In collaboration with
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEMAL JUFRI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Banks Put Forests in Peril
By HIROKO TABUCHI
IN EARLY 2015, scientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch
raised the alarm about the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia.
Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan Province, on the
island of Borneo, and found a charred wasteland: smoldering fires, orangutans
driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.
There was pretty much no forest left, said Karmele Llano Snchez, director of
the nonprofit International Animal Rescues orangutan rescue group. All the forest
had burned.
Fingers pointed to the Rajawali Group, a sprawling local conglomerate known
for its ties to powerful politicians like Malay- according to an examination of lending data
sias scandal-plagued prime minister. But by The New York Times.
lesser known is how some of the worlds larg- The deal forms part of at least $43 billion
est banks have helped Rajawali and other in loans and underwriting to companies
global agricultural powerhouses expand linked to deforestation and forest burning in
their plantation empires. Southeast Asia alone, according to the Cali-
The year before the clearing of trees in fornia-based Rainforest Action Network, the
West Kalimantan, Rajawalis plantation arm Dutch consultancy Profundo and the Indone-
secured $235 million in loans funds that the sian nongovernmental organization TuK In-
Indonesian company used to buy out a part- donesia. More than a third of that comes from
ner and bolster its landholdings from banks American, European and Japanese banks.
including Credit Suisse and Bank of America, That figure is almost certainly incomplete be-
CULTURE
Can La La Land Make the Musical Matter Again?
By MANOHLA DARGIS
LOS ANGELES This must have been
what it was like to watch Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers during the Great Depression.
In La La Land, the director Damien Cha-
zelle has a shot at something that has eluded
auteurist titans like Peter Bogdanovich and
Francis Ford Coppola: to make musicals
matter again. For decades, the genre that
helped Hollywoods golden age glitter has
been sputtering.
A musical with big numbers, intimate rev-
eries and adult feelings, La La Land is a
boy-meets-girl tale with early 21st-centu-
ry rhythms. It grapples with love between
equals in a story about an aspiring actress,
Mia (Emma Stone), who meets an ambi-
DALE ROBINETTE/SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
tious musician, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling),
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in a scene from Los Angeles-style during a traffic jam on a
La La Land, directed by Damien Chazelle. freeway: He honks his horn at her; she gives
WORLD TRENDS CULTURE
Vegetarians beware of Questions on resale of
5-pound note. PAGE 2 a masterpiece. PAGE 8
INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
The International Animal
Rescue group in Indonesia
trains orphaned orangutans
how to survive after fires
destroy their habitat. Bornean
orangutans are listed as
critically endangered.
cause not all financing is made public.
While there has been a growing movement
among endowments and pension funds to di-
vest from the fossil-fuel industry and banks
have started to back away from financing coal
projects any move away from deforestation
has been slower to catch on.
The money is aiding a process that scien-
tists say destroys ecosystems, displaces in-
digenous communities and covers the region
each year in a thick, suffocating smog that
stretches from Jakarta to Hong Kong.
Deforestation and the fires that frequent-
ly accompany it also generates one-tenth
of total global warming emissions, making
forestry loss one of the biggest single con-
tributors to global warming, according to the
Union of Concerned Scientists.
Destroying the worlds forests makes
fighting climate change almost impossible,
said Andrew W. Mitchell, executive director
of the Global Canopy Programme, a forestry
think tank. The finance sector is really lag-
ging behind in realizing that.
In funding Rajawalis palm oil plantations,
Continued on Page 6
Bringing color and energy
back to a genre that has
faded over the decades.
him the finger. It takes awhile for them to get
together they meet, they retreat, repeat
only to end up swaying in that fading, soft-
light time known as the magic hour. After
another encounter, they at last move as one
swonderful, as Fred Astaire crooned.
Contemporary movies could use more
swonderful, more music and dance, and
way, way more surrealism. Theyre too
dull, too ordinary and too straight, whether
theyre mired in superhero clichs or remod-
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Altering genes to grow
more food. PAGE 13
Copyright 2016 The New York Times
Trumps
Children,
Looming
Conflicts
This article is by Matt Flegen-
h e i m e r, Rachel Abrams,
Barry Meier and Hiroko Tabuchi.
When Donald J. Trump hosted a
foreign leader for the first time as
president-elect, the guest list includ-
ed his daughter Ivanka, who looked
on while he and Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe of Japan chatted high
above Manhattan.
Some 10,800 kilometers from
Trump Tower, in Tokyo, another
exclusive gathering was underway:
a private viewing of Ivanka Trump
products, with treasures like a sam-
ple of the pale pink dress Ms. Trump
wore to introduce her father at the
Republican National Convention.
Ms. Trump is nearing a licensing
deal with the Japanese apparel gi-
ant Sanei International, both parties
said. The largest shareholder of Sa-
neis parent company is the Devel-
opment Bank of Japan, owned by the
Japanese government.
The circumstances highlight the
remarkable tangle awaiting the
Trump family, its business empire
and those who have interacted with
the family at home and abroad a
web of complications that seems
certain to persist even if Mr. Trump
makes good on his promise to re-
move himself from his companys
business operations.
Continued on Page 6
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE GETTY IMAGES
From left, Ivanka, Donald
Jr., and Eric Trump hold
equivalent titles at the Trump
Organization.
eled kitchen-sink realism. One of the trans-
formative pleasures of musicals is that even
at their most choreographed, they break
from the dos and donts of life, suggesting
the possibility that everyone can move to
her own beat. Its enormously pleasing when
an evening stroll turns into a rhythmic saun-
ter, then bursts into dance think of Gene
Kelly singing in the rain.
When Mr. Chazelle was at Harvard Uni-
versity, he was studying Alfred Hitchcock,
the French New Wave, and the American
avant-garde when, for the first time, he saw
Astaire and Rogers cheek to cheek in Top
Hat. Suddenly, I started thinking of them as
experimental movies in mainstream garb,
Mr. Chazelle said. That was the initial thing
where I woke up and went, Oh my God, Ive
Continued on Page 9
INTELLIGENCE
Relearning Spanish
has benefits. PAGE 14
2 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
Aging Well
With Herbs,
Eggs and Sex
Becoming a centenarian might
be easier than previously thought:
just lie.
Dharam Pal Singh says he was
born October 6, 1897, but that has
come under scru-
LENS tiny since hes
still a competi-
tive runner. The
World Masters
Athletics Cham-
pionships re-
quested for four
years that he
provide reliable
evidence of his age, and he could
not. Dr. Thomas T. Perls, an expert
on aging, told The Times that being
able to race at 119 has the same odds
as building a rocket ship and going
to Pluto. Inconceivable.
Whatever the truth is, Mr. Singh
certainly is not young. He credits his
longevity to sleeping on a hard bed
to keep his spine straight, and herb-
al chutney. He also said he avoids
the usual culprits: sugar, fried food,
caffeine, tobacco and alcohol.
I may compete until Im 125,
said Mr. Singh, who may be closer to
79, according to records in India.
Other recent recommendations
from The Times for aging well in-
clude the obvious, such as staying
active, and the less obvious, which
are somewhat dubious and some-
times contradictory: being active
on social media, keeping a pet tur-
tle, cooking with lots of rosemary,
eating raw eggs every day, joining
motorcycle clubs, having a happy
spouse, and staying single.
The Times reported that research-
ers are studying a community in Ac-
ciaroli, Italy, where the quality of life
for people with nine or 10 decades
behind them is high: virtually no cat-
aracts, few bone fractures, excellent
heart health, and a low incidence of
Alzheimers disease.
They get lots of sun and their diet
includes rabbits, anchovies and a po-
tent variety of rosemary. Whatever
The many ways to
attain longevity.
(One, just lie.)
their magic formula is, it keeps them
youthful in another important way.
At 95, they have brains more like
someone who is 50, and at 50, youre
still thinking a lot about sex, Dr.
Salvatore Di Somma told The Times.
The sexual activity is huge.
All over the world, it seems, being
sexy isnt just for young people any-
more. In China, Wang Deshun has
become a sex symbol by strutting
down runways at 80. His fans call
him laoxianrou, which means old
fresh meat.
Far from looking frail, the sil-
ver-haired actor, model and artist
wore a crisp white shirt and black
jeans, his back straight and his eyes
glittering with humor, Didi Kirsten
Tatlow wrote in The Times.
I should wear a long robe, with the
word longevity embroidered on the
front, said Mr. Wang, who exercises
daily. One way to tell if youre old or
not is to ask yourself, Do you dare
try something youve never done
before? Nature determines age, but
you determine your state of mind.
Mr. Wang would have to live near-
ly four more decades to match the
worlds oldest person, who recently
celebrated her 117th birthday. Em-
ma Morano is believed to be the last
human alive who was born in the
1800s if Mr. Singh isnt quite as old
as he says.
Ms. Morano, who lives in Rome,
eats two raw eggs a day, as well as
bananas and ladyfinger cookies.
She also credits something else:
staying single after her divorce in
1938, despite having many suitors.
I didnt want to be dominated by
anyone, she said.
Dr. Carlo Bava told The Times that
Ms. Morano is in great form and
offered another theory about her
longevity. While she doesnt have a
spouse, she is not alone and has been
cared for.
The secret is in growing old with
people who love you, which is differ-
ent from growing old and being put
up with, Dr. Bava said. Thats the
secret to a long life. ROBB TODD
For comments, write to
nytweekly@nytimes.com.
INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
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TOM BRADY Editor
ALAN MATTINGLY Managing editor
The New York Times International Weekly
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Panama Hits Hurdles in Corruption Fight
This article is by Walt Bogdanich,
Ana Graciela Mndez and
Jacqueline Williams.
In August 2015, Panama sought to
shed its image as a magnet for un-
derhanded deals by paying at least
$2 million to host the worlds largest
anticorruption conference, held this
month in Panama City. At the time,
it seemed like a good idea.
Now, some prominent Panamani-
ans arent so sure. In April, the na-
tion was deeply embarrassed when
confidential records now known
as the Panama Papers leaked
to journalists revealed that a single
Panamanian law firm had created
thousands of offshore companies,
allowing the wealthy to hide income,
some of it from illicit activities.
After the leak, the president, Juan
Carlos Varela, appointed a commis-
sion to find ways to make the finan-
cial sector more transparent. That
did not work out exactly as planned.
For credibility, the president had
included Joseph E. Stiglitz, the No-
bel laureate economist and a fierce
critic of tax havens. Mr. Stiglitz and
another board member, Mark Pi-
eth, a Swiss anticorruption expert,
resigned after one official meeting
because the government, they said,
would not promise to make their fi-
nal report public. You cant have a
committee on transparency and not
be transparent, Mr. Stiglitz said.
Panama has taken some steps
toward transparency, agreeing this
year to provide the names of owners
of offshore companies when other
countries request them.
But more needs to be done, Mr.
Stiglitz said. He and Mr. Pieth said
they rued Panamas lost opportu-
nity to be a model for other nations
that do not fully comply with inter-
Vinod Sreeharsha contributed
reporting.
Fearing for the Future of Democracies
By AMANDA TAUB
WASHINGTON Yascha
Mounk has spent the past few years
challenging one of the bedrock as-
sumptions of Western politics: that
once a country becomes a liberal
democracy, it will stay that way.
His research suggests other-
wise: that liberal democracies
around the world may be at serious
risk of decline.
Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in gov-
ernment at Harvard University,
and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political
scientist at the University of Mel-
bourne in Australia, gathered and
analyzed data on the strength of
liberal democracies and are to pub-
lish their conclusion in the January
issue of The Journal of Democracy.
Right now, Mr. Mounk said, the
warning signs are flashing red.
Political scientists have a theory
called democratic consolidation,
that once countries develop demo-
cratic institutions, a robust civil so-
ciety and a certain level of wealth,
their democracy is secure.
For decades, global events
seemed to support that idea. Data
from Freedom House, a watchdog
organization, shows that the num-
ber of countries classified as free
rose steadily from the mid-1970s
to the early 2000s. But since 2005,
Freedom Houses index has shown
a decline in global freedom each
year.
Mr. Mounk and Mr. Foa devel-
oped a three-factor formula to de-
tect that a democracy is ill before it
develops full-blown symptoms.
The first factor was public sup-
port: How important do citizens
In Britain, Currency Isnt Free of Meat
By HANNAH OLIVENNES
LONDON When it released a
new 5-pound note in September, the
Bank of England said the polymer
bills were stronger, safer and better
for the environment. One thing they
are not, it turns out, is meat-free.
The Bank of England has con-
firmed that tallow a hard, fatty
substance usually made from ren-
dered beef or mutton suet was
used in the base of the new notes,
worth about $6.25.
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WORLD TRENDS
Mossack Fonseca, from its office in Panama City, set up offshore accounts to hide wealth.
national standards of transparency.
An examination by The New York
Times of the connections of the four
Panamanian commission members
points to the challenges that Mr. Sti-
glitz and Mr. Pieth had to overcome.
One member, Nicols Ardito Bar-
letta, a former president of Panama
under a dictatorship, helped to cre-
ate the countrys offshore industry
in the 1970s.
A second member, Gisela Porras,
was once a partner in a law firm that
recently advertised: Our corporate
law is attractive for many reasons.
First of all, shareholder information
is not filed at the Public Registry,
therefore granting confidentiality
to beneficial owners.
NEWS ANALYSIS
Percentage of people who say it is essential to live in a democracy
Sweden Australia
100%
75%
95%
50%
confidence
intervals
25%
1930s 1980s 30s
Source: Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, The Signs of Democratic Deconsolidation, Journal of Democracy
think it is for their country to re-
main democratic? The second was
public openness to nondemocratic
forms of government, such as mili-
tary rule. And the third factor was
whether antisystem parties and
movements were gaining support.
If support for democracy was
falling while the other two mea-
sures were rising, the researchers
marked that country deconsoli-
dating, the political equivalent of a
low-grade fever that arrives before
the flu.
Venezuela, for instance, enjoyed
the highest possible scores on Free-
dom Houses measures of political
rights and democracy in the 1980s.
But during that apparent period of
stability, Venezuela already scored
as deconsolidating on the Mounk-
Foa test.
There is a trace of tallow in the
polymer pellets used in the base
substrate of the polymer 5 notes,
the Bank of England said in re-
sponses to multiple inquiries on so-
cial media on November 30. That led
to an outpouring of outrage.
Being forced to pay taxes to
contribute to animal products is a
breach of rights, Tim Doble, who
describes himself on Twitter as a
vegan, wrote in a tweet. Shut. up.
omnivores. You have no say in this,
he continued.
Within the week, a petition call-
ing on the Bank of England to make
a vegan-friendly bank note This
is unacceptable to millions of veg-
ans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs,
Jains and others in the U.K, it reads
had received more than 100,000
signatures.
Not all were sympathetic to the
cause. Even if I was a vegetarian I
still wouldnt eat a five pound note,
wrote a Twitter user who identified
himself as Chris. Dont know what
all the fuss is about. Have a carrot.
EL NUEVO DIARIO, NICARAGUA n CORREO, PERU n NEDELJNIK, SERBIA
A co-chairman, Alberto Alemn,
is an independent director of Glob-
al Bank, one of three Panamanian
banks to recently receive a negative
outlook from S & P Global.
President Varela is also closely
tied to law firms that handle off-
shore accounts. One Alemn cousin
is now his chief of staff. And one of
the presidents closest advisers un-
til early this year was Ramon Fon-
seca Mora, a partner in Mossack
Fonseca, the law firm that generat-
ed the Panama Papers.
Potential conflicts in the commit-
tee quickly became apparent. When
the subject of a public registry of
beneficial owners was raised, Mr.
Stiglitz said, you could see them
Netherlands United States
80s 30s 80s 30s 80s 30s
Decade of birth
In 1992, a faction of the Venezue-
lan military loyal to Hugo Chvez
attempted a coup against the demo-
cratically elected government. Mr.
Chvez was elected president in
1998 on a wave of populist support,
and he immediately passed a new
constitution that consolidated his
power. His government cracked
down on dissent, imprisoned polit-
ical opponents and shredded the
countrys economy with a series of
economic overhauls.
According to the Mounk-Foa ear-
ly-warning system, signs of demo-
cratic deconsolidation in the United
States and many other liberal de-
mocracies are now similar to those
in Venezuela before its crisis.
Across numerous countries,
including Australia, Britain, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Swe-
Critics of the new note pointed out
that the issue was about more than
what people choose to eat. Although
some people are vegan or vegetar-
ian for health reasons, others are
concerned about animal welfare.
The new notes also represent
something of a problem for Hindus,
who consider cows sacred. The lat-
est census, released in 2012, showed
that there were more than 800,000
Hindus in England and Wales.
Theres a choice issue that comes
into it, said Lynn Elliot, the chief ex-
ecutive of the Vegetarian Society in
Britain. If you go into the sofa shop,
you dont have to pick the leather
one, you can pick the fabric one. But
this is the currency of the land, so
you dont really have a choice.
The Bank of England has printed
440 million notes since this sum-
mer, but Mrs. Elliot said her group
was working with bank officials to
resolve the issue.
The Bank of England issued a
statement saying that it respected
peoples concerns and had only re-
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
CARLOS JASSO/REUTERS
blanch. And, he added, there was
no serious discussion about closer
monitoring of tax-advantaged, free-
trade zones, or the enforcement of
the open-records law.
Compounding matters, Mr. Sti-
glitz and Mr. Pieth said, other mem-
bers had sent an interim report
to President Varela without their
knowledge. That report, Mr. Stiglitz
said, was too narrow.
The recently filed final report, Mr.
Stiglitz said, was not substantively
different from the interim report.
Theyre making a valiant effort
to sound tough, he said. But the
key weaknesses in the transpar-
ency framework have not been ad-
dressed.
den and the United
New Zealand Britain
States, the percent-
age of people who
say it is essential
to live in a democra-
cy has plummeted,
and it is especially
low among younger
generations.
Support for auto-
cratic alternatives is
rising, too.
The researchers
found that the share
of Americans who
say that army rule
would be a good or
very good thing
80s 30s 80s
had risen to 1 in 6
in 2014, compared
THE NEW YORK TIMES with 1 in 16 in 1995.
In a previously
published paper, the researchers
calculated that 43 percent of older
Americans believed it was illegiti-
mate for the military to take over if
the government were incompetent
or failing to do its job, but only 19
percent of millennials agreed. The
same divide showed up in Europe,
where 53 percent of older people
thought a military takeover would
be illegitimate, while only 36 per-
cent of millennials agreed.
Of course, this is just one paper
and although the researchers found
a relationship between deconsoli-
dation and democratic instability,
that is not the same thing as prov-
ing the root causes of either factor.
Thats only one measure, Mr.
Mounk acknowledged. But, he
added after a pause, it should have
us worried.
FRANK AUGSTEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The polymer used in the new
5-pound note was said to allow
it to outlast paper.
cently been informed by its supplier
about the extremely small amount
of tallow used in the production pro-
cess. The new 5 note was unveiled
in June and was said to be made from
polymer that would allow it to last
at least 2.5 times as long as its cot-
ton-paper predecessor.
There is a possible refuge for veg-
ans: Scotland, whose leaders have
suggested holding a second vote
on independence after British vot-
ers decided to leave the European
Union. In response to a question on
Twitter, the Bank of Scotland, which
prints currency, said that its 5 note
was free of animal products.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY 3

