After the Iranian delegationleft the kingdom on Fridaywithout reaching an agree-ment, the Saudi governmentsaid Iranian officials “will beresponsible in front of AllahAlmighty and its peo
Trang 1MONDAY, MAY 30, 2016 ~ VOL XL NO 189 WSJ.com
World News A2-4
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What’s
News
Hundreds are thought
to have died attempting to
cross the Mediterranean
Sea from North Africa in
the past few days, the U.N.’s
refugee agency said A3
Japan’s Abe sounded a
warning on the global
economy, opening the
door to another delay in a
sales-tax increase A4
Obama focused on
vic-tims and survivors and the
ills of nuclear war on the
first visit to Hiroshima by
a sitting U.S president A4
Iran canceled its
partic-ipation in this year’s holy
pilgrimage to Mecca,
blaming Saudi Arabia amid
increasing tensions A1
Long before EgyptAir
Flight 804’s pilots received a
smoke alert, U.S watchdogs
documented such warnings
were often erroneous A3
France is girding for
security challenges at the
Euro 2016 soccer
champi-onship in the shadow of
the November attacks A3
A court in Argentina
sentenced the country’s
last dictator and 14 other
ex-military officials to jail
over Operation Condor A3
Romney is among the
few Republicans still
pub-licly resisting Trump’s
candidacy, though advisers
discouraged him A5
Oil-supply outages are
at their highest level in
more than a decade even
as spare capacity shrinks,
contributing to a risk
pre-mium in the market A1
Energy firms are
treat-ing with caution the recent
upswing in oil prices, wary
of boosting spending and
production too soon B1
Car makers recalled
millions more vehicles
world-wide with faulty
Takata air bags B1
Zoomlion ended its
pur-suit of crane maker Terex,
joining a line of failed
ef-forts by Chinese firms to
buy U.S rivals B1, B16
China’s stock exchanges
tightened their rules on
trading halts B13
Philippine rules allow
untraceable cash to wash
through casinos’ VIP junket
rooms, opening the door
to money launderers A1
The Fed’s Yellen
sig-naled the central bank will
likely raise rates within
months if the U.S economy
keeps strengthening A5
A U.S study found a
link between cellphones
and cancer in rats, but
sci-entists said it was too early
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ASIA EDITION
Obama’s Kumbaya
In Hiroshima
OPINION | A10
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Russia’s Long Road
To the Middle East
Iranians Won’t Join in Mecca Pilgrimage
takes place in the westernSaudi city, the holiest in Is-lam
months of talks over how nians would obtain Saudi vi-sas after Riyadh severed dip-lomatic ties with Iran inJanuary The break was a re-sponse to attacks on Saudidiplomatic compounds in Iran
Ira-Please see IRAN page A2
“Unfortunately, Iranian grims cannot go to hajj thisyear,” Iranian Culture MinisterAli Jannati told state televi-sion
pil-Iran’s Hajj and PilgrimageOrganization blamed “Saudisabotage” for the cancellation
“Despite all the Islamic public’s efforts, the Saudis ig-nored the absolute right ofthe Iranians to perform thehajj rituals,” it said
Re-Iran on Sunday canceled itsparticipation in this year’sholy pilgrimage to Mecca,
blaming rival Saudi Arabia, asthe regional powerhouses’
troubled relationship reached
a new low
By Aresu Eqbali in Tehran, Asa Fitch in Dubai and Ahmed Al
figures to the
pantheon
“Without Baba’sblessings, it’s im-possible to live up
24-year-old Mr rawat says “Howcan I not believe?”
Seh-Baba is an ific bestowed onHindu saints
honor-The Hindus are a devoutpeople, believing in millions ofgods and numerous saints
Many believe in rebirth, andsome in the afterlife Few re-vere a dead person as if he isgod
At Nathu La, a strategic pass
Please see SAINT page A6
NATHU LA, India—Indianarmy enlisted man JitenderSingh Sehrawat has had a fewclose calls
When lightningtore through theroof of his bunker
at a high-altitudepost on the Chi-nese border onerecent afternoon,
a serviceman who died in 1968and who is revered as awatchful spirit by soldiers
It is lonely and hostile in
of a top-secret Naval facility where U.S
military engineers prepared to strate a weapon for which there is littledefense
demon-Officials huddled at a video screenfor a first look at a deadly new super-gun that can fire a 25-pound projectilethrough seven steel plates and leave a5-inch hole
The weapon is called a railgun and
to seven VIP rooms, decoratedwith paintings, and their ceil-ings studded with crystals
Croupiers wait in silence forplayers who might win or lose
millions on a roll of the dice
or the turn of a card
These rooms, critics say,represent a loophole in efforts
to stem the flow of ill-gottenmoney through the country
The Philippine Amusementand Gaming Corp., or Pagcor,which is both the industryregulator and a casino opera-tor, succeeded in exemptingcasinos from new anti-money-laundering regulations whenthey were introduced in 2013
That means large amounts of
untraceable cash can washthrough without casino opera-tors having to identify itssource or report it to financialregulators—something whichsimplifies business at the casi-nos, but also opens the door
to money launderers
This loophole was exploited
in February, Philippines tigators say, when millions ofdollars stolen from Bangla-desh’s central bank were used
inves-to buy large volumes of chips
Please see CASINO page A2
Gamblers Exploit Loophole
Philippine regulatory exemption means VIP junket rooms can be used to launder money
NAVY DEVELOPS NEW SUPERGUN
The experimental railgun is designed to keep the U.S military’s edge over Russia and China
Oil-supply outages are attheir highest level in more than
a decade, bolstering the “fearpremium” that has helped pushcrude prices higher to $50 abarrel
About 3.5 million barrels aday worth of production is offline because of disruptions such
as militant attacks in Nigeria,wildfires in Canada and politicalunrest in Libya—more than 3%
of the global total, says researchfirm ClearView Energy PartnersLLC That is likely the highestsince the Iraq war hit outputthere in 2003, says JacquesRousseau, the firm’s managingdirector of oil and gas
At the same time, there isless slack to fill supply gaps.Unused production capacitythat the Organization of the Pe-troleum Exporting Countriescan bring on quickly has dwin-dled, and the glut of outputfrom other producers, includingU.S shale companies, has ebbed
as companies cut back amidlower prices
“There isn’t a lot of extrasupply out there,” said Ann-Louise Hittle, lead oil-marketanalyst at energy-consultingfirm Wood Mackenzie “That’swhen you start to get a riskpremium back in the market It
is absolutely to be expected and
it is, in our opinion, just the ginning.”
be-Natural disasters or politicalunrest in oil-producing nationscan halt production and disruptshipping routes Such eventshave historically boosted oilprices because traders worryabout the availability of futuresupplies
In 2014 and 2015, however,the oil market mostly ignoredoccasional supply disruptions,from sanctions on Iran to ex-port-terminal closures in Libya.Traders focused instead on thegrowing crude surplus pro-duced by U.S shale companies,sending prices tumbling 76%before they bottomed out inFebruary
After talks of an outputfreeze among major producingnations fizzled in April, traderssay, the reduced supply from
Please see OIL page A2
B Y N ICOLE F RIEDMAN
Concern About Output Aids Oil
Rain Can’t Damp Joy
In Spain
HOMECOMING: Real Madrid players held the Champions League trophy as fans surrounded their bus in Madrid
on Sunday Tens of thousands turned out despite gray weather to celebrate the team’s win over Atlético Madrid on Saturday
in Milan A4
requires neither gunpowder nor sive It is powered by electromagneticrails that accelerate a hardened projec-tile to staggering velocity—a battlefieldmeteorite with the power to one daytransform military strategy, say sup-porters, and keep the U.S ahead of ad-vancing Russian and Chinese weaponry
explo-In conventional guns, a bullet beginslosing acceleration moments after thegunpowder ignites The railgun projec-tile gains more speed as it travels thelength of a 32-foot barrel, exiting themuzzle at 4,500 miles an hour, or more
than a mile a second
“This is going to change the way wefight,” said U.S Navy Adm Mat Winter,the head of the Office of Naval Re-search
The Navy developed the railgun as apotent offensive weapon to blow holes
in enemy ships, destroy tanks and levelterrorist camps The weapon systemhas the attention of top Pentagon offi-cials also interested in its potential toknock enemy missiles out of the skymore inexpensively and in greater num-
Please see GUN page A6
Oil firms treat rally with caution B1
Everyone, even mom, is trading crude B13
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WORLD NEWS
by people angry with the
king-dom’s execution of a
promi-nent Shiite cleric and activist
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel
al-Jubeir on Sunday said the
kingdom had agreed to most
of Iran’s demands, and
ac-cused Tehran of asking for
what’s usually provided to
other Muslim countries
“It was demanding the
right to stage semi-protests,
and it was demanding for
privileges outside the
frame-work of the normal
organiza-tion which would create chaos
during the hajj period,” he
said “This is unacceptable.”
Despite several visits to
Saudi Arabia to negotiate
vi-sas and other logistics for the
September hajj by Iranian
offi-Continued from Page One
The Television Centre in
London will still have threetelevision studios on thepremises after it is convertedinto luxury apartments AMansion article in the Friday-Sunday edition about the con-version incorrectly said onlyone studio would remain
CORRECTIONS AMPLIFICATIONS
Readers can alert The Wall Street Journal to any errors in news articles
by emailingwsjcontact@wsj.com.
Notice to Readers
Simon Nixon’s Europe File column will resume next week.
used in high-stakes VIP junket
rooms at Solaire and another
Manila casino
The saga began early this
year when investigators found
that hackers planted malware
on computers at the central
bank’s Dhaka headquarters
and accessed an international
funds-transfer system On Feb
5, someone instructed the New
York Federal Reserve to
with-draw $951 million from
Ban-gladesh Bank’s account there,
transaction records show
Some $81 million went to
bank accounts in the
Philip-pines and $20 million to Sri
Lanka before the New York
Fed stopped the payments,
re-cords show
The money directed to Sri
Lanka was intercepted and
re-turned
But in the Philippines, efforts
to trace the cash have been
hampered because money was
transferred to junkets operating
in the casinos, according to
testimony at Philippines
Sen-Continued from Page One
supply disruptions are goingaway Iraq, Nigeria and Venezu-ela together produced 25% ofOPEC’s total crude output inApril, according to the Interna-tional Energy Agency Each isstruggling with outages or po-tential disruptions
Iraq is trying to keep its duction high amid the threat ofIslamic State Many analystswarn that production could fall
pro-in Venezuela because of chronicpower outages in the cash-strapped nation and disputesabout payments to interna-tional oil-field-service provid-ers
Militant attacks continue inNigeria, including one related
to a Chevron Corp facility onThursday “You could be looking
at a sustained outage for a longperiod,” Ms Croft at RBC said
of the country’s total output
Unplanned production ages are the highest since atleast 2003, when the war inIraq briefly halted nearly allproduction in that country, ana-lysts say
out-During the 2011 Arab Springuprisings and the overthrow ofLibyan leader Moammar Gad-hafi, supply disruptions helpedlift global crude prices above
$110 a barrel on average thatyear and in 2012, up from anaverage of about $80 a barrel in2010
Since late 2012, global ply disruptions have held morethan two million barrels a dayoff the global crude market, ac-
sup-cording to ClearView Fear oflost production after IslamicState seized some Iraqi citiesbriefly helped push global oilprices above $110 a barrel inmid-2014
If supply was still growingfast, disruptions might not af-fect prices as much But pro-duction in the U.S and otherparts of the world is falling ascompanies cut back
“Today, it doesn’t look like
we will see a return to excesssupply conditions,” said BoChristensen, chief analyst atDanske Invest, which manages
$100 billion in assets “Thatmakes the market susceptible
to other types of risks, ofcourse including geopoliticalrisks.”
Avengers has claimed bility for attacks on a produc-tion facility and an export ter-minal The country’s output hasfallen to the lowest level since2009
responsi-Some think the rise in ages is in part a byproduct ofdepressed crude prices Whenoil is cheap, producing nations’
out-budgets suffer That makes itharder for some governments
to boost spending to head offunrest and deprives oil facilities
of money needed for nance and recovery
mainte-“At $100 a barrel, you canpaper over a lot of problemswith money,” said Helima Croft,head of commodities strategy
at RBC Capital Markets “2016
is proving to be the year of
reckoning for the weakest ducers.”
pro-Some analysts think theboost from the disruptions mayalready be waning Canadian of-ficials have lifted a mandatoryevacuation order on certainproduction sites in Alberta, andKuwait’s output has returned tonormal Even in Libya, whereunrest has kept the country’sproduction below capacity foryears, some analysts expect ex-ports to increase
“Some of the bullish ment has to ease,” said RobHaworth, senior investmentstrategist at U.S Bank WealthManagement, which oversees
senti-$128 billion “There’s some its to how far this can go.”
lim-Others aren’t so sure that
unplanned outages has been a
primary factor driving U.S oil
prices from below $27 a barrel
in February to more than $50 a
barrel intraday on Thursday
U.S crude settled Friday at
$49.33 a barrel, down 0.3%
A strike by oil workers in
Kuwait in April briefly shut
down nearly half the Gulf
na-tion’s production Wildfires in
Alberta, Canada, this month
forced the shutdown of
produc-tion facilities in the country’s
oil-sands region
In Nigeria, a militant group
calling itself the Niger Delta
Continued from Page One
OIL
Problems at the Pumps
Unplanned production disruptions
Unplanned oil outages are at the highest level in more than a decade, helping to boost crude prices
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Sources: ClearView Energy Partners; WSJ Market Data Group (crude oil futures)
2530354045
a barrel
ate hearings on the theft
“It’s not hard to imaginewhy those guys chose Manila
to clean their money,” saidBen Lee, a gaming-industryanalyst at Macau-based con-sultancy IGamiX
In other jurisdictions, bly Macau, the world’s biggestgambling center by revenue,anti-money-laundering legisla-tion does apply to casinos Au-thorities in the southern Chi-nese territory recently stepped
nota-up enforcement of the lawsthere amid a crackdown oncorruption initiated by China’scommunist leaders
“We have to put more teeth
in our laws so we could stopcriminal elements from ex-ploiting the deficiencies in our
Dooc, a member of the pines’ Anti-Money LaunderingCouncil, told the Senate hear-ings “There are gaping holes
Philip-in our law We have to Philip-includecasinos as covered entities”
under the ing law, he said
anti-money-launder-Operating like a casinowithin a casino, a junket lureshigh rollers to play in its exclu-sive gambling rooms and guar-
antees a casino a set amount ofrevenue Junkets propelledMacau’s success, and Pagcorwon a small slice of this busi-ness after lobbying for themoney-laundering exemptionfor junkets and casinos
The Solaire was the first
opened on Manila’s seafront in
2013, by ports magnate rique Razon Jr It was fol-lowed by City of Dreams, oper-ated by Laurence Ho andJames Packer, sons of billion-aires Stanley Ho and KerryPacker Japanese pachinko bil-lionaire Kazuo Okada is cur-rently building a $2 billion ca-sino nearby Total gamblingrevenue rose 17% to $2.78 bil-lion last year, according toPagcor—though still a fraction
En-of Macau’s $29 billion 2015 sino take
ca-One junket operator, KimWong, a Chinese national whohas lived in the Philippines fordecades, told the Senate in-quiry that he helped clientsfrom China open the bank ac-counts that received the stolenmoney, but said he had no ideawhere the money originated
The Philippines’ Anti-Money
Laundering Council has filed acriminal complaint against Mr
Wong, who denies any doing and has since handedover to the council $15 million
wrong-he received from his clients
Macau-based junket GoldMoon said it received some ofthe money In one instance, itissued 100 million pesos ($2.1million) of chips for use at its
Solaire VIP rooms, a lawyerfor Gold Moon told the Senatehearings Another chunk went
to another Macau-based ket, Suncity, whose lawyertold the hearings that it wasstill checking how much it re-ceived
jun-In Gold Moon’s VIP room,two Chinese high-rollers alleg-edly gambled 33 million pesos
worth of the chips during amarathon two-day stint, turn-ing that into 38.5 million pe-sos before leaving, according
to the junket’s lawyer Theother 67 million pesos in chipsremain unaccounted for, ac-cording to the casino GoldMoon’s attorney said the twomen may have walked outwith the chips and could havesold them to other gamblers.Solaire declined to com-ment Midas, a Pagcor-run ca-sino where investigators sayanother $11 million of the sto-len Bangladesh money wasgambled, didn’t respond to re-quests for comment
Executives at the Pagcorhave said stricter anti-money-laundering rules for casinoswouldn’t have stopped the sto-len money entering the VIPjunket rooms They blamedbanks for failing to stop thefunds entering the country.The Philippines’ centralbank Gov Amando Tetangcohas said the bank will workwith the nation’s Congress toenhance money launderinglaws
—Yang Jie contributed to this article.
Iranian officials insisted onhaving visas issued in Iran,while Saudi officials counteredthat Iranians could apply forand receive hajj visas through
an online portal
An Iranian official gested this month that timehad run out to adequatelyplan Iranian participation inthe hajj, prompting Saudi’sMinistry of Hajj and Umrah toblame Iran for instigating anydisruption
sug-Mr Jubeir said Saudi bia had worked to organizethe attendance of Iranian pil-grims
Ara-“We believe that if Iran hasintended from the start to ma-neuver and find excuses toprevent its citizens from per-
forming hajj, then that’s verynegative,” he said
“If the matter is over cedures and arrangements,then we believe we have goneabove and beyond the call ofduty to respond to theseneeds and that the Iraniansare the ones who rejected[them].”
pro-The Saudi cabinet has cized Iran for allegedly politi-cizing a religious rite
criti-“The kingdom rejects nian attempts aimed at put-ting obstacles to prevent thearrival of Iranian pilgrims inorder to politicize hajj and use
Ira-it to insult Saudi Arabia,” Ira-itsaid recently on the officialSaudi Press Agency
After the Iranian delegationleft the kingdom on Fridaywithout reaching an agree-ment, the Saudi governmentsaid Iranian officials “will beresponsible in front of AllahAlmighty and its people for
inability of the Iranian zens to perform hajj for thisyear.”
citi-Iran last boycotted the grimage for three years be-tween 1988 and 1990, afterclashes between Shiite pil-grims and Saudi securityforces led to the deaths ofmore than 400 Iranians dur-ing the 1987 hajj The eventalso led Saudi Arabia to lowerthe maximum number of Ira-nians approved to take thehajj to 45,000 The quota hassince been raised
pil-The cancellation will forcethousands of Iranians to wait
at least a year to make the grimage, potentially deepen-ing popular anger towardSaudi Arabia
pil-“They don’t want to gothere, be fingerprinted orsniffed by dogs at the airportfor something,” one pilgrim-age tour operator in Tehransaid, asking not to be namedbecause of the political sensi-tivity of the issue The tour
don’t want to be disrespected
by Saudis.”
Travel to Saudi Arabia forthe hajj is tightly controlled,with visas granted based onagreements between SaudiArabia and other countries
About 64,000 Iranians pated in last year’s hajj, a reli-gious duty that able-bodiedMuslims are called upon toperform at least once in theirlifetime
partici-Tensions between SaudiArabia and Iran have risensharply since last year, in partdue to disputes over SaudiArabia’s handling of the hajjand off-season pilgrimagescalled umrah
Allegations that Saudi rity personnel molested twoIranian boys returning fromumrah last March led Iran tobriefly suspend umrah pil-grimages pending an investi-
secu-gation A Saudi court tenced two men over theincident in June
sen-The death of more than
400 Iranians last September
in the worst stampede in thehajj’s history further stokedIranian anger at Saudi Arabia
Iranian officials criticized yadh for failing to managelarge crowds properly and en-sure pilgrims’ safety
Ri-Enmity between the tries peaked early this year,after Iranian demonstratorsangry about Saudi Arabia’s ex-ecution of Shiite cleric Nemeral-Nemer stormed the Saudiembassy in Tehran and setparts of it ablaze
coun-After Saudi Arabia severeddiplomatic and commercialties with Iran, several Saudiallies downgraded their ownrelations with the Islamic Re-public
The Iranian decision is a minder that those tensions areunlikely to abate in the com-ing months, said SabahatKhan, a senior analyst at theDubai-based Institute for Near
re-East and Gulf Military sis
Analy-“Tehran will pin the blame
on Riyadh, but the Saudis willobviously reject this andblame the Iranian govern-ment,” he said “For ordinaryIranians, there will certainly
be anger—for some againstthe Saudi government and forothers against their own gov-ernment.”
