A month after the killing of the Saudi sident Jamal Khashoggi, the growing in-ternational consensus that CrownPrince Mohammed bin Salman was be-hind it has done almost nothing to weak- d
Trang 1A DESERT UTOPIA
PAGE 8 | BUSINESS
Late one afternoon in the difficult spring
of this year, Gustavo Dudamel stood stage at the Barbican Center in London,preparing to enter the realm of higherbeauty His baton was raised; 218 musi-cians, his chosen companions on thevoyage he was about to undertake,looked up at him
on-Not so many people believe in higherbeauty these days, but Dudamel, theconductor of the Los Angeles Philhar-monic, believes in it He believes in truthtoo, and in joy — especially in joy — and
in the fellowship of humankind and the
freedom of the human spirit where he goes, he brings a dog-earedcopy of Rousseau’s “Confessions” andthe battered “Also Sprach Zarathustra”
Every-that he has carried around since hisyouth in Venezuela Now he and his or-chestra, along with the chorus of theLondon Symphony, were about to tackleone of the purest expressions of theideals he finds most stirring — the finalmovement of Beethoven’s Ninth Sym-phony, the “Ode to Joy.”
Dudamel has been the music director
of the orchestra for almost a decade,since he was hired as a 28-year-old wun-derkind out of Caracas He has becomeone of the most famous conductors inthe world, renowned for the energy hebrings to a live performance; he hasbeen called the savior of classical music
so often that there’s an entire grumpysubwing of classical-music criticismdedicated to proving he isn’t At 37 hisfamous hair, the weightless black curls
DUDAMEL, PAGE 20
Gustavo Dudamel rehearsing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic He has been the
music director for almost a decade, since he was hired as a 28-year-old wunderkind.
SHAUGHN AND JOHN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A maestro whose career
is one long ode to joy
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Gustavo Dudamel firmly believes music can bring the world together
BY BRIAN PHILLIPS
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
A month after the killing of the Saudi sident Jamal Khashoggi, the growing in-ternational consensus that CrownPrince Mohammed bin Salman was be-hind it has done almost nothing to weak-
dis-en his grip on power over the kingdom.The crown prince owes his apparentimpunity partly to the nature of power inSaudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy and
to his own proven ruthlessness But healso owes it to the Trump administra-tion It has decided to stand by him, ac-cording to three people familiar with theWhite House deliberations
Barring a surprise intervention by hisaging father, King Salman, there is ev-ery expectation that Prince Moham-med, 33, will succeed him and dominateSaudi Arabia for a half-century to come.White House officials knew from anOct 9 phone call with Prince Moham-med that he considered Mr Khashoggi,
a Virginia resident and Washington Postcontributor, a dangerous Islamist, twopeople familiar with the call said, so theofficials knew he had a potential motivefor the killing
But having invested deeply in PrinceMohammed as the main driver of the ad-ministration’s agenda for the region,and under pressure from allies who sup-port him — notably the leaders of Israeland Egypt — the Trump administrationhas concluded that it cannot feasiblylimit his power, the people familiar with
SAUDI ARABIA, PAGE 5
Saudi prince retains his grip, in spite
of outrage
LONDON
U.S backing is said
to help him hold on after killing of dissident
BY DAVID D KIRKPATRICKAND BEN HUBBARD
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appears to have no serious rivals.
BANDAR ALGALOUD/SAUDI ROYAL PALACE
KARACHI, PAKISTAN After spending
eight years on death row, Asia Bibi, a
Christian, was acquitted by Pakistan’s
Supreme Court this week For many
here it seemed like a good day The
country’s highest court had finally
delivered justice and released a
wom-an whose life has already been
de-stroyed by years in solitary
confine-ment The court decision quoted
Is-lamic scriptures, bits of letters by the
Prophet Muhammad and a smattering
of Shakespeare Agreat wrong wasrighted
And that’s whyPakistan’s newreligious right,which has re-branded itself asthe protector of theProphet’s honor,has threatened tobring the country to
a halt
Posters were put
up with fatwasagainst the judges who had issued the
Bibi decision The judges’ guards and
cooks were urged to kill them before
evening; anyone who did would earn
great rewards in the afterlife Pakistani
conservatives, emboldened by gains in
the general election this summer,
goaded the generals into rebelling
against the army chief, whom they
accused of being an Ahmadi, a
perse-cuted religious minority They called
Prime Minister Imran Khan a “Jew
child.”
Khan, in an impromptu address to
the nation, seemed appalled at the
language and the implication: He said
his government had already done more
than any other for Islam and warned
protesters not to take on the state But
the mobs will settle for nothing short of
Bibi’s public hanging
Bibi probably didn’t even know what
blasphemy was when she was accused
of committing it There are many
ver-sions of what led to the charges
against her, but all revolve around a
verbal altercation with Muslim
neigh-bors in Punjab, an eastern province,
The island, Sakkiluoto, belongs toPavel Melnikov, a 54-year-old Russianfrom St Petersburg, who has dotted theproperty with security cameras, motiondetectors and no-trespassing signs em-blazoned with the picture of a fearsome-looking guard in a black balaclava Theisland also has nine piers, a helipad, aswimming pool draped in camouflagenetting and enough housing — all of itequipped with satellite dishes — to ac-commodate a small army
The whole thing is so strange that theSept 22 raid, one of 17 in the same area
Retired to a tiny island in an archipelagobetween Finland and Sweden, Leo Gast-givar awoke early one morning to visitthe outhouse in his bathrobe, only to no-tice two black speedboats packed withFinnish commandos in camouflage fa-tigues waiting in the bay near his frontdoor
After an exchange of awkward ings, Mr Gastgivar went inside, col-lected a pair of binoculars and watched
greet-on the same day, has stirred feveredspeculation in Finland that the island’sreal owner could be the Russian mili-tary Finnish officials have attributedthe raid to a crackdown on money laun-dering and cheating on tax and pensionpayments
But few are convinced More than 400Finnish police officers and military per-sonnel swooped down on Sakkiluoto and
16 other properties in western Finlandlinked to Russia Helicopters and a sur-veillance plane provided support Theair space over the region was closed toall craft not involved in the security op-eration
When Prime Minister Dmitri A
Medvedev of Russia visited Helsinki,Finland’s capital, a few days after theraid, he scoffed when asked at a newsconference if Russia had been preparinglanding zones for military helicopters on
Finnish islands “I don’t know in whosesick mind such a thought could be for-mulated,” Mr Medvedev said “Suchthinking is paranoid.”
Yet the problem for Russia, and nowalso for Finland, is credibility Moscowhas denied so many strange and sinisterthings that have turned out to be true —
or at least far more plausible than theKremlin’s often-risible counter stories
— that even the most seemingly fetched speculation about Russian mis-chief tends to acquire traction
far-One former member of the FinnishParliament, who once served as a bor-der guard officer, has claimed withoutevidence that Russia had plans to builddocks to service its submarines Onetheory popular on social media is thatthe raided islands — which lie nearFinnish military installations and im-
ISL AND, PAGE 4
The headquarters on the Finnish mainland of Airiston Helmi, a company that Pavel Melnikov, a Russian businessman who owns properties in western Finland, helped to set up.
KSENIA IVANOVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mystery island in Finland
SAKKILUOTO, FINLAND
Russian owner has dotted
a tiny property with 9 piers and security cameras
BY ANDREW HIGGINS
INTERNATIONAL
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Trang 2page two
SANTIAGO, CHILE Ana González, a less Chilean human rights advocatewhose husband, two sons and pregnantdaughter-in-law disappeared during thePinochet dictatorship, has died in Santi-ago She was 93 and never learned thefate of her family members
relent-Her death on Oct 26 was confirmed
by her daughter, Patricia Recabarren
In late April 1976, Ms González’s sonsManuel, 22, and Luis, 29, and Luis’s wife,Nalvia Alvarado, 20, who was threemonths pregnant, were seized by secu-rity forces on their way home from theprint shop where the brothers worked.The abductors left the couple’s 2-year-old boy on the street Early the nextmorning, when Ms González’s husbandleft to look for his missing children, hetoo was kidnapped She never saw orheard from any of them again
They were among the 3,000 peoplewho disappeared or died during the mili-tary dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet,who was installed in a coup in 1973 thatoverthrew Chile’s democraticallyelected president, Salvador Allende.The disappearances began almost im-mediately after the coup, with oppo-nents of military rule snatched from thestreets and taken to clandestine torturecenters Ms González became one of theearly members of the Association of Rel-atives of the Disappeared, vowing toturn her grief into political action and torefrain from crying until she knew thefull truth of what had happened to herfamily
She joined dozens of others in thegroup, mainly women, who took to thestreets at a time of fierce political re-pression and widespread fear They pro-tested, went on hunger strikes, chainedthemselves to the gates of the outlawedNational Congress and marched relent-lessly with photographs of their missingloved ones pinned to their chests
Ms González’s abiding optimism andsense of humor helped make her a high-profile campaigner for justice
“They never thought that a woman, ahousewife who didn’t know anything,not even where the courts were located,would take up the battle cry,” she said in
an interview with The New York Times
Once democracy was restored there
in 1990, she continued to demand justiceand the truth about the fate of her lovedones and the other Chileans who haddisappeared
Ana González was born on July 26,
1925, one of six children of a widowedmother, in Tocopilla, a city 800 milesnorth of Santiago, the capital
She became involved with the munist Party in her teens and in 1944married Manuel Recabarren, who wasalso an active party member Mr Re-cabarren led a local food distributioncommittee under the socialist Allendeadministration, making him a target ofthe right-wing dictatorship The cou-ple’s sons and daughter-in-law werealso members of the Communist Party
Com-In addition to her daughter, Ms.González is survived by two sons, Ricar-
do and Vladimir, and numerous children and great-grandchildren An-other daughter, Ana María, died of can-cer in 2007
grand-In 2010, Ms González figured nently on posters and in television ad-vertisements as part of a governmentcampaign to collect DNA samples fromthe relatives of the disappeared so theycould be matched with unidentified hu-man remains in the morgue
promi-After her death, hundreds of peoplecame to her home in spontaneous ex-pressions of affection that reflected
“what she represented, her principles,her values and her struggle,” Congress-woman Maya Fernández, the grand-daughter of Salvador Allende, said “Shekept on fighting, but with a strong lovefor life.”
Judicial investigations eventually termined that Ms González’s husbandhad been taken to at least two torturecenters before vanishing But at herdeath, Ms González had come no closer
de-to knowing anything about the fate ofthe others, including her unborn grand-child, than she was in 1976
She turned her pain into activism for the abducted
ANA GONZÁLEZ 1925-2018
BY PASCALE BONNEFOY
Ana González spent decades trying to find her abducted family members in Chile.
SANTIAGO LLANQUIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Cicely Berry, whose unorthodox
exer-cises released actors’ minds to feel the
sound and muscularity of Shakespeare’s
verse for nearly a half-century as the
Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice
di-rector, died on Oct 15 in Cornwall,
Eng-land She was 92
Her daughter, Sara Moore, confirmed
her death and said Ms Berry had
re-cently had two small strokes
Ms Berry was not an acting teacher,
but her passionate work as a voice
direc-tor influenced the stage and screen
per-formances of generations of British
ac-tors, including Sean Connery, Judi
Dench, Emily Watson and Patrick
Stew-art
Ms Berry, who was known as Cis,
used her understanding of Shakespeare
to help actors absorb the rhythms of his
language and the weight of his words It
was not enough to grasp his literal
meaning, she argued; one had to feel his
vowels and consonants and to
appreci-ate the beats of the iambic pentameter
in which he wrote
Only then, she said, would an actor’s
voice be capable of evoking
Shake-speare’s poetry and musicality
“When we read a piece of text, our
first impulse is to make sense of it,” she
said during a workshop with British and
American actors in 1996 that was
repro-duced as a book and DVDs titled
“Work-ing Shakespeare” (2004) “The danger
is that, having come to a conclusion
about the meaning, we often miss out on
the surprises within the language.”
In a soothing but commanding voicethat she leavened with profanity, Ms
Berry took actors at the Royal speare Company, one of Britain’s lead-ing theater organizations, throughmovements designed to bring them anew understanding of Shakespeare’sresonant language
Shake-She would tell a group of actors toread, in unison, the prologue from “Ro-meo and Juliet,” while appearing to walkaimlessly around a rehearsal room
“Walking around, speaking it all gether,” she said in the 1996 workshop,
to-as the actors meandered while ingly muttering the words, “frees us andhelps us understand the movement oflanguage, and we become familiar with
seem-the text without feeling seem-the pressure to
do it right.”
She also directed actors to toss chairsand kick beer cans while reciting Ham-let’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy Andshe devised breathing exercises andother activities that included having ac-tors bounce up and down on the floorwhile reading a “Macbeth” passage
“The exercises took away the fear andoverconcentration that actors used toapproach Shakespeare,” Jeffrey Horo-witz, founding artistic director of The-ater for a New Audience in New YorkCity, which is devoted to Shakespeareand other classics, said in a telephone in-terview Ms Berry held annual work-shops with his troupe in New York
Mr Horowitz described one exercise
in which several actors held the actressplaying Ophelia in “Hamlet” and hadher push against them while reciting the
“O, what a noble mind is hereo’erthrown” speech
“Cis wanted to show that the effort toovercome the physical resistance to thegroup is the same energy that wasneeded to reach the audience,” Mr Hor-owitz said “She felt that physical re-sponses to things like her exercises en-ergized the text.”
The actor Ian McKellen was anotheradmiring pupil “Her personal approach
is almost that of a confidante, relaxingthe mind and the body, or of a healersoothing tensions, rooting emotions inreality,” he said in an interview in 1976with The Times Saturday Review ofLondon “She prepares the actor to be atuned instrument, which may clearly,resonantly, play Shakespeare’s subtlestand grandest notes.”
Cicely Frances Berry was born onMay 17, 1926, in Berkhamsted, England
Her father, Cecil, was a city clerk, andher mother, Frances (Batchelor) Berry,was a part-time dressmaker
Cicely became enamored with poetry
as a youngster, often escaping her terous older siblings by retreating to thebathroom to read aloud Shakespeare,Keats, Shelley and Auden, sometimes toMicky, her dog
bois-“Taught myself, read it aloud to self,” she said in a video interview in
my-2014 with Jane Boston, an instructor atCentral School of Speech and Drama inLondon, which Ms Berry attended inthe 1940s “I was absolutely obsessed.”
After graduating, she was hired bythe school as a voice instructor Her rep-utation steadily grew and led Trevor
Nunn, the Royal Shakespeare’s artisticdirector at the time, to hire her as thecompany’s first voice director in 1969
She said she was fortunate to work forthree very different directors there: Mr
Nunn, John Barton and Terry Hands
“It was a wonderful, enlighteningtime to work on Shakespeare,” she told
Ms Boston “I started working on voice,but it quickly worked out that actorswould ask for advice or help on a speech,and I’d have to find ways of honoringwhat the director wanted but find ways
to get the actors to get their own sponses to the language.”
re-Ms Berry also taught at Nós doMorro, a theater company in the favelas
of Rio de Janeiro, and in various Britishprisons She also directed productions of
“King Lear” in Stratford-upon-Avon andLondon, wrote several books, including
“Voice and the Actor” (1973) and “TheActor and the Text” (1987), and was thedialogue coach for two BernardoBertolucci films, “The Last Emperor”
(1987) and “Stealing Beauty” (1996)
In addition to her daughter, she is vived by her sons, Aaron and SimeonMoore; four grandchildren; and twogreat-grandchildren Her husband,Harry Moore, an American-born actorwho was later a producer for the BBC,died in 1978
sur-The cadence, flow and power of guage that transformed Ms Berry as agirl in poetry’s thrall guided her into her10th decade
lan-“We were working on Thomas Kyd’s
‘The Spanish Tragedy’ a few years ago,”
she told The Guardian in 2011, “and theline kept coming out at me: ‘Wherewords prevail, not violence prevails.’
That’s the bottom line of what I feel mywork does.”
Bringing Shakespeare’s voice to the modern stage
Cicely Berry in 2008 She used her understanding of Shakespeare to help actors absorb the rhythms of his language and the weight of his words.
ELLIE KURTTZ/ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
CICELY BERRY
1926-2018
BY RICHARD SANDOMIR
The idea that anything labeled “food”
can be described as “disgusting” is a
minefield, running up against cultural
tastes and personal preferences, not to
mention the shrinking ability of some
countries to feed all their people
But clearly, if every human had a
cor-nucopia of the world’s edibles laid out on
a table stretching from one end of the
earth to the next, not everyone would
dig enthusiastically into, say, a lamprey
pie, a sliver of maggot-infested pecorino
or a chunk of rotten shark meat
A basic human reaction would surface
at some point: disgust And that
emo-tion is the basis for an unusual and
con-troversial exhibition here in Malmo, in
the south of Sweden
“I want people to question what they
find disgusting,” said Samuel West, the
lead curator of the Disgusting Food
Mu-seum, a touring pop-up exhibition that
opens on Wednesday
Visitors will be invited to explore their
notions of food through the lens of
dis-gust, said Dr West, an organizational
psychologist, who hopes the museum
will stimulate discussion and
self-reflec-tion
“What’s interesting is that disgust is
hard-wired biologically,” Dr West said
this week over a restaurant lunch of
cab-bage pudding “But you still have to
learn from your surroundings what you
should find disgusting.”