WORLD TRENDS

A Grim Ritual for Iraqis: Scouring Mass Graves

By TIM ARANGO
HAMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq The
battle was over in Hamam al-Alil,
Iraq, an old spa resort town that the
countrys security forces had wrest-
ed from the Islamic State last month,
but one Iraqi soldier was still on a
very personal mission.
The soldier, Zaman Mijwal,
was looking for his older brother,
Munther, a former policeman who
lived in a nearby village but hadnt
been heard from in weeks.
At a stretch of road flanked by two
dirt fields, Mr. Mijwal pointed to
one side, where decaying, headless
corpses were lying on a barren plot
of land that had once been a shooting
range for the Iraqi Army.
He may be there, he said. He
pointed to the other side of the road,
an expanse of earth that looked
freshly moved. Or he may be there.
With every stretch of territory the
Iraqi security forces retake from the
Islamic State, it seems another mass
grave is uncovered.
The legacy of the mass grave in
Iraq goes back to the times of Sadd-
am Husseins industrial-scale kill-
ings. It is a symbol of what has been
for decades a constant of Iraqi life:
the disappearance of loved ones into
the machinery of despotism.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
For Iraqis, the Islamic State is just a
new form of tyranny with direct links The legacy of mass graves, like
to Mr. Husseins regime. Many former this one near Hamam al-Alil,
Baathist officers from Mr. Husseins The Islamic State adds Iraq, goes back to the regime
security forces populate the top ranks
of the Islamic State, mimicking the to the toll of millions of Saddam Hussein. A federal
police officer with a family in
former dictators tactics.
Lately, with the Islamic State un-
missing since 1980. the town.
der pressure from Iraqi security forc-
es, the groups cruelty has gone into
overdrive: Many of the mass graves covered, and he heard gunshot after In Diyala Province, where the Is-
recently uncovered contain the bod- gunshot. lamic State was once strong, a father
ies of local men. Most were former I saw Daesh bury 200 bodies over who lost his son about two years ago
members of the security forces who here, he said, using an Arabic ac- said he scours jihadist websites for
were executed after the campaign ronym for the Islamic State, which videos that might show his child. He
for Mosul began. is also known as ISIS or ISIL. (The rushes to every mass grave uncov-
There are those, like Jamal Abul official government estimate is that ered in the province.
Younis, who count themselves as roughly 100 people were killed in The most difficult thing is when
lucky. The former policeman from Hamam al-Alil. But Human Rights my grandson asks me about his fa-
Hamam al-Alil survived by hiding in Watch believes that at least 300 were ther, said the man, who gave his
a hole in the ground, obscured by an killed there.) name as Abu Marwan. I answer,
air cooler, in his dirt-floor house. Of In the days before the killings, he He is on a trip and will return one
hiding out, he said, Each one hour said, Islamic State militants herded For Iraqis, the pain of not knowing chemical-weapon strikes against the day.
was like one year. hundreds of people perhaps thou- can be the worst of all. The Interna- Kurds in the late 1980s, and the more Mr. Mijwal, like millions of others
He is now one of just a few surviv- sands from nearby villages and tional Commission on Missing Per- recent sectarian civil war of the last here who have endured the same
ing witnesses to the Islamic States took them to Hamam al-Alil, using sons, based in the Netherlands, has decade. painful ritual, has found no answers
killings in Hamam al-Alil. One re- them as human shields against the estimated up to a million Iraqis have The Islamic States brutality has about what happened to his brother.
cent evening, he said, he watched as possibility of American airstrikes. gone missing in recent history. That written a new chapter in that dark I dont know his destiny, his fate,
eight minibuses drove toward the They separated out the former po- encompasses the war between Iran history. The number of bodies has he said. At the very least, I need to
area where the mass grave was dis- licemen and ordered them killed. and Iraq, the mass killings ordered overwhelmed the Iraqi government, find his body. This is the important
I cannot believe I am still alive, by Mr. Hussein after a Shiite uprising and few are ever identified by DNA thing for us. So we can have a funer-
Falih Hassan contributed reporting. Mr. Younis said. in 1991, the Iraqi governments Anfal testing. al.
4 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
Egypt and Turkey Soften Their Opposition to Assad
By ANNE BARNARD
BEIRUT, Lebanon The Syrian
government, flush with pivotal bat-
tlefield gains and bolstered by sup-
port from Iran and Russia, is finding
itself the beneficiary of an evolving
regional realignment spurred by the
war in Syria.
Egypt and Turkey, countries that
were once vocal opponents of Syrias
president, Bashar al-Assad, have
softened their positions. Egypt, the
regions most populous Sunni coun-
try and wary of Irans Shiite theoc-
racy, has made its tacit support of
the Syrian government public for the
first time. And Turkey, a Sunni re-
gional power, is reshaping the Syrian
battlefield by edging closer to Russia
and dampening its support for rebels
fighting Mr. Assad.
The shifts come as countries in the
Middle East long aligned with the
United States are looking to Moscow
for support as Russian intervention
transforms the conflict in Syria.
Russia is asserting itself across the
region to a degree not seen since So-
viet times, partnering with an ambi-
tious Iran. Longstanding American
alliances with Turkey, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia are frayed, and face
new uncertainty with the election
of Donald J. Trump, whose foreign
policy remains largely undefined,
except for an avowed eagerness
Chinese authorities are destroying living quarters in Larung Gar, where 20,000 Tibetan Buddhists live.
LARUNG GAR JOURNAL
Chain Saws Disrupt
Buddhist Enclave
By EDWARD WONG
LARUNG GAR, China Atop a
hill, a growling chain saw drowned
out loudspeakers broadcasting a la-
mas chants from a nearby temple.
The chain saw signaled the immi-
nent end of thousands of hand-built
monastic dwellings here at Larung
Gar, the worlds largest Buddhist
institute.
Since its founding in 1980,
Larung Gar has grown into an
extraordinary and surreal sprawl
countless red-painted dwellings
surrounding temples, stupas and
large prayer wheels and has
become one of the most influential
institutions in the Tibetan world,
the teachings of its senior monks
praised, debated and proselytized
from here to the Himalayas. Now
China is tightening control over the
settlement, in what many Tibetans
and their advocates call a severe
blow to Tibetan religious practice.
On a recent afternoon, workers
were dismantling cells that monks
and nuns had built along a ridge.
Nuns looked for their belongings in
the rubble.
Hundreds of Buddhists had
already been forced out. A monk
watching the destruction from a
ledgesaid he was staying in a home
across the valley. Like others inter-
viewed for this story, he spoke on
the condition of anonymity to avoid
reprisal from the authorities.
I heard my home will be de-
molished, he said. I dont know
whether Ill be allowed to stay.
Tensions between Tibetans and
the Chinese government have been
high ever since a widespread up-
rising across the Tibetan plateau
in 2008.
Suppression of their culture
and religious life remains at the
OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE GETTY IMAGES
to shake things up.
Egypt, which has seen its influence
wane, is seeking allies and relevance
wherever it can find them, even if
that means shelving concerns about
Iran.
While Russias goal seems to be
to expand its influence and pave the
way for the international rehabilita-
tion of Mr. Assads government, the
scrambling of alliances remains in
motion and the results unclear.
Turkey has reached a potentially
game-changing understanding with
Russia in northern Syria slack-
ening support for besieged rebels in
Aleppo in exchange for a sphere of in-
fluence along its border but contin-
ues to push the deals boundaries po-
litically and militarily. And Egypt is
heart of Tibetans grievances, and
restrictions at important religious
institutions like Larung Gar stoke
that resentment.
Many Tibetans say they fear the
erosion of their language, tradi-
tions and ways of worship.
China still denounces the Dalai
Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader,
and bans his image in the region.
Some estimates put Larung
Gars population at 20,000, many of
them clergy who have flocked here
from far corners of the vast plateau.
Buddhist practitioners who are
Han, the dominant ethnicity in
China, live alongside Tibetans in
the settlement, which is a winding
16-hour drive from the provincial
capital, Chengdu.
Interviews with residents at
Larung Gar and reports from Hu-
man Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia
and overseas pro-Tibet groups indi-
cate that officials intend to reduce
the settlements population to 5,000
by late next year.
Tibetan users of WeChat, a Chi-
nese app, have said that those evict-
ed must promise never to return. As
WORLD TRENDS
Turkey has
edged closer
to aligning
itself with
Russia over
Syria. Turks
protesting
Russian
military
operations in
Aleppo.
diverging from its traditional allies,
by splitting from Saudi Arabia on
Syria; it remains financially depen-
dent on the kingdom, and hopes to
mend fences with the United States
under Mr. Trump.
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress, a re-
search organization in Washington,
said Egypt is seeking to signal that
it has an independent perspective
and position on the Syrian conflict
and on regional policy, balancing the
United States and Russia, not align-
ing entirely with either the Gulf Arab
states or Iran.
The emerging Sisi doctrine,
named for President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi of Egypt, is rigid anti-Isla-
mism and rigid anti-militancy and a
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLES SABRI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Human rights groups say China plans to reduce a Buddhist
settlements population to 5,000 by late 2017.
China tightens its
grip on a Tibetan
settlement.
of October, as many as 1,000 people
had been forced out, residents and
human rights groups said.
In June, an article on a state-
run website quoted a local party
official, Hua Ke, as saying that the
authorities were overhauling the
crowded settlement to eliminate
hidden dangers and safeguard the
personal safety and property of the
monks and nuns.
A visit, despite officials closing
the area to foreigners this summer,
showed nothing out of the ordinary,
until a large prayer wheel on a road
winding up the valleys north wall.
Four workers in hard hats stood
atop a home, ripping off the metal
roofing.
Uphill, workers were tearing
down homes in a part of Larung Gar
with particular religious signifi-
cance. They had been built across
from the valleys highest stupa,
which pilgrims circumambulate.
very vocal support for nation states
and sovereignty, said Michael Wa-
hid Hanna, a senior fellow at the
Century Foundation, a New York re-
search group.
Those positions diverge from those
of Saudi Arabia, which has long been
one of Egypts main financial life-
lines, supplying aid worth tens of bil-
lions of dollars.
Mr. Sisi is also wary of Turkey. He
sees the recent defeat of a coup at-
tempt against the Erdogan Islamist
government as the birth of a reli-
gious state in Europe, Mr. Sisi told
Mr. Katulis for a forthcoming report
on United States policy in Egypt.
Yet, Mr. Katulis said, Mr. Sisi made
clear he remained suspicious of
Irans Shiite brand of Islamism de-
spite its alignment with Mr. Assad
and opposition to Turkey in Syria.
But for now, Mr. Sisi seems to be
putting concerns about Iran on the
back burner and focusing more on
Sunni Islamist movements, which he
sees as a bigger threat. And lending
support to Syria helps a weakened
Egypt evoke its glory days as the
leader of Arab nationalism in the
1960s.
Mr. Sisis emphasis on state sov-
ereignty, supporting Arab states
against insurgents, is also a major
boon to the Syrian governments
quest for legitimacy, said Kamal
The government says the settle-
ment is crowded, and it is. There
are open sewage drains and trash
pits. In 2014, a fire destroyed about
100 homes. But Tibetans here say
officials could build newer, cleaner
enclaves rather than evict people.
The governments real aim, they
believe, is to weaken centers of
power that can rival it.
Across Chinese-controlled Tibet,
disciples of Larung Gar have been
spreading the 10 new virtues
movement: no killing or selling an-
imals, no stealing, no drinking, no
feuding and so on.
For some Tibetan nomads, these
tenets make life more difficult,
since much of their economy relies
on the herding and sale of animals,
particularly yaks.
Monks from Larung Gar have al-
so traveled across the region to try
to defuse local conflicts and help
with issues of social justice.
But residents of the region said
the authorities were not happy with
such activity.
They want to control Tibetans,
said a man from the region who has
visited Larung Gar multiple times.
They dont want the monastery to
develop too quickly.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
Alam, a visiting fellow at the Royal
United Services Institute in London.
Three years ago, Turkey and
Egypt were prominent supporters
of the Syrian rebellion, aligned with
Saudi Arabia in what the Saudis saw
as a geopolitical struggle against
Iran.
Today, both have tilted away from
Saudi Arabia and toward Russia, if
not directly Iran. So has Jordan, an-
other American ally and mostly Sun-
ni country whose support for rebels
had always been lukewarm.
All three seek to insulate them-
selves from the upheaval in Syria
from refugees and migrants, from
the Islamist militants like Islam-
ic State and Qaeda affiliates that
gained footholds within the insur-
gency they helped support, and from
any popular revolt.
One question, though, is how much
control Russia has over the Syrian
government.
Diplomatic realignment can go
only so far, and the more triumphant
Damascus feels the harder it may be
for Russia to deliver a de-escalatory
path, said Mr. Hanna, who favors
United States-Russia talks to reach
a political solution.
Russia lines up the regional domi-
noes, he said. And the regime says,
Great, now lets continue fighting
this war.
He Was
An Afghan
Prince. Until
He Wasnt.
By MUJIB MASHAL and FAHIM ABED
KABUL, Afghanistan He ar-
rived in northern Afghanistan bear-
ing certificates of appreciation from
the presidential palace a favored
token of Afghan officials, second only
to government medals.
The dignitary was provided se-
curity by Afghan commandos and
ushered around in one of the govern-
ments precious helicopters. District
governors posed with him for photo-
graphs; generals clicked their heels
together in respect.
The only problem? The man, who
had introduced himself as Sardar
Zmarai, a prince and a senior rep-
resentative from President Ashraf
Ghanis Office of the National Secu-
rity Council, was an impostor. And
after more than a decade of tricking
officials, and growing rich from it,
Mr. Zmarai, the son of a wheat seller,
had pushed his luck too far.
At the end of his northern tour, Af-
ghan security agents were waiting
for him with handcuffs at the airport
in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Mr. Zmarai, whose latest identity
was as a descendant of an Afghan
prince who had served as the coun-
trys first president, may be one of
the more cunning impostors.
He came to Baghlan from Balkh
with a bunch of army commandos,
then he called the army corps com-
mander in Balkh to inform him that
he had arrived safely to Baghlan,
said General Noor Habib Gulbahari,
the police chief of Baghlan Province.
I also talked with the corps com-
mander in Balkh through his phone,
and he told me to take care of him.
Mr. Zmarai, believed to be in his
late 20s, hails from Khanabad Dis-
trict in Kunduz Province.
Relatives said Mr. Zmarai began
about 14 years ago posing as a gov-
ernment inspector on projects, luring
officials and contractors to give him
a cut. But early on, he was arrested
twice.
In Kunduz, he marketed himself as
a middleman to NATO.
Recently, Mr. Zmarai preferred
the identity of a prince. He even sold
the land of his supposed ancestor,
Prince Daoud.He took $10,000 from
me, and when I followed the issue, the
land did not belong to him, said Gen-
eral Abdul Wahid Taqat, a retired
commander.
The final moments before his ar-
rest had to be dramatic, and were
though the accounts, fittingly, differ.
The office of Balkh Provinces gov-
ernor said Mr. Zmarai had jumped
from the third floor of the airport.
A second official said Mr. Zmarai
was arrested as soon as the govern-
ment helicopter he used landed in
Mazar-i-Sharif. Fearing his arrest
when he saw security guards on the