Trang 3THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | A3
with waves of people movingthrough the stands to getaway
The breaches highlightedthe unprecedented challengeFrance faces in securing Euro
2016, a sprawling tournamentthat will run in 10 French cit-ies from June 10 to July 10and overlap with the three-week Tour de France bicyclerace, for which security is alsobeing beefed up Due to the
terror threat, for the first time
a SWAT team will accompanycyclists along the 2,200-milerace, and 23,000 police andgendarmes will be deployed onthe route
For the Euro matches—thefirst major men’s soccer cham-pionship held in Western Eu-rope in eight years—two mil-lion fans from abroad areexpected to flock to Frenchstadiums and town centers
Despite the security fears,
30 of the 36 opening-roundgames are completely sold out,according to the official tour-nament ticketing website
The French public appearssanguine about the risks Ac-cording to a survey of 1,002French people at the end ofMarch, 82% thought Euro 2016and the Tour de France should
go ahead despite the officialstate of emergency that wasdeclared after the Nov 13 at-tacks and remains in place
France has deployed sands of police and soldiers atsensitive locations after those
thou-attacks, which highlighted thevulnerabilities of so-called softtargets such as sports eventsand concerts
Police investigators say theIslamic State operatives whokilled 32 in suicide-bomb at-tacks in Brussels in Marchwere planning attacks inFrance, including at the soccerchampionship
raised the security budget ter Nov 13 by 15% to €34 mil-lion ($38 million) for locationsdirectly connected to matchesand teams But fan zones,where thousands of people
af-WORLD NEWS
spond to the smoke warning,electrically powered items inthe airplane ceased to func-tion,” according to NationalTransportation Safety Boarddocuments The crew lostsome radios and a transpon-der, and needed air-trafficcontrollers to direct the jetback to the runway, where itlanded with impaired steeringand its nose wheel veered intograss beside the runway No-body was injured
Ten days later, United sentpilots a bulletin saying its
“Airbus fleet has experiencedcases of spurious avionicssmoke warnings” and stress-ing that emergency electricshutdowns are required only
in the event of “perceptiblesmoke.”
It isn’t known if the tAir alert was false, or whatactions the crew took Thenewer-model, optical smokesensors installed on the 13-year-old jet have been deemedmore reliable than older tech-nology like that on the Unitedplane
Egyp-But the more recent ants continued to issue falsewarnings—though at signifi-cantly lower rates than theolder ones—and were “stillsensitive to dust and someaerosols,” Airbus told U.S
vari-crash investigators in 2011
Recovery of the black-boxvoice and data recorders is ex-pected to reveal whether theaviators got the warning andbegan the prescribed series of
steps intended to isolate theproblem by shedding electricalload from the main circuits
Going back to 2011, thatprocedure, designed by Airbus,was controversial among crit-ics who said it could be con-fusing and overly complicated
The prospects that theEgyptAir crew inadvertentlycut off power to some essen-tial systems or otherwisefailed to react appropriatelyduring the checklist procedureare among the investigativestrands being pursued by the
international team of expertsinvolved in the EgyptAirprobe, people familiar with theissue said The effort includesrunning ground-based simula-tor sessions to re-create possi-ble sequences of events
Given the scant informationnow available, it isn’t clearwhich of the scenarios exam-ined so far—ranging from air-craft malfunctions and pilotmissteps to a terrorist act—
can be considered the mostlikely, these people said
Airbus has been working onthe problem of erroneous avi-
onics smoke alerts since thelate 1990s An Airbus spokes-man on Friday declined tocomment, citing the continu-ing investigation EgyptAir of-ficials couldn’t be reached tocomment
Theories about what mighthave occurred in the avionicsbay of Flight 804—an under-floor compartment near thecockpit that houses the jet’selectrical brains—don’t seem
to fit with the relatively fewsystem-failure messages theaircraft automatically trans-mitted before it stopped com-
municating with the ground,safety experts said
In addition to the avionicssmoke warning, the six othermessages included malfunc-tions of cockpit-window sys-tems and of a flight-controlsystem
The avionics smoke list rarely pops up during re-current training, said severalpilots who fly the workhorseA320, one of the world’s mostwidely used jetliners
check-“We only get to practice theprocedure once or twice in thesimulator every couple ofyears,” said Ben Riecken, whoflies A320s for a U.S carrier.Barely hours after theEgyptAir crash killed all 66people on board, Egyptian of-ficials appeared to jump onthe idea of terrorism Butsince then, with President Ab-del Fattah Al Sisi saying noth-ing has been ruled out, publicattention has shifted to otherpotential causes spanning anarray of airplane malfunctionsand cockpit errors
In the case of EgyptAirFlight 804, safety experts saidturning off both generatorscould account for the suddenloss of automated transmis-sion of system updates as well
as dropping off air-traffic trol radar screens But theycautioned that other combina-tions of problems also couldlead to such communicationloss
con-—Robert Wall contributed to this article.
Long before EgyptAir Flight
804’s pilots received an alert
signaling smoke in a vital
elec-tronics compartment, U.S
safety watchdogs documented
that such warnings on that
airliner model were frequently
prompted unnecessary and
risky cockpit responses
Investigators are trying to
determine whether the pilots
reacted to the smoke message
by following an emergency
checklist that can lead to
shut-ting down essential safety
sys-tems, including automated
flight-control protections,
peo-ple familiar with the probe
into the May 19 crash of the
Airbus Group SE A320 said
Possible pitfalls of that
pro-cedure emerged vividly in an
April 2011 incident Shortly
af-ter United Airlines Flight 497
took off from New Orleans, the
pilots of the A320 plane
re-ceived a smoke alert from its
avionics system, but
investiga-tors from the National
Trans-portation Safety Board later
said they found “no evidence
of fire or overheated
compo-nents.”
The pilots told investigators
that “after they began to
re-B Y A NDY P ASZTOR
Flight 804 Smoke Alert Draws Scrutiny
Investigators say such
warnings on A320s
can be wrong and
trigger risky reactions
Egyptians lighted candles in Cairo on Friday for the 66 victims of the May 19 EgyptAir plane crash.
On Saturday, 668 werepicked up at sea, with no
spokesman for the Italiancoast guard Those rescue ef-forts were carried out by shipsbelonging to the Italian coastguard, the Italian and Irish na-vies, and nongovernmental or-ganization Sea Watch.After being rescued, mi-grants are taken to receptioncenters in southern Italy Thecountry is currently hosting125,000 migrants in its recep-tion system, the Interior Min-istry said
MILAN—About 700 peopleare thought to have died at-tempting to cross the Mediter-ranean Sea from North Africa
in the past few days, the UnitedNations’ refugee agency said onSunday, further highlightingthe perils of the world’s deadli-est migration route
That figure is “a tive estimate,” with most ofthe deaths the result of threelarge shipwrecks, said CarlottaSami, spokeswoman for theU.N High Commissioner forRefugees Most of the migrantswere from sub-Saharan Africa
conserva-On Wednesday, a ship wentdown with about 100 peoplethought to have been trappedinside, Ms Sami said, citingwitnesses The following day, aship sank with about 550 onboard, migrants watching from
a nearby vessel said On day, several dozen bodies wererecovered from another shipthat sank
Fri-About 15,000 migrants haveleft Libya, and to a muchlesser extent Egypt, in the pastweek headed toward Italy, theUNHCR said, putting freshstrain on the government’s ef-forts to accommodate new ar-rivals The vast majority arefrom sub-Saharan Africa—
largely Nigeria, Gambia, lia, Ivory Coast and Eritrea
Soma-After a lull over the winter,
2006 World Cup in Germany,the wide-open areas ringedwith big screens were hailed
as the beating heart of a tional celebration
na-In Paris, a zone at the foot
of the Eiffel Tower is expected
to draw 90,000 fans on an most daily basis
al-The state and local ties will spend €17 million se-curing fan zones and installingvideo surveillance at the sites
authori-Authorities will carry out tematic frisking around the ar-eas and ban open-air screen-ings and gatherings outsidethe fan zones
sys-The French state will lize 73,000 police officers andgendarmes for Euro 2016 andredeploy some of the 10,000soldiers on the homeland anti-terror mission
mobi-Some participating teamshave expressed concerns aboutsecurity
“After what happened inNovember you can’t just ig-nore it,” said Germany man-ager Joachim Löw, who re-
explosions around the stadium
as his team played France thatFriday night in November
Each of the 24 squads willtravel with a delegation of po-lice, private security and atleast two French SWAT-teammembers
The high state of alert trasts with France’s most re-cent experience with an event
con-of this scale: the 32-teamWorld Cup in 1998, when thenational team, Les Bleus, liftedthe trophy on home soil
“This has led us to deploysecurity measures that aremuch more complex, muchmore complete and muchtougher,” said Jacques Lam-bert, the head of the Euro
2016 organizing committeewho also ran that World Cup
“We are taking maximumprecautions to ensure safety,even if, as everyone knows,there is no such thing as zerorisk,” said French InteriorMinister Bernard Cazeneuve
PARIS—When soccer fans
set off smoke bombs and
fire-crackers at the Stade de
France on May 21, the
explo-sions did more than add to the
drama of a French cup final
between bitter rivals They
ex-posed gaps in France’s efforts
to tighten security just two
weeks before hosting Euro
2016, the continent’s largest
sporting event
Still in a terror-induced
state of emergency after 130
people were killed in the
No-vember attacks, French
au-thorities are preparing to
manage eight million fans and
secure around 100 locations
for the European soccer
cham-pionships
France’s apparatus was
be-ing tested at the Saturday
game between Paris
Saint-Ger-main and Olympique de
Mar-seille, held in the same
sta-dium suicide bombers targeted
in November Despite new
se-curity barriers where all
at-tendees were supposed to be
searched, soccer fans were
able to smuggle in banned
smoke bombs When they
went off, stewards had to cope
B Y W ILLIAM H OROBIN
A ND J OSHUA R OBINSON
French Soccer Tourney Tests Security
Fans faced a phalanx of security forces at a game on May 21 at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis.
An Argentine federal court
on Friday sentenced formerjunta leader Reynaldo Bignone,
88 years old, to 20 years inprison for being part of an il-licit association, kidnappingand abusing his powers in theforced disappearance of more
than 100 people The eral, who ruled Argentina in1982-1983, is already servinglife sentences for multiple hu-man-rights violations duringthe 1976-1983 dictatorship
ex-gen-In the landmark trial, 14other former military officialsreceived prison sentences ofeight to 25 years for criminalassociation, kidnapping andtorture They include an Uru-guayan army colonel, ManuelCordero Piacentini, who alleg-edly tortured prisoners inside
Automotores Orletti, the nos Aires repair shop wheremany captured leftists were in-terrogated under orders fromtheir home countries Two ofthe accused were absolved
Bue-The sentences are seen as amilestone because they markthe first time a court hasproved that Operation Condorwas an international criminalconspiracy carried out by U.S.-backed regimes in Chile, Ar-gentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Para-guay and Uruguay
“Operation Condor affected
my life, my family,” ChileanLaura Elgueta said outside thecourtroom Her brother, LuisElgueta, had taken refuge inBuenos Aires from Gen Au-gusto Pinochet’s forces, only
to be forcibly disappeared inBuenos Aires in 1976
launched in the 1990s when anamnesty law still protectedmany of the accused Argen-tina’s Supreme Court over-turned the amnesty in 2005 at
the urging of then-PresidentNéstor Kirchner
“Forty years after OperationCondor was formally founded,and 16 years after the judicialinvestigation began, this trialproduced valuable contribu-tions to knowledge of the truthabout the era of state terror-ism and this regional criminalnetwork,” said the Buenos Ai-res-based Center for Legal andSocial Studies, which is part ofthe legal team representingplaintiffs in the case
BUENOS AIRES—An
Argen-tine federal court sentenced
the country’s last dictator and
14 other former military
offi-cials to prison for
human-rights crimes, in the first
rul-ing that Operation Condor was
a criminal conspiracy to
kid-nap and forcibly make people
disappear across international
borders
Six South American
dictator-ships launched the covert
oper-Associated Press
Argentine Court Sentences Ex-Dictator for Dissent Crackdown
The Euro 2016 tournament will overlap with the Tour de France bicycle race.
Trang 4WORLD NEWS
SPAIN
Real Madrid’s Reign
Celebrated in Rain
Tens of thousands of fans
endured rain to greet Real
Ma-drid players as they returned
home to celebrate the
Champi-ons League title
Many waited all night after
cel-ebrating the team’s win over
cross-town rival Atlético Madrid on
Sat-urday in Milan The final score was
1-1, with Real prevailing 5-3 in a
penalty shootout
The players arrived in Madrid
early Sunday and traveled on an
open bus to the club’s traditional
celebration spot, the Cibeles
fountain, where an estimated
30,000 supporters marked the
club’s 11th European title
Real Madrid captain Sergio
Ramos draped the statue of the
Cibeles goddess with the club’s
scarf and flag
—Associated Press
BRAZIL
WHO Says Olympics
Are Safe From Zika
The World Health
Organiza-tion said there is “no public
health justification” for
postpon-ing or cancelpostpon-ing the Rio de
Ja-neiro Olympics because of the
Zika outbreak
The assessment came after
150 health experts issued an
open letter to the U.N health
agency calling for the games to
be delayed or relocated “in the
name of public health.”
The letter cited recent scientific
evidence that the Zika virus causes
severe birth defects In adults, it
the G-7 and a stronger call forlooser fiscal policy wouldhave helped Mr Abe counterthe objections of Japan’s fis-cal hawks to his plans for astimulus package of up to ¥10trillion ($91 billion)
The prime minister’s movetoward delaying the tax in-crease, along with the stimu-lus plan, amounts to a tacit ac-
“Abenomics” program is introuble Mr Abe found himself
on the defensive Friday, saying
in a news conference that
“Abenomics is not a failure”and citing the number of jobscreated during his tenure.The latest bad news cameearlier in the day, when thegovernment reported that con-sumer prices, excluding freshfood, fell 0.3% in April Thedata showed that the Bank ofJapan’s goal of reaching 2% in-flation, a key pillar of Abe-nomics, remains as elusive aswhen it was set in early 2013.The robust growth prom-ised by Mr Abe hasn’t materi-alized either Though theeconomy grew 1.7% on an an-nualized basis during the firstquarter, it contracted in two ofthe three previous quarters
A previous sales-tax crease in April 2014—to 8%from 5%—was blamed for de-railing a recovery early in Mr.Abe’s tenure Consumer spend-ing has yet to fully recover,and some economists say theprospect of another tax risenext year is causing consum-ers to save more Mr Abe said
in-he would make a decision onthe tax before an upper houseelection scheduled for July
World
Watch
can cause neurological problems
The authors also noted thatdespite increased efforts to wipeout the mosquitoes that spreadZika, the number of infections inRio have gone up
WHO, however, said that
“based on current assessment,canceling or changing the loca-tion of the 2016 Olympics willnot significantly alter the inter-national spread of Zika virus.”
—Associated Press
UKRAINE
Fire Kills 17 People
At Home for Elderly
A fire swept through a vate home for the elderly in aUkrainian village shortly beforedawn on Sunday, killing 17 peo-ple and injuring five others, anemergency official said
pri-The head of the emergencyservices, Mykola Chechetkin, said
35 people were in the housewhen the fire broke out It wasunclear whether any staff mem-bers were among the dead
Police said they are working
to determine the cause of thefire and to learn whether thehome was operating legally
The owner of the businesswas detained for questioning,police said
—Associated Press
FRANCE
Would-Be Migrant, Hit by Truck, Dies
An Afghan man was killed ter being hit by a truck on afreeway near the French coastaltown of Calais in an apparentattempt to sneak onto a vehiclebound for the U.K., officials said
af-The 25-year-old man, wholived in the city’s sprawling mi-grant camp, is one of at least 20people killed in the Calais regionwhile attempting to reach theU.K since June 2015
—Noemie Bisserbe
HIROSHIMA,
Japan—Presi-dent Barack Obama mourned
the victims of the U.S atomic
bombing of Japan at the
me-morial honoring those who
died in the Aug 6, 1945 attack
on Hiroshima, the first visit to
this city by a sitting U.S leader
In solemn comments, Mr
Obama neither apologized for
nor justified the U.S atomic
bombs dropped both here and
in Nagasaki that killed more
than 200,000 people, and
in-stead focused on a nonnuclear
future, seeking to avoid
in-flaming passions on either
side of the Pacific
After laying a wreath at the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Park, the president reflected
on the day “death fell from the
sky” and how America’s
deci-sion during World War II
ended the conflict but also
forever changed the world
“We stand here in the
mid-dle of this city and force
our-selves to imagine the moment
the bomb fell,” Mr Obama said,
standing alongside Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
“We remember all the
inno-cents killed across the arc of
that terrible war,” he said
“We have a shared
responsibil-ity to look directly into the
eye of history and ask what wemust do differently to curbsuch suffering again.”
Mr Obama’s focus on victimsand survivors and the ills of nu-clear war, after earlier saying
he would leave the thornier
viewed favorably across Japan
“It’s like a dream cometrue,” said Shigeaki Mori, 79years old, one of two bombingsurvivors who briefly met Mr
Obama and who created a morial for U.S prisoners ofwar killed in Hiroshima Thepresident hugged Mr Mori asthe two spoke “I suffered somuch, so today was the bestday that was given by Amer-ica,” he said
me-Mr Abe also spoke, saying
it took courage for Mr Obama
to visit Hiroshima “Even day there are victims who aresuffering unbearably,” he said
to-“This tragedy must not be peated again.”
re-The visit was delicate for Mr
Obama The military and moralquestions posed by the atomicbombings have provoked fiercedebate in the U.S through theseven decades since the end ofWorld War II
Sen Tom Cotton (R., Ark.)who often clashes with theWhite House on foreign policy,avoided directly criticizing Mr
Obama’s comments, but he fered a counterpoint
of-“Using nuclear weapons inWorld War II was not a mis-take—it was a moral necessity
to halt tyranny, save lives, andend the most destructive war
in history,” he said
In the U.S as well as Japan,
Mr Obama’s visit was receivedwith mixed emotions amongarms-control advocates, whowelcomed the president’s ges-ture but drew a contrast be-tween his call to action andhis administration’s modestrecord on arms reductions
“It was especially ful for the hibakusha—the Jap-anese A-bomb survivors—whohave dedicated their lives not
meaning-to the extraction of an ogy, but to ensuring that no
apol-one else suffers an bomb attack,” said Darryl Kim-ball, executive director of theArms Control Association, aWashington nonproliferationadvocacy group
atomic-Mr Obama has concededhis nonproliferation effortshave made only modest prog-ress during his two terms Inthat time, he has struggled toend two wars and entered new
year’s Iran nuclear deal—seen
by the administration as anonproliferation achievementbut questioned by critics—hasconsumed his administration’seffort, and a deterioration inties with Russia has sloweddisarmament efforts
In 2009, Mr Obama ered an address in Prague in
deliv-which he called for specificmeasures to avoid the globaldevelopment of nuclear weap-ons But those measures—such
as U.S Senate ratification of atreaty banning nuclear testingand a new global effort to haltthe production of fissile mate-rial—have remained stalled
Meanwhile, Mr Obama hasoutlined plans to spend nearly
$1 trillion in 30 years to ernize and upgrade the U.S
mod-nuclear arsenal
One survivor of the Nagasakibombing who attended the
Tanaka, praised the president’sspeech but was disappointed tonot hear specifics on how toeliminate nuclear weapons
Others agreed, saying aplan for disarmament wasmore important than an apol-ogy “It’s far too late to be ask-ing Mr Obama for an apology
If there was to be one, itshould have come from previ-ous presidents,” said 73-year-old Masashi Ieshima, who was
at home about a mile and ahalf from ground zero whenthe bomb fell on Hiroshima
“Rather than an apology, it’s
my strong wish for him to setout a course to eliminate allnuclear weapons.”
At the museum, Mr Obamawrote a message in the guestbook: “We have known the ag-ony of war Let us now findthe courage, together, tospread peace and pursue aworld without nuclear weap-ons.”
—Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.