The idea for the exhibition was
prompted, in part, by his concerns about
the ecological impact of eating meat and
his own environmental footprint He
said he hoped the exhibition would
stim-ulate discussion about sustainable
pro-tein sources
“We can’t continue the way we are
now,” he said “I was asking myself, why
don’t we eat insects, when they are so
cheap and sustainable to produce? The
obstacle is disgust.”
When word of the exhibition broke,
people in some countries were aghast
that their favorite foods or treats were
included
“It’s interesting to see how everyone
comes to the defense of their own food,”
said Andreas Ahrens, the museum
di-rector “People can’t believe that we take
their favorite foods and put them in the
museum.”
More than 80 items from 35 countries
will be on display: Haggis, the Scottish
delicacy made of offal and oatmeal,
tra-ditionally boiled in a bag made from a
sheep’s stomach; Vegemite, the thick,
black yeasty spread from Australia; and
Spam, the pink-hued canned cooked
pork product that American troops
in-troduced to the cuisine of the Pacific
Is-landers in the years following World
War II, will be represented
So will dishes such as fruit bat soup
from Guam, a maggot-infested cheese
from Sardinia and a glass vat of Chinese
mouse wine
Visitors can sample items like root
beer, sauerkraut juice and salty licorice
But if you’re not up for tasting tofu with a
smell redolent of “stinky feet” and
“baby poo,” or durian fruit (banned on
planes and in some hotels) or hákarl, an
Icelandic shark dish once described by
the chef Anthony Bourdain as “the
sin-gle worst, most disgusting and terribletasting thing,” you can get a sense oftheir taste by taking a whiff from a
“smell jar.”
Mr Ahrens said that to make it intothe museum, foods had to be real andconsidered disgusting by many people
“It is inherently a somewhat tive thing to figure out what is disgust-ing,” he acknowledged
subjec-He said a panel worked its way down
a list of 250 foods based on four criteria:
taste, smell, texture and background,the latter being how an animal is treated
in the making of a dish, for example
Pork scored low on taste, smell andtexture on the “disgusting” scale, butvery high for background Japanesenatto — fermented soy beans — scoredhigh for its slimy texture
The factors that go into a feeling ofdisgust vary
A combination of textures, as with thesight of many insects on one surface,can make people feel ill at ease
“A crackling surface and soft drippinginterior can often evoke disgust,” saidHakan Jonsson, a food anthropologist atLund University in Sweden
Seeing the way animals are treated inthe preparation of food (displayed onvideo screens at the museum) can also
inspire revulsion: geese being force-fed
to make the French delicacy foie gras,fish served still flapping in Japan, orbeating cobra hearts in Vietnam
“Disgust is the result of a combination
of biological and cultural factors,” Dr
Jonsson said “And when it comes tofood, it is most often impossible to definewhat is biology and what is culture Youcan say that something is disgusting —
but only from the individual’s point ofview.”
While it is difficult to find somethingthat is disgusting to everyone, there arefoods that large groups of people uni-formly find disgusting
“Things that are particularly raw andalso things that are really rotten — theyare disgusting to most people,” he said
Disgust is also mutable
“We can change what we find ing,” said Rebecca Ribbing, a researcherworking on the exhibition
disgust-It has shifted in local cultures throughthe ages She cited lobster as an illustra-tion “In the 1600s, it was considered in-humane to feed lobster to prisonersmore than twice a week,” Ms Ribbingsaid (this is possibly because lobsterswere so common at the time)
Fried tarantula became popular withCambodians when food became scarceunder the Khmer Rouge regime in the1970s
This isn’t the first time Dr West, 44,
has explored hot-button issues through
a museum An innovation researcherwho advises companies on how to be-come more successful, he opened a Mu-seum of Failure in 2017 to examine whysome gadgets end up in the junkyard ofproduct history
Since news of the food museum wasannounced, there have been many com-plaints on social media, Mr Ahrens said
Australians are angry that Vegemite isincluded Americans are shocked thatroot beer made the exhibition
“I had the same reaction when wewere talking about my favorites likepork and beef,” he said “My initial reac-tion was that we can’t put this in here
When we talked about it, it was obviousthat we had to have it in the museum be-cause of the factory farming and the en-vironmental impact.”
If any of the items in this exhibitionmakes visitors want to throw up, the cu-rators have thought of this, too Theticket doubles as a sickness bag
What is so disgusting?
MALMO, SWEDEN
Museum asks its visitors
to explore why certain
edibles turn them off
BY CHRISTINA ANDERSON
Top, Samuel West, lead curator of the Disgusting Food Museum, with Japanese natto, fermented soy beans “A crackling surface and soft dripping interior can often evoke disgust,”
he said More than 80 items from 35 countries will be on display including, below from left, fruit bat soup; baby mice; and a boiled duck egg with a partly developed fetus.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATHIAS SVOLD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“I was asking myself, why don’t we eat insects, when they are so cheap and sustainable to produce?”
Trang 3The Scottish government said it was viewing its animal culling laws after aphotograph of an American hunter pos-ing with the carcass of a black-facedgoat with magnificent horns during ahunting trip to Scotland set off a furor onsocial media in the past week
re-The hunter, Larysa Switlyk, whoseTwitter account says she is from Floridaand is the host of a show called “LarysaUnleashed” on the Canadian channelWild TV, posted the image of the deadgoat on her Instagram account
“Beautiful wild goat here on the land of Islay in Scotland,” wrote Ms
Is-Switlyk, who describes herself on ter as “not your typical CPA, profes-sional huntress and angler.” “Such a funhunt!!”
Twit-Ms Switlyk added: “Made a perfect
200 yard shot and dropped him with thegunwerks and nightforce-optics! (Goodthing too because he could have ran offthe cliff into the water).”
She also posted on Twitter images ofother dead animals shot during thehunt, including a ram and a red stag, andappeared to have enjoyed eating thestag, publishing an image of cuts of meatwith vegetables with the caption “Noth-ing Better than enjoying what youhunt!! Fresh Red Stag from our hunt inthe highlands of Scotland!!”
Outraged Scots took to social media toslam what they saw as a cruel, boastfuldisplay, though some justified the legalhunt as necessary to cull a wild animalclassified as a nonnative invasivespecies in Scotland with no naturalpredators
But Sarah Moyes, a spokeswoman forOneKind, an organization dedicated toending cruelty to Scotland’s animals,said in an email: “It’s utterly shocking tosee these images of Larysa Switlyk andother hunters posing for photos with thewild animals they killed on a recent trip
to Scotland Yet again, instead of brating Scotland’s magnificent wildlife,
cele-we are seeing these beautiful animalsexploited in the name of sport.”
“This is not the kind of tourism weshould be encouraging in Scotland, letalone allowing to happen in the 21st cen-tury.”
A 2015 report shows that countrysports tourism in Scotland brings in 155million pounds, or almost $200 million,
to the economy every year, according tothe Scottish Country Sports TourismGroup
But hunting, or rather the display ofanimal trophies, has become a reviledactivity in some corners of social media,
as well-heeled individuals, including theolder sons of President Trump, proudlydisplay their trophies for the world to
see on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.The killing of Cecil the lion by anAmerican dentist, Dr Walter J Palmer,
in Zimbabwe in 2015 set off an tional outcry and drew new scrutiny tothe practice of paying to kill big game.Two years later, the lion’s son Xanda waskilled in a trophy hunt
interna-Since then, photographs of huntersposing triumphantly with the bodies ofanimals such as giraffes and a family ofbaboons have stirred global condemna-tion In the latter case, the Idaho fish andgame commissioner, who was seen grin-ning with an array of carcasses from anAfrican hunting trip, resigned
While many defenders of hunting see
it as an honorable, skilled and bondingexperience, others denounce it as un-necessary waste in the modern age anddetrimental to the environment and tothe animals who roam in the wild Butthe issue is more complex than a clash ofcultures
Some countries like Zimbabwe courage big-game hunting as a source ofincome, and others allow the activity tokeep down herd populations throughmanaged hunting trips and as a way topay for the upkeep of game reserves.Researchers warned recently in theProceedings of the National Academy ofSciences that 90 percent of nearly 300protected areas on the African continentfaced funding shortfalls and that somecould vanish
en-Some studies have shown, however,that hunting can be devastating to en-dangered populations A study pub-lished in 2010 by Craig Packer, director
of the Lion Center at the University ofMinnesota, found that sport hunting di-rectly contributed to the decline of lions
in most of Tanzania’s hunting areas
To many conservationists and animallovers, there is simply no excuse forhunting
Michael Russell, a member of theScottish Parliament, said on Wednesdaythat he would raise the issue “as a mat-ter of urgency” with the environmentsecretary, Roseanna Cunningham “Ifthis is actually happening on #Isla, andlaid on by some sort of tour company, Iwould want to see it stopped immedi-ately,” he wrote on Twitter
In response to the concerns, Ms ningham vowed to look into clarifying orchanging the law, writing on Twitter,
Cun-“We fully understand why so many ple find these images of hunted animalsbeing held up as trophies so upsetting.”It’s likely that Ms Switlyk, who wrotethat she had been in Scotland more than
peo-a month peo-ago, wpeo-as well peo-awpeo-are of the rage unfolding because of her photo-graphs In posts on social media, Ms.Switlyk wrote:
out-“I’m headed out on a bush plane for
my next hunting adventure and will beout of service for 2 weeks Nothing bet-ter than disconnecting from this socialmedia driven world and connectingback with nature Hopefully that willgive enough time for all the ignorantpeople out there sending me deaththreats to get educated on hunting andconservation.”
The island of Islay in Scotland, where the hunter and television show host Larysa lyk boasted about killing a “beautiful wild goat.”
Swit-ANDY HASLAM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hunter displays kill, and Scotland is angry
LONDON
Officials to review laws after photo of goat carcass appears on social media
BY YONETTE JOSEPH
The young applicant is described as fident and courageous His résumé, at 15pages, is glittering, complete with per-formance reviews (“full of energy”), amap of his travels (trips to Tokyo andBali) and a list of books he has read thisyear (408 in total)
con-But the applicant is not a seasoned jobseeker He is a 5-year-old boy fromsouthern China applying for a spot infirst grade at a Shanghai private school
“I hope I can outperform my parents,”
the boy is quoted as saying, betweenphotos showing him playing the piano,swimming and driving a toy car
The résumé, which was leaked andshared widely online this week, has pro-voked a mix of fascination, indignationand debate about whether children inChina’s test-crazed education systemare being raised as soulless strivers
Some called for the parents of the boy
to be arrested Others wonderedwhether today’s children would knowtrue happiness, given the intense pres-sure to perform well and land good jobs
“Only 5 years old?” one user wrote onWeibo, a Twitter-like site “So scary.”
Still, some defended the parents, ing they were trying to promote theirchild’s best interests in a flawed system
say-By Thursday evening, tens of sands of people had weighed in, and ahashtag about the boy had been viewedmore than 38 million times
thou-Yong Zhao, a professor of education atthe University of Kansas, said the de-bate reflected widespread anxietyamong Chinese parents about gettingtheir children into top schools In Chi-na’s test-dominated system, examscores determine where students go tocollege and what careers they can pur-sue “No matter how many good schoolsthere are, people are always shootingfor the best,” he said “Where their chil-dren go to school represents an achieve-ment, an accomplishment for parents
But many don’t know what a good
edu-cation is.”
It is unclear who prepared the sumé, which was addressed to theShanghai Starriver Bilingual School butwhose claims could not be independ-ently verified As in urban school dis-tricts in the United States and else-where, it is common for parents in Chi-nese cities to hire coaches to help theirchildren gain admission to selectiveschools
ré-A staff member at Shanghai Starriverdeclined to comment, except to say thatthe school did not accept résumés fromparents as part of the admissionsprocess The boy’s father also declined
to comment, saying he did not want todraw attention to his son
The competition for seats at topschools in China is notoriously cut-throat In some cities, the wealthy andwell connected pay large sums ofmoney, sometimes described as “dona-tions,” to secure placements in top pro-grams
The boy’s résumé reads like a Point presentation, complete with
Power-growth charts and stick-figure clip art Itincludes discussion of his adversity quo-tient and his artistic talents It also pro-vides details of his schedule — time formemory training, English diary class,sports and piano — and samples of hisartwork, including drawings of dogs andfish
“I never cry when I get shots,” the sumé says “Starting when I was a yearand a half old, I would get up by myselfwhen I fell down Everyone praised me
A caption alongside a photograph ofthe school’s terra-cotta facade reads,
“When will Shanghai Starriver open itsgates to me?”
Albee Zhang contributed research from Beijing, and Carolyn Zhang from Shang- hai.
A primary school in Shanghai The 15-page résumé of a first-grade applicant has
pro-voked debates about China’s test-crazed education system.
ALY SONG/REUTERS
A 15-page plea for a place in the first grade
BEIJING
BY JAVIER C HERNÁNDEZ
In the political obituaries chronicling
the departure of Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany, the world is
prepar-ing to lose a rare source of sober-minded
leadership at a time rife with dangerous
tumult
For the European Union, the loss
ap-pears grave The bloc is contending with
a nasty divorce with Britain, rising
au-thoritarianism in Hungary and Poland
and a showdown with a populist
govern-ment in Italy Ms Merkel’s pending
re-tirement will remove a stalwart
cham-pion for the union’s cohesion So say
countless pundits and editorials
But many economists take a less
gen-erous view of the German chancellor’s
place in modern European history Far
from a hero who anchored the bloc
un-der profound challenges, she played a
leading role in amplifying an economic
crisis, allowing it to erupt into an
exist-ential threat to the European Union and
its shared euro currency The resulting
distress has undermined faith in the
Eu-ropean bloc while fueling
anti-establish-ment grievances across the Continent
Like many national leaders, Ms
Merkel, time and again, catered to
do-mestic political interests at the expense
of broader European concerns,
dismiss-ing calls that Germany’s prodigious
sav-ings be put on the line to rescue
debt-sat-urated members of the bloc She
imped-ed measures aimimped-ed at coordinating
banking rules and public spending
across national boundaries
She adamantly opposed debt
forgive-ness to Greece, even as it teetered
to-ward insolvency, and even as
jobless-ness exceeded 27 percent — a special
source of outrage given that German
banks were primary lenders in Greece’s
catastrophic explosion of borrowing
“She was at the heart of the design of
the flawed Greek program, which not
only imposed austerity, but most tantly resisted restructuring the debt inorder to save the German and Frenchbanks,” said Joseph E Stiglitz, a Nobellaureate economist at Columbia Univer-sity in New York “The rhetoric that sheused suggested that the crisis wascaused by irresponsible behavior byGreece, rather than irresponsibility onthe part of the lender.”
impor-In place of public spending to softenthe crisis, Ms Merkel used Germany’spower as the largest economy in Europe
to force troubled governments to slashsupport for pensions, health care andeducation In the process, the moveshelped lengthen and deepen a devastat-ing economic downturn
“This is what history will remember, acomplete mismanagement,” said Aman-dine Crespy, a political scientist at theInstitute for European Studies at theFree University of Brussels “Austerityvery clearly has deepened or even cre-ated this great gap, political fragmenta-
tion between the north and the south,between the debtors and the creditorcountries that is very, very difficult tofix, and has had dramatic political con-sequences in terms of fueling the popu-list forces.”
Sifting through history is a complexexercise open to divergent interpreta-tions One can never know how eventsmight have transpired absent somevariable Anyone in Ms Merkel’s posi-tion would have found the going diffi-cult She oversaw Europe’s most power-ful country during the worst financialcrisis since the Great Depression, thenthe European debt crisis, and then thesurge of immigrants from some of thepoorest, most troubled nations on earth
Some argue that no German lor could have held on to the office whilebehaving much differently in the realm
chancel-of economic policy Given a deep
cultur-al proclivity toward thrift, morcultur-al sion over debt and a fear of rising prices
revul-dating to the hyperinflation after WorldWar I, Germans were aghast at any ar-rangement in which their savings were
on the hook for the recklessness ofGreeks and Italians
“She had to sell German voters on theidea that Germany would send re-sources to bail out European countriesthat were already engaged in irrespon-sible policies,” said Nicola Borri, a fi-nance professor at Luiss, a university inRome “That was the problem Political-
ly, it’s really hard to criticize Merkel.”
But other economists say Ms Merkelsquandered an opportunity to use thecrisis as a teachable moment that couldhave altered German public opinion
She might have fostered a sense of sponsibility in Germany to see the na-tion as a primary beneficiary of the Eu-ropean Union, with the responsibility toaid those in distress
re-Instead, she catered to stereotypes oflazy Greeks, at one point suggestingthey take too much vacation She usedtheir troubles to inaccurately depict thebreadth of the crisis Though Greece’sgovernment had been profligate, those
in Ireland and Spain had enjoyed budgetsurpluses before they landed in crisis,falling into perilous debts only after bail-ing out banks
Europe’s economic troubles have ten centered on a dearth of faith in theendurance of the euro, the currencyshared by 19 members of the bloc Sincethe euro’s inception, critics have warnedthat it is structurally unsound — a cur-rency union lacking a political appara-tus to coordinate policy and collectiveaid when trouble emerges
of-Under the guidance of Ms Merkel andher famously unsentimental financeminister, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germanyeffectively used the crisis as an elabo-rate demonstration of the euro’s founda-tional defects As they bickered with Eu-ropean counterparts over the principlesthat should apply to the Greek rescue,they delayed help and exposed globalmarkets to the possibility that nonemight be forthcoming A currencychampioned as a source of Europeansolidarity was exposed as an impetusfor discord
As the crisis mounted in the early part
of this decade, reformists called for
col-lective action Europe needed rules erning all of its banks along with insur-ance for depositors to lift confidence inthe financial system The worst-hitcountries needed relief from Europeanrules limiting deficit spending
gov-Ms Merkel and Mr Schäuble tained a hard line aimed at protectingGerman taxpayers from having to payfor the supposed sins of profligatespenders in sunnier climes In tones ofmoral admonishment, they prescribedstructural adjustment — rules making iteasier to fire workers — along with morecuts to public budgets
main-“There is no crisis of the euro itself,”
Ms Merkel declared in a 2012 speech livered at the World Economic Forum inDavos, Switzerland “There is a debt cri-sis We have to ensure that stability andsound public finances are the order ofthe day Indebtedness is the biggest dan-ger and the greatest risk to prosperity
de-on this cde-ontinent.”
