

forms will eventually disappear or degrade or collapse.” Treasuring that impermanence, he said, is “a Japanese virtue.” The first year, the sculptures sat outside and lasted about a month and half, attracting about 100,000 visitors. But after four years of staging the exhibit under a tent, the city decided that maybe a little permanence would bring

in more visitors. It invested $5.5 million to construct a customized building to house a 21,000square-foot exhibition floor, where sculptures would remain standing for eight months before bulldozers reduced them to piles of sand to be used in the following year’s exhibit. For artists, the facility, the finegrained sand and the opportunity to col-

laborate with top international sand sculptors make Tottori one of the most coveted spots on the sand-sculpting circuit. “There is no other place like this in the world,” said Jon Woodworth, 50, a sculptor from Leander, Tex., working on his first assignment in Tottori this spring. “This is the mack daddy of them all.” Mr. Chaen, now the artistic director of the museum, said he hoped it would help raise the profile of sand sculpture as a legitimate art form. “It has been difficult for these sand sculptures to be regarded as art,” he said. “People think of it as an activity that kids do on the beach or as a hobby.” Many of the artists have been working in sand — as well as ice and snow in the winter months — for years. In Tottori, Mr. Chaen selects each artist and assigns each one a scene that he has sketched out. The artists adapt his vision with their own ideas. Two weeks before the official exhibition opening in mid-April, the artists carved and smoothed the sand with shovels, chisels, painters’ palette knives, pastry wheels, scalpels, masonry levels and garden trowels. They often seemed to push the bounds of physics as they whittled detailed faces or delicate scenery. Aside from water, they use no adhesives or shellac to keep the sand in place. That means the artists have to know what the sand can do. “The sand has a big part in the conversation,” said Daniel Doyle, 43, an Irish artist who has been making sand sculptures for 20 years. In Tottori this year, he designed a montage of sports figures. “Sand is different all over the world,” he said. “If you go with an idea and try to make the sand do something, the sand may not care.” One of the biggest challenges is making the sculptures look fully threedimensional when in fact they are rendered more in two and a half dimensions. The prominent faces on the sand replica of Mount Rushmore, for example, are much flatter when viewed from the side than from the front. “It would be dangerous to do a nose in 3-D,” Leonardo Ugolini, 47, said as he completed the sand version of the famous lineup of American presidents. “It might fall off.” Mr. Ugolini, who is from Italy, has worked on every Tottori exhibit since 2006. Sometimes, the sand does not cooperate. Seven days before they were scheduled to finish, the artists working on a Hollywood scene discovered a hairline crack on the head of a planned bust of Lucille Ball. The artists shaved several pounds of sand off the figure’s head and turned on high-powered fans overnight to help it dry faster. They also reconceived part of the design to give more support to Ms. Ball’s neck. “You really have to think on your feet,” said Jill Harris, a seven-year Tottori veteran from Melbourne, Fla., and one of three artists working on the scene. Curiously, with such an international crew, Mr. Chaen has never invited a Japanese artist to sculpt in Tottori. “I am not intentionally excluding Japanese artists,” he said. “But at this moment I don’t think any Japanese artists have risen to the top level yet.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

After purge aimed at dissenters, a Turkey in chaos TURKEY, FROM PAGE 1

range of groups has filled the void. But some claim that the gaps have been largely plugged by members of other Islamic orders, or loyalists from the president’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P. “The A.K.P.’s own cadres are filling the void,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the largest opposition party. “They want to establish a bureaucratic structure that accepts whatever the politicians say.” Mustafa Karadag, the head of the judges’ union, says that gaps in the judiciary have often been filled by novices who can provide letters of accreditation from a legal guild with links to the A.K.P. “This has allowed access to the judicial and prosecutorial professions to those who receive lower marks but who have a closer relationship to the government, or who are able to procure references from them,” Mr. Karadag said. The government denies this. Ibrahim Kalin, the president’s official spokesman, said in a recent briefing with reporters that those let go had been “replaced by ordinary people” who had “all gone through very transparent, open examinations.” But even some of the president’s critics say the situation is too chaotic, and the purges too widespread, for one faction alone to have benefited. To fill the holes in the bureaucracy and the political sphere, some say, Mr. Erdogan has had to rely on right-wing nationalists, hard-left nationalists, novices and recalled retirees, as well as party loyalists and Islamists. “The perception among Turks is that Erdogan rules everything, but that’s not the case,” said Orhan Gazi Ertekin, a judge who heads the Democratic Judicial Association, a liberal legal watchdog. “There are various groups, all different to each other, that previously plotted against each other, but are now in alliance” against the Gulenists.

The most striking example may be that of Dogu Perincek, the leader of the tiny arch-secularist Patriotic Party. He was jailed for plotting to overthrow Mr. Erdogan before his conviction was quashed in 2014. Upon his release, Mr. Perincek pledged to “demolish” Mr. Erdogan’s government, which he accuses of undermining Turkey’s secular system. Yet, in a recent interview, Mr. Perincek offered qualified approval of some of Mr. Erdogan’s recent policies. “There’s no reason for us to fight. We became side by side. They are now following our program,” he said, referring

“The perception among Turks is that Erdogan rules everything, but that’s not the case. There are various groups, all different to each other.” to Mr. Erdogan’s government. Mr. Erdogan also has the unlikely support of the Nationalist Movement Party, also known as the M.H.P., a far-right nationalist group whose votes helped him secure parliamentary backing for the referendum. In return, senior officials with the nationalist group privately say, they expect cabinet seats after the referendum. If they get what they want, it would constitute an unlikely about-face for a party whose leader once called Mr. Erdogan a “political disaster.” In the military, the firings of thousands of officers have led to no obvious ideological victor. Mr. Erdogan raised eyebrows with the appointment last August of Adnan Tanriverdi, a former onestar general, as his new military adviser. Mr. Tanriverdi was expelled from the army in 1996 because of concerns over his religiosity. He has since run a group for other soldiers fired for similar rea-

sons in the late 1990s, known as the Association of Justice Defenders. His appointment as Mr. Erdogan’s adviser prompted claims that the president had enlisted Mr. Tanriverdi to help install loyalists in the army. But Mr. Tanriverdi’s allies said that no other members of his association had been appointed to positions of significance. Other observers have concluded that a mix of factions has benefited from the purge of the military. Anti-American ultranationalists — known as Eurasianists and sometimes associated with Mr. Perincek — have profited at the expense of pro-NATO officers, according to two military experts at Sabanci University in Istanbul. “It seems for now that the Eurasianists will hold on to their influence and ranks, but for how long remains a question,” the experts, Megan Gisclon and Metin Gurcan, a former officer in the Turkish special forces, wrote in a briefing last year. One former military prosecutor says such was the scale of undercover Gulenists’ infiltration over the last two decades that they are still the largest faction in the armed forces. “In the Turkish armed forces,” said Ahmet Zeki Ucok, who once led investigations into Gulenists in the military, “if there is a group that currently is influential, it’s still the Gulenists.” In some parts of higher education, the vacuum has not been filled. At Ankara University, half of the 14 professors in the university’s human rights law department have been let go, and it has had to scrap more than half its courses. It will not admit new students during the next academic year. The professors have had to triple the number of students in their care, and they have no ability to supervise new arrivals. “How can we write our dissertations?” asked Emine Ay, a master’s student who has been left without a supervisor.

Her department head, Prof. Kerem Altiparmak, said: “If our professors are not reinstated, this program will end. These are the last students we will see in this program.” Some wonder if this, in fact, is the goal: to dismantle one of the country’s liberal strongholds. In the judiciary, the number purged is one-third of Turkey’s 12,000 judges and prosecutors. “If you purge 30 to 40 percent of the judiciary, in a sense you purge it all,” Judge Ertekin said. “There’s no tradition left and no knowledge left.” Mr. Karadag, the head of the judges’

union, said the government was filling the vacancies with loyalists. Some say the situation is dangerous for Mr. Erdogan because it leaves him vulnerable to groups beyond his control, just as his relationship with the Gulenist network once did. “As long as he depends on these alliances,” Judge Ertekin said, “a new betrayal may be on the horizon, too.” Mr. Erdogan’s newfound allies in Parliament, the M.H.P., offer a glimpse of this vulnerability. While the party’s leadership supports expanding the president’s powers, several of its lawmakers do not. Many in the party’s ultranation-

alist rank and file also have yet to be convinced. In the case of Mr. Perincek, the leader of the arch-secularist party, his support for Mr. Erdogan goes only so far. While he applauds the president’s recent proRussian, anti-Kurdish policies, he says the president has eroded the country’s secular character. Significantly, he also vehemently opposes the expansion of Mr. Erdogan’s powers, and therefore opposes the referendum. “Turkey,” Mr. Perincek said, “is not going to carry Tayyip Erdogan on its shoulders.”

BULENT KILIC/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

An opponent of the proposal to expand the president’s power waving a flag at a rally in Istanbul.

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 5

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How party affiliation trumps policy BY AMANDA TAUB

Working-class Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump continue to approve of him as president, even though he supported a health care bill that would disproportionately hurt them. Highly educated professionals tend to lean Democratic, even though Republican tax policies would probably leave more money in their pockets. Why do people vote against their economic interests? The answer, experts say, is partisanship. Party affiliation has become an allencompassing identity that outweighs the details of specific policies. “Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,” said Frances Lee, a professor at the University of Maryland who wrote a book on partisan polarization. Rather, it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are. TRIBAL SELF-EXPRESSION

For American voters, party affiliation is a way to express a bundle of identities. “It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,” Ms. Lee said. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.” That process is not necessarily conscious. “There’s sort of an embarrassment about being a partisan,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s seen as admitting to a bias.” That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean toward one of the parties. As partisanship grows, switching parties has become rare for voters. So has ticket-splitting, in which voters support different parties in presidential and down-ballot races. But when people do switch, it is often because they feel that the other party has become a better representative of the groups that they identify with. Preliminary data suggests that is what happened with the Democratic voters who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, said Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies partisanship. “Older voters who scored high on ra-

cial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,” Ms. Mason said. She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated white voters that he would represent their interests. But how voters choose their party is only one element of the story. The overlapping identities that underlie partisanship are also driving a form of polarization so strong that it is now essentially impossible for politicians, or the public, to avoid its influence. IDENTITY DRIVES POLARIZATION

In 2009, when Ms. Mason was still a graduate student, she had a “eureka” moment about American politics. “I stumbled across this social psychology article from 2002 that talked about what happens when multiple identities line up together,” she said in an interview. “There was all this social psychology literature about how it increases bias.” The same, she realized, was true of partisan identity. Everyone has multiple identities: racial, religious, professional, ideological and more. But while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions — think of the conservative Democrats of old in the South or all the liberal Republicans in the Northeast — today it’s more common to line up behind one party. A white conservative who lives in a rural area and is an evangelical Christian is likely to feel that the Republican Party is the best representative of all of those separate identities, for instance. An African-American liberal who lives in a city and works in a professional job is likely to feel the same way about the Democratic Party. Can this explain why American politics have become so polarized over the last several decades? Starting in 1980, the National Election Study, a long-running survey that tracks Americans’ political preferences, showed that Republicans and Democrats were growing apart: Each reported increasingly negative opinions of the opposing party. And other data showed that polarization was seeping into nonpolitical arenas, making Republicans and Democrats less likely to marry or be friends. Ms. Mason decided to make that the focus of her doctoral thesis, and found much to support her hypothesis: Americans’ overlapping political identities were driving extreme polarization.

When multiple identities line up together, all pushing people toward the same party, partisan identity becomes a kind of umbrella for many different characteristics that people feel are important to them. That magnifies people’s attachment to their team. And that, in turn, raises the stakes of conflict with the opposing “team,” Ms. Mason found. In every electoral contest or partisan disagreement, she explained, people now feel that they are fighting for many elements of who they are: their racial identity, professional identity, religious identity, even geographical identity. “The way I think of it is, imagine that the World Series also affected the N.C.A.A. and the Super Bowl and every other team you care about,” she said. “So as our identities line up with party identity, politics becomes more and more consequential.” WANTING A PARTISAN WIN

The result of those overlapping, powerful identities is that Americans have become more willing to defend their party against any perceived threat, and to demand that their politicians take uncompromisingly partisan stands. But while those demands can affect policy, they are rooted in emotional attachments, not policy goals. “When we talk about being a sports fan, there’s no policy content related to that,” Ms. Mason said. “It’s just this sense of connection. And that’s powerful! It makes people cry. It makes people riot. There doesn’t really have to be any policy content for people to get riled up, and to be extremely committed.” Ms. Mason, Leonie Huddy of Stony Brook University and Lene Aaroe of Aarhus University in Denmark conducted an experiment to test the importance of policy. People responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues. They became angry at perceived threats to their party, and enthusiastic about its perceived successes. Their responses to policy gains and losses, by contrast, were much more muted. That helps explain why Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters remains quite high, despite scandals, political setbacks and very low national approval ratings. He has been careful to recast every potential scandal and policy struggle as a battle against the Democrats and other outside groups.

WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Top, a rally for President Trump in Mandeville, La. Above, a “not my president” rally against Mr. Trump in New York, both in February. Studies suggest that once people align themselves with a political party, they tend to support it regardless of policies they prefer.

Admissions and the power of 4 Some top U.S. universities like move by quadruplets to apply together BY ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

It was Nick Wade’s idea to write about being a quadruplet. He went on a college advice website called College Confidential, and in a chat room about college admissions essays, asked whether other people thought this would be a good idea. A college essay adviser, Christopher Hunt, noticed his question, and replied, in essence, “That’s a no-brainer.” But Mr. Hunt, a former journalist now living in Boulder, Colo., had some advice. “I said, ‘Yes, that’s good, but you can’t just leave it at, “Oh, gee, I’m a quadruplet.” Tell readers how that influenced your life.’ ” So Nick did. So did his brothers. It has paid off. All four brothers, who go to high school outside Cincinnati, have been accepted by Harvard and Yale, among other top schools. The Wade quadruplets have spent a lot of their lives trying to carve out individual identities. But when it came time to apply to college, they took a different approach: a package deal. After briefly considering submitting a joint application essay, they decided that each would write an essay detailing his experiences as a quad. In a clever stroke, the four brothers wrote essays that can be read separately, yet are meant to be read together, like four pieces of a puzzle. Each piece is charming and winning on its own, but together, they are even better, and college admissions officers everywhere seemed to agree and were unwilling to pull them apart. Nick’s begins: “ ‘Wade. Wade. Wade. Wade,’ shouted my football coach as he called roll at breakneck speed. ‘Here,’ we shouted in unison.” Aaron’s begins: “ ‘Yes, Nigel?’ the teacher said. I lowered my head and glanced back at Nigel’s vacant desk.” Even though the four boys look different, when it came to the teachers, the essay said, “We were four boys who shared one face.” Nigel begins: “0.00000125 percent. The chance that my mother would give birth to quadruplets. 100 percent. The chance that this woman striding towards me and my brothers was about to make me feel like the black sheep.” Finally, Zach’s essay begins: “ ‘Change your shirt,’ I said.” (He and Aaron arrived at breakfast wearing the same thing.) It was not an easy balancing act, said Aaron, a musician with perfect pitch who wants to study artificial intelligence. “Our approach was to establish

an identity as one of these quads, and then outside of being a quad,” he said. “I think that really bolstered the way we are perceived. Our own personal aspirations and goals played a role in that, and that’s what made us individuals, as well as being quads.” The Wade quads are “fertility babies,” conceived through a fertility procedure, a growing part of the college-age population. So it seems likely that admissions officers will tire soon enough of reading college essays about multiples. But for now, they are still a novelty, in the Wades’ case both because they are quads and because their parents managed to raise four exceptionally highachieving boys. Their high achievement was no accident, the boys say. When they were

So far, Yale has given them the best financial aid deal and has assiduously courted them, offering to fly them to visit the campus. younger, their father, Darrin Wade, a software architect for General Electric, would punish disciplinary infractions like lying by making them do situps and push-ups and run around the block. He and their mother, Kim, a school principal, also had them do word puzzles, memorize math tables and write book reports at home from a young age. Mr. Wade describes his child-rearing philosophy as, “There is no Santa Claus, but there is a God,” which seems to translate into the idea that nothing in life is free, but you will be rewarded for your hard work and good deeds. The Wade parents met in math class

at Jackson State University, a historically black university in their native state of Mississippi. Jackson State would have taken all four on scholarship, Mr. Wade says, but their sons had different ideas. The Wade children did not take it for granted that they would do so well with their admissions. They all say they were shocked at being admitted to so many schools, especially Ivy League schools. The young men applied to as many as they could — Nicholas and Aaron to about 20 and their brothers to a dozen or so each — because they were trying to get the best possible financial aid package. Sending four children to college simultaneously is not easy, even for an upper-middle class family like theirs. So far, Yale has given them the best financial aid deal, they said, and has assiduously courted them, offering to fly them to New Haven to visit the campus, something they could not afford to do before they were accepted. (Yale admitted another set of African-American quadruplets, two boys and two girls, in 2010.) But they are not sure whether Yale’s offer is a package deal, and whether, if Aaron breaks away and goes elsewhere, as he is considering, that will compromise it. He favors, and has been accepted by, Stanford. The brothers asked that precise details about their academic records not be disclosed. But they said they were all in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. Aaron, the musician, said he was among the top 25 students in his class, and their ACT scores range from the 94th to the 99th percentile. Their father, known to everyone as the “quad dad,” says there was no great secret to their success: “It wasn’t a choice to be average.”