grounds, Mr. Zmarai had jumped
from the helicopter and hurt his leg,
that official said.
ROHULLAH YOUSUFI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sardar Zmarai, center, posed as
an inspector and another time
as a NATO go-between.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016 5
6 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
In Land of Beer,
Gin Finds a Home
By ROBERT SIMONSON
BERLIN Bar Convent Berlin,
a sprawling trade show held in Oc-
tober in a former train station here,
heralded every sort of spirit. There
was a booth pouring a new German
gin. There was a stand mixing dai-
quiris with rum from Cuba. Nearby
was a new German gin. Around the
corner, a Campari bar was handing
out Negronis. Farther down the
aisle was a new German gin.
Notice a pattern? Germany, the
land of beer, riesling and schnapps,
has gone gin mad.
In the last decade, the number of
small gin distillers has exploded.
An exact figure is hard to pin down,
but many here say there are now
hundreds of gin makers. And the
nation is giving England and Spain
a run for their money in its love of
the gin and tonic.
It is a common joke to say that
EVA-MARIA HAEBERLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Gin in 2005.
Jrg Meyer, a prominent German
bartender, said everybody is drinking gin. brand so far is the fan-
Its unbelievable.
not a week passes without a new
gin on the market, said Dariusz
Kulakowski, a bartender at Limon-
adier, a cocktail bar in Berlin where
he said gin flows like a river.
The only liquid that can com-
pete with it in Limonadier, amount-
wise, is fresh lime and lemon juice,
he said. In the past, bars said that
vodka pays the bills, he added.
Scrap that. Its truly gin that is the
big moneymaker.
Theres no specific demographic
for this fad: Everybody, it seems, is
drinking gin. Its unbelievable,
said Jrg Meyer, a prominent Ger-
man bartender and the owner of Le
Lion, a bar in Hamburg. Corner
pubs are now serving gin and ton-
ics. Its all over.
In Business Since Birth: Trumps Children and Looming Conflicts
Continued from Page 1
While Mr. Trump has insisted that
he faces no legal requirement to turn
over the company, the Trump Or-
ganization has said it is preparing
an immediate transfer of manage-
ment to Mr. Trumps three eldest
children Donald Jr., 38; Ivanka,
35; and Eric, 32 along with a team
of executives.
The president-elect said on Twit-
ter that he would make an announce-
ment on December 15 about leaving
my great business in total in order to
fully focus on running the country.
Doing so is visually important, he
wrote, to in no way have a conflict
of interest with my various business-
es.
Yet an examination of the profes-
sional histories of the three children
raises doubts about how a wall can
ever be erected between Mr. Trump
and his heirs at the Trump Organiza-
tion.
For years, the siblings have oper-
ated with few dividing lines in their
travels as ambassadors of the Trump
brand, allowing them to lean heavily
on the reputation and backing of their
father while establishing their own
credibility in business. Officially, all
three are executive vice presidents
for development and acquisitions.
Practically, they conduct meetings
and report back to Mr. Trump.
Ms. Trump has used the Trump
Organizations payroll, information
technology and human resources for
her separate brand. It is, of course,
an advantage to be my fathers
daughter, Ms. Trump told an audi-
ence in Malaysia, via videoconfer-
ence, in 2008. I think it has afforded
me many great opportunities.
All three children declined to be
interviewed for this article. In its
statement about the transfer of man-
agement, the Trump Organization
said the structure that is ultimately
selected will comply with all applica-
ble rules and regulations.
Still, for an enterprise premised in
large measure on the relentless mar-
keting of a surname, the most famous
Trump cannot help looming largest
in perpetuity, experts in government
ethics say, opening the door to con-
flicts inside and outside the United
States.
Susanne Craig, Michael Barbaro,
Maggie Haberman, Steve Eder,
Richard C. Paddock and Chris Dixon
contributed reporting.
An explosion of
local distilleries
and flavors.
The flood has even seeped into
the home liquor cabinet. What is
big at home is gin and tonic, for ev-
ery party, Mr. Meyer said. They
dont buy one tonic, they buy three,
and six gins, so you can mix. They
may have one good bourbon, one
good vodka, but they have five, six
gins.
The makers of The Duke Gin, in
Munich, credited Germans new
interest in the provenance of what
they are eating and drinking.
Mr. Kulakowski said the local
nature of the products, each with
its distinctive blend of
botanicals like lemon
verbena and linden
bloom, has an attrac-
tion. Suddenly a gin
and tonic is not just a
gin and tonic, he said.
Its a story in a glass,
and people will get
moved by it.
The Duke, first
produced in 2008, is
among the more prom-
inent of the new gins.
Many bartenders and
distillers agree that
the rush to gin began
with Adler Berlin Dry
But the best-known
cifully named Monkey Europeans.
47, made in the Black
Forest. It quickly at-
tracted a following after arriving
in 2010. This year, after years of
climbing sales, the brand was
bought by Pernod Ricard, the li-
quor conglomerate.
Other notable labels include
Siegfried Rheinland Dry Gin, Gin
Sul from Hamburg and Windspiel
Gin from the Volcanic Eifel region.
I have seen gins come and go
for more than six years, and there
comes a time you stop counting,
said Alexander Stein, head of Mon-
key 47.
And Stephen Garbe, the founder
and chief executive of Gin Sul, said
the momentum shows no signs of
slowing. There are a lot of band-
wagoners, late-movers and follow-
ers, he said.
Donald J. Trump, center, and his family in October during
the opening ceremony for the Trump International Hotel in
Washington, in the Old Post Office Building.
The children each hold a stake in
the lease that allows the organization
to operate the Trump International
Hotel out of the federal governments
Old Post Office Building in Washing-
ton. Mr. Trump, as president, will
appoint the head of the General Ser-
vices Administration, which manag-
es the property, while his children
oversee a hotel with millions of dol-
lars in ties to the agency.
In addition to attending the meet-
ing with Mr. Abe, Ms. Trump was
present for her fathers initial con-
versation with President Mauricio
Macri of Argentina. The children
also met recently with Jose E. B. An-
tonio, a Philippine developer who is
collaborating with the Trumps on a
tower in Manila and who in October
was named a special envoy to the
United States by the Philippine pres-
ident, Rodrigo Duterte.
At times, the president-elect has
grown incredulous when pressed
on the specter of conflicts. In an in-
terview last month, he wondered
what harm might come from taking
a picture with business partners for
a project his children were leading.
He allowed, though, that his election
had changed at least one thing. The
brand is certainly a hotter brand
than it was before, he said.
Growing Up in the Business
Grooming began early in the
Trump family. For as long as they
can remember, the children visited
WORLD TRENDS
The burning of peatland, like that in West Kalimantan in 2015, adds to global warming.
Banks Imperil Rain Forests in Asia
Continued from Page 1
the banks appear to have violated
their own sustainability policies. In
its policy, Credit Suisse says it will
not finance or advise companies
with operations in primary tropi-
cal moist forests like those of West
Kalimantan. Bank of America says it
will not finance commercial projects
that result in the clearing of primary
tropical moist forests.
The 2014 deal financed Rajawalis
expansion into palm oil. Demand for
palm oil is surging worldwide, driv-
en by rising incomes in markets like
China and India and a switch away
from trans fats by Americans and
change a hoax. Mr. Trump has said
Rajawalis plantations have been
accused by environmental and la-
bor groups of deforestation and ille-
gal burning. Indonesia is one of the
worlds biggest palm oil producers,
and forestry loss there and else-
where ranks as one of the biggest sin-
gle contributors to global warming.
Sebastian Sharp, a spokesman for
Rajawalis plantation arm, acknowl-
edged that the burning and clearing
on its West Kalimantan forest sites
might be illegal, but said local com-
munities encroaching on its prop-
erties and starting the fires were to
blame. He said the company did not
engage in illegal burning or clearing.
Credit Suisse declined to comment
on its Rajawali deal. A Bank of Amer-
ica spokesman, Bill Halldin, said that
the most serious accusations against
Rajawali came after the 2014 loan, in
STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
job sites, as Mr. Trump had done as
a boy with his father, Fred. They sat
in on meetings with executives and
government officials.
I always joke, I have been working
in the company for 37 years, Donald
Jr. said in a Fox News special this
year, because we had that kind of
level of access and because he was
always there with us.
The president-elect also has a
daughter Tiffany, 23, from his second
marriage, and a son Barron, 10, with
his current wife, Melania. While the
eldest three have been presented as
business successes of the highest or-
der, there have been some stumbles
cushioned often by the built-in ad-
vantages of being a Trump. As Don-
ald Jr. has sought to establish his own
business identity, he has borrowed
from his fathers playbook and his
payroll.
In 2010, the younger Mr. Trump
helped found a company in South
Carolina called Titan Atlas Manu-
facturing, which made cast panels
for prefabricated houses. Titan At-
lass chief executive was an old friend
named Jeremy Blackburn.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Blackburn also
sought business deals in Mexico and
Colombia, traveling with executives
of the Trump Organization and Yun
Capital, an investment firm involved
in Trump Organization projects
abroad.
By 2012, Titan Atlas was mired in
debt, prompting a suit from a Phila-
Where the jungle
stood, palm oil
plantations grow.
which the bank played a very small
role.
Today, we would certainly consid-
er more information before making
any decision on any client, he said.
Climate concerns have been
brought into sharp relief by the
impending presidency of Donald
J. Trump, who has called climate
with another plantation operator,
he will pull the United States out of
the Paris accord, a commitment by
195 countries to take concrete mea-
sures to reduce planet-warming car-
bon emissions.
Daily emissions from Indonesias
forest fires last year at times exceed-
ed emissions produced by all eco-
nomic activity in America. A recent
study found the fires caused 100,000
premature deaths in Southeast Asia.
The World Bank estimates the fires
cost Indonesias economy $16 billion.
Although deforestation has slowed
in many parts of the world, forest
clearing is on the rise in Southeast
Asia. Indonesia suffers the worlds
highest rates of forest loss, an av-
erage of almost 850,000 hectares a
year, a study published in 2014 found.
Rajawali originally operated its
palm plantation business, Green
delphia law firm it had hired to repre-
sent it. The firm claimed it was owed
$400,000 in unpaid fees.
After Mr. Blackburn filed for
personal bankruptcy, the law firm
turned its attention to Donald Jr.,
issuing a subpoena for him to tes-
tify about Titan Atlass assets. The
Trump Organization jumped to his
defense. In a letter on company let-
terhead, Alan Garten, the organiza-
tions general counsel, threatened to
file a disciplinary complaint about
a lawyer at the firm if he sought to
bring Donald Jr. into the case.
On the eve of Donald Jr.s testi-
mony, a confidential settlement was
reached. Separately, in late 2014, the
Trump Organization formed an enti-
ty that took over a $3.65 million loan
made by Deutsche Bank in 2011 to
Titan Atlas. The younger Mr. Trump
had been a co-signer.
Lifting a Brand of Her Own
Ivanka Trump was often her fa-
thers most potent surrogate during
the campaign, an essential bridge to
female voters who might have been
dismayed by Mr. Trumps disparag-
ing comments about women and the
allegations of sexual assault against
him.
She has traveled widely as a fresh-
er face of the family brand, at times
convening with foreign dignitaries:
an adviser to the Ukrainian presi-
dent; a governor of Rio de Janeiro;
Queen Rania of Jordan. Often wear-
ing the heels and sheath dresses
sold under her name, she stars in
an impeccably curated Instagram
feed, filled with products, pictures of
her children and the promotion of a
hashtag: #womenwhowork.
Amid criticism that Ms. Trump
was using her fathers victory for
financial gain, she has said she will
separate her personal Twitter and
Instagram accounts from those of
her brand, which she wholly owns.
That brand is likely to flourish under
a Trump administration regardless
of social media strategy. In 2013, be-
fore a major partnership, about $75
million worth of products bearing
Ms. Trumps name sold at whole-
sale, a company document stated.
Her company said the terms of the
Sanei agreement had been decided
before the election. To date, Ivanka
Trump apparel and jewelry have
been available to Japanese shoppers
through a small number of indepen-
dent import sites. One of them, waja.
co.jp, has reported a 28-fold increase
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
KEMAL JUFRI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Eagle Holdings, as a joint venture
with the French conglomerate Louis
Dreyfus. But in 2014, Rajawali took
the first step to consolidate the oil
business under its control and invest
in new infrastructure.
Its loans from Western banks were
crucial. In January 2014, Green Ea-
gle attracted a $120 million loan from
a group of lenders led by ABN Amro
(a spokeswoman declined to com-
ment). In July of that year, it scored
$235 million from a syndicate led by
Credit Suisse. Bank of America also
took part in that loan.
The financing allowed Green Ea-
gle to buy out Louis Dreyfus. In No-
vember 2014, Green Eagle merged
BW Plantation; Rajawali is majority
shareholder of the resulting compa-
ny, Eagle High Plantations.
The orangutan rescues continue.
The world has lost 60 percent of its
population of Bornean orangutans
since 1950, according to the Interna-
tional Union for Conservation of Na-
ture. In July, the Bornean orangutan
was listed as critically endangered.
In September, Rajawalis planta-
tion arm secured a $192 million loan
from Bank Negara Indonesia, a state
bank, to double the capacity of palm
oil refineries in Papua and West Ka-
limantan.
Bank Negara Indonesias sustain-
ability policies say that its clients
must adopt minimum environ-
mental, social and governance stan-
dards. The bank did not respond to
requests for comment.
in sales since the election, according
to the local news media.
We Made It Great Again
By most accounts, Eric, the young-
est child of Donald J. Trump and
Ivana Trump, has been an effective
steward of the Trump Winery in Vir-
ginia.
Eric Trump, who oversees the
familys golf courses, has also shown
that he is comfortable with conflict.
Shortly after the Trump Organiza-
tion bought a golf course in Jupiter,
Florida, in 2012, some club members
filed a lawsuit claiming that the com-
pany had violated their rights by
barring them from the facility. The
Trump Organization has said it did
nothing wrong, and the case remains
undecided.
The legal dispute centered on
the contracts signed by members
with the facilitys previous owner,
Ritz-Carlton. To join, members paid
initiation fees ranging from $35,000
to $210,000, deposits that were re-
fundable when they resigned. But
that process could take years, and
under the old rules, those on the res-
ignation list could still use the club
if they paid annual fees. When the
Trump Organization acquired the
club, it assumed liability for those
refunds. It was eager to convert de-
posits into cash that could be used
to improve the club. Soon, a letter
arrived, signed by Donald J. Trump.
It offered to reduce members annual
fees if they agreed to convert refund-
able deposits into nonrefundable
ones and suggested that members
who wanted to resign were out.
But Mr. Trump testified in a depo-
sition last year that although he had
signed the letter, Eric Trump was
in charge. Eric Trump contended in
his pretrial testimony that members
seeking to resign had been allowed to
use the club so long as they paid an-
nual dues.
Members and club employees tes-
tified that those on the resignation
list had been barred from using the
club even while they received bills.
Presented with this evidence, Eric
Trump acknowledged that his earlier
statements had been mistaken. Jug-
gling different policies at the assort-
ed clubs was difficult, he explained.
But on balance, the younger Mr.
Trump testified, the estate had
thrived on the familys watch. We
took something that had gone really
bad, he said, and we made it great
again.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY 7