Eventually, Europe forged a partialbanking union that put in place bloc-wide rules, while allowing crisis-hitcountries some flexibility from limits ondeficit spending The European CentralBank resorted to extraordinary meas-ures, and a series of rescues kept Greecesolvent, even as many doubt the countrywill be able to pay back its crushingdebts
“The euro crisis started getting betterthe moment Europe decided to goagainst what Merkel said the policiesshould be,” said Christian Odendahl,chief economist at the Center for Euro-pean Reform, a research institution
Ultimately, Ms Merkel fueled the tion that Europe’s crisis was a moralityplay in which prudent nations in thenorth would school their reckless coun-terparts in the south on the virtues of liv-ing within their means
no-Such depictions seem likely to outlast
Ms Merkel herself, making it difficult toimagine Europe’s summoning the unity
to bolster itself against the next crisis
“She helped shape the mind-set of theGermans,” said Mr Stiglitz, the Nobel-laureate economist “She shifted it in avery ugly way, and that makes it verydifficult to change the framework of theeurozone She could have reframed it
That would have been leadership.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany oversaw Europe’s most powerful country during a severe financial crisis, then the European debt crisis and then a surge of immigrants.
MICHELE TANTUSSI/GETTY IMAGES EUROPE
Split views on Merkel’s legacy
LONDON
Many economists assert
austerity policies amplified
downturn and euro crisis
BY PETER S GOODMAN
“The euro crisis started getting better the moment Europe decided to go against what Merkel said.”
Trang 4Near the Accademia Bridge, a corridor
of thin trees lay horizontal Vaporetto
tickets, pigeon feathers and candy
wrappers floated in stagnant pools
around St Mark’s Basilica Saltwater
seeped into private gardens and
poi-soned rose bushes behind stone walls
And children sidestepped the
spill-over from the canals as they
trick-or-treated in Venetian masks and witches’
hats under the Rialto Bridge
On Wednesday, Venice’s lagoon
sub-sided and revealed the damage that a
vi-olent storm had wrought on the city
ear-lier in the week, one of the worst
episodes of flooding in decades
Wind-blown tides reaching 61 inches above
sea level had submerged more than 70
percent of the city
On Thursday, the water returned
Some tourists frolicked in the filthy
water and dined in restaurants as it
lapped at the calves of their rubber
boots Locals instead worried that the
saltwater was eating its way through
the city’s treasures
“Here it’s solid,” said Pierpaolo
Cam-postrini, a member of the board
respon-sible for managing St Mark’s Basilica,
as he knocked on the marble facade of
the structure, as if listening for a secret
passageway, “But here it’s empty We
have a splitting here in the brick and the
plaster The water did this.”
He explained that “unlike an
earth-quake, where you see the damage right
away,” the constant water infiltration,
accentuated by dramatic events like this
week’s flood, would reveal its cost only
over time
The building’s bricks sponged the
wa-ter up, and as the wawa-ter rose, the danger
became more acute to the 8,450 square
meters, or about 91,000 square feet, of
fingernail-size mosaic tiles that give the
basilica its stunning golden shimmer
The water had already taken its toll on
the marble columns, brought from
By-zantium centuries ago Mr Campostrini
pointed at one base, now a corroded
green crumble “It’s not just global
warming,” he said “But the episodes are
more severe and long.”
After about 1,000 years, Venice is
im-periled by the sinking of its foundations
and the rising of the water, as well as the
hordes of tourists arriving on cruise
ships and low-cost flights They clog the
narrow streets and have pushed out
res-idents, filling Airbnb apartments
Flooding, though, is the existential
danger
Earlier in the week, for only the fifth
recorded time in St Mark’s nine-century
history, the water reached the marble
floor inside, submerging the area
around the altar of the Madonna
Nicopeia
On Wednesday, the floor was dry but a
yellow sign reading “Attention: Wet
Pavement” stood ready by the entrance
Outside, though, the water still filled St
Mark’s Square As tourists climbed the
steep steps to the basilica’s balcony
(“We saw a wedding proposal!” one
woman shouted), the Roman Catholic
patriarch of Venice, Msgr FrancescoMoraglia, checked on his church
Earlier in the week, he had rushed tovisit when he heard the water hadbreached the door “I said a prayer andgave a blessing,” Monsignor Moragliasaid, showing pictures of himself wear-ing galoshes Now, he said, he was hop-ing for help from the multibillion-dollar
Mose project, an unfinished system offloodgates that was initiated more than
a decade again to block the rising watersand threats from global warming
He said he and the city’s leaders had a
“mission to defend the basilica,” not justfrom excessive tourism and the enor-mous cruise ships that brought them,but also from the threats brought on byclimate change
But the two make a formidable nation
combi-Outside the church, traffic and roadrage were in full display on the raisedwooden walkways An American wom-
an elbowed a group of Chinese touristswho sought to cut the line
On Thursday, high tides brought the
water back all across the city, floodingthe narrow streets up to people’s anklesand shins The thumping sound ofrolling luggage was replaced by thescratching of the yellow, orange andblue plastic bags that tourists bought to
cover their shoes and ankles Some ofthe tourists seemed to be having fun,picking up crabs that had washed ontothe sides of the canals or laughing asthey carried their luggage over theirheads
Mr Campostrini, the St Mark’s boardmember who is working on new ways tokeep the water out of the basilica, didn’tsee the appeal “No one will miss it,” hesaid of the high water
On Wednesday night, when thestreets around the square temporarilydried out, the tides seemed to have mo-mentarily washed away the invadinghordes
An American influence lingered,though, in the local children wearingHalloween costumes and bidding “dol-cetto scherzetto” — treat or trick — toshopkeepers as their parents sippedbeers and Aperol spritzes in the quietSestiere Santa Croce square
Toto Bergamo Rossi, a noted restorerand director of the Venetian HeritageFoundation, called the rising waters “atragedy” for the monuments he had ded-icated his life to protecting
With ancestors that include some of
the most powerful figures in Venice’shistory, Mr Rossi said he now felt “pow-erless” in the face of the rising waters
He mourned the damage done to his stored garden, one of the city’s treasuresand featured in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
re-“The Flame of Life.”
The city historically became rich fromthe salt trade, Mr Rossi said, and nowthe salt had returned with a vengeance
as “our big enemy.”
His house guest this week was hisfriend James Ivory, the acclaimed direc-tor of “A Room With a View,” and manyother films, several of which were set inItaly His love affair with Venice dated tohis first film as a student in 1957,
“Venice: Theme and Variations.”
As Mr Ivory crossed a footbridge to alocal trattoria, he talked about thecharms of a city he had been returning
to for more than 50 years
At age 90, he said he couldn’t worryabout everything, but the recent flood-ing was the worst he had seen The fate
of Venice was one of the things worth onizing about
ag-“In a funny way,” he said, “I can’t livewithout it.”
Tourists take selfies as Venetians worry
Unusually high water
threatens treasures
in the vulnerable city
BY JASON HOROWITZ
VENICE, ITALY
Above, San Marco Square, where visitors sat surrounded by high water on Thursday, some taking selfies Below, brushing away floodwater outside the historic Caffe Florian on Tuesday.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA MEROLA/ANSA, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
A mission to defend St Mark’s Basilica not just from rising tourism, but also from threats brought on by climate change.
portant Baltic Sea shipping lanes —
were part of an undercover operation by
Russia’s military intelligence service,
the G.U., formerly known as the G.R.U
Mr Gastgivar, for one, has long
thought something curious was going
on at his Russian neighbor’s island
“I’ve been thinking for many years
that they are doing something military
over there,” he said “Building, building,
building, but nobody knows what for.”
Finland’s intelligence service,
accord-ing to recent reports in the Finnish news
media, has long warned that property
purchased in Finland by Russian
na-tionals could be used for military
pur-poses
During a recent visit to the island, not
a soul was in sight, only clusters of
de-serted clapboard villas joined by
wood-en pathways through the forest of birch
and pine that covers the island Despite
the abundant security precautions, no
alarms were tripped and nobody rushed
out to confront the intruders
Yet the seafront sauna, stacked with
fresh towels, looked ready for use, as did
the barbecue pits and other amenities
on an island that seemed like the
luxuri-ous lair of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the
fic-tional villain of James Bond’s creator,
Ian Fleming
Finland, anchored firmly in the West
but wary of antagonizing Moscow, has a
longstanding policy of not raising
is-sues, at least in public, that might create
friction with Russia, with which it
shares an 830-mile border
This approach, however, has come
un-der strain from Russia’s increasing
as-sertiveness Finland, though not a
mem-ber of NATO, risked Russian ire in the
past week by sending troops to Norway
to join American forces taking part in
Trident Juncture, the military alliance’s
largest military exercise since the end of
the Cold War in 1991
The September raids coincided with
discussions in Parliament of new lation to strengthen the powers of Fin-land’s intelligence service Lawmakersare also considering prohibiting peoplefrom outside the European Union fromacquiring land in strategic areas
legis-The biggest group of foreign propertyowners is from Russia, including peopleclose to President Vladimir V Putin
Two people were taken into custodyafter the raids — an Estonian of Russiandescent and a Russian — and officersseized a stash of cash in multiple curren-cies, including 3 million euros, or about
$3.5 million Also seized were computerdiscs and flash drives containing morethan 100 terabytes of data
All the targeted properties werelinked to Mr Melnikov, the Russianowner of Sakkiluoto, and a company hehelped set up in 2007 called AiristonHelmi
The company has repeatedly
reshuf-fled its board of directors and ownershipover the years, with the identity of itsreal owners disappearing behindopaque shell companies registered inthe British Virgin Islands and other taxhavens It is now headed, at least on pa-per, by an Italian, who says he took theposition as a favor to a businessman heknows from Russia
It is far from clear exactly who Mr
Melnikov is A man with the same nameand birth date appears in Russian cor-porate and other records as the owner ofsix companies in Russia, including awell-known manufacturer of plumbingequipment, and as the holder of severalpatents related to plumbing That man,now back in Russia at an office in St Pe-tersburg, declined to comment on whathis assistant called “private” matters inFinland
While investing in Finland, Mr nikov operated under several different
Mel-guises Annual corporate filings ously identify him as Russian, Latvianand Maltese Finnish news media out-lets report that he also has residency inHungary and passports from three tinyCaribbean nations that, like Malta, sellcitizenship
vari-When Airiston Helmi first registered
in Finland in 2007, the company clared itself engaged in “travel and ac-commodation services as well as real es-tate holdings and leasing/renting.”
de-It invested millions of euros in buyingand developing property on the archi-pelago between Finland and Swedenbut, year after year, reported a loss andhad no evident source of revenue
Kaj Karlsson, a Finnish contractorwho supervised much of the construc-tion on Sakkiluoto, said he could neverwork out what Mr Melnikov was up to,especially after he started building newpiers and installed a network of security
cameras on an island with no people orcrime “Usually an island has two piers,but how do you explain nine? It makes
no sense,” Mr Karlsson said Mr nikov, he added, “always made a goodimpression and seemed legitimate,” butnever seemed very interested in getting
Mel-a return on his investment
“No way is this all about money dering or tax evasion,” he said “You
laun-don’t put so much effort into a laundering case.”
money-Even local officials are skeptical
Patrik Nygren, the mayor ofParainen, the archipelago’s administra-tive center, said he received no advancenotice and was out picking mushroomswith his family when the raids hap-pened The scale of the operation struckhim as strange; Mr Melnikov some-times skirted building codes — likewhen he installed the helipad onSakkiluoto — but was never threat-ening, the mayor said
“Personally, I don’t think this tion was just about money laundering
opera-There has to be something else,” he said
Niklas Granholm, deputy director ofstudies at FOI, the Swedish Defense Re-search Agency, Division for DefenseAnalysis, did not rule out that the is-lands that were raided could have beenpart of a money-laundering scam But
he added that their helipads, multipledocks, barrackslike structures and loca-tion near Finnish military facilities sug-gested possible preparations for “somekind of hybrid warfare.”
Airiston Helmi’s seafront ters has a helipad and multiple surveil-lance cameras like Mr Melnikov’s is-
headquar-land, as well as a decommissioned tary landing craft that has been con-verted into a sauna and three othervessels Standing guard next to the mainentrance of the company’s office is afashion mannequin dressed in militaryfatigues with a cracked plastic head.Its basement, according to a recentreport in Iltalehti, a Finnish newspaper,contained a communications centerwith sophisticated equipment far be-yond what an ordinary tourism or prop-erty company would need
mili-Thomas Willberg, a dairy farmerwhose land abuts Airiston Helmi’s head-quarters on the mainland, said he wasasked several times by the Russian andhis associates whether he would be will-ing to sell his cow patch He declined.The farmer said he met Mr Melnikov
a few times and did occasional odd jobsfor him like clearing snow, but couldnever figure out why Mr Melnikovneeded so much security equipment orwhat kind of business Airiston Helmiwas really in
“Finland is maybe sending a signal toour eastern neighbor that it is ready totake action if needed,” Mr Willberg said
Mr Karlsson, the former constructionsupervisor, refused to believe that Mr.Melnikov was setting up hideaways forRussian soldiers, noting that Mr Mel-nikov always insisted on having largeglass windows facing the sea — not agood feature to have if bullets are flying.All the same, he conceded that hemight have been nạve about Mr Mel-nikov’s intentions “He said he had fall-
en in love with our archipelago andcould feel safe here, unlike at home inRussia I swallowed that explanation,”
Mr Karlsson said
“Pavel is clearly not what I thought hewas,” he said
The mystery of a Russian’s island off Finland
ISL AND, FROM PAGE 1
KSENIA IVANOVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Left, the island of Sakkiluoto has nine piers, a helipad, a swimming pool draped in camouflage netting and enough housing — all of it equipped with satellite dishes — to accommodate a small army Right, Pavel Melnikov, the Russian businessman who owns the island.
FINNISH PATENT AND REGISTRATION OFFICE
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from London, Johanna Lemola from Hel- sinki and Oleg Matsnev from Moscow.
“I’ve been thinking for many years that they are doing something military over there.
Building, building, building.”
Trang 5its deliberations said.
Instead, the White House has joined
governments around the region in
weighing what effect the stigma of the
Khashoggi killing may have on the
crown prince’s ability to rule — and
what benefit can be extracted from his
potential weakness
“Everybody is milking this,” said
Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie
Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon
With the crown prince now in need of
ex-ternal assistance to rehabilitate himself,
she said, “everybody is trying to turn
this to their advantage and try to get
what they can out of it.”
For the Trump administration, the
people familiar with its thinking said,
that means pressing the crown prince
for steps to resolve the Saudi-led
block-ade of Qatar and the Saudi-led bombing
of Yemen Secretary of Defense Jim
Mattis and Secretary of State Mike
Pom-peo have both issued calls for a
cease-fire in Yemen as part of that plan
Officials in the Trump administration
had discussed proposals like urging
King Salman, the 82-year-old father of
the crown prince, to appoint a strong
prime minister or other senior official to
help oversee day-to-day governance or
foreign policy, according to the people
familiar with the deliberations
But such ideas were quickly
dis-carded, partly because no one would
risk taking such a job, or dare appear to
counter Prince Mohammed while he
controls the Saudi intelligence and
secu-rity services and has the king’s ear
Scholars and diplomats say it is
al-most inconceivable for him to relinquish
his authority in the way that an official in
a Western government might accept a
reduced role or shared responsibilities
Power in Saudi Arabia’s absolute
mon-archy, they say, adheres to the
individ-ual, not the office
“All power flows from the king,” said
Bernard Haykel, a scholar at Princeton
University who studies the kingdom
and has met with Prince Mohammed
“The king delegates power to a person,
and it belongs to that person until the
king takes it away.”
If anything, the killing of Mr
Khashoggi has only strengthened the
crown prince’s capacity to intimidate
others inside the kingdom, even in his
own family, royals and other Saudis
said
Many royals already had lost money
and influence because of Prince
Mo-hammed’s swift rise over the past threeyears The damage to their reputationssince the Khashoggi killing has com-pounded their alarm
Some whispered with intrigue at thereturn to Riyadh recently of an uncle,Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, who hadopposed Prince Mohammed’s designa-tion as heir to the throne and then ap-peared to criticize his rule
But Prince Ahmed, who had been inLondon, may only have returned home
in a gesture of family solidarity So farthe clan sees no alternative to the domi-nance of Prince Mohammed, said onemember of a branch of the family dimin-ished by his rise
“They hate him, but what can theydo?” this family member asked “If youspeak, they’ll put you in jail, while othercountries want to sell arms and buy oil Iwould find it really sad if he gets out ofthis one.”
Prince Mohammed, often known bythe initials M.B.S., had already humili-
ated or imprisoned seemingly any tential rival among his royal cousins At
po-an investor conference he sponsored inRiyadh late last month he appeared tosmile through the Western backlash,and several Western officials with expe-rience in the kingdom said it was nạve
to think that a new arrangement of visers could contain him
ad-“If M.B.S is constrained, he will try tobreak out,” said a Western diplomat whoknows him “And he will become a threat
to those he thinks did it to him.”