FROM 19 TO 25 JUNE, 2017 Where aerospace leaders get down to business

an event from

GREG LYNCH/THE JOURNAL-NEWS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

From left, Zachary, Aaron, Nigel and Nick Wade, who go to high school outside Cincinnati, have been accepted by Harvard and Yale, among other top schools.

siae.fr

.. 6 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

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Court approved tap on Trump adviser WASHINGTON

Justice Dept. had to show probable cause that ex-aide was acting as Russian agent BY MATTHEW ROSENBERG AND MATT APUZZO

The United States Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official has said. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said on Wednesday, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August. Mr. Page is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in a federal investigation. The Justice Department considered direct surveillance of anyone tied to a political campaign as a line it did not want to cross, the official added. But its decision to seek a wiretap once it was clear that Mr. Page had left the campaign was the latest indication that, as Mr. Trump built his insurgent run for the White House, the F.B.I. was deeply concerned about whether any of his associates were colluding with Russia. To obtain the warrant, the government needed to show probable cause

SERGEI KARPUKHIN /REUTERS

Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, in Moscow in December.

that Mr. Page was acting as an agent of Russia. Investigators must first get approval from one of three senior officials at the Justice Department. Then, prosecutors take it to a surveillance court judge. And though the Trump administration has said Mr. Page was a bit player who had no access to the candidate, the wiretap shows the F.B.I. had strong evidence that a campaign adviser was operating on behalf of Moscow. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Page have called the investigation a “witch hunt” and said it was cooked up by their rivals for speaking out against President Barack Obama’s policies. On Tuesday, Mr. Page said in an email that it “will be interesting to see what comes out when the unjustified basis for those FISA requests are more fully disclosed over time,” using shorthand for the court. The F.B.I. declined to comment. James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, has described the hurdles to obtaining an intelligence wiretap as a “rigorous, rigorous process.” The wiretap of Mr. Page was reported by The Washington Post. The revelation followed months of speculation about such warrants against associates of Mr. Trump, an idea that was broached in November by Heat Street, a news website that cited a pair of unnamed sources with “links to the counterintelligence community” in its report. Heat Street was founded by Louise Mensch, a former Conservative member of the British Parliament who emerged as a critic of Mr. Trump, and it is owned by

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London. The official who confirmed the warrant against Mr. Page did so on the condition of anonymity because intelligence wiretaps are classified. The official was not aware of any instances in which an active member of Mr. Trump’s campaign was directly surveilled by American law-enforcement or spy agencies, though some Trump associates were swept up in surveillance of foreign officials. That assertion was in line with previous statements by Obama administration officials, including James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who said during a March 5 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the surveillance court issued no warrants either for the president or his campaign staff. “For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as D.N.I., there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper said. As part of the investigation, American intelligence agencies have examined wiretapped communications and phone records. Among those intercepts were conversations among Kremlin officials about contacts with people close to Mr. Trump, including Mr. Page, according to current and former American security officials. A spokesman for Mr. Clapper did not respond for requests for comment. A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. Mr. Page, a former Moscow-based investment banker for Merrill Lynch who later founded an investment company in New York called Global Energy Capital, has been on the F.B.I.’s radar screen for years. In early 2013, he met with a Russian intelligence officer posing as a banker in New York. The Russian agent was part of an espionage ring the F.B.I. had been investigating, and court records indicate that the spy tried to recruit Mr. Page. That year, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page, who said he did not know he had met with a Russian intelligence officer. Last July, while working as an adviser to Mr. Trump, who accepted the Republican nomination for president later that month, Mr. Page traveled to Moscow and criticized American foreign policy toward Russia in a speech at the New Economic School, a university. The address in Moscow and Mr. Page’s contacts with Russians raised alarm bells anew within the F.B.I. Later that month, the agency opened its counterintelligence investigation into whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates had colluded with Russians to influence the election. Late last year after the election, Mr. Page traveled to Moscow again and said he was there to meet with “business leaders and thought leaders.” Former and current federal investigators say he would most likely have remained of interest to Russian intelligence because of his links to the Trump administration. Mr. Page said on CNN on Wednesday that he was not a foreign agent. “Until there’s full evidence and a full investigation has been done, we just don’t know,” Mr. Page said. He repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether he had been interviewed by the F.B.I., adding that he had “nothing to say about any ongoing investigations.” According to court records, Mr. Page had been looking to make money in Russia, and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service singled him out. The F.B.I. secretly recorded Russian spies talking about Mr. Page, describing him as an enthusiastic “idiot.”

Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

KEVIN HAGEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Demonstrators in New York City against America’s deportation practices. President Trump issued an executive order in January broadening the definition of deportable offenses.

The risk of migrant check-ins What was routine for some has turned into a high-stakes event BY LIZ ROBBINS

For years, it was an uneventful ritual. Unauthorized immigrants who weren’t considered a priority for deportation would meet with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and be told simply, “See you next year.” The deportation officers, as they are known, were employing prosecutorial discretion, which let them free up resources and detention center space to focus on the deportation of convicted criminals. Now, under President Trump, the stakes of these meetings have changed. What was routine is now roulette. Mr. Trump issued an executive order in January broadening the definition of deportable offenses to include all immigrants living in the country illegally. It has affected all levels of enforcement, including the check-in where people wait to go before an immigration judge or appear with pending appeals and petitions or final orders of removal. Nobody wants to be the next Guadalupe García de Rayos, the Arizona woman who was deported to Mexico after her routine check-in with ICE officials in February. She had been checking in annually since she was caught using a fake Social Security number in 2008. “Every immigration lawyer in the U.S. has this uncertainty with clients now,” said Kerry Bretz, a veteran New York lawyer. Previously, he said, he told his clients: “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to walk in, you’re going to walk out, you’re going to renew your work authorization and get on with your life.” Now, he said, it’s his ethical duty to warn clients before a check-in to get their affairs in order. “Because you might not come out,” he said. Meredith Kalman, a lawyer for Mr. Bretz’s firm, said that as she was leaving

a check-in last month in Manhattan, an officer gave her this warning: “It’s a whole new world, Counselor.” According to Ms. Kalman, the officer told her during the meeting, “I’m sorry. I’m getting pressure because my title is deportation officer — my job is to deport people.” Immigration agency officials insist that they still focus on the deportation of people who were convicted of crimes and pose a threat to their community. However, Rachael Yong Yow, a spokeswoman for the ICE New York field office, said, “All of those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.” That is what should be happening, said Daniel Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports stricter immigration controls. “If you are here and removable, you are living on borrowed time,” he said. Mr. Stein said prosecutorial discretion, generally used in criminal law, should not technically cover ICE checkins since ICE was not giving people legal status to stay in the country at these meetings, only granting them an administrative delay. Cheryl R. David, a New York immigration lawyer, sees the chances for such a delay dwindling. “There’s definitely been a culture shift,” she said. “ICE is more inclined to enforce, from their perspective, the immigration law,” Ms. David added, “and if you have a final order of removal, you’re going to have to try and rectify it.” Or else, she said, deportation will follow. There seems to be no consistent policy from one field office to the next, lawyers say. The immigration agency was not immediately able to provide statistics regarding those who were detained or deported as a result of their check-ins, or how the frequency of those check-ins had changed. Last month, Mr. Bretz accompanied a client, a 49-year-old real estate business

owner from the former Soviet Union, to his check-in in Manhattan, bringing a thick file of testimonials from his client’s associates along with pictures of his children. Mr. Bretz said that his client had no criminal record, and that attempts to rectify what he claimed was an immigration officer’s mistake in adjusting his status more than 20 years earlier had failed. For the seventh straight year, the man was told that he could come back in a year. Another lawyer in Mr. Bretz’s firm, Tiffany Javier, had the opposite experience in Hartford. Her client, a 44-yearold man from Kenya, had arrived in 1993 on a visa but had overstayed. He became a nurse, he paid taxes, and he was raising a stepson with his second wife.

“I’m sorry. I’m getting pressure because my title is deportation officer — my job is to deport people.” But years earlier, a judge had rejected his request for a green card after he married his first wife, suspecting that the marriage was fraudulent. He had been checking in quarterly, until February, when he was given a month to buy his own ticket back to Kenya. He left in mid-March. The experience led Ms. Javier to believe that now, prosecutorial discretion was “out the window.” She said some immigration officers “feel emboldened where they can pretty much do what they want.” The uncertain climate has led to a new trend: spirited protests by advocates, clergy and city officials surrounding a check-in. In March in Newark, a 59-year-old man who had come in illegally from Mexico in 1991 arrived for a check-in with an entourage that included Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of the Newark Archdiocese. Cardinal Tobin, an outspoken defender of immi-

grant’s rights, gave a brief speech imploring the ICE officials who would decide the man’s fate to “not only see his face, but see ours as well.” The man, Catalino Guerrero, had been checking in annually since 2011 because an asylum application someone had filed by mistake had been rejected. He had suffered a stroke, and because of his health was granted a stay of removal. This time, he was told to return in three months while his lawyers pursued another avenue for him to stay in the country. In the ninth-floor waiting room of the federal building in Manhattan, where ICE check-ins take place, the worry among people of all ages and nationalities was palpable last month. Two televisions were turned to CNN; Mr. Trump flashed on the screen. From one of the four unmarked doors — no one knew where to look — an ICE officer would emerge and call a name. Ramesh Palaniandi, a legal permanent resident from Guyana who had served a brief sentence for burglary, went in that day, but did not re-emerge. He was taken to a detention center after his ICE check-in, leaving his crying wife, Janice Hoseine, behind. A month later he was released with his case still pending. But in Latham, N.Y., at the federal immigration office in the Hudson Valley, one lawyer was heartened by the treatment of his client’s case. Maria Martínez-Chacón, a native of El Salvador, has been under an order of supervision since February, when ICE picked up her husband, Ramiro, for having reentered the country illegally. She has two children who are United States citizens and was told to return on April 19. According to her lawyer, Nicholas E. Tishler, Ms. Martínez-Chacón has a good case for asylum. “The people I have come into contact with so far have exercised their discretion in a humane manner,” Mr. Tishler said, “and I hope it continues.”

Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.

E.P.A. chief sees ire from right for not fighting climate basis WASHINGTON

BY CORAL DAVENPORT

When President Trump chose the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, his mission was clear: Carry out Mr. Trump’s campaign vows to radically reduce the size and scope of the agency and take apart President Barack Obama’s ambitious climate change policies. In his first weeks on the job, Mr. Pruitt drew glowing praise from foes of Mr. Obama’s agenda against global warming, as he moved to roll back its centerpiece, known as the Clean Power Plan, and expressed agreement with those who said the E.P.A. should be eliminated. His actions and statements have galvanized protests from environmentalists and others on the left. But now a growing chorus of critics on the other end of the political spectrum say Mr. Pruitt has not gone far enough. In particular, they are angry that he has refused to challenge a landmark agency determination known as the endangerment finding, which provides the legal basis for Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan and other global warming policies. These critics say that Mr. Pruitt is

hacking only at the branches of current climate policy. They want him to pull it out by the roots. “The endangerment finding must be redone, or all of this is for naught,” said Steven J. Milloy, who runs a website, JunkScience.com, aimed at debunking the established science of humancaused climate change, and who worked on the Trump administration’s E.P.A. transition team. “If you get rid of the endangerment finding, the rest of the climate regulations just sweep themselves away. But if they don’t get rid of it, the environmentalists can sue, and then there’s going to have to be a Trump Clean Power Plan,” said Mr. Milloy, who is also a former policy director for Murray Energy, a major coal company whose chief executive, Robert E. Murray, was a backer of Mr. Trump’s campaign and his push to undo climate change policy. The 2009 legal finding is at the heart of a debate within the Trump administration over how to permanently reverse Mr. Obama’s climate change rules. The finding concludes that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and welfare by warming the planet, which led to a legal requirement that the E.P.A. regulate smokestacks and tailpipes that spew planet-warming pollution.

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Traffic in New York. Conservatives want Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to overturn the legal foundation for the agency’s climate-change policies.

Thus, climate policy experts on both sides of the debate say, even if Mr. Pruitt succeeds in the legally challenging process of withdrawing the Clean Power Plan, the endangerment finding will still put him under the legal obligation to put together a replacement regulation. Mr. Pruitt has told the White House

and Congress that he will not try to reverse the finding, saying that such a move would almost certainly be overturned by the courts. Last month, as Mr. Trump prepared to release an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, along with nearly every other ma-

jor element of Mr. Obama’s climate change legacy, Mr. Pruitt argued against including a repeal of the endangerment finding in the order, according to people familiar with the matter. Legal experts outside the Trump White House say that while Mr. Pruitt may face political fire on his right flank for the move, it is nonetheless pragmatic legally, since the finding has already been challenged and upheld by federal courts. Legal experts say they can see why opponents of climate change policy want to go after the endangerment finding — as long as it remains in place, any efforts to undo climate regulations can always be reversed. “As a matter of theory, they’re absolutely right,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “If you want to get rid of the climate stuff, you get rid of the root, not just the branches. They want him to uproot the whole thing.” But, Mr. Lazarus added, “as a matter of legal strategy, it makes little sense, because the endangerment finding is very strong.” The original recommendation to make an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide emissions was made by Stephen L. Johnson, a career scientist who was the administrator of the E.P.A.

during the second term of President George W. Bush, although the Bush White House did not act on Mr. Johnson’s memo. After the Obama administration did so, the finding was legally challenged but upheld in a federal court. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Mr. Lazarus said that Mr. Pruitt would have his hands full with the legal challenges of undoing the regulations themselves. Taking on the endangerment finding would probably be futile, he said. “He doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with something that’s a sure loser,” he said. “It wrecks your credibility with the courts.” Mr. Pruitt has a long history of championing legal efforts to undermine major environmental rules. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, he sued the E.P.A. 14 times in efforts to undo regulations. He believes in stripping power away from the federal government and returning it to states. But during his Senate confirmation hearing, he told senators that despite that, he was likely to draw the line at trying to overturn the endangerment finding. “It is there, and it needs to be enforced and respected,” Mr. Pruitt said. “There is nothing that I know that would cause it to be reviewed.”

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 7

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Business Low oil prices threaten Venezuela’s solvency BY CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Venezuela has put off a reckoning on its tens of billions of dollars in debt, but its ability to avoid a disastrous default will probably require much higher oil prices than appear likely in the next year or two, financial experts say. With its oil production and international reserves falling at an accelerating rate, the government is juggling as fast as it can to pay for imported food and medicines while meeting its short-term bond payments. Even as the country has slashed imports, its reserves have declined by half over the last two years, to $10.4 billion. Most of that sum is in gold and is pledged as security for many of the government’s creditors, which include international institutional investors and everyday Venezuelans. “The probability of default is rising,” said Stuart Culverhouse, head of sovereign and credit research at Exotix Partners, a London-based investment bank that trades Venezuelan bonds on behalf of clients. “So far their willingness to pay has been pretty firm, surprisingly so given the political situation. But you have to ask how long that can continue when they are probably spending more on debt service than imports.” Complicating the picture is the escalating political turmoil challenging President Nicolás Maduro, who needs to shore up his popularity if he is to retain power in the elections scheduled for next year. Consumers have to endure long lines for food and other necessities, and hunger is spreading. With Venezuela’s refineries in disrepair, even gasoline is in short supply. A monthly inflation rate of 20 percent is shrinking the value of paychecks. International financial experts say that the global oil price will have to rise about $15 a barrel — to $70 — to substantially improve the financial situation for the government and Petróleos de Venezuela, its state-owned oil company, better known as PDVSA. With United States oil production rising, and the commitment of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to extend production cuts in question, few energy experts expect prices of more than $65 a barrel over the next year unless political violence causes a serious oil disruption in the Middle East. The external bond debt of the government and PDVSA amounts to roughly $60 billion, most of which has been incurred since President Hugo Chávez took power nearly two decades ago and

FEDERICO PARRA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

A protest in Caracas, Venezuela, against President Nicolás Maduro. With oil output and international reserves falling, the country struggles to pay for imported medicine and food.

installed a socialist-inspired government. But that tells only a piece of the story, since the country has additional liabilities with international lending institutions. China appears to have quietly stopped making new project loans guaranteed by oil shipments last year. All told, the Venezuelan government and the state oil company owe $8.5 billion in payments this year, and at least an additional $7.9 billion in 2018 — amounts that economists say will fur-

ther erode international reserves that form the last defense against default. Venezuela said it would make the nearly $3 billion in payments due on Wednesday. Those are mostly related to PDVSA’s April 5.25 percent note, which requires a combined interest and principal payment of $2.5 billion, and institutional investors said the PDVSA payment had been made. Normally that would be an easy stretch for an oil company with some of the largest reserves

Hollywood loves a sequel

in the world. But PDVSA is but a shadow of its old self. The company’s cash is running out, its oil fields are losing pressure, critical equipment at its ports and processing plants is in disrepair, and it is unable to pay billions of dollars it owes to the international oil service companies critical to its operations. Once one of the premier oil exporters, Venezuela now produces roughly two million barrels a day, down by more than

Adviser pick riles Trump’s base WASHINGTON

LOS ANGELES

Supporters sense betrayal in choice of top economist, who favors immigration

Top executives recycled as studios play it safe when picking new leaders

BY ALAN RAPPEPORT BY BROOKS BARNES

Grand. Gutsy. Godlike. In the popular imagination, movie studio chiefs embody all of those qualities — volcanotempered rulers who blurt out things like “We’re gonna make you a star, kid,” and alter careers, and maybe even film history, in a hot second. But the reality of the modern-day studio boss is much more mundane. Largely gone are the days of swashbuckling moguls with offices big enough to accommodate Cleopatra’s barge. Instead, the job has become corporate in the extreme — answering to parent-company boards, serving up sequels so related merchandise keeps selling, cutting costs as DVD money vanishes. The real fun (and profit) for much of the Type A executive set has migrated up the coast to Silicon Valley. So when the former 20th Century Fox chairman James N. Gianopulos was tapped to take over the struggling Paramount Pictures — he started last week — it was no surprise. In an industry that tries to thrill audiences, the identities of the studio chairmen are almost mindnumbingly predictable. Of Hollywood’s eight biggest film suppliers, five are managed by someone who has held the same job at another one of those companies. Alan F. Horn was forcibly retired from Warner Bros. Now he runs Walt Disney Studios. Thomas E. Rothman was pushed out at Fox. Now he reigns at Sony. Stacey Snider, now leading Fox, formerly ran Universal. Adam Fogelson? Ousted by Universal, currently STX Entertainment’s movie chief. Talk about a game of thrones. These are all talented executives who know the movie business inside and out — no small qualification in such a unique mix of art and commerce. Mr. Horn, in particular, has led Disney to astounding success. But why does Hollywood keep recycling its studio bosses? The question has been percolating in the movie capital since Paramount hired Mr. Gianopulos. With pretty much everyone agreeing that the film business needs shaking up (the analyst Michael Nathanson released a report last week titled, “Film Industry: Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something!”), why did Para-

MICHAEL BUCKNER/GETTY IMAGES FOR CINEMACON

Stacey Snider and James N. Gianopulos in 2015, when they were the top executives at 20th Century Fox. Mr. Gianopulos took over at Paramount Pictures last week.