WORLD TRENDS

Stodgy British Baking, Transformed by a Show

By MELISSA CLARK
LONDON In a big white tent
tucked in the green fields of the En-
glish countryside, six bakers were
putting their signature spin on din-
ner rolls.
They fretted over rising times and
knelt, prayerlike, in front of their
ovens, hoping to avoid the dreaded
soggy bottoms the judges disdained.
Wasps buzzed in their midst.
The episode in progress, part of a
holiday series, was being shot out-
side London.
It was a familiar scene to fans of
The Great British Bake Off, one of
the top-rated shows on British tele-
vision, which reached its peak audi-
ence of 15 million viewers with the
Season 6 finale last year.
The Great British Bake Off has
fundamentally changed the way the
British regard baking, dessert-eat-
ing and their culture of sweets.
The Bake Off Effect, as it is
known, has manifested in a resur-
gence in home baking, a noticeable
increase in the quality of baked
goods in Britain, and a growing num-
ber of people pursuing careers as
pastry chefs.
Just as Jamie Oliver and Gordon
Ramsay increased the allure of Brit-
ish chefs, the two Bake Off judges,
Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, an
elegant octogenarian, have reinvig- ANDREW SCRIVANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, MARK BOURDILLION/LOVE PRODUCTIONS
orated the bakers. (The show, which
was on the BBC, was recently sold and professions from all over Britain. A lineup baking was both good and bad.
to the deeper-pocketed Channel 4, Its the opposite of the superfi- from the The good bit is that supermarkets
drawing much debate in the press.) ciality you usually see in television 2015 season have doubled the size of their bak-
The bake-off, with its multicultur- casting in that we arent necessarily ing sections, she said. But I find it
al roster of contestants, has put for- choosing people with the biggest per-
of the Great annoying because baking, thats al-
ward a contemporary vision of Brit- sonalities, said Richard McKerrow, British ways been my thing. Now its every-
ishness that emphasizes diversity. a founder of Love Productions, which Bake Off bodys thing.
Although the premise of the show produces the show. Youre looking television Bread Ahead bakery in London
is overtly nostalgic all of the bak- at a bus driver, a builder, a doctor, just show, offers a workshop that gives lessons
ing is done outside in a tent hung with as long as they are great bakers. which has in potato farl from Northern Ireland
cheery Union Jack bunting the Ms. Berry said that the main rea- broadened and fruit and tea loaf from Wales.
contestants are a culturally and eth- son for the shows success is that We used to call it the Celtic baking
nically mixed group. baking holds a universal, wholesome
the view of a class, said Matthew Jones, the bak-
There was Norman Calder from appeal. good sweet erys founder, but after the success
Scotland, with his haggis pie, but al- You have whole families from all in Britain. of the show, we rebranded.
so Tamal Ray, an anesthesiologist of different cultures and across the gen- Top, Victoria Rebranding is at the very soul of
Indian descent, who used syringes to erations, the grannies, the babes in sponge cake. The Great British Bake Off, a re-
infuse syrup into pastries. And, most arms, everyone, who can sit down to consideration of everything British
prominently, there was Nadiya Hus- watch it and know that there will be baking can be. Chetna Makan, a
sain, the Season 6 winner, who was no swearing, that its a family show, keeping up, remaining resolutely find British cakes in twee little tea semifinalist in Season 5 who moved
born in Luton to a family of Bangla- she said. stodgy and Continental tira- shops with lace doilies and such, but from Mumbai to Kent in 2004,
deshi immigrants and who wears a The show came at a time when mis and chocolate mousse cakes they were often dry, she recalled. charmed the audience with her in-
hijab. Ms. Hussain triumphed with restaurants were rethinking what at fancy restaurants, and generally There was a lot of stale cake going spired use of fenugreek, cardamom
creations like cayenne gingerbread it meant to serve British food, by uninspired at bakeries and tea shops. on back then. and turmeric. Ms. Makan called
and cream puff towers in bubble gum looking outward at international in- In 2005, when the American pastry Zoe Tew, who manages the Mrs being on the show the opposite of
flavors. fluences, and inward, going back to chef Claire Ptak started Violet Cakes Kings Pork Pies stall at Borough Brexit.
About 8,000 bakers apply each sea- artisanal traditions and classic but at the Broadway Market in East Lon- Market in London, said that for a It was the most welcoming, warm
son. The producers arrive at a mix neglected recipes. don, most British cake shops were longtime committed home baker like place, that showed unity and love
that represents a range of ages, races Desserts, however, hadnt been rather unremarkable. You could herself, this greater interest in home among the competitors, she said.
8 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
A Fight
Over Art
Involves
Billions
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The joy must have been palpable in
2013 when three New York art trad-
ers arranged through Sothebys to
sell a newly discovered painting by
Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance
master, for $80 million. One of them
had purchased it for less than $10,000
eight years earlier, when most ex-
perts viewed it as only the work of
Leonardos school.
But the traders joy soured when
they learned that the man who bought
it, a Swiss art dealer, had turned
around and sold the painting within
days to a Russian billionaire for $47.5
million more. Hadnt Sothebys taken
the painting, presale, to an apartment
where the Russian billionaire had
viewed it? Were the traders misled to
favor the Swiss dealer, a valued Sothe-
bys client named Yves Bouvier? The
traders have told Sothebys they plan
to sue, claiming fraud, to recover the
millions they say they missed out on,
according to court papers.
The papers were filed in federal
court in Manhattan last month by
Sothebys in a pre-emptive move
to block such a suit. Sothebys says
in the filing that it never knew Mr.
Bouvier had the Russian billionaire
waiting to pay much more for the
work, a depiction of Christ known as
Salvator Mundi. The price reached,
Sothebys said, was likely a world
record price for an old master paint-
ing at the time. The traders, Sothe-
bys lawyer wrote, are trying to
gain the benefit of a subsequent sale
price that Sothebys had nothing to
do with.
The dispute offers a view of the
messy side of the international art
market. But it is only part of a much
larger battle between Mr. Bouvier
and the Russian billionaire, Dmitry
Rybolovlev, a battle in which Sothe-
bys is now entangled.
Mr. Rybolovlev has accused Mr.
Bouvier of defrauding him in the pur-
chase of 38 paintings for which com-
panies controlled by Mr. Rybolovlevs
family trust paid nearly $2 billion. The
Russian has said he thought Mr. Bou-
vier was acting as his agent, on com-
mission, in such sales, but instead he
said he later found that Mr. Bouvier
had skimmed as much as $1 billion
in profits by buying the paintings
himself first, then selling them to his
Russian client at escalated prices, ac-
cording to court papers. Mr. Rybolov-
lev leveled criminal charges against
Mr. Bouvier in Monaco, where he was
arrested last year.
Twelve of the 38 paintings were
Paintings by the
masters, bought
and flipped.
originally bought by Mr. Bouvier in
sales arranged by Sothebys, only to
be flipped to Mr. Rybolovlev. Sothe-
bys said that it was unaware of Mr.
Bouviers intentions. In a statement,
Sothebys said that it had hired an out-
side law firm to investigate its behav-
ior and that it found no wrongdoing.
Mr. Rybolovlevs advisers have ex-
pressed concern about a set of valua-
tions that Sothebys prepared for Mr.
Bouvier. One was prepared last year
after Mr. Rybolovlev learned he had
paid $47.5 million more for his Leon-
ardo than the prior purchaser. So-
thebys, which 20 months before had
C U LT U R E
Salvator Mundi,
a depiction
of Christ by
Leonardo da
Vinci, sold for $80
million through
Sothebys to a
dealer who sold
it days later for
$47.5 million
more, according to
court papers.
brokered the sale of
the painting for $80
million, provided an
insurance apprais-
al that valued it at
about $113 million.
A spokesman for
M r. Ryb olovlev,
Sergey Chernitsyn,
said, Tracing back
Mr. Bouviers steps
has thrown up some
questions about the
private sale process
conducted by Sothe-
bys, and the subsequent role that the
organization may have played.
Mr. Bouvier, who is free on a
10-million-euro bond, said he had a
right to charge whatever price a buy-
er would pay.
A spokesman for him said that So-
thebys knew nothing about his rela-
tionship with Mr. Rybolovlev.
Sothebys revealed in court fil-
ings that it had earned $3 million
for arranging the sale of the Leon-
ardo. Much of the speculation about
Sothebys revolves around what its
representative knew when he took
the Salvator Mundi to be inspected
by Mr. Bouvier and Mr. Rybolovlev.
The meeting occurred six weeks
before the sale to Mr. Bouvier, in a
Manhattan apartment owned by a
Rybolovlev family trust. Sothebys
argues that Samuel Valette, its vice
chairman for private sales world-
wide, did not realize Mr. Rybolovlev
was inspecting the painting as a po-
tential buyer.
The meeting had been requested
by Mr. Bouvier, the auction house
said, and though Mr. Valette said
that he recognized a third man in the
room as having been associated with
a previous sale to Mr. Bouvier, he
said that he had not known his name.
The picture painted by Sothebys
in its complaint is incomplete, and
brushes aside many of the events
surrounding the sale of the da Vinci,
said Thomas C. Danziger, a lawyer
for the original sellers of the Leonar-
do. We look forward to presenting
our case in court.
Rap Song Goes Viral,
With Sir Pauls Help
By JOE COSCARELLI
There was no stopping Black
Beatles once Paul McCartney got
involved.
Though the song by the rap duo
Rae Sremmurd had been rising,
it hit Number 1 on the Billboard
singles chart recently in a most
unexpected fashion, after becom-
ing the de facto soundtrack to the
Mannequin Challenge, the online
video craze of the moment, where
subjects hold a pose as the camera
pans across a comically eerie tab-
leau.
Love those Black Beatles
#Ma nnequinCha llenge, the
74-year-old Mr. McCartney posted
to Twitter on November 10, along
with a video of him still at a
CHAD BATKA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A song by Swae Lee, left, and
Slim Jxmmi of Rae Sremmurd
caught on in a video craze.
piano as the songs spare intro
blooms into a joyous number about
rocking John Lennon lenses.
But most crucial to its rise were
the California high school students
who, by chance, made Black Beat-
les the score of choice for the ram-
pant trend. Black Beatles joins
a peculiar lineage of recent hits
that have been boosted by organic
user-generated content on social
media, outside of the traditional
channels of music promotion.
The components of what makes
a hit have changed so dramatical-
ly, said David Bakula, a senior an-
alyst for Nielsen Music, which sup-
plies the data for Billboard. This
is not a world that is dominated by
just radio and sales. There are new
creative outlets to market songs,
albums and artists.
Luckily for major labels such as
Interscope, which released Rae
Sremmurds album, SremmLife
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
Fans spread music
and change the way
hits are made.
2, to modest sales in August, fans
can now spread music on an almost
unimaginable scale.
On November 2, students at Colo-
ny High School in Ontario, Califor-
nia, choreographed an elaborate
#MannequinChallenge video just
as the fad was taking off. A student
there, Joseph Day, 17, used Black
Beatles because, as he said on
Twitter, Its my favorite song and I
wanted my friends and the internet
to all hear it and enjoy it as well.
The next night, at a concert in
Denver, Rae Sremmurd led the
crowd in its own rendition of the
meme, eventually earning nearly
60,000 retweets of the video and
linking Black Beatles to the chal-
lenge.
It was like a lightning strike,
said John Janick, the head of In-
terscope. Without the Mannequin
Challenge, this song wouldve been
a hit who knows how far it would
go. But with the Mannequin Chal-
lenge, its gigantic.
Psys Gangnam Style was
an early beneficiary of a song go-
ing viral, as was Harlem Shake
by Baauer, an obscure electronic
track that hit Number 1 after fans
began making clips of themselves
thrashing to the songs breakdown.
More carefully choreographed
dance crazes that all but demand
homemade videos, such as Juju
On That Beat (TZ Anthem), by the
Detroit teenagers Zay Hilfigerrr
and Zayion McCall, are more point-
ed attempts to go viral.
But Black Beatles may have
wider reach. The #Mannequin-
Challenge videos have succeeded
in driving people back to Rae Srem-
murds music.
This isnt Gangnam Style, this
isnt Harlem Shake, which did
not find as much success removed
from their videos, Mr. Bakula said.
Its not just this one song, its
not just this one video, he added.
Thats the kind of thing that can
buoy a career.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY 9

C U LT U R E

Can La La Land Revive Musicals?