Prince Mohammed’s effectiveness inregional politics, however, is a moreopen question, partly because theKhashoggi killing has caused many inthe West to re-evaluate other episodes
in his recent past
His bombing campaign over Yemen,now in its fourth year, has produced only
a military stalemate and a humanitariancatastrophe His decision a year ago toorder the arbitrary detention of about
200 of the kingdom’s richest
business-men on vague allegations of corruptionhas driven away many investors
Perhaps strangest, the crown princebriefly kidnapped the prime minister ofLebanon a year ago in a botched gambit
to push back against Iran’s Lebanese lies At the investor conference, thecrown prince himself made a joke of thatmisstep, laughingly assuring the Leba-nese prime minister he could leave Ri-yadh freely
al-A growing number of current and mer Western officials are now assertingpublicly that in light of the Khashoggikilling, those earlier episodes portraythe young prince as dangerously ag-gressive, impulsive and destabilizing
for-If he were damaged, it would be cause institutions and governmentsabroad no longer want to deal with him,”
“be-said David H Rundell, a former chief ofmission at the United States Embassy inRiyadh who served 15 years in SaudiArabia
But the United States and other
West-ern govWest-ernments have such extensiveties to Saudi Arabia that they are un-likely to walk away, Mr Rundell said,predicting “a newfound caution and will-ingness to compromise” from the crownprince
Andrew Miller, deputy director forpolicy at the Project on Middle EasternDemocracy and a former United StatesState Department official with experi-ence in the region, argued that the lin-
gering stain on the crown prince wouldmost likely hamper him as an advocatewith Western governments, where hehas mainly argued for a hard lineagainst Iran
“I think this makes it much more cult for him to sustain his singular focus
diffi-on Iran because the actidiffi-ons he is cdiffi-on-demning there, he himself is perpetrat-ing,” Mr Miller said
con-One person familiar with the WhiteHouse deliberations said the adminis-tration expected that bipartisan pres-sure from Congress will force the impo-sition of some sanctions
But the White House intends to keepthe sanctions limited enough to avoid arupture with Prince Mohammed Forone thing, he remains central to theplans of the president’s son-in-law andMiddle East adviser, Jared Kushner, in-cluding hopes to build an Arab-Israeli al-liance against Iran and to pressure thePalestinians into a peace agreement
Two people close to the Saudi royalcourt said Mr Kushner and Prince Mo-hammed communicate often, including
by text message, and multiple timessince Mr Khashoggi’s disappearance AWhite House spokesman declined tocomment about those communications
Prince Mohammed first charged that
Mr Khashoggi was a dangerous ist in an Oct 9 telephone call with Mr
Islam-Kushner and John R Bolton, the tional security adviser That was sevendays after Mr Khashoggi disappearedand well over a week before the royal au-thorities admitted that Saudi agents hadkilled him
na-Two people familiar with the call saidthe crown prince had described Mr
Khashoggi as a member of the MuslimBrotherhood — a reference that the
White House officials knew meant thatthe prince saw him as a dangerous radi-cal Saudi Arabia had long tolerated theBrotherhood, an 80-year-old Islamistmovement, but the kingdom branded it
a terrorist organization and outlawed itwhen the group advocated calls for elec-tions after the Arab Spring revolts
Mr Khashoggi was not a formal ber of the Muslim Brotherhood But hehad joined for a time in his youth, main-tained friendships with several mem-bers, and wrote columns arguing thatbanning the Brotherhood was incom-patible with democracy in the region
mem-To assuage Western fears raised bythe Khashoggi killing, Prince Moham-med intends to formalize some of his de-cision making, and show the West he istaking steps to avoid similar episodes,according to two people familiar withthe plans
The crown prince’s stature in ington may be stabilizing, with at least ahandful of American voices extolling theimportance of the Saudi-American alli-ance
Wash-“There is no change in any militaryrelationship we have with Saudi Ara-bia,” Gen Joseph Votel, the top UnitedStates commander in the Middle East,told the military publication DefenseOne
Major figures in finance signaled thatthey, too, intended to look past thekilling “I understand the emotionaround the story,” John Flint, the chiefexecutive of HSBC, told Reuters, “but it
is very difficult to think about ing from Saudi Arabia given its impor-tance to global energy markets.”Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of
disengag-JP Morgan Chase, said that he had complished “nothing” by dropping out
ac-of the prince’s investment conferenceand that his bank expected to continue
to pursue business with the kingdom
“Being engaged is not a bad thing; itdoes not mean you condone every-thing,” Mr Dimon said at a conferenceorganized by the publication Axios
Ms Yahya, of the Carnegie MiddleEast Center, said such responses send amessage to other Arab strongmen
“You can be even more brutal thanyou already are,” she said “Just besmarter about it next time Don’t kill awell-known journalist inside a consul-ate.”
Saudi prince retains his grip, despite stigma
SAUDI ARABIA, FROM PAGE 1
David D Kirkpatrick reported from don, and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Leb- anon.
Lon-A vigil for Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul Prince Mohammed was said to have considered Mr Khashoggi a dangerous Islamist.
CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES
If the crown prince “is constrained, he will try to break out And he will become a threat
to those he thinks did it to him.”
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Trang 6President Trump’s closing argument is
now clear: Build tent cities for migrants
End birthright citizenship Fear the
car-avan Send active-duty troops to the
bor-der Refuse asylum
Immigration has been the animating
issue of the Trump presidency, and now
— with the possibility that Republicans
could face significant losses in the
midterm elections on Tuesday — the
president has fully embraced a dark,
anti-immigrant message in the hope
that stoking fear will motivate voters to
reject Democrats
In a rambling speech on Thursday
af-ternoon that was riddled with
false-hoods and vague promises to confront a
“crisis” at the border, Mr Trump used
the official backdrop of the White House
to step up his efforts to demonize a
cara-van of Central Americans that has been
making its way through Mexico, assail
Democrats, and promote a vision of a
United States that would be better off
with fewer immigrants
The president said he had ordered
troops to respond to any migrants in the
caravan who throw rocks as if they were
brandishing firearms, saying, “I told
them: Consider it a rifle.” He said his
government had already begun to
con-struct “massive cities of tents” to
im-prison legal and illegal immigrants who
try to enter the United States
“This is a defense of our country,” Mr
Trump declared from a lectern in the
Roosevelt Room before leaving the
White House to attend a campaign rally
in Missouri “We have no choice We will
defend our borders We will defend our
country.”
The president also played fast and
loose with the truth At one point, he said
that 97 percent of immigrants
appre-hended at the border and released into
the United States do not show up for
their trials; the number is closer to 28
percent He also said the government is
no longer releasing immigrants while
they await trial Meanwhile, migrants
are being caught and released at the
border regularly, as has happened for
decades
He repeated his oft-stated, misleading
description of the situation south of the
border, saying that “large, organized
caravans” are heading toward the
United States, filled with “tough people,
in many cases.”
“A lot of young men, strong men,” he
continued, “and a lot of men we maybe
don’t want in our country.”
“They have injured; they have
at-tacked,” he added
In recent weeks, Mr Trump has
prom-ised a number of actions to demonstrate
a renewed crackdown on immigrants
While he has followed through on one of
them — ordering an increase in military
units on the border — there was no
men-tion in the speech of the presidential
proclamation on asylum and the new
policy on family separation that he has
promised
Mostly what the president offered
was a repeat of the angry rhetoric that
has been a central theme of his
cam-paign rallies and in Fox News
inter-views for the past two weeks A new posal to give migrant families the choice
pro-to willingly separate from their dren? “We are working” on it, Mr
chil-Trump said The presidential tion and regulation aides had promised
proclama-to bring an end proclama-to asylum for illegal migrants? They are “finalizing” them,
im-he added He promised an executive der soon, providing no details but saying
or-it would be “quor-ite comprehensive.”
Raising fears about immigrants hasbeen a central theme for Mr Trump
since he first announced he was runningfor president On Thursday night, in achilly airplane hangar in Columbia, Mo.,with Air Force One as his backdrop, Mr
Trump whipped thousands of ers into a chorus of boos over the consti-tutional guarantee of birthright citizen-ship, dismissing a core tenet of the 14thAmendment as a “crazy, lunatic policythat we can end.”
support-He warned that the Constitution’sgrant of citizenship to any person born
on United States soil could benefit the
offspring of “an enemy of our country”
or “a dictator with war on your mind.”
“Democrats want to spend yourmoney and give away your resourcesfor the benefit of anyone but Americancitizens,” he charged falsely, crystalliz-ing his fear-mongering closing mes-sage: “If you don’t want America to beoverrun by masses of illegal immigrantsand massive caravans, you better voteRepublican.”
In the past week, as a series of pipebombs sent to prominent opponents ofthe president and then the killing of 11people at a Pittsburgh synagogue domi-nated the news, the president’s politicalteam has urged him to put renewed em-phasis on immigration and use his bullypulpit to ratchet up the nation’s sense ofalarm about the dangers of migrantsheading for the border
The president did not need much vincing On Wednesday afternoon, hetweeted out a 53-second, expletive-filledvideo that features immigrants chargedwith violent crimes and images of athrong of brown-skinned men breaching
con-a bcon-arrier con-and running forwcon-ard Thepresident’s message was clear: Immi-grants will kill you, and the Democratsare to blame
“It is outrageous what the Democratsare doing to our Country,” Mr Trumpwrote in the tweet, part of a grim warn-ing about the dangers of immigrantsthat has left some Republicans — includ-ing the House speaker, Paul D Ryan —uneasy heading into Tuesday’s voting
Still, the president’s dark rhetoric hasclearly put some Democratic candidates
on the defensive, especially in
conserva-tive states where Mr Trump won bywide margins in 2016 In the last severaldays, Senator Claire McCaskill, Demo-crat of Missouri, has embraced some ofthe president’s anti-immigrant messag-ing as she fights for re-election, tellingFox News that “I do not want our bor-ders overrun, and I support the presi-dent’s efforts to make sure they’re not.”
In his remarks on Thursday noon, Mr Trump appeared to promise alethal response from the military if mi-grants threw rocks at soldiers At North-ern Command, the military headquar-ters overseeing the newly announceddeployments to the border, military offi-cials were shocked upon hearing thepresident’s comments
after-A Defense Department official saidthe American military’s rules of engage-ment allowed deadly force to be used if aservice member was faced with an im-minent threat of death or injury But theofficial said the military units headed tothe border with weapons, such as themilitary police, would keep them storedunless told otherwise The official couldnot say if they would be issued ammuni-tion, but did not expect them to be in aposition to use their weapons
In his speech at the White House, Mr
Trump made no mention of trying to endbirthright citizenship with an executiveorder, despite opposition from within hisown party and broad criticism from le-gal scholars
But the president dismissed tions about whether all of his ideaswould be legal under American law
ques-“Oh, this is totally legal,” he said “No
This is legal.”
Others say that it would depend on thedetails of Mr Trump’s proposals, whichhave not been disclosed If Mr Trumpmoves to deny asylum to all undocu-mented immigrants, for example, thatwould be illegal, according to StephenLegomsky, a Washington UniversitySchool of Law professor and formerchief counsel for U.S Citizenship andImmigration Services
“Such a policy would be in clear lation of the U.S asylum laws and anequally clear violation of our interna-tional treaty obligations,” he said “Once
vio-a person enters our territory, there is noanalogous law that permits a blanket de-nial of asylum.”
But details aside, Mr Trump is bettingthat a relentless focus on the threat heenvisions from immigrants crossing theMexican border, combined with his re-peated assertion that Democrats are toblame for letting them into the country,will energize conservative supporters.And he is hoping that the dark imagerywill not alienate suburban voters — es-pecially women — who have alreadybeen abandoning Republicans indroves
It is a risky bet Last year, the can candidate for governor in Virginialost after running dark ads warning ofthe dangers of marauding MS-13 gangs
Republi-in the state
And the president’s determined effort
to shift the conversation away from sues like low unemployment, tax cuts,conservative Supreme Court justicesand reduced regulation has worriedmany Republicans
is-At the beginning of the past week, Mr.Trump’s campaign put out a 60-secondtelevision ad appealing to the messagethose Republicans have advocated Itfeatured a suburban woman who fretsabout the possibility that the economicrecovery could be fleeting But the presi-dent’s comments about the dangers ofthe Central American caravan and hisnew ad about violent immigrants at-tracted far more attention
The immigration video, which reliessolely on news clips and stock footage,includes courtroom footage of Luis Bra-camontes, a twice-deported Mexicanimmigrant sentenced to death this yearfor killing two California law enforce-ment officers
Two people close to Mr Trump clined to say whether it was made by theWhite House video unit or someone onthe campaign But one White House offi-cial, who was not authorized to speakpublicly, said that it had been in theworks for several days, and was re-leased on Wednesday in an effort tochange the focus of cable television fromthe pipe bombs and the Pittsburghkillings
de-At his rally on Thursday, the presidenthinted that the effort to change the sub-ject had worked
Mr Trump, who is in the middle of an11-rally sprint across the United States,lamented that the rash of pipe bombstargeting his political opponents and thesynagogue massacre had diverted at-tention from his push to elect Republi-cans
“For seven days, nobody talked aboutthe election — it stopped the tremen-dous momentum,” he said, adding that
“now, the momentum is picking up.”
Trump bases final appeal on fear of immigrants
Migrants, mostly Honduran, making their way north through Mexico “A lot of young men, strong men,” was President Trump’s description of the caravan.
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Members of the caravan receiving food and other help at a camp in Mexico In ton, Mr Trump said, “We have no choice We will defend our borders.”
Washing-SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
WASHINGTON
As election approaches,
he says Democrats will
let America be overrun
BY MICHAEL D SHEAR
AND JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
Michael D Shear reported from ington, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Columbia, Mo Maggie Haberman con- tributed reporting from New York, and Peter Baker and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Washington.
Wash-When President Trump arrived
Tues-day at the Tree of Life synagogue in
Pittsburgh to pay his respects to the 11
victims of a mass shooting three days
earlier, the only public official standing
there to greet him was Israel’s
ambassa-dor to the United States, Ron Dermer
The symbolism was stark, and it
did-n’t end there A few hours later, another
prominent Israeli official, Naftali
Ben-nett, took to Twitter to defend Mr Trump
from critics, including some in the
American Jewish community, who said
the president’s divisive, inflammatory
language sowed the seeds for the
deadli-est anti-Semitic attack in the United
States in recent memory
Israel’s right-wing government has
become Mr Trump’s prime validator in
the anguished days since the massacre
in Pittsburgh — reflecting its loyalty to a
president who has backed its interests
but also deepening a rift with American
Jews, many of whom hold Mr Trump at
least partly responsible for the rise in
anti-Jewish vitriol over the last two
years “Factually, the guy has been a
huge friend to the Jewish state,” said Mr
Bennett, who serves as Israel’s minister
for diaspora affairs, at the Council on
Foreign Relations on Wednesday
The slaughter in Pittsburgh had
al-ready laid bare fissures between Israel
and American Jews after David Lau,
Is-rael’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, refused to
refer to the Tree of Life as a synagogue
because it is Conservative, a
non-Ortho-dox branch of Judaism not recognized
by the religious authorities in Israel
But the discord over a presidential
visit — a time-honored ritual in the
af-termath of such a tragedy —
under-scores how wide the gulf has become, at
a time when the White House and the raeli government are in lock step on ev-ery major issue, yet a majority of Ameri-can Jews voted against the president
Is-Mr Dermer, a onetime aide to PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu, playedsuch a visible role in Pittsburgh largelybecause state and local officialsshunned Mr Trump Jared Kushner, thepresident’s son-in-law and senior advis-
er, who is close to Mr Dermer, had
invit-ed him to attend, according to a personbriefed on the matter
The optics were awkward for theWhite House, but Mr Trump was clearlygrateful for Mr Dermer’s support
Mr Bennett, who leads a right-wingreligious party, the Jewish Home, which
is part of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition ernment, flew to Pittsburgh on his owninitiative to mourn the victims Whilethere, he met Jason D Greenblatt, whoserves as Mr Trump’s Middle East en-voy and was taking soundings for a visit
gov-by the president
On Tuesday, Mr Bennett posted astream of Twitter messages defendingthe president, just as Mr Trump wasleaving the synagogue to the distantchants of protesters marching throughthe Squirrel Hill neighborhood, carryingsigns that said “Words matter” and
“President Hate is not welcome in ourstate.”
The next day, in New York, Mr nett continued his defense of Mr Trump
Ben-The president, he said, supported Israel
in its battle with Iran and recognized rusalem as the capital of Israel His son-in-law, Mr Kushner, is Jewish; hisdaughter Ivanka is a convert to Juda-ism; and his grandchildren are Jewish,
Je-as are many of his advisers “What,” heasked, “could be more pro-Jewish?”
Mr Bennett also cast doubt on a study
by the Anti-Defamation League, which
claims the number of anti-Semitic dents in the United States rose 57 per-cent in 2017, the first year of Mr Trump’spresidency “I’m not sure at all there is asurge in anti-Semitism in America,” hesaid “I’m not sure those are the facts.”
inci-Mr Bennett clarified later that he wasreferring to the number of physical as-saults against Jews, not all acts of anti-Semitism
But he also emphasized that ish invective comes from a variety ofsources, citing Louis Farrakhan, theblack Muslim leader who recently
anti-Jew-posted a video in which he likened Jews
to termites
To many in the American Jewish munity, Mr Trump’s responsibility isclear Bend the Arc, a progressive Jew-ish group in Pittsburgh, sent the presi-dent an open letter urging him not to vis-
com-it the ccom-ity “until you fully denouncewhite nationalism.”