mount go with the tried and true? In a column for the trade news outlet Deadline.com, Peter Bart, who was Variety’s editor in chief for two decades, was generally supportive of Mr. Gianopulos. But Mr. Bart also seemed to side with Tom Freston, the highly regarded former Viacom chief executive, whom Mr. Bart quoted as saying that, if he were taking over an entertainment company today, he would “hire a motorcycle gang of rule breakers to reinvent the whole business.” As Mr. Bart noted, “Gianopulos, thoughtful and cautious, does not fit that description.” Hollywood loves nothing more than a sequel. In a topsy-turvy business where new movies can cost $400 million to make and market, sequels are safe — audiences are already familiar with them. The same holds true with film executives. As Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, said in an email, hiring at “these increasingly corporate studios” does not involve innovation as much as self-protection. “They hire people that have done it before,” she wrote, “so no boss or board can ever say they took a chance on someone without experience!” Most studios are not in the business of building anything. They are about protecting what they have. So they go with the safe choice. Some longtime Hollywood observers point to other forces that keep the same names in circulation. Film companies are not known for grooming a new generation of strong leaders. It has been

part of Hollywood’s hard-knuckled executive culture dating back to those cigar-chomping moguls of yore — take a hatchling under your wing, and they may well “grow up to eat you,” said Jeanine Basinger, author of “The Star Machine” and founder of Wesleyan University’s film studies program. “It’s not something unique to Hollywood,” she added. “Show me the business — or college, for that matter, or museum — where the top man, and it’s still almost always a man, aggressively grooms a successor.” (One prominent movie exception: Ron Meyer, vice chairman of NBCUniversal. He has been a mentor to Donna Langley, promoting her through the ranks at Universal Pictures, where she has been chairman, to strong results, since 2013. Mr. Meyer previously helped groom Ms. Snider.) To some degree, there is a limited pool of people who even want to run old-line studios. Some young turks see a better future in streaming companies. Scott Stuber, a producer whose credits include the comedy “Ted,” just took a senior job at Netflix. Others are more interested in building their own companies. (Jason Blum, the horror film impresario, is one example.) Others have plum jobs outside the lumbering studios. Mary Parent, a producer of films like “The Revenant,” is often courted for studio jobs, but her current position — running production for China’s Legendary Entertainment — comes with considerSTUDIOS, PAGE 8

a million barrels over the last two decades. Experts say they expect another 10 percent decline in production this year. Since last November, Venezuela has gotten some relief; oil prices have gradually risen after OPEC cut its oil production by more than a million barrels a day, to the lowest levels in a year. Venezuela has been one of the leading members of the cartel pushing for the production cuts. Its recent output, as estimated by

Middle East Petroleum and Economic Publications, is about 60,000 barrels a day above the production target Venezuela agreed to last year. Such figures suggest that the country may be cheating a bit on its commitments. “They still have rabbits in their hat,” said Walter Molano, head of research and chief economist at BCP Securities, based in Greenwich, Conn. “They will do everything they can to keep on servicing their debt with the hope that oil production turns around and oil prices go up.” PDVSA has turned to Citgo, its American-based refinery and gas station subsidiary, for relief. In recent years Citgo has borrowed several billion dollars, using its three refineries and pipeline assets as collateral, with the money going to Caracas. PDVSA pledged about half of Citgo’s equity to bondholders, and the rest to secure a loan from Rosneft, the Russian oil giant. Late last year, Venezuelan oil officials began to consider transferring control of a Venezuelan oil field around San Félix to Citgo to increase Citgo’s valuation and raise its creditworthiness for more borrowing. But at the moment, financial analysts say, Citgo is not in a position to borrow much more for its parent company. “Citgo has been used as a cash cow,” said Diego Ferro, co-chief investment officer at Greylock Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund that invests in distressed, high-yield bonds, including Venezuela’s. “They are trying to get any cash that they can. And over the next year and a half until elections, they will go to more absurd ways of monetizing things.” Still, Venezuelan bonds have been a lucrative trade for some investors. When oil prices dipped below $30 a barrel in February 2016, the April 2017 PDVSA bonds sold at 36 cents to the dollar. Those who held the bonds to maturity this week will gain a return of nearly 114 percent on principal, according to Nomura, which trades Venezuelan bonds for clients. “While they are able to muddle through, your exposure to Venezuela is going to outperform almost everything else in the emerging-market bond universe,” said Siobhan Morden, Nomura’s head of Latin America fixed-income strategy. “However, you have to be very careful to have an exit strategy. You’re looking at an advanced stage of cashflow stress.”

The choice by President Trump of a proimmigration economist to lead his Council of Economic Advisers is stirring a backlash among his most ardent supporters, who worry it is an abandonment of the tough stance he took on the issue during the campaign and the latest in a string of broken promises. Mr. Trump had already disappointed some of his base supporters by intervening in Syria with a military strike last week and by delaying a tough stance on trade with China and Mexico. He expressed the idea via Twitter on Tuesday that he would be willing to offer the Chinese government a more favorable trade deal if it helped the United States with North Korea. Now there is growing unease that immigration is the next area where he will go soft. To these supporters, the appointment of Kevin A. Hassett, announced Friday, as Mr. Trump’s top White House economist is another sign that the president is succumbing to the swamp he promised to drain. Like most economists, Mr. Hassett believes that immigration spurs economic growth. At times he has pilloried Republicans for becoming the “Party of White,” arguing in 2010 that Republicans like then-Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona “have too often appeared hostile to immigrants.” In 2013, Mr. Hassett said the United States should double its intake of immigrants. Mr. Hassett, who currently works at the American Enterprise Institute, is a widely respected conservative economist who previously advised prominent Republicans like Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney. But for those who backed Mr. Trump because of his promises to build a wall and deport illegal immigrants, such notions are heresy. “It would be nice, considering how important the immigration issue has been to Trump, to have gotten an economist to this position who was at least not a booster for higher immigration,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank. Mr. Trump’s right-wing media supporters are also up in arms. Breitbart, the website that was formerly run

by Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief political strategist, said Mr. Hassett’s appointment showed that the “corporatist, business-first” was muscling out the “populist, America-first” that got Mr. Trump elected. Commenters on the conservative website Infowars were similarly appalled, with some lamenting, “We have been sold a false bill of goods.” Some leaders of the white nationalist “alt-right” movement also interpreted the move as a sellout. “This is yet another betrayal, just like breaking his promise to deport all illegal immigrants and to repeal President Obama’s executive amnesties,” said Jared Taylor, the editor of the online magazine American Renaissance, who spoke highly of Mr. Trump during the campaign. Mr. Taylor said the choice of Mr. Hassett, combined with the recent missile strikes in Syria, made it “very hard to believe anything he says.” The controversy follows decades of grappling within the Republican Party over how to address immigration. After some party leaders considered a more inclusive approach, Mr. Trump swung the party to the right as a candidate when he painted immigrants as criminals who were stealing American jobs and depressing wages.

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kevin A. Hassett in 2012. He was named to lead the Council of Economic Advisers.

Such pronouncements amplified voices within the Republican Party that have been fearful about both illegal and legal immigration. Last month, Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who is a strong supporter of Mr. Trump, caused an uproar when he said, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Some Republicans in the Senate, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have also been focusing on limiting legal immigration. Mr. Cotton has proposed legislation that would narrow the scope of the permanent resident green card system and reduce access to visas. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to the border with

Mexico and laid out a tougher approach the administration will be taking with people who sneak into the country. Those measures include prosecutions. But despite his tough tone as a candidate, Mr. Trump has shown some signs of moderation as president. He said he welcomed immigrants who love the country and bring valuable skills and strong work ethics. And he has yet to unravel President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for the so-called Dreamers, as Mr. Krikorian ruefully noted. Economists who have been wary of the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment are hopeful that Mr. Hassett will be an influential voice in the administration to encourage a more welcoming approach. On Wednesday, a group of 1,470 economists, both conservative and liberal, sent a letter to Mr. Trump and congressional leaders urging them to consider policies that allow more immigrants into the country legally. They contend that the economic benefits outweigh the costs. (Mr. Hassett did not sign the letter, which was organized by New American Economy, a coalition of mayors and business leaders.) “Immigration is really not a debatable issue,” said James Miller, who led President Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget and signed the letter. “Immigration is a good idea if you control it the right way.” Mr. Hassett declined an interview request after his appointment was announced. A White House spokeswoman, Lindsay Walters, dismissed the negative reaction, pointing to his experience in economics, and said, “The president is confident he will work tirelessly to improve the economy for all Americans and looks forward to welcoming him onboard following his confirmation.” It remains unclear how much influence Mr. Hassett will actually have. Mr. Trump broke with recent tradition and removed the council’s chairman from a cabinet-level position. He has also expressed skepticism about economics in the past by casting doubt on official government statistics and expert opinions about the health of the economy. For those reasons, some who have been critical of Mr. Trump are tempering their optimism about Mr. Hassett. “He might be a sign of some stability, but no one knows if the president is going to listen to him, so it’s premature to say it is encouraging,” said Austan Goolsbee, who was chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Regarding his critics, there is not a single reputable economist they could find in either party that would support their worldview.”

.. 8 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

business

Why ‘sorry’ is so hard to say

Tech helps airlines, but it fails passengers

White House official and United Airlines chief grapple with apologies

STATE, FROM PAGE 1

BY MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

“I’m sorry.” Two simple words, not so simply said. On Wednesday, the public representatives of two embattled American institutions — United Airlines and the White House — found themselves on national television grappling with a delicate and increasingly common ritual of the corporate and political worlds: the public apology. Oscar Munoz, United’s chief executive, recalled his “shame” upon seeing a cellphone video, shared among millions of people, of a paying passenger being violently evicted from one of his airline’s flights. Face taut, voice soft, Mr. Munoz’s televised prostration was a far cry from the robotic statement issued by United days earlier, expressing regret for “re-accommodating” a traveler. Around the same time, President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, was denouncing himself as “reprehensible” for having favorably compared Hitler to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and referring to Nazi death camps as “Holocaust centers,” all spoken from the White House podium. The fine art of repentance is a skill taught in business schools and promoted by high-priced consultants. But all kinds of offenders in public life still seem to struggle with the execution. Corporations like BP and Wells Fargo have faced criticism for dawdling responses to cascading crises, while politicians from former President Bill Clinton to former Representative Anthony Weiner have had difficulty admitting to peccadilloes. The key to contrition, according to public-relations experts, is projecting sincerity, humanity and a plain-spoken demeanor — with the aim to convince a cynical public. And in this age of whipsawing social media, you had better do it fast. “The head of United should never have been allowed to take three swings at correcting and apologizing for an incident that was on more social media than Kim and Kanye’s wedding,” said Mortimer Matz, a New York consultant who has guided decades’ worth of clients through crises small and large. United issued several halting statements about the plane episode, which first emerged Monday morning, before Mr. Munoz made his abject appearance on Wednesday on ABC. Mr. Matz said the airline had missed its moment. “You’ve got to be a fast thinker in the digital age,” said Mr. Matz, who will be 93 in July. Many companies now take steps to be nimble and responsive when a furor erupts online. Last week, Pepsi took less than 24 hours to apologize and retract a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that used populist imagery to sell soda. It was a rapid U-turn that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. This week, Mr. Spicer was quick to recognize the damage done by his illconsidered remarks, which prompted immediate denunciations on Twitter as well as calls for his resignation. He appeared on CNN within hours of his gaffe, while Mr. Munoz waited two days. Still, Mr. Spicer’s apology came only after his office tried to clarify his remarks with statements that, while remorseful, did not clearly admit error. On Wednesday, in a previously scheduled interview at the Newseum in Washington, Mr. Spicer took a new tack: no excuses. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” Mr. Spicer told Greta van Susteren, the MSNBC anchor, his tone notably subdued. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.” He added: “It really is painful to myself to know that I did something like that.” Mr. Munoz, interviewed on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, was similarly solemn. “That shame and embarrassment was pretty palpable for me,” he told the correspondent Rebecca Jarvis, emotion For online listings and past performance visit:

T. J. KIRKPATRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.” SEAN SPICER

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

“That shame and embarrassment was pretty palpable for me. This can never — will never — happen again.” OSCAR MUNOZ

in his voice. “This can never — will never — happen again on a United Airlines flight. That’s my premise and that’s my promise.” Later on Wednesday, United said it would refund the fares of all passengers on the affected flight. Both Mr. Munoz, who was named “communicator of the year” by PR Week magazine last month, and Mr. Spicer took pains to personalize their apologies. It’s a technique that, conscious or not, is recommended by crisis experts. “That’s on me, I have to fix that,” Mr. Munoz said when asked about the airline policies that led to the violent ejection. Mr. Spicer described his blunder as “mine to own, mine to apologize for, mine to ask forgiveness for.” That plead-no-contest approach, consultants say, is one of the few ways to start rebuilding trust. The accounting firm PwC, for instance, gave a detailed explanation, and quick apology, for this year’s Oscar best picture fiasco, eventually holding onto its Academy Awards account.

“People want someone to throw the book at,” said Katie Sprehe, a senior director at the communications firm APCO Worldwide. Ms. Sprehe, who studies reputation maintenance, said United had erred by not moving swiftly to mirror its customers’ outrage. “You need to speak your stakeholders’ language, and coming out with P.R. mumbo jumbo, like ‘re-accommodate,’ is the wrong thing to do,” she said. Stu Loeser, an adviser to executives in the technology and finance industries, said that a high-profile apology must be considered in context. “Oscar Munoz answers to more than 85,000 employees who want to know that if they were the ones caught in a viral video maelstrom, he’d back them up,” said Mr. Loeser, who was press secretary to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. “Sean Spicer ultimately answers to one person and one person only” — Mr. Trump —

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“someone who sees backing down or apologizing as not only a weakness, but a character flaw.” “In both cases,” Mr. Loeser added, “what might appear to be an irrational series of statements that got you into trouble makes more sense, when you think about who they’re actually answering to.” Mr. Munoz ended his interview by saying he had no plans to resign. “I was hired to make United better, and I’ve been doing that, and that’s what I’ll continue to do,” he said. Mr. Spicer, asked by Ms. Van Susteren if he enjoyed being press secretary, said he loved it. “I truly do believe it’s an honor to have this job,” he said. “It is a privilege. And if you don’t believe it, then you shouldn’t be here.” Whether the apologies outlive the gaffes remains to be seen. Ken Sunshine, who founded the public-relations firm Sunshine Sachs, said he was skeptical. “My rule?” he said. “You get one shot.”

Hollywood recycles top executives STUDIOS, FROM PAGE 7

able autonomy and none of the hassle of an unwieldy, old-line studio. The same is true for Jenno Topping, a producer of hits like “Hidden Figures” and Chernin Entertainment’s film president. Even a decade ago, when DVD money was still gushing into Hollywood, studio chiefs were allowed to go with their gut. Amy Pascal, the former chairman of Sony’s motion picture group, could listen to a story pitch and decide on the spot to proceed. (“Love it. Make it.”) These days, studio bosses are forced to focus on bloated sequels. How creatively stimulating could it possibly have been to churn out “XMen: Apocalypse”? “Let’s face it,” said Ms. Basinger, the film historian, “these are not the movies that Hollywood’s best and brightest got into the business to make.”

including lack of legroom, lack of amenities, mediocre or worse customer service, dirty airplanes and more to save money,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “And the airline industry has evolved to meet that desire” for cheap fares. Part of the problem is how we buy tickets. The system is mercilessly transactional. When you search online, you look for price and travel times, and perhaps you consider some airline loyalty program. Customer service — that is, how the airline treats you — isn’t often part of the transaction. As a result, airlines have little incentive to reform themselves. “Airline executives will tell you they don’t view themselves as being service companies,” Mr. Harteveldt said. “They want Wall Street to view them as industrial companies, and they want consumers to view them as transportation providers. Customer service is just not what the airlines are about.” You can see this in United’s initial response to what happened on Flight 3411. “I apologize for having to reaccommodate these customers,” Oscar Munoz, United’s chief executive, said in a statement with all the warmth of a ransom note. In a letter to employees, he suggested that the customer, not the airline, was at fault. After all, the passenger was offered $1,000 in vouchers for his trouble. As a United spokesman told The Times, the passenger was “asked several times, politely,” for his seat before anyone beat him up. It took two days for the airline to offer a real apology. “I want you to know that we take full responsibility and we will work to make it right,” Mr. Munoz said in a statement on Tuesday. Can technology improve how airlines work? Some people have ideas for how that may happen. One of them is obvious and sensible: customer reviews. Last year TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site, began rating airlines. Its new rankings, released this week, show that over all, airlines get an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 from customers. Emirates and Singapore Airlines are rated the best in the world; two American airlines, JetBlue and Alaska, made TripAdvisor’s Top 10 list. But Delta was the only major American airline to receive TripAdvisor’s seal of approval. United and American Airlines did not meet the site’s minimum threshold, though Bryan Saltzburg, senior vice

president for TripAdvisor’s global flight business, said that the two had been improving. A bigger disruption would come from altering how we pay for airfares. In the same way that Netflix changed the DVD business by charging a monthly fee, some consultants argue that a membership fee could radically improve flying. “We’ve prototyped a subscription airline in the past, and it basically gets the airline out of the business of reducing service for offering the lowest fares,” said Devin Liddell, the principal brand strategist for Teague, a design firm that works with Boeing and other companies. Some airline start-ups have tried a monthly subscription model, and none have gained traction. But “Airline airline start-ups executives face high capital costs; a new will tell you model they don’t view business might work, Mr. themselves Liddell said, if an as being established airline tries it as service a way to break companies.” free from the accepted way of doing things. You might wonder why an airline would dare try such a thing. After all, airlines are doing well; profits are up across the globe, despite your annoyance about flying. But Mr. Liddell warned of long-term competition from other kinds of transportation. If self-driving cars make driving easier and more comfortable, he said, midrange flights would face competition because lots of people might abandon planes for cars. Already, counting the time it takes to clear airport security and get to and from the airport, it takes just as long to drive between some places as to fly. An even longer-term idea is the Hyperloop, Elon Musk’s vision for superfast tunnel travel. It’s a speculative idea, but if it works, airlines would need to radically alter how they work. For now, though, none of that hurts the commercial air business. Airlines are content to feed you ever-worse service for lower prices, because that is what the web wants. Your only technological hope for better service is your smartphone camera and the push of social networks. If you are violently kicked off your flight, at least your fellow passengers will post a video to Facebook.