B Y C AROL E . L EE
A ND A LEXANDER M ARTIN
ObamaUrgesNuclearCurbs
On visit to Hiroshima,
U.S president urges
world: ‘Look directly
into the eye of history’
Mr Obama hugged Shigeaki Mori, a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Friday.
Min-to issue a warning himself
His grim view served toopen the door to another de-lay in a planned sales-tax in-crease in Japan, a possibility
he acknowledged for the firsttime Friday, saying it wasprompted by G-7 commit-ments to foster growth
This followed more than ayear of vows by Mr Abe thatthe tax increase would pro-ceed as scheduled next yearunless the world faced condi-tions similar in magnitude tothe 2008 “Lehman shock” andglobal financial crisis
After the G-7 issued a muniqué that warned of risingrisks to the global economybut didn’t call for coordinated
pointed to slowing growth inChina and emerging markets,
as well as the long slump incommodity prices, as condi-tions that could herald an eco-nomic crisis
“The world economy is atrisk of falling into a crisis” un-less an appropriate policycourse is chosen, he said “Theextent of the decline, compa-
around the time of the called Lehman shock, is caus-ing a major blow to emerging-market economies that depend
so-on exports of commodities andbasic materials for growth.”
A grimmer assessment by
B Y M ITSURU O BE
Japanese Leader Hints at Delay For Tax Increase
Mr Abe at a news conference during the G-7 summit on Friday.
Mr Obama has struggled to end two wars and entered new conflicts.
China Swaps Troupes for Troops
Cultural ensembles with the military are swept up in President Xi’s overhaul
BEIJING—One militaryunit in China has racked upsome notable victories
They’re just not the kindPresident Xi Jinping wants
as he undertakes the biggestrevamp of the People’s Liber-ation Army since the 1950s
Among them are lades for performing “LionDance and Trick-Cycling byGirls” at a festival in France,
acco-“Juggling Umbrellas withFeet” in Sweden and forplate spinning in Poland
Known as the “AdvanceCultural Troupe” of the She-nyang Military Region, theunit is among dozens of thePLA’s acrobatic, theatricaland song and dance groups
in the firing line of Mr Xi’splans to cut 300,000 of its2.3 million troops—includingmany in noncombat roles
Many have been merged,renamed or shrunk, and allhave been banned from com-mercial performances
Formed in the 1930s tospread propaganda among il-literate soldiers and peas-ants, the troupes have per-formed live across China andoverseas, produced hundreds
of plays, operas, ballets andfilms, and been regular fea-tures on state television Theensembles have createdstars, some linked romanti-cally to Chinese leaders fromMao Zedong to Mr Xi,whose wife Peng Liyuan rose
to fame as a singer in one
In recent years, however,PLA performers’ commercialactivities and glamorous life-styles have fallen foul of Mr
Xi’s drive to curb militarycorruption and focus thePLA on preparing to “fightand win wars.” He fired awarning shot in a 2014speech when he asked: “Ifour PLA cultural workersdon’t have a military flavor,
a taste of war, then why dothey wear uniforms?”
Yang Yujun, a DefenseMinistry spokesman, said re-cently that authorities werestill researching how to reor-ganize the troupes
But the process has ready begun In February,
al-Mr Xi eliminated the PLA’sseven Military Regions, eachwith its own troupe, usuallyincluding a dance ensemble,chorus, orchestra, televisionarts center and acrobaticteam They were replaced
with five new combat zones,leaving two regional troupes
to be merged with others
“As noncombat troops, allthe performers are facingthe question of whether theyare staying or leaving,” thearmy website cited theleader of the “Advance Cul-tural Troupe” as saying
Mr Xi has banned ing cultural troupes fromcharging fees, which hadsupplemented PLA perform-ers’ salaries “We used to dosome commercial perfor-mances but since we re-ceived orders from our head-quarters, we stopped doingthat,” said a troupe official
surviv-There were no such strictions when Tong Yaojoined Beijing’s “Comrades-in-arms” troupe in 1999 She
re-was soon in huge demand,principally as she looked andsounded like the late TeresaTeng, a Taiwanese singer
Ms Tong performed resa Teng medleys in con-certs nationwide and touredSoutheast Asia By 2012, Ms.Tong was a lieutenant colo-nel with an official salary ofaround 6,000 yuan ($930) amonth, supplemented withincome from commercialperformances, she said.Comrades in combat unitswere jealous “They felt wecultural troupe memberswere singing and dancing ev-ery day, just playing around,yet we earned more thanthem,” she said
Te-She resigned to pursue anindependent career in 2012,the year Mr Xi came topower Military propagandahas shifted focus toward on-line images of combat exer-cises and modern weaponry
“The military propagandasystem and the entire politi-cal system is focusing muchmore on training and equip-ment than song and dancefluff,” said Dennis Blasko, aPLA expert at the Virginia-based CNA Corporation.The PLA doesn’t revealthe exact number of troupes,but before the overhauls, theNavy, Army, Air Force andArmed Police each had onetoo It is unclear how manywill survive: The Navytroupe, among those thathas, performed songs forChinese forces on a disputedartificial island in the SouthChina Sea this month
—Olivia Geng in Beijing contributed to this article.
Trang 5THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | A5
months of 2016 after decliningthe prior two quarters, theCommerce Department said
Still, on an annual basis,profits in the first quarter weredown 3.6% for the secondstraight quarter, and profits as
a share of the overall economyremain depressed from the re-cord levels reached earlier inthe expansion
The resilience of corporateprofits in the months aheadwill be key to supporting thestock market, which is backnear the record highs reached
in the spring of 2015, and cal to firms’ ability to hireworkers and invest in newequipment and facilities
criti-Ms Yellen’s comments on apossible rate increase echoedthose of other Fed officials who
have said in recent days theysee two or three rate increasesthis year and could see moving
in June or July
Investors on Friday noon saw roughly a 61% chancethat the Fed would raise rateseither in June or July, up from56% a day earlier, according tofed-fund futures tracked byCME Group
after-The central bank in ber raised its benchmark fed-eral-funds rate, which had beennear zero for seven years, to arange between 0.25% and 0.5%
Decem-Since then, policy makers haveheld rates steady through a U.S
economic slowdown, market volatility and worriesabout global growth
weighed on business earnings
and the broader economy seem
to be fading: the energy slumpand the strong dollar.Crude prices touched $50 abarrel this past week for thefirst time since last year, pro-pelled by the most powerfulrally in seven years Higherprices are set to ease pressure
on energy firms that have shedworkers and pulled back ondrilling
The dollar, meanwhile, hasbeen more or less stable overthe past year after risingsharply against other majorcurrencies in late 2014 andearly 2015 as the Fed prepared
to begin raising rates A ger dollar has made U.S.-madeproducts more expensive forforeign customers, reducing de-mand for exports and squeez-ing the domestic manufacturingsector
stron-The worst may be over fromthe oil downturn and effects of
a strong dollar But a tighteninglabor market is pushing upwages “and that probably iscutting into margins” morebroadly, said Jesse Edgerton, aJ.P Morgan Chase economist
Ms Yellen emphasized theFed is likely to raise interestrates “gradually and cau-tiously” because raising themtoo quickly could trigger adownturn to which the Fed mayhave limited tools to respond.One possible impediment to
a June rate increase is theU.K.’s June 23 referendum onwhether to leave the EuropeanUnion Several Fed officialshave flagged the so-called Br-exit vote—which falls one weekafter the Fed’s June meeting—
as a possible source of tainty that could cause them tohold off on another rate riseuntil later this summer
uncer-Ms Yellen wasn’t askedabout the risks from a Brexit
appear-ance Friday
GOP candidates in 27 states
Mr Romney, 69, wasn’t ried when Mr Trump joinedthe race in June, believing the
wor-16 other Republicans made up
a “very capable, enced, very deep field.” Alongwith other politicians, he ex-pected the businessman to im-plode after his pronouncementattacking illegal immigrants
well-experi-On July 18, Mr Trump said
he wouldn’t call Arizona Sen
John McCain, the 2008 GOPpresidential nominee and aVietnam prisoner of war, a
“war hero.” Mr Romney andmany of his 2012 staff, whowere attending a pre-weddingevent in Massachusetts for twostaffers, saw their phones light
up with Mr Trump’s comment:
“I like people who weren’t tured.”
cap-Mr Romney tweeted on thespot: “Trump shot himselfdown McCain and Americanveterans are true heroes.”
As Mr Trump surged ahead
in debates, touting positionsincluding a temporary ban onMuslims coming to the U.S.,
Mr Romney held back in lic Instead, he called an ad-viser to Florida Sen Marco Ru-
recommended Mr Rubio hit
Mr Trump for not releasinghis tax returns, Mr Chen said,adding that Mr Rubio didn’toblige
After Mr Trump’s Januarysecond-place finish in Iowa toTexas Sen Ted Cruz, Mr Rom-
ney saw a chance to publicly
heading into the Feb 9 NewHampshire primary, said StuartStevens, his longtime politicalstrategist
against it “Trump can saysomething crazy and inflam-matory against you and getnonstop coverage,” Mr Stevenssaid he told him
In early March, Mr Romneysaid, he and his wife were get-ting ready for church whentheir son Tagg told them about
Mr Trump’s refusal to disavowthe endorsement of DavidDuke, a former Ku Klux Klanleader (Mr Trump later attri-buted his ambiguous answer to
a defective earpiece.) Mr
Rom-U.S NEWS
His motivation: “I wanted
my grandkids to see that I ply couldn’t ignore what Mr
sim-Trump was saying and doing,which revealed a character andtemperament unfit for theleader of the free world.”
Today, the GOP anti-Trumpchorus is dwindling, leaving
Mr Romney among the fewmaking the case publicly
Mr Trump, in an interview,said of Mr Romney: “Once achoker, always a choker I’vegot a store worth more than heis.” He said Mr Romney’s at-tack “has nothing to do withhis country It has to do with
me I’m the one who forcedhim out” of running in 2016
Mr Romney said he is ing on his own behalf and ac-knowledged many Republicansthink his Trump attacks couldhelp the likely Democraticnominee, Hillary Clinton Still,
act-he said, “otact-hers, including self, believe our first priorityshould be to stand by our prin-ciples and if those are in con-flict with the nominee, theprinciples come first.”
my-Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Co Chief Executive Meg man, who has known Mr Rom-ney for 25 years, said: “Mitt’sclarity about his position ishelping others thinking abouttheir patriotism and theircountry.”
Whit-After losing in 2012 to ident Barack Obama, the for-mer Massachusetts governorand longtime businessmanmoved on to what he called a
Pres-“balanced and full life.” He andhis wife, Ann, who has multi-ple sclerosis, started the AnnRomney Center for NeurologicDiseases For the 2014 mid-term elections, he stumped for
ney tweeted: “His coddling ofrepugnant bigotry is not in thecharacter of America.”Hope Hicks, Mr Trump’scommunications director, said:
“Mr Trump has disavowed vid Duke on every occasion.”Days later, Mr Romney re-called, his son Josh, drivinghim to the Salt Lake City air-port, inquired: “When thegrandkids ask ‘What did you
Da-do to stop Donald Trump?’what are you going to say?’ ”
through a family woman, confirmed their fa-ther’s accounts
spokes-On the plane, he begandrafting a speech that he deliv-ered March 3 He said Mr.Trump’s policies could lead torecession and “make Americaand the world less safe.” Hetallied what he saw as the can-didate’s sins: dishonesty, bully-ing, greed, misogyny, “absurdthird-grade theatrics.”
Mr Trump fired back thatday, contending Mr Romneyhad begged for his endorse-ment for 2012 On Wednesday,
he said: “He shouldn’t have cepted my money if he felt thatway about me.”
ac-Mr Romney’s speech mayhave helped Trump rivals win
in Utah and Wisconsin Mr.Trump quickly recovered andessentially locked up the nomi-nation with his Indiana victory
At his oceanfront home, Mr.Romney said he didn’t expect
to criticize Mr Trump furtherbut wouldn’t rule it out “Iknow that some people are of-fended that someone who lostand is the former nomineecontinues to speak, but that’show I can sleep at night,” hesaid
SAN DIEGO—Mitt Romney’s
advisers begged him not to go
to war with Donald Trump
Af-ter he decided to go ahead, Mr
“lightweight” and a “failed
candidate.” This week, Newt
Gingrich called him “pathetic.”
Mr Romney, sticking to his
guns, has become a rare figure
in American history—a former
presidential nominee openly
defying the man succeeding
him as his party’s
standard-bearer
Sitting at his home on the
Pacific Ocean, Mr Romney
re-flected on the waves he
cre-ated by attacking Mr Trump,
how his family helped
per-suade him it was the right
thing to do, and how he
in-creasingly finds himself a voice
in the wilderness
“Friends warned me, ‘Don’t
speak out, stay out of the fray,’
because criticizing Mr Trump
will only help him by giving
him someone else to attack,”
Mr Romney said in an
inter-view—the first time the 2012
GOP nominee discussed in
depth his reasons for going
af-ter Mr Trump
“They were right I became
his next target, and the
incom-ing attacks have been constant
and brutal.” He said he had no
illusions he would alter Mr
Trump’s progress toward the
nomination or spark a
mean-ingful independent candidacy
Among the documents to beunsealed are two sets of TrumpUniversity “playbooks,” outlin-ing rules and procedures for
events and employee scripts forengaging with customers
Some of the documents havealready surfaced online Politico
in March posted a 2010 TrumpUniversity playbook, which in-structed employees to rank stu-dents by liquid assets to helpdetermine what kind of coursepackages they could afford tobuy
Other documents would bemade public for the first time,including a sales playbook thejudge said contained marketingtechniques for selling TrumpUniversity programs The un-sealed versions will redactphone numbers and noncorpo-rate email addresses
Judge Curiel ordered thedocuments released by June 2
He was responding to an Aprilrequest by the WashingtonPost for the records to be un-sealed Lawyers for Mr Trumpopposed making the docu-ments public, arguing that thematerials contained trade se-crets
In his order, Judge Curiel luded to Mr Trump’s recentcommentary, noting that thecandidate has “placed the in-tegrity of these court proceed-ings at issue.”
al-The plaintiffs accuse Mr
Trump and the now-defunctschool of defrauding peoplewho paid as much as $35,000for real estate advice Mr
Trump said Trump Universityreceived “mostly unbelievablereviews” from its 10,000 stu-dents
A federal judge in San Diego
has ordered the unsealing of
hundreds of pages of internal
documents produced by Donald
Trump’s Trump University in
connection with a fraud lawsuit
against the company, the latest
twist in the long-running
law-suit against the school
U.S District Judge Gonzalo
Curiel’s order releasing the
documents came the same day
that the presumptive
Republi-can nominee attacked the judge
by name during a campaign
rally at the San Diego
Conven-tion Center
“I have a judge who is a
hater of Donald Trump, a hater
He’s a hater His name is
Gon-zalo Curiel,” Mr Trump said
Friday, as the crowd of several
thousand booed “He is not
do-ing the right thdo-ing And I
fig-ure, what the hell? Why not
talk about it for two minutes?”
Mr Trump ended up
devot-ing 12 minutes of a 58-minute
address to Judge Curiel and the
Trump University case, which
is scheduled to go to trial in
San Diego federal court on Nov
28—after the presidential
elec-tion Mr Trump’s attorney said
earlier this month that he will
testify in the six-year-old case
Mr Trump also told the
au-dience, which had previously
chanted the Republican
stan-dard-bearer’s signature “build
that wall” mantra in reference
to Mr Trump’s proposed wall
along the Mexican border, that
Judge Curiel, who was born in
“It’s appropriate…for the Fed
to gradually and cautiously crease our overnight interestrate over time, and probably inthe coming months such amove would be appropriate,”
in-she said Friday during a paneldiscussion at the Radcliffe In-stitute for Advanced Study atHarvard University
This leaves the door openfor a move as soon as the Fed’snext policy meeting June 14-15
or at its gatherings in July orSeptember if officials prefer towait for more economic data
One reason for action: After
a couple of weak quarters,
“growth looks to be picking upfrom the various data that wemonitor,” Ms Yellen said
Gauges of consumer dence and spending, housing-market activity and industrialproduction all gained steamduring the spring months Fore-casting firm MacroeconomicAdvisers on Friday projectedgrowth in gross domestic prod-uct, a broad measure of thegoods and services producedacross the economy, would ac-celerate to a 2.5% annual rate
confi-in the second quarter from thefirst quarter’s 0.8% pace
In another positive sign, U.S
corporate profits show signs ofstabilizing, though Americancompanies still face earningspressure due to rising wagegrowth and a still-weak globaleconomic expansion A keymeasure of corporate profits—
after taxes, without inventoryvaluation and capital-consump-tion adjustments—rose at a1.9% pace in the first three
B Y K ATE D AVIDSON
A ND B EN L EUBSDORF
Yellen Sees Rate Rise Coming Soon
Incomes and Outcomes
Source: Commerce Department via St Louis Fed THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Note: All figures are seasonally adjusted; income, investment and spending are also adjusted for inflation.
*Without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments
Change from a year earlier
Corporate profits, after tax*
Disposable personal income
Consumer spending
–4–20246
–4–20246
%
8
–4–20246
leaving consumers, buoyed by slow-but-steady income growth,
to prop up GDP with their sturdy spending habits.
A sharp drop in U.S corporate profits has pressured businesses
to cut back on investments in structures and equipment
Business investment
Corporate profits, after tax*
Disposable personal income
Consumer spending
An attorney for Mr Sanders’s
campaign sent a letter to cratic National Committee offi-cials asking them to disqualifyformer congressman BarneyFrank and Connecticut Gov Dan-nel Malloy as co-chairmen of theconvention’s rules and platformcommittees, respectively
ing only
While widespread use of erless cars may be years away,lawmakers and transportationleaders say the technology isprogressing so rapidly that Mich-igan must stay ahead of thecurve or risk losing automotiveresearch and development toother states
William Gordon of Key West,Fla., had taken off from RepublicAirport on Long Island in a P-47Thunderbolt and was flying in athree-plane formation Fridayover the river for a local airshow when he sent a distresssignal at around 7:30 p.m., au-thorities said
The single-seat plane crashed
a short while later into the riveracross from 79th Street BoatBasin on the New Jersey side ofthe river and then sank in about
25 feet of water, authoritiessaid Divers with the NYPD andFire Department of New Yorksecured the boat and pulled Mr.Gordon’s body from the river, au-thorities said He was pro-nounced dead at the scene
—Pervaiz Shallwani
Trang 6FROM PAGE ONE
to Tibet high in the Himalayas,
the army has built a shrine to
Mr Singh, who was a sepoy, the
equivalent of a private, when
he drowned in a rushing alpine
stream at age 22
Believers say he patrols the
frontier, wakes sleeping sentries
and keeps soldiers from harm
“Life is tough,” says Maj
Gen Vinod Karnik, a retired
officer who served in Nathu
La There is “a lot of snow and
the Chinese are just about 50
yards in front of you, eyeball
to eyeball.”
Though India’s urban youth
are less inclined to believe in
spirits than their elders,
In-dian army soldiers are an
ex-ception For men stationed at
the Siachen Glacier on India’s
frontier with Pakistan, there is
Om Prakash, or O.P Baba
Leg-end says that in the 1980s, Mr
fended off an enemy advance
His body was never found
The glacier, at 20,000 feet
above sea level, is the world’s
highest military base Soldiers
pay their respects to Mr
Prakash at a shrine at the foot
of the massive ice sheet It
contains a bust and a few
per-sonal effects
Over in the northeastern
In-Continued from Page One
“You can’t ignore the factthat Russia has great ability tomass conventional munitionsand fire them over great range
We have to be able to fightthrough those salvos,” said Mr.Work, of the Pentagon “Andthe railgun potentially will give
us the means to do that.”Russian officials, mean-while, including AlexanderGrushko, Moscow’s envoy tothe North Atlantic Treaty Or-ganization, have said techno-logical advances by the U.S.,
could undermine the strategicstability currently guaranteed
by the relative balance tween the Russian and U.S nu-clear arsenal
be-Faster, smarter
Hitting a missile with a let—a technical obstacle thathampered Mr Reagan’s initia-tive—remains a challenge Rail-gun research leans heavily oncommercial advances in super-computing to aim and on
steer the railgun’s projectileusing the Global PositioningSystem
“Ten years ago, we wouldn’thave been able to build a pro-jectile like this because thecellphone industry, the smart-phone industry, hadn’t per-fected the components,” saidWilliam Roper, the director ofthe Pentagon’s Strategic Capa-bilities Office “It is a reallysmart bullet.”