PUZZLE 1
N K E S O S T A E A R N Y R I S T E T
E O T A G E E C S P I R A E S S U G I
D A N D E L L B R U S S E R P P O O R T

to playful effect, allowing him dinary strolling and then

E A P S A L I B O O R T A O
Continued from Page 1 to transform the everyday into
ONLINE: SWAYING IN L.A.
singing and soaring.
E D T E H E S E D L O N N C E L G
A preview of Damien Chazelles
I find it wonderful that in
N O T A W A C I N E R S H R U G
been sleeping on a gold mine. what he calls the dramatically
musical film: E T A B L S E A R O U E O E G R L L A
Mr. Chazelle became ob- or comically epic. the same era in Hollywood as
nytimes.com Search top hat D O N G E L E Y L S H E L D Y A L O T
sessed with Gene Kelly and With the choreographer screwball comedies, Mr. Cha- A E L B I N P U T D E A W A R N
Stanley Donens Its Always Mandy Moore, Mr. Chazelle zelle said, where everything D E A Y S I D Q U E T R A S R A
Fair Weather, and started on worked with what Mr. Gosling was about this patter and con- D I T T E R A D P E D B N N N P E A E S
his senior thesis film, which and Ms. Stone brought with except at clubs and parties; the versations building to certain E B O R T H U M L E D I A A S S
became his feature directorial them. He also showed them fa- film musical grew grim and then catharsis with a couple that G R H U S C A G L I S U G O G A
debut, Guy and Madeline on a vorites like The Band Wagon grimmer. Womens liberation this series of musicals was able A E S S N D C N E R E A R E S G M A J
Park Bench, a near-musical. and Jacques Demys The Um- and changing gender relations to do its version of that, but with- P D T R I E L S A U G I E B O N M R A
La La Land, which is being brellas of Cherbourg. Togeth- confused Hollywood and still out any words at all and just N E E E M E D A R R E H I A B M
released worldwide this month er they tried to find the little do. The movie industry excels with dancing. D U N T E L E N H S H E A T A W R
and next, integrates its numbers weird idiosyncrasies of their at recycling genres, stories and While La La Land engages R S L E O S E R L E N E L G
as if it were the most natural characters body language, Mr. stereotypes, but it hasnt been with nostalgia, it also speaks A N C O L E D U L O O M O B A N D L R O
thing in the world for a guy to Chazelle said, and then build adept at making them work with to the present just by asking C E R O I R E H A G L A O I N T Y A L
tap-dance on a park bench or a numbers out of that. emancipated women, who no whether its possible (finally) E T A B L A R S Z I P C P T T I L E F
woman to dream herself into a There are various reasons the longer need men to have their for a romantically involved
waltz. Throughout, Mr. Chazelle musical fell out of favor, includ- happily ever after. woman and man to get past
engages distinct genre tropes ing the transformation of the Musicals are for idealists. the struggle for reciprocity. PUZZLE 2
the not-quite-touching dance, old studio system and chang- One of the pleasures of classic We know men and women can
the constantly interrupted kiss, ing audience tastes, behaviors film musicals is the chance to go toe to toe, but can they still
D E Y D S R I T S A S A N
the miracle of synchronicity and more. We stopped dancing, watch bodies become extraor- dance cheek to cheek? E R T E S A B U T S C U B A
T E U D O E M O R O R O M E
S H A N M Y S A N I H C

Presenting Filipino Life,

A N E E Z O H T L E S O
Brillante Mendoza is among
filmmakers telling stories of
T I B E E N A
W S E Y E
the forgotten.
R A N E I T E C R E T

Full of Grit and Hardship filmmakers have turned to the

S
T A
E
N
C
A
A N
S
D C E S
R I A
N
O
F R A
P E
international festival circuit. I P N T A O P H T O Y S
By AMY QIN miere and sent him a copy of the Some critics say the films fa- N G
Y I R A P O S T E N
MANILA The Filipino di- DVD, said Mr. Mendoza, who vored by festivals abroad tend
rector Brillante Mendoza had al- directed the presidents State of to cater to a widespread per- S O N M E L S N Y E M E
ready presented his latest film at the Nation address in July. But ception of the Philippines as a U R U S S A O L L A A N I L
the Cannes Film Festival when Im not sure if hes seen it. bleak, impoverished place of O G O S S L O G O T S I R E
President Rodrigo Duterte took Mr. Mendoza is part of a wave slums, corruption and drugs.
office in the Philippines in June. of moviemakers in the Philip- PATRICK KOVARIK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The term poverty porn is of- M A Y A A L O B E I N C H
But since then, the movie, pines shedding light on over- ten tossed around.
Ma Rosa a gritty, unvar- looked corners of society. stantially. Filmmakers and in- I live in a developing coun-
nished depiction of drug use, Their films tell of poverty, vestors became more willing try, Mr. Mendoza said. So is it PUZZLE 3
police corruption and surviv- drugs, postcolonial malaise, to experiment with different poverty porn when you are tell-
al in the Manila slums has bureaucratic corruption, envi- forms of storytelling. ing stories of society?
B Y S M A A T E S L N O Z
acquired new relevance, as ronmental ills, homosexuality Before, it seemed like there In recent months, filmmakers E G G O L U S L T A A E Z
Mr. Duterte has accelerated a and the nations thriving ethnic was nothing more to learn have faced a more immediate N AG E R A AG E M R S T E V A
crackdown on drugs, leaving diversity. about Filipino culture through concern. Until now, official cen-
thousands of Filipinos dead. Its been a remarkable turn- film, said Laurice Guillen, who sorship has not been a major
S P F L Y S E S I I M A J
Drugs, corruption its hap- around. In the early 2000s, pro- co-founded the Cinemalaya worry. At the 2009 Cinemalaya, D A N A I D V R
pening all around us, Mr. Men- duction had dwindled to about Philippine Independent Film for example, the director Pepe E E R I S AG E E T O D R AG
doza said recently at his studio 50 films a year, from around 150 Festival in 2005. But then the Diokno presented Engkwen-
in Manila. in the 1980s. submissions starting coming in, tro, based on extrajudicial I R E D T A T A L D A R
In the film, Rosa (Jaclyn The country has experienced and it was amazing. Most were killings carried out by death H O N E R E R A I F A J O
Jose) is a working-class conve- what are often called two gold- stories that we had never heard squads in Davao, where Mr.
nience-store owner who resorts en ages of film: in the 1950s, of before. Duterte was then the mayor.
D O E U T R O R T E A D
to low-level drug dealing to sup- and again in the 1970s and early What hasnt changed, film- But with the ascension of AG A I N F N O F O N AG A I
port her family. 1980s (during the martial law makers say, is the challenge of Mr. Duterte to the presidency, T O E D A R N I
Rosa may be a bad citizen, years under President Ferdi- finding an audience at home. whether filmmakers will now
but she is a good person and a nand E. Marcos). Commercial screens continue dare to touch such subjects is an H O M E T S A E E A T E S
good parent, Mr. Mendoza But the film industry strug- to be dominated by thinly plot- open question. S P A M A I M G AG E C L AG B
said. People dont see this per- gled with piracy and competi- ted melodramas, romantic com- There will be upheaval, Ms. A S I A E R O U L T A D A
spective. tion from Hollywood. edies and action films, along Guillen said. But Im not sure
Has Mr. Duterte? Digital technology lowered with Hollywood imports. how this will be reflected in our H E L L W I G L F S S A C
I invited him to the pre- the costs of making a film sub- As a result, more independent films, if at all.
10
Germanys Hate Speech Laws Pose Test to Facebook
By MARK SCOTT
and MELISSA EDDY
BERLIN Yorai Feinberg was go-
ing about his daily routine last month
when his social media feeds and cell-
phone began lighting up.
It was the 78th anniversary of
the Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi po-
grom against Jews, and the Berlin
restaurant owned by Mr. Feinberg, a
35-year-old Israeli, had been includ-
ed without his knowledge on a map
of the city that a far-right group had
published on Facebook.
The social media post listed the
names and addresses of lo-
cal Jewish institutions and Israe-
li-owned businesses under the ban-
ner Jews Among Us, in bright yel-
low Gothic script. Mr. Feinberg soon
received anonymous phone calls
telling him, I hate Jews.
A standoff developed between
Facebook, the social media giant,
and German authorities over what
many here said was its inadequate
response to the publication of the
map. But Germanys rules on what
may be said or published among
the worlds toughest, with long prison
A Space Where Anger Reaps a Profit
By CLAIRE MARTIN
As a teenager in the 1990s, Donna
Alexander fantasized about setting
up a business where stressed-out
people could relieve their tension by
smashing things safely.
In 2008, while living in Dallas,
Texas, Ms. Alexander began an ex-
periment. She invited current and
past co-workers to her garage to pul-
verize items she had collected from
the curbs in her neighborhood. She
charged $5.
I started getting strangers at my
door asking if my house was the place
to break stuff, Ms. Alexander said.
When that happened, I knew I had
a business.
In 2011, she started the Anger
Room in a 90-square-meter space
in downtown Dallas. The business
charges $25 for five minutes of crush-
ing printers, alarm clocks, glass
cups, vases and the like. Prices rise
to about $500 for custom room set-
ups.
Several other anger rooms have
popped up around the world, includ-
ing in Toronto, Niagara Falls and
Australia.
Some anger rooms profited from
the American presidential election.
At the Anger Room in Dallas, manne-
quins of Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton were taking beatings before
the election. Weve gone through at
least three of the male mannequins
that we have to dress up as Donald
Trump, Ms. Alexander said.
Sessions in an anger room are
meant to be therapeutic. But mental
Nostalgia Drives Nintendo Demand
By ZACH SCHONBRUN
When she heard that Nintendo was
planning to reproduce its classic Nin-
tendo Entertainment System video
game console for the holiday season,
Emily Bradbury put a note on her cal-
endar and set an alarm on her phone.
She was not interested in buying it
for her children. She wanted it for her
husband.
Hes 40 years old and grew up
with a Nintendo, Ms. Bradbury said.
Its a nostalgia thing.
Since its release on November 11,
the NES Classic Edition, a smaller
version of the original console intro-
duced to North America in 1985, has
become one of the hottest gift items
of the year. It has struck a chord es-
pecially among older millennials
and younger members of Generation
X, who may have found in it a video
game system to share with their chil-
dren if they dont just keep it for
themselves.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
terms for denying the Holocaust and
inciting hatred against minorities
ensured the post was deleted.
The incident is one of several ex-
amples including threats of reg-
ulation and attempts to prosecute
Facebooks chief executive, Mark
Zuckerberg of how Germany has
become an important test case glob-
ally for how the social network polic-
es what may be published online, and
how it should respond to inappropri-
ate and illegal content.
Such steps in Germany are part of
a growing push around the world to
regulate what users are allowed to
post online.
Mr. Feinberg did not report the in-
cident to Facebook, convinced after
previous anti-Semitic attacks that
the social network would not act, he
said, adding he complained at least
20 times to Facebook.
Others listed in the map did com-
plain. At first, Facebook did not re-
move the map, saying it complied
with the companys guidelines. But
within 48 hours, after an outcry on
social media, in newspapers and
from German lawmakers, Facebook
PHOTOGRAPHS BY COOPER NEILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
health professionals question the ef-
ficacy of rampaging in a faux cubicle
or whacking airborne glasses.
Although its appealing to think
that expressing anger can reduce
stress, there is not much evidence
of that, said George M. Slavich, a
clinical psychologist in California.
On the contrary, the types of phys-
iological and immune responses that
occur during anger can actually be
harmful for health.
Anger Room customers are pro-
vided with protective equipment that
includes a helmet, goggles, boots and
gloves. They can pick out an array of
objects to swing.
The business accepts donations
of crushable items from residents
and businesses in the area. Its four
employees also go out on bulk trash
pickup days looking for fodder.
Customers have included execu-
tives at large corporations, including
Hilton and Microsoft, Ms. Alexan-
der said. In the first year, the Anger
It retails for $60, with one original
controller, and comes preloaded with
30 classic games, including Super
Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Leg-
end of Zelda and Tecmo Bowl.
But this trip down memory lane
has not been without headaches. Nin-
tendo has been sluggish in respond-
ing to the demand, resulting in huge
markups on the secondary market,
including on sites like eBay, where
the consoles were being resold for as
much as $390.
On the release date, most retailers,
including Amazon and GameStop,
sold out almost immediately.
Heeding her calendar warnings
and alarms, Ms. Bradbury tried to or-
der the NES online through Amazon
and Walmart but could not act quick-
ly enough. She even enlisted friends
to visit stores in Wichita, Kansas, the
closest big city to her home. But they,
too, returned empty-handed.
I thought it would be a bunch of
MONEY & BUSINESS
A backlash against
migrants plays out on
social media.
relented. It deleted the far-right
groups entire page.
We recognize that this is a work in
progress, said Richard Allen, Face-
books director of policy in Europe.
It was hate speech, and it should
have been taken down.
In Germany, more than almost
anywhere else in the West, lawmak-
ers, including Chancellor Angela
Merkel, are demanding that Face-
book go further to police what is said
on the social network a platform
that now has 1.8 billion users world-
wide.
The dispute has raised concerns
over maintaining freedom of speech
while protecting vulnerable minori-
ties in a country where the legacy
of World War II and decades under
Communism still resonate.
For a $25 fee, patrons at
the Anger Room get five
minutes and the tools
needed to crush old
office equipment.
Rooms revenue was $170,000. Since
then, she has received about 2,500
inquiries from other aspiring an-
ger-room entrepreneurs, and she is
in the process of drafting a licensing
agreement for franchisees.
At the Rage Room in Toronto, 45
minutes of destruction costs $19.99
and includes video downloads of the
sessions.
The date night package is the
most popular offering there, said
Steve Shew, a co-founder. A favorite
activity for couples is for one person
to throw a cup in the air for their date
to smash. People really love that,
he said.
The Rage Room has granted li-
censes to several franchisees for
$1,000, Mr. Shew said.
One early obstacle for both the
Rage Room and the Anger Room
was obtaining insurance. Since its
a new concept, Ms. Alexander said,
her insurer literally had to create a
category for my business.
Michael Salazar,
with his wife,
Stephanie, and
baby, said his
Nintendo console
reminded him of his
childhood.
us 40-something peo-
ple going after it, but it
wont be much of a big
deal, said Ms. Brad-
bury. I was shocked.
But Michael Pachter, a Wedbush
Securities analyst, said he was not
surprised by the intense demand or
the low supply, which he considered
an intentional move by Nintendo
to garner attention, knowing that
it could restock before the holiday
shopping season was over.
The Classic is sold out for three
reasons: Its nostalgic, its cheap and
Lawmakers in America, Germany
and beyond are pressing Facebook
to clamp down on hate speech, fake
news and other misinformation on-
line, or face legal action.
Facebook has a certain responsi-
bility to uphold the laws, said Heiko
Maas, the German justice minister.
Facebook says it continually up-
dates its standards to weed out inap-
propriate posts. It says such material
represents a small fraction of the mil-
lions of posts daily, and argues there
is a fine balance between protecting
freedom of expression and stamping
out hate speech.
Facebooks problems in Germany
began in summer 2015 as more than
one million refugees began to enter
the country. Their arrival incited
an online backlash from Germans
opposed to the swell of people from
Syria, Afghanistan and other war-
torn countries. The number of hateful
posts on Facebook increased sharply.
German politicians appealed to
Facebook to comply with the coun-
trys laws. Ms. Merkel confronted
Mr. Zuckerberg in New York in Sep-
tember 2015.
China Opens Door
Wider to Investors
By NEIL GOUGH
HONG KONG Global investors
this month got direct access for the
first time to the stock market in
the Chinese city of Shenzhen, giv-
ing them a chance to bet on a tech-
heavy clutch of private companies
on an exchange sometimes called
Chinas Nasdaq.
But many investors will be skep-
tical, and the tale of Baofeng Group
explains why.
A largely unknown tech firm
that designs online video players,
Baofeng conducted a modest de-
but on the Shenzhen exchange in
March 2015. Over the next three
months, its stock rose 4,200 per-
cent.
The company went public at the
height of Chinas share market
frenzy, as speculative investment
in stocks became the national
hobby. Fortunes were minted
Baofengs chief executive quickly
became a billionaire.
Then, just months later, Chinese
stocks imploded, and the govern-
ments attempts to stem the losses
only added to the concerns of pri-
vate investors.
Many fled the market and re-
main on the sidelines. As a result,
shares of Baofeng while up near-
ly 10 times from the day they began
trading are down more than half
from their peak.
Every stock went down large-
ly, said Wang Jing, an investor re-
lations representative at Baofeng.
This has also had a big impact on
the company.
A stock market operator in Hong
Kong will serve as the way point
between the Shenzhen market
and the rest of the world. Called
the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock
Connect, the venture opens a small
door in Chinas regulatory wall
restricting money from moving
across its borders. The plan, sim-
ilar to one in Shanghai, allows in-
vestors in Hong Kong a Chinese
city long open to foreign investors
to buy and sell shares in Shen-
zhen, and vice versa.
The move is the latest test of
Chinas readiness to allow a more
open financial system. Beijing
worries that easing its grip too fast
could lead to destabilizing flows
of funds in and out of the country.
Programs like the Stock Connect
are aimed at opening the door wid-
er but also at retaining state con-
trol over the pace of liberalization.
Analysts welcomed the move, but
questioned whether it would lift
markets or lure much new invest-
ment. Part of the reason is that
Chinas economic prospects have
ELI HILLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Nintendo clearly didnt ship enough
of them, Mr. Pachter said in an
email.
In a statement, Nintendo said that
it was working hard to keep up with
consumer demand.
David Cole, the chief executive of
DFC Intelligence, a market research
firm, said there was a lot riding on
Nintendos ability to satisfy demand
in the next few weeks. The company
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
In response, Facebook updated
its global community standards to
give greater protection to minority
groups, primarily to calm German
concerns. Facebook also agreed to
work with the government, local
charities and other companies to
fight online hate speech. Facebook
hired a tech company in Berlin to
monitor and delete illegal content
from Germany and elsewhere.
For Chan-Jo Jun, a lawyer in Wrz-
burg, Germany, new laws governing
Facebook cannot come soon enough.
Mr. Jun recently filed a complaint
with Munich authorities, seeking
prosecution of Facebook executives
on charges they failed to sufficient-
ly tackle the wave of hate speech in
Germany.
While his complaint may be dis-
missed, Mr. Jun says the roughly 450
hate speech cases that he has collect-
ed, more than half of them aimed at
refugees, show that Facebook is not
complying with German law.
I know Facebook wants to be seen
as a global giant, Mr. Jun said. But
theres no way around it. They have
to comply with German law.
lost some of their luster, as growth
has eased to its slowest pace in a
quarter-century. At the same time,
a weakening renminbi, the Chinese
currency, has also reduced the at-
tractiveness of investing in domes-
tic shares.
Opening up to more foreign mon-
ey is a modest step toward fixing
markets many regard as unreli-
able. In June, MSCI, a firm that
compiles a widely tracked index of
global emerging market stocks, de-
clined to add A-shares, or mainland
stocks, to its benchmark index.
It cited issues with international
investors access to domestic Chi-
nese markets.
If Shanghai is Chinas answer to
the New York Stock Exchange, the
traditional home to big, blue-chip
industrial and financial compa-
nies, then Shenzhen is the coun-
trys answer to the tech-heavy
Nasdaq.
Nicole Yuen, head of equities
for greater China at Credit Suisse,
said about two-thirds of Shanghais
stocks were state-owned compa-
nies, while in Shenzhen, the ratio
Easing restrictions
on money trickling
across borders.
was only about a quarter of stocks.
The significance of Shenzhen
Connect is it brings to the interna-
tional market a whole new horizon
of stocks that are much more rep-
resentative of the future of China,
Ms. Yuen said, as opposed to the
Shanghai Connect, which is very
much more a representation of the
previous China, so to speak.
Before, the only access foreign
investors had to shares listed in the
city was through Qfii, a program
open only to big investors that en-
tails a time-consuming approval
process to invest or repatriate
profits. The new link will open the
door to smaller and more active in-
vestors, like hedge funds, and give
them quicker access to over 800
new stocks many entrepreneur-
ial tech firms.
Appetite for domestic shares
has improved slightly, said Jian
Shi Cortesi, an investment man-
ager for Chinese equities based in
Zurich. Still, she added, Shenzhen
Connect is not likely to bring large
inflows from foreign investors to
push up A-share prices.
is introducing a new product, Ninten-
do Switch, in 2017, which it hopes will
make up for its lagging sales of the
Wii U and its late entry into mobile
gaming. Pokmon Go, which was re-
leased over the summer and is partly
owned by Nintendo, was the compa-
nys first major effort in mobile gam-
ing, and it was a sensation.
Mr. Cole said buyers were pursu-
ing the NES Classic Edition most-
ly for nostalgia, but he thought the
console could potentially make older
customers interested in future Nin-
tendo products.
They had really lost their brand
identity the past two years, Mr. Cole
said. This was the kind of thing that
was perfect for bringing that back.
Michael Salazar, from Sacramen-
to, California, managed to place a
request to pre-order a console on
July 22 through Amazons British
website. When it arrived, shipped di-
rectly from Edinburgh, Mr. Salazar
was elated.
Im 38; thats my childhood, Mr.
Salazar said. Nintendo was always
a very important piece of my life.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016 11
12 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016