Policy shifts hint at who has sway in White House WASHINGTON

Wall Street wing seems to be gaining the upper hand over the populists BY ALAN RAPPEPORT

President Trump has made three startling economic policy reversals in one day, stepping away from pledges he made as a candidate and even policies he supported only days before. The shifts confounded many of Mr. Trump’s supporters and suggested that the moderate financiers he brought from Wall Street are eclipsing the White House populist wing led by Stephen K. Bannon, the political strategist who is increasingly being sidelined by the president. In a series of interviews on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he no longer wanted to label China a currency manipulator — a week after telling The Financial Times that the Chinese were the “world champions” of currency manipulation. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the president said he no longer wanted to eliminate the Export-Import Bank. And he said that he might consider reappointing Janet L. Yellen as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve when her term ends next year. Yet before the election, he regularly denounced China and said that Ms. Yellen should be “ashamed” of herself because of what he said was her political bias. Mr. Trump’s latest pronouncements suggest he is moving toward a mainstream economic approach, although on other issues that he discussed on Wednesday, like a tax overhaul and health care, his policy and strategy appeared muddled. Mr. Trump asserted in a Twitter post on Wednesday night that his agenda remained on track. “One by one, we are keeping our promises — on the border, on energy, on jobs, on regulations. Big changes are happening.” Mr. Trump began the day with an interview with Fox Business Network in which he backed away from the socalled border adjustment tax favored by Speaker Paul D. Ryan and House Republicans. He also backtracked on his claim last month that he was moving on from his plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, to focus on taxes. Now he is again putting health

care first. In the interview published by The Journal, Mr. Trump revealed his softer approach to China — the about-face coming less than a week after meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping — and made another reversal on health care. He said that the government would not continue to pay subsidies to health insurers under the Affordable Care Act, only days after the administration said it would. Mr. Trump said the threat to withhold subsidies was a way to force Democrats to negotiate with him over the future of the Affordable Care Act. To make the muddy waters even murkier, Mr. Trump took his plans to rewrite the tax code into uncharted territory when he threw cold water on the border adjustment tax that is the linchpin of the tax reform plan. After months of waffling on that tax, he instead called for a new “reciprocal tax” that appears to be a different kind of duty on imports. “I don’t like the word adjustment because our country gets taken advantage of, to use a nice term, by every other country in the world,” Mr. Trump said in the Fox Business interview. “So when I hear border adjustment, adjustment means we lose.” The notion left tax experts scratching their heads. “I’m genuinely confused,” said Itai Grinberg, a tax expert at Georgetown University’s law school. “If one imposes a tax that varies based on the country of origin of the good or service, then what one may in substance have is something akin to a country-specific tariff regime.” What is clear is that all of the uncertainty surrounding the White House’s economic plans is causing frustration among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, including those who helped get him elected. Larry Kudlow, the economist who advised Mr. Trump when he was a candidate, panned Mr. Trump’s reciprocal tax idea as a nonsensical approach that would essentially raise taxes. He suggested that the scattershot approach to economic policy coming from the White House was probably because of poor leadership at the National Economic Council, which is led by Gary Cohn, and the diminished role of the Treasury Department, which is steered by Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “It’s complete chaos,” Mr. Kudlow said. “It sows confusion, and people lose confidence. The process is broken.”

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 9

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Opinion How 70 years of fake news ended Never underestimate the power of fact-based reporting, as the Soviet dissidents proved.

Gal Beckerman

In the summer of 1990, at a fulcrum moment when his country was tipping from reform to dissolution, Mikhail S. Gorbachev spoke to Time magazine and declared, “I detest lies.” It was a revolutionary statement only because it came from the mouth of a Soviet leader. On the surface, he was simply embracing his own policy of glasnost, the new openness introduced alongside perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet Union’s command economy that was meant to rescue the country from geopolitical free-fall. Mr. Gorbachev was wagering that truthful and unfettered expression — a press able to criticize and investigate, history books without redacted names, and honest, accountable government — just might save the creaking edifice of Communist rule. For the Soviet leader, glasnost was “a blowtorch that could strip the layers of old and peeling paint from Soviet society,” wrote the Baltimore Sun’s Moscow correspondent (and now Times reporter) Scott Shane in “Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union.” “But the Communist system proved dry tinder.” We in the West have always praised Mr. Gorbachev for his courage in The idea taking this gamble — even that a better though he lost an relationship empire in the with facts process — but he might be did it under pressure. The liberating idea that a better for a corrupt relationship with and ailing facts might be Soviet Union liberating for a was not new. corrupt and ailing Soviet Union was not new. Mr. Gorbachev was echoing and appropriating the arguments of a dissident movement that, for decades, had made an insistence on truth its essential form of resistance. If the Soviet Union was the 20th century’s greatest example of a regime that used propaganda and information to control and contain its citizens — 70 years of fake news! — the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution is an important moment to appreciate how it also produced a powerful countercurrent in the civil society undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad. True internal pushback against the Soviet regime began to emerge only in the 1960s, at the moment when the political temperature inside Russia was moving from post-Stalinist thaw back to chilly. The suppressions began with the trial of the satirical writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in early 1966. As protests and further trials followed, the dissidents were faced with an interesting dilemma: how to fight back most effectively in light of the information that was coming their way. Almost daily, they would hear the details of interrogations, stories passed around about life in the labor camps,

V. ARMAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

and the drumbeat of searches and arrests. The dissidents could have presented their own form of propaganda, hyping the persecution and turning that rich Soviet lexicon of “hooligans” and “antisocial elements” into bitter screeds against the state itself. But they didn’t. They chose instead to communicate it all as dispassionately and clinically as possible. They reached for what we might call objectivity. Generations of Soviet citizens had trained themselves to think of factuality as a highly relative concept. The newspapers were read as a narrative meant to glorify the state and not as a reflection of reality. And people likewise felt split into authentic private selves that often had nothing to do with their public faces and utterances. Given how much of Soviet society was built on this decadeslong duplicity, it is remarkable and reassuring that speaking truly and plainly still held such power for the dissidents by the 1960s. But it did. To hear Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of the early organizers

of a key underground journal engaged in this fact-gathering, A Chronicle of Current Events, describe it, the attraction was almost religious: “For each of us who worked for the Chronicle, it meant to pledge oneself to be faithful to the truth, it meant to cleanse oneself of the filth of doublethink, which has pervaded every phase of Soviet life,” she wrote. “The effect of the Chronicle is irreversible. Each one of us went through this alone, but each of us knows others who went through this moral rebirth.” In its meticulous commitment to holding the Soviet Union accountable to its own laws and international treaties, A Chronicle of Current Events represented also a rebirth of civil society. It was a small community, and one that existed entirely on the onion-skinthin pages of samizdat, the illegal, self-published writing of the dissidents, but this was where they could act as citizens, witnessing and reporting on violations of human and civil rights. The Chronicle worked in a straightforward way. Issues were produced in

Moscow and then passed from hand-tohand. If someone had some piece of information to circulate, she could write it down on a slip of paper and pass it on to the person from whom she received her copy of the journal, who in turn would then keep it going along the chain. At the source were editors like Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the journal’s first “compiler,” as they preferred to call themselves. Eventually arrested by the state security agency, the K.G.B., in 1969, she was locked up in a psychiatric institution until 1972. Over some 65 issues, from 1968 to 1983, the Chronicle became a catalog of abuses, noted in the most sparse, neutral tone possible. It was a painstaking effort to publish information that could never be obtained through the official Soviet media. Here, a citizen could read the details of closed political trials and the stories of what the Chronicle called “extrajudicial persecution,” understand what a K.G.B. search entailed, read secret documents meant only for those in power, learn about the constant religious and cultural persecution and

get updates on political prisoners in the East. This was self-consciously an attempt to create a valid and verifiable news source. The Chronicle demanded that its contributors be “careful and accurate” with any information they passed along and even ran regular corrections to previous items (pioneering a practice some Western media organizations only adopted years later). As the scholar of Soviet dissidence Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972, put it, “the Chronicle’s aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word, glasnost.” This was in direct opposition to the diktat the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had issued for newspapers, back in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1901. The press was to be “not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organizer” — a tool, in other words, for shoring up the power of the state. For the compiler BECKERMAN, PAGE 11

Trump versus the love gov Let’s compare the president and Alabama’s new former chief executive.

Gail Collins

Our question for today is: How does Donald Trump compare to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, the now-famous “Love Gov”? Bentley resigned this week after a long-running sex scandal. Trump, who used to be a king of sex scandals, doesn’t have any presidential ones. When the day is done and the moon is high, our chief executive now appears to be moved mainly by the siren song of Fox and Twitter. But nobody’s forgotten those girlgrabbing tapes from the campaign. There’s also currently a grope-related lawsuit. And recently, his sympathetic take on Bill O’Reilly’s multiple sexual harassment problems. Plus, face it: These days we cannot possibly talk about anything without bringing up Donald Trump: chocolate cake, funny dog videos, Easter, professional wrestling, Millard Fillmore. . . . But first, Governor Bentley. Our story begins in 2014, when he was re-elected by a whopping margin, wearing the image of a kindly family man. However, during the march to victory, his wife recorded her husband having a conversation with campaign aide Rebekah Mason that centered

heavily around feeling up Mason’s breasts. And his staff couldn’t help noticing that the governor started calling Mason “baby” during staff meetings. Lots and lots of incidents later, Mrs. Bentley filed for divorce after 50 years of marriage. She also gave investigators a ton of love texts — thanks to what appeared to be a certain technological ineptitude on the part of her husband. (They included the immortal “Bless our hearts. And other parts.”) The State Legislature began to investigate. After the release of a 131-page report, 3,000 pages of documents, threats of felony charges and a thumbs down from the State Ethics Commission, Bentley finally “Bless our agreed to quit, plead guilty to hearts. And two other parts.” misdemeanors and promise never to run for office again — the last not appearing to be a likely problem. Now Bentley is obviously a very, very different guy from Donald Trump, who is never going to be married to anybody for 50 years. Trump’s children are in his employ, while Bentley’s show up in the report trying to get their father checked for dementia. However, there are some commonalities: Both men are in their 70s and have a thing for messaging via cellphone. One of the most useful lessons of the Bentley scandal, in fact, was that when your wife’s name is Dianne, it’s a very bad idea to send her a text saying “I

ALBERT CESARE/THE MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Robert Bentley last Friday, when he was insisting he wouldn’t resign amid a sex scandal.

love you, Rebekah.” Both guys have a history of bragging about their special privileges. In Trump’s case there was all that talk about his right to go into the Miss Universe dressing room and stare at naked ladies, and, of course, the famous recorded boast about how “when you’re a star” you get to grab women by their private parts, whether they like it or not. Bentley told an unhappy staffer that as governor, people had to “bow to his throne.” Differences: Mason, a former TV anchor, first entered Bentley’s employ as his press secretary. Trump’s press secretary is Sean Spicer, and that is

never, ever going to be a compromising relationship. On the other hand, Rebekah Mason never claimed that Hitler didn’t use poison gas on any Germans. Bentley went crazy trying to shut down gossip that he was committing adultery, and it’s hard to imagine Trump reacting the same way. Back in the day, when New York papers were full of stories about him cheating on his wife, Ivana, with an aspiring actress named Marla Maples, he had a squad of publicists on the case. But none of them seemed to be trying to discourage the coverage. “We got absolutely no pushback,” agreed Matt

Storin, who was then an editor at The Daily News. In the end, Bentley may have been undone less by his affair than by the financial flimflammery on the side. (His lover’s husband, a former weatherman, got a $91,000-a-year job as director of the state’s Office of FaithBased and Volunteer Service.) So far, we haven’t heard reports about Trump spending public money to please a former mistress. As opposed to spending public money taking heads of state to his resort or providing security for the kids when they go abroad to make business deals. On occasion we are reminded that the worst things that happen in this world are generally not about consensual sex. Morning Consult, a nonpartisan polling company, recently queried registered voters across America on their attitudes toward their governors, and Alabama’s got a 44 percent job approval rating, with 48 percent disapproving. That’s bad, but there were nine other governors who ranked lower. Pop Quiz: Guess who ranked on the very bottom of the chart? A) Chris Christie B) Chris Christie C) Chris Christie On the list of things the voters dislike, it appears, sex takes a back seat to running around the country behaving like Donald Trump’s spaniel. And now we’ll wait to see how long it is before people start shaking their heads and saying President Trump is acting crazier than that governor in Alabama.

Mikhail Gorbachev at the Congress of Deputies in Moscow in 1990.

.. 10 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

The G.O.P. and fear of crowds ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., Publisher

A.G. SULZBERGER, Deputy Publisher

DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor

MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer

JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor

STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International

TOM BODKIN, Creative Director

PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN, Senior V.P., International Operations

SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising

JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor

CHANTAL BONETTI, V.P., International Human Resources

JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing

ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences

TERRY TANG, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer

MR. TRUMP’S FICKLE DIPLOMACY RussiaAmerican relations are as tense as ever, a casualty of Mr. Putin’s ruthless behavior and Mr. Trump’s whiplash approach to policy.

Until a few days ago, Americans and the world had reason to think that the Trump administration’s policy toward Russia would involve cooperation and harmony and seek to reverse the acrimony and dysfunction that had come to characterize relations between the Kremlin and the Obama administration. During the campaign, Mr. Trump fawned over Russia’s assertively proud leader, Vladimir Putin, praising him for “doing a great job” and calling him a “stronger leader” than Barack Obama. As to policy, he seemed almost an apologist for Mr. Putin’s aggressive behavior in Syria, his annexation of Crimea and his transparent efforts to undermine the NATO alliance. Findings by the American intelligence community that Russia had intervened in the election on Mr. Trump’s behalf seemed further evidence of a bromance, if not something more sinister. Three months into the Trump presidency, RussiaAmerican relations are as tense as ever, a casualty of Mr. Putin’s ruthless behavior and Mr. Trump’s changing views and whiplash approach to policy, infuriating Russians who had every reason to believe they would have a pal in the White House. While both men could end up losers, there is a greater chance that Mr. Trump, a foreign policy neophyte who has bungled his presidential debut, will find it hard to prevail over the nefarious ways of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent. Mr. Putin’s approach to international engagement, which involves expanding efforts to meddle in countries from Europe to Libya and beyond, has been largely consistent; Mr. Trump’s has been anything but. This, in turn, has shaken the confidence of allies that depend on America for prudent, steady leadership. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s trip to Moscow on Wednesday was further evidence of how low RussianAmerican relations have sunk since Mr. Trump, reversing earlier opposition to intervening in Syria’s civil war, launched 59 cruise missiles against a Syrian air base after President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians. The Russians have strongly supported Mr. Assad despite his brutality. Russian leaders kept Mr. Tillerson wondering for most of the day whether an encounter with Mr. Putin would take place. Once they did meet — it was the first between Mr. Putin and a top Trump administration official — the results were not encouraging. Mr. Putin said bilateral trust has “degraded,” while Mr. Tillerson said relations were “at a low point.” Back in New York, Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s chemical attack, the eighth time it has protected Mr. Assad from diplomatic action. Since the airstrikes, administration officials have steadily increased their criticism of Russia, which has variously denied that a chemical attack occurred and has blamed it on anti-Assad rebels, giving Mr. Trump, the master of misdirection, a taste of his own medicine. On Tuesday, the White House accused Russia of a cover-up. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump weighed in, saying Russia most likely knew of Mr. Assad’s plan to gas his own people and promising that Mr. Putin will come under increasing pressure to abandon Mr. Assad — “truly an evil person” — and to help end the Syrian civil war. Another significant shift in the administration’s position has come from Mr. Tillerson who as chief executive of Exxon Mobil once received a friendship medal from Mr. Putin but is now ruling out any early end to international sanctions unless Russia returns Crimea to Ukraine and stops meddling elsewhere. Some of Mr. Trump’s critics have wondered whether he ordered the airstrikes against Syria, at least partly, to deflect attention from allegations that he and his allies had collaborated with the Kremlin during the presidential campaign. Congressional and F.B.I. investigations into these matters must continue. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the F.B.I. last summer obtained a secret court order to monitor the communications of a Trump adviser, Carter Page, the clearest evidence so far that Mr. Page may have been acting as an agent of a foreign power. One important question is whether the chill in the relationship will make it harder for Mr. Trump to engage Moscow in the struggle to defeat the Islamic State in Syria; cooperation on that front, always questionable, now seems impossible. Another is whether an angry Mr. Putin will intensify his mischief in Europe. He doesn’t have the strongest hand — his economy is in trouble — but he has thousands of nuclear weapons and a proven ability to chip away at the Western liberal order. The challenge is for Mr. Trump to develop a coherent strategy to address those threats.

Arthur C. Brooks Contributing Writer

Republican members of Congress have a haunted look about them. Ordinarily, this is the time of year when they are in the best mood — the April recess is here, meaning a few friendly, sparsely attended town hall meetings, and then home early for family dinner. Not this year. Many are facing large, well-organized crowds who are out for blood. Even in deep red states like Utah and South Carolina, progressive groups are making these events a living hell for the Republicans, just as the Tea Partyers did to Democrats early in President Barack Obama’s first term. Knowing what they’ll face, many Republicans are bailing out of town halls altogether. Is this kind of political protest good for American democracy or bad? And is the best response to cancel the meetings or show up and take your lumps? One’s answer often depends on who is doing

the protesting. Many liberals who disdained the Tea Party revolt like the progressive “resistance” movement, and for conservatives the inverse. For a more objective view, we should turn to history and social science. Many of America’s founders saw protests as a useful force against tyranny and believed crowds could still act with restraint and self-discipline. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1787 letter to Abigail Adams, “I like a little rebellion now and then.” Clearly, the man feared aloof and insulated leaders more than he feared ochlocracy (mob rule). But American philosophers have usually held a more jaundiced view of crowds. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, “The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “The Conduct of Life”: “Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them

up, and draw individuals out of them.” These thinkers argued that crowds add up to something less than the sum of their parts. The principle behind this is called “deindividuation,” in which an individual’s social constraints are diminished and distorted by Members being part of a crowd that forms of Congress to express a facing furious particular point crowds could of view. The learn a lesson French psychologist Gustave Le from social Bon first exscience and plained this start treating concept in his protesters magisterial 1895 as individuals. text “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Le Bon found that crowds were inherently “unanimous, emotional and intellectually weak.” Lots of research confirms this, showing that deindividuation can lower inhibitions against immoral behavior. In

one of my favorite studies, researchers set up a bowl of candy for Halloween trick-or-treaters, told them to take just one piece and then left them alone. Some of the children were in anonymous groups, others were by themselves. When kids were part of a group, 60 percent took more than one piece of candy. When they were by themselves but not asked their names, 20 percent cheated. But when they were alone and asked their names, only 10 percent took more than they were allotted. Of course, it stands to reason that deindividuation could improve individuals instead of making them worse. We can all think of cases in which we have been swept up in a wave of kindness and compassion in a group, even in spite of our personal feelings. Group polarization, in which individuals are pushed emotionally in the general direction of the crowd, can be either positive or negative. So are political protest crowds good or bad? The best answer is probably “it depends.” Regardless, they are a fact of life for politicians. The studies above reveal one common error that politicians on both sides make when facing an angry crowd — and one big opportunity. The common error is when leaders treat the whole group like one individual. Remember Le Bon’s theory that a crowd is stronger, angrier and less ideologically flexible than an individual. Getting irate or defensive will always be counterproductive. Similarly, it is mostly futile to try talking over a protest chant. The opportunity is to “re-individuate” audience members — to treat people as individuals and not as part of a mass. This is done not by acknowledging questions shouted anonymously but by asking audience members to physically separate from the mass and identify themselves if they wish to speak. When people detach from a group, the research suggests they will become more ethical, rational and intelligent. Will there still be that former trick-ortreater who would have snatched the whole bowl of candy despite being alone and giving his name? Sometimes. But this approach maximizes the likelihood of a civilized, respectful exchange of ideas and concerns. A re-individuation strategy is not an attempt to subvert the legitimate political expression of demonstrators. On the contrary, this approach treats a concerned assembly of people as individuals with a right to be heard, as opposed to a faceless mass to be placated. As such, working to re-individuate a crowd is to offer a sign of respect, and it could help forge a path toward civility and intelligence in American politics. Jefferson, Emerson and maybe even your member of Congress could all agree on that.