Development of the railgunguidance system is about done,officials said, but circuits in theprojectile must be hardened towithstand gravitational forcesstrong enough to turn mostminiaturized electronics toscrap
Missile defense by the gun is at least a decade away,but Pentagon officials believethe weapon’s projectiles can beused much sooner They arefilled with tungsten pelletsharder than many kinds ofsteel, officials said, and willlikely cost between $25,000and $50,000, a bargain com-pared with a $10 million inter-ceptor missile
rail-The electrical energy quired to fire a railgun means
re-it is likely to be used first as aship-mounted weapon Onlyone class of Navy ship, theZumwalt-class destroyer, hassuch a power plant, officialssaid The Navy is building justthree of those destroyers, sothe Pentagon is working toadapt the projectile to use inexisting Naval guns on othervessels, as well as for Army ar-tillery
While slower than a railgun,
a powder-fired railgun tile still flies at 2,800 miles anhour, which extends the rangeand power of existing weapons
projec-At Dalhgren last year, tary engineers test-fired 5- and6-inch Navy guns loaded with aversion of the railgun projec-tile The range of the Navy’s 6-inch guns was extended to 38miles from 15 miles
mili-The Pentagon also testedthe railgun projectile in 155
mm Army howitzers, fully extending its range
success-“The Navy is on the cusp ofhaving a tactical system, a nextgeneration offensive weapon,”
Mr Roper said “It could be agame changer.”
commanded too large a portion
of resources and focus “Thisbetter work,” one defense offi-cial said
The age of the gun faded ter World War II, hampered bythe limited range and accuracy
af-of gunpowder weapons siles and jet fighters dominatedthe Cold War years, promptingthe Navy to retire its big-gunbattleships The railgun—andits newly developed projec-tiles—could launch a new gen-eration of the vessels
Mis-“Part of the reason wemoved away from big guns isthe chemistry and the physics
of getting the range,” saidJerry DeMuro, the chief execu-tive of BAE Systems, a railgundeveloper “The railgun can cre-ate the kind of massive effectyou want without chemistry.”
The Navy’s current 6-inchguns have a range of 15 miles
The 16-inch guns of mothballedWorld War II-era battleshipscould fire a distance of 24miles and penetrate 30 feet ofconcrete In contrast, the rail-gun has a range of 125 miles,officials said, and five timesthe impact
“Anytime you have a tile screaming in at extremelyhigh speeds—kilometers persecond—the sheer kinetic en-ergy of that projectile is awe-some,” Mr Work said “Thereare not a lot of things that canstop it.”
projec-Star Wars sequel
Railguns have for years beenlimited to laboratories and vid-eogames
Former President RonaldReagan’s Strategic Defense Ini-
Wars missile defense—at onetime envisioned using the rail-gun to shoot down nuclearmissiles Those plans werestalled by 1980s technology
One problem was that the gun
Projectile
A non-explosive bulletfilled with tungsten pelletsWeight: approx 25 pounds
Shoe
An aluminum jacket that supports thebullet in the gun barrel; also provides abridge for the current between the rails
Breaking Out the Big Guns
Railgun technology accelerates a hardened projectile to staggering velocity, a battlefield meteorite with the power to one day transformmilitary strategy and keep the U.S ahead of advancing Russian and Chinese weaponry, say supporters
Railgun components
Firing mechanics
Electromagnetic railgun
(as seen in the lab setting)
Electromagnetic field Rail Current
The enormous amount
of energy generatedfrom the bullet’s speed
is transferred to thetarget on impact
After exitingthe barrel, thebullet’s shoefalls away
A surge of electrical currentfrom a capacitor bank issent into one rail, throughthe projectile and into thesecond rail
This repulsive force pushesthe projectile forward —out of the magnetic field —accelerating it down the barrel
at 4,500 miles an hour
Since the current flows inopposite directions in the rails, anelectromagnetic field is createdthat repels each rail from theother and the projectile
43
10 times a minute
barrel and electromagneticrails had to be replaced after asingle shot
The Navy now believes ithas a design that soon will beable to fire 10 times a minutethrough a barrel capable oflasting 1,000 rounds
Besides speed, the railgunalso has a capacity advantage
A typical U.S Navy destroyercan carry as many as 96 mis-siles—either offensive cruisemissiles or defensive intercep-tors A ship armed with a rail-gun could potentially carry athousand rounds, allowing thevessel to shoot incoming mis-siles or attack enemy forces forlonger periods and at a fasterrate of fire
Unlike the Reagan-era tive, the Pentagon doesn’t seethe railgun as a shield againstintercontinental ballistic mis-
missiles
The U.S has kept its
mili-tary dominance over the past
through such precision onry as guided missiles andmunitions It also has spent bil-lions of dollars on interceptor-missile based defense systems
weap-to shoot down ballistic missilesfired at the U.S or its allies
That monopoly is aboutover China is perfecting aship-killing ballistic missile
Russia mostly impressed U.S
military planners with thepower and precision of itscruise missiles deployed inSyria, and its improved artil-lery precision revealed inUkraine
“I am very worried aboutthe U.S conventional advan-tage The loss of that advan-tage is terribly destabilizing,”
said Elbridge Colby, a militaryanalyst with the Center for aNew American Security
Defense planners believe theU.S needs new military ad-vances Russia, for example, is
believed to be developing ger-range surface-to-air mis-siles and new electronic war-fare technology to blunt anyforces near its borders
lon-Prospects for an armed flict among the great powersstill seem remote But for thefirst time since the end of theCold War, the Pentagon isagain looking closely at re-sponses to rising tensions withChina and Russia
con-Military planners say therailgun would be useful if theU.S had to defend the Balticstates against Russia, or sup-port an ally against China inthe South China Sea
Moscow and Beijing are vesting in missile systemsaimed at keeping the U.S out
in-of those respective regions Arailgun-based missile defensecould defend naval forces orground troops, making it easier
to move U.S reinforcementscloser to the borders of Russia
or China, officials said
Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, right, after a railgun demonstration in Dahlgren, Va.
bers than current
missile-de-fense systems—perhaps within
a decade
The future challenge for the
U.S military, in broad terms, is
maintaining a global reach with
declining numbers of Navy
ships and land forces Growing
expenses and fixed budgets
make it more difficult to
main-tain large forces in the right
places to deter aggression
“I can’t conceive of a future
where we would replicate Cold
War forces in Europe,” said
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Robert Work, one of the
weapon’s chief boosters “But I
could conceive of a set of
rail-guns that would be inexpensive
but would have enormous
de-terrent value They would have
value against airplanes,
mis-siles, tanks, almost anything.”
Inside the test bunker at
Dahlgren, military officials
turned to the video monitor
showing the rectangular
rail-gun barrel Engineer Tom
Boucher, program manager for
the railgun in the Office of
Na-val Research, explained: “We
charge We are taking power
from the grid.”
Wires splay out the back of
the railgun, which requires a
power plant that generates 25
megawatts—enough electricity
to power 18,750 homes
The siren blared again, and
the weapon fired The video
re-play was slowed so officials
could see aluminum shavings
ignite in a fireball and the
pro-jectile emerge from its
protec-tive shell
“This,” Mr Boucher said, “is
a thing of beauty going off.”
The railgun faces many
technical barriers before it is
battle ready Policy makers also
must weigh geopolitical
ques-tions China and Russia see
the railgun and other advances
in U.S missile defense as
up-ending the world’s balance of
power because it negates their
own missile arsenals
The railgun’s prospective
military advantage has made
the developing technology a
priority of hackers in China
and Russia, officials said
Chinese hackers in
particu-lar have tried to penetrate the
computer systems of the
Pen-tagon and its defense
contrac-tors to probe railgun secrets,
U.S defense officials said
Pen-tagon officials declined to
dis-cuss the matter further
The Navy began working on
the railgun a decade ago and
has spent more than half a
bil-lion dollars The Pentagon’s
Strategic Capabilities office is
investing another $800
mil-lion—the largest share for any
weapon’s defensive ability, as
well as to adapt existing guns
to fire the railgun’s high-tech
projectiles
Some officials expressed
concern the technology has
Continued from Page One
Pradesh, scene of intense ing during India’s 1962 warwith China, soldiers turn to ri-fleman Jaswant Singh Rawat,who is said to have perishedbattling a Chinese advance
fight-In Nathu La, it is all about
Mr Singh His shrine includes
a bedroom and office along
with a chapel Each morning,
an orderly prepares tea for Mr
Singh, now an honorary tain, and lays out his uniformfor the day Other meals arrivewith military precision
cap-The shrine contains a roomwhere visitors can leave bottles
of water next to a picture of
Mr Singh to receive his
bless-ings Believers say drinkingthis water will relieve achesand pains above the waist
Wearing slippers kept in theroom is said to cure ailments
in the lower extremities
Mr Sehrawat, a sepoy, saysacclimatizing to duty at theNathu La post, which is 15,000feet above sea level, was a
challenge The altitude cancause headaches and wreakhavoc with soldiers’ digestion
Soon after he arrived inNathu La in 2013, Mr Sehra-wat found himself in a convoy
of army trucks towing artilleryalong a winding mountainroad He watched horrified as
a landslide swept down a hilltoward him The cascade nar-rowly missed the vehicles
“Baba ji is our support,” Mr
Sehrawat says “He is ing us.”
protect-On a recent morning, files
of sepoys jumped out of ing army trucks, headed up tothe shrine and bowed theirheads Some snapped pictures
pass-of Mr Singh’s rooms, each pass-ofwhich contains a picture ofhim wearing a uniform and anolive-drab turban
Shambhu Jha, 49-year-oldsoldier based in Kolkata whogoes to Nathu La periodicallyfor training, believes Mr Singh
is guarding the long Chineseboundary between India andTibet and helps keep the areasecure
“Those who are on duty onthe border are able to live inpeace thanks to Baba ji,” says
Mr Jha
Pamphlets available at Mr
Singh’s shrine propagate themystery “Even Chinese troopshave been reported sayingthat they had seen a man inwhite clothes on a white horse
patrolling the watershed,”says the pamphlet
Like other soldiers and cers in the Nathu La area, Mr.Sehrawat says he doesn’t eatmeat or drink alcohol on Sun-days, as a mark of respect forthe saint In the bunker where
offi-he sleeps, a picture of Mr.Singh is placed in a shrinewith images of Hindu gods.Soldiers offer him dailyprayers Many set a place forthe soldier-saint when theyeat meals
Capt Ashwani Chandel, 25,says last year he saw a trooptruck skid off a road during aheavy snowfall, plunge into aravine and crumple No onewas hurt, he says
“How can someone escapewithout a scratch from such
an accident?” the captain says
“This was because of Baba ji.”Parthiban Chandrasekharan,who has been in the army fornearly 30 years, says he saw ajeep pass a shrine to anothersoldier-saint, rifleman JaswantSingh Rawat in ArunachalPradesh, without stopping.The jeep then lost control Oneofficer who failed to salute theBaba died, Mr Chandrasekha-ran was told by the driver ofthe vehicle—who saluted andsurvived
“For those who don’t paytheir respects, the punishment
is immediate,” says Mr drasekharan
Trang 7© 2016 Dow Jones & Company All Rights Reserved. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | A7
Do today’s
anti-depression drugs
help? Yes, says a
doctor who saw
the old days
A9
In Thailand, where fair skin is prized, a rapper has made tanning a cause
ne-as its strategic backyard
Russia has been in contact with the Muslim world, ten unhappily, for more than a millennium In the sev-enth century—long before the emergence of the Slavicprincipalities that would eventually form the Russianstate—Arab armies of the early caliph-
of-ate brought Islam to Derbent, the est city in today’s Russian Federation
old-Ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arabdiplomat and traveler, described meet-ing early Russians while visiting Mus-lim towns along the Volga River Hewas struck by their “perfect bodies,”
their poor hygiene and their practice
of burning slave girls in the borne funeral pyres of dead noblemen
ship-Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century Arabglobe-trotter, was less impressed: Hewrote off the Russians as “an ugly andperfidious people with red hair and blue eyes.” At thetime, the prince of Muscovy was a vassal of the Muslimkhan of the Golden Horde, and Moscow’s coinage boreArabic script
Only in 1480 did Muscovy become fully dent and stop paying tribute to its Muslim overlords
indepen-A few decades later, Czar Ivan the Terrible began aseries of wars that destroyed the vast Muslim khan-
Please turn to the next page
Russia’s history with Islam goes back well over a millennium.
SOVIET LEADER Nikita Khrushchev and Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser raised hands during Khrushchev’s visit to the Middle East in 1964, above left Top right, Muslims
gathered outside the Moscow Grand Mosque for morning prayers during the Eid al-Adha festival on Sept 24, 2015 Above right, a convoy of Soviet armored vehicles crossed
a bridge in Termez at the Soviet-Afghan border on May 21, 1988, during the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan
which seemed imminent just a year ago It also has tioned itself at the center of the Middle East’s diplomaticmaneuvering, challenging the formerly unrivaled influ-ence of the U.S in the region
posi-“Russia sent a message to the Middle East with its rect intervention in Syria: We are more serious in set-tling the region’s problems than the Americans are,” said
di-A Bdi-ADGE on a serviceman’s uniform at Russia’s
Hmeimim airbase in Syria showing Bashar al-Assadand Vladimir Putin, March 10
They were persuaded instead to overrun the U.S
em-bassy, creating a no less historic trauma for another
world power entangled in the politics of the Middle East
Russia’s long history of involvement—and warfare—in
the region is largely unknown to Westerners, but it helps
to explain President Vladimir Putin’s decision last fall to
intervene in Syria’s civil war Mr Putin’s gambit on
be-half of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad caught many
in the West by surprise Critics have assailed it as a
mis-calculated bid to replace the U.S as the dominant
out-side power in the region
But when viewed from Moscow, Mr Putin’s Middle
Eastern adventure looks like something very different:
an overdue return to geopolitical aspirations that stretch
back not only to the Soviet era but to centuries of
czar-ist rule “The Middle East is a way to showcase that the
period of Russia’s absence from the international scene
as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov,
the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in
Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other
govern-ment institutions
In Syria, Mr Putin has achieved notable results
Rus-sia has prevented the collapse of the Assad regime,
BY YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
VERY RUSSIAN SCHOOLCHILD IS TAUGHT about the violent death of Aleksandr boyedov in 1829 A poet and playwright whose work is enshrined in the country’s literary canon, Griboyedov had the misfortune to be Czar Nicholas I’s ambassador to Tehran in the wake of Persia’s humiliating loss of territory to Moscow’s spreading empire A Tehran mob, furious at the czar and his infidel representatives, stormed the embassy, slaughter- ing the unlucky ambassador and 36 other Russian diplomatic staff H A century and a half later, in 1979, those events were almost replayed in Iran (as Persia is now known).
Gri-When five leaders of the Iranian revolutionary students gathered in Tehran to decide which foreign embassy to target, two of them advocated seizing the Soviet legation.
E
Russia’s Long Road
to the
Middle East Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria caught many by surprise, but it is a return
to Russian geopolitical aspirations that
stretch back to the czars.
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Zhang Xin CEO, entrepreneur and philanthropist
Trang 8SYRIAN PRESIDENT Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Oct 20, 2015.
ates in Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia, pushing Russia’s
bound-aries far to the south and east
In the following centuries, Russia fought more than a dozen
wars against the receding Ottoman Empire and steadily
ad-vanced into Persian-held lands In the “Great Game” of the 19th
century, Russia punched further south toward British India,
gobbling up one Central Asian principality after another and
al-most coming to blows with the British over Afghanistan
Moscow also positioned itself as the protector of the Middle
East’s Christians—many of whom, like the Russians, were
Or-thodox (The current head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
Pa-triarch Kirill, alluded to this history when he recently
de-scribed Russia’s military campaign in Syria as a “holy war” and
called Russian troops there “Christ-loving warriors.”)
When World War I erupted, Britain and France promised Russia
that, once the Ottoman Empire was defeated, the ultimate prize of
Constantinople—today’s Istanbul—would come under Russian rule
That promise went unfulfilled after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
The Soviet Union, which retained most of the territories that
had been conquered by the czars, also hungered for more influence
in the Middle East In 1941, working as partners during World War
II, the Soviet Union and the U.K occupied Iran and ousted its shah,
ostensibly to prevent German activities there
By the 1960s, Soviet weapons, pilots and military instructors
were pouring into Arab client states, transforming the Middle
East into an arena for Cold War competition While the U.S
backed Arab monarchies and Israel, the Soviets sided with
left-ist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and South Yemen, which
became the Arab world’s only Marxist state
With Iran’s revolution in 1979 and the rise of political Islam,
Moscow’s influence began to wane Egypt, the most populous
Arab state, signed a U.S.-brokered peace treaty with Israel, and
Moscow presided over a textbook case of imperial overreach
by invading Afghanistan—undermining its regional influence
and speeding up the Soviet Union’s own demise
After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mikhail
Gorbachev went along with the U.S.-led war to expel Iraq from
its conquered neighbor As Moscow’s influence in the region hit
its nadir, Washington’s involvement grew larger In the
follow-ing decade, Russia was too busy tryfollow-ing to prevent the breakup
of its own rump post-Soviet state, bloodied by separatist
upris-ings in Chechnya and other Muslim regions
Mr Putin successfully pacified those borderlands and, at
first, largely left unchallenged the Middle East’s Pax
Ameri-cana As recently as 2011, when the Arab Spring started blazing
through the region, Moscow chose not to use its veto in the
U.N Security Council to block a resolution that paved the way
for the U.S and its allies to intervene militarily in Libya and
oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi
But Mr Putin has repeatedly blocked any such action in
Syria, where 400,000 people have been killed and more than
half the population displaced since 2011,
ac-cording to the United Nations Moscow’s
rela-tionship with the Syrian regime goes back
many decades—to the days of Hafez al-Assad,
the current president’s father—and the
coun-try is also home to Russia’s only naval facility
in the Mediterranean, at Tartus While the
U.S has long stated that Mr Assad must go,
Washington has refrained from openly
attack-ing his regime Mr Putin, by contrast, has
de-ployed Russia’s latest weaponry against Mr
Assad’s opponents, including groups backed
by Washington
Few people in the Middle East—even Moscow’s beneficiaries—
assign charitable motives to Russia’s new activism in the region
“The Russians are not doing it because they are part of the Red
Cross They are doing it because they have interests,” said Yassine
Jaber, a Lebanese Shiite member of parliament and a former
cabi-net minister “Now they’ve achieved their historical dream of
hav-ing bases in the warm waters of the region, and they will make sure
no gas pipelines will come from Central Asia or Qatar without their
approval They have gained a foothold in the region.”
Mr Putin’s ambition to re-establish Russia as a major power
in the Middle East (and the rest of the world) has been
con-strained by his country’s declining economy, now roughly the
size of Italy’s and still shrinking Already suffering from
sanc-tions imposed by the West after Mr Putin’s 2014 invasion of
Ukraine, Russia has been hit hard by the low prices of oil and
gas, the country’s main exports But such limits are familiar to
Russia, which has never been particularly prosperous but has
frequently sought a leading role in global affairs
“Putin understands that Russia, based on its economic weight
today, can’t be a great power, but he refuses to act in accordance
with this weight,” explained Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie
Center in Moscow and a former Soviet military officer whose
ca-reer included a stint as an adviser in Iraq “He aims to punch well
above Russia’s economic might The worldview is: We are either a
great power, or we disintegrate and are nothing.”
Nor is it just a lackluster economy that limits the reach of
Rus-Continued from the prior page sian influence Russia also lacks the kind of soft power that the U.S
has long exercised world-wide Young Arabs and Iranians arenot particularly eager to watch Russian movies, listen to Rus-sian pop music or study in Russia
“No one in this part of the world loves or hates Russia today
Russia in the Arab mind is just political strategy and weapons
These are its only commodities,” said the Lebanese writer andcommentator Hazem Saghieh “It can’t give much because itdoesn’t have much.”