“Our Jewish community is not theonly group you have targeted,” said theletter, which had more than 84,000 sig-natures “You have also deliberately un-dermined the safety of people of color,
Muslims, LGBTQ people, and peoplewith disabilities.”
Some American Jewish leaders, ticularly from Republican and right-leaning groups, condemned efforts toblame Mr Trump, accusing his critics ofexploiting a tragedy to score politicalpoints during an election season
par-Mr Greenblatt, the president’s dle East envoy, insisted that Mr Trumpspoke out powerfully against anti-Semitism
Mid-“Those seeking their destruction, wewill seek their destruction,” Mr Green-
blatt wrote in an essay for Fox News,quoting the president
By drawing Israel close, some lysts said, Mr Trump was simply findinganother way to play to his political base
ana-“The more they wrap themselves inDermer and Netanyahu and the Israeliflag, the more it seals the 20 to 25 per-cent of the American Jewish communitythey already have,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a left-of-center, pro-Israel advocacy group “And
it also seals the evangelical base.”
Mr Bennett conceded that his viewswere not popular among liberal Ameri-can Jews, who have grown increasinglyestranged from the policies of the Ne-tanyahu government But that does notseem to trouble him much His job as anIsraeli official, he said, is to defend theinterests of the Jewish state It is a per-spective that puts Mr Bennett closer to
Mr Trump’s right-wing supporters than
to many American Jews
“From the Israeli point of view, gelicals are far more reliable than liberalJews,” said Martin S Indyk, a senior fel-low at the Council on Foreign Relations
evan-“They support the best president fortheir right-wing agenda that they’veever had.”
To hear an Israeli official defend Mr.Trump, however, underscores just howdifferently Israelis and American Jewsview the world “Their major issue is thesafety and security of the Israeli peo-ple,” said Abraham H Foxman, the for-mer national director of the Anti-Defa-mation League But the president, hesaid, can be both a defender of Israel and
an accelerant for anti-Semitic passions
in the United States “The fact thatsomeone supports Israel doesn’t vitiatethe impact he has on other issues thattouch upon Jews,” Mr Foxman said
“Trump is not an anti-Semite,” hesaid “He’s a demagogue.”
After shooting, president finds his backing in Israel
President Trump and Melania Trump with Rabbi Jeffrey Myers during a visit to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON
BY MARK LANDLER
Trang 7When John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal set
out to raise money this year for their
first venture capital fund, Unusual
Ven-tures, industry peers advised them to go
after the easy money — sovereign
wealth funds like those managed by
Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, which
have become major investors in Silicon
Valley
“People would say, ‘It’s really easy —
they’ll give you as much money as you
want,’” Mr Vrionis said
But the pair said they didn’t feel
com-fortable making investments on behalf
of repressive governments Instead,
they sought investments from nonprofit
groups, historically black universities
and children’s hospitals
That move has helped them avoid
dif-ficult conversations in recent weeks, as
gruesome details emerged about the
murder in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi,
a journalist who had been critical of the
Saudi government On Wednesday, the
chief prosecutor of Istanbul said Mr
Khashoggi had been strangled almost
as soon as he stepped into the Saudi
Consulate in the city Some of the agents
who have been detained in connection
with the killing have been linked to
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
“This has started the conversation of
‘Where is the money coming from?’”
Mr Bansal said
Other Silicon Valley investors are in a
more uncomfortable position Some
start-up founders are asking their
in-vestors whether they have financial
connections to a foreign government
with a poor human rights record Others
say that from now on, they will demand
to know the source of investment
money
But it is easy for founders to ask
where the money is coming from, and
much harder for them to take action
Of-ten, it is difficult to figure out where
ven-ture capital firms are getting their
money, because the firms rarely
dis-close that information And even if
start-up executives discover that some of
their money is from an unwelcome
source, it is tricky to give back money
already accepted — and possibly spent
The efforts and calls for action are
nascent Luis von Ahn, chief executive
of a language-learning app, Duolingo,
said he had recently taken a closer look
at the more than $100 million his
com-pany had raised from investors,
includ-ing Union Square Venture and Kleiner
Perkins He does not believe any of it
came from Saudi Arabia, he said, but he
added that he could not be sure, given
the complex, opaque network of
invest-ment vehicles that back venture capital
funds
Mr von Ahn said the information was
more useful for evaluating potential
fu-ture investments than reassessing past
ones, and that he planned to raise the
question with potential investors if
Duolingo sought more investment
“There are all kinds of places I
per-sonally wouldn’t want to have money
from,” he said
Amol Sarva, a founder of Knotel, a
co-working start-up, said he had beentelling bankers and fund-raising advis-ers that he wants to avoid money fromcertain groups, including “evil govern-ments.”
“All money is green, but there isplenty of it all around,” he said “If wecan choose who we talk to, we will.”
Fred Wilson, a partner at UnionSquare Ventures, a prominent firm inNew York, wrote on his blog last weekthat a chief executive of a company in itsportfolio had, for the first time, askedabout the firm’s financial ties He said heexpected more emails like that in thecoming weeks
Mr Wilson wrote that he didn’t havecompletely “clean hands,” because hisfirm had once sold shares in a portfoliocompany to a “buyer who was frontingfor gulf interests.” But he said UnionSquare Ventures’ funds had not raisedmoney from repressive governments,and he called for venture capital firmsand start-ups to find out whether theycould be proud of their investors
“Sadly, the answer for many will be noand it will not be easy to unwind thoserelationships,” Mr Wilson wrote
Venture capital investors raise moneyfrom a variety of sources, including pen-sion funds, college endowments, sover-eign wealth funds, wealthy individualsand family fortunes They then use themoney to invest in start-ups with the po-tential for fast growth
Since the venture capital funds areprivately held, they are under little obli-gation to disclose information abouttheir activities Some executives at thefirms say they keep the information pri-vate for competitive reasons Others do
so at the request of the people and nizations, known as limited partners,that invest
orga-Some top-tier firms, including dreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins,are so secretive that they do not acceptinvestments from public pension funds,which publish the results of their invest-ments These disclosures allow the pub-lic to know how much — or little —money the firms earned for their invest-ors
An-The lack of required disclosuresmakes following the money difficult
When reached for this article, many ofthe top firms in Silicon Valley, includingSequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Accel,Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz,Greylock, Benchmark and New Enter-prise Associates, declined to publiclydiscuss their limited partners
But Saudi Arabia has been a big vestor in tech The kingdom’s Public In-vestment Fund has made investmentsdirectly in some start-ups, like Uber andMagic Leap, an augmented-realityheadset company Neither company hasgiven any indication that it would returnthe money
in-The kingdom has also invested in topventure firms It sometimes strikesthese deals through other entities, likethe endowment fund of King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology, aSaudi research university that bears thename of the former ruler who created it
Only the largest and most powerfulstart-up investor, SoftBank, whichraised $45 billion from Saudi Arabia forits Vision Fund, has made its associationpublic
After the news of Mr Khashoggi’sdeath, David Gutelius, a partner at theData Guild, a boutique venture “studio”
that incubates and invests in start-ups,began asking prospective investorsabout the sources of their money Find-ing them out was more difficult than heexpected, Mr Gutelius said, becausemany investments into the venturefunds came from shell companies andother entities But he said he had foundpervasive ties to governments with poor
Start-ups are asking
where the money’s from
SAN FRANCISCO
Some are newly resistant
to taking investments from
countries like Saudi Arabia
BY ERIN GRIFFITH
“All money is green,
but there is plenty of it
all around If we can choose
who we talk to, we will.”
VENTURE, PAGE 8
Pull up a chair and ponder a part of the
automobile that drivers may take for
granted but that the manufacturers do
not: seats Buyers are seduced by a
car’s styling, performance and brand
image But you’re going nowhere fast
without a good place to park your
behind
A good seat helps improve safety,
makes us better drivers and can even
increase a car’s fuel efficiency And
while the car’s exterior can get a
shop-per to open the door, an eye-catching
and comfortable chair can close the
sale
A typical driver will spend nearly
38,000 hours behind the wheel in a
lifetime, covering some 800,000 miles,
according to a study by Harvard
Health Watch
While the budget for seating can be
second only to the engine, the
au-tomakers do not manufacture the seats
— that’s the job of suppliers like
Adi-ent, Faurecia and Lear They employ
designers, chemists, ergonomic
spe-cialists, metallurgists and artisans,
plus biomedical and software neers to provide solutions for the au-tomakers
engi-Because of nondisclosure contracts,it’s unlikely you’ll ever know whomade the seat in your car But themakers are working hand in hand withthe auto companies The car compa-nies provide some outlines, includingbudget, and the seat makers come
back with a product
“We recently helped a customerreduce the mass of the pickup truckseating by replacing metal componentswith new materials,” said Ray Scott,the chief executive of Lear “It helpedthe company achieve their weight-reduction targets.”
A lighter vehicle is more efficient
Comfort is deeply personal for
con-sumers My wife is so uninterested incars that she hardly knows a Buickfrom a Jaguar, but until recently, sheknew one brand with her eyes shut
“It’s Honda, isn’t it?” she’d say with ascowl when settling into an Accord or aCivic The cushion contours simplydidn’t work for her
Honda has revised its seats, so shehas lost her superpower
The car companies know an fortable perch can mean a lost sale, nomatter how exceptional the car is
uncom-Rarely offered in sizes, the same seatthat supports a 5-foot frame mustplease a 6-foot-4 rugby player
When Nissan got serious aboutimproving its seats, it looked at datacollected by NASA on the shape of thehuman spine in space
In theory, cradling the back in thisneutral posture reduces the fatigue ofsitting
The Zero Gravity seats that debuted
in the 2013 Altima scored much betterwith consumers than the departingunits
“Zero Gravity isn’t just a buzzword,”
said Chris Reed, the vice president forplatform and technology engineering
at Nissan “People actually noticed
Our testers driving the developmentalcars for 5,000 miles at a stretch told us
A comfortable place to sit for 38,000 hours
Lear’s ConfigurE-Plus technology, which allows for custom arrangements and a tion of personal amenities, is aimed at autonomous vehicles.
ob-Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury tary, said in an interview that he wouldhonor any legal requests from Congress
secre-to release the president’s tax returns,which are stored in a vault at the Inter-nal Revenue Service But the demandwould undoubtedly thrust Mr Mnuchininto the fraught position of balancing hisloyalty to Mr Trump with a legal re-quirement to deliver the returns
“The first issue is, they would have towin the House, which they haven’t doneyet,” Mr Mnuchin said during a recentinterview in Jerusalem “If they win theHouse and there is a request, we willwork with our general counsel and theI.R.S general counsel on any requests.”
Mr Mnuchin said his team would lyze any demands for the president’s re-turns and fulfill them if required by law
ana-Asked whether a request made for tical purposes would be legal, Mr
poli-Mnuchin demurred, saying he did notwant to stake out any legal positions
His team has not yet studied the issue,
have the power to request taxpayer formation from the Internal RevenueService and asserts that “the secretaryshall furnish such committee with anyreturn or return information specified insuch request.”
in-“On a plain reading of the statute, Ithink the baseline ought to be, they askfor taxpayer information, they’re enti-tled to it,” said Neal Wolin, who served
as the Treasury Department’s generalcounsel from 1999 to 2001
House and Senate Democrats havemade several unsuccessful attempts toobtain Mr Trump’s tax returns and saythey intend to try again if they gain con-trol of either chamber
Mr Trump was the first presidentialcandidate in decades to refuse to releasehis taxes
After promising to do so, he cited acontinuing I.R.S audit as a reason hewas being advised by his lawyers
against releasing them before mately settling on the argument that theAmerican people are not that interested
ulti-in his fulti-inances
Portions of Mr Trump’s returns thathave become public have shed light onthe legal maneuvers he has used to re-duce his tax liabilities A more completerelease of his filings could offer addi-tional insight into his business ties,charitable giving and wealth
Still, after withholding the documentsfor so long, Mr Trump is unlikely tohand over his taxes without a fight Ru-dolph W Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personallawyer, said this month that it would be astruggle for Democrats to prove thatthey have a legitimate oversight objec-tive and that it would be a “heck of agood battle” for the president
If Mr Trump tries to deny a request, itwould potentially lock two branches ofgovernment in a protracted legal clash
Most tax experts agree that Congresshas the authority to request taxpayer re-turns
There is some legal debate aboutwhether the motivations for such a re-quest matter and under what circum-stances the returns can be made public.Andy Grewal, a professor at the Uni-versity of Iowa College of Law, argued inthe Yale Journal on Regulation last yearthat Mr Trump could order the I.R.S not
to disclose his returns if he could makethe case that the congressional requesthad been made out of “personal ani-mus,” rather than for legitimate legisla-tive reasons
Democratic congressional aides havesaid taxpayer returns can be releasedpublicly if the chairman and rankingmember of a tax-writing committeeagree to do so or if the majority of thecommittee votes in favor of disclosure
In 2014, the Republican-led House Waysand Means Committee helped to estab-lish that precedent by voting alongparty lines to release some taxpayer in-formation related to an investigationinto whether the I.R.S was wrongfullytargeting conservatives
But other tax and legal experts arguethat the committee violated the law inreleasing that tax information and thatdoing so opened the door to use ofoversight powers as a weapon againstpolitical enemies
Ken Kies, a tax lobbyist and formerchief of staff of the Congressional JointCommittee on Taxation, noted that theInternal Revenue Code also mandatedstrict penalties for unauthorized disclo-sures of tax information Lawmakers, hesaid, could be putting themselves in le-gal jeopardy if they released the presi-dent’s tax information to the public with-out Mr Trump’s permission “I’ve seenall this stuff about how people are going
to release it and I keep wondering whatare they thinking,” Mr Kies said “It sureisn’t something I would want to take toocavalierly.”
President Trump has broken with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax returns, saying that the American people are not that interested in his finances.
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Seeking Trump’s tax filings
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview that he would honor any legal requests from Congress to release the president’s tax returns.
JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON
Democratic Party intends
to request the president’s returns if it wins control
BY ALAN RAPPEPORT
Sky is the limit with exclusive
20 years visa and privileges.
Trang 8Mr Berns has managed to win over cal officials who are eager for economicdevelopment Nevada’s governor, BrianSandoval, read a proclamation thatnamed the Blockchains property “Inno-vation Park” at an event last monthwhere Mr Berns sat on a panel with thegovernor and Elon Musk, the chief exec-utive of Tesla
lo-Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada, whichhas been described as the largest build-ing in the world, is surrounded byBlockchains’ land Companies likeGoogle, Apple and Switch also haveproperties in the industrial park that issurrounded by Mr Berns’s holdings
This week, he announced a dum of understanding with one of thestate’s main power companies, NV En-ergy, to team up on projects that will runenergy transactions through ablockchain
memoran-The Nevada county where this is alllocated, Storey County, has only about
An enormous plot of land in the Nevadadesert — bigger than nearby Reno —has been the subject of local intriguesince a company with no history,Blockchains L.L.C., bought it for $170million in cash this year
The man who owns the company, alawyer and cryptocurrency millionairenamed Jeffrey Berns, put on a helmetand climbed into a Polaris off-road vehi-cle a week ago to give a tour of thesprawling property and dispel a bit ofthe mystery
He imagines a sort of experimentalcommunity spread over about a hun-dred square miles, where houses,schools, commercial districts and pro-duction studios will be built The center-piece of this giant project will be theblockchain, a new kind of database thatwas introduced by Bitcoin
After his driver stopped the Polaris on
a high desert plateau, surrounded byrabbit brush and wild horses, Mr Berns,who is 56, pointed to the highlights of hisdream community
“You see that first range of tains,” he said, pointing south “Thosemountains are the border of our SouthValley That’s where we’re going to buildthe high-tech park,” a research campusthat would cover hundreds of acres
moun-There are also plans for a college and ane-gaming arena
As strange — even fantastical — as allthis might sound, Mr Berns’s ambitionsfit right into the idiosyncratic world ofcryptocurrencies and blockchains
The blockchain began as a digitalledger on which all Bitcoin transactionsare recorded Some aficionados havegrander plans They think it could takepower back from the institutions theybelieve are calling all the shots
Just as Bitcoin made it possible totransfer money without using a bank,blockchain believers like Mr Bernsthink the technology will make it possi-ble for ordinary people to control theirown data — the lifeblood of the digitaleconomy — without relying on big com-panies or governments
There is a fuzzy line between theseutopian visions and get-rich-quickschemes Several cryptocurrencyprojects have been shut down by regula-tors; apparent hucksters have been ar-rested; and a plan to transform PuertoRico with cryptocurrencies has beencriticized as nothing more than a bid totake advantage of the island’s status as atax haven
Mr Berns was drawn to Nevada bytax benefits, including its lack of incometaxes And the breadth of his ambitionscertainly raises the risk of a boondoggle
But he is different from his brethren in one big way: He is spendinghis own money So far, he said, he hasspent $300 million on the land, offices,planning and a staff of 70 people Andbuying 67,000 largely undevelopedacres is a bit of old-fashioned, real estaterisk-taking
crypto-Still, Mr Berns said his ambition wasnot to be a real estate magnate or even
to get rich — or richer He is promising togive away all decision-making power forthe project and 90 percent of any divi-dends it generates to a corporate struc-ture that will be held by residents, em-ployees and future investors Thatstructure, which he calls a “distributedcollaborative entity,” is supposed to op-erate on a blockchain where everyone’sownership rights and voting powers will
be recorded in a digital wallet
Mr Berns acknowledged that all this
is way beyond what blockchains haveactually accomplished But that hasn’tdiscouraged him
“I don’t know why,” he said over theroar of the Polaris engine “I just —something inside me tells me this is theanswer, that if we can get enough people
to trust the blockchain, we can begin tochange all the systems we operate by.”