is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. ARTHUR C. BROOKS

ERON HARE

Ecuadoreans have right to recount Andrés Páez Benalcázar

QUITO, ECUADOR The people — hun-

dreds and thousands of them — took to the streets to peacefully demand a recount of the votes. Many Ecuadoreans simply did not believe the announcement of the results of the April 2 election, which gave the victory to the ruling party’s candidate, Lenin Moreno, with 51.15 percent of the vote, and said Guillermo Lasso, the Creo-Suma party candidate, received 48.85 percent. Ecuadoreans need to clear up any doubts about what happened the day of the runoff presidential election. Since then, those doubts have become a dark cloud hanging over President Rafael Correa’s government, especially over the National Electoral Council (known as the C.N.E. for its initials in Spanish), which is tightly controlled by the executive branch. I ran as the vice-presidential candidate on the opposition ticket, campaigning on a platform of change. We wanted to rescue the democratic institutions seriously affected during the decade of Mr. Correa’s presidency. We wanted to construct a government of national consensus, respect differences and put an end to political persecution. A strong believer in democratic principles, I would like to accept the election results, but I cannot, because the will of the people appears to have been violated. I refuse to be an accomplice to fraud. What Ecuador needs is an orderly return to a democracy in which all political actors can participate on equal terms. For this, its citizens must believe in the results of their elections. We are not insisting that we won the election. We are asking for a manual recount of the votes, supervised by both parties, and we will respect the findings. The health of our democracy greatly depends on passing this test, and that’s why the C.N.E. should satisfy our demand. Why do we think the election was fraudulent? Because of what we witnessed on election night. We were on a winning streak — close but steady — when the National Electoral Council’s

official website went dark. The votes began to be counted at 5 p.m., when the polls closed. With 21,515 voting sheets transmitted and verified by us, that is, 53.8 percent of the votes, we were ahead. When the National Electoral Council ceased to function, our team continued counting votes one by one, made copies of a great majority of the voting sheets and calculated that with 32,878 voting sheets counted — 82.2 percent of the total — we were still ahead. When the National Electoral Council website came back online, the official candidate was suddenly winning. We knew that with 82.2 percent of the votes counted, it was impossible to reverse the tide, so we decided to analyze each and every vote to try to understand what had happened. In analyzing the data of the election given to us by the C.N.E., we discovered that when the votes from 95.3 percent of the polling stations were added up, we had won, but that in a small number of the polling stations — 4.7 percent — something very strange had taken place. At these, almost 80 percent of the votes were in favor of the official candidate, tipping the election. In all the other polling stations, there was a close but consistent trend in favor of our opposition party.

These “unusual” (for lack of a better word) polling stations gave the victory to Mr. Correa’s candidate. We considered the possibility that these polling stations didn’t really exist. Since they were in rural zones, they should have been surrounded by others with similar results. But that did not happen — the stations with overwhelming results for the official candidate were simply an anomaly, a statThe country’s istical impossibility. democracy is Furthermore, being tested as we found an mistrust of the additional 4,243 official results polling stations favoring the of the official candidate presidential where the voting election sheets showed continues. irregularities such as numerical inconsistencies, no signatures or signatures different from those in our copies. We believe this election was rigged. Once again, the National Electoral Council has proved itself loyal to the populist government of President Correa. It has lost credibility in the eyes of many Ecuadoreans. The government has further

weakened its credibility by meeting peaceful protest with violence, threats and repression. On Friday, it raided the offices of Cedatos, one of Ecuador’s most respected polling firms, alleging an “attack on the public faith” because it had reported an exit poll indicating that Guillermo Lasso and I had won the election with 53 percent of the vote. In a tweet, President Correa threatened a group that had carried out a quick vote count, Participación Ciudadana, and had announced to the press it couldn’t declare who had won because of a technical tie between the two candidates. Its director received death threats. The windshield of my car was broken, and my bodyguards were injured. Mr. Lasso and I thought we would be arrested at any moment on charges of disturbing the peace. The government party threatened us and said it would bring us to trial on criminal charges for questioning the electoral results. Losing the election was never an option for Mr. Correa’s party. His government has operated for a decade as an absolute power that maintains control over the courts, Congress and the security apparatus. Without checks and balances, the country has suffered from authoritarianism, arbitrariness, persecution and systematic corruption that offers rewards and unlimited power to government officials. So many officials are tangled up in a web of corruption that the possibility of a new government that would investigate them was too great a risk to run. Two days ago, Mr. Lasso gave the C.N.E. documents of the many violations that support his claims of electoral fraud. We demand a recount. We have asked our supporters not to resort to violence, to protest in a firm but peaceful way. If Mr. Correa’s government insists on imposing a candidate whose rightful election is in doubt, the new government will not have the legitimacy to govern a divided country. For the good of Ecuador and of democracy, it is necessary to establish the truth about these elections.

was a vicepresidential candidate in the 2017 election and is a former assemblyman in Ecuador’s National Assembly. ANDRÉS PÁEZ BENALCÁZAR

EDU LEON/LATINCONTENT, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Protesting against official results of the elections this month in Quito, Ecuador.

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 11

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

How to stand up to Trump Nicholas Kristof

BOSTON After President Trump’s

HENG IN LIANHE ZAOBAO (SINGAPORE). CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL/NYTS

Kosovo feels Russia’s grip, via Serbia HOXHAJ, FROM PAGE 11

be expected to create, at Russia’s behest, a sphere of influence by exploiting and inciting Serb minorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and, to an extent, Croatia and Macedonia — leaving them weak states to dominate while it pursues entry to the European Union just when the union is preoccupied by internal challenges of its own and the international order itself is exposed to multiple uncertainties. While Kosovo is a target of Serbia because it represents freedom from Serb occupation, it is also a humiliating reminder to Russia of the day when, at the end of the 1999 war, its forces tried to occupy the Pristina International Airport only to be confronted and superseded by NATO troops. Its efforts to control an entire sector of Kosovo also went unheeded, and NATO protects Kosovo to this day. Serbia’s strategy against Kosovo is to use the minority Serb population here to oppose institutions and provoke tensions. The tactics include disinformation campaigns, trying to arrest or extradite Kosovar citizens and political leaders, and dispatching a train into Kosovo emblazoned with signs reading “Kosovo is Serbia.” When Kosovo halted that train, Serbia threatened to send its army into Kosovo. Serbia maintains illegal parallel agencies to serve Serbs within Kosovo’s territory, harming domestic sovereignty and impeding the integration of Kosovo’s Serbs. It uses its official visits to Kosovo to propagandize and spread ethnic antagonism. It promoted the building of a wall in Mitrovica, to physically split that mixedpopulation northern city along ethnic lines; the barrier was finally removed

at the Kosovo government’s insistence. Similar provocative acts, backed by Russia, have taken place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Montenegro, which experienced a failed coup attempt that would have shaken that country’s democratic institutions and prevented Montenegro from membership in NATO, a process now underway. The most worrisome development is Serbia’s rapid militarization, with Russia supplying air defense systems and other sophisticated military equipment. Serbia’s expanded military serves as a tool for pre-emptive coercion of its neighbors while RusSerbia’s sia asserts its aggressive own influence in the region. policies These dangerfundamentally ous geopolitical deviate from games come at a any genuine time when commitment Balkan nations to normalize should be on a relations path of stability with Kosovo. and progress. Instead, Serbia is blocking that path. During a meeting of the Western Balkans prime ministers last month in Sarajevo, a common market in the Balkans was proposed. But regional economic integration would not be viable until Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina recognize Kosovo’s independence and accept its equal participation and representation in all regional bodies. Serbia’s aggressive policies, then, fundamentally deviate from any genuine commitment to normalize relations with Kosovo. They run counter to European integration and pose a new security threat for all countries in the

PIERRE CROM/GETTY IMAGES

A Serbian nationalist mural in the Serbian area of Mitrovica, Kosovo, in February.

Western Balkans. Why has Serbia returned to its old belligerent habits? In addition to its collaboration with Russia, it has never dealt properly with its genocidal past. Serbia remains unwilling to deal with the war crimes of the Milosevic regime, with which many of Serbia’s current nationalist leaders were associated. Their denials of responsibility for war crimes in Kosovo only entrench a culture of impunity, which in turn encourages Serbia to increase its military power, defy any European integration path and fulfill its role as Russia’s advance guard. Our region’s security cannot be guaranteed by flaunting military strength and ensnaring countries. It can be guaranteed only by a joint commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration and democratic peace. It is important, then, for all to see Serbia as it is, not as it pretends to be. It is important to see Russia’s use of Serbia in its grand scheme to regain power. Both countries’ provocations toward the region cannot be minimized or ignored. Those acts pose the most serious threat not only to the region, but also to international peace and security. Despite these threats, Kosovo remains committed to the normalization of relations with Serbia, facilitated by the European Union and supported by the United States. This is the way to promote cooperation — two sovereign countries reaching toward Euro-Atlantic integration and improving the lives of their peoples. Yet Serbia continues to seek expansion beyond its borders, and the international community must be prepared to take necessary measures for the region’s peace and stability. Russia not only supports Serbia’s ambitions; it also underwrites them. Russia has never been welcomed as a broker to the Balkans. The United States and the European Union are invested in promoting democracy, reconstruction and human security, while Russia invests in promoting authoritarianism, destruction and human insecurity. It is incumbent, then, for the United States, the European Union and NATO to implement all necessary peaceful and preventive measures to maintain security and stability in the Balkans. NATO’s continued presence in Kosovo is critical not only to Kosovo but also to the entire region. The very best of the democratic world’s preventive diplomacy will be called upon to allow the Balkans to pass the last milestone toward a sustained peace and prevent a victory for the region’s darkest forces.

is the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Kosovo. ENVER HOXHAJ

How 70 years of fake news ended BECKERMAN, FROM PAGE 9

Alexeyeva, the Chronicle represented something very different and without precedent in the Soviet Union: “A source of honest information about the hidden layers of our society.” The K.G.B. did not take kindly to this business, and Gorbanevskaya was only the first of many editors to be arrested and imprisoned. By the 1970s, though, this fact-based evidence-gathering had become the central modus operandi of the dissidents, especially among its most prominent figures like Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. These were men and women who, in some cases, were professionally inclined toward facts — many of them were scientists, a vocation they adopted, even before they embraced dissidence, out of a conscious effort to move away from any field that could be distorted by Communist ideology. In 1975, the Soviet Union, thinking it was outsmarting the West, signed on to the Helsinki Final Act. The pact offered international recognition of its territorial gains following World War II, but it also demanded adherence to international human rights norms. Moscow

dissidents saw this as an opportunity: They could use this commitment against the apparatchiks, by claiming the right to publish every violation. The Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, as the monitoring organization became known, followed the style of the Chronicle, producing a range of reports, all scrupulously researched and running sometimes to hundreds of pages. Among the first were investigations of the persecution of Crimean Tatars and the poor caloric intake of prisoners. The reports were delivered to Western embassies, as well as circulated in samizdat form. Soon, copycat watchdog groups popped up in other Eastern bloc countries, and even in the United States. The one based in New York, Helsinki Watch, became the organization we know today as Human Rights Watch. Did this underground quest for truth based on scrupulous, objective reporting hasten the downfall of the Soviet Union? That is hard to say, since so many other factors, economic ones especially, also contributed to the collapse of Russian communism in the late 1980s. But it did impact the way the Soviet

Union ended. Unlike China, which also faced a major challenge to its authority in 1989, the Soviet Union could not hope to reform itself through perestroika alone. As Mr. Gorbachev’s adoption of the word “glasnost” conceded, there had to be change in civil society as well. The dissidents had created an expectation that a different kind of language was possible, one that expressed a reality not filtered through Soviet imperatives. They craved honesty and transparency in a country where even the suicide rate was considered a state secret. Samizdat provided the outlet. And facts, relentlessly stacked one on top of another, became the dissidents’ way of building the different Russia they hoped might one day emerge and overcome all the lying.

is the author of “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone,” a history of the Soviet Jewry movement, and a forthcoming book on social media before the internet. GAL BECKERMAN

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

election, a wave of furious opposition erupted. It was an emotional mix of denial and anger, the first two stages of grief, and it wasn’t very effective. Yet increasingly that has matured into thoughtful efforts to channel the passion into a movement organized toward results. One example: the wave of phone calls to congressional offices that torpedoed the Republican “health care plan.” Yes, Trump opponents lost the election and we have to recognize that elections have consequences. But if “resistance” has a lefty ring to it, it can also be framed as a patriotic campaign to protect America from someone who we think would damage it. So what are the lessons from resistance movements around the world that have actually succeeded? I’ve been quizzing the experts, starting with Gene Sharp, a scholar here in Boston. Sharp’s works — now in at least 45 languages and available free online — helped the Baltic countries win freedom from Russia, later guided students in bringing democracy to Serbia, and deeply influenced the strategy of Arab Spring protesters. Sharp is THE expert on challenging authoritarians, and orders for his writings have surged since Trump’s election. Today Sharp is 89 and in fading health. But his longtime collaborator, Jamila Raqib, has been holding workshops for anti-Trump activists, and there have even been similar sessions for civil servants in Washington exploring how they should serve under a leader they distrust. The main message Sharp and Raqib offered is that effectiveness does not come from pouring out into the street in symbolic protests. It requires meticulous research, networking and preparation. “Think!” Sharp said. “Think before you do anything. You need a lot of knowledge first.” His work emphasizes grass-roots organizing, searching out

weak spots in an administration — and patience before turning to 198 nonviolent methods he has put into a list, from strikes to consumer boycotts to mock awards. Raqib recommended pragmatic efforts seeking a particular outcome, not just a vague yearning for the end of Trump. When pushed, she said that calls for a general strike in February were insufficiently organized, and that the Women’s March on Washington, which had its first protest the day after Inauguration Day, will ideally become anchored in a larger strategy for change. But she thinks the Day Without Immigrants protest was well crafted, and the same for the bodega strike by Yemeni immigrants. Sam Daley-Harris, another maestro of effective protest, agrees on a focus on results, not just symbolic protest. He has overseen groups like Results and the Citizens Climate Lobby that have had outsize influence on policy, so I asked him what citizens upset at Trump should do. “The overarching answer is to work with your member of Congress,” Daley-Harris told me. He suggested focusing on a particular issue that you can become deeply knowledgeable about. Then work with others to push for a meeting with a member of Don’t just Congress, a state hold a sign. lawmaker or Experts share even a legislative staff member. how to resist He recomand get results. mended speaking courteously — anyone too hostile is dismissed and loses influence — and being very specific about which bill you want the person to support or oppose. I’m encouraged by the increasing savvy of the resistance efforts, with excellent online resources cropping up and grass-roots groups like EmergeAmerica.org and RunforSomething.net developing to train people who want to run for political office. Students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government have organized “Resistance School,” a kind of online teach-in to sharpen the tools activists need. The first 90-minute webcast had more than 50,000 streams. “We wanted to move away from a defensive response to an offensive response, not just marching but also

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Observing the Day Without Immigrants in New York in February.

thinking of longterm strategy,” one of the organizers, Shanoor Seervai, told me. To students of resistance — patriotic resistance! — let me offer three lessons from my own experience reporting on pro-democracy movements over decades, from China to Egypt, Mongolia to Taiwan. First, advocates are often universityeducated elites who can come across as patronizing. So skip the lofty rhetoric and emphasize issues of pocketbooks and corruption. Centrist voters may not care whether Trump is riding roughshod over institutions, but they’ll care if he rips them off or costs them jobs. Second, movements must always choose between purity and breadth — and usually they overdo the purity. It’s often possible to achieve more with a broader coalition, cooperating with people one partially disagrees with. I think it was a mistake, for example, for the Women’s March to disdain “prolife” feminists. Third, nothing deflates an authoritarian more than ridicule. When Serbian youths challenged the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, they put his picture on a barrel and rolled it down the street, allowing passers-by to whack it with a bat. In recruiting for the Trump resistance, Stephen Colbert may be more successful than a handful of angry Democratic senators. Trump can survive denunciations, but I’m less sure that in the long run he can withstand mockery.

.. 12 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

well

Tackling diabetes with video chats

To add years to your life, running is the best way

New digital programs help patients control disease, or even prevent its onset BY ANAHAD O’CONNOR

About a year and a half ago, Robin Collier and her husband, Wayne, were like millions of other Americans: overweight and living with Type 2 diabetes. Despite having tried multiple diet plans, the couple could not seem to lose much weight. Then Ms. Collier’s doctor told her she was going to need daily insulin shots to control her diabetes. That was the motivation she needed. “I made up my mind right then and there,” said Ms. Collier, 62, an administrator at an accounting firm in Lafayette, Ind. “I said to myself, ‘I’m not going on insulin. I’m too young to have this disease.’ ” Instead, Ms. Collier and her husband entered a study sponsored by a company called Virta Health, one of a new crop of high-tech companies that have designed programs aimed at helping people prevent or even reverse their diabetes. On the program, patients have a video chat with a remote Virta doctor, who consults with their primary care doctor, reviews their blood tests and medical history, and makes diet and drug recommendations. While studies show that a variety of diets can benefit people with Type 2 diabetes, Virta, based in San Francisco, takes a low-carbohydrate approach, training patients to swap food like pastries, pasta and sugary snacks for veggie omelets, almonds and salads with grilled chicken and beef. Every day, patients use an app to upload their blood sugar levels, blood pressure, body weight and other measurements. A health coach, usually a registered dietitian, monitors their data and checks in by phone, text or email to discuss any problems or just to provide encouragement. Ms. Collier has lost 75 pounds and has avoided taking insulin. Her husband has lost 45 pounds and was able to stop two diabetes medications. Both are still in the program, which she called “life changing,” as part of an ongoing clinical trial. Initial results that examined the program’s impact on 241 Type 2 diabetics, published in the journal JMIR Diabetes in March, found that 56 percent had lowered their blood sugar to nondiabetic levels after 10 weeks. About 90 percent had reduced or stopped their use of insulin altogether, and three-quarters had lost at least 5 percent of their body weight. After six months, 90 percent remained on the Virta program, and most continued to lose weight and improve their blood sugar control. Dr. Martin J. Abrahamson, an endocrinologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who has no financial ties to Virta, said the new study was “a great proof of concept” but that he would like to see longer-term results. Still, he believes that these kinds of digital programs will be critical for patients who need more support than the current model of treatment provides. “People with diabetes have to manage their diabetes 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, but

FITNESS

GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LYNDON FRENCH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Robin and Wayne Collier lost weight by following the low-carbohydrate diet in a clinical trial by Virta, which includes regular check-ins by phone or text with a health coach.