If anything, there is a stronger social and cultural influencespreading in the other direction Today’s Russian population
is about 15% Muslim—a proportion that has grown with the flux of millions of migrant workers from Central Asia Russia
in-is also, by some counts, the world’s second-largest source of cruits for Islamic State From a city like Derbent, the distance
re-to Baghdad is roughly the same as from Bosre-ton re-to Chicago
“The Middle East is too close to us for Russia to be a mere server,” said Andrey Kortunov, the head of the Russian Interna-tional Affairs Council, a think tank affiliated with the Russian for-eign ministry “It’s not remote Australia or Argentina; it is a worldthat we see on the streets of our cities, behind the counters of ourstores, among the workers of our construction sites and, yes, alsoinside our jails All of this requires playing an active role.”
ob-An active role does not mean, however, attempting to imitatethe massive Middle East engagements of the U.S over the pastdecade “The American experience in Iraq is being studied withgreat attention,” said Mr Lukyanov of the Council on Foreignand Defense Policy “The lesson is that we can’t get involved toodeeply—but we also can’t withdraw too quickly.”
Despite concern about maintaining limits on its involvement inSyria, Moscow may yet—as President Barack Obama publiclywarned last year—get “stuck in a quagmire.” Russia also risksalienating the Muslim world’s majority Sunnis by siding with Mr
Assad, who is backed by Shiite Iran and Shiite militias in his waragainst mostly Sunni rebels In a region increasingly split acrosssectarian lines, such alliances may make Russia more of a target forIslamic State and other Sunni Islamist terrorist groups
Aware of that danger, Russia has avoided casting today’sMiddle East as a zero-sum game or seeking to push the U.S
from the region Despite occasional bombast, Moscow quietlywelcomed Mr Obama’s recent decision to extend the deploy-ment of nearly 10,000 U.S troops in Afghanistan, a move thatcould prevent the spread of Islamist militancy into former So-viet states in neighboring Central Asia
Unlike the U.S.—or the former Soviet Union, whose MiddleEastern alliances were constrained by ideology—Mr Putin’sRussia has the advantage of being on speaking terms with all
of the region’s main powers (The lone exception is Turkey, abitter foe of the Assad regime that, to Mr Putin’s fury, downed
a Russian warplane in November.)
“While the American influence has receded, Moscow has builtunique relationships in the Middle East On one side, it has strate-
gic ties with Israel, and on the other, no lessimportant ties with Iran,” said YelenaSuponina, a Middle East expert at Russia’s In-stitute of Strategic Studies, a think tank affil-iated with the Kremlin Moscow also keeps
up ties with Hamas and Hezbollah, which theWest considers terrorist groups “Not a sin-gle Western country can repeat what Russia
is doing,” she added
This readiness to deal with all sides hasmeant, however, that Russia finds itselfwith no bedrock allies in the region Even
as Russia has joined with Iran to save Mr
Assad’s regime, overall Iranian-Russian relations remain cool,and the two countries haven’t become major trade partners TheIranians resent Moscow’s cooperation with Israel, and Russiadoes not want to get dragged into Iran’s sectarian conflict withSunni powers led by Saudi Arabia
“The Iranians feel they are constantly being duped [by the sians]…and that they are not going to follow through with theirpromises,” said Dina Esfandiary, a fellow at King’s College London
Rus-“There is no love for Iran in Russia, and for Russia in Iran Thebeauty of this relationship is that it’s purely pragmatic,” agreed Mr
Trenin of the Carnegie Center The only country in the Middle Eastwith which a significant proportion of Russians empathize, headded, is Israel, in part because so many Israelis hail from the for-mer Soviet Union and speak Russian As it happens, of course, Is-rael is also the closest regional ally of the U.S
The Russia-Israel connection is likely to grow even warmer withthe return to government of the most prominent of the Soviet-bornIsraelis, Avigdor Lieberman, who became Israel’s defense ministerthis past week Mr Lieberman, an ultranationalist and a former for-eign minister, has called the Russian-sponsored deal to removeSyria’s chemical weapons a major boon to Israeli security
“My experience is that you can do business with [the Russians]
They are pragmatic, and you can close a deal and get a clear swer,” Mr Lieberman said in an interview before taking his newpost “Russia is nearby, and it will never renounce its interests inthe Middle East It is too big a power to be ignored.”
an-Putin Plays an Old Russian Game
‘Russia is nearby, and it will never renounce its interests in the Middle East.’
MIND & MATTER:
ROBERT M SAPOLSKY
FEW THINGS are more
shock-ing than the intentional, lent killing of one person byanother But there are circum-stances that can compoundthe horror Consider an inci-dent earlier this month in St Cloud, Fla Po-lice say that 25-year-old Benjamin Midden-dorf shot and killed his older brotherNicholas after an argument over a cheese-burger (Mr Middendorf has pleaded notguilty to a charge of second-degree murder
vio-in Osceola County Circuit Court.)The mere existence of homicide withinfamilies is a puzzle Evolutionary successmeans passing on copies of one’s genes, typi-cally by reproducing as successfully as possi-ble But another route is “kin selection.” Aparent and child share half their genes, as dotwo full siblings Thus, mathematically, an or-ganism achieves the same genetic success if
it manages to reproduce once on its own or
to help a full sibling reproduce twice Thisprompted a famous quip attributed to theBritish scientist J.B.S Haldane: “I’d lay down
my life for two brothers or eight cousins.”
So evolution favors cooperation and ism among relatives This explains a wholerange of social behaviors: how, for example, ayoung, untested female baboon achieves arelatively high rank in her group because herolder, higher-ranking sister has her back, orhow lion siblings form cooperative coalitions.Why would humans ever kill a relative? Inresearch published in several different jour-nals in recent years, the psychiatrists SusanHatters Friedman of the University of Auck-land, Phillip Resnick of Case Western Re-serve and colleagues have reviewed the var-ied and ghastly literature about such events.They found a list of causes familiar to anyreader of police reports Sometimes severepsychiatric illness is to blame—say, murder/suicide by someone deeply depressed, or psy-chotically delusional “altruism,” in which aparent kills a newborn to prevent a sinful lifeand damnation Revenge may also play apart: A child attacks an abusive parent or aspouse kills a partner demanding a divorce
altru-In some societies, “honor” killings are mitted by families against a (usually female)relative who has violated cultural norms.Other families will put to death an ill child orone of the “wrong” sex—again, typically girls.Then there’s material gain In BeverlyHills in 1989, the Menendez brothers shottheir parents; prosecutors said that theywanted to get their hands on the family for-
com-tune Parents, inturn, can seetheir children
as mere modities In
com-2014, Kenyantelevision re-ported that thefather of a 5-year-old albinogirl attempted to sell her, trying to capital-ize on a market for albino body partsthought to have magical properties
As I said, varied and breathtakinglyghastly, and utterly puzzling
One corner of zoology provides an ple of vaguely similar behavior: “brood re-duction,” which occurs in numerous bird spe-cies (and one species of hyena) When amother has more offspring than the availableresources can support, the strongest siblingssometimes kill the others
exam-This would lead you expect that human
“siblicide” would occur over valuable sources—God’s approval, birthrights orkingdoms—and it does sometimes, fa-mously But more typically it results insteadfrom years of tension prompted by competi-tion, envy or bullying And the immediatecause of the killings can be shockinglypetty: a snide comment, music played tooloud, a late arrival at a family get-together.The historian Richard Mc Mahon has found
re-a pre-attern of mundre-ane triggers of intrre-afre-am-ily violence in famine-era Ireland It’s over-whelmingly rooted in everyday life
intrafam-Evolutionary theory often comes up short
in explaining the extremes of human ior We sometimes bequeath wealth to chari-ties instead of to our own children We adoptand raise other children who are completelyunrelated to us And brothers may sometimes
behav-do grievous harm to one another over thesmallest disputes From an evolutionarystandpoint, we are one weird species
A puzzle that defies the rules of evolution.
In Families, Small Disputes Can Set Off Major Mayhem
FAMILY FEUD Paolo Guidotti’s ‘Cain and
Abel,’ painted around 1610 (detail)
REVIEW
Trang 9THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | A9
DO ANTIDEPRESSANTS WORK? The notion
that they don’t—that Prozac, Lexapro and
other drugs are little more than placebos with
side effects—has become mainstream
“Anti-depressant Lift May Be All in Your Head,” a
typical headline reads, atop an article citing
research from medical journals With as many
as one in eight American adults now taking an
antidepressant, the stakes are high
Concerned about providing effective care to
my own patients, I have spent the past five
years exploring the evidence on treatment for
depression As I read the formal findings, they
jibe with what my clinical work as a psychiatrist
had led me to expect Antidepressants are
harm-ful in a subset of depressed patients but helpharm-ful
for most Little of the benefit comes from the
classic placebo effect—that is, hopeful tancy based on the fact of pill-taking Most of itcomes instead from the inherent, chemical prop-erties of the drugs, perhaps through their ability
expec-to resexpec-tore resilience in the brain
I base these conclusions largely on the sults of randomized trials, in which patientsreceived medication or dummy pills and werefollowed over time In psychiatry, however,such outcome studies are often flawed, andtheir implications are open to competing inter-pretations I read the data with a doctorly eye
re-Today, when evidence-based medicine is a word, mere mention of the practitioner’s view-point is transgressive But I have a further con-fession to make: There are reasons beyond thenumbers—even beyond the progress of my pa-tients—that make it hard for me to believe thatantidepressants do not work Chief among them
by-is the apparent decrease in the sort of the-line depression that I encountered regularlyduring my medical training in the late 1970s
end-of-Back then I saw men and women who fered depression at the deepest level On generalhospital wards, such patients were not rare
Antidepressants
Studies now question their
effectiveness, but a doctor
has seen dramatic benefits
prema-They spoke slowly and repetitively prema-They werehard to interview
I was known to have an interest in psychiatry,
so when a depressed woman—call her Irma—fellsilent, the team on rounds asked me to sit withher In time, she shared her story Long ago, herhusband had died and then a daughter NowIrma had heart disease She was content tojoin them Depression hardly captures thebleakness she suffered Her brain transmitted
a single message: despair
I trained at Harvard cal School, a center of Ameri-can psychoanalysis Antide-pressants had been availablesince the late 1950s, but toprescribe them was consid-ered a failure of imagination
Medi-Psychiatrists believed thatthe drugs robbed patients oftheir autonomy
For my psychiatry tion, I was sent to a hospital staffed by eminentpsychoanalysts The ward housed many patientslike Irma In the activity room, depleted depres-sives sat still, distinguishable from catatonic pa-tients only by their hand-wringing We offeredpsychotherapy Otherwise, depression was al-lowed to run its course
rota-In much of the country, antidepressants hadgained acceptance In time, I learned to sup-
plement talk therapy with prescribing where did I see the volume of end-stage de-pression I had previously encountered, norhave I ever again During 30-plus years of out-patient practice in Providence, R.I., none of mypatients has begun with or, to my knowledge,moved on to paralyzing melancholy
No-Is end-of-the-line, immobilizing depression indecline? Public Health Service surveys on men-tal illness are not fine-grained enough to tell us.But I have asked students and colleagues whatthey see Their response is uniform: little end-stage depression—much less of it (say the oldestdoctors) than four decades back
Of their gravest cases, trainees say: A patientwho had been doing well in treatment lost hisjob, could not afford his medicine, resumeddrinking, missed his clinic appointments, andwas brought to the emergency room by the po-lice Paralyzing melancholy has become an ele-ment in a tale of care interrupted
Further testimony comes from a psychiatrist
at the University of Massachusetts, AnthonyRothschild—arguably our premier expert onpsychotic depression, which includes hallucina-tions or delusions In 2014, I asked him if he wasseeing classic, immobilizing melancholy—in theabsence of psychosis No, he said There’s muchless of it His thought was that primary-caredoctors nip progressive mood disorders in thebud People used to move from depression to se-vere depression to paralyzing melancholy Sincethe 1980s, with the advent of easier-to-use anti-depressants, often the slide is interrupted.With the deinstitutionalization of mentallyill patients, we should all know people withcatastrophic depression For the sweep of hu-man history, they have been with us, suffer-ers with wasting bodies, tortured eyes anddownturned gazes They were a familiar sight
at church and in family homes Now, we dom encounter them
sel-Diagnoses shift Increased awareness of mentia, drug abuse and post-traumatic stateshas made depression a more limited category.And diseases come and go, for unknown reasons
de-If treatment has helped to reshape the face ofmood disorders, antidepressants may not de-serve all the credit New psychotherapies aim totarget depression directly, to interrupt episodes.Still, my impression is that end-stage depres-sion is less common in part because—haphaz-ardly, with many cases missed altogether—doc-tors employ antidepressants They have broadeffects, preventing recurrences, improving pa-tients’ quality of life Even partial successescount I see patients who, though still afflicted,function as attentive parents and pursue ca-reers With depression as with cancer, we canturn terminal cases into chronic ones
If that effort matters, then the practice I served in my training years—of letting depres-sion linger—was, for all its idealism, barbaric.Imagine Irma at critical junctures, strugglingwith worsening symptoms Should she have
ob-been offered a trial of pressants? Surely she shouldhave—unless they do notwork Because I rarely see apatient like her any more, Ibelieve that they do.There are weak links inthis chain of reasoning, butevery doctor approaches re-search findings from a per-spective shaped by profes-sional experience I workunder this influence: time spent with depres-sion when prescribing for it was taboo
antide-Dr Kramer is a psychiatrist and professor at Brown Medical School His latest book, “Ordi- narily Well: The Case for Antidepressants,” will be published on June 7 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Immobilizing melancholy was once a familiar sight;
now it is rare.
TANNED SKIN is a tough sell in Thailand, where
both men and women prize fair complexions
and spend large sums on skin-whitening pills
and lotions When Thais visit the beach, they
of-ten wrap themselves up in beach towels or wear
long-sleeved spandex outfits Magazine models
are usually ivory-white Around Siam Square,
Bangkok’s equivalent of New York’s SoHo or
Shibuya in Tokyo, skin-whitening clinics abound
For young women in particular, the pressure
to have a fair complexion is intense
Sociolo-gists say that skin tone in many Asian
coun-tries is widely linked with both social class and
beauty As in 17th-century Europe, darker skin
is associated with manual laborers or farmers
exposed to the sun, while lighter tones are
seen as a sign of wealth and privilege
But attitudes may be shifting A pro-tan camp
has emerged in Thailand, and one of its biggest
advocates is the rapper Joey Boy, who is
invest-ing a chunk of his fortune in a magazine called
Tan “The idea is to go outside and do something
Don’t stay at home worrying about your
skin-whitening cream,” said Joey Boy, who at 41 is one
of Thailand’s best-known performers
Recent issues of his magazine ran articles
on surfing and skateboarding Models featured
on the cover often sport deep tans, and one
piece explained how to apply self-tanning
creams to get a bronzed beach look
These are radical notions across much of
Asia, where the market for skin-whitening
prod-ucts is projected to swell to $20 billion a year by
the end of the decade, according to the
consult-ing firm Global Industry Analysts Inc
At the same time, however, many Thais are
gan: “You just need to be white to win.” ties are casting a more critical eye, too, investi-gating other skin-whitening products claiming
Authori-to contain salmon sperm, among other things
Joey Boy (whose real name is Apisit saimlikit) has helped to expand the debate
Opa-Raised in Bangkok’s Chinatown, where hisparents ran an auto-parts business, he spentmuch of his youth skateboarding and dab-bling in hip-hop His rapping career took off
in 1995 with a hit single, “Fun Fun Fun,” that
is still played on Thai radio Later he rated with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas
collabo-beginning to reflect on the deeper significance
of their attitudes about skin color The country’spolitical upheavals over the past decade, includ-ing two military coups, have raised an uneasyawareness of rural and urban divides in thecountry—with darker skin traditionally more as-sociated with rural residents
Consumers, meanwhile, are beginning topush back against the aggressive and, in somecases, offensive advertising of skin-whiteningproducts One Bangkok-based firm selling skin-lightening pills apologized recently after one ofits commercials provoked an uproar for its slo-
A CROWD waiting for a boat at Maiton Island in Phuket, Thailand, March 18.
His new magazine has struck a chord At itslaunch in February, singers and actors sippedfrom glasses of organic cider as they posed forphotographs with fans Waitresses glided around,offering Thai beach treats such as black herbaljelly before Joey Boy entered to the soundtrackfrom the “Hawaii Five-O” television series.Leafing through an issue of Tan during abreak from her job selling cars in a Bangkokshowroom, Kanyana Sontinen, 24, said that shewas struck by the selection of models in themagazine “This sends a positive message fordarker-skinned people like me,” she said “Inthe past I wanted to be white, but I can seethat things are beginning to change.”
TV host Patcharasri Benjamas—whosenickname, Kalamare, refers to a dark Thaidessert and alludes to her darker skin—alsothinks that Tan is helping Thais open up tothe idea of getting a suntan or revealing theirnatural skin color “If people can see models
on the beach with tanned skin, maybe theywill feel they can do that, too,” she said “Notlike now, when they cover up their arms andlegs as soon as they arrive at the beach andsit in the shade all the time.”
Interest from advertisers is picking up Thebiggest so far is Rip Curl, which advertises biki-nis and other leisure-wear in the magazine Oth-ers include Brazilian footwear brand Havaianasand the Italian maker of Vespa scooters Edito-rial meetings can still be a little fraught, though
“Some of the team were complaining thatnot all the models are tanned,” Joey Boy said
“It’s really, really sensitive.”
—Wilawan Watcharasakwet contributed to this article.
ARE THAIS READY TO LET THEMSELVES TAN?
Trang 10Obama’s Hiroshima Genie
N o phrase in national security is more
fa-miliar than the notion of putting the
nu-clear genie back in the bottle In his
speech Friday in Hiroshima,
President Obama proposed
such a miracle: “Among those
nations like my own that hold
nuclear stockpiles, we must
have the courage to escape the
logic of fear, and pursue a
world without them.”
The genie was not the mere existence of
nu-clear weapons but the technical knowledge to
produce them North Korea, one of the world’s
most economically bereft nations, has
nonethe-less acquired knowledge to produce nuclear
bombs and missile-delivery systems And it
dis-plays no inclination to stop producing
nuclear-weapons technology—for itself or for export to
other nations.
This is known as proliferation, the most
vex-ing problem of the nuclear age, one that
states-men have worked tirelessly to address across
the seven decades since Hiroshima and
Naga-saki, which by the way saved millions of lives
by ending World War II.
Mr Obama’s contribution at the end of his
Presidency is to anathematize war: “We must
change our mind-set about war itself To
pre-vent conflict through diplomacy and strive to
end conflicts after they’ve begun To see our
growing interdependence as a cause for
peace-ful cooperation and not violent competition To
define our nations not by our capacity to stroy but by what we build And perhaps above all, we must reimagine our connection to one
de-another as members of one human race.”
That statement may stand in history as the apotheosis of Mr.
Obama’s view of world affairs.
It also summarizes the basis for most criticism of the Presi- dent’s foreign-policy legacy, which is its nearly unbounded credulousness It is belief without of- fering adequate evidence for its beliefs.
Mr Obama’s sentiments are undeniably ble, but they are in conflict with the observable and growing disorder of the world his successor will inherit One word that describes that un- certain inheritance is alliances As virtually all his postwar predecessors understood, limiting war and especially the spread of nuclear weap- ons depends crucially on the willing participa- tion of other nations.
no-Mr Obama’s policies toward Iran, Russia, Syria, Iraq, China and North Korea have caused important allies in each instance to doubt America’s traditional postwar resolve to sup- port and protect them.
Saying, as he did in Hiroshima, that what the world needs in the nuclear age is “a moral revo- lution” is inadequate to the growing prolifera- tion he has presided over Mr Obama’s speech was eloquent, but the next President’s policies will have to be much more than that.
A ‘moral revolution’
won’t stop the spread
of nuclear weapons.
The TSA’s Summer of Lines
H ours of standing in line at airports has
never topped anyone’s list of holiday
pastimes, but the U.S Transportation
Security Administration seems
intent on imposing this
equal-ity of misery this summer On
Thursday House Republicans
unveiled legislation to reduce
wait times, and the agency
de-serves a full body scan.
For months passengers have languished in
lines in Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, Seattle and
fill in the blank American Airlines says more
than 70,000 of its passengers have missed flights
this year due to lines Some airports are telling
folks to show up three hours before takeoff—and
that’s before you wait on the tarmac Passenger
outrage has been so potent that the government
even held someone accountable: TSA’s security
chief resigned this week.