PUZZLES

All spellings are American, not Canadian | Answers on Page 9

PUZZLE 1

ACTION STARS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
BY BRUCE HAIGHT / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ
20 21 22
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23 24 25
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the Middle Ages) 120 Stacking game 41 Some rounds 55 56 57 58 59
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60 61 62 63 64 65
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roles 7 Sunbathing locale
44 Bio word project
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45 Radius, for one 62 Naval conflict
89 Cads 9 Borodins prince
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cartoons 90 Like food 10 1993 accord grp.
64 Straggles
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Online subscriptions: Todays puzzle and 79 Actor Lugosi 93 Yippee! In the middle 114 Word before and
more than 7,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/ 24 ____ noire
80 Yemen seaport 94 Im waiting ? of the journey of 107 Depiction in after yes, in the
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nytimes.com/wordplay. Velvet
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PUZZLE 2 PUZZLE 3

Edited by Will Shortz No. 1101 Edited by Will Shortz No. 1103
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26 27 28 29 30 31 letters 27 28 29 30 31
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59
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For answers, call 1-900-285-5656, $1.49 a minute; or, with a credit card, 1-800-814-5554.
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WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
He Wants to Be a Garbageman. In Space.
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO Sitting in a drab indus-
trial area surrounded by warehouses
and factories, Astroscales Tokyo of-
fice seems appropriately located for a
company seeking to enter the waste
management business.
Only inside do visitors see signs
that its founder, Mitsunobu Okada,
aspires to be more than an ordinary
garbageman. Pictures of the plan-
ets decorate the door to the meeting
room. Satellite mock-ups occupy a
corner. Mr. Okada greets guests in a
T-shirt emblazoned with his compa-
nys slogan: Space Sweepers.
Mr. Okada is an entrepreneur who
wants to create a company dedicat-
ed to cleaning up some of humanitys
hardest-to-reach rubbish: the spent
rocket stages, inert satellites and
other debris collecting above Earth
since Sputnik ushered in the space
age. He started Astroscale three
years ago in the belief that space
agencies were not facing the prob-
lem, which he thinks could be tackled
more quickly by a small private com-
pany motivated by profit.
Lets face it, waste management
isnt sexy enough for a space agen-
cy to convince taxpayers to allocate
In Genetic Tinkering,
A Path to More Food
By JUSTIN GILLIS
URBANA, Illinois A decade
ago, agricultural scientists at the
University of Illinois suggested a
bold approach to improve the food
supply: tinker with photosynthe-
sis, the chemical reaction powering
nearly all life on Earth.
The idea was greeted skeptical-
ly in scientific circles and ignored
by funding agencies. But one outfit
with deep pockets, the Bill and Me-
linda Gates Foundation, eventually
paid attention, hoping the research
might help alleviate global poverty.
Now, after several years of work
funded by the foundation, the sci-
entists are reporting a remarkable
result.
Using genetic engineering tech-
niques to alter photosynthesis,
they increased the productivity of a
test plant tobacco by as much
as 20 percent, they said in a study
published recently in the journal
Science. That is a huge number, giv-
en that plant breeders struggle to
eke out gains of 1 or 2 percent with
more conventional approaches.
The scientists have no interest
in increasing the production of to-
bacco; their plan is to try the same
alterations in food crops, and one
of the leaders of the work believes
production gains of 50 percent or
more may ultimately be achiev-
able. If that prediction is borne out
in further research it could take
a decade, if not longer, to know for
KATARZYNA GLOWACKA/UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS mechanism off faster so
AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Tobacco has proved particularly
amenable to genetic alterations at the
University of Illinois.
sure the result might be nothing
less than a transformation of global
agriculture.
The findings could also intensify
the political struggle over genet-
ic engineering of the food supply.
Some groups oppose it, arguing
that researchers are playing God
by moving genes from one species
to another.
But gains of 40 or 50 percent in
food production could offer enor-
mous benefits for the worlds poor-
est people, many of them farmers
working small plots of land in the
developing world.
Were here because we want to
alleviate poverty, said Katherine
Kahn, the officer at the Gates Foun-
dation overseeing the grant for the
Illinois research. What is it the
farmers need, and how can we help
them get there?
One of the leaders of the re-
search, Stephen P. Long, a crop
scientist, emphasized that a long
road lay ahead before any results
from the work might reach farm-
ers fields.
But Dr. Long is also convinced
that genetic engineering could
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
money, said Mr. Okada, 43, who put
Astroscales headquarters in start-
up-friendly Singapore but is building
its spacecraft in his native Japan.
Over the last half-century, low
Earth orbit has become so littered
with debris that scientists warn of
the growing danger of collisions for
satellites and manned spacecraft.
The United States Air Force now
keeps track of about 23,000 pieces
of space junk that are big enough
about 10 centimeters or larger to
be detected from the ground.
Scientists say there could be tens
of millions of smaller particles, such
as bolts or chunks of frozen engine
coolant. Even the tiniest pieces move
through orbit at speeds fast enough
to turn them into deadly projectiles.
In 1983, the space shuttle Challeng-
er returned with a pea-size pit in its
windshield from a paint-chip strike.
And plans are being made to make
low orbit even busier. Companies
like SpaceX and OneWeb plan to cre-
ate networks of satellites to provide
global internet connectivity and cell-
phone coverage.
More traffic increases the risk of
collisions that could disrupt commu-
nications, as in 2009 when a dormant
Gains in productivity
would aid the worlds
poorest farmers.
ultimately lead to what he called
a second Green Revolution that
would produce huge gains in food
production, like the original Green
Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,
which transferred advanced agri-
cultural techniques to some devel-
oping countries and led to reduc-
tions in world hunger.
The research involves photo-
synthesis, in which plants use
carbon dioxide from the air and
energy from sunlight to form new,
energy-rich carbohydrates. These
compounds are, in turn, the basic
energy supply for almost all animal
cells, including those of humans.
The mathematical description of
photosynthesis is sometimes billed
as the equation that powers the
world.
Much of the work at the Universi-
ty of Illinois was carried out by two
researchers, Johannes Kromdijk
of the Netherlands and Katarzy-
na Glowacka of Poland. They used
tobacco because it is a particularly
fast and easy plant in which to try
new genetic alterations.
We hope it translates into food
crops in the way weve
shown in tobacco, Dr.
Kromdijk said.
In the initial work, the
researchers transferred
genes from a thale cress,
or mouse-ear cress, into
strains of tobacco. The
effect was not to intro-
duce alien substances,
but rather to increase the
level of certain proteins
that already existed in
tobacco.
Plants often get more
energy than they can
use when they receive
direct sunlight, and
they activate a mech-
anism that helps them
shed it as heat while
slowing carbohydrate
production. The genet-
ic changes introduced
help the plant turn that
that photosynthesis can
get back more quickly to
maximal production of
carbohydrates.
It is a bit like a factory
worker taking a shorter
coffee break before getting back to
the assembly line.
When the scientists grew the
newly created plants in fields at
the University of Illinois, they
achieved yield increases of 13.5
percent in one strain, 19 percent in
a second and 20 percent in a third,
over normal tobacco plants grown
for comparison.
Because the machinery of pho-
tosynthesis in many food crops
is identical to that of tobacco, a
comparable manipulation of those
crops should increase production.
Tests are planned for crops that are
dietary staples in Africa, like cow-
peas, rice and cassava.
The work is, in part, an effort to
secure the food supply against the
possible effects of future climate
change. More efficient crop plants
could potentially make the food
system more resilient, Dr. Long
said.
Were in a year when commod-
ity prices are very low, and people
are saying the world doesnt need
more food, Dr. Long said. But if
we dont do this now, we may not
have it when we really need it.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
A plan to use glue to
grab all the junk that
orbits Earth.
Russian military satellite slammed
into a private American communica-
tions satellite, causing brief disrup-
tions for satellite-phone users.
Worse, each strike like that creates
a cloud of shrapnel, potentially set-
ting off a chain reaction of collisions
that could render low orbit unusable.
Mr. Okada said a midlife crisis four
years ago prompted him to return to
his childhood passion of space. As a
teenager in 1988, he flew to Alabama
to join the United States Space Camp
at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.
Mr. Okada said he has created a
two-step plan for making money
from junk removal.
First, Astroscale plans to launch a
nearly 23-kilo satellite called IDEA
OSG 1 next year aboard a Russian
rocket. The craft will carry panels
that can measure the number of
strikes from debris of even less than
Healthy River Is Vital
To Valley Ecosystem
By JIM ROBBINS
MISSOULA, Montana They
are beautiful, glistening icons of
the American West, filled with life
and history. But there is far more to
mountain rivers than the churning
water.
In a paper published this year, a
team of ecologists sought to outline
the essential role of gravel-bed rivers
in mountain ecosystems.
A river doesnt just flow down the
channel, said F. Richard Hauer, a
professor at the University of Mon-
tana and the lead author of the paper.
It flows over and through the entire
flood plain system, from valley wall
to valley wall, and supports an ex-
traordinary diversity of life.
Perhaps most surprising of all:
Most of the water in these systems
is not in the river its in the gravel.
Dr. Hauer and his colleagues con-
cluded that these river systems are
among the worlds most ecologically
important habitats.
A dynamic river is not important
just to fish or to amphibians, but also
to grizzly bears and mountain lions
descending from mountaintops to
the flood plain for important foods.
Indeed, two-thirds of the species in a
large river valley spend at least part
of their lives in its flood plain.
The new study also demonstrates
that altering this complex biological
machinery with dams and diversions
Microsoft Is Building a Quantum Machine
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft is
venturing into quantum mechanics
to build a machine that could tackle
problems beyond the reach of todays
digital computers.
In the tech world, optimism is
growing that quantum computers
are possible and may even be prac-
tical.
Microsofts decision to move from
pure research to an expensive effort
to build a working prototype under-
scores a global competition among
technology companies, including
Google and IBM.
Microsofts approach is based on
braiding particles known as any-
ons which physicists describe as
existing in just two dimensions to
form the building blocks of a super-
computer that would exploit the
unusual physical properties of sub-
atomic particles.
Leading researchers acknowl-
edge that barriers still remain to
building useful quantum machines,
both at the level of basic physics and
in developing new kinds of software
to exploit certain qualities of devic-
es known as qubits that hold out the
possibility of computing in ways not
a millimeter. Astroscale will use this
data to compile the first detailed
maps of debris density at various
altitudes and locations, which can
then be sold to satellite operators and
space agencies, Mr. Okada said.
We need to get revenue at an ear-
ly stage, even before doing actual
debris removal, to prove that we are
commercial, as a business, said Mr.
Okada, who added that he had so far
raised $43 million from investors.
In 2018, Mr. Okada said Astroscale
will launch a craft called the ELSA 1.
Larger than its predecessor, the EL-
SA 1 will be loaded with sensors and
maneuvering thrusters that will al-
low it to intercept debris.
The company settled on a light-
weight and simple approach to grab-
bing space debris: glue.
Astroscale has worked with a Jap-
anese chemical company to create
an adhesive that would cover a flat
surface about the size of a dinner
plate on the ELSA 1. The craft would
bump into a piece of space junk,
which would stick to the craft and be
dragged out of orbit. Both the ELSA
1 and the debris would burn up on
re-entry.
Mr. Okada said the key to bring-
A river is important not
only to fish, but also to
grizzly bears and other
predators on the hunt.
has far-reaching effects, leading to
long-term decline of the ecosystem.
A river is a huge, huge biodiver-
sity engine with multiple parts, Dr.
Hauer said. If you keep taking out
parts, pretty soon the engine stops.
Melting snow and groundwater
flow down the channel; this is what
we think of as a river. But under-
ground, far more water is moving
slowly through a labyrinthine net-
work of cobbles, gravel and sand that
make up the entire valley bottom.
The matrix of gravel and sand
cleans the water, filtering organic
material and freeing up nitrogen and
phosphorous embedded in the grav-
el. These natural fertilizers spread
across the valley bottom, nourishing
plants in the flood plain such as wil-
lows and aspen, which in turn draw
birds and beavers, elk and caribou.
The plant-eaters attract predators
like wolves and bears.
In the summer, warm water is
stored underground. That water sur-
faces in the winter, moderating water
temperatures and creating a refuge
for some aquatic species, shielding
them from winters freeze. In the
winter, the opposite happens.
A tech giant spends
big to move computing
beyond the digital.
possible for todays digital systems.
Unlike conventional transistors,
which can be only on or off at any one
time, representing a digital 1 or 0, qu-
bits can exist in superposition, or si-
multaneously in both states. If qubits
are placed in an entangled state
physically separated but acting as
though they are intertwined with ney and Matthias Troyer of E.T.H.
other qubits, they can represent a
vast number of values simultaneous-
ly. A quantum computer would prob-
ably consist of hundred or thousands
of qubits.
Microsoft began funding research
in the field in 2005 when it set up a
laboratory known as Station Q. The
company believes that it is close
enough to designing the basic qubit
building block that it can begin to
engineer a complete computer, said
Todd Holmdahl, who will direct the
Microsoft effort.
13
KO SASAKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mitsunobu Okada, founder of
Astroscale, with a model of a
satellite to remove junk from
Earths orbit.
ing down a price tag of tens or even
hundreds of millions of dollars is to
reduce the weight. He said that the
ELSA 1s adhesive would weigh just
several dozen grams, far less than,
say, a 45-kilo robotic arm, and that
his companys engineers had found
ways to bring the spacecrafts weight
down to 90 kilos, making it much
lighter than other proposed craft.
In the U.S., aerospace engineers
are more interested in working on
missions to Mars, not waste man-
agement, Mr. Okada said. Japan
doesnt have so many interesting
space missions, so engineers were
excited by my idea.
PETER MATHER; BELOW, JOHNNY ARMSTRONG
During high water, topsoil, gravel
and woody debris are washed in-
to new sites downriver and below
ground, fostering new habitats and
new plant communities.
On a recent flight over the Bitter-
root River here, Dr. Hauer pointed
out places where people have tried to
tame the river in order to plow farm
fields or build subdivisions.
Theres no renewal the river
doesnt move gravel around and
doesnt create new mosaics of habi-
tat, he said. Nutrients are not dis-
persed. Everything gets locked in
place and starts getting old and de-
clines.
The environmental damage is hid-
den at first. Channels feeding the
underground habitats are sealed off
as the river is confined. The species
that depend on the hidden flows be-
gin to falter.
These gravel flood plains, Dr.