In a study of Virta’s program, 56 percent of Type 2 diabetics had lowered their blood sugar to nondiabetic levels after 10 weeks.

A healthy home-cooked meal might include grain-free buns for grilled burgers.

Using the Virta app to upload blood sugar levels, blood pressure and body weight.

most Type 2 diabetics see a doctor four times a year at most. In between those visits, they are largely left on their own — and many end up struggling with their diets, their blood sugar and other complicated aspects of their care. “When you think of the amount of time they actually spend in a health care professional’s office getting counseling and support, it’s negligible. “Developing remote care models is going to be the key if we’re going to have some sort of impact on improving glucose control for the millions of people with diabetes,” he said. “It’s a much

more scalable model than seeing people in a doctor’s office.” While Virta works with patients who already have Type 2 diabetes, other high-tech programs, like Omada Health, another San Francisco start-up, target the 86 million Americans who have prediabetes, which means they have high blood sugar and other major risk factors for the disease. Omada trains people to follow a diet and exercise program that was shown in a large clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to lower the risk of progression to diabetes by 58 percent.

To help people stick to their program, the company assigns them to online support groups that meet regularly, and it pairs them with personal health coaches who counsel them through private messages and phone calls. Such programs aren’t cheap. The outof-pocket cost for Omada, for example, is about $130 a month. But the program is also covered by health plans such as Kaiser Permanente and Humana, as well as large employers like Lowe’s, Costco and Iron Mountain. Virta’s outof-pocket cost is $400 a month, but the company offers financial assistance based on a patient’s ability to pay, and it is low or no cost for patients whose employer or health plan sponsors it. Diabetes is a costly disease — accounting for $176 billion in direct medical costs in the United States alone every year — and digital health companies are betting that they can offset costs for patients and their insurers in the long run. A large study sponsored by Omada and published in the journal PLOS One in October looked at 1,121 overweight or obese people on the company’s program and found that participants lost an average of 7 percent of their body weight after 26 weeks. The researchers estimated that patients who sustained their improvements could reduce their health

care costs by up to $14,000 over 10 years. Virta was created by a tech entrepreneur, Sami Inkinen, who co-founded the real estate website Trulia in 2004 and sold it a decade later to a rival website, Zillow, for $2.5 billion. Mr. Inkinen was inspired by his own personal brush with metabolic disease. Despite being an endurance athlete and triathlon world champion, he discovered five years ago that he was prediabetic. Eventually he determined that his diet was the culprit: Cutting out sugary foods, sports drinks and refined carbohydrates allowed him to reclaim his health, he said. Mr. Inkinen secured $37 million in venture capital and recruited a team of doctors, dietitians, nutrition scientists and tech experts to build Virta, whose long-term mission “is to reverse Type 2 diabetes in 100 million people by 2025,” he said. “I simply thought that millions of people living with Type 2 diabetes deserved better than lifelong and costly ‘management’ of the disease,” he said. Dr. Robert E. Ratner, the former chief scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association and an adviser to Virta, said that the two-year clinical trial of the program currently underway would provide more data about the extent of Virta’s effectiveness over the long haul. “We don’t have the final answers by any means,” said Dr. Ratner, who is also a professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine. “But this is a positive step forward to improving the lives of people with diabetes.”

Learning from our parents’ mistakes with heart disease PERSONAL HEALTH

JANE E. BRODY

Narrowed, aging blood vessels, which put most older American adults at risk for heart disease and strokes, are not inevitable. This fact was underscored by a newly published study of a population in the Bolivian Amazon. Among these indigenous South Americans, known as the Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay), coronary atherosclerosis was found to be one-fifth as common than in the United States. CT scans of the hearts of 705 Tsimane adults aged 40 to 94 revealed that nearly nine in 10 had clean coronary arteries and faced no risk of heart disease. The research team estimated that an 80-year-old in the Tsimane group has the same vascular age as an American in his mid-50s. I’ll return to the likely reasons and the lifesaving lessons we can all learn from them even now after a discussion of a half-century of improvements in the heart health of Americans. In the early 1960s, when I began writing about science and health, American hearts were in dismal condition. Heart disease, an uncommon cause of death at the turn of the 20th century, had become the most common cause of death by midcentury. Coronary mortality peaked in 1968, when it was not unusual for Americans to die of a heart attack in their 50s or 60s. At the time, about 40 percent of adults smoked, doctors deemed a cholesterol level of 240 milligrams per deciliter to be normal and nearly half of young adults had blood pressure readings now considered high. Had the coronary death rate continued its meteoric rise, today more than 1.7 million Americans would suc-

cumb to heart disease each year. Instead, there’s been a significant decline, to some 425,000 deaths a year, with a commensurate increase in longevity of 8.7 years between 1970 and 2010. More than 70 percent of the rise in life expectancy is attributable to fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease, primarily heart attacks and strokes. The countless millions of Americans who have escaped a premature cardiovascular death can thank in part a half-century of public health measures and other preventive medicine initiatives that are now threatened by proposed cuts in the federal budget. The fall in cigarette smoking alone had a major impact, having declined to about 15 percent of adults. (Alas, teenagers, whose smoking rates Too often, the were once well American below those of adults, have all approach to caught up.) heart disease is but Smoking by itself like shutting increases the the barn door risk of heart disease; it raises after the horse blood pressure, has escaped. diminishes exercise tolerance, decreases protective HDL cholesterol and increases the blood’s tendency to clot. But when smoking is combined with other coronary risk factors, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity or Type 2 diabetes, the risks of a heart attack, stroke and an early coronary death are greatly increased. A decline in average blood levels of cholesterol also played an important role in the drop in coronary deaths. Today only about 12 percent of American adults have high total cholesterol levels — 240 milligrams or greater, although nearly a third still have ele-

PAUL ROGERS

vated levels — 130 milligrams or more — of artery-damaging LDL cholesterol. People with high total cholesterol face nearly twice the risk for heart disease as those with ideal levels (200 milligrams or less), and a high level of LDL cholesterol — above 100 milligrams — is even more problematic. Yet even now, fewer than half of adults with elevated LDL levels are being treated to reduce it. Recognizing and treating high blood pressure, based on the findings of a large number of studies of promising medications, has helped to save the hearts and lives of countless Americans who might otherwise have succumbed to coronary disease since its peak incidence. Nonetheless, today one adult in three has high blood pressure, and of those only half have it under control. Another third of adults have blood

pressure that is higher than normal, though not yet in the high blood pressure range. Too often, the American approach to heart disease amounts to shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped. Once in trouble with life-threatening arterial damage, patients are usually treated with stents in hopes of keeping the vessels from closing down, at a cost of $30,000 to $50,000 for each procedure. But while having a stent in place can indeed be helpful for those in the throes of a heart attack, at least eight randomized clinical trials found that for people with stable coronary artery disease, they offer no benefit over standard noninvasive medical treatment — diet, exercise and perhaps treatment with an inexpensive statin. Yet, more than half of stable coronary patients, who may have symptoms like chest pain during vigorous exercise,

are treated with stents before they’ve tried a more conservative therapy. So what can we learn from the Tsimane? Are medications, treatment with stents and other costly procedures our only hope for cutting coronary mortality further? Yes, if millions of Americans continue to spurn changes in their living habits that have been shown over and over again to be protective. The Tsimane have a forager-horticulturist lifestyle. Tsimane men are physically active for an average of six to seven hours a day — accumulating about 17,000 steps a day — and Tsimane women are active for four to six hours a day, walking about 15,000 steps a day. Smoking is rare in this population. The Tsimane diet derives 72 percent of its calories from carbohydrates, though not the overly refined starches and sugars consumed by most Americans. The Tsimane eat unprocessed complex carbs high in fiber, like brown rice, plantain, manioc, corn, nuts and fruit. But the Tsimane are not vegetarians. Protein accounts for 14 percent of their calories and comes primarily from animal meats that, unlike American meats, are very low in artery-clogging saturated fat. This does not mean we must return to hunting and gathering or subsistence farming to protect our hearts. But we’d do well to adapt the Tsimane example and modify our modern highfat, highly processed, low-fiber and high-sugar diet, and our extremely sedentary lifestyle. Most Americans today are nearly or completely inactive. Barely 20 percent of adults get the recommended minimum of 30 minutes a day of physical activity, and fewer than half of adults get enough activity to achieve any meaningful health benefits.

Running may be the single most effective exercise to increase life expectancy, according to a new review and analysis of past research about exercise and premature death. The new study found that, compared with nonrunners, runners tended to live about three additional years, even if they run slowly or sporadically and smoke, drink or are overweight. No other form of exercise that researchers looked at showed comparable impacts on life span. The findings come as a follow-up to a study done three years ago, in which a group of distinguished exercise scientists scrutinized data from a large trove of medical and fitness tests conducted at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. That analysis found that as little as five minutes of daily running was associated with prolonged life span. After that study was released, the researchers were inundated with queries from fellow scientists and the general public, said Duck-chul Lee, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University and a co-author of the study. Some people asked if other activities, such as walking, were likely to be as beneficial as running for reducing mortality risks. High-mileage runners wondered if they could be doing too much and if at some undefined number of miles or hours running might become counterproductive and even contribute to premature mortality. And a few people questioned whether running really added materially to people’s life span. Could it be, they asked rather peevishly, that if in order to reduce your risk of dying by a year, you had to spend the equivalent of a year’s worth of time on the trails or track, producing no discernible net gain? So for the new study, which was published last month in Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, Dr. Lee and his colleagues set out to address those and related An hour of issues by reanarunning lyzing data from the Cooper Instistatistically tute and also lengthens life examining reexpectancy by sults from a seven hours. number of other large-scale recent studies looking into the associations between exercise and mortality. Over all, this new review reinforced the findings of the earlier research, the scientists determined. Cumulatively, the data indicated that running, whatever someone’s pace or mileage, dropped a person’s risk of premature death by almost 40 percent, a benefit that held true even when the researchers controlled for smoking, drinking and a history of health problems such as hypertension or obesity. Using those numbers, the scientists then determined that if every nonrunner who had been part of the reviewed studies took up the sport, there would have been 16 percent fewer deaths over all, and 25 percent fewer fatal heart attacks. (One caveat: the participants in those studies were mostly white and middle class.) Perhaps most interesting, the researchers calculated that, hour for hour, running statistically returns more time to people’s lives than it consumes. Figuring two hours per week of training, since that was the average reported by runners in the Cooper Institute study, the researchers estimated that a typical runner would spend less than six months actually running over the course of almost 40 years, but could expect an increase in life expectancy of 3.2 years, for a net gain of about 2.8 years. In concrete terms, an hour of running statistically lengthens life expectancy by seven hours, the researchers report. The gains in life expectancy are capped at around three extra years, Dr. Lee said, however much people run. The good news is that prolonged running does not seem to become counterproductive for longevity, he continues, according to the data he and his colleagues reviewed. Improvements in life expectancy generally plateaued at about four hours of running per week, Dr. Lee said. But they did not decline. Meanwhile, other kinds of exercise also reliably benefited life expectancy, the researchers found, but not to the same degree as running. Walking, cycling and other activities, even if they required the same exertion as running, typically dropped the risk of premature death by about 12 percent. Why running should be so uniquely potent against early mortality remains uncertain, Dr. Lee said, but it is likely that it combats many of the common risk factors for early death, including high blood pressure and extra body fat, especially around the middle.

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 13

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports Carmelo Anthony’s team? Yes, but it’s not the Knicks BAYAMÓN, P.R.

For N.B.A. player, owning Puerto Rican soccer club ‘is a long-term investment’ BY SCOTT CACCIOLA

Tom Payne, the president of Puerto Rico F.C., is too anxious to sit during his team’s soccer matches. So he paces the concourse here at Estadio Juan Ramón Loubriel, a converted baseball stadium in a commercial neighborhood about 10 miles from San Juan, and fields text messages from his boss. “Why aren’t they tackling more?” the boss wants to know. “We need to get tougher!” The boss is Carmelo Anthony, whose role as owner of Puerto Rico F.C., a second-year club in the North American Soccer League, serves multiple purposes. It is a form of community outreach, a pull he felt as a result of his Puerto Rican heritage. It is an investment opportunity. And it is a welcome diversion from his day job in the N.B.A. as a starting forward for the New York Knicks. “I try to watch every game,” Anthony said. After another disastrous season for the Knicks, Anthony’s future with the organization seems tenuous at best. Phil Jackson, the team president, wants to ship him elsewhere, which would require Anthony to waive his no-trade clause. Anthony has warned of reading “the writing on the wall.” Amid so much dysfunction, at least he has his other team — the one he gets to run. The one with playoff hopes. The one that is not wedded to the triangle offense. The one with the team president who actually listens to him. “It’s nice when his basketball season lessens, because we get a little more time with him,” Payne said. In September, before training camp with the Knicks, Anthony visited Puerto Rico with several teammates — a bonding trip of sorts. But he carved out time for soccer-related business. He spent five hours with Payne at the team’s offices in San Juan, poring over budget reports. He badgered members of the vid-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCOTT MCINTYRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Left, the Puerto Rico F.C. soccer team, owned by Carmelo Anthony, after practice. Above, the team’s Jordi Quintillà, center, in a Caribbean Club Championship match last month.

eo team for promotional materials. He gave the players pep talks. “You can tell he’s invested,” goalkeeper Trevor Spangenberg said. “He’s not just a name attached to the team that we never see. He’s been here. He’s spoken with us individually.” For a meeting with officials from a local bank, Anthony decked himself out in his Team U.S.A. sweatsuit from the Olympics. “And he looked fantastic,” Payne said. “Only an athlete at Carmelo’s level could get away with that.” Anthony also rummaged through one of the team’s storage closets, which was full of gear: T-shirts, hoodies, hats, shorts. He wanted to know if he could take a few items home. “He was in there for a half-hour,” Payne said. “And I’m like: ‘Carmelo, you can have anything you want. It’s not like everyone else here. You paid for this stuff.’ ” Anthony grew up in Baltimore but visited Puerto Rico, where his father

NON SEQUITUR

League in 2009, before the franchise folded. Anthony, a longtime soccer fan, said he had observed how the game had grown in recent years, particularly among youths. So when he learned of

“You can tell he’s invested. He’s not just a name attached to the team that we never see. He’s been here.’’ the opportunity to start a new club, he saw potential: to build something of his own and to contribute to a community that is important to him. “He wanted to bring something back to Puerto Rico,” said Adrian Whitbread, the club’s coach. “There was a void.” Some of Anthony’s financial advisers were less enthusiastic. Puerto Rico was (and remains) mired in a deep recession. It was not an ideal environment in which to start a business, especially one

PEANUTS

DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1988

GARFIELD

CALVIN AND HOBBES

WIZARD of ID

DILBERT

$50. (Anthony wanted to sell them for $5 apiece before Payne intervened.) Payne wants to see Puerto Rico F.C. turn a profit. He knows it could take years, if it happens at all. Anthony was also drawn to the freemarket principles of the N.A.S.L., which does not have a salary cap. While player salaries range from about $20,000 to more than $100,000, the eight clubs in the league can pay whatever they want. If Anthony really wanted to sign someone, he could shell out millions. His players say he cares about the product. “You can tell he knows a little bit,” said Cristiano Dias, a defender from Brazil. “You can sit in the stands and watch two players running and tell who’s really putting the effort in. On that part, being an athlete, I think he can judge the game pretty good. On the technical part — well, I’m not so confident to say that!” Puerto Rico F.C. opened its season with draws against the New York Cosmos and two against the Indy Eleven, the top two teams in the league last season. Anthony said he expected to pay the team another visit soon. He has big plans, which include designing new uniforms for next season. Here, on a distant island, if nowhere else, Anthony has a team that will look exactly the way he wants it to look.

No.1404

Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz (c) PZZL.com Distributed by The New York Times syndicate

SUDOKU

was born, when he was a child, and then again after his senior year of high school, he said in an interview last week. The trip left an impression, he said. He even contemplated joining Puerto Rico’s national basketball team before opting to preserve his eligibility to compete for the United States. (Some Puerto Ricans were not pleased. Anthony said he had managed to “smooth things over” since then.) He has returned to the island over the years, funding the construction of seven basketball courts. Then, in 2015, an unusual opportunity presented itself: the chance to buy an expansion team in the N.A.S.L., which sits a rung below Major League Soccer on American soccer’s professional league structure. Soccer has never been as popular as baseball, boxing or volleyball in Puerto Rico, but it does have some history here. From 2004 to 2012, a pro club called the Puerto Rico Islanders played in various leagues, and even advanced to the semifinals of the Concacaf Champions

so dependent on sponsorship deals and ticket sales. But that, Anthony said, was kind of the point. “We wanted to get involved when everybody was counting the island out,” he said. “I wanted to be there from the ground level.” One of his first hires was Payne, a former president for business operations with the Los Angeles Galaxy of M.L.S. When Payne showed up to interview with Anthony at his offices in New York, he was surprised when Anthony answered the door. It was a sign, Payne said, of Anthony’s hands-on approach. At one point during their hour-and-ahalf conversation, Anthony asked Payne how long he thought it would take the club to become profitable. Payne told him that it would depend on the economy. “This is a long-term investment,” Anthony said last week. “It’s not something that I’m looking at as a get-rich-quick type of thing.” Asked how much money he had poured into the team, Anthony said, “That’s undisclosed.” Anthony covers the club’s losses, said Payne, who added that one of his goals was to see the club double its average home attendance, to 8,000 from about 4,000 a game last season. Ticket prices range from about $8 to

Fill the grid so that every row, column 3x3 box and shaded 3x3 box contains each of the numbers 1 to 9 exactly once. For solving tips and more puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ sudoku

Solution

No. 1304

CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

KENKEN

Fill the grids with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. For solving tips and more KenKen puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ kenken.com KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. Copyright © 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

Answers to Previous Puzzles

Across

1

27 “The Blacklist” network

1 Yankee fare

28 Followed

9 Order to go

29 Some long sentences

…”

32 Floor support?

15 Verona vino

34 Arrive on the sly

16 A good bawling-out might be an example of it

17 World leader who’s a

35 Brewski

16

genre

60 Instrument with a three-sided body

62 Show room?

19 Word after light or fire

44 Spiked punch? star Jon

Down

1 It may be beaten

2 Instrument with

21 June honorees: Abbr.

47 Vernacular

22 Provision for

49 Bud source, perhaps

3 Museum offering

50 16 things in

4 Persian, e.g.

an outdoor event

24 Family-friendly diner choice

octave keys

“Don Giovanni”

51 Take up again?

G O S H

C U B

P A D I G OT S N I D M OT T OT H E S A D A T OT T A A P N N E P OT A T R U T I T M E N P R I T R I P L A I R O P T O P E A N S

S P Y H O O O O D OT H E L W A A L A T OT W T O O F L M E O V Z B A Z E S O Y E

R O E

S A L S A D I P

I T H I N K N

M E A D

O S OT A O N Y A S H L I OT T E R T I OT T R T R E OT R

5 Husband or wife

6 Statue at Rockefeller

Solution to April 13 Puzzle I B E G

5

6

7

Center

B A A M S A E C U T E A M O C O

H M O S

7 Opportunity 8 Place where people make the rounds?

9 Out 10 Siesta 11 Play an ace? 12 Flinched, e.g.

E S T S

14 Big data unit

10

11

12

36

37

38

53

54

55

15

19

20

21 25

22

26

23

27

29

30

31

28 32

34

41

9

17

18

24

8

33

35 39

46 “Napoleon Dynamite”

20 Kendrick and Paquin

4

14

climber

41 Big hit

18 “I’m with ___”

3

59 Ancient mountain

61 Seasonal transport

39 Then 40 Kayak alternative

judo master

13

56 Culture ___ 57 Foreigner’s

closely?