One reason for the bottlenecks is that TSA
has reduced screening staff more than 10% since
2011, while travelers increased 11% The agency
hoped to shuttle people into its PreCheck
pro-gram, which expedites security for those who
show up somewhere for fingerprinting and pay
$85 More time at this glorified DMV hasn’t
been as popular as the agency thought TSA has
thrice since 2013 invited private companies to
develop new advanced screening techniques So
far, no results.
TSA says its $7.6 billion annual budget is a
pittance, and so Congress freed up $34 million
more for the agency Senate Democrats want to
pour even more cash into TSA for hiring
thou-sands of new staff But ask anyone who has ever
hired an employee how easy it is to find 1,000
workers, and add that screeners spend weeks
in Washington for training That won’t help
summer travelers.
A better solution is from the House
Home-land Security Committee Its bill directs TSA to
reassign as screening staff some thousands of
“behavior detection officers” who currently
stare or bark at travelers The bill also instructs
TSA to reserve jobs like stacking bins for
em-ployees without security training, while giving local directors more flexibility in allocating staff than they generally have now TSA must
also consider deploying ployees from headquarters, and the bill tells the agency to finish the private partnerships that might reduce the hassle
em-of enrolling in expedited screening.
Here’s what the House should add: TSA runs
a Screening Partnership Program, which in theory allows an airport to “opt out” of TSA and bring in a certified private security firm In a
2011 report, the House Committee on tation and Infrastructure compared Los Angeles data with a private operation running San Fran- cisco’s airport A contract screener in San Fran moved through 65% more passengers than TSA employees in L.A.
Transpor-But only a handful of airports participate, as TSA chooses the security company and micro- manages the contract That isn’t a partnership.
Congress could stipulate that an airport age its own bidding and operations; the govern- ment would remain a safety regulator Execu- tives at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta and elsewhere have floated dropping TSA, but with- out Congress that’s about as useful as hiring cir- cus entertainers to distract the disgruntled, as San Diego International tried recently.
man-Congress nationalized airport screening after 9/ll, as Democrats saw a political opening to add thousands of new union workers But after nearly a decade and a half, TSA’s legend of in- competence grows Last year Department of Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth told Congress that a secret performance investi- gation had turned up “failures in the technology, failures in TSA procedures, and human error.”
Safety oversights are common.
One bill won’t end the dysfunction, but ing government to shift priorities to serve pas- sengers would at least offer relief to anyone un- lucky enough to pass through an airport over the summer.
forc-They’re from the government and they’re here to make you wait.
Democrats vs Israel
N ot too long ago Democrats were
Amer-ica’s pro-Israel party Harry Truman
recognized Israel moments after the
Jewish state declared
inde-pendence in 1948 JFK sold
advanced anti-aircraft
mis-siles to Jerusalem, ending a
de facto U.S arms embargo.
Bill Clinton was famously
close to the late Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
If that party isn’t dead, it’s close This week
Bernie Sanders named James Zogby of the
Arab-American Institute and professor Cornel
West to the party’s platform-drafting
commit-tee The pair are expected to push hard for a
more “even-handed” position on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in practice means
denouncing Israel at every turn.
Mr West offered a flavor of his
even-hand-edness on Facebook in 2014 during Israel’s last
war with Hamas “Let us not be deceived,” he
wrote “The Israeli massacre of innocent
Pales-tinians, especially the precious children, is a
crime against humanity! The rockets of Hamas
indeed are morally wrong and politically
inef-fective—but these crimes pale in the face of
the U.S supported Israeli slaughters of
inno-cent civilians.”
Mr Zogby has prominently endorsed the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement against Israel, calling it “a
legiti-mate and moral response to Israeli policy.”
BDS has gained steam in recent years on
col-lege campuses, where Palestinian victimology
plays well and students are easily misled about
the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
These views go well beyond the usual
bounds of fair criticism of Israel No other
country—including a genuine occupier like China in Tibet—is being singled out for boy- cotts the way Israel is The suggestion that Is-
rael deliberately “massacres”
innocent Palestinians is false based on everything we know about Israel’s military re- straint and war practices If Palestinians wanted to end Israel’s occupation, they could have taken the deal offered to them at Camp David in 2000 when Bill Clinton was President.
Pro-Israel Democrats might reply that Messrs West and Zogby are only two of a 15- person panel, and Hillary Clinton has taken a more mainstream line But there’s no gainsay- ing the increasingly anti-Israel tilt of progres- sive politics A Pew poll from April found that while moderate Democrats still sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a 53% to 19% margin, self-identified liberal Democrats now tilt to the Palestinians, 40% to 33%.
Even Mrs Clinton is only moderate on rael when compared to the Democratic left.
Is-Her State Department was notorious for its nunciations of Israel, and some of her closest advisers are often quicker to denounce Israeli self-defense than Palestinian terror.
de-The shame of all this is that support for a robust liberal democracy like Israel should come naturally to the Democratic Party Last
we checked, it was better to be a woman, or homosexual, or environmentalist, or political dissident in Tel Aviv than in Gaza As they write their party’s platform, Democrats might ask why Israel, the one Middle Eastern country that fully shares their values, should be the one they most seek to condemn.
Sanders puts two hostile voices on the party’s platform committee.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
OPINION
Trump Rakes The Clinton Muck
If the political class had
a theme song, it would
be that old Toby Keithtune, “I Wanna Talk
Trump knows the ing, though of late hehas been focusing onothers He wants to talkabout Bill He wants totalk about Hillary Hewants to talk about the1990s, and Vince Foster, and JuanitaBroaddrick
feel-He wants to talk about things thatcould help him win an election
That Hillary Clinton today has a shot
at the White House comes down to onereality: People forget This is a politicianutterly defined by scandal, and withmore baggage than the carousels at Dul-les International She ought to be dis-qualified And yet the Clintons thrive,the beneficiaries of forgetfulness
They’ve spent decades bulling throughtheir messes, blaming their woes onright-wing plots, and depending on afickle press and a busy nation to lose in-terest in their wretchedness It worksevery time
Yet Mr Trump has a way of ing the status quo He does this in part
disrupt-by behaving in ways most politicianswouldn’t or couldn’t Unlike Republicanswho may be wary of resurrecting theClinton past, for instance, Mr Trump isnot afraid of being labeled “obsessive.”
But there is usually a method to hismadness And his current let’s-cam-paign-like-it’s-1999 strategy has pur-pose—it’s part offense, part defense
On offensive, Mr Trump’s goal is toplay off the soaring distrust Americanshave in Mrs Clinton by tying the past tothe present He wants voters to realizethat the Whitewater land deal and PaulaJones aren’t dusty, closed chapters in theClintons’ history They are, rather, mark-ers on a long continuum, one that beginswith young Bill’s draft-dodging and con-tinues today with mature Hillary’s pri-vate-email-server deletions and ClintonFoundation money-grubbing And thosescandals would accompany the Clintonsback to the White House and define thenext eight years
whether it’s Vince or whether it’s hazi It’s always a mess with Hillary,”
Beng-said Mr Trump in a recent interview
The Clintons will claim that nobodycares It’s also possible that youngerAmericans—some of whom were in dia-pers during the Clinton administration—
can’t figure out why people are suddenlytalking about blue dresses Still, give Mr
Trump marks for doing more than any
politician in recent memory to educate.The newspapers are suddenly brimmingwith synopses of Filegate, Chinagate,Travelgate, cattle futures, the Marc Richpardon, Kathleen Willey and WhiteHouse looting
Which is also part of the Trump fense: Energizing GOP base voters.Older Republicans in particular remainfrustrated that the Clintons have neverbeen held to account, and that the me-dia so easily lost interest in the scan-dals
of-Mr Trump’s hits about the 1990s arealso defensive moves, against what mightotherwise be Mrs Clinton’s biggeststrength—the “women’s issue.” Demo-crats have used the “war on women”theme against Republicans for more than
a decade, and for the most part fully Mrs Clinton is already playing thewomen’s card, accusing Mr Trump of in-sulting women His response goes likethis: “You want to talk about women?Awesome Let’s talk about Bill.”
success-His ad on Instagram, featuring BillClinton chomping on a cigar, with thevoices of women describing his un-wanted sexual advances in the back-ground, along with an ominous Hillarycackle, was a study in full-throttle blunt-ness
Mrs Clinton now knows that ing Mr Trump about women will invite acounterattack from him citing PaulaJones, another of Bill’s accusers So per-haps Mrs Clinton will lay off that front.Which is Mr Trump’s goal He’s playingfor a draw on this issue
attack-Does Mr Trump’s Bad Bill approachrisk making Mrs Clinton look like a vic-tim? It might, if this were the 1990s, andshe were still viewed as the victim of aphilandering husband But Hillary hasspent the past 16 years embracing herwomanizer, using his fame and fortune
to bolster her presidential run And this
is the woman who, according to her time friend Diane Blair, railed that Mon-ica Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony-tune.” It’s hard to feel sorry for a womanwilling to blame her husband’s dishonor
Write to kim@wsj.com.
The Clintons have never run into a foe willing to go where this one goes—gleefully.
POTOMAC WATCH
Last year, sales byBoeing and Airbuswere down 40% from
years In 2016, thesledding, so far, hasbeen even rougher
Boeing’s stock price isdown only a bit, but trails the market
Break-even for its spiffy 787 Dreamliner,which ran up $30 billion in deferredproduction costs, has been delayed
Profits are even more remote forAirbus’s gigantic A380, a plane popularwith travelers and unlikely to earn anickel for Airbus shareholders
But jet bubbles don’t pop the way com or telecom bubbles do If the planemakers never booked another order, theywould still work eight years or more tomeet those already penciled in Airbus’sbacklog, at list prices, officially tops $1trillion, and Boeing’s isn’t far off
dot-Naturally, both worry about tions and deferrals by airlines whoseeyes were bigger than their tummies Inmany ways, though, the duo have luckedout New invaders from Russia, China,Japan and elsewhere, aiming to chal-lenge their dominant, workaday narrow-bodies, the 737 and A320, have beenslow to get off the ground Canada’sBombardier a few weeks ago racked upits first big order from a U.S carrier(Delta) for its CS100, but the companystill is seeking a billion-dollar bailoutfrom the Canadian government
cancella-Was bubble ever the right word?
What is a bubble anyway?
As this column has detailed, politicaland market factors lay behind the boom
in orders that barely took a hiatus evenduring the financial crash of 2008
The courts in the U.S keep bankruptcarriers flying, wiping out their debtsand freeing up balance sheets for newplane purchases and leases An authen-tic air-travel boom in Asia generatedlots of sales, but so did cheap, govern-ment-subsidized lending
Europe pitched in with noise- andcarbon-abatement rules that artificiallyencouraged carriers to park older butperfectly serviceable aircraft High oilprices further rewarded carriers for re-tiring 10-year-old jets to the desert infavor of newer jets promising a 10%
improvement in fuel efficiency
Even so, the latter dynamic was ready fraying before 2014’s fracking-in-duced bust in oil prices Delta, Southwestand others noticed that high-quality,older planes had become so cheap on thesecondary market that flying themwould be profitable even with theirhigher fuel-burn
al-One of our cohorts in bubble-saying,Adam Pilarski of the Avitas consultancy,was already predicting six years agothat, by 2018, oil prices would fall to
$40 based on sluggish global growthand shale
The Boeing-Airbus duopoly, youmight think, would be capable of disci-plining itself, but being a duopolist isnot all it’s cracked up to be Boeing, de-spite evidence of doubts, followed Air-bus in rolling out expensive commit-ments to develop new aircraft evenwhen these planes would undercut thevalue of hundreds of planes that cus-tomers had not yet taken delivery of.Still, the bubble thesis may have beenoverstated if you were expecting a sud-den meltdown Both manufacturers delib-erately sought to increase production inlocales where law and culture are lessfriendly to organized labor, giving them-selves the flexibility to slash costs andoutput if needed Boeing built its second
787 line in South Carolina; Airbus lastyear started production of A320s in Mo-bile, Alabama
But the risk remains Both have thepotential to blow themselves up byguessing wrong on future deliveries andtrying to build too many planes too fast,creating the kind of production snafuthat almost undid Boeing in the 1990s.Not only are both companies, as theirstruggles with the A380 and 787 show,tempted to overestimate their own com-petence in the most complex manufac-turing task known to man The future ofcommercial aviation is also a question.Does air travel seize up under securityfears, environmental costs, the closing
of markets and the appeal of ence? Or does globalization, despiteTrumpian and Brexit hiccups, continue?
telepres-Do the happy trends prevail that cently saw Chinese police officers de-ployed to Italy to cooperate in keepingChinese tourists safe and comfy? Willgrowing hordes continue to wander theglobe in search of business, adventureand new scenery? Of course, bothmanufacturers also have large militarybusinesses to fall back on should the fu-ture choose a darker path
re-BUSINESS WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.
Trang 11THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | A11
history, knowing his sickness, havingevery reason to believe the chargeswere true, she attacked her hus-band’s critics, in a particular way:
“The great story here is this vastright-wing conspiracy that has beenconspiring against my husband sincethe day he announced for president
Some folks are gonna have a lot
to answer for.”
She was speaking this way aboutconservatives, half or more of thecountry At a charged moment shetook a personal humiliation andturned it into a political weapon,which further divided the nation,pitching left against right She didthis because her first instinct isalways war If you have to divide thecountry to protect your position byall means divide the country It wasunprotective of the country, and sounpatriotic
The lack of backlash against Mr
Trump’s attacks on Mrs Clinton,though, I suspect is due to some-thing else It’s that the subjectmatter really comes down to oneword: decadence People right nowwill respect a political leader whowill name and define what theythemselves see as the utter deca-dence of Washington
I don’t mean that they watch
“Scandal” and “House of Cards” and
think those shows are a slightlyover-the-top version of reality,though they do Now and then Imeet a young person who, finding I’dworked in a White House, asks, half-humorously and I swear half-curi-ously, if I ever saw anyone kill areporter by throwing her under atrain I say I knew people who wouldhave liked to but no, train-stationmurders weren’t really a thing then
(Someday cultural historians willwonder if the lowered political stan-dards that mark this year were at allconnected to our national habit ofwatching mass entertainment inwhich our elites are presented ashigh-functioning psychopaths Yes,that may have contributed to acertain lowering of real-world stan-dards.)
But the real decadence Americanssee when they look at Washington is
an utterly decadent system Just one
famous example from the past fewyears:
A high official in the IRS namedLois Lerner targets those she findspolitically hateful IRS officials are inthe White House a lot, which oddlyenough finds the same people hate-ful News of the IRS targeting isabout to break because an inspectorgeneral is on the case, so Ms Lernerplants a question at a conference,
OPINION
Donald Trump has said
recently isn’t his taunting
of Hillary Clinton, it’s his
comment to Bloomberg’s
Joshua Green Mr Green writes:
“Many politicians, Trump told me,
had privately confessed to being
amazed that his policies, and his
lacerating criticism of party leaders,
had proved such potent electoral
medicine.” Mr Trump seemed to
“in-tuit,” Mr Green writes, that standard
Republican dogma on entitlements
and immigration no longer holds
sway with large swaths of the party
electorate Mr Trump says he sees
his supporters as part of “a
move-ment.”
What, Mr Green asked, would the
party look like in five years? “Love
the question,” Mr Trump replied
“Five, 10 years from now—different
party You’re going to have a
worker’s party A party of people
that haven’t had a real wage
in-crease in 18 years.”
My impression on reading this
was that Mr Trump is seeing it as a
party of regular people, as the
Dem-ocratic Party was when I was a child
and the Republican Party when I was
a young woman
This is the first thing I’ve seen
that suggests Mr Trump is
ideologi-cally conscious of what he’s doing
It’s not just ego and orange hair, he
She breaks the rules
and gets away with it
every time No wonder
voters are fed up.
America’s Inattention-to-the-Deficit Disorder
ti-tle of a Dutch e-book now
available online in English
The young author, Rutger Bregman,
argues that technology has made
those of us living in advanced nations
rich enough that we should start
tak-ing it easier The utopia he imagines,
as the subtitle says, would have a
“Universal Basic Income, Open
Bor-ders, and a 15-hour Workweek.”
But how rich are we, really? A
good argument can be made that we
seem richer than we actually are
be-cause we have borrowed so heavily
from future generations That’s not
exactly an original idea Young adults
have been fretting for years that the
government safety nets available to
today’s elderly and infirm won’t be
there when they reach old age
What is less obvious is that the
nation’s slow growth and rising debt
are already reducing the
opportuni-ties for upward mobility That could
account for the political unrest so
evident in the protest votes in
today’s party primaries
Recent projections of the future
cost of current government
obliga-tions certainly won’t relieve youngpeople’s worries Those promiseshave expanded far beyond anyreasonable projection of the govern-ment’s ability to extract enoughrevenue to cover them
Ironically, the default position—
literally one might say—of the leftistpoliticians like Bernie Sanders is topromise more and more freebies
Judging from the improbable larity of his presidential campaign,
popu-it wins votes Maybe voters need abetter understanding of the prob-lem
Harvard economist Jeffrey Mironhas provided the latest estimate of,
as its title says, the “U.S Fiscal balance,” in a monograph for theCato Institute The gap is appalling
Im-Looking 75 years out, he estimatesthat the present value of future U.S
government expenses exceeds thepresent value of future governmentrevenues by $117.9 trillion That’strillions, in case you misread
Retired Cato president John son notes in an introduction to thebooklet that this enormous gap be-tween government promises and anymeans of filling it exceeds the totalannual production of the U.S (GDP)
Alli-by 6.8 times and Alli-by far exceeds thenation’s total private wealth cur-rently of $63.5 trillion
The gap estimate is not a fantasynumber It is based on entitlementlaws already on the books, projec-tions of the future number of pen-
sioners relative to workers and mates of economic growth Thecosts of Social Security, Medicare,Medicaid and ObamaCare are at ornear record highs despite somesuccess by House Speaker Paul Ryanand other budget hawks in bringingthem under better control TheCongressional Budget Office projects
esti-a steesti-ady rise in “mesti-andesti-atory” (i.e.,entitlement) costs as a share of GDPout into the distant future
Entitlement costs soared as ashare of GDP during the 2009 reces-sion, mainly because GDP fell
sharply The federal deficit looned to more than $1 trillion forfour straight fiscal years, 2009through 2012 An improved economyand congressional efforts lowered it
bal-to $439 billion in fiscal year 2015but the CBO projects it will riseagain this year by about $100 bil-lion
These huge deficits doubled thenational debt in only seven years androck-bottom interest rates ordained
by the Federal Reserve expanded vate debt as well The upshot: Ameri-cans are deep in debt, mainly thanks
pri-to government excesses Debt is flationary because it devotes moreincome to paying for past consump-tion The Fed, working against itself,
de-is fighting deflation and trying to gineer inflation to devalue the debt
en-But inflation is no cure because itwill expand the cost of entitlements
The only real answer is that theentitlement programs will have to bereformed, and sooner better thanlater, because the longer reform ispostponed the greater the fiscal im-balance will become and the greaterits drain will be on other importantgovernment functions, such as na-tional defense That reform can be
done For example, reprivatizinghealth insurance to restore marketcompetition would be a big help.Republican front-runner DonaldTrump is out to lunch on this issue,
as he is on most questions that quire more than a fatuous sound-biteanswer As for Hillary and Bernie,forget about it They want to addnew entitlements, such as free col-lege education
re-As for Mr Bregman, “Utopia forRealists” is better than it mightseem at first glance Respectablecases have been made for a univer-sal income, even by the likes of thatgreat free marketer Milton Fried-man But this was on the conditionthat it supplant other welfare pro-grams and thus bring greater sim-plicity and market forces to bear
would fight it like tigers
But as for utopia, we’re certainlynot there yet And we may be going
in the opposite direction
Mr Melloan is a former deputy editor of the Journal editorial page His book “When the New Deal Came
to Town” will be published by Simon
& Schuster in the fall.
By George Melloan
By one estimate, the U.S.
government will spend
$117.9 trillion more than
it takes in this century.