Hauer said, are among the most en-
dangered ecosystems worldwide.
Keeping them intact will help depen-
dent species adapt to the greatest
environmental threat of all: climate
change. The implication for conser-
vation is enormous, Dr. Hauer said.
Once we get the first qubit figured
out, we have a road map that allows
us to go to thousands of qubits in a
rather straightforward way, Mr.
Holmdahl said.
Microsofts effort drew encour-
agement from this years award of
the Nobel Prize in Physics to three
scientists who had explored forms
of matter that may exist in just two
dimensions.
Mr. Holmdahls project will al-
so include the physicists Leo Kou-
wenhoven of Delft University in the
Netherlands, Charles M. Marcus of
the University of Copenhagen, Da-
vid Reilly of the University of Syd-
Zurich.
The researchers recently made a
remarkable breakthrough in their
ability to control the materials used
to form qubits, Dr. Marcus said.
Most immediately, quantum com-
puters might advance the basic un-
derstanding of physics, a possibility
the physicist Richard P. Feynman
mentioned in 1982.
Dr. Kouwenhoven said, My dream
application for a quantum computer
would be a machine that could solve
problems in quantum physics.
14
E D ITORIA LS O F T HE T IM ES
Trump in the World The Spanish Lesson I Never Got
Donald Trumps trouble in choos-
ing a secretary of state under-
scores concerns about his ability to
manage the international challeng-
es he will face in office from the
aggression of leaders like Russias
Vladimir Putin to the Islamic State
to strains among NATO allies.
His mantra of America first im-
plies a reduced American role over-
seas, but he has also advocated a
tough posture toward adversaries.
All of this creates an unsettling
unpredictability that has already
affected how governments and
companies think and act. There is
still little sign that Mr. Trump, who
has declined daily briefings by the
intelligence agencies, understands
these threats and how to deal with
them.
North Korea: An early test may
be North Korea, which could soon
have enough nuclear fuel for 20
bombs and could deploy warheads
on missiles capable of hitting South
Korea, Japan and American as-
sets in the Pacific. Experts say the
Norths production of better bombs
has increased the chance of a mili-
tary confrontation. Mr. Trump has
threatened to slap tariffs on Chinas
exports, in part to force Beijing to
exert more pressure on Pyongyang.
But raising tariffs on the Chinese
would risk a trade war and would
make cooperation less likely.
The Islamic State and Syria:
Mr. Trump has said, I know more
about ISIS than the generals, but
has not offered any plan beyond I
would bomb the [expletive] out of
em.
On Syria, he has talked of aban-
doning American support for reb-
els trying to oust President Bashar
al-Assad and joining the alliance
between Mr. Assad and Russia, Mr.
Assads partner in bombing Syri-
an civilians. After 500,000 deaths,
theres no end to the five-year civ-
il war, which has allowed ISIS to
thrive and claim large parts of Syr-
ian territory. A united effort to fight
ISIS would require a peace deal be-
tween Mr. Assad and the opposition
forces. But Secretary of State John
Kerry has not been able to get Rus-
sia to push Mr. Assad in that direc-
tion. Mr. Trump seems confident he
can work with Mr. Putin, but its un-
clear that Russia would accept any
The Arch of Chernobyl
The great steel arch over the
blackened and crumbling sar-
cophagus containing the radioac-
tive carcass of Chernobyls Reactor
Number 4 is an extraordinary feat
of human ingenuity. Resembling a
vast, gleaming hangar, it was de-
signed to withstand extreme tem-
peratures, tornadoes and corro-
sion for at least a century, and it had
to be built far from the toxic reactor
and then slid, all 29,000 metric tons
of it, into place.
It was also a feat of internation-
al cooperation. The $1.5 billion in
financing, arranged by the Euro-
pean Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, comprised dona-
tions from the United States, the
European Union and about 30 oth-
er nations. The construction was
by a French consortium, and the
workers came from many lands.
It was a model, in other words, of
what humanity can do in the face of
a real danger that no one country
certainly not Ukraine, which in-
herited Chernobyl from the defunct
Soviet Union could manage. This
is worth celebrating, even as the
Chernobyl accident itself must be
mourned and studied for the hubris
and failure it represents.
The saga of Chernobyl is well
known the ill-advised test of
Colombia Ratifies Peace
Among the dozens of people who
addressed Colombias Congress
before lawmakers recently ratified
a peace deal with the countrys larg-
est guerrilla group, Richard More-
no stood out. When he got his turn
at the podium, Mr. Moreno, an Af-
ro-Colombian activist from Choc,
one of the poorest and most vio-
lence-scarred departments in the
country, didnt speak. He bellowed.
History will remember you for
being willing to let us continue ex-
changing lead for 52 more years!
Mr. Moreno exclaimed, using slang
for bullets, as he addressed law-
makers opposed to the deal. Many
of you who want the conflict to car-
ry on, your kids dont serve in the
army, theyre not recruited by the
guerrillas; when things get tough,
they get sent abroad.
In the end, lawmakers approved
the deal. Yet this milestone, which
paves the way for the disarmament
of the Revolutionary Armed Forc-
es of Colombia, or FARC, is being
greeted with more apprehension
than jubilation.
The final stretch of the peace ne-
gotiations, which began in 2012, po-
larized the nation. In October, a slim
majority rejected an earlier version
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
deal unless Mr. Assad is allowed to
remain in power indefinitely, which
the Syrians he has brutalized are
unlikely to accept.
Iran: Mr. Trump has vowed to
tear up the 2015 deal under which
Iran halted its most dangerous nu-
clear activities in exchange for the
lifting of most international sanc-
tions. The agreement is working,
as many of its critics in Congress
and the Middle East acknowledge.
Mr. Trump, however, has chosen
a national security adviser and a
C.I.A. director who are both ada-
mantly opposed to the deal. If it is
jettisoned, Iran would almost cer-
tainly resume its nuclear program.
This is the kind of self-made cri-
sis a new president cannot afford.
Iranian moderates open to engage-
ment with the West are battling
for power against anti-Western
hard-liners. The hard-liners hope
to exploit Mr. Trumps hostility.
Nuclear Proliferation: In the
campaign, Mr. Trump spoke ca-
sually about possibly retaliating
against the Islamic State with a
nuclear weapon and about Japan,
South Korea and Saudi Arabia
possibly developing their own nu-
clear arsenals instead of relying on
defense alliances with the United
States. It would be catastrophic if
a nuclear weapon was used during
Mr. Trumps presidency or if his
stance encouraged more countries
to acquire such arms.
Global Order: Mr. Trumps ques-
tioning of the value of NATO, other
alliances and Americas role in the
world has shaken the core institu-
tions that kept the peace in Europe
and elsewhere for decades. But he
has offered no coherent analysis of
what is wrong with these alliances
or what should replace them. His
fondness for strongmen like Mr.
Putin and President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi of Egypt, whom he called a
fantastic guy, suggests indiffer-
ence if not disdain for efforts to pro-
mote human rights and democracy.
The world has long relied on
the United States to be the steady
hand. The challenges will be more
complex than Mr. Trump ever
imagined. There is little reason to
believe that he will provide strong
leadership on these fronts, but ev-
ery reason to hope that he does.
some safety systems in the early
hours of April 26, 1986, that went
terribly wrong, turning Reactor
Number 4 into a volcano of deadly
radioactivity that reached Poland
and Scandinavia; the initial at-
tempts of Soviet authorities to play
down the catastrophe, followed by
the heroic efforts of firefighters and
untold thousands of Soviet workers
to throw a concrete and steel cas-
ing, called the sarcophagus, over
the deadly ruins, a casing that de-
veloped cracks almost from the
outset. An area around the reactor,
including the ghost town of Pripy-
at, remains off limits to this day.
Chernobyl has been used as an
argument against nuclear pow-
er, especially in Germany, but it
shouldnt be. Modern reactors have
extensive safeguards against the
kind of meltdown that happened in
Reactor Number 4, which lacked
sufficient containment structures.
While nuclear energy, respon-
sibly harnessed, remains for
now a viable alternative to cli-
mate-changing fossil fuels, the
Chernobyl arch stands as a dra-
matic monument to a catastrophes
consequences, stretching far into
the future. And it speaks, too, to
what nations can do in the face of
disaster if they join together.
of the deal in a plebiscite, forcing
President Juan Manuel Santos to
go back to the negotiating table. His
team reached a more favorable ac-
cord, under which the FARC agreed
to, among other things, surrender
all its assets to compensate victims.
Opposition lawmakers argued that
those concessions were insufficient
and boycotted the votes.
Now that the deal has been rati-
fied, Congress must move quickly
to pass a series of bills to put it into
effect. These include an amnes-
ty law for FARC members, a legal
framework for a transitional justice
system and a pathway for mem-
bers to establish a political party.
Delay would raise the likelihood of
further cracks in the fragile cease-
fire. If the measures are passed
promptly, the guerrilla groups dis-
armament under the supervision
of the United Nations could start
before the end of the year.
When Mr. Moreno spoke, he
didnt dwell on the legal and proce-
dural disagreements that turned
the national debate over the peace
deal so toxic. For him and many oth-
ers, the country faced an urgent de-
cision to take a chance on peace
after five decades of violent conflict.
O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY
LOS A NGELES
In the deepest reaches of my brain,
there is a boy who speaks Spanish.
He calls his mother and father
Mam and Pap. One of his fa-
vorite expressions is qu lindo
(how nice, or how sweet). Hes proud
of the Mexican slang hes learned:
for instance, no hay pedo, which
means no problem, though its lit-
eral translation is there is no fart.
California nearly killed that boy.
My parents arrived in Los Ange-
les as immigrants from Guatemala.
We had a shelf of books in Spanish
in our Los Angeles home, including
El Seor Presidente by the Guate-
malan Nobel laureate Miguel ngel
Asturias, but growing up I could not
read them.
Like millions of Latino kids educat-
ed in California public schools, I nev-
er took a class in Spanish grammar
or Spanish literature, nor was I ever
asked to write a single word with an
accent or a tilde over it. In the 70s,
Spanish was the language of pover-
ty and backwardness in the eyes of
many.
Supposedly, we got smarter by for-
getting Spanish. By the time I was a
teenager, I spoke the language at the
level of a second grader. My English
was perfect, but in Spanish I was an
idiot.
I knew I had lost something price-
less to me. A lot of Latino kids who
grow up without Spanish feel this.
And even as the Latino-immigrant
basher Donald J. Trump was elect-
ed president, many engaged in a
successful collective act of cultural
resistance by joining other Califor-
nian voters who overwhelmingly ap-
proved a ballot measure to expand
bilingual education in public schools.
Proposition 58 overhauls another
ballot initiative that was approved
by the voters in 1998. That measure
was born in the early years of the
anti-immigrant movement, before
it spread from California across the
United States.
Back then, Spanish had become
the de facto second language of Cal-
ifornia. Latino immigrant children
were filling the underfunded public
schools and not doing very well, while
chattering away to one another and
to their teachers in Spanish in their
overcrowded classrooms. Ron Unz,
the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who
helped lead the anti-bilingual educa-
tion movement, argued that educat-
ing immigrant kids exclusively in En-
glish would improve our test scores.
No one disputes that every child
in this country should learn English.
But the no-Spanish dictate amounted
to a form of cultural erasure. It was a
Hctor Tobar, a professor of
journalism at the University of
Oregon, is the author of the novels
The Barbarian Nurseries and The
Tattooed Soldier. Send comments to
intelligence@nytimes.com.
Agents of Idiocracy
When Donald Trump began his so-
called Thank You Tour in Cincinnati,
Ohio, recently, he had yet another
opportunity to be magnanimous and
conciliatory, to step beyond the divi-
sion and acrimony of his campaign
and into the unity and healing nec-
essary to be president of a strained
nation.
As is his wont, he declined, instead
gloating and boasting, playing to the
minority of American voters who
chose him, relishing his own impen-
itence.
He is choosing to push America
further apart rather than bring it
closer together.
And be clear: It is not the job of the
defiant to conform to a future presi-
dent who makes them completely un-
comfortable. The burden of unity lies
with Trump, not his detractors.
Just wait and see. Give him a
chance. But what if what youve al-
ready seen is so beyond the pale that
its irrevocable? What if Trump has
already squandered more chances
than most of us will ever have?
What if Trump has shown himself
beyond doubt and with absolute cer-
tainty to be a demagogue and bigot
and xenophobe, and has given space
and voice to concordant voices in the
country and in his emerging Legion
of Doom cabinet? In that reality,
resistance isnt about mindless ob-
struction by people blinded by the
pain of ideological defeat or people
gorging on sour grapes. To the con-
trary, resistance then is an act of rad-
ical, even revolutionary, patriotism.
Resistance isnt about damaging the
country, but protecting it.
There is no Electoral College
clause that blunts ferocious oppo-
sition to the demeaning of women
and racial, ethnic and religious mi-
norities in this country; there is no
Election Day reset on the coddling of
white supremacy.
Furthermore, the emergence of
Donald Trump as a political figure
has threatened to kill many of the
ideals that Americans hold dear:
decency and decorum, inclusion and
empathy, truth and facts themselves.
INTELLIGENCE/HCTOR TOBAR
cruel, shortsighted act, born of igno-
rance and intolerance.
Being literate in the language of
your immigrant ancestors (whether
that language is Spanish, Korean,
Mandarin or Armenian) makes you
wiser and more powerful. I know this
from experience.
It took me two years of college study
and a year enrolled abroad at Mexi-
cos national university to reboot and
upgrade my bilingual brain. Shake-
speare and Cervantes now live in my
frontal lobe. Seinfeld and the Mexican
comedian Cantinflas, too. Bob Dylan
and the Chilean songwriter Violeta
Parra. I have sought to master the
Anglo-Saxon language spoken by
Lincoln and Whitman, and also the
Latinate language of Pablo Neruda
and of the Angeleno street vendors.
With Spanishs endearments and
ample use of the subjunctive tense
and the diminutive, I have learned
that to know a language is to enter
into another way of being.
My father, for example, is a charm-
ing man in English, a language he has
spoken fluently for a half-century. In
Spanish, however, his full talents as
a sardonic raconteur are on display;
hes even prone to the occasional phil-
osophical soliloquy. My mother is a
fluent English speaker, but in Spanish
shes a storyteller with a deeply ro-
mantic bent and a flair for the ironic.
Today, I write books in English, but
the roots of my career as a writer lie in
Spanish literacy and Spanish fluency.
Most of my extended family lives
in Guatemala and speaks no English.
When I returned to that country as
a fluent Spanish speaker, I had my
first grown-up conversations with
my grandparents, uncles and cous-
CHARLES M. BLOW
Trump and his agents of idiocracy
are now engaged in an all-out cru-
sade to exaggerate the scope of his
victory, rewrite racial history, justi-
fy their vendettas and hostilities, and
erase the very distinction between
true and false.
At a fiery exchange at Harvard
University, Hillary Clintons commu-
nications director, Jennifer Palmieri,
rightly accused the Trump campaign
of emboldening white supremacists
and white nationalists.
The Trump campaign manager,
Kellyanne Conway, barked back:
Do you think I ran a campaign
where white supremacists had a plat-
form? Youre going to look me in the
face and tell me that?
It did. Kellyanne, it did, Palmieri
said. Yes, Kellyanne, that is exactly
what you did, and no amount of per-
Americans face a
threat to the ideals
that they hold dear.
sonal outrage about being called out
on it is going to rewrite that history.
Everyone who sees you should say
that to your face at every opportunity.