13 “I meant to tell you

53 These, in Toulouse

2

42

40

43

47

44

45

46

48

49

50

51

56

57

59

60

61

52 58

62

PUZZLE BY ANDREW KINGSLEY

23 Climber’s tool

37 German “never”

49 1000, familiarly

24 Cheap shot?

38 Piece in Mr. Potato

52 Prefix with pad

25 Muesli morsel 26 One begins “Thou

still unravish’d bride of quietness”

30 Fibonacci, by birth 31 Catch on TV’s

“Deadliest Catch”

15 Cross

33 Leader of the pack

21 Very conservative

36 Whimsical

Head

41 Jerks 42 Creator of the 1966 underground film “Chelsea Girls”

43 Melodic 45 Check out, in a rude way

48 Poses

53 “When we have shuffled off this mortal ___”: Hamlet

54 Fashion designer Marc

55 Game in which sevens are low

58 Aides at M.I.T. and U.S.C.

.. 14 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture A German art show’s Greek revival ART REVIEW ATHENS

For its 14th iteration, Documenta sets up shop outside its home country BY JASON FARAGO

Even today, in a supersaturated calendar of worldwide art events, no show matters more than Documenta, a colossal German exhibition of contemporary art, reinvented every five or so years as a “museum of 100 days.” Of 13 editions so far, two have become touchstones in recent art history: the freewheeling fifth edition, curated by the Swiss Harald Szeemann in 1972, which equalized painting and sculpture with conceptual art and happenings; and the erudite 11th edition, organized by the Nigerian Okwui Enwezor in 2002, which propounded a global art ecosystem with Europe no longer at the center. But every Documenta, since the first in 1955, has served as a manifesto about art’s current relevance and direction, and every one has taken place in Kassel, an unlovely town north of Frankfurt destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II. Until this year. The 14th edition of Documenta, led by the 46-year-old Polish curator Adam Szymczyk, is being shared by Kassel and Athens, a city with intertwined crises of finance and migration, and the capital of a country whose recent relations with Germany have been anything but collaborative. Mr. Szymczyk and the bulk of his curatorial team have been living in Greece for years, and the Athenian half of this two-city show opened last weekend in the presence of both countries’ presidents. The local welcome has been skeptical. The German news media, too, has looked askance at Documenta’s expansion into the capital of what some still call a schuldenland, or debtor country. A full reckoning will have to wait until June, when the show’s second half opens in Kassel. This much I can say now: If the exhibition falls short (far short, in places) of the great editions of 1972 and 2002, Mr. Szymczyk’s decision to uproot Documenta was the right one. This Hellenized Documenta is sometimes forceful, often obscure, and in places exhaustingly proud of itself. Parts reminded me of the apartment rental app Airbnb, which allows young cosmopolitans to “go local” on the cheap. And yet the show’s most important themes — migration, debt, fraying European unity and the historical antecedents of today’s populism and intolerance — are ones Athenians have reckoned with for years. Now that those troubles span the world, Greece may be the best place to come to grips with them. There’s art by nearly 160 participants, almost all of whom will also show work in Kassel. For every familiar name, such as the American painters Vija Celmins, R. H. Quaytman and Stanley Whitney, there are 10 you’ve never heard of, often for good reason. (Albanian socialist realism, weirdly, gets a major day in the sun.) It sprawls across 40 sites, as far afield as the port of Piraeus, though its most important is probably the new National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, in an elegantly converted former brewery vacant for years. The accompanying bureaucratic and financial headaches are not incidental for Mr. Szymczyk, who opted to work with

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EIRINI VOURLOUMIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Above, a piece by the Mexican artist Guillermo Galindo at Documenta 14 in Athens. Below, patrons taking in Daniel García Andújar’s “Disasters of War” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in the city.

public institutions rather than Athens’s cash-flush private museums. A fair chunk of Documenta’s 37 million euro budget (about $40 million) has gone into nearly bankrupt Greek art organizations, which you can think of as an artsy stand-in for the eurozone transfer payments that Germany continues to resist. Standout works at EMST include “Tripoli Canceled,” a film by the New York-based artist Naeem Mohaiemen, set on an old 747 parked at the crumbling Hellenikon Airport in Athens. The pilot goes through the motions of announcing flight time, but never takes off; like the myriad migrants here whose movements are blocked by European Union regulations, this plane is stuck in Greece. A languorous video,

by the British artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, revisits sites painted by Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, but the women they film rarely return their gaze. This honest, knowingly partial film is a model of how to depict other cultures ethically, and how not to shy away from the risks. A large gallery at EMST showcases music by the Soviet composer Arseny Avraamov, whose “Symphony of Sirens,” backed by gun blasts and metallic droning, is a classic case of an artwork for a future that never came. Music and sound are major concerns of this Documenta, especially in the section at the Athens Conservatoire, Greece’s oldest music school. Graphical scores by Greek composers such as Jani Christou and Bia Davou are juxta-

posed with nifty diagrams of a rare synthesizer, the EMS Synthi 100, which the Documenta team has been restoring for Greek electronic musicians. Greece’s troubled relationship with Germany finds kitschy form in the EMST lobby. A large box there is filled with thousands of olives; the Argentine artist Marta Minujín, rather daftly, proposes Greeks could win debt cancellation with stone fruit. (At a performance on Saturday, which I missed, Ms. Minujín passed handfuls of the olives to a performer dressed in a red blazer and a frowzy wig, more than passable as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.) David Lamelas, another veteran Argentine, has rigged up a live feed at the entrance to the Conservatoire, showing debates in the Bundestag and the Hellenic Parliament — and a video of the Parthenon, looming as ever over this city. That third feed from the Acropolis is a reminder that the ties between this country and Germany are far older than the eurozone. A Bavarian was Greece’s first king, after the country won independence from the Ottomans two centuries ago. Art history itself, in fact, is a Greek-German invention; it was 18th-century Prussian aesthetes, most prominently Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who first systematized the art of the past, and placed Greece at the summit. The use and abuse of Classical antiquity, born in Greece and routed through Germany, therefore hums through Documenta 14. Campy hoplites and temple maidens appear in dramatic photographs from 1970 by Pierre Zucca, whose collaborations with the

great artist and writer Pierre Klossowski mashed up sex and economics. Flatter are the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski’s reproduced stills from “Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Nazi propaganda film. They hang alongside dire older paintings of Hitler by the American duo McDermott and McGough, each meant to memorialize a gay victim of the Holocaust but undone by their cheapness. (The legacy of the Holocaust may be even more present in Documenta’s Kassel half. Several artists are apparently working on projects related to the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, much of it believed looted from Jewish families.) A much more thoughtful analyst of Classicism is Daniel García Andújar, of Spain, who has filled an EMST gallery with 3-D-printed statues of the “Farnese Hercules,” the “Boxer at Rest” and more deformed riffs on Greek art, plus banks of images that place Greek art within a dizzying network of nationalist imagery and racial classification. And everywhere, everywhere, bodies are in motion. The ongoing refugee crisis — a hopeless euphemism to describe the greatest moral failure of our time, which has left 65.3 million people displaced and pushed Greek social services to the breaking point — is inescapable in Documenta 14. Some artists here have responded poetically, including Peter Friedl, who films a stage adaptation of Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” in which the ape narrator is played by actors and nonactors of various races, languages and ages. Other times it leads to self-righteousness or glibness, as with the wonky musical instruments made by Guiller-

mo Galindo, a Mexican composer, incorporating tubes salvaged from a refugee camp near Kassel. And what are we to make of “Glimpse,” a 20-minute silent film by the Polish provocateur Artur Zmijewski that is this show’s most important work, as well as its most disturbing? It’s at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and was shot largely in the Jungle of Calais, France, the recently destroyed camp home to 6,000 migrants. The film’s initial, documentary sequences of plywood shacks and pitiful tents, hopeless against the rain, are searingly accusatory. Some refugees stare down the camera; a young girl smiles, while her father looks down, abashed. But then the film’s tone changes: The artist enters the frame, offers a new coat to a refugee and then paints its back with a dripping white X. Later, in Paris, he shoots African migrants in close-up, turning their heads slowly to get just the pose the artist wants. His film is brave and urgent; it’s also shockingly discomforting, and stamps on our expectations of objectivity and respect in depicting the least fortunate. While much of the rhetoric of Documenta 14 invokes a common humanity, “Glimpse” proposes that even the do-gooders have motives of their own. That is a sentiment many Athenians, skeptical of the intentions of this German-born megashow, will find easy to understand. All the same, one of the central aims of modern art has been to break through society’s assumptions, to imagine living as equals even if we never get there. It takes courage to get your hands dirty, even if you wash them clean later in your Airbnb.

This rabbit hole’s worth falling down The streaming site Fandor offers dedicated film buffs the thrill of the eclectic BY GLENN KENNY

“Drama.” “Thriller.” “Sci-Fi.” “Action/ Adventure.” If you’re searching for a movie to watch on a streaming site, and you filter by genre, those are among the words you’ll see right away. Pretty straightforward, yes. Intrepid or surprising, not in the least. The Fandor experience is quite different. Based in San Francisco, Fandor combines breathtaking eclecticism with an editorial-social platform that’s an exemplary example of the digitization of film-buff culture. Search for a film in the “Action/Adventure” genre, and you’ll get 18 pages with 18 choices on each, but there are even more options: The top of the page has links to 10 other very specific subgenres, including “Martial Arts,” “Sword and Sandal,” “Wilderness” and “Treasure Hunting.” You can also refine your search by checking off from a list of about 30 countries, or toggle between film durations (shortest to longest) and years of release (oldest to most recent). Going down the Fandor rabbit hole is the most fun I’ve had with a streaming website in a while. While “Documentary” isn’t the first place I look when exploring movies on streaming sites, one

recent afternoon two of the many documentaries the service offers jumped out at me. The first was “Komeda: A Soundtrack for a Life.” This 2010 short feature directed by Claudia Buthenhoff-Duffy tells the life story of Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish jazz musician and film score composer whose life came to a freakishly tragic end not too long after he went to Hollywood to work on his friend Roman Polanski’s first American film, “Rosemary’s Baby.” The next documentary was Mark Rappaport’s “Debra Paget, for Example,” from 2015, a study of the onetime 20th Century Fox contract bombshell best known for her work with Elvis Presley and Fritz Lang. Not all of the documentaries are so cinephile-oriented, but this is a site that rewards buffs capable of appreciating the tendrils of its library and how it’s organized. Returning to “Action/Adventure,” the selection under that rubric reflects a wide and arguably generous interpretation of the category. There’s the searing 1980 military saga “Breaker Morant” and the 2001 extreme-gore cult item “Ichi the Killer.” There’s John Ford’s seminal “Stagecoach”; Ted V. Mikels’s grindhouse-triple-bill evergreen, “Ten Violent Women”; and “The Wild Geese,” a late-’70s mercenary (in every sense of the term) all-star action picture in which Richard Harris and Richard Burton phone it in while Roger Moore does his usual level best. According to Gail Gendler, the head of programming at Fandor, the site’s goal

is to maintain access to 6,000 titles (more or less) at any given time, even as titles come and go. “We want to present a canon for film fanatics and millennial movie lovers,” Ms. Gendler said in a phone interview. She was quick to point out that the site, which started in 2011, functions as a vital bridge between cult and mainstream. “We have the first film by Damien Chazelle and the first film by Barry Jenkins,” she said, citing two filmmakers who had good showings at this year’s Academy Awards. (Those are “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” by Mr. Chazelle, the “La La Land” director, and “My Josephine” by Mr. Jenkins, the “Moonlight” director; both are well worth checking out.) “We have early work by Kelly Reichardt, one of the most vital indie filmmakers in the United States.” Speaking to Ms. Gendler about the site’s remarkable menus, I mentioned that while looking through Fandor’s L.G.B.T.Q. page, I found “Out 1,” the French director Jacques Rivette’s 13hour experimental drama from 1971, a picture that I never considered as thematically L.G.B.T.Q. But thinking about how one of that film’s characters, a street hustler played by Juliet Berto, struggles with identity questions throughout her story line, it occurred to me that perhaps I had been looking at the film narrowly. “We’re always having interesting arguments internally about genre and tagging systems,” she said. “Does one cate-

MEDIA BLASTERS

Tadanobu Asano in the film “Ichi the Killer,” directed by Takashi Miike.

gory contain too many films or not enough films is one aspect of the discussion. But oftentimes where we place a given film offers an opportunity for conversation with the film community of both subscribers and nonsubscribers who look at the editorial and social part of the site, or on the Facebook page. We want to make the experience not just about viewing, but connecting with

other film lovers.” To that end, the editorial side of the site, Keyframe, has a great asset in the correspondent David Hudson, who deftly aggregates film news, connecting readers to outside material while maintaining a reliable and witty voice and displaying a far-ranging sensibility. Keyframe itself offers a lot of video essays, with topics recently ranging from

a profile of the silent film pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché to a primer on the “chopped and screwed” genre of hip-hop featured on the soundtrack of “Moonlight.” Also contributing to what Ms. Gendler calls a “once you get there, it’s hard to leave” aim, the site features monthly “Spotlights,” which gather library films under occasionally timely topics. February, for instance, featured 2017 Oscar nominees, with work by Mr. Jenkins; Mr. Chazelle; and Maren Ade, whose “Toni Erdmann” was a nominee for best foreign language film. Sometimes the topics are just topics, as in last month’s “Twenty Something,” with titles from Bertrand Blier’s corrosive bad-boys-on-the-road “Going Places” (co-starring a young and hunky Gérard Depardieu in 1974) to Sean Baker’s “Starlet” (2012), about an aimless young woman in the fringes of California’s porn industry (a very fringy place to be). This month, a nod to the Tribeca Film Festival comes in the form of a “New York films” spotlight. The company is expanding into the funding and production of original documentary shorts and anticipating more good things from a deal with Amazon, offering the service at a slightly reduced rate for Amazon Video subscribers. (Fandor’s stand-alone monthly fee is $10.) “That’s wonderful for us,” Ms. Gendler said. “Any platform wants more growth. And we’re hungry to build our subscription base.” I’d say the site deserves that.

.. FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017 | 15

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

culture

Heading for his ‘Doctor Who’ exit Peter Capaldi defends his decision to leave the long-running BBC series BY DAVE ITZKOFF

The Doctor, the shape-shifting, dimension-hopping hero of “Doctor Who” may have traveled the cosmos for centuries, but for the earthbound humans who have portrayed him, the job has lately lasted about three years. So it goes for Peter Capaldi, who came into the role on this long-running science-fiction series in 2014 and is now nearing the end of his journey. Mr. Capaldi, the Scottish actor (and star of the political satires “The Thick of It” and “In the Loop”), said in January that the current season, which begins Saturday on BBC America, will be his last. There are still plenty of interplanetary adventures to come for Mr. Capaldi’s incarnation of the character, as well as the introduction of a new companion for the Doctor (played by Pearl Mackie), before he takes his final spin in the Tardis. Speaking by phone from London, where Mr. Capaldi was taking a break from filming “Doctor Who” in Cardiff, Wales, he talked about his decision to leave the role and what he’s learned from his time on the series. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

What is it like, in the midst of shooting a “Doctor Who” season, to get a few days of shore leave in the real world? I’m sort of institutionalized when I’m filming. People lead me from my trailer to the studio. People ask me if I want cups of coffee. They give me a ride home, they pick me up in the morning. They tell me what I’m going to be doing the next day. After 10 months of that, you’re like, “What crime did I ever commit to get into this really nice prison?” [Laughs] It’s a bit of a shock every weekend when I go home, because my wife and my daughter do not treat me as if I’m the star of the show. I have to make my own coffee.

These days, the role of the Doctor seems to come with a built-in expiration date. Did you decide it was time to move on, or did you just reach the end of your commitment? Oh, no, they asked me to stay on. And I love this show. But I began to get worried about my capacity to deliver my best work. The schedule is very intense, and I began to wonder, how many different ways can I find to say, “The time vortex is going to open up and destroy the entire universe as we know it, unless we blow up that model spaceship over there”? It concerned me that if I did more, yes, I’d be able to do it, but I’d just be phoning it in. And I didn’t ever want to be in that situation.

Now that you’ve had nearly three seasons to play the character, what do you think distinguished your version? First and foremost, he’s not human. So I think he struggles to create a version of himself that humans find easy to be around. He’s always trying to save the universe, so if he upsets someone, that has to come with the territory. But then later on, he probably gets a bit worried and wishes he could go back and say, “I’m sorry I upset you.” I like when he’s strange.

Was it your idea that the character should also be able to play the electric guitar? We had just done my first season, and I

BBC AMERICA

The Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, encountering the Mondasian Cybermen, enemies from his past, on “Doctor Who.” The current season of the series is the actor’s third and will be his last.

made a little list of things that might be interesting to have a go at in the next season, and one of them was guitar playing. To my surprise, they went with it, in quite a big way. I’d open a script, and it would say, “The Doctor is playing ‘Amazing Grace,’ Jimi Hendrix-style.” I had a day where they said, “You’ve got to go buy the Doctor’s guitar.” I thought he should have a Fender Stratocaster, but every time I tried one on, it looked like I was having a midlife crisis. And then we found this one Yamaha guitar, which was the one we ended up with, which looks like someone had described a Fender Stratocaster to somebody else, and made it without ever seeing a picture of it.

What has it been like to work with Pearl Mackie, who plays Bill, the Doctor’s new companion? My previous companion [Clara, played by Jenna Coleman] was someone who was really part of the “Doctor Who” world. Pearl’s character, Bill, is someone from the real world, if you like, who has no understanding and no knowledge about Tardises and Daleks and monsters and all that stuff. She’s just someone who has great potential, and the Doctor thinks that potential is not being realized, and decides it would be fun to help her. It’s good, because Pearl is not particularly an expert on “Doctor Who,” so everything is new to her, as it was to her character. It meant that she wasn’t

bringing any baggage to it.

little kid, you know?