4,000 residents and was best known, til recently, for its history of silver min-ing and its modern brothels, includingone owned by a county commissioner
un-That same county commissioner,Lance Gilman, bought the land sur-rounding the brothel and turned it intothe industrial park where Tesla andGoogle are now located
Blockchains has received preliminarycounty support for a new town along theTruckee River, with thousands ofhomes, a school and a drone deliverysystem, and is working closely with thecounty on a broader master plan
But for now, Blockchains is emptyland and a repurposed office building
Mr Berns said the company won’t beginconstruction on the broader propertyuntil late 2019, at the earliest, afterputting together the master plan andgetting it approved by the county
The office manager from Mr Berns’sold law office in Los Angeles, JoannaRodriguez, moved with her four chil-dren and husband to Nevada
“He has these crazy ideas — but Iknow that every time he sets his mind tosomething he will get there,” said Ms
Rodriguez, 29, who has worked with Mr
Berns for eight years and is now the
manager of the Blockchains office in vada “That’s why I decided to move.”
Ne-Mr Berns spent most of his sional life on class-action lawsuits,many of them against financial compa-nies He learned about Bitcoin in 2012but was won over by another cryptocur-rency, Ethereum, which makes it possi-ble to store more than just transactiondata on a blockchain
profes-Mr Berns bought Ether, the digital ken associated with Ethereum, in a bigsale in 2015 Thanks to an astronomicalincrease in the price of Ether and somewell-timed selling last year before itcrashed, he became wealthy enough tofund his dream project
to-Ethereum is what he believes makeshis community more than just a giantreal estate project To understand whyrequires some imagination And faith
Every resident and employee will havewhat amounts to an Ethereum address,which they will use to vote on localmeasures and store their personal data
Mr Berns believes Ethereum willgive people a way to control their identi-ties and online data without any govern-ments or companies involved
That is a widely shared view in theblockchain community, but there are
significant questions about whether any
of it can work in the real world Mostblockchain companies have failed togain any traction, and Ethereum andBitcoin networks have struggled to han-dle even moderate amounts of traffic
Mr Berns believes that one of the bigproblems has been security Peoplehave been terrible at holding the privatekeys that are necessary to get access to
a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet
He wants to address that with acustom-built system where people’s pri-vate keys are stored on multiple digitaldevices, kept in vaults, so that no one de-vice can gain access to the keys He hasalready purchased vaults that are bur-rowed into mountains in Sweden andSwitzerland, and he plans to build addi-tional vaults in the mountains in Neva-da
The other thing holding backEthereum, Mr Berns believes, has been
a lack of real-world laboratories His vada land, he hopes, will change that
Ne-“This will either be the biggest thingever, or the most spectacular crash andburn in the history of mankind,” Mr.Berns said “I don’t know which one Ibelieve it’s the former, but either way it’sgoing to be one hell of a ride.”
A cryptocurrency millionaire’s desert utopia
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
DESIGN BY EHRLICH YANAI RHEE CHANEY ARCHITECTS + TOM WISCOMBE
Clockwise from top: Jeffrey Berns, the chief executive of Blockchains L.L.C., envisions a futuristic community spread over about a hundred square miles of desert near Reno, Nev.; employees inside the Blockchains office, where a staff of 70 is planning the dream community; a rendering of what Mr Berns’s blockchain-based community might become.
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
STOREY COUNTY, NEV.
BY NATHANIEL POPPER
“If we can get enough people
to trust the blockchain, we can begin to change all the systems
we operate by.”
human rights records, including Russia,
China and Saudi Arabia
As a result of his discoveries, Mr
Gutelius said, he ended fund-raising
conversations with three groups,
includ-ing venture capital funds, and plans to
cut off two more He declined to name
the groups Last month, he announced
that his firm would not take money from
repressive regimes or have
partner-ships with any firms or companies that
counted them as customers, investors
or board members
“I want to get back to building
compa-nies that matter to the world without
worrying about which board is beholden
to which regime,” Mr Gutelius said
“That’s not something we should even
be having to discuss.”
Roy Bahat, an investor at Bloomberg
Beta, the venture capital arm of
Bloom-berg, said the questions were part of a
growing realization in Silicon Valley
about the global nature of investment
money
He said some founders started asking
him about venture fund limited partners
about a year ago, when sovereign
wealth funds became more aggressive
in the technology industry Bloomberg
Beta has one limited partner, its parent
company, Bloomberg
“Founders now really care, and
they’re getting more sophisticated on
it,” Mr Bahat said
It is unclear to what extent these
con-cerns will stick Past revelations of such
connections have barely made waves
among start-ups
Last year, an investigation of offshore
banking documents known as the
Para-dise Papers revealed that an investment
in Twitter by DST Global, founded by
Yuri Milner, was backed by VTB, a
Kremlin-controlled bank often used for
politically strategic deals Mr Milner
has built a reputation for savvy deal
making in Silicon Valley, and the
revela-tion did not hurt his standing among
start-ups Several companies that
raised money from the firm — which
were not revealed to be connected to
any deal involving an investment from
the Russian government — defended
him at the time
But Mr Gutelius at the Data Guild
said he thought the technology industry
was in a different place now Technology
companies face a backlash against their
addictive products, privacy violations
and their role in the spread of
misinfor-mation
He said the source of the tech
indus-try’s funding matters, “because the
profits you generate go directly back to
supporting that regime and everything
VENTURE, FROM PAGE 7
David Gutelius, a venture capitalist, will
not take money from repressive regimes.
TIFFANY BROWN ANDERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
they were a solid improvement.”
Car owners rarely think past fort Automakers must consider thebottom line Adjustments to cushionlength, side bolsters and the lumbarsupports all add expense
com-An extreme example is Lincoln’sPerfect Position seat, a $1,500 optionwith 30 points of adjustment and mas-sage
Simple front seats can have around
200 parts That can climb to 700 anisms allow them to slide, fold, rise,pivot, tilt for entry or drop into thefloor to create cargo room Seat tracksare engineered to keep French friesfrom gumming them up
Mech-The design must integrate with thelook of the console, the instrumentpanel and the door panels Adding tothe cost and complexity, each has 1,700
to 3,000 requirements that includestyle, durability, recyclability, comfort,government safety specifications, andfeatures like heat and venting
Seats have become interactive
Mercedes-Benz has side bolsters thatquickly adjust to steering inputs, keep-ing drivers properly positioned Cadil-lac cushions vibrate on the appropriateside to warn drivers when the cardrifts from its lane
Rolls-Royce and Bentley have long
offered massage seating That hastrickled down to Cadillac’s entry XT4crossover as an option The budgetNissan Kicks crossover offers an inte-grated Bose system in the driver’sheadrest
Orthopedics and advanced materialshave raised today’s basic seats headand shoulders above what babyboomers grew up with Until themid-1950s, American cars basicallyhad a couch behind the steering wheelwith alarmingly low backs that fundedwhiplash lawyers for decades Theyhelped couples cuddle at drive-in mov-ies but offered no driving support,
seatbelts or head protection
Automakers were happy to kill offbench seats because it saved them thework of designing front airbags thatwould protect all three passengers
As for safety concerns now, modernunits are engineered for strength toprotect your back in a rear-end colli-sion
Volvo (consistently viewed as ing the “most comfortable seats” byautomotive writers) patented some-thing we take for granted — the three-point seatbelt, becoming standard inits models in 1959 Today, Volvos can behad with integrated child booster seats
hav-in the back
Most people know about crumplezones in the front and rear of the vehi-cle Malin Ekholm, the vice president
of the Volvo Cars Safety Center, pointsout that its vehicles’ seats have verti-cal crumple zones
“In the event you run off the road,
we wanted to do more,” Mr Ekholmsaid “Peak forces in such accidentswere found to be above the limit of thehuman spine in many cases, and thecrumple zone is designed to reduce orremove the spinal injuries.”
At Lear, Mr Scott expects that seatswill become smart devices “Our newIntu seat is the world’s first intelligentsystem using sensors and intelligent
features,” he said
Discreet sensors in the seat providemedical-grade data to the vehicle,which can then react with tones, vibra-tions or visual responses when itthinks the driver is stressed, drowsy ordistracted The seat can also automati-cally adjust itself “into an optimalposition based on the occupant’s size,shape and location in the seat,” Mr.Scott added
As autonomous driving technologyimproves, it will inevitably change thecabin space It’s possible that the front
or middle rows will rotate to face theback seat so people can conversebetter
At the very least they’ll have a nificant ability to recline with more of
sig-us being asleep at the steering wheel(if cars retain them) These new re-laxed positions will mean airbags willhave to shift, built into the seat in amore integral way
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WHEEL S, FROM PAGE 7
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trusted perspective.
Trang 9Ara Guler, who died on Oct 17, was thegreatest photographer of modernIstanbul He was born in 1928 in anArmenian family in Istanbul Arabegan taking photographs of the city in
1950, images that captured the lives ofindividuals alongside the city’s monu-mental Ottoman architecture, its ma-jestic mosques and magnificent foun-tains I was born two years later, in
1952, and lived in the same hoods he lived in Ara Guler’s Istanbul
neighbor-is my Istanbul
I first heard of Ara in the 1960s when
I saw his photographs in Hayat, a
widely read weekly news and gossipmagazine with a strong emphasis onphotography One of my uncles edited
it Ara published portraits of writersand artists such as Picasso and Dali,and the celebrated literary and cultur-
al figures of an older generation inTurkey such as the novelist AhmetHamdi Tanpinar When Ara pho-tographed me for the first time afterthe success of my novel “The BlackBook,” I realized happily that I hadarrived as a writer
Ara devotedly photographed bul for over half a century, continuing
Istan-into the 2000s Ieagerly studied hisphotographs, to see
in them the ment and transfor-mation of the cityitself My friendshipwith Ara began in
develop-2003, when I wasconsulting his ar-chive of 900,000photographs toresearch my book
“Istanbul.” He hadturned the largethree-story home heinherited from hisfather, a pharmacistfrom the Galatasaray neighborhood inthe Beyoglu district of the city, into aworkshop, office and archive
The photographs I wanted for mybook were not those famous Ara Gulershots everyone knew but images moreattuned to the melancholy Istanbul Iwas describing, the grayscale atmos-phere of my childhood Ara had manymore of such photographs than I ex-pected He detested images of a sterile,sanitized, touristic Istanbul Havingdiscovered where my interests lay, hegave me access to his archives undis-turbed
It was through Ara’s urban age photography, which appeared innewspapers in the early 1950s, hisportraits of the poor, the unemployedand the new arrivals from the country-side, that I first saw the “unknown”
report-Istanbul
Ara’s attentiveness to the itants of Istanbul’s back streets — thefishermen sitting in coffee shops andmending their nets, the unemployedmen getting inebriated in taverns, thechildren patching up car tires in theshadow of the city’s crumbling ancientwalls, the construction crews, therailway workers, the boatmen pulling
inhab-at their oars to ferry city folk from oneshore of the Golden Horn to the other,the fruit sellers pushing their hand-carts, the people milling about at dawnwaiting for the Galata Bridge to open,the early-morning minibus drivers —
is evidence of how he always pressed his attachment to the citythrough the people who live in it
ex-It is as if Ara’s photographs weretelling us, “Yes, there is no end tobeautiful cityscapes in Istanbul, butfirst, the individuals!” The crucial,defining characteristic of an Ara Guler
photograph is the emotional tion he draws between cityscapes andindividuals
correla-His photographs also made mediscover how much more fragile andpoor the people of Istanbul appearedwhen captured alongside the city’smonumental Ottoman architecture, itsmajestic mosques and magnificentfountains
“You only like my photographsbecause they remind you of the Istan-bul of your childhood,” he would attimes say to me, sounding oddly irri-tated “No!” I would protest “I likeyour photographs because they arebeautiful.”
But are beauty and memory rate things? Are things not beautifulbecause they are slightly familiar andresemble our memories? I enjoyeddiscussing such questions with him
sepa-While working in his archive ofIstanbul photographs, I often won-dered what it was about them that soprofoundly appealed to me Would thesame images appeal to others? There
is something dizzying about looking atthe images of the neglected and yetstill lively details of the city I havespent my life in — the cars and thehawkers on its streets, the trafficpolicemen, the workers, the women inhead scarves crossing bridges envel-oped in fog, the old bus stops, theshadows of its trees, the graffiti on itswalls
For those who, like me, have spent
65 years in the same city — sometimeswithout leaving it for years — thelandscapes of the city eventually turninto a kind of index for our emotionallife A street might remind us of thesting of getting fired from a job; thesight of a particular bridge might bringback the loneliness of our youth A citysquare might recall the bliss of a loveaffair; a dark alleyway might be areminder of our political fears; an oldcoffeehouse might evoke the memory
of our friends who have been jailed
And a sycamore tree might remindhow we used to be poor
In the early days of our friendship,
we never spoke about Ara’s Armenianheritage and the suppressed, painfulhistory of the destruction of the Otto-man Armenians — a subject that re-mains a veritable taboo in Turkey Isensed that it would be difficult tospeak about this harrowing subjectwith him, that it would put a strain onour relationship He knew that speak-ing about it would make it harder forhim to survive in Turkey
Over the years, he trusted me a littleand occasionally brought up politicalsubjects he wouldn’t raise with others
One day he told me that in 1942, toavoid the exorbitant “Wealth Tax” theTurkish government was imposingspecifically on its non-Muslim citizens,and to evade deportation to a forcedlabor camp on failing to pay the tax,his pharmacist father had left hishome in Galatasaray and hidden formonths in a different house, neveronce venturing outside
He spoke to me about the night ofSept 6, 1955, when in a moment ofpolitical tension between Turkey andGreece caused by events in Cyprus,gangs mobilized by the Turkish gov-ernment roamed the city looting shopsowned by Greeks, Armenians andJews, desecrated churches and syna-
gogues, and turned Istiklal Street, thecentral avenue that runs throughBeyoglu, past Ara’s home, into a warzone
Armenian and Greek families ranmost of the stores on Istiklal Avenue
In the 1950s I would visit their shopswith my mother They spoke Turkishwith an accent When my mother and Iwould return home, I used to imitatetheir accented Turkish After the eth-nic cleansing of 1955, the purpose ofwhich was to intimidate and exile thecity’s non-Muslim minorities, most ofthem left Istiklal Avenue and theirhomes in Istanbul By the mid-1960s,barely anyone was left
Ara and I were comfortable talking
in some detail about how he wentabout photographing these and othersimilar events Yet we still did nottouch upon the destruction of theOttoman Armenians, Ara’s grandfa-thers and grandmothers
In 2005, I gave an interview where Icomplained that there was no freedom
of thought in Turkey and we still n’t talk about the terrible things thatwere done to the Ottoman Armenians
could-90 years ago The nationalist pressexaggerated my comments I wastaken to court in Istanbul for insultingTurkishness, a charge that can lead to
a three-year prison sentence
Two years later, my friend the nian journalist Hrant Dink was shotand killed in Istanbul, in the middle ofthe street, for using the words “Arme-nian genocide.” Certain newspapersbegan to hint that I might be next
Arme-Because of the death threats I wasreceiving, the charges that had beenbrought against me and the viciouscampaign in the nationalist press, Istarted spending more time abroad, inNew York I would return to my office
in Istanbul for brief stays, withouttelling anyone I was back
On one of those brief visits homefrom New York, during some of thedarkest days after Hrant Dink’s assas-sination, I walked into my office andthe phone immediately started ringing
In those days I never picked up myoffice phone The ringing would pauseoccasionally, but then it would startagain, on and on Uneasy, I eventuallypicked up Straight away, I recognizedAra’s voice “Oh, you’re back! I amcoming over now,” he said, and hung
up without waiting for my response
His tears weren’t slowing down Themore he cried, the more I was gripped
by a strange sense of guilt and feltparalyzed After crying for a very longtime, Ara finally calmed down, andthen, as if this had been the wholepurpose of his visit to my office, hedrank a glass of water and left
Sometime after that we met again Iresumed my quiet work in his archives
as if nothing had happened I no longerfelt the urge to ask him about hisgrandfathers and grandmothers Thegreat photographer had already told
me everything through his tears
Ara had hoped for a democracywhere individuals could speak freely oftheir murdered ancestors, or at leastfreely weep for them Turkey neverbecame that democracy The success
of the past 15 years, a period of nomic growth built on borrowedmoney, has been used not to broadenthe reach of democracy but to restrictfreedom of thought even further Andafter all this growth and all this con-struction, Ara Guler’s old Istanbul hasbecome — to use the title of one of hisbooks — a “Lost Istanbul.”
eco-PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARA GULER/MAGNUM PHOTOS
ORHAN PAMUK, who won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 2006, is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Red- Haired Woman.” Ekin Oklap translated this essay from Turkish.
‘I like your photographs because they are beautiful’
Above, nightfall
in the Istanbul district of Zeyrek, 1960.
It was through Ara’s portraits of the poor, the unemployed and the new arrivals from the countryside, that I first saw the
“unknown”
Istanbul.