Clinton Embodies Washington’s Decadence
suggests, it’s politically intentional
It invites many questions ments require troops—not only sup-porters on the ground, but an army
Move-of enthusiastic elected Move-officials andactivists Mr Trump doesn’t havethat army Washington hates what
he stands for and detests the idea herepresents policy change GOP eliteswill have to start thinking about twothings: the rock-bottom purpose ofthe party and the content, in 2016,
of a conservatism reflective of andresponsive to this moment and thenext This will be necessary what-ever happens to Mr Trump, becausebig parts of the base are speakingthrough him It is no surprise somany D.C conservatives are hissing,
They’re in the middle of somethingepochal that they did not expect
They’re lost
To another part of the Trumpphenomenon that does not involvepolicy, exactly:
When Mr Trump went after Mrs
Clinton over her husband’s terribletreatment of women—she was his
en-abler”—my first thought was: Man,
I thought it was supposed to get bloody in October This is May—
where will we wind up? But I was
struck that no friend on the leftseemed shocked or appalled A few
on the right were delighted, andsome unsure Isn’t this the sort ofthing that’s supposed to turn womenoff and make Hillary look like avictim?
But so far Mr Trump’s numbersseem to be edging up
I was surprised that if Mr Trumpwas going to go there early, hedidn’t focus on a central politicaldepredation of the Clinton wars
That was after Mrs Clinton learned
of the Monica scandal and did notstep back, claiming a legitimate veil
of personal privacy—after all, it wasnot she who had been accused ofterrible Oval Office behavior—butcame forward on “Today” as anaggressor Knowing her husband’s
answers with a rehearsed lie, tries topin the scandal on workers in acubicle farm in Cincinnati, lies somemore, gets called into Congress,takes the Fifth—and then retireswith full pension and benefits,bonuses intact Taxpayers will befooting the bill for years for thewoman who in some cases targetedthem, and blew up the reputation ofthe IRS
Why wouldn’t Americans thinkthe system is rigged?
This is Washington in our era: aplace not so much of personal as ofcivic decadence, where the LoisLerner always gets away with it.Which brings us to the StateDepartment Office of Inspector Gen-eral’s report involving Hillary Clin-ton’s emails It reveals one big thing:Almost everything she has said pub-licly about her private server was alie She lied brazenly, coolly, as onewho is practiced in lying would, asone who always gets away with itcould
No, she was not given legalapproval to conduct her business onthe server She was not given theimpression it was fine She did notcomply with rules on storage andarchiving Her own office told U.S.diplomats personal email accountscould be compromised and theymust avoid using them for officialbusiness She was informed of adramatic increase in hacking attempts
on personal accounts Professionalswho raised concerns about herprivate server were told not to speak
of it again
It is widely assumed that Mrs.Clinton will pay no price for misbe-havior because the Democratic presi-dent’s Justice Department is notgoing to proceed with chargesagainst the likely Democratic presi-dential nominee
This is what everyone thinks, andnot only because they watch “Scan-dal.” Because they watch the news.That is the civic decadence theywant to see blown up And there’sthis orange-colored bomb
Campaigning in Buena Park, Calif., May 25
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flunking out of school and my
girl-friend was pregnant Then I joined
the Marine Corps and went to
Viet-nam
When a rocket hit the mess hall,
half full of young Marines, I was about
200 yards away I saw it pass
over-head, long and white, and heard the
explosion I had only been in country
a few days and knew no one Some of
the boys were placed in body bags
and trucked out, as I recall
Now I’m old and beat up, moving
Gurney Tiny Pig Pen I Remember Them All
toward another Memorial Day I’mthinking about the Marines I did knowand wondering what their lives wouldhave been like if they had survived
Gurney was my first squad leader
in Vietnam and I’ve spent a lot of timeover the decades thinking about him
He had blond hair and blue eyes Hequoted memorized lines from movies
One night he told me he had oncetaken an R&R trip to Hawaii and flownhome to get married
The next day our company wasflown out in choppers to the junglefor a big operation Our squad wasleading as we hacked through
elephant grass up to our waist andbegan the ascent up the mountain
The jungle was thick and hot as weclimbed I was scared and worriedabout getting shot in the face Gur-ney was on point, Forrest followedand I was behind him
Soon we were on a well-used trailwhere enemy had carved out stepsand built bamboo guard rails, whichwas frightening Gurney and Forrestdisappeared around the bend andsoon the firing came Forrest yelled,
“He’s hit, Gurney’s hit.”
When we found him Gurney waslying on his back, eyes open, with astartled look on his face He had ahole in his neck, with a white cordhanging from it He’s dead, I said, asForrest was shaking
What would Gurney have donewith his life? If he had moved an inch
or two and the bullets whizzed by, hemight have lived He’d have comehome to his young wife’s kisses Hecould have read books and walked onbeaches and had children and somekind of fulfilling career I knew heused to surf I’ll imagine him as asurfer or actor or director, makingmovies about war and how familiesfeel when their soldier’s don’t comehome
Over 58,000 died in that damnwar Some were boys from the city
or young men from Midwest farms,like Tiny He was big and strong andcarried a machine gun His best budhauled Tiny’s extra ammo and I nick-named him Pig Pen We all laughedabout that They reminded me ofblue-collar guys who drink beer after
working a day shift at the house They both died when arocket-propelled grenade hit Tinydirectly Forrest saw it
ware-But I’ll pretend they’re alive andremained close pals That they wentinto business and owned a string ofgas stations and their boys played
baseball and they sat in the stands,ate hot dogs and cheered Simplestuff we take for granted
What if Jimmy from Georgiahadn’t been killed? When he wasfirst wounded I helped him on thechopper and the enemy kept firingand I dived off What if Jimmy didn’tget shot again and die as the chop-per landed? And suppose 20 yearslater, I never called his parents to tellthem how he died? What if his sisterdidn’t fly into town to meet the manwho once knew her dead brother?
No No I’ll pretend none of thatever happened I can wish Jimmyalive and that we stayed friends andthat the way I met his pretty sisterwas when he introduced us at hiswedding It was high on a hill, with alittle church, where the pastures be-low were green and everyone dancedand drank, and his name didn’t end
up on the black granite wall in D.C.The wall full of nightmares, whereeveryone comes to grieve
Hodges was wounded and Reconand Happy and Doc, too I don’t knowwhat happened to any of them But Isaw them bleeding as we helped them
to the chopper Charlie Young took around through the throat like Gurneyand shrapnel ripped through Bo’shead Bob was shot four times Today
he walks with a limp and has a less arm, and a slew of grandchildren
use-We were best friends during the war,and I tied his shattered forearmtogether with my sock
One night our squad was set in avillage overlooking a graveyard,when we were attacked CorporalSwan ran shirtless outside of a grasshut and took one round through theheart I heard him say, “Oh my God,”
as he fell If he had lived, would hehave come home damaged inside, theway some did and still do? I won’timagine that
These are all real young men Ilived with and fought with and think
of on Memorial Day When the nics are over and the beer hasstopped flowing and the flags havebeen picked up at all the graveyards,memory brings them back to life.They sweep into my dreams or visitwhen I’m walking in the woods withGurney
pic-Mr Estes is the author of the 1987 Vietnam memoir, “A Field of Inno- cence,” (Kindle, 2014); his novel, “A Soldier’s Son,” will be released Aug 1 through Ingram Spark and Amazon.
By Jack Estes
What if Jimmy from Georgia hadn’t been killed in Vietnam?
And we’d all danced
at his wedding instead?
Trang 12WEATHER & CROSSWORD
Weather
Shown are today’s noon positions of weather systems and precipitation Temperature bands are highs for the day.
City Hi Lo W Today Hi Lo W Tomorrow City Hi Lo W Today Hi Lo W Tomorrow
s sunny; pc partly cloudy; c cloudy; sh showers;
t t’storms; r rain; sf snow flurries; sn snow; i ice
Today Tomorrow
ey
yd d lb
Riyadh h
D h
h lk t
y T
Jakarta
Kuala Lumpur Singapore
Bangkok Hanoi Manila
Hong Kong Taipei Riyadh
New Delhi Karachi Kolkata
The WSJ Daily Crossword | Edited by Mike Shenk
7 Ocean Spray trademark
36 Song about an overconfident mammal?
41 Salad bar array
53 Battery for a large flashlight
55 Song about a hair stylist who won’t work evenings?
58 U.S Grant was its eighth pres.
59 Wherewithal
60 Tax
61 View from Sharm el-Sheikh
62 Blacken
63 Memo starter
64 Valuable extraction
65 Neurologist’s diagnostic test,
74 Song about a beautiful copier?
82 There’s a lot of interest in this job
85 Solo
89 Brand with a crocodile logo
92 Song about an untrustworthy pop star?
7 Yahoo News star
8 Naif in the big city
9 Twenty suppliers
10 Hoppy beer, briefly
11 One in a tight squeeze
33 Word from un dictionnaire
35 Island north of Western Australia
44 Etcher’s stuff
47 Money for Money
49 Going rate
50 Lake in the Mojave Desert
51 Titania and Oberon circle it
70 10-Down and others
71 Old Calif base
109 Decorates in a prankish way
110 Composer Rorem
BEATLES WANNABES |by Mike Peluso & Jeff Chen
Previous Puzzle’s Solution
“Crescent City,” Chicago is “Windy City,” Houston is
“Space City,” Detroit is “Motor City,” Rome is “Eternal City,” and Indianapolis is “Circle City.” The eight letters those cities begin with, in order of the parenthetical numbers, yield the answer.
works, do more of what works, and
if it doesn’t work stop it.”
Spirit of America has no directhand in the programming, but Mr.Hake has offered advice and said
Mr Makukhin understands thatArmy FM can’t fight propagandawith propaganda “Trust and credi-bility are more important thantransmitters or radio equipment,”
he said
The station’s plans include ing frank interviews with Ukrainianofficials to show soldiers the gov-ernment is willing to address hardproblems It is important for Army
air-FM, which is owned by the DefenseMinistry, to avoid a stuffy officialmilitary style, said Yana Kholodna,
a TV producer hired as an adviser
“The challenge is to make a coolradio station,” she said After theblue-haired Ms Huzhva didn’t workout as host, Mr Makukhin’s col-leagues brought him another po-tential find, Pvt Oleksandr Bez-sonov, a young front-line soldierwho had started a pirate radio sta-tion to entertain troops at his base.Unfortunately, his tryout didn’t
go well He had technical wizardrybut not the right on-air personality,
Mr Makukhin said Army FM hiredhim as a sound engineer instead,and then made him sound directorfor several of the shows
On March 1 the station went onthe air in beta form, without amorning host Even so, its openingwords were a nod to Mr
Makukhin’s quest for a soldier-DJ:
“Good Morning, Ukraine.”
He hasn’t given that quest up,but in late March he turned to aveteran civilian radio presenter,Philip Boiko In its early form,Army FM’s morning show is a mix
of front-line news (Ukraine’s use ofMiG 29 jet fighters), pop culture(Axl Rose’s turn as frontman forAC/DC) and long tales of historicalUkrainian war heroes In one, Mr.Boiko celebrated the ingenuity of avolunteer who made a mobilesauna for soldiers out of an oldmilitary truck
Refuting “fake news and nouncements” from the occupiedeast will be part of his show, hesaid Bands whose music he hasplayed include a Russian one calledDDT that was founded by a Kremlincritic
an-Mr Boiko, 38, doesn’t pretend tohave the manic energy of the DJstar of “Good Morning, Vietnam.”But he figures that good rock musicand his mix of sarcasm and humorcan keep the soldiers listening
Mr Makukhin, while still ing his eye out for the military ser-vice member he can put on the air,says he can’t complain about his ci-vilian DJ
keep-“Eight a.m in Kiev ‘Soldiers,wake up!’ ” Mr Boiko boomed on arecent broadcast as he as greetedthe troops “Morning infotainmentshow starts its second part, and I,Philip Boiko, greet all the listeners
of Army FM Especially our heroes
in the military zone who diligentlyfight with separatist and occupyingbastards, protecting their mother-land.”
KIEV—Ukraine’s army is
search-ing for its own Robin Williams
Specifically, it is looking for a
charismatic army disc jockey like
the one Mr Williams played in the
film “Good Morning, Vietnam”
three decades ago
Alexey Makukhin, an adviser to
Ukraine’s military who is helping
set up the station, wants a Robin
Williams to help with his “big
problem.” Troops facing
Russian-backed separatists in the east hear
a steady barrage of radio and TV
broadcasts that seem crafted to
sow doubts about their mission
His solution is Army FM, a radio
station for Ukraine’s soldiers To
make it a success he needs a DJ—a
great DJ
Dozens of résumés poured in
when word about the plan got out
Mr Makukhin interviewed about 50
DJ applicants They were an almost
complete bust
“A lot of candidates just do not
fit to the role of presenter—poor
voice, cannot keep up a discussion
or stop themselves,” he says
“Some candidates have a fixed
mind-set and are not ready to work
in our format of entertaining and
friendly radio.”
Mr Makukhin, a 35-year-old
for-mer TV sitcom producer,
dis-patched old colleagues from the
military and television worlds to
hunt for undiscovered talent
One military colleague, scouring
the front lines where the army
faces breakaway provinces, found
Lidiya Huzhva
With dyed blue hair and a
mis-chievous look, Ms Huzhva has both
personality and a knowledge of the
fighting She spent 18 months as a
freelance reporter interviewing
Ukrainian soldiers
She also has a good voice and
understands what the station’s vibe
should be, a blend of “Daily Show”
style humor and serious purpose
like that of an armed-forces
news-paper She says Army FM should
respond to pro-Russian broadcasts
not with indignant rebuttals but
with jokey dispatches
“The people here need to laugh,”
she says “They love comedy.”
There was just one problem Ms
Huzhva, 38 years old, doesn’t really
want to be a host sitting in the
stu-dio She would rather report from
the front
She also has the wrong taste in
music She likes jazz Ukraine’s
sol-diers like rap, hard rock and metal
For Mr Makukhin, it was back to
the search
The music that Ms Huzhva
doesn’t like, but that many soldiers
do, is what they get from the
Rus-sian and separatist-province radio
stations, sometimes with lyrics
slamming Ukraine’s government
A separatist heartthrob named
B Y J ULIAN E . B ARNES
Ukraine Army Can’t Find Charismatic DJs
Army FM station hopes a
‘cooler vibe’ will drown out
Gleb Kornilov dominates the charts
at Radio Novorossia in Donetsk, in
the heart of the breakaway nian region the separatists dub No-vorossia, or New Russia When therebellion got going two years ago,
Ukrai-he sang about tUkrai-he Ukrainian armedforces’ alleged burning of Donetsk
More recently, he has sung of orossia planning to go on the of-fensive against the West
Nov-“We believe in the empire withthe new vigor/Our song is a mili-tary crusade/ Our music is the fin-ger on the trigger,” Mr Kornilovsings in Russian
Reached by phone in easternUkraine, Mr Kornilov said hissongs weren’t about criticizingUkraine, just the oligarchs he saystook it over He said he was bothpro-Ukraine and pro-Novorossia
“We are fighting not against thepeople, but against the powers thatbe,” Mr Kornilov said “One personfights with a weapon, another withtheir art.”
News on the trolled radio and television stationspresents a grim picture of Ukraine,frequently accusing the Kiev gov-ernment and its supporters of arange of atrocities One broadcastsaid pro-Ukrainian militias had kid-napped journalists
separatist-con-The stations, say Ukrainian cials, have grown adept at mirror-ing the actual news, quickly issuingreports about mortar strikes, artil-lery barrages or buses hitting landmines While Ukrainians say rebelsare responsible for the attacks, thepro-separatist radio stations assignblame to Kiev
offi-Other reports on channels such
as Novorossia TV and Radio Free Novorossia highlight true, but un-
Lidiya Huzhva, above, has the voice and personality to be a DJ at Army FM but prefers reporting from the front lines Right: Alexey Makukhin, center, hopes for a soldier-DJ like Robin Williams in ‘Good Morning, Vietnam.’
flattering, news about the nian government, particularly cor-ruption accusations from theInternational Monetary Fund or theEuropean Union Novorossia TVand Radio Free Novorossia didn’trespond to a request for comment
Ukrai-Ukrainian officials say they areworking on addressing concernsbut add that pro-separatist stationsexaggerate the problem
One common theme from theseparatist broadcasting is that theUkraine government does nothingwhile its soldiers sit in the mud onthe front lines
“If I watch or listen to it for anhour or two, it hits you in thehead,” said Lt Col Oleksandr Va-sylenko “Whether you want it to
or not, it just influences you Eventhough you know it is propaganda.”
The U.S ambassador to Ukraine,Geoffrey Pyatt, called the informa-tion war in eastern Ukraine part of
a larger struggle “The point of thisRussian propaganda is not to winthe argument and it is certainly not
to illuminate the truth,” he said “It
is to confuse It is part of their senal.”
ar-Russian officials such as cow’s ambassador to the North At-lantic Treaty Organization, Alexan-
Mos-der Grushko, say Russia has nodirect role in the fighting inUkraine Separatist and Russian of-ficials say the reports Westernerscall propaganda are factual broad-casts, not controlled by Russia,about Ukrainian government in-competence or corruption It is theU.S and Ukraine that are mislead-ing the public, Russian officials say
In setting up the Ukraine armyradio station, Mr Makukhin hashad help from a U.S nonprofit
called Spirit of America Unlike
many nongovernment tions in war zones that pledge neu-trality, this one tries to align its ef-forts with U.S objectives
organiza-In Afghanistan, Spirit of ica’s workers were stationed in thefield, helping provide nonlethalequipment to local police forcesworking with U.S special operationforces In Ukraine, it is providing
Amer-$200,000 to outfit Army FM’s dio and put up transmitters, includ-ing one just 36 miles from Donetsk
stu-“The entrepreneurial, capital approach is somethingthat’s rarely applied in these situa-tions overseas,” said Jim Hake, theNGO’s founder “The core of that is
venture-to support the initiative of peopleclosest to the problem…see what
Trang 13© 2016 Dow Jones & Company All Rights Reserved. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, May 30, 2016 | B1
BUSINESS &TECH.
Qualcomm’s China Market
Mizuho Warns on Sales-Tax Risks
FINANCE | B13
INSIDE:
MONEY&
INVESTING
The airline industry has
finally shaken off its
boom-and-bust past, says the head
of the world’s largest carrier,
but investors aren’t buying it
because familiar signs of
trouble loom on the horizon
Global airfares are falling
as carriers add ever more
fears are weighing on
book-ings and, even as more
pas-sengers take to the skies,
growth is stalling in some
regions
It is a challenging mix for
the 200-plus airline
execu-tives gathering in Dublin this
week for the industry’s
an-nual jamboree hosted by the
International Air Transport
Association, a trade group
The message they would
like to deliver echoes that of
American Airlines Group
Inc Chief Executive Doug
Parker in a well-publicized
speech in March
“We have an industry
that also can be a real
busi-ness like other busibusi-nesses,”
said Mr Parker, who has
spearheaded much of the
consolidation that has
al-lowed airlines to become
more efficient, and last year
earn more than their cost of
capital for the first time
“The airline business has
been fundamentally and
“We’re not going to try and
get into a boom and bust,” BP’schief financial officer, BrianGilvary, said in a conferencecall last month Even at $60 abarrel, he said, “We wouldn’t
be looking to significantly
ramp [activity] up.”
Shell this week announced afresh round of job cuts acrossits business, bringing its totalplanned for the year to at least5,000
Oil hitting $50 a barrelmight boost smaller producers
in places such as the U.S.’sshale fields, sending their rela-tively low-cost projects intothe black But many of the ex-pensive, long-term projectsthat big oil companies special-ize in, such as deep-waterwells, require higher prices to
be profitable
Still, some larger oil nies say they can boost pro-duction as prices reach the $50threshold, though the increase
compa-Please see OIL page B2
The world’s biggest energycompanies are treating withcaution the rally that brieflylifted crude-oil prices over $50
a barrel last week, wary ofboosting spending and produc-tion too soon
Companies including Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC and BP PLC spent
huge sums on giant new oiland natural-gas projects asprices surged over the past de-cade, only to make large corre-sponding cuts to their develop-ment budgets when pricesplunged in 2014 and 2015
Oil prices are recovering,topping $50 a barrel for the
on Thursday—nearly doublethe price in January—before
B Y S ARAH K ENT
A ND L YNN C OOK
Oil Firms Remain Shy Despite Upswing
Expensive projects require higher oil prices Above, Polar Pioneer rig.
are emitted by cellphones
The researchers, as well asscientists not involved in thestudy, said it was still too soon
to draw sweeping conclusions
cause cancer
“Much work remains to bedone to understand the impli-cations, if any, of these find-ings on the rapidly changingcellular technologies that are
in use today,” said John R cher, the associate director ofthe Department of Health andHuman Services run NationalToxicology Program, whichconducted the study Yet “wefelt it was important to getthe word out.”