Is there a moment about your experience that you’ll remember most?

Do you want to know how your Doctor meets his fate?

At the end of my first season, we did a sequence where the Cybermen emerge from St. Paul’s Cathedral. We shot it on this most wonderful summer’s day, a Saturday afternoon, and everywhere were these huge crowds gathered around us, waiting for the Cybermen. I love stuff like that. I would go into work on days that I wasn’t scheduled to work, if there was something I thought was interesting. If the Daleks attacked a space station, well, I had to go in and see that. The only other choice is to go: “Oh, I’ll go home now. I’m tired.” It’s like being a

I know what’s going to happen.

Britain and the United States have seen a lot of upheaval in recent months. What do you think “Doctor Who” offers viewers at a time like this?

It’s more complicated than that. There’s this notion now that it’s the same process he’s gone through every time, and that’s not true. It’s only the last couple of regenerations that have been, as it were, fairly straightforward ones. I can’t go into the details of a lot of it, because I know what happens, but I don’t know how it happens.

It offers hope for the power of kindness and intelligence and care. The Doctor is someone who sees the big picture, and has seen how the human race is — he loves the human race, because he sees its cruelty, but also astonishing kindness and heroism. The Doctor is a beacon of goodness, and that’s why he can survive all these different permutations — an abrasive character or an avuncular character or a strange character. Because at heart, he is, in essence, a good creature. I think we need heroes like that.

Tom Clancy’s character Jack Ryan after “The Hunt for Red October,” is “a little man, short, scrawny and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.” He is tough on himself. Writing about “The Cooler,” a small film he made in 2003, when his popularity was not at an all-time high, he says, “When I read the script and got to the page where my character kicks a pregnant woman in the stomach, I asked my agent, ‘Don’t I have enough troubles?’ ” Baldwin writes with great knowledge about old films, the art of acting, what he has learned from other actors, and about the differences among television, film and theater. He also takes the opportunity to settle old scores. It appears that the book itself has given rise to some new ones. “The editors at HarperCollins were, I imagine, too busy to do a proper and forensic edit of the material,” he wrote recently in a Facebook update devoted to postpublication corrections and amendments. He says that he had no ghostwriter or collaborator for this book. That is impressive, because he’s a highly literate and fluent writer, but it also means that his authorial discipline can abandon him. He has a bit of trouble with transitions. In the worst example, he’s talking admiringly about the actor Christopher Reeve, who was president of the Creative Coalition, an organization for

politically involved actors like Baldwin. One moment Baldwin is standing next to Reeve at the group’s 1995 retreat and all is well. And then: “Two weeks later he broke his neck and was paralyzed,” Baldwin writes. “Soon after that, I was elected TCC president.” Baldwin expresses love for his second wife, Hilaria, and his four children, and seems to have found a new peace after a lifetime of battling his demons. “I want to end this book contemplating happiness and renewal,” he says. The most recent time he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” in February (it was his 17th time, a record), showed that he had weathered one of the hardest things anyone can face: how to square who you are now with who you used to be. During the opening monologue, the camera panned to a photograph of Baldwin in 1990, when he first hosted the show. The contrast was so breathtaking that the audience gasped. “I can’t believe that was you!” the young cast member Pete Davidson exclaimed. “You were so handsome!” They traded personal-appearance insults for a bit, with Davidson marveling at the ravages of time. “At what point when you get older does your whole head, like, expand?” he asked. “Does that happen to everyone? Is it going to happen to me?” “Yes, Pete,” Baldwin responded, “and along the way if you’re lucky you’ll have an entire career.”

Do the producers tell you what’s going to happen, or did you just read it in a script one day?

Unexpectedly moving celebrity memoir BOOK REVIEW

NEVERTHELESS: A MEMOIR. By Alec

Baldwin. Illustrated. 272 pp. HarperCollins. $28.99. BY SARAH LYALL

Whenever I think unhappily about Alec Baldwin, the way you do when you feel ashamed of knowing too much about a celebrity — whenever I think about his nasty divorce; the horrible voice mail message he left for his daughter Ireland in 2007; the time he fought with a photographer in New York — I remember his performance in one of my favorite old “Saturday Night Live” skits. The year is 1993, and Baldwin is at the peak of his dreamy youthful handsomeness. He plays a soap opera actor who claims to have done extensive research to prepare for his part as Dr. Dirk Johanson in the ludicrously overthe-top show “Doctors, Nurses and Patients,” but is unable to pronounce even the simplest medical term correctly. “Anal canal” comes out as “anal CAY-nal.” “We’ve got the results of your ur-INE test,” Dr. Johanson declares to a patient, played by Phil Hartman. “It might be the Big C — canker.” You can forgive an actor an awful lot when he can produce something so

sublimely deadpan, and then, in Baldwin’s particular case, eventually go on to play the great Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock,” his dark eyes glinting with anarchic, Machiavellian intelligence; and then to out-dumb President Donald J. Trump on the current season of “Saturday Night Live.” So how are we meant to think about this person, whom we know but of course do not know? It is in this spirit of trepidation mitigated by appreciation that you approach “Nevertheless,” Baldwin’s latest book. (He’s also the author of “A Promise to Ourselves,” about his custody battle over Ireland.) “I’m not actually writing this book to discuss my work, my opinions or my life,” Baldwin declares right off the bat and soon adds, “I’m writing it because I was paid to write it.” After that start, you feel the needle on your Baldwin-appreciation meter trending downward. But to his surprise (and ours) he pulls himself together and delivers a thorough and sophisticated effort to answer an interesting question: How did an indifferently raised, self-flagellating kid from a just-making-ends-meet, desultorily functioning Long Island family, in Massapequa, turn into Alec Baldwin, gifted actor, familiar public figure, impressively thoughtful person, notorious pugilist? The passages about his childhood — his mother overwhelmed, depressed,

PATRICIA WALL/THE NEW YORK TIMES

lying in bed surrounded by laundry; his father working at a school; six siblings fighting for space and resources in a two-bedroom house, their parents unable to afford even a washing machine — are beautifully written and unexpectedly moving. “Six pieces of driftwood,” Baldwin writes of himself and his siblings, “just bobbing through our neighborhood, without a current to carry us in any particular direction, passing time, trying to pass our classes, avoiding trouble, courting trouble, scoring points, telling jokes, drinking, smoking, always mindful of how little we had.”

He never intended to be an actor but fell into the job when, as a student at George Washington University, he spontaneously decided to audition for the New York University theater program while visiting the city. He got a spot despite having no experience, transferred out of George Washington and then had an existential crisis. Why hadn’t he continued with his plans of going to law school? “Why was I spending hours at the Lee Strasberg Institute weeping or directing scenes wherein we staged our dreams or shouting into a corner at some unseen source of my anxieties?” But then he spent two years on an actual soap opera, moved to Hollywood, moved back to New York, and saw his career rise and then fall and then rise again. His current film, “The Boss Baby,” in which he voices the character of a tyrannical infant, is currently No. 1 at the box office. People cannot get enough of his portrayal of Trump, with its perfectly pitched vapidity laced with self-regard. “Nevertheless,” whose title comes from a dirty joke that Baldwin heard from the British actor Michael Gambon, is full of unexpectedly sharp descriptions. Of Mary-Louise Parker, his Off Broadway co-star in “Prelude to a Kiss,” he writes: “With her big eyes and lanky frame, you weren’t sure if she was a ballet dancer or a murderer.” Harrison Ford, who replaced him as

.. 16 | FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

travel

Drinks for morning, noon and night menu. I should probably add that this drink was served to me in a baby bottle, and that it was accompanied by a toy panda. Called the Innocent, it was delicious: a daiquiri variation composed of Mount Gay Black Barrel rum, kumquat, fresh lime juice, house bitters and kombucha. The crazy drinks — and the pick-a-toy means of choosing them — were backed up by more mainstream cocktails and a normal menu, which also listed six unusual variations on the old-fashioned. Among them was the squid-ink version, made with Nikka blended whiskey, the first sugary, mineral-inflected taste of which finally pushed me to admit that Brno really did have something cool going on. I still had one last stop: another nominee for the country’s best cocktail bar, the recently opened Spirit Bar. At close to midnight, I found the last free seat at the grand piano in the front room. Old brass trumpets, converted to light

PURSUITS

Brno is overtaking Prague as the best Czech city for coffee, beer and cocktails BY EVAN RAIL

By the time I tasted my squid-ink oldfashioned — made with Japanese whiskey and served alongside a wakame-and-sesame salad — I had to admit something cool was happening in Brno. I hadn’t expected that. Just as few Berliners would ever say that Munich or Cologne beats their city for coffeehouses or clubs, few Prague residents would ever claim that the Czech Republic’s second city of Brno is the best spot for beer, cocktails or coffee. But in recent years I had started hearing more stories about Brno’s new drinks scene. Fellow Praguers had mentioned new microroasters, cafes and bars in Brno, about 2½ hours southwest of Prague by train. I’d heard that one of the world’s most famous bartenders, Alex Kratena, came from Brno, though I knew Mr. Kratena had made his name in London at Artesian, named No. 1 by World’s 50 Best Bars for several years in a row. As such, I chalked up the stories about great drinks in Brno to exaggeration. At least, until the announcement of the nominees for last year’s Czech Bar Awards. For best cocktail bar, two venues in Prague had been nominated, while Brno claimed three nominees. In the best beer bar category, an eastern city, Olomouc, had one entry, Prague had two entries and Brno again had two entries. Not bad, considering that Brno, the capital of the eastern region of Moravia, has a population of 377,000, less than one-third that of Prague. To find out if the drinks scene in Brno really did rival Prague’s, one fall evening I caught a fast train and checked into one of the city’s recently renovated hotels. Housed in a former bank, the Grandezza Hotel overlooked the scenic Zelny Trh, or Cabbage Market, a small square that predates Brno’s official founding in the 13th century. From my window, I could see the jagged spires of the city’s most imposing church, the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, rising behind the Baroque buildings on the other side of the square, while the tall, ornate Parnas Fountain, built in 1695, looked almost within reach. The three spurting gargoyle spouts at the base of the fountain reminded me of my growing thirst.

In the war between Prague and Brno, the Bar Which Doesn’t Exist felt like Brno’s greatest weapon.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MILAN BURES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bar, Ktery Neexistuje, or the Bar Which Doesn’t Exist, in Brno, Czech Republic. “It’s one of the best bars I’ve ever been to,” said one customer from Germany.

A mai tai at Spirit Bar.

The Moravian Gallery in Brno, capital of the eastern Czech region of Moravia.

I decided to try one of the new craft bars I’d heard about. But before I did, I made an impromptu stop for a half-liter of traditional Czech svetly lezak, or pale lager, at U Richarda, a taproom and restaurant for the U Richarda microbrewery on the city’s outskirts. I had visited the brewery a decade earlier, and while coming across the new location was a surprise, the familiar bready taste of U Richarda’s excellent unfiltered lager was just as I’d remembered it. But now it was time to try something new: a bar called JBM Brew Lab. I turned down a narrow residential street featuring some great examples of Brno’s celebrated functionalist architecture, and found the pub in the middle of the block. Taking its name from the owners’ initials, JBM was narrow, warm, boisterous and blissfully smoke-free, unlike many of the country’s traditional pubs. The beer list, too, was up to date, as well as international, featuring 10 taps of unusual brews, including Kapitan Drake, a sour but incredibly refreshing “mojito Gose” from the cult Polish producer Browar Setka that tasted of limes and fresh mint. After finishing the Gose and a better-than-decent pastrami sandwich, I tried an aromatic wet-hop IPA from a favorite Czech microbrewery, Clock. I figured that was enough for one evening. But then I encountered a bustling scene behind a magnificent Gothic church on the way back to my hotel. It looked like a late-night religious service had just ended, but instead of the faithful, the crowd turned out to be spillover from a nearby pub with tall windows. Both inside and out, just about everyone was holding a pullitr, or halfliter beer glass, and the atmosphere was remarkably festive. I stuck my head inside and recognized

Pie and coffee at Skog Urban Hub.

it from my list of places to try — just from the décor. One of the nominees for the best beer bar was called Na Stojaka, a name that roughly means “standing up,” a Czech term for a quick cold one. Inside, almost everyone was standing, with the chest-high tables packed to overflowing, forcing some customers to move to the square like congregants. I ordered a traditional low-grade pale lager from Beskydsky Pivovarek, a tiny microbrewery in the remote Beskid mountain range, which starts northeast of Brno. It had a crisp finish with a nice note of Saaz hops, despite having less than 4 percent alcohol. Such a brew wouldn’t be impossible to find in Prague, but it wouldn’t be easy, either. And I couldn’t think of a single beer bar in Prague that had such a fun late-night atmosphere, certainly not with its clientele taking over the sidewalk and square out front. “Oh, it’s a lot easier to find good coffee in Brno than in Prague,” a bartender had

boasted the previous night when I had asked him to name his favorite coffeehouses. As I left to look for my coffee fix the next morning, I wondered if Brno’s southern European feel might also extend to cafes. My first stop felt like the opposite of Italian, however. Instead, it had a distinct Nordic feel. Called Skog Urban Hub, it featured windows overlooking another tiny square. The menu listed two types of espresso beans from Rusty Nails, a micro-roaster just upstairs: Kelloo from Ethiopia, and Santa Christina from El Salvador. A single-estate Kenyan coffee was available for filter drinks. I ordered a flat white, enjoying the Kelloo’s fruity peach flavors, then tried the Ethiopian espresso with tonic water while I took in the scene. The high ceilings, hardwood floors and stark, whitepainted brick walls gave it a minimalist vibe, and the cafe’s English-speaking staff members looked as if they could have been shipped in from Copenhagen. The next cafe felt less foreign, though it seemed even more serious about its drinks. Called Kafec, it listed three kinds of hot chocolate on the menu — Peruvian, Tanzanian and São Toméan — along with tasting notes. Above the bar, a chalkboard highlighted the five kinds of beans available, most of which I’d never heard of, including the type of bean, the processing method, the farm, the individual farmer and the roaster, as well as tastes and aromas and a recommendation for how to serve each type. I ordered a cappuccino of something called Kenya Kii AB and wrote down the rest of the details from the board. I wasn’t sure if I really needed to know if my coffee was made from the SL28 and SL34 cultivars, let alone that it came from the cult Brno roastery Fiftybeans, but I figured such details might come in handy, perhaps at a name-dropping competition among food snobs in Prague. My cappuccino was light but nutty and fruity, tasting remarkably like one of the cafe’s hot chocolates. With a tile floor and bentwood chairs, Kafec felt modest, but it clearly took pride in what it served. I rode my caffeine buzz through a visit to the Moravian Gallery, taking in sculptures and paintings that included a 14thcentury limestone statue of St. Procopius, then wandered around the city center, enjoying its nearly tourist-free churches and palaces. After an excellent meal of strozzapreti pasta and pan-fried sea bass at a restaurant called Retro Consistorium, I was ready to try more beverages. First on the list: Bar, Ktery Neexistuje, or the Bar Which Doesn’t Exist, on a narrow street northeast of the main square. The room was full, and I felt lucky when a hostess found a seat at the bar. Soon I was sipping a pitch-perfect cognac Sazerac and admiring the rare bottles on illuminated shelves that reached to the ceiling. A fellow barfly, in town from Germany on business, started up a conversation. “I always come here when I’m in Brno,” he said. “It’s one of the best bars I’ve ever been to.” I had to agree. I had watched Prague’s cocktail scene blossom in recent years, but even great watering holes like Hemingway Bar and Bonvivant’s CTC in Prague lacked the combination of intimacy and energy at the Bar Which Doesn’t Exist. My cognac Sazerac was beautifully balanced and aromatic, the juicy bar hamburger the best I’d had in the country, and the crowd was friendly and fun. In the war between Prague and Brno, the Bar Which Doesn’t Exist felt

like Brno’s greatest weapon. At least until I visited its sister bar, Super Panda Circus, on a busy street west of the main square. At first I walked past the front door, which I found locked. After ringing a buzzer I was greeted by a woman wearing something like a ringmaster’s uniform. She took my coat and offered me a cup of green tea. The bar’s name, she explained, came from the Super Panda, a famous rum cocktail invented by Mr. Kratena at Ar-

tesian. She left to check the seating upstairs, and soon I found myself inside the craziest bar I’d ever visited. Was it dark? Yes. Loud? Yes, but manageably so, with a “rave in the jungle” style of deep house music that masked the intimate conversations around me. And was it weird? Well, let’s just say that I chose my first drink by picking a rubber ducky instead of a plastic rocket from the tray of colorful toys that functioned as the drinks

fixtures, hung over the bar. A giant antique display cabinet housed modern liquor bottles, as well as engraved, unlabeled heirloom vessels. The menu focused on Golden Era cocktails like the martinez and the boulevardier, with interesting variations like the smoke, blood & sand, a house twist on the classic blood & sand that added peaty Laphroaig. I settled on a refreshing mai tai with Pusser’s Blue Label rum. Later, I learned that I wasn’t the only one impressed by Brno’s new drinks scene: Super Panda Circus ended up winning the award for the country’s best cocktail bar from the Czech Bar Awards. More surprising, the winner for the competition’s best beer bar prize was also in Brno, though it was one I didn’t know: Zelena Kocka Pivarium. I felt a pang of disappointment on missing what was said to be the best beer bar in a country that truly loves beer, and I wondered if it, too, was a worthy rival of the pubs in Prague. But I could console myself that at least I had a new reason to return.

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From Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Yangon in Myanmar, cruise the waters of Southeast Asia on this journey aboard the 466-foot megayacht L’Austral. With expert guidance and the accessibility a smaller ship offers, immerse yourself in one of the most beautiful regions of the world. • Mingle with longtime New York Times journalists. • See the legacies of the Vietnam War and colonialism in Ho Chi Minh City. • With the guidance of Times-selected experts, learn more about this important region of the world. ONBOARD EXPERTS Gretchen Morgenson, Times Columnist has covered the world financial markets for The Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Wall Street. At Forbes, she became national press secretary to Steve Forbes when he ran for president. She has won two Gerald Loeb awards.

Roger Cohen, Times Op-Ed Columnist joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting foreign editor on Sept. 11, 2001, and foreign editor six months later. Since 2004, he has written a column for the International New York Times, formerly known as The International Herald Tribune. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Richard Paddock, Times Foreign Correspondent reports on Southeast Asia as a contributor to The New York Times based in Bangkok. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for more than a dozen years and reported from nearly 50 countries on five continents, including wartime Bosnia and Iraq.

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