Resistance is not about some sort
of clairvoyant condemnation of acts
yet uncommitted, but rather about
the resilience of memory, the rigidity
of morality and the depth of wounds.
The truest measure of a leader
is as much about how he or she at-
tains power as how he or she wields
it; while the latter is yet to be deter-
mined, the former has been revealed
in devastating clarity.
A Pew Research Poll released last
month found that voters grades
for the way Trump conducted him-
self during the campaign are the low-
est for any victorious candidate in 28
years. The report continued: For
the first time in Pew Research Center
postelection surveys, voters give the
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
EDWARD UBIERA
ins. I learned of village dramas and
quiet acts of resistance against Gua-
temalas dictatorship, including my
grandfathers adventures as a brick-
layer and die-hard union man.
It was only as a fluent Spanish
speaker that I finally I came to know
my true self. Who I was and where I
came from.
Soon enough, I also came to know a
Los Angeles I would not have known
otherwise: a city with its own brand
of Spanish, a city shaped by the
ceaseless improvisations, reinven-
tions and ambitions of its Spanish
speakers. They became the subjects
of my novels.
For Latino immigrant children,
Spanish is the key that unlocks the
untranslatable wisdom of their elders,
and that reveals the subtle truths in
their family histories. Its a source of
self-knowledge, a form of cultural cap-
ital. They are smarter, in fact, for each
bit of Spanish they keep alive in their
bilingual brains. And they are more
likely to see the absurdity in the rants
of xenophobes and racists.
In Europe, most people speak
more than one language. Some speak
three or four or more. Multilingual-
ism is a sign of intellectual achieve-
ment and sophistication.
A fourth grader from Guadalaja-
ra, Mexico, learning English for the
first time in a Los Angeles classroom
needs to know that what she already
possesses is valuable. Teach her En-
glish, yes, but also the rules of Span-
ish spelling and give her some Juan
Rulfo to read when she gets older.
Shell most likely see some of her-
self in the stories of that Mexican ge-
nius. And it might soon dawn on her
that shes a genius, too.
losing candidate higher grades than
the winner.
Furthermore, as Nate Silver, the
writer and blogger, responded to
one of Conways tweets, Trump will
soon become the first president who
failed to win a majority of the vote
either in the general election or in
his primary, meaning the Repub-
lican primaries. He added: That is
to say, since 1972. Primaries werent
widespread before that. 45/46% of
the vote can go a long way under the
right circumstances.
And there are disturbing signs
about how a Trump administration
will conduct itself, from the early dip-
lomatic blunders that signal a worri-
some break in the continuity of pro-
tocol, to his teams nursing vendettas
and continuing to dangle the threat
of jail in front of his opponents. Con-
way appeared to waffle on whether
Trump or a federal agency during his
term might still pursue prosecution
of Clinton; the Trump lackey Corey
Lewandowski forthrightly said of
the executive editor of The New York
Times: He should be in jail.
And to add insult to injury, the
Trump surrogate Scottie Nell
Hughes uttered this jaw-dropping
line on another show:
One thing that has been interest-
ing this entire campaign season to
watch is that people that say facts are
facts; theyre not really facts. Every-
body has a way, its kind of like look-
ing at ratings or looking at a glass of
half-full water. Everybody has a way
of interpreting them to be the truth or
not true. She continued: Theres no
such thing, unfortunately, anymore of
facts. Folks, Dimwit-ism is a disease
easily spread, and denigrators of the
absolutism of truth are its vectors.
This is why resistance isnt only
principled, but essential and even
existential.
We are not in an ordinary post-
election period of national unity and
rapprochement. We are facing the
potential abrogation of fundamen-
tal American ideals. We stand at the
precipice, staring into an abyss that
grows darker by the day.
WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016
ANALYSIS/STEVEN RATTNER
No Jobs
From
Tweets
Donald J. Trump spent much
of his campaign peddling hope to
working-class Americans that, on
his watch, those well-paying man-
ufacturing jobs would come back to
America.
The president-elect was in Indiana
on December 1 to celebrate the news
that the Carrier Corporation will
move only 1,300 jobs to Mexico, not
2,100 as planned. Thats not bringing
jobs back to the United States; they
are just leaving more slowly.
Manufacturing employment in
the United States peaked at 19.6 mil-
lion in June 1979; today, 12.3 million
Americans work in factories. So far
in 2016, they have fallen by 62,000,
even as 1.8 million new jobs have
been created.
The lesson: You cant fight a vast
tide with a Twitter account.
To some degree, trade liberaliza-
tion has encouraged countries like
China to engage in anticompetitive
practices. But the vast preponder-
ance of American job losses has come
because emerging-market countries
have gotten much better at making
stuff with workers earning far less.
In 2015, a typical factory employee
in the United States earned $37.71 an
hour, including benefits; his Mexican
counterpart received $5.90 an hour.
And American executives say the
productivity that they get in Mexico
is at least as good as what they get at
home.
No wonder then that Mexico cur-
rently has a booming auto sector.
Between 2007 and 2015, employment
in the Mexican auto sector grew to
558,000 from 405,000, while auto
jobs in the United States declined to
762,000 from 828,000.
Ford and General Motors plan to
invest a combined $9.1 billion in Mex-
ican facilities and hire 12,200 more
workers over the next four years.
By 2020, analysts project that about
40 percent of small cars sold by the
Detroit automakers will be made in
Mexico, more than double current
levels.
And so I dont see how the Carrier
experience can be replicated.
For one thing, Carrier was appar-
ently promised $7 million over 10
years in state tax incentives. Its not
realistic for Mr. Trump to run around
Factory jobs stayed
with government pork,
not with sensible policy.
subsidizing manufacturing jobs at
high costs.
For another, Carriers parent cor-
poration, United Technologies, gets
about 10 percent of its revenues from
defense contracts, making the com-
pany receptive to a president-elect.
And, of course, Mr. Trumps
mouth-to-mouth combat can do little
to address the important problem
of wages. Thanks to pressure from
low-wage countries, average hourly
earnings for manufacturing work-
ers in Indiana have dropped to $19.20
from $23.70 in 2003, after adjusting
for inflation.
Mr. Trump wants to renegotiate
trade deals and impose high tariffs
once in power. Higher import duties
would hurt the very people he is try-
ing to help. Thanks to trade, prices of
many goods have fallen.
One study of 40 countries found
that if international trade ended, the
wealthiest consumers would lose 28
percent of their purchasing power
while those in the bottom tenth, who
rely on more imported goods, would
lose 63 percent. Sure, some manufac-
turing jobs would return, but at an
extraordinary price.
Lets instead focus on a sensible
economic plan to help those Trump
voters who are hurting.
For starters, the president-elect is
correct that more logical tax policies
need to be pursued; our loophole-rid-
den corporate tax code encourag-
es American companies to move
abroad. And yes, some regulations
hurt our competitiveness.
But his solutions (like huge tax cuts
for the rich) seem like giveaways to
capitalists rather than effective ways
to help blue-collar workers in Mich-
igan. More useful measures would
be to raise the just 0.1 percent of our
gross domestic product we spend on
retraining workers, one-sixth of the
average of other wealthy countries.
Mr. Trumps priorities seem to be
elsewhere; Republican plans to slash
federal spending would reduce the
help Washington gives struggling
workers.
That highlights the conundrum
of Trumponomics: He is offering an
economic plan devoid of policies that
would help the voters who elected
him.
Steven Rattner is a Wall Street
executive who served as lead auto
adviser in the Obama administration.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY
After Carrier announced it would move fewer jobs to Mexico from its Indiana factory, Donald Trump spoke to the plant workers.
A Great Deal for the Many
If Donald Trump could script his
presidency, every week would prob-
ably look like the last one in Novem-
ber. You get on the phone with some
corporate big shot whos consider-
ing closing a plant in the Rust Belt.
You offer some carrots, you threat-
en implicitly, you make a deal:
Jobs stay, factories dont close, and
maybe next time they even open.
(Nothing will make Trump happier
than the day he gets Apple to open a
minor widget factory in Wisconsin.)
Then you hold a big rally, brag about
your dealmaking prowess, promise
that C.E.O.s wont be shipping jobs
overseas with impunity anymore
and then fly back to Trump Tower
and wait for the next opportunity to
do it all again.
Unfortunately this is not an opti-
mal approach to economic policy.
It ignores the problems inherent
in picking winners and punishing
losers from on high. It expands an
economy of favors and phone calls in
which insiders will inevitably profit
more than innovators. It embodies
the crony capitalism that only yes-
terday Republicans opposed.
At the same time well, it could
be worse. Trump is putting a celeb-
rity spin on something that hap-
pens under both parties: George
W. Bushs administration came in
with steel tariffs and went out with
the Wall Street bailout, which was
followed by the G.M. bailout under
President Barack Obama; mean-
while, ethanol salesmen and sugar
Sure, you can buy your uncle a
necktie that he wont wear, or your
niece an Amazon certificate that
shell forget to use. Or you can help
remove shrapnel from a child in Syr-
ia, or assist students at risk of geno-
cide in South Sudan.
The major aid organizations have
special catalogs this time of year:
You can buy an alpaca for a family
for $150 at Heifer International, help
educate a girl for $75 at Save the
Children or help extend a much-ad-
mired microsavings program for
$25 at Care. This year for my annual
holiday gift list, Ive also looked for
organizations that you may not have
heard of:
As Syria and Russia commit war
crimes in Aleppo, heroic physicians
from many countries are traveling
secretly to rebel-held areas of Syr-
ia to treat the wounded in under-
ground hospitals and call attention
to the carnage. They work through
the Syrian American Medical So-
ciety, SAMS, sams-usa.net, which
supports more than 100 medical fa-
cilities in Syria.
Human rights and press free-
doms seem likely to get much less
attention from the next administra-
tion in Washington, which makes
this a good time to support the
Committee to Protect Journalists,
cpj.org. The C.P.J. speaks up for im-
prisoned journalists worldwide and
tries to end impunity for those who
murder journalists (at least 40 jour-
nalists have been killed worldwide
so far in 2016 for their work).
In the same vein, consider buying
ROSS DOUTHAT
moguls and defense contractors
and green-energy tycoons all jos-
tle for their share of federal favors,
and at the state level the bribery is
even starker. Trump will make the
cronyism more personal and pub-
lic, and his own conflicts of interest
will bear watching. But if he sticks
to jawboning individual companies
as opposed to instituting tariffs
and starting trade wars he wont
necessarily make the underlying
sclerosis that much worse.
But strong-arming individual
companies also isnt going to do
that much to help the mass of heart-
land voters to whom he promised a
Trumpian New Deal. Saving jobs
that Carrier planned to ship to Mex-
ico is a meaningful thing for the
workers involved. But even if you
scale up the same deal-making dra-
matically, youre still talking about
a footnote to the unemployment rate
and average wage.
And its disappointment with
wages writ large, and male-bread-
winner wages especially, thats
crucial to the economic element in
Trumps populist appeal. Even with
unemployment falling, years and
decades of slack wage growth are a
crucial fact on the economic ground,
and an issue that both parties the
Republicans in their paeans to hero-
ic entrepreneurs, the Democrats in
their promise of new welfare spend-
ing have talked around more than
theyve addressed.
Theyve talked around it, of
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Gifts With Meaning
In this holiday season,
make a difference with
a different present.
a gift subscription to a reliable news
organization for yourself or a friend
as an investment in a robust civil
society.
The recent hurricane in Hai-
ti was devastating, and one of the
most effective aid organizations in
Haiti is Fonkoze, fonkoze.org, which
has adopted a graduation model
course, because there is no single
policy lever to pull that delivers
higher wages, and the policies in-
volved can be slow, subtle, and un-
certain in their effects. Perhaps
Trumpisms immigration restric-
tions and infrastructure spending
and corporate tax cuts can have
a clearer impact than other presi-
dents approaches; its not impos-
sible. But if the rest of his agenda is
conventionally Republican, he could
end up with a disappointingly con-
ventional Republican result: Rising
Can Trump help
workers when he isnt
strong-arming bosses?
G.D.P., but stagnant take-home pay.
However: It is possible for policy
makers to raise take-home pay di-
rectly even without big boosts in the
underlying wages. Cutting payroll
taxes would do it. The earned-in-
come tax credit does it. Middle-class
tax cuts do it. Child tax credits do it.
A wage subsidy would do it. The list
of possibilities is long.
Several of those possibilities are
immediately available to Trump,
if he wants to reach for them. His
daughters child-care subsidy could
be reconfigured to deliver more to
ADAM FERGUSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
that has been particularly success-
ful at combating global poverty.
Founded by a local Catholic priest,
Fonkoze works with the most im-
poverished women in Haiti over 18
months to get them earning regular
incomes through raising livestock
or selling merchandise. Its about
teaching people how to fish, not
handing out fish. Ive seen it in ac-
tion. Its terrific.
Congo is home to probably the
most lethal conflict since World War
II, and it is sometimes called the
rape capital of the world. One of the
heroes there is Dr. Denis Mukwege,
who founded the Panzi hospital to
treat injured women and risks his
15
A. J. MAST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
the working class; it could be com-
bined with the larger earned-in-
come tax credit envisioned by Paul
Ryan or the wage subsidy that Mar-
co Rubio is championing, and both
could be folded into a tax reform that
makes good on Trumps Treasury
nominees recent promise to prior-
itize middle-class tax cuts over tax
cuts for the rich.
None of this would solve the long-
term dilemma of slow wage growth.
But it would make it immediately
easier, often to the tune of thousands
of dollars a year, for Americans who
arent employed by companies
amenable to Trumpian jawboning to
pay bills, raise children, and pursue
the American Dream.
It would also cost money, money
that conventional Republican eco-
nomics and Trumps official cam-
paign tax plan tends to reserve
for upper-bracket tax cuts. Which
is why the tax policy to expect from
Trump is probably a modest gesture
toward Middle America paired with
a sweeping, 1-percent-friendly, sup-
ply-side tax cut.
But it could be otherwise. So far
Trump has induced free-trading Re-
publicans to sound like protection-
ists, and once-libertarian Republi-
cans to nod along to his mercantil-
ism. If he bends the partys tax or-
thodoxy as well, he would be able to
deliver something bigger than last
weeks public-relations win: not just
manufacturing jobs for a fortunate
few, but more money for the many.
The Syrian
American
Medical Society
supports more
than 100 medical
facilities in war-
torn Syria. A
doctor examining
a boy in a
refugee camp.
life to stand up to
warlords. He has
survived an assas-
sination attempt
and some day will
get the Nobel Peace
Prize but in the
meantime, you can
support his hospital
at panzifoundation.
org.
Ive reported on crimes against
humanity unfolding in South Su-
dan, one of the worlds poorest coun-
tries, and now the United Nations
is warning of the risk of full-blown
genocide. In this impossible situa-
tion, a South Sudan-born American
named Valentino Deng is running
a high school, one of few still func-
tioning. It needs support so students
can get an education and build their
country.
You may remember Valentino:
Hes the lost boy at the center of
Dave Eggerss best-selling book
What Is the What. What he has
done since, in founding this school,
is even more impressive.
16 WEEKEND, DECEMBER 10-11, 2016