Bu-Scientists pointed out some
of the unusual findings:
Tu-Please see PHONE page B3
For almost as long as
peo-ple have had cellphones,
scien-tists have been debating
whether the now-ubiquitous
devices cause health effects
More than a decade ago,
the U.S government set in
motion a study to help answer
the question Its initial
find-ings were released last week
The researchers said the
find-ings were significant enough
that they felt the urgency to
release the results before the
entire study was complete
The study found “low
inci-dences” of two types of
tu-mors—one in the brain and
one in the heart—in male rats
that were exposed to the kinds
of low-level radio waves that
kicked off the U.S recalls onFriday
Honda, Takata’s largest tomer, recalled roughly 4.5million vehicles, includingsome that had already beenrecalled earlier Fiat Chryslerrecalled 4.3 million vehicles
cus-Japanese officials orderedcar makers to recall as many
as seven million more vehicleswith Takata air bags, bringingthe total there to 19.6 million
Japan’s recall, to be carriedout in phases, must be com-pleted by the end of March
2019, an official at the port ministry said Friday
trans-The latest recalls in Japancover car makers includingHonda, Toyota, Nissan, Mit-
subishi and Mazda Motors
Corp., the transport ministrysaid Takata shares fell 8.1% to
¥421 ($3.82) in Tokyo on
Fri-day, after surging 21% a dayearlier on hopes the companywould find an investor to help
it restructure
The air bags use ammoniumnitrate as a propellant in theirinflaters, a setup found to de-stabilize and lead to explo-sions amid prolonged exposure
Shigehisa Takada in May saidhis company would cooperate
on the expanded recalls andwork with U.S regulators andauto makers to develop long-term, orderly solutions to thesafety crisis He added that
the company remains ted to safety and restoringconfidence with drivers
commit-The recalls are proving ing for consumers, who insome cases need to get vehi-cles fixed more than once andface parts shortages when go-ing to dealerships for repairs
vex-The death toll from the airbags, meanwhile, could rise
Honda in May pointed to twofatal crashes in Malaysia inwhich air bags ruptured,though officials hadn’t yet de-termined causes of death
For Takata, the crisis isleading to financial losses,strained relations with carmakers and litigation and gov-ernment investigations, whichcould lead to penalties thatfurther drain its coffers
Takata posted a $121 lion loss for the year ended inMarch, and logged more than
mil-$180 million in special lossesfor recalls and settling of legalclaims from air-bag victims
Car makers on Friday
re-called millions more vehicles
world-wide with faulty Takata
Corp air bags, further
escalat-ing an automotive-safety crisis
linked to at least 11 deaths and
more than 100 injuries
In the U.S., more than 12
million additional vehicles will
need air bags replaced
ini-tially, according to filings with
U.S regulators The U.S safety
campaigns are part of a
mas-sive expansion disclosed
ear-lier in May requiring the recall
of as many as an additional 40
million air bags that risk
rup-turing and spraying shrapnel
in vehicle cabins All told,
nearly 70 million air bags are
being recalled in the U.S
Honda Motor Co., Fiat
Car Makers Widen Air-Bag Recalls
A recalled Takata air-bag inflator New recalls hit Takata’s shares.
Airline Executives Look to Soothe Investors
The industry will need
Investors have shruggedand headed for the exits,dragging an index of globalairline stocks down 6.4%
since the start of the year
U.S carriers have been hithardest, with Mr Parker’sAmerican shedding a quarter
of its value even as it pouredprofits into stock buybacks
Demand isn’t the lem Global passenger num-
prob-bers rose 7% in the firstquarter from a year earlier,driven largely by growthamong carriers in Asia andthe Middle East
Fliers are paying less,with global fares down anaverage 4% through Apriland particularly weak ontrans-Atlantic flights and inthe U.S
Average U.S domesticfares haven’t risen in morethan a year and airlinesdon’t expect them to stabi-lize before the end of 2016
Hunter Keay, airline
ana-lyst at Wolfe Research LLC,last week boosted his airlineinvestor-sentiment gauge to
4, on a scale of 1 to 10, ing pegged it at 1 or 2 formuch of the year “This isthe 2016 version of goodnews, sadly,” he said of therecent raise
hav-The executives gathered
in Dublin have few levers topull to soothe disgruntled in-vestors or those passengersfacing long security lines atairports in coming months
Airlines can cut flights togain more control over fares
Some U.S carriers such as
Delta Air Lines Inc have
re-cently announced plans totrim capacity after the LaborDay holiday in September InEurope, British Airways par-
ent International dated Airlines Group SA and Deutsche Lufthansa AG
Consoli-have also scaled back
Executives have to becareful in Dublin Antitrustlaws bar them from discuss-ing or coordinating fares inmost markets Commentsmade at last year’s IATA
Please see AIRLINES page B2
Airlines face challenges such as lower fares The International Air Transport Association convenes its annual gathering this week.
Corp., joining a line of failed forts by Chinese companies tobuy U.S rivals
ef-Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co said
the two sides failed to agree on
a price after Terex last weekdelivered an ultimatum: final-ize terms for the whole com-pany by May 31, or lose one ofTerex’s key units to a $1.3 bil-
Konecranes Oyj.
A push by China for seas assets is running into hur-dles, ranging from securing fi-
among local regulators andlawmakers Terex makes cranesfor loading ship cargo, anddeals involving U.S port infra-structure have long been politi-cally sensitive
Shares of the based company fell 14% to
Connecticut-$20.89 on Friday in the wake ofthe deal’s collapse—for whichthe two parties offered differ-ing accounts
Zoomlion said plans nounced in the preceding week
an-by Terex to sell its maritimeport and factory cranes busi-nesses to Konecranes left thetwo sides unable to agree on aprice for the remainder Terexsaid the Chinese companycouldn’t formalize its $31-a-share, or $3.4 billion, offer forthe entire company, includingcommitments for financing thepurchase
“After many months of cussions, Zoomlion was unable
dis-to provide a fully financed,binding proposal for the pur-chase of Terex with or withoutthe material handling and port
Chairman David Sachs said in awritten statement
Terex had been pressuring
months to confirm detailed nancing for the purchase.Zoomlion is part-owned byChina’s Hunan provincial gov-ernment and had tapped state-owned banks including ChinaDevelopment Bank, China Con-struction Bank and Bank ofChina to fund the Terex deal,according to people familiarwith the situation
fi-Please see SUITOR page B2
B Y B OB T ITA
A ND K ANE W U
Chinese Suitor Gives Up U.S Bid
14%
Drop in Terex’s share price Friday after Zoomlion Heavy Industry threw in the towel.
Heard on the Street: Chinese firms end bids abruptly B16
Trang 14INDEX TO BUSINESSES
These indexes cite notable references to most parent companies and businesspeople
in today’s edition Articles on regional page inserts aren’t cited in these indexes.
N
News Corp B2 Nissan Motor B1 Novorossia TV A12
O
Oracle B3
P
Parsley Energy B15 Philippine Amusement and Gaming A1
Q
Qualcomm B3
R
Riverstone Holdings.B15 Royal Dutch Shell B1 Royal London Asset Management B15
Rystad Energy B2
S
Samsung Electronics B16 Seven West Media B2 SGL Carbon B2 State Bank of India B16 STX Offshore &
Shipbuilding B2 Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group B15
T
Takata B1 Takeda
Pharmaceutical B16 Terex B1 Titan
Pharmaceuticals B3 Toyota Motor B1 Twitter B16
V
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International B16
W
Wells Fargo B15 Williams B16
Z
Zoomlion Heavy Industry B16 Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science &
Again for Bankruptcy
Hercules OffshoreInc said it
would again file for bankruptcy, this
time planning to liquidate as the
ocean driller goes out of business
amid the long swoon in oil prices
Less than seven months after
exiting bankruptcy court with
$450 million in fresh financing
and a lighter debt load, Hercules
said Friday that it reached a deal
with 99% of its senior lenders
that will be executed with a
“prepackaged” chapter 11 filing
In a prepackaged bankruptcy,
companies line up creditor
sup-port for their debt-payment
plans before seeking chapter 11
protection, allowing them a
speedier—and cheaper—trip
through bankruptcy
Hercules’s plan would see the
company liquidate its assets and
use the proceeds to repay
credi-tors The company expects to be
able to pay unsecured creditors in
full and provide as much as $12.5
million to shareholders
Senior lender recoveries will
be based on the success of the
asset sales The company said
Friday that it already has lined up
a $196 million offer for its harsh
environment jackup rig, formerly
named Hercules Highlander, to
Maersk Highlander UK Ltd
As reasons for its distress,
Hercules cited “the ongoing
de-cline in oil prices, the
consolida-tion of its U.S customer base
and the addition of new capacity
[that] negatively impacted day
rates and demand for Hercules’s
L
Lindell, Grant B15 Lindzon, Howard B16
M
Makukhin, Alexey A12 McRae, Eric B15 Mellier, Philippe B2
N
Nelson, Randy B15
O
Olsen, Yngvild B3 Omens, Mark B16
R
Rousseau, Jacques A1
S
Sem, Claude B13 Seppala, Marvin B3 Sheldon, Behshad B3 Swanson, Michael B13
Zoomlion joins a growinglist of Chinese companies un-able to complete acquisitionsoutside of the country In aprominent case, Anbang Insur-ance Group Co entered into abidding war with Marriott In-ternational Inc for control ofStarwood Hotels & ResortsWorldwide Inc., but abandonedits $14 billion bid in March,citing only “various marketconsiderations.”
Such failed attempts couldmake bankers and potential ac-quisition targets wary of enter-taining overtures from China
That said, there have been
some high-profile deals struck
by Chinese businesses thisyear, including China NationalChemical Corp.’s $43 billion of-fer for Swiss seed giant Syn-genta AG So far this year, over-
companies totals $119 billion,according to Dealogic, whichcompares with $107 billion forall of 2015
China’s ment market has been mired in
construction-equip-a slump Zoomlion went public
in January with an unsolicited
$30-a-share offer for Westport,Conn.-based Terex The offerdisrupted Terex’s plan fromlast August for an all-stockmerger with Konecranes
—Joanne Chiu contributed to this article.
LONDON—De Beers named
a new chief executive on Friday
as the storied diamond pany steers through a roughpatch of weak demand and lowprices for the precious gems
com-Bruce Cleaver, 51 years old,will succeed Philippe Mellier aschief executive on July 1 Mr
Cleaver currently heads strategyand business development at
U.K.-based mining company glo American PLC, which owns
An-85% of De Beers
Mr Mellier, 60, is steppingdown after serving what he hadsaid would be a five-year stint
to revive De Beers’s fortunes
De Beers is among the gest diamond producers in theworld and is the gem’s mostimportant seller, having effec-tively marketed diamonds as
big-Government-owned China is interested in acquir-ing all of SGL Carbon but isopen to other options, accord-ing to Manager Magazin
Chem-A spokesman for SGL bon said the company has pro-vided potential investors withinformation about its graphiteelectrodes business He saidthe possible sale of the entirecompany was “pure specula-tion” and declined to commentfurther on it
Car-Ms Klatten’s investmentvehicle, Skion, holds a 27%
stake in SGL Carbon
A ChemChina spokesmandidn’t immediately respondwith a comment and Ms Klat-ten couldn’t immediately bereached
BERLIN—Shares in
jumped 12% on Friday
that China National Chemical
Corp was interested in
acquir-ing the graphite-electrode and
carbon-fiber maker
ChemChina Chairman Ren
Jianxin has held talks several
times with SGL Carbon Chief
Executive Juergen Koehler and
its main shareholder Susanne
Klatten, Germany’s Manager
Magazin reported
SGL Carbon wants to spin
off its carbon electrodes
busi-ness, which supplies the steel
sector where weak prices have
been weighing on demand
B Y F RIEDRICH G EIGER
SGL Carbon Surges
As ChemChina Circles
uncertainties is whether the
$50 threshold will lead them tofinish the many wells that aredrilled but not yet pumping infields from Texas to North Da-
4,000 according to data from
consulting firm Rystad ergy “Consensus appears to
En-be building around the notionthat $50 to $55 is tantamount
to an industry ‘all clear,’ ” lysts at Tudor, Pickering, Holt
ana-& Co said
Further out in the futuresmarket, oil is trading over $50
a barrel into 2017 That allowscompanies to hedge their fu-ture output by locking inhigher prices today for oil theywon’t pump until next year,said John England, a vicechairman of oil for DeloitteLLP in Houston
The prevailing view on WallStreet is that $60-a-barrel oil
is the new $90, the priceneeded to trigger the sort ofproduction growth seen duringthe last upswing, said EvanCalio, head of U.S oil research
at Morgan Stanley
—Erin Ailworth contributed to this article.
more favorable rates
Also on the Dublin agenda
is the prospect of a new costheadwind as regulators con-sider making carriers pay forcarbon-dioxide emissions
Airlines are exempt fromthe global climate change dealstruck in Paris last December,but pressure has been mount-ing on politicians and regula-
from commercial flights
Environmental groups fretthat the airline industry’srapid growth could undermineother climate-change initia-tives unless limits are im-posed The International CivilAviation Organization, an arm
of the United Nations, is trying
to secure agreement on amechanism to limit the indus-
an essential engagement giftsince the mid-20th century
But the South African pany has struggled in the pastyear amid an economic slow-down in China, where bur-geoning wealth had previouslyfueled sales of diamonds DeBeers’s underlying earningsshrank 72% last year to $258million
com-De Beers cut production tohelp rebalance supply and de-mand That led diamond traders
to sell down bloated inventories
of polished diamonds as sumer demand reached its sea-sonal year-end holiday peak
con-The production cutbackshave helped buoy rough-dia-mond prices, although demandebbed recently due to a sea-sonal lull in buying activity
Still, De Beers has become
an important profit center forparent company Anglo Ameri-can
Diamonds accounted for 31%
of Anglo’s underlying earningslast year, making it the group’ssecond-most important earningsdriver after coal Anglo’s heavy-
weight divisions of years past—
such as iron ore, copper andplatinum—have struggled due
to a drop in metal prices tomultiyear lows
In a news release, Mr lier said he steered the com-pany “through some of the di-amond industry’s toughesttimes and with the marketshowing signs of recovery,now is the right time for me
Mel-to pass the baMel-ton Mel-to the nextgeneration.”
Mr Cleaver joined De Beers
as general counsel in 2005, coming commercial director in
be-2007 In 2010 he was pointed an interim co-CEO ofthe company before Mr Mel-lier became CEO in 2011 Mr
ap-Cleaver headed strategy andbusiness development for DeBeers before assuming his cur-rent role in 2015
Anglo American CEO MarkCutifani said Mr Cleaver’s ap-pointment will provide conti-nuity to Mr Mellier’s workgiven that the two spent much
of the past decade working gether on executing strategy
to-De Beers Gets New CEO
Change at top comes
has filed for receivership, infurther evidence of the chal-lenges facing global shipbuild-ers mired in one of the indus-try’s worst slumps
The filing with the SeoulCentral District Court on Fri-day came just two days aftercreditors for STX Offshore dis-continued providing a lifelineafter years of financial assis-tance failed to keep the com-pany afloat
The court will soon mine whether STX Offshoreshould be liquidated or given achance for survival after rigor-ous debt restructuring, thecompany said
deter-State-run Korea ment Bank, the company’smain creditor, said Wednesdaythat any additional bailoutfunds would do little to helpthe company while it struggles
Develop-to get shipbuilding orders inits current situation
STX Offshore, once thecountry’s fourth-largest ship-builder by revenue, has beenunder the control of its cred-itors since April 2013 afterlosing money from opera-tions and amassing hugedebt
The creditors injected lions of dollars to bail it out,but it still ran a 314 billionwon ($265 million) operatingloss last year, following a 1.5trillion won loss in 2014 Thecompany owes financial in-stitutions nearly 6 trillionwon
bil-As a glut of vessels and lowfreight rates have created a fi-nancial nightmare for manyshipbuilders, the Korean gov-ernment said last month that
it would push for sector solidation, particularly in the
The world’s three largest
Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co and
Samsung Heavy IndustriesCo.—are also staggering underheavy debt loads
B Y I N- S OO N AM
Korean Shipbuilder Could Be Liquidated
cur-tailing growth
ICAO members pledged toimprove the fuel efficiency ofcommercial aircraft by 2% ayear and to see that any in-dustry growth beyond 2020won’t increase pollution
ICAO representatives vened in May to help bridgedifferences between memberstates about what the systemmight look like
con-Exactly how much of an line’s carbon emissions willneed to be offset is still beingnegotiated IATA estimatesthat the airline industry’s an-nual bill would be about $2.8billion compared with pro-jected profits this year of $36billion, a forecast expected to
air-be updated this week
meeting in Miami form part of
a class-action lawsuit lodgedagainst four U.S carriers,which all deny the charges
Cheaper jet fuel has beenthe biggest driver of higherprofits, but prices have beenrising since January Still, theairline industry should deliverstrong earnings this year, saidPeter Morris, chief economist
at aviation consultant AscendWorldwide Ltd
Many carriers in Europeand Asia are only starting tosee the benefit from cheaperfuel as costly fuel hedges,made before crude tumbled,are replaced by ones made at
Continued from the prior page
AIRLINES
trigger for us,” said Jeff bury, vice president of investorrelations, when Exxon dis-cussed first-quarter earnings
Wood-in late April
The company cares moreabout the broad supply-and-demand balance across thewhole world, he said
Global oil demand is ing, but not fast enough to out-pace the crude supply glut thathas built up over the past twoyears A forecast from the In-
grow-ternational Energy Agency nowprojects a strong rebound inthe second half of 2016, withoil demand rising by 1.8 millionbarrels a day to 96.8 millionbarrels a day by the fourthquarter
Although many U.S ers have said $50 oil won’tspur them to rush out and tapnew wells, one of the bigger
produc-$60-a-barrel oil is the price needed to kindle a production rise, analysts say.
Seven West MediaLtd is in
discussions with News Corp to
buy Western Australian per The Sunday Times and newswebsite Perth Now
newspa-The Perth-based company,which owns the West Australiannewspaper as well as free-to-airbroadcaster Seven Network, onFriday said any deal would boostearnings in the first year afterthe acquisition but would besubject to approval from Austra-lia’s antitrust regulator
As part of the agreement,Seven West Media and NewsCorp plan to implement a newscontent sharing agreement forthe West Australian with News’
daily brands in Adelaide,
Bris-China Development Bankwas expected to lead the fi-nancing, they said However,the policy bank hadn’t yet pro-vided a commitment letter toZoomlion, one of the peoplesaid
Chinese officials have beentrying to slow an exodus ofmoney from the country, mak-ing life tougher for companiesthat need to trade the yuan forU.S dollars to do business TheWall Street Journal earlier re-ported that China’s foreign-ex-change regulator had askedbanks to more closely reviewforeign-currency transactions;
Continued from the prior page
SUITOR
might be modest
Although many of Chevron
Corp.’s mega projects aroundthe globe need higher prices to
be profitable, the company cently said that its Permian Ba-sin operations in West Texascan hum along with crude at
re-$50 Chevron has slashed 40%
from its costs in the area andnow has 4,000 wells there thatgive a 10% rate of return whenWest Texas Intermediate, theU.S benchmark price, is at $50
“We are now in full tal factory mode in the Perm-ian,” said Joe Geagea, an exec-
technology and services atChevron, comparing drillingoperations there to a stream-lined manufacturing process
Exxon hit the brakes thisyear, slashing its budget by25% and dropping the number
of drilling rigs it runs in theU.S from close to 60 at theheight of the oil boom to about
16 as it delayed shale tion “It’s not really a price
produc-Continued from the prior page
OIL
bane, Melbourne and Sydney
The company said the sition would allow it to exploreexpansion of its printing opera-tions which could deliver scalebenefits and synergies
acqui-—Rebecca Thurlow
CHINA
Nuclear Company
To Build Sudan Plant
China is to build Sudan’s firstnuclear reactor, as the East Afri-can nation moves to boost elec-tricity generation and avert alooming power crisis
The reactor will be built by
China National Nuclear Power
Co The 600-megawatt powerplant would supply electricity tothe Sudanese capital, Khartoum,
as well as several other towns