The enduring charm of the Turkish baths, 1965.
In the Tophane quarter, 1986.
Waiting for bazaar customers, 1959.
Opinion
Trang 10LONDON The Democratic UnionistParty, the hard-line Northern IrishProtestant party that essentially hasboth Prime Minister Theresa May andthe Brexit process in a death grip, is notmerely stupid or fanatical The partyunderstands that its fortunes depend on
an increasingly threatened Britishnationalism
Unionism is dying in Northern land During the 30-year war, the Prot-estant majority was mostly loyal, eventhough Northern Ireland was one of thepoorest parts of the United Kingdom
Ire-With a dwindling industrial base, it wassubsidized by war, infused with moneyfor an occupying army and giant, gar-risoned stations full of police officers
When I was growing up in the 1980s,
in a small Protestant town in the east ofthe six counties, Protestants couldbelieve that those men of violence werethere for us, that the Union was ours
Electoral gerrymandering shored upUnionist power There were jobs for the
“Prods,” as Protestants were known
Protestants occupied most of theskilled work and the few professionaland managerial jobs available
The south of Ireland was poor, andeveryday chauvinism said Catholicswere poor because they were backwardand dirty, and brought it on themselves
“That’s a Protestant-looking house,”
mothers would chirp after tidying up
The annual Twelfth of July bonfiresand parades, celebrating the history ofUlster Loyalism, saw effigies of wickedPapists burned for public edificationand the delight of inebriated Loyalists
This was “our culture.” These festivitieshelped create a lynch mob atmosphere,leading to the murder of Catholics
Every year, the stories were the same:
Bonfire night was a night for pettyterror and bricking Catholic windows
Parades day was a day for blood I recallthat one year during my childhood,members of a local Loyalist flute bandstabbed a Catholic bus driver repeat-edly; a woman tried to stanch the bleed-ing by wrapping him in towels, but whenthe ambulance arrived, he was dead Weheard this story on the radio, on the wayback from watching a parade Manypaid with blood for Protestant loyalty toBritain
What, today, is the point of NorthernIreland? Built for perpetual war to keepthe British in Ireland, it has lost its war,and with it the enormous, animatingreservoirs of feeling and meaning thatkept the “Prods” loyal The barracks aregone, the stations empty hulks Peacebrought multinationals and chainstores, and the town centers grewdeathly quiet The bunting, flags andmurals still appear in some Protestantheartlands, if local councils don’t dare toremove them But they cut a fadedfigure in just another north Britishregion struggling to lure investors withlower corporate taxes
Parades draw diminishing, agingcrowds Young, working-class Protes-tants once waved banners celebratingUlster plantation lords, as though theirlives were connected to such viciousmen Now they want out Every year,more than a third of students flee North-ern Ireland More would if they could: ABelfast Telegraph survey of youngpeople found that two-thirds want toleave Ironically, the communal institu-tions bequeathed by Good Friday pro-long sectarian allegiances, runningStormont, the Northern Irish assembly,
on the principle of communal sharing
power-Hence the Democratic UnionistParty’s ability to stalemate the govern-ment
Prime Minister May formed a
coali-tion with the D.U.P after losing herparliamentary majority in last year’ssnap election In exchange for keepingher in office, she gave the hard-lineUnionists veto power over Brexit nego-tiations The D.U.P., which has a history
of ties to gunrunning and tarism, has never been easy to dealwith Its leadership is based in the FreePresbyterian Church, the fundamental-ist sect founded in 1951 by the formerD.U.P leader Ian Paisley It has beendescribed by the journalist Owen Jones
paramili-as “the political wing of the 17th tury.”
cen-During the 1980s, campaigningagainst Prime Minister MargaretThatcher’s negotiated settlement with
the Irish Republic, itsslogan blared fromevery lamppost inNorthern Ireland:
“Ulster Says No.”
Ulster is saying noagain Mrs May, tosatisfy her party, has
to get Britain out ofthe Europeancustoms union, re-storing a customsborder between theUnited Kingdom andthe European Union The D.U.P wel-comes that But the Good Friday agree-ment presupposes a “soft” border be-tween the north and south of Ireland
Mrs May, to preserve the agreement,proposes keeping Northern Ireland inthe customs union That means acustoms border between NorthernIreland and the rest of Britain There,the D.U.P draws a “blood red” line That,
it says, mortally threatens the Union
The panic has a basis in reality In theNorthern Ireland Assembly elections of
2017, Unionism lost its majority SinnFein came close to beating the D.U.P asthe biggest single party In the 2016referendum, most people in Northern
Ireland voted against the D.U.P.’s Brexit position Census figures show along-term decline in the share of Protes-tants, who tend to be Unionist voters,with a Catholic majority possible by
pro-2021 An ironic turn for a statelet built topreserve a loyal Protestant majority.For the theocrats at the core of theD.U.P leadership, this is a threat to thepolitical self-defense of Protestantsagainst, as Ian Paisley used to put it,the Papal Antichrist Hence, the D.U.P.obstructs gay marriage, abortion rightsand Irish language rights The partyand its Loyalist base are waging acultural war to defend “Britishness.”They’ll spoil a deal with the EuropeanUnion, even if the Good Friday Agree-ment must be rewritten or collapses
In mainland Britain, the Brexit rightlaps this up These politicians, repre-senting the right wing of the Conserva-tive Party and those who have brokenfrom it over Europe since the 1990s,have seen the crisis coming, too TheUnion, forged by empire, looks purpose-less; Britishness forlorn The institu-tions of government are losing legitima-
cy The Conservative Party has been in astate of decline, particularly since the1990s Scotland almost seceded in 2014
A resurgent left under the Labour Partyleader Jeremy Corbyn poses its ownsolution to the pervading sense of col-lapse
The Brexit right blames all of this on aliberal establishment allied to Europe Itclaims that European rules have heldback business, weakened the pound anderoded national self-determination Byquitting the European Union, the Brexi-teers hope to break that establishmentand empower the Conservative Party’ssmall-business base
The D.U.P and the Brexit right don’thave identical priorities Brexiteerswant a low-wage, low-tax economy tocompete with the European Union TheD.U.P., with a more working-class base,often votes with Labour on issues likepublic spending But they share thevocabulary of “Britishness,” and theD.U.P would go along with “free mar-ket” reforms as long as Northern Ire-land received generous funding
If they succeed in forcing a “hard”
Brexit and in imposing their post-Brexit
settlement, they would further weakenthe Union They would exacerbate theregionalized class inequalities thatbrought Scotland to the brink of depar-ture
In Ireland, north and south, Sinn Fein
is a growing power It is heading to aplurality in the Assembly A crisis forthe Good Friday Agreement, alreadystretched by D.U.P obstructionism, isleading Sinn Fein to put a united Ire-land back on the agenda Though un-likely in the short-term, it seems moreplausible than Brexit did just five yearsago
Loyalists, faced with a threat to theUnion, would put up a fight Theparamilitaries still exist But in thepebbledash, gray concrete, rained-onestates of Northern Ireland, Unionism isslowly dying And with it, an idea ofBritain
The last gasp of Northern Ireland
Bullet holes marked a sign post at the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland last July.
CHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY IMAGES
A hard-line loyalist party has British politics in its death grip, because it knows that its cause
is dying.
Donald Trump’s conservative criticshave one last hope: defeat If Republi-cans suffer humiliating defeats in themidterm elections, they suggest, Presi-dent Trump will get the blame Influen-tial donors and grass-roots Republicanswill turn on him, and the party will getback to normal Not so long ago this wasthe party of Paul Ryan and free trade
This was the party of George W Bushand compassionate conservatism Thiswas a party whose self-performedautopsy after the 2012 election called formore minority outreach After Mr
Trump, why can’t the G.O.P be thatparty again?
The ranks of anti-Trump Republicansgrow thinner by the day They’re retir-ing from Congress They’re writingmemoirs blasting their former friends
But they hold out hope for the future Ifthe Republican Party could undergosuch a profound change in personalityand policy thanks to just one man in amere three years, who’s to say it can’tchange back? The Trump coalitionseems so impermanent, after all, amotley mix of Southern evangelicals,businessmen who think like the Cham-ber of Commerce and disaffected whitevoters from the Rust Belt Throw inforeign-policy hawks and anti-interven-tionist America Firsters, and Trump’sRepublican Party looks like an impossi-ble contradiction It can’t last Can it?
Yes, it can In fact, the party thatPresident Trump has remade in hisimage is arguably less divided and in abetter position to keep winning theWhite House than it has been at any
time since the 1980s What Mr Trumphas done is to rediscover the formulathat made the landslide RepublicanElectoral College victories of the Nixonand Reagan years possible Mr Trump’ssignature themes of economic national-ism and immigration restriction areonly 21st-century updates to the issuesthat brought the Republican Partytriumph in all but one of the six presi-dential elections between 1968 and 1988
Some of the parallels are obvious
President Trump talks about crime andleft-wing agitation in much the sameway that Richard Nixon once did — andRonald Reagan, too, especially duringhis time as governor of California Mr
Trump’s combination of force with anaversion to large-scale military inter-ventions and nation-building also bears
a resemblance to the policies of lican presidents past Dwight Eisen-hower and Mr Reagan also preferred tobuild up military strength withoutengaging in the kinds of prolongedwars for which Lyndon Johnson andGeorge W Bush are remembered Andwhile Mr Nixon was mired in Vietnam,
Repub-he ran as a candidate eager to find anexit
Mr Trump’s willingness to deal witheven as repellent a dictator as KimJong-un has a precedent in the creativediplomacy pursued by Mr Nixon withMao Zedong If Mr Trump is mocked forsaying that he fell in love with Mr Kimafter an exchange of letters, Mr Reaganwas once mocked, too, and by conserva-tives at that, for his love affair withMikhail Gorbachev
But the most important ways in which
Mr Trump recapitulates the winningthemes of earlier Republicans are lessdirect Throughout the Cold War, Repub-licans presented themselves as the
party of greater nationalism in thestruggle against a global threat If theUnited States was to survive in a worldthat seemed increasingly subjugated byinternational Communism, the countrywould have to embrace the party thatwas most anti-Communist
The Soviet Union is long gone, but ournational distinctiveness — the Ameri-can way of life — is perceived to beunder threat by new global forces, thistime in the form of competition fromChina and international economic andregulatory bodies that compromisenational sovereignty Many voters seeimmigration as part of this story They
want America tocontrol its borders bypolitical choice, not toadmit more immi-grants because aglobal labor marketinsists that moremust come for thegood of all
Even in the areawhere Mr Trumpseems most differentfrom Republicanspast, on trade, he hasreally returned to anolder style of politics Mr Reagan was
an economic nationalist, too, not justbecause he protected a company likeHarley-Davidson against competitionfrom Japan but more important be-cause his pro-growth policies of deregu-lation and tax cuts were themselves theappropriate forms of economic nation-alism for the 1980s In the decadesbefore the rise of China as an industrialsuperpower, economic nationalism waschiefly a matter of keeping the Ameri-can economy entrepreneurial — de-fending it against red tape and busi-
ness-unfriendly policies at home ratherthan the predatory economic strategies
of foreign governments
By the early 1990s, the Reagan nomic strategy — a mix of en-trepreneurship, tough bargaining andlimited protection — had succeededagainst stiff competition from Japan.That victory was squandered, however,
eco-by Republicans and Democrats startinglater in that decade who pursued eco-nomic policy not in terms of nationalindustry but as an exercise in globalideological consumerism
The business side of PresidentTrump’s coalition still puts its bottomline ahead of its theoretical commit-ments: Mr Trump has produced a verygood environment for business, nomatter what the businesspeople thinkabout his tariffs They want to winelections so that they can continue toprosper, and if that means electing moreprotectionists after Mr Trump, that is aprice they are readily willing to pay.Grass-roots evangelical Christiansand Rust Belt workers, meanwhile, bothfind something to like in an Americathat reaffirms its economic exceptional-ism and sovereignty That, no less than
Mr Trump’s loyalty to Christian vatives on abortion and other issues, iswhy evangelical voters have not aban-doned him
conser-Few Republicans running this yearseem to understand what gave Mr.Trump his edge in 2016 — it was not that
he was simply combative and rically right-wing It was that he had avision of what it meant to make Ameri-can great again, by making the Republi-cans a party for the nation again
opinion
A flurry of pipe bombs targeting political figures andthe media A black man and woman gunned down in agrocery store, allegedly by a white man who had, mo-ments before, tried to storm a black church A massshooting at a synagogue The past two weeks have beenones of heartbreak and fear for many Americans Evenfor those not directly touched by the horror, it is hard toescape the feeling that something has gone very wrong
In the face of such tragedy, a president is expected toserve as the consoler in chief, setting aside the pettyelements of politics to comfort a scared and grievingnation Historically, the role has been pretty straightfor-ward, as the presidential historian Michael Beschlossnoted this week: “They heal They unite They inspire
It’s not exactly rocket science.”
But with this president, observed Mr Beschloss,things don’t work that way: “It’s not in Donald Trump’ssoftware to do this He’s a one-trick pony His singlepolitical m.o is to try to divide and conquer, to pitgroups against one another and benefit from it political-ly.”
The violence of late has driven home just how tant President Trump is to focus on matters beyond thepurely political He knows, or at least is told, what he issupposed to say or do in such situations But he has adevil of a time staying on that message for more than afew hours — especially with a high-stakes election justdays away The president’s carefully scripted calls fornational unity are brief and ephemeral, abandoned formore visceral ones of political warfare It has beenpainfully easy to distinguish which are coming from theheart
reluc-With both the bomb plot and the massacre in burgh, Mr Trump issued reassuring statements, con-demning the acts of evil and expressing the need forAmericans to come together — then promptly chasedthose sentiments with overheated partisan talk, poli-tical scaremongering, and attacks on the media, which
Pitts-he repeatedly has blamed for tPitts-he ugly mood of tPitts-he tion
na-For Mr Trump, a mass assassination plot was littlemore than a distraction from what truly mattered: histeam’s political fortunes Mr Trump managed to make itthrough his visit to Pittsburgh on Tuesday without inci-dent, avoiding public remarks altogether Nonetheless,several residents, most notably Pittsburgh’s mayor, BillPeduto, had publicly requested that a presidential visit
be delayed until after the community was done ing the dead.” The immediate focus, they explainedgently, should be on the grieving families But a WhiteHouse official told CNN that a trip later in the weekwould have been complicated by Mr Trump’s tightlypacked campaign schedule Once again the presidentmade his priorities clear
“bury-Mr Trump is hardly the only president to wade intopolitics during times of crisis After the 1995 OklahomaCity bombing, President Bill Clinton called out the mili-tant antigovernment sentiment coming from conserva-tive corners of the political world, denouncing the “pur-veyors of hatred and division, the promoters of para-noia.”
More pointed still, in the aftermath of more than onemass shooting — some 17 of which he had to addressduring his tenure — President Barack Obama pleadedfor stricter gun laws In response to the 2015 blood bath
at a community college in Oregon, Mr Obama went sofar as to assert that gun violence is “something weshould politicize.”
But Mr Trump has not been seeking to find a broaderpolitical lesson in recent tragedies so much as he hasbeen eager to blow past the events and return to cam-paign combat and the adulation of his followers
Last month, as Hurricane Michael ripped across thepanhandle of Florida, Mr Trump stuck to his stumpschedule, appearing at a rally in Pennsylvania “I can-not disappoint the thousands of people that are there —and the thousands that are going,” he tweeted in justifi-cation
A heartbeat after Mr Trump’s Pittsburgh visit, hewas back in full brawler mode, ratcheting up the fear-mongering and immigrant-bashing that he is counting
on to drive his base to the polls He touted his proposal
to end birthright citizenship and talked of tripling thenumber of troops being dispatched to combat the mi-grant “invasion.” The online ad released on Mr Trump’sTwitter feed Wednesday, which pairs footage from themigrant caravan with that of an undocumented immi-grant convicted of killing two California police officersand binds it all together with claims that Democratswant to let criminals flood the country, was xenophobicdemagogy in its purest form
At this point, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect thing different from this president Like the snake in hisfavorite parable, Mr Trump cannot rise above his fun-damental nature And even in the face of national trage-
any-dy, his perspective remains fixed: The presidency is allabout the politics, and politics is all about him
The president
returns to
campaign
combat mode.
TRUMP’S FRIGHTENING CLOSING ARGUMENT
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Trang 11When I met Oso, a trash collector from
rural Georgia in his late 30s, he was
wearing dark shades and a black T-shirt
with a silhouette of an assault rifle and
the words “Piece Now.” A tall and burly
white man, he had a sleeve of tattoos on
one arm, stubble on his shaved head,
and a bushy gray beard He looked, at
first glance, like the sort of intimidating
figure who’d fit in at a far-right rally
In fact, you might see him at such a
rally — among the counterprotesters
“There shouldn’t be any question in
anybody’s mind in this country that
fascism is here,” he said “It’s alive and
well and marching us all towards
some-where that we don’t want to be.” That’s
part of the reason, he said, that he’s into
guns: “I wear a pistol every day
be-cause I’m a Jewish person in the South.”
It was the Sunday after the
terror-filled week that culminated in the
mas-sacre at the Tree of Life synagogue Oso
was sitting with a handful of other
mem-bers of the North Georgia branch of the
Socialist Rifle Association, a new,
swiftly growing left-wing gun group, in
the backyard of an Italian restaurant in
a gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood
(None of them wanted their last names
used; Oso, Spanish for “bear,” is a
nick-name.)
The mission of the S.R.A is “to arm
and train the working class for
self-defense.”
It launched in its current form this
spring — before that there was a
Face-book group of the same name — and
now has several hundred dues-paying
members and over 30 chapters This
Monday, 28 new people joined, the
group said
Brad, a 36-year-old math professor, is
a founder of the S.R.A.’s North Georgia
chapter and a member of the S.R.A.’s
central committee “Some people are
scared with what’s going on in the
coun-try right now,” he told me He only
re-cently started carrying a gun, aftergetting death threats for the socialistorganizing he was doing in his smalltown “People want to be able to protectthemselves,” he said
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,parts of the radical left fetishized fire-arms Back then, some conservativessupported gun control as a way to dis-arm African-American militants; Ron-ald Reagan signed a bill banning opencarry of loaded weapons when he wasgovernor of California “The BlackPanthers and other extremists of the1960s inspired some of the strictest guncontrol laws in American history,” theU.C.L.A law professor Adam Winklerwrote in his book, “Gunfight: The BattleOver the Right to Bear Arms in Amer-ica.”
Since then, however, gun culture hasbecome virtually synonymous withAmerican conservatism The NationalRifle Association is now perhaps the
most powerful publican lobby in thecountry, and its rhet-oric increasinglyechoes that of theapocalyptic far right
Re-Over the last 20 or 30years, Winkler told
me, “not only has theN.R.A become more and more associ-ated with the right, but there’s an in-creasingly militaristic, rebellious tone
to the N.R.A and the gun rights ment.” It’s become, he said, “all aboutarming up to fight the tyranny that’scoming.”
move-Meanwhile, most of the left has braced gun control, something that’sunlikely to change anytime soon But itwas probably inevitable that, as ourpolitics have become more polarizedand violent, a nascent left-wing gunculture would emerge
em-“These are some trying times, so I dobelieve more black men and women arearming up,” Maitreya Ahsekh, chair-man of the Houston chapter of the Huey
P Newton Gun Club, told me His group,named after the co-founder of the BlackPanther Party, started in 2014 In 2016,members faced off against armed anti-Muslim demonstrators outside a Nation
of Islam mosque in South Dallas (One
of the group’s founders was later rested in an F.B.I campaign against
ar-“black identity extremists.” He wasimprisoned for five months before the
charges against him were dismissed.)
In addition to Ahsekh’s group and theSocialist Rifle Association, there are thegun-toting anti-fascists of RedneckRevolt, an organization founded inKansas in 2009 that now has chapters allover the country, and the queer andtrans gun group Trigger Warning,started last year Left-wing gun culturehas already grown enough to producedefectors; in March The New Republicpublished an essay titled, “Confessions
of a Former Left-Wing Gun Nut.”
As a squishy liberal, I generally findthe idea of adding more guns to ourfebrile politics frightening and danger-ous But sometimes a small desperatepart of me thinks that if our country isgoing to be awash in firearms, maybe itbehooves the left to learn how to usethem If nothing else, an armed leftmight once again create a bipartisanimpetus for gun control
The members of the S.R.A I met weremore sober and responsible than Imight have inferred from the group’sbullet-strewn Twitter feed Far frombeing cosplay revolutionaries, they’veadopted bylaws banning members fromadvocating violence, and they havestrict rules about carrying weapons atprotests As their bylaws say, they don’twant to be seen as a “militia or anti-fascist action group.”
Part of the group’s mission is to ply provide a home for people who want
sim-to shoot, or sim-to learn about shooting, butwho recoil at the right-wing trappings ofmainstream gun culture “This seems to
be the antithesis of what happens atmost Georgia gun ranges,” said Steve, a66-year-old paramedic and certifiedmarksmanship instructor who recentlyjoined the S.R.A “Mine had a BrianKemp day last Saturday,” he added,referring to Georgia’s right-wing guber-natorial candidate “I go in there, shoot,and leave.”
But even if the S.R.A is surprisinglynonthreatening up close, much of itsgrowth is still a response to a wide-spread sense of terror and vulnerability
This week, the group released a videointerspersing clips of Donald Trumpdenouncing “globalists” with images ofNazism, anti-Semitic propaganda andanti-Semitic tweets It ends with pic-tures of people firing guns, and thewords, “We Keep Us Safe.” In this com-bustible moment, some have come tofeel that no one else will
The left gets triggered
Michelle Goldberg
Threats from the right inspire a new left-wing gun culture.
about drinking water from the same
vessel Some Muslims won’t share
utensils with non-Muslims, a belief that
has more to do with (Hindu) casteism
than (Islamic) scripture We can never
know what she may or may not have
said because repeating blasphemy is
also blasphemy, and writing it down
may be even greater blasphemy So
let’s not go there
We do know what happened next
Bibi was convicted of blasphemy in
2010 and, after what her lawyers called
a forced confession, was sentenced to
death by one court Another court later
confirmed the sentence The governor
of Punjab Province, Salman Taseer,
visited her in prison and promised to
lobby for a presidential pardon He was
assassinated by one of his police
body-guards who believed the governor had
committed blasphemy by questioning
the country’s blasphemy laws The
Pakistani media was understanding Of
the bodyguard’s feelings
A federal minister who happened to
be Christian and spoke up for Bibi also
was assassinated Although nobody
has actually been hanged by the state
for blasphemy so far, the mere
accusa-tion can be an open invitaaccusa-tion to kill
the accused Last year, the university
student Mashal Khan was lynched by
classmates after he was accused of
putting some blasphemous posts on
social media They were nothing more
than a campus rebel’s personal
thoughts, some revolutionary poetry
and musings about the meaning of life
Also last year, five bloggers were
picked up by intelligence agencies in
what seemed like coordinated raids
They had all written against the army
or its security policies Some had
writ-ten in prose, some in poetry; others inFacebook rants As their disappear-ance lasted, some people on socialmedia and TV anchors close to thearmy started accusing them of havingcommitted blasphemy They wereeventually released by their abductors,but so much poison had been spreadabout them that they had to leave thecountry
Ahead of the last election the samepeople who are now demanding thearmy chief’s head laid siege to thecapital They were protesting againstthe government for changing one word
in the oath that you are required totake as a member of parliament This
blasphemy brigadewas egged on by themedia and opposi-tion political parties
Khan, who was theopposition leader atthe time, said thathis followers wererearing to join theprotest Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, thearmy’s top commander, said publiclythat it couldn’t be expected to use forceagainst its own people, an honorablesentiment with little precedent inPakistan’s history
After a botched police operation, thearmy triumphantly negotiated with theprotesters, and an agreement wassigned conceding many of their de-mands The law minister was fired
The word change in the law waschanged back A general was seendistributing 1,000-rupee notes to dem-onstrators and patting them on theback: Are we not with you? Aren’t weall part of the same brotherhood?
Now those brothers have returned tobite our military and civilian establish-
ment An arm around the shoulder andsome petty cash may be a good law-and-order strategy in some potentiallyexplosive situations But not when youplay politics with the Prophet’s honor
It’s almost certain that Bibi will not
be able to live in the country after heracquittal And a lot of people like herare still languishing in cells waiting to
be tried There’s a literature professor,Junaid Hafeez, who has been in jail forthe last five years facing bogus blas-phemy charges After he was arrested,his lawyer was shot dead for defendinghim His current lawyer can’t benamed Hafeez has to be kept in soli-tary confinement to protect him fromother prisoners who might take it uponthemselves himself to avenge theProphet’s good name
Now that the prime minister himself
is in the righteous’s sight — protecting
a blasphemer may be even graverblasphemy — and a man even morepowerful than him, Bajwa, has been
declared kafir, an infidel, one can only
hope their respective institutions won’tuse the blasphemy card against theirperceived enemies There were about adozen reported cases of blasphemybetween 1927 and 1986, but there havebeen more than 4,000 since then, whenthe laws were reinforced
Pakistani liberals are asking thegovernment and the army to go andcrush the mullahs and take the countryback It might be more useful to goafter these blasphemy laws that seem
to be turning all of us into phemers
blas-HANIF, FROM PAGE 1
MOHAMMED HANIFis the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,”
“Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” and “Red Birds.”
Blasphemy, Pakistan’s new religion
Some people are playing politics with the Prophet’s honor.
NASHVILLE The best thing about fall inTennessee is the clarity of the light:
The shadows at day’s end grow longand then longer, and the dry soilthrows out motes of dust that catch inthe sunset and seem to burst intoflame All autumn is on fire — sour-wood and red maple and poison sumacand witch hazel and oakleaf hy-drangea Sunset lights them all on fire
at the end of the day
The red berries of the dogwood treesand the red seedpods of the magnoliasflare up, too, and so do the berries ofthe bush honeysuckle, invasive but stillineffably beautiful in the failing light atthe end of an October day
Best of all are the neighborhoodchildren, home finally from school andall the obligations that attend 21st-century childhood in the suburbs:
soccer practice and guitar lessons andmath tutorials and a dozen kinds ofcultural enrichment
They are home and free at last toplay with one another, setting theirown rules and settling their own dis-putes My own children were part of anafter-school herd that migrated fromyard to yard in the waning light, foot-ball giving way to tag as 5 o’clockbecame 5:30 and it grew too dark tosee the ball
My children are grown now, andeven the children who followed theirtrackless ways through all the neigh-borhood yards are now too old for tag
But here there is always a new tribe ofchildren playing in the last light, andtheir glad, galloping games and theirhigh, thin voices lift my heart I try totime my walk at the end of the work-day to hear them play
But this is the last week for suchautumn pleasures, for on Sunday theclocks change again in North America
Daylight saving time will be over, andwhat will follow are months of darkafternoons unpunctuated by young feetracing for a ball In standard time it isalready too dark to play when the chil-dren finally get home, and there is noone in the dark yards at all when I go for
a walk after my own day’s work is done
We live in an age of disputes, so itshould come as no surprise when furyerupts over this question of clocks But
I am always astonished at the end of
October whenever I utter some sadexpression of regret about the comingtime change in the presence of some-one who, it turns out, prefers her light
to arrive before breakfast You wouldthink I was expressing a preference forstrychnine in my coffee The kind ofperson who likes to jog before work orwho can’t accept the ruling of an alarmclock at 6 a.m when outside it’s still asblack as midnight — that kind of person
will huffily join JohnOliver in asking,
“Daylight SavingTime — How Is ThisStill a Thing?”
Evidence of anypragmatic benefit of
a time change —either to daylightsaving time or back
to standard time — ismixed, but that does-n’t stop people fromfeeling stronglyabout the question
Floridians votedthis year to keep daylight saving timeall year long, in a plan called the Sun-shine Protection Act, to offer sleepytourists a full year of sunrises that takeplace at the sort of hour vacationersapprove
States have the right to opt out ofdaylight saving time, but they don’thave the right to opt out of standardtime, so Florida’s vote isn’t bindingwithout Congressional approval And
so far, Congress has failed to act oneither of two bills put forth by SenatorMarco Rubio to ratify it (One of the
bills would make D.S.T the yearlongschedule of Florida; the other wouldmake it the yearlong schedule for thewhole country.) So for now at least,Florida will fall back on Sunday with allthe rest of us
Loath as I am to find myself on thesame side as Marco Rubio, I agree withthe people of Florida, but in the end it’sjust a matter of personal preference A
2015 CBS News poll found that 23 cent of adults would prefer to keepdaylight saving time year round, thesame number would prefer to keepstandard time all year, and 48 percentwant to keep switching it up as we donow
per-On Sunday, the nation — except forArizona and Hawaii, which haven’tadopted daylight saving time and sonever sprang forward anyway — willfall back an hour, and circadianrhythms will be disrupted all across theland
Babies will continue to wake in thedark, only now they will wake theirbleary-eyed parents a full hour earlier.Dogs will demand their supper at theusual margin of day and dark, and theirpeople will spend an entire hour fruit-lessly trying to convince them that itisn’t in fact suppertime
And here in Tennessee, I will take myday’s-end walk in the dark, missing theshadows of sunset and the sounds ofchildren calling to one another as theyplay
MARGARET RENKLwrites about flora, fauna, politics and culture in the Ameri- can South.
Margaret Renkl
Contributing Writer
MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A love letter to autumn light
There are two kinds of people: those who don’t want to wake
up in the dark, and those who don’t want
to come home in it.
26 BRUTON STREET, LONDON W1J 6QL +44 (0)20 7493 2341 ADVICE@RONALDPHILLIPS.CO.UK
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On 106 acres in Fishlake National Forest in Richfield, Utah, a 13-million-pound giant has loomed for thousands
of years But few people have ever heard of him This is
“the Trembling Giant,” or Pando, from the Latin for “I spread.” A single clone, and genetically male, he is Earth’s most massive organism, a forest of one, a grove of some 47,000 aspen trees connected by a single root system, all with the same DNA.
But a new study suggests that Pando is fighting a losing battle against human encroachment and herds of hungry animals The study, consisting of recent ground surveys
and aerial photographs, shows that the giant is shrinking And without more careful management of the forest, and
of the mule deer and cattle that forage among the trees, Pando will continue to lost ground.
Inadequate fencing, or the absence of it, seems to leave young patches of forest at the mercy of hungry mule deer Foraging cattle, allowed into the forest in the summer, are another factor.
Aerial photos also showed that Pando’s crown has ily thinned as human activity has grown, especially in the last half century JOANNA KLEIN
stead-Diminutive foragers nibble away
at a 6,500-ton giant in Utah
B E L E A G U E R E D B E H E M O T H
Clockwise from top: a forest of one; a fence that is supposed to keep deer away; dying trees at the edges that often are not replaced by new shoots, according to researchers.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LANCE ODITT, STUDIO 47.60 NORTH
In the next 60 seconds, people around
the world will purchase one million
plastic bottles and two million plastic
bags
Though it will take more than 1,000
years for most of these items to
de-grade, many will soon break apart into
tiny shards known as microplastics,
trillions of which have been showing
up in seawater (at right) tap water and
even table salt Now, add one more
repository to the list: the human gut
In a pilot study with a small sample
size, researchers looked for
microplas-tics in stool samples from eight people
from Finland, Italy, Japan, the
Nether-lands, Poland, Russia, Britain and
Austria Every sample tested positive
“The results were astonishing,” said
Dr Philipp Schwabl, the study’s leadauthor
There are no certain health tions yet, and the researchers plan abroader study DOUGLAS QUENQUA
implica-G U T C H E C K
They don’t just end up
as trash; plastics may
get to your stomach
ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
Lavender is said to have the power toreduce stress and anxiety But arethese effects more than just folk medi-cine?
Yes, said Hideki Kashiwadani, aphysiologist and neuroscientist atKagoshima University in Japan — atleast in mice
“Many people take the effects of
‘odor’ with a grain of salt,” he said in
an email “But among the stories,some are true based on science.”
In a new study, Dr Kashiwadani and
his colleagues found that sniffing alool, an alcohol component of laven-der’s odor, worked on the same parts of
lin-a mouse’s brlin-ain lin-as drugs like Vlin-alium,but without dizzying side effects And
it didn’t reach parts of the brain rectly from the bloodstream, as hadbeen thought
di-Relief from anxiety could be gered just by inhaling through ahealthy nose
trig-Their findings add to a growing body
of research demonstrating reducing qualities of lavender odorsand suggest a new mechanism for howthey work in the body Dr Kashiwadanibelieves this new insight is a key step
anxiety-in developanxiety-ing lavender-derived pounds like linalool for clinical use inhumans
com-P U R com-P L E B A L M
Researchers learn that lavender has the power to bring relief from anxiety
ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
“The U.S.A is one of the most active countries
in the world, when it comes to volcanic activity.”
Janine Krippner, a Concord University volcano expert, on a U.S Geological Survey
report that classified 18 American volcanoes as “very high threat.”
What lives a mile under the sea, has
tentacles and fins and looks like a
decapitated chicken ready for
roast-ing? The headless chicken monster,
of course
That is actually the name of a rare
creature caught on film by
re-searchers working in the Southern
Ocean, nearly 2,500 miles off the
southwest corner of Australia The
“monster” — actually a sea
cucum-ber that helps to filter organic matter
on the ocean floor — has been caught
on film only once before, last year inthe Gulf of Mexico Floored by itsunusual physique, scientists call itthe headless chicken monster
“It looks a bit like a chicken justbefore you put it in oven,” said DirkWelsford, with the Australian Antarc-tic Division
As part of a project exploringfishing’s impact on marine ecosys-tems, Dr Welsford’s team attachedcameras to fishing lines that weredropped nearly two miles below thesurface LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
T W O M I L E S D O W N
‘Headless chicken’
in a rare portrait
THE NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION
First, the island was there Then, itwas mostly gone
Before Hurricane Walaka sweptthrough the central Pacific a monthago, East Island was captured in im-ages as an 11-acre sliver of sand thatstood out starkly from the turquoiseocean
After the storm, officials confirmed
that the island, in the northwesternpart of the Hawaiian archipelago, 750miles northwest of Oahu, had beenlargely submerged, said Athline Clark
of the National Oceanic and pheric Administration
Atmos-Chip Fletcher, a climate scientistwith the University of Hawaii who hasbeen studying East Island, said it wasloose sand and gravel rather than solidrock “I had just assumed that theisland had another decade to threedecades of life left,” Dr Fletcher said
“It is quite stunning that it is now, forthe most part, gone.” JULIA JACOBS
F R A G I L E I S L A N D
It was just a sliver
of sand in the Pacific, and it couldn’t withstand the force of a hurricane
East Island before Hurricane Walaka, above, and afterward.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY U.S FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
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